The Girl with the Long Green Heart

One

When the phone rang I was shaving. I put my razor down and walked across the room to pick up the phone on the bedside table.

A woman’s voice said, “It’s eight-thirty, Mr. Hayden.”

I thanked her and went back to finish shaving. I put on a plain white shirt and the good blue suit I had bought in Toronto. I picked out a dark blue tie with an unobtrusive below-the-knot design and tied it three times before I got the knot as small as I wanted it. I gave my shoes a brief rubdown with one of the hotel’s hand towels, got the day’s first cigarette going, and went over to my window to have a look at the city.

It was my first real look at Olean. I had gotten into town the night before on a puddle-jump flight from Toronto to Buffalo to Olean. My cab ride in from the airport had been less than a scenic tour. At that hour the city looked like any small town with everything closed. There were two movie houses, the Olean and the Palace, and one had already turned off its marquee. A few bars were open. I had gone straight to the Olean House and straight to bed.

Now, in daylight, the town still had little to set it apart. My room was on the third of four floors, and my window looked out across North Union Street. The Olean Trust Company was directly across the street, flanked by a chain five-and-dime and a small drugstore. The street ran to eight lanes, with cars parked at angles to the curb on both sides of the street. Most of the parking spaces were taken.

On the extreme right, I could just see the Exchange National Bank building. It was eight stories tall, twice as high as any of the buildings near it. Wallace J. Gunderman had an office in it, on the sixth floor.

I went downstairs. There were no messages for me. The gray-haired woman at the desk asked me if I would be staying another night. I said that I would. I picked up the local paper at the newsstand in the lobby and carried it into the hotel coffee shop. Businessmen and secretaries sat around drinking morning coffee. I took a table in front, near a group of lawyers who were discussing a hearing on a zoning ordinance. I ate scrambled eggs and bacon and drank black coffee and read everything of interest in the Olean Times-Herald. Gunderman’s name kept cropping up. He was on a committee of the City Club, he was heading up the Men’s Division of the United Fund campaign — that sort of thing.

I had a second cup of coffee and signed the check. Outside, the air was warm and clear. I walked the length of the block, turned and came back to the hotel. It was nine-thirty when I got back to my room. I looked up Gunderman’s number in the phone book and gave it to the hotel operator.

A girl said, “Mr. Gunderman’s office, good morning.”

“Mr. Gunderman, please.”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“John Hayden. I represent the Barnstable Corporation.”

There was a very brief pause, a short intake of breath. “One moment, please,” she said. “I’ll see if Mr. Gunderman is in.”

I lit a cigarette while she saw if Mr. Gunderman was in. When he came on the line he sounded younger than I had pictured him. His voice was deep and resonant.

“Mr. Hayden? Wallace Gunderman. I don’t believe I know you, do I?”

“No,” I said. “I’m representing the Barnstable Corporation, Mr. Gunderman, and I wondered if I could drop by and see you sometime this afternoon.”

“You’re here in Olean?”

“That’s right.”

“Could you tell me what you want to see me about?”

“Of course. It’s our understanding, sir, that you own a fairly sizable tract of land in northern Alberta. Our corporation is a Toronto-based outfit interested in—”

“Oh, so that’s it.”

“Mr. Gunderman—”

“Now you wait a minute, sir.” He was a few decibels short of a full-fledged roar. “You must think I’m an awfully stupid man, Mr. Hayden. You must think that just because a man’s been played for a sucker once he can be raked over the same coals forever. I took a neat beating on that Canadian land. I made the mistake of listening to one of you smooth-talking Canuck salesmen and I fell for his line like a ton of bricks. I shelled out one hell of a lot of money for some of the most useless land in the world.”

I let him go on. He was doing nicely.

“That was five years ago, Hayden. It took me a while to quit being ashamed of myself. I’m not ashamed any more. I was a damn fool. I’ve been a damn fool before, and I’ll probably be one again before I die, but I’ve never been enough of a damn fool to make the same mistake twice. You people took me once. You taught me a lesson, and goddamn it, I learned that lesson. I’m not in the market for another patch of moose pasture, thank you.”

“Mr. Gunderman—”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t you get the message? I’m not interested.”

“Just let me say one thing, Mr. Gunderman.”

“You’re just wasting your time. And my time as well.”

“There’s just one point of misunderstanding, Mr. Gunderman, and as soon as we clear the air on that I think you’ll see my point.”

“I already see your point.”

I took a breath. I said, “Mr. Gunderman, you seem to think that I’m interested in selling you land at inflated prices. That’s not my intention. I’m here in Olean to make a firm offer on behalf of the Barnstable Corporation to buy your land from you.”

There was a fairly long pause. I put my cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Did I hear you right, Mr. Hayden?”

“I said I’m here to make you an offer for your land in Alberta,” I said. “We wrote to you not long ago but never received an answer.”

“I never got that letter.”

“I’m sure it was sent. In any case—”

“Just a minute. Maybe my girl can dig up that letter. That’s the Barnstable Corporation?”

“Yes.”

I held on while he sent his secretary on a search of the files. I had a fresh cigarette working by the time he was back on the line. His voice was pitched a lot lower now. He sounded almost apologetic.

“I have that letter after all,” he said. “It’s from someone named Rance.”

“Douglas Rance. That’s our company president.”

“And you are—”

“Just a hired hand, Mr. Gunderman.”

“I see.” He thought that over. “According to this letter, you people want to purchase my Canadian holdings for a combination preserve and hunting lodge. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I can’t understand how I overlooked this letter, Mr. Hayden. I must have thought it was a solicitation of one sort or another and just tossed it aside, and then it wound up in the files. I’m sorry for the attitude I took before.”

“Oh, I can understand that.”

“You could if you’d ever been taken by those swindlers. No reflection on your country, Mr. Hayden, but there are a lot of smooth operators based on your side of the border. You say you want my land for a hunting lodge?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, I’d like to give this some thought before I see you. You said you’re here in town. Where can I reach you?”

“I’m at the Olean House. Room 309.”

“You’ll be there for the next hour or so?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll call you within the hour.”

He called at ten. I picked up the phone on the third ring. This time around he was slicker than oil. Was I free for lunch? I said I was. Could I drop over to his office around noon? I could. He was at the Exchange Bank building, and did I know where that was? I did. Well, good. He would see me then.

I got to his office a few minutes after twelve. His name was listed on the building directory downstairs, just his name and the number of his office. I rode an outmoded elevator to the sixth floor and found my way around the corridors to a door with his name on it. It opened into an anteroom. There were bookshelves and a magazine rack to the left. On the right side was a steel desk with a girl behind it.

Quite a girl. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown and there was a lot of it. Her eyes were large, and just a shade lighter than her hair. She looked up from her typewriter and gave me a smile filled with sugar and spice and everything nice. Could she help me?

“I’m John Hayden,” I said. “I’ve an appointment with Mr. Gunderman.”

The eyes brightened and the smile spread. She looked as though she wanted to say something. Her tongue flicked over her lips and she got to her feet.

“Just one moment,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. Gunderman that you’re here.”

She walked through a door marked Wallace Gunderman Private. I watched her go. She was worth watching. She was a tall girl, almost my height, and she had a shape to carry the height. Slender enough to be called willowy, but a little too full in bust and hips for that tag. She wore a skirt and sweater. Both were probably too tight. I wasn’t about to complain.

The door closed after her. When it opened a second time she led Wallace J. Gunderman out of it. She stepped aside and he came across the room to shake my hand.

“Mr. Hayden? I’m Wally Gunderman. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”

“Not at all.”

“Good,” he said. He was a tall, thick-set man with iron-gray hair and bushy eyebrows and a sunlamp tan. He could have posed for Calvert ads. “Have you met my secretary, Mr. Hayden? Mr. Hayden, this is Evelyn Stone. Evvie’s the girl who managed to bury your Mr. Rance’s letter in the files.”

“I was sure you’d seen that letter, Mr. Gunderman—”

“And maybe I did, dear. At least you didn’t throw it away.” He laughed. “But we can forget that now. I’m just glad you people didn’t let the matter drop after one letter. Do you like Italian food, Mr. Hayden? Because there’s a pretty good Italian place around the block.”

“Sounds fine to me.”

“Good,” he said.

His car was parked in front of the building in a spot reserved for him. It was a Lincoln Continental, a convertible, dove-gray with lighter gray leather upholstery. He had the top down.

“Beautiful weather these past few weeks,” he said. “We usually get a lot of rain in September, but so far it’s held off. How’s the weather in Toronto?”

“Cooler than this, but nice.”

“And I suppose the winters are equally bad here and there. You have it colder, but we get a little more in the way of snow. You don’t have a Canadian accent. Are you originally from Canada?”

“Not even close. I was born in New Mexico, near the Colorado border.”

“Been in Canada long?”

“Not very long.”

We made exciting talk like that while he drove the few blocks to the restaurant. It was called Piccioli’s. There was a small bar, and the tables were covered with red checkered cloths.

“Not fancy,” Gunderman said, “but clean, and the food’s good.”

They had a fairly good crowd for lunch. Gunderman had a booth reserved and we went to it. A slim dark-eyed waitress brought us drinks, Scotch with water for him and a martini for me. Gunderman said the Italian specialties were very good, but that I could get a decent steak if I wanted one. I ordered lasagna. He had one of the veal dishes with spaghetti.

The lunch conversation was small talk that avoided the main issue very purposefully. I followed his lead. We talked about Canada, about his one trip to the American Far West. He asked me if I’d been to Olean before, and I said I hadn’t.

“It’s not a bad little town,” he said. “A good place to live. We’re a little off the beaten track here. Up along the Mohawk Valley, the Erie Canal route, it’s one town after another. You’ve got a lot of growth there but you’ve got all the problems of that kind of growth, the slums, everything. We don’t have that kind of growth but at the same time we’re not stagnant, not by a long shot. And there are a few stagnant areas in this state, John. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the central part of New York State, but you take a county like Schoharie County, for example — why, they’ve got less population today than they did during the Civil War. We’ve had steady growth, not tremendous growth but just healthy growth.”

We were John and Wally now. He added cream to his coffee and settled back in his chair.

“I certainly can’t complain,” he said. “This town has been good to me.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?”

“All my life. Oil made this town, you know. You could figure that from the name of the city. Olean, like oleaginous or oleomargarine. Oil. The oil fields here and in northern Pennsylvania were producing around the time that Oklahoma was just a place to dump Indians. And the wells still pump oil. Secondary and tertiary extractions, and not as important as they were once, but that oil still comes up.”

“Is that where you got started?”

“That’s where the money first came from.” He grinned. “My father was a wildcat driller, bought up oil leases and sank holes in the ground. He was in the right spot at the right time and he made his pile and it was a good-sized pile, believe me. I still see income from wells that he drilled.”

“I see.”

“But I never did much with oil myself. My dad died, oh, it’s about thirty years now. I wasn’t thirty myself then and there I was, his sole heir, with a guaranteed income from the wells and a pretty large amount of principal, and this with the country right in the middle of the Depression. Everybody figured me to move to New York or some place like that and just live on income. I surprised them. Know what I did?”

“What?”

“I started buying land like a crazy man. Scrap land and wasteland and farm land that wasn’t paying its way and timber land with the hardwood growth all cut and gone. Land nobody wanted, and this was in the thirties when land was so cheap you could have had an option on the whole state of Nebraska for maybe a dollar and fifty cents. That’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. Land was cheap, and the craziest damned fool in creation was the man interested in buying it. At least that was what people thought. Hell, there would be a piece of land where the oil rights had already been sold, and where there was no oil there anyway, nothing but rocky soil, and I would go and buy it, and you can’t blame the people for thinking I was out of my mind.”

“But I guess you made out all right, Wally.”

He laughed like a volcano erupting. He was enjoying himself now. “Well, I guess they found out who was crazy,” he said. “One thing about land, there’s only so much of it in the world, and there won’t ever be more. Every year there’s more people in this country, and every year there’s more industry and more housing and more of everything else, and there’s always the same amount of land. And the best thing to buy for the long pull is the land nobody wants. You buy it and hang onto it and sooner or later somebody wants it, and then he has to pay your price for it. When they were looking to put up a shopping plaza east of the city, it was my land they picked for it. When they decided to cut Route 17 as a four-lane divided highway from Jamestown to New York, I was sitting with the land on either side of the old two-lane road. And when some smart boys figured out the money they could make growing Christmas trees on scrub land, and they wanted to buy in this area, I had a hell of a lot of land for them to pick from, that I’d bought awful damned cheap. So you can say I made out all right, John. There’s some chunks of land around here that I bought twenty years ago and couldn’t get my money out of today, but there aren’t many like that. And I’m happy to keep them anyway. They’ll pay off, sooner or later.”

I made the appropriate comment and started on my coffee. He lit up a cigar and chewed the end of it for a few minutes.

Then he said, “That’s what burned me the most about that tract of moose pasture up in Canada. Here those sharpshooters took me at my own game. Here I am in the land business, buying land cheap all over the Southern Tier, and they sell me useless land at such a high price I still can’t believe I went for it. You know about that promotion?”

“Just how much land you hold, and that you’re supposed to have paid a pretty stiff price for it.”

“Stiff.” He finished his coffee. “You don’t know the half of it. I got a fast-talking sharpie who called me on the phone and went on about uranium strikes in the area and how his real estate brokerage house wanted to turn over a lot of land in a hurry, and how the uranium rights were sure to sell on a terrific royalty arrangement, and he sent along just enough in the way of promotional material to make me convinced I was getting in on the ground floor of the greatest bargain since the Dutch bought Manhattan Island. I went for it like a fish for a worm. Except it wasn’t even a worm on that hook, it was a lure, and when I bit on it I was hooked through the gills and back out again. All that money for some acreage I could graze reindeer on, if I had some reindeer.”

“Didn’t you have any legal recourse?”

“Not a bit. That was the hell of it. Everything they did was legal. They were contracting to sell me land, and they sold it, and I bought it, and it was mine and my money was theirs and that was that. I don’t think they could have pulled it off in the States. But Canada’s a little more lenient when it comes to government regulation. They get away with murder up there.”

He shook his head. “But I’m running off at the mouth. Anyway, I guess we’re back to the subject that got us here in the first place. We’re talking about my stretch of land. You want to buy it, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I won’t say it’s not for sale. What kind of an opening offer did you have in mind?”

“I believe there was a figure mentioned in Mr. Rance’s letter,” I said carefully.

“There was, yes, but I thought it was just a feeler. There was an offer of five hundred dollars.”

“Well that’s what I’m prepared to offer, Wally.”

He grinned. “As an opening offer?”

“As a firm price.”

The grin faded. “That’s a hell of a figure,” he said. “If you had any idea what that hunk of property cost me—”

“Yes, but of course you paid an inflated price for it.”

“Still and all, I sank all of twenty thousand dollars into that land. There’s an even seventy-five hundred acres of it, most of it in Alberta but a little chunk edging into Saskatchewan. That’s better than eleven square miles. Closer to twelve square miles, and you want to steal it for five hundred dollars.”

“I wouldn’t call it stealing, exactly.”

“Well, what would you call it?” He ducked the ash from his cigar and rolled the cigar between his thumb and forefinger. His hands were very large, the fingers blunt. “That’s about thirty dollars for a square mile of land. Well, more than that. Let me figure a minute—”

He used a pencil and paper, calculated quickly, looked up in triumph. “Just a shade over forty dollars a square mile,” he said. “That’s pretty cheap, John. Now I wouldn’t call that a high price.”

“Neither would I.”

“So?”

I took a breath. “But Barnstable’s not looking to pay a high price,” I said. I looked at him very sincerely. “We want to buy land cheaply, Wally. We can use this land — we have a client who’s interested in a hunting preserve in that area, but we have to get that land at our price.”

“When you figure my cost—”

“But at least this enables you to get out of it once and for all, and to cut your loss. Then too, once you’ve sold the land you can take your capital loss on it for tax purposes.”

He thought that over. “I had an argument with my tax man on that a few years ago,” he said slowly. “You know what the guy wanted me to do? Wanted me to sell the works to someone for a dollar. Just get rid of it for nothing so that I’d be transferring title and I could list a twenty-thousand-dollar loss. I couldn’t see giving something away like that, not something like land. I’d rather keep the land and pay the damn taxes.”

“Well, we would be paying you more than a dollar.”

“Five hundred dollars, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

He called the waitress over and ordered another Scotch and water. I joined him. He remained silent until the girl brought the drinks. It was past one now, and the lunch crowd had thinned down considerably. He sipped his drink and put it down on the table and looked at me.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “At that price I just wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I think you’ll have trouble finding anyone who’ll be inclined to take the kind of offer you’ve made me.”

“There’s a lot of land up in that neck of the woods,” I said.

“Yes, I know that.”

“And we’ve had little difficulty buying it at our price so far,” I went on, and then stopped abruptly and studied the tablecloth in front of me.

“You’re interested in more than just my land, then.”

“Well, that’s not what I meant to say. Of course we’ve bought occasional parcels of this type of property before, but—”

“For hunting lodges.”

“Actually, no. But we’ve had occasion to purchase unimproved land in the past, and in cases like this, we’re usually able to get the land at a low price. When you’re dealing with worthless land—”

“No land is useless.”

“Well, of course not.”

His eyes probed mine. I met his glance for a moment, then averted my eyes. When I looked back he was still scanning my face.

“This is beginning to interest me,” he said finally.

“I had hoped it would.”

“And one thing that interests me is that you haven’t upped your offer. I figured from the beginning that if you would open with an offer of five hundred you’d be prepared to go to double that. But you haven’t given me any of the usual runaround, about calling the home office and trying to get them to raise the ante. None of that. You’ve just about got me convinced that five hundred is as high as you intend to go.”

“It is.”

“Uh-huh. Anything important happening in Canada that I don’t know about?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean that it would be quite a joke if it turned out that there really was uranium on that land, wouldn’t it?”

“I assure you—”

“Oh, I’m sure there isn’t.” I was obviously uncomfortable, and he was enjoying this. “I’m sure the land is just as rotten and deserted as it always was. But I am interested, and not so much in your offer as in what lies beneath it. That’s something that I find very interesting.”

“Well,” I said.

He finished his drink and put the glass down. “This whole situation is something I’d like to give a certain amount of thought to. Five hundred dollars is an almost immaterial factor here as far as I’m concerned. The question is what I want to do with the land, whether or not I want to own it. You can appreciate that.”

“Then you might consider selling?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. He was not very convincing. “But the thing is, I want to think it over. Were you planning to stay overnight in Olean?”

“I was going to fly back this evening.”

“You ought to stay,” he said. “I’ll tell you, I’d like to have dinner with you tonight. I have to get moving now, I’m late for an appointment as it is, but I’d like to go over this with you and perhaps get a fuller picture. It might be worth your while if you spent an extra day here.”

“Well—”

“And there’s a really fine restaurant out on Route 17. Marvelous food. Could you stay?”

He talked me into it. He signaled the waiter and took the check. I didn’t fight him for it.

I divided the rest of the afternoon between a barbershop down the street from the hotel and a tavern next door to the barbershop where I nursed a Würzburger and watched a ball game on television. When I got back to the hotel there was a message for me to call Mr. Gunderman. I went to my room and called him.

“Glad I reached you, John. Listen, I’m in a bind as far as tonight is concerned. There’s a fund-raising dinner that I’m involved in and it slipped my mind completely this afternoon. Then I thought I could get out of it but it turns out that I can’t. They’ve decided that I’m the indispensable man or something.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I was looking forward to it.”

“So was I.” He paused, then swung into gear. “I’ll tell you — I really did want to see you, and now I’ve gone and gotten you to stay over and all. How would it be if I sent my secretary to sub for me? I don’t know if you noticed, but she’s easy on the eyes.”

“I noticed.”

He chuckled. “I can imagine. Now look — you don’t have a car, do you?”

“No, I flew in and then took a cab. I could have rented a car at the airport, I suppose, but I didn’t bother.”

“Well, Evvie drives. She’ll pick you up at your hotel at six, is that all right? And then you and I can get together in the morning.”

“That sounds fine,” I said.

I spruced up for my date. I remembered the dark brown hair and the brown eyes and the shape of that long tall body, and I combed my newly trimmed hair very carefully and splashed a little after-shave gunk on my face. I took off the blue tie and put on one with a little more authority to it.

There was a Western Union office down the block, sandwiched in between the Southern Tier Realty Corp. and a small loan company. I got a message blank and sent a wire collect to Mr. Douglas Rance at the Barnstable Corporation, 3119 Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I wired: ALL GOES WELL. PROSPECT DUBIOUS AT FIRST BUT HAVE HOPES OF SUCCESSFUL TRANSACTION. STAYING IN OLEAN OVERNIGHT. JOHN HAYDEN.

Then I went back to the Olean House to wait for Evvie.