Material things, p.20
Material Things, page 20
Desperate, Jon comes up with a really lame story to try and sell Longo: he suggests Matthew tell him he skipped town and went to Moscow until things cooled off.
“Tell him I’ve got relatives in Russia who will hide me. Encourage them to contact the Russian mob and ask them for a favor—to hunt me down like the lowlife dog that I am.”
Matthew is incredulous. “Are you fucking serious? If I give Longo that bullshit story he’ll laugh in my face, then blow it off with a 9 millimeter.”
There’s a knock on the front door, followed by a loud, powerful voice: “Jon Lewis, we know you’re in there. Open up! It’s the FBI. We have a warrant for your arrest.”
This meeting was over. Jon swiftly leaves the same way he came in, slithering through the sliding glass door back into the dark of night like a prowler. Matthew and Chris exchange nervous looks.
“I’ll handle the Feds, you shag-ass the fuck out of here,” Chris says.
After a beat, Matthew slithers through the sliding glass door, but is met by two federal officers, guns drawn, waving the search warrant in the air. Bud Collins shoulders his way past them.
“Where the hell is Jon Lewis?” the narc demands.
Of course they lie, denying Jon was ever there. “We were just sitting in the dark,” Matthew offers, “getting ready for a surprise party—in case he did show.”
Bud frowns. “A party? Just the two of you? Bullshit.”
Chris shrugs. “Well, the birthday boy didn’t have many friends.”
Bud and the Feds finally leave empty-handed. Jon obviously got away and this pissed off Bud, because he knew he had the fugitive in his sights and let him slip through his fingers. Even though they had no real proof that the guys were aiding and abetting, they were reprimanded by the Feds and warned that next time they’d serve jail time. Matthew saw this as just another idle threat to scare them into divulging under what rock Jon was hiding. No way were they going to lock them up when they were the only lead they had to Jon.
CHAPTER 33
Against their better judgment, like idiots they agree to give Jon’s mother the twenty grand and let the two of them—and Jon’s ex-wife Patti—fight over the split. Matthew and Chris cling to a slender hope that Longo buys their ridiculous Russian story, or else they’re in for a major fire sale.
The plan was to withdraw the money in the form of a cashier’s check, then take a road trip to Palm Springs. But first, Matthew takes his car in for needed service. The mechanic, Lonnie, your typical grease monkey, who still sports a ducktail, gives him a lift back to the store. An hour later, Matthew gets a call from Lonnie telling him that someone had installed a tracking device under his car frame. No big mystery. Matthew knew it was the Feds, following his every move, hoping he’d come in contact with Jon. For now, he leaves it intact so as not to give away he’s on to them. He also decides to keep this discovery to himself and not share it with Chris.
With Jon now out of the picture and legally dissolved from the partnership, they had to assume other in-house responsibilities. The bookkeeping, for one. Matthew knew nothing about ledgers, balance sheets, or financial statements. He sought help from Dede, his seamstress, who was good with numbers and smart as hell. The guys left her alone with the books, for as long as she needed. After about a week of retracing Jon’s complex system, she comes to Matthew looking panic-stricken. Her complexion pale, her expression serious, her eyes red from straining for too many hours on the calculator.
She finds Matthew on the floor checking out a new shipment of pants from Sisley Jeans. The smell of new denim made his eyes tear and wreaked havoc on his sinuses. It was like breathing in ammonia. Dede approaches and sits down next to him. In her hand was a balance sheet. The fact that the paper was trembling was a dead giveaway something was not good. She stalled a few beats before laying it on him. Seems Jon had cleverly embezzled over twenty thousand dollars. Panic scissors through Matthew; he thought he heard someone scream and didn’t realize it was him.
Dede went over the numbers a thousand times and it always came out the same—twenty thousand in the red. Matthew was sickened. She explained how he managed to cheat them: “He took an average of seven-hundred a week using a bank counter check to cover his tracks.”
It was never entered. Never recorded. To use a more felonious term, he was cooking the books and robbed them with a number 2 pencil.
Wasting no time, Matthew makes a desperation call to Chris, who was working on some crazy-ass bogus TV talent show called The Gong Show that featured weird, freakish performers who were a heartbeat away from being committed.
Chris wasn’t shocked to hear Jon had bilked them and skimmed off the top. In his words: “We were sucked into his lying, cheating, malicious fucking world of crime.”
“I’m afraid there’s more,” Matthew says.
“Of course there’s more. He’s a user. He has no value system. Tell me—but first let me grab a Valium.”
Matthew paused, before telling him that while Dede was cleaning and straightening up Jon’s hellish mess, she discovered twenty thousand dollars worth of unpaid, delinquent bills that had slid down between the desk and the wall. This was clearly a slap in the face. Their only alternative was to slap back—even harder.
And they did.
CHAPTER 34
Road trip. Chris and Matthew drove to Palm Springs and paid a visit to Jon’s mother, Agnes Lewis-Baldwin. They take Chris’s car to avoid being tailed by the Feds’ tracking device that remained on the Rolls. Matthew had not yet told Chris about it. He left the car parked at the store, allowing the Feds to think he wasn’t going anywhere for the day.
The desert heat was unbearable. Summer weather. 109 in the shade. You need to constantly hug an air conditioner or you’d melt. Agnes was only in her late fifties but looked like she could die at any moment. Growing old gracefully was unfortunately not in the cards for this woman. She served them iced tea that tasted like yellowish chalk dissolved in cold tap water and stale cake that must’ve been in her fridge since Betty Crocker was a teenager. Her kitchen was old and outdated. Cupboard doors hanging off their hinges. Sink stained around the drain. Curtains yellowed from nicotine. Jon grew up in this environment during most of his formative years, while his mother worked the night shift as a waitress at Sambo’s Restaurant and Pancake House on North Palm Canyon Drive.
Agnes lit a cigarette and gave vent to a hacking cough that startled the cat sitting on the windowsill. It was losing its hair and also looked as if it was not going to make another sunrise. She knew why they were there and was naturally excited to get a hefty check for twenty thousand dollars.
She planned to use her share to tidy up her dreary house, then Western Union Jon a few bucks once she got word where to send it. There was a long pause before the guys explained how her son embezzled over twenty thousand from them and that giving her yet another $20K was out of the question.
“So, I’m getting crap? My Johnnie boy is getting nothing?” she says, disappointed and choked up.
“Afraid so, Agnes,” Matthew says.
“But how will I survive? How will my only boy survive in a foreign country without money? He will starve and die, and that will be on your conscience,” she says with an overdramatic tenor.
She starts to hyperventilate, gasping for air. It was hard to tell if this was a genuine problem or she was seeking an Oscar nomination. Even so, Chris finds her a paper bag for her to breathe in. She refuses to use the bag because it has the residual odor of a rotten banana. They wait as she regains her normal breathing pattern without the aid of a sack.
Once fully recovered, Chris then jumps in and reveals more of her son’s shameful behavior. For instance, how they found the stack of unpaid bills he left behind that coincidentally totaled yet another twenty thou. Once again she chews the scenery, swooning, losing her balance as if she’s about to pass out, but she doesn’t, supporting herself against the hutch that housed her prized shot glass collection. And again she finds a way to recover, sticking her wrists under a cold running faucet. She dries off with a dishcloth, then begins to switch the blame on Jon’s father for his mischievous, inexcusable behavior as the reason for Jon’s criminal misconduct.
“His father was a conniver,” she expounds. “Plotted and schemed and paid the price with a five-year stretch in the state penitentiary for check fraud and selling arms to the Contras.” Sure, this was head shaking news but not at all unexpected.
During the entire visit, Chris sat there in an unsteady kitchen chair, marred by cat scratches, and listened to Agnes’s in-depth recitation of Jon Lewis’s backstory. According to Agnes, Jon had fled an adolescence whose catalog of woes had included drug use, countless arrests for disturbing the peace, a fondness for keeping company with women of questionable virtue, and one suicide attempt when life got to be too much for Jon to hack.
Chris didn’t believe a single solitary word this nut job threw at them. In his assessment she was as much a bullshitter as Jon and the father. Swindling was in their blood. A family legacy. They left with a feeling of indifference. Agnes Lewis-Baldwin was not their concern or their responsibility. She would somehow have to survive through her own polluted guilt. They left her to dwell on the reality of her corrupt son over stale cake and diluted iced tea that she later spiked with Jim Beam.
§
That night, Matthew sat at home alone, drinking a can of Country Club and staring at the phone, trying to screw up his nerve to call Longo. Matthew twiddled the mobster’s business card in his other hand. It’s been a week since Longo threatened them with arson. Although Matthew wasn’t intimidated by this so-called gangster’s threat of arson via incendiary device, there was still the issue of trying to convince him of the ridiculous story that Jon split the country to lay low in Russia.
Finally, Matthew grows big enough balls to make the call. The phone rings at least six times before he hears a voice on the other end.
“This is Longo.”
The Mafioso himself answering takes Matthew by surprise. He gets straight to the point, speaking with respect.
“Mr. Longo, sir, this is Matthew Street. We met on the street the other day. You threatened me with a lit match to my store.”
“That wasn’t a threat so much as it was just a way of getting you to act in perfunctory manner. Know what I’m saying?”
“I do, but I think you may have misused the word perfunctory. But what do I know? I’m not a grammarian, I sell pants.”
“So, whaddaya got for me? Good news, I hope.”
“Nothing but good news, sir.”
Matthew tells him the whole Moscow scenario—how Jon made it to Russia and that he’s using the alias Nikolai Petrov. Yes, it sounded like a stage name but how would Longo know? Petrov is a common name in Russia—like Smith in the United States. He’ll be looking under every rock and dish of beef Stroganoff in the damn city and come up with ten thousand Petrovs living in a three-mile radius of one another.
“How do I know this is not some bullshit fairy tale you just conjured up to throw me off the trail and make me look like an ass?”
“I’d be stupid to try and deceive you, Mr. Longo. Your reputation as a powerful figure precedes you. Any further information I get, you’ll be the first to know. So, we done here?”
There was a long, silent pause.
“For now, Street, your building and your pants are safe. I’ll keep you posted when we take care of business with your friend, so we can all sleep better at night knowing this unscrupulous piece of shit is in the trunk of some car at the bottom of the fucking Black Sea. Sleeping with the fishes.”
It was weird how this man suddenly became this stereotypical gangster. Then, as if Matthew was a winning contestant on a game show, Longo announces: “Meanwhile, you’ve earned a complimentary dinner for yourself and that cute deaf girlfriend of yours at my restaurant, Café Alma.” He hangs up.
Matthew felt the call went well, but of course anticipated that somewhere down the line, Longo would catch on to the fact that Matthew was lying.
§
None of this resolved their problem of owing big money to their suppliers. They needed a miracle of some sort. They had no plan, and Matthew actually thought of going to Longo for a loan. Really bad idea? Maybe not. He figures as long as he owed him money, he wouldn’t torch their only source of income, wrap his dead body in a shower curtain, and stuff him in a steamer trunk. Now who’s spewing gangster clichés?
He suddenly hears a sound outside his window—footsteps crunching on top of leaves and twigs. His first thought is, it’s the Feds making sure he’s not hiding Jon Lewis under his bed. He goes outside to scope out the area. He sees nothing that looks suspicious. He’s thinking it’s time to remove the tracking device from his car and put it on a truck that’s headed for Canada. Clever? Not really. An old diversion.
§
It was on the weekend when Matthew woke at the crack of dawn and headed directly for a local truck stop diner in Bakersfield called Rosalie’s Cafe. His purpose was to find a suitable truck upon which to attach the tracking device that’s been on his car for the past month. Bakersfield seemed to be the ideal location because most truckers heading north towards Washington and Canada take Interstate 5. Since Matthew had no knowledge of how to physically make the transfer, he brought along his mechanic, Lonnie, who was a reformed felon and had some skill in this particular area. There was a labor charge of a hundred dollars—steep, but well worth the price of deception.
Parked in a central spot, they lie in wait for just the right truck. It was amazing the amount of truck drivers that rolled in for breakfast before hitting the road. What a thankless job, Matthew thought. An endless, solitary existence, and their only socializing is done on a CB radio, or when they stop at a greasy spoon, flirting with the waitresses and shooting the bull with their fellow truckers.
A good hour later, an eighteen-wheeler with Toronto plates rolls in. The perfect vehicle. A hefty, beer-bellied guy sporting a full beard and a straw cowboy hat gets out of the cab and heads into the diner for his caffeine top-off. Once out of sight, Lonnie immediately goes to work under the truck. Unbeknownst to them the driver gets his coffee to go and is headed back sooner than expected. Matthew thinks fast and springs into action, asking the driver for directions.
“Excuse me, sir, but do you, uh, know how to get to, uh … Placerville,” he says, pulling a name out of a hat.
The driver isn’t that accommodating. “Look, kid,” he responds sharply, “I know you might think that every truck driver who rolls in here knows the whereabouts of every street, highway, and roadside eatery in the western United States from memory, but most of us don’t. We sometimes get lost, just like normal folks. I remember once I couldn’t find my way looking for Wayne, Nebraska. A small, nondescript town with a population of five thousand. Not exactly a jumping metropolis. Have a pleasant afternoon.”
After this rambling dissertation he clambers into in his cab and drives off, leaving Lonnie flat on his back, lying in an oil spot. Matthew shrugs a “well?” Lonnie gives him a thumb’s up. Mission accomplished.
With the tracking device securely attached to the underbelly, Matthew decides to play their game and keep his car out of sight, to make it appear he might be chauffeuring Jon Lewis to Toronto.
CHAPTER 35
The Canadian border. Dusk. Tony Clarke’s VW bus with the Union Jack on the roof idles in a long line of cars, trucks, and RVs waiting to cross the border into Vancouver, BC. He has a passenger who is hard to identify, because he wears a baseball cap and dark shades. Probably a hitchhiker. Tony is notorious for picking up riders during the long haul from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Makes the journey less of a bore. Not to mention, in the event he falls asleep at the wheel, it’s handy to have someone to prevent the bus from swerving into an oncoming car. This particular passenger appears nervous and edgy. Tony tries to comfort him in his Liverpudlian vernacular.
“Try to relax, mate,” he says. “If they get a sense things are all at sixes and sevens, we’re fucked. And the last thing we need is to be hassled by the Old Bill. No way do we want this little delay to go pear-shaped.”
Tony’s passenger nods, confused. Sixes and sevens? Old Bill? Pear-shaped? What the fuck is he talking about?
Fifteen minutes later they reach the border crossing and the border patrol checkpoint. A uniformed Canadian officer instantly asks to see their passports and ID. Both Tony and his passenger comply without protest. The officer studies both passports thoroughly, looking for any discrepancy. These guys have that Bohemian, nonconformist, beatnik look, so they’re automatically profiled as suspicious drug users who might be smuggling contraband across the border. He asks that the guy riding shotgun remove his cap and glasses, making sure the ID picture and the man match. After he complies, the guy stays in the shadows, not revealing his full face. But it’s not hard to detect that it’s Jon Lewis trying to remain incognito.
It’s nervous time when they’re asked to step out of van while they inspect the contents. Standard procedure, according to the border officer. But Tony thinks otherwise, as he opens up the back. Jon, now out in the open and more identifiable, prays he’s not recognized. Fidgety and uneasy, he keeps his head down during the entire search. The officer notices his restless behavior.
“Your friend okay?” he asks Tony.
“Yeah, he just needs to take a slash.”
“A what?”
“A piss.”
Next, they’re asked why they’re headed into Canada. Tony, trying to keep it friendly, speaks up. “Strictly business, mate. We sell those British-made T-shirts you’re checking out in the back to the local retailers. Big sellers. This is my third trip. His first. I’m training the bloke.”
Jon doesn’t respond, nor does he look up. The border Mounties finally complete their look-see and are about to relinquish their passports, when the officer asks Jon to step closer into the light. He checks him out closely. Jon is about to piss his pants.
