The Girl With the Long Green Heart (4 page)

He told me all about it. The wire con is one of the three standard long cons, and as old as you can get. You keep being surprised when it still works after all those years. He told me all the cute little details and I could tell just how much of a kick it was for him, a kick to pull it off, a kick to remember it and talk about it. In a lot of ways he was the same kid I’d known before, in love with the whole pattern of the life, in love with the whole idea of being with it. I tried to remember if I had been like that once, all enthusiasm and excitement. It didn’t seem possible.

“But that’s history,” he said. “Let me tell you what I’ve got on the stove now. You know the Canadian moose pasture bit, don’t you?”

“I worked it once.”

“That’s what I heard. How did you work it? Stock?”

“Uranium stocks.”

“You’ve heard it worked with land?”

“I know somebody was doing it that way somewhere in the East. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Just about,” he said. “It’s also just about played out, although there are still a few boiler rooms going in Toronto. I was inside of one with half a dozen phones going full-time.”

“Is that what you want to set up?”

He laughed. “No, this is nothing like that. This is quicker and neater and easier and the score is a lot bigger. This is a fresh wrinkle on the whole thing. I’ll tell you, Johnny, this is one I dreamed up all by myself. I heard this girl’s story—”

“What girl?”

“A girl I met in Vegas. I’ll get to that. I heard her story, and I got a picture of this mooch in my mind, and I just let it lay around there. I wasn’t in Vegas to line up a con and I wasn’t there for a woman, either. I never pull a job in Vegas, or anywhere else in the state. That place is strictly for gambling for me.”

“You gamble a lot?”

“I’m a high roller when I’m not working. Everybody has a weakness, Johnny. On the con or off it, everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you’ve got more than one vice. You know, I’m getting way off the track here. Let me just give you a fast picture. It’s getting late and all, and you must be pretty beat, and I’m not so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed myself. I’ll just sketch it in for you.”

He gave me just the outline. He ran through it very quickly, very sketchily. He knew what he was doing. He was working me the same way you work a mark at the beginning, the same way a fisherman works a trout. Just teasing, poking the bait around, giving a flash of it and then jerking it away before you can even make up your mind whether or not to bite. I knew I was being hustled. It didn’t bother me.

For one thing, it was impossible to dislike Doug Rance. He was too genuinely charming. A confidence man has to have one of two things going for him. He can be so tremendously charming that the mark likes him at first meeting, or he can be so obviously honest and sincere that the mark trusts him from the opening whistle. If the mooch likes you, or if he trusts you, you are halfway home; the rest is just mechanics.

Doug made it on charm. I was the other way, I was a man people were likely to trust. I don’t know why this is so, but it is. I’ve always played things that way, pushing the honest-and-sincere bit, but you can’t make it on acting talent alone.

Charm and sincerity. The best two-handed cons feature a pair of men who complement one another in this respect, one of them charming and one of them sincere. Doug wanted me in this one, and he probably knew what he was doing in picking me. The odds were that we would work well together.

I let him get all the way through the pitch and I listened to him all the way. He skipped most of the details, so it was hard to tell if the thing was as good as it sounded right off the bat. There could be snags he hadn’t thought of, rough spots he’d glossed over. On the surface, though, the thing looked beautiful.

“It’s a new one,” I told him.

“I thought it was.”

“Of course, I’ve been out of circulation for seven years. But I think you actually found something new.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes,” I said. And lit a cigarette and added, “But I’m afraid it’s not for me. I’m just not buying.”

“Oh, I know,” he said easily. “I just wanted your opinion. I wish I could have you in on it, but you can’t win them all.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to split, Johnny. I’m halfway dead. I’ve got a room over at the Mountain Lodge.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“I’m not sure. I figure I’ll be in town until tomorrow night, anyway. Maybe we’ll get together, huh?”

What a sweet soft hustler he was. I stood up. “Drop around. We’ll have lunch.”

“Fine.”

When he had his hand on the knob I gave him the first nibble. The words just came out by themselves.

What I said was, “Just for curiosity, how big do you think you’d score on this one?”

He pretended to think. “Hard to say. I know what I figured your end at.”

“Oh?”

“About thirty thou,” he said.

Three

I tried not to think about it. I listened as his car pulled away, and I blocked out the echo of his parting line, and I got undressed and crawled into bed and found out in no time at all that I wasn’t going to drop off to sleep all that easily. I flipped the light back on and killed some time working on my correspondence course homework. Actually I was taking two courses at once, one in hotel and restaurant management and one in basic accounting. I worked out four of the accounting problems before my eyes started backing up on me. I lit a fresh cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.

So I thought about some of the things I hadn’t wanted to think about. Like how long it would take to save thirty thousand dollars, and how old I would be when I had it. Fifty at the earliest, and probably a lot more like fifty-five. I was forty-two, and forty-two was still young enough for big plans and hard work, but fifty—well, fifty was a lot closer to being old. And fifty-five was closer still.

I thought about spending another ten years in that little room, scrimping and saving to beat hell. Adding up score sheets at the Boulder Bowl, grabbing quick lunches at diners and coffee pots. Dreaming through correspondence courses.

I had liked that life, too. But a man can endure many things day by day that become unthinkable when seen as a larger chunk of time. My life was all right as long as I lived it a day at a time. See it as ten years of the same thing, with Bannion selling his place to somebody else somewhere along the line, with the dream evaporating and the correspondence courses discontinued and nothing left but the habit; work and sleep and save. See it that way and the window grows bars and the door locks itself and the eight-dollar room turns itself into a cell.

Doug had left the bottle of Cutty. I let it alone. Dawn was breaking by the time I managed to get to sleep. I did not sleep well, I did not sleep long. There were dreams I don’t remember. Around nine o’clock I woke up, chilled and damp, certain at first that I was not here in my room in Boulder but back in my cell at San Quentin.

I showered, I shaved, I smoked. If only there was something really wrong with his grift, I thought. If only there was a pretty snag I could catch around my finger. If only I could see the flaw. But on the surface it looked too very perfect, with a big payoff for maybe three months of work, and with no chance at all of a foul-up that could lead me back to a cell.

Rance showed up at eleven-thirty. “I’m catching a four o’clock plane from Denver,” he said. “I’ll have to drive back there. Let’s grab lunch now.”

“Come on in and sit down.”

“Oh?”

“I want to hear the whole thing,” I said. “It sounded too damned good last night. I want to prove that there’s something wrong with it.”

“And if there isn’t?”

“Well.”

He took it from the top. It went back five years to a time when a few of the New York boys were working a boiler-room operation out of Toronto. It was a standard high-pressure operation with one important difference. Instead of peddling uranium or oil stocks, or mineral rights, the promoters were selling parcels of raw land itself. They bought up the land for thirty to fifty cents an acre and sold it for three or four dollars an acre.

“Goldin and Prince were on top of this one,” he said. “You’ve got to remember when this was, just five years ago. The uranium stock con got its first big play right after the war, and then it came back strong during the Korean thing and for about a year after that. By the time it ran its course everybody had a little bell inside his head that rang when you mentioned the words
Canadian uranium stocks
. The newspapers and magazines ran features on the con and Washington circulated lists of bad stocks and everybody got wise, even the thickest marks around. But Goldin and Al Prince had a gimmick working for them. They weren’t selling stocks. They were pushing the land itself, and that let the mark see that he was getting something. You tell him he can buy a thousand acres of valuable land for three or four thousand dollars and he doesn’t see how he can get taken. The land is real, it’s there for him to look at. Half the time he doesn’t know what a thousand acres is. All he knows is that it’s a lot of land. It’s maybe four hundred dollars worth of land that he’s paying ten times actual value for, but he doesn’t know this.”

I said it was expensive—Goldin and Prince had to buy the land in the first place, and that cost more than printing up stock certificates.

“They didn’t care. They were operating on the mooches’ money, buying the land after they’d collected, and they didn’t mind knocking ten percent off the top to cover the cost of the land itself. Besides, the whole thing came out perfectly legal. They promised land and they delivered land, and any extra promises were verbal and uncollectable. It worked for them. They sold half of Canada, or close to it. Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, some tracts in the Yukon and in the Northwest Territories.”

I told him to go on. “All right,” he said. “That’s the background. Now you’ve got a bunch of marks around the country who own land they paid maybe ten times too much for. They’re stuck with it. Right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Now we skip to this frail I found in Vegas. She’s a secretary in her late twenties. For the past six years or so she’s been working for this millionaire. For about four of those years she’s been sleeping with him. All this time his wife was sick. She thought he was going to marry her when the wife finally died. A year ago the wife died.”

“And he didn’t marry her.”

“Didn’t and doesn’t plan to. She’s not too happy about this. She’s a good-looking broad; she was married once before and the marriage fell in. Now she’s stuck in a hick town working for this guy and she’d like to get the hell away from him and make a good marriage. She figures that she needs front money to do this. She wants to marry rich, and that means going where the money is and living the part. She’d like to pick up a healthy piece of change, and she’d also like to stick it into this guy and break it off, because she figures he has it coming.”

“She really expected him to marry her?”

“Yes. She was bitching about him and I started drawing her out just automatically, and she gave me a good picture of the guy. That started the wheels turning. You can see how it went. I said something about how she’d probably like to see him get taken but good, and she mentioned that he had been taken once before, when she had just started working for him. And of course it was this Canadian deal that had hooked him. He bought a nice stretch of mooseland from Capital Northwestern Development, which was what Goldin and Prince were calling themselves about that time.”

“How deep did he go?”

“Twenty or twenty-five thou.”

“Jesus.”

“Uh-huh. So now we come to the mooch himself. His name is Wallace J. Gunderman. He lives in someplace called Olean, in western New York near the Pennsylvania border. His father got rich in oil. Gunderman got richer in land. If he wasn’t so rich you’d laugh all over him, because he’ll buy any piece of land he can get at his price. He’s a nut on the subject, according to what Evvie said.”

“Evvie?”

“Evelyn Stone, that’s her name. But Gunderman. He’ll buy any piece of land, no matter how worthless it is. He started doing this about thirty years ago. He made out very well. Part of this was a matter of luck, of being in the right place at the right time and having the cash to operate on. Another part was shrewdness. He’s supposed to be a tough man in a trade.”

He went on about Gunderman. Five years ago Gunderman had gone for a minimum of twenty thousand dollars and had wound up with a chunk of scrubland with a fair market value in the neighborhood of two grand. He was rich enough to stand that sort of a loss without any trouble, but the whole thing hit him where he lived. He was proud of himself, of his head for business, and here he’d been taken in his own backyard, on a land swindle. This wasn’t easy to live down. He still owned the land and he liked to tell people that he would make out on it eventually, that any land would be valuable if you held it long enough. But he was itching to get the bad taste of that con out of his system. He had been crazy to take that kind of a beating. If he could wind up turning his loss into a profit, if he could make out nicely on that Canadian land, then he would wind up crazy like a fox.

“You can see where he stands, Johnny.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The right type of set-up—”

“And he’s there with both hands full.”

“That’s the idea. And here’s how it works, and this is all mine and I think it’s beautiful. Gunderman gets a letter making him an offer for his Canadian land. This gets his head spinning right away. Nobody’s ever been interested in this land and he can’t understand why anybody would want it. What he probably figures from the go is that there’s been a uranium strike in the neighborhood, or something like that, and he wants to find out what’s up. He checks, and nothing’s up, the land is as worthless as ever. “Then you go to see him and repeat the offer. You—”

“What am I offering?”

“About five hundred dollars.”