The Girl With the Long Green Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

about a man at the track with a transistor set-up that got the results before the store did. It all worked like a beautiful piece of machinery. It was sweet.”
    He told me all about it. The wire con is one of the three standard long cons, and as old as you can get. You keep being surprised when it still works after all those years. He told me all the cute little details and I could tell just how much of a kick it was for him, a kick to pull it off, a kick to remember it and talk about it. In a lot of ways he was the same kid I’d known before, in love with the whole pattern of the life, in love with the whole idea of being with it. I tried to remember if I had been like that once, all enthusiasm and excitement. It didn’t seem possible.
    “But that’s history,” he said. “Let me tell you what I’ve got on the stove now. You know the Canadian moose pasture bit, don’t you?”
    “I worked it once.”
    “That’s what I heard. How did you work it? Stock?”
    “Uranium stocks.”
    “You’ve heard it worked with land?”
    “I know somebody was doing it that way somewhere in the East. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
    “Just about,” he said. “It’s also just about played out, although there are still a few boiler rooms going in Toronto. I was inside of one with half a dozen phones going full-time.”
    “Is that what you want to set up?”
    He laughed. “No, this is nothing like that. This is quicker and neater and easier and the score is a lot bigger. This is a fresh wrinkle on the whole thing. I’ll tell you, Johnny, this is one I dreamed up all by myself. I heard this girl’s story—”
    “What girl?”
    “A girl I met in Vegas. I’ll get to that. I heard her story, and I got a picture of this mooch in my mind, and I just let it lay around there. I wasn’t in Vegas to line up a con and I wasn’t there for a woman, either. I never pull a job in Vegas, or anywhere else in the state. That place is strictly for gambling for me.”
    “You gamble a lot?”
    “I’m a high roller when I’m not working. Everybody has a weakness, Johnny. On the con or off it, everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you’ve got more than one vice. You know, I’m getting way off the track here. Let me just give you a fast picture. It’s getting late and all, and you must be pretty beat, and I’m not so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed myself. I’ll just sketch it in for you.”
    He gave me just the outline. He ran through it very quickly, very sketchily. He knew what he was doing. He was working me the same way you work a mark at the beginning, the same way a fisherman works a trout. Just teasing, poking the bait around, giving a flash of it and then jerking it away before you can even make up your mind whether or not to bite. I knew I was being hustled. It didn’t bother me.
    For one thing, it was impossible to dislike Doug Rance. He was too genuinely charming. A confidence man has to have one of two things going for him. He can be so tremendously charming that the mark likes him at first meeting, or he can be so obviously honest and sincere that the mark trusts him from the opening whistle. If the mooch likes you, or if he trusts you, you are halfway home; the rest is just mechanics.
    Doug made it on charm. I was the other way, I was a man people were likely to trust. I don’t know why this is so, but it is. I’ve always played things that way, pushing the honest-and-sincere bit, but you can’t make it on acting talent alone.
    Charm and sincerity. The best two-handed cons feature a pair of men who complement one another in this respect, one of them charming and one of them sincere. Doug wanted me in this one, and he probably knew what he was doing in picking me. The odds were that we would work well together.
    I let him get all the way through the pitch and I listened to him all the way. He skipped most of the details, so it was hard to tell if the