Cogan's Trade

“Offhand,” the driver said, “no. Never heard of a Mitch.”

“Mitch’s all right,” Cogan said. “He’s a guy I know. Now, you take Mitch, he’s a real gentleman. I’ve seen Mitch drop a grand on one race. And Mitch, he’s about, oh, I du

“I was down to Florida there, last winter? Going again this year. Hialeah. Mitch’s in town, he’s staying over to that place that the two guys had that just got hooked with Lansky there. I see Mitch at the track. I ask him, what’s good. And he’s got a few things, he tells me: ‘You know me, now, Jackie. Wasn’t for me, some guy’d have to invent losers, the tracks’d go out of business.’ He knows everybody, the jocks, the hot-walkers, everybody. They all tell him. ‘They all talk to me,’ he says, ‘and I listen to them, and I always take their advice and I always go home losers. I’m a lousy horse-player, is all. You can have what I got if you want it. I ever get cancer, call me up and I’ll give you some of that, too, and you’re such a jerk you’ll probably take it.’ I take what he’s got. We lose. We go out that night, is he pissed? Not Mitch. He’s just a great guy, is all. ‘I been doing this a long time,’ he tells me. It’s not like when I went out, I didn’t know what’s go

“The Squirrel,” Cogan said, “he can’t do that. He loses and everything he loses, he can’t afford to lose, and he gets all edgy. He gets nervous. He starts walking around. He’s go

“Can’t live on thirty thousand,” the driver said.

“My friend,” Cogan said, “Squirrel couldn’t live on ten million. If he got it, he’d lose it.”

“Well,” the driver said, “it’s too bad he had to lose at the card game.”

“He didn’t,” Cogan said. “He won there. He was only there twice. He had any sense, he should’ve kept going back there. He was the only guy in the place that could come close to knowing anything. The guys he was playing against’re bigger shits’n he is. He actually won, the two times he was there, about a thousand, eight hundred or so both times. Which of course for the Squirrel’s not even carfare.

“A guy I know,” Cogan said, “told me, Joh

“What’d he do?” the driver said.

“Robbed a bank,” Cogan said. “It was the same thing. He robbed the same bank twice. Actually got away with it once. And then he did it again. He was too far i

“So he sets it up again,” Cogan said, “and those dummies go back in, the people in the bank’re starting to think they’re go

“Yes,” the driver said, “as a matter of fact, I have.”

“Okay,” Cogan said, “Mattie’s one of them. Now there’s only one thing wrong with Mattie, which a guy might expect, he’s got to have Squirrel think up things for him to do, and that’s that he’s fuckin’-A-number-one stupid. So he robbed a bank, right? And he’s in a school zone or something, is he being very careful and everything? Not him. He’s doing close to ninety and they got this lady cop there that’s kind of against that, and she waves him down. And the dumb shit stopped. She hasn’t got no cruiser, she hasn’t got no gun, he’s got this car if they find it the only thing they’re go

“What’d the Doctor do?” the driver said.

“Three to five,” Cogan said. “He was as pissed off as they were. Thought he was go

“Good deal for the Doctor,” the driver said. “He must’ve gotten out some time ago, then.”

“Three or four years ago, I guess,” Cogan said.

“He wasn’t in on this,” the driver said.

“No,” Cogan said.

“You’re sure of that,” the driver said.

“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” Cogan said.

“Because he asked me to ask you about that,” the driver said.

“You can tell him, I’m very sure,” Cogan said.

“Because he never okayed anything on the Doctor,” the driver said.

“Is that so?” Cogan said.

“That’s so,” the driver said. “Told me that himself, when he asked me to ask you.”

“Of course some times,” Cogan said, “a guy’ll get a guy, and the guy’ll think, the man wants it. The guy hasn’t got no way of checking, you know. You just assume that.”

“I understand,” the driver said. “This was merely something I wanted to suggest, that he wanted me to suggest. Mattie having worked with people and all. Just a question.”

“Of course everybody’s got his own way of doing business,” Cogan said.

“Of course,” the driver said.

“Now, aside from the Squirrel,” Cogan said, “we got the two kids. One of them’s a guy that Squirrel had on the bank robberies. That one I’m sure of. The other one, I’m picking up some stuff on him, I think, but I’m not sure yet. The guy I’m talking to, he swears it’s this particular kid, but I don’t know.”