= The Swindlers Circle
  by Daniel Elton Harmon


Harper sat one dreary Saturday morning in his city quarters at his chessboard--a fine, worn old set of ebony and sandalwood, one of the very few family heirlooms he possessed. The pieces still retained a vestige of their distinctive scents. His father had brought the souvenir home from Borneo in the early 1850s. "They play chess in Borneo?" the young Harper used to ask, and his father would smile kindly and shake his head. "No, but they know their wood, and they know the wants of the European."
  
The lad never had forgotten the strange, pat response: They know their wood, and they know the wants of the European. Even this day he remembered it, and wondered again why those in foreign lands so revered the invasive European. It was true enough: In the few remote islands and unexplored sections of continents he had visited, he had been disconcerted to find himself always treated like a god. It made him wholly uncomfortable, mitigating his love of travel.

He was alone. Playing chess against himself provided the silence and freedom from distraction he required to think out possible combinations beyond one or two moves. It also eliminated the stress of competition--how he loathed competition! Moreover, he was the only chess player in Columbia against whom he felt...competent.

His hallway entry door unexpectedly banged open amid a commotion of voices. Into his quiet study charged Lora, his ten-year-old niece.

"Who's winning?" she demanded, scrutinizing the half-vanquished board as she jumped into the single padded visitor's chair.

The reporter's eyes twinkled warmly. "I am."

"White or black? Looks like there's been a devil of a brawl."

He was a bit nonplussed. Lora knew the rudiments of the game--he had taught her. Just how much did she understand? he wondered. "I'm really not sure which side has the advantage at the moment," he answered.

She laughed and clapped her hands. "An...an...how do you say it? An impasse!"
  
"Something like that." Harper was truly pleased by Lora's developing vocabulary--an achievement for which he privately claimed a degree of credit. From her earliest years, he always had spoken to his niece in adult language, never infantile monosyllables. And from her earliest years, she had seemed to understand the words he used. That, combined with several other intriguing signs in the child's nature, to some extent unsettled him. He had a dogged impression Lora, not a quarter his age, understood certain things about life he did not.

"Lora, now, you must behave," instructed Harper's sister--his editor's wife--taking off her white shopping gloves as she entered the room. "Uncle has agreed to let you stay here a few hours. He never agreed to serve as your parole officer."

The child again laughed, causing Harper to smile. She was to him the dearest delight of life in the capital city--although he sometimes let her believe she was a burden, an intruder to be endured. He had forgotten his promise to entertain her awhile this morning, but at her entry he was not at all annoyed. Any other interruption to his game would have been resented. Lora, to the contrary, always had something to tell him. In her childish concerns, he invariably found helpful reprieve from his own.

She turned on him mischievously. "Daddy still hates you."

Harper tossed back his head with a broad grin.

"Do you still hate him?" she pressed.

"Lora!" the mother rebuked.

The journalist intervened calmly. "I don't think we hate each other at all, Lora. We merely don't see eye to eye on...on...."

"On anything," Mrs. Sweeney finished, frowning. After Lora left them to go exploring into Harper's eternally mysterious, cluttered closet, sister turned to brother. "When will you two ever come to some sort of...agreement?"
  
Harper shrugged with an air of complete innocence. "I've never fathomed what it is about me he dislikes."

She scowled in disgust. "That's what he says, verbatim." Rising abruptly: "Must go, dear. Luncheon at 11:30 at the Sandlapper Club, and I've a number of things to arrange for Sunday dinner. Lot of people coming tomorrow.... You'll join us this time?"

He cocked his head noncommittally.

"You rogue." She kissed his cheek. "Thank you for doing this. Lora adores you, you know."

His face turned deep crimson. She smiled wryly and left.

The reporter ushered his wee guest into the parlor. She plunged gaily onto the couch. He took a stuffed chair beside the fireplace and lit his pipe. He waited. After a few minutes of blissful frolic in the soft down cushions, Lora sat upright and peered at him. He simply waved a hand, inviting her to begin whatever it was she had to reveal to him this week. He would be all attention.

"I know a mystery, as wonderful as any you've ever told in the newspaper--and just as real!" She nodded her head deliberately, confidentially. "It's all true."

"Then let's hear it. You know how I love mysteries."

Lora turned toward the door, as if to confirm they were alone.

"Katherine told me. Katherine's my best friend."

"Yes, I've heard you speak of Katherine. She's the daughter of Jimmy Burleigh, the lawyer."

She lowered her voice to a whisper: "They've come onto money. A lot of money. They've bought things--expensive things." She crinkled her face into a massive frown and shook her head slowly. "Katherine isn't sure where it came from." She stared wide-eyed at her uncle as if to say, "You know what that means...."

It was difficult for Harper to hide his amusement. Burleigh was a successful Columbia lawyer with many a well-heeled client. If he had, in fact, received an unusually high settlement fee, he likely was only earning his just desserts after years of diligent practice.

"The worst of it is," Lora continued, "they're going off on a very long trip. South America. And they're not taking poor Katherine with them! They're leaving her with her mother's kinfolk out in Camden. We won't get to see each other at all. They might be gone for months, maybe a year! She'll be all by herself, away from her mama and papa--and away from me."

Harper still smiled, but his mind, initially entertained, shifted into the pattern of calculation and theory that came inevitably to the perceptive reporter. Several months is very different from a year, he opined. "They haven't told Katherine just how long they'll be gone?"
  
"No."

Then, too...why South America?

While Harper was preoccupied with the destination of the parents, Lora was far more concerned about the destination of her friend. "What do you think, Uncle?"

"Why...I think she should feel quite blessed if her family has gotten such wealth."
  
"No--what do you think about Camden? Other times, when they've gone away for a week or two, they've left her with kinfolk right here, so we could still see each other almost every day."
  
He reflected. Whose business was this but the Burleighs'? If they wanted to jaunt off to Timbuktu, or Siberia, and could afford it, why shouldn't they go? And if they chose to leave their daughter with this relative or that, what difference did it make to anyone outside the family? Still, his curiosity was piqued.

"When did this good news come about?"

"In the last week or two."

"Your friend Katherine has no idea what case her father was representing that proved so valuable?"

"No...but there's a strange man involved. Katherine has heard them talking about him, at night, at table, after she was supposed to be asleep in bed."
  
"What man?"

Lora pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. "We're sworn to secrecy?"

"Of course!"

"It's a Mr. Pendergast. A 'Ronald' or 'Roland' Pendergast, or something that sounds like that."

At first, the name conveyed nothing to Harper's memory. He stared across the room toward the window and the grey street outside. The girl watched him intently. She knew he was chewing on her data.

Roald, he remembered at last. Roald Pendergast, the German forger. Arrested the year before. For some time he had been suspected of much, but had been convicted only of the one insignificant deception at which he'd been caught.

Three facts about the case raised themselves squarely before Harper's deductive intellect. First was the seemingly minor nature of the matter. The rather ordinary falsification that had proved to be the forger's ticket to prison had not made for much copy in The Challenge or any of the other dailies.

Second was the timing. Pendergast, if memory served correctly, had been sentenced to a year. Had he just been released? Possibly.
  
Third was the recollection that Pendergast had not been a client of Jimmy Burleigh or of any other lawyer. He had represented himself--remarkably well--before the jury.

"Roald Pendergast, the forger," Harper dutifully informed his niece. "I remember the case. Do you know what, exactly, Katherine's parents have said about him?"

"No. But she thinks her daddy has gone off to meet him somewhere, more than once." Her puckish face screwed into a frowning question mark. "What's a forger?"
  
Harper explained, patiently providing several examples. Like his father before him, he felt it both his sacred duty and privilege to impart whatever knowledge he could to an inquisitive child. "I wonder, Lora," he concluded, "whether you would like to come along to The Challenge newsroom with me?"
  
Her eyes danced. "Daddy never lets me go up there."

"Yes, but Daddy's away, and what he doesn't know this one time can't hurt. Besides, I have something I must do there. It won't take long."

Lora was out the door before he could put on his coat. This rare opportunity to roam the forbidden newsroom would be the highlight of her week.

While Lora poked, unbridled, through all the reporters' desks and even gaped into her father's private office, Harper immersed himself in the paper's morgue, the categorized files of past clippings. He found Pendergast's conviction--thirteen months previous. He found, the preceding month, Pendergast's arrest--a brief report, much as he'd remembered, containing few details. Further back, spaced irregularly over a period of three years, he found a sequence of unsolved forgeries that had victimized several of the oldest families and business establishments of the capital city; these usually involved illegal transfers of title, followed by cash redemptions before the victims ever knew of the transactions. Lastly, he found what he'd hoped for, what had germinated as a vague reminiscence in the back of his mind: a quotation from a city detective who'd speculated publicly that the mastermind behind the false papers in the unsolved cases "has to be someone keenly intimate with the nature of legal documents."
  
Forty minutes later, the two sleuths were out the door, Harper with a folder of clippings and notes under an arm. "There's one other place we have to go," he said. "Have you ever been inside the police station?"

Her face beamed in wonderment. What a great adventure this visit with her uncle was turning out to be!

Harper left the bundle of mischief in the unhappy care of the officer at the desk while he conferred with Dempsey, the detective on weekend duty. At first unwilling to share information, the big policeman loosened his tongue when it became apparent Harper had corroborative details of possible use to his own career. Apart from that, the reporter for The Challenge had done Dempsey a favor or two in previous cases, choosing not to publish revelations of certain oversights the young detective had committed.

"He had a stash," the reporter stated. "Am I correct?"
  
Dempsey shrugged. "That's not exactly what we would classify as delicate information. Of course he had a stash. His take from his last job was no more'n a hundred-fifty dollars. But he had more from other operations. Lot more."
  
"Thousands?"

"Tens o' thousands." The detective immediately wished he could have back that bit of volunteered intelligence. He shook a finger in the reporter's face. "See that you remember our agreement. All this is off the record."
  
"Certainly it's off the record, as long as you keep your promise to alert me at least one publication cycle before you make any arrest. That's our agreement. You're aware of our deadline schedules."

Dempsey nodded begrudgingly.

"Why wouldn't his backers be privy to where he hid his stash?" Harper wondered. "I don't understand that. They could have made off with every penny while he was behind bars."

"'Cause they don' know where it is, no more'n we do. He's too smart. Besides, if they cut 'im out, he'd expose 'em. Anyway, they trusted 'im. He wasn't just the perpetrator; he was their accountant, practically their banker. He'd stow the money an' pay 'em in installments. That way none o' his bosses could get careless an' make a big bank deposit or buy somethin' outlandish right after they pulled one o' the jobs, and draw attention."

Harper pondered. "You've been watching him?"

The big officer sighed. "I think he got to the stash before we got on 'im, and divvied it up before we realized what he was doin'. In the last two weeks he's paid calls to half the business offices in the city--includin' the digs o' three city councilmen. 'Course, they ain't all in it. Operation wasn't big enough for that. Most o' those calls were unrelated. He mighta just been droppin' in to say hello to some ol' crony, maybe a clerk or a secretary who'd slipped him confidential information, lettin' 'em know he's out 'n' about again. Or"--Dempsey leaned forward and whispered--"if you want my real opinion, some o' those visits was decoys." He nodded intimately to the question on Harper's brow. "I'm almost certain he knows we're taggin' 'im."
  
"So what do you intend to do?"

"Keep lookin' in after 'im, any place he makes a purchase. See"--Dempsey leaned forward again--"we can trace some o' the money."

"From his last job?"

"No. From one o' the big jobs, month or two before that one. Bank clerk remembered the draw on the fraudulent note. They'd just gotten in some fresh currency, and that's what was paid out to whoever cashed that note. We've got most o' the serial numbers."

"And none of it's turned up yet?"

"Nope, not the first fiver--it was all in fives and tens."

"So you're checking behind Pendergast to see if he spends it?"

"It's the best we can do, for now."

"What if it's all in the hands of his backers? They could have spent every dollar by now. They could have spent it, in fact, before he ever went to prison."

"Well, now," Dempsey said acidly, "it would be nice if we knew who to follow. We can't be trailin' every man in Columbia who sports a bowtie an' a wallet."

Harper wrote a name on a slip of paper and pushed it toward the detective. "Try him."

Dempsey raised an eyebrow at the name. "You sure?"

"No. But it would be an interesting exercise for you, I believe."

A chilly drizzle had freshened to a steady downpour as the writer walked back to his lodgings with his niece under a broad black umbrella. Harper cautioned her, "I'm afraid your friend Katherine soon may be receiving some sad news." To Lora's questioning frown, he answered, "I have no details yet. I might predict, though, that her parents may not be taking that dreaded trip. Would that make you happy?"

"Oh, yes!--as long as Katherine is all right." She broke from the canopy and skipped several irresistible puddles.

"She'll be all right, I think."

* * *

Just four days later, The Challenge broke one of the most sensational South Carolina crime stories of the year. Harper was in his element, describing methodically and without embellishment the arrests of nine men--including some of the best-known names in the Columbia business community--and the long history of events leading up to them. Roald Pendergast, a professional criminal recently released after a year's servitude for forgery, was the operative of an unprecedented scheme to embezzle dormant but valuable homes and acreage. Pendergast's backers, or "silent accomplices," included a prominent lawyer, a city councilman, a county court clerk, a bank teller and several merchants and professional men--including one of the co-owners of a rival newspaper, The Eastern Sun.
  
Apparently, these respectable civic leaders, whom city detectives had dubbed the "Swindlers Circle," would identify obscure but lucrative properties, half forgotten in archaic trusts, ripe for the taking. Once these easy pickings had been agreed upon, Pendergast was the "picker." The percentages of the ring's profit divisions had not been revealed, but it was believed Pendergast received at least a double share. After years in concealment, much of the money only now, with Pendergast's release from prison, was being distributed--and many thousands of dollars were as yet unaccounted for.
  
Sweeney had no accolade to bestow upon his brother-in-law. "I don't suppose you'd care to reveal to your editor how you happened to get onto this in front of everyone else?" was Sweeney's only dry remark.
  
Harper slowly shook his head. "My original source," he said without expression, "was an individual of whose involvement I'm certain you would vehemently disapprove."

A week later, as further details of the Swindlers Circle continued to emerge, it occurred to Harper that he labored under a great unpaid debt. He dispatched a note round to his sister's home late one morning; an hour later a reply came back to The Challenge newsroom; and that evening, a few minutes earlier than usual, the crime reporter was gathering his papers to leave.
  
"Where are you off to so fast?" asked Donnabelle Ropp, the civic reporter. "Some dark, dangerous scoop?"

"Another 'Circle'!" joked a colleague. "This one involves the governor, I hear."

"I have," Harper said pleasantly, "a social engagement."

All eyes turned to the crime writer. "Not in female company?" Ropp posed, feigning shock.

"Yes indeed!" Harper replied. "With one of the very most cunning of your sex."

Ropp's affected incredulity turned genuine. Harper--in courtship at middle age? She and her associates exchanged dubious gawks.

It was not difficult for the little band of prying Challenge staff writers to locate Harper at dinner. Columbia's selection of romantic cafes was not a lengthy one. They spied him at the very best: the Poinsett. He was seated at a secluded, candlelit table for two beside a small window, removed from the main dining chamber. Staring in from the dark street, the journalists watched in bewilderment as the singular senior writer laughed and gestured convivially with a sprightly, velvet-clad child of about ten. The strange couple were being served a most unusual second course, by special request: salad sans lettuce, with extra cherry tomatoes and sweet dressing, and a side of peach jelly on sourdough rolls.


South Carolina author/editor DANIEL ELTON HARMON (www.danieleltonharmon.com) has written more than thirty nonfiction books. Recently published by Chelsea House are NIGERIA and SUDAN, two of his six volumes in the "Exploration of Africa" series. He is associate editor of SANDLAPPER: THE MAGAZINE OF SOUTH CAROLINA and editor of THE LAWYER'S PC, a technology newsletter. THE CHALK TOWN TRAIN AND OTHER TALES, due from Trafford Press in the fall of 2001, is the first of his series of short story collections featuring Harper the crime reporter.

Copyright (c) 2001 Daniel Elton Harmon