The Girl With the Long Green Heart (14 page)

Oh, I could have killed him then. I could have reached through space to strangle him long-distance with the phone cord. I tried to keep all of this out of my voice while I got rid of him, and then I went downstairs and around the corner for a pint of Scotch. I came back to the room and called Evvie. A nightly habit of mine. We talked long enough for AT&T to split their stock again, and we said not a word about Gunderman or Rance or Toronto or Olean. We talked about Colorado. I left Gunderman hanging for the weekend and a day on either side of it. He left messages for me, and I ignored him. I saw every movie in Toronto. I also saw the insides of most of the bars, and looked at the bottoms of a great many glasses. I slept ten to twelve hours out of every twenty-four. There was not much else to do.

I got him at his office at a quarter after two in the afternoon. I said, “Wally, this is John. I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

He wanted to know what I meant.

“I thought there might be a way to get in on the deal, if they were going to dispose of the land. I didn’t understand their whole operation. They’re planning on selling, Wally, but they intend to move it all at once. The whole thing in one package.”

“So?”

“That adds up to quite a deal.”

“I’m not interested in nickels and dimes, John.”

“You’d go for the whole parcel?”

“At the right price, I’d grab it.”

“I’m afraid they’ve already got somebody, Wally. There’s a deal hanging on the fire.”

“With who?”

“Someone from the Midwest. A syndicate, as far as I can make out. I don’t have every last detail. I’ve been playing this very close, because I’ve had to do some detecting from the inside without letting them know what I’m after. It hasn’t been that easy.”

“Now you know I appreciate your position, John—”

I cut in on him. “But I’ve got most of the picture. I think—God, I hate to go into all of this over the phone. They plan to get completely out from under. They don’t intend to sell the land—”

“What the hell—”

“Wait a minute. They’re selling the whole corporation, the whole block of Barnstable stock. There are a lot of tax aspects, and there’s the matter of publicity. I wish I could get down to Olean and explain this more openly, but I can’t possibly get out of town now.”

“Suppose I came up there?”

“That’s what I was getting at. Could you come up here?”

“No problem.”

“Because there’s a chance . . . I’m trying to think on my feet, Wally, because I wouldn’t want you to make the trip for nothing. I hadn’t realized you might be in the market for the whole thing. It might run six figures, as far as I can tell.”

“I’m good for it. If the value’s there, John.”

“And there are other aspects, too. But there’s a fair chance that the deal is all arranged with the syndicate, and that you wouldn’t even have a chance to outbid them. Not that I think they’d be willing to work it with bidding anyway. I’m . . . listen, this is confusing as hell. Can you come up here tomorrow?”

“Why not tonight?”

“Well, I’d want to check out a few angles. I’ll tell you what. Make your flight reservations, and I’ll figure on meeting you tonight at the Royal York. If anything comes up, I’ll call you back before five o’clock. If you don’t hear from me, I’ll meet you around nine o’clock. Does that sound good?”

He told me it sounded fine.

The element of confusion was not accidental. It was there for a reason. If things were too smooth, he might begin to wonder who had greased the skids for him. But as long as I was a little uncertain as to which end was up, he didn’t have anything to be suspicious about.

Getting him to come to Toronto was basic. When you want to win a mooch, you meet him on his home ground. When you want to put him on the defensive, you take him into your own parlor and keep him off balance. Once he got on that plane, Gunderman was committing himself. As long as he stayed in Olean he could tell himself it was just an armchair exercise, one he could back away from whenever the going got rough. Every commitment of time and space and money drew him in a little deeper. The five hundred bucks he’d slipped me was a partial commitment, but he could write off that kind of money easily enough. The trip would tie him up a little tighter.

I went up to the office. Doug had gone for the day. I picked up a phone and called his apartment. “He’s on his way,” I told him.

“When’s the meet?”

“Tonight. Nine o’clock.”

“You’ll be good, won’t you, Johnny?”

“I’ll be beautiful. Want to meet him tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.” My partner was a little on the nervous side, I decided. “You think that’s rushing things?”

“It’s hard to say. I can’t be sure how he’ll go tonight. How much rope to give him.”

“Enough to tie him up tight, Johnny.” He was silent for a minute. “You play it by ear,” he said finally. “If it looks like a good idea, you arrange a meeting tomorrow, a sounding session. You see how he acts, how hungry he seems to you. If he’s a little cool about things, then just cool him down some more and send him back to Olean to sit on his money. Invent something about how you wanted him up here to give him the full picture but you can’t set up a meeting because the Chicago money is all set to make its pitch. But if he seems ripe, make it that he and I’ll get together just so he can let his interest show.” He laughed suddenly. “Here I am giving orders,” he said. “I don’t have to draw you pictures, Johnny. You know the game.”

“I know the game.”

“If he’s ready for it, I suppose tomorrow morning would be the best time. That the way you figure it?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“Sure. I should fill up the store, don’t you think? Bring in a boy or two?”

“Can’t hurt.”

“I’ll line them up. You do what you can, Johnny, and it’ll be ten-thirty at the office. He was good on the phone, huh?”

“Perfect.”

“I think we got him,” he said. “Jesus, I hope we do.”

I managed to be fifteen minutes late getting to the Royal York. I called his room from the desk. He said he would come right down, and I told him it would be better if we talked in his room. It might not be too good, I said, if anybody happened to notice us together. He probably thought I was acting a little too much like Herbert Philbrick leading three lives. But he went along with the gag, and I took the elevator to his room.

“Come on in, John,” he said, “I called room service, and we ought to have a boy coming up with some Johnny Walker Black any minute. Now don’t tell me some sharpies from the corn country are going to cut us out of this pie. I’d hate to hear that.”

“Chicago’s not exactly the corn country.”

“That where they’re from? Not gangsters, are they?”

It’s funny how a mooch can give you ideas you might never have thought of on your own. I brushed the question aside and made a note to feed the notion to Doug for future reference. Sooner or later we would need a good reason why the pending deal fell in, and that might be the germ of as good a one as any.

I started in on the main business at hand. I began by going over familiar territory. The men who owned Barnstable were not interested in long term gain. They were all important people who had seen a chance for a fast dollar with a quick turnover. They had bought a parcel of land, and now they wanted to get completely out from under, make themselves a neat hundred percent profit, and do all of this without getting any dirt on their hands. They cared enough about their reputations to take less for their holdings than they could get otherwise. That didn’t matter to them as much as the kind of deal they arranged, and the kind of people they were dealing with.

“You better slow down, John,” he said. “I think our liquor’s here.”

He got the Scotch and ice and glasses from the bellhop, signed the tab and gave the kid a buck. I let him make the drinks. We got back into the swing of things, and I watched the way he worked on his liquor. He was normally a fairly hard drinker, but he wasn’t paying the stuff much attention tonight. That meant he was intent on staying on top of things, and that in turn meant that (a) he was hot for the deal and (b) he was no longer supremely confident. I was glad of it on both counts.

“You talk about how they care what kind of people they’re dealing with,” he said. “Isn’t one man’s money as good as the next?”

“They want more than money. They want it kept quiet.”

“So? If I got a piece of a sweet deal, I wouldn’t be anxious to hire a skywriter to spread the word. Anybody who buys in is going to put a lid on things.”

“Not if they want money in a hurry.”

“I don’t follow you.”

I laid it out for him. The buyer Barnstable was looking for had to be someone who was willing to sit for a long time before he took his profit. If he started parceling the land and selling it off right away, things would come out into the open and all of this would work to Barnstable’s disadvantage. If the buyer held on for a minimum of two years, there was no problem. But it wasn’t easy to find someone who would play it that way. Lots of people might say they would keep the property intact, but then they might turn around and do the opposite as soon as the ink was dry.

“That’s one thing that occurred to me,” I said. “You might not want to tie your money up that way. At the price they want, an operator could work things so that he turned a profit in ninety days’ time. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.”

“Well, hell,” he said. “I don’t want it either!”

“You don’t?”

I let him show me just how obvious it was. Why, he pointed out, long-term holdings in cheap land were right up his alley. He was no fast-dollar operator. If any man on earth believed in holding on for the big killing, he was that man. Why, if he could buy the right kind of land and get it at the right price, he would sit on it until hell turned cold. That was what made it all so perfect. They had the deal that was perfect for him, and he was just the buyer they were looking for.

“I just don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t know what?”

“If you were only someone they knew, Wally. So much of this has to be done on trust. If they can’t trust the man they’re dealing with—”

“Dammit, don’t you think they can trust me?”

“
I
do, but they don’t know you. Now—”

“I could sell them. This Rance, is he the top dog there?”

“He runs things.”

“Suppose I met him?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Dammit, what don’t you know?” He was upset with me. I was obviously trying to put the brakes on things, and he wasn’t having any part of it. I was seeing complexities where everything was as simple as rolling off a girl. I admitted that I might be able to arrange a meeting. It would have to be quick, and I couldn’t promise anything. I knew that the deal with the Chicago interests hadn’t been finalized yet, but I couldn’t guarantee that it wasn’t in the bag for them.

“I don’t know how well it could work, Wally. The one thing they don’t want is someone who’s apt to walk in there with a pocketful of lawyers and accountants. They—”

More assurances. His accountant was a glorified bookkeeper and that was all, he told me. His accountant kept the taxes down and the books in order, but he wasn’t one of these modern morons who didn’t put a nickel in a pay toilet without checking it out first with his accountant. And he didn’t need legal advice before he took a leak, either.

I more or less knew this side of him already, through Evvie. But it was good to hear him put it into words of his own.

“What kind of money’s going to be involved in this, John?”

I told him I wasn’t sure, but it looked as though it would run between a hundred and a hundred fifty thou. I made it sound as though I didn’t believe that much money existed. That gave him the chance to play the sum down. Nothing was too expensive for the big noise from Olean. The Scrubland King.

“What kind of terms, John?”

“All cash.”

“They won’t take any paper at all?”

“Not a chance. It has to be cash. And part of it under the table.”

“Is that right?’

“I think so.”

He thought it over. “That’s not so bad,” he said. “Raises the capital gains tax on my end, but that’s a long time in the future and there’s a thousand ways to dodge that part of it. Thinking up the dodges is the part I leave to the accountants, John. They’re a whole lot cuter at that side of the game. But they don’t have the imagination for the big decisions. Take away their slide rules and they can’t tie their shoes in the morning.”

“You wouldn’t mind a cash deal?”

“Why should I mind?”

“It means tying up money.”

“When the profit is there,” he said, “a man’s a fool to worry how he ties up his money. Instead of drawing interest he takes his time and makes a profit ten times the size of interest.”

I was with him until somewhere around midnight. During the tail end of the evening we did a lot less talking and a lot more drinking. He loosened up some and worked harder on the Black Label. He had the right attitude, and as far as I could tell he had taken all the bait without finding a trace of hook so far. He was doing what we wanted. He was pushing hard to sell himself to Rance.

I had already managed to slide a few rough ones past him. I’d dropped the idea in his mind that he might do better playing his own hand instead of bringing his accountants and lawyers too far into the thick of things. This was his style anyway, but it didn’t hurt to reinforce it. And I’d set him up for the big hassle of an all-cash deal.

We had considered other possibilities. We had thought about increasing the size of the mythical corporation, inflating our sales price to around a million, taking a hundred thou in cash and paper for the balance. Doug had liked it that way. He thought Gunderman would salivate at the notion of all that profit to be handled with an outlay of a hundred thousand.

I liked it the other way. If the deal was too big, he’d want to look at it a lot harder. To Gunderman, a hundred thousand dollars was a lot less than a million, even if the cash outlay was exactly the same. We wanted to keep him in love with the deal and entranced with the possibilities, but we didn’t want him so shaky at the idea of all that money that he would take too long a look at the weak points of our house of cards.