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

Sunday renting apartments. He took a two-room place in a good building, and I booked a sixty-a-month room in a residential hotel on Jarvis near Dundas. I paid a month’s rent on the place. We picked out a spot for our offices, rented them Monday morning in Doug’s name. Then I flew back to Denver.
    By that Thursday Harry had found a man to replace me at the alleys. I spent a few hours that afternoon breaking him in, then went back to my room and threw a few things into a suitcase. I had cleared out my bank account and I had the money in cash, something like eight hundred bucks and change. I threw out some of my clothes along with my correspondence course debris and other odds and ends. Then I was on another plane, headed again for Toronto by way of Chicago.
    By this time Doug had set some of the wheels in motion. He found us a Richmond Street lawyer who was handling the incorporation procedures for us. Doug gave him a list of tentative names—Somerset, Stonehenge, and Barnstable, all of them crisply Anglo-Saxon. Our lawyer checked them out and discovered that there was already a Somerset Mining and Smelting, Ltd., and a Stonehenge Development, Ltd. Our third choice was open. The lawyer filled out an application for letters-patent for the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., and shot it off to the Lieutenant-General of the Province of Ontario.
    All of this was routine. We incorporated with two hundred shares of stock of a par value of one dollar. We stated our corporate purpose on our application, listing ourselves as organizing for the purpose of purchasing and developing land in the western provinces. We gave the address of our head offices as 3119 Yonge Street, Toronto. We listed three officers—Douglas Rance, President; Claude P. Whittlief, Vice-President and Treasurer; and Phillip T. Liddell, Secretary. Liddell was our lawyer. Whittlief was me—just another hat to wear, another name to sign. We gave our capitalization as fifty thousand dollars, Canadian. You don’t have to show your capital, just proclaim it. Fifty seemed like a decent figure.
    The charter went through and we were the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., with a charter from the Province to prove it. We painted that name on the door of the Yonge Street office and had the phone company put in a bank of telephones. A printer on Dundas ran off a ream of stationery on good high rag content bond. Our incorporation was duly listed in the appropriate section of the Ontario Gazette.
    We opened an account at one of the downtown offices of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. All checks on our account had to be signed by Rance and countersigned by me as Claude Whittlief. We deposited seventy-five hundred dollars of Doug’s capital in the account. It wasn’t enough of a balance. I went on the earie and found out that Terry Moscato had moved across the border to Buffalo. I flew down to see him and told him I needed ten thousand dollars for about two months, maybe three.
    “For what?”
    “Front money,” I said. “It goes in a bank account and it stays there, Terry.”
    “Because I wouldn’t want to be financing this at a lousy ten percent.”
    “Strictly front money, Terry.”
    Not that he trusted me, but he knew that I knew better than to play fast with him. People who crossed him had trouble getting insurance, and I was well aware of this, and that was enough collateral as far as he was concerned. I got ten grand from him in cash, bought a cashier’s check for that amount at a bank, flew back to Toronto and stuck the money in the Barnstable account.
    So we were in business. A store is a vital element in the operation of a big con. It must look more like what it’s pretending to be than the real article itself. The most difficult illusion to maintain is one of furious activity. The store—in our case, the office and the corporation itself—was geared for one thing and one thing only, the act of parting a certain fool from his money with a minimum of risk. But