The Con Man (87th Precinct)

The Con Man (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain




This is for my brother-in-law, Howard



The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established

investigatory technique.



Everybody has a right to earn a living.

That’s the American way. You get out there and sweat, and you make a buck. And you invest that buck in lemons and sugar. The water and ice, you get free. You’ve got yourself a little lemonade stand by the side of the road, and pretty soon, you’re pulling in five bucks a week. You take that five, and you buy more lemons and more sugar, and you spot your stands at intervals along the road, and pretty soon, you can’t handle all the business. You hire people to work for you. You start putting the lemonade up in bottles and then cans, and before you know it, you’re freezing the stuff, and it’s being distributed in chain stores all over the country. You buy yourself a big house in the country with a swimming pool and a garbage disposal unit, and you go to cocktail parties where people serve your lemonade with a little bit of gin tossed in for kicks. You have arrived in spades.

That’s the American way, and everybody has a right to earn a living.

The law doesn’t quarrel with man’s inalienable right to pursue the buck. The law only questions the method and means of acquiring the elusive green.

If, for example, your particular penchant is cracking safes, the law may cock a slightly disciplinary eyebrow in your direction.

Or if, for example, you like to hit people on the head and take their wallets, you can’t very well blame the law for looking at you somewhat disdainfully.

Or if, to stretch a point, you make your living by hiring out a gun, your gun, by squeezing the trigger of that gun, by using that gun to actually shoot people—well, really!

You can, after all, be a gentleman about all this. You can, if you figure crime is the quickest, safest, most exciting way of making the most money in the shortest time, go about it like a gent.

You can fool people.

You need not resort to violence.

You need not go out and buy a costly set of burglars’ tools.

You need not acquire a pistol.

You need not draw up complicated plans for getting in and out of a bank.

You need not set up an expensive counterfeit printing press in your basement.

You can remain a gentleman, pursue a life of romantic criminal adventure, see the world, meet a lot of nice people, drink a lot of cool drinks, and still make a lot of money—all by fooling people.

You can, in short, become a con man.





The little Negro girl was very nervous. She was nervous because she was in a police station talking to two detectives. One of the detectives was Negro, too, but that didn’t make her any less nervous. Both detectives were listening to her sympathetically, but that didn’t make her feel any less a fool—and she supposed this feeling of foolishness was what made her feel so nervous.

She had been in the city for two years now. She had come up from North Carolina a long while ago, and she knew she’d looked green at the time, and she knew her speech was not Northern, but that was a long time ago, and she’d thought she was quite cosmopolitan by now, quite the city slicker. Pride goeth before a fall, she supposed, and she sat with her foolishness inside her, and her nervousness breaking out on her hands, which picked lint from the small black purse she carried.

She sat in the detective squadroom of the 87th Precinct on a mild day in April. There had been rain just a little while before, and the greenery in Grover Park across the street had shoved its clean, sweet scent onto the air, and the cleanness and sweetness had somehow managed to cross the street and filter in through the grilled windows of the squadroom. The squadroom did not very often smell sweet. The squadroom housed sixteen detectives who, while they were not always all there at the same time, worked hard nonetheless in somewhat cramped quarters. Detectives sweat. That sounds almost sacrilegious because everyone knows only living human beings sweat. But even admitting that some detectives aren’t quite human, let’s be kind and allow that some of them are almost quite living. Which is why the sweet smell from the park was a welcome one on that April day, which had miraculously turned to one of sunshine after a bad start.

“I feel awful silly about this,” the girl said.

“What was your name again, miss?” Kling asked. Kling was a detective/3rd grade. He was tall and blond and somewhat young looking, mainly because he was young. He was the newest detective on the squad, and sometimes, his questions weren’t exactly to the point because he was still learning the art of questioning. Sometimes, too, his questions made him feel a little foolish. So Bert Kling knew just how the young Negro girl in the straight-back chair felt.

“My name is Betty,” she said. “Betty Prescott.”

“Where do you live, Betty?” Kling asked.

“Well, I work for some people in the next state. I’m a domestic, you know? I been working for them for six months now. Mr. and Mrs. Haines?” She made the last a question, and she raised her eyebrows as if expecting Kling to know who Mr. and Mrs. Haines were. Kling did not know. “I’m supposed to be back there now,” Betty said. “Thursday’s my day off, you see. Thursdays and every other Sunday. I generally come into the city every Thursday. Mr. Haines drives me to the station, and then Mrs. Haines picks me up when I come back. I’m supposed to be back now, but I felt I should report this. I called Mrs. Haines, and she said, by all means, I should report it. You see?”

“I see,” Kling said. “Do you keep an apartment in the city?”

“I live with my cousin here. Isabel Johnson?” Again she made the name a question. Kling didn’t know Isabel Johnson, either.

“All right, what happened, Betty?” Brown asked. He had been silent up to this point, giving Kling his head. But Arthur Brown was a detective/2nd grade and a known tendency toward impatience. He was impatient, perhaps, because his name was Brown and the accidentals of birth had tinted his complexion the same color. He had taken a lot of ribbing from fellow Americans over the years and had once considered changing his name to Lipschitz so that the hate mongers could really have a ball. His impatience, as it related to his chosen profession, was sometimes a hindrance, but it crossed a very subtle line into a second character trait, and that trait was doggedness. Once Brown got his teeth into a case, he wouldn’t unclamp his jaws until the nut was cracked. His impatience was a peculiar thing. There was, for example, a detective named Meyer Meyer at the precinct. Meyer’s surname was, of course, Meyer, and Meyer’s father had stuck him with the given name of Meyer so that his offspring emerged as Meyer Meyer. Now, if ever a man took guff because of a handle some unthinking parent had given him, Meyer Meyer was that man. But, in Meyer, the years of guff had led to an almost supernatural attitude of patience. The only crack in Meyer’s veneer of extreme patience emerged in a physical way. For Meyer Meyer was as bald as a cue ball, even though he was a young man. But that’s the way it goes. Two men, two names, two extremes.

Impatiently, Brown asked, “What happened?”

“I got off the train yesterday morning,” Betty said. “I take the eight-seventeen in with Mr. Haines. I don’t sit with him because he’s always talking business with his friends. He’s in public relations?” Again, the question mark.

Kling nodded.

“Go on,” Brown said impatiently.

“Well, when we got here to the city, I got off the train, and I was walking along when this man came up to me.”

“Where was this?” Brown asked.

“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 squadroom 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.