The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  Felix and Cooper eventually fell asleep, but Norfleet could not afford to relax his guard. Like a hunter in the woods, he set up a blind to spot his enemies before they saw him. He placed a chair at the end of his bed, which stretched lengthwise behind the door. He sat in the chair with his right side against the wall, allowing him to survey the entire room and the door and concealing the death grip he had on the revolver strapped to his right hip. All through the night, Norfleet watched for the unknown, monitoring the room and his own paranoia. When the tension and fatigue threatened to break his concentration, he knocked his head against the wall or stood and quietly paced. When one of his friends awakened, he says he threw himself forward on the bed and pretended to sleep, his right hand burrowing the gun under the pillow. It is, admittedly, difficult to picture.

  Norfleet watched morning arrive with bloodshot eyes. If there was any benefit to be had from the situation, he thought to himself, it was that his haggard appearance supported his story of ill health. Felix and Cooper inquired about his tooth, but Norfleet knew that they only cared if he was well enough to carry out their scheme. Norfleet accordingly recalibrated his pain. He was suffering too much to eat, but by all means, gentlemen, let them proceed with business!

  Cooper stepped out to retrieve the telegram they had been awaiting, and when he returned, his face had gone sour. His rich uncle was in Mexico, out of reach. Felix’s Liberty Bonds would only cover half of the money. On cue, Norfleet pulled out the letter from his wife. Cooper, his voice at once smooth and commanding, suggested that perhaps Norfleet might conduct his business by telegram and the whole affair might be concluded in just a few days. Norfleet deferred entirely to his friend and sat down to write, in big, loopy script, a message to his fictitious wife. Cooper sent the telegram, and the game was on.

  For the rest of the day, Felix, Cooper, and Norfleet continued this courtly masquerade with the deadly undertow. Felix and Cooper pretended to be Norfleet’s friends, finding yet more creative ways to make his captivity feel like pampering. Norfleet pretended to trust his friends unconditionally, all the while forgoing food and sleep, nursing his spurious toothache, and clutching his concealed revolver. Under the direst strain, none of the three actors broke character. Later, Norfleet attested to the monumental effort that lay behind his impersonation of the gullible farmer. “It was a mad fight against hunger, sleep and these murderous wolves.” His feigned neuralgia took the greatest toll on him. “Had the suggestion produced the genuine malady,” he wrote, “it would have been more easily borne than the constant struggle to simulate pain and suffering.”

  Yet he had many reasons to congratulate himself for his toothache as he pretended to await his wife’s bank draft. That day it seemed as if all of Denver’s underworld passed through the hotel room. Again and again, a secret code was knocked onto the door—two loud raps, then two quiet ones—and it opened to reveal yet another swindler, stopping by to check out the newest mark and ensure he was not a plant. Norfleet remained shielded behind the door, his hands cupping his throbbing jaw to delay recognition, his eyes hurriedly scanning his visitors’ faces and matching them up to his mental database. He did not fear spotting a swindler whom he knew. He was confident that he could pull his gun out faster than any fancy talker. In fact, his hope bloomed anew each time the door opened that the man he had trailed to Denver would walk through.

  No, his greatest fear was that now that his notoriety had spread throughout the criminal world, he would be recognized by someone he didn’t know. His entire life now rested on the meager disguise afforded by his phantom pain. The irony was that Norfleet didn’t actually have a tooth left in his head. In one version of his story—but only one—he claimed that he had pulled all his teeth out at the beginning of his manhunt in favor of false teeth, which he could pop in and out to alter his appearance in an instant.

  Norfleet knew that his grace period was dwindling. If he did not receive a letter from Mrs. Mulligan, he would have called his own bluff, and the searching glances would become far more penetrating. His only chance of rescue was decisive action—but what? He paced past the telephone he was not allowed to use to dial the district attorney’s secret number. He eyed the satchel at the foot of Felix’s bed which was stuffed with a “small artillery” that he found no opportunity to sabotage. The hotel stationery lying on the desk gave him an idea. He sat down to write to Mrs. Mulligan back in Ferris, making a point to borrow a stamp from Felix and seal the letter before his eyes. Later, in the bathroom, he loudly splashed his feet in the tub while he flushed his wife’s letter down the toilet and wrote another one to Van Cise, giving him as many details of his location as he could and ending with: “If I am bumped off before you can get to me this is my true statement.”

  That afternoon, Felix drove Norfleet to the post office to check for remittances from his wife. Robert Maiden was on duty, and he saw a Cadillac pull up to the post office, with Norfleet and Felix in the front seat. Maiden saw what Norfleet did not: Felix gave the office to a man standing at the window of a hotel across the street. That man in turn signaled to a large man standing just outside, and they both headed inside the post office. Maiden’s senses bristled at the danger, and he hurried into the post office, watching the two men watching Norfleet and Felix. He saw Norfleet hobble his way to the M window at the general delivery counter and call for his mail, the large man directly behind him in line. Norfleet was able to slip Van Cise’s letter into the outgoing slot without Felix noticing. Maiden saw all four men exit the post office and the mustached man whisk Norfleet away in the Cadillac.

  Back in the hotel room, the clock ticked implacably through his hunger, his maddening fatigue, and his phony toothache. Norfleet found himself near his breaking point. And just like that, he would later say, the solution came to him. Wildly, he announced that he could not stand it anymore. In a matter of seconds, he convinced them to take him to the nearest dentist, just a few blocks away from their hotel. At the reception desk, Norfleet’s plan brought instant dividends. “Name?” inquired the receptionist. “L. A. Mulligan.” “Address?” Norfleet cast about confusedly; “310—310—Oh! where do we live boys?” he asked his companions. Felix and Cooper faltered, until finally Cooper said reluctantly, “Er—er—Hotel Metropole.”

  A few more seconds, and Norfleet was on the phone to the district attorney, relaying his precise address and room number. He had barricaded himself in an examining room with the dentist and secured his complicity before making the secret phone call. Lying back in the chair amid the steel instruments and the enamel sink, carefully staying in character, and speaking elliptically lest his end of the conversation be overheard, Norfleet helped Van Cise plot the ambush of the largest ring of confidence artists in the country.

  The dentist turned out to be an ace improviser. He led Norfleet back out to the waiting room as if escorting a dying man to his grave. Felix and Cooper asked if he had managed to fix Norfleet’s tooth. No, said the dentist grimly, his condition was so dire he would need to come back later in the evening for another treatment, and he’d phone Norfleet at the next opening in his schedule. As they returned to the hotel, Norfleet noticed two men nonchalantly talking in the lobby; Van Cise had acted quickly. One of the men pressed the elevator button for Norfleet and turned to meet his eye. Norfleet rose up to the third floor a little safer than when he had left it.

  But the outing had made Felix and Cooper nervous in direct proportion to Norfleet’s internal relief. Sensing that their hermetic seal on the situation had begun to leak, they rounded on Norfleet and demanded to know when he might expect word from his wife. Norfleet mumbled and stalled. Felix and Cooper furiously gestured behind his back and came to a wordless consensus. Pulling out a Colorado and Southern rail schedule, they selected a midnight train to Ferris. Surely Norfleet would be well enough by then to travel back home with them and conclude the land lease in person. Behind his cupped hand, letting his misery gush out as the pantomime of pain, Norfleet assented. His window
of rescue had just contracted to mere hours.

  The phone rang and the dentist summoned Norfleet back to his office. Norfleet assumed his position in the dental chair, and at the welcome sound of Van Cise’s voice on the line he poured out the sorry details of his plight. He beseeched to know how soon before midnight the DA’s men could spring him loose. Van Cise crisply outlined a rescue plan: the deputies who would act without the knowledge of the Denver Police Department, the Rangers on their motorcycles, the church that would sacrilegiously be pressed into service as a holding pen for the con men on their way to the county jail. It would all go down, he told Norfleet, at six o’clock the next morning. If, he added, the Colorado Rangers made it back from the coalfields in time. Norfleet must find a way to forestall his journey without exciting a modicum of suspicion. His companions must be in that hotel room the next morning, and they must not be on guard. Van Cise ever so gently tightened the pressure on Norfleet. “Don’t let them kill my men!” he barked.

  Next, the district attorney gave marching orders to the dentist: “Norfleet must give all the appearance of a suffering patient. Dump everything in the shop on his tooth and mouth so you can smell it for a block and fix it up swell.” Cooperative to the last, the dentist administered a pharmacy’s worth of unmarked drugs to his healthy patient and turned him loose.

  Norfleet stumbled down the dark city street between his two companions, headed for the train station despite his protestation that his condition had worsened since his two dental treatments. In just minutes, his years of hunting, his weeks of preparation, and his days of unrelieved agony would be for naught as he sped away from the only people who knew his true identity and could release him from his disguise. Surreptitiously, he leaned down and sniffed from a vial the dentist had given him. As he would tell it later, “Large cramps wrapped their arms about my stomach and bent me over. I gloried in being able to act natural for the first time in nearly a week.” He vomited prodigiously, staggered, and keeled over in a dead faint, the first time his eyes had closed in two nights. When he came to, he saw the dour faces of Felix and Cooper hovering above him, and he heard the whistle of the train departing for Texas without them.

  The three men trudged back to the Hotel Metropole, Felix and Cooper in bitter disappointment, Norfleet in utter dread at the night awaiting him. But he had come this far, and his native stubbornness and resourcefulness did not desert him. For the third night in a row, Norfleet began his dance of wakefulness as Felix innocently slept and Cooper spent the night elsewhere. He paced, he knocked his head into the wall, he doused his head in hot and cold water. But the bodily mortifications of the past days had accumulated, and he could feel his consciousness disobediently slipping away from him. Norfleet had one desperate, stupid, brilliant trick up his sleeve. He ducked into the bathroom and sprinkled tobacco leaves into his eyes. “In an instant I thought my head had hit the ceiling!” he wrote in his memoir. “Water gushed from both eyes and daggers pinned my quivering eyeballs to the back of my head. I was awake!” He had nothing left to do but watch the clock and wonder who would enter the door the next morning.

  Meanwhile, as Norfleet tortured himself, Van Cise convened a meeting of all the Rangers, veterans, and detectives at the home of Roy Samson. Beginning at seven o’clock that night, they made a list of all the swindlers they’d identified through surveillance and mug shots, then mapped the offices and watering holes where the bunco men congregated, and choreographed the raids at each locale. They finished at two o’clock, and each man headed home for a few hours’ sleep before reconvening at six o’clock in the morning at the First Universalist Church. The first sortie would be to room 310 in the Metropole to arrest Leon Felix and Arthur Cooper and rescue Norfleet. Van Cise reminded his men of the swindlers’ secret knock.

  Two loud knocks, then two soft ones. Leon Felix blearily lifted his head from the pillow, saw Norfleet still asleep, and rose to open the door. In came the muzzles of two guns, followed by Detective Kenneth Robinson and a Ranger in plain clothes. As Norfleet sat up in bed and beamed, Robinson said calmly, “Put your hands up, you’re under arrest,” and handcuffed Felix. “Davis,” Norfleet asked, “do you know who I am?” In Norfleet’s account, when Felix heard Norfleet’s true identity, he “jumped about a foot into the air, let out a yell and keeled over on the bed in a dead faint.” Van Cise’s version is simpler: “ ‘My God!’ said Felix, falling back upon the bed.”

  While Norfleet and his rescuers waited for Cooper to arrive, Norfleet devoured the two chicken sandwiches that Robinson’s wife had sent along. Robinson phoned the church and told Van Cise, “The weather’s fine.” About an hour later, Cooper gave the secret knock. Norfleet opened the door with his left hand, keeping his right hand hidden until Cooper was through the door, then jabbed his gun into Cooper’s stomach. Cooper responded with far greater resignation than his colleague and refused to say a word after he’d been handcuffed. Much later, a fellow swindler would tell Van Cise that Cooper had never wanted to pick up Norfleet and had even offered to bet $1,000 that Norfleet was “wrong” because he seemed so jumpy and would whip his head around to the door at the slightest noise. Now Robinson called Van Cise and said, “Number Two party ready to go to church.” Van Cise told him, “Wait an hour for other worshipers, then come in.”

  While they waited, Robinson, Norfleet, and the Ranger inventoried the two men’s belongings and confiscated every scrap of paper, from the blank record slips of the International Exchange to a small black memo book that listed Cooper’s debts and credits with his fellow spielers. Cooper’s pockets also held several hundred dollars in cash, a platinum watch, and other jewelry. As Robinson began to write a receipt for each item, Cooper spoke up for the first time. “There is no need of mentioning that diamond stickpin in the receipt. You have included plenty without it,” and he gestured toward the three-carat jewel that had first caught Norfleet’s eye outside the capitol. Robinson ignored the offer. In Felix’s bags, they found a small quantity of opium.

  In the late morning, a car arrived at the Metropole to transport the prisoners and wardens to their holy jail. The car slipped into a small alley behind the church, and the three men led the prisoners into a back door, out of sight of the haughty residents of the neighborhood and anyone passing by who might be inclined to notify the underworld grapevine. Though Felix and Cooper were the first two arrests of the day, by the time they arrived at the church, another twenty men had been apprehended.

  Prisoner number three had been Kid Duff, whom Roy Samson quietly arrested as he left his apartment to walk to the Lookout, just after Robinson phoned to say that Norfleet’s men were in bracelets. “By God,” Duff exclaimed, when Samson flashed his badge and his gun, “your District Attorney isn’t going to get away with this! If he thinks he can pick up a reputable businessman on the street and arrest him this way, I will show him what’s what.” Samson ignored him, and once they arrived at the church, he cut through the businessman’s masquerade by reaching into Duff’s inside pocket to collect his personal effects. He pulled out a list of names, and after one glance at it he raced upstairs to show it to Van Cise.

  The list was a perfect copy of the one that Van Cise had drawn up the night before, which he’d completed just a few hours prior to Duff’s arrest. Duff’s version was not a carbon copy, but a typewritten copy of the first page of Van Cise’s two-page document, with most of the sixty-five names that the district attorney’s crew had identified. Van Cise and his assistant Fred Sanborn were electrified by what the list’s almost instantaneous transmission implied about Blonger’s organization. Sanborn recalled that, while he and a deputized veteran had waited in the car for Duff to emerge from his apartment, they’d seen an under sheriff drive by and, upon spotting Sanborn, wave, circle the block, and return the way he’d come. Van Cise brushed aside the details for the time being. He was far too confident in his own men to suspect a leak. All he knew was that if his men had waited but a few minutes more, Duff would have broadcast the
ir intentions to the entire conglomerate. It was now time to crumple up their carefully wrought plan. “Shoot the works and don’t wait for Blonger’s arrest,” he told his team. “Hustle on every con-man in town, before they light out on us.”

  Fred Sanborn had been detailed to hook Blonger, and he’d been waiting outside the Kentom Apartments all morning, planning to trail Blonger to the American Bank Building so he could arrest him inside his office and seize its contents. But Blonger had spent the night with his mistress and arrived at his office undetected. Fortunately, Van Cise still had someone listening to the Dictaphone, and word soon reached Sanborn that his quarry was ready for his big moment. Sanborn entered room 309 with two other men and said, “The District Attorney wants to see you at once, Mr. Blonger,” then he watched as Blonger silently took down one of the two coats on his coatrack and moved to close the roll-top desk at which he’d been sitting. Like the greenest of marks, Blonger had just telegraphed to Sanborn the location of his most incriminating document. Sanborn searched the coat still hanging on the coatrack to find a small bank-deposit book showing a balance of $10,000. What interested Sanborn was that Blonger also used it as an address book. The penciled names and phone numbers (“Randle York 3201,” “Duff Champa 2074,” “Lookout Champa 7453”) materially tied Blonger to the lower corps of his organization, providing precisely the link Van Cise had hoped to find between the ropers and spielers who’d been observed in the act of swindling and the boss who never spoke to them. Blonger did not protest as he was led out of the office.