Ed McBain - The Con Man

On the couch, Priscilla Ames moaned. Donaldson went to the doorway and looked into the living room. “Relax, lover,” he called. “In a little while, you’ll go for a nice refreshing swim.” He burst out laughing and turned to Teddy. “Nice girl,” he said. “Ugly as sin. Nice.” He went back to packing the bag, silent now, working rapidly. Teddy watched him. He had not packed a gun, so perhaps he didn’t own one.

“You’ll help me downstairs with her,” he said suddenly. “The service elevator again. In and out, and whoosh, we’re on our way. You’ll stay with me for a while. You can’t talk; that’s good. No phone calls, no idle gossip to waiters, good, good. Just have to keep you away from pen and paper, I guess, huh?” He studied her again, his eyes changing. “Be good to have a ball for a change,” he said. “I get so goddamn tired of these witches, and you can’t trust the beauties. If you want to know something, you can’t trust anybody. The world is full of con men. But we’ll have a ball.” He looked at her face. “Don’t like the idea, huh? That’s rough. It’ll make it more interesting. You should consider yourself lucky. You could be scheduled for a swim with Miss Ames, you know. You should consider yourself lucky. Most women fall down when I come into a room. Consider yourself lucky. I’m pleasant company, and I know the nicest places in town. That’s my business, you know. My avocation. I’m really an accountant. Actually, accounting is my avocation, I suppose. Women are my business. The lonely ones. The plain Janes. You’re a surprise. I’m glad you followed me.” He grinned boyishly. “Nice having somebody to talk to who doesn’t talk back. That’s the secret of the Catholic confession, and also the secret of psychoanalysis. You can tell the truth, and the worst that’ll happen to you is twelve Hail Marys or the discovery that you hate your mother. With you, there’s no punishment. I can talk, and you can listen, and I don’t have to spout the love phrases or the undying bliss bit. You look sexy, too. Still water. Deep, deep.”

He heard the sudden, sharp snap of the front door lock. He whirled quickly and ran into the living room.

Carella saw a blond giant appear in the door frame, eyes alert, fists clenched. The giant took in the .38 in Carella’s fist, took in the unwavering glint in Carella’s eye, and then lunged across the room.

Carella was no fool. This man was a powerhouse. This man could rip him in two.

Steadily, calmly, Carella leveled the .38.

And then he fired.

April was dying.

The rains had come and gone, and the cruelest month was being put to rest. May would burst with flowers. In June, there would be sunshine.

Priscilla Ames sat in the squad room of the 87th Precinct. Steve Carella sat opposite her.

“Will he live?” she asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“That’s unfortunate,” she replied.

“It depends how you look at it,” Carella said. “He’ll go to trial, and he’ll be convicted. He’ll die, anyway.”

“I was a fool, I suppose. I should have known better. I should have known there’s no such thing as love.”

“You’re a fool if you believe that,” Carella said.

“I should have known,” Priscilla said, nodding. “It took a stomach pump to teach me.”

“Love is for the birds, huh?” Carella said.

“Yes,” she answered. She lifted her head, and her eyes behind the glasses glared defiance. But they asked for something else, too, and Carella gave it to her.

“I love my wife,” he said simply. “It may be for the birds, but it’s for the humans, too. Don’t let Donaldson sour you. Love is the biggest American industry. I know.” He grinned. “I’m a stockholder.”

“I suppose...” Priscilla sighed. “Anyway, thank you. That’s why I came by. To thank you.”

“Where to now?” Carella asked.

“Back home,” Priscilla said. “Phoenix.” She paused and then smiled for the first time that afternoon. “There are a lot of birds in Phoenix.”

Arthur Brown was conducting a post mortem.

“I couldn’t figure why two big con men who are knocking over marks in the two-hundred- to a thousand-dollar category should bother with a little colored girl. Five bucks he got! He worked it as a single, without his partner, and all he got was five bucks!”

“So?” Havilland said.

“So it annoyed me. What the hell, a cop’s got to bank on something, doesn’t he? I asked Parsons. I asked him why the hell he bothered conning a little girl out of five bucks. You know what he said?”

“No, what?” Havilland asked.

“He said he wanted to teach the girl a lesson. Now, how the hell do you like that? He wanted to teach her a lesson!”

“We’re losing a great teacher,” Havilland said. “The world is losing a great teacher.”

“You mustn’t look at it that way,” Brown said. “I prefer to think that the state penitentiary is gaining one.”

On the telephone, Bert Kling said, “So?”

“It worked!”

“What!”

“It worked. She bought it. She’s letting me go with my aunt,” Claire said.

“You’re kidding!”

“I’m dead serious.”

“We leave on June tenth?”

“We do,” Claire said.

“Yippppeeeee!” Kling shouted, and Havilland turned to him and said, “For Christ’s sake, pipe down! I’m trying to read!”

The working day was over.

There was May mixed in the April air. It touched the cheeks mildly; it lingered on the mouth. Carella walked and drank of it, and the draught was heady.

When he opened the door to his apartment, he was greeted with silence. He turned out the light in the living room and went into the bedroom.

Teddy was asleep.

He undressed quietly and then got into bed beside her. She wore a fluffy, white gown, and he lowered the strap of the gown from her right shoulder and kissed the warm flesh there. A cloud passed from the moon, filling the room with pale yellow. Carella moved back from his wife’s shoulder and blinked. He blinked again.

“I’ll be goddamned!” he said.

The warm April moonlight illuminated a small, lacy, black butterfly on Teddy’s shoulder.

“I’ll be goddamned!” Carella said again, and he kissed her so hard that she woke up.

And, big detective that he was, he never once suspected she’d been awake all the while.

It’s necessary that this be an afterword rather than an introduction because if it were placed before the book began, it would spoil the suspense — such as it is — of scenes you’ve now already read.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that my original plan was to kill Carella at the end of The Pusher, which gleefully malignant intent was stifled by my misguided and greedy publishers who insisted that I could not kill a hero — who, by the way, had only appeared in one and a half books by then. Some hero!

Having had time to think over their suggestions while hanging in chains in the basement and being fed only bread and water — and never mind the brutal torture and such, which I am reluctant to describe in detail lest it cause vapors in those among you who are fainthearted — having had time, as I say, to reconsider the untimely demise of Stephen Louis Carella, to resurrect him, so to speak, I was now confronted with writing the next book in the series wherein this big hero, mind you, was to become a ✫✫✫ star ✫✫✫!!!

Recognizing the rarely disputed fact that behind all great men there stands a woman, it occurred to me that Teddy Carella — who had been invisible in the second book of the series and virtually nonexistent in the third book, wherein Carella should have lain down and died if he had a decent bone in his body — it occurred to me, as I say, that it wouldn’t be a bad notion to revive Teddy Carella, too, to give her a larger role in the proceedings, in fact, to have a sizable segment of the plot revolve around her. This was not too difficult a task to accomplish in that she had been conceived as someone both hearing- and speech-impaired, and therefore presumably more vulnerable to attack.