“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.
Two
It was the tail end of July when Doug Rance dropped around to see me. I didn’t even recognize him at first. It had been a good eight or nine years since we had seen each other, and we were never close, never worked together. Now he was about thirty-three to my forty-two. Before, when I’d known him, he was just a raw kid and I was an old hand.
It was a Wednesday night, around twelve-thirty. I was working the four-to-midnight swing at the Boulder Bowl, and the night had been a slow one. The bowling leagues ease off during the summer months and open bowling only gets a heavy play on the weekends. By eleven-thirty the place was just about empty. I rolled a pair of unimpressive games, helped the kid with the mop-up, and made a note for Harry to call AMF in the morning and tell them one of their automatic pin-spotters had died on us. I locked up a few minutes after twelve, had a short beer around the corner, and walked the rest of the way to my room on Merrimac.
When I got there, Rance was waiting for me. He was sitting on a chair with his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He got up when I walked in and gave me a large grin.
“The door was open,” he said.
“I don’t lock it.”
I was trying to place him. He was about my height with a lot of curly black hair and a smile that came easy. A very good-looking guy. Ladies’-man looks. He crossed the room and stuck out his hand and I took it. “You don’t make me, do you? It’s been a while.”
And then I did. The first image that jumped into my mind was of a young, good-looking guy standing up straight and listening pop-eyed while Ray Warren and Pappy Lee bragged about a sweet chickie-bladder con they had pulled off in Spokane. He wasn’t that young now, or that fresh. Well, neither was I.
“You’re looking good,” he said.
“Well, thanks.”
We stood around looking at each other for a few seconds. Then he said, “Say, I picked up a bottle around the corner. I didn’t know what you’re drinking these days but I got Scotch. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine.”
“If you’ve got a couple glasses—”
I found two water glasses and went down the hall to the john and rinsed them out. He poured a few fingers of Cutty Sark into them and we sat down. He took the chair, I stretched out on the bed and put my feet up. It was good Scotch.
I asked him how he’d found me.
“Well, I was in Vegas, Johnny. I asked around, and somebody said you were here in Boulder. Something about your working at a bowling alley. I went over to the place but I didn’t want to bother you. One of the kids told me where you were living and I came on over.”
“Why did you come?”
“To see you.”
“Just to talk over old times?”
He laughed. “Is that a bad idea?”
“It’s a funny reason to come this far.”
“I guess it is. No, I’ve got business with you, Johnny, but let’s let it wait for now. I was surprised as hell when they told me you were here. I’ve never been to Colorado before. You like it here?”
“Very much.”
“How’d you happen to pick it?”
I told him I’d grown up not far from here, just across the border in New Mexico, a smallish town called Springer. “Like elephants, I guess. Going home to die.”
“Nothing wrong with you, is there?”
“No, I was just talking.” I worked on the Scotch. “I would have gone to New Mexico, maybe, but I’ve got a record there and it didn’t seem like a good idea. This is about the same kind of country.”
“A hell of a lot of mountains. I flew to Denver and drove up in a Hertz car. Mountains and open spaces.”
“You can get pretty hungry for open spaces.”
“Yes, I guess you can. Was it very bad, Johnny?”
“Yes, it was very bad.” He offered me a cigarette. I took it and lit it. “It was very bad,” I said.
“I can imagine.”
“Have you ever been inside?”
“Three times. Twice for thirty days, once for ninety.”
“Then you can’t imagine,” I said. “Then you can’t have the vaguest goddamned idea about it.”
He didn’t say anything. I reached for the bottle and he gave it to me. I poured a lot of Scotch in my glass and looked at it for a few seconds before drinking it. I felt like talking now. I’d been out for eight months, and ever since I got out of California I hadn’t run across anybody who was with it. Conversation with straight people is limited—you can’t talk about the library at San Quentin, or about the first long con you worked, or about any of the things that made up your life for so many years. You can drink with them and gab with them, but you have to keep a lid on the major portion of yourself.
“I was in Q,” I said. “I did seven years. You couldn’t know what it was like. I didn’t know, not until I was in. San Quentin’s a model prison, you know. Recreational facilities, a good library, and the guards don’t beat you up at night. There’s only one thing wrong with the place. There’s this cell, and there are these iron bars, and they lock that door and you have to stay inside. That’s all. You have to stay inside.
“I drew ten-to-twenty. It was a sort of variation on the badger game and there was long green in it. The girl fakes a pregnancy and then there’s a fake abortion and a fake death, and the mooch winds up with the hook in him all the way up to his liver. Only this time the whole play turned sour and we bought it, but good. I drew ten-to-twenty for grand larceny and extortion and a half a dozen other counts I don’t remember.”
“And got out in seven.”
I finished the Scotch. “Seven years and three months. I could have made it a year earlier if I’d put in for parole.”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t want it. Parole is a leash—you get out a little sooner but you have to stay on that leash, you have to report to some son of a bitch once a month, you have to stay in the state, you have to live like a mouse. I stayed very straight inside. I made every day’s worth of good time I could make. I never got in trouble. But I didn’t want parole. I didn’t want any leash on me that could yank me back any time somebody decided I belonged inside again. I’m out now and I’m staying out. Nothing gets me back in again.”
He didn’t say anything. He filled our
glasses. I put out my cigarette and got up from the bed and walked over to the window. There were a lot of stars out. I watched them and said, “I guess you made a trip for nothing, Doug.”
“How’s that?”
“Because I’m not interested.”
He got up and came over and stood beside me.
“You didn’t even wait for the pitch.”
“That’s because I know I’m not swinging.”
“It’s a beautiful set-up, Johnny.”
“They always are.”
“This one’s gilt-edged. All triple-A, front to back. The least you ought to do is hear about it.”
“I don’t think I want to.”
He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. We both worked on our drinks. He sat down on the chair again and I got back on the bed. When he started in again he came through from a new direction.
“You’re some kind of manager at the bowling alley, Johnny?”
“Assistant manager.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
“Not really.”
“The pay pretty decent?”
“Eighty-five a week. I should get raised to a hundred by the end of the year, and then it levels off.”
“Well, that’s not too bad.”
I didn’t say anything. He looked around at the room, which was not very impressive. I paid eight a week for it and the price fit the accommodations. I said, “But there’s no bars on the windows, and nobody locks me in at night.”
He grinned. “Sorry,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t mean to pry, but I couldn’t help catching the stuff on your dresser. What’s doing, some kind of a course?”
“I’m taking a correspondence course in hotel management.”
“Yeah?” He looked genuinely interested. He was pretty good at it. “Are those things any good?”
“This one isn’t. I did a little studying at Q, hotel management and restaurant operation. I figured I’d follow it up now. The gaff on this deal is only fifty bucks, so I can’t really get burned too badly.”
“You’re interested in that, huh?”
I nodded. “It’s a good life, with the right set-up.”
“You got any plans?”
The Girl With the Long Green Heart Page 2
