Watch Your Back! d-13 Read online

  "Shopping?" she asked, fingers still on the keys. "At Wal-Mart? You?"

  "Not exactly," he told her, as he put the shopping bag on the bed. "I was more hunting for the pot." Tossing the sweater into the wastebasket, he reached into the bag and brought out a short silver sable coat of a style that's never out of fashion. "I think this one's your size."

  She leaped up from the computer. "Sable in August! How appropriate."

  "I got three of them," he told her, admiring the way she snuggled into the coat. Taking two similar trophies from the bag, he said, "One for you and two for the rent."

  "Well, this is the best of them," she said, smiling as her hand smoothed the fur down her front.

  "John wants me to call, I'll do it in the living room."

  "These people," she said, with a dismissive wave of the hand at the computer. "They want to know where Daddy stood on the Cold War. As though Daddy ever stood on anything. He was a politician, for God's sake."

  "Tell them," Kelp suggested, "your daddy felt the Cold War was an unfortunate necessity and he prayed every night that it would come out okay."

  He left her standing there in the sable but with a sudden fraught expression on her face, as though wondering if she'd wound up with her father after all, and in the living room he sat on the sofa, looked at the television set, and called John.

  Who answered on the fifth ring, sounding out of breath. "Ern?"

  "You hadda run from the kitchen."

  "It turns out, snacking's a good thing. Many small meals all day long, easier on the system."

  "Still, you hadda run from the kitchen."

  "You aren't going to," Dortmunder said, "talk to me about extra telephones."

  "I am not," Kelp agreed. "I gave up on you long ago. Besides, you're the one wanted to talk, so you get to pick the subject."

  "Good," Dortmunder said. "Arnie Albright."

  Kelp waited, then said, "That's the subject?"

  "It is."

  "He's down south, for the intervention."

  "He's back, he called me, he says it worked."

  "I'll want a second opinion."

  "You can have one," Dortmunder offered. "Your very own opinion. He wants to see us, he says he's got a great proposition for us."

  "Us?" Kelp watched Anne Marie walk through the room toward the kitchen, smiling. She still wore the coat. Into the phone, he said, "Arnie didn't call me, John, he called you."

  "But he knows we're a team."

  "Arnie Albright didn't call me," Kelp said, "so I don't need to go over there."

  "He says it's a really great offer."

  "Fine," Kelp said. "You go over, if it turns out it really is a really great offer, then you call me. You can even come here and describe it to me."

  "Andy," Dortmunder said, "I'm gonna level with you."

  "Don't strain yourself."

  "I just can't do it alone," Dortmunder admitted. "I'm afraid to know what Arnie is after Club Med. Either we go together, or I'm not going."

  Kelp was beginning to feel trapped. "Look, John," he said, and Anne Marie walked through the room again, from the kitchen toward the bedroom, still smiling and still wearing the sable coat. She stopped midway and opened the coat, and she didn't have anything on underneath it. "Uuuuu," Kelp said.

  "So you'll meet me there," Dortmunder said.

  It was unfair; life was too full of distractions. How could a person figure a way to weasel out of a thing? Anne Marie walked on to the bedroom, the coat twitching behind her legs, and Kelp said, "Only not right now. Later on today, say four o'clock."

  "I'll meet you there," Dortmunder said. "Out front."

  "I can hardly wait," Kelp said, and hung up.

  4

  "ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL day in paradise."

  "You say that every day."

  "Well, of course I say it every day," Preston said, flicking sand off his belly. "That's the point, isn't it? The unchanging sameness, the lack of surprise, the loss of suspense, the eternal undifferentiated pleasantness of it all, of course I have to respond in the character of the setting, with the same hackneyed phrase every single pointless, drifting, inane day. The wonder of it is that you don't say it every day."

  Alan frowned. Preston suspected, not for the first time, that Alan had not been paying strict attention. "Say what every day?"

  " 'You say that every day. »

  Alan scrunched his monkey face into a walnut, a walnut wearing a Red Sox hat and sunglasses. "I say what every day?"

  "Oh, Lord," Preston said. Should he try to get back to the beginning of the thread, untangle the snarl? What for? Instead, he said, "You're not quite the thing as a paid companion, are you?"

  "I'm every bit a companion," Alan insisted. "I'm here at your beck and call, I engage in conversation with you, I fetch and carry, I completely subordinate my own preferences and personality, and I never argue with you."

  "You're arguing with me now."

  "No, I'm not."

  Another dead end. Preston sighed and looked out over his own supine form on the chaise longue, past his mounded pink belly cresting at the waist of his scarlet swimming trunks, past the tops of his toes, just visible way down there this side of the white wood rail enclosing the porch, past the bit of sand and neat plantings and brick path that paralleled the shoreline, past the shoreline out there and then to the green and foamy sea, speckled with snorkelers, whizzing with windsurfers, caroming with canoes. It was exhausting just to watch all those people exercise. "I hate this place," he said.

  Alan had no doubt heard that before as well. "We could go somewhere else, if you'd like," he said.

  Preston snorted. "Where else? It's all the same, except most of it is even worse. At least, here there's no weather."

  Alan waved a hand at the view. "It's August, Preston," he said, "the whole northern hemisphere's like that at the moment. No snow, not even much rain. You could go anywhere you like."

  "You know perfectly well," Preston told him, beginning to become really annoyed, "the only place I'd like to go is the one place I certainly cannot go, and that is home. New York. My apartment. My clubs, my city, my theaters, my restaurants, my board of directors' meetings, my five-hundred-dollar hookers speaking French. That's where I cannot go, as you full well know. And you also know why, because that's something else I talk about often, because it preys on my mind."

  "Your wives, you mean."

  "To have ex-wives is the normal state of affairs," Preston explained. "It's merely the end product of lust. But ex-wives are not supposed to band together, pool their resources, set themselves to strip their former benefactor to his skivvies, and then set fire to the skivvies."

  "You probably jeered at them," Alan suggested.

  Preston spread his hands. "Well, of course I jeered at them. Ex-wives are meant to be jeered at. Tiny little grasping brains, greedy little pigs."

  "Driving them together."

  "Well, they weren't supposed to be together, they were supposed to hate each other too much. If those four women had remained solitary soreheads, as they were supposed to do, I wouldn't be on the run the way I am, hounded to the ends of the earth by the baying of the world's most rapacious divorce attorneys."

  "Club Med isn't exactly the end of the earth," Alan informed him.

  "It's one of them," Preston said. "It isn't your hub, your beating heart, your nerve center, in short, your New York. It isn't, Alan, New York."

  "I agree," Alan said.

  "Thank you." Preston brooded, then said, "If I could go home again, Alan, I would go there in a shot, as you very well know, and I would have absolutely no further use for a paid companion, and you would no doubt starve to death in a gutter somewhere. And deserve it, too. Is there anything more otiose than a paid companion?"

  "Probably not," Alan said. "Of course, pleasant people get companionship for free."

  "And worth every penny of it. What do you mean, pleasant people? I am pleasant. I smile at the waitstaff, I josh with the other
guests."

  "You taunt and tease," Alan told him. "You like to hurt people's feelings — mine, if I had any — and use big words they won't understand and just be so superior it's amazing you're not in a toga."

  "Don't forget the laurel leaves," Preston said, and laughed, and said, "Do you know who I miss?"

  Alan seemed mildly surprised. "You miss somebody?"

  "That little Albright fellow," Preston said. "The crook, whatever he was. The fellow out of the Bowery Boy movies."

  "You miss him," Alan said, the words as flat as a skipping stone.

  "I do," Preston said, and smiled at the memory. "You talk about teasing people, he was the best subject I ever had in my life. Albright — there's a misnomer. And when he got to drinking!

  "You got to drinking yourself," Alan told him.

  "Oh, a bit, here and there," Preston acknowledged, and waved the idea away. "Just enough to keep him company, so he could tell me things I could make fun of."

  "You told him a few things yourself," Alan said.

  "I did?" Preston tried to remember something he might have told the little Albright fellow. "What on earth could I possibly have told Arnie Albright?"

  "Oh, I don't know," Alan said. "Personal details, when you were in your cups together. He's probably forgotten it all. But you know, I almost had the feeling sometimes that he came around so often mostly because he was trying to pump you."

  "Pump? Me? Don't be foolish. Arnie Albright was about as crafty as that scuba instructor you inveigled me into going to."

  "If you'd gone back," Alan said, "he might have drowned you."

  "One of the reasons I didn't. But Arnie Albright. To pump me. He came back, day after day—"

  "Because he had nowhere else to go, like you."

  "Paid companions do not interrupt," Preston said. "He came back because, in his pitiful little brain, he had dreams of someday one-upping me. It was wonderful to watch him, tongue-tied, nose turning bright red, trying to find a snappy retort."

  "No, he didn't have a lot of those," Alan agreed.

  "I should think not." With another laugh, Preston said, "Wherever he is right now, back up there in the city, I wonder if he thinks sometimes of me."

  5

  DORTMUNDER WAS five minutes early and Kelp five minutes late — par for the course. Dortmunder was well aware that Arnie's nasty little apartment, up on the second floor, had no street-facing windows but was wrapped like a dirty scarf around an unpleasant airshaft, but nevertheless he felt exposed out here on West 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, as though Arnie might be able somehow to see through the front apartment and down to the street, where Dortmunder was not rushing to come up and see him.

  But then Kelp did get there, whistling up the street with his hands in his chino pockets, wearing a light blue polo shirt with the ghostly echo of a panther on the left front, where Anne Marie had removed the manufacturer's logo. "Waiting long?" he wanted to know.

  "Nah, I just got here," Dortmunder said, to give him no satisfaction. "Let's go."

  He turned toward the building, but Kelp said, "Shouldn't we discuss it first?"

  Dortmunder frowned at him. "Discuss what?"

  "Well, what the plan is, what's our approach, like that."

  "Andy," Dortmunder said, "he hasn't told us the proposition yet. We discuss after we got something to talk about. You're just trying to stall here. Comon."

  Dortmunder turned toward the entrance again, and this time Kelp followed. The ground floor of Arnie's building was a storefront, at the moment selling video games, with the most astonishing posters about sex and violence in the window and with a tiny vestibule to its left. Dortmunder and Kelp crowded into the vestibule; Dortmunder pushed the button next to the dirty card that said Albright, then gave a fatalistic look at the metal grid beside it, knowing what was coming next.

  Which it did. "Dortmunder?"

  "That's right," Dortmunder said to the metal grid, sorry he couldn't deny it, and the nasty buzzer sounded that would unlock the door.

  Inside, a narrow hall was filled with the fragrance of old, damp newspapers, and the steep stairs led up to the second floor, where Arnie Albright himself stood and gazed down, a very strange expression on his face that he might have intended for a welcoming smile. "So," he called. "Two of you."

  "I knew he didn't mean me," Kelp muttered as they went up the stairs. Dortmunder did not dignify that with a reply.

  When they reached the top, Arnie turned away toward the open door of his apartment, saying, "Well, come on in, but try not to look at me, I still look like an army uniform."

  Well, it was slightly worse than that, in fact. The way a tan manifested itself on Arnie Albright's city-bred skin was to look like the kind of makeup the mortician uses when there's going to be a viewing. If anybody wanted to know what Arnie Albright would look like in his coffin, this was the chance.

  Otherwise he seemed unchanged, a grizzled, gnarly guy with a nose like a tree root. He was dressed in a Soho Film Festival T-shirt, bright blue cotton shorts, and Birkenstocks that looked as though they came from the same tree as his nose.

  Arnie's apartment, small underfurnished rooms with big dirty windows showing the airshaft, was decorated mostly with his calendar collection, walls covered with Januarys of all times, combined with pictures of leggy girls, icy brooks, cuddly kittens, and classic cars. Here and there were the ones he called incompletes, years that had apparently started in June or September.

  "Sit down at the table by the window there," Arnie offered. "It's the only place in the apartment where you don't get that smell."

  So they sat on opposite sides of a kitchen table with incompletes laminated onto it, and Arnie dragged over another wooden chair to join them. Dortmunder said, "It doesn't smell so bad in here, Arnie."

  "Not here," Arnie said. "But try the bedroom. Lemme tell you about the intervention."

  "Sure, if you want to."

  "It's what you call the background to the proposition," Arnie said. "I went down there, because my nearest and dearest made it pretty plain the alternative was sudden death, and believe me, it was not an experience I would wish on anybody."

  "Sorry to hear that," Dortmunder said.

  "In the first place, sun." Arnie scratched an ecru arm reminiscently. "It's overrated," he assured them. "You can't look at it, you can't get away from it, and it makes you itch. Or anyway, me. Then there's the ocean."

  Kelp said, "You were on an island, I hear."

  "Boy, was I. Any direction you go, ten feet, splash. But the thing I never got about the ocean, you think it's water, it isn't."

  Kelp, interested, curious, said, "It isn't?"

  "Looks like water, sounds like water." Leaning in close, Arnie half-whispered the secret: "It's salt."

  "Sure," Kelp said. "Salt water."

  "Forget the water, it's salt." Arnie made a face that did not improve his looks. "Yuk. I couldn't believe how much beer I had to drink to get that taste outa my mouth. Then somebody said, 'You don't want all that beer in the sun, you want a margarita, so I took a margarita and that's salt. Come on. All the salt down there, you could curl up like a mummy."

  "This is a lotta background, Arnie," Dortmunder said.

  "You're right," Arnie said. "Now that I'm not so obnoxious any more, I'm garrulous instead. You know, like an old uncle after he goes straight. So let me cut to the chase, and the chase is a guy called Preston Fareweather."

  Dortmunder repeated the name: "Never heard of him."

  "Well, he isn't a movie star," Arnie said, "he's a venture capitalist. He's got more money than the mint, he invests in your up-and-coming operation, when the dust settles, hey, look, you got a partner, he's even richer. The reason he's down there, he's hiding out from lawyers and process servers."

  "From the people he screwed?" Kelp asked.

  "In a way," Arnie said. "But not the businesspeople. Seems, one way or another, Preston Fareweather married most of the really good-looking women
in North America, and they banded together to get revenge. So he went to this island where nobody can get at him, waiting for the wives to get over their mad, which is not likely. But the thing about him is, his personality's even worse than mine used to be. Everybody down there hates him because he's so snotty and in your face, but he has all this money, so people put up with him. He insulted me a couple times, and I shrugged it off, he's just another bad taste, like ocean, but then a couple people there told me about this place he has."

  "A place," Dortmunder echoed. "I have the feeling we're getting somewhere."

  "We are," Arnie agreed. "Preston Fareweather has a big luxury duplex penthouse apartment on top of a building on Fifth Avenue, views of the park, all that, and in that apartment he's got his art collection and his Spanish silver and all this stuff. Well, you know, I'm interested in stuff, that's been the basis of our relationship over the years, so I went back to this guy. I hung around with this guy, I drank with him, pretended I was drunk, pretended his snotty little remarks got under my skin, and all along I'm getting the details of this apartment, because it occurs to me I know some people — namely, you people — who might be interested in this apartment."

  "It sounds possible," Dortmunder agreed.

  Kelp said, "Depending on this and that. Like getting in and getting out, for instance."

  "Which is why I hung around the bastard so much," Arnie said. "He has this guy with him, personal secretary or assistant or something, I dunno, named Alan Pinkleton, and he's actually pretty sharp, I thought once or twice he might have piped to what I was doing, but it turned out okay. And by the time I had everything I needed to know, I realized this Preston son of a bitch had cured me, can you believe it?"

  Kelp said, "Preston cured you?"

  "I watched him," Arnie said. "I watched the people around him, how they acted, and I suddenly got it, those are the expressions I used to see on the faces of people looking at me. I was never obnoxious in the same way as Preston, on purpose to hurt and embarrass other people, but it all comes down to the same place. 'I don't wanna be Preston Fareweather, I told myself, 'not even by accident, so that was it. I was cured and I come home, and I called you, John Dortmunder, because here's my proposition."