A Shared Confidence

by William Topek

  “I’ll put it this way,” I hedged. “I’m not the kind of man to rule out anything, not during times like these.”

  “Practical attitude,” Mattling observed.

  “Agent Mattling and I have been batting it around,” Straker said. “I think we’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion. If you’re able to help us with the Stanton case, well, that would really give Agent Mattling something to sell to his superiors in terms of taking you on in a more permanent fashion, so to speak.” Most people would risk tearing something trying to sound deferential and arrogant at the same time. Straker’d been doing it so long he probably didn’t even notice.

  I looked at Mattling and shrugged. “I’m still keeping Stanton on the line, playing the mark for him like we talked about.”

  “Giarelli hasn’t scared him into hiding yet?” Mattling asked it almost casually.

  “Not so far.”

  “You must have fashioned a pretty tempting lure for him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They say never try to con a con,” Straker chuckled. “So naturally, that’d be your first instinct, wouldn’t it, Dev?” He turned to Mattling. “He’s innovative, Agent Mattling. You have to give him that. And frankly, I think innovation is something the Bureau could use a bit more of, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.” Mattling pardoned Straker by ignoring him.

  “Here’s my situation, Mr. Caine,” Mattling began. “We need to catch Stanton at something big, something he’d definitely serve time for. That’s the only thing that will appease Senator Cumberland. Tracking Stanton’s every petty con just keeps us all at this for months while we wait to collect enough small stuff to put together. And frankly, some of us have more important work we need to be getting back to.”

  I appreciated Mattling laying it out for me like this, but this was still going to take some delicate handling.

  “Much as I want to help the F.B.I., Agent Mattling, I was hired by a paying client to do a job and, well, there are some professional ethics involved here.”

  “I’m afraid that’s our fault,” Straker grinned smugly. “We really drill that into our boys at Pinkerton’s, the importance of maintaining the highest ethical standards at all times. Of course,” he added, his voice dropping as he looked at me (Straker’s idea of a subtle hint), “nothing must take second place to upholding the law. Pinkerton’s history of lending assistance to law enforcement when and where needed is unsurpassed.” As is Pinkerton’s history of lending assistance to private companies with labor problems, I thought, but that was another story. Straker always spoke like a public relations man when he wanted to impress someone, which was most of the time. He’d have been better off sitting in an office and typing out press releases, but there’s no prestige in that, and you don’t get to tell other people what to do.

  Mattling politely asked Straker to give us a few minutes alone. Straker rose from his chair, patting me on the arm on his way out and saying, “Listen to what this man has to say, Dev. He can help your career.” Mattling and I looked at each other in silence for a moment, a silence he was clearly happy to have me break for him.

  “How are things going with Giarelli?” I asked.

  “We’re watching him,” he shrugged. “Not much more I can tell you than that. He causing you any problems?”

  “Not so far. Are you hoping to get Stanton out of the way first to give you a clearer field of fire at Giarelli? Or the other way around?”

  “Either works for us,” Mattling said. “We’ll take what comes.” Something wasn’t adding up right. Mattling told me the other night in my hotel suite that all the F.B.I. really cared about was nailing Giarelli, that they’d been dragged into this federal posse formed by Senator Cumberland and that they didn’t want Giarelli to get away while they were busying themselves with a simple con man. But Mattling didn’t seem all that worried about such a possibility now. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask him a lot about it without tipping too much of my own hand.

  “So what’s your plan with Stanton?” Mattling asked.

  “I’m trying to get some of my client’s money back,” I answered truthfully.

  “How much money?”

  “I’m shooting for two hundred thou.”

  “Pretty big score. How do you plan to pull that off?”

  “Haven’t quite got the details worked out yet,” I told him.

  He nodded stoically, took a drink.

  “You’re hoping,” I surmised, “that what I’m doing is big enough for you to haul Stanton in. Make him do some real time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not sure how that would work,” I admitted. “I mean, if I’m the one taking money from Stanton instead of the other way around…” I let the sentence trail off. “I sure as hell don’t want to go to jail for employing a confidence scheme.”

  “I’m not even sure there is any law against conning a con man, Mr. Caine,” Mattling said, which was hooey. That’s like saying there’s no law against robbing robbers or murdering murderers.

  Mattling kept staring at me, not hard, not soft, just staring.

  “There’s some other reason you’re holding back on playing ball with us.” It was a statement.

  “I’m worried about what happens if I do. I do all this work for my client, and the money I’m trying to collect for him gets seized as evidence. He’d likely never see it again.”

  “Your client seems perfectly willing to cooperate with us.” I knew Mattling was talking about Ethan Ryland, and I damn sure wanted him to keep thinking Ryland was my client. I didn’t need the feds to know about my brother’s embezzlement problems. “Besides,” Mattling continued, “we’re after Stanton, not the money. Hell, maybe the money just disappears before we move in and nobody ever knows what happened to it.”

  “You want Stanton more than Giarelli?” I prodded.

  “Separate cases,” he said flatly. “We want them both.”

  I took a drink, thinking of all the things I wanted to ask but didn’t dare.

  “How do you have a case against Stanton if you can’t prove money changed hands?” I asked.

  “We don’t always need to show the money to a judge to prove money changed hands. We have some of the brightest accountants in the country working for us, Mr. Caine. That’s not our weak side.”

  “What is your weak side, Agent Mattling? What do you really want from me?”

  Mattling took a pull from his drink, put it down on the table, leaned forward, and told me, in a few simple sentences and with Straker out of the room, exactly what he really wanted.

  I thought it over for a moment. “And you’d need me as a witness after the fact, I guess?”

  “A sworn deposition from a private detective recruited by the Bureau, attesting to the salient facts, yes, we’d need that. I don’t see that we’d have to drag you all the way back out here to give testimony in court.”

  Mattling picked up his drink and leaned back in his seat again, taking another swallow. “I don’t know that we’d even have to give the detective’s actual identity. We have a lot of latitude these days in our pursuit of lawbreakers.” I wondered if that thought scared Mattling as much as it did me.

  Mattling’s request had been straightforward. And in exchange for my help, he was basically telling me I could run my own con against Stanton, keep the money for my client, swear to a written statement that didn’t even have to include my name, and breeze on back home. Even in the unlikely but possible event that all that was true, I knew how fast the Bureau’s hospitality would dry up if anything went wrong. I could go from walking away free and clear to sharing a prison cell with Stanton.

  “Let me make sure I’m following,” I said to Mattling. “We all know Stanton’s a confidence artist. We all know his brokerage firm on Chase Street is just a ‘store’. The money he took from Cumberland and Ryland would be big enough to land him in the pen, only those two scores are in the past and nobody was collecting evidence at the time they went down.
But if I do this thing for you, you’ll have what you need and you can move on him. Is that about the size of it?”

  “That’s it exactly, Mr. Caine.”

  “And then Cumberland, Treasury, and the S.E.C. are all happy and you can get back to focusing on Giarelli.”

  “And a number of other criminals at large.”

  “But even with my help and a sworn deposition about it later,” I said, thinking aloud, “you still need to be there at the kill. Catch Stanton red-handed at something.”

  “That we do, Mr. Caine. I see Straker hasn’t been exaggerating about how quickly you put things together.”

  “He’s really been trying to sell me to you, hasn’t he?”

  “He has,” Mattling admitted. “And not without some success, I’ll admit.” He paused for a moment and asked: “Are you interested in working for the Bureau full-time, Mr. Caine?”

  I paused to be polite, taking a quick drink.

  “No. Look, I appreciate the work you fellows do, but running down public enemies, gangs full of criminals loaded down with Tommy guns, that’s not my idea of a good time.”

  “We have other jobs,” Mattling said. “Desk jobs. Analysts, researchers, people like that. We’re always looking for sharp minds with your kind of experience.”

  “I appreciate that, Agent Mattling. But I have a job and I like it just fine.” Most of the time, I thought. “Despite whatever Straker’s telling you, you don’t need to sell me a government job to get me to help you.”

  “What do we need to sell you?” Mattling asked.

  “What you have on the table already works for me,” I told him. “A little elbow room, a chance to get my client’s money back and keep it. If my name can be kept out of all this, if I can be just an anonymous informant, even better.”

  “Then you are willing to help us?”

  I nodded, swallowing a small piece of ice from my drink.

  “I will if I can. And I think I can.”

  I left the suite and walked down the hall to find Straker loitering by the elevator, ready to pounce like a praying mantis.

  “How’d it go in there?” he asked.

  I stood there looking pleased with my situation.

  “We came to a pretty clear understanding.” I said. “I think this is going to work out well for all parties involved.” I gave Straker a knowing smile, clapped him on the shoulder, and stepped past him into the elevator.

  “Keep me informed!” Straker called after me.

  I winked and shot him with a finger pistol. Right through the heart, which, considering the size of the target, was damn fine shooting.

  I was walking down the sidewalk with Penny Sills on my arm, doing a little window shopping. There was still plenty of daylight left, and the foot traffic was sufficient that we were constantly angling back and forth to dodge it. We stopped to admire a diamond necklace in a jeweler’s window, holding hands and smiling as we did so.

  “Stanton cash the checks?” I asked softly.

  “Oh yes,” she laughed. “Took them to the bank himself right after you left him, came back to the store this afternoon with three or four stacks of fresh greenbacks to show everyone.”

  “He didn’t run off to stash the thirty grand in his mattress or something?”

  “Not if he wants his people to stay loyal to him,” Penny reminded me. “This thirty grand is part of their score, too, not just his. They’ve all been working hard to set up this Mr. Shaw. Besides, showing them the money is good faith. Lets them know there’s plenty more to come if they all keep at it.”

  We ambled on down the street again, still holding hands.

  “He still think you stole forty thousand from me?”

  “He did at first, but I’m pretty sure I convinced him otherwise,” Penny said. “I mean, I want my cut from the big score, don’t I? If I do something stupid like clean the mark in his own hotel room, that could upset the whole game, probably scare the mark off for good.”

  “But forty thousand is a lot more than your cut would be from this score, right?”

  “Yeah,” she mused, figuring in her head. “I’ll be lucky to get more than two or three grand from the big play, especially coming in late like I did. Of course, I am close to you and Stanton knows this, and that might bump it up a little.” She finished her mental accounting with a quick shake of her head. “But the thing is, Stanton knows I’m not an amateur, that I’m in this game for the long haul. If I pulled a stunt like grabbing the mark’s cash myself, no one in this town would ever let me near a big con again. And if I did do something stupid like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t show my face inside Stanton’s place again.”

  It made sense to me. Had Stanton bought it? He had to have for now, I decided. Penny had behaved like a real pro, and she was closer to Kelly Shaw than anyone these days. Stanton would be a fool not to keep using her.

  “Has he mentioned Giarelli to you?” I asked.

  “No. Not to anyone so far as I know. I don’t think he wants anyone knowing some mobster might be after him.”

  We stopped at another window so Penny could look at a long, red dress on a mannequin.

  “You think I’d look good in that?” she asked.

  “In the dress or in the window?”

  She gave me a friendly jab in the arm, then turned her face to me, a teasing glimmer in her eyes.

  “So how’d your friend Jennings make out the other night at the poker game?” She’d have already picked up the story from her buddies.

  I threw my cigarette on the ground and crushed it under my shoe.

  “Aw, hell, the kid lost a bundle.”

  “And he’s supposed to be some big-time card player you said,” she laughed. “Aw, don’t take it so hard, Dev. Lots of small-town guys show up here thinking they’re ready for some real action.”

  I shrugged. “I guess that’s true.”

  “It screw up your plans? Him losing like that?”

  I let out a sigh. “We’ll just have to see.”

  Stanton and I enjoyed a leisurely dinner Wednesday evening at a nice restaurant across from the Lord Baltimore. Sated with after-dinner coffee and liqueurs, we strolled back to the hotel in splendid moods. I would give Stanton the last four cashier’s checks, happy that I could hide money from my partners without them kicking up too much of a fuss. Stanton would pretend he was going to invest them for me instead of simply running off to the bank tomorrow and cashing them, confident that I wouldn’t ask after the money again for at least a month.

  We stepped off the elevator and headed toward my suite. My stomach started fluttering as we approached the door. I turned and saw one of Giarelli’s torpedoes coming up the hall behind us, his bulk cutting us off from the elevator.

  He jerked his head toward my door and said: “Inside.”

  I took out my key and unlocked the door, stepping inside while the torpedo brought Stanton in just behind me and pulled the door closed after us.

  Casper Giarelli sat comfortably in an armchair, a single, small lamp in the far corner throwing light on his cream suit and the lower half of his face, pretty much all you could see in the otherwise darkened room. He was still wearing his hat and leisurely smoking a cigar. He looked up at us dully as we entered.

  “If you keep using my room like this,” I told him, “I’m going to hit you up for half the bill.”

  Giarelli stared at me a moment but didn’t say anything. Apparently I was beneath his notice. He turned his impassive gaze to Stanton.

  “Seen your friend Ryland, lately?” Giarelli asked.

  “We’ve been in conference over the matter you and I discussed last Saturday,” Stanton replied. His voice sounded smooth enough, but even in this dim light I could see his face was pretty pale. “I was under the impression,” Stanton continued, “that you and I would conclude our business this coming Saturday.”

  “Your business?” I echoed. “You told me you didn’t have any business with this guy. That you’d made that clear to him
.”

  “Keep quiet, Shaw,” Giarelli advised. “I want to hear what you got to say, you’ll know it.”

  I waited to see if Stanton would try to persuade Giarelli into going somewhere else to talk, some place far away from his prize mark. But maybe he wasn’t all that keen on being alone with Giarelli, who kept staring at Stanton with cool, unblinking eyes.

  “When’s the last time you saw Ryland?” Giarelli asked again.

  “Yesterday,” Stanton answered automatically.

  “Where and when exactly?”

  “At his hotel at four o’clock in the afternoon, I believe.” Only the experienced con in Stanton kept the answers quick and smooth; the man was scared.

  “You’ve been meeting with Ryland and this man?” I asked Stanton. Regardless of the situation, I still had my part to play.

  “Shaw,” Giarelli’s voice was soft, making a nice contrast with his eyes which were hard as diamonds, “I ain’t gonna tell you again.”

  I shut my mouth and just watched.

  “Yesterday at four o’clock, Ryland was with me,” Giarelli said. “Know what he was doing?” Stanton shook his head slowly. “He was doing the same thing you’re doing now: lying to me.”

  Giarelli took a casual puff at his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke, half in the light, half in the shadows.

  “Know what I did?” he asked.

  Another mute shake of the head from Stanton.

  “I took offense.”

  Giarelli reached out to the table lamp on his left and clicked the switch. The blackness to that side evaporated suddenly, revealing a man’s body face down on the carpet. The face was turned toward us. It was Ethan Ryland, a dark, messy pool on the carpet next to his head.

  Chapter Twenty: The Businessman and the Poker Player

  I could hear Stanton catch his breath next to me, then he seemed to stop breathing entirely. I forced myself to exhale slowly before gradually drawing air back in. Neither of us made a move, both staring at the corpse. Ryland couldn’t have been dead long; the stain on the carpet glistened wetly in the lamplight.