Grift Read online

  “Piper. Piper, did you catch that? Kim, you saw it, right? That was effing awesome! I’m going to do it again. Kim, get your camera.”

  I walk to the other side of the room. The game area. Pool table. Ping-pong. Retro arcade games. Air hockey. Claw machine (it’s free but impossible to pick up any of the stuffed animals, which have collected a layer of dust over the years). Six flat-screens. Every video game console ever – from Atari all the way up to the latest Nintendo that hasn’t even officially hit the market yet. Thousands of Blu-rays. A karaoke machine.

  Mars sits on a couch watching football. Three different games on three different TVs. He repeatedly taps his knuckle on the table next to him. A knuckle smudged with green chalk.

  Mars is an 18-year-old pool player from Texas. Well, more than a pool player, he’s a shark. A great white shark.

  “How long was she out here?”

  Mars doesn’t look up from the games. “I dunno. Twenty minutes. Give her a break, Pi.”

  Give her a break? Don’t tell me to give her a break. “Not everybody can play the role of the cool uncle.”

  Mars only shrugs back. The guy is harmless, and I’m happy to let him play the role of the cool uncle.

  I head down a hallway that leads to the different bedrooms of the penthouse, stop at the last one, and enter. That blond streak of hair I saw a couple minutes ago belongs to Sophie. My sister. She sits at her desk, writing in a notebook.

  “I saw you.”

  “I know.”

  She looks up at me and her eyes burn into mine. Replace her braids of blond hair with snakes, and she’d make a perfect teenage Medusa.

  I debate over whether to launch into a lecture. In the end, I refrain. Choose your battles, I remind myself. “How’s it coming?”

  Sophie shrugs. She’s 14 years old. Eighth grade. Well, the equivalent of eighth grade. I make her do these educational tapes and workbooks that correspond with each grade level. I ordered them from this homeschooling website. She hates them.

  “When you’re finished, you can come out and hang out, okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  ***

  Back in my own room, I change into sweats. Most girls would kill for my closet. Dresses from every top designer. Hundreds of pairs of shoes. Dozens of pairs of jeans. Various designer rompers and jumpsuits. Twenty skirts. A hundred different tops.

  One time, in the middle of the night, Max took me to a distribution zone where Guess, Louis Vuitton, and Calvin Klein reroute clothes to 60 different outlet stores in Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. Max told me to walk through and pick out whatever I wanted.

  Hard to put a price on what you don’t pay for, but if I had to guess, I’d say my closet is probably worth $50K, easily. Needless to say, if I’m not on the clock, I can be found wearing sweats. Sweats and knock-off Croqs, which I’m proud to say I paid for the old fashioned way: $35 at Target.

  I walk back into the living area just as Max enters the penthouse. He waves to me. But then he sees the slide. Irritation washes over him, but not confusion or surprise. He knows it was Rob.

  He whistles. Max’s sharp, piercing whistle = time to talk business. We all congregate at a large dining table. Everyone’s here. Except Jesse.

  “How’d everyone do?”

  Kim hands him a brown lunch bag. “I got heat at two different casinos and had to bounce. Had friendly eyes over at the Bellagio, so I played for an hour.” Friendly eyes means someone in the surveillance room was on her payroll. Well, Max’s payroll. In fact, those were the same friendly eyes that first tipped Max off to Kim.

  Max takes the bag. Then looks to Rob who hands over his own paper bag. “Any trouble?” Max is always more interested in avoiding trouble than making money. And he’s really f-ing interested in making money.

  “No. Nothing really. I played the Good Samaritan for a couple hours with that security guard over at the MGM Grand.”

  Max nods, content. Rob doesn’t always make Max content. Rob, who has gone skydiving 14 times, gets his kicks from risk. But Rob’s comfort with risk remains Max’s discomfort with Rob.

  Rob is an amazing pickpocket. But no matter how talented you are, eventually trouble emerges. Someone sees you. Someone catches you. Someone reports you. Max didn’t teach Rob how to pick a pocket or two. What Max did was teach Rob how to get away with picking pockets.

  The Good Samaritan is one way. Here, Rob teams with a security guard. Rob steals a wallet from some tourist. Removes the cash. Gives the wallet to the security guard. The guard then hustles up to the tourist, pretending to be out of breath. Panting, he tells the tourist (before the tourist even realizes his wallet is gone) that he saw some kid steal his wallet. He tells the tourist that he chased the thief. That the kid, while he was running, took the cash out of the wallet and threw the wallet down.

  The tourist is so pleased to avoid cancelling his credit cards and getting a new license, that the cash missing from his wallet is nothing more than stepping in gum (annoying, but not worth calling the cops over). And he’s so pleased with the security guard’s courageous behavior that he never suspects him as an accomplice to the thief. But why go to all that trouble? Why not just take the wallet? ‘Cause this way, Rob can work the same area for hours at a time.

  Max looks next to Mars. And next, yes, Mars hands him a small brown paper bag. “A couple regulars outted me over at Club Charleston, so I had to move along. But it was all tourists over at Club Cue. And not a shark swimming among ‘em.”

  Of all of us, Mars holds the steadiest work. He goes to pool halls. And hustles tourists. At any given pool hall in America, it’s fairly difficult to get in a game for money with strangers.

  In Vegas? It’s hard to go to a pool hall and not play for money.

  Now it’s my turn to hand Max my brown paper bag. Each week, the money from all the brown paper bags more than covers the cost of the suite. The hotel rents out the other five penthouses on the top floor at an ever-changing price correlated with seasonal demand. But this suite has been Max’s home for years.

  Max takes the bag, awaiting my summary.

  “First was clockwork, but my second showed up with a second, so…”

  “You walked? Good. I want to talk to you. Go wait in my room.”

  Max lives in the master, which sits on the opposite side of the living area from our rooms. Max only brings us in his room under two conditions:

  1. If we’ve fucked up somehow.

  2. If he has a new plan for us.

  Wondering which it’ll be, I walk inside the ginormous room. Not an abundance of possessions. In the corner, a safe built and painted to look like a simple chest of drawers. Exactly 31 suits in the closet. I remember as a child asking him if there was a particular suit he didn’t wear in months that had only 30 days.

  When Max found me, I was 11 years old. Sophie was 8. We lived alone in a room in the Excalibur. I approached tourists and said I wanted to surprise my mother with a gift from the gift shop and was only a few dollars short. This took some genuine acting because the only gift I would have bought my mother was a thank you note that said thank you for nothing, you selfish bitch.

  If I ever got complaints from hotel staff, I walked to another. I did this for four or five hours a day for a couple months before Max took us in. Max later told me he watched me repeat the scam for a whole hour.

  It was an early afternoon, and I was on a roll outside the lobby of the Monte Carlo when Max approached me. After I gave him my pitch about needing a couple dollars, he claimed he only had a twenty. I offered him change and gave him 17 dollars. The moment we completed the trade, he boasted that the twenty he had given me was fake.

  He told me that he knew what I was doing. But he didn’t scold me. Or threaten to call the police. Instead, he said that he could help me do better.

  So I went with him. He could have been a rapist or a serial killer.

  But he wasn’t.

  Sophie and I have been with Max ever since
. A few years after me came Mars. Then Jesse. Then Kim. Last, Rob.

  Max joins me in his room. He’s a wonderful man. A few years one side or the other of 50. Inviting eyes. A contagious laugh. Even as his body ages, his soul retains a youthful energy. Max is almost always in a good mood.

  However, recently, I’ve noticed impatience. Rob, Mars, and Kim have all become great, thanks to Max. But they lack motivation. They live the high life in this amazing penthouse. They spend money on whatever they want. They get to experience the greatest shows on the planet: bands, comedians, plays, circuses, magicians, sporting events. They meet other teens in the young Vegas social scene (which mostly consists of UNLV students). They inhabit some 21st century teenage version of Neverland. So when they go out to work The Strip every day, they’re content to work just enough to keep Max off their backs. Max, though, has no sense of being content. He wants more.

  Always more.

  In his late twenties, Max worked as a salesman. He sold calculators. He sold tens of thousands of them. (This was before computers were widespread, so individuals and businesses paid a handsome sum for calculators.) He had a fiancé. He owned a home. He had the so-called perfect American life in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But whenever his business trips brought him through Las Vegas, where he had several key accounts, he gambled. Poker, blackjack, everything. He began stopping in Vegas even when his business was in other cities.

  Eventually, he lost everything. His money. His job. His house. And his fiancé. In exactly that order. For years, he struggled with his gambling addiction, living in the slums of Vegas. He went from broke to broken noses. At one point, loan sharks had a $10,000 bounty out on him.

  Then one day, he stopped. He hasn’t gambled for twenty years. Not so much as slipped a penny in a slot.

  Instead, Max has been conning tourists, and he’s fared better than he did at the tables. In his mind, he’s not stealing from people. The way Max views it, the money he takes from tourists is less that goes to Las Vegas. It’s his vengeance on a city that took everything from him.

  After he closes the door, Max motions for me to sit. I choose the leather couch, and he sits in the suede chair across from it. As if it were a father-daughter sit-down. I never knew my father. When your mother doesn’t even know who knocked her up, the odds of you finding out are pretty slim. I don’t like to think about who he might be. Some asshole who came to Vegas and knocked up a prostitute? Where’s he from? Was he cheating on his wife? How many prostitutes did he sleep with before my mother? How many after her? Did he knock up other ones? Or maybe he has a traditional family in some suburb on the east coast? Do I have more half siblings out there? Every single time I con a man over 40, I wonder if the guy’s my own goddamn father.

  Max is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a dad.

  From age 11 to 15, Max taught me everything he knew. He taught me the oldest cons in the book: the Spanish prisoner, the pig-in-the-poke, the fiddle game, the pigeon drop, and many others.

  Las Vegas, as Max taught me, is the ideal city for a con artist. Why? The easiest people to con are those looking to get rich quick. Plus, most of the people here are tourists. With 40 million people visiting the city each year, the average person stays a mere three and a half days. By conning folks in any other city, a grifter might get a reputation as just that: a grifter. In Vegas, with all the turnover, it’s nearly impossible to get a reputation.

  Max and I worked as a tandem. He taught me how to choose a mark and how to gain their confidence. When to stick it out and when to walk away.

  Most of the cons we pulled took advantage of my age. Max knew how to benefit from the innocence associated with youth. Think about it: a 12-year-old kid walks up to you at a bus station and tells you how she lost her wallet and her mother’s waiting for her at a bus station in Albuquerque. You’d probably slip her the five dollars she said she needed and spend the rest of the day feeling good about yourself. Well, what if a 40-year-old guy approaches you and spins the same yarn? You’d say no. Avoid eye contact. And spend two minutes wondering whether he wanted the cash for drugs or booze.

  As I grew older, the innocence card became harder and harder to play. When I turned 15, I had grown up, physically. I was 5’6”, 110 pounds. And I could have passed for 17 or 18. As potential marks became less likely to trust me on my age alone, Max saw a different way to beat Las Vegas: new targets. The thousands of slimy men who come to Las Vegas every day to cheat on their wives and girlfriends, to pay for the sex they have trouble finding for free.

  I already understood the art of the con. I only had to apply it to this new arena. But men were not something I understood. Max taught me how to talk to them. How to look at them. How to flirt with them.

  He taught me perfect posture – how to stand like a lady but maintain a certain swagger. How to flaunt my strengths without seeming like I was flaunting. How to wear makeup without seeming like I was wearing makeup.

  He taught me how to dance.

  He taught me what makes men insecure. What makes men laugh. What turns men on and what turns men off. He taught me how men think.

  It could have been awkward or creepy. Really, it should have been. This fifty-year-old man teaching me about intimacy. Buying me lingerie. Showing me exercises I had to do every day to stay in shape. But it was never awkward. It was business to Max. He never touched me or gaped at me.

  Two years later, and I know the right shoes to make the right dress pop for the right man. I know how to walk. I know how to hold a champagne glass. I know when to look cute and when to look sexy. I know when to talk and when to listen. I know how to get any man’s attention.

  I’ve been to hotel rooms with hundreds of men. The irony is that I’ve never really kissed a guy let alone had sex with one.

  Distracted, Max stares at his phone. I wait patiently until he finally puts it back in his pocket and turns his attention on me. “If you don’t have any daytime appointments for tomorrow, I want you and Mars to work a glim-dropper. We haven’t hit the gift store circuit in 14 months.”

  Max hands me a list. 30 gift shops from different hotels, casinos, and restaurants. “Okay.”

  Guess I didn’t fuck up.

  ***

  After dinner Sophie finished her homework, and now she watches TV. Rob reluctantly disassembles the ramp he put together earlier in the day. Mars and Kim play ping-pong. They have an ongoing game in the tens of thousands. I check Sophie’s homework. She doesn’t know it, but half the reason I check over her work is to learn it all myself. I didn’t get past fourth grade.

  After giving Rob a lecture, Max retired to his room, then went out for a drink. Every night around 8:30, Max leaves the penthouse and goes on a walk and gets a drink. I would think the walks would get lonely, but he seems to come back in a stress-free, favorable mood. He calls it his walk a day to keep the demons at bay.

  The door to the penthouse opens.

  Jesse.

  The wave in my stomach returns. The wave that won’t break.

  His return comes as a pleasant surprise. We weren’t sure when he’d be back. We never are.

  Mars, Kim, Rob, and I all work different short cons for Max, but Jesse works the long con. That’s because Jesse, as Max puts it, is his chameleon.

  When Jesse was 15 years old, he ranked at the top of his class at some prep school in Delaware. But one night, he stole his parents’ car and took his younger brother for a drive. A collision with a pine tree killed his brother. His parents never forgave him. Jesse left that life behind. He created a fake identity and got a full scholarship to a state university. After spending a semester there, he made new identities and went to new colleges four more times before he was 17. Each time, he was a new person with a new personality. A new accent and a new backstory. Eventually, he tired of college all together and moved around the country, traveling from town to town.

  A year ago, Jesse ended up in Las Vegas. Was only a matter of time. It’s the ultimate city to be someone you
’re not. A gym teacher from Baltimore can be James Bond. Or an alpha male pharmaceutical salesman can be a queen.

  Soon after he showed up, Jesse fell in with a group of seedy individuals. His guise was a fugitive on the run from Alaska. Normally, it’s the fugitives who lie and convince people they’re civilians, but in this case, Jesse was a civilian posing as a fugitive.

  His latest deception landed him at a cocktail party in a suite in the Trump. As it turned out, the person running the party was also running cocaine. When the police raided the suite, this drug runner saw a way to get out of his trouble by offering the police a fugitive.

  After Jesse confessed his story of how he tricked the drug runner, a police officer told Jesse there was someone who might enjoy meeting him. Max bailed him out of jail thirty minutes later. That was a year ago.

  Before Max took him in, Jesse never stayed in one place for longer than a month or two.

  From a drifter to a grifter. Courtesy of Max.

  We’re all pretty aware of each other’s daily work. Except Jesse. Max sends him out on longer jobs. Ones that require more time and more secrecy.

  I only know the details of one of Jesse’s long cons. Because I was part of it.

  About seven months ago, Max put Jesse on a mark he knew frequented a private swingers’ party held at a huge ranch just outside the city limits. Max recruited me to play the role of Jesse’s girlfriend.

  A role I was more than willing to play.

  The mark was a woman in her early fifties named Gabriella. She was married to a doctor in his late fifties, but the two had an open marriage and often attended swingers’ parties in and around Las Vegas. (Fairly typical outrageousness for this outrageous city.)