Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

It was all very easy. Later on I couldn’t believe how easy it had been, how gently I had slipped into the role, how stupid they were. The idiots thought they were being so goddamn smooth about everything. Greasing the skids for me, making me sign myself out of a six-figure nuisance suit for a few bucks and a watch and an airplane ticket. They danced for me like puppets, and they were so busy being cute they never even felt the strings.

The only hard part was at the beginning. Pitching myself down that escalator — that took a little doing. But from there on it was gravy. The first step was a lulu, but the rest of the road was a cinch.

And that, I suppose, was the beginning. I pulled the same dodge a week later in a San Francisco department store and found out I’d had a large dose of beginner’s luck. I took a fairly bad fall to start things off, and then I ran up against a floor manager who pegged me for a grifter from the go. As it turned out, I had to spend a week in the hospital. I actually went ahead and got a Market Street lawyer to take the case. This surprised the hell out of the floor manager. I turned out to be one hundred percent clean, a hard-working college dropout with no criminal record and no shady past history whatsoever. They got religion and settled out of court. After I paid the lawyer and the hospital I had almost eighteen hundred dollars to cushion me.

I also had one grift I could never pull again for the rest of my life. Nor was I inclined to. That was one nasty fall on that escalator.

There were other angles.

With eighteen hundred dollars I was in no particular hurry to find a job. Knock around for a while with time on your hands and the right gleam in your eye and you meet people. Meet the right people and you learn the business. If the life doesn’t fit, it’s not long before you drop it or it drops you and you look for a calmer way to make a living. If it fits you, then you’re home.

I used to think about this in Q. I had worlds of time for thought. I tried to work it back to the beginning, like tracing a river to its source. When I was a kid in geography class I thought rivers had sources that were very dramatic affairs — clear streams of water leaping out of rocks and such. But follow a river back and it spreads into smaller and smaller streams. Trace them one by one and they disappear into acres of dust. The thinking sessions in prison dried up the same way.

If I hadn’t busted out of State I’d have screwed things up for myself somewhere else along the line. If I had struck out hard on that first roll down the escalator I’d have found another better angle later on. I was too good at it, and too given to dreams and lies, and far too inept at going through life reading the script.

The crazy things you think of late at night. I never did get to sleep. I drank coffee until it backed up on me and I got a little shaky. I took a long walk in the false dawn and watched the city yawn and wake up. I went back to the hotel, showered again, changed clothes again, and had a respectable breakfast. Before too long it was time to pick up my pigeon and show him the coop.

The store was swinging in full-dressed splendor by the time I got Gunderman there. The night before, Doug had called our Manpower secretary and told her to take the day off. Then he made other calls and hired us a batch of day-workers.

With Gunderman actually coming to the office, we had to be able to stand a genuine white-glove inspection. We had to present the illusion of real activity. To do this, we needed people. And, because we were dealing strictly in illusion, we needed people who could play their assigned roles and keep their mouths shut. People who were with it.

We had two men, local grifters who were presently unemployed and who were not averse to picking up half a yard apiece for doing nothing special. One of them wore glasses and sat behind a desk jockeying a rented adding machine. The other leafed through a stack of newspapers and assorted garbage and dictated meaningless memos from time to time into a rented dictaphone.

Our Manpower girl had been temporarily replaced by a pleasant old girl with salt-and-pepper hair and a touch of Scottish burr to her voice. She was an old girlfriend of Winger Tim. She had since married on the square. Her husband was a few years dead. She lived on insurance money, acted in some Toronto amateur theater group, and did per diem work with grifting mobs when she was needed. We got her at bargain rates, just twenty dollars for the day. But she didn’t really need the money. She wanted the excitement.

Everything was staged just about right. When I ushered Gunderman into the outer office, one of our men was working the adding machine while the gal — Helen Wyatt — was talking on the telephone to a dead line. She was explaining that Mr. Rance was not in. She hung up, and I told her that Mr. Gunderman was here to see Mr. Rance. She buzzed Doug to tell him this, and while we waited our other hired hand came into the office, said hello to me, hung his coat on a peg and went to work. This was one of my touches. It is better if the scene changes within the store while the mark is present. This keeps him from wondering whether things have been set up for his benefit, all waiting for him to come and see.

I turned Wally over to Doug. My partner followed the script, wasting no time on me, hitting Gunderman with a ray of charm while giving the impression that he really had better things to do than spend time with Olean’s answer to William Zeckendorf. They wended their pleasant way into the inner office and I walked over to the front desk and chucked Helen under the chin. “One of these days,” I assured her, “you and I are going to have a wild affair.”

“Not I. My bones are too brittle.”

“A young chicken like you?”

“Don’t tease a poor widow lady, John.” She sighed theatrically. “I wish I knew what this was all about,” she said. “Nobody ever lets me read the whole script. Just my own lines.”

I looked her elaborately up and down and assured her that there was nothing wrong with her lines. She told me to go away, and I did. I went to a drugstore around the corner and called the office.

She said, “Barnstable, good morning.”

I said, “I had one grunch but the eggplant over there,” and she hung up.

I was not calling just to keep Helen happy in her widowhood. This was more of the illusion. Phones ringing show that an office is in contact with the outside world. All of this helps, not on a conscious level but right back at the base of the mark’s mind.

The more elaborately you do this, the better off you are. Cutting corners is always dangerous. When a store is set up perfectly, it gives you so great an edge that you can clean your mark and blow him off and leave him so sold that he simply refuses to believe he’s been conned, no matter what. I knew a stock mob that set up a bucket shop that came on stronger than any Wall Street office ever did. They had four marks on the string at once, and they scored with three and let the fourth off because it looked as though he might tip. One of the mooches figured things out a few days later, and the police wound up picking up the other two losers and telling them they bad been had.

They had been so well sold that they would not believe it. And when the bulls took one of them by the hand and led him back to the office of that very friendly stockbroker, he wouldn’t believe it when the suite of offices turned out to be very empty. He was sure he was on the wrong street. He made the cop check out some other addresses, because he was utterly sold on the legitimacy of that bucket shop.

I kept calling our offices. Not constantly, because we weren’t supposed to be all that active. Just often enough so that Gunderman would hear a phone ring every once in a while. He might not take conscious note of it, but it would make an impression.