What's the Worst That Could Happen? Page 9

  The corridor was long, not too brightly lit, and empty. Here and there, room service trays with meal remnants waited on the floor. Dortmunder and Andy went down to the end of the corridor, turned right, and here was another identical corridor, with identical carpeting and lighting and room service trays. Midway along, an illuminated green sign on the right, up near the ceiling, said EXIT . “Down there,” Dortmunder said.

  Halfway along the corridor, under the green exit sign, were the elevators, on the right, the inner side of the building, away from the street. Next to the elevators on their left was the staircase, and next to them on their right was the room containing the ice machine. Opposite the elevators was a blank wall decorated with a mirror and a small table and a chair with wooden arms. Opposite the staircase was an unmarked door.

  Unmarked and locked. Andy spoke to it, gently, and soon it opened, and they stepped through into a square room filled with rough wooden shelves on which were piled stacks of linen, of toilet paper, of tissue boxes and boxes containing soap and shampoo and body lotion. To their left was an open space in front of two sets of elevator doors.

  “One of these,” Dortmunder said, nodding at the elevator doors. “Ought to be, anyway.”

  “Maybe the one that’s coming,” Andy said.

  Dortmunder listened, and could hear the faint buzzing whirr of an elevator moving upward through its shaft. “Not to this floor, though,” he said.

  “Well, maybe,” Andy said. “Let’s wait back here.”

  Dortmunder followed him, and they faded back into the rows of supplies, just as the whirring stopped and they heard the elevator doors open. Andy lifted an eyebrow at Dortmunder—see?—and Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at Andy: yeah, I see.

  Looking through mountains of clean towels, they watched a guy in a black-and-white waiter outfit push an empty two-tiered gray metal cart out of the elevator. Its doors closed behind him as he opened the door to the main corridor, pushed the cart through, and disappeared.

  Speaking softly, Andy said, “Gone to pick up those trays.”

  “So we’ve got a few minutes.”

  They left the supplies, went over to the elevators, and Andy pushed the up button. The elevator that had brought the waiter was still there, so its doors immediately opened. Andy held them open while he and Dortmunder studied the simple control panel inside. It was just black buttons with numbers on them, 31 the highest number (they were at the moment on 26) and 17 the lowest number, with two more buttons below 17, marked KITCHEN and LAUNDRY .

  “So it must be the other one,” Andy said.

  “Or,” Dortmunder said, contemplating the control panel, and thinking about how his luck tended to run, “we didn’t figure it right.”

  “What else could it be? So we’ll hang around here till the waiter comes back through, and then we’ll bring up the other one.”

  “We’ll see what happens,” Dortmunder agreed.

  They released the elevator door and went back to the stacks of towels. “It probably won’t be just a button,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, if we’re right about it. It’ll probably be a key, for the security.”

  “Sure. You can go to any other floor in that elevator, but you can’t go to that floor unless you’ve got the key.”

  The waiter opened the door from the hall and pushed in the cart, now piled high with trays and dishes and utensils. He maneuvered the cart, which was apparently unwieldy when full, around to the elevator, thumbed open the doors, pushed the cart aboard, pushed a button inside, and disappeared.

  Immediately, Andy went out and pushed the up button. There were no lights or indicators to say whether or not the other car was coming; they could only wait and see.

  “Of course,” Dortmunder said, following, “they might have the other one shut off at night.”

  “Why? They got a lot of stuff to do all night long. And you know? Come to think of it, maybe we should duck back in there again.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, just in case,” Andy said, “when the elevator gets here, and the door opens, there’s somebody aboard.”

  “Right,” Dortmunder said.

  So they went back to the towels and waited, and soon the other elevator did arrive, and when its doors opened, it was empty. Andy hurried to it before the doors could shut again, and he and Dortmunder studied the control panel, which was identical to the first one. “Naturally,” Dortmunder said.

  “They’ve gotta clean,” Andy insisted. “Somehow, they’ve gotta clean. Rich people clean a lot, they hire whole companies to clean.”

  “Let’s take a look on seventeen,” Dortmunder said.

  The corridor on seventeen had almost the same colors of walls and doors and carpet as the corridor on twenty-six, but not exactly, so that your first idea was that something had gone wrong with your eyes. On that floor, Dortmunder and Andy checked out all three service clusters, north, west, and south (west being the one that should be above the Fairbanks apartment), and found nothing they hadn’t already seen on twenty-six. Sighing, Andy looked at his watch and said, “And it was gonna be so simple.”

  “It is simple,” Dortmunder said. “We can’t get in.”

  “There’s gotta be a way. Do they keep a maid chained up in there? How does she get new soap? How does she get rid of the old sheets?”

  They were standing in the public corridor again, near the public elevators in the middle section. The Fairbanks apartment should be directly beneath their feet. Dortmunder looked up and down the corridor and said, “We need another door. A door without a number on it.”

  “Sure,” Andy said.

  They moved southward down the corridor, and by the time they’d got to the turn they’d found three unmarked locked doors, unlocked them all, and found first a room full of maids’ carts and vacuum cleaners, then a room full of television sets and lamps, and then a bathroom, probably for staff. So they turned and went the other way, and north of the elevators they found a locked and unmarked door that opened to a great tangle of pipes; heat or plumbing or both. And the next door they opened was an elevator, with a maid’s cart in it.

  “Well, look at that,” Andy said.

  “Somebody coming,” Dortmunder said, having heard the public elevator stop, down the hall. Moving as one, like a very small flock of birds wheeling in the air, they stepped into this new hidden elevator and let the door snick shut behind them.

  Now it was dark. They both patted walls until Andy found the light switch, and then it was okay again.

  This was an elevator like the service elevators, simple and rectangular and painted industrial gray. Its control panel was even simpler: two buttons, neither of them marked. And just to remove any last vestige of doubt, the maid’s cart contained boxes of stationery marked, in fussy lettering, MF or LF .

  There was a keyhole in the control panel, just above the buttons. Andy stooped to study it, then straightened again and said, “No.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. “No?”

  “This is not your ordinary lock,” Andy said.

  “No,” Dortmunder agreed. “It wouldn’t be.”

  “Your ordinary lock I shrug at,” Andy explained. “But not this. And I suspect,” he went on, “that it probably has an alarm in there behind it, to go off in some security office somewhere if anybody sticks a bobby pin or anything in that keyhole.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Dortmunder said.

  “In fact,” Andy said, “it would be my opinion that it would be safer to go through the floor and shinny down the cable or climb down the rungs, if there’s rungs, than to fool around with this lock here. If we turn the screws there and there and there and there to take the face off the control panel, just to see what’s what and how come, that could send a signal to security.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Dortmunder said.

  “So let’s take a look at this floor here.”

  They moved the cart as far back as possible, then got down on hands and knees and looked at t
he floor. It was plywood, four large sheets of plywood, screwed down and painted gray. They rapped the plywood with their knuckles, and the sound was flat, not echoing. They looked at each other, on all fours, like dogs meeting at the neighborhood fire hydrant, and then they got to their feet and Andy said, “Steel underneath.”

  “I noticed that,” Dortmunder said.

  “No trap door for access to the machinery or anything.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So the machinery’s probably up above.”

  They looked upward, at the plain gray-painted roof of the elevator, and in the rear right quadrant were the clear outlines of a trap door. And in the trap door was a keyhole. “They’re beginning to annoy me,” Dortmunder said.

  “Us guys don’t give up,” Andy said.

  “That’s true,” Dortmunder said, “though I sometimes wonder why.”

  “When the going gets tough,” Andy said, “the tough get an expert. I know when a lock is beyond my simple rustic skills. What we need is a lockman.”

  “You want to bring somebody in?”

  “Why not? What we pick up in that place down there we split three ways instead of two. You don’t care anyway, you just want your ring.”

  “That’s also true,” Dortmunder admitted. “But a little profit would be nice.”

  “I’ll see if Wally Whistler’s around,” Andy said, “or Ralph Winslow, they’re both good. I’ll show them the pictures in that magazine, they’ll pay us to come along.”

  “I wouldn’t hold out for that,” Dortmunder said, and looked at the damn keyhole in the damn control panel. “Here we are, right here and all,” he said, “and the ring right down there underneath us. I can feel it.”

  “We’ll get it,” Andy assured him, and looked at his watch and said, “But not tonight. Tomorrow night.” He turned to unlock the door to the corridor. “Tonight I kinda got an appointment, I wouldn’t want to be late.”

  Dortmunder frowned at him. “An appointment? This time of night?”

  “Well, New York, you know,” Andy said, and opened the door cautiously, and stuck his head out just a bit to see if the coast was clear, and nodded back at Dortmunder, “the city that never sleeps.”

  Dortmunder followed him out to the corridor, and behind him the unmarked door snicked shut. “New York, the city with insomnia,” he said. “Is that a good idea?”

  “See you tomorrow,” Andy said.

  21

  M ost of the guests staying at the N-Joy Broadway Hotel, when they got up in the morning, went out sight-seeing, but not the Williamses. They got up and went out, like everybody else, but Mrs. Williams then became May Bellamy and went to work at the supermarket downtown, while Mr. Williams reverted to one John Dortmunder, who went home to East Nineteenth Street, where he did what he usually did at home all day long, which wasn’t much.

  It had been agreed that Dortmunder and May would get together back at the hotel at six, to add another hotel meal to the credit card tab they were running up, and then wait for Andy Kelp and X Hour to arrive, which they figured to be midnight; this evening, they’d try not to fall asleep. So at about five-thirty, Dortmunder left the apartment, and when he opened the street door downstairs who was coming up the stoop but Gus Brock. “Hello,” Dortmunder said.

  “Hello,” Gus said, and stopped there on the steps.

  Dortmunder said, “This is not a coincidence, am I right?”

  Gus scrinched up his eyes. “What isn’t a coincidence? I came over to see you.”

  “That’s what I meant. I’m walking uptown.”

  “Then so am I.”

  They started walking together, and after they made the turn onto Third Avenue and headed uptown Gus said, “I read in Newsday where we scored pretty good out on the Island last week.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “That was us, wasn’t it? Took all that stuff from that big house in Carrport?”

  “Us?” Dortmunder asked. “How do you figure ‘us’?”

  “Well, you know, John,” Gus said, “you didn’t know about that place, I did. You didn’t know about the Chapter Eleven and all that, and I did.”

  “Except the guy was there,” said Dortmunder. “So much for all your chapters.”

  “It was our little job, John,” Gus said. “I’m just asking you to consider the situation and you’ll see it would be fair I should get a piece of this. Maybe not half, I’m not a greedy guy, but—”

  Dortmunder stopped, on the sidewalk. People and traffic went by in all directions. He said, “Gus, you and I went out there to make a little visit and it didn’t happen. You went away—”

  “John, don’t fault me,” Gus said. “You would’ve went away, too.”

  “Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “And I wouldn’t come to you afterward and say we did this and we did that.”

  “Sure you would,” Gus said. “Can we walk, John? Where are we walking anyway?”

  Dortmunder started walking again, and Gus kept pace. “Uptown,” Dortmunder said.

  “Thank you. About us sharing—”

  “No, Gus,” Dortmunder said. “That little visit stopped. You went away, and I was arrested.”

  “Yeah, I read about that,” Gus said, and shook his head with empathetic concern. “Wow, that was a close one.”

  “It wasn’t a close one,” Dortmunder said, “it was a direct hit. I was arrested.”

  People going by looked at them, but kept going. Gus said, “You don’t have to shout about it, John, it isn’t like hitting the lottery or something.”

  Patiently, calmly, Dortmunder said, “After I was arrested, I escaped. Nobody helped me, and especially you didn’t help me, I just—”

  “Come on, John.”

  “—escaped. And after I escaped I went back to that house, and that was a completely different visit, that didn’t have one thing to do with you. You were gone, and I was escaped, and it was a whole new start. So what I got was what I got and not what we got.”

  They walked half a block in silence, Gus absorbing the philosophy of Dortmunder’s concept, and then he sighed and said, “John, we been friends a long time.”

  “I would say,” Dortmunder said, “we’ve been associates a long time.”

  “Okay, a little more precise, fine. I understand your position here, I’d be a little aggrieved at my partner, too, if the circumstances were reversed, but John I’m asking you to put yourself in my position for a minute. I’m still the guy that found the score, and I still have this like empty feeling that the score went down and I didn’t get bupkis for it.”

  “You should’ve stuck around,” Dortmunder said, unsympathetically. “We could’ve escaped together.”

  “John, you’re usually a reasonable kind of a guy.”

  “I’m trying to break myself of that.”

  “So that’s how you want to end it. Bad feelings all around.”

  Again, Dortmunder stopped in the flow of pedestrian traffic to turn and frown at Gus, studying him, thinking it over. Gus faced him, being dignified, and finally Dortmunder said, “Did you hear about the ring?”

  Gus looked bewildered. “Ring? What ring?”

  I’m going to tell him the story, Dortmunder decided, and if he laughs that’s it, let him walk away. “It’s the reason I went back to the house,” he said.

  “Which I thought, when I realized what must have happened,” Gus said, “was a very gutsy thing to do.”

  “It was a very necessary thing to do,” Dortmunder told him, “given what happened.”

  “Something happened?”

  “After I was arrested, the cops asked the guy, did he take anything? And the guy said, he took my ring, he’s wearing my ring. And it was my ring, that May gave me, and the cops made me take it off and give it to the guy.”

  Gus’s jaw dropped. “He stole your ring?”

  Dortmunder watched him like a hawk. “That’s what happened.”

  “Why, that bastard!” Gus cried, and pedestrians made wider
detours around them as they stood there. “That son of a bitch, to do a thing like that!”

  Dortmunder said, “You think so?”

  “They’ve already got you caught,” Gus said, “they’ve got you arrested, you’re facing heavy time, and he has to rub your nose in it? What a crappy guy!”

  Dortmunder said, “Let’s walk.”

  “Sure.”

  They started walking, and Gus said, “I can’t get over it. I never heard such a nasty thing to do. Kick a guy when he’s down.”

  “That’s why I had to escape,” Dortmunder said. “I had to go back there and try to get my ring back, only the guy was already gone. So I took all that other stuff instead.”

  “I get ya,” Gus said.

  “But I still want my ring,” Dortmunder said.

  “Naturally,” Gus said. “Me, I’d chase the son of a bitch around the world if I had to.”

  “It was looking like that was exactly what I was gonna have to do,” Dortmunder told him, “only now it turns out, he’s at another of his places, right here in New York.”

  “No kidding,” Gus said.

  “Also got a lot of nice stuff in it,” Dortmunder said.

  “I bet it does.”

  “We’re going in there tonight,” Dortmunder said, “try to get my ring, pick up whatever else’s around.”

  “We?”

  “Andy Kelp and a lockman, I don’t know who yet, and me. You wanna make it four?”

  Gus thought about that. “You mean, forget the Carrport thing, and come in with you on this one.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Deal me in,” said Gus.

  22

  M ax was furious. To be talked to like that, to be chastised, by some pip-squeak stooge, was intolerable. Max was shaking when he finally left Judge Mainman’s chambers at two-thirty—an hour and a half with that moron!—shaking with frustration and rage, ready to commit a personal murder with his own two hands for the first time in years and years. “That—that—that—”

  “I wouldn’t say it, Max,” Walter Greenbaum advised, walking beside him. Walter, Max’s personal attorney with the heavy bags under his eyes, could even make a statement like that sound like profundity.