“Sounds like you did just perfect, Jennings,” I told him.
“You and me should work together more, Mr. Caine,” he grinned, adding more cream to his cup of coffee. I’d had that thought myself more than once this year. Maybe after we got back to Kansas City….
When I walked Jennings back to the hotel, I stopped at the front desk to check for messages. The clerk handed me a note someone else had written:
Please contact me as soon as you can. Nathan
I walked over to the house phone, dialed the bank, and had myself put through to Nathan.
“Nathan Caine speaking.”
“I got your message. What’s up?”
“It’s Myers and Wiedermann,” Nathan said, sounding nervous. “They took the afternoon off today.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes. They simply walked into my office and told me they had some business to take care of and that they wouldn’t be back today. They were quite arrogant about it.”
“That’s not good.”
“They also asked me to contact Mr. Shaw and tell him to meet them at three o’clock this afternoon.” I scribbled down the address Nathan gave me.
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Myers said ‘Tell Mr. Shaw not to be late.’ And then they simply walked out. Just like that.”
It was five minutes to three when I stepped inside the anonymous saloon at the very edge of a decent neighborhood. The place was all but empty, one bartender practically napping behind the bar and maybe two old drunks. A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, barely disturbing the dust floating in the shaft of sunlight coming through the front window. Whatever was brewing, the two men I was to meet had wanted to pick some place inconspicuous, some place their peers wouldn’t be likely to run into them.
There at a round wooden table in the far corner were Myers and Wiedermann, the latter smoking a fat cigar. They sat next to a big guy in shabby clothes, some cheap hired thug who was either trying to stare me down or hold in his wind. I walked up to the table with my hands in my pockets.
“What’s all this?” I asked. Wiedermann looked me up at down, taking in my expensive duds and my new shoes, catching the glints of gold from my watch and pinky ring. I’d been dressing like this for what seemed so long I hadn’t even thought of changing for this meeting. I should have.
“Little change of plan, Mr. Shaw,” said Wiedermann, sounding full of himself.
“Change of plan,” agreed Myers.
“You see,” Wiedermann again, “I had an interesting little chat with Mr. Ferrier the other day. It seems you have to rely on a forger to get your federal identification these days, Mr. Shandle.” Wiedermann pretended to be confused. “Or is it Shaw, like it says on the driver’s license you also got from Ferrier? Mighty peculiar, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would,” chimed in Myers.
I was half-listening to them, concentrating more on the thug in my periphery. He was cheap goods and that was a fact. Big and bulky, yes, but even low-rent mob torpedoes aren’t allowed to be seen on the street dressed that shabbily. These two bankers had started talking, first to each other and then to Ferrier. They figured they had my number, so they’d walked into some pool hall or gone to the track and given a tenspot to the first oversized gorilla who was broke and sober enough to be looking for his next drink.
“We don’t know who you are,” Wiedermann said. “And we don’t care to know. What we do know is you’re going to get on a bus or a train, get the hell out of town, and never darken our door again. Otherwise…” he glanced to his right, “you’ll have to take things up with Mr. Braughton here.”
The thug’s eyebrows raised a fraction. At least he knew his name. He snorted once, no doubt in derision at the rich dandy in imported clothing standing in front of him. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, sighing inwardly. I had real problems to deal with. Still, to be fair, this was my fault. I’d ignored Myers and Wiedermann for too long now, let them build their courage back up. Well, I could fix that.
“So that’s how it is, is it?”
“That’s how it is.” Wiedermann took a puff from his cigar and leisurely blew a smoke ring.
“Let me ask you one thing,” I said, picking up the heavy glass candle bowl from the table top. I turned it over and looked at the bottom. “Do you have any idea where this was made?”
Myers and Wiedermann looked at one another, trying to figure what I was getting at.
“Neither do I.” I brought the candle bowl down in the center of the thug’s face and broke his nose, then jabbed him hard in the throat with it. Blood was pouring down his face as I put my palms on his cheeks, wrapping my fingers around his ears and giving them a good, solid yank. My thumbs found his eyelids. I applied just enough pressure to make him let out a yelp, then leaned in close to one ear.
“Back to the pool hall, rummy!” I hissed. “I see you again, I’ll hurt you for real.”
The thug rose from the table with an effort, almost blinded from eyes watering with pain, and shambled as quickly as he could out the door. I put my hands back in my pockets and looked casually back at Myers and Wiedermann, who were paler now than I’d ever seen them. I don’t enjoy hurting people, but the thug was big and he’d heal just fine. If I’d given him half a chance at a fair fight, it would have been a case of having to hurt him a lot worse or get busted up myself. And people believe what they see. Myers and Wiedermann had just seen a man make short work of their insurance without breaking a sweat.
I ran a hand over my face tiredly and sat down.
“No, don’t get up,” I said tiredly. “I’ll tell you when you can leave.” Neither man had moved, but now each was scared thinking the other had.
“Either of you two ever hear of Lon Kruger?” They shook their heads. “About six-foot-six and over two hundred and eighty pounds. Biceps as big around as my damn leg and enough hair on his back alone to make two Indian blankets. Murdered his whole family with a pair of scissors seventeen years ago. And every day since then he’s been in a prison cell. He’s given up all hope of ever seeing a woman again. However,” I glanced at Wiedermann, “he still likes brunettes, fat boy.
“Now any ordinary day, a fella breaking his solemn oath with me, well, you’d already be sharing that same cell with Kruger, and doing your goddamnedest to make yourself pretty for him so he wouldn’t hurt you any worse.” Wiedermann was sweating so badly now I could have put the cigar out on his forehead.
“Lucky for you two I’m busy these days,” I continued in the same lackadaisical tone. “I’ve put a lot of effort into my plans and I don’t have time to put out more working around you two jerks. It would put me behind schedule, and I hate being behind schedule.”
Both men seemed plenty scared, but I’d made that mistake before. I calmly took the cigar out of Wiedermann’s hand, then grabbed him by the tie and yanked him forward, holding the lit end of the stogie an inch or two from his left eye for a second.
“What’s your favorite eye, Wiedermann? Right or left?”
“Please.” He shut his eyes tight and you could barely hear him.
After another few seconds I let him go. He slumped back in his chair and I took out a cigarette, lighting it from the end of the cigar.
“Not that it concerns you two small fry,” I puffed, “but I have plans for your Mr. Ferrier as well. Those documents I collected from him are what we in the law enforcement profession refer to as ‘evidence’. Maybe you two geniuses have heard of that concept before.
“Point is, this is your last last chance. My offer’s still good. You play ball with me, you walk. But if either of you ever tries to pull a stunt like this again–”
“We won’t!” They said it almost in perfect unison.
“Don’t interrupt me. If you ever try this again, you’ll be locked up inside of five minutes, and you’ll stay locked up, from city to county to state to federal, while your lawyers make noise, take your money, and forget about you.
And just as soon as I can arrange it, you’ll be sharing a cell with Lon Kruger, playing house with that burly, hairy, sweaty psychopath until he gets tired of you and you wake up one morning with a pair of scissors in your neck.”
I turned to Myers again. “That goes for you both of you. You’re a team now. This joker does something and you don’t know about it, tough. Kruger will still be able to add bigamy to his list of crimes. You both catching my drift on this?”
They assured me they were.
“This is the last time we have this conversation. I mean the very last.”
I stood up and walked out.
I stepped into Ferrier’s back office noisily enough for him to look up from his work table. Without a word I dumped his two-hundred-dollar printing machine onto the floor where it hit with a loud smash, rollers and cogs and gears scattering across the linoleum. Then I stomped across to his filing cabinet and found his gun, taking out the magazine and clearing the chamber before dumping it back in the drawer. I took the shell from the chamber, walked over to Ferrier, grabbed him roughly by the hair, and forced it into his mouth. I took out my Colt and pressed it against his forehead. My voice was low and cold.
“Swallow it.”
He stared at me, his eyes wide.
“Five, four, three…”
He swallowed. It would do him no harm, of course, but there’s something about making a man swallow a bullet.
“My business with you is private. You don’t talk to bankers, you don’t talk to a living soul about it. It ever happens again, you’ll eat another bullet, one that’ll be coming a hell of a lot faster.”
I let go of his hair and he slumped back, his shoulders drooping like he was too exhausted even to shrug.
I walked out.
Penny was waiting for me at our spot at the hotel lounge, along with the Campari and soda she’d ordered for me. I sent it back for a scotch over ice. Kelly Shaw might be a fan of Campari, but Devlin Caine had had a rough day. After leaving Ferrier’s print shop, I’d found a drugstore and called Nathan.
“It’s all sorted out,” I told him. “Myers and Wiedermann will be back in tomorrow, on time and probably with an apology. Try to keep them busy, won’t you?”
“I’ll do my best with whatever I can trust them with these days. But what if they leave again?”
“I really don’t think they will, but let me know the minute I’m wrong.”
“Don’t I usually?”
I snorted into the phone reflexively. Nathan making a joke had caught me off guard.
“Hang in there,” I told him. “Everything is on schedule and it shouldn’t be much longer.”
The waitress brought me my scotch and I took that first cool sip. Kelly Shaw was a Nancy Boy, I decided, if he preferred Campari to this. I realized that, when I wasn’t actually being Shaw, I tended to think of him as a real but separate person. Probably happens to a lot of cons, I figured. I put the question to Penny.
“Oh sure,” she said. “I mean, first off, you have to make the character real, believable. How you gonna make the mark believe in him if you don’t? And you play a part long enough, over time you naturally find yourself building the character up more. Thinking about what he likes to eat, where he goes to church, what his family’s like.”
“Probably the same with actors,” I said.
“Probably,” she agreed.
I knew from my time at Pinkerton’s that it wasn’t just the character. There came a point in big confidence games where the con man had to believe it himself. Only way to sell it. I don’t mean like self-hypnosis – there’s always a part of you that knows what’s real and what isn’t – but there are moments when the con actually does con himself, makes himself think that whatever he’s doing is really as he’s presenting it to the mark. It’s hard to explain, but I realized now how often over the last several days I’d been thinking as Kelly Shaw. About my summer house and my closet full of imported suits and even about the building I was going to buy. Christ, I was even catching glimpses in my mind of the faces of my partners who didn’t exist, the ones who were going in on this building with me. It started as just making sure I had the details right, but damn if it hadn’t started to feel real. I ran this by Penny, too.
“Sure,” she said. “You can’t live in a world every day without it becomes real to you after awhile. No matter how many times you pat yourself on the back for being clever or make fun of the mark who’s only getting what’s coming to him, you still gotta live with yourself. And the more real you make that world, the easier it is to do that.”
And I realized how dangerous that could be, coming to believe in your own lies. Oh sure, people do it all the time, one way or another. But in the game I was playing, that seemed like a quick way to blind yourself to dangers on the horizon. Of course, at the other extreme, if you thought of yourself as some big-time operator who knew all the angles, thought you were too sharp ever to get off course, you could be blinded that way, too. How the hell do people do this for a career? I wondered. Without ending up half crazy?
“You make it to the bank?” I asked Penny.
“Sure did, lover.” She opened her purse and handed me a cashier’s check for the amount of twenty thousand dollars. I put it in my coat pocket with the cashier’s check for ten thousand I’d picked up on my way to see Jennings.
I stared at Penny for a moment until she started laughing.
“You thought I was gonna make off with the twenty gees and never come back?”
“I wondered,” I smiled lazily, downing another drink of scotch.
Chapter Nineteen: A Mobster Takes Offense
Tuesday morning I met Stanton at the little diner across from First Quality Investors, the same diner I’d used to stake out the phony brokerage office the day I saw Myers and Wiedermann get taken. It occurred to me that had been a Tuesday also, and I hoped this one went better. Stanton did his best to hide his disappointment that I was bringing him only thirty thousand dollars, and in the form of two cashier’s checks instead of cash. I explained that I had to cover the forty thousand that had been stolen from my hotel suite, which meant I had to divert funds from another deal. Reminding Stanton of the stolen money also made it easy to convince him that I was no longer comfortable carrying large sums of cash around this city.
“It just holds me up a day or two, that’s all,” I told Stanton, assuring him that I was still wanting to invest half a million dollars with him this week. “Handle this for me today,” I instructed, gesturing at the two checks in his hand, “and we’ll do the rest Thursday and Friday. Two checks each, just like today. One investment in the morning, the other in the afternoon. I don’t want to go over a hundred thousand for any single investment. That way, if my partners find out, it won’t look like I’m stashing cash.”
“These other four checks will also be cashier’s checks?” Stanton inquired.
“They will. I’d rather not use any checks with my name on them for this. In fact, you mentioned that the investments needn’t necessarily be made in my name?”
“There are numerous ways we can work around that, Mr. Shaw,” Stanton assured me. “All of them perfectly legal.”
“Mr. Stanton, would it be asking too much for you to handle the investments personally? To purchase the shares yourself at the window? In your name? I know you’re a busy man and all, and that you don’t like your competitors to see what you’re buying, but–”
“I’d be happy to take care of it for you, Mr. Shaw.” That Stanton was a prince. “Besides,” he added with a slight smile, “the stocks I’ll be putting your money into aren’t related to the larger investments I’m working on. If any of my competitors do observe me making the purchases for you, it’s very likely to give them a false impression. Help throw them off my scent, as it were.”
I smiled in return. “Sounds like it works out well for both of us.”
We made arrangements for Stanton to stop by my hotel tomorrow evening for a late supper. He could b
ring me the receipts for the stock he’d purchase today – they’d be in his name, he explained, but I’d at least have the dates, numbers of shares, and prices – and the two of us could relax and talk about the remaining investments for later in the week. The receipts would be as worthless as every prop in that phony brokerage office, of course, but he didn’t know I knew that.
Stanton was pretty happy when I left him. He’d be even happier this afternoon when he rushed off to the bank and cashed those checks, which were both perfectly good. Thirty thousand dollars’ real money. Money I’d never be able to pay back on my own. Now my plan had to work.
That afternoon I was seated in the hotel suite where I’d first met Agent Mattling and assorted fellows from his and other government agencies. Straker had telephoned me at the Lord Baltimore and asked if I could come around for a visit. The fact was, I needed to speak to Mattling again, but I let Straker keep believing the notion was all his. Of course, being Straker, he’d have kept believing that if the Almighty Himself had set up the meeting.
The suite was empty save for Mattling, Straker, and myself. We sat around the low table, a glass of bourbon and water over ice for Mattling and me, and plain seltzer for Straker. There was a lot I wanted to ask Mattling, but I still wasn’t sure how far I could trust him. I knew how far I could trust Straker.
Mattling leaned back comfortably in his chair, his drink untouched, his bland face appraising me for a moment before he spoke.
“Mr. Straker tells me you might be interested in coming to work for the Bureau.”
I picked up my glass and thought over possible answers to this. Four whole seconds passed before Straker butted in.
“Come now, Dev, no need to be shy with Agent Mattling. I can tell you, he’s a man who appreciates real talent.” Either Mattling was too bored to roll his eyes or he’d been long enough in Straker’s company to learn to tune the man out.
A Shared Confidence Page 25