Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 4. Whole No. 245, April 1964

Dime Store Diamond by Arthur Moore

A free-and-easy frolic in the gentle, if not noble, art of slang, jargon, argot, and vernacular... Meet McGinty and his pal Nifty — in “The 5-C’s Caper.”

“You heard of easy touches?” Nifty says to me. “Well, this here’s like a butterfly on a fogbank.”

“Slippery,” I say. “I dunno what it is yet, but already I don’t go for any part of it.”

“That’s what I like about you, McGinty. You got an open mind — like a safe-deposit box. Here, our ship has come in and you ain’t even gonna stand on the dock and wave.”

“The kind of ship that’s gonna come in for us is a police boat and I would just as soon the pier collapses.”

Nifty and me are old friends. He is almost as bright as a four-watt firefly and if he has thought up an easy touch, then I am going out and stand on a hill somewhere, because this is E-Day, meaning End of World.

“You goin’ to knock a half G, McGinty?” he asks me. “Uncle Whiskers has been sit tin’ up nights just stampin’ out these here C things.”

Nifty spreads five one-hundred-dollar bills on the table in front of me.

Of course, that is more money than I have seen outside of a Brinks armored truck, and my eyes bug out something fierce. We are standing in my kitchen, which is large enough for six church mice who are exceptionally friendly, and I grab the wall to make sure it is real. I figure if the wall is real, then maybe I am, and then maybe what I am seeing will be, too.

I have never known Nifty to have enough green goods to cover bets on a hopscotch game. He has got a permanent stoop from shooting snipes in the gutter and he cuts his own hair — sometimes even in the back.

“Where,” I gasp finally, “did you glom onto that loot?” I am unconsciously listening for the sound of sirens and bracing myself for the pounding on the door which comes just seconds before they break it in.

“From Loopy Sims,” he says, and I nearly keel over.

Loopy is short for loophole. Loopy Sims is a guy who would give his starving mother chopsticks to eat soup with. He is also our big competitor in the horse-fixing dodge and in certain circles he is freely known as Loopy Syringe. “I don’t believe it,” I say.

“Pal, you got Loopy all wrong,” Nifty assures me. “He is an up-and-up Joe when the chips is down. Him and us has been on the opposite sides of the hay burners so long we ain’t really got to know him.”

The crisp new folding stuff and them five portraits of Ben Franklin is hypnotizing me. I am hearing Nifty’s words but I am really listening to the sweetest music this side of Guy Lombardo. The things that we can do with five hundred iron men makes my knees weak. I feel like a government agency which has just discovered another undeveloped country.

With an effort which makes me groan, I tear my eyes away from the Fort Knox cabbage and look at Nifty. He is the perfect shill. He has got a face like a choir boy, but you always feel that even if he is singing Brighten the Corner, he is reading Captain Billy’s Whizbang on the side. He has got appeal, if you know what I mean, for the mark, the sucker. A citizen may be honest as a canary with a good lock on the cage, but he don’t mind getting a parking ticket fixed.

It is beginning to percolate through the wheels in my head that I ain’t heard why Loopy has suddenly shook the wrinkles out of his money belt. Being of a naturally suspicious nature, I am beginning to wonder also if Nifty is the one being fixed.

“Loopy wouldn’t pay that much,” I tell Nifty, “for a guaranteed list of tomorrow’s winners. Did you take it off his body?”

“You got it all pegged, ain’t you?” he says sarcastically. He points to the moola. “That’s gelt-type geetus, ain’t it? Five hunnerd smackeroonies. Whassa matter, you got your rent paid?”

“ ’Course not, but who we gotta kill?”

“Look,” says Nifty in a voice like he is trying to tout me on a longshot with a broken leg. “Relax your head muscles. We got the loot, ain’t we? And we don’t have to do nothin’ for it.”

“Nothin’?”

“Well — hardly nothin’.”

“What’s by you ‘hardly nothin’?” Nifty is trying to be casual but he couldn’t carry a spear in Ben-Hur. I edge over and sit down so I won’t have so far to fall when he tells me we are going to ambush J. Edgar Hoover.

“We’re runnin’ over to the track at Quincy tomorra, right?”

“So?” I say. Quincy is a little burg about forty miles down the pike and there is a local racing meet there.

“So, nothin’. We go, that’s all.”

Dumb as he is, Nifty can see that ain’t much of a reason for Loopy shelling out gobs of the long green. It takes me ten minutes more, but I get the rest of it. Nifty puts down a little box on the table. It is about an inch and a half square, like a ring box, and he is supposed to deliver it to some sport in Quincy.

I pick up the box and look at it. It is wrapped good with white bandage-tape and feels solid. “Why don’t Loopy deliver it?” I ask.

“Because he broke his leg and can’t move. I saw him myself. He’s in bed with two splints.”

“So he called you, you bein’ such a close friend and all.”

I am staring at the box, and am scared to death I know what’s in it.

“We had a nice talk, me and him,” Nifty says. “Like I say, he ain’t a bad Joe when you get to know him. This here’s important, and I ain’t s’posed to tell you about it, so don’t let on.”

“Uh huh. What’s in the box?”

“A diamond ring,” Nifty says. “That’s a ring box.”

Nifty has never bought a diamond ring in his life, so I don’t disillusion him. The box is okay, but I know there ain’t no ring in it. I am sure it’s full of H.

Loopy would love to get rid of us on account of we are beginning to make some good contacts, and Loopy feels that this is strictly his territory. We have been here three weeks and have already made enough to eat on, and I am hoping we can get a battery on a nag at Quincy. We might make us twenty or thirty clams. If we had dough to bet the horse, who knows? — the sky’s the limit. Maybe even a hundred.

I am afraid to tell Nifty that I think he has been carrying around a load of heroin, but he lets me take charge like usual. He gives me a slip of paper with a name on it.

“That’s the bird it goes to,” he says. “I’m s’posed to look him up at the hotel.”

We pool our resources, which comes to a little under two dollars, and I slip Nifty fifty cents to run out and get us some chow. He is all for splitting up the five C-notes right away, but I talk him out of it.

After he has gone clattering down the stairs, I open the ring box, intending to wash the H down the sink. Only I get the shock of my life.

There really is a ring in the box!

It is pure glass, of course, and the gold is already beginning to turn green. I figure it might be worth ten or fifteen cents in an inflation market. Why it is worth five hundred just to deliver is definitely making me dizzy.

I slip the ring into a drawer, and before Nifty gets back I wrap up the ring box again with some tape from the bathroom.

The next morning we don’t even lock the door when we leave on account of there is nothing in the joint that even a ragpicker would find interesting. We head for Quincy, which is one of them towns that nobody has any trouble forgetting. We arrive at about noon on the bus, which takes our last small change. We have to walk about a mile to the track.

Our contact for boosting one of the ponies along is a guy named Sidney, last name unknown. He is a tall, nervous wreck with eyeglasses which are always sliding down his nose on account of he is sweating so much.

“Lay off,” he says, looking around like a hood in a Class B movie. “Scarce out. This joint is crawlin’ with the law.”

“But, Sidney—”

“Not today,” he says, “anyway not right now. Hang around till the last race. Maybe I take a chance, maybe I don’t.”

He is definite as a little duck but that’s the best I can get out of him, except for six bits for coffee and doughnuts. Sidney takes off in the direction of the stables, and Nifty and I slouch over to a one-arm joint and stool up for the java and.

“Cheers,” Nifty says. “We still got the five C’s. Whyn’t I deliver the ring?”

I stall him for a couple races, and some longshot nag, which has never won a race since Coolidge wouldn’t run either, pays off 60 to 1. I am worried enough already, but that takes my appetite away. I am also edgy because I can’t figure the ring angle.

“Let’s get outa here,” I tell Nifty. “And dummy up about the dough.”

We walk back to Quincy, and Nifty wants to stop at the hotel.

“There won’t be anyone there,” I say. “Let’s go see can we bum a ride home.”

“I got a better idea,” Nifty counters. “We deliver the ring and hit this bird up for carfare. How come you don’t wish to bust loose with our moo?”

“Look,” I tell him. “Last night I opened the box, and your ring is worth all of one thin dime. I can’t place this caper, and I am worried.”

“Yeah?” Nifty says in considerable surprise. “Loopy was lyin’ to me, huh?”

“Like a stack of rugs.”

“Then we ain’t got nothin’ to lose. And maybe we can still get the carfare.”

I am all out of arguments but I am not out of curiosity. So I let Nifty lead me to the hotel. I am wrong again. The bird whose name is on the slip of paper is registered. Nothing makes sense.

I follow Nifty up to the room wondering if Loopy’s mind was may be affected by that broken leg.

Nifty knocks on the door and a gent opens it. Both of us stand there with our mouths open. The gent is holding a roscoe.

“Come in,” the gent says in a voice which is not pitched as an invite. “We been expecting you.” He stands back and we walk into the room like zombies. “Call the bus station,” he says to another gent. “We got ’em here.”

“You got what?” I ask.

The first gent is a square solid type with a shiny suit and hard-boiled eyes. He shows us a badge. “The game’s up, boys,” he smirks. “You fixed your last race.”

“We fixed nothin’,” Nifty says with real indignation.

“Sure, sure,” the cop says and puts the gun away. “We know all about it.” He winks at the other one. “Which one of you big brains has got the dime store ring?”

Nifty sags a little and the cop frisks me and finds the ring box in two seconds flat. “You’re the guys, all right.” He tosses the box in the wastebasket. Then he goes over me again, real thorough. He frowns at me, then he frisks Nifty. The other cop puts the phone down and comes over to give his pal a hand.

“Where’s the dough?” the second cop says.

“What dough?” Nifty is looking at me in a funny way.

“Come on, we got a sure tip,” the first cop says kind of annoyed. “You guys fixed that sixty-to-one longshot today, and now it’s payoff time. Make it easy on yourselves. Where’s the dough?”

“You sure got us wrong. We ain’t got no dough,” Nifty says, still looking at me.

The two cops go to work. They make us strip, and even rip apart our shoes. But they don’t find the five C-notes, and they ain’t too happy about it.

Nifty tells them about Loopy and the ring like it’s all a gag, and finally his shill face gets to them. I can see they are beginning to believe him.

They keep us there two hours but finally they give up. When they leave we are trying to get dressed again.

“That’s what it was,” I say. “Loopy give us a come-on with that ring box malarkey. That wasn’t what we were deliverin’ — it was the five hunnerd bucks. And we were deliverin’ the dough to them cops.”

“Whaddaya mean, deliverin’ the dough to the cops?”

“We didn’t fix no race, huh? Loopy fixed it. He figured to pay off his protection and get us run out of the state at the same time.”

“Pretty slick,” Nifty says. He gives me a hard stare. “Only where’s the dough?”

“You sound like a cop,” I tell him. I go over to the wastebasket. “Last night I put it in this here box.”