Chapter Eighteen: “Back to the Pool Hall, Rummy!”

I was hoofing it down Chase Street to keep my appointment outside the brokerage office with Clay Stanton. He was waiting outside the door and greeted me with an apology for that “most unfortunate incident” in my hotel suite the other day.

“I got your letter,” I acknowledged, somewhat brusquely. “That guy had some nerve busting into my room like that.” Stanton agreed wholeheartedly, but assured me it wouldn’t happen again.

“I hope it hasn’t colored your view of our arrangements for this week,” he added.

“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “I need to ask you something, Mr. Stanton. Something important. Who left my room first after you two had your talk? Was it you or that other guy and his goon?”

With the finely-honed instincts his years in the game had given him, Stanton sensed danger immediately. His answer was quick and smooth.

“Mr. Giarelli – that is the gentleman’s name by the way – was rather insistent that I depart first. Naturally, I was loathe to leave him alone in your hotel room. I protested but, as I said, he was rather insistent. And he did have someone with him, you’ll recall.”

I nodded sharply. “That’s what I figured. Well, the fact is, Mr. Stanton, I had the forty thousand dollars’ cash in my suite Saturday, ready for our transaction this morning. It’s gone now, every dollar of it.”

“Oh no!” Stanton gasped. “My boy, that’s terrible!”

“It’s an inconvenience,” I agreed. “It’ll be terrible for this Giarelli when I catch up to him. You wouldn’t know where I might find him?” My face had been dark the whole time we’d been talking, and I made sure not to lighten it just yet.

“I’m afraid I have no idea, Mr. Shaw. As I explained in my letter, he’s attempted for some time now to invest through me. I wanted no part of him from the start. Quite frankly, sir, the man reeks of the criminal element.” Stanton said it with a perfectly straight face, I had to give him that.

“You think he’s a mobster?” I asked, showing a little concern over the fact.

“That is my suspicion, Mr. Shaw.”

“Sure looks like one at that.”

“You didn’t happen to notice whether the money was still in your room yesterday?”

I gave Stanton a smile that was both irritated and embarrassed, explaining that I had been out most of the day with my traveling companion, Miss Sills. Stanton asked as circumspectly as he could whether Miss Sills had visited my suite at any point during the day…or evening.

“We came back for a nightcap after dinner last night,” I said. “It was fairly late and…” I looked up sharply. “You think Penny might have taken the money?”

Stanton shrugged slightly, giving my imagination time to start working.

“You haven’t known her all that long, I believe,” he said simply.

It was just after one o’clock when I knocked on the door of my room at the first hotel. A few moments later, Jennings answered in his bathrobe, his hair sticking up like straw. He’d still been asleep.

“Getting a pretty late start today, aren’t you, boy-oh?” I strolled past him and tossed my hat onto the desk.

“I didn’t make it back here till after five this morning,” he informed me.

“Five? How’d the poker game go.”

“Went fine,” he said through a yawn. “Clockwork.”

“How much, Jennings?”

“Twenty-five hundred,” he said, shrugging.

I stared at him a moment before showing off my ignorance.

“It took you all night to lose twenty-five hundred dollars in a poker game?”

“Geez, Mr. Caine, it takes just as long to lose as it does to win.” He went onto explain – fairly politely, I thought – that you don’t just go throwing down big money into the pot and lose time after time until you’re out. Not if you’re wanting to make the right kind of impression on certain people. Imagine, Jennings asked, if the dealer for the next hand had scooped up Jennings’ fold from the last and noticed three queens or even a full boat, sixes over aces. Everyone would know something was up. He had to take a few small pots now and then when he had too good a hand to risk that happening.

“It makes sense when you put it that way,” I admitted, feeling like an idiot. “Come on, get dressed and I’ll take you to breakfast. You can fill me in on the rest of it then.”

Half an hour later I watched as Jennings put away three eggs, six strips of bacon, six pancakes with syrup, two thick slices of toast, and a side order of two biscuits with gravy. I took it slow with my turkey sandwich, giving him time to get started on his meal by bringing him up to date on Stanton.

“I told him it wouldn’t be a problem for me to get more cash,” I explained, “but that it would take at least another day. Of course, that put us behind schedule, so he’ll have to handle larger amounts for the remaining investments.”

“And he was okay with that?” Jennings grinned, reaching for the jar of syrup.

“He was a regular sport about it.”

When it came Jennings’ turn, I sat back over a cigarette and coffee and listened. He’d shown up at the backroom game around eleven-thirty last night, following the directions given to him at The Cordovan and mentioning the barman’s name to get in. He introduced himself as Tom Shandle to the group of cons passing the time over a friendly game, asking again if any of them had ever worked with The Yellowtail Kid. No, they couldn’t say they had, but they promised to keep an ear out if he showed up in Baltimore. Jennings sat at the table, bought five hundred dollars worth of chips, had a cold beer brought to him, and thanked them for letting an out-of-towner join their game. Jennings warned them with a smile that, well, he was a pretty good poker player and they might want to watch themselves. There were a few friendly hoots and jeers around the table, and the game commenced.

Jennings won the first two pots right off the bat. He knew his hands weren’t great, that the other players were throwing away better just to pump up his confidence and make him careless. Jennings dutifully clapped his hands, raked in the chips, and announced to the table that he had a feeling this was going to be his night. Jennings is the best poker player I’ve ever met, and would have had a fair chance at cleaning out the whole table, but that wasn’t the plan. He was playing the deftest con there is against pros in the game: letting them know he wasn’t a total rube, that he had some experience under his belt, but coming across as thinking he was a lot sharper than he was. Just the kind of young upstart they’d want to have a little fun.

According to Jennings, they were impressed at the simplicity of his latest small-con scheme. Don’t make it any more complicated than it has to be, that’s what The Yellowtail Kid had taught him when they were on the grift together back in St. Louis. See, Tom Shandle had come across a forger back in Knoxville, and believe you me, fellows, this guy was an artist. He’d had this guy make up a phony identification showing Shandle to be a T-Man.

“’T-Man actually refers to the Bureau of Prohibition,” I interrupted. “The guys who went around with axes smashing stills.” It got confusing, as the Bureau of Investigation also had a Prohibition Department, which is a big part of the reason they finally changed their name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“But Secret Service is still Treasury, right?” Jennings asked.

“Yeah, it is. Go on.”

So with this phony identification, Jennings could walk up to practically anyone, explain that he was with anti-counterfeiting, demand to see whatever bills the mark had on him, and relieve said mark of any funny money he happened to be carrying.

“Only it ain’t funny money,” Jennings explained to them, laughing. “I help myself to a fifty here, a couple of c-notes there, all perfectly good but the mark, he thinks I done him a favor taking it off his hands and not hauling him in.” Of course, he was careful to catch the right kind of people in the right kind of place, and he rarely tried to take a mark’s whole wad (“Unless the guy’s just extra dumb or I really don’t like his face.”). But it was a neat score. No partners, no witnesses, only a phony name nobody could track. The cons around the poker table offered nods of approval along with their compliments. Neat score, indeed! Had Shandle thought this up on his own? Indeed he had, Jennings assured them. Of course, he couldn’t play a town too small for too long. Best to keep moving. He’d probably stay in Baltimore another two weeks maybe.

“So if any of you boys are planning to use this one, I think it’s only fair that you wait for me to clear town first. I mean, that’s kind of a courtesy in a right town like this one, ain’t it?”

The men around the table agreed earnestly, a few of them probably thinking they might try it if times got too tough, or just to see if it really worked, but most of them working regularly for “stores” now and considering their hard-scrabble grifting days behind them.

The game started to go badly for the new kid after awhile. Even his good hands were getting trumped by better, and he kept buying more chips and losing them almost as fast.

“Were they cheating?” I asked.

“Sure. I mean they weren’t stacking decks or hiding cards, but they were signaling across the table like a six-way telegraph. Scratch an earlobe, rub a nose, stick out a lower lip while looking at their cards. Each guy had his own signal for when he thought he had the best hand, and the rest of them would pump the betting in that guy’s favor.”

And so the night dragged on, and as the new kid kept losing, sly digs became groans of sympathy around the table. Hard luck, Shandle, but things got to start turning around for you one of these hands, don’t you think? That’s just the odds. They ended up taking the whole twenty-five hundred I’d staked Jennings, who got gloomy for awhile and then shook it off with a laugh. Easy come, easy go, ain’t that what they say? So it wasn’t his night, but it very well could be next time. That is, he grinned, if he hadn’t scared them off tonight. Good-natured laughter followed this taunt, and the other players allowed as to how Tom Shandle was a real sport who knew how to take his licks. He was welcome at their table any time. Of course he was: he was a young con with money in his pockets who wasn’t a very good poker player.

“Sounds like you did just perfect, Jennings,” I told him.

“You and me should work together more, Mr. Caine,” he grinned, adding more cream to his cup of coffee. I’d had that thought myself more than once this year. Maybe after we got back to Kansas City….

When I walked Jennings back to the hotel, I stopped at the front desk to check for messages. The clerk handed me a note someone else had written:

Please contact me as soon as you can. Nathan

I walked over to the house phone, dialed the bank, and had myself put through to Nathan.

“Nathan Caine speaking.”

“I got your message. What’s up?”

“It’s Myers and Wiedermann,” Nathan said, sounding nervous. “They took the afternoon off today.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes. They simply walked into my office and told me they had some business to take care of and that they wouldn’t be back today. They were quite arrogant about it.”

“That’s not good.”

“They also asked me to contact Mr. Shaw and tell him to meet them at three o’clock this afternoon.” I scribbled down the address Nathan gave me.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Nathan said. “Myers said ‘Tell Mr. Shaw not to be late.’ And then they simply walked out. Just like that.”

It was five minutes to three when I stepped inside the anonymous saloon at the very edge of a decent neighborhood. The place was all but empty, one bartender practically napping behind the bar and maybe two old drunks. A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, barely disturbing the dust floating in the shaft of sunlight coming through the front window. Whatever was brewing, the two men I was to meet had wanted to pick some place inconspicuous, some place their peers wouldn’t be likely to run into them.

There at a round wooden table in the far corner were Myers and Wiedermann, the latter smoking a fat cigar. They sat next to a big guy in shabby clothes, some cheap hired thug who was either trying to stare me down or hold in his wind. I walked up to the table with my hands in my pockets.

“What’s all this?” I asked. Wiedermann looked me up at down, taking in my expensive duds and my new shoes, catching the glints of gold from my watch and pinky ring. I’d been dressing like this for what seemed so long I hadn’t even thought of changing for this meeting. I should have.

“Little change of plan, Mr. Shaw,” said Wiedermann, sounding full of himself.

“Change of plan,” agreed Myers.

“You see,” Wiedermann again, “I had an interesting little chat with Mr. Ferrier the other day. It seems you have to rely on a forger to get your federal identification these days, Mr. Shandle.” Wiedermann pretended to be confused. “Or is it Shaw, like it says on the driver’s license you also got from Ferrier? Mighty peculiar, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” chimed in Myers.

I was half-listening to them, concentrating more on the thug in my periphery. He was cheap goods and that was a fact. Big and bulky, yes, but even low-rent mob torpedoes aren’t allowed to be seen on the street dressed that shabbily. These two bankers had started talking, first to each other and then to Ferrier. They figured they had my number, so they’d walked into some pool hall or gone to the track and given a tenspot to the first oversized gorilla who was broke and sober enough to be looking for his next drink.

“We don’t know who you are,” Wiedermann said. “And we don’t care to know. What we do know is you’re going to get on a bus or a train, get the hell out of town, and never darken our door again. Otherwise…” he glanced to his right, “you’ll have to take things up with Mr. Braughton here.”

The thug’s eyebrows raised a fraction. At least he knew his name. He snorted once, no doubt in derision at the rich dandy in imported clothing standing in front of him. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, sighing inwardly. I had real problems to deal with. Still, to be fair, this was my fault. I’d ignored Myers and Wiedermann for too long now, let them build their courage back up. Well, I could fix that.

“So that’s how it is, is it?”

“That’s how it is.” Wiedermann took a puff from his cigar and leisurely blew a smoke ring.

“Let me ask you one thing,” I said, picking up the heavy glass candle bowl from the table top. I turned it over and looked at the bottom. “Do you have any idea where this was made?”

Myers and Wiedermann looked at one another, trying to figure what I was getting at.

“Neither do I.” I brought the candle bowl down in the center of the thug’s face and broke his nose, then jabbed him hard in the throat with it. Blood was pouring down his face as I put my palms on his cheeks, wrapping my fingers around his ears and giving them a good, solid yank. My thumbs found his eyelids. I applied just enough pressure to make him let out a yelp, then leaned in close to one ear.

“Back to the pool hall, rummy!” I hissed. “I see you again, I’ll hurt you for real.”

The thug rose from the table with an effort, almost blinded from eyes watering with pain, and shambled as quickly as he could out the door. I put my hands back in my pockets and looked casually back at Myers and Wiedermann, who were paler now than I’d ever seen them. I don’t enjoy hurting people, but the thug was big and he’d heal just fine. If I’d given him half a chance at a fair fight, it would have been a case of having to hurt him a lot worse or get busted up myself. And people believe what they see. Myers and Wiedermann had just seen a man make short work of their insurance without breaking a sweat.

I ran a hand over my face tiredly and sat down.

“No, don’t get up,” I said tiredly. “I’ll tell you when you can leave.” Neither man had moved, but now each was scared thinking the other had.

“Either of you two ever hear of Lon Kruger?” They shook their heads. “About six-foot-six and over two hundred and eighty pounds. Biceps as big around as my damn leg and enough hair on his back alone to make two Indian blankets. Murdered his whole family with a pair of scissors seventeen years ago. And every day since then he’s been in a prison cell. He’s given up all hope of ever seeing a woman again. However,” I glanced at Wiedermann, “he still likes brunettes, fat boy.

“Now any ordinary day, a fella breaking his solemn oath with me, well, you’d already be sharing that same cell with Kruger, and doing your goddamnedest to make yourself pretty for him so he wouldn’t hurt you any worse.” Wiedermann was sweating so badly now I could have put the cigar out on his forehead.

“Lucky for you two I’m busy these days,” I continued in the same lackadaisical tone. “I’ve put a lot of effort into my plans and I don’t have time to put out more working around you two jerks. It would put me behind schedule, and I hate being behind schedule.”

Both men seemed plenty scared, but I’d made that mistake before. I calmly took the cigar out of Wiedermann’s hand, then grabbed him by the tie and yanked him forward, holding the lit end of the stogie an inch or two from his left eye for a second.

“What’s your favorite eye, Wiedermann? Right or left?”

“Please.” He shut his eyes tight and you could barely hear him.

After another few seconds I let him go. He slumped back in his chair and I took out a cigarette, lighting it from the end of the cigar.

“Not that it concerns you two small fry,” I puffed, “but I have plans for your Mr. Ferrier as well. Those documents I collected from him are what we in the law enforcement profession refer to as ‘evidence’. Maybe you two geniuses have heard of that concept before.

“Point is, this is your last last chance. My offer’s still good. You play ball with me, you walk. But if either of you ever tries to pull a stunt like this again–”

“We won’t!” They said it almost in perfect unison.

“Don’t interrupt me. If you ever try this again, you’ll be locked up inside of five minutes, and you’ll stay locked up, from city to county to state to federal, while your lawyers make noise, take your money, and forget about you. And just as soon as I can arrange it, you’ll be sharing a cell with Lon Kruger, playing house with that burly, hairy, sweaty psychopath until he gets tired of you and you wake up one morning with a pair of scissors in your neck.”

I turned to Myers again. “That goes for you both of you. You’re a team now. This joker does something and you don’t know about it, tough. Kruger will still be able to add bigamy to his list of crimes. You both catching my drift on this?”

They assured me they were.

“This is the last time we have this conversation. I mean the very last.”

I stood up and walked out.

I stepped into Ferrier’s back office noisily enough for him to look up from his work table. Without a word I dumped his two-hundred-dollar printing machine onto the floor where it hit with a loud smash, rollers and cogs and gears scattering across the linoleum. Then I stomped across to his filing cabinet and found his gun, taking out the magazine and clearing the chamber before dumping it back in the drawer. I took the shell from the chamber, walked over to Ferrier, grabbed him roughly by the hair, and forced it into his mouth. I took out my Colt and pressed it against his forehead. My voice was low and cold.

“Swallow it.”

He stared at me, his eyes wide.

“Five, four, three…”

He swallowed. It would do him no harm, of course, but there’s something about making a man swallow a bullet.

“My business with you is private. You don’t talk to bankers, you don’t talk to a living soul about it. It ever happens again, you’ll eat another bullet, one that’ll be coming a hell of a lot faster.”

I let go of his hair and he slumped back, his shoulders drooping like he was too exhausted even to shrug.

I walked out.

Penny was waiting for me at our spot at the hotel lounge, along with the Campari and soda she’d ordered for me. I sent it back for a scotch over ice. Kelly Shaw might be a fan of Campari, but Devlin Caine had had a rough day. After leaving Ferrier’s print shop, I’d found a drugstore and called Nathan.

“It’s all sorted out,” I told him. “Myers and Wiedermann will be back in tomorrow, on time and probably with an apology. Try to keep them busy, won’t you?”

“I’ll do my best with whatever I can trust them with these days. But what if they leave again?”

“I really don’t think they will, but let me know the minute I’m wrong.”

“Don’t I usually?”

I snorted into the phone reflexively. Nathan making a joke had caught me off guard.

“Hang in there,” I told him. “Everything is on schedule and it shouldn’t be much longer.”

The waitress brought me my scotch and I took that first cool sip. Kelly Shaw was a Nancy Boy, I decided, if he preferred Campari to this. I realized that, when I wasn’t actually being Shaw, I tended to think of him as a real but separate person. Probably happens to a lot of cons, I figured. I put the question to Penny.

“Oh sure,” she said. “I mean, first off, you have to make the character real, believable. How you gonna make the mark believe in him if you don’t? And you play a part long enough, over time you naturally find yourself building the character up more. Thinking about what he likes to eat, where he goes to church, what his family’s like.”

“Probably the same with actors,” I said.

“Probably,” she agreed.

I knew from my time at Pinkerton’s that it wasn’t just the character. There came a point in big confidence games where the con man had to believe it himself. Only way to sell it. I don’t mean like self-hypnosis – there’s always a part of you that knows what’s real and what isn’t – but there are moments when the con actually does con himself, makes himself think that whatever he’s doing is really as he’s presenting it to the mark. It’s hard to explain, but I realized now how often over the last several days I’d been thinking as Kelly Shaw. About my summer house and my closet full of imported suits and even about the building I was going to buy. Christ, I was even catching glimpses in my mind of the faces of my partners who didn’t exist, the ones who were going in on this building with me. It started as just making sure I had the details right, but damn if it hadn’t started to feel real. I ran this by Penny, too.

“Sure,” she said. “You can’t live in a world every day without it becomes real to you after awhile. No matter how many times you pat yourself on the back for being clever or make fun of the mark who’s only getting what’s coming to him, you still gotta live with yourself. And the more real you make that world, the easier it is to do that.”

And I realized how dangerous that could be, coming to believe in your own lies. Oh sure, people do it all the time, one way or another. But in the game I was playing, that seemed like a quick way to blind yourself to dangers on the horizon. Of course, at the other extreme, if you thought of yourself as some big-time operator who knew all the angles, thought you were too sharp ever to get off course, you could be blinded that way, too. How the hell do people do this for a career? I wondered. Without ending up half crazy?

“You make it to the bank?” I asked Penny.

“Sure did, lover.” She opened her purse and handed me a cashier’s check for the amount of twenty thousand dollars. I put it in my coat pocket with the cashier’s check for ten thousand I’d picked up on my way to see Jennings.

I stared at Penny for a moment until she started laughing.

“You thought I was gonna make off with the twenty gees and never come back?”

“I wondered,” I smiled lazily, downing another drink of scotch.