Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim for the Work of Donald E. Westlake!

  Hard Case Crime Books by Donald E. Westlake

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

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  Acclaim for the Work of DONALD E. WESTLAKE!

  “Dark and delicious.”

  —New York Times

  “Donald Westlake must be one of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.”

  —George F. Will

  “Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

  —Booklist

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Brilliant.”

  —GQ

  “A wonderful read.”

  —Playboy

  “Marvelous.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Tantalizing.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A brilliant invention.”

  —New York Review of Books

  “A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “The wildest, screwiest, fastest-paced yet…It is also insanely funny.”

  —Des Moines Register

  “Suspenseful…As always, [Westlake] writes like the consummate pro he is.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Westlake remains in perfect command; there’s not a word…out of place.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Donald E. Westlake is probably the funniest crime writer going.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The suspense and the laughs multiply as the mad one-upmanship resembles doings at the Tower of Babel…The dénouement is a stunner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Westlake is one of the best.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “You’re a prisoner?” she kept saying. “A convict? At the penitentiary?”

  “Yes,” I said, and went on with my story.

  It took a while to tell, and by the time I was finished I was utterly weary and in despair. “Poor baby,” she said, and cuddled my head against her bosom for consolation, and shortly after that we went to bed.

  I woke up and it was still dark. But what time was it? I sat bolt upright and said, “Hey!”

  “Mmf?” A sleepy form moved obscurely in the darkness next to me. “What?”

  I remembered everything, I knew I had told the whole thing to this woman I didn’t even know. But I didn’t care about that now, I had a much more urgent problem. I said, “What time is it?”

  “Um. Oom.” Rustling and rattling. “Twenty after five.”

  “Holy Christ!” I shouted, and jumped out of bed. “I’ve got to get back to prison…!”

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE:

  361

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED

  THE CUTIE

  FOREVER AND A DEATH

  LEMONS NEVER LIE (writing as Richard Stark)

  MEMORY

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  EASY DEATH by Daniel Boyd

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain

  THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES by Lawrence Block

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SOHO SINS by Richard Vine

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

  SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

  HELP

  I Am Being Held

  PRISONER

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-132)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2018

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 1974 by Donald E. Westlake

  Cover painting copyright © 2018 by Paul Mann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78565-682-8

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-683-5

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  for Abby—the gentle jailer

  HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER

  1

  Sometimes I think I’m good and sometimes I think I’m bad. I wish I could make up my mind, so I’d know what stance to take.

  The first thing Warden Gadmore said to me was, “Basically, you’re not a bad person, Kunt.”

  “Künt,” I said quickly, pronouncing it the right way, as in koont. “With an umlaut,” I explained.

  “A what?”

  “Umlaut.” I poked two fingers into the air, as though blinding an invisible man. “Two dots over the U. It’s a German name.”

  He frowned at my records. “Says here you were born in Rye, New York.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Wry, New York.

  “Makes you a U.S. citizen,” he said, and peered at me through his wire-framed spectacles, challenging me to deny it.

  “My parents came from Germany,” I said. “In nineteen thirty-seven.”

  “But you were born right here.” He bunk-bunked a fingertip on his desktop, as though to suggest I’d been born in this office, on that desk.

  “I’m not denying American citizenship,” I said.

  “I should think not. Wouldn’t do you any good if you did.”

  I felt the confusion was now coming to a natural end, and that nothing I said would be useful, so I remained sil
ent. Warden Gadmore frowned at me a few seconds longer, apparently wanting to be sure I didn’t have anything else contentious to say, and then lowered his head to study my records some more. He had a round bald spot on the top of his head, like a small pancake on a dead hedgehog. It was a very serious head.

  Everything here was serious: the warden, the office, the very fact of the prison itself. I relished seriousness now, I felt it was long overdue in my life. It seemed to me that jail was going to do me a lot of good.

  The warden took a long time over my records. I spent a while reading his name on the brass nameplate on his desk: Warden Eustace B. Gadmore. Then I spent a further while looking around this small crowded office at the black filing cabinets and the photographs of government officials on the institutional green walls and the rather disordered Venetian blinds raised over the large window behind the desk. Gazing over the warden’s bald spot and through that window I could see a kind of smallish garden out there, completely enclosed by stone walls. A fat old man in prison denim was at work in the gray November air, wrapping burlap around the shrubs bordering the garden. A narrow rectangular brick path separated shrubs and grass from the inner flower bed, at this time of year full of nothing but dead stalks. Next spring, I thought, I’ll see those flowers bloom. It was, all in all, a comforting idea.

  Warden Gadmore lifted his head. When he peered up at me through his glasses I could no longer see his bald spot. “We don’t tolerate practical jokers here,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Bunk-bunk; he prodded my records. “I don’t find this amusing reading,” he said.

  “No, sir.” Wanting to reassure him, I added, “I’m cured, sir.”

  “Cured?” He squinted, as though to hide his eyes from me behind his cheekbones. “You mean you used to be crazy?”

  Was that what I meant? “Not exactly, sir,” I said.

  “There wasn’t any insanity plea at the trial,” he said.

  “No, sir. I wasn’t crazy.”

  “I don’t know what you were,” he said. Bunk-bunk. “You injured a number of people.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Including three children.”

  “Yes, sir.” And two Congressmen, though neither of us mentioned that.

  He frowned at me, squinted at me, strained toward me without quite moving from his seat. In his fussy way he was on my side; he wanted to understand me, so he could understand what was wrong with me, so he could fix it.

  I said, “I’ve learned my lesson, sir. I want to be rehabilitated.”

  The guard standing back by the door, the one who had walked over with me from the Orientation Center where I had spent my first night here at Stonevelt Penitentiary, shifted his weight in his big black gunboat shoes, expressing by the creak of his movements his disdain and distrust. He’d heard that line before.

  Bunk-bunk. Warden Gadmore gazed past me, thinking. I gazed past him, watching the old gardener outside, who was now calmly peeing on a shrub. Finished, he zipped himself and wrapped the same shrub in burlap. A warm winter.

  “Against advice from several quarters…”

  Startled, I refocused on Warden Gadmore, who was frowning at me again, waiting to capture my attention. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Against, as I say,” he said, “advice from several quarters, I have decided to give you a work assignment here. I don’t know if you appreciate what that means.”

  I looked alert and appreciative.

  “It means,” he said, looking very solemn, “that I’m giving you a break. Very few individuals prefer to sit around their cells all day with nothing to do, but we only have work for about half our inmates. New men usually have to prove themselves before they get a work assignment.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I see. Thank you.”

  “I’m taking a chance on you, Kunt,” he said, pronouncing it wrong again, “because you don’t fit any of our normal categories of prisoner.” He began to check them off on his fingers, saying, “You aren’t a professional criminal. You ar—”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “—en’t a radical. You did—”

  “No, sir.”

  “—n’t, uh.” He looked slightly exasperated. “You don’t have to say, ‘No, sir,’ every time,” he said.

  “No, sir,” I said, and immediately bit my lower lip. He looked down at my records again, as though he’d been reading from them aloud, though he hadn’t been. “Where was I?”

  “I’m not a radical,” I suggested.

  “Exactly.” Nodding seriously at me, checking the items on his fingers again, he said, “You didn’t commit a crime of passion. You aren’t here because of drugs. You’re not an embezzler or an income tax evader. None of our standard prisoner categories fits your case. In one way of looking at things, you aren’t an actual criminal at all.”

  Which was true enough. What, after all, had I done? I had parked a car on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway on a Sunday afternoon in early May. That, however, was an argument which had already been rejected at my trial, so I didn’t pursue it now. I merely looked eager and innocent, ready to accept whatever decision Warden Gadmore might choose to make.

  “So I’m assigning you,” he said, “to license plates.”

  Vision of self adorned with license plates, fore and aft; obviously not what he meant. “Sir?”

  He understood that I didn’t understand. “We manufacture license plates here,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  “I’m assigning you,” he said, sneaking another quick look at my records to see where he was assigning me, “to the packaging shop, where the plates are enveloped and boxed.”

  Solitude in a cell must be worse than I’d imagined. “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  Another look at my records. “You’re eligible for parole,” he told me, “in twenty-seven months.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you’re sincere about rehabilitation—”

  “Oh, I am, sir.”

  “Obey our rules,” he said. “Avoid bad companions. This could prove the most beneficial two years of your life.”

  “I believe that, sir.”

  He gave me a quick suspicious look. My eagerness was perhaps a little more fervent than he was used to. He chose not to press the point, though, but merely said, “Good luck, then, Kunt.” (With an umlaut, I thought, but didn’t say.) “If you behave yourself, I won’t see you in this office again until you’re discharged.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded past me at the guard, saying, “All right, Stoon.” Then, looking down at his desk as though I’d already left his office, he closed the file of my records and tossed it into a half-full tray on the corner of his desk.

  Prison etiquette requires that the guards hold the doors for the inmates. Pretending not to know that, moving quickly while pretending to move slowly, I reached the doorknob before Guard Stoon. The chewing gum I’d been packing motionless in my left cheek I quickly palmed while turning, and pressed it to the underside of the knob as I pulled the door open. It’s a brand of gum which, so long as all the flavor hasn’t been chewed out of it, remains semi-moist and gooey for half an hour or more after leaving the chewer’s mouth.

  I had opened the door, but Stoon gruffly gestured me to precede him. I did, knowing he would only be touching the knob on the other side while closing the door, and the two of us left the office building and headed across the hard dirt prison yard toward my new home.

  2

  My name is Harold Albert Chester Künt. I am thirty-two years old and unmarried, though three times in my early twenties I did propose marriage to girls I’d become emotionally involved with. All three rejected me, two with embarrassments and evasions that were in a way worse than the fact of the rejection itself. Only one was honest with me saying, “I’m sorry. I do love you, Harry, but I just can’t see spending the rest of my life as Mrs. Kunt.”

  “Koont,” I said. “With an umlaut.” But it was
no use.

  I don’t blame my parents. They’re German, they know their name only as an ancient Germanic variation on the noun Kunst, which means art. They came to this country in 1937, Aryan anti-Nazis who emigrated not because they loved America but because they hated what had become of Germany. So far as possible, they have remained German from that day to this, living at first in Yorkville, which is the German section of Manhattan, and later in German neighborhoods in a number of smaller upstate towns. My father eventually learned to speak English almost as well as a native, but my mother is still more German than American. Neither of them has ever seemed aware of any undercover implications in the name we all share.

  Well, I have. The wisecracks started when I was four years old—at least I don’t remember any from further back than that—and they haven’t stopped yet. I would have loved to change my name, but how could I explain such a move to my parents? I’m an only child, coming to them rather late in their lives, and I just couldn’t hurt them that way. “When they die,” I’d tell myself, but they’re a long-lived pair; besides, thoughts like that put me in the position of wishing for my parents’ death, which only made things worse.

  I came to the early conclusion that my name was nothing more than a practical joke played on me by a rather sophomoric God. There wasn’t any way I could get even with Him directly, of course, but much could be done against that God’s wisecracking creatures here below. Over my life, much has been done.

  The first practical joke I myself performed was in my eighth year, the victim being my second grade teacher, a woman with a rotten disposition and no heart, who regimented the children in her charge like a Marine Sergeant with a bunch of stockade misfits to contend with. She had a habit of sucking the eraser end of a pencil while thinking up some group punishment for a minor individual misdemeanor, and one day I gouged the gray-black eraser out of an ordinary yellow Ticonderoga pencil and replaced it with a gray-black dollop of dried dog manure carefully shaped to match. It took two days to infiltrate my loaded pencil onto her desk, but the time and planning and concentration were well worth it. Her expression when at last she put that pencil into her mouth was so glorious—she looked like a rumpled photograph of herself—that it kept the entire class happy for the rest of the school year, even without the array of frogs, thumbtacks, whoopee cushions, leaking pens, limburger cheese and dribble glasses which marched in the original eraser’s wake. That woman flailed away at her students day after day like a drunk with the d.t.’s but it didn’t matter. I was indefatigable.