The Rag, The Wire, And The Big Store
Volume One
Copyright 2013 Duane Lindsay
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE: One Mississippi...Two Mississippi...
CHAPTER TWO: The Red Hot Yellow Bugatti
CHAPTER THREE: It’s All Fun And Games Until Somebody’s Married
CHAPTER FOUR:A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
CHAPTER FIVE:The Nut Comes Off the Head of The Joint
CHAPTER SIX:How High the Moon
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Chapter One
ONE MISSISSIPPI…TWO MISSISSIPPI…
SEPTEMBER 1945
Seaman First-Class Leroy Logan, as fresh and green as a sprout of new grass, first notices the redhead, not because she’s beautiful, though she is, in a scarlet dress setting off green eyes that certainly make this Woolworth counter shine, but because she’s scamming a middle-aged man at the watch counter.
He decides it’s his business to butt in. He says, “Excuse me, but we don‘t allow this sort of thing,” playing like he’s the house dick. He takes her by the elbow, sees those eyes widen. Fortunately, he’s in civilian clothes; a crisp charcoal suit he bought tailored in Singapore before sailing home - seven dollars US and worth every penny.
“What’s all this?” says the victim, blustery as a walrus with his thick mustache and outraged expression. A banker for sure, thinks Leroy, who shakes his head sadly at the girl. “I thought we told you to peddle your wares someplace else.”
“You got me mixed up with someone else,” she says, trying to pull away. “Gimme back my arm.”
Leroy explains to the mark, “This lady’s after your money, sir. She’s a local con artist.”
“What?” Emotions show under all that lip hair; outrage, indignation, denial, all the classic responses.
“Let me guess,” says Leroy. “She tells you she’s got a sick mother and no money for car fare. She’s got to get to Mercy Hospital before the old broad croaks. Am I right?”
The mark’s face says he is.
“What happens next is you’ll front her taxi money and while you’re paying the cabbie she’ll dip your wallet before it’s back in your pants.”
The man eyes her like she’s a Tenderloin hooker and gasps his thanks to Leroy.
“That’s all right, sir. How much would she get you for? I ask because over fifty dollars I can get her taken down for felony bunko. May I see your wallet, please?”
“Certainly, detective,” says the mark, hustling it out. Leroy thumbs one-handed through a wad that would choke War Admiral on Derby day, counting better than two hundred in twenties. He whistles, awed that anyone would carry that kind of cash. What was the guy planning, buy the Golden Gate Bridge?
He shakes the woman and she responds as expected, making a scene. “I’m innocent,’ she bellows. “You got nothing on me.” In the struggle the wallet falls to the floor, the banker dives for it, comes up puffing from the rare exercise.
Leroy says, “We’ll need your co-operation, sir; put this woman where she belongs…”
But this woman’s carrying on and the mark will have none of it. “I can’t,” he says, tucking the billfold, backing away. “There’s no need. She didn’t get…I can’t be seen…never mind.” He turns tail and scurries from the store.
The canary stops singing and Leroy let’s go of her arm. She eyes him like he’s last week’s leftover hash, then turns away and Leroy follows to a door in the rear, noting it as a very good exit. They step out into an alley.
“Kate,” he says and she steps into his arms, giving him a kiss like he only imagined all those long nights on ship. His eyes cross and he’s short of breath when she finishes.
“When did you get in? And why,” she slugs his arm, hard, “Didn’t you call me?” Then she kisses him again which makes for some very mixed feelings.
Later, at a bar down on Castro Street she says, “I didn’t need your help, you know.”
“I know.” He grins, amused, loving the freedom, loving her. It feels so good to be with a woman again. “That was a nice move, swapping the money with paper.”
“A simple switch,” she scoffs. “You think I can’t get along without you, Logan? Hell, I’ve been hustling since you went to sea.”
“Sure.”
“Small time, but it keeps the wolf from the door.”
“It does.”
“I mean, a girls’ gotta live.”
“Right,” he agrees, having no desire to argue. “How much did you get?”
That brings out the smile. She’s got a gap between her upper front teeth like a secret entry through the Great Wall, maybe let the invaders in, maybe not, as she counts the money on the table.
“All of it,” she beams.
“Nice,” Leroy tells her, “But now that the war’s over it’s time to think big again.”
She doesn’t go for the obvious joke. Instead, “What do you have in mind?”
“I was thinking about stealing a battleship.”
“That’s bigger,” she acknowledges seriously. “Which one?”
“The one I rode in on,” he says, deadpan, no big deal. Like it’s his already, a battleship.
“The Mississippi?” She laughs suddenly, a hiccup of surprise and delight. “A United States Navy battleship?
“Yes.”
Later still, both of them smoking in the narrow twin bed at her furnished studio, she muses, “I wonder…do they leave the keys just laying around?”
“How much,” Leroy asks Little Freddy, “is scrap metal going for?”
Freddy Kocher, a fat man with a ring of beard around his thick-lipped mouth, like he fell face down in a bowl of chili, clucks his tongue and considers. “Twenty bucks a ton – give or take.”
“And how much does a battleship weigh?”
“Which battleship? The baby destroyers out of Kaiser’s shipyards? Or the big ones like the Missouri?”
“Like the Missouri.”
Freddy does the thing with his tongue again as he consults some internal filing system. Too fat for the services, even at the end of the war when they were taking any man with a pulse, Freddy spends his time fencing stolen goods out of a rundown brick warehouse south of Market Street. He has a memory that won’t let him forget a fact and a body odor that keeps all but the most determined person at a distance.
“Um...about...fifty thousand tons?”
“You saying or asking?” Leroy, still dapper in his pin-stripe suit, slips a finger into the vest pocket and taps his belly.
Freddie inhabits a tent-like expanse of faded white shirt and a ratty tie, loose knotted around his thick neck. A Lucky Strike burns into ash in a sand-filled can near his elbow, spectral smoke rising like the spirits of graft.
“Guessing,” he admits, though with a shrug. “It could be higher, but certainly that’s close.” He studies Leroy, a man he’s never met. An acquaintance set up the meeting, which is as it should be. The underworld, like the good old boys network in the straight world, relies on connections. “Why?”
“No reason.” Leroy picks up a gold pocket watch from the crowded glass counter. “How much?”
“Can’t let it go for less than a sawbuck.”
“Ten dollars?” Leroy sputters, shakes his head with awe. “God Damn. Everything costs so much these days.”
“Tell me about it,” says Freddie. “Scrap steel for twenty bucks a ton.”
Kate, shocked, says, “That’s almost a million dollars.”
“Uh-huh.” Leroy grins, looking about twelve years o
ld, just a skinny little kid about to play a prank. He watches Kate, waiting for approval, which does not immediately appear .
“You’re out of your mind,” she says, picking off points on fingers with long red nails crooked like talons. “One, it’s too big. Two, nobody’s ever done it before because three, it can’t be done and four...let me finish...! there’s how many military police around here?”
“There’s a lot of cops,” Leroy agrees. If that bothers him he doesn’t show it.
“A lot,” Kate says. “With guns and stuff.”
“And stuff.” They’re sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel, a swanky place a couple of blocks off Lombard that features a piano bar and a torch singer named Doris LaVerne. Leroy glances over from time to time as he guzzles beer from a tall Pilsner glass. Kate, in a coffee colored dress with white polka dots and brown beret, occasionally sips a Martini.
“Lots of ‘and stuff,’” admits Leroy. Doris is singing Stardust and he hums along absently. The bar is dark and smoky with an almost audible hint of promise running through it like an electric wire. These are the days of expectation; the war is over and anything is possible.
“But you’re going to do it anyway, right?”
“Well...yeah.”
“That’s my guy.” Kate’s tired of being the girl waiting in port. She’s worked at this and that – more often that, since she has an aversion to waking early, amorous foreman and hard labor. Smiling with sensuous promise she runs her sharp nail across his cheek and Leroy shivers as if it’s suddenly cold in here.
“Logan, listen to me. I know you have plans to become a con man -”
“A grifter,” he corrects.
“Whatever. And I’m happy to be your moll. But this is huge.”
He leers, she rolls her eyes, says, “Oh, shut up!”
“But if I pull it off -”
Kate, sighing, thinks it’s like talking to an avalanche; unstoppable. The idea delights her. “Then you’d be the best.”
“That’s right. So here,” says Leroy, raising his glass to the future, “is to the best.”
He turns on his stool and leans his elbows back against the bar, his attention so focused on Doris LaVerne that he misses Kate’s mutter.
“Don’t even think about it, Buster.”
“I wish I was older.”
Leroy reaches out to touch the front of Kate’s dress. The sheath is tight and as red as the waves of her hair, bound up in some current style, with sequins that glisten like silver in the light of the San Francisco afternoon.
“Why?” Absently, she slaps his hand. She bends to adjust her stocking, aware of his interest. Barely eighteen, alone three years now since she ran away from her parents’ one bedroom flat near Chicago’s Midway, Kate deliberately prolongs the moment, running slender fingers up the seam to the clasp of the garter belt. She smiles wickedly and lets the hem fall.
“Because I can’t pull this off looking like I do.” He yanks his eyes from her legs and studies his reflection, noting the lack of age lines, the sparse facial hair that, despite being eighteen and a veteran, still doesn’t need a razor. He frowns at the blue eyes that say, “Trust me,” when no, you shouldn’t. “Who’d believe this face?”
“I love this face,” says Kate, caressing it. She leans close and Leroy feels the gentle breath on his neck. Sixteen months at sea, the war finally over, the Germans broken and the Japanese surrendered, Leroy is on his final leave before being, like a million other sailors, soldiers and marines, dumped back into the world of the civilian.
The security of life aboard a battleship is over and now he has to sink or swim, root hog or die. The idea both terrifies and elates him.
Kate smoothes the collar of his crisp starched white shirt and loosens the knot of his blue tie, her touch tender and disturbing.
“This face can’t do what I need it to,” says Leroy.
“Sooo?” She asks, stretching the word.
“So, I need to find a face that can.”
Leroy gets to the Colonel the same way he reached Freddy: a friend of a friend. In this case the guy is a security bull at the Plaza Hotel, fat with graft, fat with a disability pension and fat.
He says, “I’m not promising, boyo. I hear he’s a prime jackass, but he’s aces playing the long con.”
“Thanks.” Leroy slips him a deuce and is on his way with a number on the bar napkin: Fairfax 7 – 3241.
The Colonel, when Leroy sets up a meet, is a jackass.
“You’re going to run the Eiffel Tower?”
“Yep.”
“The Eiffel Tower.” The Colonel sniffs, like he’s smelled something funny. “Son, you’re either an idiot or a fool.”
The Colonel – not a rank, just an affectation – is Walter P. Edens, a dignified looking man of middle years, wearing a slightly out of fashion serge suit and a homburg hat. Leroy meets him at the corner of Divisidero and Valencia at a curbside metal table. The day is cool and windy and he has to keep placing things on the napkins to keep them from blowing into the bay.
Walter studies Leroy through a Chesterfield haze, drawing smoke deep into his lungs, holding it, then blowing it out through his nose like a bull.
“An Eiffel,” he says, sadly. His voice is that of a retired judge or a bank president; someone immediately trusted, which isn’t right. The Colonel would steal the pennies from the eyes of your dead grandmother. “I thought you’d have something worthwhile.”
“Selling a battleship isn’t worthwhile?” Leroy doesn’t like the guy, not that it matters. He’s here because he needs a face, not advice, which the guy seems to want to give anyway. Leroy sits back, resigned.
“If you could do it, which you can’t. Listen. The Eiffel tower scam was run only once, back in 1925 by Victor Lustig. He convinced scrap dealers he had the ins to sell the tower since it was intended only as a short time exhibit for the Paris World’s Fair. He conned scrap dealers into bribing him to get the contract. People bought that story then because it was new. ”
Leroy knows all this but that’s just the idea. Who’d expect something so bold in this modern age? Nobody, that’s who.
The Colonel doesn’t think so. “Son, if you even tried something like this you’d be a laughing stock. So would anybody dumb enough to play along with you. Do I look stupid to you? Do I?”
Leroy considers the question. No, he thinks, you look like just what you aren’t; trustworthy and respectable, which is what I need more than I need this kind of lip.
“So I take it you’re out.”
The Colonel laughs out loud, startling a waiter cleaning the next table. A coffee cup tips over and the guy scowls, huffy, and scoots away.
“No, sonny; I am most definitely not out. I’m in.”
Leroy thinks what the hell - ? as the Colonel tells him, “I’m in for sixty percent. And let me tell you why. It’s because this plan of yours is crazy, that’s one. Then there’s the fact that, without me, you couldn’t pull off scamming a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint. You got the face of a twelve-year old! Who’s going to believe you?” He’s obviously on a roll, thinking he’s teaching the kid something.
Leroy’s getting hot now, not listening anymore, just ready to get up and go before he starts throwing things. Sixty percent! The gall of the man is infuriating. Leroy thinks of the hours he’s spent aboard ship coming up with the plan, working out the details, ironing out any little wrinkle that didn’t fit. Now this big bazoo wants to cut himself in for sixty?
“Before you go off half-cocked,” says the Colonel, seeing the expression and correctly reading it. “Even if you tell me no, you’re not going to do this. Do you want to know why?”
Leroy won’t say it so the Colonel, smirking, tells him anyway. “Because I won’t let you. I’ll spread the word to every grifter, every scam artist in California. I’ll get you so greased that you’ll never – and I mean never! – run a con in your life.”
A long silence follows as Leroy thinks of
the best comeback. Clobber the guy? Why bother? He’s made his point clear. So he says, “You finished?”
“Sure.”
“Then thanks but no thanks. I’ll do it on my own.”
“You don’t think I can stop you, kid?” There’s a tone of menace, a thinly veiled warning like the silence just before the snake starts to rattle. He shouldn’t do it but he’s had enough. Leroy busts open.
“Listen Grandpa; I don’t think you‘ve got the juice. I think you’re all mouth and no moxie. You think you run the hill? Well, I think you’re over it.” He stops to light a Pall Mall as the Colonel, red faced as a warthog, chews his mustache. Veins are popping and his brow’s furrowed like a Kansas wheat field but he pulls it together to say, “Let me tell you something else.”
Oh good, thinks Leroy; I love it when people tell me something else. He’s just finished sixteen long months in Uncle Sam’s navy being told something else by every ensign, mate, and seaman who outranked him, which was almost everyone by the time he’d gotten busted down the third time.
“If you’re foolish enough to go ahead with this without me –” Leroy’s expression says he is – “I won’t just blackball you with the grifters; I’ve got pull with the cops. You spit on the sidewalk they’ll run you in. You cross the street they’ll tap you for jaywalking.” He laughs, a nasty turn. “Hell, sit at home playing solitaire and the bunco boys’ll get you for gambling.”
Leroy sips the last of his coffee, puts a quarter on the table for the brews and a nickel for the tip. “Go screw,” he says and walks away down the steep hill, the Colonel’s voice following him
“No one’s gonna back your play, kid!” he calls after him. “Not no one. Not no how.”
A week later Leroy’s discovering this to be true; he can’t put together a string for love or money. Evidently the Colonel’s been both busy and a loudmouth because the word is out. Leroy’s been scoffed at, ridiculed, reviled as an idiot and out and out laughed at by as sorry a collection of misfits as he’s ever imagined.
Case in point: a small-timer named Benny Lipps, supposed to be smooth with the ladies; Leroy heard he might be up for a score. But when they meet, at a little place in the Mission district, Benny cuts wise, saying, “I heard about you, kid. They say you’re bad news and I don’t want any part of you.”
“Who says?” asks Leroy, though he knows already.
“Everybody. Listen up, it’s no good. You’re a non-starter in this town.”
Or Fred O’Bannon, a mick who runs a costume shop in Alameda, near the shipyards. Leroy’s come to him to get the Navy whites and officer uniforms he needs to run the con.
“No dice,” he says. “A guy’d be crazy to try what you’ve got in mind.” He laughs, lapping up the beer Leroy bought him. “Still, I’m glad to meet the man who thought of it. You got moxie, kid. An Eiffel tower scam in this day and age.”
He chucks Leroy on the arm, sort of comrade like and staggers off to throw darts.
It’s getting old but Leroy keeps it up. Everywhere is the same reaction; no dice, nix on this and, as the days wear on, “Give it up, son; it’s not happening.”
Leroy doesn’t know where the Colonel gets his pull but he’s definitely juiced; the fix is in and Leroy’s on the skids.
“I can’t even get a printer,” he complains as Kate rubs his neck. They’re sitting in the kitchen of a rented efficiency, seventeen-seven-fifty a month for the top of a three-story walkup with a view of Alcatraz floating in the bay like a toad in a punchbowl. What possessed the Feds to make it a prison is a mystery. What matters to Leroy is the daily reminder that he does not want to go there.
Kate’s got one hand on his shoulder while she pours herself a glass of Zinfandel from some winery up in Napa. Wine gives Leroy headaches so he’s sipping whiskey from a white enamel coffee mug, a habit he’s picked up shipside. Smoke from their cigarettes rises and twists together and Leroy feels aggrieved.
“What’s his beef, anyway?” he says, referring to the Colonel. “It’s not like I’m any skin off his nose that he’s gotta queer my pitch.”
Kate tries a few, “there, there’s,” and an “I hear you,” as Leroy gathers steam.
“I go back to Freddie and he’s with them now. Says the words out that nobody should work with the kid.”
He twists to look up at Kate, explaining, “They call me the kid, ‘cause I look so young.”
“I got that. At least they don’t know your real name,” Kate suggests, but it’s the wrong thing to say. She has a feeling that anything would be wrong.
“They will,” Leroy vows angrily. “When I pull this off, there won’t be a con man in the state – in the country! – who doesn’t know about Leroy Amadeus Logan.” He takes an angry sip, gets the fiery liquor up his nose and sneezes violently, which doesn’t make his mood or the booze go down any easier.
Kate’s not handling this well either, but for different reasons. She’s thinking about the home she left three years ago, remembering her broken down wreck of a father, all booze and meaty fists, hanging down at Sullivan’s bar every night looking for a fight. It’s the only fight he’s got left in him after the depression wiped out every dream he ever had.
Not such big dreams, either. A house and a steady job, a car – maybe a Hudson or a Studebaker – take the wife and kids for a drive out to Lake Michigan or someplace.
But the job washed away in a flood of whiskey and he never recovered, even when the war brought work back to the steelyards. Kate remembers the endless protests of the family, “You can’t – you can’t - you can’t,” like a drumbeat in her head until she runs off when she’s fifteen, traveling west, looking for something better.
She found it too, she thinks, in the company of this gangling young man she calls Logan, a kid with pockets as empty as hers but with such dreams! The best con man who ever lived! Glorious. After the soul-numbing life at home, Leroy is fresh air in a world of soot.
But right now Kate’s had enough. Her patience with whining men, never all that great, shuts off like pulling the chain on the overhead bulb as, not tenderly, she whacks him on the top of his head. “Stop grousing, Logan, and pull yourself together.”
Leroy, squinting from the sudden smack, stares openmouthed. “What are you -?” He rubs his head, like it hurts, the baby.
“What am I?” Kate says. “What are you? I sit around waiting for you to come back, I put up with your ways –” She stops Leroy from saying, “what ways?” with a look. He wisely shuts up.
“You come here with big ideas. Gonna be this, Kate, gonna be that.” She’s prowling the kitchen like a feral cat, hands flying in agitation. “I’ve got a plan, Kate. We’ll be on top. Then what? The first little thing you go to pieces.”
She stops in front of him, hands on hips and gives him a stare like he’s not worth eating. “I had a bellyful of quitters, Logan. Times weren’t all that easy for me, you know, waiting. There’s too many little men out there tell you, can’t do this, can’t do that. Are you going to listen to them?”
“But,” says Leroy, ‘cause that’s about all that comes to mind. “The crew...”
“What about the crew? You can’t get anyone bent to help you, get a straight crew.” She stops, puts on a puzzled look as if she’s just said something she didn’t plan on. Leroy, missing it, starts to get mad himself.
With awe Kate says, “you could...you could...they wouldn’t have to know. Don’t you see Logan? You could con both sides of the street.”
“What,” he asks, “are you talking about?”
“I’m talking,” Kate says, “About turning this around.” Words come pouring out now as ideas crash around like rocks in a polisher, clacking and banging together with a huge noise. She’s never seen anything clearer in her life and she rushes to get it out before it pops like a soap bubble.
“Logan, you can do this. A bent printer won’t work? Get a straight one and con him into thinking he’s doing something legit. Need a roper? Need
a Face? Hire straights and lie to them. Hell, hire an actor and tell him it’s a scene. Con the grifters while you pull off the greatest Eiffel tower scam the world’s ever seen.”
She stops to tuck his face between her hands. “Think big, Logan. Too many people think small.” Then she waits for a reaction wondering, did I get it right? Does he get it?
Nope. He pulls her hands roughly from his cheeks and gets up, knocking the chair backwards. “That’s the damn stupidest thing I ever heard, Kate.” He mimics her voice. “Con both side of the street. Girl, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Kate responds, “Don’t you ‘girl’ me, Logan. You’re all mouth, you know that? When it comes time to pick berries, you’re nothing but a big talker.”
More words follow – none of them nice – and Leroy storms out, slamming the door behind him.
Uphill both ways is what it feels like as Leroy plods around the streets of San Francisco trying to burn off a whole pile of anger. He can’t help feeling mad at Kate, seeing as how she’s probably right, and he sucks tar, thinking frustrated, useless thoughts. He doesn’t hold much stock in Kate’s idea of using straight people to help. The straight world is the marks, the people you scam. The rest are a noble brotherhood of con men.
But maybe not. Since meeting the Colonel and the other guys passing as grifters in this burg, Leroy has been revising his romantic notions downward so far he can hardly see them for his feet. These people are no different than the petty officers, the cops or the railroad dicks he encountered on his journey from New Orleans to the recruiting office in St. Louis.
Irritation settles over him as the last of the sun touches the harbor, painting it as red as Kate’s hair.
Damn it, he thinks. She’s right.
Kate wakes up in the rickety single bed and says, “Logan?” Her voice is gravelly from too many smokes, too much wine. The spot next to her is empty.
A renewed sense of fury courses through her, like last night after the damn man stormed out, only considerably tamer now that he’s still gone. She does her morning ritual while thinking up dandy new things to say to him – some real zingers she’ll deliver when he walks back in that door.
Then she spends the day cleaning and slamming pillows and realizing that maybe he isn’t going to walk back in and that thought makes her decide who needs him anyway? He’s just a man, right? She’s had a few before him since leaving home, hitching rides, fending off wolves and worse, working dives or diners, always clean but never quite nice, finally arriving at the CITY, which is how she thinks of it, THE CITY, all caps, like it’s the emerald city from her favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz.
Around four, as the sun is touching down on the rooftops she sits on the iron fire escape and wonders where he is. Her mood is petulant and she thinks, fine! Let him run off; I don’t need him. Maybe I’ll just go instead, huh? Wouldn’t that teach him a lesson, if he comes back and finds me gone? She thinks up what she’ll write in the note she’s going to leave and there are some beauties in there, too.
Past six, hungry and worn out she begins to think that no, he isn’t coming back and she struggles with guilt and sadness like this is her fault, she drove him away. Men need a woman to comfort them in their troubles, not yell and belittle them. She picks up a pillow that she embroidered herself in the long year she waited for him to come home from the war. It says, in pretty good cursive, gold threads on a red satin fabric, “Home is Where We Are.”
She holds it to her chest and rocks with it, listening to the radio until nine-thirty when she hears the key in the lock.
It doesn’t matter who says, “I’m sorry,” first; they’re wrapped up in each other as soon as the door swings shut on the prying eyes of the neighbors. Kate’s crying and Leroy’s not too steady himself as they touch each other like they were never going to again, like they can’t believe it’s real. It feels, Leroy thinks, like a last minute call from the Governor.
Words turn to kisses, turn to passion and they turn down the covers of the bed, the cheap brass headboard creaking like a ship in a storm and won’t that make the biddy in 312 turn up her Motorola. Sure enough, the sound of big band – Benny Goodman or Count Basie– comes through the paper-thin walls and they start to move in time to Pennsylvania Six-Five Hundred and then The Continental, finishing up to the Andrew Sisters and Leroy, singing along, climaxes with, “The boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company Beeeeeeeee - ah!”
And Kate, laughing like she thought she never would again, slugs him with that same pillow, shutting him up when he falls to the floor. She tugs the sheet around her body and slips down to join him.
“It’s a good idea,” he says.
“I didn’t mean it when I -” she says, but he shushes her, one finger on the lip, which she kisses.
“When you said play both sides. That’s a good one.”
“How you going to do it?” she asks, drowsy, not real interested right at this moment until he tells her.
“Not me, doll; you. This is your idea, you’re going to have to go out and make it happen.”
“Me?” She considers it, shrugs. “Okay.” Then she curls around until her head’s in the right place, nestled on his left shoulder. Softly she whispers, “Logan, you’re the greatest.”
His voice is a purr against her hair. “No, baby,” he says. “We are.”
“Yessir, I can do that; yessir,” says the man, Tim something, or Eddie, Leroy didn’t quite catch it. “You want these contracts printed on US Navy Stationary, exact copies right down to the seal. Is that it?”
Not expecting things to go this smoothly, Leroy says, “Um, yes.”
“Thursday work for you?”
Today being Monday. “Sure.”
“We’ll see you then.”
Leroy thinking, it can not be this easy.
Oh, but it is. Leroy and Kate, dressed in their Sunday best - modestly cut green dress and a matching box-like hat with a white egret feather for her, a black suit and tie for him - pause at the shack to let the guard study them.
“State your business,” says the kid, eighteen, maybe, twenty tops, but he’s got a real service revolver in a polished holster and his partner’s got a rifle at port arms so Leroy treats this extra carefully.
Big grin, shading his eyes from the glare off all that brass, he says, “Here to see Captain Spaulding. I was mustered out before getting my last pay. They told me to report to the paymaster before Friday.” He holds out the letter Kate typed out on that official Navy letterhead.
The guard nods. “Sure, looks okay,” and passes them through. What’s the danger after all? The war’s over and we won. Who’s gonna screw with us now?
They park in front of a Quonset hut and hustle off to separate tasks.
Leroy goes into the hut where he finds the base staff in charge of personnel. Knowing the schedule kept in the Navy, Leroy’s pretty sure they’re on skeleton staff during lunch and sure enough, he has the run of the place. He looks up a chart of command, makes notes and memorizes names and phone numbers, then wanders off in search of office C-for-Charlie-two-oh-six, which is, according to the paperwork, empty.
Another stroke of luck – it is. Leroy carries in a small tool-kit filled with clips and screwdrivers and pretty soon is face down, ass high under the desk attaching a couple of wires to a standard black rotary dial telephone picked up from supplies.
When he’s finished he goes to the PBX closet where the phone exchange relays clack and whirr, finds what he wants by studying a spaghetti-like maze of lines on a blueprint until the ammonia makes his head buzz. Satisfied, he moves a wire here, another wire there and leaves, as unsuspected as a ghost.
Back at the car, a six year old Ford sedan with a strait-six engine that takes the San Francisco hills like an asthmatic, Leroy waits for Kate to return. He’s got the radio on and happily listens to KVOB, the “voice of the bay.” Rodney Kirkwell is playing standards and Leroy croons along with Bing.
The back door
opens and Kate dumps what looks like an entire platoon’s clothing on the broad backseat. She dances around the car, jumps in front and says, “Got ‘em!”
She’s flushed with delight, as giddy as a ballerina on Halloween tallying her haul. “I’ve got WAC dress white’s, Shipman’s whites, a couple of Lieutenant blues, with all the patches you wanted. I’ve got shoes and hats; Logan, I could outfit half of Peoria with what I have here.”
He says, “Don’t get all excited. We still have a lot to do.” But he’s pleased and she knows it. Damn, thinks Kate; this is like Christmas and a birthday all rolled into one. What an amazing high. No wonder Leroy likes this stuff.
He waves at the guard as they leave and the kid lifts a hand in reply. They could have taken a tank out of here and no one would say boo.
So Kate’s jazzed, bouncing on the seat. “What’s next?”
“Now we start the actual con.”
Madelyn Crier, well-known socialite and wife of Admiral Edward Sturgeon Crier (Ret.) and her daughter Theresa enter the office of Commander Richard “Ricky” Hyman on the fourteenth of March, a Thursday morning, with a complaint.
“I have heard,” states Mrs. Crier, a large boned woman of sixty, “that the Navy intends to dispose as scrap several of the battleships that served our country so honorably.”
This after Commander Hyman bids the ladies to be seated. He gazes at the woman like a rather stupid sheep, not having a clue what she’s saying. The younger one, a carbon copy of her mother, wears a fashionable gown and wide-brimmed hat. She looks like a high society daughter, rather like Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Her hair is red, like fire in the night.
“What?” he asks, blinking a lot.
“I am referring to the Mississippi,” says Mrs. Crier.
“And...what about her?” The Commander is perplexed. Had she heard something he’s unaware of? Richard Hyman, promoted far beyond his abilities due to wartime vacancies, is well on his way to a comfortable retirement and understands that, as the wife of a retired Admiral, this woman might know things. He decides to play it safe.
“I have received information,” says Mrs. Crier, “that the Mississippi and several other ships are to be decommissioned and sold as scrap to the highest bidder. Is this true?”
“I,” says the Commander, rendered speechless by the preposterousness of this idea. But, carefully, “I haven’t heard anything, madam, and I’m certain that I would have. Where did you get this information?”
The daughter, Theresa, speaks up. “Mother and father are members of a social club on the hill.” They don’t have to say which one. In San Francisco, anyone who lives on any of the seven hills is gentry.
“They were being regaled with stories of criminals and their folly when a gentleman told the story of an attempt to sell the battleships for scrap metal. Mother,” she waves a hand in the direction of Mrs. Crier, who sniffs as if she’s offended by her surroundings, “believing that this would be a tragedy of no small order, called on some friends to get this meeting with you.”
The commander nods; ‘the friend’ who called him said he was a member of the Joint Chiefs in Washington. “Ricky,” he had said, voice tense over the wire, “I don’t know what the snafu is out there, but clean it up pronto. Do I make myself clear?”
He had, hence this meeting. Eager to reassure that he’s taking them seriously, despite the complete idiocy of the notion, Commander Hyman says, “Ladies, I can assure you. There is no attempt to sell any of the vessels in the fleet. They have, as you’ve alluded, served our country well and loyally and while a few may be mothballed, none are being scrapped.”
There, he thinks; that ought to hold them. But he asks, “Who, if I may ask, is spreading this rumor?”
“His name,” says Mrs. Crier. “Is Walter P. Edens. He’s a member of the Beach Club with my husband. Edward calls him the Colonel.”
“I see,” says the Commander. He makes polite noises to the ladies before escorting them on their way, opening the front door of the huge Lincoln Limousine before the waiting driver can get there.
“Trust me, ladies,” he says. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
The visitor smiles at the receptionist in the dark-paneled offices of Empire Steel and Recycling. The middle-aged woman sitting behind a big grey Remington, typing efficiently, looks up, arching an eyebrow.
“I’ve got a letter to a Mr. Giles Maldive.”
“Who’s it from?” says the woman, not caring. She hits a bad key, mutters, “crap!” and picks up the brush/eraser to fix it.
“The Department of the Navy,” says the visitor, a young woman in a blue skirt and white shirt and the receptionist gets suddenly interested. The naval base in Alameda and the training camp on Angel Island are the company’s bread and butter.
“I’ll see he gets it,” she says.
Outside, the woman taps on the window of the Blue Ford idling at the curb. Kate rolls down the window. “Did she take it?
“Yes. You got my money?”
“Yes.” A ten spot is handed over and Kate drives away. This is the fifth delivery and all goes well. Possibly, Kate thinks, the best fifty bucks I’ve ever spent.
The telephone rings as Leroy is explaining. “I only need two,” he says, reaching for it. “One straight and one bent to give the bribe. Hold on.” Changing voices he says, “Lieutenant Hanritty here. How may I help you?”
Kate watches him closely, waiting. Is this it? Is this really it? Her hands and feet are needles and pins and she’s biting her lower lip, a habit since she was eight, that makes her look like a rabbit.
“Yes, sir,” says Leroy. “Certainly it’s true. The government wants to expedite this matter before public opinion overwhelms us. We’ve been building these ships for four years at breakneck speed. Now the war’s over and we simply don’t have the docks to store them. Or frankly,” he says confidentially, “the budget. Yes, sir; I’d be happy to meet with you. My office on base. Say Four-thirty? Certainly, sir. I’ll see you then.”
Leroy hangs up and takes a deep breath. “Expedite,” he laughs
But there’s trouble at the base. Leroy, in dress blues with a chest full of lettuce testifying to his alleged rank, gets stopped at the first gate and by a roving guard who is entirely too curious. If his forged paperwork wasn’t first-rate, Leroy would certainly be explaining the inexplicable to some interested people about now.
But he arrives unarrested at the Quonset hut office he’d be assigned if he was an actual lieutenant, and at precisely four-thirty is joined by a balding middle-aged man wearing a poorly tailored suit, a battered fedora and the smell of the cigar that he wasn’t allowed to carry on base.
The visitor is Charlie Wapner, president of the third largest scrap yard in the Bay Area. Kate, dressed as a Navy WAC in a crisp white uniform that hugs her hips and stops mid-calf, is a model of efficiency, offering coffee with an impersonal, “And for you, sir?” Charlie swivels in his seat to watch hers swivel from the room and says, “Huh? Some tomato. Huh?” He shakes his head, drops the wolf act and gets down to business.
“Mr. Hanritty,” he says, addressing Leroy’s current alter ego. “I’m interested in this project. I have to say it’s a welcome sign that the Navy is moving so swiftly to reduce costs.” He’s referring to the war years when the civilians worked exclusively for the benefit of the military. “Better days ahead, boys,” his tone suggests, not incorrectly.
“Ah, Yes.” Leroy tents his fingers together like a parson or a door-to-door peddler – either way a bill of goods is being sold – and does his song and dance. “The glut of ships, the need for both speed and confidentiality...I’m sure you understand, Mr. Wapner.”
“Sure, sure. But I got a question. How come such a high-pressure job’s being done by such a green kid such as yourself? No offence, I’m only asking.”
“None taken, sir. One, you have to consider how many troops were lost in the war. And, two; those of us who stayed behind learned
a lot about how the Navy really works.” He lets his eyebrows, grin and long pause state the obvious; there’s a right way to do this and a wrong way. The Navy way and the profitable way. Wash my hand and I’ll wash yours…
Charlie Wapner wasn’t born yesterday and his wide grin says he knows the score. “Perhaps you could narrow in on a figure,” he says.
“If I did it there would be five of them. The bids went out to six companies. I certainly wouldn’t want to show any favoritism.”
“Of course; of course,” agrees Charlie. He considers. “I’m going to be at the Twenty-One club this coming Friday evening. I might bump into you there. Say about eleven?”
“It’s a free country, Mr. Wapner,” says Leroy. “You never can tell where a person will be.”
His second conference is with a man named Carroll Chesterbrook of American Way Metals who makes it clear that a bribe is the American Way. Leroy concludes the meeting with a promise to get back to him and nudges Kate playfully as they watch him leave.
“That’s number two,” he says. “A full haul. I do believe we’re on the right track.”
But things are happening elsewhere that he hasn’t planned on. Kate has delivered six of the bogus bid packages to large scrap dealers and has heard back from three of them. Did the others merely not want to bid? Or is the danger in the lack of response? The extra security on base makes him jumpy and he sniffs like a wary deer.
Something is in the air.
Giles Maldive of Empire Steel and Recycling, a company with offices in the East bay. He knows a fraud when he sees one and immediately makes an appointment, not with the sender, but with the Navy. He’s given an immediate audience, which fits his status and convinces him that he’s doing the right thing.
He shows the paperwork to Commander Hymen who calls in some other military types, all bigwigs, if Giles is reading the chevrons right. They thank him for his cooperation and ask if he’s willing to do a favor for his Uncle Sam.
“A little something,” says Commander Hyman, “that will turn the tables on this rat and his schemes.”
“Sir,” says Giles who served in WWI and never forgot. “I’d be honored.”
Feeling like he belongs, smoking fat Cubans, Giles stays until two in the morning with the assembled brass, making sure the plan is foolproof.
“Nope, nope, nope!” Kate fends off Leroy’s advances with a push against his chest. He’s dressed for love in a sleeveless tee, suspenders and enough tonic lotion to choke a mule. Combined with his usual Bryl-Cream the smell is heady.
But that’s not why Kate’s resisting. A tussle in the sack would be fine as a tension reliever and a good time, but she senses something going on and wants to nip it in the bud – whatever it is.
The signs are clear: he’s restless and bored, playing endless hands of solitaire, griping about the weather, the horses (he’s listening to the radio broadcast out of Santa Anita) the food, even politics. Since Leroy Logan doesn’t care a fig about local civic criminals, Kate knows she’s got to act.
“Let’s go for a stroll,” she insists, tugging his arm. He puts on a shirt, grabs his snap-brim hat and they walk through glorious sunshine, Leroy carping all the while. Kate doesn’t care – or listen really; it’s all a symptom.
They catch a cable car, climb a lot of stairs and find themselves at the base of Coit Tower, San Francisco’s phallic tribute to firefighters. They take the rickety elevator, hand the Chinese girl a nickel and look out the tiny windows at the view.
A gaggle of tourist is tossing coins but they may as well be alone; no one speaks English. “What’s the deal, Logan?”
Kate learned some things about men in her slow travel from childhood to California. One was to always get your man talking about himself. “It’s better than sex,” said a madam in a brothel in Chicago. Kate hadn’t been a hooker – she washed sheets for twenty cents an hour during a bad spell after being mauled by a salesman out of Topeka. A ride, she explained carefully to the battered lothario, did not mean sex.
But the part about getting a man to talk is always good advice. She pushes him to open up and soon it comes out in a rush. He’s worried about the extra security, the cops are everywhere, there’s a mood of impending disaster, none of which matter much.
“I’ve got to go see the Colonel again,” he concludes, frowning some more.
“What?” This surprises her. Leroy can’t stand the man and says so, often. “Why?”
He shakes his head, weary or resigned, hard to tell. “Because I can’t pull this off without him.” A long white sailboat drifts across the blue waters of the bay. From this elevation it feels like you can see China. What the hell is he talking about?
“The Colonel’s bad news, Logan. What’d’ya gotta see him for?”
But he won’t unload any more. “No other way to do it,” is all he’ll say and Kate, knowing a dead end when she hears one, lets it go all the way home where she drags him, unresisting, into bed.
She learned that from the madam, too.
Walter P. Edens, aka the Colonel, is every bit as condescending as Leroy expects when they meet at La Tratoria, an upscale eye-talian place where Walter dines on Chicken Marsala and Leroy eats crow.
“I hear you’re having...difficulties,” laughs the Colonel, sampling a Chianti and finding it substandard. He grouses to the waiter who whirls away in search of a better vintage. Leroy uses the distraction to finger a knife and consider the location of arteries; his own or the Colonels, at this point it doesn’t matter.
The Colonel’s playing up the part of the man about town, pointing out celebrities in the crowd, like Leroy could give a damn. A celebrity, to him, means a high profile mark with guaranteed money. A little harder to get to, but well worth the effort.
“You’re having difficulties,” the Colonel repeats and waits until Leroy nods. “I want to hear you say it.”
So Leroy has to admit to this fat prig that, no; the plan’s not working so well.
“I wonder why?” muses the Colonel, and waits.
Leroy gestures at his baby face. “Because of this. Because I’m not believable.”
“I think I told you that when we first met, didn’t I? Any other reasons?”
“Because of the pressure,” says Leroy, feeling a lot of it at this moment. His face feels like it’s on fire and he’s developed an irritating itch all over his shins that makes him need to scratch. Instead he says, “The pressure you put on.”
“Ah,” says the Colonel, savoring the Chicken or, more likely, the moment. “Have some wine?”
The waiter appears and the Colonel does the cork sniffing, pouring, rolling the damn glass, sipping, gazing into space like he’s discovering a comet but mostly just looking like a jerk until finally he nods and the waiter pours some more. Honest to God, thinks Leroy, you don’t get this kind of crap with a cup of coffee.
Leroy sips his wine – tastes like any other – and gets to it. “I need your help.”
“Really?” Of course he pulls it out, stretches the word, enjoying himself hugely at Leroy’s expense. The whole meal goes like this and Leroy’s about ready to throw the whole thing away, just chuck it and be a truck driver when the point is reached.
“I’d be happy to help you, son.” It’s ‘son’ now, Leroy notices. “For a price.”
Sure, that’s expected. “You said sixty percent.”
“I did,” agrees the Colonel. “Then.”
Then?
“Now it’s eighty.”
Leroy protests. Actually he makes a noise like a poodle being poked with a sharp stick and the Colonel laughs, nasty, like he’s got you, which he does and Leroy better know it.
“That’s robbery!” Leroy protests.
“Consider it tuition, son. You’re learning from a master.”
Leroy bows his head and eventually nods, but the Colonel pushes it, making Leroy grovel. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I said, sure. Eighty percent’s fine.”
&nbs
p; “That leaves you enough to cover expenses, I trust,” says the Colonel, rubbing it in, acting as if he cares.
“Sure,” says Leroy. His teeth clench and he knows he can’t hold on much longer.
The Colonel, sensing this – he is a professional con man, after all – lets the fun end. “Tell me the details.” He listens for a while, writes down a few things and tells Leroy, “I’ll do the con and get back to you to give you your share.” He waves a couple of fingers in dismissal, and says, “Oh, and kid?” Leroy stops. “Pick up the check on your way out, will you?”
Leroy drops a ten spot on the table and flees. Fog has rolled in and the harsh street lights are fuzzy globes stretching away like ghostly candles. Ship’s bells and foghorns boom hollow warnings. He lights a Pall Mall red and flips the dead match, goes down Columbus to the lot where he stashed the car, his walk becoming a strut.
“Tuition,” he says, liking the word. He cackles and the sound echoes, like laughing ghosts.
“We’re on,” he tells Kate. “The meet’s set for eleven.”
“You sure of this guy?” Kate’s getting in the way, brushing his coat, adjusting his tie. Leroy takes her hands to stop them.
“I’m sure. He’s as bent as a cheap nail. If he leaned any further he’d fall over. Trust me, babe; he’ll pay.” He puts on his fedora, sets it at a rakish angle that Kate immediately changes.
“I’ll meet you downstairs at midnight,” she tells him. “I’ve already packed; we’re ready to go.”
“Swell. Wish me luck.”
Instead she gives him a kiss that curls his toes.
Chinatown looks exactly like it does in the movies. Narrow crowded streets, people sliding by in the midst, even the shadows are filled with shadows. The Colonel is already at a dark booth when Giles Maldive slides in.
“How much?” he asks.
“Fifty.”
Giles chokes, sucks water from a red plastic cup. “Thousand?”
“Dollars,” agrees the Colonel companionably. “Try the Duck, I hear it’s tasty.”
“Try screwing,” says Giles, pissed. He tugs out a pack of smokes, lights one with hands that shake. “No chance.”
“The contract is worth millions. I can guarantee you’ll get it.”
“I dunno –”
The Colonel shrugs, begins to ooze out of the booth, taking his time…
“Wait. Wait a second. Maybe I can do…thirty?”
“Maybe,” suggests the Colonel, “You could try, how’d you put it? Screwing.”
“Forty then. I got it right here. Cash.” He slides a fat envelope from an inside pocket, holds it out, waiting.
The Colonel pauses, good theatre, like this is a dramatic moment, then settles back in the booth. He takes the envelope and two suits appear as if by magic, like twin rabbits from a cheap magician’s hat, identical in fedoras and dark shades.
“FBI,” says one of them, doesn’t matter who, while the other slips handcuffs on the Colonel as smooth as a professional.
“What? Why? Wait!” The Colonel squawks as they lead him away. Surprisingly few patrons even look up from their Chop Suey as Giles Maldive shouts, “Screw that, you miserable crook. Maybe you got juice with the police, pal, but you cut no ice with the Navy.”
The experience at the Twenty-One Club is a lot more friendly. Charlie sips scotch raw, glancing around so furtively that Leroy thinks, if anybody is watching, that look will bring them over here in a shot.
But nobody cares. The waitress brings Leroy a beer, accepts a quarter with a dull smile and leaves. Charlie Wapner dances around naming a number he thinks will buy him the contract and Leroy imagines that right now the Colonel is sitting down for a meeting with Giles Maldive. The thought makes him laugh.
“How about...ten thousand dollars,” says Charlie.
Which makes Leroy laugh again. “How about twenty?” In the background the drummer, some new kid named Buddy Rich, hits the high hat. Dum-dum-dah. They settle on seventeen-five, which must have been what Charlie had in mind because he only pulls a couple of C-notes out of the brown leather case when he hands it to Leroy in the parking lot.
“You’ll get me the contracts?” He asks.
“Oh, you’ll get everything,” agrees Leroy.
On the lam in a ’40 Chrysler Highlander, baby blue with an automatic transmission and a radio that actually pulls in tunes from farther away than the next block, Leroy takes the turn onto the Golden Gate and points the car toward Napa. Wine country, he thinks, appropriately, a sort of finger at the Colonel.
Kate’s snuggles against him as he steers the brute auto with one hand on the huge white wheel. He feels like he’s piloting one of those sailboats he’s been watching these last weeks and briefly considers getting one. He can afford it, after all; he’s rich.
Kate purrs like a cat by the heater, laughing occasionally as if everything in the whole universe is jake. With an uptown hoity-toity voice, she says, “Mother and father are members of a social club up on the hill.”
Leroy squeezes her shoulder. “That was amazing, what you did. I would have believed you were upper crust any day. And hiring that woman to play Madelyn Crier,” he says. “A stroke of genius.”
“I told you we could hire straight people to help us.” She shakes her head in wonder. “I can’t believe you pulled it off.”
“We,” Leroy corrects, meaning it. “We pulled it off. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Lies,” she says. “But such lovely lies.”
“Truth.” Leroy takes his hand off the wheel and puts it on his heart. “I swear to God.”
“You swear at everything,” Kate laughs. “That bit with the Colonel though; that was inspired.”
“Why not use the pressure he caused to set him up, I figured. Sure was hard groveling though.”
“Well, you’ll never have to do that again. So what’s the play now?” she asks.
“We lay low in Napa and see what’s up. Then we can go anywhere you want to go.”
“Anywhere I want to go,” Kate wonders. Where would that be? “As long as I’m with you, Logan. Just as long as I’m with you.”
Three days of playing around in a roadside motel in Sonoma, a drive-in with a pool you could swim in if you didn’t mind freezing. Leroy prefers indoor sports and Kate obliges as often as possible figuring he’s been at sea a year and change. Averages out, she thinks, stretching languidly before the mirrored walls.
The fourth morning Leroy comes back from a stroll carrying a rolled up newspaper in one hand and a look of bemused wonder on his face.
“What?” Kate lets the covers slip but he barely notices.
“He didn’t talk,” says Leroy.
“Who didn’t?”
“Charlie Wapner.” He tosses the paper on the bed. “I’ve been watching the news for some word of a scam in the Bay area, but nothing. Kate; I think we got away clean!”
“What are you talking, Logan? We skinned the mark seventeen gees. No way he’s not going to sing like a canary.” Kate had a canary when she was a kid; a noisy little bird that would never shut up.
“That’s the thing, Kate; he didn’t. If he had the whole city would be buzzing with the news. But they’re not!”
Kate climbs out of bed and stands looking at him in amazement. “Why wouldn’t he shout it from the rooftops?”
“What’s he going to say? Hey, I bribed somebody to slip me a contract only the contracts a fraud and I want my money back? They’d laugh themselves silly.”
“The Colonel?”
“He’s already a laughingstock. He won’t admit he was taken by a kid.”
“Then…?” she says.
“We could do it,” he says.
“Carroll Chesterbrook,” says Kate.
“The American Way,” says Leroy.
Damned if they can’t pull this off twice.
He wraps an arm around her and looks at their reflection in the mirrors, front and back.
Ka
te and Leroy/Leroy and Kate.
Forever.
End of Chapter One
The Rag, The Wire And The Big Store Page 1