Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

“So? If I got a piece of a sweet deal, I wouldn’t be anxious to hire a skywriter to spread the word. Anybody who buys in is going to put a lid on things.”

“Not if they want money in a hurry.”

“I don’t follow you.”

I laid it out for him. The buyer Barnstable was looking for had to be someone who was willing to sit for a long time before he took his profit. If he started parceling the land and selling it off right away, things would come out into the open and all of this would work to Barnstable’s disadvantage. If the buyer held on for a minimum of two years, there was no problem. But it wasn’t easy to find someone who would play it that way. Lots of people might say they would keep the property intact, but then they might turn around and do the opposite as soon as the ink was dry.

“That’s one thing that occurred to me,” I said. “You might not want to tie your money up that way. At the price they want, an operator could work things so that he turned a profit in ninety days’ time. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.”

“Well, hell,” he said. “I don’t want it either!”

“You don’t?”

I let him show me just how obvious it was. Why, he pointed out, long-term holdings in cheap land were right up his alley. He was no fast-dollar operator. If any man on earth believed in holding on for the big killing, he was that man. Why, if he could buy the right kind of land and get it at the right price, he would sit on it until hell turned cold. That was what made it all so perfect. They had the deal that was perfect for him, and he was just the buyer they were looking for.

“I just don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t know what?”

“If you were only someone they knew, Wally. So much of this has to be done on trust. If they can’t trust the man they’re dealing with—”

“Dammit, don’t you think they can trust me?”

“ I do, but they don’t know you. Now—”

“I could sell them. This Rance, is he the top dog there?”

“He runs things.”

“Suppose I met him?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Dammit, what don’t you know?” He was upset with me. I was obviously trying to put the brakes on things, and he wasn’t having any part of it. I was seeing complexities where everything was as simple as rolling off a girl. I admitted that I might be able to arrange a meeting. It would have to be quick, and I couldn’t promise anything. I knew that the deal with the Chicago interests hadn’t been finalized yet, but I couldn’t guarantee that it wasn’t in the bag for them.

“I don’t know how well it could work, Wally. The one thing they don’t want is someone who’s apt to walk in there with a pocketful of lawyers and accountants. They—”

More assurances. His accountant was a glorified bookkeeper and that was all, he told me. His accountant kept the taxes down and the books in order, but he wasn’t one of these modern morons who didn’t put a nickel in a pay toilet without checking it out first with his accountant. And he didn’t need legal advice before he took a leak, either.

I more or less knew this side of him already, through Evvie. But it was good to hear him put it into words of his own.

“What kind of money’s going to be involved in this, John?”

I told him I wasn’t sure, but it looked as though it would run between a hundred and a hundred fifty thou. I made it sound as though I didn’t believe that much money existed. That gave him the chance to play the sum down. Nothing was too expensive for the big noise from Olean. The Scrubland King.

“What kind of terms, John?”

“All cash.”

“They won’t take any paper at all?”

“Not a chance. It has to be cash. And part of it under the table.”

“Is that right?’

“I think so.”

He thought it over. “That’s not so bad,” he said. “Raises the capital gains tax on my end, but that’s a long time in the future and there’s a thousand ways to dodge that part of it. Thinking up the dodges is the part I leave to the accountants, John. They’re a whole lot cuter at that side of the game. But they don’t have the imagination for the big decisions. Take away their slide rules and they can’t tie their shoes in the morning.”

“You wouldn’t mind a cash deal?”

“Why should I mind?”

“It means tying up money.”

“When the profit is there,” he said, “a man’s a fool to worry how he ties up his money. Instead of drawing interest he takes his time and makes a profit ten times the size of interest.”

I was with him until somewhere around midnight. During the tail end of the evening we did a lot less talking and a lot more drinking. He loosened up some and worked harder on the Black Label. He had the right attitude, and as far as I could tell he had taken all the bait without finding a trace of hook so far. He was doing what we wanted. He was pushing hard to sell himself to Rance.

I had already managed to slide a few rough ones past him. I’d dropped the idea in his mind that he might do better playing his own hand instead of bringing his accountants and lawyers too far into the thick of things. This was his style anyway, but it didn’t hurt to reinforce it. And I’d set him up for the big hassle of an all-cash deal.

We had considered other possibilities. We had thought about increasing the size of the mythical corporation, inflating our sales price to around a million, taking a hundred thou in cash and paper for the balance. Doug had liked it that way. He thought Gunderman would salivate at the notion of all that profit to be handled with an outlay of a hundred thousand.

I liked it the other way. If the deal was too big, he’d want to look at it a lot harder. To Gunderman, a hundred thousand dollars was a lot less than a million, even if the cash outlay was exactly the same. We wanted to keep him in love with the deal and entranced with the possibilities, but we didn’t want him so shaky at the idea of all that money that he would take too long a look at the weak points of our house of cards.

On top of everything, there was something sweet about the notion of the all-cash deal. It fit into the hush-hush aspects of the game. It added, oh, maybe a touch of reality. And by balancing it off against the bit about paying part of the price sub rosa, it all fell right into place. Oh, I liked it fine.

By the time I left his hotel room I knew he’d have to meet Rance in the morning. It made no sense to leave him hanging as much as an extra day. He was set up perfectly now, the timing was ideal, and we couldn’t pick a better psychological moment to get this part out of the way. It’s tricky when you shift the mooch from the roper to the inside man. You have to handle it just right. Tomorrow was fine.

“I’m their man,” he was still telling me as I left. “They couldn’t find a more logical person to deal with if they looked forever. I’ve got a batch of arguments to use on Rance. One man’s better to deal with than a whole mob, dammit. When you want to keep things on the quiet side you don’t negotiate with a whole army. I can tell him a hell of a lot. I can sell myself, John.”

You can sell yourself down the river, I thought. But I just gave him some good sound brotherly advice. Don’t push too hard, I told him, and don’t rush things. He nodded soberly. He’d be careful, he assured me. He’d do his best.

I called Doug that night just to go through the motions with him. I went back to my hotel, figuring I had enough Johnny Black in me to sleep. It turned out I figured wrong. In the morning I would be handing the ball to Doug Rance and it would be my turn to sweat it out on the bench. I got nervous in advance. Sometimes this is good; you get your worrying out of the way and keep cool later on. But I wasn’t in the mood for it.