The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

them later.
    “I’ll need eight days,” I told him.
    “For what?”
    “One day to decide if I’m in. And a week’s notice before I leave my job.”
    “I thought you already decided you were in.”
    “I want twenty-four hours to make sure.”
    He shrugged this off. “And a week’s notice? That’s a new one. You’re not going to come back and play assistant manager anymore, Johnny. What the hell do you care about giving notice?”
    “The same reason you don’t do any grifting in Nevada. I don’t crap where I eat.”
    “Oh.”
    “I’ll be coming back to this town,” I said. “Not as a flunky, no, but to live here and do business here. I want to leave it right.” I spent the hour before I started work on the telephone. I sat in a booth at a drugstore and kept pouring change down the slot. I called a lot of people that I couldn’t reach and reached a lot of others. I spent my dinner hour at the telephone, and I got back on the phone that night after I left the alleys. I spoke to people who knew Doug Rance vaguely, to some who knew him well, to one or two who had worked with him not long ago.
    You damn well have to know who’s working with you. When you’re all wrapped up in a big one you live a whole slew of lies all at once, and if you have a few people in on it who are lying back and forth and conning each other as much as they’re conning the mooch, then you are looking for trouble and fairly certain of finding it. This doesn’t mean that good con men are inherently honest in their dealings among themselves. They aren’t. If they were honest, they wouldn’t have gone on the C to begin with. I expected Doug would lie to me, and I expected to lie to Doug, but not to the point where we’d be fouling each other up. If there were things I ought to know about him, I wanted to know them now.
    He checked out pretty well. They knew him in Vegas, all right. He was a high roller, an almost compulsive gambler, but he never gambled while he worked. On a job, he was nothing but business. I had wondered about that.
    He was in love with the life, which was another thing I had managed to figure out by myself. He was good and he was smooth. He was attractive to women but he could generally take them or leave them. He’d done a short bit in a county jail in Arizona, and he’d done time twice in California, a vag charge in Los Angeles and a ninety-day stretch at Folsom for petty theft, a short con that hadn’t worked right.
    Everyone I talked to, everyone who knew him, seemed to like him well enough. That much figured. That was his stock in trade. It was another late night for me, but this time I slept. In the morning I walked over to his hotel and we had a bite together. He asked me if I’d had a chance to run a check on him.
    “Sure.”
    “How did I make out?”
    “You’ve got good references.”
    He laughed. “I’m glad you asked around,” he said. “I’d hate to work with anyone who wouldn’t take the trouble. You in, Johnny?”
    “All the way.”
    “You won’t regret it. Smooth as silk, all the way, and nothing’s going to go sour on us.” I gave notice that afternoon. I told Harry that I had to leave at the end of next week, that I had a very attractive opportunity waiting on the East Coast and I couldn’t afford to pass it up. He was unhappy. He told me he could maybe see his way clear to a ten-a-week raise if I cared to stay. I told him it wasn’t that, that this was a real chance for me.
    “Maybe you’ll come back some day,” he said. “Not to work here, maybe, but to open up a place of your own. This is a good place to live, John.”
    “I’d like to come back.”
    “Hope you do. I hate to lose you, I really do.”

Four

    That was Friday. The following night I finished work at midnight. I had Sunday off, so Doug picked me up after work and we drove to Denver. He gave the Corvair back to the Hertz people. We caught a jet to Chicago, changed planes and flew on to Toronto. We spent