I tossed my Boss jacket over the back of a chair and slipped out of the gift from Gian.
“If you like this one, I have four more just like it in the car,” I said.
“Let me have a look at that,” she said.
I handed it over and she gave it a thorough inspection. Mary knows a thing or two about clothes. She worked at Bloomingdales for eight years in women’s fashion.
“Tell me you didn’t pay money for this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Someone told you this was leather?”
“Not just leather, but Italian leather,” I said. “Retails around two-thousand bucks.”
“It’s not worth twenty bucks. It’s pleather.”
“It’s what?”
“Imitation leather made from plastic. It’s crap. Probably made in China. Look at the stitching. It’s already coming apart in places. It’s probably lined with old newspaper.”
“I got five of them for a thousand bucks,” I told her.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
“Oh, Samuel,” Mary said. “I feel like I sent you to sell our cow at market and you’ve come back with magic beans.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I bought the coats with his own money.”
Mary smiled. “Well, that’s something I suppose. Anything left over?”
I reached into the pocket of my dress slacks and pulled out some bills. “When he was showing me his wares out of the trunk of his car, I got this off him.” It was the better part of a thousand dollars. It had been tucked into his front pocket, not far from that gun. Which meant that our con man friend Gian had about two thousand on him. So, even though I’d given him a grand back, I was up a thousand.
“I don’t think I told you about the first time,” I said.
“First time?”
“About six months ago, guy with a fake Italian accent asks me for directions to get back to the Best Western for a meeting with a bunch of buyers from J.C. Penney. Says he’s here on a business trip, from Mee-lah-no. Wanted to give me a jacket. He was reading from the same script as this guy today. Both of them very good. The first time, it didn’t even hit me it was a scam, and I was pressed for time and didn’t bite. But today, when I heard the thing all over again, I got curious.” I paused. “A touch nervous, too. He had a piece tucked into his belt.”
“Oh my,” Mary said. She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I’m glad you made it home alive. I made lasagna.”
“Wonderful.”
“How’d the rest of your day go?”
I emptied out my other pocket. “About eight hundred and fifty, looks like.” As usual, I had thrown out the purses and wallets and credit cards and returned home with just the cash I’d pickpocketed. Penn Station and Grand Central were my two favorite places to work. Crowded, people fumbling with luggage, distracted by kids, confused if they were coming into the city for the first time. They weren’t paying attention to their wallets or handbags. And there were plenty of places to disappear in a hurry if someone realized they’d been picked.
“So nearly two thousand,” Mary said. “Not bad for a day’s work.”
I agreed. Especially since it was not the kind of income one generally reported to the authorities. All tax-free. But the business was not as good as it used to be. Fewer people kept much cash on them. We were becoming a cashless society. I was hanging on by my fingernails. But I didn’t like cards. With all the ways to rip them off these days, there were also too many ways to track their use.
“Oh,” said Mary. “Did you pay the phone and gas bills?”
I bounced the heel of my hand off my forehead. “I got so wrapped up with Gian—”
“Gian?”
“My new fashion adviser. At least, that was the name on his card. But I’ll bet anything the phone number and website are bogus. I totally forgot to go to the bank after. I’ll do that tomorrow.”
I grabbed my sport jacket from the chair, reached into the pocket for the bills.
“Here’s the gas one...”
I could only find the one bill.
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“You sure you gave me both bills to pay? I don’t have the phone bill here.”
“I gave both of them to you.”
“The other one must have fallen out. When I took it off.”
I thought back to when I had dropped my jacket into the trunk of the Chrysler. I grabbed it in a hurry while Gian was putting the pleather jackets in my van.
My missing phone bill was, in all likelihood, in his trunk. A bill that carried our name and address on it.
“Mary, I think I may have made a mis—”
Someone was banging on the door.