Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  Your victim sighs with relief.

  “Now then,” the detective says. “Would you mind coming down to the police station with me, so that you can look at a lineup and identify the criminals who stole your money?”

  Of course the victim agrees. Detective Thomas leads the old man to his unmarked police car, which has a small plastic siren light Velcroed to the dashboard, and a CB scanner tuned to the police frequency. Detective Thomas drives the old man down to the police station parking lot.

  “Wait here,” the detective says. “I’m going inside to arrange a lineup.”

  The detective leaves the victim in the parking lot for a few minutes. In the meantime, he walks into the police station, uses the bathroom, maybe buys a Coke at the soda machine. After a while, he returns to the victim.

  “Good news,” Detective Thomas says. “Looks like we can spare you the unpleasant face-to-face confrontation with the suspects. My captain says I can show you a few Polaroids instead. If you wouldn’t mind, please look through this pile and point to the man who stole from you.”

  Detective Thomas hands a stack of photos to the old man. He flips through them. One of them is a photograph of your partner, Bank Examiner Marley. The old man points at the photo. “That’s him,” he says.

  “Just as we thought,” the detective says. “Now listen, Mr. Jones, here’s what we need you to do. We need to get to the bottom of this counterfeiting operation. The teller who is working with these men is still at large. This is clearly an inside job.”

  The victim nods. He’s still thinking about the fact that he’s about to recover his stolen money. Soon everything will be all right.

  “So,” Detective Thomas says, “I’m going to come down to the bank with you. I want you to repeat exactly the same steps those criminals told you to do. Stand in the same teller line. Go in and withdraw five thousand dollars.”

  Mr. Jones agrees. You drive him to the bank. He withdraws five thousand dollars from his account and returns to the unmarked police car.

  Detective Thomas looks through the bills. He makes a point to hold each one to the light. He licks his finger, rubs it across the paper. “Yup,” he says. “Counterfeit. Every one of them. These guys are good.” He shakes his head in wonder.

  He puts the cash in a manila envelope marked “Evidence.” He hands a receipt to the victim. He says, “We’ll replace these funny bills with real ones and bring them over to your apartment tonight. Will you be there at, say, seven o’clock?”

  The victim agrees. You drive him back to his house, and thank him for his cooperation.

  Needless to say, when seven o’clock comes, no one shows up at Mr. Jones’s door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At two o’clock in the morning, I’m awakened by the ringing telephone. I reach across my bed, bobble the receiver, knock it against my night table. Somehow it makes the journey to my ear. I mutter something that sounds like: “Hello?”

  It’s a female voice. For a moment I think it’s Celia; then I realize it’s not.

  “Kip,” she says. “Are you sleeping?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you. It’s been a long time.”

  Later, I wonder about the phone call. About whether it was a coincidence, or part of someone’s plan. But for now, I’m just excited to hear her voice. It has been a long time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Her name, as of today, is Jessica Smith, and the address she gave me is in the Mission District, in a loft building surrounded by Salvadoran restaurants and Web design firms.

  I park my Honda near a street sign that reads like an inscrutable Zen koan:

  No Parking Thurs

  2 Hr Parking Mon, Wed, Thurs

  I take a creaky lift up three floors and am deposited in a cramped reception area. On the wall hangs a sign with a voluptuous female silhouette, like the kind you find on the mud flaps of big rigs cruising down 880. The sign says: “Aria Video, Inc.” Behind a desk sits a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound male receptionist. He’s black, with a shaved head, a diamond-stud earring, a Vandyke, and rippling muscles visible under a skintight T-shirt. Although he’s sitting, the posture seems temporary, as if he might spring upward, like some kind of terrifying gay boxer, and rush from his corner to kick my lily-white ass.

  He says, “Can I help you?” His voice rumbles like thunder.

  I say, “Jessica around?”

  “You are?”

  “Kip. She’s expecting me.”

  He smiles, revealing a gap between his two front teeth the size of a Tic-Tac. “Okay, Kip. She said you’d be coming. Go on back. But stay quiet. They may be filming.”

  “Right,” I say. “Understood.”

  I wander through a curtain of hanging beads. I am in a large space, half a football field in size, lit with halogen fixtures mounted on C-stands. A young Hispanic man holds a white light reflector panel down by his feet. He’s staring off into space and seems completely unconcerned by the fact that, ten yards away, in the middle of the room, a gorgeous woman—blond, thin, with huge fake breasts—is lying, naked, sprawled on the floor atop a futon, fingering her pussy.

  There’s a gaggle of people at the other end of the room, also ignoring the masturbating girl. They mill about, glancing at their watches, checking their light meters, snapping batteries into and out of shoulder-mounted video cameras.

  I see Jessica in the center of the hubbub. She’s different than I remember. Actually, the way I remember her is like the girl currently on the futon—naked, on her back, and oozing, among other things, sexuality. But today Jessica is brunette, not blond; standing, not lying; and dressed in a conservative charcoal-gray Ellen Tracy suit that makes her look like a banker, not a pornographer. Today her hair is cut stylishly short, cropped and layered with an elegant bob; and her killer body has been tapered, through clothes and workout and diet, to look less like a boast and more like a promise. She radiates a quiet sexiness, like the voluptuous PTA mom whose comments about homework and field trips are met with clamorous applause by all the fathers in the school auditorium.

  One of the cameramen offers his viewfinder to Jessica. She leans over and checks his shot. She nods approval.

  As I walk toward her, a voice calls out from across the room, “We have wood!”

  Like a shout of “Fire!” being relayed across miles of remote forest watchtowers, the cry of “We have wood!” bounces across the cavernous space. Another man frantically shouts, “Wood! Wood!” Cameramen scramble back to position. Lighting grips flick on their halogens. The Hispanic man lifts the reflector panel. The blonde stops playing with herself, and straightens up the hair on her cooch.

  Now I see what all the excitement is about. A man rises, naked, from a chair, displaying an enormous erection. The entire production has been waiting for him to rest, and to return, engorged, ready to shoot the next scene.

  “Wood!” Jessica shouts. “Let’s go!”

  “Rolling!” a cameraman calls.

  The man with the huge penis struts into the center of the room, which is, I belatedly realize, a movie set made to look like a college dorm room. There are pennants hanging on the wall behind the blonde—preposterously, from Harvard—and a few books scattered on the floor. One, I notice, is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Never let it be said that surrealism in cinema is dead.

  Jessica says, “Take it from ‘Fuck me, Professor Johnson.’”

  The blonde says, “Fuck me, Professor Johnson.”

  “Oh, I will,” the naked man says, as he struts toward his recumbent student. “And I’m going to be a very firm grader today.”

  “Ooh, yeah,” the blonde says.

  One of the cameramen scampers into the scene with his Betacam. He kneels down beside the male actor, and—with the man’s penis mere inches from his face—points his camera at the blond girl’s genitals. She obligingly poses them with her fingers.

/>   “All right,” Jessica Smith says, matter-of-factly. “Let’s make some magic.”

  I met her eighteen years ago, when she was a call girl, not even twenty years old.

  I was desperate. I needed a way to keep a mark around town for a few days while I ripped him off. The safest way to make a guy stick around: the promise of pussy. Out came the Yellow Pages, and I began calling escort services, one after another, requesting that they send someone to my hotel room. I rejected the first four candidates who were unsuitable for various reasons—coked up, with track marks, black (doesn’t play well in Boise), retarded—until luck smiled on me, and I finally met the woman whose office I visit today. Except, back then, her name was Brittany Diamond; and she had blond hair and double-D breasts; and she wore fishnets and smelled of bubblegum.

  The night that she appeared in my hotel room, I told her that I didn’t want to have sex with her. Instead, in return for a thousand dollars, I wanted her to pretend to fall in love with a balding accountant from Boise. She played her part brilliantly. The accountant stayed around town, giving me time to extract his banking information, and to set up the fake FBI raid that scared him back home. In the end, he retreated, a hundred grand poorer, scared out of his wits and certain that he was about to do hard time.

  For me and Brittany, it was the beginning of a working relationship that lasted, on and off, for ten years. First we worked together on Pigeon Drops—she played the attractive girl who found the suspicious wad of cash. Later, we arranged countless Honey Traps, snagging lawyers and executives by placing classified ads in newspapers from a “lady seeking an unencumbered sexual relationship.” (Few cons are as easy as this, in which the mark—usually a married man—sends you letters that will serve as fodder for his own blackmail.)

  But over the years we grew apart. The first problem, of course, was my wife. Celia was innately suspicious of this beautiful woman whom I introduced as my “sales assistant.” (For the first ten years of our marriage, Celia thought I worked for Caterpillar, as a regional sales director responsible for industrial equipment leasing in the Southeastern United States.)

  But the more serious problem was Brittany herself. After the first few years, the novelty of conning middle-aged men out of their money wore off. She grew tired of worrying—about doing time or being killed. She wanted a real, legitimate career. So, without ever formally announcing that we were doing so, we parted ways. It happened gradually, as we saw each other less often, spoke less frequently, until finally, we realized that we were mere acquaintances, not partners, and that we owed each other nothing.

  She darkened her hair, changed her name, and reduced her breasts. Today, Jessica Smith, as she calls herself, is a businesswoman—a porn entrepreneur: a director and producer of such classics as Hindfeld and Bumpin’ Donuts.

  It’s been four years since I last saw her. She came once to Lompoc, but it was an uncomfortable visit. I could read her face as she looked around the prison’s cold gray steel: She was glad that it was me behind the glass, and not her.

  I have not seen her since then, or heard from her. Until last night’s phone call.

  Later, while the cast and crew wait for more wood, I meet Jessica Smith in her office, a small room with a ficus tree, an Ikea desk, and bookcases filled with VHS tapes, probably her own products.

  “Would you like some water?” she asks.

  I say, “From a glass, or a sealed bottle?”

  “Very funny.” She reaches under her desk to a mini-fridge, pulls out a Calistoga, and tosses it to me. She sees me examine the bottle. “It’s sealed,” she adds.

  I twist the top and take a sip. I stare at her. “You look good,” I say, finally.

  “Do I?” She touches her hair, like a matron surprised by a compliment she hasn’t heard for years, and for a moment I think she is being ironic. Then I see she is sincerely pleased.

  “Really,” I insist, since I’m making headway.

  “And you?” she says. “How’ve you been?”

  “So so.”

  “You’re finally out.”

  “Can’t keep a good man down.”

  “Are you a good man now?”

  “Temporarily.”

  She examines me: my face, my hair, my paunch. “You look . . . good.”

  I ignore the obvious lie. “How’s business?”

  “Pretty good.” She nods, trying to convince herself. “Yeah, good. I won an AVA award last month.”

  “For which movie? Shaving Ryan’s Privates?”

  “Very funny,” she says. “That’s a gay movie, by the way. I find it interesting that you even know about it.”

  “I was impressed with your directing out there.” I wave my hand in the direction of the Harvard movie set. “Gosh, college sure has changed since my own university days.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “Sorry.” I genuinely am. Truth is, I’m jealous. She got out of the game and never went to prison. Instead, she went legit and is now making good money with Aria Video. In contrast, my first attempt at going legit landed me in Lompoc, and my second has me standing in a dry cleaning shop eight hours a day. I say, “I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Well don’t,” she says. “It’s not becoming.”

  She smiles. She’s still beautiful, but now the signs of age have crept into her face: the lines around her eyes, the skin under her neck. I wonder: Will she be adequate for the con? Will she be able to seduce Edward Napier, to attract his interest, to lie naked in his bed and win his loyalty?

  “What are you looking at?” she says.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re looking at me funny.” She squints. “What’s wrong? You think I look old.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Listen, Kip,” she says, “you look old. Me—I’m still one hot piece of ass.”

  I raise my palms in surrender. “Okay.”

  “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Even though it has been four years, it feels like we never left each other. Across the desk I see not a whore or a con artist, but the person (I now realize) that I want to settle down with—a thirty-six-year-old woman who is ready to order Chinese food delivery on a rainy night, to snuggle in front of the TV, to watch a movie, and to fall asleep in my arms.

  I wonder: Is there any way to get from here to there? That has always been my problem. I know where I am, and I know where I want to be. It’s getting from here to there that’s the mystery.

  “How’s Celia?” she says.

  “Divorced.”

  “How many times?”

  “Just me. She’s with a new guy now. His name’s Carl.”

  “Better looking than you?”

  “Probably. Definitely smarter.”

  “Well that’s not saying much. You still rich from the Diet Deck?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any money whatsoever?”

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “So that’s why you’re here.”

  “Wait a second. You called me.”

  She says: “But I know you, Kip. You would never drive into the city, unless you wanted something.” She cocks her head, looks at me intently. More softly now: “Do you want something?”

  What I want, at this exact moment, is to marry her.

  I say: “No.”

  “Let me guess,” she says. “A con.”

  “Well, okay,” I say, since I guess a marriage proposal would be out of place. “There’s a piece of business. I need a girl.” I correct myself. “A woman.” Then I correct myself again. “A girl,” I say, finally, deciding this will flatter her most. “And since you called . . .” I let my voice trail off.

  “I thought you were going straight.”

  “I am.” I think about it. “Well I was.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Toby.”

  “Toby?”

  “My son.”

  “He’s like—what?—twelve years old?”

/>   “Sometimes,” I say, and shrug. “But officially he’s twenty-five.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she says. “You’re one old motherfucker.”

  “Thank you. Do you want to get married?”

  I’ll never know the answer, because—before she can continue the Nick and Nora routine—there’s a knock at the door. The bald black receptionist pops his head into Jessica’s office. “Jessica,” he says, in the quiet and respectful tone someone might use to announce a visitor in the waiting room, “we have wood.”

  “Okay, Levon, I’ll be right there.”

  Levon leaves. She turns to me. “Kip, I gotta go.”

  “Something pop up?”

  “That’s clever. Never heard that before.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” she says. “I’ve heard that about a hundred times. This week.” She stands behind her desk. “It’s good to see you, Kip.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Is what it?”

  “That’s all? We’re done?”

  “I have to go back to work. These boners are precious . . . you know how it is.”

  Do I ever. I say: “Jess, in all seriousness . . .”

  “Fine,” she says. “I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “The job. The con. Whatever it is. That’s why you’re here, right?”

  Not the marriage, then. Maybe I’ll try again later.

  I say: “Yeah, that’s why I’m here.”

  “I know you wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t important. You wouldn’t want me to risk all of this.” She gestures around her office: the Ikea desk, the ficus tree, the mini-fridge. As usual, I can’t tell if she’s serious or kidding. She pauses. “It is important, right?”

  “Toby’s in trouble,” I explain.

  “Then I’m in.”

  “Don’t you want to know—”

  “Just keep me out of jail.”

  I nod. “I promise.”