The Girl With the Long Green Heart (11 page)

He waved all of this away with one hand. “When you’ve been in business as long as I have,” he said, “you know how to get information. And you’d be surprised how easy it is to find something out once you’ve made up your mind. When someone comes to offer me money, John, I want to know something about him. When someone wants to buy something from me, I like to know what it is he plans to do with it.” He set the cigar aside and folded his hands on the desk top. “And that still has me up in the air. You people have bought all of that land, and by God, you’ve put your hands on a hell of a lot of land. How much acreage would you say you’ve got, John?”

“I don’t honestly know,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I’ve seen quite a few people, but a large portion of our dealings have been carried on through the mails, or over the telephone. I’m only sent on the road when we don’t get anywhere through the mail. So I honestly don’t know how large the corporate holdings are, Wally.”

“But Barnstable owns quite a bit of land, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Now that’s as far as I can go with it,” he said. He sat back and scratched his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, John, I’m damned if I can figure out what you people plan to do with that land. Now I can see that you’ve been very clever about this. Not you personally, John, but your company, in hitting on this method of purchasing land. By dealing with people who’ve been cheated on this land in the first place, you’re putting yourselves in a position where you can steal it right back.”

“Not steal it,” I said. “We—”

“Figure of speech, John, but let’s not mince words. You folks are picking up that land at a hell of a lot less than it’s worth. When you offered me five hundred dollars for land I sank twenty thousand into, all I could see was the difference between five hundred and twenty thousand. Which is a hell of a difference. And I’m damn certain that’s all anybody sees when they come up against your offer. When a man overpays for a piece of property the way I overpaid for that stretch of goddamned moose pasture, all he can see is that he got taken, that he laid out money for something worthless.

“But that land’s not worthless because, damn it, no land is worthless, no matter where it is. I ought to know that if anybody should. Hell, the land I’ve bought that people said wasn’t worth a damn, and the money I made on it while those jokers thought I was acting like several kinds of an idiot—”

He launched into a long tirade while I got another cigarette going. He was bragging now, boasting about a deal he had pulled off years ago, and he seemed to like the sound of his own voice so much that I let him listen to it as long as he wanted to. During the war, it seemed, he had bought a ring of property around the perimeter of the city. He bought it cheap, and he was sitting on a whole boatload of it when the postwar housing boom hit at the end of the war. Then he had gone and done the same thing during Korea, with results almost as spectacular.

“I’m getting off the track again. What I mean, John, is that you people are buying up this land for no price at all. Now take my acreage. You offered me five hundred dollars for it, is that right?”

“Yes, and—”

“And do you want to know something? It didn’t occur to me for the longest time to stop and figure out what the right market price for that land is. I always knew it was a good sum short of what I had in the property, but I never bothered to pinpoint it. Well, I finally did, and do you know what my land actually ought to be worth?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said triumphantly. “And here you were trying to steal all of that for no more than five hundred.”

I drew myself up straight in my chair. “I don’t think you can call that stealing,” I said stiffly. “That was a bona fide offer, Wally, and whether or not you happened to like the price—”

“Now hold on.” He got up from his chair, came out from behind the desk. He gripped my shoulder and I let myself relax. “Just take it easy,” he was saying. “No one’s calling you a thief.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“Well, then, I apologize. Is that better?” I let that go. He told me he certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of me. After all, we were both Americans, weren’t we? I might be working for a Canuck outfit, but, damn it, I was a New Mexico boy, and New Mexico and Olean were a lot closer to each other than either was to Toronto, weren’t they? They weren’t on any map that I knew about, but he was talking and I let him have all the room he needed. “Here’s where it gets funny,” he said. “See, I know what this Barnstable outfit’s been doing. Damned if I don’t admire the whole operation, John. If anybody wanted to pick up land at a good price, you couldn’t ask for a better way of doing it.”

“And perfectly legal,” I reminded him.

“Oh, perfectly legal.” He smiled momentarily. “But to get back to what I was getting at. Here I’ve got the whole thing figured out, what you people are doing and all, and then I run into a snag. Because I’ll be damned if I can figure out what you intend to do with the land.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Purchase and development of western territory,” he quoted. “That’s the alleged purpose of your incorporation, John.”

“It is?”

He chuckled. “Didn’t know that yourself, did you? But that’s the way you boys worded it in your application for a charter. I’m willing to dig a little for information, see? Purchase and development. That might make a little sense, except as far as I can see you folks aren’t in any position to do any development, and developing the quantity of land you’ve bought would be one hell of an expense. You know what the total capitalization of the Barnstable Corporation is?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“No reason why you should. It happens to be fifty thousand dollars, which might sound like a good sum of money but which, believe me, is a damned small figure in an operation like this one. Why, John, I’d be willing to bet that you people have spent close to that much just on land.”

“How did you—”

“Why, as I said, John, I have my ways of getting information. Now there are various possibilities involved. You—I don’t mean you personally, I mean Barnstable—you might have set up this corporation just for purchase itself, and then you’ll do the actual development through another corporation so that you can work out a nice capital gain picture for yourselves. That’s one possibility. Or you might augment capitalization once you’ve got your land purchased, and then you’ll float a stock issue or have all the stock holders increase their investment.”

I didn’t say anything. He walked over to the window and yawned and stretched and looked at his watch and said that it looked like that time again, and could I use a drink? I thought it over and started to say that I didn’t think so.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I can use an eye-opener myself, so why not join me?”

He had one drawer of a filing cabinet set up as a makeshift bar. He brought out a bottle of very good Scotch, poured a couple ounces in each of two glasses, and added squirts of seltzer from a siphon.

“British style,” he said. “No ice. That how they drink up in Canada?”

“Well, I guess most people take ice.”

“That’s something,” he said.

We worked on our drinks. He set his down and said, “You know what bothers me? Even figuring that you’ll recapitalize after you’ve bought as much land as you want, even figuring that, I can’t make out why the hell you would want to develop that land now. What the hell can you do with it? You can’t build a row of houses out there and expect anybody to buy them. Dammit, I checked what’s planned for that area, and there’s no prospect of growth there for years and years. It’s still wasteland. It may be worth a couple hundred dollars a square mile and you’re buying it at forty dollars a square mile, so you’re certainly getting it at the right price, but what the hell are you going to do with it?”

I had some more of my Scotch and made circles on his desk top with the glass. I lit a cigarette and shook out the match.

“Wally,” I said, “why are you so interested in finding out?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I know you got interested because we expressed interest in your land. But it’s pretty obvious by now that you’re not going to sell to us, and that we wouldn’t be interested in raising our offer, so why stay excited about it?”

“You mean why poke my nose in?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way—”

“You ought to, John, because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been poking my nose into something that’s not my business. No getting around that.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” I said.

“I suppose I’ve got a reason.”

“Oh?”

He finished his drink. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes and did all those little facial tricks that were supposed to show that he was ready to get down to brass tacks, that he was prepared to talk sincerely about something of prime importance.

“John,” he said, “I smell money.”

We both paused reverently to let that sink in. He picked up his cigar and put it down again and said, “John, somebody’s setting up to make a pile of money out of a load of moose pasture. I’ve always been interested in money. And ever since I got raped by those Canadian sharpies you can bet I’ve been interested in moose pasture. If there’s a way to make a nice chunk of dough out of that land, I’d like to know about it. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

“I guess I can.”

“If you’ve ever been swindled, you know what I mean. It’s damn hard for a man to swallow his pride and say the hell with it, he’s been taken. A real man wants to get back. Not just to get even, but to come out of the whole thing smelling like a rose. And there’s something going on here with Barnstable, and I can’t get away from the feeling that there’s an opportunity here for Wally Gunderman. You blame me for being interested?”

“I don’t know what good it can do you,” I said levelly.

“Don’t you?”

“Well, frankly, no. I don’t.”

He thought it over for a moment. “Maybe if you told me a little, John. If you filled in the gaps for me, maybe we’d both know a little more where we stand.”

“Anything I know is confidential,” I reminded him. “I already told you more than I should have.”

“Now, John, you and I both know you never told me a thing.”

“Well, what I let slip to Evvie, then. Your secretary.” I swallowed. “If Mr. Rance or anybody else in Toronto learned that I had too much to drink and then shot off my mouth—”

“You didn’t say a thing I wouldn’t have found out anyway, John. And I had already decided to find out what was going on, so I would have done my digging even if you never said a word to the girl.” He winked slyly. “Besides, John, I’m not about to tell your Mr. Rance or Mr. Whittlief or anyone else about our conversations. You can trust me, John.”

I brightened a little. He took my glass and freshened both our drinks without asking. I sipped mine and he lit his cigar again and sighed heavily. I looked at him.

“John,” he said, “I don’t mind saying that I’m glad you’re the man they sent down here. There are certainly men in the world who might talk more freely than you do, but one thing is sure. When you finally do open up, I’m able to believe what you tell me. If you’re not prepared to tell the truth, why, you just don’t say anything at all, do you?”

“Uh—”

“The thing is that I feel I can trust you to play straight with me, and that’s an important thing.” He lowered his eyes. “I hope you feel the same way about me, John.”

“Of course I do.”

“Because I’m a man who deals honestly with people. If someone plays fair with me, you can bet that I’ll play fair with him. And when somebody does me a favor, or helps me out in any way, you can be damned certain that I’ll see he’s taken care of and properly. When I have dealings with a man, he has no cause to regret it, and you wouldn’t either, John.”

I think I probably looked slightly lost just then. It wasn’t all acting. He was approaching the whole question from about five different angles all at once. He had the ball, and he was damn well ready to run with it, but he wasn’t too certain where the goal posts were and he was tearing off in several directions without knowing exactly where he was headed. He wanted to win me over, and he wanted to learn what Barnstable was going to do with its land, and he wanted, somehow, to find a way to cut a piece of the pie for himself.

And I wasn’t sure how much to give him at once. He was a tricky guy. This was good—the con we had going for us would only work against a shrewd man. There’s an old maxim to the effect that you cannot swindle a completely honest man. I’m not sure this is entirely true—it would be hard to test it empirically, because I don’t think I have ever met an entirely honest man. But there is truth to it, and there is a corollary argument: You cannot pull certain cons against stupid men. In the more elaborate long cons, you need to use the mark’s native intelligence and shrewdness against him. It’s a sort of mental judo.

At any rate, I had to admire Gunderman, at least in certain respects. He was doing a good job of roping me. First he made me feel foolish for blabbing to Evvie, then he let me know that I could trust him, that he wouldn’t let Rance know what I’d done. Right away this made us co-conspirators and set the groundwork for future conspiracy. He wasn’t as smooth as he could be, and he made his own position a little too obvious, but I had to give him credit; for an amateur, he wasn’t that bad a con artist.

Now he said, “John, you don’t mind a personal question, do you?”

“I guess that depends on how personal it is.”

“Well, why beat around the bush? I’ll come right out and ask you. How much money do these Barnstable people pay you?”

I hesitated. Then I said, “Well, around two hundred a week.”

“A little less than that, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“About one-eighty?”

“How did you—”

“Well, I didn’t inquire directly, John. It came out in the wash. That’s one-eighty Canadian, and with the discount that means you’re earning something like a hundred and sixty-five a week. I’ll tell you, John, that isn’t much for someone doing the work you do. And all the traveling and responsibility.”