Second-Faced Angel” Queen Of The Grifters-With Melinda Loring In Mind    

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Bart Webber, the writer, Bartlett Standish Webber III to those who need to know full monikers but nobody ever called him anything but Bart, or when he was a kid Black Bart after some television bad guy, had been in a funk, had had his seventh hell version of writer’s block ever since she, Melinda Loring she, had left town whereabouts unknown. As is well-known to any who have read his sketches and short pieces in some of the small smart alternative journals and on-line “zines” he had been subject to this writer’s block seemingly every other issue, although this was the first time that Melinda Loring had been the direct cause of his suffering. She had come whirling into town, into his life and then almost as quickly moved on, vanished really. But maybe we had better begin back when Bart and Melinda met and under what circumstances.

Bart had gone into his bank, the Boston First Bank, one day in order to apply for an automobile loan since his old Toyota Camry, vintage 1996, had bit the dust and he needed new wheels. Never having been much of a car buff in his youth back in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston he almost automatically went back to the Toyota Camry again, this time a brand new 2012 version, since what he knew about cars and their conditions would fill a thimble at best and so went the tried and true route that has been the default positon for lots of things in his life, especially recently. At the bank he was directed to the loan officer, a Ms. Perkins, as he found out when she introduced herself and then asked him to sit down as she was running behind on her work but she expected to be able to see him into about ten minutes. Since Bart was in the full bloom of his writer’s block he really did not mind the wait which he usually would have if he was in literary full flower.

When Bart sat down he noticed an attractive brunette who he thought had been waiting on the female customer who was being waited on by Ms. Perkins, or so he thought, roughly his age (although being wise to the ways of the world, the ways of the world with women of his generation despite being hit over the head constantly with the new sensibilities he would never publicly estimate a woman’s age), nice figure with very nice well-turned legs and pretty blue eyes behind her scalloped eyeglasses. Bart had a feeling that he had met this woman before, who turned out to be Melinda Loring later when they exchanged names, but like a million such situations once you have been in the world long enough to have these memory lapses you just do the best you can to see if you are right. Strangely Melinda after Bart made his first inquiry also thought that she had recognized him but she too could not place his face.

So they began the old routine, had they met at some literary function that Bart was endlessly being invited too, invited to when he was not suffering writer’s block and maybe had something new published in say the Evergreen Journal otherwise the literati or actually the non-literate social butterfly pace-setters went on to the next best thing. No. Melinda asked him if it might have been at some bar down on the Cape, around Falmouth since she had when she was on the East Coast always headed that way at the slightest whiff of summer and liked to relax at night either at Sailor Jack’s in Falmouth or Sandy’s Pub in Centerville. No.              

Getting nowhere with this line of inquiry they backtracked to their hometowns, hers’ Olde Saco up in Maine and his Carver so again no. Then they got to colleges, bingo. They were both members in good standing in the Class of 1984 at Boston University. Although they had not known each other then, had not been on speaking terms, the connection, the tenuous connection as it turned out, was that her best friend back then, Joyce Davis, had been Bart’s girlfriend Laura Parson’s roommate in the 700 dorms (the towers at 700 Commonwealth Avenue) and so they had seen each other a few times in passing, to give the nod to (not literally though since in those days guys only gave the “nod” to other guys they knew in passing as sign that while they were not companions for some reason they were cool. Females got the furtive glances and Bart did not remember doing so with Melinda since in those days he was enthralled with Laura.).

What Melinda did not know since Joyce had moved out to an apartment up off of Commonwealth Avenue in Allston for senior year and lost contact with Laura was what had happened to Laura. Bart, red-faced, proceeded to tell Melinda that Laura had been divorced wife number one of three divorces. Melinda laughed and said he was ahead of her since she had only two under her belt. Both making clear that they were now single as the mating ritual moved along right there in those waiting room chairs.  Melinda a bit coquettishly for a, ah, mature woman said she would not mind inspecting that new automobile Bart was about to purchase when the deal was closed. As Melinda’s  companion came out of Ms. Perkin’s office Bart no stranger to the wiles of coquettes, took the bait, they exchanged e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers and that turned out to lead to their first date. (That companion although she does not play any role in the future turned out to have been a fellow employee of Melinda’s who Melinda accompanied during their lunch break while she was arranging a loan, purpose unknown.)              

Of course for those who have been paying the slightest bit of attention to those smart journals and “zines” Bart wrote for he has a certain following more for his acerbic wit and clever eye than any serious pretentions to literary greatness. He always in mock humility called himself paraphrasing others a “first- rate third- rate hack.” He was no Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Banks, Tyler, or you name the well-known A-list author but he made his living at the trade and while many times he had led a hand-to-mouth existence he had survived and expected to continue to make his living that way. Apparently that blast of sincerity and candor sparked something in Melinda and they became lovers, the details of the affair need not detain us, or at least that was Bart’s position after Melinda left town for parts unknown. Bart argued that the less said about the details of their short affair the better since in the aftermath of Melinda’s vanishing many of the details probably were flat out lies or mis-directions.  

What does need to detain us is Melinda’s story. And that is where Bart met his comeuppance, had been the direct reason why these days he was in the throes of writers’ block. Melinda had had quite a ride after she graduated in 1984 having gotten married shortly after college to a guy, Jonathan Fairfield, from California who made a ton of money in the high tech field and then took off for parts unknown leaving her high and dry since she had no work resume then, having led the second level version of the rich and famous life as long as he Jonathan was around and showered her with whatever she needed as long as she “curled his toes ” (her expression for what Jonathan called sex, good sex). She assumed he had gone to Alaska since he had mentioned that he wanted to get out of the rat race but despite putting a couple of different private detectives on the case she came up empty-handed and had run out of dough anyway after the pawn shop-worthy stuff he had given her ran out.

Somehow Melinda survived all of that, having gotten her degree in accounting she got into the banking field out in Los Angeles for the Bank of America. That is where she had met her second husband, Lawrence Landon, a bank executive in the main office of the bank she worked at an after work party. After their marriage she was leading the life of the third level version of the rich and famous when the other shoe dropped and it turned out that old Lawrence had been dipping into the till, had been embezzling the bank for years to keep up his fantastic interest in antique automobiles which required much more money that he could access legally. (Melinda as a catch-line said she thought he loved those damn cars more than her which Bart thought rather sad and tried extra hard to console her about in the balmy days of their affair.) Lawrence must have had some inside information because he told Melinda that he was taking his automobiles to an auto show at Pebble Beach and would be gone for several days. The day he had the cars transported in a car van they waved each other good-bye like nothing was up. A couple of days later bank officials and governmental agents came looking for him out in their Topanga Canyon home. So again Melinda was on cheap street and back to accounting work.

Melinda related some other matters about affairs and funny trysts she had as well as some places a guy she met in Vegas, Jack Lang, took her to. So she had been around, been around the mean streets and she said survived if not with a smile then at least survived. Basically fleeing the West she decided to try her luck in Boston since she had gone to school there, had family close by up in Maine and knew the area and the prospects for a job. She quickly got a job at a large accounting firm and seemed to be getting along fairly well.            

Over a few month period Bart and Melinda got very close, and not surprisingly Bart produced some interesting articles based on the stories Melinda told him about her life, and about the men she knew. Bart also found out that he was getting very serious about Melinda despite the fact that after, Joyell, after wife number three he was off marriage, said that it was cheaper just to have affairs. Melinda also was putting a little bit of pressure on Bart to get married citing the fact that she needed at that time in her life to have some stability, have a steady home. She did not do a tom-tom drumbeat about the matter but she did make her point of view known.    

And that is where the other shoe fell on Bart’s head. One day Melinda called Bart from work telling him that she needed to talk to him as soon as possible, that their futures depended on the talk. Bart agreed to meet her at her firm within an hour. They met and went to the Café Blanc near Downtown Crossing in Boston. There Melinda told Bart that Lawrence Landon had called her and said that he was getting ready to turn himself in but that he would need her help to get bail money. Putting it plainer than that though Lawrence said if she didn’t help then he would implicate her in the embezzlement schemes the bank and government were looking for him about. Melinda started crying and then begged Bart to help her. She said Lawrence’s lawyer had told him to expect to come up with fifty-thousand dollars to gain bail. Melinda said she had twenty-five thousand or could raise that amount on her own, so could Bart loan her the other twenty-five to save her. Bart hesitated, seriously hesitated, since he had at most thirty thousand in the bank or that he could raise on short notice. Bart told her that and she pleaded with him some more to figure out a way to save her, couldn’t he borrow off of his 401k or grab an advance from a publisher. She was persistent and eventually Bart tapped part of his 401k to get the twenty-five grand.            

Here is where things got squirrelly though. After giving Melinda the money in the office he kept to do his serious writing in over in North Cambridge she said she was taking the train to meet Lawrence in New York City so that he could turn himself in, have his bail hearing, make arrangements to post his bail and so Bart would not hear from her for a few days. Bart was not happy about that but did not press the issue under the circumstances aided by the forlorn look Melinda gave him at parting. After a week though he couldn’t figure out what had happened to Melinda since she had not contacted him. He went to the manager of her apartment building to find out that she had left a least the week before owing six months’ rent and no forwarding address. The manager told him that he let her slide on rent because she said she had some money coming in soon and, well,  she was nice, and nice to look at. Bart winced. He then went to the accounting office in downtown Boston where they told him she had given her notice a couple of weeks before, no, no forwarding address. Also told him after he inquired about her position with the firm that contrary to what she had told him she was not a senior accountant with her own office but merely a staff accountant in a small cubicle. That last piece of information cut him to the quick, began giving him a sinking feeling, as other things she had told him over the previous started to not add up. Bart decided then he had to go to the cops to see if he should file a missing person’s report or whether they knew anything about Melinda Loring from a criminal angle.  

At the station, Station Four, after a fifteen minute wait, he talked to a Detective Sergeant Malloy from what used to be called the bunko squad when he was a kid but now was called the white collar crime department and gave him his story. Malloy in turn looked kind of quizzically at Bart and asked him if he had ever heard of a woman whom had the moniker “Second-Face Angel.” Bart said he never had, although he was not unfamiliar with monikers from his writing and from his addiction to old time private detection stories by guys like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Then Malloy filled Bart in on what had happened to him as he nodded in agreement as Malloy presented the facts. Melinda Loring, aka, Angel Lang, aka, Angel Linden, aka, “Second-Face Angel” among others in other jurisdictions had been working that “needs bail bond money” scam for a while, maybe two years around the Boston area. Malloy described the way the scam went which matched up with what Bart had told him in his story except Malloy snidely said Bart had gotten away cheap at twenty-five grand so she must have been desperate. Jonathan Fairfield had been taken for fifty thousand several months before. Lawrence Landon for almost one hundred thousand the previous year. Other guys, totally twelve as far as the detective knew, at least that is the number who had contacted the cops after she pulled her capers, had been being taken for amounts between that fifty and two hundred thousand, so join the line. The detective snickered when he asked if Bart wanted a list of the name of the other suckers and compare notes. Bart declined the offer and his writing declined from that time as well.           

Although Bart did not directly contact in person the other, well, suckers, he did sent some of them e-mails, made some inquiries and put a private detective friend, Rick Roberts, who usually did key-hole peeping for divorce lawyers but who thought he could help, to work for a while not so much to find Melinda, to find the Second-Face Angel (named that Bart thought from the contrast between her upscale front, her good looks, and her stone cold “grifter” heart). Here is what he was able to piece together from what Rick and other sources reported after a couple of months when Bart called everything off. He had had enough, had played the sucker in his mind enough:     

Melinda Loring had been arrested along with her parents up in York Beach, Maine in the summer of her junior year of high school in 1978 for running what amounted to a Ponzi scheme among the summer crowd when one “customer” though the whole scheme involving time shares in beachfront condos seemed fishy. Very fishy as it turned out since the Lorings were selling shares for five thousand dollars a pop in York and Wells giving out fake paperwork for property they did not own but which did belong to real owners who had not commissioned them to sell shares of their property. Melinda who role was to play the dutiful daughter to give the appearance that the play was family-friendly was placed on a year’s probation. Apparently off of that experience she decided to work her grifts alone since there was no record of her working her “bail” scams or any others she might have pulled off with a confederate.

Melinda, no question smart, an A student mostly at Olde Saco High up in Maine, got accepted at Boston University with a scholarship and that is where Bart and Melinda passed in the night through Laura’s roommate Joyce. Here is what surprised Bart though Melinda had never actually graduated in 1984, or any year. In her senior year she developed a little cocaine habit, the drug of choice at the time provided by a small-time dealer boyfriend, and dropped out to do some free-lance escort work (prostitution for the less faint-headed) advertising in the Phoenix back pages and working out of a Harvard Avenue apartment in Brookline. At some point in the late 1980s she broke her coke habit and had gathered enough money from her tricks to head west. That was at a time when the vicious Russian syndicates  were then attempting to corner the sex trade in Boston and wanted no free-lancers around to cut the price of paid-for sex and had tried with a belt buckle to her face by one of their thugs to put her in their stable, or else. So she split.

Out West Melinda may or may not have picked up on her escort service to make ends meet for a while, the evidence was inconclusive.  She did attempt to break into the film industry as an actress, model or in some capacity so she probably did wind up as some producer’s mistress for a while. In about 1992 Rick was able to find evidence that she worked her first “bail” scam nicking a well-known married film director out in California for about forty thousand (Bart wondered how she came up with the numbers in her demands, probably by a shrewd estimate of what the traffic would bear as in his case).

The next dozen or so cons ending with him went about the same way Bart figuring she had raked in at least a million plus if the numbers guys were taken for were right. Bart also figured only a very attractive, smart college-type woman with an ability to “curl a guy’s toes” and get him all confused with the jasmine scent of sex while carrying around a heart of stone could pull off that many grifts and not get caught. By the way Rick could find no record of Melinda ever having been married to anybody anywhere. End of story.                

Well wait a minute not the end of the story Bart thought later once the shock of his sucker-hood had sunk in and began to fade. He was sure some publisher, hell, maybe a pulp fiction publisher, would pay more than twenty-five grand for a dressed up version of that Melinda story as a novella or short novel describing how a well-educated good-looking woman with seemingly no guile decided at some point the “grift” was easier than working the straight and narrow. Guys would love it if he spiced it up with sex, especially a couple of “curl your toes” things she did and a few other alluring things, no, just the sex would sew it upon that end. Women would half admire her for taking a run of so-called smart guys over the hoops, maybe would pick up the book for some pointers.

Bart thought would work like he had done previously with such real live material by loading up the project up with various insights gleaned from his experience and that of the others. Like how easy it was for Melinda to con guys who were just looking to try to help her without question and without checking into whether the reasons she gave about anything were true or not (other guys gave small sums of money to help tide her over and he had given her money for rent a few times which as he found out she did not bother to pay in Boston), how according to Rick she stayed with each guy just long enough, a few months, to gain his trust and then spring her trap. He was fascinated by working through how she used the same basic understanding of men, certain men and Bart confessed that he had been in his life something of a con artist himself when he had his own addictions out of control, without much deviation according to the reports each time she pulled a con on the premise that cons of whatever stripe were the most susceptible to a con. How she sized guys up for the kill and for how much which really intrigued him since if she had say asked in his case for fifty grand he would have balked. How guys including him overlooked in their lust (he had originally just seen the thing as a fling, a little something to have nice memories of when he got older, and then move on back to his long-time companion Laura Peters), or plans for future togetherness (he had in the end took Melinda that he would dump Laura for her if it came down to it and she encouraged that train of thought), the inconsistences in her story. How she would always cover up her mistakes quickly like the time she told Bart she had been in California with Lawrence at a certain time when she later told him that she had been down the Cape during that time, or about her jacking up her job description, told a pretty story about her family which she claimed was doing well up in Maine when he father was sitting then in Shawshank for his part in an armed robbery, and that all her personal information after college was totally bogus. Worse and Bart felt he might get some play out of the idea how easy it was for her to put on an act about how much she cared about a guy when she was already half-way out the door. Talked about marriage and retirement and the big warm blues skies in California. All puff. Sure he could put together a hundred or two hundred thousand words easy. Yes the writer’s block was over.