The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Of course. Mirplo. If it were a snake, it would’ve bit me.

  “He should keep his opinions to himself,” I said.

  “Maybe. But …” Again the shrug. This time I took it to mean that whatever Allie wanted out of Vic—information, money, maybe a foot rub—he’d have been powerless to resist. Doubtless, she was right. You recognize people with personal power, and Allie oozed charisma from every pore. I shot her a nod to acknowledge her manifest mastery over the weak mind of a Mirplo. She continued, “I told him I needed someone with a specialized set of skills. Your name came up.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t promote himself for the gig.”

  “Oh, he did, but …”

  “I know, last float on the clueless parade.”

  “I gave him a finder’s fee. The thing is, I need someone with some actual ability here. Just because Vic calls himself an oven doesn’t mean he can bake bread. Besides,” she said, “your reputation precedes you.” This sent a chill through me. In my business, reputations that precede you also often haunt you. Sometimes they chase you down and knock you in the head with a brick.

  “Where, exactly, did this precedent take place?”

  “In my office,” offered Hines. “I’m an investment counselor. Well, semiretired. Apparently one of my clients took your advice over mine.” Oh, man. I could think of ten different ways that had gone wrong: pump and dump, insider-trading fake, phantom gold mine; classic pyramid, death-benefit buys, financial-planning seminars, affinity fraud, trapdoor hedge fund. When I get my hands on loose money, I’m not the kind to let go.

  The picture, in any case, was starting to come clear. “So you think I ripped somebody off, and tracked me down to exact your revenge.” I decided to play the bravado card. “So what’s the riff now? One of you holds me down while the other beats me up?”

  Allie laughed, trumping the bravado card with the formidable Ace of Ridicule. “Radar,” she said, “does this look like a revenge tip? Honestly, if I wanted revenge on someone I’d be thinking more along the lines of available fuels, incendiary triggers, and a good benzene accelerant.” Huh? I gotta tell you, it’s not every day a dead-bang cute girl of unknown provenance sits across from you on your own couch and spins out the practical aspects of an arson fire. “Plus, pay attention,” she said. “I already told you we need you for work.”

  “What kind of work?” I asked.

  Said Milval, “I want you to teach me to grift.”

  Sure, that’s a good idea. Right up there with teaching the art of medieval trebuchet construction to a blind amputee with Bell’s palsy. Grifters are a breed apart. To be good at it, you have to have a taste for danger, a heightened sense of self-preservation, and, at the end of the day, a certain dishonest honesty, the unsentimental knowledge that you fly through life solo. Sometimes, in my dark moments, I feel a little like a remora, clinging to the tiger shark of humanity, feeding on its crumbs or, as the case may be, feces. Other times, I feel like the shark. At no time do I feel like the things I know could be authentically conveyed to someone not born and bred in the grift. It’s in the blood, like peanut allergy.

  So my first reaction was to reject the proposal out of hand, send these two packing, and go on about my business—top of the to-do list being to track down Vic Mirplo and kick his flat white ass for telling tales out of school. But the grift isn’t about first reactions, it’s about measured responses. And the fact that Allie had been clever enough to climb into my life and chill enough to talk about arson made me think that my disengagement, however I chose to effect it, should be gracefully staged. No sense in leaving a trail of tears. So I just nodded and said, “Go on.”

  Allie looked me up and down. I got the icy feeling that she had accurately registered both my mental rejection of the proposition and my decision to play cozy with that choice. Nevertheless, she appeared to take my answer at face value. “It’s kind of a Make-A-Wish Foundation thing.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, looking at Milval, “don’t tell me I’m on your daisy chain.” (Where daisy chain is the sum of things you want to do before you push up those eponymous perennials.)

  “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “So far as I know, my health is as good as the next man’s, provided the next man is sixty-three with no history of smoking or excessive drink. Why, just last month, a doctor shoved his finger up my ass and pronounced—”

  “You know,” I said, “I’m almost positive I don’t need to know about the state of your prostate, no matter how robust. Why don’t we keep this on the bare-bones track if we can?” Milval nodded his acquiescence, and looked to Allie to continue.

  “My grandfather,” she said, “is what in his day they called a square. All his life he’s played by the rules, and while he can’t say that this strategy hasn’t borne certain fruits—”

  “—By which she means I’m rich.”

  “—he now feels that the time has come to let loose a little. You know, try something new.”

  Milval felt constrained to amplify. “My wife dragged me to church every Sunday from the day we wed to the day she died. And do you know what I thought about every damn Sunday?”

  I couldn’t begin to guess. Were I in church, I’d be pining for an iPod.

  “Mostly, I thought. If this is the only life I have, why am I wasting it here? Lately, that question has come to assume a somewhat greater state of urgency.”

  “Healthy prostate notwithstanding?”

  “Healthy prostate notwithstanding. Mr. Hoverlander—may I call you Radar?” I shrugged a nod. “I’ve been good all my life. Textbook good. Ticket to heaven good. Good to my friends, good to my wife, good to my kids, …” a nod toward Allie, “… my grandkids. I never cheated on my taxes; hell, I don’t even cheat at golf. Can you imagine?” He paused—for effect, I felt—and then continued. “I’m not sick, and I’m not that old, but I am tired. Tired of all those rules, you know? What were they for? What good did they do me? What good do they do me now? All my life, I’ve never been bad. Just for once and just for real, I want to know what that’s like.”

  “I understand the impulse,” I said, “but why the grift? I can think of lots of ways to be bad. Have you considered shoplifting? Buying pharmaceuticals from Canada? Or how about this: Find yourself an adventuress about Allie’s age and pursue that prostate investigation on a more, you know, recreational basis.”

  “Radar, don’t be gross,” said Allie tartly. It was absolutely the first crack in her cool and I wondered whether it represented a deeper emotional fault line. I made a mental note to explore the fissure later. One thing you always need in the grift is to know where someone’s buttons are and how they can be pushed.

  “The issue is not sex,” added Milval. “I’ve lived a long time. I’ve had all the sex I need.” I tried to wrap my brain around that concept and failed by a fairly wide margin. “It’s a matter of the life of the mind. I want a problem I can sink my teeth into, one that carries real risk and real reward.” He rose to his feet and strode around my apartment in a state of unsuspended animation. “You’re young,” he continued. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be my age. To see the end of the line lurking, if not exactly around the corner then somewhere down the street or in the next block. And from what Allie tells me, your life hasn’t been burdened by an excess of conventionality. However, mine has. And I don’t want to die saying, ‘Mine was.’ Do you understand?”

  “Why don’t you let Allie be your guide?” I asked. “She seems to have a natural bent for this sort of thing.” Yeah, she did. Tracking techniques. Contrived encounters. Cryptic e-mails. Cinderfuckingella shoes. Allie was no more innocent of the grift than I was. Which meant that her gift of me to gramps was just an attempt to hold him at arm’s length from her own true nature, or agenda.

  “But you’re the, er, professional,” said Hines.

  I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking the same thing. This whole setup had, well, setup written all over it. But what was I going to d
o? Bust Allie for trying to play me? Then hope she’d lose interest and go find some other mook to mook? I couldn’t see that happening. But nor could I see me willingly drinking the Kool-Aid of the first chick slick enough to squeeze a Mirplo till he popped.

  So: Let’s assume that Milval Hines saw his clever granddaughter as nothing more than someone who could track down other clever people like me. Let’s also assume that Allie’s gift of a bad-boy adventure for her beloved grandpa was so much smoke concealing … well, whatever lay behind the smoke. And while we’re at it, let’s further assume that Allie’s smart enough to know I’m smart enough to know all this, so that if I say, “Okay, sure, I’ll train the dude,” I’m really saying, “Okay, sure, I’ll see the next card.” And the peculiar nature of this thing is that each of us knows the absolute truth about the other and absolutely can’t speak it. Grifters are many things, but frank and open and honest do not head the list. They don’t even crack the top ten.

  So what you end up with is wheels within wheels, right? Wheels within wheels within wheels. An “I know that she knows that I know that she knows” Ouroboran serpent that eventually swallows its own tale. I don’t know about you, but I find this shit interesting.

  Still, I could have walked away, either with sufficiently face-saving “my dance card is full right now” excuses or just the common grifter’s vanishing act, no explanation, no forwarding address. But it was a measure of Allie’s skill of assessment that she either intuited or deduced two irresistible fixatives gluing me in.

  One was a puzzle. We know I’m a dog with a bone with those.

  The other was Allie herself, coming off like a ballsy, no-shit schoolmarm who treated me with all the respect due a slow learner in the back of the class. I’m a huge sucker for that.

  Or just a sucker, full stop.

  So now we’re reading from a mutually arrived-upon script, and it’s my line, and what I come up with comes out in my huskiest tough-guy voice of concern. “The grift’s not easy,” I say, running my fingers theatrically through my hair. “And it’s sure as hell not cheap.”

  “I spent ten thousand dollars once,” said Hines, “learning to appraise heirloom jewelry. I know the price of a quality education.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Where would you like to begin? Maybe a few pointers on how to make the pigeon drop less lame?”

  “If that’s what you suggest, but don’t you even want to discuss your fee?”

  I thought about this for a moment. Of course, one classic way of moving the mark in your direction is just to push him away. The more you pay, the more it’s worth, right? And someone who went ten dimes into jewelry appraisal was likely to go very deep pocket indeed. But that didn’t feel like the right angle here. After all, if Hines was prepared to pay for the mystery, it seemed like the mystery should start right here at the price tag. Besides, any good negotiator will tell you that naming the first price is the first step to getting screwed. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll get my taste. If I’m good at what I do, it won’t even come out of your end.”

  I looked over at Allie. She was beaming. Like she knew exactly how good I was at what I do, and what a fun little Disneyland ride this would be for gramps. But what about her ride? Where was it headed, and who was the passenger? That needed thinking about, so I decided to bring this little conclave to a close, take some distance, and start sorting the players from the scorecard. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll need some time to map out a snuke. You cool with that?” Allie hit me with her best doe-eyed look, a look so convincing that at that point she seemed not a mistress of the grift but, indeed, the last true innocent.

  Have you played much poker? A certain situation occurs in the game where you get so confused that you don’t know whether to raise, fold, or screw the waitress. It’s called getting lost in the hand, and that’s where I was just then. I honestly didn’t know whether Allie was on the straight or so pretzeled out that I couldn’t tell where the ingenue left off and the femme fatale began.

  I decided to track down Vic Mirplo and get his input.

  While also, of course, not neglecting to kick his flat white ass.

  7.

  twenty-five cents a tit

  L ike a comet leaves a trail of stardust across the night sky, Mirplo inevitably leaves a clumsy mess in his wake. Set out to track him down and you’ll hear comments like, “Oh, yeah, he was in here last night bowling for beers. He stank out the joint.” Or, “Tried to run a shell game in front of an LAPD substation. Can you imagine?” Or—and this one I love—“He was selling parking places outside the Hollywood Bowl.” This last gag was a Mirplo favorite, possibly the lowest low-rent snadoodle the human mind has yet devised. What he does, he finds a parking place near a crowded sports or cultural event, pulls his shitbox Song Serenade half out of it and waits there till someone comes along and asks, “Are you leaving?” “Sure am,” he says, “for five bucks.” Then he and Shirley Temple go troll for another open space and start the gaff all over. He’s been known to net literally tens of dollars an evening. Seriously, what a mook, huh?

  In this case, of course, I didn’t have to track him down. All I had to do was text him:

  biz prop big $$ RU n?

  This brought him running faster than a cat to a can opener.

  We met at Broadview, a topless joint in Atwater Village that I love for its name and Mirplo loves for its liberal no-cover, one-drink-minimum policy. The girls in Broadview are skanky in the extreme—their needle tracks practically glow in the blacklight. But if you sit in back and look like you don’t have any money, no stretch for Vic, they never hassle you and you never have to tip anybody anything. And they have the requisite body parts to meet all your ogling needs, at a price anyone can afford. According to Vic’s twisted math, since he could nurse a single watery beer through roughly a dozen floor shows, this works out to something on the order of twenty-five cents per nipple, not at all bad value if you’re horny, borderline broke, and unlikely to get laid in any circumstance short of lying on your back with a hard-on when a nymphomaniac alien drops out of the sky, legs spread.

  I was sitting at the bar drinking tonic water when Vic shambled in looking like the drop-off bag at a Salvation Army thrift store. Happy to see me, he extended his hand for a manly fist bump. I took my tonic and tonic and dumped it on his head. He barely had time to sputter, “What the fuck?” before a bouncer was among us, a hyperinflated poster child for Winstrol with the word killre tattooed on his thigh-size biceps. I wondered if killre was intended as the British spelling, like theatre, or just a dermal typo.

  “Is there a problem here?” asked the bouncer in a voice that cut through the lowest registers of the Broadview’s PA system, just then cranking Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” stripper Kimi’s signature tune for your viewing pleasure.

  “I’ll leave that up to him,” I said, fixing Vic with a stare so clearly hard and meaningful that it actually managed to penetrate to the deeper recesses of his brain.

  “We’re fine,” Vic decided at last. “I could use a towel.” The bouncer reached over the bar and brought out a limp, brown rag rank with mildew. Vic wanly thanked the bouncer, who went off to look large somewhere else. Then, tossing the rag back behind the bar, Vic ran the sleeve of his ratty sweatshirt over his head and asked, “Okay, how did I fuck up?” Say this for a Mirplo: They never think the indignities they suffer are undeserved.

  I told him about my run-in with Allie Quinn, and tore him a metaphorical new one for leading her to me.

  “That bothered you?” he said, genuinely surprised. “But why? You already know her. You’ve met her before.”

  “The fuck I have.”

  “Yeah, you did. Last time, though, she had orange plastic hair.”

  As Vic Mirplo is the clumsiest liar who ever drew breath, I had to believe that he at least thought he was telling the truth. So I had him run it down.

  “It was the car show,” he said. “Don’t you remember? Last year at
the convention center. We were working the test-drive scam.”

  “You were working the test-drive scam,” I corrected. This was another low-rent Mirplo venture, where he set up a booth (okay, a box on a card table) outside the convention center, offering car fans a free shot at test driving the hot new whatever out of Tokyo or Detroit. His “display” consisted of crudely cut photos from magazines, and his entry forms were a stack of bad Xeroxes, but nobody seemed to mind too much; nor did they balk, terribly, at giving up their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other useful digits. The promised drawing, of course, never took place, but Vic banked a dollar per entry form from data consolidators who would later phish contest entrants with the chance to learn race-car driving from blissfully unaware NASCAR pros. All that took was valid plastic and, well, the rest was garden-variety credit rape. Meanwhile, back at the car show, Vic was more bird dog than scam artist, but among his limited gifts is that of gab—he had no trouble getting the punters to fill out a form. To sweeten the deal, he gave out free Dodge Stealth pens to everyone who filled out a form. And where did he get the pens? By the handful from the Dodge Stealth booth when the booth babes were otherwise occupied. Swear to God, plunk a Mirplo down on a desert island without food or shelter, and his native resourcefulness could easily keep him alive till the end of the day.

  I, meanwhile, had been stalking somewhat weightier game, from actual leased space on the convention floor, where my fabricat high-end import enterprise discreetly offered gray-market luxury sedans to quote-unquote discerning individuals who didn’t mind skirting California’s clean-air or safety standards. The cars in question, I claimed, had been manufactured overseas to bullet- and kidnapping-proof standards, for sale to African dictators or South American drug lords. Geopolitical flux being what it was, some of these cars now needed backup buyers, the intended customers having apparently been deposed or murdered, but it’s an ill wind that blows no good, right?

  I faced some hard questions. If such a car wasn’t imported through normal channels, they asked, how could it possibly be street legal in California, or indeed anywhere in the United States? And if it were imported through normal channels, how could it be so cheap?