The Con Man

Twenty

April was dying.

The rains had come and gone, and the cruelest month was being put to rest. May would burst with flowers. In June, there would be sunshine.

Priscilla Ames sat in the squad room of the 87th Precinct. Steve Carella sat opposite her.

“Will he live?” she asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“That’s unfortunate,” she replied.

“It depends how you look at it,” Carella said. “He’ll go to trial, and he’ll be convicted. He’ll die, anyway.”

“I was a fool, I suppose. I should have known better. I should have known there’s no such thing as love.”

“You’re a fool if you believe that,” Carella said.

“I should have known,” Priscilla said, nodding. “It took a stomach pump to teach me.”

“Love is for the birds, huh?” Carella said.

“Yes,” she answered. She lifted her head, and her eyes behind the glasses glared defiance. But they asked for something else, too, and Carella gave it to her.

“I love my wife,” he said simply. “It may be for the birds, but it’s for the humans, too. Don’t let Donaldson sour you. Love is the biggest American industry. I know.” He grinned. “I’m a stockholder.”

“I suppose...” Priscilla sighed. “Anyway, thank you. That’s why I came by. To thank you.”

“Where to now?” Carella asked.

“Back home,” Priscilla said. “Phoenix.” She paused and then smiled for the first time that afternoon. “There are a lot of birds in Phoenix.”

Arthur Brown was conducting a post mortem.

“I couldn’t figure why two big con men who are knocking over marks in the two-hundred- to a thousand-dollar category should bother with a little colored girl. Five bucks he got! He worked it as a single, without his partner, and all he got was five bucks!”

“So?” Havilland said.

“So it annoyed me. What the hell, a cop’s got to bank on something, doesn’t he? I asked Parsons. I asked him why the hell he bothered conning a little girl out of five bucks. You know what he said?”

“No, what?” Havilland asked.

“He said he wanted to teach the girl a lesson. Now, how the hell do you like that? He wanted to teach her a lesson!”

“We’re losing a great teacher,” Havilland said. “The world is losing a great teacher.”

“You mustn’t look at it that way,” Brown said. “I prefer to think that the state penitentiary is gaining one.”

On the telephone, Bert Kling said, “So?”

“It worked!”

“What!”

“It worked. She bought it. She’s letting me go with my aunt,” Claire said.

“You’re kidding!”

“I’m dead serious.”

“We leave on June tenth?”

“We do,” Claire said.

“Yippppeeeee!” Kling shouted, and Havilland turned to him and said, “For Christ’s sake, pipe down! I’m trying to read!”

The working day was over.

There was May mixed in the April air. It touched the cheeks mildly; it lingered on the mouth. Carella walked and drank of it, and the draught was heady.

When he opened the door to his apartment, he was greeted with silence. He turned out the light in the living room and went into the bedroom.

Teddy was asleep.

He undressed quietly and then got into bed beside her. She wore a fluffy, white gown, and he lowered the strap of the gown from her right shoulder and kissed the warm flesh there. A cloud passed from the moon, filling the room with pale yellow. Carella moved back from his wife’s shoulder and blinked. He blinked again.

“I’ll be goddamned!” he said.

The warm April moonlight illuminated a small, lacy, black butterfly on Teddy’s shoulder.

“I’ll be goddamned!” Carella said again, and he kissed her so hard that she woke up.

And, big detective that he was, he never once suspected she’d been awake all the while.