The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Seven

I’d been up for an hour and a half when the phone rang at eleven. The woman said, “It’s eleven o’clock, Mr. Hayden. You had several phone calls, but I didn’t put them through because there was a message that you weren’t to be disturbed.”

“Fine. Any messages?”

“The calls were all from Mr. Gunderman,” she said. She made the name sound almost holy. “You’re to call him as soon as possible.”

I sat around the hotel room for another half hour. I packed my suitcase, smoked a few cigarettes. I left the suitcase by the side of the bed and went downstairs for breakfast. At noon I called Gunderman’s office from a pay phone across the street.

Evvie answered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hayden,” she said. “Mr. Gunderman is out to lunch.”

“I’m at a pay phone,” I said. “You can talk.”

“He’ll be sorry he missed your call, Mr. Hayden. He’s been trying to reach you all morning, but he had a luncheon appointment and he was called out.”

“Oh, I get it. There’s someone in the office.”

“That’s quite correct, Mr. Hayden.”

“Who is it? Gunderman?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“All right, it doesn’t matter. I’ll give you questions you can answer without any trouble. When do you expect him back?”

“Perhaps an hour, Mr. Hayden.”

“How did he take the line you handed him? Was he with it all the way?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And he’s very anxious to see me?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Then I think it’s just as well that he doesn’t. There’s a plane leaving Ischua Airport at four-thirty this afternoon. When he comes in, tell him I was over to the office. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“And that I was sorry we couldn’t get together, but I had a few things hanging fire that I had to take care of, and that I’d try to get in touch with him in a week or so. Give him the general impression that I’m sorry I wasted my time here but if he wants to sell and take his tax loss the offer is still open. I’m not pushing, but I’m willing. Have you got that?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I could stay another day. I’ll get back as soon as I can, Evvie. There’s no chance of you getting up to Toronto for a day, is there?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Uh-huh. You might get him to send you on a reconnaissance mission, but that’s probably not that good an idea. I’ll miss you.”

Silence.

“Bye, baby.”

I cradled the phone. I picked up a paperback and a couple of magazines and went back to the hotel. I sat around in the room for an hour while Gunderman ate his lunch, then checked out of the hotel and caught a cab to the airport. I got there better than three hours before flight time. I checked my bag and walked down the road a little ways to a tavern. I nursed a few drinks and listened to a juke box. The place was very nearly empty.

At four-thirty my plane left, and I was on it.

Doug had to hear all of it twice through. He made a perfect audience. He hung on every word and grinned at every clever turn of phrase and nodded approvingly at every halfway cute gambit. I kept expecting him to burst into spontaneous applause.

“You roped him,” he said admiringly. “You lassoed that son of a bitch.”

“He’s not branded yet.”

“Now we stick it in and break it off, Johnny. Jesus, this is beautiful. How long do you want to leave him hanging? A week?”

“More or less.”

“Won’t he try to reach us before then?”

“He won’t be able to reach me. If he calls Barnstable, they’ll tell him I’m out. The girl will. The girl doesn’t even know me, does she?”

“She’s met you. I don’t know if she remembers the name.”

“She didn’t meet me as Claude Whittlief, did she?”

“No.”

“Because if she did, we’d have to get rid of her before the payoff. No, I’m sure she didn’t, now that I think about it. So if he tries to reach me he won’t get any place, and I don’t think he’d want to go over my head and talk with you. If he’s as shrewd as I figure him to be, he’ll want to work through me, to use me to get the inside dope and to make whatever pitch he might want to make. Remember, he only has a little bit of the picture now, only as much as Evvie’s given him.”

“How did you like her, incidentally?”

“She’s all right.”

“Get anywheres?”

“I didn’t try,” I said.

“Not interested?”

“Not on a job.”

His grin spread. “That’s the professional attitude, all right. I could go another cup of coffee. You?”

“Fine.”

We were in a booth at an all-night diner on Dundas about a block or so from my hotel. The food was greasy and so were most of the customers. The coffee wasn’t too bad. A bucktoothed waitress with a West Virginia accent brought us more of it. She was a long way from home.

“About those letters,” he said. “How do you want to handle them?”

I had gone over the letters Gunderman had written to those other pigeons. Of the eighteen, ten had been to people we were already in correspondence with, and those Evvie had mailed. I had the other eight. One man lived in Buffalo, two in Cleveland, one in Toledo, one in a Chicago suburb, two in New York City, and one way the hell up in Seattle.

“We throw out the Seattle one, first of all,” I said. “It won’t hurt him if he doesn’t get a reply from everybody, and Seattle is too damn far to run to just to get a postmark.”

“There are remailing services,” he suggested.

I sipped coffee, put the cup down. “The hell with those. I ran one of those myself about twelve years back. Letters Remailed — 25¢. Your Secret Address. Mail Forwarded and Received. I opened every letter and sold the interesting ones to a blackmailer. Somehow I don’t think I was the only grifter to run one of those outfits.”

“That’s one racket I never heard of.”

“Everything’s a racket,” I said. “The day after tomorrow, I’ll have the letters ready. I’ll spend tomorrow taking care of the stationery angle. Then I’ll fly to Chicago and mail a letter and work my way back on the trains. The cities spread out in a line, Chicago and Toledo and Cleveland and Buffalo, and then a plane down to New York and back again. That’s no problem.”

“And the detective agency?”

That was a problem, all right. If we didn’t answer that letter at all, Gunderman would get on the phone and call them himself. Evvie couldn’t head off the calls forever. If we did answer, using a fake sheet of the firm’s letterhead (or even a real sheet; it wouldn’t be all that hard to run up to their offices and filch a piece of paper and an envelope) we would run into headwinds when Gunderman called to thank them, or sent along a check in payment.

“Let it lie for a day or two,” Doug suggested. “He won’t expect a report from them by return mail, anyway. We’ll think of something.”

In the morning I got busy on the handful of letters. There was a printer in town who specialized in doing a little work on the wrong side of the law. He did job-printing for the boys who printed up pornography and trucked it across the bridge into the States, and he was supposed to be fairly good at passports and other documents. I could have had him run off a few different batches of stationery for us, but I didn’t want to.

We already had a use for him — he was going to draw up the fake deeds for us, deeds to Canadian land which we did not own. I’ve never been very tall on the idea of using the same person too many times in a single job. It’s not a good idea to let one man get that much of a picture of your operation. He would handle the deeds, and do a good job with that, and that was enough.

I went to a batch of printers and a couple of office supply stores. Each printer made up a batch of a hundred sheets and envelopes, and the stationery stores came through with cheaper standard stuff. I had seven letters to answer, and I wound up with seven hundred sheets and envelopes, each batch with a different name and address and city, each on different paper and in different ink. I got one-day service from everybody, and by six o’clock that evening I had everything I needed.

We typed out four of the responses and wrote out three by hand. We used the office typewriter, cleaning the keys after the first letter, knocking a letter out of alignment before the third one, and otherwise disguising the fact that all four letters were coming out of the same machine. The hand-written letters were no problem at all. I have five very different styles of handwriting, and Doug has about as many. An expert could find enough similarities to guess that any of my five styles was my writing, but the average person would never see a connection. And Gunderman would not be putting our letters under a microscope. The pens were different, the inks different, the envelopes would be zooming in from different cities — he wasn’t going to run to a handwriting expert as an extra safeguard.

We varied the text of the letters, too. Five of our seven men wrote Gunderman to tell him that they had sold their land to Barnstable, that Barnstable had paid off promptly and legitimately, and would Gunderman tell them what was the matter with the operation? (I guessed that he wouldn’t answer, not wanting to get people curious. If he did, Evvie could simply throw the letters away.) One man replied that he used his land for summer camping and was not interested in selling it to Barnstable, to Gunderman, or to anybody else. The last man, the one in Toledo, wrote that he had turned down Barnstable’s first offer in the hope that they might raise it, and that so far they hadn’t.

Doug and I both worked on the wording. We kept the letters short and to the point. By the time we were through, the letters were set to do their job. They would convey the impression we were aiming at. Our man Gunderman would be left with the impression that the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., had managed to buy up half of Canada for a song. Our man Gunderman would be starting to drool.

“The detective agency,” he said. “Any ideas?”

“None that I’m too crazy about. It would be easy if they had never done any work for Gunderman before. I could go to them, introduce myself as Gunderman, and give them some very minor piece of work to do for me. Then in the meantime I send Gunderman a faked report on a copy of their letterhead, along with a bill for the same amount as their bill to me. His check would go to them and it would cover the work I’d done, and that would touch all the bases neatly enough.” I shrugged. “But they’ve worked for him, and that queers it. They might know him, or at least know enough to know I wasn’t Wallace J. Gunderman. And besides, I don’t like the idea that much to begin with.”

“It’s a little shaky.”

“Uh-huh.”

He looked at me. “Maybe we should let the letter go through.”

“I don’t like that, either.”

“What can they find out about us that isn’t legit?”

“You’d be surprised.”

He thought that over and decided he agreed with me. “We’ll work it out,” he assured me. “You get those letters in the mail and I’ll see if I can’t come up with something.”

“Sure. I might be two or three days.”

“Take your time.”

“Right.”

“And don’t get hung up on the detective angle. We’ll think of something good.”

“Sure.”

I called Evvie’s apartment that night. I let the phone ring a dozen times before I gave up, and I called back half an hour later and let it ring another dozen times without getting an answer. It was around midnight by then and she wasn’t home, and I knew she must be with Gunderman and I tried not to let it bother me. What the hell, she had warmed his bed for four years already. I couldn’t exactly turn jealous because she was playing the same role.

Besides, it was part of the game, wasn’t it? It happened all the time. A good percentage of the long cons had a sex angle, with a girl’s body helping to tie the mark up tight. The one that put me in San Quentin was one like that. Our mooch started sleeping with a girl who told him she was pregnant. I’d been sleeping with that girl myself, and not in a completely casual way. I hadn’t liked it when she spent too much time around other men. But it didn’t rub me the wrong way when she played with the mooch. That was part of the game, part of setting him up for the score.

I worked that job as roper. I was the mooch’s friend, helping set up the phony abortion. I remembered how I sat with him in the waiting room, how he bit his nails and how his sweat smelled, cold and rancid. And the “doctor”—Sweet Raymond Conn, dead of a heart attack while awaiting trial — the doctor coming out to the waiting room with horrible eyes to tell us that something had gone wrong, that our little girl was dead as a lox.

Instead of operating, Conn had worked on the girl with makeup. He led the mooch inside, I followed, and Peggy was all spread out on a long white table with waxy cheeks and pale flesh and dead staring eyes. I was terrified that she would blink. She didn’t, and not six hours later she scrubbed off the deadish makeup and I took her to bed.

I hadn’t seen her since the trial. She drew one-to-five, no previous record and her lawyer did a good job for her, and she was on the street within six months. God knows where she is now, or what she’s doing.

So I had no reason to sweat because Evvie was busy earning her keep. Anyway, I didn’t own her. One roll in the rack, one sweet time that sealed a bargain and made the gears mesh more perfectly, that was all it was. No burning passion, no eternal flame of love.

I flew to Chicago in the morning with no luggage but a briefcase with a batch of letters in it. The cab from O’Hare Airport to the downtown train station happened to pass through the suburb where Gunderman’s unwitting correspondent hung his hat. It was a coincidence worth taking advantage of. I made the hackie stop while I dropped the letter in a mailbox, then rode on to the train station.

The Central had a train that went to New York by way of Toledo, Ashtabula, Cleveland, and Albany. It left around eleven-thirty in the morning. We had enough of a stopover at Toledo for me to duck into the terminal and drop the letter in a mailbox and get back to the train on time. In Cleveland, I left the train and had dinner at a downtown restaurant and mailed another two letters. The next train that went on to Buffalo made too many stops. I passed it up and caught another an hour and a half later, mailed my Buffalo letter and took a ride out to the airport.

There were no more planes that night, by the time I got there. I took a room at a motel across from the airport and left an early morning call. I got up, showered, and called Toronto. Nothing was new, Doug told me. I made my plane and was at La Guardia an hour and twenty minutes later. I took the limousine into Manhattan, mailed the last two letters, rode back to the airport and caught a luncheon flight for Toronto by way of Montreal.

All of this was a lot of travel with not much to do. Detail work, moronically simple, automatic, and fairly expensive. I believe in details. They are almost always worth the trouble.

We had bought seven hundred sheets and envelopes of stationery, used seven, and thrown away the other six hundred ninety-three. All this to keep a crooked printer from figuring out too much of our angle. I had trained and planed around two thousand miles because I didn’t believe in remail services, and because there was a bare possibility that Gunderman noticed postmarks on his mail. I didn’t regret a dollar of the expense or a minute of the time invested. When you’re pulling the string on a big one, you want the whole superstructure to be just right.

I took my time dropping over to the Barnstable office. When I got there it was past five and our secretary was gone for the day. Doug was sitting at his desk looking busy.

“Everything done?”

“Done and done,” I said.

He got a bottle from his desk and made drinks for us. “Your friend in Olean is starting to get warm,” he told me. “Three calls for you today, one in the morning and two this afternoon. I had the girl tell him you were out of town the last time he called. Before that she just said you weren’t in.”

“Good.”

“You were right on one thing, incidentally. He didn’t ask to talk to me. And he didn’t really want to give his name to the girl, either. He did, but he was reluctant about it.”

I nodded.

“So everything’s moving, Johnny.”

“Except for the detective agency.”

“I’ve got an angle on that, Johnny.”

“What is it?”

“Watch,” he said. He looked very pleased with himself. He picked up the phone and dialed the operator. He told her he wanted to place a person-to-person call for Mr. Wallace J. Gunderman in Olean, New York. He gave her Gunderman’s office number.

“You can’t talk to him,” I said.

“I can. You can’t, because he knows you. He hasn’t talked to me yet, and by the time he meets me he’ll have forgotten my voice.”

“But—”

He held up a hand. He said, “Mr. Gunderman? This is Gerald Morphy, of Brennan Scientific Investigations. You wrote us about an outfit called the Barnstable Corporation?” A pause. “Mr. Gunderman, I wanted to tell you right away that I don’t believe we’ll be able to handle this investigation ourselves. Right at the moment we’ve got almost all of our operatives tied up on an industrial sabotage thing, and we’re not accepting any other cases at the moment.”

Another pause. Then, “I do have a suggestion. If it’s satisfactory to you, I’d like to refer the matter to another investigator, a man named Robert Hettinger. He’s worked for us in the past. He has his own office now and he’s quite reliable and honest. Would that... yes, certainly. Yes, he’d make his reports directly to you and you could make your own financial arrangements with him. This looks to be a small matter, Mr. Gunderman, and while I wish we could serve you directly... yes, well, I can guarantee the man’s work personally. Yes, fine, Mr. Gunderman, and it’s my pleasure, sir.”

He put the phone down and smiled across the desk at me. He looked as triumphant as a sparring partner who’d just knocked out Liston. “In two or three days,” he said, “we send him this.”

He handed me a two-page letter. The letterhead read Robert M. Hettinger... private investigative service... 404 Richmond West... Toronto. The report said everything we could have wanted it to say. It invented a fine upstanding background for Rance, who was cast as a scion of an established Toronto family with a background in shipping and land development. It said that I was new in Toronto, an employee of Barnstable, and so on. We couldn’t have worked up a cleaner bill of health for ourselves.

There was also a bill for fifty dollars Canadian for services rendered.

I said, “Who’s Hettinger?”

“I am.”

“And the address?”

“You can rent office space at four-o-four Richmond for five dollars a month. I get a desk and mail privileges for that much. I paid them five dollars, and they’ll have Gunderman’s check for me when he sends it along.” He grinned elaborately. “Fifty dollars, and when you subtract the cost of the stationery and the phone call and the month’s rent on the desk space, we still come out about twenty dollars ahead. I figured we might as well pick up pin money along the way.”

“And if he tries to call you?”

“There’s a girl who answers the phone for everybody on the floor there. If he calls, Mr. Hettinger is out. But he won’t. He’ll get the report and send a check, and that’s all.”

It was neat and I told him so. He was as hungry for praise as a puppy who had finally succeeded in getting the puddle on the paper. He poured more Scotch for us and as we drank to success, I told him again how neatly he’d fielded the ball, and that was that.

I called Evvie from my hotel. This time she was home. I said, “John here. You alone, baby?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Just a progress report. Everything’s running smoothly on this end. Your boss is going to start getting letters any day now.”

“Good.”

I told her about the detective agency routine. She thought it was very clever, and I didn’t bother mentioning that it was Doug’s idea. I asked her how Gunderman was behaving.

“He’s falling all the way,” she said.

“I understand he’s trying to reach me.”

“Three times today, John. He was upset when you managed to leave town the other day without seeing him. He’s positive there’s something going on that he could make money on. He doesn’t know what the gimmick is but he’s sure there is one and he’s dying to find it. How much longer do you want to let him dangle?”

I thought about it. “Maybe I’ll take another trip to Olean soon,” I said.

“That would be nice.”

“Let’s see. I think maybe the middle of the week, maybe on Wednesday. He should have enough replies by Monday afternoon so that the whole picture will soak in fast enough. Now here’s the bit. Monday, you’ll tell him that you got a call from me. I wasn’t in Toronto, you’re not sure where I was, but I wasn’t in Toronto. I called you, and it seems as though I’m anxious to see you, not Gunderman but you. You have the feeling that I’m halfway crazy about you, and—”

“Are you, John?”

“What?”

“Halfway crazy about me?”

I lit a cigarette. “Anyway, at this point you became the little heroine, doing it up right for the boss. You knew he wanted to see me, so you conned me into coming down to Olean on the excuse of seeing Gunderman. He’ll be delighted. And set it up so that I’ll come around to his office sometime Wednesday afternoon.”

“You didn’t answer my question, John.”

“Did you get what I said?”

“Of course. You still didn’t answer my question.”

“I’ll give you the answer in person,” I said.

I wound up sitting at the bar at The Friars. They had a piano trio there that wasn’t half bad, a West Coast outfit a long way from home. The bass player had worked with Mulligan ages ago. I stayed there until the place closed and walked back to my hotel.