Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder) Page 9

  It was Murch who finally said the awful truth aloud. "You don't have it."

  "Something–" Kelp lifted up and looked beneath himself, but it wasn't there either. "Something happened," he said. "In that fight. I don't know, all of a sudden there was this huge fight going on."

  "We don't have it," Bulcher said. He sounded stunned. "We lost it."

  "Oh, my goodness," Chefwick said.

  Kelp sighed. "We have to go back for it," he said. "I hate the whole idea, but we just have to. We have to go back."

  Nobody argued. Murch took the next right, and headed uptown.

  The scene in front of the theater was not to be believed. The police had arrived, ambulances had arrived, even a fire engine had arrived. Platoons of Scotsmen were being herded into clumps by wary policemen, while other policemen in white helmets trotted into the hall, where the controversy was apparently continuing.

  Slowly Murch drove past Hunter House along the one lane still open to traffic, and was waved on by a cop with a red-beamed long flashlight. Sadly Kelp and Chefwick and Bulcher gazed at the concert hall. Kelp sighed. "Dortmunder is going to be very upset," he said.

  Chapter 18

  Dortmunder took the subway to Union Square, then walked the rest of the way home. He was in the last block when a fellow came out of a doorway and said, "Pardon me. You got a match?"

  "No," said Dortmunder. "I don't smoke."

  "That's all right," the man said. "Neither do I." And he fell into pace with Dortmunder, walking along at his right hand. He had a very decided limp, but seemed to have no trouble keeping up.

  Dortmunder stopped and looked at him. "All right," he said. The man stopped, with a quizzical smile. He was an inch or two taller than Dortmunder, slender, with a long thin nose and a bony sunken-cheeked face, and he was wearing a topcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim pulled down, and he was keeping his right hand in his topcoat pocket. Some sort of black orthopedic shoe was on his right foot. He said, "All right? All right what?"

  "Do whatever you're here to do," Dortmunder told him, "so I can knock you down and go home."

  The man laughed as though he were amused, but he also stepped back a pace, twisting on the lame foot "I'm no holdup man, Dortmunder," he said.

  "You know my name," Dortmunder mentioned.

  "Well," said the man, "we have the same employer."

  "I don't get it."

  "Arnold Chauncey."

  Then Dortmunder did get it. "You're the other guy the lawyer found for him. The killer."

  The killer made a strangely modest gesture with his left hand, while the right remained in his pocket. "Not quite," he said. "Killing is sometimes part of what I do, but it isn't my real job. The way I like to think of it, my job is enforcing other people's wishes."

  "Is that right."

  "For instance," the killer said, "in your case, I'm being paid twenty thousand dollars, but not to kill you. I get paid whether you live or die. If you give back the picture, that's fine, you live and I collect. If you don't, if you make trouble, that's not fine, and you die and I collect." He shrugged. "It makes no difference."

  Dortmunder said, "I don't want you hanging around me the next six months."

  "Oh, don't worry," the killer said. "You'll never see me again. If it's thumbs down, I'll drop you from a distance." Grinning, he took his right hand out of his pocket, empty, made a pistol shape with the fingers, pointed it straight-arm at Dortmunder's face, closed one eye, grinned, sighted along his arm, and said, "Bang. I'm very good at that."

  Somehow, Dortmunder believed him. He already knew that he himself was precisely the kind of reliable crook Chauncey had asked for, and he now believed that this fellow was precisely the kind of reliable killer Chauncey had asked for. "I'm happy to say," he said, "that I don't intend to do anything with that painting except hold on to it till I get paid, then give it back to Chauncey. Fancy is not my method."

  "Good," said the killer, with a friendly smile. "I like getting paid for doing nothing. So long." And he started away, then immediately turned back, saying, "You shouldn't mention this to Chauncey."

  "I shouldn't?"

  "He doesn't want us to meet, but I thought we should have one chat." His grin flickered. "I like to see my people," he said. His eyes glittered at Dortmunder, and then once again he turned away.

  Dortmunder watched him go, tall and narrow and dark, body twisting as he strode on his game leg, both hands now in his topcoat pockets, and he felt a faint chill up the middle of his back. Now he understood why Chauncey had said Dortmunder wasn't dangerous; it was because he'd had that fellow as a comparison. "Good thing I'm an honest man," he muttered to himself, and he walked on home, where he found Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher and May all waiting for him in the living room.

  "Dortmunder!"

  "John!"

  "You made it! I knew you would!"

  They gave him cheers and pats on the back, and he gave them Chauncey's bourbon, and then they all sat down with glasses of the stuff – terrific bourbon, almost worth the trouble it caused – and Kelp said, "How'd you do it? How'd you get away?"

  "Well, I went down to the bottom of the elevator shaft," Dortmunder started, "and then…" And he stopped, struck by something vaguely wrong. Looking around at the attentive faces, he saw they were more glazed than attentive. Bulcher's and Kelp's clothes were all messed up, and Kelp maybe had the beginnings of a black eye. There was a kind of subterranean tension in the room. "What's the matter?" he said.

  May said, "John, tell us how you got out of the elevator shaft."

  He frowned at May, he frowned at the others, he listened to the silence, and he knew. Looking at Kelp, he said, "Where is it?"

  "Now, Dortmunder," Kelp said.

  "Where is it?"

  "Oh, dear," said Chefwick.

  Murch said, "There was a fight in the theater."

  "It wasn't anybody's fault," said Kelp.

  Even Tiny Bulcher was looking abashed. "It was just one of those things," he said.

  "WHERE IS IT?"

  An electric silence. Dortmunder watched them stare at the floor, and finally it was Kelp who answered, in a tiny voice:

  "We lost it."

  "You lost it," Dortmunder said.

  Then all of them were talking at once, explaining, justifying, telling the story from a thousand different directions, and Dortmunder just sat there, unmoving, stolid, letting it wash over him until at last they all ran down. In that next silence, Dortmunder sighed, but didn't speak, and May said, "John, can I freshen your drink?"

  Dortmunder shook his head. There was no heat in him. "No, thanks, May," he said.

  Kelp said, "Is there anything we can do?"

  "If you don't mind," Dortmunder told him, "I'd like to be alone for a while."

  "It wasn't anybody's fault," Kelp said. "It really wasn't."

  "I'm not blaming you," Dortmunder said, and oddly enough it was the truth. He didn't blame anybody. Fatalism had captured another victim. "I just want to be alone for a while," he said, "and think about how I've got six months to live."

  THE SECOND CHORUS

  Chapter 1

  Amid the merry flocks of Christmas shoppers, Dortmunder looked like some sort of rebuttal; the wet blanket's answer to Santa Claus. As he stood in the perfume department at Macy's, the word HUMBUG seemed to float in a balloon in the air over his head, and the eye he cast on the salesgirl would have to be called jaundiced. "What's that one?" he said.

  The girl was holding a tiny glass phial shaped like a 1920's floor lamp without the shade; a spread-out pancake at the bottom, where the eighth of an ounce of perfume was, and then a long skinny neck with nothing in it at all, except the tube of the atomizer. "Ma Folie," said the girl. "It's French."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "It means, 'My Folly.'"

  "Yours, huh? Let me smell it again."

  The girl had already sprayed a mite on her wrist, which she obediently re-extended in Dortmunder's
direction. It felt weird to lean over and rest his nose on some unknown female's wrist – bony, gray-white skin, thin blue vein tracings – and all Dortmunder knew after he'd sniffed was the same as he'd learned last time; the stuff smelt sweet. He wouldn't have known Ma Folie from peach brandy. "How much is it?"

  "Twenty-seven fifty."

  "Twenty-seven dollars?"

  "Foreign currency can be exchanged on the sixth floor," she told him.

  Dortmunder frowned at her. "I don't have any foreign currency."

  "Oh. I'm sorry, I thought… well, anyway. It costs twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents."

  "I oughta knock this place over," Dortmunder muttered, and turned to look around at the store, the customers, the exits, the escalators – kinda casing the joint. But it wasn't any good, of course. They had private cops, closed-circuit TV, electric eyes, all kinds of sophisticated defenses. And the real cash would be kept in the offices, way upstairs; you'd never get out of the building, even if you managed the score.

  "Sir?"

  But Dortmunder didn't answer. He remained frozen in position, having just that second noticed a face he knew on the Down escalator, descending steadily from the ceiling; a bright cheerful Christmassy face, gazing birdlike this way and that as he glided down that long diagonal. Dortmunder was so taken aback that it didn't occur to him to avert his own face until too late; Kelp had seen him, Kelp had flashed a huge smile, Kelp was up on tiptoe on the escalator waving one hand high over his head.

  "Sir?"

  "Christ," Dortmunder muttered. He gave the girl a bilious look and she backed away, uncertain whether to be frightened or offended. "All right," Dortmunder said. "The hell with it, all right."

  "Sir?"

  "I'll take the goddam thing."

  Kelp was struggling his way through the multitudes, the bewildered husbands, the snotty-nosed children, the self-absorbed secretaries, the massed family groups, the smirking pairs of teenage girls, the short stout women carrying nine shopping bags, the tall slender women wearing fun furs over their shoulders and yellow-lensed sunglasses on top of their heads, all the flux and flow of gift-time in the metropolis, and Dortmunder, now that it was too late, lifted one shoulder to shield his face while he slipped the girl three crumpled saw-bucks.

  "Dortmunder!"

  "Yeah," Dortmunder said.

  "What a coincidence!" Kelp was carrying a full Korvette's shopping bag; working some dodge, no doubt. "I just called your place about an hour ago, May said she didn't know where you were."

  "Christmas shopping," Dortmunder said, as another man might say, "Cleaning the cesspool."

  Kelp glanced at the girl, currently putting a fresh perfume bottle in a complicated little cardboard box, and he leaned closer to Dortmunder to say, quietly, "Whadaya wanna buy that stuff for? We hit one of them shopping centers out on the Island, we make a profit on it."

  "For a Christmas present?" Dortmunder shook his head. "A Christmas present is different," he said. "A Christmas present is something you buy."

  "Yeah?" Kelp received that as though it were a brand-new idea, but one possibly worth further thought.

  "Besides," Dortmunder said, "I still got some of that Chauncey money." The five of them had split nearly seven thousand dollars after fencing all the jewelry and other goods from the fiasco.

  Kelp was surprised. "You do? That was over a month ago!"

  "Well, I'm not a big spender."

  The girl came back with Dortmunder's purchase in a bag, and his change. "That's twenty-nine seventy," she said, and dropped a quarter and a nickel into Dortmunder's palm.

  "You told me twenty-seven fifty."

  "Plus tax."

  "Well, shit," Dortmunder said, put his change in his pocket, picked up his parcel, and turned away.

  "And Merry Christmas to you," the girl told his back.

  "Listen," Kelp said, as they moved away from the counter, "I got to talk to you, that's why I was looking for you. It's too crowded in here, you want a lift home?"

  Dortmunder gave him a wary look. "No new capers," he said.

  "Nothing new," Kelp said, with funny emphasis. "I promise."

  "Okay, then."

  They went out to Herald Square. It was nearly six, quite dark, not quite freezing, and slowly, slightly, sloppily snowing. Jammed traffic and roly-poly bundled people were everywhere. "Colder'n hell," Dortmunder said.

  "It isn't the cold, it's the humidity," Kelp told him. "The air's so damp, it gets right into your bones. If it'd get down below freezing, dry the air out, we wouldn't feel so cold."

  Dortmunder looked at him. "Everything's gotta be the opposite with you," he said.

  "I'm just saying."

  "Don't. Where's your car?"

  "I don't know yet," Kelp said. "Wait right here, I'll be back." And he sloshed away, carrying his Korvette's shopping bag into the swirling crowds and the gathering snow.

  It was after Kelp was out of sight that what he'd said ricocheted in Dortmunder's mind. Aloud, he muttered, "He doesn't know yet?" Escape suggested itself, but when he thought about his alternatives – the subway in the Christmas rush, trying to find a cab in Herald Square at six o'clock on a shopping day in December, walking twenty-five blocks home in the snow and the cold – he realized he might just as well stay where he was. So he leaned his back against the wall of Macy's, near the entrance doors, put his hands in his overcoat pockets – his right hand closing around the box of perfume – and settled down to wait. Snow gathered on his shoulders and his black knit cap, snow melted on his forehead and caused little icy rivulets to run down his nose and cataract onto his coat buttons, and icy slush transmitted previews of the grave through his wet shoes to his feet.

  He'd been standing there about five minutes when a distinguished gent in an astrakhan hat and white moustache and fur-collared coat paused in front of him, stuffed something into the breast pocket of Dortmunder's overcoat, and said, "Cheer up, old chap. And a merry Christmas to you." And walked on.

  Dortmunder stared after him, nonplussed, then fingered his pocket and drew out a neatly folded dollar bill. "Well, Jesus H. Jumping Christ," he said.

  A car was honking. Dortmunder looked past the dollar and saw a tan Mercedes-Benz at the curb, and somebody inside it waving. Kelp?

  Kelp. And, yes, the Mercedes had MD plates; from Connecticut, as it happened. Dortmunder trotted around to the passenger side, slid into the car, and felt dry warmth bask over him as Kelp shot the Mercedes forward. "Ahhh," said Dortmunder.

  "Impossible traffic," Kelp said. "Even Stan Murch wouldn't get anywhere in this stuff. I picked up this beast a block away, can you believe it? Took me that long just to come back." He glanced over. "What's with the dollar bill?"

  Dortmunder was still holding it in his hand, and now he shoved it away in his side pocket. "I found it," he said.

  "No kidding. Maybe this is your lucky day."

  What an idea. "Yeah," said Dortmunder.

  "In fact," Kelp said, "this is your lucky day." Dortmunder closed his eyes. He could enjoy the comfort of the car, and just not listen to anything Kelp had to say.

  "For instance," Kelp said, "there's that question of the painting, and what happens six months from now."

  "Four and a half," Dortmunder said. His eyes were still closed.

  "Okay, four and a half."

  "And I figure maybe I can leave the country," Dortmunder said. "Go to South America, maybe. Me and May, we could open up a bar or something. Is the guy gonna follow us all over the world for twenty grand?"

  "Yes," said Kelp. "So long as they're looking for the painting, they'll look for you, and you know it."

  Inside his closed eyes, Dortmunder sighed. "You could let me at least have my little dreams," he said.

  "I got something better," Kelp told him. "I got an out."

  "You don't."

  "I do."

  "You don't. Not unless you got the painting, and you don't. When Chauncey comes around and wants it back, there aren't gonna be
any outs."

  "One," Kelp said, and suddenly flew into a frenzy at the wheel, honking his horn in a mad bebop rhythm of toots, the while yelling, "Move your god darn ass whatsa matter don't you wanna go home?"

  Dortmunder opened his eyes. "Take it easy," he said.

  "They give anybody a license," Kelp grumbled, subsiding. Then he said, "Listen, I can't talk in this traffic. You got any of that good bourbon left?"

  "You're kidding."

  "I tell you what," Kelp said. "I'll buy a bottle of bourbon on the way downtown – not Chauncey's brand, but something nice. Something bottled in Kentucky."

  "Yeah?"

  "Invite me up to your place," Kelp said. "We'll have a drink, I'll give you my idea."

  "You know what I think of your ideas," Dortmunder told him.

  "Can it be worse than a visit from Chauncey's friend?"

  Dortmunder sighed.

  "I'll buy two bottles," Kelp said.

  Chapter 2

  "You remember my nephew Victor," Kelp said.

  "The FBI man," Dortmunder said.

  "The ex-FBI man," Kelp corrected him. "It makes a difference."

  "They threw him out," Dortmunder said, "because he kept putting a suggestion in the FBI suggestion box that they oughta have a secret handshake, so they'd be able to recognize each other at parties."

  "That's not necessarily so," Kelp said. "That's just a theory."

  "It's good enough for me," Dortmunder told him. "It helps me remember the guy. What about him?"

  "I was talking to him at Thanksgiving," Kelp said, "at my grandmother's. She makes the most fantastic turkey, you wouldn't believe it."

  What was there to say to a remark like that? Nothing; so that's what Dortmunder said. He settled himself more comfortably in his personal easy chair in his warm dry living room – May was out at the Safeway, where she was a cashier – and he sipped a little more bourbon. It was bottled in Kentucky (as opposed to being distilled in Kentucky, shipped north in railroad cars and bottled in Hoboken) and it was pretty good; a firm stride upward from the stuff at the O.J. Bar and Grill, which was probably also distilled in Hoboken, from a combination of Hudson and Raritan waters.