The Con Man (7 page)

It’s the little things in life that get you down.

The big problems are the easy ones to solve. There’s a lot at stake with the big problems. It’s the little ones that are the tough bastards. Should I shave tonight for the big date with Buxom Blonde, or should I wait until tomorrow morning for the big conference with Amalgamated Aluminum? God, a man can go nuts!

The 87th’s big problem was the floater. It’s not often you get a floater.

The 87th’s little problem was the con man.

It was the con man who was driving Detective Arthur Brown nuts. Brown didn’t like to be conned, and he didn’t like other people to be conned, either. The man—or men, more accurately— who were fleecing honest citizens of Brown’s fair city rankled him. They invaded his sleep. They dulled his appetite. They were even ruining his sex life. He was surly and out of sorts, more impatient than ever, scowling, snapping, a very difficult man to
work with. The men who worked with him, being kindly, considerate, thoughtful bulls, did everything in their power to make his working day even more difficult. A moment did not go by but what one or another of the 87th’s bulls would make some passing crack to Brown about the difficulties he was experiencing with the con man.

“Catch him yet, Artie?” they would ask.

“Hey, some guy conned my grandmother out of her false teeth yesterday,” they would say. “Think it’s your buzzard, Brown?”

Brown took all the patter and all the jive with enviable discourteousness, admirable lack of self-control, and remarkable short temper. His usual answer was short and to the point and consisted of a combination of two words, one of which was unprintable. Brown had no time for jokes. He only had time for the files.

Somewhere in those files was the man he wanted.

Bert Kling was occupied with another kind of reading matter.

Bert Kling stood before the bulletin board in the detective squadroom. It was raining again, and the rain oozed against the windowpanes, and the harsh light behind the panes cast a sliding, running, dripping silhouette on the floor at his feet so that the room itself seemed to be slowly dissolving.

The vacations schedule had been posted on the bulletin board.

Kling studied it now. Two detectives studied it with him. One of the detectives was Meyer Meyer. The other was Roger Havilland.

“What’d you draw, kid?” Havilland asked.

“June tenth,” Kling replied.

“June tenth? Well, well, well, ain’t that a dandy time to start a holiday?” Havilland said, winking at Meyer.

“Yeah, dandy,” Kling said disgustedly. He had honestly not expected a choicer spot. He was the newest man on the
squad—promoted from a rookie, at that—and so he could hardly have hoped to compete with the cops who had seniority. But he was nonetheless disappointed. June 10! Hell, that wasn’t even summer yet!

“I like my vacations at the early part of June,” Havilland went on. “Excellent time for vacations. I always ask for the end of April. I like it chilly. I wouldn’t think of leaving this lovely squadroom during the suffocating months of July and August. I like heat, don’t you, Meyer?”

Meyer’s blue eyes twinkled. He was always willing to go along with a gag, even when the gag originated with a man like Havilland whom Meyer did not particularly like. “Heat is wonderful,” Meyer said. “Last year was marvelous. I’ll never forget last year. A cop hater loose and the temperature in the nineties. That makes for a memorable summer.”

“Just think, kid,” Havilland said. “Maybe this summer’ll be a hot one, too. You can sit over there by the windows, where you get a nice breeze from the park. And you can think back over your nice cool vacation in the beginning of June.”

“You slay me, Havilland,” Kling said. He turned to start away from the bulletin board, and Havilland laid a beefy hand on his arm. There was strength in Havilland’s fingers. He was a big cop with a cherubic face, and a leer-like smile was on that face now. Kling disliked Havilland. He had disliked him even when he’d been a patrolman and had only heard of Havilland’s questioning tactics with suspects. Since he’d made 3rd/grade, he had had the opportunity to see Havilland in action, and his dislike had mounted in proportion to the number of times Havilland used his ham like fists on helpless prisoners. Havilland, you see, was a bull. He roared like a bull, and he gored like a bull, and he probably even snored like a bull. In truth, he had once been a gentle cop. But he’d once tried to break up a street fight, and the fighters
had ganged up on him, taken away his service revolver, and broken his arm with a lead pipe. The compound fracture had to be broken and reset at the hospital. It healed painfully and slowly. It left Havilland with a philosophy: Hit first; ask later.

The broken arm, to Kling’s way of thinking, bought neither benediction nor salvation for Havilland. Neither did it buy understanding. It bought, perhaps, a little bit of insight into a man who was basically a son of a bitch. Kling wasn’t a psychiatrist. He only knew that he didn’t like the leer on Havilland’s face, and he didn’t like Havilland’s hand on his arm.

“Where you going on your vacation, kid?” Havilland asked. “You don’t want to waste that nice cool month of June, do you? Remember, it gets to be summer along about the twenty-first. Where you going, huh?”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Kling said.

“We? We? You going with somebody?”

“I’m going with my fiancée,” Kling said tightly.

“Your girl, huh?” Havilland said. He winked at Meyer, including him in a secret fraternity that Meyer did not feel like joining.

“Yes,” Kling said. “My girl.”

“Whatever you do,” Havilland said, winking at Kling this time, “don’t take her out of the state.”

“Why not?” Kling asked, the implication escaping him for a moment, immediately sorry as soon as Havilland opened his mouth in reply.

“Why, the Mann Act, kid!” Havilland said. “Watch out for those state lines.”

Kling stared at Havilland and then said, “How would you like a punch in the mouth, Havilland?”

“Oh, Jesus!” Havilland roared. “The kid breaks me up! There’s nothing dishonest about screwing, kid, unless you cross a state line!”

“Lay off, Rog,” Meyer said.

“What’s the matter?” Havilland asked. “I envy the kid. Vacation in June, and a sweet little shack-up waiting for—”

“Lay off!” Meyer said, more loudly this time. He had seen the spark of sudden anger in Kling’s eyes, and he had seen the involuntary clenching of Kling’s right fist. Havilland outweighed and outreached Kling, and Havilland was not famous for the purity of his fighting tactics. Meyer did not want blood on the squadroom floor—not Kling’s blood, anyway.

“Nobody’s got any sense of humor in this dump,” Havilland said surlily. “You got to have a sense of humor here, or you don’t survive.”

“Go help Brown with his con man troubles,” Meyer said.

“Brown ain’t got no humor, either,” Havilland said, and he stalked off.

“That big turd,” Kling said. “Someday…”

“Well,” Meyer said, his eyes twinkling, “in a sense, he’s right. The Mann Act is a serious thing. Very serious.”

Kling looked at him. Meyer had used almost the same words as Havilland, but somehow, there was a difference. “A very serious thing,” he answered. “I’ll be careful, Meyer.”

“Caution is the watchword,” Meyer said, grinning.

“The truth is,” Kling said, “this damn June tenth spot might screw things up. Claire goes to college, you know. She may be in the middle of finals or something right then.”

“You been planning on this for some time?” Meyer asked.

“Yeah,” Kling said, thinking of the June 10 spot, and hoping it would jibe with Claire’s schedule, and wondering what he could do about it if it didn’t.

Meyer nodded sympathetically. “Is it a special occasion?” he asked. “Your going away together, I mean?”

Kling, immersed in his thoughts, answered automatically, forgetting he was talking to a fellow cop. “Yes,” he said. “We’re in love.”

“The trouble with you,” Havilland said to Brown, “is you’re in love with your work.”

“I spend almost all my waking hours in this room,” Brown said. “It’d be a sad goddamn thing if I didn’t like what I was doing.”

“It wouldn’t be sad at all,” Havilland said. “I hate being a cop.”

“Then why don’t you quit the force?” Brown asked flatly.

“They need me too much,” Havilland said.

“Sure.”

“They do. This squad would go to pieces in a week if I wasn’t around to hold its hand.”

“Hold this a while,” Brown said.

“Crime would flourish,” Havilland continued, unfazed. “The city would be overrun by cheap thieves.”

“Roger Havilland, Protector of the People,” Brown said.

“That’s me,” Havilland confessed.

“Here, Protector,” Brown said, “take a look at this.”

“What?”

“This RKC card. How does it look to you?”

“What am I supposed to be looking for?” Havilland asked.

“A con man,” Brown said. He handed the card to Havilland.

With the casual scrutiny born of years of detective work, Havilland studied the face of the card:

“Tells me nothing,” Havilland said.

“Flip it over,” Brown told him.

Havilland turned over the card and began reading again.

“Could be,” Havilland said.

“Thing that interests me about him is that he’s a jack of all trades,” Brown said. “You get a con man, he usually sticks to one game if it’s working for him. This guy varies his game. Like the louse we got roaming the 87th. He must be pretty smooth, too, because he’s barely a kid and he only took one fall.” Brown looked at the card. “Who the hell made out this thing? It’s supposed to tell you where he was sentenced and what for.”

“What difference does it make?” Havilland asked airily.

“I like to know what I’m dealing with,” Brown said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m heading for the Hotel Carter right now to pick him up.”

The Hotel Carter was, in many respects, a very sleazy dump.

On the other hand, to those of its inhabitants who had recently arrived from skid row, it had all the glamour and impressiveness of the Waldorf Astoria. It all depended how you looked at it.

If you stood on the sidewalk at the corner of Culver Avenue and South Eleventh Street, and it happened to be raining, and you happened to be a cop out to make a pinch, the Hotel Carter looked like a very sleazy dump.

Brown sighed, pulled up the collar of his trench coat, remarked to himself silently that he looked something like a private eye, and then walked into the hotel lobby. An old man sat in a soiled easy chair looking out at the rain, remembering kisses from Marjorie Morningstar under the lilacs. The lobby smelled. Brown suspected the old man contributed to the smell. He adjusted his nostrils the way he would adjust his shoulder holster, glanced around quickly, and then walked to the desk.

The clerk watched him as he crossed the lobby. The clerk watched him carefully. An April fly, not yet feeling its summer oats, buzzed lazily around the desk. A brass spittoon at the base of the desk dripped with misaimed spittle. The smell in the lobby was a smell of slovenliness and dissolution. Brown reached the desk. He started to open his mouth.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” the desk clerk said. “We don’t take niggers.”

Brown didn’t even blink. “You don’t, huh?” he asked.

“We don’t.” The clerk was a young man, his hairline receding even though he was not yet twenty-six. He had a hawkish nose and pale-green eyes. An acne pimple festered near his right nose flap. “Nothing personal,” he said. “I only work here, and those are the orders.”

“Glad to know how you feel,” Brown said, smiling. “Trouble is, I didn’t ask.”

“Huh?” the clerk said.

“Now, you have to understand there’s nothing I’d like better than a room in this hotel. I just come up from a cotton patch down South where we fertilize our cotton with human excrement. I lived in a leaky tarpaper shack, and so you can imagine what a palace your fine, splendid hotel looks like to me. I think it would be too much for me to bear just being allowed to stay in one of your rooms. Why, just being here in the lobby is like coming close to paradise.”

“Go ahead,” the clerk said, “make wise cracks. You still don’t get a room. I’m being honest with you. You should thank me.”

“Oh, I do, I do,” Brown said. “I thank you from the bottom of my cotton-pickin’ heart. Is there a man named Frederick Deutsch registered here?”

“Who wants to know?” the clerk asked.

Brown smiled and sweetly said, “
I
want to know. Jus’ li’l ol’ cotton-pickin’ me.” He reached into his back pocket and flipped his wallet open to his shield. The clerk blinked. Brown continued smiling.

“I was only joking about the room,” the clerk said. “We got lots of Negro people staying here.”

“I’ll bet the place is just packed with them,” Brown said. “Is Deutsch registered here, or isn’t he?”

“The name don’t ring a bell,” the clerk said. “He a transient?”

“A regular,” Brown said.

“I got no Deutsches in my regulars.”

“Let’s see the list.”

“Sure, but there aint a Deutsch on it. I know my steadies by heart.”

“Let’s see it anyway, huh?” Brown said.

The clerk sighed, dug under the counter, and came up with a register. He turned it on the desktop so that Brown could see it. Rapidly, Brown ran his finger down the page.

“Who’s Frank Darren?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Frank Darren.” Brown pointed at the name. “This one.”

“Oh.” The clerk shrugged. “A guy. One of the guests.”

“How long’s he been here?”

“Couple years now, I guess. Even more than that.”

“He register as Darren when he checked in?”

“Sure.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Tall guy, kind of skinny. Blue eyes, long hair. Why?”

“He in now?”

“I think so, yeah. Why?”

“What room’s he in?”

“312,” the clerk said. “I thought you was looking for somebody named Deutsch?”

“I am,” Brown said. “Give me the key to 312.”

“What for? You need a warrant before you go busting in on—”

“If I have to go all the way home for a warrant,” Brown said levelly, “I’ll also pick up one for violation of PL 514, excluding a citizen by reason of color from the equal enjoyment of any accommodation furnished by innkeepers or—”

Hastily, the clerk handed him the key. Brown nodded and crossed to the elevator. He stabbed at the button and waited patiently while the elevator crept down to the lobby. When it opened, a blonde chambermaid stepped out of it, winking at the elevator operator.

“Three,” Brown said.

The elevator operator stared at him. “Did you see the clerk?”

“I saw the clerk, and the clerk saw me. Now, let’s cut the bull and get this car in motion.”

The elevator operator stepped back, and Brown entered the car. He leaned back against the back wall as the car climbed. Darren, of course, might very well be Darren and not Deutsch, he reasoned. But an elementary piece of police knowledge was that a man registering under a phony name—especially if his luggage, shirts, or handkerchiefs were monogrammed—would generally pick a name with the same initials as his real name. Frederick Deutsch, Frank Darren—it was worth a try. Besides, the RKC card had given this as Deutsch’s last address. Maybe the card was wrong. Or, if it was right, why hadn’t the mastermind who’d figured out where Deutsch was staying also have mentioned the fact that he was registered under an alias? Brown did not like sloppy police work. Sloppiness made him impatient. Slow elevators also made him impatient.

When they reached the third floor, he said, “Doesn’t it hurt your eardrums?”

“Doesn’t what hurt my eardrums?” the elevator operator asked.

“Breaking the sound barrier like this?” Brown said, and then he stepped into the corridor. He waited until the doors slid shut behind him. He looked at the two doors closest to him in the corridor, to ascertain which way the numbers were running, and then he turned right.

302, 304, 306, 308, 310…

He stopped outside room 312 and reached under his coat. He pulled the .38 from its shoulder rig, thumbed off the safety, and then took the key the clerk had given him and inserted it into the latch with his left hand.

Inside the room, there was sudden movement. Brown turned the key quickly and kicked open the door. There was a man on the bed, and the man was in the process of reaching for a gun that lay on the night table.

“Better leave it where it is,” Brown said.

“What is this?” the man asked. He was somewhat better looking than his photo, but not much. He looked a little older, possibly because the photo had been taken many years back when he’d been mugged and printed before his arraignment. He wore a white-on-white shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up just past his wrists, bulging with the cuff links, which had been rolled up with the material. A small monogram was on the man’s left breast pocket, the red letters FD in a black diamond.

“Put on your coat,” Brown said. “I want to talk to you back at the squad.”

“What about?”

“Swindling,” Brown said.

“You can just blow it out,” the man said.

“Can I?”

“Damn right you can. I’m as legitimate as the Virgin Mary.”

“Is that why you carry a gun?” Brown asked.

“I’ve got a permit,” the man said.

“We’ll check that back at the precinct, too.”

“Go get a warrant for my arrest,” the man said.

“I don’t need any goddamn warrant!” Brown snapped. “Now, get the hell off that bed and into your coat, or I’ll have to help you. And you won’t like my help, believe me.”

“Listen, what the hell—”

“Come on, Fritzie,” Brown said.

The man looked up sharply.

“It is Fritzie, isn’t it?” Brown asked. “Or is it Dutch?”

“My name’s Frank Darren,” the man said.

“And mine’s Peter Pan. Put on your coat.”

“You’re making a mistake, pal,” the man said. “I’ve got friends.”

“A judge?” Brown asked. “A senator? What?”

“Friends,” the man said.

“I got friends, too,” Brown said. “I got a good friend who runs a butcher shop in Diamondback. He’ll be as much help to you as your judge. Now, come on, we’re wasting time.”

The man slid off the bed. “I got nothing to hide,” he said. “You got nothing on me.”

“I hope not,” Brown said. “I hope you’re clean, and I hope you’ve got a permit for that gun, and I hope you went to confession last week. In the meantime, let’s go back to the precinct.”

“Jesus, can’t we talk here?” the man asked.

“No,” Brown said. He grinned. “They don’t allow niggers in this hotel.”

The man’s license and registration were made out to Frederick Deutsch.

Brown looked them over and said, “All right, why were you registered under an alias?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Deutsch said.

“Try me.”

“What the hell for. I’m innocent until I’m proved guilty. Is there any law against using a phony name to register in a hotel?”

“As a matter of fact,” Brown said, “it’s a misdemeanor, violation of PL 964. Use of name or address with intent to deceive.”

“I wasn’t trying to deceive anybody,” Deutsch said.

“I can get a court injunction without any proof that you’ve deceived and misled anybody.”

“So get one,” Deutsch said.

“What for? I don’t care if you use the name forever. I’d just like to know why you felt it was necessary to hide behind an alias.”

“You hit it, cop,” Deutsch said.

“If I hit it, I don’t know it,” Brown answered. “What’s the story?”

“I’m going straight,” Deutsch said.

“Hold it a minute,” Brown said. “Let me get the string quartet in here. We’re going to need violins for this one.”

“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” Deutsch said, wagging his head.

Brown studied him seriously for a moment. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“I took a fall in 1950,” Deutsch said. “I was twenty-four years old. I’d been working the confidence game since I was seventeen. First time I fell. I got off with eighteen months. On Walker Island.” Deutsch shrugged.

“So?”

“So I didn’t like it. Is that so hard to understand? I didn’t like being cooped up. Eighteen months with every kind of crazy bastard you could imagine. Queers and winos and junkies and guys
who’d ax their own mothers. Eighteen months of it. When I got out, I’d had it. I’d had it, and I didn’t want anymore of it.”

“So?”

“So I decided to play it straight. I figured I take another fall, it ain’t going to be eighteen months this time. This time it’ll be a little longer. The third time, who knows? Maybe they throw away the key. Maybe they begin to figure Fritzie Deutsch is just another guy like these queers and winos and junkies.”

“But you weren’t,” Brown said, a faint smile on his mouth.

“No, I wasn’t. I conned a lot of people, but I was a gent, and you can go to hell if you don’t believe me. Working the game was the same as having a job with me. That’s why I got so good at it.”

“I imagine it paid pretty well, too,” Brown said.

“I’m still wearing the clothes I bought when things were going good,” Deutsch said. “But what’s the percentage? A few years of good living, and the rest of my life cooped up with slobs? Is that what I wanted? That’s what I asked myself. So I decided to straighten out.”

“I’m listening.”

“It ain’t so easy,” Deutsch said, sighing. “Guys don’t want excons working for them. I know that sounds corny as hell. I see it in a lot of movies, even. Where Robert Taylor or somebody can’t get a job because he once was a con. Only, of course, with him, it’s like he was a con by mistake. You know, he took the fall when he was really clean. Anyway, it’s true. It’s tough to get a job when you got a record. They make a few phone calls, and they find out Fritzie Deutsch done time...Well, so long Fritzie, it’s been nice knowing you.”

“So you assumed the Frank Darren alias, is that right?”

“Yeah,” Deutsch said.

“And you’ve got a job now?”

“I work in a bank.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m a guard.” Deutsch looked up quickly to see if Brown was smiling. Brown was not. “That’s how come I’ve got a permit for the gun,” Deutsch added. “I ain’t snowing you. That’s one thing you can check.”

“We can check a lot of things,” Brown said. “What bank do you work for?”

“You going to tell them my real name?” Deutsch asked. A sudden fear had come into his eyes, and he put his hand on Brown’s arm, and the fingers there were tense and tight.

“No,” Brown said.

“First National. The Mason Avenue branch.”

“I’ll check that, and I’ll check the permit,” Brown said. “But there’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“I want some mooches to meet you.”

“What for? I ain’t conned anybody since—”

“They may think differently. If you’re clean, you won’t mind them looking you over.”

“At the lineup? Jesus, do I have to go to the lineup?”

“No. I’ll ask the victims to come down here.”

“I’m clean,” Deutsch said. “I got nothing to worry about. It’s just I hate the lineup.”