“That’s where our store will be. Our company.”
“Then there’s no worry. Unless something happened to him. Do you know Terry Moscato?”
He didn’t.
“Well, he ought to be all right. He wouldn’t be in jail, he’s in too good to take a fall. He used to work out on the Coast and then he went East and wound up in Toronto, and he’ll loan us front money. It has to be strictly front money, dough that sits in a bank account in our name and that goes straight back to him as soon as we’re out of it. We’ll have to pay a thousand for the use of ten, but it’s worth it.”
“See why I wanted you on this, Johnny?” He took a hand from the wheel and punched me gently on the knee. “I never would have thought of an angle like that. The extra touches. But I’ll learn them, kid.”
I wasn’t listening. It was that old familiar feeling, getting into it, getting with it again, feeling your mind start to slip into gear. Funny after so many years. The extra touches. A whole batch of them were coming to me now. The hell with it, we could talk about them later.
“I’ll need eight days,” I told him.
“For what?”
“One day to decide if I’m in. And a week’s notice before I leave my job.”
“I thought you already decided you were in.”
“I want twenty-four hours to make sure.”
He shrugged this off. “And a week’s notice? That’s a new one. You’re not going to come back and play assistant manager anymore, Johnny. What the hell do you care about giving notice?”
“The same reason you don’t do any grifting in Nevada. I don’t crap where I eat.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll be coming back to this town,” I said. “Not as a flunky, no, but to live here and do business here. I want to leave it right.”
I spent the hour before I started work on the telephone. I sat in a booth at a drugstore and kept pouring change down the slot. I called a lot of people that I couldn’t reach and reached a lot of others. I spent my dinner hour at the telephone, and I got back on the phone that night after I left the alleys. I spoke to people who knew Doug Rance vaguely, to some who knew him well, to one or two who had worked with him not long ago.
You damn well have to know who’s working with you. When you’re all wrapped up in a big one you live a whole slew of lies all at once, and if you have a few people in on it who are lying back and forth and conning each other as much as they’re conning the mooch, then you are looking for trouble and fairly certain of finding it. This doesn’t mean that good con men are inherently honest in their dealings among themselves. They aren’t. If they were honest, they wouldn’t have gone on the C to begin with. I expected Doug would lie to me, and I expected to lie to Doug, but not to the point where we’d be fouling each other up. If there were things I ought to know about him, I wanted to know them now.
He checked out pretty well. They knew him in Vegas, all right. He was a high roller, an almost compulsive gambler, but he never gambled while he worked. On a job, he was nothing but business. I had wondered about that.
He was in love with the life, which was another thing I had managed to figure out by myself. He was good and he was smooth. He was attractive to women but he could generally take them or leave them. He’d done a short bit in a county jail in Arizona, and he’d done time twice in California, a vag charge in Los Angeles and a ninety-day stretch at Folsom for petty theft, a short con that hadn’t worked right.
Everyone I talked to, everyone who knew him, seemed to like him well enough. That much figured. That was his stock in trade.
It was another late night for me, but this time I slept. In the morning I walked over to his hotel and we had a bite together. He asked me if I’d had a chance to run a check on him.
“Sure.”
“How did I make out?”
“You’ve got good references.”
He laughed. “I’m glad you asked around,” he said. “I’d hate to work with anyone who wouldn’t take the trouble. You in, Johnny?”
“All the way.”
“You won’t regret it. Smooth as silk, all the way, and nothing’s going to go sour on us.”
I gave notice that afternoon. I told Harry that I had to leave at the end of next week, that I had a very attractive opportunity waiting on the East Coast and I couldn’t afford to pass it up. He was unhappy. He told me he could maybe see his way clear to a ten-a-week raise if I cared to stay. I told him it wasn’t that, that this was a real chance for me.
“Maybe you’ll come back some day,” he said. “Not to work here, maybe, but to open up a place of your own. This is a good place to live, John.”
“I’d like to come back.”
“Hope you do. I hate to lose you, I really do.”
Four
That was Friday. The following night I finished work at midnight. I had Sunday off, so Doug picked me up after work and we drove to Denver. He gave the Corvair back to the Hertz people. We caught a jet to Chicago, changed planes and flew on to Toronto. We spent Sunday renting apartments. He took a two-room place in a good building, and I booked a sixty-a-month room in a residential hotel on Jarvis near Dundas. I paid a month’s rent on the place. We picked out a spot for our offices, rented them Monday morning in Doug’s name. Then I flew back to Denver.
By that Thursday Harry had found a man to replace me at the alleys. I spent a few hours that afternoon breaking him in, then went back to my room and threw a few things into a suitcase. I had cleared out my bank account and I had the money in cash, something like eight hundred bucks and change. I threw out some of my clothes along with my correspondence course debris and other odds and ends. Then I was on another plane, headed again for Toronto by way of Chicago.
By this time Doug had set some of the wheels in motion. He found us a Richmond Street lawyer who was handling the incorporation procedures for us. Doug gave him a list of tentative names — Somerset, Stonehenge, and Barnstable, all of them crisply Anglo-Saxon. Our lawyer checked them out and discovered that there was already a Somerset Mining and Smelting, Ltd., and a Stonehenge Development, Ltd. Our third choice was open. The lawyer filled out an application for letters-patent for the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., and shot it off to the Lieutenant-General of the Province of Ontario.
All of this was routine. We incorporated with two hundred shares of stock of a par value of one dollar. We stated our corporate purpose on our application, listing ourselves as organizing for the purpose of purchasing and developing land in the western provinces. We gave the address of our head offices as 3119 Yonge Street, Toronto. We listed three officers — Douglas Rance, President; Claude P. Whittlief, Vice-President and Treasurer; and Phillip T. Liddell, Secretary. Liddell was our lawyer. Whittlief was me — just another hat to wear, another name to sign. We gave our capitalization as fifty thousand dollars, Canadian. You don’t have to show your capital, just proclaim it. Fifty seemed like a decent figure.
The charter went through and we were the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., with a charter from the Province to prove it. We painted that name on the door of the Yonge Street office and had the phone company put in a bank of telephones. A printer on Dundas ran off a ream of stationery on good high rag content bond. Our incorporation was duly listed in the appropriate section of the Ontario Gazette.
We opened an account at one of the downtown offices of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. All checks on our account had to be signed by Rance and countersigned by me as Claude Whittlief. We deposited seventy-five hundred dollars of Doug’s capital in the account. It wasn’t enough of a balance. I went on the earie and found out that Terry Moscato had moved across the border to Buffalo. I flew down to see him and told him I needed ten thousand dollars for about two months, maybe three.