The Girl with the Long Green Heart

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.”

“For something that ran him twenty thou?”

“Right. Of course he doesn’t take it. Then he finds out we’ve been making the same kind of offer to other men who got caught in the Capital Northwestern Development swindle. That stirs him up. It’s not just his land, it’s a whole lot of land that we’re looking to buy. He can’t figure out why, but two things are certain. First of all, he’s not going to sell that land of his, not for anything. And second, he’s going to be hungry to find out more.”

Bit by bit we would let Gunderman figure things out. We wanted to buy his land for five hundred dollars because it was worth in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars, maybe as much as three. We were a group of important Canadians with a lot of legitimate interests who had managed to get hold of a list of men taken in by Capital Northwestern Development. We were attempting to buy their land from them at twenty to twenty-five percent of its fair market value. For around fifty thousand dollars we would be able to acquire title to a huge block of Canadian real estate worth close to a quarter of a million dollars, and with a tremendous potential for future price appreciation. A potential Gunderman could certainly understand — the investment value of unimproved land was his personal religion. The more he nosed around the more he learned about our operation, and the more he learned about it the more he liked it.

“So he doesn’t want to sell us his land, Johnny. He wants to buy our land, the whole package.” He lit a cigarette. “You like it so far, Johnny?”

I slipped the question. “If it’s such an attractive deal, why would we be willing to sell it to him?”

“That’s where it gets pretty. Remember what we’re supposed to be. We’re a syndicate of highly respectable Canucks who’ve hit on something a little sneaky. Legal, sure, but sneaky. We’re capitalizing on an old con game and buying land surreptitiously for a fraction of its value. We’re dealing with people who’ve been taken to the point where they think of their land as utterly worthless, and we’re buying it in very cheap.”

“And?”

“And we don’t want to turn this into a long-term deal. We want to get in and get out, to take a quick but sweet profit and go about our business. You’ll be working outside, getting tight with Gunderman. He’ll figure out what a perfect man he’d be for us to deal with, taking this piece of land that ran us around fifty thousand and selling it to him for maybe double that. I figure we’d try for one-fifty and settle for an even hundred thou.”

“Go on.”

“Right. Now here is where Gunderman has to prove that we can trust him. We would be selling the land damned cheap at a hundred thou. We’re willing to do that if we’re sure of who we’re dealing with. We can’t afford the risk of selling to somebody who’s going to turn around and dump it for a fast buck. We’ve got our personal reputations to consider. We’ve got to sell to the type of man who will sit on that land for a few years, letting it increase in value as far as that goes, and then sell right for a good price later on. That way we don’t come out of it with our reputations in a sling.

“And of course this is perfect for Gunderman, because he wants the land for long-term investment, not for a fast deal. He’ll sit on it for five years if he has to. We let him convince us of this, and then we sell to him, and that’s all she wrote.”

I wondered if Rance knew just how perfect it was. The trickiest part of any con game is the blow-off, when you’ve got the mooch’s money and you want to get him out of the way before he tips to the fact that he’s been taken. A blow-off can be very blunt or very subtle or anything in-between. In the short con games you can just blow your mark off against the wall, sending him around the corner while you jump in a cab and get out of the neighborhood. In a long con, you ought to do better than that. The longer it takes him to realize he’s been had, the less chance there is that he’ll squawk and the less chance that it’ll do him any good.

This was tailored for a perfect blow-off. Our Mr. Gunderman might die of old age before he found out he didn’t really own any land in Canada.

I said, “We don’t sell him land. We sell him our company.”

“Instead of faking deeds?”

“Sure. That way he never gets around to a title search or anything else. He buys a hundred percent of the stock of our corporation. He thinks the corporation owns certain real estate and it doesn’t. I’ll tell you something. I think the whole deal might even be legal. He’ll be buying a corporation and he’ll be getting a corporation. If there’s nothing on paper—”

“Jesus, I think you’re right.”

By then I was hooked. I think I must have known it myself. Once you start improving a scheme, building on it, smoothing it, you are damned well a part of it.

We had lunch at the Cattleman’s Grill. Open steak sandwiches and cold bottles of ale. We let the deal alone during lunch. We found other things to talk about. Doug picked up the tab.

Afterward, we drove around in his car. I lit a cigarette and pitched the match out the window.

“About the money arrangement,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How did you figure it?”

“I figured you in for thirty.”

“Out of a hundred? That doesn’t sound too wonderful.”

“Well, it won’t be a hundred, Johnny. We’ll gross a hundred, but there are going to be some expenses that have to come out of the nut, and then there’s twenty off the top for the girl. Now—”

“That’s too damned much for the girl,” I said.

“It can’t be less.”

“The hell it can’t. She ought to be in for a finder’s fee of five thou and no more. Why twenty?”

“Because she did more than set this up. She’s going to be working this from the inside, right there in his office. She’ll be in on the whole play, and she’ll have to scoot after it’s over. Besides, there has to be a big piece in it for her or she won’t go. She wants a stake to go hunt a husband with, and if it’s not enough of a stake she’ll get shaky and pull out.”

I let that ride. “So how did you figure the split?”

“Twenty off the top, plus maybe ten more off the top for expenses, leaves seventy. I figured forty and thirty.”

“What’s wrong with evens?”

The smile stayed. “Well, it is my job, Johnny.”

I knew it wasn’t the five. This was the first con he was working from the top, and he needed the glory as much as the money. If we split it down the middle he didn’t get as much of a boost out of it. We tossed it back and forth. I told him to pare the girl’s end of it down to seventeen-five and to cut himself down to thirty-seven and a half and give me thirty-five even. He didn’t like it that way. He said he’d chop her to seventeen-five and add her end to mine, keeping forty for himself.

“You can swing your deal with thirty easy, Johnny. Ten to buy the place, ten to fix it up, and ten more in reserve. Two and a half more is just gravy.”

So we settled it that way. Forty thousand dollars for him, thirty-two thousand, five hundred for me, seventeen thousand and a half for Evelyn Stone. The extra twenty-five hundred wasn’t really important to me as money. It was a question of face. We agreed that anything over and above the hundred thou would be split down the middle between us, with the girl out of it.

I said, “We’re going to need front money.”

“I’ve got the bankroll.”

“How much?”

“Close to ten grand.”

“I’d feel better with double that. But ten should do us without much sweat. I’ve got a few hundred set aside. Living money, eating money.”

“We can do it on ten.”

“It might mean cutting it close. The more you can spend on your front the better off you are. And sometimes it isn’t even a question of spending it, it’s having it in the bank. Oh, the hell. Where do we kick this off from? Toronto?”

“That’s where our store will be. Our company.”

“Then there’s no worry. Unless something happened to him. Do you know Terry Moscato?”

He didn’t.

“Well, he ought to be all right. He wouldn’t be in jail, he’s in too good to take a fall. He used to work out on the Coast and then he went East and wound up in Toronto, and he’ll loan us front money. It has to be strictly front money, dough that sits in a bank account in our name and that goes straight back to him as soon as we’re out of it. We’ll have to pay a thousand for the use of ten, but it’s worth it.”

“See why I wanted you on this, Johnny?” He took a hand from the wheel and punched me gently on the knee. “I never would have thought of an angle like that. The extra touches. But I’ll learn them, kid.”

I wasn’t listening. It was that old familiar feeling, getting into it, getting with it again, feeling your mind start to slip into gear. Funny after so many years. The extra touches. A whole batch of them were coming to me now. The hell with it, we could talk about them later.

“I’ll need eight days,” I told him.

“For what?”

“One day to decide if I’m in. And a week’s notice before I leave my job.”

“I thought you already decided you were in.”

“I want twenty-four hours to make sure.”

He shrugged this off. “And a week’s notice? That’s a new one. You’re not going to come back and play assistant manager anymore, Johnny. What the hell do you care about giving notice?”

“The same reason you don’t do any grifting in Nevada. I don’t crap where I eat.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be coming back to this town,” I said. “Not as a flunky, no, but to live here and do business here. I want to leave it right.”

I spent the hour before I started work on the telephone. I sat in a booth at a drugstore and kept pouring change down the slot. I called a lot of people that I couldn’t reach and reached a lot of others. I spent my dinner hour at the telephone, and I got back on the phone that night after I left the alleys. I spoke to people who knew Doug Rance vaguely, to some who knew him well, to one or two who had worked with him not long ago.

You damn well have to know who’s working with you. When you’re all wrapped up in a big one you live a whole slew of lies all at once, and if you have a few people in on it who are lying back and forth and conning each other as much as they’re conning the mooch, then you are looking for trouble and fairly certain of finding it. This doesn’t mean that good con men are inherently honest in their dealings among themselves. They aren’t. If they were honest, they wouldn’t have gone on the C to begin with. I expected Doug would lie to me, and I expected to lie to Doug, but not to the point where we’d be fouling each other up. If there were things I ought to know about him, I wanted to know them now.

He checked out pretty well. They knew him in Vegas, all right. He was a high roller, an almost compulsive gambler, but he never gambled while he worked. On a job, he was nothing but business. I had wondered about that.

He was in love with the life, which was another thing I had managed to figure out by myself. He was good and he was smooth. He was attractive to women but he could generally take them or leave them. He’d done a short bit in a county jail in Arizona, and he’d done time twice in California, a vag charge in Los Angeles and a ninety-day stretch at Folsom for petty theft, a short con that hadn’t worked right.

Everyone I talked to, everyone who knew him, seemed to like him well enough. That much figured. That was his stock in trade.

It was another late night for me, but this time I slept. In the morning I walked over to his hotel and we had a bite together. He asked me if I’d had a chance to run a check on him.

“Sure.”

“How did I make out?”

“You’ve got good references.”

He laughed. “I’m glad you asked around,” he said. “I’d hate to work with anyone who wouldn’t take the trouble. You in, Johnny?”

“All the way.”

“You won’t regret it. Smooth as silk, all the way, and nothing’s going to go sour on us.”

I gave notice that afternoon. I told Harry that I had to leave at the end of next week, that I had a very attractive opportunity waiting on the East Coast and I couldn’t afford to pass it up. He was unhappy. He told me he could maybe see his way clear to a ten-a-week raise if I cared to stay. I told him it wasn’t that, that this was a real chance for me.

“Maybe you’ll come back some day,” he said. “Not to work here, maybe, but to open up a place of your own. This is a good place to live, John.”

“I’d like to come back.”

“Hope you do. I hate to lose you, I really do.”