The Tell-Tale Con (12 page)

“I didn't do that.  My brother Marty did.  But it doesn't matter now.  I already kicked his butt for it.”

My eyebrows rose.  Well, wasn't Hector quite the little firecracker.  He sat back in his chair.  “Here.”  He hit the enter button on his computer with finality.  The computer was hooked up to the TV somehow, and the image played on both. 

“I watched this tape after school and thought how weird it was, because look what it's doing.”  He pointed at the grainy image of a red car driving in a circle around the parking lot, slowly enough to be checking out every car.  Finally the car came to a stop in the corner of the screen, near the fence, so that only the short, square nose was visible. 

We watched in anticipatory silence as cars came and went, parking and dropping people off.  Finally, Harrison's car pulled into the lot.  There we were, on tape, looking pretty ridiculous in our business clothes.  As soon as we moved into the view of the camera, and the range of the car, the vehicle jetted away from the curb and came right towards us, never hesitating.  I watched Harrison realize what was going on and push me to the ground.  The car caught his leg, threw him down, and didn't stop at all.  It just sped away. 

“Wow.”  Harrison's voice was tinged with shock, as though he hadn't lived through it.  Or maybe it was shocking to watch because we
had
lived through it. 

“That person had no intention of stopping.  By the way, you were the intended target.  Whoever it was sat there and waited until you showed up.” 

“Why didn't you tell the police?”  Harrison asked. 

“Because they didn't ask, for one.  And because…well, because I wanted you to have to come to me and beg.  Frankly, I wanted revenge.  But you're pretty cool.  I was wrong.”  He rewound the footage and pointed to a spot on the screen.  “Here's a good shot of the plates.”

“But it's so tiny and grainy.  You can't even see it.”

Hector glanced at me with open disgust.  “Well, yeah.  Right now it is.  But it won't be.” 

He opened about a million windows at once, took a square of the picture and reproduced it half a dozen times, moved the boxes all over the screen, clicked this and that and something else, and he did it all so quickly I had no idea what he was doing. 

Finally, Hector sat back again with a smug smile, and a very grainy picture of the license plate on the red car came into view.  It wasn't a good picture at all.  But it was good enough.  Harrison wrote the number down on a scrap of paper, but he didn't need to because now that I had seen it, I would remember it. 

Hector and Harrison parted like old friends, bumping fists on the way out and referring to one another as bro.  Like that, their feud was over.  Seriously?  Boys were stupid. 

I helped Harrison out to the car and then sat in the driver's seat, unmoving for a moment.  “So what do we do now?  I mean, how do we find out who the car belongs to?”  In my mind I envisioned half a dozen working scenarios as to how I could get the person on the other end of the phone at the DMV to give me the information.  And barring that, other possible sources of answers. 

I started the car and pulled onto the road that would lead us home.

“Well, I'll give the number to Dad's research assistant.  She'll find out whom it belongs to.”

I stared at him for a second too long and almost failed to stop at a stop sign.  “Really?  Just like that?  You ask her something that should be, like, practically impossible for a stranger to find out, and she'll tell you.  Because you asked.”

“Her job is to find things out when people ask.  Why wouldn't she be willing to do it?”

“Stuff for your dad and stuff for movies,” I reminded him.

“Why does she care who it's for?  If she isn't busy with my dad she has nothing else to do, and she gets paid whether it's for a school project or a movie.”  He was looking at me like I was the one who was ignorant of the way the world should work.  Maybe I was. 

“Okay.”  I gave up.  “When do you think she'll be able to get it?” 

I didn't bother to ask
how
she would get it.  It was no doubt another thing Harrison would act like everyone should know that sounded absurd to me.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was so not kidding when he said the very rich are different from you and me. 

“I don't know.  Depends on if she's busy for Dad.  If she is, it could be tomorrow or something.  If she's not it will only take a few minutes.”

I pulled up in front of The Library and pulled into the pay-as-you-park spot that he'd been in that morning.  I would leave it up to him to put some money in the meter.  “Well, call me when you know.”

“I guess you could come up with me and wait.  If she's going to find out today it won't take too long.”

The idea of going up to Harrison's place when the whole household was awake was totally cringe worthy.  I'd already seen enough of My Sharona from the other side of a hospital curtain, and I had absolutely no desire to meet Van Poe.  I was slightly curious about Harrison's step-mom, but not enough to subject myself to that. 

“Uh, that's okay.  I've got to get upstairs.  There's something I need to do before I go anywhere.”  I didn't include the fact that what I needed to do was avoid his family. 

We parted ways on the curb with him promising to call once the researcher told him ‘yay' or ‘nay' for the possibility of getting the information today.  When I got up to my place, Mom was at the desk.  “You're late.”

“Yep.”  If she was expecting more than that she certainly wasn't going to get it.

“Do I have a six o'clock?”  It was so eerily like the day Harrison had come in that it stopped me for a moment. 

“Yes,” I reminded her.  “A woman who wants to know if she's ever going to get that partnership.  She has cats.  I could hear them in the background when she made the call.”  Little details like that were always good to work into a psychic conversation.  It made people feel like they were getting their money's worth. 

I ducked around the beaded curtain and headed down the short hall to the apartment.  I opened the refrigerator, figuring it was going to be another bologna sandwich kind of day since I hadn't done any real shopping yet.  But the shelves were stacked.  I spent a moment staring the way another person would stare if they returned home from school or work and found a severed head in their fridge. 

“Mom,” I called, pushing my way back out to where she was waiting for the cat lady.  “Where'd all this food come from?”  I knew very well that she hadn't bought it herself because I kept no money in the bank account.  That would make it too easy for her to get to.  Once the checks were cashed I took all of the money and loaded it onto prepaid visas, allotted for specific uses.  I had the food card in my purse right now.

For a second it seemed like she had no idea what I was talking about.  Then she waved her hand like she was waving the whole thing away.  “Oh, that stuff.  Mr. Wong brought it.  His son's grocery lost their refrigerator system today.  He gave a bunch of stuff to all the people down the block.” 

I had my suspicions this wasn't entirely true, and that made me uncomfortable.  If Mr. Wong was noticing that we were having trouble getting by or if he was feeling sorry for us, that put us at a disadvantage in a number of ways.  Had I been home, I would have refused the food.  But Mom never refused something she didn't have to pay for.  Now I was going to have to feel awkward around Mr. Wong for an indeterminate amount of time, wondering what he was thinking of us and of our situation. 

I was standing there, debating what I could kick without hurting myself, when the stupid yellow cell rang in my room.  I ran to grab it, hoping it was Harrison. 

Luckily, I was right.  As soon as I answered, his voice came through the other end.  “The car is a 1997 Honda Civic, registered to someone named Theresa Wilson.  She reported it as stolen the night before last.”

So just hours before it had nearly run us down, the car had supposedly been stolen.  “Did the police find it?”

“Not that Ana could figure out.”

“So are we paying this Theresa person a visit?”  Seeing her up close was the only way that I could know what kind of game Theresa Wilson was playing, if indeed she was.  It was a dangerous gamble because if she was the person who had tried to run us over, our reception at her house was unlikely to be a good one.  If she really had been the victim of car theft, she was unlikely to be able to tell us anything.  But those were all chances we had to take if we wanted to know anything. 

“Sure.  She lives on Trumbull.  The demilitarized war zone side, not the old people side.”

Great.  Of course she did.  Trumbull was a street that ran through the older sections of Albuquerque.  One half of the road was home to people who still lived in the same mid-century homes they'd purchased when the houses had first been built.  The other half was a place were people who valued their safety didn't go after night fell. 

“Well, then we want to be there and gone before it gets dark.”

“Yep.  Meet you outside in five minutes?” 

I nodded, though he couldn't see me.  Then I remembered to speak.  “Yeah, I'll be there.”

In the interest of not freezing my butt off if it did get dark before we got home, I grabbed a cardigan.  Then I changed out my beloved contacts for my old glasses to make me look older.  I wasn't sure what kind of lies I'd be telling the lady with the car to gain her trust or to get information, if indeed she knew anything at all. 

When I slid into the driver's seat, Harrison was already waiting.  He stared long and hard before nodding in approval.  “I like the glasses.”

“You like my glasses?”  Dude, really?  Who liked glasses? 

“Yeah, I do.  They're hot.  There are whole websites dedicated to red-haired girls in glasses.” 

“Pssht.”  I put the car in drive.  “As if.”

He shrugged.  “Well, you don't have to believe me.  But the red-headed librarian is not a rare vision of the fantasy girl.”

“You are on crack.”  Normally, I would have felt immediate awkwardness if someone was telling me how hot I was, but Harrison was full of crap. 

He shrugged again.  “I feel so abused right now.”

We drove down Central to get San Mateo, the street that would take us to the part of Trumbull where we wanted to be.  We got farther and farther into the ghetto with every mile that passed.  Sometimes I had lived in neighborhoods like this.  Sometimes I'd lived in pretty nice places.  It was all the same to me.  But I knew how to be careful, and this was no neighborhood for a teenaged girl after dark. 

So I wasted no time finding the address that Van Poe's researcher had given to Harrison.  The car lady, whose name, of course, I could not remember, lived in a small brown stucco box of a house situated between a squat fourplex and a white stucco house almost the same as hers.  The paint was peeling, and the stucco was falling off the chicken wire in massive chunks.  Some of the chunks were still lying on the dirt in front of the house.  There was no garage and no driveway.  Just a short, chain link fence with a tiny gate and a slender sidewalk leading up to the front of the house. 

“Jeez.”  Harrison glanced out the window with clear hesitation, and it occurred to me that he'd probably never been in a neighborhood like this, let alone lived in one. 

“What's this chick's name again?”

“Theresa Wilson.”  This time Harrison didn't bother to give me crap about my inability to remember her name.  

We got out of the car.  Theresa Wilson was not expecting us, but her front door was slightly ajar, so she was at home.  Or someone was, anyway.  Loud music was pouring out of the house.  When we got close enough to knock, I had to restrain myself from covering my ears like a three-year-old.  Then, when we discovered that the doorbell was no longer connected to the house and was just a metal plate hanging from a single random wire, Harrison knocked as hard as he could. 

It took three tries to get someone to come to the door, and even then, unless Theresa was a sullen teenage boy with an acne problem, this was not her. 

“Could we talk to Theresa?” I shouted as loud as I could at the same instant that someone turned off the music.  Well, sure.  Of course. 

The kid at the door, who was slightly younger than us, shrugged his bony shoulders, the straps of his wife beater slipping.  “Mooooommmmmmmmm!” 

If there could be an Olympic sport for parent screaming, this guy was so taking the gold.  Maybe he just couldn't hear anymore because of the music, and the deafness made him yell. 

Either way, he wandered off, leaving us alone on the porch with the door hanging wide open.  Momentarily the music turned back on, and we were standing there, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement that we were still there.

Finally, “mooooommmmmmm” came to the door.  She was incredibly small.  I would have been surprised if she was five feet tall or more than a hundred pounds.  She looked totally old to me but in reality she was just slightly older than my mom.  Maybe forty. 

Years of living poor and hard times had made her skin wrinkled and thick.  Her brownish gray hair was pulled tight from her face, and her dark-eyed stare was apathetic.  “Yeah?”

I pulled a notebook from my purse and flipped it open.  I still had no idea what we were going to tell this lady, but I knew that it wouldn't be the truth.  It would be too easy to tell the police we'd been there the next time they came about her car, if she remembered us.  “Hi.  Are you Theresa?”

“Yeah.  Who are you?”

“I'm Kinney Collins, and this is James Chan.  We're here about your car.”