The Tell-Tale Con Read online

  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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.

  He smiled slightly, but the smile lacked as much sincerity as my demands to myself to leave this mess alone. “Sure. Sorry about coming over to your place. I didn’t know.”

  Now why did he h
ave to apologize? I felt even worse.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  I wanted to say something else, but I needed to not say something else. So I left him on the sidewalk and dodged back over to Mr. Wong’s without a backward glance.

  The collect call from Dad came at 7:00 on the dot, as usual. Mom always acted like maybe this time she wouldn’t take it, but she always did. Dad and Mom were truly criminals, but they seemed to have a relationship that most people’s parents never managed. They loved each other, and were devoted to one another in their own strange way.

  I said hello because I felt like I had to. It was all I could do for him. Not that he didn’t deserve to be in jail. And it wasn’t like doing two to five in a low security prison in the SoCal sun was the worst thing ever. Regardless, he was still my dad.

  Once my mom was busy recounting some of her better lies of the past week, I escaped to my room. I hurried across the hardwood floors, my bare feet objecting to the cold. Evidently a lot of people weren’t drying things tonight.

  The Wong building had been built somewhere around World War II, and, like most buildings that were seventy years old, it was drafty and creaky and filled with nice details interspersed with horrible crap people had added during the last renovation, circa 1972.

  We lived behind the work area of Mystic Madam Megdala’s in a little apartment that was perhaps 600 square feet, if we were lucky. I wasn’t sure what the original intention of these rooms had been, if someone had lived here from the start or not, but I was pretty sure my bedroom had once been a janitor’s closet. However, the apartment had two bedrooms and an ugly, but functional kitchen.

  Which was better than our first place after Dad had gone to jail, where we’d been forced to share a single room and cook on a smuggled in hot plate.

  My room faced the same direction as the lobby did, my window also overlooking The Library. Though I didn’t have the same impressive bank of windows our lobby did, the view wasn’t bad.

  My bed was positioned directly under the window, and I knelt on my knees and spent way too long staring at The Library wondering which window was Harrison’s and what he would hear tonight while he was supposed to be asleep. Then I spent another few minutes wondering why I cared.

  Then a few more being irrationally pissed at Harrison because I did.

  Later, once homework was done for the weekend and I had given up on staring across the street, I slept, waking up frequently. I dreamt I was being hunted by a demon who kept incessantly talking to me in the dark. Spurred on by his insatiable need to tell me about his love of pop music and Hollywood starlets and his personal life. Including the fact that, contrary to what one might anticipate in dealing with a demon, his name was Larry and he was a huge fan of squash. The vegetable, not the British sport.

  It was the weirdest dream I’d ever had, and I woke up when it was still dark, surly and achy from sleeping in the wrong position. I couldn’t blame Harrison for my bad rest, though I wanted to. I also couldn’t sleep anymore, though I was still exhausted.

  So I dragged myself out of bed and into the kitchen.

  I was the sole cook in our family. Dad came and went like an errant breeze, and Mom’s idea of culinary mastery was a bologna sandwich with chips shoved inside. Which, by the way, is pretty good. I’m just saying. But if it wasn’t for me and our personal chef, Boyardee, we’d all have starved a long time ago. I wasn’t much of a cook either. I knew just enough to get by, and it depended entirely on how high your standards of getting by were.

  I poured myself a bowl of cereal and a diet soda on the avocado green Formica countertop and gave myself some time to shake the fugue of bad sleep and weird dreams. I had an idea brewing. And those are never good. When the clock hit eight, I grabbed the phone and made a call.

  I didn’t have friends, per se. I was more of the acquaintance type. Relationships were too high maintenance, and my family would likely move in a few months anyway, though Mom swore she was in love with the Land of Enchantment, and we were here for good, or at least until Dad was done with his incarceration.

  But I had people I hung around with. I was pretty fond of some of them, though I wasn’t willing to commit to a real friendship with any of them. If I had to pick, however, I would have said my favorite person at Metropolitan High School was Samantha Spenser. Sam didn’t care what people thought, and neither did I. Of course, our reasons weren’t exactly the same. Sam had a level of confidence that was almost frightening. She was like the Fukishima of self-assurance, exploding all over with personal worth.

  I didn’t care what other people thought of me because I couldn’t bring myself to care about them at all. Sometimes a person came along and affected me enough to make me wonder how they viewed me. But it happened so rarely that I could count the instances on my fingers.

  I cared about Sam’s opinion, though. If we stayed around long enough I was sure I’d have to give in and count her as a friend.

  While the phone rang I made a note on a piece of paper to pick up batteries for the incessantly beeping smoke detector. While that kind of crap drove me nuts, my mom didn’t care that it was making terrible noises. And it wasn’t as though this building had a maintenance man. We had Mr. Wong and his family, but they made it clear that unless the house was falling down around us, our miniscule rent meant we were on our own.

  When Sam picked up, I said hello and asked, “Do you have Harrison’s phone number?”

  Sam had everyone’s phone number. She had a special skill for remembering the names, faces and interests of pretty much every person she’d ever met. It took me a good dozen times meeting someone to even remember we’d met before and twice that to remember their name.

  “Who is Harrison?” She sounded like she was eating.

  I rolled my eyes as she so easily made me a liar in my admiration of her ability to remember everyone. I was sure she did know him. “Harrison Poe. My lab partner.”

  We were in the same honors biology class so she had to have seen him.

  “The chess guy?” I could still hear her chewing.

  I smiled slightly. “Yeah, the chess guy.”

  “Are you calling him? Are you asking him out?” Her voice rose on the end of the question, and I could feel her incredulity and mounting excitement through the line. “Why him?”

  “I’m not asking him out. I found out yesterday he lives across the street. I just wanted to ask him something.”

  Her voice sounded muffled. “Really?”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear with a flinch. Hers must have dropped, hitting the ground with a painful clatter. There was scraping, another smaller clatter, and Sam came back on. “Like where?”

  “In those lofts of The Library.”

  She drew in a hard breath. “Have you been in those things? Spence Wiggins used to live there before his dad went belly up. They’re, like, completely insane. Everything is made out of marble and gold leaf and crap.”

  I had no clue who Spence Wiggins was, but I didn’t tell her that. For all I knew the guy sat at the same lunch table as us every freaking day. “Right. Spence. I’ve only been in the lobby. It’s pretty fancy.”

  “You have no clue who Spence is, do you?”

  Crap. Clearly she already knew me too well, which felt dangerous. “Not completely,” I hedged.

  “He’s that guy I dated at the beginning of the year.”

  Whew. I didn’t feel too bad. I’d barely known her then, and Metro High was massive. Our class had a good seven hundred people in it. “Oh right, him.” For some reason I’d been certain that guy’s name was Stewie. Go figure.

  “Anyway, whatever. He lived there for like a year. It’s totally posh. Ridiculous. They won’t let you in without, like, written permission. Anyway, why do you want to call Harrison?”

  “I told you, I need to ask him something.”

  “Out?”

  It took me a second to figure out what she meant. “No, not out. Why is everything about dating t
o you? I just need to ask him about something he told me yesterday.”

  “Harrison is cute enough. And his dad is Van Poe. That’s all you really need to know.” What she meant was Harrison’s dad was Van, and that made him cute enough. “How’d you find out he lives across the street?”

  Lying came so easily to me it was almost pathetic. But I couldn’t give away Harrison’s secrets. That would be totally uncool of me. “I ran into him on the sidewalk. We talked for a few minutes, and I found out he lives across the street. It was pretty uneventful actually. Do you have his number or not?”

  Sam caught on to the fact that I was getting impatient, but that made her more suspicious of my motives. “Okay, okay. I’m dying to know what you’re going to ask him, though.”

  “I lost something,” I lied again. “I was hoping maybe I left it behind on the sidewalk.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment rang clear in her voice. “Well, tell him I said hi.”

  “Sure.” Because they were such good friends before this moment, on account of the fact she’d known exactly who I was referring to.

  Sam rattled off the number, and I said goodbye. I didn’t bother to write the number down. As aforementioned, like Sam with most people’s names, I always remember numbers.

  I spent an hour debating whether or not offering Harrison my help would be getting too involved. I had standards of staying out of other people’s business to maintain.

  And I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted from him or what I was willing to offer. I just knew he needed help that I was in the position to give. I also knew I needed money, something he was in the position to give.

  I dialed, hung up, and then dialed again. I wasn’t nervous. But I wasn’t sure I’d made the right choice, either. Before I could hang up again, someone picked up the line. “Hello?”

  It was a woman. No one I knew. I hadn’t realized Van Poe was married. I’d simply assumed that, like everyone else in Hollywood, he was divorced. “Can I…is Harrison there?”