He'd lit two matches-one each for the already dead old men-and tossed them one by one at their targets, lurching back at the immediate flare-up, and ducking out back. No one had seen him as far as he knew. There was a one-story lean-to out back, a sort of annex built onto the house, where some of the old biddies slept (he'd picked up eight passbooks at the Joanna Home), and the lights were out there, too. He was safe.
But he'd had a bad weekend. He hadn't worked at all. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking torch. He was a con artist, not a killer. It made his stomach jumpy.
He just sat in his hotel room and listened to the radio and read every edition of every paper, looking for mentions of the fire. When the Plain Dealer reported the fire warden as blaming the blaze on a short circuit in the "old, rotten wiring, sending flames crackling up through the dead, dry timber of the walls into the attic," Joe felt relieved, but not at ease. He could only make it through the weekend by drinking his worries away. Straight Scotch, and a lot of it, had allowed Monday to finally roll around.
He'd felt hung over and shaky, but ready to have at the world again. He went down to the Hanna Building to get a fresh list of names. The way the scam operated was, like all great scams, simple. Neighborhoods were surveyed and blocked off. Slush money was paid to a savings-and-loan employee in the district for providing a sucker list of passbook holders. Commissions were paid to the savings-and-loan bird dog whenever a salesman successfully scammed a passbook. With this system, a guy like Joe didn't have to go door to door. He could hit pay dirt every time he made a call.
There were different ways of going about it, on Joe's end. Some salesmen posed as bank presidents or big real estate operators, particularly those salesmen dealing with clients who could read. They would openly tout cemetery lots as a good investment ("everybody has to die sometime, and there's a big demand for burial plots") which was horsefeathers, of course. Enough lots were available in the Cleveland area to bury the city's dead for the next three hundred years.
That was how the racket got off the ground in the first place: cemeteries laying off their excess lots cheap to the "sales organization" Fusca worked for. He was vague about who the big shots were. He had the name of a contact, some guy who ran a horse parlor on Ivanhoe Road, if he got in a jam and needed to lam out or hole up. Beyond that he knew nothing.
Except he knew it wasn't the Mayfield Road bunch. They'd tried to cut themselves in for a percentage a while back and got told to back off, by the cops no less. He didn't know who would have the kind of leverage it took to make the local mob back off like that, using the cops as muscle. Some crooked politician, maybe. Joe didn't really care.
All he knew was he was making good dough, a third of everything he hauled to shore.
Of course, Joe had less overhead than most of the salesmen. A lot of them worked in pairs. Those posing as bankers or real estate agents needed translators, as many of the marks didn't speak English. These marks Joe simply avoided. And in most cases it was necessary to employ yet another bird dog, namely somebody in the neighborhood, a respected businessman who spoke the mark's native tongue, to make introductions and pave the way. Or the cop on the beat, of course.
Joe cut out the middle-man with his G-man routine. The shiny gold badge and a little Uncle Sam went a long way with these dumb fucking hunkies. And he got a kick out of using a G-man badge to bilk a mark. It was like getting back at the bastards for nabbing his brother Phillie.
Phillie had been the class act of all con artists. Joe admired and loved his older brother. Every Christmas, coming up soon now, he sat down and wrote Phillie a letter, and sent it off to the pen at Atlanta.
Everything Joe knew about conning came from Phillie. When they were little kids, Joe and his older brother had come over from Italy with their parents. Their papa was an honest man who almost made a living with an import cheese business in Brooklyn. When Phillie came into the nearly bankrupt business at age sixteen, it took him only a few months to turn things around by bribing customhouse weighers.
In 1915 Phillie got sentenced to a year in prison, but only served a few months. An eloquent letter from the parish priest ("the gallant lad shielded his father from jailhouse bars, shouldering the blame on himself) won him a Presidential pardon. It paid, young Joe had learned, to put money in the collection plate.
The next family business, engineered by Phillie of course, was importing human hair from Italy to make wigs for American would-be Gibson girls. This went very well, till the Burns Detective Agency proved the Fuscas had conned twenty banks out of nearly a million bucks by taking loans on hair shipments based on phony invoices.
The whole family was caught in New Orleans, boarding a Honduras-bound liner. Joe tried to throw twenty grand overboard, but it landed in a government boat. Phillie again gallantly took the rap for the family, winding up in the Tombs in New York City. He played stoolie for the prosecutors for a year, spying on other prisoners, and earned the gratitude of the law, and a suspended sentence.
Chicago and Prohibition came next. Phillie became a partner in a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, entitling him to five thousand gallons of alcohol a month for production of hair tonic and cough syrup. It was Joe's idea (Phillie was proud) to color and scent the products in such a way that a simple run through a still turned them back into high-proof straight alcohol. A little water, some color and flavoring, and you had stuff "right off the boat."
They had to tie in with the Capone crowd, of course, but there was money enough to be had by all.
At least there was until that goddamn Ness had busted the entire operation and put Phillie in stir. Another year and Phillie would be out, and Joe had no doubt great things would start happening again.
Until then he was on his own, picking up on whatever con he could. The Chicago outfit offered him work, but he didn't like all those deaths in the family. Anyway, he preferred grifting.
This cemetery scam was better than most. Cleveland wasn't the only place where this sting was playing. He first broke in his G-man act (fuck you, Ness) in New York, for another cemetery lot sales outfit. The New York cops had finally got wise, and he and two other salesmen had lammed. But Joe had heard about the Cleveland game, and so, here he was.
In front of a creaky old house on East Sixty-sixth.
Joe dug his hands in his topcoat pockets-Christ, it was cold-and made his way up the front walk, and around the side and climbed the rickety steps to what was more an attic than a second floor. Twelve grand, hiding out in a hovel like this. He knocked on the door. Yellow paint dropped off like ugly snowflakes.
The door opened and seventy-three-year-old childless widower Elmer Elsworth answered. A skinny prune-faced geezer in Coke-bottle wire-framed glasses, Elsworth was the first client Joe had encountered in the neighborhood who wasn't a Slovak.
"What can I do for you?" the old man rasped, squinting behind the thick glasses, smiling, immediately friendly. He wore a frayed plaid shirt, suspenders, and well-worn brown trousers. None of the clothing looked any too clean, and Elsworth's face was stubbled white.
Joe showed him the badge, identified himself as Agent White and asked if he could step in out of the cold.