The Con Man

Seven

It’s the little things in life that get you down.

The big problems are the easy ones to solve. There’s a lot at stake with the big problems. It’s the little ones that are the tough bastards. Should I shave tonight for the big date with Buxom Blonde, or should I wait until tomorrow morning for the big conference with Amalgamated Aluminum? God, a man can go nuts!

The 87th’s big problem was the floater. It’s not often you get a floater.

The 87th’s little problem was the con man.

It was the con man who was driving Detective Arthur Brown nuts. Brown didn’t like to be conned, and he didn’t like other people to be conned, either. The man — or men, more accurately — who were fleecing honest citizens of Brown’s fair city rankled him. They invaded his sleep. They dulled his appetite. They were even ruining his sex life. He was surly and out of sorts, more impatient than ever, scowling, snapping, a very difficult man to work with. The men who worked with him, being kindly, considerate, thoughtful bulls, did everything in their power to make his working day even more difficult. A moment did not go by but what one or another of the 87th’s bulls would make some passing crack to Brown about the difficulties he was experiencing with the con man.

“Catch him yet, Artie?” they would ask.

“Hey, some guy conned my grandmother out of her false teeth yesterday,” they would say. “Think it’s your buzzard, Brown?”

Brown took all the patter and all the jive with enviable discourteousness, admirable lack of self-control, and remarkable short temper. His usual answer was short and to the point and consisted of a combination of two words, one of which was unprintable. Brown had no time for jokes. He only had time for the files.

Somewhere in those files was the man he wanted.

Bert Kling was occupied with another kind of reading matter.

Bert Kling stood before the bulletin board in the detective squad room. It was raining again, and the rain oozed against the windowpanes, and the harsh light behind the panes cast a sliding, running, dripping silhouette on the floor at his feet so that the room itself seemed to be slowly dissolving.

The vacations schedule had been posted on the bulletin board.

Kling studied it now. Two detectives studied it with him. One of the detectives was Meyer Meyer. The other was Roger Havilland.

“What’d you draw, kid?” Havilland asked.

“June tenth,” Kling replied.

“June tenth? Well, well, well, ain’t that a dandy time to start a holiday?” Havilland said, winking at Meyer.

“Yeah, dandy,” Kling said disgustedly. He had honestly not expected a choicer spot. He was the newest man on the squad — promoted from a rookie, at that — and so he could hardly have hoped to compete with the cops who had seniority. But he was nonetheless disappointed. June 10! Hell, that wasn’t even summer yet!

“I like my vacations at the early part of June,” Havilland went on. “Excellent time for vacations. I always ask for the end of April. I like it chilly. I wouldn’t think of leaving this lovely squad room during the suffocating months of July and August. I like heat, don’t you, Meyer?”

Meyer’s blue eyes twinkled. He was always willing to go along with a gag, even when the gag originated with a man like Havilland whom Meyer did not particularly like. “Heat is wonderful,” Meyer said. “Last year was marvelous. I’ll never forget last year. A cop hater loose and the temperature in the nineties. That makes for a memorable summer.”

“Just think, kid,” Havilland said. “Maybe this summer’ll be a hot one, too. You can sit over there by the windows, where you get a nice breeze from the park. And you can think back over your nice cool vacation in the beginning of June.”

“You slay me, Havilland,” Kling said. He turned to start away from the bulletin board, and Havilland laid a beefy hand on his arm. There was strength in Havilland’s fingers. He was a big cop with a cherubic face, and a leer-like smile was on that face now. Kling disliked Havilland. He had disliked him even when he’d been a patrolman and had only heard of Havilland’s questioning tactics with suspects. Since he’d made 3rd/grade, he had had the opportunity to see Havilland in action, and his dislike had mounted in proportion to the number of times Havilland used his ham like fists on helpless prisoners. Havilland, you see, was a bull. He roared like a bull, and he gored like a bull, and he probably even snored like a bull. In truth, he had once been a gentle cop. But he’d once tried to break up a street fight, and the fighters had ganged up on him, taken away his service revolver, and broken his arm with a lead pipe. The compound fracture had to be broken and reset at the hospital. It healed painfully and slowly. It left Havilland with a philosophy: Hit first; ask later.

The broken arm, to Kling’s way of thinking, bought neither benediction nor salvation for Havilland. Neither did it buy understanding. It bought, perhaps, a little bit of insight into a man who was basically a son of a bitch. Kling wasn’t a psychiatrist. He only knew that he didn’t like the leer on Havilland’s face, and he didn’t like Havilland’s hand on his arm.

“Where you going on your vacation, kid?” Havilland asked. “You don’t want to waste that nice cool month of June, do you? Remember, it gets to be summer along about the twenty-first. Where you going, huh?”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Kling said.

“We? We? You going with somebody?”

“I’m going with my fiancée,” Kling said tightly.

“Your girl, huh?” Havilland said. He winked at Meyer, including him in a secret fraternity that Meyer did not feel like joining.

“Yes,” Kling said. “My girl.”

“Whatever you do,” Havilland said, winking at Kling this time, “don’t take her out of the state.”

“Why not?” Kling asked, the implication escaping him for a moment, immediately sorry as soon as Havilland opened his mouth in reply.

“Why, the Mann Act, kid!” Havilland said. “Watch out for those state lines.”

Kling stared at Havilland and then said, “How would you like a punch in the mouth, Havilland?”

“Oh, Jesus!” Havilland roared. “The kid breaks me up! There’s nothing dishonest about screwing, kid, unless you cross a state line!”

“Lay off, Rog,” Meyer said.

“What’s the matter?” Havilland asked. “I envy the kid. Vacation in June, and a sweet little shack-up waiting for—”

“Lay off!” Meyer said, more loudly this time. He had seen the spark of sudden anger in Kling’s eyes, and he had seen the involuntary clenching of Kling’s right fist. Havilland outweighed and outreached Kling, and Havilland was not famous for the purity of his fighting tactics. Meyer did not want blood on the squad room floor — not Kling’s blood, anyway.

“Nobody’s got any sense of humor in this dump,” Havilland said surlily. “You got to have a sense of humor here, or you don’t survive.”

“Go help Brown with his con man troubles,” Meyer said.

“Brown ain’t got no humor, either,” Havilland said, and he stalked off.

“That big turd,” Kling said. “Someday...”

“Well,” Meyer said, his eyes twinkling, “in a sense, he’s right. The Mann Act is a serious thing. Very serious.”

Kling looked at him. Meyer had used almost the same words as Havilland, but somehow, there was a difference. “A very serious thing,” he answered. “I’ll be careful, Meyer.”

“Caution is the watchword,” Meyer said, grinning.

“The truth is,” Kling said, “this damn June tenth spot might screw things up. Claire goes to college, you know. She may be in the middle of finals or something right then.”

“You been planning on this for some time?” Meyer asked.

“Yeah,” Kling said, thinking of the June 10 spot, and hoping it would jibe with Claire’s schedule, and wondering what he could do about it if it didn’t.

Meyer nodded sympathetically. “Is it a special occasion?” he asked. “Your going away together, I mean?”

Kling, immersed in his thoughts, answered automatically, forgetting he was talking to a fellow cop. “Yes,” he said. “We’re in love.”

“The trouble with you,” Havilland said to Brown, “is you’re in love with your work.”

“I spend almost all my waking hours in this room,” Brown said. “It’d be a sad goddamn thing if I didn’t like what I was doing.”

“It wouldn’t be sad at all,” Havilland said. “I hate being a cop.”

“Then why don’t you quit the force?” Brown asked flatly.

“They need me too much,” Havilland said.

“Sure.”

“They do. This squad would go to pieces in a week if I wasn’t around to hold its hand.”

“Hold this a while,” Brown said.

“Crime would flourish,” Havilland continued, unfazed. “The city would be overrun by cheap thieves.”

“Roger Havilland, Protector of the People,” Brown said.

“That’s me,” Havilland confessed.

“Here, Protector,” Brown said, “take a look at this.”

“What?”

“This RKC card. How does it look to you?”

“What am I supposed to be looking for?” Havilland asked.

“A con man,” Brown said. He handed the card to Havilland. With the casual scrutiny born of years of detective work, Havilland studied the face of the card:

“Tells me nothing,” Havilland said.

“Flip it over,” Brown told him.

Havilland turned over the card and began reading again.

“Could be,” Havilland said.

“Thing that interests me about him is that he’s a jack of all trades,” Brown said. “You get a con man, he usually sticks to one game if it’s working for him. This guy varies his game. Like the louse we got roaming the 87th. He must be pretty smooth, too, because he’s barely a kid and he only took one fall.” Brown looked at the card. “Who the hell made out this thing? It’s supposed to tell you where he was sentenced and what for.”

“What difference does it make?” Havilland asked airily.

“I like to know what I’m dealing with,” Brown said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m heading for the Hotel Carter right now to pick him up.”