Lawrence Block: The Girl with the Long Green Heart

I showered, I shaved, I smoked. If only there was something really wrong with his grift, I thought. If only there was a pretty snag I could catch around my finger. If only I could see the flaw. But on the surface it looked too very perfect, with a big payoff for maybe three months of work, and with no chance at all of a foul-up that could lead me back to a cell.

Rance showed up at eleven-thirty. “I’m catching a four o’clock plane from Denver,” he said. “I’ll have to drive back there. Let’s grab lunch now.”

“Come on in and sit down.”

“Oh?”

“I want to hear the whole thing,” I said. “It sounded too damned good last night. I want to prove that there’s something wrong with it.”

“And if there isn’t?”

“Well.”

He took it from the top. It went back five years to a time when a few of the New York boys were working a boiler-room operation out of Toronto. It was a standard high-pressure operation with one important difference. Instead of peddling uranium or oil stocks, or mineral rights, the promoters were selling parcels of raw land itself. They bought up the land for thirty to fifty cents an acre and sold it for three or four dollars an acre.

“Goldin and Prince were on top of this one,” he said. “You’ve got to remember when this was, just five years ago. The uranium stock con got its first big play right after the war, and then it came back strong during the Korean thing and for about a year after that. By the time it ran its course everybody had a little bell inside his head that rang when you mentioned the words Canadian uranium stocks . The newspapers and magazines ran features on the con and Washington circulated lists of bad stocks and everybody got wise, even the thickest marks around. But Goldin and Al Prince had a gimmick working for them. They weren’t selling stocks. They were pushing the land itself, and that let the mark see that he was getting something. You tell him he can buy a thousand acres of valuable land for three or four thousand dollars and he doesn’t see how he can get taken. The land is real, it’s there for him to look at. Half the time he doesn’t know what a thousand acres is. All he knows is that it’s a lot of land. It’s maybe four hundred dollars worth of land that he’s paying ten times actual value for, but he doesn’t know this.”

I said it was expensive — Goldin and Prince had to buy the land in the first place, and that cost more than printing up stock certificates.

“They didn’t care. They were operating on the mooches’ money, buying the land after they’d collected, and they didn’t mind knocking ten percent off the top to cover the cost of the land itself. Besides, the whole thing came out perfectly legal. They promised land and they delivered land, and any extra promises were verbal and uncollectable. It worked for them. They sold half of Canada, or close to it. Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, some tracts in the Yukon and in the Northwest Territories.”

I told him to go on. “All right,” he said. “That’s the background. Now you’ve got a bunch of marks around the country who own land they paid maybe ten times too much for. They’re stuck with it. Right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Now we skip to this frail I found in Vegas. She’s a secretary in her late twenties. For the past six years or so she’s been working for this millionaire. For about four of those years she’s been sleeping with him. All this time his wife was sick. She thought he was going to marry her when the wife finally died. A year ago the wife died.”

“And he didn’t marry her.”

“Didn’t and doesn’t plan to. She’s not too happy about this. She’s a good-looking broad; she was married once before and the marriage fell in. Now she’s stuck in a hick town working for this guy and she’d like to get the hell away from him and make a good marriage. She figures that she needs front money to do this. She wants to marry rich, and that means going where the money is and living the part. She’d like to pick up a healthy piece of change, and she’d also like to stick it into this guy and break it off, because she figures he has it coming.”

“She really expected him to marry her?”

“Yes. She was bitching about him and I started drawing her out just automatically, and she gave me a good picture of the guy. That started the wheels turning. You can see how it went. I said something about how she’d probably like to see him get taken but good, and she mentioned that he had been taken once before, when she had just started working for him. And of course it was this Canadian deal that had hooked him. He bought a nice stretch of mooseland from Capital Northwestern Development, which was what Goldin and Prince were calling themselves about that time.”

“How deep did he go?”

“Twenty or twenty-five thou.”

“Jesus.”

“Uh-huh. So now we come to the mooch himself. His name is Wallace J. Gunderman. He lives in someplace called Olean, in western New York near the Pennsylvania border. His father got rich in oil. Gunderman got richer in land. If he wasn’t so rich you’d laugh all over him, because he’ll buy any piece of land he can get at his price. He’s a nut on the subject, according to what Evvie said.”

“Evvie?”

“Evelyn Stone, that’s her name. But Gunderman. He’ll buy any piece of land, no matter how worthless it is. He started doing this about thirty years ago. He made out very well. Part of this was a matter of luck, of being in the right place at the right time and having the cash to operate on. Another part was shrewdness. He’s supposed to be a tough man in a trade.”

He went on about Gunderman. Five years ago Gunderman had gone for a minimum of twenty thousand dollars and had wound up with a chunk of scrubland with a fair market value in the neighborhood of two grand. He was rich enough to stand that sort of a loss without any trouble, but the whole thing hit him where he lived. He was proud of himself, of his head for business, and here he’d been taken in his own backyard, on a land swindle. This wasn’t easy to live down. He still owned the land and he liked to tell people that he would make out on it eventually, that any land would be valuable if you held it long enough. But he was itching to get the bad taste of that con out of his system. He had been crazy to take that kind of a beating. If he could wind up turning his loss into a profit, if he could make out nicely on that Canadian land, then he would wind up crazy like a fox.

“You can see where he stands, Johnny.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The right type of set-up—”

“And he’s there with both hands full.”

“That’s the idea. And here’s how it works, and this is all mine and I think it’s beautiful. Gunderman gets a letter making him an offer for his Canadian land. This gets his head spinning right away. Nobody’s ever been interested in this land and he can’t understand why anybody would want it. What he probably figures from the go is that there’s been a uranium strike in the neighborhood, or something like that, and he wants to find out what’s up. He checks, and nothing’s up, the land is as worthless as ever.

“Then you go to see him and repeat the offer. You—”

“What am I offering?”

“About five hundred dollars.”

“For something that ran him twenty thou?”

“Right. Of course he doesn’t take it. Then he finds out we’ve been making the same kind of offer to other men who got caught in the Capital Northwestern Development swindle. That stirs him up. It’s not just his land, it’s a whole lot of land that we’re looking to buy. He can’t figure out why, but two things are certain. First of all, he’s not going to sell that land of his, not for anything. And second, he’s going to be hungry to find out more.”