The Big Con Read online

  “Why do you want to help me?”

  “Good question,” I said, the classic corporate response to a question when you don’t know the answer. I used the delay to try to think of one but came up empty. “I don’t know why.”

  Rebecca seemed to accept my lack of a reason.

  “The bank in Pasadena,” she said after a few moments. “The one on the GPS from the loaner car?”

  “You did know about it,” I answered for her.

  “A few months back, I found a checkbook in Julie’s things. There were a few records of payments…to Lois,” she finished. In a tone that tried to convey the degree of her disappointment, she added, “It was for a lot of money.”

  “How much?”

  “Three payments. Two hundred thousand each.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  I assumed that the discovery of the checkbook in “Julie’s things” meant an element of snooping on the part of a suspicious spouse. Confronting a loved one about that discovery often got the issue thrown back in your face for one’s lack of faith.

  “I brought it up once,” Rebecca answered. “She dismissed it as nothing to fret over. ‘An insignificant blip.’” After a moment’s reflection she added, “That’s Julie for you.”

  They were the lighthearted words of someone rationalizing the faults of the person they love.

  I quickly processed the latest developments in my head—a bank account that Julie kept secret from Rebecca, a love nest that she also kept from her partner, several checks made out to her lover for a sizable amount of money. It all pointed to a single conclusion, one that I was reluctant to bring up directly with Rebecca.

  “Who handles the finances for Power of One?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer. When it came time to pay, you got the call from Rebecca, not Julie. The guru delivered the inspirational messages but collecting the money was an unsavory task left for the minions. “Could Lois have been skimming money off the top?”

  “I handle the money for the firm,” Rebecca stated. “And our books are in order.”

  The second part of her answer headed off my next question, which would have been to inquire if Julie could be dipping into her own firm. It happens when people get into financial binds; sometimes the only answer is to steal from themselves.

  “Do you and Julie combine finances?” I asked.

  “I assume by that question you want to know if we have separate bank accounts?” she retorted. “No, we share everything. And since I didn’t know about this one in Pasadena, you want to know why I think she felt the need to have one?” Rebecca was clearly getting frustrated. “You corporate guys just talk in circles all day. Can’t someone just be direct, for once?” The question was addressed to more than just me.

  “What am I talking around?”

  “The fact that my wife and Lois were having an affair,” she said flatly. “Clearly you knew this also.”

  Now it was my turn to feel guilty for holding back information.

  “I think they were using the Sierra Madre home to see each other.”

  “You think they were?” she chided me again.

  “They were using the home for their affair,” I corrected. My directness was oddly appreciated by Rebecca. She even thanked me for it. “Was Lois blackmailing her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Somehow I don’t see Julie ever feeling the need to pay someone to keep something like that a secret.”

  I sifted through her words to find the unstated meaning behind them.

  “Was there some sort of arrangement between you two?”

  “An arrangement to feel jilted?” she replied, laughing bitterly. “No, I didn’t sign up for that.” After a short pause she again said, “That’s Julie for you.”

  It was the second time she’d used that phrase, but in this instance it didn’t feel like a way to excuse someone’s sins. It felt more like someone’s reluctant acceptance of them. “Well, you finally got your backstory,” she said, sounding both embarrassed and relieved. She pulled a chair over and sat in front of the fire.

  We let the intermittent pops from the burning logs fill the silence. After a while I took up the poker and made a few adjustments and then we started talking. We spoke about a lot of things, including childhood fireplaces that only got lit on Christmas, and the blue-flame variety that was environmentally conscious but an insult to the word fire. One thing we didn’t talk about was Julie. After almost two decades of working together on bogus seminars and human-engagement programs, when we sometimes spent multi-week sessions in each other’s company with mandatory cocktail hours and dinners every night, it took just one full day of looking for an estranged spouse for Rebecca and me to finally have an authentic discussion.

  At some point I suggested she crash in my spare bedroom. Rebecca didn’t flinch when I made the offer and didn’t run when she saw the actual room, which was more a walk-in closet by today’s standards, with just enough room for a twin bed and a cheap nightstand.

  “It’s perfect,” she said, but judging by the look on her face, a pile of hay covered in burlap would have garnered the same response. Exhaustion overrode any misgivings over a twin bed with scratchy sheets and that unique kind of loneliness that only a spare bedroom can have.

  “Let’s talk in the morning,” she said as I closed the door behind me. It was her way of confirming that she still needed my help to find Julie.

  A SHADE OF AMBER

  Badger didn’t believe in writing things down.

  Whereas the corporate world memorialized everything from sneezes to bathroom visits in a PowerPoint deck, he preferred the old-fashioned verbal approach. If you were lucky enough to get something down on paper from him, it was likely on the back of an overdue bill notice.

  “She’s ass out,” he told me.

  Badger and I were at the café outside my building. Sensing this was a non–firm-related meeting, he spared me the dank suit and opted for his traditional attire of tight jeans, an even tighter sweater, and amber-tinted sunglasses.

  “Julie?” I asked. “How bad?”

  “Piss broke,” he continued. “Got a stack of liens on the business, underwater on the PV house, and getting sued up the wazoo: the building management company for breach of contract, that company in Culver for false representation pertaining to the sale of a business, a printer in Bell Gardens for non-payment—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, “what company in Culver City?”

  “The one you guys were talking about,” he answered. “Color-Whatever-the-Hell-They-Call-Themselves.”

  “Nalysis,” I filled in for him. “What did you mean by sale of a business? Who sold what to whom?”

  Badger explained that ColorNalysis had bought the rights to Power of One’s intellectual property but had then pulled out due to misrepresentation of terms.

  I smiled at the idea of buying someone else’s gibberish and then suing them because there was nothing in the box when you finally got it. The smile faded when I started to wonder why I was hearing this from Badger and not the woman staying in my house.

  “The murdered woman did the deal,” he added.

  “Lois Hearns? She was a lawyer?”

  “A bad one, it sounds like. She hasn’t been practicing for years but her name is on all the deal documents.”

  Badger had uncovered a significant amount of information in a very short time and it showed on his face. He looked very proud of himself. Now it was my turn to impress.

  “Julie’s been making payments to Lois for several months. Probably too large for her legal services but they have to be connected to what’s going on.”

  “Maybe,” he said tersely.

  I then recounted the discovery of the lover’s den in Sierra Madre, Fitch’s body among its pillows, and the secret bank account in Pasadena. With each new detail I divulged, Badger grew more sullen. It was as if any new information that didn’t source directly from him besmirched his reputation as a top-flight investig
ator. Badger was at his best with constant ego stroking, so I returned to a field in which we could both be proud of his accomplishments.

  “How’s it all connect?” I asked.

  “It’s your classic lesbo-affair/blackmail-the-cheating-spouse routine,” he said, seeming slightly annoyed that he even had to spell it out for me. “This Fitch guy does the strong-arming. Your ‘boy’ doesn’t like it and fights back. Two people end up dead.”

  “Blackmail, huh?” I repeated, and pretended to process it. I must have oversold it because he grew sullen again.

  “Just like you suspected,” he said.

  “Badger—”

  But he held up his hand to stop me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I initially thought of the blackmail angle but dismissed it after talking with Rebecca. It still could be a shakedown but not over the affair.”

  Badger nodded.

  “I won’t charge you for the work,” he said. And to prove how sincere he was, he added, “I have standards, you know.”

  Naturally, I didn’t believe him. Private investigation wasn’t the most lucrative of trades, and turning down a job could equate to him not eating for a week.

  “I appreciate you offering,” I told him, but left off whether or not I was going to accept it.

  He got a little nervous that he might have overplayed his hand and supplied some more information in order to prove he did indeed deserve payment.

  “Julie might be broke,” he began casually, “but she could always fall back on her old job.”

  “Which was?”

  “Librarian.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Badger doesn’t tell jokes when he’s working,” he admonished.

  I continued laughing anyway. I could think of a thousand other jobs for Julie before ever coming up with that one.

  “There’s no way.”

  “Believe it.”

  Julie had worked at the Sierra Madre Library for nearly a decade before leaving in the early 1980s. Badger didn’t have an employment record for her until several years later when she established Power of One.

  I shook my head at the thought of this woman going from working a small-town card catalogue to coaching executives in the boardroom. Of the countless reinvention stories that make up Los Angeles, this had to be one of the better ones.

  Badger slid a Santa Anita betting slip across the table.

  “You’re giving me one of your losers from the track?”

  “Turn it over,” he instructed.

  Written on the back was a phone number and address in Burbank.

  “The murdered woman’s contact info in case you wanted to talk to her husband,” Badger said. “I thought you would.”

  Once again I was legitimately impressed with his ability to find out so much information in such a short span of time.

  Apparently Badger was also impressed with himself because he took off his sunglasses so I could look him directly in the eyes. It was an unnecessary gesture given that I could already clearly see them through the amber lenses.

  “You, my friend, have an itch.” He rose dramatically from the table. “And Badger needs to help you scratch it.”

  I would have chosen another visual but I was grateful for the sentiment. Before I could thank him, Badger strode off with the swagger of a man who knew he was going to get paid.

  “It’s what I do,” he shouted loud enough for everyone in the café to recognize his oversized dedication.

  SANCTUARY

  A flooded water main near Griffith Park ruined what had up until then been a successful shortcut into the Valley. The storm drains couldn’t handle the volume of water coming down off Los Feliz and traffic backed up all the way along Riverside Drive. By the time I made it to Lois Hearns’s home in Burbank it was well past dark.

  Her street’s best feature was that it was an effective shortcut between two of the big studios. Otherwise it was an unkempt stretch lined with ficus trees decades past the point of needing pruning. The house was a substandard ranch that hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. A few of the shutters leaned against the garage as if begging for someone to return them to their rightful home. It looked like they had been waiting for a while.

  I walked up the short driveway and approached the attached garage. The door was partly ajar, and I could see the glare of a fluorescent light inside as well as a pair of work boots moving around. I called out to announce my presence but didn’t get a response. I knocked on the cheap aluminum door, which rattled more loudly than I needed it to.

  “Yeah?” barked a voice.

  I didn’t get very far into my planned introduction.

  “I’m busy,” came the response.

  “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” I said, and then added a little tidbit to whet his appetite. “It’s about the money.”

  “It’s always about the money,” I heard him say, and then watched a hand curl under the door and shove it high up on its rails. I stepped inside but he didn’t lower the door behind me. Maybe he anticipated my visit would be short.

  The walls were lined with well-marked work-shelves and covered in pegboard holding more types of wrenches than I thought existed. A few red tool chests on caster wheels served as hubs of the work activity. At the center sat an old engine from some hot rod long past its racing days perched on a block like a lion statue. A portable infrared heater chased out some of the cold, damp air, and although I was loath to get any grease on my work slacks, this place just begged for me to pull up a stool, crack a beer, and talk about engine parts that I knew nothing about.

  “I’m always interested in money,” he said with a smile, “as long as it isn’t the kind leaving my wallet.”

  “We’re of like minds,” I told him.

  He shot me a look.

  “Maybe.”

  Mr. Hearns was in his sixties. He wore tired jeans and a paper-thin white T-shirt from which a pair of long arms hung like ropes. Two golf balls under the skin served as elbows. His yellow-gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but I wasn’t about to resent him for it. Where my co-worker Paul wore his as a symbol of some insincere allegiance to the counterculture, Hearns’s fit with his legitimate toughness. He looked like someone with deceptive strength, the kind that you discovered too late.

  “First, let me offer my condolences,” I started. “A tragic development, to say the least.”

  “Yes, it was,” he replied. “We had the service today.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” I said. “Apologies for intruding.”

  Hearns was a difficult man to read. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or indifferent or something else. After a moment, it was clear he wasn’t ready to shoo me away just yet.

  “So did Lo have some kind of insurance policy or something?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said, and then wondered why he immediately shot to this potential money source presented to him by a perfect stranger. He gave me his reason, which came in the form of an insult.

  “You look like an insurance man,” he said, shrugging.

  I had hoped to present myself as some sort of detective of the official or private kind. Having been dismissed as a hawker of extended warranties, I now had to defend the significance of an imaginary role.

  “Trust me, I am not in insurance,” I scoffed. “I help people recover money, like the large payments made to your wife over the last year.”

  “Cops said something about that,” he said.

  “Did you know about it?” I asked.

  “Not until they told me. Bastards thought I had it.” After giving it some proper reflection, he added, “Man, I hate cops.”

  “Everyone does.”

  Our mutual distaste for law enforcement put me right in his book.

  “So large sums, huh?”

  He was trying to coax out what different interpretations he and I might have of the word large.

  “Couple hundred thousand,” I told him.

  He whistled
between the gap in his front teeth. His gaze fell on me with the glare reserved for job candidates. His posture got a little stiffer. I knew where this was headed.

  “And where do you fit in?” he asked. “You a lawyer?”

  He said the last word with the same vitriol he’d used to express his views on law enforcement.

  “Lo was a lawyer,” he added, then said, as if sensing my confusion, “before she got into the art thing.”

  “Well, I’m not a lawyer,” I said. “But we can help you recover the money.”

  “Who’s ‘we’ and how much do you charge for this so-called service?”

  I made up a firm using my surname and the street I grew up on and then added “Associates” at the end to make it sound more legitimate.

  “We take a third,” I explained.

  Hearns didn’t look like someone who got fast ones pulled on him very often. And if he did, the perpetrator might end up regretting it. But I reasoned that lawyers take a third—at least that’s what legal dramas say—and that amount felt right. I didn’t want to get into the specifics of what exactly my firm did because I didn’t have a clue.

  “That’s a big chunk. I could always get it myself,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “You know, we never officially got divorced,” he added, which was his way of asking me to confirm that he had a right to that money.

  I didn’t oblige and simply nodded my head. I found that men like Mr. Hearns often had a deep insecurity around educated men. Their antagonism masked a disabling inferiority complex. It also made them surprisingly compliant.

  “Who am I kidding,” he said, laughing. “Lois handled all the finances. Seventy percent of nothing is still nothing.”

  “Sixty-six percent,” I corrected, and extended my hand. “We got a deal?”

  He might as well have put my hand in his workshop’s vice, as I felt my knuckles fold over in his grip. But he then showed mercy by placing a very cold can of beer in my aching hand, pulled from the beat-up fridge on the far wall. I finally got my wish to crack a cold one—but we weren’t two old buds talking manifolds. We spoke instead about the topic men never talk about.