The Tell-Tale Con (13 page)

Harrison glanced at me but said nothing.

“About time.  How many times have I called to complain because you've done nothing?  If I was from Chamisa Hills or some crap, you'd have found my Cadillac already.”  She gave me a once over and then lit a cigarette.  “You guys look way too young to be cops.” 

And just like that she'd given me our in.  “That's because we're not cops.  We're journalism students from UNM.  We're here to talk to you about the lack of response from the APD in terms of property crimes in these neighborhoods.”

A moment of satisfaction so deep crossed her features that I felt bad for lying.  I wasn't stealing money from her like my parents did, but I was mostly certainly stealing something.  “Well, someone might as well notice.  Even if it's just a college paper.  That car's been gone three days, and they haven't tried to find it.  They didn't come to take a report yet.  They said they'd get to it
eventually
.  Whatever that means.  They don't care because we live
here
.  Because we're poor.”

That might have been true, but the police hadn't seemed particularly interested in Harrison and me almost getting run over either.  My guess was they were busy and loss of cars and televisions was trumped by loss of human life.  There was just too much crime in Albuquerque for the cops to keep up. 

“Can you tell us what happened when the car was taken?” 

“Look, this is what I told the cops, not that they listened.  I looked out the window, and some lady in a fur coat was breaking into my car.  I ran outside, but she was already gone.”

“A woman in a fur coat stole your car,” I repeated.

“Don't come to my house to doubt me.  It pisses me off.”

“Oh, believe me, we don't doubt you,” Harrison said soothingly.  “It's just not the usual kind of crime.  What did the police tell you about your chances of getting the car back?”

“They didn't tell me nothing.  They blew me off.  And when I called, like, the sixth time, they told me I'd probably never get it back.”

“That sucks,” I said. 

“Yeah.” 

“What did the woman in the fur coat look like?” I asked.  “I mean, did you see her?”

She took a long pull on her cigarette.  “Yeah, I saw her.  She looked like Mick Jagger in drag.”

 

 

Rules of the Scam #9

Know who you can lie to and who you can't…

 

“Mick Jagger in a wig, wearing a fur coat and driving a dinosaur Honda.  Do you know someone who can draw a composite sketch of that one?” 

Harrison slumped back in the passenger seat.  “Actually, what I saw wasn't entirely unlike that.  It was a woman, older, emaciated, wearing what looked like a wig and dark glasses, with massive lips.” 

“That could be a man or a woman.  The car is a dead end.  We don't know who gave Nate the money.  Basically, we've got nothing.” 

“I guess.”  Harrison sounded as sullen as I felt. 

We got back on to Central and headed for home as the sun was falling.  “Look, the way I see it we have the same three options we had before.  You can try to explain this to the police, though we have absolutely nothing to substantiate it, and hope it doesn't add to their suspicion that you killed Nate.  Or we could forget it ever happened and hope that it's all coincidence.  Or we could keep looking.  Try another angle.  Look somewhere else.”

“Where else?  I'm not very good at mysteries, Talia.  I never even read
Encyclopedia Brown
, or the
Hardy Boys
.”

He did tell me he'd seen
Scooby-Doo
, despite Van Poe's rules.  Van would only like the show if there was a version of
Scooby-Doo
where the members of the gang go crazy and have two hours of carefully crafted hallucination scenes leading to a psychologically twisted ending that might or might not have been reality. 

“I don't know.  The car is a dead end.  So where else can we look?  We can assume Nate was killed by someone involved in all the crap he was doing.  Or we can assume he was killed by the person who gave him that twelve thousand dollars.  If we assume that, then we can make another assumption.  All this is about you.  No one else.  Not Nate, not me, and not that lady who got her car stolen.  Someone is out to get you.  So the question becomes, why?”

“I don't know.  I can't think of anyone who would hate me enough to go through all this trouble.” 

I pulled into the heavy afternoon traffic headed into downtown.  “Well, think smaller, maybe someone you might annoy, and we'll move up from there.  Maybe what seems minor to you is actually horrible in that person's mind.”

He sighed.  “Okay.  I'll play.  Um, the person who dislikes me the most in the world is Mitch Reber.” 

I didn't bother trying to search my mind for a face to go with the name.  “Who is Mitch Reber?”

“Well, he's a chess player.”  Harrison seemed hesitant, like he wasn't sure how to explain it to me, or he didn't want to.

“I don't get it.  You're going to have to give me more.”

“I used to play against him a lot.  Back when I played.”

Another long silence.  Seriously?  This was like pulling teeth.  “So you don't play chess anymore?  Because that wasn't the impression I got.”

He glanced at me.  “I don't play competitive chess anymore.”  He grabbed the arm of his seat as I coasted to a stop in front of The Library.  I wasn't sure he realized what he was doing.  

“So he was competitive chess player?” I prompted. 

Harrison's head whipped in my direction.  Obviously, I'd brought him back from wherever he'd gone for a moment.  “Yes.  We were both grandmasters.  Highest ranked in our organization.  But he had…a run of bad luck.  He had trouble beating me.”

“So that pissed him off enough to hate you?”  Sounded stupid to me.  Then again, I was the one who'd told him to start small. 

“No, I told you, I don't think anyone hates me.  But he sure doesn't like me.”

“So you beat him a bunch, and now he's bitter?” 

“Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.  He thought his game was improving.  That his Elo rating would be better than mine in another year and that if he played me one more time he'd prove to the whole chess world that he was better.”

First of all, I had no freaking clue what an Elo rating was, and I was pretty certain that I didn't care.  Secondly, I'd had no idea that Harrison had taken chess to quite that level.  I thought he was just your average chess nerd.  This was something else all together.  Grandmaster sounded important, and an Elo rating sounded intimidating. 

“At any rate he was sure he could settle it once and for all.  Only…I was quitting.  I mean, last year I resigned from competitive chess before he could play me again.  So it goes down forever that he never beat me.  I thought he was going to have a stroke when he found out.”

“Yeah, okay.  I could see how that might be annoying if you were vain.”

“Well, he is.  He's also very competitive.  It drove him crazy that he never had a chance to beat me.  I wouldn't be surprised if he's still pissed about that, and I retired over a year ago.”

“Okay, this sounds like a decent lead.  Where do we find this guy?”

Harrison shrugged.  “At the moment?  I'm not sure.  I'll have to do some research.  Chess involves a lot of tournaments.  He could be anywhere.”

“So.” I turned off the car.  “You find out where this guy is.  In the mean time, is there anyone else you can think of?”

He twisted his mouth, deep in thought.  Finally, he said.  “Well, my step-mom.  I think maybe she hates me.”  

 

My dad was obsessed with Yoko Ono.  I had seen her picture hundreds, maybe thousands, of times.  Harrison's step-mom, Kanako Poe, Van Poe's third wife, looked exactly like a young Yoko Ono.  To the point that, after looking at dozens of pictures of her online at movie premiers and parties, I was certain she was doing it on purpose.  She wore the same long flowing caftans made of some indeterminable natural fiber, the same sunglasses worn inappropriately indoors, the same long flowing hair parted down the middle.  Even the same propensity for stupid hats. 

There weren't a million pictures of her on the internet.  There were tons more of Van alone, but I wasn't interested in those.  I scoured the internet, but there was very little info about Kanako.  She was a Japanese American; her parents had sent her to UCLA at seventeen from Kyoto.  She'd married Van two years ago in a private ceremony in the French countryside.  From what I could tell, Harrison hadn't been there.  I didn't know if that had been his choice or hers.  Or maybe he'd been there and simply hadn't been invited to be in the staged wedding pictures.  Either way, every photo was Van, Kanako and half a dozen people who were unfamiliar to me. 

But all the information I found on her didn't help me.  She wasn't crazy as far as I could tell.  There was nothing in her very brief biographies to indicate she was likely to go on a step-son killing spree.  I honestly didn't know why Harrison thought she might hate him.  Especially after claiming he was a hate-free zone the world over.  Whatever the reasoning was, he'd immediately clammed up after spitting out that little tidbit and rushed off for the relative safety of his house. 

So I'd decided to do a little checking of my own.  But there was nothing to see.  With Kanako, anyway.  Harrison himself was a different story.  Of course, I'd forgotten the name of the dude who Harrison had told me about, but now that I knew Harrison was a gold-dipped chess nerd, rather than the garden variety type, I figured I could trace the guy by googling the names of the people Harrison had played before retiring. 

It wasn't hard to figure out who the guy was.  Mitch Reber was the
John McEnroe of the professional chess world.  So I like to watch tennis.  Don't judge me. 

The guy had been in fights with just about anyone he'd ever played.  Despite my initial impression that we were talking about another kid, Mitch Reber was definitely no junior player.  He was, like, forty, with a scruffy beard, wiry curls, and thin, wire-framed glasses that seemed much too small for his face.  He was a good player by all the accounts I read, but his inability to control his temper colored his game and made him too aggressive.  Though I couldn't see how chess could ever be an aggressive game. 

I learned enough to know that he was now at the top of my suspect list.  But why would he wait a year before lashing out at Harrison?  Then, I got a teeny bit curious and started reading about Harrison's stellar career rather than Mitch Reber. 

 Harrison had been the youngest grandmaster in many, many years.  I figured, considering the context, that grandmaster meant he was really good at chess, but to me it sounded like someone who played too much
Dungeons and Dragons
.  He'd started playing the circuit at six years old.  That sounded like it would suck.  But I did have a moment of amusement looking at a grainy video of a tiny little Harrison playing chess at a small table in the middle of an arena against a man at least twenty years his senior.  While he made his moves he kicked his legs back and forth.  They were too short to reach the floor. 

I read a couple of articles about how sad everyone had been at Harrison's decision to retire at sixteen.  Then I read that since his departure, Mitch Reber and a Russian man named Ivar Gustapian had been fighting each other for the highest Elo score, which was some kind of rating system used to rank players.  At the moment, Mitch Reber was finally winning.  His score was still not higher than Harrison's had been, but he was the current highest in the world.  There were articles all over the internet suggesting that Harrison might come out of retirement at any moment, setting the chess world ablaze, like Justin Bieber suddenly dropping in on a middle school party. 

To Mitch Reber, this had to read like a slap in the face.  First Harrison refuses to play him again by retiring, never allowing Reber to prove himself triumphant.  Then, just when Reber has the chess world on a silver platter, the rumor comes along that Harrison might be back.  If I were this dude, I'd have been annoyed too.  But the real question was, was he pissed enough to kill? 

I had no way of knowing.  Articles didn't tell me much about the real Mitch Reber.  Just like they didn't tell me much about the real Harrison Poe.  I couldn't help but wonder why he'd made the decision to stop playing competitive chess.  Clearly, he was like some kind of chess god.  I could only find that embarrassingly nerdy and secretly impressive at the same time.  Like Harrison as a whole, really. 

So we'd have to seek Mitch Reber out, and I'd have to speak to him directly to know.  And I couldn't do that until Harrison told me where we could find him.  Until then, I could follow the cases we did know something about.  I surfed the internet and discovered that the police still had no suspects in Nate's murder, aside from Harrison, though they didn't mention him.  Nate had been shot once in the heart at close range by a .22 caliber pistol.  The kind anyone could buy anywhere.  There was no indication of forced entry and no indication he'd attempted to fight back at all.  The police felt he'd known the murderer well. 

That suggested to me that they'd be back to see Harrison again before long.  He'd move up from their theoretical list of suspects to their actual list.  Some of the stuff Nate had written in his notes, and the things he'd done that the police still didn't know about, made Harrison seem like a good suspect.  Even to me, and I knew he hadn't done it.

I couldn't find a police blotter about the stolen car, and there was almost nothing about our accident either, except a couple paragraphs in the human interest section talking about the danger of high school parking lots and the fact that Hollywood director Van Poe's son had been “nearly killed” in a school parking lot incident.  I wasn't sure where the jump from injured leg to nearly killed happened, but bruised bones weren't interesting news.