A Shared Confidence

by William Topek

  “Did you find your friend Jennings?”

  “I know where he is,” I told her.

  “Are we going to go get him?”

  “Pretty soon now.”

  We’d almost made it to the car when a strong hand caught my arm from behind and spun me around. I found myself looking into a face I’d never seen before. It was hard face, deep-set, dark eyes under a thick brow. Hooked nose and bloodless lips. An ugly scar dented one cheek just under the right eye. The face belonged to a powerfully-built man in his forties wearing a nondescript suit. Four other good-sized, dangerous-looking men were standing close behind him.

  “Are you the guy,” the man asked in a low, gravelly voice, “who’s been using my name all over this goddamn city?”

  Penny stood next to me, not speaking. I had an awful premonition, and only the fact that my stomach was fluttering like a hummingbird kept it from falling right down into my socks.

  “I don’t know your name, Mister,” I said simply.

  His eyes looked like chips of unpolished rock as he glared at me.

  “Giarelli,” he said. “Casper Giarelli.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Bad Night And a Worse Morning

  The man who’d just introduced himself as Casper Giarelli stared at me for a moment, waiting for me to speak.

  “I don’t know any Casper Giarelli,” I said. “I certainly haven’t been using your name.”

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  I flipped a mental coin. “Name’s Kelly Shaw.”

  “You got anything on you proves that?”

  “Maybe. What’s this about?”

  Giarelli nodded to two of the four men behind him. They moved quickly, pinning my arms at my sides, going for my wallet and finding my gun as well. They tossed the wallet to their boss, who flipped through it and found two driver’s licenses: mine and Kelly Shaw’s.

  “How many names you got, Ace?”

  I didn’t answer, just looked over at Penny. She had the good sense to keep quiet as well.

  “You two are coming with us,” Giarelli said. “That your car?”

  “Now just a minute,” I started to protest, and that was as far as I got. Giarelli stepped in close, his dark eyes boring into mine.

  “You two are coming with us,” he repeated. “Easier all around if you come with us alive.” There wasn’t much I could do against five men, especially now that I’d already let them grab me. If Penny hadn’t been there, I might have tried something sooner, but even that would have been iffy at best.

  Moments later, I was sitting in the back of my hired Cadillac with one of the new Giarelli’s four men. Another was driving and Giarelli sat up front with him. Penny had been taken to another car, an anonymous black sedan, with the other two men.

  “Mind telling me what this is about?” I asked as we pulled away from the curb. Nobody answered so I sat back and tried to relax my muscles. We headed over to the east side of town and pulled into a warehouse by the water. Penny and I were hustled out of our respective cars and led inside the building. The interior was all steel beams and peeling paint. A battered desk with a metal lamp stood in one corner. An older man sat behind it in shirt sleeves, looking up at the boss but barely noticing Penny or me. Giarelli walked over and talked to the man for a few moments, quietly enough that I couldn’t hear what was said. He seemed to come to a decision.

  “Tie those two up in the corner,” he said to the man nearest me. The team of men moved quickly and efficiently, and in short order Penny and I were sitting next to one another on a pile of burlap sacks, ropes binding our wrists and ankles in front of us. Giarelli conferred with his men awhile longer, then came walking over to us.

  “You two are going to be here for awhile. So far, I don’t know either of you. You don’t make any trouble and I don’t find out you are trouble, I’ll let you go.”

  “If you don’t know either of us, why did you pick us up?”

  Giarelli looked at me for a moment, then turned and walked out of the warehouse with three of his men. One of them stayed with the older guy at the desk about thirty feet away. The two of them started up a hand of pinochle.

  “Dev,” it was the first time Penny had spoken since we’d been ambushed on the sidewalk, and she was keeping her voice very low. “Who is that man?”

  “He says he’s Casper Giarelli,” I said softly, testing the ropes and finding no play in them at all. “I’m guessing he is.”

  “Then who is that man at your hotel? The one you and Stanton have been meeting with?”

  I thought for a second, decided she may as well know the truth.

  “Some friend of Jennings,” I told her. “I think he paints cars.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open in surprise.

  “You mean to tell me–”

  “Think about it, Penny. I already told you I’m in tight with some some feds on this. If a real mobster had been threatening me, you don’t think I’d have gone running to them like my shoes were on fire?”

  Penny shook her head and turned her eyes to the ceiling. Even the slickest con in the game still gets the privilege of feeling like a complete dope now and then.

  Penny and I were tied up in that warehouse for several hours. I’ve been through worse. At one point the two men brought us food, allowing us to eat with our hands still tied. We were even given an after-meal cigarette each and then untied, one at a time, to use the W.C. in the corner. We were tied again the same way right after, and the man doing the tying hadn’t become any more careless with the ropes.

  The hours dragged by and I had plenty of time to think, sometimes talking with Penny in quiet voices. We were never told to stop talking; apparently anything we might have to say was no threat to anyone. I told Penny a good part of the real story.

  I’d learned from the F.B.I. that Ryland owed money to a Chicago mobster named Giarelli, and that this Giarelli would be coming out to Baltimore on business at some point soon. That gave me the idea. Working with Jennings, we’d picked a friend of his – a rough-looking Italian type named Verdi – and flown him out to Baltimore. Verdi had grown up in a neighborhood full of gangsters, knew how they talked and how they acted. I interviewed him, decided he might be able to pull it off, and then spent hours coaching him. Townsend helped me out, too, by loaning me his two operatives to act as the faux Giarelli’s torpedoes. We would rehearse every meeting in detail, feeding our Giarelli lines and phrases and possible responses to anything Stanton might say. The biggest risk with using amateurs is that they’re awkward, starting out stiff and always trying to make light of the work. Or they tend to enjoy themselves too much, get a bit cocky in their roles. But we explained to Verdi how important this was. What kind of danger he might be in if he blew it, what kind of reward was waiting for him if he pulled it off. He stuck to the script and never broke character, and we kept coaching him and feeding him lines in between meetings with Stanton. It also helped that he was able to turn on the wire recorder under my bed just prior to Stanton and I entering my suite.

  Verdi kept to the hotel, not showing his face out on the street or talking to anyone besides Townsend’s men, myself, or Jennings. Like true confidence men, we planned things out to the last detail, brainstorming over various approaches, trying to cover every possible action and counter-action. We carefully orchestrated Casper Giarelli’s first appearance on the stage, his introduction to Stanton. We continued meeting throughout this operation, constantly comparing notes and updating our information. We’d listen to the wire recordings, critiquing performances when necessary or honing in on something Stanton said. Verdi, Jennings, Ryland, Townsend’s men, and myself sitting around one hotel suite or another, drawing diagrams, challenging one another’s ideas, rehearsing conversations, always preparing for the worst and how to either avoid it or deal with it.

  Penny hadn’t known anything about any of this, but she’d done her part as well. She’d scouted out the small bank in Delaware, then sent one of her friends in
to clear the place out for an hour. Posing as a man from the gas company, he assured them they had a leak in the building. He could fix it, but the staff needed to vacate the premises until the building was safe again. Penny also provided three or four shills to act as bank staff when Stanton and I went in to cash the two checks. It didn’t matter that the real bank manager had locked the vault and all of the drawers before leaving; the money we received was the money Stanton had already handed over to Verdi. I’d simply taken it up to Delaware for the transaction, allowing one of Penny’s shills to fetch it discreetly from the trunk while Stanton and I were inside.

  The whole idea had been to shake Stanton up, to make him too scared to do anything but hand over two hundred thousand dollars. To make it work, we not only had to scare Stanton, we had to confuse him. We had to keep so many oddball things flying at him that he really didn’t have time to think. A vengeful, homicidal mobster, a young con posing as a phony Treasury agent, accusations of counterfeiting, being forced to drive out of state to get more money. Even the silver bullion (courtesy of the pretty young teller who laughed at my Houdini joke, and also taken out of the trunk by one of Penny’s shills) was just one more oddball thing to keep Stanton’s mind occupied. Maybe make him think that the Liberty Silver Mining Company was ready for business ahead of schedule, that he may have to move fast to get more of Shaw’s investing capital. I’d even trotted out Townsend at the last minute so that Stanton would think that was how our Giarelli had learned my identity, thus leaving Stanton still uncertain as to what Ryland knew about me. I hadn’t let Penny in on the Verdi ruse, not sure how far I could really trust her. She thought our Giarelli was the real deal.

  Ryland had worked as hard as anyone, eager to help put the screws to the man who had ruined him. He particularly liked the fake killing, as it was the same game Stanton had used on him months ago, the one that had caused him to travel over half the United States, hiding out in various hotel rooms and alternating between wire-tight fear and a deep blue funk. Ryland knew he was taking a chance – none of us were sure when the real Giarelli might blow into town – but he wanted in from the beginning. There was the barest chance he might end up getting more out of this than simple revenge, but I hadn’t tried to encourage him along those lines. Still, I had to feed him something to keep his conversations with Mattling at least a little censored. Mattling would have to know our Giarelli was fake – from Ryland if from no other source – but he hadn’t let on anything to me and I hadn’t pushed it.

  My original plan had been much simpler: I was going to try and rope Stanton in as Kelly Shaw, gain his confidence, feed him a little real money, then find some pretext to trick him into cashing enough of my phony cashier’s checks to pay back Beldham & Morrissey’s missing hundred and forty grand. The chances of it working were slim, but I thought it was worth a few days’ effort to at least try. When the feds showed up and I learned about Giarelli, I figured I just might be able to use that. It was a much more complicated and risky plan, and I’m a great believer in keeping things simple, but I decided the new plan had a much better chance of working: pull Stanton in by his own greed like you do with any mark, and then scare him the rest of the way into the trap.

  And it had worked. We now had two hundred grand of Stanton’s money sitting in a safe place where Verdi, Ryland, Jennings, and Townsend’s men were holed up waiting for me to contact them. Of course, we could have just pulled up stakes right after Stanton first handed over the cash, and we probably should have. But Agent Mattling had promised to extend me a little courtesy if I could help him out, and I might need that courtesy before this was all over. Just blowing town with the money would have left too many loose ends. And a slew of disappointed federal agents – along with one pain-in-the-neck Pinkerton’s supervisor – might have followed one of those loose ends back to my brother. And that would make every carefully-planned action of the last several weeks utterly worthless.

  From the beginning, I knew the biggest risk: the real Giarelli could show up on the scene at any moment. Even if he did, though, there wasn’t any reason to believe he’d know of my crew or what we were up to. What had put him onto us? I wondered. Did the real Giarelli use the Lord Baltimore Hotel when he was in town and someone there tipped him off about a faker? I had a brief moment of panic, wondering how far Giarelli’s influence extended. Was it possible he’d somehow managed to round up Jennings, Ryland, and the rest, go to work on them to find out why he was being impersonated? I forced myself to calm back down. No, my people were hiding out nice and comfortable, I decided. They had to be. I pictured Townsend’s men sitting around a table with their watches missing and their pockets turned out, Jennings egging them on for one more hand of poker while they waited.

  “You didn’t trust me enough to tell me about this Verdi guy,” Penny said, rubbing her bound hands over her knees for warmth. “You thought I might tell Stanton.”

  “I couldn’t be sure, honey,” I admitted. She nodded acceptance, not all that wounded or even surprised at my decision.

  “So what happens now?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Other than we wait.”

  There was a brief silence and Penny asked: “Do you think they’ll kill us?”

  I pretended to mull this over so it wouldn’t seem that I was answering too quickly, and therefore dishonestly.

  “It’s not looking that way at the moment,” I said. “If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead.”

  “So the trick is to keep them from changing their minds about wanting us dead?”

  The desk lamp thirty feet away wasn’t throwing much light, and I tried to make out her eyes in the darkness.

  “Giarelli may want information, Penny. And if he does, you tell him anything and everything he wants to know. You don’t play games with people like him.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do? Tell him anything he wants?”

  “Hell yes, if he asks.”

  I felt her shift position next to me, trying to restore circulation to her legs.

  “Why didn’t you just take off once you had his money?” Penny asked.

  “I told you, the law is moving in on Stanton. They’ve asked for my help, and it’s in my interest to help them.”

  “They got something on you?” Typical con’s question, I thought. Why help the law if you don’t have to?

  “No,” I told her. “And I want to keep it that way.”

  My watch read just past two in the morning when Giarelli and his men returned to the warehouse. He ambled over to where Penny and I sat, hands in his pockets. He looked us over for a minute, trying to decide something.

  “We’ll start with him,” he said, and walked away.

  I was hoisted to my feet, untied, given a few seconds to rub my wrists and stamp my feet (the other men careful to stand just out of kicking range), then I was marched to a small office built into one corner of the warehouse. Giarelli sat behind an old wooden desk while another man stood in the corner smoking a cigarette.

  I was pushed roughly down into the chair on the other side of the desk.

  “You know a guy named Antonio Verdi?” Giarelli spat out sharply.

  “The name’s not familiar,” I answered nervously. Jesus, how had Giarelli managed to find out this much in just a matter of hours?

  “Big, heavyset guy,” Giarelli prodded. “Showed up in town maybe two weeks ago. Staying at the Lord Baltimore Hotel on the sixth floor. You sure you never heard of him?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I can’t place him, no.”

  Giarelli opened the desk drawer and pulled out a photograph of Verdi in his cream-colored suit and matching hat, walking through the lobby of the Lord Baltimore.

  “This is the guy,” he said. “Take a good look at him, see if you know his face.”

  I pretended to study the photo carefully. Of course I knew the man in it, but what was bothering me at the moment was the photo itself. It was a surveillance photograph, taken by a professional. Either a
very good private investigator or a cop, and I realized Giarelli had some connections to have gotten hold of this. With the local police? The cops here aren’t any more crooked than in places like New York or Chicago, but they aren’t any less so.

  “You know him or not?” asked Giarelli impatiently.

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What about this guy?”

  He tossed another photo onto the desk. Another professional job, this one of Clay Stanton walking down the street. Before I could answer, he placed another photo on top of it. This one of Clay Stanton at an outdoor cafe, having lunch with – my stomach turned to ice – Kelly Shaw.

  “What’s his name?” Giarelli asked.

  “I – I just had lunch with him one time. I’m trying to remember.”

  Giarelli nodded to the man on my left, who seized my arm and held my wrist at the edge of the desk, my hand and fingers falling over the edge. His other hand pressed down like an anvil on my elbow. The man in the corner opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a pair of bolt cutters. He walked up to the edge of the desk and started fitting my pinky between the blades.

  “Clay Stanton!” I yelled. “His name is Clay Stanton! Jesus!”

  “We going to have to do this every time I ask a goddamn question?” Giarelli wanted to know.

  I shook my head, my heart hammering. “No.”

  The other man backed away and put the bolt cutters on top of the filing cabinet, leaving them in plain sight. The man holding my arm let go and they let me catch my breath for a moment.

  “Who is Clay Stanton?”

  “He’s a con man.”

  “Why are you hanging around him?”

  “I’m trying to con him.” That seemed to surprise Giarelli.

  “Why?”

  “He took a client of mine. I’m trying to get his money back for him.”

  “You working for the feds?”