The Girl With the Long Green Heart (17 page)

“I don’t want to blow everything for nickels and dimes, John.”

A born mooch. “Don’t worry about that part of it. The thing is, they’ve got the tax consideration, and that’s important to them. That’s why part of the money has to be under the table, and that’s where you have a big bargaining point.”

“I think I see what you mean.”

“Sure. You offer less money overall but a higher proportion in cold cash. That makes it less like haggling, too. They can accept a lower offer without losing face.”

“I follow you.”

“Start by saying yes to the full price, Wally. But say you’ll pay that figure on paper, period. Don’t worry about Rance saying yes to it. He won’t. He can’t.”

“And then?”

“Then you come back with a counter-offer. Tell him you’ll go more in cash if he wants, but you want a concession on the price. Offer him fifty each way.”

“And he’ll take that?”

“No, but that should open it up. I think he’ll settle for seventy cash and fifty on paper. That’s a hundred twenty thousand, and that saves you thirty thousand dollars.”

You just have to let them think they’re getting a bargain. You have to put them in the driver’s seat, and then let them drive over the cliff. When Doug talked to him, he gave Gunderman just a little extra rope. They wound up ten thousand dollars under the figure I’d mentioned. A hundred ten instead of a hundred twenty. I’d supplied good information and Gunderman had showed himself to be a good and proper wheeler-dealer. He’d never dig his way out now. It was piled hip deep all around him, and the fool thought it smelled just fine.

“Wally, I think you should start raising cash.”

“Well, what the hell is this, anyway? Just Wednesday—”

“You don’t know how these things move. Or what I’ve been going through. This isn’t a promise, but it would be good if you had the cash on you when the time came. Can you get up the dough without being obvious about it? A little here and a little there?”

“Nothing easier.”

“You’re sure?”

“No problem, John.”

No problem at all. Doug called later and told him to raise the money, that he felt the deal was ninety percent firm, that he’d spoken with everyone on the board and every silent partner and all that was needed was the board’s formal approval. No problem, none at all. But Barnstable had better make its mind up, he wanted Doug to know. He wasn’t handing out an ultimatum, not by any means, but he had another very attractive opportunity open to him and he didn’t have the cash to swing them both at once. He’d prefer the Barnstable deal any time, but if they wouldn’t close with him soon he might not want to take the chance of losing out entirely.

Not a bad old horse trader, Wallace J. Gunderman. A standard pitch, one you see coming all the way but one you don’t want to ignore entirely because it just might be true. A handy way to put on pressure for a closing without seeming to press too hard.

He was good in his element. But we had never been in his element, had never played ball in his league. This was no straight deal. It was a con, and we sat and laughed at shrewd old Wally.

No problem, no problem at all. And on an early-to-bed evening my phone jangled brittlely on the nightstand. I cursed Gunderman for waking me and hustled the phone to my ear.

And a kitten’s voice said, “Oh, John. Oh, God—”

“What’s wrong?”

“Could you get on a plane right away? Could you come here? Maybe I’m crazy, I don’t know. Maybe I am. It’s risky, isn’t it? We shouldn’t see each other now—”

“Evvie, calm down.”

Silence. Then, “I’m all right.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I just better see you,” she said. “I think he knows. I’m scared to death he knows.”

Fourteen

Somehow I beat the sun there. I spilled out of a yawning cabby’s hack and dashed up the walk to her door. There was a light on upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time. She met me at the top and collapsed in my arms. She tried to talk and couldn’t make it. I got her inside, shut the door. She still couldn’t talk. Her eyes were circled in red, her face drawn. She looked like hell. Broken by a life of unquiet desperation. Shredded; wrung out.

I’d done the wrong thing, of course. There are two possible courses of action when things come unglued. If the end is still at all uncertain, you cool it and wait things out from a safe distance. If there is no doubt that the fit and the shan have connected, you fold up your tent and run for cover.

What you do not do, ever, is lead the Light Brigade straight into hell’s mouth.

Fine. But my woman had called for help, and the rules were suddenly obsolete. We had been too long apart. She was afraid, and alone. If she was in trouble I had to be with her to get her out. If she was only having nightmares, it was my job to hold her hand.

When she calmed down she said, “I shouldn’t have called you. I guess I’m not as good as I thought I was.”

“Easy.”

“I think I’m all right now. I wanted to call you back and tell you not to come. It doesn’t make any sense. I missed you, and I kept getting more nervous all the time and there was nobody handy to lean on. I’m sorry, darling.”

I told her that it was all right. She took the last cigarette from her pack. I gave her a light. She sat close beside me on the couch and smoked.

I said, “You said you thought he knows.”

“It was probably my nerves.”

“What happened?”

“Partly his attitude. He seems very different. He’s a gruff, impulsive man, John, but he’s always been even-tempered with me. He blows off steam now and then. Everybody does. But lately he snaps all the time. And the way he looks at me. I catch him looking at me when he doesn’t know I can see him. As though he’s trying to figure something out, as though he suspects something.”

“You’re piling up molehills.”

“Enough of them could make a mountain, couldn’t they?” She knocked ashes from her cigarette, put it to her lips, drew on it. “He needles me about you.”

“How?”

“He refers to you as my boyfriend. In a sarcastic way, but with an undertone that gives me the feeling—I don’t know, I guess this must be way off-base—”

“Go on.”

“As though it’s a joke but he means it anyway. Do you know what I mean?”

“He’s kidding on the square.”

She nodded gratefully. “As though he has things figured out with almost all of the pieces in place. And he’s going along with it, waiting to see what happens, and ready to tear us apart at the end. I’m so
scared
of him. He would kill me. Just like that.”

Her hands were shaking. I took her cigarette and put it out for her. I told her she was adding it up and coming out all wrong.

“Well, what does it mean?”

“It first of all doesn’t mean what you think. It’s too far out of character. Even if he decided to stick around for the ending once he tipped to the con, he wouldn’t play it this way. He’d be poking around everywhere trying to fit all the pieces together. He’d be on the phone with me trying to trap me up. He thinks he’s very good at that. He would push it.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Besides, I know how sold he is. I’ve been playing him slow for a reason, baby. Slower than Doug would like, all to make sure that nothing will shake him loose. Don’t you know why he’s acting the way he is?”

“Why?”

“Because he has to have it all. Everything. He can’t stand to give a thing away. Not money and not people either. He used you as bait to get me into this thing. Now it bothers him. He can’t get rid of the feeling that maybe you gave me a little too much. You belong to him, see? It’s all right for him to use you as a teaser, but he doesn’t like the idea that maybe you got carried away with yourself and crawled into the rack with me.”

She was nodding slowly.

“He needed you to get me into it on his side, but he’s conveniently forgotten that by now. I think he’s forgotten that I’m supposed to be cut in for five percent of his action. He never put it on paper, naturally, and I’m damn sure he’d edge out of it if I ever asked for the dough. He’s not exactly the last of the big spenders. He sweetened things a while back with a half a thou for my expenses. Anyone with class would have doubled that figure, minimum. But he’s cheap. He picks up dinner checks and he doesn’t turn off the lights to save electricity, but he’s still a stingy son of a bitch.”

“Well, that’s the truth.”

I went on like that, giving her every reason on earth why there was nothing to be afraid of. They weren’t all of them logical, but the more I could throw at her the cooler she would be for the rest of the distance. I must have sounded a lot more sure of myself than I actually was. A score is never a sure thing until the cash is in hand and the mooch a thousand miles away. There’s never been one yet that didn’t have a chance of going to hell on crutches.

But I talked, and she listened, and it seemed to sink in. She asked me if Doug knew I’d come down. I said I hadn’t had a chance to tell him, and wouldn’t have bothered anyway. She agreed that I shouldn’t, and that she’d been foolish to call me and I’d been less than wise to come running.

“But I’m glad you did,” she said. “How long can you stay?”

“I’ve got return reservations in two and a half hours.”

“So soon?”

“Uh-huh.”

She sighed. “I wish you could stay longer. I know you can’t. We don’t even have time to—” She colored.

“We might have time,” I said.

“I . . . I don’t know. I’m not really in the mood, I don’t think.”

“It’s a bad time for it.”

“And a bad place. But God knows I need you, my darling—”

An invisible violinist played pizzicato on my vertebrae. I turned from her. “In Colorado,” I said.

“Mmmmm. At Barnstable Lodge.”

We’d taken to calling it that. “We should find a better name for it,” I said.

“It’s a fine name. Do you want coffee? I’ll make some.”

She went into the little kitchen to cook water. A fine domestic lady. I did not feel bad about the plane ride. It was nothing, just a little static, and worth a scare to see her, to be with her.

She called in: “I think I left my cigarettes on the table, John. Bring me one?”

I poked around in the pack. It was empty. I asked her if one of mine would do.

“Not really. I’ve got a fresh pack in my purse. I think it’s in there somewhere. On the television, I think.”

It was. I took it to her, opened the catch, fumbled inside for her cigarettes. She was at the stove spooning instant coffee into a pair of Melmac cups. All at once her eyes went very wide and her mouth shaped a small O. About that time my hand settled on something hard and cold. Some people could have guessed; I had to haul it out and look at it to know what it was.

It looked like a howitzer.

“Why?”

“I . . . oh, I don’t even know. I’ve been dreaming about him, John. He’d kill me if he knew, I know he’d kill me, and I can’t even think about it without turning cold inside. I thought it would be good to . . . to have something. In case something happened. I don’t know.”

“Where did you get it?”

“It’s his.”

“How come you’ve got it?”

“I took it. He kept it in his desk for years. Then it got switched to one of the filing cabinets. He’ll never miss it. I don’t think he’s looked at it once in the past eight months.”

“Ever shoot it?”

She shook her head.

“Ever handle
any
gun?”

“No.”

“Then you probably couldn’t do anything with it if you had to. Nine people out of ten can’t hit the side of a garage at twenty feet with a handgun. The only time you might ever shoot this would be if you panicked. You would probably miss and be in deeper than ever. Or else you would kill somebody and get tagged with it.

“But chances are you’d never fire the gun at all. You’d just carry it, and you’d get unlucky and he’d just happen to look in your purse the way I just did. Or someone else would look in your purse, anyone. Or you’d drop the bag and the gun would go off. Or any of a thousand other damn fool things that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do a harebrained thing and carry a gun along.”

She stood wordless, and about to cry. The teakettle had been whistling throughout the tail end of my speech. I turned the burner off and the whistle died.

I said, “I didn’t mean to fly at you like that. Guns make me as nervous as a virgin bride on opening night. They scare the hell out of me. I won’t even work with anybody who carries one. All they buy you is trouble. A bank robber needs one, a killer needs one, all the thickheaded heavies need them. Nobody with a brain has to have a gun on his hip. Not even you.”

“I feel—” I reached for her arm. She drew away. “I feel like an idiot,” she said.

“Forget it. I’m just glad I found this thing.”

“I almost wish you hadn’t. You must think—”

“I think I’ll be glad when this is over. And when you don’t have to worry about anything more terrifying than what pattern glassware to buy for our little cabin in the pines. Is this loaded, by the way?”

“I think so.”

I sat down on a kitchen chair, holding the gun gingerly. Guns do bother me. I hunted now and then when I was a kid, but nothing beyond birds and small game. I’ve never used a handgun. I do not like them at all. This one was a Smith and Wesson, .38-caliber, three-inch barrel, a safety on the grip. I shook my head at the last and thought she would never know to depress the grip safety before firing. The gun was all risk and no reward. I fumbled it open. It was loaded all the way, with a slug waiting there right smack under the hammer, which proved that Wally Gunderman didn’t know a hell of a lot more about guns than she did.

I pulled its teeth, set the shells upright on the table top. I put the gun back together again and held it out toward her. She drew away and shook her head.

“I don’t even want to touch it,” she said.

“Should I leave it here? I could take it with me and dump it somewhere, but it would be better if you put it back in his files. If you’d rather not—”

“I don’t mind. I just . . . put it on the counter, John. I don’t want to touch it now. I’ll take it with me when I go to work.”