The grifter, p.1
The Grifter, page 1
THE GRIFTER
HARPER MORITA
BOOK 1
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
CONTENTS
Author’s Note: The Grifter
Burned
Harmony
Blue
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE GRIFTER
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Sting, the classic starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Plus a who’s who of character actors and “That Guy” players, all at the top of their game.
Then, one day, I came across a reference to the book upon which so much of the movie was based, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man by David Maurer, detailing some of the adventures of Fred and Charley Gondorff.
Got it. Read it. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Decided I needed to base a character around that logic. A Grifter. A con artist, but one that plays in the big leagues, instead of the bush league stuff. Not those little cons, starting with something as simple as 3-Card-Monty. Long play.
In order to have fun with it, I made her a woman, and inserted her into a galaxy that didn’t necessarily hold to equal rights. So much of Science Fiction dabbles around the edges of gender equality, without ever confronting it. Some authors fall back on the OLD tropes, while others get so wrapped up in gender and sexuality that they sometimes forget to tell an entertaining story. Hard to strike a middle ground.
Originally, I had also intended Harper to be inserted longways around into some of the SF erotica I write under a different penname, but that hasn’t (yet) worked out. Might not. Doesn’t matter.
I wanted her to be a female version of Harry Mudd, from the original Star Trek. (Haven’t watched the modern incarnation, so I don’t know if they ended up keeping that dapper edge of rascal that made him so endearing without making him a shit. Hard line to walk, when you end up cheering for Harry to get away in the end. Or not to suffer too badly when he gets what’s coming.)
Because when you get down to it, Harry only wanted to con people out of money. He never really intended to hurt people. Robin Hood, at least in his own mind, regardless of what the authorities said.
And, because of the intended (and never explored) erotica connection, I wanted Harper to have a particular gimmick. She never does nudity. Never does sex. You never get to touch as part of one of her grifts. She might dangle it out there, but she never consummates it.
So then, I had a character. And circling back to Henry/Charley Gondorff and Harry Mudd, a con game to run. Except I wanted to set everything up cleanly.
And tell the story backwards, if you will. The result was the first Harper Morita Grift: Burned. Harper, starting already in jail, and trying to figure a way out of her predicament, and how to chase down the partner who screwed her at the end with a pigeon drop and a dropped dime.
I really enjoyed writing that story, as you’ll see, which inspired me to write more of them. More of her.
The next time around, however, I wanted something a little bigger and more ambitious, so I went back to Maurer and studied some of those big grifts that he wrote about. And decided to tell the scam of a real estate/land office gig. In this case, taking deposits against both building a colony ship to carry folks off to a new future, as well as grifting them out of their deposit in order to stake better claims on said colony. Harmony was the result.
In this kind of grift, the team takes the cash and disappears. No ship is ever built. No colony ever established.
And, as has been Harper’s luck, something goes wrong. Or right. Whichever, she’s now trapped inside the grift, and decides to run with it as hard and far as she can go, because all she really wants is to be successful enough to be noticed by the big players. To get that call to participate in the big game grifts where stupid amounts of money get siphoned off before every one runs. Remember, I’m starting from The Sting here, where they took a crooked banker for an utterly stunning amount of cash, then got away with it, which rarely happened in the real world.
Finally, I got to watching old episodes of McHale’s Navy. (Ernest Borgnine, early 60s). Not something I grew up with. Hardly knew anything about it. But it drew me in, because, like many comedies, it is built on misdirection and conning a superior officer into not seeing what he thought he saw. Like a good grift, running as long as it can go.
For fun, I also borrowed liberally from Carl Ballantine, as Sparrow Olmstead.
Blue is a story of revenge. In that, it follows The Sting in many ways, because that was the emotional heart of the movie. Getting even with someone for something they did to a friend.
Time and circumstances have prevented me from circling back and writing that elusive fourth story (yet), but I have left things on a good note. And do intend to get back to Harper and her new friends one of these days, when I have the right idea.
For now, however, sit back and learn a few tricks about confidence games, shops, and long grifts. And meet a cast of fun characters just trying to get by and make a dishonest buck in the process.
Because it’s Harper’s galaxy. We just live in it.
BURNED
BURNED
A HARPER MORITA GRIFT
“Next case is State versus Elizabeth Malcolmb,” the voice rang out. “Is the defendant present in the courtroom?”
A long, wooden truncheon, slipping through the bars behind her and poking her in the shoulder blade, caused Harper to stir and remember which fake identity she had been using for this grift. She liked Liz Malcolmb, but obviously that one was burned.
Pity.
Harper scowled back at the officer outside the cage as she stood up from the hard, wooden bench and moved forward to the bars across the front of the holding cell. Her wrists were cuffed in front, so she grabbed the bars at stomach level and tried to smile at the judge.
His Honor was seated on a bench above her and across the way a bit. Black robes. Gray hair slicked back. Beak of a nose. Cruel, intelligent eyes. He perched on a high platform, with a female bailiff off to Harper’s left as she faced the man. The rest of the cops were on the other side of the room, standing behind the holding cell that held all the seated prisoners, where they could reach in and smack someone with a billy club if they needed to.
Harper supposed that it made a cruel bit of sense to just have a courtroom attached to a holding pen for prisoners, though she would have liked to have done this whole she-bang in better circumstances.
Right now, the rest of the women in here were dressed like common tarts who looked like they had been busted on various prostitution raps and raids. The men looked to be mostly drunks, rather than Johns. Harper wondered if some cat house had forgotten to make their payment to the local police department this week and gotten themselves punished.
Ganome was a hard planet to get ahead on. She wouldn’t have come here but for the mines that were churning up all manner of exotic minerals. Gold and silver might be a good base of economy, but when you could mine asteroids for the stuff, you needed weird to make money. Ganome had a lot of weird.
And there was no way she’d wanted to dig. Too much like hard work. The money in a mining boom was always in selling shovels to miners, not in the digging. Which meant that you needed to grift the folks that owned mining supply stores. And brothels. And wherever else folks with sudden riches might blow them.
Harper knew she could have just settled down and opened a running card game, content with paying the house a share of her winnings. Except that she’d have been bored out of her mind in about two weeks.
On the flip side, she’d have been unlikely to be standing in front of a judge tonight.
The corset wrapped about her chest was too tight. She hated corsets, but Ganome was a backwards kind of place, with really paternal ideas about women’s fashion. At least nobody had reminded them that historical accuracy would have included a bustle.
Fuck that noise.
“Miss Malcolmb, you are charged with fraud and theft by falsification,” the judge said in a tired voice from his high bench, where he could look down on the poor sinners brought before his court.
Worse, it was a night court, so they moved quick. Get them in, charge them, fine them or jail them, move on. Only pretty, wealthy people got trials that lasted more than ten minutes.
“Does the defendant have counsel?” he asked her now.
“The defendant is indigent, Your Honor,” she replied.
The judge paused to look at her file closer. Most of the hookers in here with her probably didn’t know that word.
No way she could afford a good lawyer right now anyway. Her supposed—obviously-now-former—partner had pulled a pigeon drop on her at some point and robbed her blind. Somehow, he’d swapped out the cash in the suitcase for all the dies and blanks they’d been using to forge the stolen rare coins that they had been trying to fence in a complicated sting.
Crooked dealers won’t go to the cops. Or they weren’t supposed to.
That rat fink Charlie must have set her up. Probably called the cops on her as he skipped town, just so they’d chase her down and miss him.
Dublin Charlie. Con artist extraordinaire. Harper Morita, currently pretending to be Elizabeth Malcolmb on the identity cards they’d bought, was the one in jail.
Most of the grifts they ran didn’t involve pretending to be husband and wife, but a few of them had. They’d even done pretty well here on Ganome.
Up until about six hours ago.
The l ure of that suitcase full of money had just been too much for the boy, hadn’t it?
“Miss Malcolmb, do you wish to have counsel appointed?” the judge asked tiredly.
He nodded to the court-designated legal-eagle, sitting back in one corner with his head down on the table, snoring. Stacks of case files two feet tall surrounded him, for all the men and women around her in here. Drunks and whores, for the most part. Plus one grifter who’d gotten burned.
Torched, even. Ganome didn’t have any sort of ideal of rehabilitation in their punishment system. They liked heavy fines or time in a prison-factory to keep you on the straight and narrow.
Harper drew as much air into her lungs as she could, confined inside this corset such that her boobs were squished up. Good for distracting people. Lousy for breathing.
“Your Honor, it is said that a defendant who is his own counsel has a fool for a client,” Harper offered in a polite, friendly voice.
“I am aware of the saying, Miss Malcolmb,” he replied, eyes softening a bit with humor from the hard-ass hanging judge persona he’d brought into the room in those black robes.
Harper nodded to the snoring man.
“I suspect that I’d rather blame the fool than rely on the drunk,” she continued.
He nodded. She wasn’t certain the man was drunk, but he had that air about it. Rumpled. Disheveled. Three-days stubble. Shoes in need of a shine.
Probably somebody’s idiot nephew who had the job because nobody else wanted it enough to oust him. Frontier worlds were frequently like that.
Harper had toured enough of them with Charlie to know the type.
She looked around the courtroom now as the judge gaveled once, quietly enough as to not wake the lawyer.
“Miss Malcolmb, I have reviewed the charges brought against you,” he said. “How do you plead?”
“Not guilty, Your Honor,” she said in firm though polite voice.
“Not guilty?” he echoed in a disbelieving voice. “You were arrested in possession of…”
He paused there, locating the paper again and lifting it up to read.
“Counterfeit coins in gold and silver determined to be manufactured by a set of dies and tools also co-located with said coins, Miss Malcolmb,” he completed his thought.
Behind her, Harper heard folks stirring now.
Everyone else had probably just assumed she was a high-class call girl when they brought her in. Certainly, she was dressed better than the locals, with her corset matched by flowing pants, both in black with maroon crescent moon designs on them. She wore a shoulder piece that strapped under both arms and across the tops of the collar bones, with a standing collar. Matching maroon, it accentuated the cleavage and showed the muscles in her upper back.
Harper didn’t have much chest, so this outfit did most of the work.
Her hair was naturally a strawberry blond that was so striking and memorable she always wore wigs on a grift.
You wanted to be above average. Nothing more. Attractive, but not memorable. Bosomy, but not overripe. Average height. Average build.
Her face was round, with soft cheekbones and a soft jaw. Full-enough lips and wide-set eyes conveyed intelligence, but again, not too much. Makeup tricks were occasionally necessary.
Behind her, the folks in the cell with her had awakened to the fact that she was something more. The judge hadn’t quite arrived there in his mind.
Yet.
“Your honor, I had never seen the contents of that suitcase until the moment I opened it,” Harper smiled innocently. Not quite batting her eyes at him, but letting those baby blues go to work “That was about two seconds before the officers who arrested me kicked in the door and came in the window like ninjas. I do not understand why that level of force was warranted, by the way.”
“The warrant suggests that you might be armed and dangerous, Miss Malcolmb,” he replied.
“Your Honor, I have never owned a gun, either beam or slug-thrower,” she countered in a haughty voice. “The only knife I ever carry is a folding kind with under three inches of blade, because everybody should have a multitool like that. I am not a physical threat to one officer of the law. Sending more than a dozen men, all heavily armed, seems to be a bit overdone to me.”
Muttering behind her now was starting to gain traction. Drunks and whores who were locals meant that eventually they might get to a point where the judge knew their names, from having been in front of him enough times.
Harper wasn’t planning on ever meeting the man again, assuming she could fast-talk her way out of this one. Somehow.
He had the decency to look a bit chagrined at her outburst, however fake it might be. Harper absolutely didn’t do weapons. Too many planets tacked years onto your sentence for that crap. Not worth it.
“You were still in possession,” he reminded her.
Harper smiled at him.
“And you will not find my fingerprints anywhere inside that case, Your Honor,” she smiled back. “Have they completed a forensics examination of said contents?”
Because you always wore gloves on this sort of a grift, so as to not leave any sort of fingerprints on anything. Most outposts and colonies didn’t bother with the complicated sorts of DNA testing that would have nailed her ass to the wall.
Ganome only thought they were sophisticated.
The stirrings got a little louder now. Not much. The judge glanced at some of them and everyone quieted down.
Still, they were here for a show. She planned on putting one on.
The judge looked down now. Rifled through his papers. Did it a second time.
“Bailiff, are there other portions of the case file still outstanding?” he asked, turning to the uniformed woman on his right who had been sitting so still up until now that you might have mistaken her for a statue.
Harper had ignored her.
“No, Your Honor,” the woman turned, after scanning her own desk and coming up empty.
Of course not. Why the hell would you need to dust everything for prints? You had the criminal dead to rights. And a drunk lawyer who would take any plea deal the state offered.
Plus, you were used to dealing with schmucks who didn’t ever push back.
That sort of arrogant ignorance was one of the reasons Charlie had suggested they grift the planet in the first place.
Amateurs.
The judge eyeballed her hard now.
“Are you suggesting that the materials were planted, Miss Malcolmb?” he asked in a leading voice.
Like the trail up to a bear-trap was leading.
“I have no idea how they came to be in that valise, Your Honor,” she replied.
Again, technically honest, which was the best kind. Charlie and his damned pigeon drop. Somehow managed to swap contents with her when she wasn’t looking, so he ended up with all the cash, after telling her he had the coins and dies, just like the plan.
Cops kicking in the door of their flat just after she got home mostly confirmed that. They’d been waiting for her, after Charlie split.
“No idea?” the judge repeated.
“That’s right,” she nodded. “It almost feels like I’m being set up by someone.”
Oh, that got a reaction. The mutters turned into noise now. Every one of those people had probably tried that one before, and been shot down.
The judge rapped his gavel hard now, scowling fiercely at the cage and shutting folks down.
Harper reflected bemused innocence.
The room fell to silence pretty quickly. Stayed there. The judge let everyone stew for a bit, daring them to try his patience, before finally turning back to her.
She smiled, eyes big and friendly.
“Miss Malcolmb, I also have a criminal complaint sworn out by a Mister Jörgen Archambault,” he said. “Detailing your alleged crimes. Trafficking in counterfeit goods. Possession of stolen goods. Etc. Is that part of a set up?”
The room was poised for noise, but he had them cowed.
As he should. The man was in charge.
Never challenge that. Play to it. They are proud of the authority and responsibility that comes with such a thing. It gives them place and helps them uphold the law.
