At this point it may be worth reviewing just once more a field of felony in which Simon Templar won quite a few interesting tourneys in his early years, and in which he exploited most effectively the gift of assuming a pose of fabulous and even fatuous innocence (when a situation called for such a disguise) which was once partly responsible for getting him nicknamed “The Saint.”
I make my excuses to anyone to whom these routines are already old stuff, but the Saint never lost a connoisseur’s and collector’s appreciation of them, and the recapitulation I have in mind may not be entirely dull.
In the simplest basic version of the “confidence” game, the sucker or mark sees a stranger drop a wallet, and naturally picks it up and restores it to its owner. The owner thanks him and keeps on talking to reveal that he is burdened with the job of distributing a huge charitable fund, or some similar sinecure involving the handling of large sums of money: his problem is to find an absolutely trustworthy assistant, and by a happy coincidence the boob who returned the wallet has just given unsolicited proof of unusual honesty. However, the operator has associates who will demand more substantial evidence that the dupe is a man of means who can be trusted with the virtually blank checks they will be handing him, so it is suggested that he bring to a meeting the largest amount of cash he can raise, to exhibit to them to win their confidence — from which theme the racket derives its name. The fool does so, his money is examined and returned to him, his candidacy is unanimously approved with handshakes, and the session rapidly adjourns on promises that formal agreements will be signed with him in a few days. It is not until after the crooks have departed that the victim discovers that the wad of currency which he got back contains only one bill of large denomination, on the outside, while the bulk of it has been dextrously transformed into single dollars or even rectangles of blank paper of the same size.
In one of the commonest variations of this plot, the con men pretend to be making fast fortunes from inside information on horse-racing or the stock market. They allow the dimwit to join in their gambles, and before long he has won, on paper, a small fortune. But when settling time comes, another member of the gang, masquerading as a bookie or a broker, refuses to pay off until the mark shows proof that he could have met his losses if the results had gone the opposite way. Again the fathead digs up all the cash he can raise, with the identical consequence.
Although these tricks have been exposed innumerable times in articles and stories, it is a staggering fact that practitioners of such hoary devices, or closely related mutations of them, are extracting pay dirt with them to this very day.
Often erroneously referred to as forms of the confidence racket, but actually only its kissing cousins, are what the professionals call bunco jobs. In these the ultimate larceny is hardly less barefaced, but the technical difference is that the “confidence” gimmick is not employed. Nevertheless, they also have one distinguishing trait in common, which is the psychology behind the manipulation of the bait which hooks and lands the poor fish who provides the sharper with his dinner.
Simon pointed this out to Mrs Sophie Yarmouth with privileged severity.
“If only respectable people like you weren’t so fundamentally dishonest,” he said, “most of these swindlers would be starved into trying to earn an honest living themselves. But when you’re offered an outrageous bargain, you’re too greedy to stop and think that anything that looks so much like what you’d lightly call a steal is most probably exactly that. You’re so excited by the idea of making a fast buck that you don’t care if the deal involves you in something that’s frankly a little shady. That only makes you feel extra clever, and you’re so fascinated by your own newly discovered business genius that you don’t even have time for the rudimentary precautions that a schoolgirl would take before lending a pal the price of an ice-cream cone.”
“That isn’t true,” Mrs Yarmouth sniffed. “I was thinking of Howard, and how much it might do for him. And if he hadn’t gone off to play some ridiculous cowboy part on location in Wyoming, and left me alone in Palm Springs, I wouldn’t have been exposed to these crooks and made to suffer for only trying to help his career.”
Howard Mayne heroically stifled the temptation to take issue with this gem of feminine logic. He could not really help looking heroic about it, for he was blessed with all the facial qualifications of the rugged type of movie star, and his only trouble was that no Hollywood producer had yet been persuaded to give him a leading role.
“Don’t argue with the man, Aunt Sophie,” he said. “Tell him the whole story, and he may be able to tell you what you can do about it.”
Mr Copplestone Eade (to give him only one of a variety of fine-sounding names which he used) had made Mrs Yarmouth’s acquaintance without difficulty beside a Palm Springs hotel swimming pool and cemented it with a few chats in the lobby, a casual cocktail, an after-dinner coffee and Benedictine in a restaurant where they had found each other eating alone, and one no less apparently spontaneous lunch together beside the same pool where they had met. It was more than enough for Mr Eade to learn that she had a nephew who was a hopeful but not yet very successful actor, and for him to establish that he had been an executive at a couple of major studios and was now embarking on the independent production of films for television.
Mr Eade was then in his fifties, with a fairly well preserved figure, gray hair which he wore just enough beyond ordinary length to seem vaguely artistic without being arty, and the kind of strongly lined face that suggests a man of force and experience, either in business or boudoir, or perhaps both. But there was no hint of romance in his approach, for that was not one of Mr Eade’s habitual methods, and besides he had an extremely jealous wife who had too much on him to take chances with.
Mrs Yarmouth brightly mentioned that he could do worse than consider her nephew for an important part in his projected series, and Mr Eade said courteously but very non-committally that he would be happy to interview him. He had already ascertained that it would be at least two weeks before Howard Mayne would be through with the small part for which he had suddenly been sent off to Wyoming, while Mrs Yarmouth, who was only a visitor from Vermont, had still never seen the inside of a movie studio and would be returning to Hollywood within a week, so that when Mr Eade, before he left the next Monday, insisted that she must call him directly when she got in town and have lunch at the studio and let him show her how movies were made, it was with a comfortable certainty that she would take him up on it, and that he had a few invaluable days ahead in which to arrange the scenery and props which would be essential to the dénouement of the tabloid drama that he had just nursed through a neat and fertile first act.
The studio which Mr Eade used for a setting was entirely legitimate, being merely an incorporated agglomeration of real estate and architecture which was in business solely to rent space and facilities to all comers, without interest in their projects or product, so long as they had the requisite credit rating or better still the cash. Mr Copplestone Eade’s credit might have evoked no raves from Dun & Bradstreet, but he always had a working reserve of cash, since bunco is one of the most capitalistic kinds of crime, and his requirements were relatively modest, consisting at this point mainly of office space in an enclave where movies were in fact busily and evidently being made.
With this entrée he was able to guide Mrs Yarmouth authoritatively around the lot, dispensing interesting lore about the processes which brought a cinematographic masterpiece from the script to the screen — much of which, thanks to some far-off days when he had worked as an extra, was reasonably authentic. He was able to take her on a stage where scenes were being shot, introduce her to a director with whom he had previously scraped an acquaintance with talk of a possible job, present her to a famous star who did not know him from Adam but gave a friendly performance from force of habit, and show her an elaborate set under construction on another stage which he said was being built for his own forthcoming series, all with such casual aplomb that by the end of the tour it would not even have entered her head to doubt that he was exactly what he had said he was.
But when they made what he called a courtesy stop at his office, to see if there had been any vital messages while he was entertaining her, before they went on to lunch, there was an abrupt change in this placid tempo. His secretary met him with a long face.
“I’m afraid this is going to be a nasty shock for you, Mr Eade,” she said. “I tried to call Mr Traustein about the meeting this afternoon, and it seems he had a heart attack in the shower this morning, and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”
“Oh no!” said Mr Eade, and collapsed into a chair as if his legs had been cut from under him.
Mrs Yarmouth felt instinctively obliged to say she was sorry.
“No, it isn’t that,” said Mr Eade, removing his hands from a face which he hoped looked convincingly haggard. “He was a fine man, I understand, but I hardly knew him at all in a personal way. Our relationship was purely business. Mr Traustein was a very rich man who privately financed movie ventures, which people like myself, on the creative side, seldom have enough capital to do. He had promised to put up the money for the series that I was expecting to start, and the papers were to be signed this afternoon.”
“And you can’t go ahead without him?” Mrs Yarmouth prompted, quite superfluously.
“Frankly, no,” said Mr Eade heavily. “Not that I couldn’t get any amount of other financing, of course. That isn’t any problem, with a property and a distribution deal like mine. But to get the right terms, you have to have time to negotiate. You’ve no idea how ruthless the vultures in this town can be. When they know you’ve got to have money in a hurry, and haven’t got time to haggle, they make you pay through the nose. And it’s their business to know everything that’s going on in the Industry — you can’t bluff them. The minute I start talking to them, they’ll know they can put me through the wringer.”
“What shall I tell the studio, Mr Eade?” asked the secretary, who had been standing patiently by.
She was a rather homely woman of primly efficient aspect, in the neighborhood of forty, so radically different from the popular conception of a Hollywood producer’s secretary that Mrs Yarmouth had approved of her on sight and had thereby been subtly strengthened in her respect for Mr Eade.
“Please don’t tell them anything,” he said urgently. “Don’t talk to anybody. Perhaps I can still think of something before the whole town knows I’m over a barrel.”
“Very well, Mr Eade.”
“You’d better get some lunch — we’ll have a lot to do this afternoon. But before you go would you bring me that last letter from Herbert and Shapiro?”
He let Mrs Yarmouth read the missive herself. On a genuine sheet of letterhead pilfered from an advertising agency so famous that jokes about it were good for a laugh even from unsophisticated audiences, it said in part:
This will confirm that the StarSuds Corporation have authorized us to pay you the agreed price of $30,000 for each episode of your series Don Juan Jones in full upon delivery of each half-hour’s film ready for projection, commencing on May 12 and weekly thereafter.
However, we feel obliged to remind you that time is of the essence in your contract, and that failure to deliver the first film on or before May 12 will be grounds for cancellation of the entire series, as it would cause us ourselves to forfeit the time commitment which we have from the network.
“You see,” Mr Eade elucidated, “as far as a sponsor’s concerned, having a good TV show is only half the battle. Getting a good network time to put it on the air is the other half. StarSuds happen to have a perfect time spot booked for this series. But if I don’t deliver, they’ll lose it, and besides canceling my contract they could probably sue me for damages.”
“I should think it’d be more sensible if they lent you the money to make the pictures,” said Mrs Yarmouth.
“You don’t understand,” said Mr Eade patiently. “Things just aren’t done that way in this business — StarSuds is packed in boxes, but the soap-makers don’t make the boxes. Their attitude is that they’re in the soap business, not the box business. Or, to take it a step further, the motion-picture business. They expect to buy television pictures, not make them. As it is, they’re as close to subsidizing this series as they’ll ever come. Think of it.” He tapped the letter. “They’ll pay for the first film on May the twelfth. That’s in just over two weeks. And from then on, they pay for each film on delivery. They’ll cost me less than twenty thousand each to make — I can show you the budget. That’s ten thousand dollars a week clear profit. But, between now and the twelfth, I must shoot at least two pictures to keep my schedule here at the studio.”
“That means an investment of forty thousand,” said Mrs Yarmouth brightly. “And then you get back thirty—”
“But, of course, right then I have to start another picture, which means an investment of another twenty thousand—”
“So then you’re only down thirty thousand, and you get all that back the following week—”
“Precisely,” said Mr Eade, unwilling to be outclassed in arithmetic. “In other words, in two more weeks I’d be even—”
“And after that you’d actually be working with their money,” Mrs Yarmouth calculated triumphantly.
Mr Eade gracefully conceded the mathematical honors.
“But we’re only talking about might-have-beens,” he reminded her lugubriously. “It would have been a very nice deal, but now I’m afraid it’s another story.” He straightened his bowed shoulders with simple dignity and assembled his features into a heart-rendingly brave smile. “But I don’t want to bore you with my troubles, and we certainly mustn’t let them spoil your lunch.”
He sustained a valorous lightness and charm for about half an hour and then allowed the first slackening of the inevitably forced conversation to develop into a silence in which Mrs Yarmouth’s thoughts could not humanly fail to go back over the details of his predicament.