“Yeah? I got a summer place I go to a lot.”
“Where?”
“Ocean City. Four bedrooms, on the water.” Ricky didn’t mention that it was T.G.’s., not his.
“Sweet.” The man nodded, impressed.
“It’s okay. I’m looking at some other places too.”
“Man can never have too much real estate. Better than the stock market.”
“I do okay on Wall Street,” Ricky said. “You gotta know what to look for. You just can’t buy some stock ’cause it’s, you know, sexy.” He’d heard this on some TV show.
“Truer words.” Now Gardino tapped his glass into Ricky’s.
“Those were some nice fucking boats.” A nod toward the briefcase. “That your line?”
“Among other things. Whatta you do, Ricky?”
“I got my hand in a lot of stuff. Lot of businesses. All over the neighborhood here. Well, and other places too. Maryland, like I was saying. Good money to be made. For a man with a sharp eye.”
“And you have a sharp eye?”
“I think I do. Wanta know what it’s seeing right now?”
“What, your eye?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it seeing?”
“A grifter.”
“A-?”
“A scam artist.”
“I know what a grifter is,” Gardino said. “I meant, why do you think that’s what I am?”
“Well, for instance, you don’t come into Hanny’s-”
“Hanny’s?”
“Here. Hanrahan’s.”
“Oh.”
“-to sell some loser asshole a boat. So what really happened?”
Gardino chuckled but said nothing.
“Look,” Ricky whispered, “I’m cool. Ask anybody on the street.”
“There’s nothing to tell. A deal went south is all. Happens.”
“I’m not a cop, that’s what you’re thinking.” Ricky looked around, reached into his pocket, and flashed a bag of hash he’d been carrying around for T.G. “I was, you think I’d have this on me?”
“Naw, I don’t think you’re a cop. And you seem like an okay guy. But I don’t need to spill my guts to every okay guy I meet.”
“I hear that. Only… I’m just wondering there’s a chance we can do business together.”
Gardino drank some more beer. “Again, why?”
“Tell me how your con works.”
“It’s not a con. I was going to sell him a boat. It didn’t work out. End of story.”
“But… see, here’s what I’m thinking,” Ricky said in his best player’s voice. “I seen people pissed off ’cause they don’t get a car they wanted, or a house, or some pussy. But that asshole, he wasn’t pissed off about not getting a boat. He was pissed off about not getting his down payment back. So, how come he didn’t?”
Gardino shrugged.
Ricky tried again. “How’s about we play a game, you and me? I’ll ask you something and you tell me if I’m right or if I’m full of shit. How’s that?”
“Twenty questions.”
“Whatever. Okay, try this on: You borrow-” He held up his fingers and made quotation marks-“a boat, sell it to some poor asshole, but then on the way here it sinks.” Again the quotation marks. “And there’s nothing he can do about it. He loses his down payment. He’s fucked. Too bad, but who’s he going to complain to? It’s stolen merch.”
Gardino studied his beer. Son of a bitch still wasn’t giving away squat.
Ricky added, “Only there never was any boat. You never steal a fucking thing. You just show him pictures you took on the dock and a fake police report or something.”
The guy finally laughed. But nothing else.
“Your only risk is some asshole whaling on you when he loses the money. Not a bad grift.”
“I sell boats,” Gardino said. “That’s it.”
“Okay, you sell boats.” Ricky eyed him carefully. He’d try a different approach. “So that means you’re looking for buyers. How ’bout I find one for you?”
“You know somebody who’s interested in boats?”
“There’s a guy I know. He might be.”
Gardino thought for a minute. “This a friend of yours we’re talking?”
“I wouldn’ta brought him up, he was a friend.”
The sunlight came through some clouds over Eighth Avenue and hit Gardino’s beer. It cast a tint on the counter, the yellow of a sick man’s eye. Finally, he said to Ricky, “Pull your shirt up.”
“My-?”
“Your shirt. Pull it up and turn around.”
“You think I’m wired?”
“Or we just have our beers and bullshit about the Knicks and we go our separate ways. Up to you.”
Self-conscious of his skinny build, Ricky hesitated. But then he slipped off the stool, pulled up his leather jacket, and lifted his dirty T-shirt. He turned around.
“Okay. You do the same.”
Gardino laughed. Ricky thought he was laughing at him more than he was laughing at the situation but he held on to his temper.
The con man pulled up his jacket and shirt. The bartender glanced at them but he was looking like nothing was weird. This was, after all, Hanny’s.
The men sat down and Ricky called for more brews.
Gardino whispered, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m up to. But listen. You get some idea that you’re in the mood to snitch, I got two things to say: One, what I’m doing is not exactly legal, but it’s not like I’m clipping anybody or selling crack to kids, got it? So even if you go to the cops, the best they can get me for is some bullshit misrepresentation claim. They’ll laugh you out of the station.”
“No, man, seriously-”
Gardino held up a finger. “And number two, you dime me out, I’ve got associates in Florida’ll find you and make you bleed for days.” He grinned. “We copacetic?”
Whatever the fuck that meant. Ricky said, “No worries, mister. All I wanta do is make some money.”
“Okay, here’s how it works: Fuck down payments. The buyers pay everything right up front. A hundred, hundred fifty thousand.”
“No shit.”
“What I tell the buyer is my connections know where there’re these confiscated boats. This really happens. They’re towed off by the DEA for drugs or Coast Guard or State Police when the owner’s busted for sailing ’em while drunk. They go up for auction. But see, what happens is, in Florida, there’s so many boats that it takes time to log ’em all in. I tell the buyers my partners break into the pound at 3 in the morning and tow a boat away before there’s a record of it. We ship it to Delaware or Jersey, slap a new number on it, and bang, for a hundred thousand you get a half-million-dollar boat.
“Then, after I get the money, I break the bad news. Like I just did with our friend from Jersey.” He opened up his briefcase and pulled out a newspaper article. The headline was: “Three arrested in Coast Guard Impound Thefts.”
The article was about a series of thefts of confiscated boats from a federal government impound dock. It went on to add that security had been stepped up and the FBI and Florida police were looking into who might’ve bought the half-dozen missing boats. They’d arrested the principals and recovered nearly a million dollars in cash from buyers on the East Coast.
Ricky looked over the article. “You, what? Printed it up yourself?”
“Word processor. Tore the edges to make it look like I ripped it out of the paper and then Xeroxed it.”
“So you keep ’em scared shitless some cop’s going to find their name or trace the money to them. Now, just go on home, keep your head down, and watch your back. Some of ’em make a stink for a day or two, but mostly they just disappear.”
This warranted another clink of beer glasses. “Fucking brilliant.”
“Thanks.”
“So if I was to hook you up with a buyer? What’s in it for me?”
Gardino debated. “Twenty-five percent.”
“You give me fifty.” Ricky fixed him with the famous mad-guy Kelleher stare. Gardino held the gaze just fine. Which Ricky respected.