“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Higgins demanded. “It’s nothing to laugh about, either.”
To Jeff, it was. The manner in which Tracy Whitney had outwitted them at the airport was the most ingenius con he had ever witnessed. A scam on top of a scam. Conrad Morgan had told them the woman was an amateur. My God, Jeff thought, what would she be like if she were a professional? Tracy Whitney was without doubt the most beautiful woman Jeff Stevens had ever seen. And clever. Jeff prided himself on being the best confidence artist in the business, and she had outsmarted him. Uncle Willie would have loved her, Jeff thought.
It was Uncle Willie who had educated Jeff. Jeff’s mother was the trusting heiress to a farm-equipment fortune, married to an improvident schemer filled with get-rich-quick projects that never quite worked out. Jeff’s father was a charmer, darkly handsome and persuasively glib, and in the first five years of marriage he had managed to run through his wife’s inheritance. Jeff’s earliest memories were of his mother and father quarreling about money and his father’s extramarital affairs. It was a bitter marriage, and the young boy had resolved, I’m never going to get married. Never.
His father’s brother, Uncle Willie, owned a small traveling carnival, and whenever he was near Marion, Ohio, where the Stevenses lived, he came to visit them. He was the most cheerful man Jeff had ever known, filled with optimism and promises of a rosy tomorrow. He always managed to bring the boy exciting gifts, and he taught Jeff wonderful magic tricks. Uncle Willie had started out as a magician at a carnival and had taken it over when it went broke.
When Jeff was fourteen, his mother died in an automobile accident. Two months later Jeff’s father married a nineteen-year-old cocktail waitress. “It isn’t natural for a man to live by himself,” his father had explained. But the boy was filled with a deep resentment, feeling betrayed by his father’s callousness.
Jeff’s father had been hired as a siding salesman and was on the road three days a week. One night when Jeff was alone in the house with his stepmother, he was awakened by the sound of his bedroom door opening. Moments later he felt a soft, naked body next to his. Jeff sat up in alarm.
“Hold me, Jeffie,” his stepmother whispered. “I’m afraid of thunder.”
“It—it isn’t thundering,” Jeff stammered.
“But it could be. The paper said rain.” She pressed her body close to his. “Make love to me, baby.”
The boy was in a panic. “Sure. Can we do it in Dad’s bed?”
“Okay.” She laughed. “Kinky, huh?”
“I’ll be right there,” Jeff promised.
She slid out of bed and went into the other bedroom. Jeff had never dressed faster in his life. He went out the window and headed for Cimarron, Kansas, where Uncle Willie’s carnival was playing. He never looked back.
When Uncle Willie asked Jeff why he had run away from home, all he would say was, “I don’t get along with my stepmother.”
Uncle Willie telephoned Jeff’s father, and after a long conversation, it was decided that the boy should remain with the carnival. “He’ll get a better education here than any school could ever give him,” Uncle Willie promised.
The carnival was a world unto itself. “We don’t run a Sunday school show,” Uncle Willie explained to Jeff. “We’re flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can’t con people unless they’re greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can’t cheat an honest man.”
The carnies became Jeff’s friends. There were the “front-end” men, who had the concessions, and the “back-end” people, who ran shows like the fat woman and the tattooed lady, and the flat-store operators, who operated the games. The carnival had its share of nubile girls, and they were attracted to the young boy. Jeff had inherited his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s dark, good looks, and the ladies fought over who was going to relieve Jeff of his virginity. His first sexual experience was with a pretty contortionist, and for years she was the high-water mark that other women had to live up to.