Collected Stories Read online

  “Why not? And what are you gonna do, play detective? John, we’re not cops!”

  “We watched cops work often enough.”

  “That isn’t the same. John, how much money you got?”

  “On me?” Dortmunder groused, reluctant even to discuss this idea, while out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kelly heading briskly toward the farmhouse. “Why couldn’t it be him?” he demanded. “Partners steal from partners all the time.”

  “He was on stage, John. How much money you got?”

  “On me, a couple hundred. In the suitcase, back at your goddamn cousin’s house, maybe a grand.”

  “I could come up with eight, nine hundred,” Kelp said. “Let’s go see if we can cut a deal.”

  “I don’t like this,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t go along with making restitution to begin with, and this is even worse.”

  Running out of patience, Kelp said, “What else are we gonna do, John?”

  “Search that farmhouse there. Search the theater. You think some amateur can hide a stash so we can’t find it?”

  “They wouldn’t let us search,” Kelp pointed out. “We aren’t cops, we don’t have any authority, we can’t throw any weight around. That’s what cops do; they don’t detect, you know that. They throw their weight around, and when you say, ‘Oof’, you get five to ten in Green Haven. Come on, John, swallow your pride.”

  “I’m not gonna say I did it,” Dortmunder insisted. “You wanna pay him off, we’ll pay him off. But I’m not gonna say I did it.”

  “Fine. Let’s go talk to the man.”

  They walked back to where cousin Bohker waited in the narrow trapezoid of shade beside the barn. “Cuz,” said Kelp, “we’d like to offer a deal.”

  “Admitting nothing,” Dortmunder said.

  “Two thousand, seven hundred twenty–four dollars,” the cousin said. “That’s the only deal I know.”

  “We can’t quite come up with that much,” Kelp said, “on accounta John here didn’t actually take your money. But we know how things look and we know what John’s reputation is —”

  “Hey,” Dortmunder said. “What about you?”

  “OK, fine. The reputations we both have. So we feel we’ll try to make good on what you lost as best we can, even though we didn’t do it, and we could probably come up with two thousand. In and around two thousand.”

  “Two thousand, seven hundred twenty–four dollars,” said the cousin, “or I call the troopers.”

  “Troopers?” Dortmunder stared at Kelp. “He’s gonna call in the Army?”

  “State troopers, he means.” Kelp explained, and turned back to his cousin to say, “That wouldn’t be a nice thing to do, cuz. Turn us over to the law and we’re really in trouble. Can’t you take the two —”

  “Two thousand, seven hundred twenty–four dollars,” said the cousin.

  “Oh, the hell with this guy,” Dortmunder abruptly said. “Why don’t we just go take a hike?”

  “I thought you might come up with that next,” the cousin answered. He was smeared all over with smugness. “So that’s why I sent Kelly for reinforcements.”

  Dortmunder turned, and there was Kelly back from the farmhouse, and with him were all the other rustics. Five of them, still in their bib overalls and T–shirts, standing there looking at Dortmunder and Kelp, getting a kick out of being the audience for a change.

  It’s one of them, Dortmunder thought. He’s standing there and I’m standing here, and it’s one of them. And I’m stuck.

  Kelp said something, and then the cousin said something, and then Kelp said something else, and then Kelly said something; and Dortmunder tuned out. It’s one of these five guys, he thought. One of these guys is a little scared to be out here, he doesn’t know if he’s gonna get away with it or not, he’s looking at me and he doesn’t know if he’s in trouble or not.

  Their eyes? No, they’re all actors; the guy’s gotta know enough to behave like everybody else. But it’s one of them.

  Well, not the fat one. You look at skinny Kelly there, and you see this fat one, and even with the donkey head on, you’d know it wasn’t Kelly, having already seen Kelly in the first half, wearing the donkey head, and knowing what he looked like.

  Hey, wait a minute. Same with the tall one. Kelly’s maybe 5’5" or 5’6", and here’s a drink of water must be 6’4", and he stands all stooped, so if he had the donkey head on, the donkey’s lips would be on his belt buckle. Not him.

  Son of a gun. Two down. Three to go.

  Conversation went on, quite animated at times, and Dortmunder continued to study the rustics. That one with the beard, well, the beard wouldn’t show inside the donkey head, but look how hairy he is anyway; lots of bushy black hair on his head and very hairy arms below the T–shirt sleeves, all that black hair with the pale skin showing through. With the donkey head on, he’d look maybe a little too realistic. Would I have noticed? Would I have said, “Wow, up close, that’s some hairy donkey?” Maybe, maybe.

  Shoes? Black work boots, black shoes; some differences, but not enough, not so you’d notice.

  Wait a minute. That guy, the one with the very graceful neck, the one who would be kept in the special block for his own protection if he were ever given five to ten at Green Haven, the one who moves like a ballet dancer; his bib overalls have a crease. Not him. He could cover himself in an entire donkey and I’d know.

  Number five. Guy in his mid–20s, average height, average weight, nothing in particular about him except the watch. He’s the guy, during the first half, while I’m waiting for it to be over, trying to find something to think about, he’s the guy with the pale mark around his wrist where he usually wears a watch, so it isn’t tanned. And now he’s wearing the watch. Did the guy who walked by me have a pale mark on his wrist? Would I have noticed?

  “John? John!”

  Dortmunder looked around, startled out of his reverie. “Yeah? What is it?”

  “What is it?” Kelp was looking frantic and he clearly wanted to know why Dortmunder wasn’t frantic as well. “Do you think she could or not?” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry,” Dortmunder said, “I didn’t hear the question. Who could what? Or not?” And thinking, it’s either the hairy arms or the watch; hairy arms or watch.

  “May,” Kelp said, elaborately patient. “Do you think if you phoned May, she could send us a grand to pay off my cousin?”

  Hairy arms or watch. Nothing shows on either face, nothing in the eyes.

  “John? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, and put a big smile on his face, and even forced a little laugh, or something similar to a laugh, “well, you got us, cuz.”

  Kelp stared. “What?”

  “Yeah, we took the money,” Dortmunder said, shrugging. “But it was just for a joke, you know; we never meant to keep it.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Bohker said with a sarcastic smirk, while Kelp stood as though turned to stone. Limestone. In acid rain.

  Kelly, cold and brisk, said, “Where is it?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly,” Dortmunder said. “I gave it to my partner to hide.”

  Kelp squawked; it sounded exactly like those chickens that a neighbor of Bohker’s kept in his back yard. He squawked, and then he cried, “John! You never did!”

  “Not you,” Dortmunder told him. “My other partner, the actor in the cast here that’s an old pal of mine. I slipped him the money and he went and hid it in the house.” Hairy arms or watch; hairy arms or watch. Dortmunder turned and grinned easily at the kid with the pale band under his watch. “Didn’t I?” he said.

  The kid blinked. “I don’t get you,” he said.

  “Aw, come on; the gag’s over,” Dortmunder told him. “If Bohker here calls his state troopers, I’ll just tell them I gave you the money to hide and they’ll go look in the house there and find it, and everybody knows I was never in that house, so it was you. So now the gag is over, right?”

 
; The kid thought about it. Everybody standing there watched the kid thinking about it, and everybody knew what it meant that the kid had something to think about. The kid looked around and saw what it was that everybody knew, and then he laughed and clapped his hands together and said, “Well, we sure had them going there for a while, didn’t we?”

  “We sure did,” Dortmunder said. “Why don’t you and me go in the house now and get the cousin his money back?”

  Bohker, sounding tough, said, “Why don’t we all go in and get the goddamn money?”

  “Now, now,” Dortmunder said, mild as could be, “why don’t you let us have our little secrets? We’ll go in and we’ll come out with the money. You’ll get your money back, cousin, don’t worry.”

  Dortmunder and the kid walked across the parking lot and up the stoop and across the porch full of gaping actors and went into the house. The kid led the way upstairs and down the hall and into the third room on the left, which contained two narrow beds and two small dressers and two wooden chairs. “Hold it a second,” Dortmunder said, and looked around, and saw the one dresser drawer open about three inches. “Taped it to the back of the dresser drawer,” he said.

  “OK, OK, you’re Sherlock Holmes,” the kid said, sounding bitter. He went over and pulled the drawer out and put it on the bed. Masking tape held a bulky white envelope to the back of the drawer. The kid peeled it off and handed it to Dortmunder, who saw that it had a printed return address on the upper left corner: BOHKER & BOHKER, FERTILIZER & FEED.

  “How’d you figure it out?” the kid asked.

  “Your shoes,” Dortmunder said. Which was a variant on the old untied–shoelace gag, because when the kid looked down at his shoes, what he saw was Dortmunder’s fist coming up.

  Outside again, Dortmunder crossed to the waiting rustics and held the envelope out in front of himself, flap open, so everybody could see the money wadded inside. “OK?”

  Kelly said, “Where’s Chuck?”

  “Resting.”

  Bohker reached for the envelope, but Dortmunder said, “Not yet, cuz,” and tucked the envelope inside his shirt.

  Bohker glowered. “Not yet? What are you playing at, fella?”

  “You’re gonna drive Andy and me to your house,” Dortmunder told him, “and we’re gonna pack, and then you’re gonna drive us to the bus depot, and when the bus comes in, I’ll hand you this envelope. Play around, I’ll make it disappear again.”

  “I’m not a vengeful fella,” Bohker said. “All I care about is I get my money back.”

  “Well, that’s one difference between us,” Dortmunder said, which Bohker maybe didn’t listen to hard enough.

  Bohker’s station wagon was one of the few cars left in the parking lot. Bohker got behind the wheel, his cousin Kelp beside him, and Dortmunder got in back with the old newspapers and cardboard cartons and fertilizer brochures and all the junk, and they drove off toward town. Along the way, Bohker looked in the rearview mirror and said, “I been thinking about what happened back there. You didn’t take the money at all, did you?”

  “Like I said.”

  “It was Chuck.”

  “That’s right.”

  Kelp twisted around to look over the back of the seat and say, “John, how did you figure out it was him? That was goddamn genius.”

  If Kelp wanted to think what had happened was genius, it would be better for Dortmunder to keep his thought processes to himself, so he said, “It just come to me.”

  Bohker said, “You had to mousetrap Chuck like you did or he’d have just denied it forever.”

  “Uh–huh.”

  “Well, I owe you an apology,” Bohker said, being gruff and man to man about it.

  “That’s OK,” Dortmunder told him.

  “And there’s no reason you fellas have to move out.”

  “Oh, I think we’re ready to go, anyway,” Dortmunder said. “Aren’t we, Andy?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Kelp said.

  As Bohker turned the station wagon in to the driveway at his house, Dortmunder said, “Does that glove compartment lock?”

  “Yeah, it does,” Bohker said. “Why?”

  “I tell you what we’ll do,” Dortmunder told him. “We’ll lock this envelope in there for safekeeping, and you give me the key off the ring, and when we get on our bus, I’ll give it back to you. On account of I know you don’t trust me.”

  “Now, that’s not fair,” Bohker said defensively, parking beside his house. “I apologized, didn’t I?”

  “Still,” Dortmunder said, “we’ll both be happier if we do it this way. Which key is it?”

  So Bohker took the little key off his key ring, and he and Kelp watched Dortmunder solemnly lock the envelope away in the crowded, messy glove compartment, and an hour and 45 minutes later, on the bus to Buffalo, Kelp turned in his seat and said, “You did, didn’t you?”

  “Sure, I did,” Dortmunder agreed, taking wads of Bohker’s money out of his pants pockets. “Treat me like that, threaten me with troopers.”

  “What’s cousin Bohker looking at in that envelope?”

  “Fertilizer brochures.”

  Kelp sighed, probably thinking about family complications.

  “Still, John,” he said, “you can hardly blame the guy for jumping to conclusions.”

  “I can if I want,” Dortmunder said. “Besides, I figured I earned this, with what he put me through. That stuff, what’s–it. Anguish, you know the kind. Mental, that’s it. Mental anguish, that’s what I got,” Dortmunder said, and stuffed the money back into his pockets.

  THE DORTMUNDER WORKOUT

  ____________________________

  When Dortmunder walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that afternoon, the regulars were talking about health and exercise, pro and con. “A healthy regime is very important,” one of the regulars was saying, hunched over his beer.

  “You don’t mean ‘regime’,” a second regular told him. “A healthy regime is like Australia. You mean ‘regimen’.”

  “ ‘Regimen’ is women,” a third regular put in. “Something about women.”

  The other regulars frowned at that, trying to figure out if it meant anything. In the silence, Dortmunder said, “Rollo.”

  Rollo the bartender, observing the world from a three–point stance — large feet solidly planted on the duckboards behind the bar, elbow atop the cash register drawer — seemed too absorbed either by the conversation or in contemplation of the possibility of health to notice the arrival of a new customer. In any event, he didn’t even twitch, just stood there like a genre painting of himself, while the first regular said, “Well, whatever the word is, the point is, if you got your health you got everything.”

  “I don’t see how that follows,” the second regular said. “You could have your health and still not have a Pontiac Trans Am.”

  “If you got your health,” the first regular told him, “you don’t need a Pontiac Trans Am. You can walk.”

  “Walk where?”

  “Wherever it was you were gonna go.”

  “St. Louis,” the second regular said, and knocked back some of his tequila sunrise in satisfaction.

  “Well, now you’re just being argumentative,” the first regular complained.

  “Some of that health stuff can get dangerous,” the third regular put in. “I know a guy knew a guy had a heart attack from the Raquel Welch workout video.”

  “Well, sure,” the first regular agreed, “it’s always possible to exercise too much, but —”

  “He wasn’t exercising, he was just watching.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder said.

  “When I was in the Army,” the first regular said, “they used to make us do sailor jumps.”

  “If you were in the Army,” the second regular told him, “they were soldier jumps.”

  “Sailor jumps,” insisted the first regular.

  “We used to call those jumping jacks,” the third regular chimed in.

 
; “You did not,” the second regular told him. “Jumping jacks is that little girl’s game with the lug nuts.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder demanded, and this time Rollo raised an eyebrow in Dortmunder’s direction, but then he was distracted by movement from the third regular, the jumping jacks man, who, with a scornful “Lug nuts!” climbed off his stool, paused to wheeze and then said, “This is jumping jacks.” And he stood there at a kind of crumpled attention, arms at hs sides, heels together, chest in.

  The second regular gazed upon him with growing disgust. “That’s what?”

  “It isn’t sailor jumps, I know that much,” the first regular said.

  But the third regular was unfazed. “This is first position,” he explained. “Now watch.” Carefully, he lifted his right foot and moved it about 18 inches to the side, then put it back down on the floor. After stooping a bit to be sure he had both feet where he wanted them, he straightened up, more or less, faced forward, took a deep breath you could hear across the street and slowly lifted both arms straight up into the air, leaning his palms against each other above his head. “Position two,” he said.

  “That’s some hell of an exercise,” said the second regular.

  The third regular’s arms dropped to his sides like fish off a delivery truck. “When you’re really into it,” he pointed out, “you do it faster.”

  “That might be sailor jumps,” the first regular admitted.

  “In my personal opinion,” the second regular said, twirling the dregs of his tequila sunrise, “diet is the most important part of your personal health program. Vitamins, minerals and food groups.”

  “I don’t think you got that quite right,” the third regular told him. “I think it goes, animal, vitamin or mineral.”

  “Food groups,” the second regular contended. “This isn’t twenty questions.”

  The first regular said, “I don’t get what you mean by this food groups.”

  “Well,” the second regular told him, “your principal food groups are meat, vegetables, dessert and beer.”

  “Oh,” the first regular said. “In that case, then, I’m OK.”