Drawing Dead (16 page)

“I'm more concerned about what I'm going to do if I don't get the fifty-seven hundred you owe me.”

Wicky frowned. “You think small, Joe.”

Crow was getting tired of hearing his own name. “I'm a small guy, Dickie.”

Wicky shrugged and finished off his martini, closing his eyes as the last two olives slipped between his lips. It looked to Crow like the windup before a pitch. He was right. Wicky cleared his throat, squared his shoulders, and launched into it.

“Joe, did you by any chance read that article in the
Journal
about comic book collections?”

“What journal?” Crow asked.

Wicky drew back. “The
Wall Street Journal
” He frowned at Crow, sighed, and continued. “Anyway, as investments go, comics are the sexiest thing going. Last year a comic book that sold for ten cents back in 1939 went for $108,000. The first Batman and Superman comics sell for over eighty thousand each. Sotheby's, Christie's, all the big auction houses, are into collectibles now. Comic books, baseball cards, old bottles and cans, you name it. It's where the money is these days, Joe. Used to be you could make your money buying stocks, precious metals, stuff like that. These days the only real opportunities for the small investor—that's you and me—are in stuff people used to throw out.”

Crow thought about the boxes of comic books and
Mad
magazines his mother had given to the church rummage sale while he was away at college. At the time, his only concern had been whether she had dug deeply enough in the boxes to discover his collection of Playboy magazines.

Wicky was watching him, a knowing smile distorting his lips. “You're thinking about the comics you used to have when you were a kid,” he stated.

“I never used to read comics,” Crow lied. Wicky was getting alarmingly good at reading him. He yawned and looked at Dickie's Rolex. “Why don't you just give me your watch and we'll call it square, Dickie.”

“Are you kidding? This baby's worth fourteen big ones.”

“Pawn it.”

“Joe, I didn't say I couldn't come up with your money. I said I had something better. You want to hear about it?”

Crow shrugged, inviting the inevitable. The sad fact was, Wicky had him hooked on the idea of a six-figure comic book. He wanted to hear more.

“Okay,” Wicky said. “I got this deal—”

“What do you mean, you 'got' it?” Crow would listen, but he wasn't going to make it easy.

Wicky cleared his throat, threw a glance over his shoulder, leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I've got the exclusive. I'm putting a few of my best customers on this, and I'm one hundred percent invested myself. That's why I don't have any liquidity, Joe. Every nickel I could get my hands on, I put it into this deal. That's how solid it is.” He pushed his jaw forward. “Fact is, it's sold out. The only way you can get in now is for you to buy some of my units. You know anything about limited partnerships?”

“They're a device used by shady promoters to rip off investors,” Crow said.

Wicky smiled and shook his head, but his eyes stayed on Crow's face. He sat back and let his voice return to normal volume. “Only if you're buying condos in Florida or gold mines in Colorado, and even then not always. What it is, basically, is a bunch of people put together an investment pool, put the money to work for a period of time, and then cash it in. When it works it can make a lot of money for everybody. Most LPs are real estate deals—shopping centers, apartment complexes, that sort of thing—but you can put one together for whatever investment you want. You heard about that sunken treasure that was recovered off the Dry Tortugas a few years back? That was funded as a limited partnership. They sold five- thousand-dollar units to a bunch of small investors, raised about a million bucks, put together a high-tech boat and crew, and went out and found it. Two hundred ten million in gold bars and coins. Every partner became an instant millionaire. Of course, not all of them pay back quite that good.”

“Most of them don't pay back at all, the way I hear it.”

Wicky shrugged. “They used to be a better deal taxwise. Back in the early eighties. That's when you heard about all the real estate scams. The tax consequences were so attractive that nobody cared if the partnership paid off. That's history. Anyway, this deal I came across is a sure thing, and the best way we knew to put it together was as an LP.”

“Who is 'we'?”

Wicky dropped his voice down again and pushed his face across the table. “I put the package together for a couple guys I know. A couple of very sharp guys named Franklin and Jefferson.” He drummed his short fingers on the tabletop. “Industry insiders. You'll meet them. I'm going to get them to come to one of our card games.”

“Sounds illegal. How about if you just loan me your watch until you come up with the cash?”

“Nothing illegal about it. This isn't like trading stocks or commodities. These guys I met, they know the market inside and out. This comic book market is exploding. It used to be that only these nut-job collectors cared about the things, but now you got your investors, big guns, guys with real money, buying the things up. Comics you could've bought five years ago for a couple bucks are now worth hundreds each. You know what the first Spider-Man comic goes for now? Five thou.”

Spider-Man? That sounded familiar. Crow was reasonably certain that his copies had gone for a nickel each at the Church of Saint Mary annual rummage sale.

“The what?” Crow had tuned Wicky out for a moment, thinking about his lost comic books.

“That's what it's called,” Wicky said in a near whisper. “The Galactic Guardians Fund. See, there are unknown comic collections scattered all over the country, just sitting in people's attics and basements. The fund will buy these collections for two to five cents on the dollar, maybe less, then sell them either privately or through the auction houses.”

“So this whole deal is to finance some kind of comic book treasure hunt? No, thanks.”

Wicky was smiling, shaking his head. “There's more to it. They've already located a
major
unknown collection. Money in the bank.”

Melly appeared and slid two plates onto the table. Crow's walleye was curled up. It looked like a deep-fried tongue. Wicky opened his cheeseburger and squeezed a layer of catsup over the beef patty. An instant later, a frosted mug of beer landed beside his plate. He drank a third of the beer, picked up his burger and pushed it into his mouth, then continued his pitch, talking in a low voice and chewing simultaneously.

“I'll tell you how this whole deal came together, but you got to keep it to yourself, okay? A few months ago, Jefferson—that's one of the general partners—is buying a paper from this newsstand, downtown Chicago, and the newsstand guy is selling a whole stack of new comic books to this weird-looking old guy in a raincoat. I swear to God this is true. Jefferson is in the comic book business, so naturally he's interested. He tries to talk to the old man, but the guy takes off like he's scared. Just then, this CTA bus comes along and runs the old guy over. Comic books and blood all up and down Michigan Avenue.

“Now most guys would've got the hell out of there, but Jefferson hangs around and after they scrape the guy up he starts quizzing the newsstand guy. Seems the old guy was one of his best customers. He tells Jefferson that the old guy's been buying up doubles of every comic he gets in. Says he'd been doing it for years. Says he saves two copies of every new comic for the old guy. So Jefferson finds out the guy's name and where he lived. Big old house, about the only private home left in the Loop. Turns out the guy has a sister lives there. House is full of comics, all perfect condition, filed and catalogued, like a dream.

“What he finds out from the sister is, back in the thirties, this guy, name is John Jones—he was just a kid then, of course—started saving comic books, every comic book he could get his hands on, which was pretty much every comic book that was ever published from 1936 up until he got run over. He was a real nut about it, treated the things like they were sacred documents, which was unheard of back then. Who cared about a bunch of comic books? But this Jones wasn't exactly a normal kid. His sister says he used to boil his marbles every time after he played with them. Some kind of germ phobia. He lived with his sister in their parents' house, living off the trust fund their parents left them, never went outside except to go to the newsstand for more comics. His whole life he didn't do anything except buy comic books and wash his hands. Imagine it: a house full of comics, every comic ever published, in perfect condition. That's what the Galactic Guardians Fund is going to acquire. They've got the collection located and are in contact with the sister. And she's agreed to their offer.”

Crow was intrigued. “How much is this collection worth?”

“Twelve million,
minimum
.”

“Twelve million dollars' worth of
comic books
?”

“The collection is extraordinary. He had over fifty thousand titles, with two of every issue published after 1941. In perfect condition. Absolute pristine mint condition. This is a one-of-a-kind collection, absolutely without equal, Joe. You run into something like this once in a lifetime, if that. And the Galactic Guardians Fund is buying up the entire collection.”

“So you're trying to raise twelve million dollars?”

Wicky grinned and shook his head. “That's the beauty of it, Joe. The sister has agreed to sell the collection for three hundred thousand dollars in cash. We've got a purchase agreement. We've got the money. Nobody else knows about this collection. Even the sister didn't know what she had until Franklin and Jefferson contacted her.”

Crow examined Wicky's flushed face. The excitement was genuine, he was sure, but was it excitement over the investment or over the prospect of selling him on the fund?

“Why would this woman sell twelve million worth of comics for three hundred thousand dollars?”

“Are you kidding? Because she doesn't know what she's got is why.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Why should it? That's what investing is about. You buy low and sell high. Every time you buy something, the guy who's selling it thinks he's getting the sweet end of the deal. Once this old lady agrees to sell her dead brother's comic books for three hundred thousand—which, incidentally, she doesn't need—what are we supposed to do, raise the offer? All we needed to do was come up with the money, which we have. We'll be taking possession within a week. When Franklin and Jefferson came to me with this deal, I knew right away to structure it as a limited partnership. It's very clean, Joe, very sexy. Once in a lifetime. I owe you six K, right?”

Crow nodded.

“What I'm saying I'll do is, I'll transfer three units of Galactic Guardians into your name and we'll call it square.”

“What's a unit worth?”

“The payback should be sixty to eighty thousand per unit.”

Crow couldn't help thinking about the things he could do with that much money. “If it's so clean, how come they don't just borrow the money from a bank, buy the comics, and keep all the profit for themselves?” He could buy a boat. He would need one to get to the island. One of those bass boats with the fancy seats.

Dickie nodded seriously. “Good question, Joe. There are reasons why they don't do exactly that. One, the deal is complicated—”

“I thought you said it was simple.”

“It is, from the point of view of the investor. But from the point of view of negotiating a loan from the bank, it's complicated. They would have to do a formal appraisal of the comic collection, and that would create a couple of problems. For one thing, you'd have the problem of the seller finding out what her collection was really worth and backing out of the deal.

“The second reason is that bankers simply don't take comic books seriously.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Really. If they were able to get through the appraisal process, which as I explained is not a good idea anyway, they'd probably turn down the loan just because if something happened they don't want a comic collection showing up on their inventory one day. Loan officers do not like explaining that sort of thing to their superiors.

“The third reason they don't want to use a bank is that these guys want to be able to buy and sell the comics quickly, and they don't want a bunch of blue suits hanging over them asking questions. See, a collection of this size is going to flood the market, so to get full value for it, it's going to have to be sold nice and quiet. You get an institution like a bank involved—for one thing, it's going to be harder to turn the stuff around for cash, if you know what I mean.” He rubbed his thumb and middle finger together.

“Okay, so they don't go to the bank.” Crow found himself wanting to believe. He forced his skeptical side to the foreground. “It still sounds too good to be true.”

Wicky shrugged. “Deals that sound too good to be true go down every day, Joe. How do you think people get rich?”

“I always assumed they stole it.”

“Let me tell you the rest of it. The Jones collection, which is going to get you thirty times your investment, is just the tip of the iceberg. Back in the forties, this John Jones started a fan club. Over the years he built up a list of pen pals that he called the Galactic Guardians. Then, in the fifties, when these fans grew up and quit buying comics, he got disgusted and turned into a sort of hermit. According to his sister, that's the way he was headed anyway. But he kept on buying those comics. And he kept his list of pen pals.”

“Let me guess,” Crow said. “You think you're going to mine a list of pen pals that's four decades old, right? Find them and buy their old comics, right?”

“Right,” said Wicky.