The Con Man (4 page)

“Well, I’m not usually lucky,” Jamison said apologetically. He exchanged a quick glance with Parsons, whose uplifted eyebrows clearly expressed the opinion that O’Neill was a strange duck, indeed.

“Come on, come on,” O’Neill said, “let’s get this over with. This time I’ll call.” He and Parsons flipped their coins and covered them. “We match,” O’Neill said.

Parsons uncovered heads.

O’Neill uncovered tails and said, “Son of a bitch! You see? I never win, never! Goddammit, let’s match for the next round.”

“We’re already a round ahead of ourselves,” Parsons said gently.

“You want me to pay for all the damn drinks, is that it?” O’Neill shouted.

“Well, no, no, that’s not it.”

“Why won’t you give me a chance to win back what I’ve lost?”

Parsons smiled gently and looked to Jamison for assistance.

Jamison cleared his throat. “You misunderstand, Frank,” he said genially. “We hadn’t planned on making this a big drinking night. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even had dinner yet.”

“Is three rounds of drinks a big drinking night?” O’Neill asked irritably. “I say we match for the third round. I
insist
we match for the third round.”

Parsons smiled weakly. “Frank, it’s really academic. We may not even get to the third round. Look, let me pay for the last two rounds, huh? This party was my idea, and I’m a little embarrassed—”

“I lost, and I’ll pay!” O’Neill said firmly. “Now, come on, let’s match for the third round.”

Parsons sighed. Jamison shrugged and caught Parsons’s eye. The men flipped their coins.

“Heads,” Jamison said.

“Tails,” Parsons said.

“Tails,” O’Neill said sourly. “This Jamison never loses, does he? By God, he never loses. Come on, it’s between you and me, Charlie.”

“It’s my turn to call, isn’t it?” Parsons asked.

“Yes, yes,” O’Neill said impatiently. “It’s your goddamn turn to call.” He flipped and covered his coin.

Parsons flipped, covered the coin, and said, “We won’t match this time.” He lifted his hand—tails.

O’Neill uncovered his coin. “Heads! I could have told you! I could have told you even before I looked at the damn thing. I never win! Never!” He rose angrily. “Where’s the men’s room? I’m going to the men’s room!”

He stalked away from the table, and Parsons watched him.

“I’d like to apologize,” Parsons said. “When I invited him, I had no idea he was such a sore loser.”

“Hell, the matching was all his idea, anyway,” Jamison said.

“God, he really got riled up, didn’t he?”

“He’s a peculiar fellow,” Jamison said, shaking his head.

Parsons seemed to have a sudden idea. “Listen,” he said, “let’s have some fun with him.”

“What kind of fun?”

“Well, he’s a sore loser—worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Me, too,” Jamison said.

“He said he’s got three thousand dollars with him. Let’s take it away from him.”

“What?” Jamison said, suddenly righteously indignant.

“Not for keeps. We’ll take it away from him and then give it all back later.”

“Take it away? But I don’t understand.”

“We’ll change the matching rules when he comes back. We’ll make it odd man
loses.
All right, we’ll make sure that your coin and my coin always match. Nine times out of ten,
he’ll
be odd man. And loser.”

“How we going to do that?” Jamison asked, beginning to get interested in the idea of a little sport.

“Simple. Keep your coin on end so you can shove it down to either heads or tails. If I touch my nose with my finger, make your coin show heads. If I don’t touch it, show tails.”

“I see,” Jamison said, grinning.

“We’ll keep raising the stakes. We’ll clean him out, and then we’ll give him back his money. Okay?”

Jamison couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Boy,” he said, “he’s really going to blow his stack.”

“Until he knows it’s all a gag,” Parsons said. He patted Jamison on the back. “Here he comes. Now, let me handle this.”

“All right,” Jamison said, secretly beginning to enjoy himself.

O’Neill came back to the table and sat. He seemed angry as hell. “The second round come yet?” he asked.

“No,” Parsons said. “You know, Frank, it’s your attitude that makes you lose. I was just telling that to Elliot here.”

“Attitude, my ass,” O’Neill said. “I’m just unlucky.”

“I can prove it to you,” Parsons said. “Come on, let’s match a little more.”

“I thought you said this wasn’t going to be a drinking night,” O’Neill said suspiciously.

“We’ll match for a few bucks, all right?”

“I’ll lose,” O’Neill said.

“Why not give Charlie’s theory a chance?” Jamison put in.

“Sure,” Parsons said. “I’ve got a little money with me. Let’s see how fast you can take it away from me, using my theory.” He paused, then turned to Jamison. “You’ve got some money with you, haven’t you, Elliot?”

“About two hundred and fifty dollars,” Jamison said. “I don’t like to carry too much with me. You never know.”

“That’s wise,” Parsons said, nodding. “What do you say, Frank?”

“All right, all right, what’s your theory?”

“Just concentrate on winning, that’s all. Think with all your might. Just think,
I’m going to win, I’m going to win,
that’s all.”

“It won’t work, but I’m game. How much do we bet?”

“Let’s start with five,” Parsons said. “To make it quicker, we’ll do it this way. Odd man loses. He pays each of the other players five bucks. How does that sound?”

“Well, that sounds a little stee—” Jamison started.

“That sounds fine to me,” O’Neill said. Parsons winked at Jamison.

Jamison gave a slight nod of acknowledgement and then hastily said, “Yes, that sounds fine to me, too.”

They began matching.

With remarkable regularity, O’Neill kept losing. Then, perhaps because Parsons wanted to make it look good, Jamison
began to lose a little, too. The men matched silently. Their table was in a corner of the place, protected from sight by a translucent glass wall. It is doubtful, anyway, that anyone would have stopped the men from their innocent coin-matching. They flipped, uncovered, and exchanged bills. In a short while, O’Neill had lost something like $400. Jamison had lost close to $200. Parsons winked at Jamison every now and then, just to let him know that everything was proceeding according to plan. O’Neill kept complaining to Jamison—who was losing along with him—about Parsons’s theory. “The only one that goddamn theory works for is him himself,” O’Neill said.

They kept matching.

Jamison did not lose as much now. O’Neill kept losing, and he got angrier with each flip of the coin. Finally, he looked at both men and said, “Say, what is this?”

“What’s what?” Parsons asked.

“I’ve dropped nearly six hundred dollars so far.” He turned to Jamison. “How much have you lost?”

Jamison did a little mental calculation. “Oh, about two hundred thirty-five, something like that.”

“And you?” O’Neill said to Parsons.

“I’m winning,” Parsons said.

O’Neill looked at his two companions with a long, steady gaze. “You wouldn’t be trying to fleece me by any chance, would you?” he asked.

“Fleece?” Parsons asked.

“You wouldn’t be a pair of swindlers by any chance, would you?” O’Neill asked.

Jamison could hardly keep the grin off his face. Parsons winked at him.

“What makes you say that?” Parsons asked.

O’Neill rose suddenly. “I’m calling a cop,” he said.

The grin dropped from Jamison’s face. “Hey, now,” he said, “wait a minute. We were just—”

Parsons, sitting secure with Jamison’s $235 and O’Neill’s $600 in his pocket, said, “No need to get sore, Frank. A game’s a game.”

“Besides,” Jamison said, “we were only—”

Parsons put an arm on his sleeve and winked at him. “The breaks are the breaks, Frank,” he said to O’Neill.

“And crooks are crooks,” O’Neill said. “I’m getting a cop.” He started away from the table.

Jamison’s face went white. “Charlie,” he said, “we’ve got to stop him. A joke is a joke, but Jesus—”

“I’ll get him,” Parsons said, rising. He chuckled. “God, he’s a weird duck, isn’t he? I’ll bring him right back. You wait here.”

O’Neill had already reached the door. As he stepped outside, Parsons called, “Hey, Frank! Wait a minute!” and ran out after him.

Jamison sat at the table alone, still frightened, telling himself he would never again be party to a practical joke.

It wasn’t until a half hour later that he realized the joke was on him.

He told himself it couldn’t be.

Then he sat for another half hour.

Then he went to the nearest police station and told a detective named Arthur Brown the story.

Brown listened patiently and then took a description of the two professional coin-matchers who had conned Jamison out of $235.

P. T. Barnum rolled over in his grave, chuckling.

The Missing Persons Bureau is a part of the Detective Division, and so the two men Bert Kling talked to were detectives.

One was called Ambrose.

The other was called Bartholdi.

“Naturally,” Bartholdi said, “we got nothing to do here but concern ourselves with floaters.”

“Naturally,” Ambrose said.

“We only got reports on sixteen missing kids under the age of ten today, but we got nothing to do but worry about a stiff been in the water for six months.”

“Four months,” Kling corrected.

“Pardon me,” Bartholdi said.

“With dicks from the 87th,” Ambrose said, “you got to be careful. You slip up by a couple of months, they jump down your throat. They got very technical flatfoots at the 87th.”

“We try our hardest,” Kling said drily.

“Humanitarians all,” Bartholdi said. “They worry about floaters. They got concern for the human race.”

“Us,” Ambrose said, “all we got to worry about is the three-year-old kids who vanish from their front stoops. That’s all we got to worry about.”

“You’d think I was asking to spend the night with your sister,” Kling said. “All I want is a look at your files.”

“I’d rather you spent the night with my sister,” Bartholdi said. “You might be disappointed since she’s only eight years old, but I’d still rather.”

“It ain’t that we don’t believe in interdepartmental cooperation,” Ambrose said. “There ain’t nothing we like better than helping out fellow flatfoots. Ain’t that a fact, Romeo?”

Romeo Bartholdi nodded. “Tell him about our war record, Mike.”

Ambrose said, “It was us who went to the Pacific after World War II to help clear up all that unidentified dead problem.”

“If you cleaned up the whole Pacific Theater,” Kling said, “you should be able to help me with one floater.”

“The trouble with flatfoots,” Bartholdi said, “is they got no heads for clerical work. We’ve got a dandy filing system here, you see? If we let dicks from all over the city come in and foul it up, we’d never be able to identify
anybody
anymore.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got such a real nice filing system,” Kling said. “Do you plan on keeping it a secret from the rest of the department, or will you throw open the files during Open School Week?”

“Another thing I like about the bulls from the 87th,” Ambrose said, “is that they are all so comical. When one of them is around, you can hardly keep from wetting your pants.”

“With glee,” Bartholdi said.

“That’s what makes a good cop,” Ambrose expanded. “Humor, humaneness, and devotion to detail.”

“Plus, the patience of Job,” Kling said. “Do I get a peek at the goddamn files, or don’t I?”

“Temper, temper,” Bartholdi said.

“How far back do you want to go?” Ambrose asked.

“About six months.”

“I thought she was in the water for only four?”

“She may have been reported missing before then.”

“Clever, clever,” Bartholdi said. “God, this city would fall to smoldering ashes were it not for the 87th Precinct.”

“All right, screw you,” Kling said, turning. “I’ll tell the lieutenant your files aren’t open for our inspection. So long, fellers.”

“He’s running home to mama,” Bartholdi said, unfazed.

“Mama’s liable to be upset,” Kling said. “Mama doesn’t mind a good joke, but not on the city’s time.”

“All work and no play…” Bartholdi started and then cut himself short when he saw that Kling actually was leaving. “All right, sorehead,” he said, “come look at the files. Come drown in the files. We’ve got enough missing persons here to keep you going for a year.”

“Thanks a lot,” Kling said, and he followed the detectives down the corridor.

“We try to keep them cross-indexed,” Ambrose said. “This ain’t the IB, but we do our level best. We got ’em alphabetically, and we got ’em chronologically—according to when they were reported missing—and we got ’em broken down male and female.”

“The boys with the boys, and the girls with the girls,” Bartholdi said.

“There’s everything you need in each of the separate folders. Medical reports where we could get ’em, dental charts, even letters and documents in some of the folders.”

“Don’t mix the folders up,” Bartholdi said. “That would mean getting a beautiful blonde police stenographer in to straighten them out again.”

“And we don’t cotton to beautiful blondes around here,” Ambrose said.

“We kick ’em out in the street whenever they come knocking.”

“That’s because we’re both respectable married men.”

“Who resist all temptations,” Bartholdi concluded. “Here are the files.” He made a grandiloquent sweeping gesture with one arm, indicating the banks and banks of green filing cabinets that lined the walls of the room. “This is April, and you want to go back six months. That’d put you in November.” He made a vague gesture with one hand. “That’s over there someplace.” He winked at Ambrose. “Now, are we cooperating, or
are
we?”

“You’re the most cooperative,” Kling said.

“Hope you find what you need,” Ambrose said, opening the door. “Come on, Romeo.”

Bartholdi followed him out. Kling sighed, looked at the filing cabinets, and then lighted a cigarette. There was a sign on one of the walls, and the sign read:
SHUFFLE THEM, JIGGLE THEM, MAUL THEM, CARESS THEM—BUT LEAVE THEM THE WAY YOU FOUND THEM!

He walked around the room until he came to the cabinet containing the file of persons who were reported missing in November of the preceding year. He opened the top drawer of the cabinet, pulled up a straight-back wooden chair upon which to prop his foot, and doggedly began leafing through the folders.

The work was not exactly unpleasant, but it was far from exciting. The average misconception of the city detective, of course, is one of a tough, big man wearing a shoulder holster facing a desperate criminal and shooting it out in the streets. Kling was big, not so tough, and he carried his service revolver in a leather holster clipped into his right back pocket. He was not shooting it out with anyone at the moment, desperate or not. The only desperation he knew was of a quiet sort, which drives many city detectives into the nearest loony bin, where they silently pick at
the coverlets. Kling, at the moment, was involved in routine—and routine is the most routine thing in the world.

Routine is what makes you wash your face and shave and brush your teeth in the morning.

Routine is the business of inserting a key into the ignition switch, twisting the key, starting the car, and putting it into drive before you can go anyplace.

Routine is answering a letter with a polite thank-you and then answering the resultant thank-you letter with another letter stating, “You’re welcome.”

Routine is the list of questions you ask the surviving wife of an automobile accident victim.

Routine is the tag you fill out and attach to a piece of evidence.

Routine is the report you type back at the squadroom.

Routine is a deadly dull bore, and it isn’t even crashing, and detectives know routine in triplicate, and the detective who isn’t patient with a typewriter—no matter what his method of typing may be—doesn’t last very long in the detective division.

When you’ve looked at missing person report after missing person report, you begin to wish you were missing yourself. After a while, they all begin to blend together into a big mass of humanity that has formed a conspiracy to bore you to death. After a while, you don’t know who has the birthmark on her left breast or who has the tattoo on his big toe. After a while, you don’t even care. There are amusing breaks in the routine, of course, but these are few and far between. Like the husband and wife, for example, who both vanished on the same day and who later filed missing person reports for each other. Very comical. Kling grinned, picturing the husband as an Alec Guinness type of character lolling with a brunette in Brazil. He formed no mental picture of the wife. He lighted another cigarette and continued his search for someone who might possibly resemble the 87th’s floater.

He consumed two packages of cigarettes while perusing the files. He had finished the first pack before lunch. He went out for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, which he took back to the bureau with him, together with a fresh package of cigarettes and a warning to himself to go slow on the coffin nails. By the end of the day, he had finished the second pack, and he’d also collected a sizable pile of folders that could possibly tie in with the floater. One report looked particularly promising. Kling opened the folder again and went over the material inside it.

There were, Kling noticed, certain inconsistencies in the report. Early in the report, for example, the girl was “last seen at” her “home address” on October 31 at 11:45
P.M.
Later in the report, under
REMARKS
, the girl was last seen at the Scranton railroad station the next morning. Kling surmised, as he was forced to surmise, that police procedure was responsible for the foul-up. Henry Proschek was the man who’d reported his daughter missing. And he had probably last seen her in his own home on the night of October 31. Someone else, apparently, had seen her at the railroad station the next morning, had observed her carefully enough to describe what she was wearing. But this someone else was not the person filing the complaint, hence the inconsistency. There was, Kling further noticed, a question mark under the word
luggage.
He wondered if she had, indeed, gone baggageless or if the observer at the station had simply failed to notice any luggage.

The report was somewhat vague when it said, “See letter in folder.” Did this mean the first letter the girl had written or the longer letter she’d promised? And which of these letters was the last contact the parents had had? The answer, obviously, was in the folder.

Kling opened it again.

There was only one letter in the folder. Apparently, the second longer letter had never been written. And, apparently, it was this lack of further clarifying communication that had brought
Henry Proschek to the city in search of his daughter, culminating in his phone call to the closest police station.

Feeling somewhat like a Peeping Tom, Kling began reading Mary Louise Proschek’s letter to her parents:

November 1st

Dear Mom and Daddy:

I know your not worried I was kidnapped or anything because Betty Anders happened to spy me at the station this morning and by now it is probly all over town. So I know your not worried but I suppose you are wondering why I have left and when I am coming back.

I suppose I shouldn’t have left without an explanation, but I don’t think you would understand or improve
what Im about to do. I have been planning on it for a long time, and it is something I have to do which is also why I have been staying on at Johnson’s because I was saving my money all these years. I now have more than $4,000 dollars, you have to hand it to me for being persistint, ha ha.

I will write you a longer letter when everything here is settled. I am starting a new life here, Daddy, so please don’t be too angry with me. Try to understand. Love and kisses.