Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

And one night I met Doug for dinner and we wound up at a side table at The Friars and nursed Scotch on the rocks and listened to a good hard-bop group. He said, “I think we’re ready. I think tomorrow. I talked to Evvie this afternoon and he’s in town, and he doesn’t have anything pressing for the next few days to get him sidetracked.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked at him, and for a change I saw tension lines in that lover-boy face. They didn’t remain there long. A smile wiped them away.

“This is big, Johnny.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you figure we ought to wait a while, about another week or two—”

He had managed to pick up elements of a Canadian accent. It showed on certain words. About came out aboat . I still sounded the same as ever, but then I wasn’t posing as a native. I was just a transplanted American.

“Now’s as good a time as any.”

“Good,” he said. “There’s a couple ways to get there. You go to Buffalo first, and then south to Olean. There’s one plane a day from Buffalo to Olean, or you can do it by bus or train. I think the bus is a better bet than the train.”

“I’d rather fly.”

“That’s what I figured, and it makes more sense that you’d fly down for the meeting instead of wasting that time on a bus or a train. You fly American to Buffalo airport and then get a Mohawk flight to Olean, I wrote it out for you.”

He left a few minutes after that. I stayed around for another drink, then walked back to my hotel. I knew I would have trouble getting to sleep. It was more trouble than I’d expected. I kept on thinking of the two bad things that could happen. I could hit a snag at the start, or I could rope him in neatly and then have a wheel come off later in the game.

If it blew up in the beginning, we were out two months’ time and the money we’d spent so far. This was a tailor-made con. Gunderman might have been the only man on earth we were primed for, and if he tipped right off the bat we could junk the whole operation and forget it. Rance was out his stake, and I could flush away my plans for turning Bannion’s roadhouse into a Rocky Mountain Grossinger’s.

If it soured later on, we were out more than time and money. If it soured later on, we would go to jail.

I kept dreaming about that. About being locked away, locked up in a cell. I kept waking up in a sweat and sitting around smoking a cigarette and dropping off to sleep again and waking up out of another dream.

The next night I puddle-jumped to Olean. That night I slept well. And woke up, and met my mooch and tossed that lasso around his manly shoulders.

And waited now, in the lobby of the Olean House, for Evvie Stone.

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.