Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #31: White-Collar Crime

TONIGHT IS FOR THE SIX OF US

 

Once a year—Halloween—the six of them gather at a tasteful mansion in Castle Pines, Colorado. It’s a $2.7-million house, at last guesstimate. The walls are stucco and the walk-out basement is big panes of glass.  There’s a glass walkway indoors, running from one side of the mezzanine to the other, and glass tile walls between rooms.  The dining-room table is made of glass, the fronts of the cabinets are made of glass.  Hearing the description of the house, you might be tempted to make a joke about how people in glass houses should not throw stones.  But the house feels warm and luminous, the kind of house where you can view the worst weather out of the windows with equanimity, because you cannot avoid feeling warm and safe within them. There’s a screening room with theater-style seating in the basement, if that tells you anything.

Within the house are a number of skylights. There are skylights on the roof, of course, but there are also skylights built into the floor inside the house, not extremely large ones, but extremely difficult to walk on. Your every instinct is to avoid them, even though they are perfectly safe. During a party, you might look upward through one of these skylights, and look up a woman’s dress.  Or look downward and see into a room you haven’t glimpsed before, and spend the rest of the night attempting to find it.

At the bottom of the stairs in the basement is a sort of shrine, two half-columns on either side of a glass sculpture, almost like a Chihuly or underwater coral. Visitors have called it a “sort of jellyfish” or “a monster.” Variously, the sculpture is said to symbolize greed, lust, the beauty of the underwater realms, or “an elder thing, something like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu,” according to one of the most spectacularly brilliant financial analysts ever to consult for a member of the six.

She was an odd one, that Nora de Zaldo.

She looked continuously on the edge of tears, or anger. She had dark circles under her eyes, and hollows under her cheeks. She had thin lips, downturned, and curly black hair that she kept pulled back in a severe bun.

Even stranger, she noticed things. She looked downward into the skylight—the one in at the bottom of the back stairs to the second floor; the basement couldn’t be reached from there—and turned to one of the other guests, a promising movie director who hadn’t quite made Hollywood, and said, “I don’t think I belong here.”

The director, also a woman, tried to reassure her.  “If you’ve been invited to one of the six’s summer parties, then you must belong here!” said the woman, still optimistic despite being in her thirties. De Zaldo shuddered, and looked upwards. Above the triangle-shaped skylight set in the floor were two large wood supports, crossed over each other in an X.  (The light on the landing came not from above, but from floor-to-ceiling windows set in a semi-circle along the outer wall.)

So when de Zaldo found herself, at the end of October, in a small room with cement walls, and the only light coming from a skylight above her, she saw the X on the ceiling of the room above her, and understood where she was, if not why. A steel door, hinge-less and without a handle on the inside, blocked her egress. There was a bed, a sink, a toilet, a drain in the floor, a heavy hook on the ceiling, and a small, muffled air vent that did not echo when she banged on its steel mesh. There was no food.

She was wearing a jogging suit, warm but moisture-wicking, clean cotton underwear and an undershirt, but no bra. Her hair was loose, but an elastic hair tie had been left on the back of the sink for her. She pulled her hair up, noting her irrational gratitude for the thoughtfulness it signified.

Why me? she asked herself. Why here?

De Zaldo ran through possibilities, reaching a tentative conclusion that she was being withheld. Not being held prisoner, but being kept out of reach. She waited.

Hours later, the owner of the house appeared, bringing a garlicky pumpkin-tomato soup and a panini, which she set down on the bed. “I hope you don’t mind, dear,” she said, “but Carlos—” One of the other guests at the party, de Zaldo recalled, and a friend of the owner’s— “was getting decidedly fussy about having you killed.”

“Why?” de Zaldo asked.

The woman laughed and named a certain company.  “Because your predictions about their stocks went contrary to his insider information, darling. How dare your math be more accurate than his informants, I think the thinking went. I made millions off your advice.”

“And?” de Zaldo asked.

“Poor Carlos,” the owner said, shaking her head.

…

A few days later, on Halloween, the owner held an intimate dinner party, entirely unlike the party de Zaldo had attended in July, and much more to her taste. By then, matters had sorted themselves out, and de Zaldo had been released from her bolt-hole, or oubliette, or whatever it was, and was wearing a low-cut velvet top with a lace choker, and a translucent, embroidered pink skirt over black tights. They were coming downstairs from de Zaldo’s guest room, where she had changed.

“And Molly?” de Zaldo asked.

The owner of the house said, “Of course your lady friend is welcome on Thanksgiving, ma chère, but not tonight. Tonight is for the six of us.”

At the landing, de Zaldo hesitated.

Below the glass of the skylight was a pale face, looking up at her. It raised one hand in supplication.

De Zaldo looked up at the owner, who had come to a stop, and wore a half-smile on an already crooked face.

“I thought—”

The owner winked. “Just before midnight,” she said. “And then we hang him for six weeks. A good sacrificial feast never happens on Halloween.”

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #30: Vandalism

ONE ORDINARY DAY, WITH SUITCASE

Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans is a necropolis, a city of the dead.  Although the homes of the dead are smaller, they are better built than the homes of the living, and less likely to succumb to flooding.  The Pontchartrain Expressway runs through the necropolis, dividing it into Greenwood Cemetery to the east, and Metairie Cemetery to the west.  In front of Greenwood along City Park Avenue, there are a few monuments, with the Confederate Tomb visible just as you get off the nearest bus stop. During Katrina, many of the gravestones had toppled, and you could still see the high-water marks stained onto the stone. But there was less damage there than in many of the neighborhoods.

I carried with me one black, hard-sided, 29-inch rolling suitcase, the kind that’s taller than it is wide.  It was dingy and had a scannable airport tag around the handle, as if I’d been flying. I was wearing a business suit and carried a briefcase-slash-laptop bag. I reeked of Wild Turkey, which I sneaked sips from as I rode.

At the corner stop, the bus driver offered to help me with the suitcase. I laughed off the offer, saying that I might be drunk but I wasn’t that drunk. An old woman with a squat oxygen tank got off the bus alongside me, totally ignored by the driver. The driver was white, as was I. The old woman was black.

It had just rained and smelled fresh and invigorating, but with an underlying smell of rot and damp. The bus had left behind the perfume of diesel fuel. All that was missing from the nostalgic, nightmarish scents of Katrina was the smell of rotten flesh, bloated and floating, to take me back to 2005.

I left the old woman behind, passed the front gates, and kept rolling, the wheels thumping heavily and wetly on the ridges of the sidewalk. I turned at Canal Boulevard and kept rolling. The city had not gone to sleep, not quite yet. I soon reached the Greenwood Funeral Home, where the fence was only thigh-high. I boosted the suitcase over it, then worked my way into the cemetery. The wet, rolling wheels echoed on the old cement road, loud to my ears but undoubtedly lost in the echo of cars running along the expressway.  I had long since marked out the particular tomb I wanted, which had been erected in 1890 and featured a fully mortised lock plate behind the antique marble door. Weeks ago, I had tested the lock with a discreet little skeleton key and some WD-40, and was able to turn the lock silently, in full daylight.  That night, the lock opened smoothly. I unzipped the suitcase, disgorged it of my victim, and locked the tomb up again, nice and tight. Then I returned the way I had come, wheels rolling more lightly through the puddles this time. The security cameras would not be checked unless there was a disturbance reported later, which there wouldn’t be. The security guard at the funeral home was higher than a kite.

I turned onto City Park Avenue and walked back to the bus stop. As I walked, I heard a low hissing sound.  A light glowed at the front of the Confederate Monument on the corner. In the distance a police siren made a soft “whoop-whoop,” almost of surprise, and my ears pricked up.

I kept walking with an unhurried pace, letting myself stumble from time to time: making noise.

The light snapped off, the hissing stopped, and someone grunted out a curse, then, “Almost!”

Almost what? I wondered.

The streetlight caught several dark shapes moving at the base of the tomb.

The soldier atop the monument had been defaced, or rather beheaded.  The rest of him had been painted neon green, with an additional application of what appeared to be pink feathers. Paint fumes bit at my nose. On the base of the statue were letters, which I could not read then but later proved to be “HEADLESS MOTHERFU.”

The old woman waited there at the head-high, wrought-iron fence opposite the bus stop, sans oxygen tank.

A shadowed form scampered away from the tomb, hissing, “They’re coming!” then boosted itself halfway up the fence, improbably hefting the heavy oxygen tank, along with enough tubes and attachments to turn it into something else entirely, at the woman, who caught it but struggled to lower it to the sidewalk.

“The bag too!” she hissed, but the dark shape had disappeared across the lawn, into the rows of tombs.

I jogged over to help the old woman untangle herself. The oxygen tank appeared to be rigged up as a sandblaster, all the better to etch marble and granite with. It was dusted with dark grit.

I bent over, unscrewed the various tubes, shoved them into my suitcase, and wiped the tank down with a clean towel just as the bright lights of the bus pulled up alongside us: the last bus of the night. Wordlessly, the old woman attached a clear tube from tank to nostrils. I helped ther onto the bus, then struggled after her with my bags in tow, again refusing help. It was the same driver.

He ignored the old woman, asking me, “She kick you out of the house?”

“She called me a–a motherfucker,” I said, with the dignified tones of a longtime drunk. The bus driver laughed, waited until I’d sat down, then pulled away from the curb.

The old woman was still on her feet, and I heard the oxygen tank clank against one of the seats as we sped up under the streetlights. He must have had selective vision.

He hadn’t even noticed a green-and-pink feathered statue.

I got off along Metairie Road, stole a Honda sedan out of someone’s driveway, and went home to Colorado, keeping the key and the sandblaster gun as souvenirs.

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #29: Telemarketing Fraud

I UNDERSTAND AND I APPRECIATE YOUR CONCERN

 

So our son, Charles.

Every man wants to think that his son will replace him in the world, and carry on a sort of immortality for him. Every man is disappointed to discover that his son can’t do that.

As Charles became a grown man, I began to lose touch with him.

I can’t blame it on “kids these days” or video games or even porn. Lynette thinks I’m just missing the fact that Charles is a genius, and he has so far exceeded me that I simply can’t follow. Lynette, although she has always been the sweetness in my life, has a blind spot when it comes to that boy. She always coddled him, saying that the way we were raised wasn’t good enough. I’ll grant her that. Nothing is ever good enough for your kids, if you have the ability to love them. You tear yourself open, thinking, What can I do to make his life better? It’s never enough.

But.

This is different.

Charles is a grown man. Lynette says he’s not quite a grown man, but he is. He’s reached his full growth. When he was sixteen he was already six feet, looked like a damned scarecrow. He’s twenty-two now, never had a job. No plans to move out. He can drive but he won’t. He’s on the computer all day in the basement. Boxes arrive at the front door for him. I ask Lynette if she’s paying for what comes in, and she says she isn’t. I haven’t quite stooped to checking her credit card bills, but it may come to that.

He doesn’t speak to us. I can hear him talking to himself downstairs. Lynette brings him food. The only time he comes upstairs is to pick up his boxes. He’s a stranger.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think he has a cache of guns in the basement. I don’t think I’m going to be on the news one day as “parents found dead in home after killer goes on a murderous rampage.” I don’t think we’re going to find out that Charles is a serial killer, or a rapist, or some kind of weird digital pedophile. I don’t think that.

The sound in the house carries. From the air vents I can hear him talk. He started out saying things like, “This confidential message is to inform you that a legal matter will be filed against you within the next twenty-four hours.” And “We are contacting you in regards to a complaint being filed against you.” And “I’m calling today to offer you the opportunity of a lifetime.”

At first I thought he had a job working for an online call center. Even a telemarketing fraud company. But I quickly disabused myself of the notion. It’s the way he repeats the same phrase over and over again, with a different tone each time: “I understand and I appreciate your concern. I understand, and I appreciate your concern. I understand, and I appreciate your concern.”

That went on for months.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, it got stranger.

“Hello, is this Mrs. Johnson? My name is Charles Adair, and I’m calling about a confidential manner,” he’d say. Then, “Confidential matter.” There’d be a pause, and he’d say, “Confidential matter, confidential matter. Hello, is this Mrs. Johnson? My name is Charles Adair, and I’m calling about a confidential matter. Yes, that’s right.”

He talked to himself—corrected himself—for hours. All day and all night.

Lynette says everything is fine, that he’s working on a programming project. I ask her what it is, and she says it’s a secret.

Yesterday, Lynette came down with the flu. I got my shot at work, but she kept putting off getting hers, and now it’s too late. Charles, of course, won’t leave the house to get his. It’ll just “slow him down.” I’m making everyone’s meals today, both because Lynette is bedridden and because she doesn’t dare touch anything he might eat.

I make him tomato soup and a couple of cheese sandwiches, then go downstairs and tap on the door of his room.

“Just leave it outside,” Charles calls.

“We need to talk,” I say.

“Not now, Dad,” Charles says.

I open the door. He’s sitting in the dark with the computer screen turning his face into a blank silhouette. He sighs and says, “What do you want, Dad?”

“I’m worried about you,” I say.

“I realize that I live like a slug down here,” he says, “but it’s a big project.”

“What is it?”

“I’m working on an artificial intelligence program that can run scripts in a natural-sounding voice for first-tier technical support, charity phone banks, things like that.”

“Telemarketers,” I say. “I’ve heard you speaking. The sound just kind of carries.”

He sighs again. “Okay, I am testing it out as a telemarketing scam,” he admits.

“Why?” I ask. “Some kind of get-rich-quick scheme?”

“There’s no such thing as a get rich-slow-scheme anymore, Dad,” he says, which is true. It’s get rich quick or inherit, these days.

I say, “I understand how that is, but all the money in the world won’t do you any good, Charles, if you don’t take care of your health. And your relationships.”

He says, “You’re probably right about my health. But…if this works, I can write a program that talks to girls and lets the AI weed out the ones who will never like me. I’ll save years that way.”

I give him a chuckle. “I suppose you will, at that. Just remember to move your lips when you’re talking to someone in person. Otherwise it gives the whole show away.”

His jaw dropped.

“Your mom sends you her love,” I said. “Be sure to have your computer call her. She’ll like that.”

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

 

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #28: Tax Evasion

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY

 

I long since discovered that I cannot live the life of an innocent man. Instead I have tried to live the life of an honest one.  After high school, I went to work as an errand-boy for a life insurance company, National Life & Trust. They liked me well enough, and promoted me to sales agent, a career at which I was moderately, but not extravagantly, successful.

My first fraud case was that of Anthony Lombardi.

When a kid starts out as an errand boy at National Life & Trust, he’s tested. For example, two agents will both claim they’ve sold a policy to the same client. It’s clear that there’s something wrong with the situation. One of the agents is the boy’s “special” mentor. The way the boy handles the situation marks him.

Conspiracy and dishonesty are complications that all life-insurance agents should avoid.  That’s what Mr. Roberts, the president of the company always said, and I agree with him.

Anthony Lombardi was a self-employed accountant, age 63, married to Veronica Lombardi, age 58, living in Rhode Island. One of Lombardi’s clients was Louis Andreozzi, the owner of a profitable groundskeeping company with possible ties to the mob. We had a saying at National Life & Trust: it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cleanup.  Mr. Lombardi was one of the first people I ever sold a policy to.  The other agents complimented me on my success, but conversation would fall suspiciously short whenever his name came up.

Several years passed.

Mr. Andreozzi was arrested and charged with tax evasion and racketeering.

One day, Mr. Roberts called me into his office to chat. “So, Mr. O’Neil.  Tell me about your cases.” Naturally, the subject of Mr. Andreozzi came up.

I told Mr. Roberts about the hush that fell whenever the case was mentioned. “I’m not sure what will come of it, Mr. Roberts, but I will do my best to handle the situation with integrity and good judgment.”

Mr. Roberts shook my hand when he dismissed me, but I wasn’t sure that I’d deserved it—yet.

When the other shoe dropped, it fell so strangely I almost missed it.

Mr. Lombardi, as expected, was arrested for aiding and abetting his client, Mr. Andreozzi, in evading the payment of his taxes. In case of such an eventuality, I had looked up the details of his policy.  The policy would be paid to Mrs. Lombardi if Mr. Lombardi died in prison, as long as he didn’t commit suicide or benefit financially from his crime.

Mr. Lombardi was released on bail.  (A high amount was set for Mr. Andreozzi’s bail, and he remained in prison.)  The night before Mr. Lombardi was to return to court, he drove off an embankment into the Scituate Reservoir and drowned.

The question was: was it an accident, murder, or had he killed himself? Was National Life & Trust required to pay out the policy, or wasn’t it?

The coroner seemed to be of the opinion that Lombardi’s death was suicide.

National Life & Trust had several investigators especially trained to look into such matters, but, as a rule, the agent who had sold the policy accompanied the investigator on his investigations.

The investigator’s name was John Madeiros. He had been my mentor when I had been but an errand boy, and had been promoted to investigator the same time I’d made agent. We went to the morgue in Providence where Mr. Lombardi’s body was being held pending identification.  The widow, Mrs. Lombardi, had fainted when she had been given the news, and had hit her head. Most of Mr. Lombardi’s family did not live in the United States, and his employer, Mr. Andreozzi, was obviously not available.

As we were waiting for someone who could perform the official identification, in walked Mr. Lombardi.

He was greeted with surprise, as you might imagine.  He was shown into the room where “his” body was being kept.  He took one look at it, shook his head, and said, “Nope, that ain’t me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got a trial to go to.”

He never arrived.

Even my mentor was puzzled by the case. If Mr. Lombardi wished to fake his own death, why reappear to identify the body?  If it was a simple case of mistaken identity, why not take advantage of the situation to simply disappear? Or was the second man the imposter?  If so, who had sent him, and how had the disguise been made so convincing? I had spoken to Mr. Lombardi during the sale of his policy, and recognized him by appearance as well as by voice.

John offered to let me avoid the autopsy of the dead man—whoever he was—but I stuck it out. Afterward, we went to the widow’s home for an interview. She seemed remarkably well. My mentor did the interviewing, while I wandered the house, searching for something.

I soon found it.

And that’s how Mr. Andreozzi got off charges of tax evasion: Mr. and Mrs. Lombardi had cooked up a scheme to launder money for the Mafia without Mr. Lombardi’s knowledge, stripped the business profits clean when Mr. Andreozzi became suspicious, and arranged to flee to South America. A clever plan.

But they had tried to take it one step too far.

Mrs. Lombardi was arrested at home, Mr. Lombardi was stopped before boarding an international flight out of San Francisco, and both went to prison for first-degree, premeditated murder, as well as multiple other charges. National Life & Trust might have argued that Mr. Lombardi’s policy was invalid, but instead earmarked the money for charity upon the resolution of Mr. Lombardi’s estate, or the cessation of monthly payments—whichever came first.

When the coroner had hinted that Mr. Lombardi’s death might be a suicide, he had put the life-insurance policy at stake, and Mr. Lombardi’s conveniently-invited-to-visit-America twin brother suddenly became an inconvenience.

Mrs. Lombardi had missed taking down a photo of the twin brothers from the old country, you see.

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #27: Shoplifting

GOOD LUCK PIG GLUCKSSCHWEIN
SILVER ANTIQUE CHARM
LUCKY BRACELET PROTECTION SPELL

 

Condition: New, handmade
Volume Pricing:
1: $39.99 (each)
2+: $35.99 (10% off each)
10 available

279 sold / See Feedback

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   Ships to: Worldwide

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…

Item Specifics:

Condition: New without tags: A brand-new, unused, and unworn item (including handmade items) that is not in the original packaging and/or does not have the original tags attached.

Color: Silver

Metal: Silver Plated

Brand: Unbranded

UPC: Does not apply

Metal purity: German silver

Style: Chain

Length (inches): 8.5”

Theme: Luck

Every charm comes with a FREE gift!

I am a practitioner of the magical arts, and I have performed a ritual over each silver Glücksschwein charm bracelet, imbuing it with positive energy. A Glücksschwein, or “good-luck pig,” is a traditional German symbol of good luck, and many Germans of all ages carry them!

Along with each Glücksschwein bracelet comes an extra charm, a tiny handcuff charm! Just clip the handcuff charm to your Glücksschwein bracelet, and, if you’re ever in trouble with the law, twist the handcuffs to snap the handcuff attaching it to your bracelet, drop it somewhere it won’t be found, and you’ll receive extra good luck! If your handcuff charm falls off, that mean it has already…

!!!PROTECTED YOU!!!

You can order other Glücksschwein items at my store, including necklaces, keychains, cell phone charms, and more! I also carry extra handcuff charms for purchase in case yours falls off!

WINK WINK 😉

Please send me a message if you would like a CUSTOM RITUAL for your charm!

!!!Please note!!!

All charms have a small LUCK symbol scratched in the back!! Your charm is not damaged!!! Just lucky!!!!!

Specifications:

Silver Pig Charm

Length: 7.5”, extension 1”

Lock: Lobster

***approximate measurement***

Shipping & Return:
Free shipping to all US addresses (please go to Shipping and payments tab for more details)

NO RETURNS ACCEPTED

Your Glücksschwein charm will do its best, but some situations are more than even a Glücksschwein can handle! No returns accepted!  It is not fair to use the luck on a Glücksschwein charm, then try to pass off a used charm to someone else!

No luck is guaranteed! Sometimes the stars just have it in for you.  Your Glücksschwein tried…but sometimes even the best spells can’t do what you need them to do!

!!!FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!

Feedback is very important. I strive for 5-star service. I will do whatever I can to satisfy my buyers! Please contact me if you need to change your luck spell…I will see what I can do!  Please contact me about any problems before leaving negative feedback!!!

Armstrong Jewelry has been doing business since 2001. I am located in downtown Los Angeles.  You can contact me for lots of different charms, bracelets, palm and tarot readings including SOULMATE readings, PSYCHIC HEALINGS, and more!  If you come to the store in person, you can ALWAYS pick up a free handcuff charm, or recharge the spell on your Glücksschwein!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

…

Ratings and Reviews:
4.9
48 product ratings

Most Relevant Reviews:

Good luck pig kept the real pigs off my back as I did a walkout with over $500 of electronics stuffed down my sweatpants, lol. Didn’t even have to snap my CUFFS.
—edyilope-2

Chain broke first day I put it on, attached it back together with both ends of cuff charm, cuff charm broke while I was in changing room. Got a bad feeling, put $$$ yoga pants back on hanger and walked out. Stopped by store dick but I was CLEAN. Listen 2UR CHARM!
—alexpursesco

Six people, six lucky pig charms, six stores, six hours, SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS merch. Good planning or good luck!?! EXTRA LUCK if you pay for the charm using the buy it once, return it twice trick.
—richrichrich777

My credit card LOVES my Armstrong lucky pig bracelet!!!
—lizangel2003

I got arrested in 2012 wearing FIRST lucky pig bracelet, grocery store in my hometown. I was broke and it was my first time, lol. I got off with a warning, cop didn’t even write my name down, on my way home he bought me food at a gas station. I cried and said I would never do it again, only thing I did right. I wasn’t even wearing a jacket, lol. Cuff charm even fell off in cop car, I kicked it under the mat so the cop wouldn’t see it.

Five years pass, it’s 2017, my time had come. I’m in a porn shop, I get cocky, try to steal some magazines.  TIP: NEVER STEAL FROM A PORN STORE.  Much heavier security than the big box stores, lol.  The clerk who busted me sees the charm and starts laughing so hard he’s crying, tears thru his mascara. He shows me his keychain, he’s got a charm too!  We both laugh.  He let me go after I gave him my handcuff charm. We dated and the handcuff charm broke the day we broke up, and I went to Armstrong’s to get Madame Armstrong to pick up a new charm and get a new spell put on mine. Like she says, some situations are more than even a lucky pig can handle.

2019, same bracelet, about a dozen different cuff charms later. I’m in the hospital for cancer and they say I have six months. No more boosting for me, it’s the end—or is it? Chain breaks, suddenly I’m in remission. Lucky pig boosted me out of the back seat of Death’s cop car, lol.  Got chain replaced on old bracelet, buying new bracelet for nephew. Happy boosting!
—divela_69

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

 

Note: This one goes very dark, but not brutally dark. 

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #26: Sexual Assault

THE FLARE OF HER NOSTRILS

 

Warren Wade had been exonerated.  Everyone knew who his family was, but no one said that explicitly.  It didn’t have to be said. Before that, he’d been suspended last year for a day for stockpiling guns—basically, his mother had freaked out about his antique Colt collection after an incident where he’d threatened her if she ever came in his room again, and she’d called Superintendent Rideout, a friend of hers, to say that Warren planned to take his guns to school and start shooting. But he hadn’t been planning to do anything like that. He’d broken up with that one girl Rebecca, but it wasn’t about that, either, the way the gossip said. It was literally just about his mom going into his room.

And then that bitch Elizabeth had started stuffing notes inside lockers.

There’s a rapist here and you know who it is.

Rideout had had Elizabeth suspended for three days. Plus the two other girls who had helped pass the notes, but only Elizabeth had stood on the front steps and protested about it.

He’d seen her on the steps that afternoon, turned around, and gone home out the door the teachers used for smoke breaks. First he’d gone to Principal Farris to tell her that Elizabeth was bullying him, making him uncomfortable. And then Farris had taken him to the teachers’ lounge and let him out that way, promising him that she’d send homework home for him.

She had a mean look in her eye, which Warren liked.

So far, he’d received about a dozen expressions of sympathy from the staff, and his grades had gone up. The girl who’d gone whining to Elizabeth had even started smiling him again.

I should do this more often, he thought. It was a nice game of chess.

Warren’s house overlooked a tiny cove leading out onto the Atlantic. Looking out that direction, you could see nothing but ocean. The beach was full of rocks, good for skipping but absolute shit for lying out on, with or without a towel. Plus it was fucking cold.  Warren’s room on the second floor overlooked the back terrace, flagstones, his dad’s lap pool, and a heated jacuzzi built into the hillside.  Warren imagined a serial killer or one of the masked attackers from The Purge breaking into the French doors on the lower floor some night, and him going downstairs with one his Colts—he kept a few of them loaded—and then stalking and killing the attacker.  He hadn’t been planning to shoot up his school.  Some nights, he left the back door “accidentally” unlocked, hoping that some thief would at least check. But none ever did.

Elizabeth’s protest was on the news.  The liberals picked it up and ran with it.  Warren’s friends asked him if he was going to do anything about it, if he was polishing his guns and they should stay home from school.

Nah.

Not like that.

He waited a week, two weeks. Then he went back to school.

He waited. Two days after he went back—the story was still in the news—he got another note shoved into his locker.

There’s a rapist here and you know who it is.

Nobody was supposed to know about it, but Elizabeth had a girlfriend.  Her name was Max, a boy’s name. Elizabeth didn’t look like a lesbian, either the porn kind or the butch kind. She just looked like a girl, with long blonde hair and chubbo thighs. But her girlfriend was definitely a lesbian. She wore a leather jacket and a biker hat and rode a motorcycle. Warren had had to find out for sure that she wasn’t actually trans, because Max had serious MAN-VIBES. But no, she was just a lesbian. For now. Maybe she’d change her mind later and start peeing in the men’s room. Warren wasn’t disgusted by her. In fact he’d been briefly intrigued, but it turned out actual lesbians were just as boring as everyone else. Except that no one was supposed to know she and Elizabeth were dating. They didn’t hang out at school. But Max lived near him. He’d seen Elizabeth on the back of Max’s bike, her blonde head leaning against Max’s shoulder. Max’s parents weren’t rich. They were barely middle-class. But the town was weird like that: multi-million-dollar houses overlooking the ocean, and three- to five-hundred thousand dollars everywhere else. There weren’t any actual poor people in their town—except for the help, but they drove in from shitty apartments in Portland with their shitty cars and their shitty buckets of cleaning supplies.

He had toyed with the idea of revenge the whole time he was away from school.  How to get back at Elizabeth.

Then Max had come to his house with his homework, looking disgusted, and it had all dropped into place as she handed him a plastic grocery sack with books and papers in it.

“Thanks,” he’d said.

Her nostrils had flared. And that was what had made up his mind.

All he had to do was stuff a note inside Max’s locker, saying what he was going to do to Elizabeth that night, and making fun of Max for not being man enough to stop him.

And then leave the French doors unlocked and the security system off, make sure his mom had plenty of Valium in her system—his dad was out of town, in New York for the week on business—clean a couple of his guns, and wait.

He’d even say that Max had tried to rape him before he shot her.

It would be a nice touch.

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

 

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #25: Racketeering

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR SHOES ARE KNOCKOFFS

Many famous brands of athletic shoes are not only marvels of engineering that protect your foot from strain and injury during exercise, but serve as status symbols.  Many a famous actor or actress has been spotted wearing a famous logo on their feet while being snapped by the paparazzi! It’s well known, even if it’s not logical, that putting on a new pair of well-known kicks can boost your ego as well as your performance. That’s not to say that expensive shoes aren’t really worth it—they are! Authentic shoes from well-known brands are safe and extremely comfortable, as well as stylish.

However, expensive athletic shoes are expensive. Those of us who aren’t rich and famous can find ourselves at the online store for an expensive shoe brand, thinking, “If only these shoes weren’t so expensive!”

We often find ourselves turning to our search engines to find a better deal.  Nobody wants to pay full price!

Unfortunately, what happens is that customers often end up at scam websites!  Cheap knockoff versions of expensive brands are all over the place.

Besides being cheap, those knockoff brands are often badly built and uncomfortable, and can lead to injury. Beware!

Here are five tips for determining whether your shoes are the real thing:

1. Beware of inexpensive shoes!

The first thing to beware of is shoes that are unreasonably inexpensive.  Even a used pair of expensive, authentic shoes can be more expensive than a brand-new pair from a cheaper brand.

2. Compare the photos of the shoes with the authorized versions from the brand’s website page.

Often, manufacturers of knockoff shoes will make a version of the shoe that doesn’t quite match the authentic one.  If it looks fake, it probably is. Some details may be skipped, or be a slightly different color, be in the wrong position—or be from an outdated version of the shoe! Always check for the manufacturing date 🙂

3. Check the packaging and tags.

Counterfeit shoes aren’t necessarily sold on big-name retailer websites. Sometimes they’re sold one pair at a time, on e-commerce, message-board, and used-clothing websites. Counterfeit shoes sold that way are often marked “New without box” or “New without tags.” Counterfeiters have already done all the work to produce cheap shoes—they don’t want to take the extra step to make the boxes and tags, too!

Counterfeit shoes will often arrive in a plastic bag with no box, in an unmarked shoe box, or in a cheaply made “brand-name” box that doesn’t hold together very well.

Another good thing to check on the box is the item’s SKU number, or Stock Keeping Unit number.  Knockoff shoes will often have last year’s number!

4. Check the materials.

If your shoes have stood up to the tests so far, the next step is checking the materials of the shoe.  Brand-name shoes are generally made with the most expensive, high-tech materials available.  Knockoff shoes will often substitute cheaper materials, such as inferior grades of cushioning plastic, and pleather accent materials rather than genuine leather.  If your shoe doesn’t feel securely sewed and glued together—run!

5. Check the performance.

The last step is to put your shoes on.  Do they feel comfortable?  Do they fit your feet properly? Do you feel secure?  Before taking your shoes outside, try out several different stances, including standing, squatting, moving into and out of a runner’s pose, or even a few yoga positions.  Knockoff shoes will often feel flimsy, unstable, and, well…just poorly engineered!

Don’t be afraid to return uncomfortable shoes for a refund, even if the seller pretends not to understand English. You are not required to prove that the shoes are knockoffs in order to return them! If an individual seller gives you any trouble, go to the retailer’s website for assistance. Retailers are used to dealing with customer complaints about knockoff products, and have a standard protocol for getting you your money back!

In 2017, over $1.2 billion dollars of counterfeit goods were captured and destroyed by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, an increase of over 8% from the year before. Also, in 2017, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property says that the loss from the U.S. economy caused by counterfeit goods, software and other types of piracy, and theft of trade secrets may be up to $600 billion dollars a year!  China counts as the #1 world culprit, accounting for about 87% of counterfeit goods entering the U.S.  That’s a lot of jobs!

Most of those counterfeit goods come from Chinese factories dedicated to mass-producing knockoff goods.  In fact, there’s an entire town dedicated to making “replicas” of U.S. goods.  They are sold in large lots to American resellers, often college students or stay-at-home moms working out of their basements.  They’ll collect orders and the cash, then serve as a middleman for Chinese black-market sellers, who drop-ship the illegal shoes directly from China. It’s like a Mafia for knockoff shoes!

And most of these shoes are worth exactly what you pay for!  But, mes chiots, a little bird once told me that, when the authorized brand-name factories in China shut down for the night, they sometimes end up with a few more boxes of shoes than shows up on their reports.  Real shoes, made at the real factories, sold straight to the black market, can you imagine?

With some pairs of brand-name shoes going for U.S. $1500 and up as shoe collectors go to war with each other, everyone wants into the knockoff market!

But these knockoffs-of-a-knockoff shoes, if they even exist, are far and few between.

If your shoes check out, then congratulations! While there is no way to be 100% sure that you’re wearing the “real deal” with expensive, name-brand sneakers, with due diligence, you can be 99.99% sure—and for that other .01%, then at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that nobody else can tell, either!

Happy shoe hunting, shoe hounds!

Marie of La Chienne de Chausseur

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #24: Pyramid Scheme

SHARES IN DUTCH TULIPS

All a good pyramid scheme requires is shares in something, and a smooth talker to sell them. Or not so much a smooth talker as someone short-sighted enough to think the con will last forever.

“Here’s how it works,” I say. And I explain. You pick something that people can imagine they want, and can imagine buying low and selling high. The classic scams involve silver mines and stock shares. Futures are always good, like corn futures or pork futures. But I’ve heard of expeditions to dive for Spanish gold off the coast of Florida, or, one time, I kid you not, it was tulips. Shares in Dutch tulips. It has to be something risky but essentially legal. This all happens out in public. It’s so public that nobody can believe it’s a scam. That’s important. You want public opinion to sway your direction, to make it seem—among the core group of investors that make up your marks—like you’d have to be a fool not to get involved. There’s also something called a “Ponzi” scheme where each investor doesn’t have to actively recruit the next investor after them. But the lines get blurred, so let’s not quibble the difference. The government is supposed to protect investors against this kind of thing, but it always takes them longer than it should. What you want to do is throw as many delays in the way as you can, and run out the clock.

Once you have your material for shares, you get some word moving. Not a gale force wind of press releases and advertising, but a sly little breeze, the kind that blows right through a good mark. You have to think like a gossip. “Did you hear about so-and-so? I can’t believe it, but what I heard was—” Like that. And then you flash some cash while acting like you’re getting away with something. People will come sniffing around like bloodhounds.

When they do, you send them over to someone else. Never try to play all the roles in a pyramid scheme. Don’t short yourself on running the store. Don’t tell yourself you can get by without. The great schemes are time-tested. A mark should get completely screwed by one set of operators, yet still be hungry for more when the next con comes through. Don’t think of it as money lost in the split. Think of it as seeding the soil for future investments. When you get the right people backing you, you can more than offset the cost of splitting the profits with them, and shuffling around marks and investigators takes longer with five people than it does with two. See what I said above, about running out the clock.

So you send the mark to the second operator, who doesn’t want to sell. In fact they refuse to sell.

The first operator apologizes, and talks to the second operator. The second operator has to be convinced. Now, if you were running a simpler con, here’s where you get off the main track. The second operator can’t be persuaded to let the mark in on the big con. The first operator feels bad about it. “Sorry about that silver mine. How about I let you in on this smaller project instead…?” Many a good mark has been milked by such a bait and switch.

But for an actual pyramid scheme, you stay on track.

After some negotiation, the second operator reluctantly agrees to sell. Numbers get thrown around at this stage. The mark invests X, minus a cut off the top (percentage Y), as a transaction fee. The mark gets back returns Z as profit. The mark can either collect their Z profits and get their investment X back, or keep their investment X in the scheme and get their Z profits back, or take their investment X and roll their Z profits into their investment. Usually what happens is the mark invests X, collects profits Z, can’t believe their good luck, then comes back with profits Z to reinvest. A lot of them come back with more capital to add to X as well.  You pay your outgoing profits Z out of your incoming X investments. The exact math is tricky. You have to balance startup costs against giving the marks a deal that’s too good to be true.

Never let the mark negotiate the numbers. Use the same rates for everybody. That way, the marks will screw each other. Investor A will recruit investor B, and take a little cut under the table for the privilege. Just ignore it. It helps muddy the water, and it keeps investor A from going to the authorities. Investor A effectively becomes an operator for you, not a trusted one, but one who risks prison time if things fall apart.

Make it exclusive, too. Literally refuse to sell to people. Don’t always let yourself get “talked in” to letting someone join.  The more exclusive you are, the longer you can take to run out that clock.

But, eventually, that clock will run out. It might take thirty years, but it will run out. The danger of this business is that a successful operator always half-believes what they tell the marks. But your scheme will have always been a con, and it was never going to work out the way you told the marks it would.  Even the most perfect system collapses.  There’s just too much chaos in the world, and you can’t control it.

But you can control who you pick as your smooth talker.  My advice here is to pick one of the world’s non-violent psychopaths.  If you know where to look, you can find a lot of them. No soul, no morals, no emotions other than a craving for “winning” at something, no awareness that they were always going to have taken the fall.  They’re the asshole in the limelight.

You’re just the accountant.

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.

 

Crime du Jour: 31 Days of Malfeasance, Misconduct, and Immorality

One crime story per day, all the way through October. Ebook to be published Nov 1. This will be under my mystery/crime pen name, Diane R. Thompson!

 

Crime du Jour #23: Prostitution

TWO SISTERS ALONG BASIN STREET, STORYVILLE, NEW ORLEANS

 

Sadie Broussard was one of the girls working Mahogany Hall, a famous house in New Orleans run by Lulu White. This was the days of Storyville, the red-light district down by the Vieux Carré. Sadie had a long face like a grayhound’s, fine dark hair, and arresting eyes, the old French sort of face which is, by turns, cruel and beautiful. When she was in a high mood, she wore a thin black ribbon wrapped around her neck and tied behind, so the ends lay down the track of her spine. Lulu always told Sadie she would be found dead in a canal some day: Sadie was the kind of girl who was made for trouble.

One day a nun walking along Basin Street, likely on her way to the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, saw Sadie at the third-floor balcony. Sadie was wearing a lace slip with one shoulder down, decently covered, and waving at the traffic along the street. The nun was wearing a habit like a racehorse’s blinkers and her mouth was soft and bowed, like a spoiled girl’s. When the nun turned her eyes up to Sadie’s, she shuddered and clutched at a crucifix lying upon a thin black ribbon upon her chest, giving a little gasp that echoed along the street.

The woman took something from within her dark clothing, and cast it at the bottom of Lulu’s long marble stairs. Then she slipped off with mincing steps and was soon out of sight.

Sadie slunk downstairs, throwing a wrap over her slip and putting on a pair of leather gentleman’s boots at the door, large enough that she could slip her feet in without tying them.

It was early, before noon, and she lifted her chin high as she descended. At the bottom of the stairs she found a tooled wallet the size of a cigarette case. Sadie fled to her room, which had a flowered rug on the floor, dark flowered wallpaper, and flowers carved in her dresser, mirror-frame, and Empire-style bed: and a tiny, dim window with colored flowers in the upper panes, too pretty to break and too small to climb through.

By the dim light of the bubbled glass, Sadie looked inside the wallet. It held an old photograph of two women in prim Victorian dresses and veiled hats. One woman’s veil was pulled back. She wore a thick ribbon around her neck, which was bruised. She faced directly toward the camera, and was perfectly clear. The other, turned toward the first woman and holding her stiff hand, was slightly blurred. In old photographs, only the dead are perfectly clear.

The dead woman had Sadie’s face, the live woman had the nun’s.

Sadie left her wrap draped over the end of the bed and went back to the third-floor parlor. The light was better there. Another girl, Chloe Sonnier, was sunning herself and drinking café au lait at the little wrought-iron table.

“What have you got there?” Chloe asked.

Sadie showed it to her, without comment.

Chloe gave a little scream and dropped the wallet on the table, crossing herself. “Where did you get that unholy thing?”

Sadie laughed and related the morning’s little tale.

“Whatever does it mean?”

Sadie shrugged. “That my double had her throat cut, and the other girl became a nun because of it, what else?”

Chloe crossed herself again, and went back into the house, leaving her café au lait behind.

Sadie leaned back against the wall of the house, holding the café in one hand and the memento mori in the other. Now she would hold it at arm’s length. Now she would bring it close to her face, giving the photograph a squint.

Her double, she decided, had also been the kind of girl who was made for trouble, and had been killed over a man. There had been a jealous spat, a straight razor, and—why not?—a luscious opera singer that both of them wanted. The other woman in the photograph was the good sister, the one who had been left behind. She had loved the wicked sister. The good were often not so good, but only afraid to be wicked. But Sadie had a feeling that the good sister in the photograph was truly good, the soft and wonderful kind of goodness that would bring the wicked sister back to her, time and again, for comfort, and to see the plain joy upon her face.

After the death of wicked sister, the good sister had gone to Louisiana to be married to a man of property, and had two daughters—one who looked like her, and one who looked like her dead sister, the wicked one.

One day, the wicked sister had run away, never to be seen again, very young. Or had she been kidnapped? The good sister had pined. Their parents had had other children—but the two sisters had never truly been separated. They were joined, as if by a long, black ribbon, which stretched from the Catholic orphanage that had raised Sadie, to the good sister’s girlhood in Broussard, the only word young Sadie could speak beside her own name, when she had been found.

With one look, that connection had been drawn taught as a piano wire, and tomorrow her sister would see Sadie, for one last time.

They would have their photograph taken together. By then, Sadie would be dead, her image perfectly clear, propped up in Lulu’s front parlor, next to her sister—who would swear to discover who had killed her, and take her revenge.

Later, the good sister would discover the name of the police officer who had arrested Sadie, then killed her. He would disappear, only to be found later, floating face-down in a canal. No one would suspect the nun. Sadie would be dead—but loved.

Everyone made up whatever stories they liked, in Storyville.

THE END

 

Geeky gothics and other strange & wonderful fiction: sign up for the Wonderland Press newsletter here. Includes two tales of Doctor Rudolpho, a teenaged fortune-teller who has the Sight.  If you enjoyed today’s story, please consider signing up!

You can find 2018’s story-a-day project, Tales of the Normal, here, and 2017’s story-a-day project, October Nights, here.