The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Allie explained (and I use the word explain advisedly, since all or part of this alleged explanation may have been pure isinglass) that some suit-and-sedan types had visited Milval’s office, asking pointed questions that pointed, well, right at me.

  “You think they’re closing in?” I asked.

  “I think they’ve closed. I think they’re just waiting for you to burn down the house before they make their move. Radar,” she said, “so far, we haven’t crossed the line. We’ve sent a lot of unsolicited investment advice to people who may or may not have forwarded it to authorities. But we haven’t taken a penny yet. We can still walk away.”

  “Walk how, exactly?” I asked.

  “Just part company.” She patted my knee through the sheet. “Part friends, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, patting her knee in kind. Meanwhile, I mentally replayed her recent plays, fiddling with the pieces till they clicked. First had come the false negative, delivered the other day outside Java Man: We have to quit for dotty Granddad’s good. That dog didn’t hunt, but she knew it wouldn’t. She was just softening me up for the next lie in her lineup—a lie she had to believe I’d believe, given that she’d given me “a woman’s ultimate gift” and all. (Could she really go so far as to bed me, just to validate her words the next morning? Of course she could; that’s how grifters roll.) Now she was playing the threat card, trying to scare me out of the picture with her “honest” admission that the feds or whoever were after me. Why? Simple. So that she and Hines could burn down the house without me and keep all the earn for themselves. It was, I had to admit, a pretty play: Ease me in, squeeze my expertise, spook me, then ease me out.

  But would it work? After all, I’d been running tech on the project from the start. All the false webworks, the offshore accounts, the laundry line back to the States—all that stuff was on my computer and in my head. They couldn’t trigger the burn without me, could they?

  Well, could they?

  “Allie,” I asked, “who is your grandfather, really?” This was a fairly risky card to play, as it openly accused her of lying. After all, if Milval Hines wasn’t her eccentric gramps, then who could he possibly be but an ally in the grift? Maybe someone ghosting my tech, ready to take over in case I bailed. I didn’t really expect Allie to tell me the truth. I just wanted to see if she’d stick to her story or shift to a different line of defense.

  She nodded, her lips tightly pursed, as if to cop to my unstated charge. “I told you: Cards on the table,” she said. “He’s the mark.”

  The mark? Now that was an imaginative inveracity. In order for Hines to be the mark, he’d have to be a completely guileless but exceedingly rich investment counselor that she’d found and mooked into playing a role. But to what end? To weevil into his bank account? Then why did she need me? Perhaps she’d promised that they’d burn down the house without me, but now she’s changing teams.

  “The mark, huh?” I said. “Okay. How do we flip him?”

  “No, no, no, Radar, you’re not paying attention. I told you: The heat is on. We’ve got to shade and fade.”

  “You’ll forgive me,” I said dryly, “if I don’t share your sense of crisis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say your credibility’s not at an all-time high.”

  “Oh, you stupid ass, why do you think I slept with you?”

  “To get me to believe you.”

  “So why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because I’m a stupid ass?”

  This earned me another coffee bath, plus a rant of some substance. “Radar Hoverlander,” she said, “if that’s even vaguely your real name, which I doubt to several orders of magnitude, you’re so far gone in the grift that you can’t even see the truth anymore through your paranoid haze. You think I screwed you to mook you? God! I screwed you because I don’t want to see you get hurt and I couldn’t think of any other way to get over that moat you’ve dug around yourself.

  “How long have you been alone, Radar? When was the last time you ever actually let someone in? I’m talking about really in. In here.” She patted her chest, twice, with the flat of her hand. “Not just the …” she groped for a phrase, and arrived at (the admirable, I thought), “penumbra of persiflage you call the real you!” By now Allie was really worked up. She stormed around my bedroom, hands and arms flying. She looked like an actress going over the top on an audition piece, and I wondered if that’s what this was: her audition for the part of Radar’s girlfriend. Suddenly I wanted to believe her. Not only that, I wanted to unwind her, backpredict her, find out who she was, how she got here, and where she got that tremendous talent of hers. In the moment, I dared to dream that we could actually get down to the place where maybe we could trust each other, if not as lovers, then at least as partners in the grift. And if I was wrong? If she really was using me to serve some other end, so what? The Merlin Game was just about money. But Allie was one of a kind. Lies and all, she was a keeper; I wanted to keep her.

  Instead, I stepped on a land mine.

  “Look,” I said, “first of all, my name is my name. It says so right on my driver’s license.” She snorted; I’d have snorted, too. “Second, where do you get off slagging me for being a closed shop? You haven’t been a paragon of honesty yourself. Now, suddenly you’re telling me the truth?”

  The trouble with too far …

  “Why should I believe you?”

  … is you never know you’re going …

  “Up till now, the only thing open about you—”

  … till you’ve gone.

  “—was your legs.”

  “Fuck you,” she spat. “Just fucking, fucking fuck you.” She snatched up her shoes and ran out into the living room. I heard her fussing with them out there. Then I heard the front door slam, then silence.

  I lay in bed a long time, inhaling the oddly conflagrant mixture of coffee and sex that lingered in the sheets. Was she right? Was I really nothing but a penumbra of persiflage? More to the point, had I just driven off the sexiest, most intelligent, most exciting woman I’d ever met? Worse, had I driven off the only woman with whom, against all foreseeable odds, I could be open and honest and true?

  The tap of regret opened, and the moat that Allie’d spoken of filled pretty damn quick.

  Eventually I got up and got dressed. I went out into the living room, hoping that somehow Allie’s earlier door-slam had been a bluff, that I’d find her sitting on my couch, arms crossed in silent fury, waiting for me to come to my senses.

  Nope. No Allie. Allie was gone.

  As was my laptop.

  Replaced by a scrap of paper with a scrawled address.

  Good times.

  * * *

  *In fairness to my erection, it did its best to meet her halfway.

  * * *

  13.

  allie’s allies

  B am! Bam! Bam!

  Thirty minutes later I’m pounding on the door of Allie’s high-rise Hollywood apartment. I didn’t bother trying to disguise my rage. Couldn’t have if I’d wanted to, I was that irate. Allie had stolen from me. Stolen! She’d taken private property and just walked off! Who does such a thing? Not that it’d do her any good, apart from dissecting my browser history to see how my taste in online porn runs. It’s not like I’m likely to leave passwords cached. At the end of the day, all she pinched was a giant paperweight.

  I know what you’re thinking: I’ve got a lot of nerve getting huffed over theft when theft, in a sense, is my line of work. To which I say: Yes, but no. Grifters have honor. We finesse our earn. We use guile and cunning, like wolves, and we take advantage of the weak (-minded) members of the herd, just like any wolf would. But we don’t steal. That’s just low. We’re artists. It’s con art. You take pride in your work. Even a Mirplo knows the difference between sticking someone up and romancing his cash. The latter takes expertise; the former, just a gun. And if Mirplo would know this, then Allie would know it in spades. Tha
t’s what made me so mad. To stoop to a snatch and grab was so far beneath her. Where was her self-respect?

  Uhm …

  Right where it always is, Radar. Spang blam in the middle of her self-interest.

  For a moment, the fog of my fury lifted and I saw things from Allie’s point of view. She had to know that I wouldn’t leave the keys to the burn just lying in a temp file on my laptop. Which meant it wasn’t the computer she wanted.

  Well, what did she want?

  The scrawled address had said it all.

  More Radar. More me.

  She knew she couldn’t burn down the house with my computer, but also that I couldn’t burn down the house without it. Therefore, she hadn’t stolen it, just taken it hostage. In a weird way, this made me feel better. The suppositive girl of my dreams was duplicitous, yes, but not dumb, and not low. She had me chasing my laptop across town like some ridiculous numpty chasing a gaffed dollar bill down the sidewalk while hidden kids tug it along on a string and just laugh. And she got what she wanted, Radar Hoverlander, utterly sans cool, bamming away on her door like a lunatic.

  I stopped in mid-bam. Pulled out a pen. Wrote “I get it” on the back of the address scrap and slid it under the door. Then I waited. After a few moments, I heard a muffled rustling inside, and the rasp of a security chain being set. Allie opened the door as far as the chain would allow. I guess she assumed—rightly—that I wasn’t the type to try shouldering my way in, and that in any case—again rightly—I didn’t have near enough shoulder.

  “Do you get it?” she asked. “Do you really?”

  I sighed in conscious imitation of the patented Allie Sigh. “I get that this isn’t about the Merlin Game,” I said. “I get that you wanted me over here for a reason. And I get,” I said, pointing past her to the rooms within, “that the reason’s in there, not out here.”

  “Are you calm?” she asked. “Are you cool? Radar, there are people inside. I can’t have you going all apeshit in here.”

  “I’m cool,” I said. “Stable as a table.” And in fact I found I was. I think it had something to do with surrender. Allie had proven herself capable of jugging me around like a piece on a chessboard. In a sense, the sooner the poor pawn admits it’s a pawn, the happier it is. (But did she have to sleep with it? In retrospect, that was just cruel.) “It’s your move,” I said with a shrug. “Just like always.”

  Allie closed the door and undid the chain, then opened the door again just wide enough to slip out into the hallway with me. She put her hand on my arm. “You know,” she said, “I could’ve gotten you here other ways. I didn’t have to sleep with you. That was by choice.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna take cold comfort in that right now.”

  “Oh, come on, Radar. Was it really that bad?” No, it was really that good. That’s the problem. Still, no use crying over spilt whatever. Time to man up. I mentally straightened my shoulders and slipped into grift mode. At this I felt a certain pride rise. After all, Allie’s allies had gone to some lengths to set this all up. That showed they valued my talent. Which gave me some leverage going in. And when you’re flying blind through a situation, leverage is handy to have.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s see what’s behind door number three.” We went inside.

  My first impression of the apartment was: movie set. Everything seemed studied and sterile. Worse, it all matched. The generic abstract art prints on the walls picked up color from the carpet. The plates, cups, and saucers in the china hutch bore mutually complementary floral designs—but no indication that they’d ever been, or ever would be, used for food or drink. More like a set of display dishes at Ikea. A ridiculously overchromed bookcase featured racks of classics with rich leather bindings that had likewise clearly never been cracked. Magazines fanned on a teak sideboard bore boring titles like Coastal Living and Decor, and like the books, they looked utterly unread. I wondered if they even had text inside; they could be just dummies. The dining table was artfully made up with a fake fruit display, place mats, and neatly rolled cloth napkins in stainless steel holders. Even the view out the window looked fake. Behind the figure sitting on the couch, a set of silk drapes framed a postcard-perfect view of the Capitol Records Building, and the HOLLYWOOD sign beyond.

  Wait … the figure sitting on the couch?

  I recognized him in an instant, but he seemed so out of place in this pristine realm that it took me a moment to shake off cognitive dissonance and accept the evidence of my eyes.

  Finally I said, “Hello, Vic.”

  Mirplo squirmed. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “No? That’s good. ’Cause it looks like a sellout.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he protested.

  “It never is.”

  “No,” agreed a voice from over my shoulder. “It really never is.” Out of the bedroom strode the player I’d expected to find here, Milval Hines.

  He had changed. Where before he carried himself with the larking naughtiness of a truant schoolboy, he now oozed arrogance and sense of purpose. He seemed to have shed years from his age, but that may have been nothing more than a matter of standing up straight and switching out of retiree drag and into something more of a businessman mode. So radical was his character shift that I knew in an instant what he was—a Jake, a cherry top, practiced at undercover work—and I mentally kicked myself for not seeing it sooner.

  Beside him stood a brusque young woman in a stolid polyester suit. She, too, had the look of law enforcement, from the top of her manic-repressive brunette bun, down the front of her department-store blouse and skirt, all the way to the tips of her sensible shoes. In other clothes and circumstances you’d have judged her as hot. Here, she just came off as academy-graduate gray, but I’m sure that was by design. She had my computer tucked under her arm. Jacked into one of the USB ports was a device I didn’t immediately recognize.

  “I believe this is yours,” she said, handing me the laptop. There was something not exactly American in her English. Kiwi? South Africa? Likely Australia. Or maybe just voice paint. In this crowd, you never can tell.

  “It is,” I agreed. I tinked the unfamiliar peripheral with a fingernail. “But I can’t place this bad boy.”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute,” said Hines. “Let’s sit down. Get familiar.” He gestured toward the dining table, and we all took seats. I glanced at the fake fruit. Did it come with fake fruit flies? I decided to treat the entire conversation as bugged.

  “So,” I said to Hines, just for shits and giggles, “which branch of law enforcement are you with?” This wasn’t necessarily the best opening move, since it demonstrated that I had him pegged. But in the name of grabbing status, I wanted the opening move to be mine.

  “No need to show off, Radar,” said Hines. “We know you know what you know. Your bona fides are not at issue here.”

  “You mean I’ve been vetted.” The closet hottie pulled a breath to reply, but I held up my hand. “Wait,” I said, “let me answer for you.” I put an antipodean gloss on my voice, as close a match to hers as I could manage at first pass, and said, “‘Of course you’ve been vetted, Mr. Hoverlander. What do you think this whole episode has been about?’” In a sense I was pinging her, trying to determine how she liked me aping her accent and also jumping her lines. To her credit, she maintained a face of utmost poker. I thought I might have to ping a little harder next time.

  “Well,” asked Hines, “what do you think it’s been about?”

  “I’ll reserve judgment on that.” I eyed Mirplo. “Since it’s not that simple and all.”

  “I swear to God, Radar, I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.”

  “Whatever,” I whatevered. To Hines I said, “It’s your meeting, Gramps. You’ve got the floor.”

  “Fine. Let’s start with introductions.” He gestured toward his colleague. “This is Detective Constable Claire Scovil. She’s with the Australian High Tech Crime Centre.”

  “
Really?” I cocked a brow. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “It’s not so far to Toluca Lake.”

  “She’s on detachment,” said Hines.

  For the sum of two odd reasons, I decided that this had a better than even chance of being true. First, I happened to know that there was a furnished-apartment complex in Toluca Lake, popular with visitors “on detachment.” Second, she said Toluca Lake like it was a toy she liked to play with. Like the way people can’t get enough of saying Cahuenga Boulevard once they get that it’s ka-WAYNE-guh, not ka-HUN-guh.

  “Detached to whom?” I asked. Seemed like the logical next question.

  But what happened next was not logical—and just a little bit scary. Hines and Allie exchanged looks. Not long, just a glance. But enough to let me know that they both knew the answer to my logical next question. Which meant—God, dare I believe it?—that Allie could be a cherry top, too. Trust me, there’s nothing a grifter likes less than learning that one of his kind has been flipped. Or not even flipped? Perhaps she’d been law all along. Was there a police department training program somewhere good enough to spit out faux grifters of Allie’s skillful ilk? The thought sent a shudder through me. If they had that level of countermeasure, I might as well hang up my fake passport and bogus notary stamp, because the grift as I knew it was done.

  But that was a contemplation for later. Just then, I was still in the moment, still trying to wrest control. “Look,” I said, spreading my hands. “I get that the Merlin Game has been rained out. And I get that you think you have me by the short hairs. Who knows? Maybe you do. I haven’t seen all the cards in your deck. But the dramatics. This”—I gestured around the room—“bourgeois safe-house thing you’ve got going here. It really doesn’t work for me. Can we just skip to the Cliffs Notes version of what’s what?”