The Con Man (3 page)

Then he began working on the dead girl’s heart.

It requires a certain amount of dispassionate, emotionless patience to lift fingerprint impressions from fingers and thumbs that have been cut from a cadaver.

If the dead girl had been in the water for a comparatively short period of time, Sam Grossman’s men could have dried off
each finger with a soft towel and then—in order to smooth out the so-called washerwoman’s skin effect—have injected glycerin beneath the fingertip skin. They could then have taken their prints with ease.

Unfortunately, the girl had not been in the water for a short period of time.

Nor had she been in the water only long enough to wear away the friction ridges of her fingers. Had this been the case, the lab boys would have cut away the skin of each fingertip, placing these snips in separate test tubes with formaldehyde solution. Assuming the papillary ridges were intact on the outer surface of the skin, one of Sam’s men would have put on a rubber glove, placed the piece of skin on his index finger, and then rolled finger, glove, and skin on an inking plate—as if the piece of skin were actually his own finger—and then recorded it on the fingerprint form.

Even if the papillary ridges had been destroyed, the papillary pattern would be found on the inner surface of the skin, and a good photograph could be had if the skin were attached to a piece of cardboard, inner surface out, and the picture taken in oblique light.

Unfortunately, the unidentified dead girl had been in the water for close to four months, and the laboratory technicians had to turn to more tedious and inventive methods of getting their fingerprints.

In the hands of less-skilled operators than Sam Grossman’s men, an attempt at the papillary method may have proved less expedient and less fruitful. But Sam’s men were whizzes, and so they took each finger and each thumb, and they stood over Bunsen burners and slowly, methodically, doggedly dried the fingers, passing them over the flame, their hands moving in short arcs, back and forth, back and forth, until each finger had shrunk and dried.

Then, at last, they were able to touch each finger lightly with printer’s ink and take their impressions.

Their impressions did not tell them who the dead girl was.

One copy of her prints was sent to the Bureau of Criminal Identification.

One copy was sent to the FBI.

A third copy was sent to the Bureau of Missing Persons.

A fourth was sent to Homicide North—since all suicides or suspected suicides are treated exactly like homicides.

And, finally, a copy was sent to the Detective Division of the 87th Precinct, in which territory the body had been found.

Sam Grossman’s men washed their hands.

There was something about Paul Blaney that made Carella’s flesh crawl. Perhaps it was the idea of Blaney dealing with death as an occupation, but Carella suspected it was the man’s personality and not his job. He had, after all, dealt with many men whose occupation was death. With Blaney, however, it seemed to be more a preoccupation than an occupation, and so Carella stood before him, towering over him, and he could feel a nest of spiders in his stomach, and he wanted to scratch himself or take a bath.

The two men stood in the clean antiseptic examination room of the morgue alongside the stainless steel table, with its troughs to gather in the flow of blood, with its stainless steel basin to capture the blood and hold it in a ruby pool. Blaney was a short man with a balding head and a scraggly black mustache. He was the only man Carella had ever met who owned violet eyes.

Carella stood opposite him, a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of athletic tightness; every muscle and sinew in his body pulled into a wiry bundle of power. His eyes were brown, slanting downward to meet high cheekbones so that his face had an almost Oriental look. He wore his brown hair
short. He wore a gray sports jacket and charcoal slacks, and the jacket stretched wide across the breadth of his shoulders, angled in sharply to cover narrow hips and a flat, hard stomach.

“What do you make of it?” he asked Blaney.

“I hate floaters,” Blaney said. “I hate to look at them. The goddamned things make me sick.”

“Nobody likes floaters,” Carella said.

“Me especially,” Blaney said, nodding vigorously. “They always give me the floaters. If you’ve got seniority around here, you can pull anything you want. So I’m low man on the totem pole. So whenever a goddamned floater comes in, everybody else suddenly has corpses in Siberia. Is that fair? That I should get the floaters?”

“Somebody’s got to get them.”

“Sure, but why me? Listen, I don’t complain about anything they give me. We’ve had stiffs in here so burned up you wouldn’t even know they were human. You ever handle charred flesh? Okay, but do I complain? We get automobile accident victims where a guy’s head is hanging from his neck by one strand of skin. I take it in stride. I’m an ME, and you’ve got to take the good ones with the bad ones. But why should I get all the floaters? How come nobody else gets the floaters?”

“Look—” Carella started, but Blaney was just gathering steam, just picking up speed.

“There isn’t anybody in the goddamn department who does a better job than me. Trouble is, I haven’t got seniority. It’s all politics. Who do you think gets the nice posh jobs? The old fuddies who’ve been cutting up stiffs for forty years. But I do a neat, thorough job. Thorough. I’m thorough. I don’t overlook anything. Not a thing. So I get the floaters!”

“Maybe they figure you’re so expert they wouldn’t trust them to anyone else,” Carella said drily.

“Huh?” Blaney said. “Expert?”

“Certainly. You’re a good man, Blaney. Floaters are tough. You can’t trust them with just any damn butcher.”

Blaney’s violet eyes softened a shade. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. He smiled slightly, and then the smile vanished before a suspicious lowering of his brows as he thought the problem over again.

“What about this one?” Carella asked, not wanting Blaney to start thinking too hard.

“Oh,” Blaney said. “Yeah. Well, I got a report there—all the junk. Been in the water about four months, I would say. I just got done with the heart.”

“And?”

“You know anything about the heart?”

“Not very much, no.”

“Right and left chambers, you see. Blood passes through, gets pumped around the body...Oh hell, I can’t give a layman an anatomy lesson.”

“I didn’t ask for one,” Carella said.

“Anyway, I did the Gettler test. Idea is that if someone drowns, water passes from the lungs into the blood. We can tell pretty well this way whether a person drowned in fresh water or salt water.”

“How so?”

“If it was fresh water, the blood in the left side of the heart will have a lower-than-normal chloride content. Salt water, the blood in the left side of the heart will have a higher-than-normal amount of chloride.”

“This girl was found in the River Harb,” Carella said. “That’s fresh water, isn’t it?”

“Sure. But according to Smith—you know, Smith, Glaister, and Von Neureiter…”

“Go ahead,” Carella said.

“According to Smith, if a person is already dead when he’s thrown into the water, it’s impossible for any water to get into that person’s left heart.” Blaney paused. “In other words, if we find no water in the left heart during autopsy, we can safely assume that person didn’t drown. That person was dead before he hit the water.”

“Yes?” Carella said, interested now.

“This little girl didn’t have a drop of water there, Carella. This little girl didn’t drown.”

Carella stared deep into Blaney’s violet eyes. “How’d she die?” he asked.

“Acute arsenic poisoning,” Blaney said. “Greatest amount of it was found in the stomach and intestines. Indicates oral ingestion. The whole system was not impregnated, so we can chalk off chronic poisoning. This was acute. She may, in fact, have died just a few hours after she swallowed the stuff.”

Blaney scratched the top of his balding head.

“In fact,” he added, “you may even have yourself a homicide here.”

Life, if you take a somewhat dim and cynical view of it, is something like a big con game.

Look around you, friends, and see the confidence men.

“I have in my hand right here, ladies and gentlemen, a bar of So-Soap. This is the only soap on the market that contains neocenephrotaneticin, which we call Neo No. 7. Neo No. 7 puts an invisible film of visible filmy acentodoids on the epidermal glottifram…”

“If I am elected, friends, I can promise you good clean government. And why can I promise you good abusive government? Because I am sincere and untrustworthy. I am honest and selfishly domineering. I am the biggest, the most attentive, the most fastidious violator of the Mann Act, and I can promise…”

“Look, George, where else can you get a deal like this one? We are willing to construct the whole damned thing, take full responsibility for the job, and all it’ll cost you is around two million dollars. And, with that, you get my own personal guarantee. My own personal guarantee.”

“Baby, what I’m trying to tell you is I never felt like this before. I mean, when you walk into a room, Jesus, the room lights up. Do you know what I mean? My heart begins to go up and down like a yo-yo. There’s a light that comes from you, baby, a light that fills up the sky. If that ain’t love, I don’t know what love is. Believe me, baby, I never felt like this. Like walking on air with my head in the clouds, like wanting to sing all the time. I love you, sweetheart. I love you like crazy. So why don’t you be a good girl and take off that dress, huh?”

“I’ll be honest with you. That car had seventy-five thousand miles on it before we turned back the speedometer. Also, that’s a new paint job. We don’t trust new paint jobs. Who knows what’s under that paint, friend. I wouldn’t sell you that dog if you begged me. But step over here a minute and take a look at this lavender-andred convertible that was owned by the maiden aunt of a Protestant minister who used it only once a week to do her marketing around the corner. Now, this car…
”

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“The trouble with this guy’s parties is he doesn’t know how to mix martinis. It takes a certain amount of finesse, you know. Now, here’s my formula. You take a water glass full of gin…”

“Hello, friends, I’m George Grosnick. This is my brother Louie Grosnick. We make Grosnick Beer…All right, Louie, you tell them…”

It’s the hard sell and the soft sell, anywhere you go, everywhere you go. It comes at you a hundred times a day, and maybe it’s stretching a point to say that every human being has his own confidence game, that every human being has a tiny touch of larceny in his soul, but be careful, friend; the television is on, and that man is pointing at you!

The man in the dark-blue suit was a con man.

He sat in the hotel lobby waiting for a man named Jamison. He had first seen Jamison at the railroad station when the train from Boston pulled in. He had followed Jamison to the hotel, and now he sat in the lobby and waited for him to appear because the man in the dark-blue suit had plans for Jamison.

He was a good-looking man, tall, with even features and a friendly mouth and eyes. He dressed immaculately. His white shirt was spotless, and his suit was freshly pressed. His black shoes were highly polished, and amazing in this elastic-top-socked age, his socks were held firmly in place with garters.

He was holding a guidebook to the city in his hand.

He looked at his watch. It was close to 6:30, and Jamison should be down soon if he planned on having dinner at all. The lobby bustled with activity. A beer company was holding eliminations for its yearly glamour girl contest, and models swarmed over the thick rugs, accompanied by press agents and photographers.
All of the models looked the same. The hair-coloring varied, but otherwise, they all looked the same. They were, in essence, symbols created by con men. They were, too, in essence, con men themselves.

He saw Jamison come out of one of the elevators. Quickly, he rose and stood with the guidebook open at the top of the steps leading to the street. He could see Jamison, from the corner of his eye, moving toward the steps. He buried himself in the guidebook, and when Jamison was abreast of him, he moved sharply to the left, colliding with him.

Jamison looked startled. He was a stout man with a red face, dressed in a brown pinstripe. The con man fumbled for the fallen guidebook, and then, from his knees, said, “Gosh, I’m sorry. Excuse me, please.”

“That’s all right,” Jamison said.

The con man stood up. “I got so involved in this book I guess I wasn’t watching where I…Say, you’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” Jamison said.

“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that. This darn book is Greek to me. I can tell you that I’m from Boston, you see. I’ve been trying to make out the street—”

“Boston?” Jamison said, interested. “Really?”

“Well, not exactly. A suburb. West Newton. Do you know it?”

“Why, sure I do,” Jamison said. “I’ve lived in Boston all my life.”

The con man’s face opened with delighted surprise. “Is that right? Well, I’ll be…Say, how do you like that?”

“Small world, ain’t it?” Jamison said, grinning.

“Listen, this calls for something,” the con man said. “I’m superstitious that way. Something like this happens, it calls for something. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Well, I was just on my way to dinner,” Jamison said.

“Fine, we’ll have a drink together, and then you can go on your way. Tell you the truth, I’m tickled I ran into you. I don’t know a soul in this town.”

“I suppose we could have a drink,” Jamison said. “You here on business?”

“Yes,” the con man said. “Marlboro Tractor Corporation—know them?”

“No. I’m in textiles myself,” Jamison said.

“Well, no matter. Shall we try the hotel bar, or do you want to scout up something else? Hotel bars are a little stiff, don’t you think?” He had already taken Jamison’s arm and was leading him down the steps.

“Well, I never really—”

“Sure. Seemed to me there were a lot of bars on the next street. Why don’t we try one of them?” He passed Jamison through the revolving doors, and when they reached the sidewalk, he looked up at the buildings, seemingly bewildered. “Now, let me see,” he said. “Which is east and which is west?”

“That’s east,” Jamison said, pointing.

“Fine.”

The con man introduced himself as Charlie Parsons. Jamison said his first name was Elliot. Together, they walked up the street, looking at the various bars, deciding against one or another for various reasons—most of which Parsons offered.

When they came to a place called The Red Cockatoo, Parsons took Jamison’s arm and said, “Now, this looks like a nice place. How about it?”

“Suits me fine,” Jamison said. “One bar’s just about as good as another, the way I look at it.”

They were heading for the entrance door when the door opened and a man in a gray suit stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a pleasant-looking man in his late thirties, a shock of red hair topping his head. He seemed very much in a hurry.

“Say,” Parsons said, “excuse me a minute.”

The redheaded man stopped. “Yes?” he said. He still seemed in a hurry.

“What kind of a place is this?” Parsons asked.

“Huh?”

“The bar. You just came out of it. Is it a nice place?”

“Oh,” the redheaded man said. “The bar. Tell you the truth, I don’t know. I just stopped in there to make a phone call.”

“Oh, I see,” Parsons said. “Well, thank you,” and he turned away from the redheaded man, seemingly to enter the bar with Jamison.

“It’s the damnedest thing, ain’t it?” the redhead said. “I haven’t been in this city for close to five years. So I come in on a trip, and I’ve been calling old friends since the minute I arrived, and all of them are busy tonight.”

Parsons turned, smiling. “Oh?” he said. “Where you from?”

“Wilmington,” the redhead said.

“We’re out-of-towners, too,” Parsons explained. “Listen, if you haven’t anything else to do, why don’t you join us for a drink?”

“Well, gee, that’s awfully kind of you,” the redhead said. “But I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“No imposition at all,” Parsons said. He turned to Jamison. “You don’t mind, do you, Elliot?”

“Not at all,” Jamison said. “More the merrier.”

“Well, in that case, I’d enjoy it a lot,” the redhead said.

“I’m Charlie Parsons,” Parsons said, “and this is Elliot Jamison.”

“Pleased to know you,” the redhead said. “I’m Frank O’Neill.”

The men shook hands all around.

“Well, let’s get those drinks,” Parsons said, and they went into the bar. They took a table in the corner, and after they’d made
themselves comfortable, Parsons said, “Are you here on business, Frank?”

“No, no,” O’Neill said. “Pleasure. Strictly pleasure. Some stock I’ve been holding took a big jump, and I decided to take those extra dividends and have myself a hell of a time.” He leaned over the table, and his voice lowered. “I’ve got more than three thousand dollars with me. I think I’ll be able to have a whopper with that, eh?” He burst out laughing, and Parsons and Jamison laughed with him, and then they ordered a round of drinks.

“Drink whatever you like and as much as you like,” O’Neill said, “because this is all on me.”

“Oh, no,” Parsons said. “We invited you to join us.”

“I don’t care,” O’Neill insisted. “If it wasn’t for you fellows, I’d be on the town alone. Hell, that’s no fun.”

“Well,” Jamison said, “I really don’t think it’s fair for you—”

“It certainly wouldn’t be fair, Elliot. We’ll each pay for a round, how’s that?”

“No, sir!” O’Neill objected. He seemed to be a pretty hot-tempered fellow, and somehow, this business of who should pay for the drinks was upsetting him. He raised his voice and said, “I’m paying for everything. I’ve got three thousand dollars, and if that’s not enough to pay for a few lousy drinks, I’d like to know what is.”

“That’s not the point, Frank,” Parsons said. “Really. You’d embarrass me.”

“Me, too,” Jamison said. “I think Charlie’s right. We’ll each pay for a round.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” O’Neal said. “I’ll match you for the drinks. How’s that?”

“Match us?” Parsons said. “What do you mean?”

“We’ll match coins. Here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. The drinks had come by this time, and the
men sipped a little from their glasses. Parsons took a quarter from his pocket, and then Jamison took a quarter from his.

“Here’s the way we’ll work it,” O’Neill said. “We’ll all flip together. Odd man, the fellow who has a head when the other two have tails—or tails when the other two have heads—doesn’t pay. Then the other two flip to see who does pay. Okay?”

“Fair enough,” Parsons said.

“Okay, here we go,” O’Neill said. The three men flipped their coins and covered them. When they uncovered, Parsons and O’Neill were showing heads. Jamison was showing tails.

“Well, you’re out of it,” O’Neill said. “It’s between you and me now, Charlie.”

They flipped.

“How do we work this?” Parsons asked.

“You have to say whether we match or don’t match,” O’Neill said.

“I say we match.”

They uncovered the coins. Both men were showing tails.

“You lose,” Parsons said.

“I always do,” O’Neill said, and somehow—in spite of his earlier eagerness to pay for the drinks—he seemed miffed now that he actually
had
to pay for them. “I’m just plain unlucky,” he said. “Some fellows go to carnivals, throw a few baseballs at a stuffed monkey, come home winning a power lawn mower. They buy one ticket in a raffle, and they win the new Dodge convertible. Me, I buy six books of tickets, I get nothing. I ain’t never won anything in my whole life. I’m an unlucky son of a gun, all right.”

“Well,” Parsons said in a seeming attempt to cajole O’Neill, “I’ll pay for the next round.”

“Oh, no,” O’Neill said. “We’ll match for the next round.”

“We haven’t even finished this round,” Jamison said politely.

“Makes no never mind,” O’Neill said. “I’m gonna lose, anyway. Come on, let’s match.”

“You shouldn’t take that attitude,” Parsons said. “I believe that, in matching, or in cards, or in things like that, you can control your own luck. No, really, you can. It’s all in the mind. If you go into this thinking you’re going to lose, why, you
will
lose.”

“I’ll lose no matter what,” O’Neill said. “Come on, let’s match.”

The men flipped their coins.

Parsons showed heads.

O’Neill showed heads.

Jamison showed tails.

“You’re a real lucky fink,” O’Neill said, his irritation mounting. “You could jump into a tub of horseshit and come out smelling of lavender.”