by Ralph Dennis
CHAPTER NINE
“I’d heard he was out of the business now,” Bill said.
Van Green’s return had interrupted us. We’d dropped the matter of Ben Pride and we’d talked some general nonsense until we could thank him and get away without it seeming hurried. Now we were on the road back toward Atlanta.
Hump wasn’t convinced. I laid back foxy and let Hump run him. “You’re sure it’s this Ben Pride? Just on the basis of two little marks on the back of his hand?”
“It’s more than that.” Bill’s voice had impatience, irritation in it. Here we’d hired him as our expert on scams and we wouldn’t accept his word on anything. “One, it’s the way it was set up. Going right into the company in Boston and getting those checks. There’s imagination. Two. That’s the attention to the small details. Leasing the office suite but going past that. Having the walls knocked out, insisting that the outside of the building be sandblasted. Hiring the interior decorator. Rejecting her first design. All that. One and two. Planning and execution. It’s got Ben Pride’s mark on it.”
“Well …” Hump said.
Bill realized that he hadn’t convinced Hump yet. “You remember the afternoon you got me from the Mission?”
“Sure.” Hump put an arm on the seat back and forked a couple of fingers at me. I placed a cigarette in the fork. “You were telling us how to gut an account.”
“The schoolboy ways,” Bill said. “And at the end, like it was a great idea, I said the best way would be to buy yourself a banker.”
“I remember,” Hump said.
“That’s the difference between me and Ben Pride. Ben Pride never considered any way, any choice, except the last one. He’d have leaped all the way over the other ones.”
“All right.” It was my turn. “Let’s suppose it was Ben Pride. He’s got the checks and he’s got the big idea. What’s his next move?”
“He’d have to find the right banker and buy his ass.”
“That might be a problem,” I said.
“Not for the man with the right connections.”
I’d moved to the left side of the seat so I could get a better angle on Bill. The enthusiasm was speed-high. If the alcohol nerves were bothering him it didn’t show.
“I don’t have the connections anymore. Maybe I never had ones like Ben Pride has. Here’s what I’d do if I needed to find the right banker, the one with his ass for sale. Say you’ve done this expense sheet in your head. So much for clothes, so much for the car, so much for living expenses, so much for leasing the offices, all that. On the sheet maybe you set aside ten per cent for the banker. Say fifty or sixty thousand. The next step is to find a banker who needs a quick tax-free fifty or sixty thousand dollars.”
“Or just the greed,” I said.
“Need is better,” Bill said. “Need’ll keep him in line. One way I’d do it. Go for somebody in a stockbroker’s office. Somebody needs two or three bills. Ask the question: you know any bankers who’ve been taking a bath in the market? Doing a bit of speculation and having trouble coming up with the money?”
It sounded possible. I grunted agreement at him.
“Or better yet …” He put his head back and laughed. The laugh had the touch of an alcohol scream in it. Maybe he didn’t know it was there. “This’ll show you how Ben Pride works. He’d have made a list in his mind and the stockbroker approach would have been on the bottom. He’d have picked the right way the first time out of the gate. He’d have got him some nice clean hundred-dollar bills and he’d have checked the Sunday travel pages in the paper and he’d have written down the names and addresses of two or three travel agencies.”
“He’s looking for a banker who travels?”
“One who takes only certain kinds of trips. The banker who goes on junkets to Vegas.”
I’d heard of those. So far, I hadn’t been invited on one.
“I’d walk right in and I’d have some kind of story made up. It wouldn’t have to be a story that had a lot of truth. You see, these agencies deal with some pretty rough people and some of them have to be rough enough to do some collecting. In other words, they’ve spent a lot of time looking at the ass of the world. So, I’d have this shit story about looking for a certain kind of banker. If the man who ran the agency didn’t want to be helpful, I’d ask him what hotels he deals with in Vegas. That’s where the connections come in. He’d say this hotel or that one and I’d put one of those nice clean hundreds on his desk and I’d say, make a call to Vegas, and I’d give him the name of somebody at that hotel. And I’d give him some name they knew me by out there. And he’d make the call and he’d get an okay. Then I’d put three or four more hundreds on the desk and I’d get my rundown on bankers who do junkets. How many trips this banker took, how much he played for, how much he lost, how fast he was about paying up when they got back to Georgia.”
“He’d know all that?”
“He’d know everything. From the man’s underwear size up. That’s the way it works. He’s got a dossier on that man before he ever steps on that plane for the first time. And he’s got sources that Dun and Bradstreet don’t have. You see, that travel agent’s got to protect himself. The junket’s supposed to be free. Free plane fare, free hotel rooms, all the food and drink at that hotel. All he’s got to do is gamble. Once he’s got there, he starts drawing on an account set up for him. It’s got limits. And he can draw to that limit and sometimes past it. That depends on his credit line. But when he gets back to Georgia that banker’s got to reimburse the agent for all the chips he drew out there.”
“Drawing’s not the same as losing,” Hump said.
“You play long enough it is. Anyway, say this banker drew up to his line and his line was twenty thousand. That hotel will know almost to the penny how much of that twenty thousand he lost. One job those people who work at the hotel have is to watch the people on junkets. That word gets to the travel agent. Banker X dropped nineteen thousand. That puts Banker X right on top of the invitation list the next time the agent makes up a junket. Two or three trips and Banker X might be a little slow coming up with the cash to reimburse the agent.”
“And he’s the likely sucker. You set up contact. You feel him out and if he bites at it you give him part of it. The rest is due at the end.”
Bill nodded. “Hell, what’s wrong with it? Those checks are good as gold. They’re good as certificates of deposit or fed checks. All the banker has to do is run those checks through, pay them off, and act innocent as hell when the shit hits the walls.”
Talk ran down. I put my head back. The gray fall light did funny patterns on my eyelids. In the front seat I heard low mumbling between Bill and Hump. Bill was still trying to tough it out but his strength was fading. It was a long day with nothing more than two beers to hold him up.
I was half asleep when I felt the Buick stop. I sat up and opened my eyes. Hump was out of the car going into a 7-11 store on the outskirts of Atlanta. When he came back, he carried three tall Buds. He passed one back to me. I popped the tab and had a swallow. It tasted damned good. I could only imagine how it tasted to Bill.
“You know this Ben Pride?”
Bill turned to me with the can at his mouth. He finished the swallow before he gave me his that-is-a-dumb-question look. “I never met him. Even the best day I worked I wasn’t in his class.”
“How do you know so much about him?”
“Rumors. Stories. Tall tales. Two con men get together over a few drinks. It starts out, did you hear what happened in San Fran? The half a mil job in Detroit? And then the Ben Pride stories pop up. The fantastic designs, the classics. The twists and turns, the brilliant new move when a scam almost went bad.”
“It sounds like hero worship to me,” I said.
“Call it that if you want to.”
“This is going to be your year,” I said.
“Huh?” The beer can rim banged against his teeth.
“You’re going to meet him. This Ben Pride.”
“You’re kidding.”
I caught Hump’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “It’s up to you, Bill.”
Hump blinked at me in the rearview. He didn’t follow me yet.
“Hump,” I said, “you never played against Johnny Blood or Jim Thorpe, did you?”
“You know damned well I didn’t.”
“But you’d have liked to?”
“Hell, yes.”
I placed the beer can between my feet and leaned forward. I put both elbows on the seat back. “That’s what I want. I want to pit you against Ben Pride. I’m backing you. I want you to pull some kind of scam on the greatest scammer of them all. A scam that will pull Ben Pride into the open.”
“You’re not serious?”
“You better believe me,” I said. “That’s how you earn your midnight beer.”
Hump dropped us at my place. He remained in the car while I unlocked the front door and let Bill in. Bill headed for a shower. I went back out front and leaned on Hump’s car window.
“You think it’s possible?”
“I wouldn’t want to set the odds on this.” He shook his head. “If Ben Pride’s this good he’ll fox Bill. That could throw him back in the gutter.”
“We’ll backstop him.”
“One thing I can say. It’s got his blood jumping. You notice how he drank that beer?”
“Like it was water.” I backed away from the car. “You going to baby-sit him tonight?”
“Not tonight. I’ve got my own social life to think about.”
“What about mine?”
“One night on, one night off. Tonight’s your night.”
I didn’t know the first thing about baby-sitting a wino. I’d never had the lessons the way Hump had. So I did the next best thing. I acted as though he was a houseguest rather than a man with a drinking problem. I called Marcy while he was in the shower and Bill and I met her an hour later for dinner at Clarence Foster’s. We waited out a line and got a table in the greenhouse part of the restaurant.
We got through number-one trap without a problem. Bill shook his head when the waiter asked if he wanted a cocktail. The next trap was the one that worried me the most. I’d ordered a bottle of a Graves to go with dinner and after I’d smelled the cork and had a taste, I allowed myself a look across the table at Bill. He’d turned his wineglass upside down.
He drank coffee with his dinner. And he was courtly and charming with Marcy. He talked about cities where he’d lived. He talked about restaurants in those cities and the dish to order in each of them. It was lively conversation and when Bill left the table for the rest room Marcy leaned over toward me and said, “Why, that man is …” And she couldn’t find exactly the word to describe him.
I thought, that’s a con man for you. He’ll even con your best girl friend.
I left him in the living room watching TV around midnight. Not that he was really watching it. I had the feeling that only one small part of his mind was involved with the late movie.
I didn’t lock the booze away or hide the wine. I wasn’t going to play jailer. It was up to him what he did with himself. But I’ve got to admit I didn’t sleep right away. I heard the TV when it went off and I heard him doing some night walking.
I awoke about eight. He was rolled up in a blanket on the sofa. He hadn’t bothered to open it.
His midnight can of Bud was on the kitchen table. He’d only drunk about half of it. The ash tray next to it was overflowing with cigarette butts.
CHAPTER TEN
For breakfast Bill ate a soft scrambled egg, two pieces of toast, and a dab of grape jelly. He washed it down with two cups of coffee. Hump didn’t offer him his morning beer and he didn’t ask for it. I’d seen Bill’s eyes drift past the refrigerator a few times. That was all. I decided that it was now to the point where he had regained some of his pride. He wasn’t about to ask for that beer and Hump, reading him pretty well, wasn’t going to give it to him until he asked. There wasn’t anything to stop Bill from going over and getting himself a beer. Nothing but his pride. That would be admitting he still had his thirst.
“Late night, Bill?” Hump sat ass-backward in the chair, arms crossed over the back of it.
“I put in some good time.”
“Anything worth talking about?”
He kept us waiting. He stacked his knife and fork on his plate and pushed it away. “I thought a lot about scams. Ones that I’d been thinking about for years and never used. I wanted a big one that might be good bait. There’s one I’ve been saving.” He patted his empty shirt pocket. I passed him my smokes. “I call it the geochemist scam. Like the rest of them it’s based on good simple godless greed.” He smiled and put a match to the cigarette. “And it’s based on some geological theory. The first step is that heat produced by radioactivity and pressure can change the composition of earth materials. After you convince somebody of that you say something about the fact that gold-bearing earth is also usually rich in silver and platinum. We call this rich earth.”
“That’s turning a good phrase,” I said.
“Now, even if this rich earth doesn’t show a lot of gold or silver or platinum it has the possibility of bearing these minerals in larger quantities if the conditions are right. It’s a matter of stepping up the process, doing in hours what it takes the earth millions and millions of years. We do this in a special oven that bombards this rich earth with radioactivity while exerting a million foot-pounds of pressure. The end result is that rich earth with only low amounts of gold, silver, and platinum comes out of the oven …”
“Almost pure gold, silver, and platinum?”
He nodded at me. “Exactly.”
“Anybody believe that?”
“You’d be surprised how many people believe that science can do anything. Of course, you’d need the proper dials on the oven and you’d need a substitution tray and you’d need the right man to play Herr Doctor So-and-so. I’ve seen worse scams work.” Another puff and Bill stubbed out his smoke. “That was supposed to be the bait. I’d get in touch with Ben Pride and lay out the scam and I’d say that I needed him for the geochemist. That it wouldn’t work without him.”
“And that would draw him into the open?” I carried my cup to the stove and mixed some instant powder and hot water.
Bill shook his head. “I doubt it. It might have if he needed the cash. Right now, he’s fat. He’s sitting on top of half a mil. The chances are, even if I knew how to reach him, the word would come back. No thanks.”
“Too bad.” I returned to the table and spooned some sugar into my cup.
“So, I got off that. Ben Pride’s warm to hot now and he wouldn’t want to do even the perfect scam this soon. If he was interested, he’d say for me to call him in a year or two. That kind of thing. So, I moved off on another track. I decided we ought to find some way to threaten him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Blackmail,” Bill said.
“You’d have to be kidding.”
“Not a bit. Here’s the script. Old Bill Heffner is a down-and-out second-rate scam man. He needs a stake to get on his feet again. And he’s figured out what nobody else in the whole country knows. He’s picked the man who pulled off the Temple Construction Company check swindle. And because he’s down and out he thinks his silence is worth about fifty thousand.”
“That would get a reaction all right,” I said.
“I thought it would.”
“Not the one you expect,” I said. “It’d cost a lot less to get you offed and that’s real silence.”
“It’s not that big a risk. The rough way is not Ben Pride’s way.”
“We told you about Joe Bottoms,” Hump said.
“That’s not Pride. That some dogfish working around the edges.”
“You want to believe that, with your life on the line?”
“It’s what I know,” Bill said. “For a scam man rough is on the bottom of the list. Talk and persuasion are on the top.”
“Look at it this way. If I try to blackmail him, he won’t just say yes or no to it. He’ll have to see me and find out what I know and how I put it together. You see, what I can figure out somebody else can too. He’ll want to know where he slipped. And if he thinks it’s worth paying me off, he’s going to try to persuade me to settle for less. Maybe ten thousand. Maybe five. Something that’s a smaller drop out of his bucket.”
“I don’t know about this.” I had my look at Hump. His face was screwed up. He’d been weighing the risk and I could tell he didn’t like the heavy dip of the scales. “Hump?”
“Could we backstop him? A hundred per cent sure?”
“Half of that,” I said. Then to Bill: “You willing?”
He laughed. It was dry, like a bark. “I’m no dumb child, Jim. If I wasn’t willing, I wouldn’t be talking about it.”
“You got it planned?”
“I know what I need. An apartment and a phone. The apartment ought to be sort of shabby. A place a down-at-the-heels con man might live.”
“That’s easy enough.” And I added to myself, one that can be watched and guarded twenty-four hours a day.
“Now we get to the hard part. I need a recent picture of Ben Pride.”
“He’s had numbers on his chest?”
“I’m not sure about that part. Maybe. Two or three years ago he got picked up on a dry well scam out in Houston.”
Hump dipped his head at me. “Art?”
“That might be pushing his friendship some.”
“Any other way you know?”
“Can’t think of any.” I let it float in my head. I’d have to find a way to talk Art into it.
Bill dipped a hand into his shirt pocket and brought out a scrap of paper. He slid it across the table to me. “It would be under one of these names.”
I scanned it quickly.
Ben Pride aka Fred Maple aka Charles Benson aka William Priest aka Edward Carson
I smoothed out the paper. “That’s a lot of also known as.”
“He might have ten more for all I know.”
“That all?”
