The Girl With the Long Green Heart (2 page)

“Not fancy,” Gunderman said, “but clean, and the food’s good.”

They had a fairly good crowd for lunch.

Gunderman had a booth reserved and we went to it. A slim dark-eyed waitress brought us drinks, Scotch with water for him and a martini for me. Gunderman said the Italian specialties were very good, but that I could get a decent steak if I wanted one. I ordered lasagna. He had one of the veal dishes with spaghetti.

The lunch conversation was small talk that avoided the main issue very purposefully. I followed his lead. We talked about Canada, about his one trip to the American Far West. He asked me if I’d been to Olean before, and I said I hadn’t.

“It’s not a bad little town,” he said. “A good place to live. We’re a little off the beaten track here. Up along the Mohawk Valley, the Erie Canal route, it’s one town after another. You’ve got a lot of growth there but you’ve got all the problems of that kind of growth, the slums, everything. We don’t have that kind of growth but at the same time we’re not stagnant, not by a long shot. And there are a few stagnant areas in this state, John. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the central part of New York State, but you take a county like Schoharie County, for example—why, they’ve got less population today than they did during the Civil War. We’ve had steady growth, not tremendous growth but just healthy growth.”

We were John and Wally now. He added cream to his coffee and settled back in his chair.

“I certainly can’t complain,” he said. “This town has been good to me.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?”

“All my life. Oil made this town, you know. You could figure that from the name of the city. Olean, like oleaginous or oleomargarine. Oil. The oil fields here and in northern Pennsylvania were producing around the time that Oklahoma was just a place to dump Indians. And the wells still pump oil. Secondary and tertiary extractions, and not as important as they were once, but that oil still comes up.”

“Is that where you got started?”

“That’s where the money first came from.” He grinned. “My father was a wildcat driller, bought up oil leases and sank holes in the ground. He was in the right spot at the right time and he made his pile and it was a good-sized pile, believe me. I still see income from wells that he drilled.”

“I see.”

“But I never did much with oil myself. My dad died, oh, it’s about thirty years now. I wasn’t thirty myself then and there I was, his sole heir, with a guaranteed income from the wells and a pretty large amount of principal, and this with the country right in the middle of the Depression. Everybody figured me to move to New York or some place like that and just live on income. I surprised them. Know what I did?”

“What?”

“I started buying land like a crazy man. Scrap land and wasteland and farm land that wasn’t paying its way and timber land with the hardwood growth all cut and gone. Land nobody wanted, and this was in the thirties when land was so cheap you could have had an option on the whole state of Nebraska for maybe a dollar and fifty cents. That’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. Land was cheap, and the craziest damned fool in creation was the man interested in buying it. At least that was what people thought. Hell, there would be a piece of land where the oil rights had already been sold, and where there was no oil there anyway, nothing but rocky soil, and I would go and buy it, and you can’t blame the people for thinking I was out of my mind.”

“But I guess you made out all right, Wally.”

He laughed like a volcano erupting. He was enjoying himself now. “Well, I guess they found out who was crazy,” he said. “One thing about land, there’s only so much of it in the world, and there won’t ever be more. Every year there’s more people in this country, and every year there’s more industry and more housing and more of everything else, and there’s always the same amount of land. And the best thing to buy for the long pull is the land nobody wants. You buy it and hang onto it and sooner or later somebody wants it, and then he has to pay your price for it. When they were looking to put up a shopping plaza east of the city, it was my land they picked for it. When they decided to cut Route 17 as a four-lane divided highway from Jamestown to New York, I was sitting with the land on either side of the old two-lane road. And when some smart boys figured out the money they could make growing Christmas trees on scrub land, and they wanted to buy in this area, I had a hell of a lot of land for them to pick from, that I’d bought awful damned cheap. So you can say I made out all right, John. There’s some chunks of land around here that I bought twenty years ago and couldn’t get my money out of today, but there aren’t many like that. And I’m happy to keep them anyway. They’ll pay off, sooner or later.”

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.”

“Well—”

“And there’s a really fine restaurant out on Route 17. Marvelous food. Could you stay?”

He talked me into it. He signaled the waiter and took the check. I didn’t fight him for it.

I divided the rest of the afternoon between a barbershop down the street from the hotel and a tavern next door to the barbershop where I nursed a Würzburger and watched a ball game on television. When I got back to the hotel there was a message for me to call Mr. Gunderman. I went to my room and called him.

“Glad I reached you, John. Listen, I’m in a bind as far as tonight is concerned. There’s a fund-raising dinner that I’m involved in and it slipped my mind completely this afternoon. Then I thought I could get out of it but it turns out that I can’t. They’ve decided that I’m the indispensable man or something.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I was looking forward to it.”

“So was I.” He paused, then swung into gear. “I’ll tell you—I really did want to see you, and now I’ve gone and gotten you to stay over and all. How would it be if I sent my secretary to sub for me? I don’t know if you noticed, but she’s easy on the eyes.”

“I noticed.”

He chuckled. “I can imagine. Now look—you don’t have a car, do you?”

“No, I flew in and then took a cab. I could have rented a car at the airport, I suppose, but I didn’t bother.”

“Well, Evvie drives. She’ll pick you up at your hotel at six, is that all right? And then you and I can get together in the morning.”

“That sounds fine,” I said. I spruced up for my date. I remembered the dark brown hair and the brown eyes and the shape of that long tall body, and I combed my newly trimmed hair very carefully and splashed a little after-shave gunk on my face. I took off the blue tie and put on one with a little more authority to it.