Lawrence Block: The Girl with the Long Green Heart

I made the appropriate comment and started on my coffee. He lit up a cigar and chewed the end of it for a few minutes.

Then he said, “That’s what burned me the most about that tract of moose pasture up in Canada. Here those sharpshooters took me at my own game. Here I am in the land business, buying land cheap all over the Southern Tier, and they sell me useless land at such a high price I still can’t believe I went for it. You know about that promotion?”

“Just how much land you hold, and that you’re supposed to have paid a pretty stiff price for it.”

“Stiff.” He finished his coffee. “You don’t know the half of it. I got a fast-talking sharpie who called me on the phone and went on about uranium strikes in the area and how his real estate brokerage house wanted to turn over a lot of land in a hurry, and how the uranium rights were sure to sell on a terrific royalty arrangement, and he sent along just enough in the way of promotional material to make me convinced I was getting in on the ground floor of the greatest bargain since the Dutch bought Manhattan Island. I went for it like a fish for a worm. Except it wasn’t even a worm on that hook, it was a lure, and when I bit on it I was hooked through the gills and back out again. All that money for some acreage I could graze reindeer on, if I had some reindeer.”

“Didn’t you have any legal recourse?”

“Not a bit. That was the hell of it. Everything they did was legal. They were contracting to sell me land, and they sold it, and I bought it, and it was mine and my money was theirs and that was that. I don’t think they could have pulled it off in the States. But Canada’s a little more lenient when it comes to government regulation. They get away with murder up there.”

He shook his head. “But I’m running off at the mouth. Anyway, I guess we’re back to the subject that got us here in the first place. We’re talking about my stretch of land. You want to buy it, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I won’t say it’s not for sale. What kind of an opening offer did you have in mind?”

“I believe there was a figure mentioned in Mr. Rance’s letter,” I said carefully.

“There was, yes, but I thought it was just a feeler. There was an offer of five hundred dollars.”

“Well that’s what I’m prepared to offer, Wally.”

He grinned. “As an opening offer?”

“As a firm price.”

The grin faded. “That’s a hell of a figure,” he said. “If you had any idea what that hunk of property cost me—”

“Yes, but of course you paid an inflated price for it.”

“Still and all, I sank all of twenty thousand dollars into that land. There’s an even seventy-five hundred acres of it, most of it in Alberta but a little chunk edging into Saskatchewan. That’s better than eleven square miles. Closer to twelve square miles, and you want to steal it for five hundred dollars.”

“I wouldn’t call it stealing, exactly.”

“Well, what would you call it?” He ducked the ash from his cigar and rolled the cigar between his thumb and forefinger. His hands were very large, the fingers blunt. “That’s about thirty dollars for a square mile of land. Well, more than that. Let me figure a minute—”

He used a pencil and paper, calculated quickly, looked up in triumph. “Just a shade over forty dollars a square mile,” he said. “That’s pretty cheap, John. Now I wouldn’t call that a high price.”

“Neither would I.”

“So?”

I took a breath. “But Barnstable’s not looking to pay a high price,” I said. I looked at him very sincerely. “We want to buy land cheaply, Wally. We can use this land — we have a client who’s interested in a hunting preserve in that area, but we have to get that land at our price.”

“When you figure my cost—”

“But at least this enables you to get out of it once and for all, and to cut your loss. Then too, once you’ve sold the land you can take your capital loss on it for tax purposes.”

He thought that over. “I had an argument with my tax man on that a few years ago,” he said slowly. “You know what the guy wanted me to do? Wanted me to sell the works to someone for a dollar. Just get rid of it for nothing so that I’d be transferring title and I could list a twenty-thousand-dollar loss. I couldn’t see giving something away like that, not something like land. I’d rather keep the land and pay the damn taxes.”

“Well, we would be paying you more than a dollar.”

“Five hundred dollars, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

He called the waitress over and ordered another Scotch and water. I joined him. He remained silent until the girl brought the drinks. It was past one now, and the lunch crowd had thinned down considerably. He sipped his drink and put it down on the table and looked at me.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “At that price I just wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I think you’ll have trouble finding anyone who’ll be inclined to take the kind of offer you’ve made me.”

“There’s a lot of land up in that neck of the woods,” I said.

“Yes, I know that.”

“And we’ve had little difficulty buying it at our price so far,” I went on, and then stopped abruptly and studied the tablecloth in front of me.

“You’re interested in more than just my land, then.”

“Well, that’s not what I meant to say. Of course we’ve bought occasional parcels of this type of property before, but—”

“For hunting lodges.”

“Actually, no. But we’ve had occasion to purchase unimproved land in the past, and in cases like this, we’re usually able to get the land at a low price. When you’re dealing with worthless land—”

“No land is useless.”

“Well, of course not.”

His eyes probed mine. I met his glance for a moment, then averted my eyes. When I looked back he was still scanning my face.

“This is beginning to interest me,” he said finally.

“I had hoped it would.”

“And one thing that interests me is that you haven’t upped your offer. I figured from the beginning that if you would open with an offer of five hundred you’d be prepared to go to double that. But you haven’t given me any of the usual runaround, about calling the home office and trying to get them to raise the ante. None of that. You’ve just about got me convinced that five hundred is as high as you intend to go.”

“It is.”

“Uh-huh. Anything important happening in Canada that I don’t know about?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean that it would be quite a joke if it turned out that there really was uranium on that land, wouldn’t it?”

“I assure you—”

“Oh, I’m sure there isn’t.” I was obviously uncomfortable, and he was enjoying this. “I’m sure the land is just as rotten and deserted as it always was. But I am interested, and not so much in your offer as in what lies beneath it. That’s something that I find very interesting.”

“Well,” I said.

He finished his drink and put the glass down. “This whole situation is something I’d like to give a certain amount of thought to. Five hundred dollars is an almost immaterial factor here as far as I’m concerned. The question is what I want to do with the land, whether or not I want to own it. You can appreciate that.”

“Then you might consider selling?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. He was not very convincing. “But the thing is, I want to think it over. Were you planning to stay overnight in Olean?”

“I was going to fly back this evening.”

“You ought to stay,” he said. “I’ll tell you, I’d like to have dinner with you tonight. I have to get moving now, I’m late for an appointment as it is, but I’d like to go over this with you and perhaps get a fuller picture. It might be worth your while if you spent an extra day here.”