What's So Funny? d-14 Page 7

  Twenty minutes later, full of a hastily-ingested mélange of corn flakes and milk and sugar, he went out into the morning cold — it was much colder out here in the morning — and after some time found a cab to take him up to Riverside Drive, where a black limo sat in front of Mr. Hemlow's building, white exhaust putt-putting out of its tailpipe. The skinny sour guy at the wheel, with the white hair sticking out from under his chauffeur's cap, would be Pembroke, and the satisfied guy in the rear-facing backseat, encased like a sausage in his black topcoat, would be Johnny Eppick in person, who pushed open the extra-wide door, grinned into the cold air, and said, "Right on time. We're all here, climb in."

  "One to go," Dortmunder told him.

  Eppick didn't think he liked that. "You're bringing somebody along?"

  "You already know him," Dortmunder said. "So I thought he oughta know you."

  "And he would be—"

  "Andy Kelp."

  Now Eppick's smile returned, bigger than ever. "Good thinking. You're starting to put your mind to it, John, that's good." Slight frown. "But where is he?"

  "Coming up the street," Dortmunder said, nodding down to where Kelp walked toward them up Riverside Drive.

  Kelp had a jaunty walk when he was going into a situation he wasn't sure of, and it was at its jauntiest as he approached the limo, looked at that smiling head leaning out of the limo's open door, and said, "You're gonna be Johnny Eppick, I bet."

  "Got it in one," Eppick said. "And you'll be Andrew Octavian Kelp."

  "Oh, I only use the Octavian on holidays."

  "Well, get in, get in, we might as well get going."

  The interior of the limo had been adjusted for Mr. Hemlow's wheelchair, so that a bench seat behind the chauffeur's compartment faced backward, and the rest of the floor was covered with curly black carpet, with lines in it that showed where the platform would extend out through the doorway when it was time to load Mr. Hemlow aboard. The bench seat would really be comfortable only for two and Eppick was already on it, but when Dortmunder bent to enter the limo somehow Kelp was already in there, seated to Eppick's right and looking as innocent as a poisoner.

  So that left the floor for Dortmunder, unless he wanted to sit up in front of the partition with the chauffeur and not be part of the conversation. He went in on all fours and then turned himself around into a seated position as Eppick closed the door. The rear wall, beneath the window, was also covered with the black carpet, and wasn't really uncomfortable at all, anyway not at first. So Dortmunder might be on the floor, but at least he was facing front.

  "All right, Pembroke," Eppick said, and off they went.

  Kelp, with his amiable smile, said, "John tells me you know all about us."

  "Oh, I doubt that," Eppick said. "I only know that little part of your activities that's made it into the filing system. The tip of the iceberg, you might say."

  "And yet," Kelp said, "I don't seem to have any files on you at all. John says you're retired from the NYPD."

  "Seventeen months ago."

  "Congratulations."

  "Thank you."

  "Where was it in the NYPD," Kelp wondered, "did they make use of your talents?"

  "The last seven years," Eppick told him, not seeming to mind the interrogation at all, "I was in the Bunco Squad."

  "They still call it that? 'Say, did you drop this wallet? That kinda thing?"

  Eppick laughed. "Oh, there's still some street hustle," he said, "but not so much any more. You watch television half an hour, you know every scam there is."

  "Not every."

  "No, not every," Eppick conceded. "But these days, it's mostly phone and Internet."

  "The Nigerians."

  "All that money they're trying to get out of Lagos and into your bank account," Eppick agreed. "Amazing how often we find the sender in Brooklyn."

  "Amazing you find the sender," Kelp told him.

  "Oh, now," Eppick said. "We do have our little successes."

  "That's nice," Kelp said. "But now you're out on your own. John tells me you got a card and everything."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," Eppick said. "I should of given you one." And, sliding two fingers under the lapel of his topcoat, he brought out another of his cards and gave it to Kelp.

  Who studied it with interest. "'For Hire, " he read. "Doesn't narrow it much."

  "I didn't want the clients to feel constricted."

  "You had many of those?"

  "Mr. Hemlow is my first," Eppick said, "and naturally the most important."

  "Naturally."

  "I don't want to let him down."

  "No, of course not," Kelp agreed. "Here at the beginning of your second career."

  "Exactly."

  "Yet John tells me," Kelp said, "this little thing you put him on the send for, he tells me it isn't gonna be easy."

  "If it was gonna be easy," Eppick said, "I woulda sent a boy."

  "That's true."

  "I got every confidence in your friend John," Eppick said. Looking at Dortmunder, who was at that moment shifting position this way and that because after a while and a few stops at red lights the limo floor and back weren't quite as comfortable as he'd thought at first, he said, "I believe also that John has every confidence in me."

  "Sure," Dortmunder said. When he crumpled himself into the corner, it was a little better.

  15

  JUDSON BLINT TYPED names and addresses into the computer. Here it was, nearly ten in the morning, and he still hadn't finished with Super Star Music, while stacked up beside his left elbow were the letters, the applications, and the checks — lovely checks — for Allied Commissioners' Courses and Intertherapeutic Research Service. What a long way to go.

  For some reason, the mail was always heaviest on Fridays. Maybe the post office just wanted to clear everything out before the weekend. For whatever reason, Friday was always the day that made this job seem most like a job, instead of what it actually was, which was three extremely profitable felonies.

  Take Super Star Music, on which he was still working at ten in the morning. Advertising in magazines likely to draw in the young and the gullible, Super Star Music promised to make you rich and famous by setting your song lyrics to music. Alternately, if it's music you got, they'll give you lyrics. Now, most amateurs do simple marching-beat doggerel, so there's lots of music out there to match; just shift the rhythms around a bit. As for lyrics, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has some pretty good ones, or there's always what's in the next envelope right here.

  Allied Commissioners' Courses, on the other hand, would teach you everything you needed to know to make a fine living as a detective; sure. And if Intertherapeutic Research Service's dirty book doesn't improve your sex life, check your pulse; maybe you died.

  Judson Blint's task in this triple threat ongoing skimming of the pittances of the reality impaired was simple. Each day, he opened the envelopes, typed the return addresses into the computer and attached the labels to the right packages. Then he carried the outgoing mail on a large dolly down to the post office in the lobby of this building, brought up the next batch of suckers, and carried the checks to the inner office of J.C. Taylor, who'd originally thought up all this stuff and would give him twenty percent of the intake simply for doing the clerical work — usually between seven and eleven hundred a week.

  He'd been at this scam since July, when he'd first come to Manhattan out of Long Island, fresh out of high school and convinced he was the best con artist of all time, until J.C. saw through him in a New York minute but gave him this job anyway, for which he would be forever grateful. Also, it had already led a bit to even better things.

  He was thinking about those better things, feeling sorry again that Stan Murch's idea at the O.J. the other night had been such a loser, because it was time to pick up a little extra coinage here and there before winter set in, when the hall door opened and, before Judson could do his spiel— "J.C. Taylor isn't in at the moment, have you an appointment, I'm terribly sorry" �
�� Stan Murch himself walked in. He shut the door behind himself, nodded at Judson, and said, "Harya."

  "Hi."

  "I was in the neighborhood."

  Of the seventh floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower on Fifth Avenue near St. Patrick's Cathedral? Sure. "Glad you could drop by," Judson said.

  There were chairs in this small crowded room, other than the one at the desk where Judson sat, but they were all piled high with books, either detective or sex. Stan looked around, accepted reality, and leaned back against a narrow clear spot of wall beside the door. Folding his arms, he said, "That was really too bad about the other night."

  "Yeah, it was."

  "I just had the feeling, you know, the guys didn't quite get the concept."

  "I had that feeling, too."

  "You in particular," Stan said. "A bright young guy, not stuck with old-fashioned thinking."

  "Well, it just seemed to me," Judson said, wanting to get out of this without acknowledging there was anything to get out of, "the other guys had a lot more expertise than me, so I oughta go along with the way they saw things."

  "I got a certain expertise, too, you know," Stan said, and looked as though he were thinking about getting irritated.

  "Driving expertise, Stan," Judson said. "You got the most driving expertise I ever saw in my life."

  "Well, yeah," Stan said, but would not be deflected. "On the other hand," he said, and the inner door opened.

  They both turned to look as J.C. herself walked in from her office, saying, "I heard voices. Hello, Stan. Keeping my staff from their work?" A striking if tough-looking brunette of around thirty, who moved in a style somewhere between a runway model's strut and a cheetah's lope, J.C., when she came into a room, particularly dressed as now in pink peasant blouse and a short black leather skirt and heeled sandals with black leather straps twining halfway up to the knee, it was impossible to look away.

  Stan didn't even try. "Just exchanging a word or two, J.C.," he said. "Exercising our chins."

  "Talking about the golden dome?" J.C. asked him.

  Stan didn't like that. "Oh, Tiny told you," he guessed, Tiny Bulcher being J.C.'s roommate somewhere around town, a pairing that seemed to those who knew them to have been made, if not in Heaven, possibly in Marvel Comics.

  "Tiny told me," she agreed. "He said it was the dumbest idea he'd heard since Lucky Finnegan decided to walk from the Bronx to Brooklyn stepping only on the third rail." To Judson she explained, "Lucky was very proud of his sense of balance."

  "If no other sense," Stan said.

  Judson said, "Somehow, I have the feeling he didn't make it."

  "They're trying to find another nickname for him," J.C. said. "Something about barbeque."

  "The golden dome," Stan said, his eye being on it, "is not as dumb an idea as some people think it is."

  J.C. gave him a frank look. "Which people, Stan, don't think it's a dumb idea?"

  "Me for one," he said. "My Mom, for two." J.C. pointed a scarlet-tipped finger at him. "Do not get your Mom involved."

  "I'm just saying."

  Judson said, "It's too bad John couldn't be there to hear the idea."

  The silence that followed that remark was so extreme that both Judson and J.C. bent deeply suspicious frowns on Stan, to find him red-faced and struggling to find a deflecting comment. J.C. said, "You told him."

  "We had a preliminary conversation on the subject, yes."

  J.C. said, "And he hated it."

  "It's true he doesn't yet see the potential," Stan said. "So all I was gonna suggest to Judson here, let's drive out, drive along the Belt, take a look at it, gleaming there beside the highway, it's like the dome of gold at the end of the rainbow."

  Judson said, "I think that was a pot."

  "A dome is a pot," Stan said. "Upside down."

  "It is true," J.C. said, "that Judson here is a beardless youth—"

  "What? I shave!"

  "— but that doesn't mean he's green between the ears."

  "Thank you, J.C."

  J.C. considered what she was going to say next, as she hitched a hip onto the corner of the desk. "You know how it is sometimes," she said, "you see a very beautiful, very desirable woman, and man, how you'd like to get your hands on that?"

  They both nodded.

  "And then you find out," J.C. said, "she's unobtainable. That's all, just unobtainable. You know what I mean?"

  They both nodded.

  "So you feel sad a little while," she said, and they both nodded, "but then you move on, something else grabs your eye, all you've got left is a little nostalgic feeling for the never-happened," and they both nodded, and she said, "Stan, that's what that dome is. You saw it, you lusted after it, you tried to figure out how to get your hands on it, but it's just not obtainable. Try to think about something else."

  The silence this time was more contemplative, and Judson deliberately gazed the other way while Stan worked his way through the seven stages of loss, or however many of those stages there are.

  "Well," Stan said, at last, and Judson dared to look at him, and Stan had a recovered look on his face. "I guess for a while," he said, "I'll be taking some alternate route."

  16

  IT TURNED OUT Mr. Hemlow's compound wasn't upstate after all, but upstate plus, which meant, having driven straight north out of the city up through New York State for more than two hours, they suddenly veered off to the right oblique, like a basketball forward going in for a layup, and here they were in Massachusetts. And still not there.

  Long before Massachusetts, Dortmunder had come to the realization that the only way he was going to survive this trip was by not sitting on the floor, which was bonier than it had seemed at first and also did a certain amount of jolting and juking, less noticeable to people up there on the comfortable upholstery. His alternative, after several failed experiments, was to lie on his back on the floor and stretch his legs out, so that his ankles were more or less between the ankles of Eppick and Kelp. In that position, left arm under his head for a pillow, he could feel foolish but also believe he would somehow live through all this.

  Being on the floor like that, he didn't get to see a lot of the scenery go by, nor to participate much in the conversation proceeding above him, though he could certainly hear everything those two had to say to one another. After an early period of parry-and-feint, in which Eppick tried to interrogate Kelp while pretending he wasn't doing any such thing, and Kelp pretended to answer all those questions without ever actually conveying any solid information — much like a politician at a press conference — they settled into their anecdotage, each telling little incidents from other people's lives, never their own. "A guy I know once—" and so on. Eppick's little tales tended to finish with the miscreant in handcuffs, while Kelp's had the rascal scampering over the rooftops to safety, but they obviously both enjoyed the exercise and each other.

  From time to time, in order to give his cramping left arm a rest, Dortmunder would roll over onto his right side, use his bent right arm beneath his head as a pillow, and let the twinging left arm lie straight down his side. At those times, he was in even less contact with the rest of the world, so much so that, at one point, he actually fell asleep, though he would have said that was impossible. That is, before—

  "Snr—? Wha?"

  "We're here, John," Eppick said, and stopped poking Dortmunder's shins with his toe.

  Dortmunder sat up, incautiously, became painfully aware of many of his body parts, and braced himself against the floor, which was not vibrating.

  The limo had stopped. Blinking gummy eyes, Dortmunder looked past the looming forms of Eppick and Kelp, and saw the steering wheel. Where was the chauffeur? Whatsit, Pembroke.

  Oh. Out there in the woods.

  They were on a dirt road now, surrounded by huge Christmas trees, and when Dortmunder twisted around — ouch — he saw out the back window that they were very close to some sort of paved road, on which, as he watched, a truck piled hig
h with monster logs went rolling by.

  Meanwhile, this dirt road had come to a metal gate in a simple three-strand wire fence extending away to left and right into the sweeping lower branches of the Christmas trees. What Pembroke was doing now was working at two padlocks holding the halves of the gate shut.

  Watching Pembroke at it, Dortmunder thought, that doesn't look very high-tech to me.

  Kelp said, "That doesn't look very high-tech to me."

  "It doesn't have to," Eppick said, and pointed. "See those square white metal plates at every post? Those'll be the notices. This is an electrified fence."

  "Oh," Kelp said.

  "It won't kill you," Eppick said, "but it will make you change your mind pretty quick."

  Now Pembroke was walking the two sides of the gate open, first to the right, then to the left. Beyond the opening, the dirt road angled rightward and almost immediately disappeared among those big dark tree branches.

  Pembroke slid back behind the wheel, drove forward past the gate, got out, shut the parts of the gate behind him but didn't refasten the padlocks, got back into the limo and started them slowly forward onto this private land.

  As they drove, Eppick twisted around frontward to say, "Pembroke, a question."

  «Sir,» Pembroke said, but kept his eye on the road curving back and forth ahead of them, nothing visible now but long curving green branches of pine needles and this well-maintained dirt road.

  Eppick said, "Yesterday, Mr. Hemlow called this the compound. How big is it?"

  "In land, sir?"

  "Well, yeah, in land."

  "I believe, sir," Pembroke said, while steering massively left and massively right, using his whole upper body as though this were a toboggan on fresh snow, "the compound consists of just under thirteen hundred acres."

  "And the whole thing is circled with electric fence?"

  "And alarmed, sir, yes."

  "Alarmed?" Eppick sounded impressed. "Where's the alarm go off?"