Ed McBain: The Con Man

“Right in the station,” Betty said.

“Go ahead.”

“He said hello, and he asked me was I new in the city? I said, no, I’d been up North for two years, but I was working out the state. He seemed like a very nice fellow, dressed nice, you know? Respectable?”

“Yes,” Kling said.

“Anyway, he said he was a preacher. He looked like a preacher, too. He started blessing me then. He said God bless you and all like that, and he said I should be very careful in the big city because there was all kinds of pitfalls for a young, innocent girl. People who’d want to do me harm?”

Again, the question mark, and again, Kling said, “Yes,” and immediately afterwards cursed himself for falling into the pitfall of the girl’s speech pattern.

“He said I should be especially careful with money, because there was all sorts of people who’d do most anything to get their hands on it. He asked me if I had any money with me.”

“Was he white or Negro?” Brown asked.

Betty looked at Kling somewhat apologetically. “He was white,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Brown told her.

“Well, I said I had a little money with me, and he asked me if I’d like him to bless it for me? He said, ‘Do you have a ten-dollar bill,’ and I said no. So he said, ‘Do you have a five-dollar bill,’ and I said yes. Then he took out his own five-dollar bill, and he put it into this little white envelope. With a cross on the front. A crucifix?”

This time Kling did not say yes. He did not even nod.

“Then he said something like, ‘God bless this money and keep it safe from those who would...’ Oh, like that. We kept talking, and he put the envelope back in his pocket, and then he said, ‘Here, my child, you take this blessed five dollars and let me have your bill.’ I gave him my five dollars, and he reached into his pocket and gave me the envelope with the cross on it, the envelope with the blessed money.”

“And this morning?” Brown asked impatiently.

“Well, this morning I was ready to go to the train station, and I saw the envelope in my purse, so I opened it up?”

“Yes,” Kling said.

“Surprise,” Brown said. “No five dollars.”

“Why, no!” Betty said. “There was just a folded paper napkin in the envelope. He must have switched that envelope while he was talking to me, after he’d blessed the money. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I needed that five dollars. Can’t you catch him?”

“We’ll try,” Kling said. “Can you give us a description of the man?”

“Well, I didn’t really look at him too hard. He was nice looking and very nicely dressed?”

“What was he wearing?”

“A dark-blue suit. Or maybe black. It was dark, anyway.”

“Tie?”

“A bow tie, I think.”

“Carrying a briefcase or anything?”

“No.”

“Where’d he get the envelope from?”

“His inside pocket.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“If he did, I don’t remember.”

“All right, Miss Prescott,” Brown said, “if anything develops, we’ll call you. In the meantime, I think you’d better forget all about that five dollars.”

“Forget it?” she asked with a great big question mark, and nobody answered her.

They led her to the slatted wooden railing that divided the squad room from the corridor outside, and they watched her walk down the corridor and then turn into the stairwell that led to the ground floor of the building.

“What do you think?” Kling asked Brown.

“The old switch game,” Brown said. “There are a hundred variations. We’d better plant a few men at the station to watch for this preacher.”

“Think we’ll get him?”

“I don’t know. Chances are he won’t be working the same place tomorrow. I tell you, Bert, I think there’s an upswing in confidence men these days, you know it?”

“I thought they were dying out.”

“For a while, yeah. But, all of a sudden, all the old confidence games are reappearing. Games that have beards on them they’re so old. All of a sudden, they start cropping up.” Brown shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, they’re not too serious,” Kling said.

“Crime is serious,” Brown said flatly.

“Oh sure,” Kling said. “I just meant...Well, aside from a few bucks lost, there’s never any real harm done.”

The girl in the River Harb had had some real harm done to her.

She floated up onto the rocks near the Hamilton Bridge, and three young kids didn’t know what she was at first, and then they realized, and they ran like hell for the nearest cop.

The girl was still on the rocks when the cop arrived. The cop did not like to look at dead bodies, especially dead bodies that had been in the water for any amount of time. Bloated and immense, the girl hardly looked like a girl at all. Her head hair had been completely washed away. Her body was decomposed, and fibrous strands of flesh clung to her brassiere, which, snapped by the expanding gasses in the body, miraculously clung to her though the rest of her clothing was gone. Her lower front teeth were gone, too.

The patrolman managed to keep down the bilious feeling that suddenly attacked his stomach. He went to the nearest call box and phoned in to the 87th Precinct, which house he happened to work for.

Sullivan, the sergeant who was manning the desk, said, “87th Precinct, good morning.”

“This is Di Angelo,” the patrolman said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got a floater near the bridge.”

He gave Sullivan all the details, and then he went back to stand alongside the dead girl on the rocks, which were washed with April sunshine.

Detective Steve Carella was glad the sun was shining.

It was not that Carella didn’t like rain. After all, the farmers sure needed it. And, though it may sound a bit poetic, walking hatless in the spring rain had been one of Carella’s favorite pastimes before the day of his idiocy.

The day of his idiocy had been Friday, December 22.

He would never think of it without referring to it as “the day of his idiocy” because that was the day he’d allowed a young punk pusher to take his service revolver away from him and fire three shots into his chest. That had been a fine Christmas, all right. That had been a Christmas when Carella could almost hear the angels, so imbued was he with the season’s spirit. That had been a Christmas when he thought he wouldn’t quite make it, when he thought sure he was a goner. And then, somehow, the clouds had blown away. And where there was a painful mist before, there was a slow clearing and Teddy’s face in that clearing, streaked with tears. He had recognized his wife, Teddy, first, and then slowly the rest of the hospital room had come into focus. She had leaned over the bed and rested her cheek against his, and he could feel her tears hot on his face, and he whispered hoarsely, “Cancel the wreath,” in an attempt at wit that was unfunny. She had clung to him fiercely, wordlessly — wordlessly because Teddy could neither speak nor hear. She had clung to him, and then she had kissed his unfunny humor off his mouth, and then she had covered his face with kisses, holding his hand all the while, careful not to lean on his bandaged, wounded chest.

He had healed. Time heals all wounds, the wise men say.

Of course, the wise men didn’t know about rain and bullet holes. When it rained, Carella’s healed wounds ached. He always thought that was a bunch of bull, wounds aching when it rained. Well, it was not a bunch of bull. His wounds ached when it rained, and so he was glad the rain had stopped and the sun was shining.

The sun was shining on what had once been a girl, and Carella looked down at the travesty death had wrought, and there was momentary pain in his eyes and momentary anger, and both passed.