Turnabout Is
Fair Play-With The Detective Fiction Writer Dashiel Hammett in Mind
By Zack
James
Fred Sims’
tales of his life as a real live private investigator, P.I., gumshoe, shamus,
private dick, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood depending on whether
you had been in thrall to the old time black and white detective films like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and picked the lingo there
or just heard it on the streets, could only be taken in small doses. So said
Alexander Slater, Alex, who for many years ran a print shop on the first floor
of the Tappan Building in Carver where Fred had his office on the fifth floor.
Many times the pair would run into one another at Dolly’s Diner across the
street from the Tappan and they would sit and have their coffee and crullers
together. Usually though the talk was on weather, of Alex’s children and
grandchildren, Fred’s troubles with his latest girlfriend usually picked up
from one of his cases since that was one of the few places where he would run
into women who might be interested in him, or how the town of Carver, once the
world famous hub of the cranberry industry, had gone to hell in a hand-basket
over the past few decades who with the place turning into a vanilla no problems
need apply “bedroom community” for the young who had flowed to the high tech
industry on Interstate 495 about fifteen miles away.
If Alex
wanted to hear some tale of Fred’s, maybe he had read some story in the Gazette or the Globe from Boston and wondered if Fred had run up against that kind
of situation, he would go up to Fred’s office, plunk himself down in one of
Fred’s drastically mismatched chairs (old-timer Fred did not believe in putting
up a front and so his office did look like old Sam Slade’s cinematic one including
the crooked coat rack), Fred would pull out a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and
Fred would answer his question with a story, or if he had no story that would
match up with Alex’s inquiry then something from his files.
The story
about the Malone brothers was just such a story, one that Fred told Alex even
before he began to spin the thing was a prima facie case of turnabout is fair
play, although he would admit that something about not being your brother’s
keeper could have worked too. For this one Fred reached back into the 1950s
when he was first starting out in the business, gotten himself the office in
the Tappan Building and put up his sign, after he had gotten out of the Army
where he had served as an MP in Germany during those Cold War days. Chester and
Arthur Malone were financiers, or that is what they called themselves, guys who
bought and sold stock for various clients’ accounts or for themselves if they
saw a tidy profit in some hot stock. Strictly small potatoes around the Boston
stock exchange and going nowhere fast until Chester hit upon the idea that he
had read about that he, they could use one or more clients’ stock (or bonds
although that was dicey) to buy high risk stock but which if it panned out
would move them up the stock exchange food chain and into maybe some merger
with a larger firm. Who knows what they would have finally wound up doing. This
whole stock transfer idea aside from the questionable legal, moral and being smart
questions was essentially a Ponzi scheme, a scheme that has been around since
old Pharaoh out of Egypt bondage time maybe before, one way or another as long there
have been suckers who have looked for high returns for little risk, so they
think.
Well the
long and short of it was that something went wrong, a few clients wanted their
assets cashed in, something like that, and the Malones’ couldn’t cover fast
enough. The clients squawked to the SEC and the boys went on the carpet, were
going to jail for a nickel anyway. All the paper transfers though were in
Arthur’s name and so they decided that since Arthur’s goose was cooked he wound
take the fall, he would cop a plea saying that the whole operation had been his
and Chester had nothing to do with his dealings. So he won the fiver, went down
for the nickel. Arthur did his time, most of it anyway, but something happened
in prison, who knows, maybe he became somebody’s “girl,” maybe he thought he
had gotten a raw deal from his brother, maybe he didn’t like that his brother
stole his wife, Mona, away, stole her
after she had divorced him when he went to prison. Whatever it was something
had been eating at him by the time he got out.
Arthur
though had his own game plan, kept his own consul, and when he got out he
played the game so that Chester believed they were on good terms. Then Chester
started getting threatening telephone calls, calls telling him that the party
on the other line, a woman, but Chester though that was just a guy using a dame
as a front that they knew he had been watering stock all the time that Arthur
was in jail and that unless he forked up dough his life would be worthless.
Chester was no fool though, had not been scamming for all those years to just
fold up when some anonymous caller called. That’s when he called me, called me
to his office saying that he had been getting threatening phone calls and
wanted to know who was behind it. I told
him that would be a hard nut to crack but he insisted he needed help, wanted me
to pursue the matter.
Here’s where
everything got squirrelly though. Arthur, as part of his plan worked in the
office after he got out, did his own hustling for accounts. While he had been
away Chester had hired a secretary, what they now call administrative
assistants but still are really secretaries with computer skills, Ms. Wyman,
Bess, a looker about thirty. Arthur made a big play for her, which she tumbled
too especially when he started dangling marriage in front of her. Of course,
aside from the fact that after prison he could use a few off-hand tumbles which
he considered a bonus, Arthur was using Bess to find out everything about
Chester’s operations since he had been gone. It turned out that Chester had
been up to his old tricks, another Ponzi scheme of sorts. So one day after he
thought he had enough information on his brother Arthur called some of
Chester’s clients and made them, a few anyway, believe that their accounts
would be in trouble if they didn’t pull out fast. They did and as you might
expect Chester couldn’t cover fast enough before the clients complained to the
SEC. And so in his turn Chester did his nickel since all the transfers had his
signature on them. It turned out that he had been the one who had sold Arthur
out to the SEC on the previous scheme to save his own neck. So turnabout was
fair play. As for me well I got paid off once the accounts were settled for
basically doing nothing except trying to cover Chester from taking a fall which
I couldn’t do. Oh yeah, I got paid off too with a few tumbles with that Bess
once she gave Arthur the heave-ho when after she had figured out that he was
playing her for a patsy just to get at Chester. People are strange, right.
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