His big bushy brows climbed his Neanderthal forehead. “We are?”
“Meyer, I think you’d make a nice plant location expert, somebody with the authority to make firm recommendations to a nice big fat rich company.”
“It is an exact science, my good fellow,” he said. “We take all the factors-labor supply, area schools and recreation facilities, transportation costs, construction costs, distance from primary markets, and by adjusting these by formula before programming the computer, we can arrive at a valid conclusion as… Travis, what is a pigeon drop?”
“Unlike what might first come to mind, Meyer, this is something one drops onto a pigeon.”
“You couldn’t have made it more clear. One thing. Aren’t you on a little dangerous ground on this bodysnatching thing?”
“Body-snatching! Me? Meyerl A perfectly legitimate funeral home in Miami is going to pick up that body in a licensed hearse and bring it back to Miami and air-ship it from there to Milwaukee.”
“And the place is run by a man who owes you a big favor, and that hearse is going to make a stop at a very well equipped and staffed pathology lab during the off hours, where two more of your strange friends are going to determine if there was some cause of death besides dropping an engine block on him.”
“Meyer, please! It’s just normal curiosity. Jan gave her permission. Is there an ordinance against it?”
“What about concealing evidence of a crime?”
“If you’re nervous about evidence we don’t even have yet, you don’t have to help me play games with LaFrance.”
“So who’s nervous?”
“I am. A little.”
We sat in silence. The tape had run out and turned off. I wondered if I should go in and give Puss a little comforting pat to cure the Noel blues. Too many pasts crowd in on you at mistletoe time. It’s the good ones that hurt.
“Meyer?”
“At your service.”
“On the sale of the marina thing to LaFrance, Jan will end up with thirty thousand, net. If we can work that pigeon drop, she’ll get maybe fifty maybe a hundred on top of that. Money won’t buy what she’s lost, but it would be nice to get her a really good big chunk. If I could find out that Gary Santo knew about what was being done to the Bannons, knew about it and didn’t give a damn because he was pressuring LaFrance into assembling the adjoining parcels so he could buy them for resale, then it would be nice to take a slice of his bread too.”
“Now wait a minute! This is not somebody that goes for your pigeon drop. This man operates very big, my friend. He has lawyers and accountants double-checking every move.”
“I was thinking of something legitimate. Something in your line. Like some kind of an investment where you would know it was going to go sour and he wouldn’t. Then couldn’t there be some way of… funneling money out of the same proposition into Janine’s pocket? Hell, Santo is a plunger. With all the protection, he’s still a plunger. Some kind of a listed stock, maybe, like those they were rigging on the American Exchange you were telling me about one time.”
“So why should Gary Santo listen to Meyer?”
“Because first we build you a track record. You dig into those charts of yours and make some of those field trips and surveys and come up with some very very hot growth items. And I think I’ve got just the pipeline, once I develop it a little, to feed them to him. The pipeline is named Mary Smith. She has brown straight glossy hair. She is small, and stacked, and she looks sullen and hungry.”
“So if the great Gary Santo knew nothing about your friend Bannon?”
“I know Ttьsh tried to get to him and couldn’t get past the girl-curtain. He didn’t think Santo was the kind of man who’d want the little guy crushed under his wheels. Somehow Santo squeezed LaFrance and LaFrance squeezed various folk, which happened to include Tush. If Santo knew-and let the roof fall on Tush-for a lousy little crumb of the acreage he needs up there, then I would like to have him get it where it stings. And, if so, can you work up something?”
Meyer got up and plodded back and forth, all hair and simian concentration, and scowling little bright blue eyes. He stopped and sighed. “McGee, I don’t know. I just don’t know. The problem divides itself into two interdependent parts. First I would have to get a line on a dirty situation like Westec before it leaks out. Those people falsified their earnings statements to keep the stock at a high level so they could pick up smaller companies on favorable merger terms. Then one executive put in for eight million worth of the stock, traded on the American Exchange, and he couldn’t come up with the money to pay for the stock and that’s when trading was suspended. Now I could smell out something like that, heading for disaster, and then if I can pick a few legitimate winners to make him feel as if I-”
“Or as if you had picked some winners, Meyer.” He looked startled for just a moment, and then came that broad Meyer smile that turns one of the ugliest faces of the Western World into what one of the articulate lassies among the Meyer irregulars one season called “a beautiful proof that someday, somehow, the human race is going to make it.”
“Dated, official, machine-printed confirmations of stock purchases on official forms from a reputable brokerage house! Hindsight! Perfectl One day, maybe two, in New York and I can come back with proof I’m such a genius I bought-”
“You had me buy…”
“Yes. I see. I had you buy highfliers right at the point where they were taking off, and I don’t have to go back far, less than a year in every case. Gulton, Xtra, Leasco Data, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Goldfield Mohawk Data. Fantastic performers! Listen, I won’t make it too good. If every buy was at the bottom, there’d be suspicion. Like instead of Gulton at fifty dollars a share, you get on at sixty-five.”
“Where is it now?”
“It went up to nearly a hundred and ten, split two for one, and the last time I looked it’s maybe sixty dollars.” He sat down and emptied the nog mug again. “Travis, how rich do you want to be? I can use an old and dear friend who will be delighted to help, so I can get you monthly margin account statements showing the security position, the debit and so on.”
“Say I started a year ago with a hundred thousand.”
“Congratulations! You are now worth a quarter of a million.”
“Success hasn’t spoiled me, Meyer. Have you noticed?”
“All I notice are your criminal instincts, my dear Travis, and how rash you are with your queen, which lets me whip you at chess, and how right now you are too tightened up over this Tush business. You are too close to this one. Be careful. I don’t want to lose you. Some terrible people might take over Slip F-18. Nondrinkers, going around saying shush.”
Puss Killian came drifting back into the lounge, looking wan. Her face was puffed, her eyes red. She snuffled and then honked into a Kleenex, and said, “Give me that Meyer’s Law again, please? The exact words.”
“In all emotional conflicts the thing you find hardest to do is the thing you should do.”
“I was afraid that was what you said, Meyer. What we all do is make excuses why we shouldn’t do the hard things. Like apologize. Like visit the dying. Like spend a little time with bores.”
“Stop short of masochism, dear girl,” Meyer said. “I always have. Too far short, maybe. Gad! I feel as if I’d been pressed flat and dried out, like an old flower in a bad book. Do something, gentlemen!”
And so we did. Meyer and I went off in opposite directions, head-hunting. He had a quota of fivethree female and two male. I went after two couples.