Free Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald

jewelry, mortgage the house, maybe they could find another hundred quick. But the way I see it, his nerves have got jumpy and he don’t want to ask her to put every last thing in.”
    “How much would it take to save it?”
    “Well, the land payments are spread pretty good, and I think maybe it could be done for three hundred thousand, no less.”
    “I expect they’ve come to you for more.”
    “I just couldn’t spare more. My cash position isn’t so good right now, Purd.”
    Purdy Elmarr grinned like an amiable old coyote. “I can tell just what you were fixin’ to do, Corey Haas. You was going to set right there and let things get just as bad as they could get, where it would look like Jamison was going to lose the whole damn thing, and all of a sudden you were going to be able to put in cash to save it, but you’d want control, and he was going to be so grateful after being so scared you were going to do just fine, and once you had control you were going to run it your way, and slap one section together cheap and fast and soon as it begun to prove out you were going to unload your stock-interest you stole from him, and make a big capital gain and get the hell out. And I bet you had that in mind right from the start, but you didn’t know I was going to get interested in it.”
    “Hell, I didn’t even know you were going to find out about it.”
    The three of them laughed. Raines felt confused. There were undercurrents he didn’t understand.
    “Now here’s maybe what will happen. You set us up a little corporation so we’ll be ready, boy. Ought to have a name. You’re good on names, J. C.”
    “Uh… how ’bout Twin Keys Corporation? Riley and Ravenna are about the same length, and this land is chunk between ’em.”
    “Boy,” Purdy said to Raines, “you check that name out with Tallahassee and set it up fifty and one-half percent to me, thirty-nine to Corey, ten to J. C. and a half percent to you instead of legal fees and all. Set it up minimum, boy. Corey, you look like you bit down on something soured you. Got anything to say?”
    “Not a word, Purdy.”
    “Good. Now here’s the way it it’ll work, Corey. Listen close. You set the timing. When things are as bad off as they’re going to get, you tell Jamison you’re peddling your stock to this Twin Keys Corporation for forty-five thousand, and getting out of this Horseshoe Pass Estates Corporation. Tell ’em it’s me behind Twin Keys. And you hear I’ll buy theirs too. That’ll get ’em in the clear without much loss to speak of. Wouldn’t want to hurt Charlie Kail’s girl too bad. So Twin Keys borrows and buys up all the stock, then sets on it a while, and we get good estimates on just what it would cost to complete it, and what we can figure on getting back off sale of the lots, and then we sell the whole thing to my Ravenna Development Corporation and take us a good fat capital gain on the holdings of Twin Key stock, hear?”
    J. C. stirred and grunted and said, “Ought to work out, Purd. Ought to work out good.”
    “Excepting for one thing,” Purdy said gently. “We got to be sure Jamison don’t get no he’p anyplace to bail himself out. Corey, you tole me this lawyer boy could find out what I was a-wondering about.”
    “He found out,” Corey said. “Go ahead, Rob.”
    Raines cleared his throat. “Well… I was with Debbie Ann last night at a party at Jamison’s and later at a beach party. I don’t know exactly how much her father left her because I didn’t ask her directly, but from what I was able to check other places, she got somewhere around three hundred thousand then. She doesn’t have to touch it now because she gets enough alimony from that Dacey Hunter to live pretty good. I found a chance to ask her whether she’d invested anything in Horseshoe Pass Estates and she laughed at me. She said Troy Jamison had had a long talk with her about it three weeks ago, showing her the engineering plans and talking