He went on about Gunderman. Five years ago Gunderman had gone for a minimum of twenty thousand dollars and had wound up with a chunk of scrubland with a fair market value in the neighborhood of two grand. He was rich enough to stand that sort of a loss without any trouble, but the whole thing hit him where he lived. He was proud of himself, of his head for business, and here he’d been taken in his own backyard, on a land swindle. This wasn’t easy to live down. He still owned the land and he liked to tell people that he would make out on it eventually, that any land would be valuable if you held it long enough. But he was itching to get the bad taste of that con out of his system. He had been crazy to take that kind of a beating. If he could wind up turning his loss into a profit, if he could make out nicely on that Canadian land, then he would wind up crazy like a fox.
“You can see where he stands, Johnny.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The right type of set-up—”
“And he’s there with both hands full.”
“That’s the idea. And here’s how it works, and this is all mine and I think it’s beautiful. Gunderman gets a letter making him an offer for his Canadian land. This gets his head spinning right away. Nobody’s ever been interested in this land and he can’t understand why anybody would want it. What he probably figures from the go is that there’s been a uranium strike in the neighborhood, or something like that, and he wants to find out what’s up. He checks, and nothing’s up, the land is as worthless as ever. “Then you go to see him and repeat the offer. You—”
“What am I offering?”
“About five hundred dollars.”
“For something that ran him twenty thou?”
“Right. Of course he doesn’t take it. Then he finds out we’ve been making the same kind of offer to other men who got caught in the Capital Northwestern Development swindle. That stirs him up. It’s not just his land, it’s a whole lot of land that we’re looking to buy. He can’t figure out why, but two things are certain. First of all, he’s not going to sell that land of his, not for anything. And second, he’s going to be hungry to find out more.”
Bit by bit we would let Gunderman figure things out. We wanted to buy his land for five hundred dollars because it was worth in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars, maybe as much as three. We were a group of important Canadians with a lot of legitimate interests who had managed to get hold of a list of men taken in by Capital Northwestern Development. We were attempting to buy their land from them at twenty to twenty-five percent of its fair market value. For around fifty thousand dollars we would be able to acquire title to a huge block of Canadian real estate worth close to a quarter of a million dollars, and with a tremendous potential for future price appreciation. A potential Gunderman could certainly understand—the investment value of unimproved land was his personal religion. The more he nosed around the more he learned about our operation, and the more he learned about it the more he liked it.
“So he doesn’t want to sell us his land, Johnny. He wants to buy our land, the whole package.” He lit a cigarette. “You like it so far, Johnny?”
I slipped the question. “If it’s such an attractive deal, why would we be willing to sell it to him?”
“That’s where it gets pretty. Remember what we’re supposed to be. We’re a syndicate of highly respectable Canucks who’ve hit on something a little sneaky. Legal, sure, but sneaky. We’re capitalizing on an old con game and buying land surreptitiously for a fraction of its value. We’re dealing with people who’ve been taken to the point where they think of their land as utterly worthless, and we’re buying it in very cheap.”
“And?”
“And we don’t want to turn this into a long-term deal. We want to get in and get out, to take a quick but sweet profit and go about our business. You’ll be working outside, getting tight with Gunderman. He’ll figure out what a perfect man he’d be for us to deal with, taking this piece of land that ran us around fifty thousand and selling it to him for maybe double that. I figure we’d try for one-fifty and settle for an even hundred thou.”
“Go on.”
“Right. Now here is where Gunderman has to prove that we can trust him. We would be selling the land damned cheap at a hundred thou. We’re willing to do that if we’re sure of who we’re dealing with. We can’t afford the risk of selling to somebody who’s going to turn around and dump it for a fast buck. We’ve got our personal reputations to consider. We’ve got to sell to the type of man who will sit on that land for a few years, letting it increase in value as far as that goes, and then sell right for a good price later on. That way we don’t come out of it with our reputations in a sling.
“And of course this is perfect for Gunderman, because he wants the land for long-term investment, not for a fast deal. He’ll sit on it for five years if he has to. We let him convince us of this, and then we sell to him, and that’s all she wrote.”
I wondered if Rance knew just how perfect it was.
The trickiest part of any con game is the blow-off, when you’ve got the mooch’s money and you want to get him out of the way before he tips to the fact that he’s been taken. A blow-off can be very blunt or very subtle or anything in-between. In the short con games you can just blow your mark off against the wall, sending him around the corner while you jump in a cab and get out of the neighborhood. In a long con, you ought to do better than that. The longer it takes him to realize he’s been had, the less chance there is that he’ll squawk and the less chance that it’ll do him any good.
This was tailored for a perfect blow-off. Our Mr. Gunderman might die of old age before he found out he didn’t really own any land in Canada.
I said, “We don’t sell him land. We sell him our company.”
“Instead of faking deeds?”
“Sure. That way he never gets around to a title search or anything else. He buys a hundred percent of the stock of our corporation. He thinks the corporation owns certain real estate and it doesn’t. I’ll tell you something. I think the whole deal might even be legal. He’ll be buying a corporation and he’ll be getting a corporation. If there’s nothing on paper—”
“Jesus, I think you’re right.”
By then I was hooked. I think I must have known it myself. Once you start improving a scheme, building on it, smoothing it, you are damned well a part of it.
We had lunch at the Cattleman’s Grill. Open steak sandwiches and cold bottles of ale. We let the deal alone during lunch. We found other things to talk about. Doug picked up the tab. Afterward, we drove around in his car. I lit a cigarette and pitched the match out the window.
“About the money arrangement,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“How did you figure it?”
“I figured you in for thirty.”
“Out of a hundred? That doesn’t sound too wonderful.”
“Well, it won’t be a hundred, Johnny. We’ll gross a hundred, but there are going to be some expenses that have to come out of the nut, and then there’s twenty off the top for the girl. Now—”
“That’s too damned much for the girl,” I said.
“It can’t be less.”
“The hell it can’t. She ought to be in for a finder’s fee of five thou and no more. Why twenty?”
“Because she did more than set this up. She’s going to be working this from the inside, right there in his office. She’ll be in on the whole play, and she’ll have to scoot after it’s over. Besides, there has to be a big piece in it for her or she won’t go. She wants a stake to go hunt a husband with, and if it’s not enough of a stake she’ll get shaky and pull out.”
I let that ride. “So how did you figure the split?”
“Twenty off the top, plus maybe ten more off the top for expenses, leaves seventy. I figured forty and thirty.”
“What’s wrong with evens?”
The smile stayed. “Well, it is my job, Johnny.”
I knew it wasn’t the five. This was the first con he wa
s working from the top, and he needed the glory as much as the money. If we split it down the middle he didn’t get as much of a boost out of it. We tossed it back and forth. I told him to pare the girl’s end of it down to seventeen-five and to cut himself down to thirty-seven and a half and give me thirty-five even. He didn’t like it that way. He said he’d chop her to seventeen-five and add her end to mine, keeping forty for himself.
“You can swing your deal with thirty easy, Johnny. Ten to buy the place, ten to fix it up, and ten more in reserve. Two and a half more is just gravy.”
So we settled it that way. Forty thousand dollars for him, thirty-two thousand, five hundred for me, seventeen thousand and a half for Evelyn Stone. The extra twenty-five hundred wasn’t really important to me as money. It was a question of face. We agreed that anything over and above the hundred thou would be split down the middle between us, with the girl out of it.
I said, “We’re going to need front money.”
“I’ve got the bankroll.”
“How much?”
“Close to ten grand.”
“I’d feel better with double that. But ten should do us without much sweat. I’ve got a few hundred set aside. Living money, eating money.”
“We can do it on ten.”
“It might mean cutting it close. The more you can spend on your front the better off you are. And sometimes it isn’t even a question of spending it, it’s having it in the bank. Oh, the hell. Where do we kick this off from? Toronto?”
“That’s where our store will be. Our company.”
“Then there’s no worry. Unless something happened to him. Do you know Terry Moscato?”
He didn’t.
“Well, he ought to be all right. He wouldn’t be in jail, he’s in too good to take a fall. He used to work out on the Coast and then he went East and wound up in Toronto, and he’ll loan us front money. It has to be strictly front money, dough that sits in a bank account in our name and that goes straight back to him as soon as we’re out of it. We’ll have to pay a thousand for the use of ten, but it’s worth it.”
“See why I wanted you on this, Johnny?” He took a hand from the wheel and punched me gently on the knee. “I never would have thought of an angle like that. The extra touches. But I’ll learn them, kid.”
I wasn’t listening. It was that old familiar feeling, getting into it, getting with it again, feeling your mind start to slip into gear. Funny after so many years. The extra touches. A whole batch of them were coming to me now. The hell with it, we could talk about them later.
“I’ll need eight days,” I told him.
“For what?”
“One day to decide if I’m in. And a week’s notice before I leave my job.”
“I thought you already decided you were in.”
“I want twenty-four hours to make sure.”
He shrugged this off. “And a week’s notice? That’s a new one. You’re not going to come back and play assistant manager anymore, Johnny. What the hell do you care about giving notice?”
“The same reason you don’t do any grifting in Nevada. I don’t crap where I eat.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll be coming back to this town,” I said. “Not as a flunky, no, but to live here and do business here. I want to leave it right.” I spent the hour before I started work on the telephone. I sat in a booth at a drugstore and kept pouring change down the slot. I called a lot of people that I couldn’t reach and reached a lot of others. I spent my dinner hour at the telephone, and I got back on the phone that night after I left the alleys. I spoke to people who knew Doug Rance vaguely, to some who knew him well, to one or two who had worked with him not long ago.
You damn well have to know who’s working with you. When you’re all wrapped up in a big one you live a whole slew of lies all at once, and if you have a few people in on it who are lying back and forth and conning each other as much as they’re conning the mooch, then you are looking for trouble and fairly certain of finding it. This doesn’t mean that good con men are inherently honest in their dealings among themselves. They aren’t. If they were honest, they wouldn’t have gone on the C to begin with. I expected Doug would lie to me, and I expected to lie to Doug, but not to the point where we’d be fouling each other up. If there were things I ought to know about him, I wanted to know them now.
He checked out pretty well. They knew him in Vegas, all right. He was a high roller, an almost compulsive gambler, but he never gambled while he worked. On a job, he was nothing but business. I had wondered about that.
He was in love with the life, which was another thing I had managed to figure out by myself. He was good and he was smooth. He was attractive to women but he could generally take them or leave them. He’d done a short bit in a county jail in Arizona, and he’d done time twice in California, a vag charge in Los Angeles and a ninety-day stretch at Folsom for petty theft, a short con that hadn’t worked right.
Everyone I talked to, everyone who knew him, seemed to like him well enough. That much figured. That was his stock in trade. It was another late night for me, but this time I slept. In the morning I walked over to his hotel and we had a bite together. He asked me if I’d had a chance to run a check on him.
“Sure.”
“How did I make out?”
“You’ve got good references.”
He laughed. “I’m glad you asked around,” he said. “I’d hate to work with anyone who wouldn’t take the trouble. You in, Johnny?”
“All the way.”
“You won’t regret it. Smooth as silk, all the way, and nothing’s going to go sour on us.” I gave notice that afternoon. I told Harry that I had to leave at the end of next week, that I had a very attractive opportunity waiting on the East Coast and I couldn’t afford to pass it up. He was unhappy. He told me he could maybe see his way clear to a ten-a-week raise if I cared to stay. I told him it wasn’t that, that this was a real chance for me.
“Maybe you’ll come back some day,” he said. “Not to work here, maybe, but to open up a place of your own. This is a good place to live, John.”
“I’d like to come back.”
“Hope you do. I hate to lose you, I really do.”
Four
That was Friday. The following night I finished work at midnight. I had Sunday off, so Doug picked me up after work and we drove to Denver. He gave the Corvair back to the Hertz people. We caught a jet to Chicago, changed planes and flew on to Toronto. We spent Sunday renting apartments. He took a two-room place in a good building, and I booked a sixty-a-month room in a residential hotel on Jarvis near Dundas. I paid a month’s rent on the place. We picked out a spot for our offices, rented them Monday morning in Doug’s name. Then I flew back to Denver.
By that Thursday Harry had found a man to replace me at the alleys. I spent a few hours that afternoon breaking him in, then went back to my room and threw a few things into a suitcase. I had cleared out my bank account and I had the money in cash, something like eight hundred bucks and change. I threw out some of my clothes along with my correspondence course debris and other odds and ends. Then I was on another plane, headed again for Toronto by way of Chicago.
By this time Doug had set some of the wheels in motion. He found us a Richmond Street lawyer who was handling the incorporation procedures for us. Doug gave him a list of tentative names—Somerset, Stonehenge, and Barnstable, all of them crisply Anglo-Saxon. Our lawyer checked them out and discovered that there was already a Somerset Mining and Smelting, Ltd., and a Stonehenge Development, Ltd. Our third choice was open. The lawyer filled out an application for letters-patent for the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., and shot it off to the Lieutenant-General of the Province of Ontario.
All of this was routine. We incorporated with two hundred shares of stock of a par value of one dollar. We stated our corporate purpose on our application, listing ourselves as organizing for the purpose of purchasing and developing land in the western provinces. We gave the address of our
head offices as 3119 Yonge Street, Toronto. We listed three officers—Douglas Rance, President; Claude P. Whittlief, Vice-President and Treasurer; and Phillip T. Liddell, Secretary. Liddell was our lawyer. Whittlief was me—just another hat to wear, another name to sign. We gave our capitalization as fifty thousand dollars, Canadian. You don’t have to show your capital, just proclaim it. Fifty seemed like a decent figure.
The charter went through and we were the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., with a charter from the Province to prove it. We painted that name on the door of the Yonge Street office and had the phone company put in a bank of telephones. A printer on Dundas ran off a ream of stationery on good high rag content bond. Our incorporation was duly listed in the appropriate section of the Ontario Gazette.
We opened an account at one of the downtown offices of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. All checks on our account had to be signed by Rance and countersigned by me as Claude Whittlief. We deposited seventy-five hundred dollars of Doug’s capital in the account. It wasn’t enough of a balance. I went on the earie and found out that Terry Moscato had moved across the border to Buffalo. I flew down to see him and told him I needed ten thousand dollars for about two months, maybe three.
“For what?”
“Front money,” I said. “It goes in a bank account and it stays there, Terry.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to be financing this at a lousy ten percent.”
“Strictly front money, Terry.”
Not that he trusted me, but he knew that I knew better than to play fast with him. People who crossed him had trouble getting insurance, and I was well aware of this, and that was enough collateral as far as he was concerned. I got ten grand from him in cash, bought a cashier’s check for that amount at a bank, flew back to Toronto and stuck the money in the Barnstable account.
So we were in business. A store is a vital element in the operation of a big con. It must look more like what it’s pretending to be than the real article itself. The most difficult illusion to maintain is one of furious activity. The store—in our case, the office and the corporation itself—was geared for one thing and one thing only, the act of parting a certain fool from his money with a minimum of risk. But we had to give the appearance of conducting a full-fledged business. Our bank account had to show activity. Our office had to receive a sensible volume of mail.