Chapter Two
THE RED-HOT YELLOW BUGATTI
Stanford, California, April 1949
“I don’t get’cha,” Leroy says from the floor, causing Kate, on the sofa, to want to slug him with something hard.
“What’s not to get? We shouldn’t be going after the cheap scores, taking down innocent people, that’s all I’m saying.”
“No such thing.” Leroy is doing one armed pushups, dressed in serge pants and a white sleeveless tee. His suspenders sag around his legs. “Fifteen,” he says, though he’s only done five.
“We’re stony,” he explains, though he knows she knows it. She talks about it often enough. “So we play short cons until we find another big score.”
Four years since they took down the Colonel in San Francisco and the money ran out in less than two. Living hand to mouth in fine hotels like this one – the Embarcadero in San Jose, California – has meant taking whatever comes along. Leroy’s been running cheap hustles and Kate’s been on him lately.
“It’s what kind of short cons, Logan. I don’t think we should run the Bible or the Spectacles scam anymore. We’re better than that.”
“Forty-nine, fifty.” He sits up, sips some scotch and lights another Pall-Mall, his fourth, lays back on the floor to do some Navy style sit-ups. “Money’s gone, Kate; we do what we have to.”
“But where’s the money gone?” She shakes that thought away – too much trouble – and returns to her main point. “You can’t cheat an honest man, Logan. That’s like the first rule.” She’s been down this road and Leroy always slips away.
“Willing to try,” he grunts, lying, “sixteen, seventeen.”
“We’ve got to do better putting up the mark. Skim a better class, you know?” She tries a new tack. “Listen, you didn’t scam your mates on board ship, did you?”
“God, no.”
“See? That’s like a moral line you won’t cross.” Kate’s been reading a lot and, considering their line of work, the subject of good and bad, missed since Sunday school, has resurfaced with a vengeance.
“There’s no place to run on a ship, Kate. They’d catch me and I’d have to walk home.” He shivers. “Twelve hundred miles of open water.”
Wrong tack, she thinks. “Okay, well then, is there anyone you wouldn’t con?”
He considers, eyes drifting. “Nope.”
Exasperated, Kate says, “How about a nun? You wouldn’t scam a nun, would you?”
He looks offended enough to be honest. “Jeez; no. Of course not.”
“Okay.” She smiles, finally getting through.
“Nuns don’t have money, Kate. You know that.” Eye roll and head shake. “Take down a Nun. Maybe go after her Boss, though…”
Kate, shocked. “You’d try to con God?”
“Do it every damn day,” he answers solemnly, hand over heart.
Kate’s not so easy to put off. Dancing cheek to cheek at the Truckadero to the swinging sound of the Count Basie Band, Leroy in an actual tuxedo and Kate in a white chiffon Ginger Rogers pleated dress bought at the new Frederick’s of Hollywood. Underneath she’s wearing something else from the store, a surprise that Leroy will discover later and yell, “Holy Hannah!” when he sees it.
“There’s gotta be something you wouldn’t do.”
He dips, she twirls, they do a finger snapping shoulder roll while he thinks about it. Everywhere there are people doing the jive to the heavy beat and the bleating horns. “Wouldn’t cheat on you,” he says finally, which gets him a lot closer to that surprise.
At the bar with a gin and tonic she says, “Let’s try this, then. A bad guy is greedy, right?”
“Yuh.” Leroy’s only half listening; he’s got his eye on a fat slob in a cream suit pouring drinks down a dyed platinum blonde. Worth it? He wonders. Does he have a stash worth taking?
“Sooo,” Kate tugs at his arm. “He’s an easier mark. And he’s not likely to go to the cops if he’s bent himself. We win both ways.” She studies him, wondering if he gets it and is rewarded with a smile.
“Fine. You can be the roper.”
“No, that’s not what I –” she starts but realizes maybe it is. “Okay, I’ll be the roper.”
Leroy juts his chin at the fat man. “Start with him.”
“Him?” says Leroy, dubiously eyeing the rich kid in the yellow roadster. “The BMOC with the Bryl-Cream, feeling up the coed?” Kid’s wearing a tan poplin suit, gangster style like the B-movies, Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. Kate and Leroy are sitting in their own car, a nice Lincoln of uncertain origins, on the corner of Pacifica and Bayside. Gotta love these street names in a town what? - a hundred miles from the ocean? Contractor calls a subdivision Bayo Vista because it has a view of a billboard with water painted on it. Like it makes scamming respectable, you got a bulldozer.
A cool breeze steals their smoke, the sun’s just making an appearance and the mark pats the girl on her short tennis skirt. She’s got a racket over one shoulder and she smiles, bright white teeth in a perfect face, perfect hair and a look that says she owns the world just for showing up.
“Top notch,” admits Leroy. “But why him?”
“He’s second generation money,” Kate says. “His father’s an engineer, made a pile investing in the Hoover Dam back in ’31. Owns a grand Victorian in San Francisco, rules the kid with his wallet. Bought him the fancy French car, pays for the lawyers when Junior goes too far with the girls.”
“Yeah?” Interested now, Leroy sees the kid leer, get in the car, drive away. “What else?”
“The kid hates the old man, wants to one up him. That makes him hungry, an easy mark.”
“What’s the take?”
“I figure eight – ten gees.”
Leroy snorts, tries to cover it up with a drag off his smoke but Kate turns on him, huffy. “It’s better than two Cee notes playing a pedigreed dog, Logan, or swindling a widow for her savings.” She’s really hot and he backpedals furiously.
“I never took any widows.”
“Not for lack of trying. You’d steal a cop’s pistol if he didn’t have one to stop you.”
Desperate Leroy says, “Why don’t we pitch the father?”
“Because I’m the roper and I say the kid. You got a problem?”
No, no; Leroy doesn’t have a problem.
Kate, armed with a pile of newly forged transcripts from a guy named Keyhole Tommy, God knows why, becomes new girl on campus Doris Clooney. She moves into a dorm at Cutler Hall, University of Northern California and within two weeks she’s been accepted as a sister in Kappa Sigma Chi, joins the tennis team and volunteers for the dance committee. She makes friends, listens to the other girls chatter about boys and, with her crown of red hair, is the envy of every brunette in the sorority.
She attends five classes and walks to campus where, on the fourteenth of March, she meets Steven, “Buzz” Barnes III.
He pulls alongside in a ’47 Yellow Bugatti with leather straps across the hood, gives her a long wolf whistle to get her attention. He’s wearing pleated slacks and a white sweater with a red ‘C’ on the right breast, his arm is draped across the passenger seat and his hair, neatly cut and gently greased, makes a slight curl above his left eyebrow. He looks, he knows, like the cat’s meow.
“Give you a lift, honey?” Ella Fitzgerald’s singing Come On a My House loud on the radio.
“I’m not your honey,” says Kate, over her shoulder, still walking. She’s wearing the campus uniform – gray poodle skirt, knee highs and patent leather pumps, red sweater tight at the chest. She carries her books like the shield of her virginity and her nose like she’s smelled something foul. “Amscray, Lothario. I’m not interested.”
Smiling, Buzz drifts the car in her wake. “Baby, don’t be like that. I’m just offering you a ride in a nice car.”
She pauses and looks over her shoulder in a Betty Grable pose. “It is a nice car…”
She sees him again of course, in town, cru
ising or on campus walking with a crowd of jocks. He makes eye contact and smiles when he sees her, cool, like she’s a sure thing, he’s in no hurry, and one day he’s on the street when she leaves the lecture hall, the radio still low, this time a Billie Holiday song, God Bless the Child.
Kate gets up close to listen and sings along with, “Your Daddy’s rich and your Mama’s good looking,” eyeing the car to make sure he knows she gets it – the car is his calling card, he’s got money.
So she says, “Sure, I’ll take a ride,” and gets in. Just like that he becomes a steady, bringing flowers on a Friday night, taking her to see Gary Grant at the Arcadium, his hand on her shoulder the second half of the picture.
Late night gabfests at school; Kate listens to the other girls. Becky Finch, one of the few out of state coeds who could afford the astounding $300 tuition, says, “That Buzz is bad news. I hear he got a girl in the family way and,” her voice drops to a whisper, “He wanted to send her down to Tijuana for a…you know…”
“What?” asks Linda, a short plump brunette, not one of the brightest lights. She’s wearing a long flannel nightie with pink flowers and has her hair up in metal curlers. “What?”
“You know,” whispers Becky, as pert and chirpy as her name. She rolls her eyes.
“An abortion,” says Kate to a lot of round eyes. She gets the picture – Buzz is a creep.
Later, sipping a Coke with Toni Mazur, more street smart than her sorority sisters but not in Kate’s league, she gets different view.
“Buzz is all right. He can take you places, nice places…he’s got that car and a lodge up near Reno, and a boat…he likes to take girls out on it and make them undress for him, right out in the open .”
If she’s hoping to scandalize Kate she falls short, Kate having seen plenty more in working houses on her trip west. “Doesn’t he dump you when he’s had his way?” she asks.
“You mean like why buy the cow when the milk is free?” Toni laughs. Her cigarette has lipstick prints, coral red, matches her nails. Her eyes turn upward, weighing the odds. “Maybe. But maybe he hasn’t met the right girl yet.”
“And you’d be the right girl?”
Toni grins, jack-o-lantern bright. “He’s got to chose somebody…”
Kate lies awake on the narrow bunk, drifting. She hears the faint stirrings of the other girls, four to a dorm room, rustles and snores and she wonders about herself. Is she the same as they are? Different circumstances but the same basic person?
She thinks about Leroy, gone away again on one of his trips, vanishing for a day or three or a week or two and she doesn’t know where but she knows he’s not stacking up too well at this moment. He is, she decides, basically immoral, faithful to her perhaps, but unable to pick right and wrong from a lineup. He drinks, he steals, he comes in at all hours, gambles, loses money like it’s water and the world’s a desert, and drags home some of the nastiest specimens ever seen outside of a prison.
Still…he’s trusted her to be the roper and trust is something she’s never experienced much of, with men or, come to think of it, anyone else.
She realizes she’s making the same dumb move as Toni. Sure, Leroy’s as bad as any man, probably worse, but dammit; he’s her man.
She falls asleep thinking she can change him.
Three weeks fly by before she makes her pitch.
“I don’t think I’ll be here next semester,” she tells Buzz. They’re at a beach, her swimsuit the briefest allowed by the times, with a ruffled skirt mid thigh. A chill wind tosses her hair and she wraps a towel around her shoulders. “I’ll be working for the summer, but I can’t afford to come back…what with my father and all.”
“Your father,” says Buzz, not interested but pretending to care. He’s invested all this time and still hasn’t made first base. It makes him feel insecure and confused. He says, “What about him?” and Kate spins him the tale.
She says, with just a little frost in her voice, “I told you, he’s an inventor.” She hadn’t told him but knows it will keep him off balance; men never remember. “He’s working on this great invention but doesn’t have the money to patent it. So I’ll be handing over my check all summer.” She sighs bravely.
“But I’ll come back, don’t you worry. As soon as he gets it patented he’ll sell it to one of the big companies, GE or Westinghouse, then we’ll see who’s talking. There’s gonna be money to burn. I’ll be on easy street come this time next year, fella.”
Buzz lays back in the sun, contemplating this information, wondering if he’ll be over her before the semester ends. One arm shading his eyes, he lets himself drift in semi-sexual images for a few moments before blinking.
Money?
Late night on the town hustling pool in a joint called the Corner Bar. Kate’s dolled up in sorority style showing a little leg, a little money, like she doesn’t belong here but what of it? Leroy’s her sweetheart, probably since high school, now a science major, Chemistry or something, got black glasses and a shabby suit coat, chalk on his sleeves. He calls her Dorie, she calls him Chuck.
The mark’s a biker named Curly, thick black greased hairdo, toothpick at the side of his mouth, tattoo of a devil on his left bicep. Leroy’s already lost fifty bucks in three straight games and is about to suddenly get lucky. Curly’s racking the balls at the other end when Kate says, “Barnes – senior – is a real straight arrow.”
Leroy, watching Curly flex the devil at a barfly asks, “Why do you say?”
“I checked him out. He’s a pillar of society type, donates to civic this and that, takes the mayor out on the town. He goes to church on Sunday, married thirty years, three kids, all in good schools, blah-blah. Your basic nice guy.”
“Then how come the kid hates him?” Leroy asks.
“I dunno. Maybe he’s just rebelling. Logan? Why the interest?”
Leroy makes a show of chalking his cue. “No reason; just curious.”
“That better be all,” Kate warns. “Don’t you try to cut into my play.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She gives him a fish-eye, like she doesn’t know whether to believe him or
Not - odds say not – then shrugs, makes an ‘ooh’ noise and kneads his arm for show. “Curley’s ready. Take him.”
Leroy makes the break, drops two, then misses to give the mark a chance. Curly grins, sinks five straight, misses the sixth. Leroy sweeps the rest, leaving an easy shot on the eight in the side.
Kate says, while he lights up a cigarette and drains his beer, pure theater to stretch out the moment, “Barnes – senior – I’m trusting you, Logan.”
“Sure,” says Leroy, lining up.
“I mean it. Don’t you go getting ideas.”
“Gotcha,” he says, a little annoyed.
“About anything. I wouldn’t like it if you… What!?” She gapes as Leroy drops the eight ball and the cue lazily follows, falling in the hole with a faint clack. Curly grins and scoops up the money – two hundred in twenties – and swallows beer with the canary.
“Jeez, Logan,” says Kate, low voice and livid. “Can’t you do anything right?”
It takes her better than two hours to hustle their stake back and turn a small profit.
“It’s a broadcast generator,” says the Professor.
Buzz, not comprehending, nods vacantly, wondering when the money part comes in.
The professor is Milt Wallingham, a local grifter hired for the part. They picked Heinrich, a good German name, suggesting Teutonic innovation. Since everyone knows that the Reich scientists were ahead of the US in the big war, the suggestion becomes its own reality. Heinrich is German, ergo he’s brilliant. Gotta be.
Of course, the illusion doesn’t stop there. Leroy is already in for a month and three hundred dollars creating and printing an article for Popular Mechanics, July, 1946 that gushes about the future of broadcast electricity. It’s filled with scientific sounding mumbo-jumbo, some of it accurate, and has quotes from Phi
lo T. Farnsworth and a nice picture of the professor in front of a blackboard.
Another C-note gets a fake cover story in Scientific American, both of which Leroy salts in the campus library. For insurance he’s been ready to hire a visiting science teacher but Buzz isn’t that smart or determined. The articles, combined with Kate’s verisimilitude and his own greed, are more than enough to cause the campus flirt to change course, now pursuing Kate for her father not her favor, his mind on a bigger prize.
Money for the forged papers, tuition…clothes to fit Kate’s new life, an low rent house for Leroy to hide out in, textbooks…a fat bribe to a weasel faced cop downtown to set the fix in case the mark makes noise…other expenses, big ones…the money flows like a river of gold – all outbound.
Fortunately, the professor is in for a piece of the eventual take, otherwise, Leroy’s a big fat zero for expenses.
But now the con is on. Doris– finally! – agrees to Buzz’s persistent pleading to meet her father and see his miracle invention. The professor, convincing in a well tailored suit that’s just a tad shabby, as if he can’t afford better any longer, has a shock of dusty frizzy hair that floats like it’s been electrified. The resemblance to Einstein is lost on Buzz except for that suggestion of familiarity and gentle genius. The boy is as dense as mahogany.
They meet at the professor’s home/lab in Sacramento, a quick hour drive in the roadster, Kate’s hair firmly pressed under a pink scarf that flutters gaily. She’s in a festive mood, babbling over the roar of the engine, touching his hand when it sits vibrating on the gearshift lever.
The professor meets them at the door, offering polite chatter and cocktails and Buzz eyes the room, seeing what he expects– a bungalow built in the early twenties, chintz covered sofa, thick drapes in deep green, wooden floors. There is an air of disuse in the room and Doris explains, “Dad’s been busy on the invention and money’s tight…”
Buzz nods and they tromp down a treacherous narrow stairway into a room filled with low counters covered with a dizzying display of beakers, electric motors, wires and boxes that do nothing he’s able to identify. A thing that looks like a colander with electrodes attached sits next to a silver box with two large dials, each vibrating ominously along a red line.
The professor whips a white cloth off a gizmo made up of large vacuum tubes, rotary dials and switches. There are black phenolic tags with white letters that say, “Power” and “Energy Level” and “Diatomic Modulator” which mean nothing to Buzz but are certainly impressive.
“Here it is,” says the professor, then, “It’s a broadcast generator,” and looks to Buzz like he’s expected to do something.
What? All eyes are on him, the professor and Doris and a funny looking little man in a white lab coat who rubs his hands as if washing them, studying Buzz with interest through tortoise shell glasses. Buzz says, “Ummm…” and gestures vaguely at the machine, “What does it do?”
The professor beams and begins to lecture. “This machine is based on the original concepts developed by Nicola Tessla in his famous experiments in Colorado Springs, Colorado…” He waits for a response and gets a goggle-eyed panicky look from Buzz.
“In eighteen-ninety-six,” explains the professor patiently, “the electrical scientist Nicola Tessla generated enough electricity to power a thousand light bulbs from his laboratory on Cheyenne Mountain. This broadcast power traveled over two miles without any wires!”
Okay, Buzz gets that part. He’s even heard of this Tessla fellow, in class or maybe in a movie like War of the Worlds, Orson Welles scaring the bejesus out of people. “Like Thomas Edison?” He ventures.
“Faugh!” spits the professor. “That so called Wizard of Menlo Park? A Pipsqueak! A pitiful thief of other men’s work. Hah! He rides on the shoulders of giants! Edison could no more conceive of such brilliance than a cow could do Calculus. No, this is no mere scientific curiosity, no technical flim-flam like the incandescent light bulb. This is a true breakthrough.”
Buzz has heard such talk, most recently from Doris at moments when his concentration is apt to wander, but he knows enough to show disinterest. The man who cares least about losing is always the winner in negotiations - his father often says this and though it’s never meant anything to him before it seems like a good idea now. He puts on a casual “show me” face and places on hand on his hip in a calculated pose. “How about a demonstration?”
“Indeed,” says the professor. He gestures to the assistant who scuttles around the room to a heavy circuit breaker mounted on the wall. He pulls down a lever and a low electrical hum fills the air along with a faint smell of ozone and burning insulation.
“Eek!” The professor dives for a fat black knob and twists it to the left. The power thrum lessens and Buzz feels his hair settle back. It feels oddly like a ghost is caressing his scalp and he shivers. Next to him, face aglow with excitement, Doris squeezes his arm and giggles nervously.
The assistant comes over and picks up a common light bulb. He hands it to Buzz who inspects it, unsure of what he’s expected to do. The man sighs, takes the bulb and walks over to an ordinary table lamp. He clicks it on and off, removes the bulb and replaces it with his own. Then he clicks the light switch again and the lamp glows.
“See?” He says, “An ordinary light bulb.” He twists it out and walks to the far end of the table. He picks up a porcelain socket, shows there are no wires attached and screws his bulb in.
“If you say so,” mutters Buzz, getting bored at this parlor trick atmosphere. If it wasn’t for Doris he’d be long gone, as disinterested in business as he is in his studies.
The professor turns the big dial again, the hum returns and Buzz gapes. The light bulb – the one way over there with no wires attached - begins glowing brightly. The professor spins the knob up and down, the light waxes and wanes in concert and Buzz swallows a suddenly dry mouth.
“My God,” he whispers, awestruck. “How did you - ?”
“It’s a broadcast generator,” says the professor.
The professor and his assistant – Leroy now without the glasses and subservient manner – are talking about the evening. Buzz and Kate – Doris – are long gone, the former stumbling out with a dazed expression as if he’s been hit by a sock full of nickels, the latter casting a backwards glance and the briefest of smiles.
The Professor, slouching in the dilapidated armchair in a most unscientific pose, is guzzling scotch from a jelly jar glass. A Cuban cigar smolders in a tray on the arm. “I thought he’d never get it.”
“He’s as dumb as a rock,” agrees Leroy. “Kate’s been priming him with the name for a week; she says it’s like teaching Sunday school to a hooker.”
The professor makes a noise in his throat as the scotch goes down hard. It’s not the best brand. “Like showing a congressman how to lower taxes,” he laughs.
Leroy, amused, “Or dieting to a great white shark. Like preaching arms control to an octopus. Like teaching –”
“Are you finished?”
“– arithmetic to a sheep.”
“I get it,” says the Professor. “Buzz is not the sharpest pencil in the box. Did you see how long it took him to get the Tessla prompt?”
“And that’s with Kate saying the name to him ten times a day,” agrees Leroy.
“Question is, will he fall for the con?”
“Surest thing you know. Kate’s got him under control. This is going to go down as smooth as that scotch you’re drinking.”
The professor glances warily at the half empty bottle – Ernie’s Black Label, bottled in Fresno. “That well?” he says and Leroy busts a gut laughing.
Buzz is afire, more enthused than any time in his life. “Do you see?” He tells Doris over steaks and wine at the Twenty-One Club. You have to be twenty-one to dine here which Kate is and Buzz and Doris aren’t, “but if you know someone…” says Buzz, “They’ll bend the rules a little.”
Try a lot. Buzz is escorted to a reserved
table, old men with white towels draped over their arms bow and scrape, his every desire is catered to. It’s obvious he and his father’s money are welcome.
“Have you ever been here before?”
“No, never,” Kate’s research, done in the weeks before she let him pick her up, tells her this is his deal closing place – where he brings the awestruck coeds to eat and be eaten.
Tonight his mind isn’t on the meat, though it’s a nice cut of beef imported from Argentina, eleven dollars for a sirloin. Kate has no real idea why anyone would ship a cow from South America – don’t we grow them right here, in Nebraska, or someplace?
“I could help your father,” says Buzz. “He could get his patents and you and I could be together. You wouldn’t have to leave school.”
Kate knows this is just part of Buzz’s line he’s running on her; make the girl think she’s his main interest and she’ll give him anything – that Buzz actually has hopes of getting both her and the patents, so she nods and looks dim and desirable and Buzz rattles on and on and finally gets to the heart of the matter, which is, “How much does he need?”
This is called giving the breakdown. It’s important to let the mark bring up the price, otherwise he sees that the tight fitting dress and the fortune making invention are worms on a very sharp hook.
Kate asks, “Need for what?”
“For the patents, of course.” Honestly, Buzz thinks, echoing Leroy’s sentiments about him, it’s like talking to rubber. The girl simply has no brains at all, which, he reconsiders, is not at all a bad thing.
“Oh, those. He did say it was expensive,” says Kate as Buzz leans in to listen. “There are legal fees to research the patents and file the forms. There are drawings and descriptions to firm up the claims. Oh, and contracts to protect him from being robbed.”
“Robbed?” says Buzz, as if he’d never considered the idea. “Who would rob him?”
“Everybody. This invention can be worth a fortune to the right person. Daddy has to be extra careful who he deals with.”
“So, what kind of number are we talking?”
Kate takes a deep breath which causes the dress to swell. “Ten thousand dollars,” she says.
“Ten!” Buzz yelps like he’s a cat with a stepped on tail. His sophisticated man-about-town air deserts him and he gulps his wine, spilling some on his shirt front. Several waiters converge to sop up the mess as Kate smiles inwardly.
Three days, five hours and – Kate checks her watch, a Timex from the Woolworth counter that fits her wrist and her persona – Doris wouldn’t wear a Tiffany – thirteen minutes. That’s how long it takes for Buzz to figure out a solution to his problem. Kate has nudged him along, suggesting trips to the library to check out broadcast power and her father’s reputation. The new research librarian is a woman named Alice; she’s been married to the professor for thirty-one years. She helpfully steers Buzz in the direction of the periodicals and wishes him well as he leaves, dazed and breathing hard.
“My car,” he croaks, the words coming out like sand through a straw. “I could give you the Bugatti. You could sell it…for the money,” he adds.
Doris looks worried, chewing her lip and Buzz is transfixed by the gap in her teeth. She says, “Oh dear…”
Oh dear? Suddenly suspicious Buzz says, “What do you mean?”
“It’s just – I like you Buzz, don’t get me wrong – but this is business…and daddy’s found someone else to invest.” She covers his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Later that evening she drives up to the house of her pseudo father and Leroy meets her on the front porch. He’s doing the Clark Gable look with underarm tee shirt under red suspenders, his fedora set at a rakish angle. A Pall Mall tip glows as he drags in the smoke and gestures at the curb.
“What’s that?” Buzz’s shiny yellow roadster gleams like a beacon in the night as Kate breezes in to kiss him on an unshaven cheek.
“A down payment,” she says, not even trying to hold back the triumph. “But there’s a problem.”
“Always is. What?”
“Buzz says Daddy insists on coming along.” She shows the gap in her teeth by chewing her lower lip, a sign that she’s more worried than she wants to let on.
“That bother you?” Leroy asks.
“No,” Kate says, too quickly. “Yes. What if he queers the deal, Logan? The
guy’s not going to fall for broadcast power, is he? I mean, we pitched this to the kid.”
“You worried because he’s honest – or afraid he isn’t?”
Too close to I told you so and Kate gets testy. “This isn’t about that. I’m just…concerned…is all.”
Which is when the professor comes out, banging the wooden screen behind him. “It’s broken again,” he gripes, rubbing grease off his hands. “The damn thing doesn’t last more than a couple of minutes before it burns out.”
“Well,” says Leroy. “That’s all it’s supposed to do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but –”
Impatient, Leroy snaps, “We’ll fix it, all right? If it takes all night, we’ll fix it.” He turns to Kate as the professor beats a hasty retreat back inside.
“And don’t worry about Barnes senior. I have faith in you. You’ll handle it fine.”
Kate, almost blushing, kisses his cheek at the reassurance. “Awww…you’re ok, Logan. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Not anyone,” he says solemnly. “Not ever.”
Steven Barnes II, a stuffed shirt businessman with more weight than his tailored suit can manage to conceal wears has a brown Homburg and a pencil thin mustache, the kind favored by bankers and pimps. He shifts a brown valise to his left hand as introductions are made in the living room and he shakes hands with the Professor. His attitude is contemptuous toward his son, leering at Doris and wary concerning the old German scientist.
“Buzz tells me you have an amazing contraption down in your basement,” he says, once the formalities are finished. “I’d like to see it.”
They all follow to the basement, squeezing through the tight stairway and find, as before, the white smocked assistant sweeping up in the shadows at the end of the room.
“Enough of that, Fennimen,” barks the Professor. “Let’s show these gentlemen what broadcast energy is all about.”
“Yessir,” says Leroy with the right amount of subservience. Kate’s sweating bullets but Leroy seems as collected as the income tax as he trots around the room, repeating the show, finishing when the bulb glows in the low humm of electrical energy.
He hears Buzz say, “See? Did I tell you?”
“You did,” says Barnes senior. “This is everything I expected it to be.”
That causes Buzz to frown but Barnes senior goes to the Professor and hands over the valise. “As promised, sir; ten thousand dollars, cash.”
The professor reaches out a hand as the electricity pulses and the light wavers. There is a feeling of anticipation in the cramped room as the case slips from Barnes’ grip into the waiting palm of the professor. Then it’s done and a collective sigh seems to appear.
Until Barnes says, “Broadcast power? Seriously? You people are all under arrest,” which causes quite a stir. Barnes twists the big black knob and the hum stops. The light bulb also goes out leaving the room in the hard dim light of the counter top fluorescents.
“What on Earth?” gasps the Professor, almost sounding convincing, and “Oh, Hell,” from Kate, quicker on the uptake. Leroy is a ghost in a white lab coat.
Finally, Buzz catches up. “What’s going on? Father? What are you doing?”
Barnes senior sneers. “It should be obvious, son, even to you. These people are con men, suckering you into a scam.”
“No,” says Buzz. “No. That’s not possible.”
“Denying it doesn’t make it any less true. Now then, who’s the mastermind here?” Barnes is enjoying himself. “The Professor? I don’t think so. You, my dear?” He aims his gaze on Kate who looks like a deer
caught in a headlight.
“No,” says Barnes senior. You’re too pretty. You must be the bait.”
“Hey,” objects Buzz.
Barnes senior laughs, says to Kate. “My son is not the smartest person on the planet –”
“Hey!” says Buzz.
“- He’s as stupid as he is pretty.” As an aside he adds, “He gets that from his mother. She’s a looker, but dense as a stalk of celery.”
“Not like you,” says Kate and Barnes laughs.
“When he came to me with this cockamamie story about an invention and Nicola Tessla and a beautiful redhead; it had all the makings of a bad movie. I mean; broadcast power?” He manages contempt and content at once. “And when the request came for cash, I knew it was a trick.”
“You chose well, I grant you that. My son is obviously an easy mark. He’s as dumb as a cow –”
“Hey!”
“As stupid as standing up crossing the Delaware–”
“Hey!” says Buzz, not understanding but knowing the general idea.
“Dumber than a frog in a punch bowl–”
“Cut it out, Dad!”
“As-”
“We got it okay,” says Kate. “Well, no harm done. What say we all just go our separate ways…?” She fakes a move toward the door.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Barnes senior chuckles. “Nice try, though.”
“What’s gonna stop us?”
“The three policemen waiting outside,” says Barnes with a laugh that is now particularly unpleasant. “The armed ones.”
“Oh,” says Kate. “Those policemen.”
Then Leroy shrugs off the lab coat and steps out of the shadows and Barnes senior loses the smirk. His eyes bug out like a cartoon as he yells, “You!”
Three men sitting in a booth in a dark restaurant. Thick glasses of amber liquor on the table, thick glasses on their faces, thick noses mottled with age, heavy jowls, bushy eyebrows. One of them wheezes as he puffs from a fat Havana. A pile of white china plates covered with the remnants of T-bone steaks, mashed potatoes and gravy, linen napkins wadded, ashtrays full, waiters stopping by, “Sir? Is everything all right?”
They talk in eastern accents, New York, Jersey, Toledo, hard consonants cracking like pebbles against short sentences.
“Did you believe it?” says the oldest, a small boned man named Limehouse Chappie, long famed as one of the originators of the wire store con. He’s come out of retirement from Buffalo, riding in a week ago on the Pacific Flyer, a Pullman coach with a sleeper berth. He hasn’t traveled in years and feels it in old bones, arthritic joints. Still, he can’t stop smiling, which makes the Negro porter laugh, just looking at him.
“Nah,” says a skeletal bag of skin named Nibs Callahan, used to run the big store in Toledo. His teeth are stained yellow from a three pack a day habit, his face is flush with booze and his hands shake as he pokes at his jaw with a toothpick. He met up with Limehouse on the Flyer and they cheated at cards all night long, swapping stories of the old days. “Kid’s a pistol, gotta give him that.”
“I made him pay me up front,” admits the final guy, grunting behind a closed fist before spitting into his napkin. He raises his glass and yells out, “Sonny! Get me another!” A waiter nods and dashes; he knows players when they enter the place.
“Didn’t believe he’d actually bring in a mark for a wire store scam.” They know him as Detroit Paul, ran a wire room in Michigan, out of work since the depression scared away the easy marks, ending the golden age of the long con. Once though, he could sell you stock as phony as a three dollar bill and put you on the send for more. He’d once worked a mark three times before having to duck out after a bum fix.
Three men, as much the remnants of another age as the detritus on the table; meal over, make way for the next diner.
They’re shocked when that next diner, in the form of a green stick from New Orleans comes calling, finding them in hotels as old and run-down as they are, the Queens, the Continental, the Carleton. They each listen, scoff and decline. Over the hill, they told him, can’t be done anymore, they said, “G’wan, beat it, kid. Ya bother me.”
But the kid goes on and on and one by one they fall to his sweet talk, lies some of it, bald-faced but oh, so pretty, all those lies. “You guys are legends,” he tells them and they eventually bite, like people will when their time is past and they get one last call.
So they ride the rails, high on the hog on the kid’s dime, all the way to California, never been there before, not once, and a good thing too, nobody out here had ever heard of them.
They use his money and a few of his contacts – the kid is green, doesn’t have many, but the old men are pros, they talk to people who talk to people and soon they have a place and a crew and the last wire store in America goes up in an unused office, third floor, right down the hall from Capone, Drew and Webster, Investment Consultants. Real guys, those, legit, makes Limehouse say, “Adds an air, don’t it? Hell, I’d believe it myself.”
They put up the tote board, odds in chalk, guys with wired headsets, green eyeshades, garters on the sleeves, cigarettes dangling. They bring in callers and shills and heavy chairs and fat carpet, all top notch, and money everywhere; wads of cash, most of it flash rolls, showing Cleveland’s face, Grover on the Gee note, front and back over piles of singles.
Phones ring, stock prices change, arcane shouts fill the room as much as the gray fog of a hundred smokes. The overhead fans don’t stand a chance of keeping up.
Truth is, they’re all in old man heaven when the kid walks in with the actual mark, a blowhard named Barnes from San Francisco. They’re set up in Sacramento, which is only right. You never take a mark on his home turf, too easy for him to slip the hook or call in the local heat. You have to send him home for the money or you haven’t played him right.
Barnes gets in a play, takes in four thousand of the kid’s money as a convincer, and he struts away like he’s got a broom handle up his spine, Mr. Money. They all know the tale, the kid’s going to distract him with a small play back home, make him travel, not know if he’s coming or going.
The old men grumble about this; it seems too complicated, but they eventually come around. New times, they decide judiciously, call for new methods.
Barnes comes back for another play and they short him out, a guy named Chick Nelson, plays a British gent in tweeds, buying up the remaining tip that the kid’s convinced the mark is a sure thing. The mark grumbles but when the stock rises as expected, they see the wheels turning, greed swelling like an appendix about to burst.
It’s another week before Barnes is back and this time they take him for a full one hundred and fifty large, bills in a suitcase, brown with leather straps, tags say it’s from Marshall Field in Chicago. They leave it for the kid to do the blow off and as quickly as it was built, the wire store is dismantled.
Now the guys are in the restaurant, fed and drunk and high on the last golden taste of sweet sweet victory. The case is at Limehouse Chappie’s feet; his brogans touch it often, a leather clad caress.
“What’s his name again,” says Nibs Callahan. His memory is as shot as his hearing. “I can’t never remember.”
“Logan,” says Detroit Paul. “Leroy Logan.” His voice is dry, like snakes hissing in a cloth sack as he laughs, a truly wicked sound, and his face splits in an evil grin.
“Hows about we just split with the loot, gentlemen? Leave the kid high and dry. Whaddaya say?”
They do consider it. They wouldn’t be con men if they didn’t at least give it a passing thought, but Limehouse nixes the idea. “Isn’t what he gave us enough? I mean beyond our cut?”
And Nibs adds, “It’s not all about the money.”
And they all know exactly what he means.
A whole lot of milling about, much uncomfortable silence and everyone gapes except Barnes senior who keeps on looking like a ghost is walking toward him.
Kate says, “What the hell?”
/> Leroy touches her cheek as he passes and she recoils, furious, like he’s queering her pitch. Inside though she’s relieved; the blowoff was not going the way she expected.
Barnes says, “Conrad?” to Leroy who nods. “What’s this all about? Why are you here?” He doesn’t add, “What about my money?” But he’s thinking it.
“Do you really want me to explain?” Leroy gets up close and Barnes, bluster entirely missing, leans in to listen. “Your money’s gone, Barnes. It was taken in a scam a lot more obvious than this one we pulled on your kid. You got taken.”
Barnes rears up, outrage and indignation, then sees his son staring at him, open-mouthed, head shaking with confusion and he knows – he knows – he can’t say a word. His image as the sophisticate, his status as Buzz’s father, all of it will vanish if he opens his mouth.
“I -” he stammers.
Leroy puts a hand to his ear, cupping it. “You got something to say? Maybe tell the kid how stupid he is?”
“Noth…nothing.” Barnes senior, breathing hard, tries to take the briefcase from Kate – he has to tug but she won’t let it go – and gestures for his son. “Let’s go, junior.” His voice is husky with emotion, what if the kid ever finds out?
They walk out the door, father and son, two men cut from the same cloth.
The sunrise yellow ’47 Bugatti Runabout grumbles pleasantly in the dark night like a cheerfully demented dragon, just finished with St. George, too full to eat the maiden for desert. It has low headlights, a foreign shift and leather buckles tight against the bonnet. Kate’s at the wheel, looking as angry and impatient as a woman can with a briefcase full of cash on her lap and she refuses eye-contact as Leroy jumps in next to her, grinning.
It’s a full thirteen miles out of town and swooping too fast on a winding road before she says, “I hate you.”
He laughs, “I love you.’
Facing him, she demands, “How could you do that to me?”
“Well,” he says, which is what he always says when he’s about to launch into something really outlandish, but he grabs his hat instead, one hand holding onto the suicide strap as Kate takes a corner on two wheels.
“Don’t you ‘well’ me, you bastard. What were you doing, breaking my play?”
“I got seventy-two thousand dollars from the wire store, Kate,” Leroy answers. “After expenses.”
Kate downshifts the car to third, letting off the clutch so hard Leroy’s teeth feel like they’re coming out as the car drops fifty miles per in about three seconds. She twists the wheel hard to the right and jerks to a stop at the side of the road under a eucalyptus. The night is suddenly quiet as the motor hums and the shadows dance in pale moonlight that tries to reach them through the branches.
“That’s not the point, Logan. You didn’t trust me to make the blowoff.”
“I trusted you,” he lies. “But the real mark was Barnes senior, not the son. I figured the father would break in on the scam to prove how smart he is and I used that to take him on the stock swindle.”
Kate’s not buying. Her hands are clenching around the wheel like it’s his neck. “You should have told me.”
“I should have told you,” Leroy agrees. He’d say anything now and does. “I got seventy-two thousand dollars from the wire store, Kate.”
She grabs the bag and shakes it in his face. “Ten thousand Logan; that’s what we agreed to play for.”
“Yes, but –”
She shoves his arm, pushing harder as he resists. “Get out! Get out of my car.”
“Your car? Whadaya mean your…ook.” Caught off balance, he tips over as the door opens and Kate shifts gears, jerking the car forward. He scrambles to his feet yelling.
“Wait! What are you doing?” But the car’s gaining speed, spraying gravel. Baffled, he yells louder, “But I got seventy-two thousand dollars!”
Which stops the car. A shriek of gears, a squeal of tires and Kate’s back, twisting around in the seat as if she’s after something. Delighted, as uncomprehending as a collie pup, Leroy trots forward thinking all is forgiven.
But no. As he reaches the car Kate hauls the battered brown suitcase from the boot and swings it, a good arc that collides with his chest, knocking him back. One of the latches snaps and money begins spilling out and Leroy has to clutch the case and clutch the bills as Kate double clutches and darts off again.
“WAIT!”
Holding the suitcase, silhouetted by the full moon, with money flying off in the gentle breeze, Leroy races after the sporty little roadster, faster and faster until it tops the hill and disappears in a jaunty wave of its little red taillights.
Author’s note: Limehouse Chappie, Nibs Callahan and Detroit Paul were all real confidence men who helped create the “golden age” of the big con.
End of Chapter Two
The Rag, The Wire And The Big Store Page 2