A Shared Confidence (27 page)

“I wondered why he was taking so long to show up,” I admitted.

As for the case against Stanton, it was pretty well sewn up. He'd been apprehended trying to cash two phony cashier's checks right here in town, on top of which the feds had raided his phony brokerage office yesterday afternoon. On Mattling's desk in front of me was the lynchpin to their case: two other fake checks made out to cash, both bearing Clay Stanton's printed name and signature. On the back of each check was a dated stamp from a bank in Delaware. The bank wouldn't be missing any money, and none of the real employees would remember having ever seen Stanton, but those slips of paper gave the F.B.I. what they'd needed all along, what Mattling had asked me for in his hotel suite a few days ago: evidence that Clay Stanton had crossed state lines with the intent to commit a felony.

Up till now, Mattling had explained, all the feds could really do was keep Stanton under surveillance. Outside of Stanton committing a federal crime like kidnapping, the F.B.I. couldn't do much more without bringing in local law enforcement, which meant Stanton would have been tipped off in a second. But once Stanton's criminal activity had taken him interstate, the F.B.I. had the authority to move in on their own. They could pick Stanton up, charge him, throw him in the clink, and make a certain U.S. senator very pleased.

There was more, of course. I'd handed over all the phony stock receipts in Stanton's name – receipts for stocks that didn't actually exist, and the men from the Securities and Exchange Commission would be particularly interested in those. Of the thirty or so shills Mattling's men had rounded up at First Quality Investors yesterday, at least five or six were willing to give testimony to avoid a sentence. And, of course, there were the wire recordings I'd be turning over soon, along with the deposition I was prepared to swear out as an anonymous informant working under the Bureau's auspices – all of it adding to the mounting pile of evidence against Clay Stanton.

“I thought Baltimore was a right town,” I commented. “That the fix was in.”

“Pretty much,” Mattling admitted. “We might catch a little hell from a D.A. who's been paid off, but that won't cut much ice in the long run. We're federal, we don't answer to state legislatures. And the fix only works so long as the cons are careful about what they're up to. If they get greedy and stupid, as it appears Stanton did, the fixers don't have too much sympathy. They'd rather let him face the music than kick up a stink and risk all of their operations being shut down.”

“I hate to say this, Agent Mattling,” I began, “but a good lawyer could do a pretty fair job tearing up a lot of your case. How the evidence was collected, the circumstances surrounding it, that kind of thing. And I'm betting a man like Stanton can afford a good lawyer if he really wants one.”

“Could be,” Mattling shrugged. “In that case, we just give him the elephant walk.”

“The elephant walk?”

Mattling explained it to me. When the U.S. government really wants a man, they get him. If Stanton hired himself a hotshot lawyer, ready to take on all comers, then Uncle Sam wouldn't just about throw every charge in the book at him. Not all at once, that is. They'd bring one charge all by its lonesome. They'd let the defendant bring his high-priced mouthpiece into court, let the case drag on for months or even years, let Stanton spend most if not all of his fortune fighting that one charge. Maybe he'd win. In that case, they'd file the next charge, knowing Stanton couldn't afford to do it all over again. And there'd be another charge after that. And another. And the Stanton would either eventually be found guilty or end up in the poorhouse before the government finished filing all its charges. And the federal prosecutors would make damn sure Stanton knew this at the outset.

“Stanton will come around,” Mattling assured me. “He's no fool. He'll see it's easier to plead guilty to a few of the charges than try and fight a couple dozen of them in open court.” Mattling went on to explain that they'd get Stanton to plead it down. They'd offer him a sentence of no more than seven years – enough to satisfy Senator Cumberland – and when it was all said and done, with good behavior he'd probably be out in less than half that time.

I sat there and shook my head.

“Kind of scary how you guys operate,” I said.

“Maybe,” Mattling agreed, “but we only use the scary stuff against the bad guys.”

“Uh huh.” I was curious about one thing, though. “So if you were really only interested in Giarelli,” I asked, “and you knew he'd already been iced in Chicago…well, what were you hanging around for? You couldn't have fobbed off this detail on one of your underlings and gone onto something else?”

“Part of government service,” Mattling answered. “Lot of political stuff. I'd been asked to cooperate with Treasury and S.E.C. on this, and that request had come from a U.S. senator. Wouldn't have done much for my career to hand my part over to junior staff.”

Mattling looked at me for a moment and gave a rare smile.

“And to tell you the God's own truth, Caine, I was having too much fun seeing what you were going to do next.”

Mattling picked up the cup of coffee on his desk, took a sip, and grimaced. I could tell he'd gotten used to better at the hotel they'd been using.

“You really can't tell us anything more about how you got all those documents forged?” Mattling asked, quite suddenly and casually, a very old cop trick.

I shrugged. “Go here, see this guy, he'll take you to see that guy. I was in kind of a hurry,” I concluded. We both knew that was bunk; you don't get work of the quality I'd come across in back alleys. Just the same, it worked in Mattling's favor to be left in the dark on this one. The forged checks were key evidence against Stanton, meant to coerce the man into a plea. And they'd been left as bait by a a private detective who'd been recruited by the Bureau itself. Establishing the chain too far back could cross a fine line, make it look like the feds had planted this evidence.

“And one client,” Mattling continued, “was worth all the trouble you've been put through this past month?”

I was noncommittal. “You don't always know how much trouble a particular case is going to bring. Chances you take.”

“Uh huh.” Again, Mattling knew I was lying, and again, he wasn't going to press it. Things were neat enough as they stood.

There was a knock at the door and Agent D'Amato stuck his head in. He saw me, smiled, and thrust his jaw out at me. I rolled my eyes and waved him away.

“What is it, D'Amato?” Mattling asked.

“Straker's outside,” D'Amato answered. “Wonders if he might have a minute.”

“Jesus.” Mattling rolled his eyes and fortified himself with another slug of cheap coffee. “Send him in.”

Straker entered the office holding the wire recorder he'd had under the chair in my hotel room…last night, was it? He saw me, stopped for a second, then seemed pleased at the fact. I noticed his tie and wondered how long he'd spent picking it out for this encounter.

“Hope I'm not interrupting you gents,” he said, “but I think you should really hear this, Agent Mattling.” Straker set the wire recorder on the edge of the desk, waiting for Mattling to give him the go-ahead.

“By all means, Mr. Straker.”

Straker's pig-eyes glittered, and he fixed me with a vengeful smile as he worked the controls of his machine. I would remember that moment for a long time to come.

Out of the speaker came the sound of a tinkling piano and a man's falsetto:

“You can pass many a class, whether you're dumb or wise

“If you all answer the call when your professor cries:

“‘Everybody! Down on your heels, up on your toes

“This is the drag, see how it goes

“Everybody do the Varsity Drag!'”

I thought I could actually hear Straker's face fall. Me, I just turned my pleasant smile to Mattling, wondering what sophisticated part of the federal investigatory procedure I was privy to at this moment.

“Thank you, Mr. Straker,” Mattling said tiredly. “Would you excuse us, please?”

Almost in a trance, Straker picked up his machine and carried it out of the office.

“What was that about?” I asked innocently.

“With that clown? God only knows.”

It hadn't been too difficult, really. A ten-spot to a hungry lounge singer, a bellhop's uniform to fit a tall, blonde youth with gray-green eyes and a lazy smile, a c-note split between Volnick and Sanderson to look the other way while the bellhop rooted around in Straker's hotel room and made the switch, and
voila
!

Of course, there'd been a better reason than fifty bucks apiece for my former Pinkerton's comrades to play along: They hated Straker's guts.

There were
a lot of details to wrap up over the next couple of days. The most important was a private meeting between Ethan Ryland and a bank vice president from Beldham & Morrissey. Ryland's hardware firm in Nebraska was willing to take over three loans recently made by Nathan's bank. Apparently the firms that had originally taken out the loans were facing unexpected financial hardships, and Ryland Hardware Midwest was ready to move in and claim them. Under normal circumstances, my brother would have been loathe to okay a hand-off like that without a thorough investigation into the credit of the entity wishing to assume the loans. Under these circumstances, he was only too happy to sign the paperwork in record time. Sometime down the road, when Ryland was back in good with his own banks in Nebraska, he'd have the loans transferred from Beldham & Morrissey, and the whole mess would be out of Nathan's hair once and for all.

I handed over $140,000 cash (less the first month's payments) to Ethan Ryland once the papers were signed. Ryland now had some working capital to really start rebuilding his empire, especially now that his chief creditor was lying on a slab in a Chicago morgue.

“Will his successors come after me, Mr. Caine?” he'd asked me.

“Doubtful, Mr. Ryland. Oh, if you were a bookie or another gangster, sure, in a minute. But anything on the books from legitimate business and they don't know the exact circumstances, well, they tend to write that kind of thing off if there's any chance it will bring them too much into the light.”

That left sixty thousand dollars from the rest of what we'd taken off Stanton. A little more than forty of it I handed over to Nathan. He'd put it in a special account and make timely payments until Kelly Shaw's forty-thousand dollar loan (plus interest) was repaid in full.

On top of the twenty thousand remaining, I had the thirty thousand interest Stanton had paid me for my “loan”, and most of the fifteen thousand Jennings had won in his last poker game. Now it was time to review expenses. I sat down with a pad and paper one afternoon and did some figuring. Air fare for Jennings and myself; train fare for Ryland and Tony Verdi; rental on two cars; two hotel rooms for Devlin Caine and Ethan Ryland; two suites at the Lord Baltimore for Kelly Shaw and Casper Giarelli (plus new suits and shoes and hats and other accessories for those two, strutting peacocks that they both were); the bill for Townsend and his men (including rental for the wire recorder and fresh spools); a week's lease on a drab, downtown office for G-Man Shaw; meals for my crew, all of whom liked to eat regular; bar tabs picked up by Kelly Shaw when he'd been showing off; and money for various sundries and services rendered, such as tips for bellhops and a manicurist, some green to mollify Penny's landlord, and a handful of very expensive, expertly forged documents. I didn't figure in Jennings' poker stake, being as he'd won it all back and then some.

I looked at the total and gave a respectful whistle. Cons really are expensive to set up. And this had been for one tiny crew with just a few people in it, nothing like Clay Stanton's store with dozens of shills and regular payoffs to the coppers. I wondered for a moment how much the federal operation had cost, travel and lodging for who knew how many representatives from three different government agencies, and all to satisfy the vanity of one U.S. senator. Rank has its privileges, no doubt.

I wasn't finished yet. Now it was time to figure up everyone's cut. Jennings, Penny, and Verdi (Townsend and I had already negotiated a flat fee for his men's time). This took me awhile. Usually cuts are a straight percentage of the take, agreed upon beforehand by the parties involved. We hadn't done that here, for the simple reason that I was never expecting to make any money off of this scheme – I'd just been trying to take enough back to get Nathan out of the soup. There'd been nothing more than my general promise to make it worth the whiles of those involved if things went well. Now, though, even after expenses, I was sitting on over fifty thousand dollars. I sat at that desk for an hour, trying to work out how you place dollar values on things like time, risk, effort, and talent, grumbling the whole while that I should have had them all agree to a percentage.

I went for a drive in the Cadillac to clear my head, and found myself sitting on the same bench in Wyman Park, looking over at the statue of Edgar Allan Poe. It seemed like ages since I'd seen the old boy and I felt it time to renew our acquaintanceship. I sat there having a smoke and staring at the brooding sculpture and letting my mind drift over the past few weeks. I had to laugh at myself. Here I'd explained to some of the people involved how you really can con a con, simply because they're the people who least expect it. I laughed because it turned out that was exactly what had happened to me. Just as Ethan Ryland had been taken in by a fake murder and then used that same trick against Stanton, so I had fashioned a fake Casper Giarelli and been taken completely in by another fake Giarelli.

For awhile, I let the whole thing spin around and around in my mind. Clay Stanton pretending to be an investment guru to Ethan Ryland. Me pretending to be millionaire Kelly Shaw to Clay Stanton. Stanton pretending again to be a Wall Street Wizard to Myers and Wiedermann. Me pretending to those same two to be Agent Shaw, employee of an unnamed federal agency. Penelope Sills pretending to be millionaire Kelly Shaw's traveling companion at the same time she was pretending to be a disgruntled member of rival confidence mob, working the inside with Stanton against Shaw (though how much she was really pretending at the time I'd never really know). Jennings pretending to be grifter Tom Shandle, who was pretending to be Secret Service Agent John Galen. Car painter Antonio Verdi, who was pretending to be Chicago mobster Casper Giarelli to Clay Stanton, who was pretending to be a master of stocks and bonds to Devlin Caine, who was pretending to be millionaire Kelly Shaw to…I started laughing all over again. Christ, it was a wonder any of us could still think straight after all this.