Quite a girl. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown and there was a lot of it. Her eyes were large, and just a shade lighter than her hair. She looked up from her typewriter and gave me a smile filled with sugar and spice and everything nice. Could she help me?
“I’m John Hayden,” I said. “I’ve an appointment with Mr. Gunderman.”
The eyes brightened and the smile spread. She looked as though she wanted to say something. Her tongue flicked over her lips and she got to her feet.
“Just one moment,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. Gunderman that you’re here.”
She walked through a door marked Wallace Gunderman Private. I watched her go. She was worth watching. She was a tall girl, almost my height, and she had a shape to carry the height. Slender enough to be called willowy, but a little too full in bust and hips for that tag. She wore a skirt and sweater. Both were probably too tight. I wasn’t about to complain.
The door closed after her. When it opened a second time she led Wallace J. Gunderman out of it. She stepped aside and he came across the room to shake my hand.
“Mr. Hayden? I’m Wally Gunderman. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”
“Not at all.”
“Good,” he said. He was a tall, thick-set man with iron-gray hair and bushy eyebrows and a sunlamp tan. He could have posed for Calvert ads. “Have you met my secretary, Mr. Hayden? Mr. Hayden, this is Evelyn Stone. Evvie’s the girl who managed to bury your Mr. Rance’s letter in the files.”
“I was sure you’d seen that letter, Mr. Gunderman—”
“And maybe I did, dear. At least you didn’t throw it away.” He laughed. “But we can forget that now. I’m just glad you people didn’t let the matter drop after one letter. Do you like Italian food, Mr. Hayden? Because there’s a pretty good Italian place around the block.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Good,” he said.
His car was parked in front of the building in a spot reserved for him. It was a Lincoln Continental, a convertible, dove-gray with lighter gray leather upholstery. He had the top down.
“Beautiful weather these past few weeks,” he said. “We usually get a lot of rain in September, but so far it’s held off. How’s the weather in Toronto?”
“Cooler than this, but nice.”
“And I suppose the winters are equally bad here and there. You have it colder, but we get a little more in the way of snow. You don’t have a Canadian accent. Are you originally from Canada?”
“Not even close. I was born in New Mexico, near the Colorado border.”
“Been in Canada long?”
“Not very long.”
We made exciting talk like that while he drove the few blocks to the restaurant. It was called Piccioli’s. There was a small bar, and the tables were covered with red checkered cloths.
“Not fancy,” Gunderman said, “but clean, and the food’s good.”
They had a fairly good crowd for lunch. Gunderman had a booth reserved and we went to it. A slim dark-eyed waitress brought us drinks, Scotch with water for him and a martini for me. Gunderman said the Italian specialties were very good, but that I could get a decent steak if I wanted one. I ordered lasagna. He had one of the veal dishes with spaghetti.
The lunch conversation was small talk that avoided the main issue very purposefully. I followed his lead. We talked about Canada, about his one trip to the American Far West. He asked me if I’d been to Olean before, and I said I hadn’t.
“It’s not a bad little town,” he said. “A good place to live. We’re a little off the beaten track here. Up along the Mohawk Valley, the Erie Canal route, it’s one town after another. You’ve got a lot of growth there but you’ve got all the problems of that kind of growth, the slums, everything. We don’t have that kind of growth but at the same time we’re not stagnant, not by a long shot. And there are a few stagnant areas in this state, John. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the central part of New York State, but you take a county like Schoharie County, for example — why, they’ve got less population today than they did during the Civil War. We’ve had steady growth, not tremendous growth but just healthy growth.”
We were John and Wally now. He added cream to his coffee and settled back in his chair.
“I certainly can’t complain,” he said. “This town has been good to me.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
“All my life. Oil made this town, you know. You could figure that from the name of the city. Olean, like oleaginous or oleomargarine. Oil. The oil fields here and in northern Pennsylvania were producing around the time that Oklahoma was just a place to dump Indians. And the wells still pump oil. Secondary and tertiary extractions, and not as important as they were once, but that oil still comes up.”
“Is that where you got started?”
“That’s where the money first came from.” He grinned. “My father was a wildcat driller, bought up oil leases and sank holes in the ground. He was in the right spot at the right time and he made his pile and it was a good-sized pile, believe me. I still see income from wells that he drilled.”
“I see.”
“But I never did much with oil myself. My dad died, oh, it’s about thirty years now. I wasn’t thirty myself then and there I was, his sole heir, with a guaranteed income from the wells and a pretty large amount of principal, and this with the country right in the middle of the Depression. Everybody figured me to move to New York or some place like that and just live on income. I surprised them. Know what I did?”
“What?”
“I started buying land like a crazy man. Scrap land and wasteland and farm land that wasn’t paying its way and timber land with the hardwood growth all cut and gone. Land nobody wanted, and this was in the thirties when land was so cheap you could have had an option on the whole state of Nebraska for maybe a dollar and fifty cents. That’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. Land was cheap, and the craziest damned fool in creation was the man interested in buying it. At least that was what people thought. Hell, there would be a piece of land where the oil rights had already been sold, and where there was no oil there anyway, nothing but rocky soil, and I would go and buy it, and you can’t blame the people for thinking I was out of my mind.”
“But I guess you made out all right, Wally.”
He laughed like a volcano erupting. He was enjoying himself now. “Well, I guess they found out who was crazy,” he said. “One thing about land, there’s only so much of it in the world, and there won’t ever be more. Every year there’s more people in this country, and every year there’s more industry and more housing and more of everything else, and there’s always the same amount of land. And the best thing to buy for the long pull is the land nobody wants. You buy it and hang onto it and sooner or later somebody wants it, and then he has to pay your price for it. When they were looking to put up a shopping plaza east of the city, it was my land they picked for it. When they decided to cut Route 17 as a four-lane divided highway from Jamestown to New York, I was sitting with the land on either side of the old two-lane road. And when some smart boys figured out the money they could make growing Christmas trees on scrub land, and they wanted to buy in this area, I had a hell of a lot of land for them to pick from, that I’d bought awful damned cheap. So you can say I made out all right, John. There’s some chunks of land around here that I bought twenty years ago and couldn’t get my money out of today, but there aren’t many like that. And I’m happy to keep them anyway. They’ll pay off, sooner or later.”