1913 CLAIRVOYANT IN NEW YORK
It was clear to all three of the siblings that their mother had been swindled. Several important aspects of the confidence game being perpetrated upon her became painfully apparent to Carlotta Cramford’s two sons and one daughter through the course of that revelatory evening in February when Dodge and Porter Cramford and their baby sister, Violet Cramford Gooch, pinned their mother down on the matter of a certain disappeared inheritance. Where had all of the money gone? They knew that Mrs. Cramford wasn’t investing in the stock market or in real estate. They also knew that she wasn’t dropping fat, dimpled bags of coin into the collection plate on Sunday mornings, or sneaking munificent donations to the city’s many settlement houses.
“I’ll tell you where it’s gone,” said Mrs. Cramford, with a defiant glare that was betrayed by the tears which moistened her lace handkerchief, “if you tell me, Violet, why you remain married to a man you do not love.”
Violet, finding the question irrelevant to the matter at hand, would not offer tit for her mother’s tat. Additional prodding and lachrymose cajoling were required before Widow Cramford was finally forced to admit that she had given most of the money left to her by her deceased husband, a successful bridge designer, to the psychics whom she saw sometimes several times a week: local seers and Cassandras, mediums, card readers, crystal ball caressers of both genders — every one professedly clairvoyant, clairaudient, telepathic, and second-sighted, and every one located in the city of New York. Mrs. Carlotta Cramford had been for the past several months, hands down, the easiest mark in town. Everyone had her number (which, by the way, was seven), and each took every opportunity to filch from her bountiful pocketbook until there was nothing left within it to be passed down to her children when she eventually joined her husband in the Hereafter.
“There oughta be a law,” railed Porter, the second oldest. “Taking advantage of a poor old lady like Ma.”
“She was a willing party to it,” countered Dodge, who had been to college for almost a year, and though he was a men’s clothier had a head for other things besides haberdashery.
“I’d like to get them all into a room,” said Porter, who kept his voice low. The two brothers stood smoking on the front porch of their mother’s Forest Hills Tudor, but the windows were open and Porter was afraid that his distraught parent, presently being comforted by her commiserating yet equally appalled daughter, might overhear.
Porter had made his money in ways that he’d never shared with his family. He had twice been imprisoned in distant states for crimes he chose not to disclose. Porter Cramford had never played by other men’s rules…or laws, for that matter.
“And what would you do, brother, were you to get them all into that room? Put a knife to their throats and demand the return of all that money? Because I have no doubt that every penny’s been spent. These lowlife charlatans live from pillar to post. They dined well while they had our family fortune to diddle with, but those days are over.”
“I’d show them up for the humbugs they are. I’d use their chicanery against them.”
“How?” Cigarette smoke swirled about the brothers’ heads as each pondered the enticing prospect of revenge.
Porter sat down upon the old porch swing where as a boy he had plotted his future in the promising field of criminal mischief (the porch swing having been moved from former family lodgings in the city of Brooklyn). He draped both arms over the top of the slatted swing-back and grinned. “We gather together several of the most egregious offenders under the pretext of finding a certain lost article, with a substantial reward awaiting the one who succeeds. Divination, as we both know, being nothing more than robe-swagged flimflammery, all will fail and the price will be a choice at the point of a gun—so much more efficient than a knife, don’t you think? — and this gun, in particular…” The gun was now conveniently produced; it lived strapped to Porter’s right calf. “…a bullet to the head for having stolen our family’s fortune through cunning lies and deception. Or…”
Porter inhaled deeply from the stub of his cigarette.
“Or what?”
“Or they sign a document that will then be promptly delivered to the New York World for next-day publication admitting to one and all — including all potential future clients — that they are arrant frauds.”
“I subscribe to every aspect of your scheme, dear brother, except for the part having to do with pointing firearms at people and threatening to use them.”
“But it will only be just that, brother dear: a threat. Who will agree to have his or her brain matter splattered across a wall, when we are permitting him — or her — to simply sign a piece of paper, pack a suitcase, and move to the safety of some other burgh? All of Gotham will thank us for ridding this city of the worse kind of predator — one who takes full advantage of the most gullible among us.”
“You mean gullible like Mother Dear?”
“Sad to say, ’tis true.” This from the baby sister Violet, who had just stepped outside to join her brothers for a smoke. Only a moment before, she had succeeded in getting their mother to stop disparaging her husband of eight years, a huckster in his own right — a trafficker in electrical warming and vibrating devices with dubious therapeutic value.
“Let it be known to each of them what bilked our poor mother, let alone her three innocent children,” Dodge went on in a comical voice, “that we have come to town with a vast fortune to spend in hopes of recovering our long lost — our long lost what, my brother and sister?”
“I saw the loveliest vase in the window of the flower shop where I bought Ma that bouquet of roses,” squealed Violet.
“A vase? A simple vase?” Porter rolled his eyes. It was the most tempered among his arsenal of contemptuous looks for those less clever than himself. “There isn’t a counterfeit psychic in the world who couldn’t by dumb luck direct us to a vase, there being only, perhaps, five million in this city. What makes this particular vase unique?”
“It had the most beautiful poppies in it.”
“So our challenge then, if I am to understand you, sister,” said Dodge with exasperated indulgence, “is to have our psychics, upon pain of death or career disfigurement, tell us the location in the city of a vase containing poppies. I must agree with Porter, Sis, that your obsession with the floral has produced a challenge that doesn’t seem to be very challenging at all.”
Violet’s look turned suddenly murderous. “Poppies do not grow in February as a rule. You know nothing of poppies!” With that, the severely offended Violet retreated back into the house to sniff her mother’s fresh bouquet of hothouse roses and to mutter foul blasphemies against her two brothers.
“Sister has a short fuse,” chuckled Dodge.
Porter nodded as he scratched his nose musingly. “Of course, if it is truly an oddity to find poppies for sale out of season, then perhaps it isn’t such a bad test for our snared charlatans. Poppies in a vase — I cast my vote for it. Do you vote likewise?”
“Vase of poppies it is. Let’s make Sis happy.”
Sis was indeed made happy. She could hardly contain her joy at seeing the four mediums gathered in the hotel room the three siblings had secured for the purpose of exposing their frequent shams against the trio’s overly trusting mother. Each seer seemed completely unsuspecting of Dodge and Porter and Violet’s true motive (sufficient reason in and of itself to impugn their psychic bona fides).