Double Dose, page 23
“Yeah…a horrors rip-off.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Is she right?”
Daley stared at him. “Are you seriously asking me that? First off, do you really think I’d stoop that low? And second, I just told you that crap is all behind me.”
“Yeah…but that’s just what a con woman would say, wouldn’t she?”
Daley felt her jaw drop. “You actually think…?”
Her words dried up as the hurt washed over her. At least Karma had stabbed her in the front. If they weren’t in the middle of the desert now, she’d tell him to pull over and let her out. But then what? Probably no cell signal out here.
Rhys seemed oblivious. “That meeting left me with so many unanswered questions. Like, why were you dressed up like a scrub nurse?”
Daley folded her arms and stared out her side window. “I think it’s better if we stop talking.”
He looked surprised. “What? No—”
“You’ll only think I’m lying so why bother?”
“Seriously, Daley. I—”
“Stop. Talking. Now.”
“But—”
“NOW!”
He finally shut up.
59
Daley wandered about her living room. The rest of the ride back from El Centro had been…quiet. By now her anger had dissipated somewhat, but not completely. And the hurt, well, that still…hurt.
Okay, she’d pulled her share of cons, but they’d been inconsequential affairs. Most of her marks hadn’t even known they’d been conned. Did Rhys actually think she’d take advantage of the families of victims of the horrors? The very idea appalled her. Didn’t he know her at all?
Well, to be fair, in his mind, he didn’t know her. He’d thought he did, but all those revelations during the meeting had morphed her into some bizarre, lowlife stranger.
And who did she have to blame? No one but herself. Oh, how smug she’d been back in the day. Stanka I-got-all-the-answers Daley. So contemptuous of the straights. They weren’t middle-class people working long hours for their money, they were marks—low-hanging fruit waiting to be harvested. No matter what plans they might have had for their money, she’d made it her money.
Pard had warned her how her cons could some someday circle back and bite her in the ass. Not that he’d used those words. How had he put it?
…these kind of things don’t go away entirely. They’re always out there, waiting to come back and haunt you…
So right—as usual. But her old life wasn’t content with a mere haunting, it had circled back to torpedo and sink the new one. Maybe she deserved it. What goes around, comes around, and all that crap.
Juana was the only one she could think of around here who might know the real score and give her the benefit of the doubt. Daley had come home to find a note from her saying she’d been waiting here for her return but had to leave for the reservation on some tribal business. She’d be back tomorrow.
Which left no one to turn to. She was on her own. She’d always liked her alone time. Maybe alone was the answer. Alone meant no one around to stab you in the back.
Listen to me! Enough. Enough about me. I’m sick to death of me.
She grabbed the remote and switched on the TV. She needed a distraction. A rerun of Law & Order or one of its variations had to be playing somewhere. Lose herself in a murder case.
But as she surfed the channels she saw a female reporter holding a microphone in front of a goateed man in a garish suit. The banner below him read: Markus Gruber—author of “The Mind of the Con Artist.” When she recognized the front entrance of ECRMC, she stopped for a look and a listen.
REPORTER: —ointed out that she took no credit for any of the three cures, in fact she denied credit. How can you be working a scam if you don’t take credit for past successes?
GRUBER: Ah, you’ve already taken a great leap. Let’s back up a step and ask: Were those genuine horrors victims? What if they were faking the illness?
REPORTER: But the doctors said—
GRUBER (waving a hand): The horrors are uncharted territory. There’s no definitive test, just symptoms. People involved in the con could be faking those symptoms and the doctors would have no test to say otherwise. As for denying credit, that tells me that we’re dealing with a highly sophisticated scammer. The con artist plays on what is known as the mark’s “will to believe.” They need to believe they’ll win the raffle, they need to believe they’re getting a great deal on resealing their driveway, they need to believe they’ve just spoken to their dead wife. And once they accept that belief, God himself can’t change their mind.
REPORTER: But if the scammer denies credit…
GRUBER: …they become all the more believable. I know it sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. If they tout themselves as the healer, they’ll trigger skepticism. People will say “Prove it.” But if the con artist simply puts himself in the vicinity of the cures when they happen, he or she becomes connected to the cures. They become a person of interest in regard to the cures. And then by denying it, they become credible. Repeated denials only increase their credibility. People will say, “Well, if he was really a con artist, he’d be hogging the credit. But if he’s walking away…he’s hiding his miraculous abilities.” As a result, he doesn’t have to prove anything. He hasn’t asked for a leap of faith because he doesn’t need to—the lemmings are leaping all on their own.
REPORTER: As you said, the will to believe.
GRUBER (grinning): Exactly! And who in the world wants more to believe in a cure than someone whose loved one has an incurable condition?
Sickened, Daley turned off the TV and dropped onto the couch.
They thought they had it all figured out. They’d retrofitted a con to support what they thought were the facts. This Gruber knew his stuff. He might even have been a grifter himself at one point. Yeah, the will to believe…tap into that and people will buy into anything.
But the press was painting her as a monster…someone plotting to prey on panicked, grieving families.
She bounded to her feet again. Unbelievable! She’d pulled off dozens of scams and everyone believed her. Now these cures, real cures, the one true thing she’d been involved in her whole life, and no one would believe her. What was that—irony? Or just a fucked-up world?
She had to get out of here—out of Nespodee Springs, out of the whole damn Imperial Valley. Back to her place in North Hollywood. That sounded good. She’d pack up a few necessities and hit the road.
60
“What are you doing here?” Rhys said when he opened his bedroom door.
His face registered the profound shock Cadoc had expected.
“It’s my home,” Cadoc said.
“I’m well aware of that. But you haven’t visited my room since…since…”
“The last time I had a meal with the family?”
“Yeah, that would be it.”
Cadoc smelled the tequila on his breath. Rhys tended to need a reason to drink—stress, usually. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
Like hell. “Can I come in?”
“Sure-sure-sure.” He backed away to make room for entry. “Want a drink?”
“No. I want to talk about Daley. Some nasty stories about her floating around.”
“That she’s a professional con woman and a grifter?”
“Those would be the ones.”
“They’re all true.”
The bitterness in his brother’s tone spoke volumes. Cadoc couldn’t hide his shock. “They’re true?”
A slug from the Patrón bottle, then a nod. “Told me so herself.” A sidelong glance. “She ever give you any clue?”
“No. I’m flabbergasted. It just doesn’t seem like her.”
“Well, it is. She says she was raised that way. The hospital CEO seems to think she was planning a scam on the horrors victims.”
Cadoc fought a surge of anger. No one had a right to talk about Daley like that.
“Do you believe that—I mean, do you believe she’s capable of something like that?”
“She said she’d never stoop that low, but who can believe a word she says now?”
“Oh, come on.”
“I don’t know what the fuck to believe, Cad! I was really into her—really, really into her, and then I find out she’s got a secret life. A petty crook! A con woman!”
“Did she ever take credit for those cures?”
“No…not that I heard.”
“Well, she should have.”
The Patrón bottle was on its way back to his mouth but stopped in mid-journey.
“What did you say?”
“She has a power, Rhys…a healing power.”
“Bullshit.”
Cadoc rolled up his sleeves. After all those years of sleeves down to his wrists, no matter what the season, he felt exposed with anything shorter. He rotated his arms back and forth.
“You saw only my hands when we played chess, but my whole body was like that. Look now. You’ve seen how I’ve been clearing.”
“Yeah, some kind of miracle. I’m so—wait. You’re gonna tell me Daley did this?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. That Sunday night you returned from San Diego with Papa and we had our delayed chess game. I doubt you remember, but you told me then that Wynny Baughan’s Pendry Patch had cleared and she was blaming Daley.”
“Yeah. I got stuck listening to Elder Baughan because his daughter was being shunned because she wasn’t a real Pendry without the Patch.”
“You might remember I called off the second game. After you’d left, I went straight to Daley’s place and asked her if she’d cured Wynny’s Patch.”
“I’m not sure ‘cured’ is the right word. It’s not a disease, it’s—”
“It’s exactly the right word, Rhys, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Daley hemmed and hawed but finally admitted that she’d fixed Wynny’s Patch while trying to help with the blood clot in her lung.”
Rhys blinked. “‘Help with the blood clot’? What—?”
“Stay focused on Sunday night, okay? I pressed her and finally got her to admit that she can, in a way, under certain conditions, heal certain things.”
“Total bullshit, Cad. She’s a con artist.”
Cadoc held out his arms again and rotated them. “Is this a con?”
“A coincidence, then.”
“There’s a woman out there who’s convinced Daley healed her intractable stomach ulcer and saved her from surgery.”
Rhys gave a dismissive wave. “Yeah, and a sheriff’s deputy who thinks she cured his daughter’s brain tumor. Which she denies, by the way.”
Yes…here was the problem.
“She publicly denies all healings, yet when I backed into a corner she admitted she could heal certain things.”
“Don’t be taken in, Cad. It’s all part of her game. How much did she charge you?”
“For clearing my skin? Her price was seeing the second half of the film.”
He watched Rhys digest that.
“That’s all? No money?”
“Not a cent. I truly believe she has a power to heal. Not to cure everything, just certain things. I think she wants to work her magic or whatever it is without being branded a miracle worker, because we all know nothing good can come of that.”
Rhys stared at him a while, then said, “What did she do to you, exactly?”
“She invited me in, we sat at the kitchen table, and she held my hands for maybe a minute, probably less.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all of it. By Monday morning I could already see signs of improvement, but I thought it was just my imagination—I wanted to see improvement, so that’s what I saw. But by Tuesday there was no question that my skin was starting to clear.”
“Placebo effect maybe?”
“You’re reaching, Rhys.”
He stalked around the room. “You’re asking me to believe in magic, Cad! In miracles!”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’—”
“Yeah-yeah, I know the quote. In fact Dad used it before he took me out to the desert to give me my first view of the porthors.”
“Which you thought were a fiction until then. So why are you holding back here?”
“Because I saw them with my own eyes. I saw what they did to that empty shop. But I can’t buy into faith healing. I can’t! It’s not in me!”
The porthors…that gave Cadoc an idea.
“Of course it is. You believe in the Pendry Patch don’t you?”
He stopped and stared. “How can I not? Like the porthors, it’s not a matter of faith. I’ve got one on my back. And you…”
“Right. I had it all over, so I should know it best of all. My point is that you’ve taken what you’ve been told about it on blind faith, and everything you’ve heard is a lie.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cadoc checked his phone for the time. Yeah, the sun was well down and it was probably late enough. He crooked a finger at Rhys.
“Follow me. Just as with the film, you must see to believe.”
61
Daley yawned as she turned onto Burbank Boulevard and cruised toward her apartment. Clouds obscured the night sky and it felt like rain. When was the last time she’d seen rain? Not a single drop in Nespodee Springs during her stay there.
Her place sat over a bookstore. She noticed the store’s lights were still on, then remembered Tuesday was reading club night and they stayed open later than usual. She pulled around the corner where she found her usual spot taken. No surprise. She hadn’t been back in weeks. She’d have to hunt up a spot on the boulevard, not always a sure thing this time of night.
As she turned around and pulled up to the stop sign at Burbank, she noticed someone sitting in a parked car across the street. A perfect spot. She waited for them to pull out but they never budged. The street lights showed a woman behind the wheel. She seemed to be involved with her phone, either texting or playing a game. But every so often she’d look up and stare across the street—straight in the direction of Daley’s apartment.
Or am I just imagining this? she thought. Paranoia was always Pard’s department. That doesn’t mean I have to sub for him. But damn it, there she goes again, looking directly at my apartment. Or was she watching the bookstore…waiting for someone attending the book club?
Daley couldn’t recognize her from over here, but maybe those miracle-cure-hunting women from the medical arts building who’d chased her last month had posted one of their number to watch her place.
Ridiculous. Crazy. Absurd. Yet there she sat, right across the street, keeping an eye on the place.
If I go in now, and she’s watching for me, she’ll call her friends and my place will be surrounded again.
Only one thing to do: call the lady who always had her back.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Hey, Gram, it’s me. Can I crash there tonight?”
“Oh…well…it’s gettin’ on late, you know.”
Tarzana was only a dozen miles west.
“I’m just a hop and a skip away.”
“Oh…well…I guess so.”
“Great. I’m heading there now.”
Daley hit the gas and pulled out onto the boulevard. Gram didn’t sound quite herself. She hoped she was all right.
Twenty minutes later Daley rolled through the entrance of Entrée, Gram’s retirement community, and parked before her unit, a tiny ranch with stucco walls and a barrel-tile roof. Gram answered her knock. She’d always been lean and lanky, but she somehow looked more frail than when Daley had last visited. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed.
“Come in,” she said and walked away, leaving the door open.
What?
Brendan, Uncle Seamus’s Jack Russell terrier, gave his usual greeting, pawing at her leg, tail wagging. But Gram…
Daley stepped into the familiar overheated, tobacco-smoke-laced air and closed the door behind her.
“Gram, are you okay?”
“Just fine,” she said without turning.
Something definitely wrong. She hurried after her.
“Gram, what’s wrong. Is it Uncle Seamus—?”
She whirled. “No, it’s you!” she said in her thick Irish accent. “I’m after spending the whole day listening to terrible stories about you.”
Daley sagged. No escaping it, not even here.
“And you believe them?”
“Not at first. They say you’ll be making your living running confidence games, just like those people I took you away from after your mother died. And then they’ll be showing a picture of you with that awful Billy Marks. What am I supposed to believe then? You told me you wanted nothing to do with him.”
“I don’t. I wasn’t with him because I wanted to be. He tracked me down.”
“They say you’re after cheating people with phony car raffles. You’ve been telling me you’re doing car sales. Which is true?”
Daley had told her she was in car sales as a half-truth. How to explain this?
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you about some things, Gram.”
He eyes widened. “Then it’s true?”
“Hardly any of it is true. I can ex—”
“But you lied to me!” she said, her voice filled with hurt. “Your own Gram!”
Oh, you’re killing me, Gram. Tearing my heart out.
“Listen—”
“I’ll be going to bed now. I’m tired of this day and I want done with it.” Shaking her head, she turned away and headed for her bedroom. “I thought I’d done a good job raising you.”
“You did, Gram,” Daley said, feeling the tears start. “You were the best. You still are.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t have turned out a guttersnipe…a lying guttersnipe.”
With that she closed her door behind her.
Guttersnipe…to Gram’s mind that was about the worst you could think of someone.
Daley crept up to her door. She had to tell her, had to explain. She was about to knock when a voice said…
“You’re best off letting her be for now.” Uncle Seamus stood in the kitchen doorway with a finger’s worth of whiskey in his hand—had to be Jameson’s since he’d drink no other. “She’s hurt something terrible. Crying all day—on Saint Paddy’s day, of all days.”
