Thieves Dozen Page 7

  Dortmunder stared. “What’s that?”

  Kelp grinned and shook his head. “It’s been too long since we scored, John,” he said. “You don’t even recognize the stuff anymore. This is money.”

  “But— From the vault? How?”

  “After you were taken away by those other guys—they were caught, by the way,” Kelp interrupted himself, “without loss of life—anyway, I told everybody in the vault there, the way to keep the money safe from the robbers was we’d all carry it out with us. So we did. And then I decided what we should do is put it all in the trunk of my unmarked police car in front of the shoe store, so I could drive it to the precinct for safekeeping while they all went home to rest from their ordeal.”

  Dortmunder looked at his friend. He said, “You got the hostages to carry the money from the vault.”

  “And put it in our car,” Kelp said. “Yeah, that’s what I did.” May came in and handed Dortmunder a beer. He drank deep, and Kelp said, “They’re looking for you, of course. Under that other name.”

  May said, “That’s the one thing I don’t understand. Diddums?”

  “It’s Welsh,” Dortmunder told her. Then he smiled upon the mountain of money on the coffee table. “It’s not a bad name,” he decided. “I may keep it.”

  A MIDSUMMER DAYDREAM

  IT HAVING BECOME ADVISABLE TO LEAVE NEW YORK CITY FOR AN indefinite period, Dortmunder and Kelp found themselves in the countryside, in a barn, watching a lot of fairies dance. “I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder muttered.

  “It’s perfect cover,” Kelp whispered. “Who’d look for us here?” “I wouldn’t, that’s for sure.”

  The fairies all skipped off stage and some other people came on and went off, and then the audience stood up. “That’s it?” Dortmunder asked. “We can go now?”

  “First half,” Kelp told him.

  First half. Near the end of the first half, one of the players in bib overalls had gone out and come back in with a donkey’s head on, which about summed up Dortmunder’s attitude toward the whole thing. Oh, well; when in Rome, do as the Romans, and when in West Urbino, New York, go to the Saturday-afternoon summer theater. Why not? But he wouldn’t come back Sunday.

  Outside, the audience stood around in the sunshine and talked about everything except A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The women discussed other women’s clothing and the men brought one another up to date on sports and the prices of automobiles, all except Kelp’s cousin, a stout man named Jesse Bohker, who smelled of fertilizer because that’s what he sold for a living, and who talked about the size of the audience because he was the chief investor in this barn converted to an extremely barnlike summer theater, with splintery bleachers and nonunion actors up from New York. “Good gate,” Bohker said, nodding at the crowd in satisfaction, showbiz jargon as comfortable as a hay stalk in his mouth. “Shakespeare brings ’em in every time. They don’t want anybody to think they don’t have culture.”

  “Isn’t that great,” Kelp said, working on his enthusiasm because his cousin Bohker was putting them up until New York became a little less fraught. “Only eighty miles from the city, and you’ve got live theater.”

  “Cable kills us at night,” cousin Bohker said, sharing more of his entertainment-world expertise, “but in the daytime, we do fine.”

  They rang a cowbell to announce the second half, and the audience obediently shuffled back in, as though they had bells round their own necks. All except Dortmunder, who said, “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Come on, John,” Kelp said, not wanting to be rude to the cousin. “Don’t you wanna know how it comes out?”

  “I know how it comes out,” Dortmunder said. “The guy with the donkey head turns into Pinocchio.”

  “That’s OK, Andy,” cousin Bohker said. He was a magnanimous host. “Some people just don’t go for it,” he went on, with the fat chuckle that served him so well in fertilizer sales. “Tell the truth, football season, I wouldn’t go for it myself.”

  “I’ll be out here,” Dortmunder said. “In the air.”

  So everybody else shuffled back into the barn and Dortmunder stayed outside, like the last smoker in the world. He walked around a bit, looking at how dusty his shoes were getting, and thought about New York. It was just a little misunderstanding down there, that’s all, a little question about the value of the contents of trucks that had been taken from Greenwich Street out to Long Island City one night when their regular drivers were asleep in bed. It would straighten itself out eventually, but a couple of the people involved were a little jumpy and emotional in their responses, and Dortmunder didn’t want to be the cause of their having performed actions they would later regret. So it was better—more healthful, in fact—to spend a little time in the country, with the air and the trees and the sun and the fairies in the bottom of the barn.

  Laughter inside the barn. Dortmunder wandered over to the main entrance, which now stood unguarded, the former ushers and cashier all away being fairies, and beyond the bleachers, he saw the guy in the donkey head and the girl dressed in curtains carrying on as before. No change. Dortmunder turned away and made a long, slow circuit of the barn, just for something to do.

  This used to be a real farm a long time ago, but most of the land was sold off and a couple of outbuildings underwent insurance fires, so now the property was pretty much just the old white farmhouse, the red barn and the gravel parking lot in between. The summer-theater people were living in the farmhouse, which meant that, out back, it had the most colorful clothesline in the county. Down the road that-a-way was West Urbino proper, where cousin Bohker’s big house stood.

  The second half took a long time, almost as long as if Dortmunder had been inside watching it. He walked around awhile, and then he chose a comfortable-looking car in the parking lot and sat in it—people didn’t lock their cars or their houses or anything around here—and then he strolled around some more, and that’s when the actor with the donkey’s head and the bib overalls went by, maybe to make an entrance from the front of the theater. Dortmunder nodded his head at the guy, and the actor nodded his donkey head back.

  Dortmunder strolled through the parked cars, wondering if there were time to take one for a little spin, and then Mr. Donkey came back again and they both did their head nod, and the donkey walked on, and that was it for excitement. Dortmunder figured he probably didn’t have time to take a little drive around the countryside particularly because, dollars to doughnuts, he’d get lost.

  And it was a good thing he’d decided not to leave, because only about ten minutes later, a whole lot of applause sounded inside the barn and a couple of ex-fairies came trotting out to be traffic control in the parking lot. Dortmunder swam upstream through the sated culture lovers and found Kelp to one side of the flow, near the cashier’s makeshift office, waiting for cousin Bohker to quit drooling over the take. “It was a lot of fun,” Kelp said.

  “Good.”

  “And it come out completely different from what you said.” Cousin Bohker emerged from the ticket office with a brand-new expression on his face, all pinched-in and pruny, as though he’d been eating his fertilizer. He said, “Andy, I guess your friend doesn’t understand much about country hospitality.”

  This made very little sense at all; in fact, none. Kelp said, “Come again, cuz?”

  “So you talk to him, Andy,” cousin Bohker said. He wasn’t looking at Dortmunder, but his head seemed to incline slightly in Dortmunder’s direction. He seemed like a man torn between anger and fear, anger forbidding him to show the fear, fear holding the anger in check; constipated, in other words. “You talk to your friend,” cousin Bohker said in a strangled way, “you explain about hospitality in the country, and you tell him we’ll forget—”

  “If you mean, John,” Kelp said, “he’s right here. This is him here.”

  “That’s OK,” the cousin said. “You just tell him we’ll forget all about it this once, and all he has to do is give it back, and we�
��ll never say another word about it.”

  Kelp shook his head. “I don’t get what you mean,” he said. “Give what back?”

  “The receipts!” cousin Bohker yelled, waving madly at his ticket office. “Two hundred twenty-seven paid admissions, not counting freebies and house seats like you fellas had, at twelve bucks a head; that’s two thousand, seven hundred twenty-four dollars, and I want it back!”

  Kelp stared at his cousin. “The box-office receipts? You can’t—” His stare, disbelieving, doubtful, wondering, turned toward Dortmunder. “John? You didn’t!” Kelp’s eyes looked like hub-caps. “Did you? You didn’t! Naturally, you didn’t. Did you?”

  The experience of being unjustly accused was so novel and bewildering to Dortmunder that he was almost drunk from it. He had so little experience of innocence. How does an innocent person act, react, respond to the base accusation? He could barely stand up, he was concentrating so hard on this sudden in-rush of guiltlessness. His knees were wobbling. He stared at Andy Kelp and couldn’t think of one solitary thing to say.

  “Who else was out here?” the cousin demanded. “All alone out here while everybody else was inside with the play. ‘Couldn’t stand Shakespeare,’ was that it? Saw his opportunity, by God, and took it, and the hell with his host!”

  Kelp was beginning to look desperate. “John,” he said, like a lawyer leading a particularly stupid witness, “you weren’t just playing a little joke, were you? Just having a little fun, didn’t mean anything serious, was that it?”

  Maybe innocent people are dignified, Dortmunder thought. He tried it: “I did not take the money,” he said, as dignified as a turkey on Thanksgiving eve.

  Kelp turned to his cousin: “Are you sure it’s gone?”

  “Andy,” said the cousin, drawing himself up—or in—becoming even more dignified than Dortmunder, topping Dortmunder’s king of dignity with his own ace, “this fellow is what he is, but you’re my wife’s blood relative.”

  “Aw, cuz,” Kelp protested, “you don’t think I was in it with him, do you?”

  And that was the unkindest cut of all. Forgetting dignity, Dortmunder gazed on his former friend like a betrayed beagle. “You, too, Andy?”

  “Gee whiz, John,” Kelp said, twisting back and forth to show how conflicted all this made him, “what’re we supposed to think? I mean, maybe it just happened accidental-like; you were bored, you know, walking around, you just picked up this cash without even thinking about it, you could. . . .”

  Wordlessly, Dortmunder frisked himself, patting his pockets and chest, then spreading his arms wide, offering himself for Kelp to search.

  Which Kelp didn’t want to do. “OK, John,” he said, “the stuff isn’t on you. But there wasn’t anybody else out here, just you, and you know your own rep—”

  “The donkey,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp blinked at him. “The what?”

  “The guy in the donkey head. He walked around from the back to the front, and then he walked around again from the front to the back. We nodded at each other.”

  Kelp turned his hopeful hubcaps in his cousin’s direction. “The guy with the donkey head, that’s who you—”

  “What, Kelly?” demanded the cousin. “Kelly’s my junior partner in this operation! He’s been in it with me from the beginning, he’s the director, he takes character roles, he loves this theater!” Glowering at Dortmunder, exuding more fertilizer essence than ever, cousin Bohker said, “So is that your idea, Mr. Dortmunder?” Dortmunder had been “John” before this. “Is that your idea? Cover up your own crime by smearing an innocent man?”

  “Maybe he did it for a joke,” Dortmunder said vengefully. “Or maybe he’s absentminded.”

  Kelp, it was clear, was prepared to believe absolutely anything, just so they could all get past this social pothole. “Cuz,” he said, “maybe so, maybe that’s it. Kelly’s your partner; maybe he took the money legit, spare you the trouble, put it in the bank himself.”

  But Bohker wouldn’t buy it. “Kelly never touches the money,” he insisted. “I’m the businessman, he’s the ar-tiste, he’s— Kelly!” he shouted through the entranceway, toward the stage, and vigorously waved his fat arm.

  Kelp and Dortmunder exchanged a glance. Kelp’s look was filled with a wild surmise; Dortmunder’s belonged under a halo.

  Kelly came out to join them, wiping his neck with a paper towel, saying, “What’s up?” He was a short and skinny man who could have been any age from nine to 14 or from 53 to 80, but nothing in between. The donkey head was gone, but that didn’t make for much of an improvement. His real face wasn’t so much lined as pleated, with deep crevices you could hide a nickel in. His eyes were eggy, with blue yolks, and his thin hair was unnaturally black, like work boots. Except for the head, he was still in the same dumb costume, the idea having been that the actors in bib overalls and black T-shirts were supposed to be some kind of workmen, like plumbers or whatever, and the actors dressed in curtains and beach towels were aristocrats. Kelly had been the leader of the bunch of workmen who were going to put on the play within the play—oh, it was grim, it was grim—so here he was, still in his overalls and T-shirt. And black work boots, so that he looked the same on the top and the bottom. “What’s up?” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what’s up,” Bohker promised him and pointed at Kelp. “I introduced you to my wife’s cousin from the city.”

  “Yeah, you did already.” Kelly, an impatient man probably wanting to get out of his work clothes and into something a little more actorly, nodded briskly at Kelp and said, “How’s it goin’?”

  “Not so good,” Kelp said.

  “And this,” Bohker went on, pointing without pleasure at Dortmunder, “is my wife’s cousin’s pal, also from the city, a fella with a reputation for being just a little light-fingered.”

  “Aw, well,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelly was still impatient: “And?”

  “And he lifted the gate!”

  This slice of jargon was just a bit too showbizzy for Kelly to grab on the fly like that; he looked around for a lifted gate, his facial pleats increasing so much he looked as though his nose might fall into one of the excavations. “He did what?”

  Bohker, exasperated at having to use lay terminology, snapped, “He stole the money out of the box office.”

  “I did not,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelly looked at Dortmunder as though he’d never expected such treatment. “Gee, man,” he said, “that’s our eating money.”

  “I didn’t take it,” Dortmunder said. He was going for another run at dignity.

  “He’s got the gall, this fella,” Bohker went on, braver about Dortmunder now that he had an ally with him, “to claim you took it!”

  Kelly wrinkled up like a multicar collision: “Me?”“All I said,” Dortmunder told him, feeling his dignity begin to tatter, “was that you went around to the front of the theater.”

  “I did not,” Kelly said. Being an actor, he had no trouble with dignity at all.

  So he did do it, Dortmunder thought, and pressed what he thought of as his advantage: “Sure, you did. We nodded to each other. You were wearing your donkey head. It was about ten minutes before the show was over.”

  “Pal,” Kelly said, “ten minutes before the show was over, I was on stage, asleep in front of everybody, including your buddy here. And without my donkey head.”

  “That’s true, John,” Kelp said. “The fairies took the donkey head away just around then.”

  “In that case,” Dortmunder said, immediately grasping the situation, “it had to be one of the other guys in bib overalls. They weren’t all on stage then, were they?”

  But Bohker already had his mind made up. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s what you saw, the big-town sharpie, when you came out of this box office right here, with the cash receipts in your pocket, and looked through that door right there in at that stage way back there, and saw Kelly was the only rustic on stage, and the don
key prop was gone, and—”

  “The what?” Dortmunder had missed something there. “The donkey prop!” Bohker cried, getting angrier, pointing at his own head. “The head! It’s a prop!”

  “Well, you know, Jesse,” Kelly said thoughtfully, “in some union productions, you know, they’d call it a costume.”

  “Whatever it is,” Bohker snapped, waving the gnats of show-biz cant away as though he hadn’t summoned them up himself, then turning back to Dortmunder: “Whatever it is, you saw it, or didn’t see it, when you looked right through there and saw Kelly asleep without his head, and none of the other rustics around, and right then you decided how you were gonna blame somebody else. And I’m here to tell you, it won’t work!”

  Well, innocence wasn’t any help—overrated, as Dortmunder had long suspected—and dignity had proved to be a washout, so what was left? Dortmunder was considering violence, which usually tended at least to clear the air, when Kelp said, “Cuz, let me have a word in private with John, OK?”

  “That’s all I ever asked,” Bohker said, with false reasonableness. “Just talk to your friend here, explain to him how we do things different in the country, how we don’t take advantage of the kindness of people who take us in when we’re on the run, how when we’re away from the city, we behave like decent, God-fearing—”

  “Right, cuz, right,” Kelp said, taking Dortmunder by the elbow, drawing him away from the ongoing flow, nodding and nodding as though Bohker’s claptrap made any sense at all, turning Dortmunder away, walking him back out toward the now nearly empty parking lot and across it to a big old tree standing there with leaves all over it, and Dortmunder promised himself, if Andy asks me even once did I do it, I’m gonna pop him.

  Instead of which, once they’d reached the leafy privacy of the tree, Kelp turned and murmured, “John, we’re in a bind here.”

  Dortmunder sighed, relieved and yet annoyed. “That’s right.” “I dunno, the only thing I can think— How much did he say it was?”

  “Two something. Something under three grand.” And that got Dortmunder steamed in an entirely different way. “To think I’d stoop to grab such a measly amount of—”