The Girl With the Long Green Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

in and sit down.”
    “Oh?”
    “I want to hear the whole thing,” I said. “It sounded too damned good last night. I want to prove that there’s something wrong with it.”
    “And if there isn’t?”
    “Well.”
    He took it from the top. It went back five years to a time when a few of the New York boys were working a boiler-room operation out of Toronto. It was a standard high-pressure operation with one important difference. Instead of peddling uranium or oil stocks, or mineral rights, the promoters were selling parcels of raw land itself. They bought up the land for thirty to fifty cents an acre and sold it for three or four dollars an acre.
    “Goldin and Prince were on top of this one,” he said. “You’ve got to remember when this was, just five years ago. The uranium stock con got its first big play right after the war, and then it came back strong during the Korean thing and for about a year after that. By the time it ran its course everybody had a little bell inside his head that rang when you mentioned the words Canadian uranium stocks . The newspapers and magazines ran features on the con and Washington circulated lists of bad stocks and everybody got wise, even the thickest marks around. But Goldin and Al Prince had a gimmick working for them. They weren’t selling stocks. They were pushing the land itself, and that let the mark see that he was getting something. You tell him he can buy a thousand acres of valuable land for three or four thousand dollars and he doesn’t see how he can get taken. The land is real, it’s there for him to look at. Half the time he doesn’t know what a thousand acres is. All he knows is that it’s a lot of land. It’s maybe four hundred dollars worth of land that he’s paying ten times actual value for, but he doesn’t know this.”
    I said it was expensive—Goldin and Prince had to buy the land in the first place, and that cost more than printing up stock certificates.
    “They didn’t care. They were operating on the mooches’ money, buying the land after they’d collected, and they didn’t mind knocking ten percent off the top to cover the cost of the land itself. Besides, the whole thing came out perfectly legal. They promised land and they delivered land, and any extra promises were verbal and uncollectable. It worked for them. They sold half of Canada, or close to it. Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, some tracts in the Yukon and in the Northwest Territories.”
    I told him to go on. “All right,” he said. “That’s the background. Now you’ve got a bunch of marks around the country who own land they paid maybe ten times too much for. They’re stuck with it. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “Good. Now we skip to this frail I found in Vegas. She’s a secretary in her late twenties. For the past six years or so she’s been working for this millionaire. For about four of those years she’s been sleeping with him. All this time his wife was sick. She thought he was going to marry her when the wife finally died. A year ago the wife died.”
    “And he didn’t marry her.”
    “Didn’t and doesn’t plan to. She’s not too happy about this. She’s a good-looking broad; she was married once before and the marriage fell in. Now she’s stuck in a hick town working for this guy and she’d like to get the hell away from him and make a good marriage. She figures that she needs front money to do this. She wants to marry rich, and that means going where the money is and living the part. She’d like to pick up a healthy piece of change, and she’d also like to stick it into this guy and break it off, because she figures he has it coming.”
    “She really expected him to marry her?”
    “Yes. She was bitching about him and I started drawing her out just automatically, and she gave me a good picture of the guy. That started the wheels turning. You can see how it went. I said something about how she’d probably like to see him get taken but good, and she