“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He paid me a five and a one. “We’ll have to do this again,” he said. Afterward I called the local office of Dun & Bradstreet and asked for a full credit report on Murray Rogers. They knew him and said they could have a brief ready the next afternoon. I gave a false name and told them I’d stop by for it.
That was Monday. On Tuesday I didn’t do much of anything besides consuming the standard amount of food and catching a double feature at the movie near the library. Late in the afternoon I went over to D & B to pick up their report. The fee was fifteen bucks, which seemed reasonable enough. But after I paid I riffled through the bills in my wallet. Money was running out again, slowly but steadily. I thought about this on the way back to the Panmore, and then I leaned against the side of a handy building and started to laugh.
It was funny. I needed that job Murray was going to dig up for me. There was a poker game in a few days but I couldn’t afford to cheat in it. If anything, I had to manage to lose a minimum of twenty dollars. When you’re playing for a few hundred grand, you can’t afford to cheat in a dollar-limit game. So I needed a job: I had to have it in order to job Murray properly. In my room I read through the three pages from the Dun & Bradstreet people. Murray wasn’t a bad credit risk, not at all. He owned the house free and clear and he had bought it a few years ago for forty-five thou. He kept about fifty grand in the stock market, mostly in fairly steady stuff with a few electronics issues mixed in for capital gains potential. He owned a lot of real property in the city—a trio of cheap residential hotels on Chippewa, a third of a forty-eight-lane suburban bowling alley, a piece of a new office building on Delaware Avenue. There was money tied up in high-yield syndications, money in a whole host of savings banks, money in his personal checking account and money in his business account. There was, all in all, a lot of money.
I committed sections of the report to memory, then tucked it away where nobody would be likely to trip over it. I went out and had dinner at one of Murray Rogers’ favorite restaurants. Then I wandered downtown and paid a buck and a half to the box-office girl at the Palace Burlesque and went inside to watch the strippers thrust their groins at me.
The strippers were a bore. I had known one once, a second-rater who played some of the Fifty-Second Street tourist traps in New York. She had lived in a three-room walkup on West Seventy-Third near the park, and she had had a ten-year-old boy who wasn’t too clear on what she did for a living. For a period of about a month I shared her bed afternoons while the kid was in school. It had been exciting at first; she was a stripper and strippers are supposed to be exciting—that’s part of the American Dream. But she had been mindless and soulless and dead inside, and in spite of the thousand sexual tricks a thousand men had taught her, she had been every bit as frigid as death. So the strippers were a bore. If they did anything, they reminded me I wanted Joyce. That I needed her.
But there was a magician on the bill. He was around fifty. I didn’t recognize him but his name rang some sort of distant bell; I’d probably heard it when I was in the business myself. His tailcoat was frayed and his face was a map of blue alcohol lines and I looked at him and saw what I might have been if a dark-eyed man in Miami hadn’t had a proposition for me.
A grim prospect. But my watching him made my fingers itch for a tall silk hat and a rabbit to yank out of it. And he wasn’t even very good. He had a lot of stage presence but his moves were fairly obvious and his bag of tricks was a skimpy one. There was only one bit he had that I wasn’t able to figure, a routine involving a batch of Christmas-tree ornaments that disappeared into each other, something like that. And I could tell he wasn’t really essential to the trick. It was just a cute piece of equipment I didn’t happen to be familiar with.
A man nudged me. I turned and looked at him. He would have been a good ad for Alcoholics Anonymous; he was drunk, and he looked unhappy about it. “Say,” he said, “now how do you figure he done that?”
“What?”
“The trick,” he said. “What he did with them balls, making ’em do that and all. Now how could a man go and do something like that?”
“It’s magic,” I said.
“Yeah, but how’s he do it?’
“It’s the wand,” I said.
“It’s something special, the wand?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s magic.”
7
On Wednesday morning the phone woke me. The voice was Murray’s.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got something good for you. You have a free day today?”
“Sure.”
“Can you get over here around a quarter to twelve? I’m setting up a lunch appointment with Perry Carver for you. Perry’s running an outfit called Black Sand Syndications. They sell limited partnerships in real estate syndications. It’s been a big thing in New York City but it’s a fairly new form of investment around here. You can get around ten percent on an investment and most of it is tax-free. I was speaking to him yesterday. He needs a good salesman or two and there’s no previous experience necessary because the field is a fairly new one here. He’ll take you out to lunch and you can see how it looks to you.”
“It sounds good,” I said.
“It might not be bad at all. Wear a suit and brush your hair and smile like a good boy. You might wind up with a pretty good position.”
I wore a suit and brushed my hair and practiced smiling at myself in the mirror. I skipped breakfast and spent the rest of the morning in the library scanning everything I could find on the scintillating subject of real estate syndication. I dodged through a book or two on the subject and checked out what some back issues of the financial magazines had to say about it. After a quick cup of coffee on Main Street I presented myself to Murray Rogers for inspection.
“You look lovely,” he said in his office. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and introduce you to Perry. Then I’ll move out of your way and you two can see what develops.”
Black Sand Syndications had a large office on the seventeenth floor of the same building. We took an elevator downstairs and Murray introduced me to Carver. He was a hefty man, bald on top, with innocent blue eyes and a firm jaw. His handshake was strictly dead-fish but his eyes took me in quickly. Murray made some jokes that weren’t particularly funny, and I showed my capped teeth in a smile, and Carver wound up taking me to the Downtown Merchant’s Club for lunch.
We had martinis first. Then I ordered a ham steak and he ordered an open turkey sandwich. He told the ancient waiter to bring us another pair of martinis. The drinks came, then the food. We ate and drank and made small talk. We were working on coffee before he said the first word about business.
“Know anything about syndicates, Maynard?”
"A little.”
“Suppose you tell me what you know. That way I won’t feed you a lot of information you’ve already got under your belt.”
I played parrot for ten minutes. I regurgitated the library’s store of information and told him just what a syndication was and just why it was a good investment for certain people. I told him the potentials above and beyond the tax-sheltered return, mentioned a few syndicates that had converted into common-stock corporations, and generally ran off at the mouth. The blue eyes became progressively more interested as I steamed along. By the time I was finished, Carver was beaming.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You actually know the field, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“Where did you learn all that? Murray mentioned you were in Chicago before you came here, said something about a plastics firm. You in investments before that?”