“Right. Of course he doesn’t take it. Then he finds out we’ve been making the same kind of offer to other men who got caught in the Capital Northwestern Development swindle. That stirs him up. It’s not just his land, it’s a whole lot of land that we’re looking to buy. He can’t figure out why, but two things are certain. First of all, he’s not going to sell that land of his, not for anything. And second, he’s going to be hungry to find out more.”
Bit by bit we would let Gunderman figure things out. We wanted to buy his land for five hundred dollars because it was worth in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars, maybe as much as three. We were a group of important Canadians with a lot of legitimate interests who had managed to get hold of a list of men taken in by Capital Northwestern Development. We were attempting to buy their land from them at twenty to twenty-five percent of its fair market value. For around fifty thousand dollars we would be able to acquire title to a huge block of Canadian real estate worth close to a quarter of a million dollars, and with a tremendous potential for future price appreciation. A potential Gunderman could certainly understand — the investment value of unimproved land was his personal religion. The more he nosed around the more he learned about our operation, and the more he learned about it the more he liked it.
“So he doesn’t want to sell us his land, Johnny. He wants to buy our land, the whole package.” He lit a cigarette. “You like it so far, Johnny?”
I slipped the question. “If it’s such an attractive deal, why would we be willing to sell it to him?”
“That’s where it gets pretty. Remember what we’re supposed to be. We’re a syndicate of highly respectable Canucks who’ve hit on something a little sneaky. Legal, sure, but sneaky. We’re capitalizing on an old con game and buying land surreptitiously for a fraction of its value. We’re dealing with people who’ve been taken to the point where they think of their land as utterly worthless, and we’re buying it in very cheap.”
“And?”
“And we don’t want to turn this into a long-term deal. We want to get in and get out, to take a quick but sweet profit and go about our business. You’ll be working outside, getting tight with Gunderman. He’ll figure out what a perfect man he’d be for us to deal with, taking this piece of land that ran us around fifty thousand and selling it to him for maybe double that. I figure we’d try for one-fifty and settle for an even hundred thou.”
“Go on.”
“Right. Now here is where Gunderman has to prove that we can trust him. We would be selling the land damned cheap at a hundred thou. We’re willing to do that if we’re sure of who we’re dealing with. We can’t afford the risk of selling to somebody who’s going to turn around and dump it for a fast buck. We’ve got our personal reputations to consider. We’ve got to sell to the type of man who will sit on that land for a few years, letting it increase in value as far as that goes, and then sell right for a good price later on. That way we don’t come out of it with our reputations in a sling.
“And of course this is perfect for Gunderman, because he wants the land for long-term investment, not for a fast deal. He’ll sit on it for five years if he has to. We let him convince us of this, and then we sell to him, and that’s all she wrote.”
I wondered if Rance knew just how perfect it was. The trickiest part of any con game is the blow-off, when you’ve got the mooch’s money and you want to get him out of the way before he tips to the fact that he’s been taken. A blow-off can be very blunt or very subtle or anything in-between. In the short con games you can just blow your mark off against the wall, sending him around the corner while you jump in a cab and get out of the neighborhood. In a long con, you ought to do better than that. The longer it takes him to realize he’s been had, the less chance there is that he’ll squawk and the less chance that it’ll do him any good.
This was tailored for a perfect blow-off. Our Mr. Gunderman might die of old age before he found out he didn’t really own any land in Canada.
I said, “We don’t sell him land. We sell him our company.”
“Instead of faking deeds?”
“Sure. That way he never gets around to a title search or anything else. He buys a hundred percent of the stock of our corporation. He thinks the corporation owns certain real estate and it doesn’t. I’ll tell you something. I think the whole deal might even be legal. He’ll be buying a corporation and he’ll be getting a corporation. If there’s nothing on paper—”
“Jesus, I think you’re right.”
By then I was hooked. I think I must have known it myself. Once you start improving a scheme, building on it, smoothing it, you are damned well a part of it.
We had lunch at the Cattleman’s Grill. Open steak sandwiches and cold bottles of ale. We let the deal alone during lunch. We found other things to talk about. Doug picked up the tab.
Afterward, we drove around in his car. I lit a cigarette and pitched the match out the window.
“About the money arrangement,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“How did you figure it?”
“I figured you in for thirty.”
“Out of a hundred? That doesn’t sound too wonderful.”
“Well, it won’t be a hundred, Johnny. We’ll gross a hundred, but there are going to be some expenses that have to come out of the nut, and then there’s twenty off the top for the girl. Now—”
“That’s too damned much for the girl,” I said.
“It can’t be less.”
“The hell it can’t. She ought to be in for a finder’s fee of five thou and no more. Why twenty?”
“Because she did more than set this up. She’s going to be working this from the inside, right there in his office. She’ll be in on the whole play, and she’ll have to scoot after it’s over. Besides, there has to be a big piece in it for her or she won’t go. She wants a stake to go hunt a husband with, and if it’s not enough of a stake she’ll get shaky and pull out.”
I let that ride. “So how did you figure the split?”
“Twenty off the top, plus maybe ten more off the top for expenses, leaves seventy. I figured forty and thirty.”
“What’s wrong with evens?”
The smile stayed. “Well, it is my job, Johnny.”
I knew it wasn’t the five. This was the first con he was working from the top, and he needed the glory as much as the money. If we split it down the middle he didn’t get as much of a boost out of it. We tossed it back and forth. I told him to pare the girl’s end of it down to seventeen-five and to cut himself down to thirty-seven and a half and give me thirty-five even. He didn’t like it that way. He said he’d chop her to seventeen-five and add her end to mine, keeping forty for himself.
“You can swing your deal with thirty easy, Johnny. Ten to buy the place, ten to fix it up, and ten more in reserve. Two and a half more is just gravy.”
So we settled it that way. Forty thousand dollars for him, thirty-two thousand, five hundred for me, seventeen thousand and a half for Evelyn Stone. The extra twenty-five hundred wasn’t really important to me as money. It was a question of face. We agreed that anything over and above the hundred thou would be split down the middle between us, with the girl out of it.
I said, “We’re going to need front money.”
“I’ve got the bankroll.”
“How much?”
“Close to ten grand.”
“I’d feel better with double that. But ten should do us without much sweat. I’ve got a few hundred set aside. Living money, eating money.”
“We can do it on ten.”
“It might mean cutting it close. The more you can spend on your front the better off you are. And sometimes it isn’t even a question of spending it, it’s having it in the bank. Oh, the hell. Where do we kick this off from? Toronto?”