The Girl With the Long Green Heart

by Lawrence Block

  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.

  Eleven

  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.

  I smoked a few cigarettes and kept reaching for the phone and changing my mind. She’d be sleeping by now. I had no real reason to wake her, nothing to tell her that wouldn’t keep. Around two-thirty I gave up, showered, shaved, got dressed and went out. The wind had a sharp cold edge to it. I found an all-night place, had coffee and a ham sandwich. The coffee wasn’t bad. I chain smoked and smelled my sweat, the special perspiration of very late hours. A human body too long without sleep, held awake by nerves and little more, is somehow unclean no matter how recent its shower or how close its shave. I had cold feet, and literally so; it was damp down there, with not enough blood circulating.

  The greasy spoons draw a greasy crowd at that hour. There were a few night workers, but only a few; Toronto, big and bustling, is still a daylight city. There were drunks either sobering up or waiting for the bars to re-open—it was anybody’s guess. There were men and women who had no particular place to go and no pressing reason to go to sleep. There were two or three women who might have been prostitutes and three teenagers who were either faggots or junkies. Sometimes you need a scorecard. Everything looks alike these days.

  I lit the last cigarette in the pack and thought about the air in Colorado.

  When I was a kid I told stories. People called it lying. It really wasn’t; I had a fairly wicked imagination and a tendency to embellish things. I got punished occasionally, but I was not always caught. I became a fairly good liar.

  I read some psychology years later in Q. I had remembered something from a college psych course that I wanted to check out, and in the prison library I learned that I had not been what they call a pathological liar. I was always aware that my stories were not true. I was simply good at the game.

  So skip a few years. I got fair grades in school—they wrote things like Could do better with effort on the margins of the cards. My guidance counselor tried to talk me out of applying to Yale. I had visions—Yale, Yale Law, an apprenticeship with some genius like Geisler or Leibowitz, then back to New Mexico to be the hottest criminal lawyer on the rapidly expanding frontier. Sometimes in the dreams I wound up staying in the big city. Sometimes I went into politics. I always came out Very Important.

  Yale turned me down. I wound up at the state university at Santa Fe and coasted for most of three years. I don’t remember many of the courses that I took. I was pre-law, but that generally leaves you a lot of room.

  Oh, hell. I couldn’t stay off probation. During my junior year there was a girl—there is always a girl—and I buckled down and tried harder. We had it figured. I was going to go to Yale Law, she was going to marry me and work to put me through law school, and then segue into the dream for a big finish, hearts and flowers, over and out.

  Everything hit the fan at once. Yale Law said no by return mail, the girl missed her period and got scared, and although it turned out to be a false alarm it managed to kill things for us. I went on a too-long drunk and came out of it in time for a mid-term. I wasn’t prepared for it, and they caught me with the book open on my lap.

  Maybe I could have talked my way out of it. I didn’t try, didn’t even wait for the news that the Dean wanted to see me. I could have gone home. You always can, they say, but you don’t realize this until later. I did not want to go back to Springer. I did not want to make up a fresh story en route and look at their faces and wonder whether or not t
hey believed it. I packed one suitcase and went into town. I started off flat broke, and the few things I hocked—my typewriter, my radio—did not fatten my wallet.

  In the Greyhound station men’s room I put on my good suit and a clean shirt and a tie. I checked my suitcase and let a yassuh-boss kid shine my shoes. Then I went shopping in the best department store in Santa Fe.

  I spent half an hour in the second-floor men’s department. I looked at a few suits and some sport jackets. I tried things on but didn’t buy much, just a couple of shirts and a five-dollar tie. I paid cash and looked at my watch while the clerk was wrapping the packages. The California bus was due to take off in fifteen minutes.

  “Better hurry it,” I said. “I’ve got a bus to make.”

  He gave me my package and my change. I walked quickly to the escalator, and I took one step, and then I fell down the full flight and landed in a heap on the floor.

  It caused quite a stir. I stayed put for the first few seconds and let them make a fuss over me. One woman had screamed tentatively while I was falling, and then a bevy of nervous clerks made properly nervous sounds. I gave them a minute, then shook my head groggily, gulped air, said something unintelligible, started to get up, stopped, got up, slipped, righted myself, and stood there finally looking as out of it as I possibly could.

  They hustled me into the manager’s office as fast as they could. If anything had been wrong with me this would have been a very bad move, but they were not anxious to have me lying sprawled out at the foot of the escalator; it was rotten public relations. They sat me down and checked me inexpertly for broken bones and asked me how I felt.

  “Gee,” I said, “I don’t know. My back’s twisted all to hell and gone.”

  “It probably shook you up. You should watch your step, son.”

  You watch your stepson, I thought. I’ll watch my fairy godmother. But what I said was, “I could swear that stair moved when I stepped on it.”

  “Of course it did. It’s an escalator.”

  “No, the tread slipped sideways. I put one foot square on it and it slipped sideways and I . . . whew, that was some feeling.”

  The silence was almost embarrassing. I looked at my watch. It had broken in the fall, and I mentioned this. I asked what time it was. They told me.

  “Oh, terrific,” I said. “I just missed a bus.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “San Francisco. I live there.”

  “You go to school at State?”

  “That’s right.”

  The room cleared a little. Two of them stayed around, and they played the game as though they knew it very well. Their watch department would repair my ticker free of charge, they explained. And they would put me in a cab to the airport so that I could fly to San Francisco.

  That was very decent of them, I said.

  “Just sign right here, Mr. Hayden—”

  I got the pen almost to the paper, then stopped. “Wait a second,” I said. “Suppose I really racked myself up?”

  “Well—”

  “Listen, my roommate’s old man is a lawyer. He’s got this big negligence practice in Albuquerque. The stories Ray told me, say, I’m not signing anything.”

  They would fix my watch and put me in a cab? Sure they would. I put the pen down and they opened up a little. Nobody wanted to talk about lawyers, I was assured. Nobody wanted to spend weeks or even months in a courtroom. I was all right, and if anything turned up I had his personal guarantee that my medical expenses would be taken care of, but it was very important to him personally that they get the paperwork out of the way. All they needed was my signature. They sweetened the pot. Just as a token of their concern for my welfare, they would throw in a suit. I could pick any suit in the store, with their compliments.

  “Well, I already looked at every suit in the store,” I told them, properly baffled. “I couldn’t find anything I even wanted, for God’s sake. I mean, my Dad buys me all the suits I want.”

  I let them make the deal. We closed for a new watch, air passage to S.F., and a flat hundred bucks in cash. I wrote my name on the line and that was that.

  It was all very easy. Later on I couldn’t believe how easy it had been, how gently I had slipped into the role, how stupid they were. The idiots thought they were being so goddamn smooth about everything. Greasing the skids for me, making me sign myself out of a six-figure nuisance suit for a few bucks and a watch and an airplane ticket. They danced for me like puppets, and they were so busy being cute they never even felt the strings.

  The only hard part was at the beginning. Pitching myself down that escalator—that took a little doing. But from there on it was gravy. The first step was a lulu, but the rest of the road was a cinch.

  And that, I suppose, was the beginning. I pulled the same dodge a week later in a San Francisco department store and found out I’d had a large dose of beginner’s luck. I took a fairly bad fall to start things off, and then I ran up against a floor manager who pegged me for a grifter from the go. As it turned out, I had to spend a week in the hospital. I actually went ahead and got a Market Street lawyer to take the case. This surprised the hell out of the floor manager. I turned out to be one hundred percent clean, a hard-working college dropout with no criminal record and no shady past history whatsoever. They got religion and settled out of court. After I paid the lawyer and the hospital I had almost eighteen hundred dollars to cushion me.

  I also had one grift I could never pull again for the rest of my life. Nor was I inclined to. That was one nasty fall on that escalator.

  There were other angles.

  With eighteen hundred dollars I was in no particular hurry to find a job. Knock around for a while with time on your hands and the right gleam in your eye and you meet people. Meet the right people and you learn the business. If the life doesn’t fit, it’s not long before you drop it or it drops you and you look for a calmer way to make a living. If it fits you, then you’re home.

  I used to think about this in Q. I had worlds of time for thought. I tried to work it back to the beginning, like tracing a river to its source. When I was a kid in geography class I thought rivers had sources that were very dramatic affairs—clear streams of water leaping out of rocks and such. But follow a river back and it spreads into smaller and smaller streams. Trace them one by one and they disappear into acres of dust. The thinking sessions in prison dried up the same way.

  If I hadn’t busted out of State I’d have screwed things up for myself somewhere else along the line. If I had struck out hard on that first roll down the escalator I’d have found another better angle later on. I was too good at it, and too given to dreams and lies, and far too inept at going through life reading the script.

  The crazy things you think of late at night. I never did get to sleep. I drank coffee until it backed up on me and I got a little shaky. I took a long walk in the false dawn and watched the city yawn and wake up. I went back to the hotel, showered again, changed clothes again, and had a respectable breakfast. Before too long it was time to pick up my pigeon and show him the coop.

  Twelve

  The store was swinging in full-dressed splendor by the time I got Gunderman there. The night before, Doug had called our Manpower secretary and told her to take the day off. Then he made other calls and hired us a batch of day-workers.

  With Gunderman actually coming to the office, we had to be able to stand a genuine white-glove inspection. We had to present the illusion of real activity. To do this, we needed people. And, because we were dealing strictly in illusion, we needed people who could play their assigned roles and keep their mouths shut. People who were with it.

  We had two men, local grifters who were presently unemployed and who were not averse to picking up half a yard apiece for doing nothing special. One of them wore glasses and sat behind a desk jockeying a rented adding machine. The other leafed through a stack of newspapers and assorted garbage and dictated meaningless memos from time to time into a rented dictaphone.<
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  Our Manpower girl had been temporarily replaced by a pleasant old girl with salt-and-pepper hair and a touch of Scottish burr to her voice. She was an old girlfriend of Winger Tim. She had since married on the square. Her husband was a few years dead. She lived on insurance money, acted in some Toronto amateur theater group, and did per diem work with grifting mobs when she was needed. We got her at bargain rates, just twenty dollars for the day. But she didn’t really need the money. She wanted the excitement.

  Everything was staged just about right. When I ushered Gunderman into the outer office, one of our men was working the adding machine while the gal—Helen Wyatt—was talking on the telephone to a dead line. She was explaining that Mr. Rance was not in. She hung up, and I told her that Mr. Gunderman was here to see Mr. Rance. She buzzed Doug to tell him this, and while we waited our other hired hand came into the office, said hello to me, hung his coat on a peg and went to work. This was one of my touches. It is better if the scene changes within the store while the mark is present. This keeps him from wondering whether things have been set up for his benefit, all waiting for him to come and see.

  I turned Wally over to Doug. My partner followed the script, wasting no time on me, hitting Gunderman with a ray of charm while giving the impression that he really had better things to do than spend time with Olean’s answer to William Zeckendorf. They wended their pleasant way into the inner office and I walked over to the front desk and chucked Helen under the chin. “One of these days,” I assured her, “you and I are going to have a wild affair.”

  “Not I. My bones are too brittle.”

  “A young chicken like you?”

  “Don’t tease a poor widow lady, John.” She sighed theatrically. “I wish I knew what this was all about,” she said. “Nobody ever lets me read the whole script. Just my own lines.”

  I looked her elaborately up and down and assured her that there was nothing wrong with her lines. She told me to go away, and I did. I went to a drugstore around the corner and called the office.