Out In The Crime Noir 1950s Night-Bunco Madness-“Confidence Girl”

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Confidence Girl, Hillary Brooke, Tom Conway, 1952

The scam artist team of Mary Webb and Richard Kingsley had it made, had it made in the shade, making every CEO of every indemnity company get more gray hairs than they already had. Making every department store owner cringe over his or her losses, making even the worldly-wise pawnbrokers around town sit up and take notice. No question they were the best from coast to coast, not small time grifters, drifters and midnight sifters like a lot of punk back alley guys who tell stories about how they ripped a guy for twenty bucks in some three-card Monte in about 1937 and they never got over it. High quality goods only. Furs, jewels, maybe a switch and bait thrown in, or a get rich real estate scam that exploded in the mark’s face. Beautiful work, real pros. And then split town, split town fast with no forwarding address, and some pretty wise people with egg on their face.

Let me give an example of one caper. Mary Webb would go into a high-end department store and look at, say, a mink worth ten or fifteen grand. Then as nice as you please she would walk, no, maybe sass-shay out the front door. Of course she would be grabbed and it would be all over for our Mary. Except for one thing the guy doing the nabbing was none other than Kingsley working his racket as a special investigator for the indemnity companies. See he had talked the department store dick innocently into the plot with a lot of investigator mumbo-jumbo. Come nabbing time Mary, escorted to her getaway car by Kingsley, flew the coop and Kingsley used as an excuse the old she pulled a gun on him. Sweet, right. Sweet stuff like that until they let things get too complicated, let too many moving parts get in the way.

See, Kingsley, maybe knowing that the odds, the percentages, of avoiding the police blotter were dropping with each caper, devised a scam of scams so he and Mary could be on easy street, retire undefeated, and go off into the sunset and raise some of those kids that Mary kept squawking about. Mary had his number though on that subject, knew he wasn’t set to be somebody’s daddy but still she loved the guy and that will make anybody do stuff that in a calmer moment would be dismissed out of hand. She bought into the scam. Funny nobody had figured from the start the pair working out together, no real chemistry except for the capers that drove them. But there they were. So as everybody knows who knows scams, and maybe knows police department Bunco squads, could see that old ‘crime doesn’t pay” sign coming a mile away as the plot thickened.

Kingsley had master-mined a variant the old get rich quick scam that had netted them plenty of dough in the past, except this time they were going really big, maybe a million if things worked out right. It all depended on Mary pulling off, well, a confidence girl act. That is getting people to have confidence in her, mainly by buying stocks that she would advise them to buy as sound investments, run up the price and then sell-out leaving plenty of that previously mentioned egg on some savvy faces. The vehicle for this confidence build-up was to make Mary a psychic, but a psychic who knew more detailed information about the future marks than normal in such situations. And that is where that“too many moving parts” came in. Kingsley has an associate, a gangster nightclub owner, front Mary’s act. That included bringing a lot of the nightclub help and gang members into the action to grab bits of information from the customers. Using information about a local bizarre killing and identifying the killer as the bait. But the cops after being a bit dumb about Kingsley’s and Mary’s act got wise, got wise when that whole killer expose kind of blew up in our pair’s faces when things got out of hand. The other show dropped, dropped hard. But when they were rolling along, pulling a caper and then moving out, they were the best, no question. Maybe there is a cautionary tale in all of this.