“No. That one is going to do it.”
“I made you talk too long. There’s more I want to ask. But I’ll wait until tomorrow.”
She got up and took the glass away. I decided I’d better get up and head for bed while I could. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again and a high sun was shining and her middle boy was standing holding a saucer with both hands, and he had his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth to help with the chore of keeping the coffee from spilling out of the cup.
“Everybody’s been up a long time,” he said disdainfully. “Mom said bring you this and if I stood here, the smell would wake you up. I think it’s a lousy crummy old smell and I’m never going to drink that stuff. Oh. Good morning.”
My shoes had been removed, belt loosened, necktie removed, collar unbuttoned. There was a blanket over me. The lady had given me bourbon and loving care. I hoped that it would be at least another full year before I had to put a necktie back on.
I sat up and took the coffee.
“You spilled a little bit,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“Like it here?”
“It’s neat. Today there’s a teacher’s meeting, so we don’t have to go on the bus. Charlie’s going to let me ride on the tractor again with him. It’s real neat. I gotta go.” And he went at a full run.
I dialed Press LaFrance direct at twenty after ten.
I wanted him to have a lot of time to make some collections. Just as I was ready to hang up, he answered, out of breath.
“Who? Trav? Where are you? What’s up?”
“Miami, boy. And I’m getting a little sweaty. Maybe we’re in trouble!”
‘How? My God, Trav, I thought everything was-“
“I’ve been making some long distance calls, Press. And it looks as if everything might go through okay. I was with Doctor Meyer a few minutes ago and he as much as admitted that he might wait until Roger Santo gets back from abroad and see if he wants to make a better deal on the side, a fatter deal for Meyer. I told you he’s slippery.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“If we play it his way, the way he suggested in the beginning, he’ll move right ahead with it. But it has to be today. He’s on his way up to Broward Beach. Do you know a place called The Annex?”
“Yes, but-”
“I had to take the chance, Press. I had to move fast. I gave him my third of the claim check. Now he’s going to be at the bar at The Annex at seven o’clock tonight. I told him that you would meet him there and give him his damned sixty thousand in cash for the two thirds he’s holding.”
“Where am I going to get that kind of money before seven?”
“The minute after you get back to Sunnydale and walk into the hotel, you’ll have it back, won’t you?”
“Yes, but-”
“Scrounge it somehow. You could pay somebody a very fat amount of one-day interest out of that fifteen extra, couldn’t you?”
“But, Trav, suppose he takes the sixty and then screws us and makes his deal with Santo? What can we do?”
“Absolutely nothing. But stop running around in crazy circles, man, and listen to me. I’m assuming the risk. Got that? It’s my money sitting up there. Give me a week and I could scrape up three or four times sixty in cash, but I damned well can’t do it today. If it falls through, what are you out?”
“There’s… maybe one possibility.”
“Now you’re beginning to think. I’ll phone you back. How long will it take you to find out?”
“I… I should know by… you phone me back right here at two o’clock?”
The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.
I went back into the house at two o’clock and phoned him. I knew just how he had probably worked it out in his mind. Get hold of sixty thousand cash to buy the claim check to seventy-five thousand in cash. Nobody ever gets hurt taking a profit. The small towns of Florida are peppered with old boys who don’t like to have too much information on record about the deals they make. And they like to keep a little leverage around in the form of cash money. LaFrance would know a couple of those shrewd old hawks. He’d hunt one up, probably put up his fifty acres and the Carbee option as security, if the bank wasn’t holding them, and pay the old boy a thousand dollars or five hundred for the loan of sixty thousand in cash for a few hours. Then he’d hike the interest rate as high as he dared when he reported to me.
“Trav?” he said. “I’ve been dreading this call, cause there’s something I hate to have to tell you.”
“You couldn’t get the money!”
“No, no. I got the money. I got it locked up right here in my office. I got it from a fellow that keeps cash on hand. Trouble is, he knows I’m spread thin. Maybe I got too anxious. Anyway, he gave it to me good. The only deal I could make was to pay him the whole fifteen thousand. Honest to God, Trav, when a man gets the tights, all the money dries up on you. There just wasn’t anybody else who’d give me the lend of it.”
“Pretty damned steep, Press.”
“Like you said, this is an emergency.”
It was the perfect example of the philosophy behind all kinds of con, big and smalclass="underline" You can’t cheat an honest man. I gave him a B in the course. B for Brass.
“When I get back,” he said, “that old boy is going to be right there in the hotel lobby with his hand out, and there won’t even be any point in unwrapping it, except he’ll want to count it slow and careful, and then go on rattling home in his old pickup truck, smiling like a toad in the moonlight. Trav, it was the pure best I could do on short notice, and that’s God’s truth.”
“Okay, then. Tote it over to The Annex and give it to Doctor Meyer, and don’t lose it on the way. Then we’ll just have to keep calm and wait for the corporation check to come through.”
“How long will it take?”
“Ask the Doctor.”
I hung up, knowing it was going to work. The secret of the big con is to move the victim, bit by bit, into increasingly implausible situations. At last, in the act of plucking him clean, you have him performing such a damned-fool act he will never understand how he came to do it, why he didn’t see through it. He was blinded by the conviction he couldn’t possibly lose a dime. And when he learned he’d been conned, he couldn’t take it to the law. He’d have to tell them he had been taking a sixty-thousand-dollar bribe to a man pretending to be a field representative of a huge corporation. He would have to tell them he’d paid forty thousand dollars for worthless equity in a defunct marina. If a story like that got out, every member of the Sunnydale business community would laugh himself sick. So he didn’t have a chance. Poor LaFrance. Exactly the same situation he put Tush in. Smashed flat, plucked clean. No mercy for Tush. No mercy for LaFrance.
I walked out and found Connie by the equipment barn. We strolled over and sat on the mossy old stone bench under the huge banyan tree in the side yard.
I told her that our fish had gobbled the hunk of ripe bait, and the hook was perfectly set. A very greedy fish, that one.
Her weather-beaten face twisted in mocking amusement. “Maybe he’s just greedy enough so your friend should be a little careful leaving that place, Trav.”
“He’s got a self-addressed envelope with him, and he walks right from The Annex through into the motel lobby and drops it in the slot. It’s got more than enough stamps on it. It’ll be solidly sealed with tape, and the money will have cardboard and a rubber band around it. Connie, again thanks. I’m going to head back.”
‘You come anytime, hear? Are you going to make our gal rich?“
“Let’s say reasonably comfortable, if all goes well.”