Not only embarrassing but could be about something funny that happened.
Yes, but I really believe she was wearing a wire. The cops probably had her backed into a corner with some felony charges that she knew she couldn’t overcome, so she plea-bargained her way out of them by offering me up as the sacrificial lamb. They must have offered her a sweet deal to get her to roll over like that, but I was suspicious from the beginning. She kept saying things like, “Get it off your chest, talk to me about it,” and “I’m not sure who exactly did what, so could you please explain it to me?” and “I can barely hear you, would you mind speaking louder, and maybe a little bit slower, please?”
My Ma didn’t raise a fool: I knew there was trouble the minute she started talking out of character. You can take the woman out of Cockney, but you can’t take the Cock out of the woman (or something like that). So I took her on a verbal roller coaster ride of imaginary jobs and half-baked capers that fell through before the planning stage was finished. I mixed up guys’ names and dames’ names, and mixed up cities, and mixed up dates and times, and mixed up police agencies, and mixed up investigating detectives, by the time I got through with her, she had nothing but a spaghetti pattern of twisted stories and fake narratives. It probably kept the flatfoot in charge of her case up nights for a month before figuring out it was all hooey.
But anyway, back to the babe who tried to put me in lurch. She and I actually ironed everything out a few years later. She was in with a new crew who needed a lookout for a gig they had going, and I vouched for her skills behind the steering wheel. That job was a six-way split, well, after the mastermind took 25% right off the top. So five of us cut a 75% pizza our way and we all got equal shares. The lass and I put our cuts together, had counterfeit passports made for us with new identities and skipped off to C.A. on the rest of the proceeds. It was fun while it lasted, almost a year and a half, because we pulled a few con games down there to extend our finances. In the end, she always spent much more than I did, but only brought in about a third of what I could bring in. One morning she went to breakfast at the bungalow’s cafe garden, and when she got back, all she found of me was memories and her empty money clip and empty jewelry box. Oh, I made sure to grab the passport too; it gave me a head start of at least a week or ten days . . .
~
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