The Girl With the Long Green Heart (13 page)

I followed Evvie’s hunch. When I got around to telling him that Barnstable had bought about as much land as was likely to be available at their price, I stopped for a moment and then let on that I would be out of a job before long.

“They’d let you go, John?”

“They won’t have anything for me to do.” I looked off to the side for a second, then lowered my eyes. “Oh, I’ll find something else,” I said. “I generally do.”

“Have money saved?”

“Not a hell of a lot. On my salary—”

“Be handy if you did, though.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll manage.” He had Evvie bring us some coffee from around the corner. He stirred sugar into his and got back on the main theme, the opening for one Wallace J. Gunderman. First, of course, he wanted a chance to buy some stock in Barnstable. I told him he didn’t have a chance in a hundred. In the first place, no one would be anxious to sell. In the second, the board would never approve of a stock transfer. Everything was very hushed up, I explained. Even I could figure out that much. They were not looking for publicity. Legal or not, they wanted to keep a lid on things.

“What are they going to do with that land, John? Suppose that they haven’t got any development planned. What are they going to do?”

“I’ve thought about that,” I said.

“So have I. What did you come up with?”

“Just a few ideas.” I stopped long enough to light a cigarette. “At first I thought they were buying for some corporation. It was so hush-hush I figured they had an important client who didn’t want anyone to know what was coming off. But they were buying at random. And there would be one little piece of land in the middle of a few of their tracts, and instead of pushing hard to buy it they would let it go if they didn’t get it at their price.”

“I’m with you so far, John.”

“So they have to be buying for themselves. Especially with so many important people involved. And the secrecy, well, they may be doing something legal but they’re still playing around in someone else’s mess.”

“And so they’re wearing gloves.”

“Right.” I drank some of my coffee and made rings on the desk top with the coffee cup. “I suppose they’ll just sit on the land,” I said. “Just sit and wait until it catches fire pricewise, or until someone wants it enough to give them a pretty profit.”

His eyes narrowed. “Would they sell some of it now?”

“To you?”

“To me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think it’s what they have in mind. I don’t really know too much about that end of the operation, actually. I’ve spent most of my time here in the States. My only real contact is through Douglas Rance, and he doesn’t spend too much time filling me in on the subtleties of company policy.” I let a little more bitterness edge forward. I was still Little Boy Loyal, but I wasn’t as important as I would have liked to be.

He said, “You could probably find out a few things, if you tried. I’d make it worth your while, John.”

I looked at him. Wary, but hungry.

“If it turns out that I can make a deal, I’ll cut you in. You wouldn’t have to lay out any cash, and you’d be in for a full five percent of any profit I might make.”

“Well—”

“How does that sound?”

“It sounds very generous, but—”

“And that five percent could be a healthy sum, John. I’m not talking nickels and dimes, you know.”

“I know.”

“Will you go to bat for me, then?”

I pursed my lips and took my time. I said, “But if you don’t wind up making a deal—”

He’d thought of that. He wanted me as a sort of partner in the operation, but he knew I would have expenses and he wouldn’t want me to take a beating. He passed an envelope across the desk. I hesitated, and I let wariness and greed mingle in my expression, and I took the envelope. After all, Evvie was right. I had to be a little bit on the make or he just would not believe I was real.

“Deal?”

“Deal,” I said. There was, I found out, an even five hundred dollars in the envelope. If he’d had any class he’d have made it a thou.

I’d told him I was taking an afternoon flight back to Toronto. I had told Doug the same thing. I did not go back to Toronto. That morning a girl with a husky voice and deep circles under her eyes had asked me to spend another night in Olean. She did not have to ask me twice.

I went back to her apartment. She had given me a spare key, and I waited inside for her to finish work and come home to me. Around four-thirty I called a Chinese restaurant and ordered up some chow mein. I called around until I found a grocery that delivered, and I had a six-pack of beer sent up along with a carton of her brand of cigarettes. We couldn’t eat out, and I didn’t want to make her cook a meal again.

The table was set when she opened the door. I opened two cans of beer. We ate in the kitchen. The Chinese food tasted as though it had come out of a can. But the beer was cold, and the company was divine.

We didn’t talk too much. She wanted to know how much longer it would take, how long it would be before we scored and blew him off once and for all. It was going to take longer than I wanted to think about—not until we scored, necessarily, but until I had a chance to see her again. After the grift was over, she would have to cool it for a while in Olean before she grabbed a westbound plane. This was all something I didn’t want to think about, or talk about.

“I feel better about it today,” she said. “Not so nervous.”

“It must be love.”

“Maybe that’s part of it.”

“It must be.”

I had a second beer. She was still on her first. She went into the living room, switched on the radio. A newscast—someone chattered about some new foreign crisis. She turned the dial and found some music. I left the table and grabbed her and kissed her. She giggled and shook free and scurried over to the front of the room. She paused at the window, and her face went white.

I started toward her. She held out a hand and warned me off.

“His car,” she said. “Oh, God.”

“So I missed my plane and decided to stay over.”

“No, it’s no good. The dishes—”

I moved fast enough for both of us. I scooped up my dishes and my beer and my pack of cigarettes and my lighter and ducked into the bedroom closet with them. I stood there holding onto everything while her clothes blanketed me. They all carried the smell of her. I was dizzy with it.

He knocked. She opened the door. They spent five or ten minutes in the living room. I could hear snatches of their conversation, not enough to add the stray phrases together and come up with something intelligible. I waited in the closet like a refugee from a French bedroom farce. The humor of it was lost on me. I wanted to grab the son of a bitch and push his face in.

Then they came closer, from living room to bedroom, and now that I could follow the conversation I no longer wanted to hear it. Wallace J. Gunderman was in the mood for love.

She said something about a headache. He said something about girls who had convenient headaches all the time. She said it wasn’t like that at all. He said, and she said, and he said, and they wound up in the hay and I had to stand there and listen to it.

It is not supposed to bother you. It is, after all, part of the game; a con artist can no more be jealous of his girl’s mock-lovers than a pimp can resent his lady’s clients. You are not supposed to give a damn. It is, after all, business and nothing more. It is push-button sex, it means nothing, it is, in fact, part-and-parcel of The Game.

I wanted to kill him. When he was through I heard her saying something about a headache, a really bad headache, and maybe it would be better if he left her alone. He didn’t seem to mind. He had gotten what he came for, what he paid for. He was a long time getting dressed, but he left, finally, and I heard his heavy feet on the stairs.

I crept out of my perfumed closet. She was sitting on the bed, her back to me. I went into the kitchen and put the dishes in the sink. When I came back she faced me and shook her head from side to side.

“I could throw up,” she said.

“Easy.”

“I’m awful. I’m a damn whore.”

“Stop it.”

“I am!”

I slapped her harder than I’d intended. Her head snapped back and she put one hand to her face. “That hurt,” she said.

“Sorry. But you did what you had to do.”

“I know that.”

“All right, then.”

“But I can’t help the way I feel about it. I’m selling myself.”

I took a breath. “Maybe,” I said. “But just think what a sweet price you’re charging. Because he’s going to get hurt. He’s going to bleed money.”

She brightened up after a while, but the evening was permanently shot. We struggled through an hour’s worth of conversation—or five minutes’ worth, stretched to fill an hour. Then I put on my jacket and straightened my tie and left. No woman should have to put out for more than one man in one night.

“It’ll be a while,” I told her. “Call me if anything happens. Or if you get nervous. Or just because you want to.” I kissed her and left.

Ten

Doug said, “We must have crossed a wire or two, Johnny. I was expecting to see you yesterday.”

“I wound up staying an extra day.” I stirred my coffee. “It looked as though it would play better that way.”

“You should have called. I thought maybe a wheel came off.” He put a match to a cigarette and winked at me. “You got something going with Evvie?”

“Hardly.”

“No? I didn’t figure you to pass up something like that.”

“Not my type,” I said. “And never when I’m working.”

He laughed. “Work or play, some kinds of games are always in season. What do you think of her?”

“She’s all right.”

“Is she holding up her end of it?”

“Sure, I’ll give her that.” Then, grudgingly, “She’s got the talent. She plays the game like somebody who knows the rules.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“She’s still getting too damned much of the pie,” I told him. “She’s getting about double what she ought to get.”

“We needed her, Johnny.”

I allowed that we probably did, after all, and we let it lie there. We were in a coffeepot around the corner from the Barnstable office. I needed a shave and a shower, but I didn’t have to impress anybody just now. I lit a fresh cigarette and finished the coffee and we switched into a rundown on the way the play was heading.

One thing you try hard not to do is lie to your partner. It’s not a particularly good policy. You generally have enough lies to keep track of without creating new muddles for yourself.

This was an exception. Evvie didn’t want him to know about us, and that would have been reason enough; if he had struck out with the girl, he wouldn’t be tickled to hear that I was swinging for the bleachers and connecting. And there was more to it than that.

Evvie and I had suddenly become a team. If he thought of us as a combination, he was going to become very unhappy about the split. It was still the same split, still the same money going into the same pockets, but I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t see it that way. He’d see himself dragging down forty thou while the team of Hayden & Stone walked off with fifty between them.

So I’d let him have the glory. Afterward, when it was all over, it would not matter much anymore. Doug would be too busy getting rid of forty thousand dollars over a dice table to worry about his personal prestige. And Evvie and I would be back in Colorado, with Bannion’s place in our pockets and the world swinging for us from a yo-yo string. Once it was over, we would have more important things on our minds than Doug Rance.

I signaled our waitress and scouted down two more cups of coffee. Doug wanted to talk and talk and talk; he had to cover every angle of the operation once again to make sure we were rolling free and easy. He didn’t have to bother, but he didn’t have anything else to do and it’s hard to do nothing day after day, putting in your time at the store and waiting for the game to catch up with you.

They always say that the waiting is the hardest time. They always say this on television and in the movies, and they are always wrong; the hardest time, naturally, is when you walk that little tightrope that stretches from just before the score on halfway through the blow-off. That’s the hardest time because it’s the only time you can get hurt. If things cave in before then, you get the hell out of there. And you stay the hell out of jail.

But the waiting time is when you keep looking for trouble spots, and dreaming of disaster. You can’t keep busy because there’s nothing for you to do. You have to sit tight and wait, and this is a pain in the neck, and Doug had had enough of it so that he wanted to hash things over more than he had to.

I’d be the same way myself in a few days. We had to let Gunderman hang by his thumbs for a few days, and I could already see where it might begin to get on my nerves.

First I had to wait for Gunderman to call me. He couldn’t call me at the office, and I wasn’t at my room much, so it took him four days to reach me.

“Not much so far,” I told him. “Not enough to call you on, anyway. I did find out two things. I couldn’t swear to them, they’re just hunches so far, but—”

He broke in. Hurry up, hurry up, tell me everything. He wanted to know it all and know it fast.

“Well, they’re definitely buying for the purpose we thought, Wally. They won’t develop and they aren’t buying as anyone’s agent. They’re picking up land for capital gain.”

“And?”

“And I don’t think they want to sit on it very long. I have a feeling that they’re looking for a fast turnover.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I can get in on this, John—”

I let him swim back and forth with it. He stayed on the phone for another ten minutes asking questions while I told him I didn’t know the answers. Couldn’t I just come out and ask Rance about it? Not yet, I explained. But was there time? And did I feel I was getting anywhere? Oh, he was all full of questions.

“Better hurry up and get those answers,” he said finally, back to his genial old self again. “Better let us both make a pile of money, John. I think my girl Evvie misses you something terrible.”