mother, though ultimately the two of them were so the same that they repelled each other like like magnetic poles. At that, I’d have to say he loved the grift far better than he ever loved her, or me, for that matter. He loved being in the wind, and that was a love that took a lifetime to wean and nurture and grow. So love, real love, isn’t sudden. Or if it is sudden, it’s perverse, like when you meet someone you think can fix your broken parts or fill some hole in your life, and your defective brain misinterprets this as “love at first sight.” Was Allie capable of this kind of malformed stalker love? Could she have spotted me across a crowded room and said, “That’s the man to undamage me”? Unlikely. I had to credit her with more common sense and self-awareness, and certainly more cynicism, than that.
So: not sex, not love, then money. But what money? How? You meet someone at a party, even a Hollywood Hills party where people have a loose enough grip on their cash, how do you know this random stranger has a sufficiently deep and accessible pocket? Well, you don’t know. You prospect. But what would Allie have seen at first glance that made her think of sinking an exploratory well in me? I’m what you call a hard mark, sufficiently chary to see the grift coming and get out of its way. And it shows. At least I think it shows. Around here we have a saying, “Only victims get victimized.” No way do I come off as a victim, unless that’s part of my grift, which at a Hollywood Hills Halloween party it definitely is not. If Allie’s in the game, she knows this. If she’s not in the game … well, what the fuck?
Oh then, let’s say revenge. Let’s say she’s the sister of someone I mooked, and now she’s playing back at me. That had a certain logic, but it didn’t pass the sniff test for a couple of reasons. First, dumb runs in tight circles, and if you’re dumb enough to fall into a conhole, no one you know—not your sister, your best friend, your coworker, priest, or dog—is smart enough to play you back out. Second, someone on a revenge tip just wouldn’t be that open with her play. No, “Java Man closest 2 u” was either a big semaphore or a casual mistake, and it didn’t feel like a mistake. She’s on to me, wants me to know it, and knows I’ll figure that out.
Bottom line: I’m being grift-wrapped for something I cannot yet see. But why?
Why being a dry hole, I took a whack at how, or rather two hows. How did she know where I lived, and how did she arrange to meet me at a party that even I didn’t know I was going to crash? The connect-the-dots answer had to be: She’s been following me, looking for an opportunity to “meet cute.” (She was cute; and it crossed my mind to wonder whether I was spending all this psychic energy on her because she presented a threat or just because I liked thinking about her. I liked how she smelled. Vanilla.)
I went to the living-room window and looked out. The view from my deck is spectacular, but the view out front, not so much. Just a pot-holed asphalt street, some jacarandas, and the flat facade of the garage across the way, with stairs going up along its side. A cat sunned himself on the bottom step. Apart from that, nothing. What did I expect? To see her casing me from some parked car, Garbo cigarette hanging from her lip?
She doesn’t smoke.
And she knows I don’t drink.
But wait … something else. I replayed a part of our party conversation, the part where I said “libated” and she said it wasn’t a word, not that I cared. That was it. That “not that you care.” The sort of thing you’d say about someone only if you knew it was true. And she’d just met me.
But she knew me.
She’d made a study.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Grifters are hunters.
We don’t like to be prey.
5.
the original mirplo
A t a quarter to Vespers on Tuesday, I was just heading out to Java Man when my cell phone rang. I half entertained the fantasy that it would be Allie, coming clean, ’fessing up, solving the big mystery for me before I had