The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Twelve

The store was swinging in full-dressed splendor by the time I got Gunderman there. The night before, Doug had called our Manpower secretary and told her to take the day off. Then he made other calls and hired us a batch of day-workers.

With Gunderman actually coming to the office, we had to be able to stand a genuine white-glove inspection. We had to present the illusion of real activity. To do this, we needed people. And, because we were dealing strictly in illusion, we needed people who could play their assigned roles and keep their mouths shut. People who were with it.

We had two men, local grifters who were presently unemployed and who were not averse to picking up half a yard apiece for doing nothing special. One of them wore glasses and sat behind a desk jockeying a rented adding machine. The other leafed through a stack of newspapers and assorted garbage and dictated meaningless memos from time to time into a rented dictaphone.

Our Manpower girl had been temporarily replaced by a pleasant old girl with salt-and-pepper hair and a touch of Scottish burr to her voice. She was an old girlfriend of Winger Tim. She had since married on the square. Her husband was a few years dead. She lived on insurance money, acted in some Toronto amateur theater group, and did per diem work with grifting mobs when she was needed. We got her at bargain rates, just twenty dollars for the day. But she didn’t really need the money. She wanted the excitement.

Everything was staged just about right. When I ushered Gunderman into the outer office, one of our men was working the adding machine while the gal — Helen Wyatt — was talking on the telephone to a dead line. She was explaining that Mr. Rance was not in. She hung up, and I told her that Mr. Gunderman was here to see Mr. Rance. She buzzed Doug to tell him this, and while we waited our other hired hand came into the office, said hello to me, hung his coat on a peg and went to work. This was one of my touches. It is better if the scene changes within the store while the mark is present. This keeps him from wondering whether things have been set up for his benefit, all waiting for him to come and see.

I turned Wally over to Doug. My partner followed the script, wasting no time on me, hitting Gunderman with a ray of charm while giving the impression that he really had better things to do than spend time with Olean’s answer to William Zeckendorf. They wended their pleasant way into the inner office and I walked over to the front desk and chucked Helen under the chin. “One of these days,” I assured her, “you and I are going to have a wild affair.”

“Not I. My bones are too brittle.”

“A young chicken like you?”

“Don’t tease a poor widow lady, John.” She sighed theatrically. “I wish I knew what this was all about,” she said. “Nobody ever lets me read the whole script. Just my own lines.”

I looked her elaborately up and down and assured her that there was nothing wrong with her lines. She told me to go away, and I did. I went to a drugstore around the corner and called the office.

She said, “Barnstable, good morning.”

I said, “I had one grunch but the eggplant over there,” and she hung up.

I was not calling just to keep Helen happy in her widowhood. This was more of the illusion. Phones ringing show that an office is in contact with the outside world. All of this helps, not on a conscious level but right back at the base of the mark’s mind.

The more elaborately you do this, the better off you are. Cutting corners is always dangerous. When a store is set up perfectly, it gives you so great an edge that you can clean your mark and blow him off and leave him so sold that he simply refuses to believe he’s been conned, no matter what. I knew a stock mob that set up a bucket shop that came on stronger than any Wall Street office ever did. They had four marks on the string at once, and they scored with three and let the fourth off because it looked as though he might tip. One of the mooches figured things out a few days later, and the police wound up picking up the other two losers and telling them they bad been had.

They had been so well sold that they would not believe it. And when the bulls took one of them by the hand and led him back to the office of that very friendly stockbroker, he wouldn’t believe it when the suite of offices turned out to be very empty. He was sure he was on the wrong street. He made the cop check out some other addresses, because he was utterly sold on the legitimacy of that bucket shop.

I kept calling our offices. Not constantly, because we weren’t supposed to be all that active. Just often enough so that Gunderman would hear a phone ring every once in a while. He might not take conscious note of it, but it would make an impression.

Once Helen put me through to Doug. I told him the weather was nice and the Yankees were in last place and ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. He said things like Mmmmm and I don’t think so and You’d better check it more carefully. Somewhere in the middle of one of my sentences he told me to call him back, he was busy, and I should go into it in detail. Then he hung up on me and I went and had another cup of coffee.

Then I called again, later on, and Helen told me that our boy was gone. “I’ll put Doug on,” she said.

“That’s a sweet friend you’ve got,” he told me. “Robbing that clod makes me feel like Robin Hood.”

“You didn’t take a shine to him?”

“I hated him. I figured the frail was exaggerating, but he’s even worse than she said.”

“How did it go?”

“The right way. Come on up and I’ll tell you about it.”

“Do you have to?”

“Huh?”

I told him that I hadn’t had any sleep. He laughed. “Stage fright? An old hand like you?”

“Partly stage fright, I suppose. Mostly some things I wanted to think about. By the time I felt like sleeping I couldn’t, because I had to be able to meet him on time. I’ve been walking around on adrenalin for a couple of hours and I’m just about out of the stuff. I think I’ll sack out and catch you later.”

“Good enough. Oh, Johnny—”

“What?”

“Don’t go back to your hotel. He told me he has to catch a plane this afternoon. I doubt that he made reservations. You don’t want to be asleep at your hotel when he calls. And your desk clerk might screw things up and tell him. Go to a decent hotel and get a good flop.”

“Where?”

“Not the Royal York if he’s there. Just a minute. Oh, hell — go to my place. You remember how to get there?”

I’d been to his apartment a few times. I told him I remembered where it was.

“The door’s open,” he said.

“You don’t lock it?”

He laughed. “I never lock my door,” he said. “I trust people, Johnny. I’ve found most people are basically honest.”