I left Gunderman hanging for the weekend and a day on either side of it. He left messages for me, and I ignored him. I saw every movie in Toronto. I also saw the insides of most of the bars, and looked at the bottoms of a great many glasses. I slept ten to twelve hours out of every twenty-four. There was not much else to do.
I got him at his office at a quarter after two in the afternoon. I said, “Wally, this is John. I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
He wanted to know what I meant.
“I thought there might be a way to get in on the deal, if they were going to dispose of the land. I didn’t understand their whole operation. They’re planning on selling, Wally, but they intend to move it all at once. The whole thing in one package.”
“So?”
“That adds up to quite a deal.”
“I’m not interested in nickels and dimes, John.”
“You’d go for the whole parcel?”
“At the right price, I’d grab it.”
“I’m afraid they’ve already got somebody, Wally. There’s a deal hanging on the fire.”
“With who?”
“Someone from the Midwest. A syndicate, as far as I can make out. I don’t have every last detail. I’ve been playing this very close, because I’ve had to do some detecting from the inside without letting them know what I’m after. It hasn’t been that easy.”
“Now you know I appreciate your position, John—”
I cut in on him. “But I’ve got most of the picture. I think — God, I hate to go into all of this over the phone. They plan to get completely out from under. They don’t intend to sell the land—”
“What the hell—”
“Wait a minute. They’re selling the whole corporation, the whole block of Barnstable stock. There are a lot of tax aspects, and there’s the matter of publicity. I wish I could get down to Olean and explain this more openly, but I can’t possibly get out of town now.”
“Suppose I came up there?”
“That’s what I was getting at. Could you come up here?”
“No problem.”
“Because there’s a chance... I’m trying to think on my feet, Wally, because I wouldn’t want you to make the trip for nothing. I hadn’t realized you might be in the market for the whole thing. It might run six figures, as far as I can tell.”
“I’m good for it. If the value’s there, John.”
“And there are other aspects, too. But there’s a fair chance that the deal is all arranged with the syndicate, and that you wouldn’t even have a chance to outbid them. Not that I think they’d be willing to work it with bidding anyway. I’m... listen, this is confusing as hell. Can you come up here tomorrow?”
“Why not tonight?”
“Well, I’d want to check out a few angles. I’ll tell you what. Make your flight reservations, and I’ll figure on meeting you tonight at the Royal York. If anything comes up, I’ll call you back before five o’clock. If you don’t hear from me, I’ll meet you around nine o’clock. Does that sound good?”
He told me it sounded fine.
The element of confusion was not accidental. It was there for a reason. If things were too smooth, he might begin to wonder who had greased the skids for him. But as long as I was a little uncertain as to which end was up, he didn’t have anything to be suspicious about.
Getting him to come to Toronto was basic. When you want to win a mooch, you meet him on his home ground. When you want to put him on the defensive, you take him into your own parlor and keep him off balance. Once he got on that plane, Gunderman was committing himself. As long as he stayed in Olean he could tell himself it was just an armchair exercise, one he could back away from whenever the going got rough. Every commitment of time and space and money drew him in a little deeper. The five hundred bucks he’d slipped me was a partial commitment, but he could write off that kind of money easily enough. The trip would tie him up a little tighter.
I went up to the office. Doug had gone for the day. I picked up a phone and called his apartment. “He’s on his way,” I told him.
“When’s the meet?”
“Tonight. Nine o’clock.”
“You’ll be good, won’t you, Johnny?”
“I’ll be beautiful. Want to meet him tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.” My partner was a little on the nervous side, I decided. “You think that’s rushing things?”
“It’s hard to say. I can’t be sure how he’ll go tonight. How much rope to give him.”
“Enough to tie him up tight, Johnny.” He was silent for a minute. “You play it by ear,” he said finally. “If it looks like a good idea, you arrange a meeting tomorrow, a sounding session. You see how he acts, how hungry he seems to you. If he’s a little cool about things, then just cool him down some more and send him back to Olean to sit on his money. Invent something about how you wanted him up here to give him the full picture but you can’t set up a meeting because the Chicago money is all set to make its pitch. But if he seems ripe, make it that he and I’ll get together just so he can let his interest show.” He laughed suddenly. “Here I am giving orders,” he said. “I don’t have to draw you pictures, Johnny. You know the game.”
“I know the game.”
“If he’s ready for it, I suppose tomorrow morning would be the best time. That the way you figure it?”
“Around ten-thirty.”
“Sure. I should fill up the store, don’t you think? Bring in a boy or two?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll line them up. You do what you can, Johnny, and it’ll be ten-thirty at the office. He was good on the phone, huh?”
“Perfect.”
“I think we got him,” he said. “Jesus, I hope we do.”
I managed to be fifteen minutes late getting to the Royal York. I called his room from the desk. He said he would come right down, and I told him it would be better if we talked in his room. It might not be too good, I said, if anybody happened to notice us together.
He probably thought I was acting a little too much like Herbert Philbrick leading three lives. But he went along with the gag, and I took the elevator to his room.
“Come on in, John,” he said, “I called room service, and we ought to have a boy coming up with some Johnny Walker Black any minute. Now don’t tell me some sharpies from the corn country are going to cut us out of this pie. I’d hate to hear that.”
“Chicago’s not exactly the corn country.”
“That where they’re from? Not gangsters, are they?”
It’s funny how a mooch can give you ideas you might never have thought of on your own. I brushed the question aside and made a note to feed the notion to Doug for future reference. Sooner or later we would need a good reason why the pending deal fell in, and that might be the germ of as good a one as any.
I started in on the main business at hand. I began by going over familiar territory. The men who owned Barnstable were not interested in long term gain. They were all important people who had seen a chance for a fast dollar with a quick turnover. They had bought a parcel of land, and now they wanted to get completely out from under, make themselves a neat hundred percent profit, and do all of this without getting any dirt on their hands. They cared enough about their reputations to take less for their holdings than they could get otherwise. That didn’t matter to them as much as the kind of deal they arranged, and the kind of people they were dealing with.
“You better slow down, John,” he said. “I think our liquor’s here.”