God Save the Mark
Donald E. Westlake
Copyright
God Save the Mark
Copyright © 1967 by Donald E. Westlake
Cover to the electronic edition copyright © 2002 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Electronic editions published 2002, 2010 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795312038
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
To Nedra
Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things
which are before,
I press toward the mark.
—The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians
You must make your mark.
—Horatio Alger
Friday the nineteenth of May was a full day. In the morning I bought a counterfeit sweepstakes ticket from a one-armed man in a barbershop on West 23rd Street, and in the evening I got a phone call at home from a lawyer saying I’d just inherited three hundred seventeen thousand dollars from my Uncle Matt. I’d never heard of Uncle Matt.
As soon as the lawyer hung up I called my friend Reilly of the Bunco Squad at his house in Queens. “It’s me,” I said. “Fred Fitch.”
Reilly sighed and said, “What have they done to you this time, Fred?”
“Two things,” I said. “One this morning and one just now.”
“Better watch yourself, then. My grandma always said troubles come in threes.”
“Oh, my Lord,” I said. “Clifford!” “What’s that?”
“I’ll call you back,” I said. “I think the third one already came.”
I hung up and went downstairs and rang Mr. Grant’s bell. He came to the door with a large white napkin tucked under his chin and holding a small fork upright in his hand, a tiny curled shrimp impaled on it. Which was a case of sweets to the sweet, Mr. Grant being a meek curled-shrimp of a man himself, balding, given to spectacles with steel rims, employed as a history teacher at some high school over in Brooklyn. We met at the mailboxes every month or so and exchanged anonymities, but other than that our social contact was nil.
I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Grant, I know it’s dinnertime, but do you have a new roommate named Clifford?”
He blanched. Fork and shrimp drooped in his hand. He blinked very slowly.
Knowing it was hopeless, I went on anyway, saying, “Pleasant-looking sort, about my age, crewcut, white shirt open at the collar, tie loose, dark slacks.” Over the years I’ve grown rather adept at giving succinct descriptions, unfortunately. I would have gone on and given estimates of Clifford’s height and weight but I doubted they were needed.
They weren’t. Shrimp at half-mast, Mr. Grant said to me, “I thought he was your roommate.”
“He said there was a COD package,” I said.
Mr. Grant nodded miserably. “Me, too.”
“He didn’t have enough cash in the apartment.”
“He’d already borrowed some from Wilkins on the second floor.”
I nodded. “Had a fistful of crumpled bills in his left hand.”
Mr. Grant swallowed bile. “I gave him fifteen dollars.”
I swallowed bile. “I gave him twenty.”
Mr. Grant looked at his shrimp as though wondering who’d put it on his fork. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “I suppose we ought to …” His voice trailed off.
“Let’s go talk to Wilkins,” I said.
“All right,” he said, and sighed, and came out to the hall, shutting the door carefully after himself. We went on up to the second floor.
This block of West 19th Street consisted almost entirely of three- and four-story buildings with floor-through apartments sporting fireplaces, back gardens, and high ceilings, and how the entire block had so far missed the wrecker’s sledge I had no idea. In our building, Mr. Grant had the first floor, a retired Air Force officer named Wilkins had the second, and I lived up top on the third. We all three were bachelors, quiet and sedentary, and not given to disturbingly loud noises. Of us, I was at thirty-one the youngest and Wilkins was much the oldest.
When Mr. Grant and I reached Wilkins’ door, I rang the bell and we stood around with that embarrassed uneasiness always felt by messengers of bad tidings.
After a moment the door opened and there stood Wilkins, looking like the Correspondence Editor of the Senior Citizens’ Review. He wore red sleeve garters with his blue shirt, a green eyeshade was squared off on his forehead, and in his inkstained right hand he held an ancient fountain pen. He looked at me, looked at Mr. Grant, looked at Mr. Grant’s napkin, looked at Mr. Grant’s fork, looked at Mr. Grant’s shrimp, looked back at me, and said, “Eh?”
I said, “Excuse me, sir, but did someone named Clifford come to see you this afternoon?”
“Your roommate,” he said, pointing his pen at me. “Gave him seven dollars.”
Mr. Grant moaned. Wilkins and I both looked at his shrimp, as though it had moaned. Then I said, “Sir, this man Clifford, or whatever his name is, he isn’t my roommate.”
“Eh?”
“He’s a con man, sir.”
“Eh?” He was squinting at me like a man looking across Texas at midday.
“A con man,” I repeated. “Con means confidence. A confidence man. A sort of crook.”
“Crook?”
“Yes, sir. A con man is someone who tells you a convincing lie, as a result of which you give him money.”
Wilkins put his head back and looked at the ceiling, as though to stare through it into my apartment and see if Clifford weren’t really there after all, in shirtsleeves, quietly going about the business of being my new roommate. But he failed to see him—or failed to see through the ceiling, I’m not sure which—and looked at me again, saying, “But what about the package? Wasn’t it his?”
“Sir, there wasn’t any package,” I said. “That was the con. That is, the lie he told you was that there was a package, a COD package, and he—”
“Exactly,” said Wilkins, pointing his pen at me with a little spray of ink, “exactly the word. COD. Cash on delivery.”
“But there wasn’t any package,” I kept telling him. “It was a lie, to get money from you.”
“No package? Not your roommate?”
“That’s it, sir.”
“Why,” said Wilkins, abruptly outraged, “the man’s a damn fraud!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is he now?” Wilkins demanded, going up on tiptoe to look past my shoulder.
“Miles from here, I should think,” I said.
“Do I get you right?” he said, glaring at me. “You don’t even know this man?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But he came from your apartment.”
“Yes, sir. He’d just talked me into giving him twenty dollars.”
Mr. Grant said, “I gave him fifteen.” He sounded as mournful as the shrimp.
Wilkins said to me, “Did you think he was your roommate? Makes no sense at all.”
“No, sir,” I said. “He told me he was Mr. Grant’s roommate.”
Wilkins snapped a stern look at Mr. Grant. “Is he?”
“Of course not!” wailed Mr. Grant. “I gave him fifteen dollars myself!”
Wilkins nodded. “I see,” he said. Then, thoughtfully, ruminatively, he said, “It seems to me we should contact the authorities.”
“We were just about to,” I said. “I thought I’d call my friend on the Bunco Squad.”
Wilkins squinted again, under his eyeshade. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s part of the police force. The ones who concern themselves with the confidence men.”
“You have a friend in this organization?”
“We met in the course of business,” I said, “but over the years we’ve become personal friends.”
“Then by all means,” said Wilkins decisively. “I’ve never seen going through channels accomplish anything yet. Your friend it is.”
So the three of us went on up to my place, Wilkins still wearing his eyeshade and carrying his pen, Mr. Grant still wearing his napkin and carrying his fork and shrimp. We entered the apartment and I offered them chairs but they preferred to stand. I called Reilly again, and as soon as I said who I was he said, “COD Clifford.”
“What?”
“COD Clifford,” he repeated. “I didn’t connect the name at first, not till after you hung up. That’s who it was, wasn’t it?”
“It sounds about right,” I said.
“He was some other tenant’s new roommate.”
“And a COD package had come.”
“That’s him, all right,” Reilly said, and I could visualize him nodding at the telephone. He has a large head, with a thick mass of black hair and a thick bushy black mustache, and when he nods he does so with such judicious authority you can’t help but believe he has just thought an imperishable truth. I sometimes think Reilly does so well with the Bunco Squad because he’s part con man himself.
I said, “He got twenty dollars from me, fifteen from Mr. Grant on the first floor, and seven from Mr. Wilkins on the second.”
Wilkins waved his pen at me, whispering hoarsely, “Make it twelve. For the official record, twelve.”
Into the phone I said, “Mr. Wilkins says, for the official record make it twelve.”
Reilly laughed while Wilkins frowned. Reilly said, “There’s a touch of the con in everybody.”
“Except me,” I said bitterly.
“Some day, Fred, some psychiatrist is going to do a book on you and make you famous forever.”
“Like Count Sacher-Masoch?”
I always make Reilly laugh. He thinks I’m the funniest sad sack he knows, and what’s worse he tells me so.
Now he said, “Okay, I’ll add your name to Clifford’s sucker list, and when we get him you’ll be invited to the viewing.”
“Do you want a description?”
“No, thanks. We’ve got a hundred already, several with points of similarity. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting this one. He works too much, he’s pushing his luck.”
“If you say so.” In my experience, which is extensive, the professional workers of short cons don’t usually get caught. Which is nothing against Reilly and the others of the Bunco Squad, but merely reflects the impossibility of the job they’ve been given. By the time they arrive at the scene of the crime, the artist is invariably gone and the sucker usually isn’t even sure exactly what happened. Aside from dusting the victim for fingerprints, there really isn’t much the Reillys can do.
This time he had me give him my fellow pigeons’ full names, assured me once again that our complaint would go into the bulging Clifford file downtown, and then he asked me, “Now, what else?”
“Well,” I said, somewhat embarrassed to be telling about this in front of my neighbors, “this morning a one-armed man in a barbershop on West—”
“Counterfeit sweepstakes ticket,” he said.
“Reilly,” I said, “how is it you know all these people but you never catch any?”
“We got the Demonstration Kid, didn’t we? And Slim Jim Foster? And Able Mabel?”
“All right,” I said.
“Your one-armed man, now,” Reilly said, “that’s Wingy St. Charles. How come you tipped so soon?”
“This afternoon,” I said, “I suddenly got a suspicion, you know the way I always do, five hours too late.”
“I know,” he said. “God, how I know.”
“So I went up to the Irish Tourist Board office on East 50th Street,” I said, “and showed it to a man there, and he said it was a fake.”
“And you bought it this morning. Where?”
“In a barbershop on West 23rd Street.”
“Okay. It’s soon enough, he might still be working the same neighborhood. We’ve got a chance. Not a big chance, but a chance. Now, what else do you have?”
“When I came home,” I said, “the phone was ringing. It was a man said he was a lawyer, Goodkind, office on East 38th Street. Said I’d just inherited three hundred seventeen thousand dollars from my Uncle Matt.”
“Did you check with the family? Is Uncle Matt dead?”
“I don’t have any Uncle Matt.”
“Okay,” said Reilly. “This one we get for sure. When do you go to his office?”
“Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock.”
“Right. We’ll give it five minutes. Give me the address.”
I gave him the address, he said he’d see me in the morning, and we both hung up.
My guests were both staring at me, Mr. Grant in amazement and Wilkins with a sort of fixed ferocity. It was Wilkins who said, “Lot of money, that.”
“What money?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars.” He nodded at the phone. “What you’re getting.”
“But I’m not getting three hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “It’s another con game, like Clifford.”
Wilkins squinted. “Eh? How’s that follow?”
Mr. Grant said, “But if they give you the money …”
“That’s just it,” I said. “There isn’t any money. It’s a racket.”
Wilkins cocked his head to one side. “Don’t see it,” he said. “Don’t see where they make a profit.”
“There’s a thousand ways,” I said. “For instance, they might talk me into putting all the money into a certain investment, where my so-called Uncle Matt had it, but there’s a tax problem or transfer costs and they can’t touch the capital without endangering the whole investment, so I have to get two or three thousand dollars in cash from somewhere else to pay the expenses. Or the money’s in some South American country and we have to pay the inheritance tax in cash from here before they’ll let the money out. There’s a new gimmick every day, and ten new suckers to try it on.”
“Barnum,” suggested Wilkins. “One born a minute, two to take him.”
“Two,” I said, “is a conservative number.”
Mr. Grant said, faintly, “Does this happen to you all the time?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” I said.
“But why you?” he asked. “This is the first time anything like this ever happened to me. Why should it happen to you so much?”
I couldn’t answer him. There just wasn’t a single thing I could say in response to a question like that. So I stood there and looked at him, and after a while he and Wilkins went away, and I spent the evening thinking about the question Mr. Grant had asked me, and trying out various answers I might have given him, ranging from, “I guess that’s just the breaks of the game,” to, “Drop dead,” and none of them was really satisfactory.
I suppose it all began twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they’d been traded to some classmate, but I couldn’t remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn’t already belonged to me when I’d left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the identity of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found.
From that day forward my life has been an endless series of belated discoveries. Con men take one look at me, streamline their pitches, and soon go gaily off to steak dinners while poor Fred Fitch sits at home and once again dines on gnawed fingernail. I have enough worthless receipts and bad checks to paper my living room, I own miles of tickets to nonexistent raffles and ball games and dances and clambakes and shivarees, my closet is full of little machines that stopped working miracles as soon as the seller went away, and I’m apparently on just about every sucker mailing list in the Western Hemisphere.
I really don’t know why this should be true. I am not the typical mark, or victim, not according to Reilly or to all the books I’ve read on the subject. I am not greedy, nor uneducated, nor particularly stupid, nor an immigrant unfamiliar with the language and customs. I am only—but it is enough—gullible. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could lie to another human being to his face. It has happened to me hundreds of times already, but for some reason I remain unconvinced. When I am alone I am strong and cynical and unendingly suspicious, but as soon as the glib stranger appears in front of me and starts his spiel my mind disappears in a haze of belief. The belief is all-encompassing; I may be the only person in New York City in the twentieth century with a money machine.
This endless gullibility has, of course, colored my entire life. I left my home town in Montana to come to New York City at the very early age of seventeen, much sooner than I would have preferred if it had not been that I was surrounded at home by friends and relatives all of whom had seen me played for a fool more often than I could count. It was embarrassment that drove me from my home to the massive anonymity of New York, when otherwise I might have stayed forever within ten blocks of the place of my birth.
My relationship with women has also been affected, and badly. Since high school I have avoided any but the most casual acquaintance with the opposite sex, and all because of my gullibility. In the first place, any girl who became close friends with me would sooner or later—probably sooner—see me humiliated by a passing bunco artist. In the second place, were I to grow more than fond of a particular girl, how could I ever really know her opinion of me? She might say she loved me, and when she was saying it I would believe her, but an hour later, a day later …
No. Solitude has its dreary aspects, but they don’t include self-torture.
Similarly my choice of occupation. Not for me the gregarious office job, side by side with my mates, typing or writing or thinking away in our companionable white-shirted tiers. Solitude was the answer here as well, and for the past eight years I have been a free-lance researcher, numbering among my clients many writers and scholars and television producers, for whom I plumb the local libraries in search of specific knowledge.
So here I was at thirty-one, a confirmed bachelor and a semi-recluse, with all the occupational diseases of my sedentary calling: round shoulders and round spectacles and round stomach and round forehead. I seemed inadvertently to have found the way to skip the decades, to go from the middle twenties to the middle fifties and there to stay while the gray years drifted silently by and nothing broke the orderly flow of time but the occasional ten-dollar forays of passing confidence men.
Until, on that Friday the nineteenth of May, I received the phone call from the lawyer named Goodkind that changed—and very nearly ended—my life.
In an effort to eliminate, or at least contain, my pot belly, I’ve taken to walking as much as possible whenever I go out, and so on Saturday morning I walked from my apartment on West 19th Street to the office of the alleged lawyer, Goodkind, on East 38th Street. I made one stop along the way, in a drugstore on the corner of West 23rd and Sixth Avenue, where I purchased a packet of tobacco.
I’d gone half a block farther up Sixth Avenue when I heard someone behind me call, “Say, you!” I turned, and a tall and rather heavy-set man was striding toward me, motioning at me to stay where I was. He wore a dark suit, the jacket flapping open, a white shirt bunched at the waist, and a wrinkled brown tie. He looked like an ex-Marine who has only recently started to get flabby.
When he reached me he said, “You just bought some tobacco in the store on the corner, right?”
“Yes, I did,” I said. “Why?”
He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and flipped it open to show me his badge. “Police,” he said. “All we want you to do is cooperate.”
“I’ll be happy to,” I said, with that sudden flutter of guilt we all feel when abruptly confronted by the law.
He said, “What sort of bill did you use back there?”
“What sort? You mean—? Well, it was a five.”
He pulled a crumpled bill from his jacket pocket and handed it to me, saying, “This one?”
I looked at the bill, but of course there’s no way to tell one piece of money from another, so eventually I had to say, “I guess it is. I can’t be sure.”
“Take a close look at it, brother,” he said, and he suddenly sounded much tougher than before.
I took a close look, but how did I know if this was the bill I’d used or not? “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling very nervous about it, “but I just can’t be positive one way or the other.”
“The counterman says you’re the one passed it on him,” he said.
I looked at him, saw him glowering at me. I said, “Passed it on him? You mean it’s counterfeit?”
“That’s exactly right,” he said.
“It’s happened again,” I said, sadly studying the bill in my hand. “People pass counterfeit money on me all the time.”
“Where’d you get this one?”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”
I could tell by his face that he was somewhat suspicious of me, and he confirmed it by saying, “You don’t seem too anxious to co-operate, brother.”
“Oh, I am,” I said. “It’s just I don’t remember where I got this particular bill.”
“Come over to the car,” he said, and led me to a battered green unmarked Plymouth parked near a fireplug. He had me get in on the passenger side in front, and then he came around and slid in behind the wheel. A police radio under the dashboard was crackling and giving occasional spurts of words.
The detective said, “Let’s see some identification.”
I showed him my library and Social Security cards, and he carefully wrote down my name and address in a black notebook. He’d taken the five-dollar bill back by now, and he wrote its serial number on the same page, then said to me, “You got any more bills on you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Let’s see.”
I had thirty-eight dollars in bills, two tens, three fives and three ones. I gave them to him and he studied each of them at length, holding them up to the light, rubbing them between thumb and finger, listening to them crinkle, and then putting them atop the dashboard in two piles.
When he was done, it turned out three more of them had been counterfeit, a ten and two fives. “We’ll have to impound these,” he said, and gave me the other bills back. “I’ll give you a receipt, but of course you know you can’t collect good money for these. If there’s ever a conviction based on these bills it’s possible you’ll be able to make a partial recovery from the people who made them, but otherwise I’m afraid you’ve been had.”
“That’s all right,” I said, and grinned weakly. In the first place, I was used to being had, and in the second place, I was delighted that he no longer thought I was potentially a member of the gang passing them.
He had a receipt book in the glove compartment. He got it out and wrote out an involved receipt, including the serial numbers of the bills, and when he handed it to me he said, “You want to be more careful from now on. Look at your change when it’s given to you and you won’t make these costly mistakes.”
“I’ll do that,” I promised. I got out of the car, looked at my watch, and saw I’d have to move fast if I intended to reach Goodkind’s office by ten o’clock. I began walking briskly uptown.
I reached 32nd Street before it occurred to me I’d been taken. Then I stood stock-still on the sidewalk, and as I felt the blood drain from my head, I took out the receipt and looked at it.
Twenty dollars. I had just bought this scribbled piece of paper for twenty dollars.
I turned around and ran, but of course by the time I got to 24th Street he was long gone. I started looking around for a phone booth, intending to call Reilly at Headquarters, but then I remembered I’d be seeing him at the supposed lawyer’s office a little after ten.
A little after ten? I looked at my watch and it was just one minute before the hour. I was supposed to be there now!
I flagged a cab, which meant another dollar the bogus policeman had cost me. I got into the back seat, the driver started the meter, and we raced uptown directly into the middle of the garment center’s perpetual traffic jam.
I got to Goodkind’s office at twenty after ten. The hallway and reception room and Goodkind’s private office were all crawling with Bunco Squad men, who had sprung the trap before the cheese had arrived. I threaded my way through them, muttering hello to the ones I knew and identifying myself to the rest, and found Reilly in Good-kind’s office with two other Bunco Squad men and, seated at his desk, a hungry lupine sharpie with onyx eyes who had to be Goodkind himself.
Reilly said to me, “Where the hell have you been?”
“A phony policeman worked the counterfeit ploy on me for twenty dollars,” I said.
“Oh, Christ,” said Reilly, and suddenly looked too weary to stand.
Goodkind, grinning hungrily at me, said, in a voice like the one Eve must have heard from the serpent, “Hello there, Fred. It’s really too bad you’re my client.”
I looked at him. “What?”
Reilly said, “He’s legit, you goofball. He’s on the up-and-up.”
“You mean—?”
“What a suit I’d have against you,” Goodkind said gleefully. “And you with all that money.”
“It’s square,” Reilly told me. “You really did inherit three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, and God help us all.”
“Still,” said Goodkind, rubbing his hands together, “maybe we can work something out.”
I stretched out on the floor and became unconscious.
Jack Reilly is a great bear of a man, sprinkled with pipe tobacco. Two hectic hours after my subsidence on the floor of Attorney Goodkind’s office, Reilly and I entered a bar on East 34th Street, and he said, “Fred, if you’re going to drive me to drink, the least you can do is pay for it.”
“I guess I can,” I said. “Now.” And my knees got weak again.
Reilly steered me to a booth in the back, hollered till a waitress came, ordered Jack Daniels on the rocks for both of us, and said to me, “If you’ll take my advice, Fred, the first thing you’ll do is get yourself another lawyer.”
I said, doubtfully, “That doesn’t seem fair, does it? After all, he’s the one handling the estate.”
“He handles it the way I handle my girl,” he said, and made a fondling motion in the air. “Goodkind’s a little too much in love with your money, Fred. Unload him.”
“All right,” I promised, though secretly I doubted if I had the nerve to just walk into Goodkind’s office and fire him. But maybe I could hire another attorney and he could fire Goodkind.
Reilly said, “And the second thing you better do, Fred, is figure out a safe place to put that money.”
“I’d rather not think about it,” I said.
“Well, you’ve got to think about it,” he told me. “I don’t want you calling me every hundred dollars till it’s gone.”
“Let’s talk about it later,” I said. “After I’ve had a drink and a chance to calm down.”
“It’s an awful lot of money, Fred,” he said.
I already knew that. It was three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, give or take a nickel. Not only that, it was three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars net, after inheritance taxes and legal fees and all the rest of it, the actual amount of the inheritance being nearly five hundred thousand. Half a million.
Five million dimes.
It seems I really did have an Uncle Matt, or that is, a grand-uncle by that name. My great-grandmother on my mother’s mother’s side married twice and had one son by the second marriage, who in his turn had three wives but no children. (A quick phone call to my mother in Montana from Goodkind’s office had garnered this information.) Uncle Matt, or Matthew Grierson, which was his real name, had spent most of his life as a ne’er-do-well and—presumably—alcoholic. Every single relative he had reviled him and snubbed him and refused him entry to their homes. Except me, of course. I never did an unkind thing to Uncle Matt in my life, primarily because I’d never heard of him, my parents being too genteel to mention such a bad character in the presence of children.
But it was this kindness by default which had produced my windfall. Uncle Matt hadn’t wanted to leave his money to a dog and cat hospital or a scholarship fund for underprivileged spastics, but he detested all his relations just as severely as they had all detested him. Except me. So it seems that Uncle Matt took an interest in me, studying me from afar, and decided that I was a loner like himself, cut off from the rotten family and living my own life the way I wanted. I don’t know why he never introduced himself to me, unless he was afraid that close up I’d turn out to be as bad as the rest of his relations. At any rate he studied me, and thought he sensed some sort of affinity between us, and in the end he left his money to me.
The source of the money itself was a little confusing. Eight years ago Uncle Matt had gone off to Brazil with an unspecified amount of capital which he’d apparently saved over a long period of time, and three years later he’d come back from Brazil with over half a million dollars in cash and gems and securities. How he’d done it no one seemed to know. In fact, so far as my mother had been able to tell me over the phone, no one in the family had even known Uncle Matt was rich. As Mother said, “A lot of people would have treated Matt a heap different if they had known, believe you me.”
I believed her.
In any case, Uncle Matt had spent the last three years living right here in New York City, in an apartment hotel on Central Park South. Twelve days ago he had died, had been buried without fanfare, and his will had been opened by his attorney, Marcus Goodkind. Among this document’s instructions, it had commanded the attorney to complete all the possible legal rigmarole before informing me either of my uncle’s death or of the bequest. “My nephew Fredric is of a sensitive and delicate nature,” the will read on this point. “Funerals would give him the flutters and red tape would give him hives.”
It had taken twelve days, and so far as I felt right now I wished it had taken twelve years. Twelve hundred years. I sat in this booth with Reilly, a hundredthousandaire waiting for a Jack Daniels on the rocks, and all I felt was sick and terrified.
And there was worse to come. After the belated arrival of our drinks, and after I’d downed half of mine in the first swallow, Reilly said, “Fred, let’s get this business of the money straightened away. I’ve got some other things to talk to you about.”
“Like what?”
“The money first.”
I leaned forward. “Like where the money came from?”
He seemed surprised. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“Figured it out? I don’t get you.”
“Fred, have you ever heard of Matt ‘Short Sheet’ Gray?”
The name rang a faint distant bell. I said, “Did Maurer write about him?”
“I don’t know, he might. Midwest con man, over forty years. Spread a swath of receipts across the middle of the country as thick as fallen leaves in October.”
I said, “My uncle’s name was Matthew Grierson.”
“So was Short Sheet’s. Matt Gray was what you might call his professional name.”
I reached unsteadily for my drink. Though it was half gone I still managed to slop some on my thumb. I drank what was left, licked my thumb, blinked at Reilly, and said, “I’ve inherited three hundred thousand dollars from a con man.”
“And the question is,” he said, “where’s a good safe place for it.”
“From a con man,” I said. “Reilly, don’t you get it?”
“Yeah yeah,” he said impatiently. “Fred, this is serious.”
I chuckled. “Talk about casting your bread on the waters,” I said. I laughed. “A con man,” I said. I guffawed. “I’m inheriting my own money back,” I said. I whooped.
Reilly leaned across the table and slapped me across the face. “You’re getting hysterical, Fred,” he pointed out.
I was. I took two pieces of ice from my glass, put one in my mouth, and held the other against my stinging cheek where Reilly had given me his Irish hand. “I suppose I needed that,” I said.
“You did.”
“Then thanks.”
The waitress came over, looking suspicious, and said, “Anything wrong here?”
“Yes,” Reilly told her. “These drinks are empty.”
She picked up the glasses, looked at us suspiciously some more, and went away.
Reilly said, “The point is, what are you going to do with the money?”
“Buy a gold brick with it, I suspect.”
“Or the Brooklyn Bridge,” Reilly agreed gloomily.
“Verrazano Narrows Bridge,” I said. “Only the newest and most modern for my money.”
“Where’s the money now?” he asked me.
“The securities are in a couple of safe-deposit boxes, the gems are in the Winston Company vault, and Uncle Matt had seven savings accounts in different banks around town. Plus a checking account. Plus he owned some property.”
The waitress brought our fresh drinks, looked at us suspiciously, and went away again.
Reilly said, “The securities and gems are all right where they are. Just leave them there and have your lawyer switch the paperwork over to you. The cash we’ll have to work out. There’s got to be a way to keep you from getting your hands on it.”
I said, “There was something else you wanted to talk to me about.”
“You haven’t had enough to drink yet,” he said.
“Tell me now,” I said.
“At least drink some of it,” he said. “You’ll spill it all over yourself.”
“Tell me now,” I insisted.
He shrugged. “Okay, buddy. A couple of people from Homicide are coming to see you at your home at four o’clock this afternoon.”
“Who? Why?”
“Your Uncle Matt was murdered, Fred. Struck down with the well-known blunt instrument.”
I poured cold Jack Daniels in my lap.
Half an hour later, as I walked homeward through Madison Square Park, a girl with marzipan breasts flung herself into my arms, kissed me soundly, and whispered in my ear, “Pretend you know me!”
“Oh, come on,” I said irritably, “how much of a fool do you think I am?” I pushed her roughly away.
“Darling!” she cried bravely, holding her arms out to me. “It’s so good to see you again!” Panic gleamed in her eyes, and lines of tension marred her beautiful face.
Could it be real? After all, strange things do happen. And this was New York City, with the United Nations just a few blocks away. For all I knew, some sort of spy ring could—
No! For once in my life I had to remain the skeptic. And if this wasn’t the opening shot of a variation on the badger game, I wasn’t the good old Fred Fitch known and loved by grifters from coast to coast. (“After all,” as Reilly had once said, “if they don’t have songs about you, Fred, it’s only because they don’t sing.”)
I said, “Young lady, you have made a mistake. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“If you don’t help me,” she said rapidly under her breath, “I’ll tear off my clothes and swear you attacked me.”
“In Madison Square Park? At ten minutes to one in the afternoon?” I gestured at the hordes of lunch-munching office workers, pigeon-feeding widows, and auto-hypnotic retirees filling the benches and paths around us.
She looked around and shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said. “It was a good try. Come on, Fred, let’s go have a drink and talk it over.”
“You know who I am?”
“Of course I know who you are. Didn’t your Uncle Matt talk about you all the time? How he used to dandle you on his knee when you were no higher—”
“I never met Uncle Matt in my life,” I said. “That one wasn’t even a good try.”
She got very irritated, put her hands on her hips, and said, “All right, smart guy. Do you want to know what’s going on or don’t you?”
“I don’t.” Although, of course, I did. The other half of gullibility is curiosity.
She stepped closer to me again, so close the marzipan nearly touched my shirtfront. “I’m on your side, Fred,” she said softly. She began fingering my tie. Watching her fingers, looking both little-girlish and sexy, she murmured, “Your life’s in danger, you know. Powerful interests in Brazil. The same ones who murdered your Uncle Matt.”
“What’s your part in all this?”
She looked quickly around and said, “Not here. Come to my place tonight—160 West 78th. Smith. Be there at nine.”
“But what’s it all about?”