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

we had to give the appearance of conducting a full-fledged business. Our bank account had to show activity. Our office had to receive a sensible volume of mail.
    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