The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Five

She was five or ten minutes late. I waited for her in the lobby. I sat in a red leather chair in front of the empty fireplace and kept glancing over at the doorway. She came through the door and got about a third of the way to the desk, and I stood up and walked across the lobby to meet her.

“Oh, Mr. Hayden,” she said.

“Miss Stone.”

“I had to double-park out in front, so if you’re ready—”

We left the hotel together. Her car was a white Ford with a small dent in the right front fender. We got in and she spun a very neat U-turn, took a right on State Street and headed the Ford out of town on Route 17. She kept her eyes on the road.

I kept mine on her. She’d changed her clothes for dinner. Now she wore a very simple black dress with a scoop neckline. A green heart hung from a small gold chain around her throat, a very deep green against her white skin. Jade, I guessed. Her arms were bare, her hands very sure on the wheel.

“I’m supposed to be very nice to you,” she said suddenly.

“I think I’ll like that.”

We stopped for a light and she turned to look at me. Her eyes were larger than I had remembered them, and deeper in tone. “You surprised the hell out of me this morning,” she said. “You don’t look like a confidence man.”

“That’s an asset.”

“Yes, I’m sure it must be.” The light changed. “Mr. Gunderman doesn’t have an important engagement tonight, you know. He just decided that I’d learn more from you than he would.”

“I guessed that. His idea or yours?”

“Well, he probably thinks he thought of it himself. I guess I actually led him into it. He told me he wished he could get more of a line on you, and that he was having dinner with you tonight, but that he didn’t think you’d be too keen on opening up to him. I said that a girl could probably draw you out a lot better, and I said something about the way you looked at my legs before. You did look at my legs, you know.”

“I know.”

“I told him this, and he paced around the room and asked me how I’d like to have dinner with you. I let him talk me into it. I’m supposed to give you the full treatment. Dinner at The Castle at a cozy table for two, and then some quiet spot for drinks, and then you’ll tell me secrets. You’ll let me dig all the information about the Barnstable operation out of you.”

“I might just do that.”

“This is the place,” she said suddenly. “Isn’t it incredible?”

She pulled off the road to the right. There are probably as many restaurants in the country called The Castle as there are diners named Eat, but this was the first one I’d ever come across that looked the part. It was a sprawling brick-and-stone affair with towers and fortifications and pillars and gun turrets, everything but a moat, and all of this in a one-floor building. A medieval ranch house with delusions of grandeur.

“Wait until you see the inside, John.”

“It can’t live up to this.”

“Wait.”

Inside, there was a foyer with a fountain, a Grecian statue type of thing with water streaming from various orifices. The floor was tile, the walls all wood and leather, with rough-hewn beams running the length of the ceiling. The maître d’ beamed his way over to us, and Evvie said something about Mr. Gunderman’s table, and we were passed along to a captain and bowed through a cocktail lounge and a large dining room into something called the Terrace Room. The tables were set far apart, the lighting dim and intimate.

We ordered martinis. “You might as well order big,” she told me. “He’ll be unhappy if I don’t give you the full treatment. This is a quite a place, isn’t it? You don’t expect it in Olean. But they have people who come from miles away to eat here.”

“They couldn’t make out just with local trade.”

“Hardly. The place seats over eight hundred. There are rooms and more rooms. And the food is very good. I think our drinks are coming.”

The martinis were cold and dry and crisp. We had a second round, then ordered dinner. She touted the chateaubriand for two and I rode along with it.

“I get called Evvie,” she said. “What do I call you?”

“John will do.”

“Doug Rance referred to you as Johnny.”

“That’s his style. He’d love it if he could call me the Cheyenne Kid, as far as that goes.”

“Is that where you’re from? Cheyenne?”

“Colorado, now. Originally New Mexico.”

“That’s what Wally said, but I didn’t know whether you’d been telling him the truth or not. You’ve got him on the hook, John. You really have him all hot and bothered.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What happened at lunch?”

I ran through it for her and she nodded, taking it all in. She was all wrapped up in the play herself. Usually I hate having an amateur in on things too deeply, but she seemed to have a feeling for the game. It wasn’t necessary to tell her things twice. She listened very intently with those brown eyes opened very wide and she hung on every word.

“He was hopping when he got back to the office,” she said. “He was on the phone most of the day, and he dictated a batch of letters to me. Do you want to see them?”

“Not here. I’ll have a look at them later. Who did he call?”

“Different people, and he placed a few of the calls himself so I didn’t know who he was talking to. I think he made a few calls to Canada. He’s sure somebody made a strike up there. Uranium or oil or gold or something, he doesn’t know what it is but he’s sure it’s up there.”

“He’ll find out differently.”

“I think he found out a little already. I managed to get him going when he was signing the letters I typed for him. He said he couldn’t get any satisfaction, that nobody seemed to know a thing about a mineral strike in the area. And the date on your letter bothers him. He said he could see you coming down as a quick fast-buck operator if you’d heard about a strike, if you had advance information. But that letter is dated six or seven weeks ago, and if you had some information that long ago it would have spread by now. That’s what has him hopping, the fact that nobody has heard a word about any developments in that section.”

“That figures. Of course he hinted to me about uranium, and of course I said there was nothing like that, which was what he damn well expected me to say.”

“He’s just about ready to believe it now, John. And when I tell him what I managed to learn from you tonight, he’ll be sure it’s the straight story, or fairly close to it. How much of the play will I give him?”

“Not too much,” I said. I lit a cigarette and drew on it. “Here’s the steak,” I said. “Let’s forget the rest of this until later, all right? I want to give it time to settle.”

We let it alone and worked on the steak. It was black on the outside and red in the middle, a nice match for the red leather and black wood decor of the room. I was hungrier than I’d realized. We made a little small talk, the usual routine about the food and the restaurant and the city itself. She wasn’t too crazy about Olean. She didn’t give me the chamber of commerce build-up I’d gotten earlier from her boss.

“I want to get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what this town gets to be like. Like a prison cell.”

I doubted it. I knew what a jail cell was like, and no town on earth was that way.

“You met Doug in Las Vegas?”

“That’s right,” she said. “I had a vacation and I just wanted to get away from all of this, and from Wally. I guess it was June when I went down there, the second or third week. I was supposed to go back, but I didn’t plan on going back. His wife had been dead for eight months and he had just gotten around to telling me that he didn’t plan on marrying me after all. It wouldn’t look too good, he said, and what was the matter with things the way they stood?”

“What was?”

“Everything, as far as I was concerned. I was in a rut, John. A pretty deep one. I should have left this town a long while ago but I didn’t have any place to go or anything much to do, and I figured I would stick with Wally and marry him when his wife died. He wasn’t that exciting but he wasn’t that bad and he does have money and, well, being poor is no pleasure.”

“Agreed.”

She managed a smile. “So by the time I found out I wasn’t going to hear any wedding bells, I took this big long look at little Evelyn Stone and the neat little niche she had cut out for herself. I wasn’t too taken with it, John. Here I’d spent a few years with a fairly romantic view of myself, the youngish girl with the wealthy older man, the office wife living a behind-the-scenes life. And then all at once I wasn’t so young anymore and I was just this girl Wallace J. Gunderman was keeping. And keeping damned cheaply. If you averaged it out, I was costing him less than if he bought it a shot at a time from a cheap streetwalker.”

I didn’t say anything. She studied her hands and said, “I don’t like to say it that way, but about that time I started to see it that way, and it didn’t sit well.”

“Sure.”

“So I went to Vegas for some fun and floor shows and roulette, and maybe a nice rich man would fall in love with me. Except I didn’t like the men I met, and then too I couldn’t afford the kind of vacation that might have put me in the right places at the right time. And I took a beating at the roulette wheel.”

“And met Doug.”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled again. “He tried awfully hard to make me, but I just wasn’t having any. I liked him, though. Right from the start I liked him.”

“Everybody does.”

“I suppose they must. After a while he must have decided that he wasn’t going to wind up in bed with me, so he started talking to me and listening when I talked. He kept getting me to talk about Wally, and I did because I wanted to tell someone how mad I was at the son of a bitch. I didn’t know what he was getting at. Then he came up with the idea and you know the rest of it.”

I nodded. I liked the picture of Doug trying to score with her and striking out. It didn’t exactly fit with the way he’d told it to me, but that figured. Nobody likes to paint pictures of himself in a foolish position.

“John? Did he say he slept with me?”

“No.”

“The way you were smiling—”

“It’s not that. He said that he didn’t try, that he wasn’t interested. And when I saw you in the office this morning I didn’t get it.”

“What do you mean?”

I met her eyes. “I couldn’t imagine him not being interested. Not when I saw you.”

“Oh,” she said, and colored slightly. Then she said, “Listen, don’t tell him what I said, will you? About him trying and not getting any place?”

“Don’t worry.”

“Because he might not like being reminded of it. But anyway, we got along fine once he quit being on the make. And he came up with this idea, and that changed my mind about coming back to Olean. I was back as soon as my vacation was up and went back to work for Wally.”

I didn’t ask the obvious question.

“Back to work in every respect,” she said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “But it was different now. I don’t feel like a cheap whore anymore.” The brown eyes flashed. “I feel like an expensive whore, John. A hundred-thousand-dollar call girl.”

A bus boy cleared our table. We passed up dessert and had coffee and cognac. The cognac was very old and very smooth. I broke out a fresh pack of cigarettes. She took one. I gave her a light and she leaned forward to take it. The jade heart fell away from her white skin. The black dress fell forward, too, and there was a momentary flash of the body beneath it, the thrust of breasts.

A hundred-thousand-dollar call girl. Our eyes locked and we smiled foolishly at each other.

The waiter brought the check. She added a tip and signed her name and, below that, Gunderman’s. We got up and left.

Outside, it was cooler. She drove and I sat beside her. We didn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular.

She said, “This town. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, after six years here.”

“Just six years? I thought you were born here.”

“God, no.” She pitched her cigarette out the window. “Not far from here, actually. I was brought up about twenty miles east of here, a little town called Bolivar. You probably never heard of it.”

“I never even heard of Olean up to now.”

“Then you never heard of Bolivar. It makes Olean look like New York. I got away from there to go to college. I went to Syracuse, to Syracuse University. I was on scholarship. I got married two weeks after graduation and wound up in New York.”

“Doug told me you were married.”

“I told him about it. When I start feeling sorry for myself I get carried away. I probably filled his ear with a lot of that. I married this boy from Long Island that I’d met at school and we went to New York to play house. I was the mommy and he was the man who took the suds out of the automatic washer. I don’t know why I should be boring you with all this, John.”

“I’m not bored.”

“You’re easy to talk to, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh. I used to be a psychiatrist before I turned crooked.”

“I could almost believe that. What was I talking about?”

“The suds and the automatic washer.”

“That’s right. Except that we played it a little different. I was the mommy and he was the baby, that’s what it all added up to, really. We never had enough money, either, and his parents hated me, really hated me, and then he started running around.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“You’re nice, but he did. I didn’t really feel insulted by it, to tell you the truth. I had managed to figure out by then that he was a nice boy but that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with a nice boy who needed someone to wipe his nose and help him on with his rubbers. That came out dirty, I didn’t mean it that way. You know what I meant.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So I went to Reno and threw my wedding ring in that river there, and came back to Bolivar, and there was a job opening in Olean, the job with Wally, and I took it, and you know the rest. I became a very private secretary. At first it was exciting and then it was secure and then his wife did die, finally, after hovering on the edge for years, and then we weren’t going to get married after all and instead of a fiery affair it was a back-door thing with a bad smell to it.”

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. When she spoke again her voice was thinner and higher. “I felt so goddamned good this afternoon. Watching that man, so hot to find a way to make a new fortune for himself, so excited he couldn’t sit still. And knowing he’s just going to get his nose rubbed in it, and that I’m going to do the rubbing. Oh, that’s a sweet feeling!”

For a few minutes neither of us said anything. Her hands relaxed their grip on the wheel and she slowed the Ford and stopped at the curb. “There are things we ought to go over,” she said. “You’ve got to tell me how much I’m supposed to tell him, for one thing, and then there are the letters he gave me. I’ve got them in my purse.”

“Are we supposed to be making a night of it?”

“In a small way, anyway.” Her eyes narrowed. “He didn’t tell me how far to go playing the Mata Hari role. I guess I’m supposed to use my own imagination. There are bars we could go to, but they aren’t all that private.”

“My hotel room?”

“I thought of that. I think he might not like that. Everybody knows who I am, that I’m his secretary and that, well, that I’m more than his secretary. He might not like the way it would look if I went to your room.”

“Where, then?”

“My apartment?”

“Fine.”

“But I don’t think I’ve got anything to drink.”

We stopped for a bottle. I paid for it, and she insisted on giving me the money back when we got in the car. This was on Gunderman, she told me. He was footing the bill for the evening.