Deutsch said. “I was twenty-four years old. I’d been working the confidence game since I was seventeen. First time I fell. I got off with eighteen months. On Walker Island.” Deutsch shrugged.
“So?”
“So I didn’t like it. Is that so hard to understand? I didn’t like being cooped up. Eighteen months with every kind of crazy bastard you could imagine. Queers and winos and junkies and guys who’d ax their own mothers. Eighteen months of it. When I got out, I’d had it. I’d had it, and I didn’t want anymore of it.”
“So?”
“So I decided to play it straight. I figured I take another fall, it ain’t going to be eighteen months this time. This time it’ll be a little longer. The third time, who knows? Maybe they throw away the key. Maybe they begin to figure Fritzie Deutsch is just another guy like these queers and winos and junkies.”
“But you weren’t,” Brown said, a faint smile on his mouth.
“No, I wasn’t. I conned a lot of people, but I was a gent, and you can go to hell if you don’t believe me. Working the game was the same as having a job with me. That’s why I got so good at it.”
“I imagine it paid pretty well, too,” Brown said.
“I’m still wearing the clothes I bought when things were going good,” Deutsch said. “But what’s the percentage? A few years of good living, and the rest of my life cooped up with slobs? Is that what I wanted? That’s what I asked myself. So I decided to straighten out.”
“I’m listening.”
“It ain’t so easy,” Deutsch said, sighing. “Guys don’t want excons working for them. I know that sounds corny as hell. I see it in a lot of movies, even. Where Robert Taylor or somebody can’t get a job because he once was a con. Only, of course, with him, it’s like he was a con by mistake. You know, he took the fall when he was really clean. Anyway, it’s true. It’s tough to get a job when you got a record. They make a few phone calls, and they find out Fritzie Deutsch done time...Well, so long Fritzie, it’s been nice knowing you.”
“So you assumed the Frank Darren alias, is that right?”
“Yeah,” Deutsch said.
“And you’ve got a job now?”
“I work in a bank.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m a guard.” Deutsch looked up quickly to see if Brown was smiling. Brown was not. “That’s how come I’ve got a permit for the gun,” Deutsch added. “I ain’t snowing you. That’s one thing you can check.”
“We can check a lot of things,” Brown said. “What bank do you work for?”
“You going to tell them my real name?” Deutsch asked. A sudden fear had come into his eyes, and he put his hand on Brown’s arm, and the fingers there were tense and tight.
“No,” Brown said.
“First National. The Mason Avenue branch.”
“I’ll check that, and I’ll check the permit,” Brown said. “But there’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“I want some mooches to meet you.”
“What for? I ain’t conned anybody since—”
“They may think differently. If you’re clean, you won’t mind them looking you over.”
“At the lineup? Jesus, do I have to go to the lineup?”
“No. I’ll ask the victims to come down here.”
“I’m clean,” Deutsch said. “I got nothing to worry about. It’s just I hate the lineup.”
“Why?”
Deutsch looked up at Brown, and his eyes were wide and serious. “It’s full of bums, you know that?” He paused and sucked in a deep breath. “And I ain’t a bum anymore.”
Murder will out, and it was a fine day for the outing of murder. The fiction con men could not have chosen a better day. They would have written it just this way, with the rain a fine-drilling drizzle that swept in over the River Harb, and the sky an ominous, roiling gray behind it. The tugboats on the river moaned occasionally, and the playgrounds on the other side of the River Highway were empty, the black asphalt glistening slickly under the steady wash of the rain. The movie con men would have panned their cameras down over the empty silent playgrounds, across the concrete of the River Highway, down the slopes of the embankments leading to the river. The sound track would pick up the wail of the tugs and the sullen swish of the rain and the murmur of the river lapping at rotted wooden beams.
There would be a close-up, and the close-up would show a hand suddenly breaking the surface of the water, the fingers stiff