The Tell-Tale Con (2 page)

“You raise your parents however you like, and I'll raise mine, okay?”

“Are you going to send the client in, Tallulah?” Mom asked before Harrison could react to my response. 

She started making the low humming noises at the back of her throat that indicated she was in mystic mode.  At least she was resorting to tricks I was familiar with now.  I didn't like it when she started pulling new crap like that little scene I'd just witnessed. 

Then she fixed me with a glare, like Harrison and I were wasting her time.  Like she hadn't come out and been all
wooooo, death is behind the eye
, or whatever. 

“He's not here for you, Mom.”

She glared at me one more time, like she couldn't believe I'd be so bold as to have a conversation in the lobby, and then disappeared behind the beaded curtain.  I turned to Harrison.  I wouldn't exactly have called us friends.  We'd dissected a fetal pig together.  He was kind of hot in an
I really like chess
kind of way.  But regardless of whether or not we were friends, I had enough of a conscience to feel uncomfortable with this whole situation. 

“Look, I'm really sorry about the whole detective thing.  Whatever you need…maybe I can help you.  Or someone else.”

“There used to be a
Private Ike
sign outside the window.  In neon letters,” he added.  “I guess I should have known he was gone.”

I had been bugging my mom to get a neon sign.  “Yes, bright lights attract the stupid ones.  I mean, you know.  Not that you're stupid.”

His eyes narrowed.  “It was right outside my window.  I saw it all day and all night.”  He glanced toward the large bank of windows through which I'd watched his approach.  “I didn't know you lived so close.”

“And yet, here I am.”  I didn't like people knowing my personal business, and this felt really personal to me.  “I'm sure there's another detective.  Somewhere.”

“
Somewhere
.  I just don't know where else to go,” he whispered, before pulling in another deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and heading for the door. 

 

 

 

Rules of the Scam #3

Don't make your story too big, or no one will believe it…

 

Harrison didn't look at me on his way past, but I wasn't just going to let him leave.  Though I had no idea why.  It wasn't my business.  I had no room for anyone else's problems in my life.  But before I could move, he was gone, breaking the land record for a teenager on foot.  Cursing, I jammed my feet into flip-flops and followed him.  I heard his footsteps bounding down the stairs, but he moved way too fast for me.  I stumbled after him, still not sure why I was doing this. 

As usual, Mr. Wong's smelled like heat and detergent.  Warm, artificially fresh air pushed in around me immediately, like an aggressive blanket monster just out of the dryer.  We'd only lived here about nine months, but in the colder months it was nice.  The heat wafted up and took huge dollars off our potential energy budget.  Right now it was still the beginning of October, and in New Mexico that meant it was too hot to live inside an industrial dryer. 

Harrison's green
chess club
jacket was just visible slipping out the door.  “Harrison, wait.”

Not surprisingly, he didn't listen.  Whatever was wrong with him was all consuming now that my mom had given him the boot.  I darted into traffic, dodging through the crawl of Friday afternoon workers desperate to get home or to one of the tiny pubs that dotted our neighborhood.  Either way, traffic was slow going, and that made it easy to follow Harrison.  And since The Library was directly across from Mr. Wong's it wasn't hard to keep up.  

I caught up to him in the lobby of his building.  I'd never been inside before though I'd seen it a million times from across the street.  The idea of living in a library appealed to me, but from what I could tell, there was very little library left.  Just the tall airy ceilings and the smoky colored panes of ancient glass in the high windows.  And maybe the white marble floor.  It was hard to say since it had ceased being a library years before I was born, let alone before I'd moved to New Mexico in January. 

Willing myself not to be distracted by the one nod to librariness, a wall of dark wood shelves lined with old books, I directed my attention back to Harrison. 

“Hey, wait.” 

I grabbed his sleeve, and he stopped, the stiffness of his spine telling me how reluctant he really was to talk to me.  He kept partially turned away, the shadows of the ill-lit room obscuring his expression.  That bothered me.  I didn't like not being able to gauge people. 

“So I went to the wrong place for help.  You don't have to feel sorry for me.” 

I made sure I kept my voice low so we didn't bother anyone else who came into the lobby.  “Why do you need a detective?”

I had to ask.  For some reason it bugged me.  All of it.  That he'd come to my house looking for help.  That we didn't help him.  That he was so clearly suffering.  So I brutally tamped down the
not my business
impulse and waited impatiently for him to speak. 

“It doesn't matter.”

He didn't sound like it didn't matter.  He sounded broken. 

I really looked at him for the first time in all the months I'd known him.  I'd seen Van Poe around town because he filmed a movie once near the high school.  He was an aging Cali boy.  I knew his type from my years running scams with my parents up and down the California coast.  It wasn't until my dad had gone to prison that we'd left SoCal and come to New Mexico instead. 

Van Poe represented a cross section of California life that was comfortably familiar.  He was tall, too tanned, face lined from too much sun exposure, board shorts and baggy shirts and hair that had once been blond and was fading out to white.  It occurred to me for the first time to wonder if Harrison was his biological son.  If he was, Harrison's mom was some other race, though I didn't know what.  His skin was darker than mine, despite my persistent tan, and he definitely wasn't Mexican.  Around here, that minority was definitely the majority. 

He looked a little like his father, but not enough to immediately seem related.  That was the long and short of it. 

“Clearly it does matter, and you would not believe how good I am at getting what I want.  So why don't you just tell me.”

He pushed out a breath, a mix of a snort of laughter and what sounded like a sigh of frustration.  “I can believe it.  Look…”  He glanced around.  “Someone wants me to think I'm being hunted by a demon.”

“What?”  Of everything I might have expected to come out of his mouth, that wasn't even on the list.  “Why on earth would you think you were being hunted by a demon?”

Breath left his body in a hard push I could hear from feet away.  “Let's just go back outside.”

I wasn't about to argue with him when I was this close to the answers I was dying to have.  Harrison was a conundrum.  He was brilliant, and yet he believed he was being hunted by demonic forces. 

I had to know why. 

We stepped back out onto the sidewalk.  The sun was going down now, and in the desert that meant it was getting colder every second.  For several moments we didn't speak.  People pushed past us on the sidewalk, but no one spared us a glance.  That was the price you paid living downtown.  

“My cousin made us play with a Ouija board at a party.”

Oh, good lord.  No story that started with a Ouija board was ever good.  “Harrison, Ouija boards are about as real as my mom is psychic.  You can't believe everything you see.”

I could not believe he'd be so naïve and superstitious.  He seriously was brilliant.  It was no exaggeration that I'd never met anyone smarter than him.  How could he be so ridiculous?

“Will you let me finish?  Anyway, I didn't say I was being hunted by a demon.  I said someone wants me to
think
I am.”

I waved my hand.  “Okay, keep talking.”

“The Ouija gave me a name.  The name of a demon.  It came up in several places after that.  Including someone who randomly told me that the demon was hunting me.  Not haunting.  Hunting.”  He watched a couple of the old familiar clientele, hookers, go into Mr. Wong's. 

“Did you believe them at that point?”

He shrugged.  “Not at first.  But now I've been…hearing things.  Voices in my bedroom.  Saying the same name that the Ouija board did and that I've heard in other places.  Telling me…things.”

Oh. 

This wasn't what I'd expected.  Was he crazy?  I'd studied plenty of psychology in my life.  Again, another byproduct of figuring out how best to play the mark.  He was the right age for the onset of schizophrenia. 

“I'm not crazy,” he told me tightly.  As though my train of thought would have been hard to anticipate.  “It's real.  Regardless of what you think.  Something is trying their best to make me feel like I really am being hunted.”

I spent only a second thinking about what he'd told me, pinning it all together.  I didn't think I had long before he sprinted again.  “Look, as you have said yourself, I don't think you're being hunted.  I think you're either crazy, which you assure me you're not, or you're being conned.”

He cocked his head to the side, his body tense, like he was on the verge of either running or lashing out at me.  “Conned?  That's an interesting way of phrasing it.”

“It's a basic rule of the scam.  Don't make your story too big, or no one will believe it.”

“Rule of the scam?” 

Whenever people start repeating everything you say it's a bad sign that the mark isn't with you.  Not that I had any intention of conning Harrison.  But the rules still applied to everyday conversation.  I shouldn't have mentioned the rules.  I'd momentarily forgotten that other people didn't learn these sorts of things at their parents' feet.  That was dangerous, and a clear sign I'd gotten sloppy since refusing to participate in any more of my parents' cons. 

“All I'm saying is that if you're not crazy, someone is trying to make you think you are.  Not that you're being hunted, but that you are crazy.  The story is too big.  It can't possibly be true.  Someone is playing you, Harrison.”

He wouldn't meet my eyes.  I glanced up and down the street, which was filling up with cars as the party crawlers headed into the trendy nightlife district.  “You don't necessarily need a detective,” I pushed.  “You just need to ferret out the person who wants to make you think you're crazy.”

 

 

 

Rules of the Scam #2

Don't let others con the conman…

 

A couple of girls, in inexplicably fur-covered mini skirts, stumbled past like they'd already been hitting a bottle of 40 proof before hitting the town.  Harrison barely looked at them.  He regarded me openly. 

“You seem to know a lot about scamming people.”

I met his eyes without hesitation, though I desperately wanted to look away.  “You seem to know a lot about chess.”

To my surprise, he laughed. 

His eyes crinkled in the corners when he laughed.  The grooves around his mouth were deep for someone our age.  Like maybe he spent much more time being amused than I would have given him credit for.  He didn't seem like the type to have a sense of humor.  Then again, he also didn't seem like the type to remember something he heard from a Ouija board.  When it came to Harrison, my antennas were all out of whack. 

What if he was scamming
me
?  Did I really know what his game was?  I should have listened to the inner voice that told me to stay away.

“Look, I've got to go.  I just wanted…”  Actually, I still wasn't entirely sure what I had wanted.  “I wanted to make sure you're cool with the fact that we weren't
Private Ike
and everything.” 

Lame and stupid.  It also wasn't the truth.  But since I didn't know what the truth was, how could I offer it?

For a second I was struck with the enormity of that statement.  I had lived with lies for so long that I literally had no concept of truth unless I manufactured it. 

Jeez, what a freaking bummer. 

“It's okay,” Harrison said, bringing me back to the present.  “I knew it was a long shot anyway.”  His voice dipped low, and I heard the truth.  Whatever he
knew
hadn't interfered with what he had hoped. 

He was someone who'd been pushed to the limit.  Sympathy wasn't something that came often for me.  Life wasn't good enough to feel sorry for my peers and their broken nails and lost boyfriends.  But sympathy for Harrison crept up on me aggressively and without warning. 

I angrily tamped down the instinct that demanded I offer to help him.  I didn't need this.  I had too much to deal with already.  I couldn't afford another person I needed to take care of. 

“Why don't you just hire a different detective?”

He shook his head.  “I can't take the risk.  If the press got a hold of this it might look really bad for my dad.  But a guy like
Private Ike
.”  He shrugged.  “No one would have believed him, even if he'd wanted to sell the story.”

A guy like
Private Ike
.  A guy who lived above a laundry.  Who was a second-class citizen.  A guy like me.  Irritation reared up.  I needed to get away from him, and anyway it was nearly 7:00 on a Friday.  Time for my father's weekly collect call from the California penal system. 

“I've got to go.”  I barely knew Harrison.  He wasn't my problem, and his issues weren't my problem either.