‘I enclose herewith’ kind of stuff.”
“That’s right. I realized that when I
got mad and started wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies
he’d told me, he’d told every one on the telephone. I couldn’t prove one thing
in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”
“He’s a sharp operator, all right,”
Ernestine said. “This couple told us a lot more stories about him.
He learned his tricks from his father, who started the business,
selling swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the first
Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they bought for a dollar
an acre, all laid out on paper with streets and business and
residential districts and even a city hall, yet, which hasn’t been
lived in by anything but alligators to this day; but they called it
Heavenleigh Hills”—she spelled it out—“and I believe Diehl is
still advertising ‘retirement farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to
reach the sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come looking for
a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he has locally. But we
were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”
“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t
forget,” Jim said ruefully.
“I wish I could be as philosophical as
that,” said his wife. “I’d just like to see him get his
comeuppance, the way the Saint would give it to him.”
“I’m the victim of publicity agents I
never hired,” sighed the Saint. “But for two swell people like
you—and in memory of a couple of lunkers that did not get
away—I’ll keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”
It was an easy promise to make, of a kind
that he had learned to make rather easily in those days when so many people
recognized his name or his face and expected miracles of freebooting to be
performed instantly. It gave him a respectful inkling of what God must
have to cope with if He heard all the prayers. But being only
human, in spite of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that Simon
sometimes forgot such promises after they had served their first soothing
purpose.
The case of Mr. Edmund S.Diehl happened not to
be one of those examples of Saintly fallibility; and that was entirely
the fault of Mr. Diehl himself. That is, if Mr. Diehl had decided at some
earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten inheritance added to
his own ill-gotten gains and live out his remaining years in luxury in some
remote refuge from the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been
reminded of him again. Possibly. But Mr. Diehl was not a retiring
type, and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in which
tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted into tax-light
Capital Gains.
Also, and even more to this point, Mr. Diehl
had not been raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an area of
real estate which could be subdivided into smaller areas, with an
automatic profit on each reduction, and eventually peddled in
convenient building lots at about the same price per foot as it had once
brought by the acre. If only God could make a tree, as Mr. Diehl had heard
it said, Mr. Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his
own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr. Diehl had
effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of fertile soil which his
machinery had scraped bare of its natural growth to make room for stark
forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of
standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless liv ing-boxes
available on a nominal down payment and easy terms. Like almost
every other fast-buck Florida developer, Mr. Diehl knew exactly
what percentage could be saved by scarifying a tract from end to end in
steam-roller sweeps instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth.
“Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became simply a
dignified verb for the
“That’s right. I realized that when I
got mad and started wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies
he’d told me, he’d told every one on the telephone. I couldn’t prove one thing
in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”
“He’s a sharp operator, all right,”
Ernestine said. “This couple told us a lot more stories about him.
He learned his tricks from his father, who started the business,
selling swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the first
Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they bought for a dollar
an acre, all laid out on paper with streets and business and
residential districts and even a city hall, yet, which hasn’t been
lived in by anything but alligators to this day; but they called it
Heavenleigh Hills”—she spelled it out—“and I believe Diehl is
still advertising ‘retirement farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to
reach the sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come looking for
a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he has locally. But we
were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”
“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t
forget,” Jim said ruefully.
“I wish I could be as philosophical as
that,” said his wife. “I’d just like to see him get his
comeuppance, the way the Saint would give it to him.”
“I’m the victim of publicity agents I
never hired,” sighed the Saint. “But for two swell people like
you—and in memory of a couple of lunkers that did not get
away—I’ll keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”
It was an easy promise to make, of a kind
that he had learned to make rather easily in those days when so many people
recognized his name or his face and expected miracles of freebooting to be
performed instantly. It gave him a respectful inkling of what God must
have to cope with if He heard all the prayers. But being only
human, in spite of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that Simon
sometimes forgot such promises after they had served their first soothing
purpose.
The case of Mr. Edmund S.Diehl happened not to
be one of those examples of Saintly fallibility; and that was entirely
the fault of Mr. Diehl himself. That is, if Mr. Diehl had decided at some
earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten inheritance added to
his own ill-gotten gains and live out his remaining years in luxury in some
remote refuge from the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been
reminded of him again. Possibly. But Mr. Diehl was not a retiring
type, and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in which
tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted into tax-light
Capital Gains.
Also, and even more to this point, Mr. Diehl
had not been raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an area of
real estate which could be subdivided into smaller areas, with an
automatic profit on each reduction, and eventually peddled in
convenient building lots at about the same price per foot as it had once
brought by the acre. If only God could make a tree, as Mr. Diehl had heard
it said, Mr. Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his
own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr. Diehl had
effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of fertile soil which his
machinery had scraped bare of its natural growth to make room for stark
forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of
standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless liv ing-boxes
available on a nominal down payment and easy terms. Like almost
every other fast-buck Florida developer, Mr. Diehl knew exactly
what percentage could be saved by scarifying a tract from end to end in
steam-roller sweeps instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth.
“Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became simply a
dignified verb for the
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