A Shared Confidence

A SHARED CONFIDENCE

“A
re you going to the
police, Mr. Caine?”

The man sat across the desk from me, haggard and beaten-down, dark circles under his eyes and a defeated slope to his shoulders. He was close to my age – somewhere in his middle thirties – pale, with thin reddish-blonde hair and a thinner reddish-brown mustache. The blue in his eyes had been washed out like a billboard faded in the sun, and the way his tailored suit hung told me he'd lost weight recently. Beneath the jacket was yesterday's shirt.

He raised his head, meek and uncertain, and looked at me. I got the feeling part of him wanted me to say yes, because then at least whatever was costing him so much sleep would be over for him.

I wiped a hand across my face and glanced down at the free bank calendar on my desk. Wednesday, March 20th, 1935. I'd be turning thirty-seven in less than a month. To celebrate, I had a date planned with a twelve-year-old bottle of scotch, and was beginning to wonder if the man sitting across from me would get to the point in time for me to keep it.

“That depends on what more you have to tell me, Mr. Ryland,” I said to him. “Or if you're going to tell me more. So far all I have is your name and your own vague admission that you're involved in something illegal. That isn't enough for me to go running to the cops. You want to walk out of here now, you have nothing to fear from me.”

It was the second time that morning I'd offered someone the chance to walk away.

Three hours
earlier, I was driving into work when I passed three or four men huddled around a small table in the alley between my building and the next. Probably nothing to it, but it was enough to make me curious, so I parked my car in its spot and walked around the corner for a better look. I leaned against the bricks and lit a cigarette while I took in the scene twenty feet away.

Four men, and the table was actually a traveling case with legs that folded out, the sort favored by peddlers hawking cheap neckties, miracle hair tonics, and other wares of dubious quality. Traveling cases were also useful for setting up impromptu games of chance, especially the kind where the random element is taken out by means of loaded dice or marked cards or – as was the case here – sleight of hand. Three playing cards lay face down on the top of the case. Lord, I thought, there are still people in Kansas City gullible enough to get hustled at Three Card Monte?

I probably would have let it go if I hadn't gotten a good look at the mark. Worn, outdated clothes, scuffed-up shoes, a jacket with patches on the elbows, and a bowl haircut fringing out beneath a faded hat that had seen better days. A Missouri farmer, I guessed, come to town to sell a hog or maybe pick up some new tools for the summer growing season. He wouldn't make it into the city often and he'd want to linger awhile, soak up a little excitement before heading back to early mornings with the chickens and milking cows, and long days tilling the fields. An eighteen-carat rube, the kind who sweated hard for his money and rarely saw any big-city action. The perfect mark for short-con operators.

I took a drag on my cigarette and strolled up at a leisurely gait. The dealer kept up his patter, inviting the three men gathered around the case to find the Red Lady, meaning either the queen of hearts or the queen of diamonds. Probably diamonds – a connection to money.

There was a cry of excitement as the man on the farmer's left succeeded in picking the queen from the face-down cards and received the payoff for his ten-dollar bet. The smiling farmer was itching for another turn. How hard could it be? He carefully studied the dealer's hands as they moved the three cards – not too quickly, really – in an aimless pattern around the tabletop. The farmer was sure he had it this time. He pointed confidently and watched the dealer flip over the three of clubs. Cries of “Ohhh!” and “Hard luck!” and the farmer tried to laugh it off, but I could see in his face it hadn't been his first wrong pick that morning. How much had they already taken off the poor sap? The cards were moved around again and the man on the farmer's right picked. You could tell the farmer knew it was a wrong pick, knew the queen had ended up in the middle and wondered how the guy could have missed that. The dealer proved the farmer right, flipping over the six of spades before revealing the red queen in the center.

The dealer looked up as my shadow fell across the table, offered me a grin. He was short with a smooth face under a cloth cap. Late twenties, but road-traveled and cagy.

“Care to try your luck, Mister?”

I gave him a big, stupid smile back.

“How's it work?” I asked.

“Easiest thing in the world,” he said, scooping up the three cards and purposely dropping one so I wouldn't get the idea he was a sharp. “You got a black six, you got a black three, you got the Red Lady, queen of diamonds, see? I put 'em all face down an' I move 'em all around, and you tell me where the lady can be found. You're right, you win, you're wrong, you lose, but you gotta watch close 'less you wanna sing the blues.” The rhyme came out with verve; he was putting stroke into his patter for the new mark. Of course, he left out the part about how you'll never find the queen unless for some reason he wants you to, how he'll hide it from you each and every time, how he'll cheat and keep cheating until you run out of money or just give up.

I made my smile bigger and stupider.

“That's all you gotta do? Find the goddamn queen?” I laughed and fished out my wallet. “Hell yeah, I'll take that action.” I dropped a fin on the table and he showed me the three cards one at a time. I saw the switch when he pretended to lay the queen face down because I was watching for it. Good enough to fool the yokels, but I'd seen lots better.

He slid the cards around with long, slender fingers and I pointed like a good mark to the card that hadn't been the queen of diamonds since before this round even started. I furrowed my brow in confusion when he turned over the black six. I let him take another fin off me before passing the play back to the guy on the farmer's left. Another correct pick, but then the guy on the farmer's left was a shill, in cahoots with the dealer. His job was to make the game look like child's play, easy money that only a chump would walk away from. The guy on the farmer's right was a shill, too. His job was to pick wrong and give the impression this really was a game of chance, that anybody could miss the queen. The only man at the table really playing this game (and losing) was the farmer. At least that had been the case until I stuck my mug in.

The farmer and the shill to his right lost a ten-spot apiece, and the dealer grinned up at me again.

“You still in, friend? Think you can find the Red Lady in the end?”

“Hell, yeah,” I said, holding my money out over the table and hesitating. “Got a question first though.”

“Shoot.”

“Charlie Carollo know you boys are operating this deep inside his territory?”

The dealer's smile hit the ground like a fat man busting a porch swing. Mentioning Kansas City's leading crime boss had made exactly the impact I hoped it would. We weren't really all that deep inside Carollo's territory – more like on the outskirts – but these boys hadn't been in town long enough to know any different. They knew the name, though. I'd never met Carollo and sure as hell didn't work for him, but I let the dealer register my dark brown eyes and olive complexion and draw his own conclusions.

The two shills were holding their breath; the farmer stood there waiting, oblivious.

“Mister,” the dealer started, but I held up one palm and stopped him.

“Yeah, I'm still in, friend,” I smiled at him. “Betting, that is, not playing. I got a feeling about my man here,” I said, nodding to the farmer. “I got a feeling his luck's about to change. In fact, I got a c-note in my pocket says he can pick the queen three times in a row, starting now.” I looked the dealer dead in the eye and dropped my voice a notch. “I'm betting it'll happen just that way.”

The farmer started to protest. I waved it away good-naturedly.

“Just a bit of sport, Mister,” I said. “I can't make you play, but if you play and lose, you won't be letting me down. I got it to burn; a c-note's pocket change to me. I will tell you this, though: I rarely get these feelings, and when I do I'm nearly always right.” I made my voice friendly, gently persuasive.

The dealer's eyes had gone listless and his patter had dried up like the Bible Belt during Prohibition. The morning's work was shot for him. Now he was worrying over how much more the farmer might bet, how much it might cost him. The two shills weren't looking too happy either, having just seen their cuts melt away in front of their faces.

The farmer tentatively put down a five-dollar bill and, for the first time that morning, managed to pick the queen of diamonds. His first win of the day, and the congratulations from the dealer and shills struck me as a tad lackluster. They picked up when I laughed and clapped my hands.

“That's how you do it, sport! Two more just like that, what do you say?”

The farmer gave a shy grin and fished out a twenty and put it down, then picked the queen again. This time I didn't have to coax the others along; one shill patted the farmer on the back and the other made damn sure I saw him do the same. The farmer took off his hat and scratched dandruff out of his hair, trying to figure it. All morning nothing and now twice in a row?

He let the forty dollars ride, put the other ten with it, and for the third straight time watched the dealer turn over the queen of diamonds. The dealer paid him fifty, paid me my hundred (I hadn't had to show my money, which was a good thing as I didn't have a hundred on me), then looked at me and waited.

“Not the right neighborhood for this kind of thing,” I advised casually. “Better pickings farther south of here, I'm thinking. A lot farther.” He nodded once and started folding up the table.

“We quitting already?” asked the farmer, finally realizing that something was going on but not quite sure what.

“The police patrol here about this time of day,” I told him. “We don't want any trouble with the law, do we, fellows?” The dealer and his shills grumbled agreement, and in a matter of seconds they were gone.

“You win back everything you lost?” I asked the farmer.

“Damn near,” he smiled.

“Shy by how much?”

He counted his money, his lips moving while he did so.

“Twenty dollars, I reckon.”

I peeled off a twenty and handed it over. He didn't want to take it.

“Listen, Mister,” I said, “you look to me like a man works hard for his dough. You want to stay away from this kind of thing. The whole damn game's a cheat. If I hadn't come along, those birds would have cleaned you out but good.”

He blinked at me. “You mean those other two guys–”

“All members of the same club.”

He looked over his shoulder, but the three men had already disappeared around the corner.

“If that don't beat all,” he said, scratching up another puff of dandruff. “Who are you, Mister? And who's this Charlie Carollo?”

“Carollo's a mobster,” I told him. “The biggest one in Kansas City.”

The farmer looked sideways at me.

“And you work for him?”

“Nah,” I laughed. “I just let them think that to throw a scare into them.” I hated having to tell him no; it would probably ruin a great story he was planning to tell. “I'm actually a private detective.”

“You don't say?” Maybe meeting a big-city detective would be almost as good a story as meeting a gangster. He chuckled and held out his hand. “Name's Ed Givvers, and you can keep your money, Mister. Maybe I'll learn something from that last twenty. Reckon it would have been a sight more if you hadn't come along when you did.”

I took the rough, calloused hand and slid the twenty into his shirt pocket before he could stop me.

“Devlin Caine, Mr. Givvers. And it isn't my money. Neither's the eighty dollars I'm keeping.” I gave him a wink before turning around and walking back toward my building. I climbed the back stairs up to my office on the second floor, whistling softly to myself. The encounter had put me in good humor. I wasn't the idealistic type who saw it as my duty to clean up the streets, and while Kansas City was home these days, I couldn't really call it my town just yet. (I'd only moved here five years ago from Chicago.) But those hucksters had set up shop right beside my building, and while I don't normally feel much sympathy for anyone simple enough to lose his money to amateurs, I guess I have a soft spot for simple men of the land who sweat to keep the rest of us fed. Besides, it's bad business to let an element like that take root in the neighborhood.

It was a couple of hours later when my secretary Gail came into my private office and quietly announced that there was a gentleman outside who wanted to see me.

“He looks like a pretty sad case,” she said, eyes full of sympathy.

“We're a business, sweetheart,” I told her. “Sad cases can hoof it on down to the mission.”

She stuck her tongue out at me and said she'd show him right in.

“Your friend Mr. Lonnigan sent him anyway,” she told me.

Mickey Lonnigan is my favorite bartender, and I was half-expecting the train wreck in a rumpled suit that walked into my office. I stood and shook the limp fish at the end of his coat sleeve and the man introduced himself as Ethan Ryland. I invited him to sit and he slumped into the chair like tapioca settling at the bottom of a bowl. Mr. Ryland told me he was in some real trouble, like I couldn't have guessed that from the hollows under his eyes and the wrinkles in the shirt he'd slept in last night.

Mr. Ryland had spent most of the previous night at Lonnigan's place around the corner from here, and downed enough joy juice that his woes finally developed a slow leak. Lonnigan had given him a sympathetic ear, of course, but at some point came to the conclusion that the poor fellow needed more than a compassionate barkeep. I could hear the lolling Irish brogue in my head. “Devlin Caine, he's the man you'll be wantin' to see.” Lonnigan had sent business my way before, and I'd certainly done the same for him.