The Con Man (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain Page 0,2

was white,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Brown told her.

“Well, I said I had a little money with me, and he asked me if I’d like him to bless it for me? He said, ‘Do you have a ten-dollar bill,’ and I said no. So he said, ‘Do you have a five-dollar bill,’ and I said yes. Then he took out his own five-dollar bill, and he put it into this little white envelope. With a cross on the front. A crucifix?”

This time Kling did not say yes. He did not even nod.

“Then he said something like, ‘God bless this money and keep it safe from those who would…’ Oh, like that. We kept talking, and he put the envelope back in his pocket, and then he said, ‘Here, my child, you take this blessed five dollars and let me have your bill.’ I gave him my five dollars, and he reached into his pocket and gave me the envelope with the cross on it, the envelope with the blessed money.”

“And this morning?” Brown asked impatiently.

“Well, this morning I was ready to go to the train station, and I saw the envelope in my purse, so I opened it up?”

“Yes,” Kling said.

“Surprise,” Brown said. “No five dollars.”

“Why, no!” Betty said. “There was just a folded paper napkin in the envelope. He must have switched that envelope while he was talking to me, after he’d blessed the money. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I needed that five dollars. Can’t you catch him?”

“We’ll try,” Kling said. “Can you give us a description of the man?”

“Well, I didn’t really look at him too hard. He was nice looking and very nicely dressed?”

“What was he wearing?”

“A dark-blue suit. Or maybe black. It was dark, anyway.”

“Tie?”

“A bow tie, I think.”

“Carrying a briefcase or anything?”

“No.”

“Where’d he get the envelope from?”

“His inside pocket.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“If he did, I don’t remember.”

“All right, Miss Prescott,” Brown said, “if anything develops, we’ll call you. In the meantime, I think you’d better forget all about that five dollars.”

“Forget it?” she asked with a great big question mark, and nobody answered her.

They led her to the slatted wooden railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside, and they watched her walk down the corridor and then turn into the stairwell that led to the ground floor of the building.

“What do you think?” Kling asked Brown.

“The old switch game,” Brown said. “There are a hundred variations. We’d better plant a few men at the station to watch for this preacher.”

“Think we’ll get him?”

“I don’t know. Chances are he won’t be working the same place tomorrow. I tell you, Bert, I think there’s an upswing in confidence men these days, you know it?”

“I thought they were dying out.”

“For a while, yeah. But, all of a sudden, all the old confidence games are reappearing. Games that have beards on them they’re so old. All of a sudden, they start cropping up.” Brown shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, they’re not too serious,” Kling said.

“Crime is serious,” Brown said flatly.

“Oh sure,” Kling said. “I just meant…Well, aside from a few bucks lost, there’s never any real harm done.”

The girl in the River Harb had had some real harm done to her.

She floated up onto the rocks near the Hamilton Bridge, and three young kids didn’t know what she was at first, and then they realized, and they ran like hell for the nearest cop.

The girl was still on the rocks when the cop arrived. The cop did not like to look at dead bodies, especially dead bodies that had been in the water for any amount of time. Bloated and immense, the girl hardly looked like a girl at all. Her head hair had been completely washed away. Her body was decomposed, and fibrous strands of flesh clung to her brassiere, which, snapped by the expanding gasses in the body, miraculously clung to her though the rest of her clothing was gone. Her lower front teeth were gone, too.

The patrolman managed to keep down the bilious feeling that suddenly attacked his stomach. He went to the nearest call box and phoned in to the 87th Precinct, which house he happened to work for.

Sullivan, the sergeant who was manning the desk, said, “87th Precinct, good morning.”

“This is Di Angelo,” the patrolman said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got a floater near the bridge.”

He gave Sullivan all the details, and then he went back to stand alongside the dead girl on the rocks, which were washed with