“Fifty mortgage plus fifteen cash equals sixty-five thousand,” said he. “And that is better than twice what any licensed appraiser would put on it.”
“For the same use Bannon put it to. A man with his house on fire and a man dying of thirst would put a different value on a glass of water.”
“Hard to put a value on ‘if,’ Trav. Link three or four it’s together and it comes out long odds, so you can’t go very high.”
“There are some men, Press, who get a little confused between greed and shrewdness. Maybe they are a little bit shrewd, and then they want to buy at the lowest dollar and sell at the highest, and finally it comes out as if they weren’t shrewd at all. They end up doing the very same thing as if they were stupid to begin with.”
The knobbly face colored a little and the mouth stiffened then relaxed as the color faded. “A fella could have made an offer way back, through a third party, and a fair offer, all considered, but somebody could have been too bullheaded to listen.”
“Fair offer?”
“We aren’t talking marina, McGee. We aren’t talking motel. You know that and I know it. We are talking ten acres.”
“Ten acres in the middle of the deal, smack in the middle of it, like a June bug in the birthday cake.”
“So I was coming up with thirty two hundred and fifty an acre for those ten acres.”
“Which gives you sixty acres, if you’d gotten it. What did the fifty behind Bannon’s place cost you?”
“A fair price.”
“One thousand dollars in nineteen fifty-one, according to the tax stamps on the deed as recorded in the Shawana County Courthouse, which comes out to twenty dollars an acre. That was probably a fair price in nineteen fifty-one. We can do a little arithmetic, Press. When you pay me forty thousand for clear title to the Bannon place, and assume the mortgage, then you have a ninety-one-thousand cost figure on the sixty acres, or just about fifteen hundred an acre. That will turn you a profit of five hundred an acre on resale, or thirty thousand, and because you are a reasonable man and because you are in a bind, you are going to be sensible and take it.”
He was absolutely immobile for long seconds. I think he even stopped breathing. He dropped the knee, swiveled and got up and peered down at me. “Man, you lost your cotton-pickin‘ mind for surel That would be two thousand an acre on resalel The deal with my buyer is for nine hundred. I couldn’t pay you any forty thousand and take over a fiftythousand mortgage! I’d come up with a loss of six hundred an acre. Where do you get this crazy twothousand figure?”
“Why, Press! You’d make out just fine on nine hundred an acre! You’ve got old D. J. Carbee screwed. You pay him two hundred an acre, or forty thousand, and you resell it to Gary Santo for nine hundred, which comes to a hundred and eighty thousand. So deduct that thirty-six thousand you’ll lose on that sixty acres, and there you are, fat and sassy, and a hundred and forty-four thousand ahead.”
He picked up the glass and drained the milk, wiped a chin-drip on the back of his wrist. “D.J. told me he didn’t tell you a thing about that option. So by God, you knew about it when you went and offered him five hundred an acre. You upset that old man something pitiful.”
“Maybe I was trying to upset you, Press.”
He sat down on the far end of the yellow couch. He shook his head like a sad hound. “What in the world are you after, McGee?”
“Money. Just like you, Press.”
“You knew I had to show up here. You left a trail and you left loose ends. But you didn’t do all this just to charge me forty thousand for something that cost you fifteen.”
“That isn’t much profit, come to think of it. What do you think I ought to charge you? Sixty? A hundred?”
“Oh, come on!” he wailed.
“You can’t come up with much. You’ve got the shorts, haven’t you? Overextended?”
“Don’t you worry about me!”
“But I do! I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, LaFrance. I’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars in cash for your fifty acres and the option you’ve got on the Carbee acreage. Then you’re out of the whole thing with a nice profit.”
He stiffened. “Hell no! Then you got the whole two hundred and sixty acres Santo wants to buy.”
“But I wouldn’t sell it to him. The price isn’t right.”
“But you can’t move it, McGee, unless you move Santo’s parcel at the same time! Calitron has to have the whole four hundred and eighty acres. You know the rest of it, so you have to know that much.”
“I know the Calitron Corporation will go as high as seventeen hundred an acre to Gary Santo.” It was nice to have the name of the corporate buyer.
Preston LaFrance brooded about it. “He never did let on what he expects to get. But there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about that. Hell, Santo can just let his land sit there for ten years. He doesn’t have to sweat these things out.”
“In a smaller sense, Press, that’s my policy too.” He looked startled, and then alarmed. “Now, you wouldn’t squirrel up the whole deal by setting on that little ten acres forever, would you. Jesus, man, Calitron will go somewhere else if they get held up! Then where are we?”
“Maybe I’ve got a buyer who doesn’t need that much room. I’m thinking of your health, Press. Fifty thousand and no more worries, and your ulcer will feel fine. You can pay off some of the notes at the bank and make Whitt Sanders happy.”
His jaw firmed up. “I’ll play it like a Mexican standoff, mister. I’ll squat on my fifty and you squat on your ten.”
“It’s like what you said when you came in. Do we learn to eat out of the same dish or do we spill the dinner? Know what the difference is, Press? I’m not hungry and you are.”
He cracked the knuckles of both hands, methodically, one at a time. “Now you said something about being shrewd. and being greedy both and how it turns out stupid, Trav. I’ve been working on this thing one way or another for a year and a half, about. The way things are, I have to make it big, and that’s the truth. Not big the way Santo thinks about money, but big for me. I’m leveling with you. I’ve got to come out of this six figures ahead anyway, or with the present timing I’m going to end up way the hell back where I started in forty-six when I got out of the service, and I don’t want for that to happen. I had it within an inch of being home free, and you slipped in out of nowhere and bollixed it all up for me. Okay, it was smart business and you’re pretty cute. So right now I think it’s up to you to find some way to fix it so we get to eat out of the same dish, each to his need. I’ve got my good option out of old Carbee, even if he is thinking about shooting me since you went to see him. And I got the fifty acres behind your place.”
“As long as you’re leveling, you can settle one thing that bothers me a little. Back when you found out Bannon wouldn’t sell and wouldn’t budge, and if you had the shorts so you couldn’t offer him enough, why didn’t you turn the problem over to Gary Santo. With what he’d stand to make, he could have paid Bannon twenty cents for every dime he had in that business, and bought him a new location.”
“I told Santo about that! I had that same idea. It took me a whole month to get to talk to him face to face, and then I had to chase him up to Atlanta, where they were opening up a hotel he’s got money in, where he’s got a penthouse thing he keeps for himself. I was up there drinking and waiting around maybe an hour and then he was ready to talk and we went back into one of the bedrooms and I told him these Bannons were a nice little family, working hard and doing pretty good, and if he could make them a good offer, which I wasn’t in any shape to do, then we were all ready to move. So he said don’t bother me with the details, LaFrance. He said that if he had to take care of all my. problems, why should I have a slice of the cake. He said that come next May first he’d pay the full two hundred and thirty-four thousand for a clean, clear title to the two hundred and sixty acres to the east of his holdings, or I could forget the whole thing. And that was what I couldn’t do, McGee-forget the whole thing!”