When Joe Fusca, alias Special Agent Sidney White, pulled his sporty blue Packard up in front of the paint-peeling, ramshackle two-story clapboard on East Sixty-sixth, he could scarcely believe his eyes. This was hardly a classy neighborhood, sure, but this eyesore was the bottom of the barrel. The pits.
Hard to believe there was a twelve-grand passbook in a shack like that, ripe for the picking.
It was Monday evening, a little before seven, and Joe was pretty much over it. He'd killed before, in Chicago, but that had been different. That had been mob stuff. You had to prove yourself to those guys if you were going to stay on the in with them. You just didn't say no when they asked a favor. And it was other mob guys he'd hit, after all. It was in the family.
Friday night had been a whole 'nother deal. It had given him the willies, doing that. It was creepy, it was dangerous, and, anyway, the two old guys he bumped off were just looking out after their own best interests. Which was more than you could say for most of the bazoos on his sucker list. Most of these lilies were so ripe for plucking it was almost a duty to get there and do the job before somebody beat you to it. People that stupid didn't deserve money. People who saved money for a rainy day when they were in the middle of a goddamn downpour simply had to be relieved of the burden of their dough.
But those two old birds at the Joanna Home, Great War veterans both, had tumbled to the scam. The way it was set up, promising the money within sixty days, was supposed to give the salesmen like Joe that long to fully work a neighborhood, and move on. Only those two old boys had got talking between themselves, after turning their passbooks-one for $5600 and another for $3200- over to "Agent White." They took a streetcar down to the Hanna Building where the Memorial Developers, Inc., office was located, just a boiler shop, really, and started complaining. They were talking about going to the county prosecutor, and the boiler-shop boys calmed them down and said Agent White would do a follow-up call.
Agent White had. It had been his own idea to handle it the way he had, but he'd heard no complaints from up-stairs. He knew the lights went out at the Joanna Home around nine, and he slipped in the back door a little before ten. The geezers in question shared a room in back, and they were both asleep in the darkness. Joe didn't even know which one was which, as he crushed the skull of first one, and then the other, with a sash weight. He splashed them down with kerosene, a can of which he'd lugged in with him, and splashed some more on the walls, particularly around a light switch and a couple of electrical outlets that were showing loose frayed wires. The Joanna Home was a wreck, anyway-a lousy firetrap. It was a crime passing the joint off as an old folks' home, Joe thought. The crooks in charge would no doubt take the blame for the fire. That is, the faulty wiring would.
He'd lit two matches-one each for the already dead old men-and tossed them one by one at their targets, lurching back at the immediate flare-up, and ducking out back. No one had seen him as far as he knew. There was a one-story lean-to out back, a sort of annex built onto the house, where some of the old biddies slept (he'd picked up eight passbooks at the Joanna Home), and the lights were out there, too. He was safe.
But he'd had a bad weekend. He hadn't worked at all. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking torch. He was a con artist, not a killer. It made his stomach jumpy.
He just sat in his hotel room and listened to the radio and read every edition of every paper, looking for mentions of the fire. When the Plain Dealer reported the fire warden as blaming the blaze on a short circuit in the "old, rotten wiring, sending flames crackling up through the dead, dry timber of the walls into the attic," Joe felt relieved, but not at ease. He could only make it through the weekend by drinking his worries away. Straight Scotch, and a lot of it, had allowed Monday to finally roll around.
He'd felt hung over and shaky, but ready to have at the world again. He went down to the Hanna Building to get a fresh list of names. The way the scam operated was, like all great scams, simple. Neighborhoods were surveyed and blocked off. Slush money was paid to a savings-and-loan employee in the district for providing a sucker list of passbook holders. Commissions were paid to the savings-and-loan bird dog whenever a salesman successfully scammed a passbook. With this system, a guy like Joe didn't have to go door to door. He could hit pay dirt every time he made a call.
There were different ways of going about it, on Joe's end. Some salesmen posed as bank presidents or big real estate operators, particularly those salesmen dealing with clients who could read. They would openly tout cemetery lots as a good investment ("everybody has to die sometime, and there's a big demand for burial plots") which was horsefeathers, of course. Enough lots were available in the Cleveland area to bury the city's dead for the next three hundred years.
That was how the racket got off the ground in the first place: cemeteries laying off their excess lots cheap to the "sales organization" Fusca worked for. He was vague about who the big shots were. He had the name of a contact, some guy who ran a horse parlor on Ivanhoe Road, if he got in a jam and needed to lam out or hole up. Beyond that he knew nothing.
Except he knew it wasn't the Mayfield Road bunch. They'd tried to cut themselves in for a percentage a while back and got told to back off, by the cops no less. He didn't know who would have the kind of leverage it took to make the local mob back off like that, using the cops as muscle. Some crooked politician, maybe. Joe didn't really care.
All he knew was he was making good dough, a third of everything he hauled to shore.
Of course, Joe had less overhead than most of the salesmen. A lot of them worked in pairs. Those posing as bankers or real estate agents needed translators, as many of the marks didn't speak English. These marks Joe simply avoided. And in most cases it was necessary to employ yet another bird dog, namely somebody in the neighborhood, a respected businessman who spoke the mark's native tongue, to make introductions and pave the way. Or the cop on the beat, of course.
Joe cut out the middle-man with his G-man routine. The shiny gold badge and a little Uncle Sam went a long way with these dumb fucking hunkies. And he got a kick out of using a G-man badge to bilk a mark. It was like getting back at the bastards for nabbing his brother Phillie.
Phillie had been the class act of all con artists. Joe admired and loved his older brother. Every Christmas, coming up soon now, he sat down and wrote Phillie a letter, and sent it off to the pen at Atlanta.
Everything Joe knew about conning came from Phillie. When they were little kids, Joe and his older brother had come over from Italy with their parents. Their papa was an honest man who almost made a living with an import cheese business in Brooklyn. When Phillie came into the nearly bankrupt business at age sixteen, it took him only a few months to turn things around by bribing customhouse weighers.
In 1915 Phillie got sentenced to a year in prison, but only served a few months. An eloquent letter from the parish priest ("the gallant lad shielded his father from jailhouse bars, shouldering the blame on himself) won him a Presidential pardon. It paid, young Joe had learned, to put money in the collection plate.
The next family business, engineered by Phillie of course, was importing human hair from Italy to make wigs for American would-be Gibson girls. This went very well, till the Burns Detective Agency proved the Fuscas had conned twenty banks out of nearly a million bucks by taking loans on hair shipments based on phony invoices.
The whole family was caught in New Orleans, boarding a Honduras-bound liner. Joe tried to throw twenty grand overboard, but it landed in a government boat. Phillie again gallantly took the rap for the family, winding up in the Tombs in New York City. He played stoolie for the prosecutors for a year, spying on other prisoners, and earned the gratitude of the law, and a suspended sentence.
Chicago and Prohibition came next. Phillie became a partner in a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, entitling him to five thousand gallons of alcohol a month for production of hair tonic and cough syrup. It was Joe's idea (Phillie was proud) to color and scent the products in such a way that a simple run through a still turned them back into high-proof straight alcohol. A little water, some color and flavoring, and you had stuff "right off the boat."
They had to tie in with the Capone crowd, of course, but there was money enough to be had by all.
At least there was until that goddamn Ness had busted the entire operation and put Phillie in stir. Another year and Phillie would be out, and Joe had no doubt great things would start happening again.
Until then he was on his own, picking up on whatever con he could. The Chicago outfit offered him work, but he didn't like all those deaths in the family. Anyway, he preferred grifting.
This cemetery scam was better than most. Cleveland wasn't the only place where this sting was playing. He first broke in his G-man act (fuck you, Ness) in New York, for another cemetery lot sales outfit. The New York cops had finally got wise, and he and two other salesmen had lammed. But Joe had heard about the Cleveland game, and so, here he was.
In front of a creaky old house on East Sixty-sixth.
Joe dug his hands in his topcoat pockets-Christ, it was cold-and made his way up the front walk, and around the side and climbed the rickety steps to what was more an attic than a second floor. Twelve grand, hiding out in a hovel like this. He knocked on the door. Yellow paint dropped off like ugly snowflakes.
The door opened and seventy-three-year-old childless widower Elmer Elsworth answered. A skinny prune-faced geezer in Coke-bottle wire-framed glasses, Elsworth was the first client Joe had encountered in the neighborhood who wasn't a Slovak.
"What can I do for you?" the old man rasped, squinting behind the thick glasses, smiling, immediately friendly. He wore a frayed plaid shirt, suspenders, and well-worn brown trousers. None of the clothing looked any too clean, and Elsworth's face was stubbled white.
Joe showed him the badge, identified himself as Agent White and asked if he could step in out of the cold.
" 'Course you can," Elsworth said, gesturing graciously. "Glad for the company. These winter evenings are mighty dull."
The interior was a shock. It made Joe wonder what made Elsworth so goddamn cheerful. With the exception of a worn easy chair, the room was bare of furniture. Across the room a fire burned in a small coal stove. The colorless wallpaper was ancient and peeling off walls that fell from a slanted, cracked ceiling. There were no curtains on the windows, just weathered shades, pulled down. The wooden floor was bare and dirty. In front of the easy chair was a crate, which served as a table for a plate of beans and a cup of coffee, Elsworth's supper, it would seem. On the floor, near the chair, was a large brass ashtray, a remnant of better days perhaps, filled with cigar butts. The smell of smoke and beans lingered in the air. And on another crate was a lit candle, dripping wax. Somewhere in the darkness, perhaps behind a wall, perhaps not, was a chittering sound. Mice.
"Sorry it's so dark in here," Elsworth said. "Don't have no electricity. Place is wired for it, but I just don't care to spend the money. And, well, I'm legally blind, so the devil take it."
The room was fairly warm from the glowing stove, but it was obvious that otherwise there was no heat either.
"Can I offer you my chair?" Elsworth asked, gesturing toward it.
"No. No thank you. You sit. I'll stand."
"Mighty neighborly of you," Elsworth said. He bumped into the crate as he sat, jostling his beans and coffee, and asked Agent White if he'd like some Java. Agent White declined.
"If there's some way I can be of service to the government," Elsworth said, "just let me know. I was a babe in arms during the War Between the States, don't you know, and too old for the Great War. But that don't mean I'm not a good American."
"I'm sure it doesn't," Joe said. "Besides, the government is interested in helping you."
And Joe went into his spiel: he was collecting pass-books in restricted loan companies with the idea of forwarding them to Washington so Mr. Elsworth could get full value, all at once.
Elsworth sat blinking behind the thick glasses and gradually started to smile.
"I knew it," he said, "I just knew it."
"Uh, knew what, Mr. Elsworth?"
"I knew one day my ship would come in. Why, I scrimped and saved all these years… worked for White Motor Company for longer than you've been alive, I'd reckon. Retired some time ago, and I suffered privations, believe you me, preparing for my declining years."
Jesus Christ, Joe thought, these crazy old coots. What were they waiting for? Elsworth here has a twelve-grand passbook (worth six grand face value, at least) and he lives in a dirty, dreary attic, sitting in the dark, eating his plate of beans, dancing with mice, waiting for what? To get even older?
They didn't deserve their money. They didn't know how to enjoy it. They didn't know anything to do with money but save it. Let somebody have it who knew what to do with it.
Joe Fusca.
"Then you'll stop by in two days with my security bonds, Agent White?"
"That's correct. And I'll see you then. You don't have to get up to show me out. I know the way."
Elsworth pointed to the coal stove.
"I was just about to stoke up my fire," he said.
"You just relax," Agent White said. "Let me do that for you."