True Detective

' 'Just don't hound me about it.''

'Right.'

She poked at her salad some more. Then she looked up and her eyes got wide. She leaned forward. 'Glance back over your shoulder.'

I did.

'Now what?' I said.

'Don't you see who that is, walking toward us?'

'Oh. yeah. It's Walter Winchell. He and Damon Runyon and all the big-shot New York newshounds are in town. So what?'

'Didn't you say you met him in Florida?'

'That's true.'

'Here he comes! Introduce me. Nathan! If I had a mention in his column, well, it could mean- ' She shut up. Winchell was nearing us.

As he went by, I said, 'Hello.'

He glanced at me, smiled without smiling. 'Hiya,' he said, not recognizing me, and was gone.

The smirk settled on the left side of Mary Ann's face. 'I thought you said you knew Walter Winchell.'

'I said I met him,' I said 'I didn't say I knew him.'

'Well, you know who this pickpocket is that Jimmy hitched a ride with, don't you?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, why don't you/?«rfhim, already?'

'Jimmy or the pickpocket?'

'Nathan!'

The people at the next table looked at us and Mary Ann, uneasy about center stage all of a sudden, said, 'You know who I meant.'

'Mary Ann, this pickpocket is a guy we used to bust all the time. He was good, one of the best, but he had a bad habit of hitting the same few places over and over again. The train stations. The Aragon. The College Inn. And he ended up getting busted so often, he left the area.'

'But he came back here with Jimmy.'

'Apparently, but that doesn't mean he stayed. In fact, according to my old working buddies on the pickpocket detail, he was run in by 'em shortly after the time he would've brought Jimmy into town.'

'Why didn't you tell me this before?'

'I didn't want to get your hopes up. They also told me they haven't seen hide nor hair of Dipper Cooney since. Word is he's stayed in the Midwest, but is floating city to city.'

'Oh. Then why did you tell me you thought he would turn up, eventually?'

I gestured toward the fair, spread out across the lagoon before us like Frank Lloyd Wright's scattered toys.

'That,' I said. 'The fair. It's pickpocket heaven. He won't be able to resist it.'

'You think you'll find him here, at the exposition?'

'Of course. I got two hundred helpers, don't I?'

The two hundred helpers were the fair's private police, the men I'd been training the better part of the month and a half since the Tri-Cities trip. The General was paying me good money, so I was giving him value for the dollar. I had taken the two hundred men- many of them ex-cops and out-of-work security people, but none of whom were pickpocket detail veterans, like yours truly- and handled them in classes of twelve in the fancy trustee's room in the blue box that was the Administration Building, using three of them who I'd known before, when they worked for the department, to act out some standard pickpocket techniques.

'There's one hard-and-fast rule on the pickpocket detail.' I'd start out. ' 'Look for people who seem inconsistent with their surroundings.''

That meant, in a department store, you looked for people walking around looking not at the items displayed for sale, but other shoppers. At a prizefight, you looked for people studying not the action in the ring, but the crowd. At the El stations, you looked for people not looking in the direction of their train, but at the guy standing next to 'em.

And at the world's fair, you looked for people not looking at the futuristic towering pavilions or the exhibits therein; you looked for people on the midway whose attention was not drawn to the Fort Dearborn Massacre show, or Carter's Temple of Mystery; you looked for people in the Streets of Paris show whose eyes weren't on Sally Rand: you looked for people looking at people. And a lot of em would turn out to be pickpockets.

I trained the three ex-cops- pickpockets usually work in teams of three- to demonstrate some of the typical routines. For instance, a whiz mob- pickpocket team- will spot a wealthy-looking dame walking along with an expensive shoulder-strap bag hanging like it's fruit and she's the tree, and guess who's harvesting? The whiz mob, who decide to 'beat her on the stride,' as it's called. Two fairer-sexed members of the mob- moll buzzers, in the dip's own vernacular will walk in front of the mark, then suddenly stop or maybe back up a step, as if avoiding stepping in something. The mark will unavoidably bump into them, and as the mark is being jostled, and being profusely apologized to, the third member of the mob- the hook- will have come up from behind to open the mark's