Erle Gardner - The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito

“That’s crude, Mr. Mason. You don’t do it that way at all.”

“How do you do it, Pete?”

“Well, it’s what Hayward Small would call a psychological proposition. You’ve got to make the sucker try to slip something over on you! ”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said, glancing out of the corner of his eye to make certain Della Street was taking down the questions and answers.

“Well, it’s like this, Mr. Mason. People are pretty well educated nowadays. They’re getting smart. You try to sell them a gold brick, or try to shoot gold into a ledge of quartz, and chances are like as not they’ll have read about it or seen it in a movie somewhere and just give you the horselaugh. In fact, you try to sell anybody a mining claim and he gets suspicious right away. If he knows mines, what you tell him don’t make any difference, and if he don’t know mines, he’s suspicious of everything.”

Quite obviously, Pete Sims was vastly relieved that Mason was asking for information rather than making direct accusations or demanding explanations. That relief made him talkative.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said.

“Well, Mr. Mason, you work it this way. You get the sucker all lined up, then you fix it so the sucker is the one that’s trying to sell you.”

Mason said, “You didn’t work it that way with Jim Bradisson, Pete.”

Pete shifted his position in the chair. “You don’t know that whole story, Mr. Mason.”

“What is the story, Pete?”

Pete shook his head doggedly.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“I’ve told you all I know,” Pete said, his manner changing from glib friendliness to surly reticence.

“All right, Pete. No offense. Let’s go back to discussing generalities. How can you make the sucker try to slip something over on you?”

“There’s lots of ways.”

“Can you tell me one?”

“I’ll give you the basic idea back of the whole thing,” Pete said. “You pretend to be the innocent guy and let the sucker be the smart guy. You’re just an innocent, ignorant son of the desert, and the city slicker decides you’re so dumb it would be a shame to cut you in on any profits.”

“I don’t see how you could work that, Pete.”

Sims once more warmed to his subject. “You’ve got to be ingenious, Mr. Mason. You’ve got to do a lot of thinking, and you’ve got to have imagination. That’s why lots of people think I’m lazy. When I’m sitting around doing nothing is when I’m thinking, when I’m... I guess I’m doin’ a lot of talking, Mr. Mason.”

“That’s all right, Pete. You’re among friends,” Mason said. “I’m interested in how you can get the city slicker to try to take advantage of you.”

“They’ll do it every time. You be simple and take them out and show them some property that you want them to buy. You get enthusiastic about that property and show them all the good points. They keep drawing back into their shell. Then about lunch time you take ’em around to some property that you tell ’em belongs to you, or belongs to a friend of yours, and sit down there to eat lunch. Then you make an excuse to wander away, and you’ve planted something that the sucker can find for himself, something that makes it look like the claim is lousy with gold. You get me, Mr. Mason? He finds it while you’re gone. When you come back, he never says to you, ‘Look, Pete, we’ve struck it rich right on your own claim.’ — I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Mason. I’ve been salting claims for twenty years and I’ve never had one of these birds pull that line on me yet.”

“How do you get the customer looking around?” Mason asked.

“Shucks, they’ll all do it. Tell ’em a claim’s rich and they’d ought to buy it, and they take only a halfway interest in it. But take ’em down to some place that looks sort of promising with nice colored rock on it and tell ’em it’s no good — and then walk away and leave ’em, and they start prowling. They’ll do it every time. That’s one thing about a sucker in the desert — he always thinks he knows more than the old-time mining men.”

Mason nodded.

“Well,” Pete went on, “that’s the way it’s put across. He begins looking around. You’ve got some rocks that’s so rich the gold is just stuck in them in chunks. You’ve blasted away a section of rock outcropping and grafted these little pieces of rock into place. If you’re good with dynamite and mixing up a little rock cement, there’s nothing to it. You can put those pieces in place so they look as though they’d been there since the Year One.

“The sucker sticks the sample of rock in his pocket and when you come back he starts asking you a lot of casual questions about the title to the property, when your option expires, and all that. Then, next thing you know, he’s sneaking around behind your back, trying to double-cross you and get the property. Or if you’ve told him you own it outright, he starts telling you about how this is such a swell place for a desert cabin; he’s never been in a place that seemed more restful to him, and all that sort of stuff. Since the thing doesn’t amount to so much as a mine, he’d like to buy it for a cabin site — or he says he has a friend who has bad sinus trouble, and he would like to get this place for his friend.

“If you’d been the one who discovered the chunk of ore the sucker would have been suspicious. He’d have wanted to call in a couple of mining engineers and had you give him bank references before he’d even listen to you. But when he discovers it, and thinks he’s slipping one over on you, he becomes the salesman and you’re the customer. That’s all there is to it. It’s his own baby and he’s putting it across.”

“A most interesting example of practical and applied psychology,” Mason said. “I think, Sims, I can use that in my business.”

“Well, Mr. Mason, if that’s all you want, I’ll be getting back. But that’s the secret of the whole business. You’ve got to get the sucker trying to sell you.”

“Just a minute,” Mason said. “Before you go, Pete, there’s just one more question I want to ask.”

Pete sat on the extreme edge of the chair. “Go right ahead, Mr. Mason.”

Mason said, “You planted that six-gun on Banning Clarke, didn’t you, Pete?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

Mason said, “You salted that group of your wife’s claims. You sold them to Jim Bradisson. Then, after the corporation commenced its action for fraud, you realized you were in hot water, so you thought you might as well have a second string to your bow. You fixed things so Banning Clarke would think the famous Lost Goler Mine was situated on properties controlled by the Shooting Star Group, didn’t you?”

“Why, Mr. Mason!” Sims exclaimed reproachfully.

“And in order to do that,” Mason went on, “you found this old six-gun somewhere and etched the name Goler on the handle. But what you overlooked, Pete, was the fact that you have a very distinctive method of printing a capital G. And the printing you put on that bag of arsenic — ‘GUARD CAREFULLY’ — had the same capital G as was on the handle of the gun.”

For a moment, Pete looked Mason squarely in the eyes, then his eyes slithered away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.

Mason turned to Della Street, “All right, Della, go get the sheriff. Tell him to bring up that bag of arsenic. We’ll get that gun and compare the printing...”

“No, no, no!” Sims exclaimed. “Don’t do that. Now don’t go off half-cocked like this, Mr. Mason. Don’t bring that sheriff into it again.”