Free The Con Man by Ed McBain Page B

be looking for?” Havilland asked.
    “A con man,” Brown said. He handed the card to Havilland.
    With the casual scrutiny born of years of detective work, Havilland studied the face of the card:

    “Tells me nothing,” Havilland said.
    “Flip it over,” Brown told him.
    Havilland turned over the card and began reading again.

    “Could be,” Havilland said.
    “Thing that interests me about him is that he’s a jack of all trades,” Brown said. “You get a con man, he usually sticks to one game if it’s working for him. This guy varies his game. Like the louse we got roaming the 87th. He must be pretty smooth, too, because he’s barely a kid and he only took one fall.” Brown looked at the card. “Who the hell made out this thing? It’s supposed to tell you where he was sentenced and what for.”
    “What difference does it make?” Havilland asked airily.
    “I like to know what I’m dealing with,” Brown said.
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m heading for the Hotel Carter right now to pick him up.”

The Hotel Carter was, in many respects, a very sleazy dump.
    On the other hand, to those of its inhabitants who had recently arrived from skid row, it had all the glamour and impressiveness of the Waldorf Astoria. It all depended how you looked at it.
    If you stood on the sidewalk at the corner of Culver Avenue and South Eleventh Street, and it happened to be raining, and you happened to be a cop out to make a pinch, the Hotel Carter looked like a very sleazy dump.
    Brown sighed, pulled up the collar of his trench coat, remarked to himself silently that he looked something like a private eye, and then walked into the hotel lobby. An old man sat in a soiled easy chair looking out at the rain, remembering kisses from Marjorie Morningstar under the lilacs. The lobby smelled. Brown suspected the old man contributed to the smell. He adjusted his nostrils the way he would adjust his shoulder holster, glanced around quickly, and then walked to the desk.
    The clerk watched him as he crossed the lobby. The clerk watched him carefully. An April fly, not yet feeling its summer oats, buzzed lazily around the desk. A brass spittoon at the base of the desk dripped with misaimed spittle. The smell in the lobby was a smell of slovenliness and dissolution. Brown reached the desk. He started to open his mouth.
    “I’ll give it to you straight,” the desk clerk said. “We don’t take niggers.”
    Brown didn’t even blink. “You don’t, huh?” he asked.
    “We don’t.” The clerk was a young man, his hairline receding even though he was not yet twenty-six. He had a hawkish nose and pale-green eyes. An acne pimple festered near his right nose flap. “Nothing personal,” he said. “I only work here, and those are the orders.”
    “Glad to know how you feel,” Brown said, smiling. “Trouble is, I didn’t ask.”
    “Huh?” the clerk said.
    “Now, you have to understand there’s nothing I’d like better than a room in this hotel. I just come up from a cotton patch down South where we fertilize our cotton with human excrement. I lived in a leaky tarpaper shack, and so you can imagine what a palace your fine, splendid hotel looks like to me. I think it would be too much for me to bear just being allowed to stay in one of your rooms. Why, just being here in the lobby is like coming close to paradise.”
    “Go ahead,” the clerk said, “make wise cracks. You still don’t get a room. I’m being honest with you. You should thank me.”
    “Oh, I do, I do,” Brown said. “I thank you from the bottom of my cotton-pickin’ heart. Is there a man named Frederick Deutsch registered here?”
    “Who wants to know?” the clerk asked.
    Brown smiled and sweetly said, “ I want to know. Jus’ li’l ol’ cotton-pickin’ me.” He reached into his back pocket and flipped his wallet open to his shield. The clerk blinked. Brown continued smiling.
    “I was only joking about the room,” the clerk said. “We got lots of