Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

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.”