“THE GENTLE GRAFTER”
Jeff Peters of O. Henry’s “The Gentle Grafter” remarks at one point, “It was beautiful and simple, as all truly great swindles are.” Perhaps the swindle in “The Spoils System” is not truly great—but only because Donald E. Westlake’s gentle grafter is merely working a door-to-door scam while waiting for a major score. But no con man should ever forget that a person looking to score is already halfway to becoming a mark himself. Mr. Westlake knows his marks; in 1968 one of them (God Save the Mark) won him an Edgar. As for the humor in his sixty novels (published under half a dozen names), it just sort of creeps in despite itself. To wit, a note Mr. Westlake recently left me when I borrowed his apartment: “Joe—Welcome. Don’t use these leather chairs, they were oiled the other day. Come to think of it, so was I.” - J.G.
It was in the catacombish club car of the Phoebe Snow, that crack passenger express that roars across the Southern Tier of the Empire State with the speed of an income tax refund, that I most recently met Judd Dooley, a man with a strong sense of family. He is named for his infamous grandfather, the Judd Dooley celebrated in song and wanted poster, the man who, with the aid of patent medicine, gold watch, and lost silver mine stock, opened the great Midwest to the rapid patter, the fast shuffle, and the quick getaway back around the tum of the century, a man sadly neglected by the television industry, which owes him a great deal.
The contemporary Judd Dooley is continuing the family tradition in a ceaseless barrage of non-violent outrages from Kennebunkport to Mexicali, and is usually good for a reminiscence or two on his latest depredations against a public which has grown no less puerile since Grandpa’s time.
Of course, there have been subtle differences in both the customer and the approach since Grandpa Dooley last foisted a genuine gold brick on a fatuous farmer in the bunco belt of the great Midwest. Judd tells me that today’s farmer is a much different cookie from the bucolic boob who supported his grandfather, and a much tougher cookie to crumble. But, says Judd, with a light of reverence in his eye, Grandpa would have felt right at home in today’s suburbia, where the modern housewife controls the income and the modern con man controls the outgo.
“I have just come from Cleveland,” Judd told me, as we sat over Scotch on the rocks while the Phoebe Snow struggled out of Binghamton, “a town with suburbs that would have made Grandpa cry with delight. I was plying the Free Home Demonstration gizmo through a split-level development when—”
“Free Home Demonstration gizmo? I don’t think I know it.”
“You don’t? It’s a little gem—the quickest fast-fin dodge since the invention of Something For Nothing. All it requires is a pocketful of forms, an identification card, an ingratiating smile and ten minutes of rapid chatter. The brand name involved is Electro-Tex Limited, and if the name sounds familiar, you’re half hooked already. The merchandise is a combination washer-dryer-television-radio-popup toaster-oven that retails for a stratospheric sum I won’t even mention. But the company is about to commence an intensive advertising campaign, built around the inane concept of the satisfied customer. Therefore, I have been sent around by the company to selected housewives to offer them a Free Home Demonstration, for a trial six week period, during which time they may have the Electro-Tex PushButton Dew-It-Awl Wonder Whiz in their home, absolutely free, on the condition that we may use their name and a statement of satisfaction from them in our advertising.”
“I imagine Mrs. America is normally interested by this time,” I said.
“Interested? She couldn’t be more excited if I were giving her a season pass to the Garry Moore show and a two-week vacation for two in Saskatchewan. She is frothing at the mouth.”
“You’ve got her hooked, all right. But where does the swindle come in?”
“With all the wonders I am offering,” said Judd, “could anyone in the world quibble over a measly five-dollar damage deposit?”
“In advance, of course.”
“If I had to wait until after the merchandise showed up, I’d be riding on top of the train, not inside here in the warm. But, as I was saying, I was working this gizmo with great success and dodging the pedigreed hounds who infest suburbia like one of the plagues of Egypt, when I happened to spy a personable young man working the same side of the street and coming my way. His briefcase was black, bulging and polished to perfection. His eyes twinkled with bland sincerity behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles, and his suit was so stark in its lines it’s a wonder he didn’t cut himself putting it on. Here, obviously, was another man in the same line of work.
‘‘Not wanting either of us to create problems for the other, and since there were so many suburbs to choose from in the locality, I called to him, hoping we could work out an equitable distribution of the terrain.
“His name was Dan Miller, and he was perfectly agreeable to a division of spoils. Our occupations being what they are, we were both equipped with maps of the city, so we hunkered down on the sidewalk, surrounded by dogs, children and young men delivering ten cents-off coupons, and divided the city between us in the age-old manner of the conquering invader. We learned that we were staying at the same hotel, a second-class but clean ‘hustlery’ called the Warwick, and made a date to meet in the cocktail lounge to compare notes on our sectors for future use.”
I got to my feet. “Another Scotch?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “yes.”
When I returned with the Scotch, swaying a bit (only an inveterate seafarer could feel really at borne on the Phoebe Snow) I asked, “Was this Dan Miller working the Free Home Demonstration gizmo, too?”
“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the glass, a man with whom first things are always first. “No, he was collecting donations for the Citizen’s Committee to Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful, with some magazine contest for the most beautiful neighborhood in the country as a tie-in. The donation games are all right, in a way, but I only work one when I’m really desperate. He’d have to do more talking per housewife for maybe a dollar donation than I had to do for a five-dollar damage deposit. Dan Miller looked to me like a boy who was building a stake. I’ve already got a couple of permanent dodges that give me a steady trickle of income, mail order things and other gimmicks along the same line, so I haven’t had to fall back on any of the smaller routines for a couple of years now.
“At any rate, I didn’t see Dan Miller for about a week, not until I was finished with my half of the territory. I don’t drink while I’m working, not even an after-dinner cocktail. It’s one of the rules Grandpa instilled in me, and I’ve never known Grandpa to be wrong yet. So I didn’t go to the cocktail lounge until a week later, when I had run out of territory and receipts.”
“Receipts?”
Judd nodded. “Another of Grandpa’s dictums,” he said. “Never leave a sucker empty-handed. Always give him something for his money, some little memento he can press between the leaves of the family bible, even if it’s just a little scrap of paper with Theodore Roosevelt’s signature scrawled on it.
“Well, as I was saying, when I’d completed my tour of Cleveland, I counted my gains and discovered I had damaged the Cleveland deposits to the tune of four thousand dollars. It was time for a celebration. I donned my money belt, a legacy from Grandpa, and went down to the cocktail lounge for a quiet toot.
“Dan Miller was there, happy as an early-morning disc jockey, and it turned out that he had just finished beautifying his half of the city to the tune of twenty-five hundred iron men. We had a congratulatory toast, and then Dan turned serious. He said, ‘Judd, what do you do with your admirable profits?’
“‘Spend it or bank it,’ I told him. ‘But mainly spend it.’
“He shook his head. ‘Bad business,’ he told me. ‘Think about your old age. You should invest it. A solid investment today will bring joy to your declining years.’
“For just a minute, I didn’t know what to say. Did Dan Miller think my declining years had set in already? Was he really going to try to sell me gold mine stock? It didn’t seem possible, so I said, ‘Dan, just what do you have in mind?’
‘Uranium mine stock,’ he whispered. He leaned close to me, looking earnestly at me through his plain-glass spectacles. ‘I’ve been putting all of my cash into uranium stock for over a year now,’ he confided. ‘I’ve got over nine thousand dollars worth of stock. And it’s a reputable New York firm, one that’s been in business since the eighteen-fifties. Uranium stock just can’t go anywhere but up. The way I’m salting it away, I’ll be able to buy Long Island for my country estate when I retire.’
“‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I’ve never put much faith in stock, since I’ve sold a share or two myself from time to time.’
‘This is legit,’ he insisted. ‘On the up and up. Come on up to my room, and I’ll show you their brochure.’
“More out of a professional interest in the competition than for any other reason, I joined Dan Miller successively in the lobby, an elevator and his room, where he bolted the door, drew the blinds, and slammed the transom before taking a whole sheaf of papers out of a battered suitcase.
“I looked it all over. The stock certificates were fancy things, all curlicues and whirligigs and gewgaws and whereases, and the brochure had been written by a man who could name his own price on Madison Avenue. The Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company really did things right.
“Dan hovered around me while I leafed through the evidence. ‘What do you think of it, Judd?’ he asked me.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to admit it does look pretty good.’
“‘Can you think of a better or safer place for your money?’ he wanted to know.
“I had to admit I couldn’t.
“‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I was about to send them a telegram, telegraph my profits and tell them to send me a batch more shares. Why don’t we double up on the same telegram, send your money too, and tell them to add you to the list of stockholders?’
‘“Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose that is the thing to do. It certainly does look like a better deal than three and a quarter percent interest at a bank.’
“So we went down to the Western Union office in the lobby, and I reached into my shirt and pulled three thousand dollars worth of damage deposits out of my money belt. We spent about half an hour getting the message down to fifteen words, then went back to the cocktail lounge to celebrate our good fortune, good sense and good security.”
Judd sipped musingly at his Scotch, and the silence was broken only by the clatter of the Phoebe Snow bucketing down a Sullivan County mountainside. Finally, I said, “Did you get the stock certificates?”
“Came just before I left Cleveland,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a bundle of stock certificates. He handed them over, and I studied them. To my unpracticed eye, they looked perfectly legitimate. But so did the Confederate money handed out in Wheaties boxes a few years back. I’m anything but a judge.
I gave the certificates back, saying, “Do you suppose they’re all right?”
“No,” he said. “They’re as phony as Dotto.”
“But—you pumped three thousand dollars into them!”
“There wasn’t much else I could do,” said Judd. He smiled rather sadly. ‘‘I couldn’t very well tell Dan Miller that the Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company was one of my little projects, now could I?”