The Road To Ruin Read online

  All right, say he wouldn’t. The thing could nevertheless fall off anyway, without underhanded scheming from Os.

  So that was one thing to be scared of. Then there was the horse. No, that was scary enough, but before the horse was the horse trailer. It was attached at the rear of a very big pickup truck with four wheels across the back axle, and it wasn’t until Mac really closed with the idea that he was the one who would have to drive it that he saw just how big the damn combination was.

  The truck was bad enough, but the trailer was big as a house, built for four horses, two across and then another two across, with a side door on the forward left to feed and look after the front pair. In it at the moment was one horse, at the back, with a big blanket suspended from the roof in front of it to block off the front half, which was where everybody else would hide while Mac drove to Monroe Hall’s compound.

  Which was another thing to be scared about. Were they really gonna buy it, those suspicious professional sentries at the entrance to Hall’s compound? Were they really not going to search the trailer from one end to the other and find the four hidden men and all that rope, but just be contented to look at the rear end of one horse? Would they really believe this stupid mustache, and this stupid four-color jockey’s hat, and this stupid green cable-knit sweater with stupid gray leather elbow patches, and these stupid jodhpurs? (Mac had never heard of jodhpurs before, and now that he had, he wished he hadn’t.)

  And then the horse. No, forget it, let’s not even think about the horse. Because everybody else is ready, whether Mac is ready or not. They’re all going through the side door into the concealed part of the trailer. Os, entering last, pauses to give one last word of advice: “Try not to have to back up.” But even that he says with a kind of snotty chuckle and a twinkle in his eye.

  Sheesh. Where did he go wrong?

  •

  And yet it worked like a charm. The thirty-mile drive was long enough for Mac to get used to that blunt gray metal box tailgating him, forever up close and personal in the mirror. He never had to back up, thank God, but he did have to learn to brake gently, or the trailer would buck and weave and threaten to take matters into its own hands. And best of all, the mustache didn’t fall off.

  He actually got to the compound ten minutes early, and when he said to the brown-uniformed tough guy at the gate, “Jay Gilly, I’m expected,” all the fellow did was make a checkmark on his clipboard and say, “I got to call the house.”

  “Sure.”

  While the guard was calling the house, a second guard walked around the pickup and horse trailer, more out of curiosity than suspicion. Then the first guard nodded at him through his guardshack window and the bar lifted in front of him, and by golly, after months of trying he just drove onto Monroe Hall’s property and up the long blacktop road to the big white house.

  And here he wouldn’t have to back up either, because the road made a little loop past the front door of the house before angling off to a parking area on the right. Mac did the loop so that the left side of the pickup was toward the house, so no one down by the gate would be able to see what was going on up here. Leaving the engine on and the gearshift in park, he got out of the pickup, touched fingertips to the mustache for luck, and walked up to the front door.

  Which opened just before he got there, and a sad sack in a black suit looked out at him as though waiting to hear his parole had been denied. “Sur?”

  “Jay Gilly,” Mac said, though he wished Flip had given him some other name. He didn’t feel like a Jay Gilly, and was glad he wouldn’t have to pretend to be Jay Gilly for very long.

  “One moment, sur,” the gloomy fellow said, and shut the door again. Butler, he must have been, and gloomy because he worked for Monroe Hall.

  Mac had acted in high school, mostly because his sister Beth had acted in high school, expecting to be a movie star any minute. (She was now a wife and mother, married to a bus driver.) The drama department at Mac’s high school had all the girl actors they could need, and then some, but it was tough to get boys to come fill in the boy parts in the plays. Beth had dragged Mac along, saying it was because she sensed his massive talent, but he knew her real reason was that she was sucking up to Ms. Mandelstam the drama teacher in hopes of better roles. Mac had parts in Romeo and Juliet and Teahouse of the August Moon and Major Barbara, and felt pretty good about it, though he knew darn well he did not have massive talent, and once high school was over he never thought about acting again.

  But here it was, wasn’t it? A new play and a new role: Jay Gilly, horse-riding instructor. He didn’t have any written lines—sides, they were called, he remembered that—but he did have a character to play, and would have to play that character from this front door all the way down to the side door of the trailer. And then briefly again at the gate, on the way out. But his main period on stage was to begin here, right now.

  And here it was. The door opened again, and the sad-sack butler stepped back to hold it open and stare into space as out came Monroe Hall himself, recognizable from all those newspaper photos and the few perp walks he’d done when the feds still thought they could pin something on him. He was dressed in what he must think appropriate for climbing on a horse, being tailored blue jeans and expensive leather cowboy boots with pictures of cactus plants on the sides and a red-check flannel shirt. He also had a big smile on his face as he said, “Jay Gilly?”

  “Yes, I am,” Mac said, and thought, yes, I am! I can do this. “How do you do, Mr. Hall?” he said, and stuck out his hand.

  “Just fine,” Hall said, though he had a rather limp handshake. Waving at the sky with the same hand, he said, “What a beautiful day to go riding, eh?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Let’s see what this horseflesh looks like, shall we?”

  “Certainly, sir. Just walk this way.”

  “Come along, Rumsey.”

  Come along? They didn’t want the butler; they didn’t need the butler in this scene; this was supposed to be just themselves and Monroe Hall.

  But what could Mac do about it? Here came the butler, slope-shouldered and heavy-browed, and here came Hall, and there was nothing for it but to walk ahead of them down the path from house to pickup and along the side of the pickup and the trailer, where in fact he did have a previously prepared line to deliver, as a signal to the group inside the trailer: “This way, Mr. Hall.”

  Well, he did have to say it, butler or no butler, and so he said it, and then, all according to plan (except for the butler), that door in the side of the trailer popped open and out jumped four people in a variety of masks with Buddy (paper bag with eyeholes cut in it) carrying the burlap sack meant to go over Hall’s head.

  And Hall couldn’t have played his part better. His reaction was stunned astonishment. He didn’t try to run; he didn’t bob and weave; he didn’t even holler; he just froze.

  Buddy leaped forward, raising the sack, as Mark (green ski mask, with elks) and Ace (Lone Ranger mask) jumped to grab Hall’s arms, while Os (rubber Frankenstein head), who was supposed to grab Hall’s ankles, pointed instead at the butler and cried, “Who’s that?”

  “The butler,” Mac said, apologetic even though it wasn’t his fault.

  “Grab him!” Mark yelled, he already having his hands full with the belatedly struggling Hall, Mark and Buddy and Ace now tugging the sacked Hall toward the trailer.

  Up to this point, the butler had just been watching events unfold, interested but not involved; as though he thought of himself as merely a bystander. But now, when Os lunged at him, shouting, “Come on, Mac!” the butler backed away, putting his hands up as he cried, “Hey, don’t call me Mac, I’m the butler, I’m not in this.”

  “He’ll raise the alarm!” Mark shouted from halfway into the trailer.

  Mac, having already figured that out, leaped forward to join Os in grabbing the butler by both arms and dragging him in his employer’s wake.

  The butler struggled like mad: “What are you
doing? I got work here! I got things to do!”

  What, was he crazy? Mark on one side, Os on the other, they lifted the butler by his elbows, ran him forward, tossed him through the trailer door onto the fallen cluster inside, Os jumped on top of the scrum, Mac slammed the door, and three minutes later the guards were waving bye-bye as he drove out the gate.

  46

  “OF COURSE,” KELP SAID into the phone, “Mr. Hall would expect to contribute to the orphans’ picnic, other than merely providing the grounds and the staff to cater the affair.”

  The child welfare woman had not yet thawed. Nor had she yet agreed to provide orphans to assist in Monroe Hall’s rehabilitation. Icily, she said, “Contribute. He’d want to supply milk and cookies, would he?”

  “Well, beyond that. Mr. Hall was thinking,” Kelp said, making it up as he went along, “of contributing a bus.”

  “A… I’m sorry?”

  “A bus,” Kelp repeated. “A large vehicle for conveying fifty-four seated persons, and twelve standees.”

  “I know what a bus is,” she snipped.

  Kelp waited. Let the penny drop. Well, more than a penny.

  Thud. “A bus?” There was a new squeak in her voice. “He would—he’d—he’d contribute a bus? Oh, I see, you mean, he’d pay the rental.”

  “No,” Kelp said, “he’d pay for the bus. Surely there are other times you’d like to take the kiddies on excursions. You’d have to come up with your own driver, though.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. …?”

  “Blanchard, Fred Blanchard.”

  “Mr. Blanchard, are—”

  “Fred, please.”

  “Are you,” she insisted, “saying that Mr. Hall would buy and donate to us a bus?”

  “He’s been impressed by the work you’re doing over there.”

  “Mr.—”

  “Fred, please. And you’re?”

  “Alice Turner.”

  “Alice, why don’t we work out a date here, agreeable to both of us, so Mr. Hall can be sure to have the bus ready in time to bring the kiddies to the picnic?”

  “Well…”

  “Sunday after next, would that be good?”

  No, as it turned out, that would be a little too soon, as Kelp had expected. Alice had board members to consult, and so on, and so on, but by the end of the conversation all ice was gone, and it was pretty clear that Monroe Hall was in one picnic with sixty kiddies and out one bus.

  Kelp was just hanging up, pleased with himself—charitable work is always satisfying, particularly with somebody else’s money—when Mrs. Hall walked in, for the second time in ten minutes, but this time looking worried. “Fred,” she said, “have you seen Mr. Hall?”

  “He’s out riding a horse,” Kelp told her. “They left about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Well, no, he’s not,” she said.

  Kelp said, “The instructor drove in with his own horse, fifteen minutes ago.”

  “And left, just a few minutes later,” Mrs. Hall said. “When I couldn’t find Monroe, and I didn’t see any horse transporter out front, I called the gate, and they said the horse transporter left not five minutes after it arrived. They thought it was merely somebody bringing a horse on approval, for Monroe to possibly buy.”

  “No, it was to learn to ride.”

  “I know that,” Mrs. Hall agreed. “But the gate didn’t know that. Nobody thought it necessary to tell the gate why a horse transporter was coming into the compound, so when it went right back out, they assumed it was merely a horse that Monroe had decided not to buy.”

  Frowning, Kelp got up and went over to look out the front window. No horse transporter in front of the house. Nothing in front of the house, all the way down to the guardshack. “Maybe,” he said, and turned around to look at Mrs. Hall’s worried face, “he decided he wasn’t ready to ride a horse after all, and sent the guy away. Or just didn’t like the guy.”

  “Then where did he go? Fred, where did my husband go?”

  Kelp looked out the window. “Well, he wouldn’t leave the compound.”

  “Not willingly.”

  Kelp studied that worried face again, and this time he suspected his own face showed a little worry as well. “Mrs. Hall,” he said, “nothing’s happened, everything’s okay.”

  “Then where is Monroe?” she said. “I’ve called all the other places around the compound where he might be, and no one’s seen him. Not since the horse transporter came in and went right back out again.”

  “But—” Kelp didn’t like what Mrs. Hall was thinking, because he knew it was the same as what he was thinking, and he wasn’t ready for what they both were thinking. He was too busy for what they both were thinking.

  Mrs. Hall said, “There are people who would like to get their hands on Monroe.”

  This was true. Their hands and probably also their feet. Feeling discombobulated, not himself, not even Fred Blanchard, Kelp said, “Couldn’t he, uh, couldn’t he be, uh …”

  She was shaking her head. “He isn’t on the compound,” she said. “He wouldn’t leave, but he isn’t here.”

  “Uh…”

  “Fred,” she said, “call the police.”

  What Kelp thought was, Wait a minute, you’ve got this backwards here! I don’t call the police, other people call the police about me! What he said was, “Yes, Mrs. Hall.”

  47

  DORTMUNDER WAS FURIOUS. He was so mad he forgot to be surprised. A bunch of clowns in funny faces boil out of a horse carrier and lay rough hands on Dortmunder (and also on whatsisname, Hall) and throw him into the horse carrier, which smells exactly like a horse carrier, and he doesn’t even take a second out to marvel, to say, Wow, looka that! Guys jumping out of a horse carrier, with weird stuff on their heads!

  No. From instant one, he knew what was going on, and it made him so mad he could bite through a phone book. What he was thinking, and what he wanted to shout, was, “Geddada here! This is my heist! You’re busting into the middle of a serious operation here! Stand in line, take a check, wait your turn! I’m not the butler, I’m the car thief! Take a hike, will ya?”

  Fortunately, he didn’t shout any of that, because it might have queered the deal if he did, if the deal wasn’t queered already. But even if he’d so forgotten himself as to voice his perfectly justified grievances, these people probably wouldn’t have heard him, because they were all shouting already:

  “Tie him up! Tie him up!”

  “He is tied up!”

  “The other one!”

  “Oh, for God’s—”

  Rough hands grasped Dortmunder, followed by rough rope. It wasn’t pitch black in here, but it was dim, and crowded, and filled with confusion. Also, the vehicle now bolted forward, which didn’t help.

  “Put a blindfold on him!”

  “We didn’t bring another one!”

  “Who knew we were gonna get a butler?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Cover his mouth, we’re coming to the guardshack! No, I’ve got this one, the other one!”

  Rough hands spread over most of Dortmunder’s head. He felt the trailer go over the speed bump at the guardshack, and then it swung leftward, throwing everybody around, and the oofs, and ows this led to were music to Dortmunder’s ears. Also, it meant all those hands left his head in order to try to break various falls in various directions.

  “We gotta blindfold this guy!”

  “Bu—uhh—uhh, put that paper bag over his head.”

  “He’ll see me when I take it off!”

  “Turn him around. Turn him around!”

  Several people in this crowded dark space with the horse blanket wafting gently and odoriferously at the back, like the curtain before a very bad play will start, grabbed Dortmunder’s arms and neck and rib cage and turned him to face away from the curtain. Now he couldn’t see anybody clearly, not that he wanted to, but only the blank front wall, beyond which the truck would be rolling along through Pennsylvania.

  A pa
per bag came down over his head. All the hands let him go. He started to turn.

  “Put the eyeholes at the back!”

  “Oh! Right!”

  Hands grabbed him again, turned him again, the paper bag was turned—now they’re gonna give me a paper cut on the neck, he thought, but they didn’t—and then he was released again, just in time to go flying when the trailer took another sharp turn.

  Apparently everybody went flying; more satisfying oofs and ows. Dortmunder hit more people than wall, which was also good. Then one of the calmer voices said, “We have to sit down. Everybody sit down. Help those two sit down.”

  More hands, encouraging him downward. Thump, he sat on a floor he doubted he’d want to sit on if he could see it. Somebody shoved him and poked him, and there he was with a wall behind him. He braced his back against it.

  They were all settling down now, calming down. The voice that had suggested they get off their feet now said, “We’ve got about two hours’ drive ahead of us, so you two try to get comfortable, but don’t think you’re going to pull anything, because you’re not.”

  “I know that voice.” That was Monroe Hall talking.

  Absolute silence. Dortmunder listened, and then heard whispering, and then another voice said, “No, you don’t.”

  “Not you,” Hall said. “The other one.”

  “There is no other one,” the new voice said. “There’s only me.”

  Clowns, Dortmunder thought. I knew they were clowns to begin with. And here they are messing up something I had put together and planned and worked for and even learned how to be a butler so I could pull it off, and these bozos come along.

  I’m gonna get them for this, Dortmunder promised himself. He didn’t care what happened to Hall, they’d planned on dealing with the insurance company anyway and still would, but these guys couldn’t just waltz into a perfectly planned and smoothly functioning heist and expect to get away with it. I’m gonna get them, he vowed. Just as soon as we get somewhere and I’m not all tied up and no paper bag over my head and it’s not five against one, whenever that happens, and it’s gonna happen, I’m gonna get them. Just wait.