Good Behaviour Read online

  There were nine different convenience addresses to which the packages were being sent, various cousins and attorneys who would restrain their curiosity. Now, when each of the ad dressers completed a batch, he or she carried them to the table in the inner room with the scale and meter, and added the appropriate postage.

  Then the packages were stored here, there and everywhere, ready to start going out, some tomorrow, some later in the week. In the days to come, packages would be retrieved from those convenience addresses and turned over to one of four different fences alerted and waiting. Very soon now, in a matter of just a few weeks, everybody in these rooms-except Sister Mary Grace, of course, another of whose vows embraced poverty-would be very rich.

  Not rich rich RICH! But not bad, either.

  Howey didn't want to take his clothes off.

  "Say, listen," he protested, "do I got my dignity or what?"

  "Or what," Stan Murch told him.

  "Sez you."

  "Try not to panic, Wilbur," Kelp said nastily.

  "Look, Wilbur," Dortmunder explained.

  "The odds are, Sister Mary Grace's father has people out looking for her already. Including he'd certainly have a couple guys hanging around the lobby, just in case she didn't get away yet. So the thing to do is disguise her as somebody else, and you're the only one around her size."

  "And you don't want those rotten rags anyway," Kelp told him.

  "Say, I like these duds," Howey complained, looking down to admire himself in his baggy tan chinos and penny loafers and bright plaid polyester shirt.

  "When I got out of the big house, the state gave me that suit, you know, that suit they give you, that suit was out of style when I went in. I went out to this snazzy new place in the suburbs, this K mart place, I got the latest threads. I need these togs, I got a front to keep up."

  "Keep this crap up," Tiny told him, "you're not gonna have any front at all. Strip."

  Howey looked around at the grim determined faces ringing him about.

  Dortmunder, Tiny, Kelp, Murch. These were, after all, desperate men, hardened criminals. If they wanted his grade-A best casual attire, they were going to get it.

  "Say, I'm gonna look like some fruitcake," he muttered unhappily, starting to undo his belt buckle, "going out of here in my skivvies."

  "You'll get her stuff," Dortmunder assured him.

  "And it isn't skirts or anything, it's regular blue jeans and a shirt."

  Howey thought about that.

  "The stuff she's wearing right now, huh?"

  Stan Murch shook his head.

  "This man is disgusting," he said.

  "Don't ever cross the street in front of me, Wilbur."

  "Wha'd I say? Wha'd I say?"

  They wouldn't tell him what he'd said. Finally his clothing was off, and then there was a brief argument about the Coors cap-"To put her hair in," Dortmunder pointed out, while Tiny ostentatiously mimed the wringing of a chicken's neck-and then Dortmunder took the rolled-up duds to the closed door leading to the outer office and knocked on it.

  J.C. opened it partway and said, "That took long enough. We've been ready a long time out here."

  "There was some discussion," Dortmunder said, handing over the clothing. J.C. went away and came back with another little pile of clothing, and Dortmunder closed the door again.

  Howey didn't like Sister Mary Grace's clothes after all. He said the shoes were too tight, and the blue jeans were too tight around the knees but too loose around the hips, and the blouse was too loose around the torso but too tight around the shoulders. And he felt naked without a hat.

  "You could wear the wastebasket if you want," Tiny told him, so then he shut up and just stood there, looking in the high-necked long-sleeved black blouse and oddly baggy jeans like a defrocked Druid.

  "Okay," Dortmunder said.

  "Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?"

  "Say," Howey said, "I don't want to get in the habit, do I?"

  But his heart didn't seem to be in it.

  J.C. appeared in the doorway.

  "Okay," she said.

  They all trooped out there, Howey last, to discover that Sister Mary Grace had been less severely dealt with by the transformation. J.C. had glued some of the girl's own cut-off hair onto her upper lip, which at first glance looked enough like a moustache to pass. With the rest of her hair tucked up inside the Coors cap, and wearing Howey's shirt and chinos and loafers, the worst you could say for her was that she looked like a tourist from Eastern Europe.

  But male.

  "It's a different guard down there now," J.C. said, "so I'll sign out like we came in together. Just remember," she told the girl, "to let me do the talking." Then she shook her head: "Sorry. I forgot."

  Sister Mary Grace went over to Dortmunder, smiled up at him, and held out her hand. Dortmunder shook it, and said, "Thanks for rescuing me."

  She did a graceful pointing-finger-rolling-over pointing-finger gesture: Thanks-far rescuing me, too.

  Everybody then told the sister goodbye.

  "Pleasure," Tiny told her, briefly engulfing her hand and forearm in his version of a handshake.

  "If you take a cab," Stan Murch told her, "tell him to go straight down Ninth." Andy Kelp said, "It was fun, you know?"

  And Howey, lingering over the handshake, said, "I gotta admit it, Sister Toots, you look better in that rig than I do myself."

  J.C. said, "I'll be back around nine tomorrow morning."

  "We'll probably be gone," Dortmunder told her.

  Tiny said, "Listen, Josie, I'll stick around, right? Help you mail this stuff."

  Josie? Everybody looked at Tiny with astonishment, but he ignored them, grinning at J.C." who smiled casually back and said, "Sure, Tiny, that'd be nice."

  Hmm, everybody thought.

  "And here's the thing," Dortmunder said.

  "It's over, you know?

  And nothing went wrong."

  "John," Kelp told him, "sometimes things work out, okay?"

  "But I don't understand this," Dortmunder said, looking around J.C.

  Taylor's now-clean outer office. It was ten minutes since J.C. and Sister Mary Grace had left, and a pleasant calm had descended everywhere. In the other room, Stan Murch watched early Sunday afternoon traffic out the window, Tiny Bulcher was taking the Allied Commissioners' Course final exam (and cheating), and Wilbur Howey was trying to decide if he looked worse with his shirt-that is, Sister Mary Grace's shirt-tucked in or hanging out.

  "We got the loot," Dortmunder pointed out.

  "We saved the nun. Nobody in our bunch got hurt or killed or even caught by the law. We're home free."

  Kelp said, "Well, that was the plan, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah, but-" Dortmunder shook his head.

  "I just don't get it."

  The door opened, and J.C. and the nun came in. The nun looked very pale and round-eyed, and J.C. looked grim.

  "Trouble," J.C. said, closing the door, and the nun nodded.

  "Ah," Dortmunder said.

  "Now I get it."

  Kelp said, bright with false hope, "What, you need carfare, something like that?"

  "Big trouble," J.C. said, and the nun nodded hugely. She looked mainly like a deer who'd just heard a gunshot.

  "Tell me," Dortmunder said.

  "Tell me every bit of it."

  "There's policemen at the exits," she said, "checking everybody's ID. I sweet-talked the security man at the desk down there, and he told me what's going on. The police know there's a lot of stuff missing from the robbery, and they're not sure they got every one of those soldiers up there, so they're doing a sweep."

  "A sweep," Dortmunder said. Tiny and Stan and Wilbur had come out from the other room to listen.

  "They got a quick warrant to search the entire building," J.C. went on.

  "They're starting at the top and sweeping down. They figure it'll take hours."

  Dortmunder looked around this little two-room
suite; a moment ago, a safe haven, but now a mousetrap and they the mice.

  "We can't get out of the building," he said, "because they're checking IDs at the exits. And we can't stay here, because they'll find us when they sweep through."

  "I'm the only one signed in," J.C. said. She looked and sounded bitter.

  "I could get out of the building, but what good does it do me? They'll find you clowns, and then they'll find my offices full of stolen property, and then they'll find me. And I never did look good in gray."

  Tiny said, "Josie, if it's any consolation at all, I promise you that before the law gets here I will personally run Dortmunder through the pencil sharpener."

  Kelp said, "Tiny, that isn't fair! John did every-" "John, huh?" Tiny lowered his head and gazed without love at Kelp.

  "John and his Sisters," he said.

  "We had a nice simple little robbery, very sweet and very smart, we could come in, we could go out, not a problem in the world. But your John here, he has to go up to the tower and knock over a hornet's nest.

  All the trouble we got, we got it because of John and this nun. It's Come to the Stable all over again. And your pal Dortmunder's the one brought in the nun."

  Kelp turned desperately to Dortmunder.

  "John," he said, "there's a way out, right?"

  "I'm glad to hear it," Dortmunder told him. He was wondering if Tiny actually did have a method whereby he could run a 22: human being through a pencil sharpener. Knowing Tiny, it was possible.

  "No, no," Kelp said, jittering.

  "I mean, you've got a way out, right? A solution? You know what we can do?"

  "We could give ourselves up, I guess," Dortmunder said.

  "End the suspense." He sat down at the receptionist's desk and waited to be taken away.

  "John," Kelp said.

  "You're the one with the plans, the ideas.

  Come up with something."

  "There isn't anything," Dortmunder told him.

  "It's all over."

  There was a certain relief, a kind of relaxation, in giving in to despair.

  "Say," Wilbur Howey said, bobbing up and down, glinting and winking,

  "prison ain't so bad, once you get used to it. Maybe we could all get in the same cellblock. Say, I was with a swell bunch this last time.

  We all got together and subscribed to Playboy, read all about hi-fi sets and everything, time passes before you know it."

  Tiny growled, "Wilbur, you are gonna pass before you know it."

  "Nothing to drive," Stan Murch said. His voice was so sepulchral it seemed to have an echo in it.

  "From time to time," the irrepressible Howey assured him, "we could escape for a while, the whole bunch of us together. You could drive then."

  "The same cellblock," Kelp said, looking with horror first at Tiny and then at Howey.

  "John," he said, "think about it."

  Dortmunder was thinking about it. He sighed. No rest for the wicked.

  "All right," he said.

  "I'll do it. Tiny's pencil sharpener is one thing, but forty-eight years in a cellblock with Wilbur Howey?

  No way."

  "John?" Hope glittered madly in Kelp's eyes.

  "You've done it?

  You found it?"

  "I'm thinking," Dortmunder told him, "but people keep interrupting."

  "Stop interrupting," Tiny told Kelp.

  "That's right," Stan said.

  J.C. said, "Everybody just pipe down."

  "Say," Wilbur said, "give this fella room."

  "Everybody's interrupting me," Dortmunder said.

  So then everybody shut up, and just looked at him.

  Dortmunder sat there at the receptionist's desk and thought. He looked at J.C." and then at Sister Mary Grace, and then at Tiny, and then at Wilbur, and then at Kelp, and then at Stan Murch, and he thought. He got up and wandered into the back room and looked at everything there, and thought. He looked out the window at the carefree people driving down Fifth Avenue in their cars, going anywhere they wanted, and he thought. He went back to the other room, where twelve eyes looked at him, and Wilbur Howey shifted position, and a pin was heard to drop.

  "Sister," Dortmunder said.

  "Is there a telephone down there in that convent?"

  Wide-eyed, she nodded.

  "Is there somebody with a, whadaya call it, a, a, compensation, decoration…"

  Sounding almost timid, J.C. said, "You mean dispensation?"

  "That's the thing," Dortmunder said. To the nun he said, "Does somebody have one of those down there, so they can break the vow of silence and talk on the phone if it rings?"

  She nodded.

  Dortmunder pointed at the telephone.

  "Call the convent," he said.

  Sister Mary Grace, holding her breath, picked up the phone and started dialing.

  Tiny looked disgruntled.

  "More nuns?" he said.

  Dortmunder nodded.

  "More nuns."

  There was a time when Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna (pronounced Maloney) of the New York Police Department didn't have to come into the goddamn city on a Sunday in May no matter what happened. That was when the chief inspector had been the top cop of the City of New York, master of all he goddamn surveyed and you'd better not forget it. But then, some little time ago, the chief inspector stubbed his toe on a case, let the object of a massive manhunt slip through his massive fingers, got mad, punched a TV reporter on camera, and in general behaved counter-productively.

  He didn't so much blot his copybook as crap all over it. He was still powerful enough to be let off with a mere slap on the wrist, but in effect he was no longer the top cop of the City of New York, and he knew it, and everybody else knew it. Until the stink faded, Mologna was on display duty, which was wearin, time-consumin and humiliatin.

  This is display duty: Whenever some major crime occurs in the City of New York-not some second-rate murder or bank robbery or an arson confined to one side of one block, but a major big-time big city felony-whenever a crime occurs so large and interestin that the media show up, it is necessary to have present there a high-rankin uniformed police official with braid on his hat brim to conduct the investigation. This display inspector or display captain is usually somebody so old and so dumb and so racked by alcohol they won't let him have bullets for his gun anymore, and for Chief Inspector Francis X.

  Mologna to be given such duty cut deep. Deep.

  And now here it was springtime, out in his home in Bay Shore on Long Island. Mologna's motorboat was in the water of the Great South Bay, just beyond his own backyard. His tomato plants and geraniums were in their beds in that yard. The sun was warm, the days were growin longer, and today was Sunday. And here in the middle of Manhattan, in the Avalon State Bank Tower, displayin his bulk to the media (but not punchin any goddamn reporters, oh, no), stood the fat and perspirin Francis X. Mologna, walkin around under his hat with the braid on the brim.

  A hell of a mess, this one. Mologna was just glad he wasn't actually conductin the investigation, because the parts of this story didn't fit. Up on the top of the buildin were a whole lot of soldiers of fortune, mercenaries enough to change the administration in Hell. On the twenty-sixth floor were half a dozen burglarized importers. Some of the burglary loot was on the top floor with the meres, who claimed to know nothin about it. And in fact, burglary was not their MO; slaughter of the innocents was more along the lines of their trade.

  While seated in his chauffeured official car, takin a break from displayin himself, restin in the open door with his feet on the curb while he brooded unhappily about the clear and beautiful and sunlit water of the Great South Bay, Mologna was approached by a young black police officer with the righteous dew of the Police Academy still gleamin in his eyes and shinin on his forehead. This whippersnapper saluted and said, "Sir, we have a woman."

  Mologna never returned salutes; he just nodded and kept them. Noddin, he said, "Good for you."

&n
bsp; "She's right over there, sir."

  Mologna frowned. Was he actually expected to do something?

  "What is she?" he asked.

  "A burglar or a soldier?"

  "A song producer, sir."

  Mologna considered this young black police officer. He was too young to know better and too black to yell at and unlikely to be pullin even a display inspector's leg.

  "And just what, in the Holy Virgin's holy name," he wanted to know,

  "should I be doin with a song producer?"

  "It's about some nuns," the young man said, blinkin rapidly.

  "Maybe she ought to tell you herself."

  "Nuns? Why would I-" But then his eye caught sight of a woman over by the Avalon Tower entrance, and he stopped, and for a second he just stared. Years and years ago he'd met a judo instructor who'd looked like that. By the good lord harry, but that woman could contort herself! That's one of the ones Mrs. Mologna never did find out about.

  "Her?" Mologna asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "And what would she be havin' to do with nuns?"

  "She wants to make a record with them, sir."

  "That'll be a hell of a record," Mologna decided.

  "That'll get into Guinness for sure. Bring that record producer over here."

  "Yes, sir." The young man saluted (Mologna nodded) and off he went, returnin in a moment with the woman, sayin, "Mrs.

  Taylor, sir."

  The woman smiled, seductive but not coarse, and said, "How do you do, Chief Inspector?"

  Mologna had already struggled out of the car and onto his feet, and now he smiled his avuncular smile and put out his hand, and she placed a card in it. He'd expected a hand, not a card, but recovered and read it: Super Star Music-].C. Taylor, President. The address was this Avalon Tower here.

  "Was you robbed, too?" he asked.

  "Not yet," she said.

  "I'm hoping there won't be any trouble about these Sisters coming to see me."