Dewey Gleason had been Bernie Graham all day. Bernie Graham was no challenge at all and in fact was a bit boring to his creator. Bernie was an L.A. guy, born and raised, and as Dewey saw him, Bernie had come from money, the son of a successful plastic surgeon who catered to a glamorous Westside trade. Bernie had an MBA from USC and had been a highly successful investment adviser, but he had suffered through two bad marriages with a gambling problem that necessitated his foray into illegal activity.
Dewey felt he had to establish this plausible backstory when dealing with college kids. They asked questions that the likes of Creole and Jerzy would never ask. The college boys were paranoid about getting caught and mentioned their parents a lot, and Dewey had to share fictional background information to reassure them. Or rather, paternalistic Bernie Graham had to.
At least Bernie Graham didn’t need to be imposing, so Dewey didn’t have to wear the shoes with lifts and suffer from ankle pain for two days, as he did when he was Jakob Kessler. Nor did he need the contact lenses, because Bernie Graham seldom needed to intimidate anybody. And Bernie Graham didn’t have to be an older man, so Dewey could lose the gray wig. About all he’d done for Bernie Graham was use a rinse in his hair to make it a few shades darker and apply a stick-on mustache along with trendy eyeglasses.
His Bernie Graham character always dressed well-thanks to Nordstrom’s no-questions-asked return policy-usually in a blazer and chinos. Dewey had considered creating a small but noticeable scar across Bernie’s forehead that a college kid would undoubtedly describe for the cops if the kid was ever arrested. Ultimately, he’d decided that the scar would be overkill, but he affected a right-legged limp that he claimed was the result of a skiing accident on Mammoth Mountain, where he’d gone with fraternity brothers.
Meeting college kids wasn’t hard to do. The previous year, Dewey had cultivated one who’d been working part-time at a Starbucks in West L.A., and he’d parlayed that meeting into several others with students who were cash-strapped. Soon he knew a dozen kids he could nurture and train. To begin with, he’d simply buy their debit cards and their PINs. The card-selling student would have to be in good standing with his bank. Dewey could almost always buy the card for $300 or less, but sometimes the more assertive kids chiseled another $100 out of him.
Then Dewey as Bernie Graham would use a “deposit runner” unknown to the first kid to deposit several of Eunice’s counterfeit checks into the account of the kid who’d sold him the card. The deposit runner would have good bogus ID created by Eunice, so that any photo taken by a bank security camera would not match the student who’d sold Dewey the card. Then a third student, one who Dewey called his “ bucks-up runner,” not known by either of the first two, would be hired to travel to San Diego County, or out to the Palm Springs area, where there were some very big Indian casinos. That student, with another of Eunice’s bogus IDs, would gamble a little, and through a clever phone call to override the card’s daily limit, he would loot the debit account until it was dry. Any security video taken at the casinos would likewise not match the legitimate owner of the debit card, nor the one who’d deposited the bogus checks.
When the bank finally contacted the original student, the kid would say, “Oh, my gosh, my debit card isn’t in my wallet! And I had my PIN number taped to it! Oh, my gosh!”
When the bank tried telling the kid that he owed the bank payback for the thousands they’d lost, the kid would recite lines fed by Bernie Graham: “But I didn’t even know it was missing until you called me!”
The security at Indian casinos was generally lax, and none of Bernie’s runners had gotten arrested so far. The security people at the casinos were concerned with customers cheating the house, not with cheating the banks. They’d look diligently for elaborate devices designed to beat the slot machines, but ATM scams were of little concern to them, and, most important, there were no close-up cameras at the ATM machines in the casinos, which made them desirable targets.
Dewey Gleason’s favorite line as a closer to a new college kid was, “Look, the banks take the hits, so the Injuns don’t give a shit. You think the banks can’t afford to lose a few thousand here and there? Who needs it more, you or Bank of America?”
Dewey had no doubt that every one of the students skimmed some of the cash they were supposed to be returning to their mentor. Most of them would say something like, “Mr. Graham, there was a guy eyeballing me, so I had to gamble more than I wanted to. But I didn’t lose too much.”
But what they ended up giving him made the whole gag surprisingly profitable. The college kids didn’t want to lose this new and fascinating source of income, so they were careful not to kill the golden goose. It made Eunice happy, but Dewey complained that he’d ended up being nothing more than a coach and collector. There was no challenge for a man who’d spent most of his adult life chasing casting agents and reading for uninterested TV producers and auditioning for parts he never got. At least with Jakob Kessler he got to give a real performance, and it was exhilarating, especially when he turned those pale contact lenses on someone like Creole and talked about greed. That’s when he felt he was doing what he was born to do. He was giving a great performance every time, no matter what that jealous bitch had to say about it.
His last stop late that afternoon was in West Hollywood, but after a long day spent collecting, Dewey got a phone call on one of the eight GoPhones he kept on his person and in his briefcase.
Eunice, who could never resist belittling him, said, “Hello. Am I speaking with the tall and fearsome Jakob Kessler or gimpy little Bernie Graham?”
“How do I hate thee?” Dewey replied. “Let me count the ways.”
“What?” she said. “You’re breaking up.”
“Get to the fucking point, Ethel,” he said, using her GoPhone name. “Whadda you want?”
“Stop by the Mexican joint after you’re all done,” she said, which they both knew to mean Pablo’s Tacos, the notorious Santa Monica Boulevard meeting place for tweakers, crackheads, and others with illicit goods to sell. “Look for a black guy who calls himself John. He’s supposed to show up at around eight fifteen with the goods I talked to you about on Monday.”
Eunice had never shut her fucking mouth on Monday or any other day, and most of what she’d said had passed him by. She had one idea after another, one job after another for him to do, while she just sat there in the apartment and “created,” and smoked herself into an early grave. The last part would be just fine with him if it could happen sooner. Monday? Which gag was that? Finally, he had to admit the truth and take what she’d surely dump on him.
He said, “Okay, Ethel, I don’t remember what you told me on fucking Monday, okay?”
“You don’t remember. Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she said. “Why do I knock myself out for you?”
“Please let me knock you out sometime,” he said, slamming on the brakes after almost blowing the light at Cahuenga and Sunset because she had him so upset.
“The guy with the goods from his office? Sweet Jesus! Do I have to spell it out for you on the goddamn phone?”
Then he remembered. A Nigerian night janitor who was acquainted with one of Dewey’s Mexican runners claimed to have access to his company’s checks, and he’d suggested that some checks could temporarily disappear from the office, no problem. His company employed several hundred Latino workers, and Eunice intended to make duplicates of the paychecks and then have the janitor return the originals to the check file. She was curious to see how many could be cashed by Dewey’s Mexicans with bogus IDs she supplied before the company and the company’s bank discovered that some paychecks were being cashed twice.