Authors: Joe Gores
Of course in this world of unenlightened souls, the
gadje
, just because they could not find the story in their Bibles, didn’t believe in this dispensation; but the
kumpania
didn’t worry about them. The
kumpania
could always outwit non-Gypsies.
Or had up until then.
O
’B spent his Friday on the phone rooms. He started out in the morning by dropping around to the Public Utility Commission
offices looking for a field investigator named Sturrock with whom he once had worked at a collection agency.
“Hey, Reverend, how’s tricks?”
“O’Bannon, you old devil, what are you doing around here?”
O’B leaned close enough for Sturrock to smell the bourbon he’d swished around his mouth in the men’s room.
“Well, I’m, ah, lookin’ for work…”
Sturrock, that subservient ferret of a man, immediately darted down his burrow to safety. “Damn, O’B, you know with the recession
and all, we don’t have even entry-level jobs…”
Then, of course, guilty about dropping his old buddy like a used condom over that drinking problem, he had to take O’B around
to meet the other field men before easing him out the door. Lots of heavy male guffaws, bluff manly hellos,
mano a mano
slaps on the shoulder, macho hearty handshakes all around—and O’B came away with
four
of the investigators’ business cards he was after.
Each was worth its weight in gold because of the miniature— but official—Public Utility Commission seal in the corner.
At the phone company’s gaudy blue building flanking Islais Creek, O’B pulled a soft wool cap down over his red hair before
facing the uniformed guard on the door. This was a big red-faced galoot with mean little eyes who loved his pinch of power.
“Yeah, you wanna see who and why?”
Even as he spoke, the guard was examining the backside of a passing secretary with casual lust. Out came O’B’s first card,
William Ready, P. U.C., Field Investigator. Inspired by the guard’s gaze, out came O’B’s repoman voice and face. Out came
O’B’s hand to finger the cloth of the guard’s jacket.
“Nice uniform. You rent-a-cops got a nice soft touch here, watch the door, watch the girls go in and out.” Leaned close, let
the guard smell his two-margarita lunch. “Watching ’em a little too close, pal? We been gettin’ complaints…”
A guilty whine, “Listen, I don’t know what you—”
“You’re gone in a New York minute you screw with me, pal.”
O’B sauntered on without signing in, flashing the second card— P. Dana Anderssen—from office to office until he got to Ms.
Pegeen Gibson and knew he was home free. The lass had milk-white Irish skin and a fine peasant bosom and round cheeks and
looked like she’d cop to a middle-aged redheaded man with a tired drinker’s face and a rich line of Irish blarney. Besides,
the phone company
loved
to cooperate with the P.U.C.—when it didn’t cost them anything.
“Hey, Red, how did a carrot-top like you end up with a name like Anderssen?”
“I think it was the Vikings, raiding our coastlines and having their way with our Irish lasses, Pegeen o’ Me Heart,” grinned
O’B. He was sprawled in the chair beside her desk. “Besides, Pegeen
Gibson?
‘Beautiful Pearl’ in Gaelic—and a last name like a martini with an onion in it?”
“Maybe it’s a pearl onion.” She dimpled nicely looking at him. “Does anyone still drink martinis, Red?”
“Not with me. Bushmills with a water back.”
“I wish all the investigators were like you. Harry was telling me on coffee break that this really nasty P.U.C. man—”
“I bet it was Will Ready,” said O’B quickly. He was very glad his red hair had been under the soft plaid cap now folded in
his topcoat pocket. “Trouble at home, makes him hostile.”
Then, amenities observed, O’B got down to the storefront phone rooms. He mentioned nothing about Cadillacs, Gypsies, DKA,
or Cal-Cit Bank.
“What I don’t see is the P.U.C. involvement,” said Pegeen.
O’B didn’t see it either, now she mentioned it. Bright lass, this. He wished he’d worked on his cover a little better. Who
expected a sharp mind in a bureaucrat?
“Um, a massive scam is being played on old people with Medicare payments due them, which makes it P.U.C. because the cons
have been set up from these phone rooms.”
She bought it, and brought up on her screen the eight phone numbers that Stan Groner had gotten for O’B from the bank’s files.
This being Head Office for Pac Bell, Pegeen’s computer had them all.
She looked up at O’B. “What is it you need to know?”
“Who the phones were listed to. How they got them on such short notice with no waiting period. The addresses where they were
installed, plus landlords’ names. If they listed references of any sort, who they were, and
their
phones and addresses.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, Pegeen frowning at the information being scrolled up. O’B stood up to look over her shoulder.
He had never mastered a word processor and knew he never would, but he could read the screen and was already writing things
down on his clipboard.
“This is very strange,” she said. “For quick installation, you have to prove a medical emergency of some sort hellip;” She
scrolled again. “‘Sick child’… ‘aged parent’… ‘retarded son’… ‘mother dying of cancer.’ Those are all valid. And they produced
the required ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter from an M.D. But they all listed themselves as businesses—Tom’s Paving, Sally’s
Dress Shoppe, Harry’s Air-conditioning, Mary’s Catering—and gave each other as references.
And
…”
Now O’B was glad she was a quick-minded woman. She was doing his work for him. “And?”
“Eight different phones, four different locations, four different counties, three different area codes—but the same San Francisco
doctor. Rob Swigart, M.D.”
“Four Fifty Slitter,” observed O’B. “Doc Swigart must be one tired pup, running around the entire Bay Area on his rounds.”
* * *
Doc Swigart had his shingle out at 450 Sutter, a medical-dental building with a prescription pharmacy on the ground floor.
At that rent, he was no fly-by-night, so maybe he had been gotten at
because
he had a reputation to uphold.
Not yet four o’clock, the worthy doctor might still be probing and poking and billing outrageously up there on the fifth floor.
He was. The nurse-receptionist was a big woman in a crisp white smock, with laughing eyes and an open face. Dr. Swigart was
in but much too busy to see Mr.… Morrell, was it? Without an appointment? Out of the question. There were other patients waiting
… O’B laid his third P.U.C. card on her desk.
“David Morrell of the Public Utilities Commission,” he said primly. “Investigative branch. Telephone fraud.”
She was frowning, but in puzzlement rather than hostility. She stood up behind her desk. She was nearly six feet tall.
“Well, I’ll go tell him, but I don’t see what—”
“Give him this list, too.” O’B was writing the addresses of the phone rooms on her memo pad. “It might save a little time.”
The addresses obviously meant nothing to her. She disappeared through the door behind her desk. To return two minutes later
with the smile gone from her eyes and voice. The addresses obviously
had
meant something to Doc Swigart.
“The doctor can fit you in now,” she said coldly.
Rob Swigart, M.D., was late 40s, lean, laid-back, sandy-haired, with quizzical eyes and a warm worried style of speech nonetheless
conveying that here was a busy man. He came into the examining room holding the P.U.C. card in one hand and O’B’s handwritten
list in the other, as if they were urine specimens.
“See here,” he checked the card, “Morrell. I don’t—”
“Whadda the Gyppos got on you, Doc?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re the P.U.C, not the A.M.A. We’re bare-knuckle boys and I don’t
like
docs, Doc. No old-boys’ network for us, covering up your little peccadillos ’cause you’re one of the club.” He leaned forward
and tapped the list of addresses with his finger. “ ‘Sick child’… ‘aged parent’… ‘retarded son’… ‘mother dying of cancer’
… This’s phone fraud, Doc, and we can prove it. We can jerk your ticket for that.”
Swigart had turned white. He sat down abruptly in the chair usually reserved for patients.
“Fraud?” he said weakly. “Look, if I explain, can—”
O’B had his hands up, palm-out. “No promises.”
Swigart stood up and began to pace the confined area. O’B hiked himself up on the examining table to get out of the way and
let Swigart’s guilts do the talking.
“I… just feel so stupid, that’s all.” He looked at O’B. “Most doctors play golf Wednesday afternoons. I fly planes. Down
the Peninsula, Palo Alto Airport.”
This wasn’t going in any direction O’B had expected, so he asked, to keep it going, “Own your own plane?”
“Yes. A Mooney 201. Got a great deal on it, fifty-five thousand used. But I’ve been wanting to get an old biplane. Prewar—from
the thirties.”
“I imagine you can afford it.”
In knee-jerk defensiveness, Swigart exclaimed, “Everybody always thinks doctors make a lot of money, but the taxes and malpractice
insurance and overhead…”
He’d flown his plane up to a small private airfield in Sonoma County to practice crosswind takeoffs and landings and there
had seen an old Belgian Stampe, lovingly restored. He’d admired it aloud to the man and woman up on the reinforced wing panel
just about to open the cockpit. They’d climbed back down, delighted at his praise.
“We restored it ourselves,” the man said in Spanish-accented English. He explained that they were from the Argentine, in cattle.
“Over a thousand hours to refabric and paint it…”
But now the health of Señor Gonzales’s father was failing and they were going back to take over the
estancia
; alas, they were going to have to sell the plane. They’d rolled it out of the hangar, in fact, to show a possible buyer they
expected in…
Swigart didn’t want to profit from their misfortune, but if there was another possible buyer already interested, ah, what
were they asking? They looked at each other, gave simultaneous Latin shrugs, simultaneous rueful Latin laughs. Since he had
admired it so, and since they were so pressed for time, $20,000.
“How does that stack up with the going price for that kind of plane in that condition?” asked O’B.
“A steal. A
steal
. Should have been thirty, at least.”
Old P. T. Barnum hadn’t had it
quite
right with his “sucker born every minute” remark. Should have said every
second
.
“So you wrote them a down-payment check right there—”
“Of course. Five thousand dollars.”
They’d given him a receipt, but the next week when he went back up to Sonoma to pay the balance, a stranger had the plane
rolled out of the hangar and was about to fly it away. Swigart had been outraged, only to learn that
this man owned it!
Even worse, the cockpit had been broken into and irreplaceable original equipment had been wrenched right out of the control
panel.
O’B couldn’t help laughing. “The Brooklyn Bridge.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Gyppos sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.” He got down off the examining table, still chuckling. “Why in hell didn’t you just
report ’em to the cops? Bunco would love to…”
Swigart sat down all-at-once in the patients’ chair again. He grimaced, squeezed his eyes shut as if he could barely face
what he had to say. He finally opened them and looked at O’B.
“I… didn’t want my wife to know that I’d been such a fool. Not her… nor my associates… nor the fellows at the club… Besides,
those people had just… vanished. I didn’t even know they were Gypsies until…”
“Until they showed up again?” supplied O’B. “Because you didn’t go to the police?”
That had shown them he was vulnerable. So they wanted a “To Whom It May Concern” statement… if he wouldn’t do it, they’d
have to tell his wife and friends what a fool he’d been… But then they’d wanted another statement, and another, and another
… And now here was the P. U.C. after him anyway, and…
“Did you stop payment on the check?”
“I tried, but it was much too late, of course.”
“Where was it cashed?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, stuck his hands out in a search-me gesture. “I can’t remember, if I ever knew. I could
find out, of course, but I don’t see what good that—”
“Find out.”
“And the rest of it…”
“All I want is information,” said O’B. “Anything you can tell me. Anything you can remember…”
A thin gruel, but suggestive. The airport up in Sonoma… the guy who actually owned the plane… where they had cashed Swigart’s
check… Detailed descriptions, of course… All of it, bits of tile in the mosaic…
B
ut it was Dan Kearny, as you might expect, who actually drew first blood. He’d been let back into their nuptial bed from the
spare-room couch, but with Jeannie still prickly as a hedgehog he’d fully expected to stay home all day on Saturday. Spend
a little quality time with the wife, mow the lawn, maybe get a start at repairing the front fence whacked by Wednesday’s windstorm.
He’d even resolutely refused to bring any of the Gypsy files home with him for work over the weekend.
But by early afternoon, as he dumped the last bale of grass clippings onto the backyard mulch heap, he found himself still
bugged by the name the Gyppo had used at all the branches of the bank. Angelo Grimaldi. Usually they went for the short, Anglo-Saxon
pseudonyms, so why such an atypical name to open those accounts? All at the same bank? Maybe he’d just drive in to the office
through the sparse Saturday traffic to check those files again. They needed to get some kind of handhold on the smooth surface
of the con.