by Joe Gores
“Yeah, you wanna see who and why?”
Even as he spoke, the guard was examining the backside of a passing secretary with casual lust. Out came O’B’s first card, William Ready, P. U.C., Field Investigator. Inspired by the guard’s gaze, out came O’B’s repoman voice and face. Out came O’B’s hand to finger the cloth of the guard’s jacket.
“Nice uniform. You rent-a-cops got a nice soft touch here, watch the door, watch the girls go in and out.” Leaned close, let the guard smell his two-margarita lunch. “Watching ’em a little too close, pal? We been gettin’ complaints…”
A guilty whine, “Listen, I don’t know what you—”
“You’re gone in a New York minute you screw with me, pal.”
O’B sauntered on without signing in, flashing the second card— P. Dana Anderssen—from office to office until he got to Ms. Pegeen Gibson and knew he was home free. The lass had milk-white Irish skin and a fine peasant bosom and round cheeks and looked like she’d cop to a middle-aged redheaded man with a tired drinker’s face and a rich line of Irish blarney. Besides, the phone company loved to cooperate with the P.U.C.—when it didn’t cost them anything.
“Hey, Red, how did a carrot-top like you end up with a name like Anderssen?”
“I think it was the Vikings, raiding our coastlines and having their way with our Irish lasses, Pegeen o’ Me Heart,” grinned O’B. He was sprawled in the chair beside her desk. “Besides, Pegeen Gibson? ‘Beautiful Pearl’ in Gaelic—and a last name like a martini with an onion in it?”
“Maybe it’s a pearl onion.” She dimpled nicely looking at him. “Does anyone still drink martinis, Red?”
“Not with me. Bushmills with a water back.”
“I wish all the investigators were like you. Harry was telling me on coffee break that this really nasty P.U.C. man—”
“I bet it was Will Ready,” said O’B quickly. He was very glad his red hair had been under the soft plaid cap now folded in his topcoat pocket. “Trouble at home, makes him hostile.”
Then, amenities observed, O’B got down to the storefront phone rooms. He mentioned nothing about Cadillacs, Gypsies, DKA, or Cal-Cit Bank.
“What I don’t see is the P.U.C. involvement,” said Pegeen.
O’B didn’t see it either, now she mentioned it. Bright lass, this. He wished he’d worked on his cover a little better. Who expected a sharp mind in a bureaucrat?
“Um, a massive scam is being played on old people with Medicare payments due them, which makes it P.U.C. because the cons have been set up from these phone rooms.”
She bought it, and brought up on her screen the eight phone numbers that Stan Groner had gotten for O’B from the bank’s files. This being Head Office for Pac Bell, Pegeen’s computer had them all.
She looked up at O’B. “What is it you need to know?”
“Who the phones were listed to. How they got them on such short notice with no waiting period. The addresses where they were installed, plus landlords’ names. If they listed references of any sort, who they were, and their phones and addresses.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, Pegeen frowning at the information being scrolled up. O’B stood up to look over her shoulder. He had never mastered a word processor and knew he never would, but he could read the screen and was already writing things down on his clipboard.
“This is very strange,” she said. “For quick installation, you have to prove a medical emergency of some sort hellip;” She scrolled again. “‘Sick child’… ‘aged parent’… ‘retarded son’… ‘mother dying of cancer.’ Those are all valid. And they produced the required ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter from an M.D. But they all listed themselves as businesses—Tom’s Paving, Sally’s Dress Shoppe, Harry’s Air-conditioning, Mary’s Catering—and gave each other as references. And…”
Now O’B was glad she was a quick-minded woman. She was doing his work for him. “And?”
“Eight different phones, four different locations, four different counties, three different area codes—but the same San Francisco doctor. Rob Swigart, M.D.”
“Four Fifty Slitter,” observed O’B. “Doc Swigart must be one tired pup, running around the entire Bay Area on his rounds.”
* * *
Doc Swigart had his shingle out at 450 Sutter, a medical-dental building with a prescription pharmacy on the ground floor. At that rent, he was no fly-by-night, so maybe he had been gotten at because he had a reputation to uphold.
Not yet four o’clock, the worthy doctor might still be probing and poking and billing outrageously up there on the fifth floor. He was. The nurse-receptionist was a big woman in a crisp white smock, with laughing eyes and an open face. Dr. Swigart was in but much too busy to see Mr.… Morrell, was it? Without an appointment? Out of the question. There were other patients waiting … O’B laid his third P.U.C. card on her desk.
“David Morrell of the Public Utilities Commission,” he said primly. “Investigative branch. Telephone fraud.”
She was frowning, but in puzzlement rather than hostility. She stood up behind her desk. She was nearly six feet tall.
“Well, I’ll go tell him, but I don’t see what—”
“Give him this list, too.” O’B was writing the addresses of the phone rooms on her memo pad. “It might save a little time.”
The addresses obviously meant nothing to her. She disappeared through the door behind her desk. To return two minutes later with the smile gone from her eyes and voice. The addresses obviously had meant something to Doc Swigart.
“The doctor can fit you in now,” she said coldly.
Rob Swigart, M.D., was late 40s, lean, laid-back, sandy-haired, with quizzical eyes and a warm worried style of speech nonetheless conveying that here was a busy man. He came into the examining room holding the P.U.C. card in one hand and O’B’s handwritten list in the other, as if they were urine specimens.
“See here,” he checked the card, “Morrell. I don’t—”
“Whadda the Gyppos got on you, Doc?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re the P.U.C, not the A.M.A. We’re bare-knuckle boys and I don’t like docs, Doc. No old-boys’ network for us, covering up your little peccadillos ’cause you’re one of the club.” He leaned forward and tapped the list of addresses with his finger. “ ‘Sick child’… ‘aged parent’… ‘retarded son’… ‘mother dying of cancer’ … This’s phone fraud, Doc, and we can prove it. We can jerk your ticket for that.”
Swigart had turned white. He sat down abruptly in the chair usually reserved for patients.
“Fraud?” he said weakly. “Look, if I explain, can—”
O’B had his hands up, palm-out. “No promises.”
Swigart stood up and began to pace the confined area. O’B hiked himself up on the examining table to get out of the way and let Swigart’s guilts do the talking.
“I… just feel so stupid, that’s all.” He looked at O’B. “Most doctors play golf Wednesday afternoons. I fly planes. Down the Peninsula, Palo Alto Airport.”
This wasn’t going in any direction O’B had expected, so he asked, to keep it going, “Own your own plane?”
“Yes. A Mooney 201. Got a great deal on it, fifty-five thousand used. But I’ve been wanting to get an old biplane. Prewar—from the thirties.”
“I imagine you can afford it.”
In knee-jerk defensiveness, Swigart exclaimed, “Everybody always thinks doctors make a lot of money, but the taxes and malpractice insurance and overhead…”
He’d flown his plane up to a small private airfield in Sonoma County to practice crosswind takeoffs and landings and there had seen an old Belgian Stampe, lovingly restored. He’d admired it aloud to the man and woman up on the reinforced wing panel just about to open the cockpit. They’d climbed back down, delighted at his praise.
“We restored it ourselves,” the man said in Spanish-accented English. He explained that they were from the Arge
ntine, in cattle. “Over a thousand hours to refabric and paint it…”
But now the health of Señor Gonzales’s father was failing and they were going back to take over the estancia; alas, they were going to have to sell the plane. They’d rolled it out of the hangar, in fact, to show a possible buyer they expected in…
Swigart didn’t want to profit from their misfortune, but if there was another possible buyer already interested, ah, what were they asking? They looked at each other, gave simultaneous Latin shrugs, simultaneous rueful Latin laughs. Since he had admired it so, and since they were so pressed for time, $20,000.
“How does that stack up with the going price for that kind of plane in that condition?” asked O’B.
“A steal. A steal. Should have been thirty, at least.”
Old P. T. Barnum hadn’t had it quite right with his “sucker born every minute” remark. Should have said every second.
“So you wrote them a down-payment check right there—”
“Of course. Five thousand dollars.”
They’d given him a receipt, but the next week when he went back up to Sonoma to pay the balance, a stranger had the plane rolled out of the hangar and was about to fly it away. Swigart had been outraged, only to learn that this man owned it! Even worse, the cockpit had been broken into and irreplaceable original equipment had been wrenched right out of the control panel.
O’B couldn’t help laughing. “The Brooklyn Bridge.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Gyppos sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.” He got down off the examining table, still chuckling. “Why in hell didn’t you just report ’em to the cops? Bunco would love to…”
Swigart sat down all-at-once in the patients’ chair again. He grimaced, squeezed his eyes shut as if he could barely face what he had to say. He finally opened them and looked at O’B.
“I… didn’t want my wife to know that I’d been such a fool. Not her… nor my associates… nor the fellows at the club… Besides, those people had just… vanished. I didn’t even know they were Gypsies until…”
“Until they showed up again?” supplied O’B. “Because you didn’t go to the police?”
That had shown them he was vulnerable. So they wanted a “To Whom It May Concern” statement… if he wouldn’t do it, they’d have to tell his wife and friends what a fool he’d been… But then they’d wanted another statement, and another, and another … And now here was the P. U.C. after him anyway, and…
“Did you stop payment on the check?”
“I tried, but it was much too late, of course.”
“Where was it cashed?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, stuck his hands out in a search-me gesture. “I can’t remember, if I ever knew. I could find out, of course, but I don’t see what good that—”
“Find out.”
“And the rest of it…”
“All I want is information,” said O’B. “Anything you can tell me. Anything you can remember…”
A thin gruel, but suggestive. The airport up in Sonoma… the guy who actually owned the plane… where they had cashed Swigart’s check… Detailed descriptions, of course… All of it, bits of tile in the mosaic…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
But it was Dan Kearny, as you might expect, who actually drew first blood. He’d been let back into their nuptial bed from the spare-room couch, but with Jeannie still prickly as a hedgehog he’d fully expected to stay home all day on Saturday. Spend a little quality time with the wife, mow the lawn, maybe get a start at repairing the front fence whacked by Wednesday’s windstorm. He’d even resolutely refused to bring any of the Gypsy files home with him for work over the weekend.
But by early afternoon, as he dumped the last bale of grass clippings onto the backyard mulch heap, he found himself still bugged by the name the Gyppo had used at all the branches of the bank. Angelo Grimaldi. Usually they went for the short, Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms, so why such an atypical name to open those accounts? All at the same bank? Maybe he’d just drive in to the office through the sparse Saturday traffic to check those files again. They needed to get some kind of handhold on the smooth surface of the con.
So he went into the house and called Giselle at her apartment in Oakland. Got her. And spoke almost accusingly.
“I thought you might be at the office.”
“Nope. Washing dishes, and clothes, and my hair—I like to do that when I can’t tell anymore if I’m a blonde or not.”
“I thought you were going to talk with the bunco cop at SFPD who specializes in Gypsies.”
“He’s off until Monday.”
“I’m going to run into the office and go over that folder on Grimaldi—”
“I’m off until Monday.”
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
He hung up before she could object. He knew she needed time for herself, to live some kind of normal life, meet the right guy, get married, have kids. At 32, her—what did they say—her clock was running? But not right now. Right now they had these Gypsies to contend with.
Until last year, when she’d learned how to drive and had gotten her license, Giselle had ridden in to work with him five mornings a week. He didn’t realize it, but those forty-five daily minutes in the car had played a big part in DKA’s success. Cut off from phones and interruptions, they’d reviewed operations, planned client strategies, discussed field men’s productivity. They’d argued about computerized report-writing, insurance, health and pension and profit-sharing plans, automated legal and skip letters. They’d fought about hiring ex-cons as field men and about dying investigations and about dead skips.
During those drives, over the years, DKA had become DKA.
Now they tried to do it at his desk in the morning before things got too hectic, but it wasn’t the same.
Giselle was dressed in jeans that looked like someone had spilled acid on them, and a mauve sweatshirt with figures leaping like lightning that spelled out Alvin Ailey. Without makeup and with her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail under a billed Giants cap, she looked about 12 years old. A tall, shapely 12.
But as she got into the car the angry gleam in her eye was anything but juvenile. On the other hand, she was carrying a fistful of folders. So she hadn’t been as dedicated to free time on the weekend as she had let on.
“Dammit, Dan, I deserve a little personal time to—”
“You too, huh?” he interrupted without sympathy.
They were coming up to the metering lights on the Bay Bridge approach, inactive now for the weekend. She fastened her seat belt and squirmed around to get comfortable. She fought a grin. Finally nodded ruefully.
“Yeah. Me too. On Monday I’ll check with the Gypsy guy in Bunco—an Inspector Harrigan—and the Better Business Bureau and the state Consumer Fraud Division.”
“Why now, Giselle? This is a major, major con, one that’s going right into the Gyppos’ book of tall tales. Somebody really bright— obviously this guy calling himself Grimaldi—had to think and plan a long time to set this one up. Why’d he spring the trap right now?”
Out beyond her window and the whizzing railings of the bridge, the bay was whitecapped with hundreds of sailboats heeled over by a stiff breeze through the Gate.
“He was ready to move. He had everything in place, so—”
“I don’t buy it.” Kearny was frowning behind the wheel. “I think we ought to check with our law enforcement and P.I. informants around the country who work with Gypsies, find out if anything big is happening in their world.”
“I thought we didn’t want anyone to know about this case.”
“We don’t tell ’em anything—we ask.” He paused. “Yeah, and when you see that bunco cop, check with him for any other odd incidents involving Gyppos and new Caddies during our time frame—hell, make that any Caddies during the past couple weeks. I think it’s like you said—this guy Grimaldi was using that name to set up some nontypical Gypsy scam. Something really bi
g, well-plannedm… It had to be something even bigger to make him endanger that by activating this Cadillac grift in such a hurry.”
They were still kicking it around as they came down off the skyway at Eighth, intending to run out Harrison to Eleventh and the office. This was the heart of San Francisco’s light industrial area, shabby and blue-collar with dirty intersections weekend-deserted, the lights clicking red and amber and green and red again in a senseless roundelay for nonexistent traffic.
Which made the car ahead of them in mid-block stand out. A white/blue Eldorado with the optional cabriolet roof. Without plates but with a paper sticker in the corner of the windshield.
“That’s one of ours,” said Kearny in a taut voice.
“You can’t be sure, Mr. K—”
“Lookit the guy driving! Gyppo all the way. I’m sure.” And he was, she knew. A savage intuition that made him the best in the business. “Get ready to slide over.”
“Dan’l—”
But Kearny had drifted into the far left lane behind the Eldorado so he was close behind it. Too close behind it. When it braked for the red light at Tenth, he ran into the rear end.
“Daniel, are you crazy? What—”
But Kearny already had the car in neutral, motor running, and was jumping out. He left the door open. Ahead of them, the driver of the other car was doing the same, leaving his door open also, outrage flooding his dark, saturnine features, Giselle understood suddenly, even as she was sliding into the driver’s seat. She wanted to pound the steering wheel with delight.
Outside, Kearny and the Gypsy—surely, he was a Gypsy— were meeting where Kearny’s front bumper was just touching the Eldorado’s rear one. The Gypsy was holding his neck.
“What the hell you do? Where the hell you learn to drive? I got whiplash—”
“It was your fault,” Kearny exclaimed. “Running fast up to the light that way, then slamming on your brakes.”
“Slam on my brakes? You were right on my bumper.”
