“I don’t think the Spaniards made much out of it,” Harris said. “But some of the later carpetbaggers did all right.”
“You can say that again,” put in his wife, with sudden unwonted vehemence. She turned to the Saint. “Yes, there is something you can do — for me, anyway. When you get down around Palm Beach, look up a fellow called Ed Diehl.”
“Now, Ernestine—”
“Well, why shouldn’t he? The Saint likes a good crook to go after, doesn’t he? And he might just happen to run short of crooks some wet weekend. And this Diehl is certainly a prize one.”
“Now, Ernestine, we can’t expect the Saint to take off after any little chiseler who took advantage of—”
“Little chiseler? He’s a big chiseler. ‘Square’ Diehl, he calls himself, Simon. Hah!”
One of the Saint’s redeeming graces was that he knew when he had hooked himself and could accept the consequences gracefully.
“All right,” he said placatingly. “I asked for it. What was the deal this merchant got you into?”
“Well, it wasn’t long after we started building this place,” Jim Harris said. “An aunt of mine back in Texas died and left me four lots she owned somewhere around Lake Worth. We were much too busy getting this place in shape to go down and look at ’em, though I know we could’ve done it all in a day. We kept telling ourselves we’d have to do it, but somehow we never could find that whole day to spare. A lot of people think that running a camp like this is all play and no work, but you’d be surprised how it ties you down.”
“So one day we get a letter from this Diehl,” Ernestine said. “He says he’s had an inquiry about these lots, and would we be interested in selling. If so, call him collect. He’s a regular real-estate broker with a fancy letterhead, so we didn’t think there’d be any harm in talking to him.”
“He’s a real smooth operator,” her husband resumed reminiscently. “He soon found out that we’d never been down that way and didn’t know much about conditions there, and while he was doing that he’d made himself sound so honest and helpful, I just didn’t even doubt him when I asked him what sort of property it was and he said it was in a poor section of town that never had done much good and lots were only fetching about a thousand dollars. I didn’t see what he was doing at the time, but I’ve thought about it since. Right then, when he said he had a customer offering five thousand for the four lots just because they were all together and he was a cranky old guy who didn’t want any near neighbors, he made it sound like the last chance we’d ever have to get that kind of price.”
“And I can’t even say ‘I told you so,’ ” lamented the distaff side of the record. “It sounded just as convincing to me, as you told it, and we thought we were lucky to get a windfall like that just when we could use it.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“And then you finally made the safari south and saw what you’d sold—”
“No, we still haven’t been able to take that day off,” Jim said. “But one day we had a couple staying here from Lake Worth, and we got to talking, and right off they said they hoped we hadn’t been given a fast shuffle like it seems this Ed Diehl is known for. So I got out the papers, and they knew exactly where these lots were, on a main-road corner right in the middle of a lot of new building developments, and there was a big new supermarket going up now on those very same lots we sold.”
“And the old codger who just wanted his privacy?”
“They recognized his name, too. Seems he’s a pretty active attorney, not very old, and also a cousin of Mrs Diehl’s.”
The Saint nodded sympathetically.
“Yes, of course. If a supermarket had appeared as the buyer, you couldn’t have helped knowing your property was worth more. They probably sold it to the market out of the same escrow, at a fat profit, without even putting up a dime of their own. And after that first vague letter, I bet you never had anything else from Diehl in writing except the formal ‘I enclose herewith’ kind of stuff.”
“That’s right. I realized that when I got mad and started wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies he’d told me, he’d told everyone on the telephone. I couldn’t prove one thing in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”
“He’s a sharp operator, all right,” Ernestine said. “This couple told us a lot more stories about him. He learned his tricks from his father, who started the business, selling swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the first Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they bought for a dollar an acre, all laid out on paper with streets and business and residential districts and even a city hall, yet, which hasn’t been lived in by anything but alligators to this day, but they called it Heavenleigh Hills” — she spelled it out — “and I believe Diehl is still advertising ‘retirement farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to reach the sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come looking for a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he has locally. But we were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”
“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t forget,” Jim said ruefully.
“I wish I could be as philosophical as that,” said his wife. “I’d just like to see him get his comeuppance, the way the Saint would give it to him.”
“I’m the victim of publicity agents I never hired,” sighed the Saint. “But for two swell people like you — and the memory of a couple of bankers that did not get away — I’ll keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”
It was an easy promise to make, of a kind that he had learned to make rather easily in those days when so many people recognized his name or his face and expected miracles of freebooting to be performed instantly. It gave him a respectful inkling of what God must have to cope with if He heard all the prayers. But being only human, in spite of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that Simon sometimes forgot such promises after they had served their first soothing purpose.
The case of Mr Edmund S Diehl happened not to be one of those examples of Saintly fallibility, and that was entirely the fault of Mr Diehl himself. That is, if Mr Diehl had decided at some earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten inheritance added to his own ill-gotten gains and live out his remaining years in luxury in some remote refuge from the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been reminded of him again. Possibly. But Mr Diehl was not a retiring type, and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in which tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted into tax-light Capital Gains.
Also, and even more to this point, Mr Diehl had not been raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an area of real estate which could be subdivided into smaller areas, with an automatic profit on each reduction, and eventually peddled in convenient building lots at about the same price per foot as it had once brought by the acre. If only God could make a tree, as Mr Diehl had heard it said, Mr Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr Diehl had effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of fertile soil which his machinery had scraped bare of its natural growth to make room for stark forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless living-boxes available on a nominal down payment and easy terms. Like almost every other fast-buck Florida developer, Mr Diehl knew exactly what percentage could be saved by scarifying a tract from end to end in steam-roller sweeps instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth. “Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became simply a dignified verb for the operation of selling the incoming settlers nursery shrubs, and saplings to restock the scorched earth, which he had created — a sideline which was not to be sneezed at.