Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

I leaned forward in my chair, stubbed out my cigarette in his ashtray, and narrowed my eyes. I said, “I’m afraid I had more to drink the other night than I usually do. When I was out with Ev — with your secretary. I guess I talked a little more than I wanted to, and I guess she relayed some of what I said to you.”

He just smiled.

“The men who employ me trust me to do my job, Wally, and part of doing my job is keeping certain matters confidential. I... if I said anything that I shouldn’t have said, and if it got back to you, well, I just wish you’d forget it.”

“Oh? You don’t have to worry about my making trouble for you, John.”

“It’s not that, but—”

“And if it’ll set your mind at rest, you didn’t tell me so very much through Evvie. Or if you did tell her everything, then she held out on me.” He chuckled to let me know how plainly impossible it was that she might keep anything from him. “But I do know a lot more about the operations of the Barnstable outfit than I ever learned from you. After all, I wouldn’t keep calling you in Toronto just to tell you that I wasn’t interested in your proposition, would I?”

“I didn’t think so, no.”

“Hardly. Would you like to know what I’ve managed to learn?”

I nodded, and he told me. He parroted back just about every fact we had arranged for him to uncover. He gave me dates and figures and names and I let my jaw drop progressively as he built himself up a good head of steam. When he finished I just sat there shaking my head.

“I couldn’t have let all of that slip to Evvie.”

“You didn’t, John.”

“Why, there are things you know that I don’t even know, like exactly when the company was organized. How did you—”

He waved all of this away with one hand. “When you’ve been in business as long as I have,” he said, “you know how to get information. And you’d be surprised how easy it is to find something out once you’ve made up your mind. When someone comes to offer me money, John, I want to know something about him. When someone wants to buy something from me, I like to know what it is he plans to do with it.” He set the cigar aside and folded his hands on the desk top. “And that still has me up in the air. You people have bought all of that land, and by God, you’ve put your hands on a hell of a lot of land. How much acreage would you say you’ve got, John?”

“I don’t honestly know,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I’ve seen quite a few people, but a large portion of our dealings have been carried on through the mails, or over the telephone. I’m only sent on the road when we don’t get anywhere through the mail. So I honestly don’t know how large the corporate holdings are, Wally.”

“But Barnstable owns quite a bit of land, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Now that’s as far as I can go with it,” he said. He sat back and scratched his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, John, I’m damned if I can figure out what you people plan to do with that land. Now I can see that you’ve been very clever about this. Not you personally, John, but your company, in hitting on this method of purchasing land. By dealing with people who’ve been cheated on this land in the first place, you’re putting yourselves in a position where you can steal it right back.”

“Not steal it,” I said. “We—”

“Figure of speech, John, but let’s not mince words. You folks are picking up that land at a hell of a lot less than it’s worth. When you offered me five hundred dollars for land I sank twenty thousand into, all I could see was the difference between five hundred and twenty thousand. Which is a hell of a difference. And I’m damn certain that’s all anybody sees when they come up against your offer. When a man overpays for a piece of property the way I overpaid for that stretch of goddamned moose pasture, all he can see is that he got taken, that he laid out money for something worthless.

“But that land’s not worthless because, damn it, no land is worthless, no matter where it is. I ought to know that if anybody should. Hell, the land I’ve bought that people said wasn’t worth a damn, and the money I made on it while those jokers thought I was acting like several kinds of an idiot—”

He launched into a long tirade while I got another cigarette going. He was bragging now, boasting about a deal he had pulled off years ago, and he seemed to like the sound of his own voice so much that I let him listen to it as long as he wanted to. During the war, it seemed, he had bought a ring of property around the perimeter of the city. He bought it cheap, and he was sitting on a whole boatload of it when the postwar housing boom hit at the end of the war. Then he had gone and done the same thing during Korea, with results almost as spectacular.

“I’m getting off the track again. What I mean, John, is that you people are buying up this land for no price at all. Now take my acreage. You offered me five hundred dollars for it, is that right?”

“Yes, and—”

“And do you want to know something? It didn’t occur to me for the longest time to stop and figure out what the right market price for that land is. I always knew it was a good sum short of what I had in the property, but I never bothered to pinpoint it. Well, I finally did, and do you know what my land actually ought to be worth?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said triumphantly. “And here you were trying to steal all of that for no more than five hundred.”

I drew myself up straight in my chair. “I don’t think you can call that stealing,” I said stiffly. “That was a bona fide offer, Wally, and whether or not you happened to like the price—”

“Now hold on.” He got up from his chair, came out from behind the desk. He gripped my shoulder and I let myself relax. “Just take it easy,” he was saying. “No one’s calling you a thief.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“Well, then, I apologize. Is that better?”

I let that go. He told me he certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of me. After all, we were both Americans, weren’t we? I might be working for a Canuck outfit, but, damn it, I was a New Mexico boy, and New Mexico and Olean were a lot closer to each other than either was to Toronto, weren’t they? They weren’t on any map that I knew about, but he was talking and I let him have all the room he needed. “Here’s where it gets funny,” he said. “See, I know what this Barnstable outfit’s been doing. Damned if I don’t admire the whole operation, John. If anybody wanted to pick up land at a good price, you couldn’t ask for a better way of doing it.”

“And perfectly legal,” I reminded him.

“Oh, perfectly legal.” He smiled momentarily. “But to get back to what I was getting at. Here I’ve got the whole thing figured out, what you people are doing and all, and then I run into a snag. Because I’ll be damned if I can figure out what you intend to do with the land.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Purchase and development of western territory,” he quoted. “That’s the alleged purpose of your incorporation, John.”

“It is?”

He chuckled. “Didn’t know that yourself, did you? But that’s the way you boys worded it in your application for a charter. I’m willing to dig a little for information, see? Purchase and development. That might make a little sense, except as far as I can see you folks aren’t in any position to do any development, and developing the quantity of land you’ve bought would be one hell of an expense. You know what the total capitalization of the Barnstable Corporation is?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”