The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (13 page)

Therefore, let’s spend as little time with him as possible. “Okay, let’s have it,” I said. “What kind of muck is my father in this time?”

“Oh,
this
time?” Wolfredian poked his cheek with his tongue, no doubt picturing all the resentment and codependence of our rocky years. I wanted him to have this picture, for it’s easier to run your script if your opponent never reads past the clichés. “It’s just a matter of money,” said Jay. “He hasn’t been able to provide it, but he says you can.”

My heart sank. Up to that moment, I think I’d secretly hoped that all of this had been some kind of audition, like what Allie put me through before dealing me in to the California Roll. Of course I’d say no to whatever they proposed—Operation Citizen, right?—but at least I’d be flattered at Woody’s and this Wolfredian’s attention. But all I saw here was a tawdry fake shakedown, jacked up with Honey’s humbo gumbo. Which meant that all of them, Wolfredian, Honey, Woody, the sidewheels, and the day-player goons back in Santa Fe, were on a common calling plan. Well, fine, congratulations, you put the touch on Radar Hoverlander. Merry Christmas.

“Money, huh?” I said, projecting weary familiarity with the phrase. “Okay, hang on, I’ll go get it.”

This seemed to surprise Wolfredian, and as I headed for my car, he motioned to his ponytail sidewheel, who jogged up to fall in step beside me. “What’s your name?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “Okay, then I’ll just call you Red.” We reached Carol and I popped the rear hatch. “I suppose you think I’m just throwing good money after black sheep, huh?” I lifted the cargo deck plate and withdrew three banded bundles of hundreds from the spare-tire well. I pocketed two bundles, counted off thirty bills from the third, pocketed that as well, then returned the rest to the wheel well. “I promised Mom I’d look after him.” I dropped the deck plate and closed the hatch. “What a bad deal that was. Seriously, what’s your name?”

“Louise.”

“Hey, that’s my mother’s name!”

“Joke,” she said, mirthlessly.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, joke. Glad you found it funny.”

By the time I crossed back over, Woody was out of the car. He looked sheepish, like a kid caught smoking cigarettes at summer camp. I handed Wolfredian the cash. He didn’t count it, just weighed it disdainfully in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Twenty-three grand. What he owes you.”

Wolfredian laughed. “What he owes me,” said Jay slowly, “this doesn’t make a dent in.”

I looked at Woody, arching my eyebrows in question.

“Son,” he said, “I may need more than five figures.”

Interesting: a shakedown with an escalator clause. You don’t see those every day. “Well, good luck with that,” I said, for I was done with this one. “You’re as deep into my pockets as you get to go.”

I turned to leave. Red Louise blocked my path. Though she kept her expression blank, her nostrils flared and you could tell this was a woman who loved her work.

“No one wants to get into your pockets,” said Jay. “It’s just that your father needs help.”

“Yeah, he needs help, all right. Mental help.”

Jay smiled. “I don’t disagree with that. All this desert rendezvous bullshit.”

If you stipulate for a moment that Woody’s actually trying to rope me into something (and not just shake me down), you can easily backpredict a conversation that he and Jay must’ve had, one where Woody sketched out the script he’d need to run in order to get his boy on board, a script thick with the fake threats necessary to neutralize a truculent girlfriend bent on keeping Radar’s nose clean. It may be that when I told Honey to meet me in Kingman, Woody decided to jack up the drama with a road trip. So then Woody was playing Wolfredian by getting Wolfredian to play me.

“He was much sharper back at Stanford,” said Jay. (Was this more script?) “Did you know he taught?”

“At Stanford?”

“Continuing education. Business practice. Not a bad class, especially if he liked you. Then he let you in on his private business model. Put your name on a lot of documents.”

A certain penny dropped. I knew all about private business models, how when they go keel-up, the name on the papers goes down with the ship. I guessed that could qualify as criminal misconduct. “Mooked you, huh? I’m surprised you’re still friends.”

“We’re not friends. A situation came up. I thought he’d be right for the job. I was wrong. I hope I’m not wrong twice.”

“Well, like I said, good luck with that.”

“I don’t think you get it. He says he needs your help, so your help he’s going to get.”

“What makes you think I can help him? Everything he says is horseshit. That’s horseshit, too. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a life.”

I turned to go.

And attacked Louise’s fist with my stomach.

I sort of fell down. Jay stood over me. “Your life is on hold,” he said. Guess I’d been right about the whole friendly-till-not vibe. He
nodded to Red, who aimed a kick and, with evident pleasure, drilled my ribs into the back of the net. And though this seemed like a random act of violence, I recognized it as personnel management of a sort. Wolfredian simultaneously sent me a message and threw his sociopathic sidewheel a bone.

She stepped over me on her way back to the car. “This I find funny,” she said.

Then they were gone. With my money. Woody and Honey rushed to me. “I’m so sorry, Radar,” said Woody, trying to help me up. “That should not have happened.”

I clambered to my feet, angrily shaking off his aid. “Go to hell,” I said.

This garnered a strange reaction from Woody: anger; anger and disdain. He put his hands on his hips and said, “Oh, for what, Radar? For trying to deal you into something tasty, just when you happen to be unfortunately and coincidentally tied up in your girlfriend’s morality play? And by morality play I mean play for morality, which is fine, you know, some people’s choices. I’m just saying: Is it yours? Do
you
want to be out of the game? Because I’ve always wanted to run a snuke with you. Circumstances didn’t allow. Now they do. We can talk about that later if you like, but right now all you have to ask yourself is whether you’re going to let some romantic bad timing deny you a major score.”

I didn’t say anything. Just got in my car and went.

And that was the last time in life I ever saw him, right?

Ha. Not even that day.

F
or a mark in the grip of a grift, there comes a time when leverage tips, and the guy who thought he was acting as a free agent suddenly finds himself, per the famous oxymoron, voluntarily compelled to continue.

I hated being that guy.

And really hated Woody for making me that guy.

Okay, so how deep was I sunk?
A situation came up. I thought he’d be right for the job
. What kind of job? Another private business model? Could be. Who knew? I needed more information.

I called Allie. We talked the problem through for a hundred east-bound miles, anticipating what we could about what we thought would happen next and planning accordingly. Then my phone battery died, and I just chewed on my thoughts in silence.

When I got home, Boy jumped me at the door, nearly put me on my ass. Allie’s greeting was more restrained, with no leaping into anyone’s arms. “We’ve got company,” she said in a muted, you’ve-done-something-wrong kind of voice.

I found Woody and Honey waiting for me in the living room, Woody standing at the window, watching traffic pass, and Honey sprawled out on the couch.

“You drive fast,” I told Honey.

“We didn’t stop,” he said.

“Piss bottles,” Woody explained.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. “Christ, old man, what is it going to take to get rid of you?”

“You can’t, Radar. This is serious. Feel your ribs.”

“I know what’s up with my ribs. Still, why should I make this my problem?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It already
is
your problem.”

“Thanks to you,” barked Allie.

“Yes,” said Woody, “thanks to me. But I was in trouble. When I saw Radar’s name in the paper, I grasped at an available straw. I realize now I should have just told him the truth. As you may have gathered, I’m not very good with the truth.”

“It runs in the family,” said Allie, with enough acid in her voice to take Woody by surprise.

“Any chance we’ll get some now?” I asked.

Woody gave the wan smile of a defeated man. “Would you settle for a consistent narrative?”

Woody, according to Woody, had truly been freelance whale-watching for various casinos in Las Vegas. Eventually his path crossed Wolfredian’s, as it likely would in so rarefied an industry sector. “I didn’t recognize him at first,” said Woody. “But he recognized me. Almost instantly offered me a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“Casino host, notionally, but really just a bird dog of a different kind. I was to drive high rollers to his bogus investment opportunities. Prequalify the leads, like.”

I could see that. Whales bond with their hosts. Be it through craps benders, Jägermeister jags, or sprints up to Pahrump for the legal brothels, you become friends, battle buddies, men with shared secrets. After that, your pet millionaire will no doubt cast a less jaundiced eye on your factitious prospectus. “I gather you took the job,” I said. Woody nodded. “Didn’t you read him for holding a grudge?”

“Of course I did, but he put that issue to rest. Said he viewed our previous encounter as an initiation of sorts, a valuable life lesson
learned.” Woody looked thoughtful. “As to why I said yes, I think it was pure pride. He’d reached out to me with a certain amount of admiration and respect.”

“Oh, please,” said Allie, manifesting frayed patience. “What was he next, the son you never had?” This was borderline rude, and quite uncharacteristic of Allie. Woody seemed to be wondering where all her empathy had gone.

I just wondered how he’d gotten so on Jay’s wrong side.

“I told you about the Saudi prince, right?”

“Right, with the bogus line of credit. I should’ve smelled a rat right there. That line was way too small.”

“Yeah, that was a weak tale. I wouldn’t have bought it either, I was you.” He looked genuinely pained. “The thing is, I never was about finding whales. I was just looking for a new way to pick his pocket.”

“Give him another valuable life lesson?”

“Mm-hmm. So I made up this fake Saudi and strung him along for a while. But then I let slip that the Saudi was bogus and …” Woody’s face clouded. “Well, yours aren’t the only ribs around here, you know.”

I could picture a certain moment: Woody getting beaten, saying the first thing that came to his mind—something fresh in his mind because he’d just read the newspaper account. “So you gave him me. What did you tell him I could do?”

“Well, find him a whale, obviously.”

“Why would he believe I can do that?”

Woody’s smile was bittersweet. “You have a persuasive press agent.”

“But all of that was bafflegab, right? He’s still the mark.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s repeat business, for sure.” By which Woody meant the kind of mook you can mook and mook again.

“Dangerous business, though. Why didn’t you sail?”

“Radar, I’m not going to drop everything and run the first time someone hits me in the ribs, come on. Would you?” I thought about what it means to pull the plug on an operation, a location, an identity. It’s a setback. Plus, you could sprain your neck with all the looking
over your shoulder. No grifter loves that. It puts a crimp in the future. “Besides,” said Woody, “I know I can take him. I just have to find the right gag. I’ve already found the right partner.” He paused, then said, “Well, Radar, what do you say?”

“I say you owe me twenty-three thousand dollars.”

“Consider it seed corn.”

“I consider it debt,” I said, coldly. “Anyway, what makes you think you can button him up?”

“ ‘Button him up’?” asked Honey. He’d been so still and silent there on the couch that I’d almost forgotten he was there. Man, Woody could get me locked on.

“Rip him off clean,” I said. “Leave him laughing when you go.”

“You kids and your slang,” muttered Honey, sinking deeper into the couch.

“I can button him,” said Woody. “With your help I can. What do you think about Nana’s Attic?”

I snorted a laugh.

Nana’s Attic is a vintage—in several senses of the word—con that involves selling certain sorts of nothing for something. It plays in the world of collectibles, driven by something called transaction friction, the natural escalation of prices when pieces change hands. Say you catch a milestone home-run ball, out there in the bleachers. You sell it on eBay, for a price that will never be lower than when starry-eyed you let it go. These virgin items, these treasures of Nana’s Attic, exposed to the market for the first time, have a higher long-term upside than almost anything in the collectibles realm. If you happen to be trading in bogus collectibles, as all of us in that room had certainly done at one time or another, you try to come across as the fortunate—and conveniently clueless—heir to such a trove, by way of explaining why your “authentic” home-run ball is so unbelievably cheap. It helps if your mark is as clueless as you’re representing yourself to be, but in this instance …

“He’ll see right through it,” I said. “You’ll never make it work.”

“Why not?”

I thought about it for a moment, certain familiar wheels starting to turn. The first step to Nana’s Attic is discovering what your mark is into. Disneyana? Nazi medals?
^*
Let’s use that classic of the Attic, heirloom jewelry. Yours is lovingly counterfeited by Han craftsmen. Now all you need is to find it a home in the mark’s display case. This can be tough, though, because the mark, he loves him his heirloom jewelry and knows every last detail of his sad little habit, right down to the standard karat weight of Edwardian gold. But also—and this is your wedge—he wants to believe. Wants to believe that a genuine treasure of Nana’s Attic just fell in his lap. So you get your storytelling chops on and feed that belief with plausible provenance. Money changes hands. The mark goes away happy—fully buttoned up—and stays that way maybe forever, but certainly until he tries to resell his prize to someone with a more practiced eye.