Read Online The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

know what it is but he’s sure it’s up there.”
    “He’ll find out differently.”
    “I think he found out a little already. I managed to get him going when he was signing the letters I typed for him. He said he couldn’t get any satisfaction, that nobody seemed to know a thing about a mineral strike in the area. And the date on your letter bothers him. He said he could see you coming down as a quick fast-buck operator if you’d heard about a strike, if you had advance information. But that letter is dated six or seven weeks ago, and if you had some information that long ago it would have spread by now. That’s what has him hopping, the fact that nobody has heard a word about any developments in that section.”
    “That figures. Of course he hinted to me about uranium, and of course I said there was nothing like that, which was what he damn well expected me to say.”
    “He’s just about ready to believe it now, John. And when I tell him what I managed to learn from you tonight, he’ll be sure it’s the straight story, or fairly close to it. How much of the play will I give him?”
    “Not too much,” I said. I lit a cigarette and drew on it. “Here’s the steak,” I said. “Let’s forget the rest of this until later, all right? I want to give it time to settle.”
    We let it alone and worked on the steak. It was black on the outside and red in the middle, a nice match for the red leather and black wood decor of the room. I was hungrier than I’d realized. We made a little small talk, the usual routine about the food and the restaurant and the city itself. She wasn’t too crazy about Olean. She didn’t give me the chamber of commerce build-up I’d gotten earlier from her boss.
    “I want to get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what this town gets to be like. Like a prison cell.”
    I doubted it. I knew what a jail cell was like, and no town on earth was that way.
    “You met Doug in Las Vegas?”
    “That’s right,” she said. “I had a vacation and I just wanted to get away from all of this, and from Wally. I guess it was June when I went down there, the second or third week. I was supposed to go back, but I didn’t plan on going back. His wife had been dead for eight months and he had just gotten around to telling me that he didn’t plan on marrying me after all. It wouldn’t look too good, he said, and what was the matter with things the way they stood?”
    “What was?”
    “Everything, as far as I was concerned. I was in a rut, John. A pretty deep one. I should have left this town a long while ago but I didn’t have any place to go or anything much to do, and I figured I would stick with Wally and marry him when his wife died. He wasn’t that exciting but he wasn’t that bad and he does have money and, well, being poor is no pleasure.”
    “Agreed.”
    She managed a smile. “So by the time I found out I wasn’t going to hear any wedding bells, I took this big long look at little Evelyn Stone and the neat little niche she had cut out for herself. I wasn’t too taken with it, John. Here I’d spent a few years with a fairly romantic view of myself, the youngish girl with the wealthy older man, the office wife living a behind-the-scenes life. And then all at once I wasn’t so young anymore and I was just this girl Wallace J. Gunderman was keeping. And keeping damned cheaply. If you averaged it out, I was costing him less than if he bought it a shot at a time from a cheap streetwalker.”
    I didn’t say anything. She studied her hands and said, “I don’t like to say it that way, but about that time I started to see it that way, and it didn’t sit well.”
    “Sure.”
    “So I went to Vegas for some fun and floor shows and roulette, and maybe a nice rich man would fall in love with me. Except I didn’t like the men I met, and then too I couldn’t afford the kind of vacation that might have put me in the right places at the right time. And I took a beating at the