Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

So we were in business.

A store is a vital element in the operation of a big con. It must look more like what it’s pretending to be than the real article itself. The most difficult illusion to maintain is one of furious activity. The store — in our case, the office and the corporation itself — was geared for one thing and one thing only, the act of parting a certain fool from his money with a minimum of risk. But we had to give the appearance of conducting a full-fledged business. Our bank account had to show activity. Our office had to receive a sensible volume of mail.

Doug hired a secretary to answer the phone and type occasional letters. There were a variety of letters that we kept her busy with. Some of them were dictated just so she would have plenty of work. They never wound up in the mailbox. Carbons went in the files, and the letters themselves went in the trash barrel. Others were requests for catalogs and information, and these were duly mailed and brought mail in return.

Finally, we had her dash off a list of letters to men who had been swindled by Capital Northwestern Development. Doug Rance knew a man who knew Al Prince, and Al Prince supplied us with a master list of guppies he and Goldin had taken for a swim in the CND gambit. We picked some names off the list, carefully selecting men who had only lost between five hundred and two thousand dollars. We sent off letters on Barnstable stationery with Doug’s signature offering to purchase their land for about three or four cents on the dollar, ostensibly for a hunting preserve, and stressing that their sale to us would enable them to take a tax loss and cut their losses on the deal.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Doug said. “Why in hell buy their land?”

I explained it to him. When we approached Gunderman, he would do a little checking on his own hook, and he would run down some of the men who had sold land to us and confirm that we were actually buying the property.

“The hell,” he said. “That’s no problem. He’ll dictate his letters to Evvie and she’ll sidetrack them.”

“But she can let these go through,” I told him, “and Gunderman will get actual confirmation. And we’ll have actual deeds to show him along with the phony ones. The cash involved won’t be much. A few dollars here and a few dollars there, and we won’t sink more than a thousand at the outside into land.”

“Does Gunderman get one of these letters?”

“No. Have the girl send him one, but don’t mail it to him, mail it to our girl in his office. Let her sneak it into the files without showing it to him.”

“So he can discover it later?”

“Right,” I said.

What the hell — the girl was in on the play for seventeen-five. She might as well make herself useful.

We let our girl write up about thirty of those letters and we mailed out eight or ten of them. Two men wrote back immediately accepting our offer, and we sent them checks by return mail. Others wrote asking for more information, which we dutifully supplied. One of those later accepted our offer. One man said that he had already disposed of his land at a price slightly higher than our offer in order to take a tax loss. Two men wanted to get us to boost our offer, and we wrote back stating that our original offer had been firm and we couldn’t possibly raise it. One of these men accepted, one didn’t.

We wound up spending about three hundred dollars on moose pasture and got title to around twenty-nine hundred acres.

Activity in our bank account was even simpler to create. Doug would write checks to various persons. I countersigned the checks as Whittlief, then endorsed them on the back with the name of the nonexistent payee and put them through my own account, an account I’d taken out under the name of P. T. Parker. I cashed each check through the Parker account and redeposited the money in the Barnstable account. With a balance of between twelve and seventeen thousand dollars, we managed to show a turnover of around forty thousand dollars in the first month of operation, and the only cost to us was that of banking fees, which were small enough. Anyone who looked at our bank statement would see a record of steady activity with a lot of money coming in and a lot going out. Anybody looking at our corporate checkbook would see a wide variety of men and companies listed as payees for various checks. No one would uncover the fact that almost every one of those checks had gone through one P. T. Parker’s account. Parker’s name appeared on the cancelled checks, but we weren’t showing those around.

There was a lot of waiting to do. No matter how much activity we feigned, you couldn’t get around the fact that we were stuck with leading fundamentally inactive lives until our front had had time to age and ripen a little. Fortunately we weren’t trying to live the part of an old established firm. Part of our cover was that we had incorporated only recently, that the Barnstable outfit was an organization of sharpshooters set up on a short-term basis with a specific purpose.

All well and good, but we still had to be two months in operation before I could set about the business of roping Gunderman. This was still a remarkably short time. I’ve known cons who would set up a store in one city a year in advance, just letting it build up by itself while they made a living at something else or on the short con or working other gigs or whatever. Then the store would be waiting for them when they were ready to use it.

I knew a man named Ready Riley from Philadelphia — dead now, and I miss him — who was facing a sentence of ninety days for some misdemeanor. He got out on bail before sentencing and set up a perfect front for a very pretty swindle. His store was a fake gambling casino. He set all the wheels in motion, then got sentenced and did ninety days standing on his ear, and got out of jail and pulled off the con and left town with a fat wallet. He had already earned his nickname before that job, but he lived up to it then.

Well. We had ourselves two months to bum and I didn’t have much to do. My room was a few steps up from the place I’d had in Boulder. I had a private bath, and the furniture was a little less decrepit. I couldn’t spend too much time in the room because I was supposed to be working. I couldn’t spend much time at the office because I was supposed to be the firm’s contact man, meeting prospects and trying to buy their land. I couldn’t see too much of Doug because I was supposed to be a hired hand, not someone he’d pick to run around with socially.

I saw a lot of movies. I did some shopping and bought clothes with Toronto labels. I spent enough nights at a jazz club on Yonge called The Friars so that they knew my face and what I liked to drink. I did a lot of reading. I knocked around a lot, got the feel of the city.

It was a good town. Toronto had a feeling of growth and progress to it that reminded me of the West Coast states. There was a lot of money in the city, and a lot of action. The night spots did a good business even in the middle of the week. They closed early, at one o’clock, but they drew well.

There were times when I had to remind myself that I was in a foreign country. The money was different, and it took a while to get used to two-dollar bills in wide circulation. The people had a slight accent that you could get used to in not much time. The differences were small ones, and mostly on the surface. If you dropped the whole city in the States, it would take you a few minutes before anything seemed out of place.

I did some drinking, but not too much of it. I moved around quite a bit. Now and then I found a girl, but those relationships were strictly short-term, begun at night and over by morning.

Doug had said that everyone was entitled to one weakness, and that his was gambling. He wasn’t gambling on the job. If I had a weakness, it was probably women, but I wasn’t indulging that weakness on the job either. A mechanical romp, yes. An affair, no. There were enough lies already to live up to, and I didn’t want any complications.