Doug hired a secretary to answer the phone and type occasional letters. There were a variety of letters that we kept her busy with. Some of them were dictated just so she would have plenty of work. They never wound up in the mailbox. Carbons went in the files, and the letters themselves went in the trash barrel. Others were requests for catalogs and information, and these were duly mailed and brought mail in return.
Finally, we had her dash off a list of letters to men who had been swindled by Capital Northwestern Development. Doug Rance knew a man who knew Al Prince, and Al Prince supplied us with a master list of guppies he and Goldin had taken for a swim in the CND gambit. We picked some names off the list, carefully selecting men who had only lost between five hundred and two thousand dollars. We sent off letters on Barnstable stationery with Doug’s signature offering to purchase their land for about three or four cents on the dollar, ostensibly for a hunting preserve, and stressing that their sale to us would enable them to take a tax loss and cut their losses on the deal.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Doug said. “Why in hell buy their land?”
I explained it to him. When we approached Gunderman, he would do a little checking on his own hook, and he would run down some of the men who had sold land to us and confirm that we were actually buying the property.
“The hell,” he said. “That’s no problem. He’ll dictate his letters to Evvie and she’ll sidetrack them.”
“But she can let these go through,” I told him, “and Gunderman will get actual confirmation. And we’ll have actual deeds to show him along with the phony ones. The cash involved won’t be much. A few dollars here and a few dollars there, and we won’t sink more than a thousand at the outside into land.”
“Does Gunderman get one of these letters?”
“No. Have the girl send him one, but don’t mail it to him, mail it to our girl in his office. Let her sneak it into the files without showing it to him.”
“So he can discover it later?”
“Right,” I said.
What the hell—the girl was in on the play for seventeen-five. She might as well make herself useful.
We let our girl write up about thirty of those letters and we mailed out eight or ten of them. Two men wrote back immediately accepting our offer, and we sent them checks by return mail. Others wrote asking for more information, which we dutifully supplied. One of those later accepted our offer. One man said that he had already disposed of his land at a price slightly higher than our offer in order to take a tax loss. Two men wanted to get us to boost our offer, and we wrote back stating that our original offer had been firm and we couldn’t possibly raise it. One of these men accepted, one didn’t.
We wound up spending about three hundred dollars on moose pasture and got title to around twenty-nine hundred acres.
Activity in our bank account was even simpler to create. Doug would write checks to various persons. I countersigned the checks as Whittlief, then endorsed them on the back with the name of the nonexistent payee and put them through my own account, an account I’d taken out under the name of P. T. Parker. I cashed each check through the Parker account and redeposited the money in the Barnstable account.
With a balance of between twelve and seventeen thousand dollars, we managed to show a turnover of around forty thousand dollars in the first month of operation, and the only cost to us was that of banking fees, which were small enough. Anyone who looked at our bank statement would see a record of steady activity with a lot of money coming in and a lot going out. Anybody looking at our corporate checkbook would see a wide variety of men and companies listed as payees for various checks. No one would uncover the fact that almost every one of those checks had gone through one P. T. Parker’s account. Parker’s name appeared on the cancelled checks, but we weren’t showing those around.
There was a lot of waiting to do. No matter how much activity we feigned, you couldn’t get around the fact that we were stuck with leading fundamentally inactive lives until our front had had time to age and ripen a little. Fortunately we weren’t trying to live the part of an old established firm. Part of our cover was that we had incorporated only recently, that the Barnstable outfit was an organization of sharpshooters set up on a short-term basis with a specific purpose.
All well and good, but we still had to be two months in operation before I could set about the business of roping Gunderman. This was still a remarkably short time. I’ve known cons who would set up a store in one city a year in advance, just letting it build up by itself while they made a living at something else or on the short con or working other gigs or whatever. Then the store would be waiting for them when they were ready to use it.
I knew a man named Ready Riley from Philadelphia—dead now, and I miss him—who was facing a sentence of ninety days for some misdemeanor. He got out on bail before sentencing and set up a perfect front for a very pretty swindle. His store was a fake gambling casino. He set all the wheels in motion, then got sentenced and did ninety days standing on his ear, and got out of jail and pulled off the con and left town with a fat wallet. He had already earned his nickname before that job, but he lived up to it then.
Well. We had ourselves two months to bum and I didn’t have much to do. My room was a few steps up from the place I’d had in Boulder. I had a private bath, and the furniture was a little less decrepit. I couldn’t spend too much time in the room because I was supposed to be working. I couldn’t spend much time at the office because I was supposed to be the firm’s contact man, meeting prospects and trying to buy their land. I couldn’t see too much of Doug because I was supposed to be a hired hand, not someone he’d pick to run around with socially.
I saw a lot of movies. I did some shopping and bought clothes with Toronto labels. I spent enough nights at a jazz club on Yonge called The Friars so that they knew my face and what I liked to drink. I did a lot of reading. I knocked around a lot, got the feel of the city.
It was a good town. Toronto had a feeling of growth and progress to it that reminded me of the West Coast states. There was a lot of money in the city, and a lot of action. The night spots did a good business even in the middle of the week. They closed early, at one o’clock, but they drew well.
There were times when I had to remind myself that I was in a foreign country. The money was different, and it took a while to get used to two-dollar bills in wide circulation. The people had a slight accent that you could get used to in not much time. The differences were small ones, and mostly on the surface. If you dropped the whole city in the States, it would take you a few minutes before anything seemed out of place.
I did some drinking, but not too much of it. I moved around quite a bit. Now and then I found a girl, but those relationships were strictly short-term, begun at night and over by morning.
Doug had said that everyone was entitled to one weakness, and that his was gambling. He wasn’t gambling on the job. If I had a weakness, it was probably women, but I wasn’t indulging that weakness on the job either. A mechanical romp, yes. An affair, no. There were enough lies already to live up to, and I didn’t want any complications.
And one night I met Doug for dinner and we wound up at a side table at The Friars and nursed Scotch on the rocks and listened to a good hard-bop group. He said, “I think we’re ready. I think tomorrow. I talked to Evvie this afternoon and he’s in town, and he doesn’t have anything pressing for the next few days to get him sidetracked.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked at him, and for a change I saw tension lines in that lover-boy face. They didn’t remain there long. A smile wiped them away.
“This is big, Johnny.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you figure we ought to wait a while, about another week or two—”
He had managed to pick up elements of a Canadian accent. It showed on certain words. About came out aboat. I still sounded the same as ever, but then I wasn’t posing as a native. I was just a transplanted American.
“Now
’s as good a time as any.”
“Good,” he said. “There’s a couple ways to get there. You go to Buffalo first, and then south to Olean. There’s one plane a day from Buffalo to Olean, or you can do it by bus or train. I think the bus is a better bet than the train.”
“I’d rather fly.”
“That’s what I figured, and it makes more sense that you’d fly down for the meeting instead of wasting that time on a bus or a train. You fly American to Buffalo airport and then get a Mohawk flight to Olean, I wrote it out for you.”
He left a few minutes after that. I stayed around for another drink, then walked back to my hotel. I knew I would have trouble getting to sleep. It was more trouble than I’d expected. I kept on thinking of the two bad things that could happen. I could hit a snag at the start, or I could rope him in neatly and then have a wheel come off later in the game.
If it blew up in the beginning, we were out two months’ time and the money we’d spent so far. This was a tailor-made con. Gunderman might have been the only man on earth we were primed for, and if he tipped right off the bat we could junk the whole operation and forget it. Rance was out his stake, and I could flush away my plans for turning Bannion’s roadhouse into a Rocky Mountain Grossinger’s.
If it soured later on, we were out more than time and money. If it soured later on, we would go to jail.
I kept dreaming about that. About being locked away, locked up in a cell. I kept waking up in a sweat and sitting around smoking a cigarette and dropping off to sleep again and waking up out of another dream.
The next night I puddle-jumped to Olean. That night I slept well. And woke up, and met my mooch and tossed that lasso around his manly shoulders.
And waited now, in the lobby of the Olean House, for Evvie Stone.
Five
She was five or ten minutes late. I waited for her in the lobby. I sat in a red leather chair in front of the empty fireplace and kept glancing over at the doorway. She came through the door and got about a third of the way to the desk, and I stood up and walked across the lobby to meet her.
“Oh, Mr. Hayden,” she said.
“Miss Stone.”
“I had to double-park out in front, so if you’re ready—”
We left the hotel together. Her car was a white Ford with a small dent in the right front fender. We got in and she spun a very neat U-turn, took a right on State Street and headed the Ford out of town on Route 17. She kept her eyes on the road.
I kept mine on her. She’d changed her clothes for dinner. Now she wore a very simple black dress with a scoop neckline. A green heart hung from a small gold chain around her throat, a very deep green against her white skin. Jade, I guessed. Her arms were bare, her hands very sure on the wheel.
“I’m supposed to be very nice to you,” she said suddenly. “I think I’ll like that.”
We stopped for a light and she turned to look at me. Her eyes were larger than I had remembered them, and deeper in tone. “You surprised the hell out of me this morning,” she said. “You don’t look like a confidence man.”
“That’s an asset.”
“Yes, I’m sure it must be.” The light changed. “Mr. Gunderman doesn’t have an important engagement tonight, you know. He just decided that I’d learn more from you than he would.”
“I guessed that. His idea or yours?”
“Well, he probably thinks he thought of it himself. I guess I actually led him into it. He told me he wished he could get more of a line on you, and that he was having dinner with you tonight, but that he didn’t think you’d be too keen on opening up to him. I said that a girl could probably draw you out a lot better, and I said something about the way you looked at my legs before. You did look at my legs, you know.”
“I know.”
“I told him this, and he paced around the room and asked me how I’d like to have dinner with you. I let him talk me into it. I’m supposed to give you the full treatment. Dinner at The Castle at a cozy table for two, and then some quiet spot for drinks, and then you’ll tell me secrets. You’ll let me dig all the information about the Barnstable operation out of you.”
“I might just do that.”
“This is the place,” she said suddenly. “Isn’t it incredible?”
She pulled off the road to the right. There are probably as many restaurants in the country called The Castle as there are diners named Eat, but this was the first one I’d ever come across that looked the part. It was a sprawling brick-and-stone affair with towers and fortifications and pillars and gun turrets, everything but a moat, and all of this in a one-floor building. A medieval ranch house with delusions of grandeur.
“Wait until you see the inside, John.”
“It can’t live up to this.”
“Wait.”
Inside, there was a foyer with a fountain, a Grecian statue type of thing with water streaming from various orifices. The floor was tile, the walls all wood and leather, with rough-hewn beams running the length of the ceiling. The maître d’ beamed his way over to us, and Evvie said something about Mr. Gunderman’s table, and we were passed along to a captain and bowed through a cocktail lounge and a large dining room into something called the Terrace Room. The tables were set far apart, the lighting dim and intimate.
We ordered martinis. “You might as well order big,” she told me. “He’ll be unhappy if I don’t give you the full treatment. This is a quite a place, isn’t it? You don’t expect it in Olean. But they have people who come from miles away to eat here.”
“They couldn’t make out just with local trade.”
“Hardly. The place seats over eight hundred. There are rooms and more rooms. And the food is very good. I think our drinks are coming.”
The martinis were cold and dry and crisp. We had a second round, then ordered dinner. She touted the chateaubriand for two and I rode along with it.
“I get called Evvie,” she said. “What do I call you?”
“John will do.”
“Doug Rance referred to you as Johnny.”
“That’s his style. He’d love it if he could call me the Cheyenne Kid, as far as that goes.”
“Is that where you’re from? Cheyenne?”
“Colorado, now. Originally New Mexico.”
“That’s what Wally said, but I didn’t know whether you’d been telling him the truth or not. You’ve got him on the hook, John. You really have him all hot and bothered.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What happened at lunch?”
I ran through it for her and she nodded, taking it all in. She was all wrapped up in the play herself. Usually I hate having an amateur in on things too deeply, but she seemed to have a feeling for the game. It wasn’t necessary to tell her things twice. She listened very intently with those brown eyes opened very wide and she hung on every word.
“He was hopping when he got back to the office,” she said. “He was on the phone most of the day, and he dictated a batch of letters to me. Do you want to see them?”
“Not here. I’ll have a look at them later. Who did he call?”
“Different people, and he placed a few of the calls himself so I didn’t know who he was talking to. I think he made a few calls to Canada. He’s sure somebody made a strike up there. Uranium or oil or gold or something, he doesn’t know what it is but he’s sure it’s up there.”
“He’ll find out differently.”
“I think he found out a little already. I managed to get him going when he was signing the letters I typed for him. He said he couldn’t get any satisfaction, that nobody seemed to know a thing about a mineral strike in the area. And the date on your letter bothers him. He said he could see you coming down as a quick fast-buck operator if you’d heard about a strike, if you had advance information. But that letter is dated six or seven weeks ago, and if you had some information that long ago it would have spread by now. That’s what has him hopping, the fact that nobody has heard a word about any developments in
that section.”
“That figures. Of course he hinted to me about uranium, and of course I said there was nothing like that, which was what he damn well expected me to say.”
“He’s just about ready to believe it now, John. And when I tell him what I managed to learn from you tonight, he’ll be sure it’s the straight story, or fairly close to it. How much of the play will I give him?”
“Not too much,” I said. I lit a cigarette and drew on it. “Here’s the steak,” I said. “Let’s forget the rest of this until later, all right? I want to give it time to settle.”
We let it alone and worked on the steak. It was black on the outside and red in the middle, a nice match for the red leather and black wood decor of the room. I was hungrier than I’d realized. We made a little small talk, the usual routine about the food and the restaurant and the city itself. She wasn’t too crazy about Olean. She didn’t give me the chamber of commerce build-up I’d gotten earlier from her boss.
“I want to get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what this town gets to be like. Like a prison cell.”
I doubted it. I knew what a jail cell was like, and no town on earth was that way.
“You met Doug in Las Vegas?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I had a vacation and I just wanted to get away from all of this, and from Wally. I guess it was June when I went down there, the second or third week. I was supposed to go back, but I didn’t plan on going back. His wife had been dead for eight months and he had just gotten around to telling me that he didn’t plan on marrying me after all. It wouldn’t look too good, he said, and what was the matter with things the way they stood?”