“If I said it then must be it’s the truth.”
“Well then,” Seth said, and sat back, arms folded on his chest.
“Well then what?”
“Well then if you was to kill yourself, then I’d get the money and you’d get the funeral.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Porter said slowly.
“Seems to me either one of us can go and do it,” Seth said. “And here’s the two of us just takin’ it for granted that I’m to be the one to go and do it, and I think we should think on that a little more thoroughly.”
“Why, being as you’re older, Seth.”
“What’s that to do with anything?”
“Why, you got less years to give up.”
“Still be givin’ up all that’s left. Older or younger don’t cut no ice.”
Porter thought about it. “After all,” he said, “it was your idea.”
“That don’t cut ice neither. I could mention I got a wife and child.”
“I could mention I got a wife and three children.”
“Ex-wife.”
“All the same.”
“Let’s face it,” Seth said. “Gert and your three don’t add up to anything and neither do Linda Mae and Rachel.”
“Got to agree,” Porter said.
“So.”
“One thing. You being the one who put us in this mess, what with firing the store, it just seems you might be the one to get us out of it.”
“You bein’ the one let the insurance lapse through your own stupidity, you could get us out of this mess through insurance, thus evenin’ things up again.”
“Now talkin’ about stupidity—”
“Yes, talkin’ about stupidity—”
“Spats!”
“Bow ties, damn you! Bow ties!”
You might have known it would come to that.
NOW I’VE TOLD you Seth and Porter generally got along pretty well and here’s further evidence of it. Confronted by such a stalemate, a good many people would have wrote off the whole affair and decided not to take the suicide route at all. But not even spats and bow ties could deflect Seth and Porter from the road they’d figured out as the most logical to pursue.
So what they did, one of them tossed a coin, and the other one called it while it was in the air, and they let it hit the floor and roll, and I don’t recollect whether it was heads or tails, or who tossed and who called—what’s significant is that Seth won.
“Well now,” Seth said. “I feel I been reprieved. Just let me have that coin. I want to keep it for a luck charm.”
“Two out of three.”
“We already said once is as good as a million,” Seth said, “so you just forget that two-out-of-three business. You got a week like we agreed but if I was you I’d get it over soon as I could.”
“I got a week,” Porter said.
“You’ll get the brassbound casket and everything, and you can have Minnie Lucy Boxwood sing at your funeral if you want. Expense don’t matter at all. What’s your favorite song?”
“I suppose ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ ”
“Minnie Lucy does that real pretty.”
“I guess she does.”
“Now you be sure and make it accidental,” Seth said. “Two hundred thousand dollars goes just about twice as far as one hundred thousand dollars. Won’t cost you a thing to make it accidental, just like we talked about it. What I would do is borrow Fritz Chenoweth’s half-ton pickup and go up on the old Harburton Road where it takes that curve. Have yourself a belly full of corn and just keep goin’ straight when the road doesn’t. Lord knows I almost did that myself enough times without tryin’. Had two wheels over the edge less’n a month ago.”
“That close?”
“That close.”
“I’ll be doggone,” Porter said.
THING IS, SETH went on home after he failed to convince Porter to do it right away, and that was when things began to fall into the muck. Because Porter started thinking things over. I have a hunch it would have worked about the same way if Porter had won the flip, with Seth thinking things over. They were a whole lot alike, those two. Like two peas in a pod.
What occurred to Porter was would Seth have gone through with it if he lost, and what Porter decided was that he wouldn’t. Not that there was any way for him to prove it one way or the other, but when you can’t prove something you generally tend to decide on believing in what you want to believe, and Porter Dettweiler was no exception. Seth, he decided, would not have killed himself and didn’t never have no intention of killing himself, which meant that for Porter to go through with killing his own self amounted to nothing more than damned foolishness.
Now it’s hard to say just when he figured out what to do, but it was in the next two days, because on the third day he went over and borrowed that pickup off Fritz Chenoweth. “I got the back all loaded down with a couple sacks of concrete mix and a keg of nails and I don’t know what all,” Fritz said. “You want to unload it back of my smaller barn if you need the room.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Porter told him. “I guess I’ll just leave it loaded and be grateful for the traction.”
“Well, you keep it overnight if you have a mind,” Fritz said.
“I just might do that,” Porter said, and he went over to Seth’s house. “Let’s you and me go for a ride,” he told Seth. “Something we was talking about the other night, and I went and got me a new slant on it which the two of us ought to discuss before things go wrong altogether.”
“Be right with you,” Seth said, “soon as I finish this sandwich.”
“Oh, just bring it along.”
“I guess,” said Seth.
No sooner was the pickup truck backed down and out of the driveway than Porter said, “Now will you just have a look over there, brother.”
“How’s that?” said Seth, and turned his head obligingly to the right, whereupon Porter gave him a good lick upside the head with a monkey wrench he’d brought along expressly for that purpose. He got him right where you have a soft spot if you’re a little baby. (You also have a soft spot there if someone gets you just right with a monkey wrench.) Seth made a little sound which amounted to no more than letting his breath out, and then he went out like an icebox light when you have closed the door on it.
Now as to whether or not Seth was dead at this point I could not honestly tell you, unless I were to make up an answer knowing how slim is the likelihood of anyone presuming to contradict me. But the plain fact is that he might have been dead and he might not and even Seth could not have told you, being at the very least stone-unconscious at the time.
What Porter did was drive up the old Harburton Road, I guess figuring that he might as well stick to as much of the original plan as possible. There’s a particular place where the road does a reasonably convincing imitation of a fishhook, and that spot’s been described as Schuyler County’s best natural brake on the population explosion since they stamped out the typhoid. A whole lot of folks fail to make that curve every year, most of them young ones with plenty of breeding years left in them. Now and then there’s a movement to put up a guard rail, but the ecology people are against it so it never gets anywhere.
If you miss that curve, the next land you touch is a good five hundred feet closer to sea level.
So Porter pulls over to the side of the road and then he gets out of the car and maneuvers Seth (or Seth’s body, whichever the case may have been) so as he’s behind the wheel. Then he stands alongside the car working the gas pedal with one hand and the steering wheel with the other and putting the fool truck in gear and doing this and that and the other thing so he can run the truck up to the edge and over, and thinking hard every minute about those two hundred thousand pretty green dollars that are destined to make his bankruptcy considerably easier to contend with.
Well, I told you right off that sometimes you can’t win for losing, which was the case for Porter and Seth both, and anothe
r way of putting it is to say that when everything goes wrong there’s nothing goes right. Here’s what happened. Porter slipped on a piece of loose gravel while he was pushing, and the truck had to go on its own, and where it went was halfway and no further, with its back wheel hung up on a hunk of tree limb or some such and its two front wheels hanging out over nothing and its motor stalled out deader’n a smoked fish.
Porter said himself a whole mess of bad words. Then he wasted considerable time shoving the back of that truck, forgetting it was in gear and not about to budge. Then he remembered and said a few more bad words and put the thing in neutral, which involved a long reach across Seth to get to the floor shift and a lot of coordination to manipulate it and the clutch pedal at the same time. Then Porter got out of the truck and gave the door a slam, and just about then a beat-up old Chevy with Indiana plates pulls up and this fellow leaps out screaming that he’s got a tow rope and he’ll pull the truck to safety.
You can’t hardly blame Porter for the rest of it. He wasn’t the type to be great at contingency planning anyhow, and who could allow for something like this? What he did, he gave this great sob and just plain hurled himself at the back of that truck, it being in neutral now, and the truck went sailing like a kite in a tornado, and Porter, well, what he did was follow right along after it. It wasn’t part of his plan but he just had himself too much momentum to manage any last-minute change of direction.
According to the fellow from Indiana, who it turned out was a veterinarian from Bloomington, Porter fell far enough to get off a couple of genuinely rank words on the way down. Last words or not, you sure wouldn’t go and engrave them on any tombstone.
Speaking of which, he has the last word in tombstones, Vermont granite and all, and his brother Seth has one just like it. They had a double-barreled funeral, the best Johnny Millbourne had to offer, and they each of them reposed in a brass-bound casket, the top-of-the-line model. Minnie Lucy Boxwood sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” which was Porter’s favorite song, plus she sang Seth’s favorite, which was “Old Buttermilk Sky,” plus she also sang free gratis “My Buddy” as a testament to brotherly love.
And Linda Mae and Rachel got themselves two hundred thousand dollars from the insurance company, which is what Gert and her kids in Valdosta, Georgia, also got. And Seth and Porter have an end to their miseries, which was all they really wanted before they got their heads turned around at the idea of all that money.
The only thing funnier than how things don’t work out is how they do.
The End
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons
Chapter One
Excerpt Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block
AROUND 11:15 ON a Tuesday morning in May, I was perched on my stool behind the counter at Barnegat Books. I was reading Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart, even as I was keeping a lazy eye on a slender young woman in jeans and sandals. Her khaki shirt had those little tabs to secure the sleeves when you rolled them up, and a scant inch of tattoo peeked out from under one rolled-up sleeve. I couldn’t make out the image, there wasn’t enough showing, and I didn’t bother to guess, or to speculate on what hidden parts of her anatomy might sport further tattoos. I was paying more attention to the capacious tote bag hanging from her shoulder, and the Frank Norris novel that had engaged her interest.
For I shall consider my cat, Geoffrey, I read, and looked over to the window to consider my own cat, Raffles. There’s a portion of the window ledge that the sun manages to find on clear days, and that’s his favorite spot, rain or shine. Sometimes he stretches, in the manner of his tribe, and sometimes his paws move as he dreams of mice. At the moment he was doing nothing, as far as I could tell.
My customer, on the other hand, had fetched a cell phone from her tote bag. She’d put the book down, and her thumbs were busy. At length she returned the phone to her bag and, beaming, brought Frank Norris to the counter.
“I’ve been looking all over for this,” she said, triumphantly. “And I’ve had a terrible time, because I couldn’t remember the title or the author.”
“I can see how that might complicate things for you.”
“But when I saw the book,” she said, brandishing the object in question, “it, like, rang a bell.”
“Ah.”
“And I looked through it, and this is it.”
“The very volume you’ve been seeking.”
“Yeah, isn’t that awesome? And you know what’s even better?”
“What?”
“It’s on Kindle. Isn’t that fantastic? I mean, here’s a book more than a hundred years old, and it’s not like it was Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick, you know?”
Eat your heart out, Frank Norris.
“Like, they’re popular, so you’d expect to be able to get them in eBooks. But The Pit? Frank Norris? And yet I Googled it and there it was, and a couple of clicks and I own it.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Isn’t it great? And you know what it cost?”
“Probably less than the book you’re holding.”
She checked the penciled price on the inside cover. “Fifteen dollars. Which is fair enough, I mean it’s like a hundred years old and a hardcover book and all. But you want to know what I just paid?”
“I’d love to.”
“Two ninety-nine.”
“Awesome,” I said.
CAROLYN KAISER, WHO washes dogs two doors down the street at the Poodle Factory, is my best friend and, more often than not, my lunch companion. Whoever’s turn it is picks up food at a nearby restaurant and brings it to the other’s place of business. It was her turn, and an hour after the girl with the peekaboo tattoo left poor old Frank Norris on my counter, Carolyn breezed in and began dishing out dejeuner a deux.
“Juneau Lock?”
“Juneau Lock,” she agreed.
“I wonder what it is.”
She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and considered the matter. “I couldn’t even guess the animal,” she said. “Let alone what part of the animal.”
“It could be almost anything.”
“I know.”
“Whatever this dish is,” I said, “I don’t think we’ve had it before.”
“It’s always different,” she said, “and it’s always sensational.”
“Or even awesome,” I said, and told her about Frank Norris and the girl with the tattoo.
“Maybe it was a dragon.”
“The tattoo? Or our lunch?”
“Either one. She used your bookshop to figure out what book she wanted, and then she bought the eBook from Amazon and bragged about what a deal she got.”
“It didn’t come off like bragging,” I said. “She was letting me be a part of her triumph.”
“And rubbing your nose in it, Bern. And you don’t even seem all that upset.”
“I don’t?” I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not. She was so innocent about it, you know? ‘Isn’t it great how I saved myself twelve bucks?’ ” I shrugged. “At least I got the book back. I was afraid she was going to steal it.”
“In a manner of speaking,” she said, “she did. But if you’re cool with it, I don’t see why I should be pissed off on your behalf. This is great food, Bern.”
“The best.”
“Two Guys From Taichung. I wonder if I’m pronouncing it correctly.”
“I’m pretty sure you got the first three words right.”
“The first three words,” she said, “never change.”
The restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and East Eleventh Street, across the street from the Bum Rap, has had the same sign for almost as long as I’ve had the bookshop. But it’s changed owners and ethnicities repeatedly over the years, and each new owner (or pair of owners) has painted over the last word on the sign. Two Guys From Tashkent gave way to Two Guys From Guayaquil, which in turn yielded to Two Guys From Phnom Penh. And so on.
We began to take the closings for granted—it was evide
ntly a hard-luck location—and whenever we started to lose our taste for the current cuisine, we could look forward to whatever would take its place. And, while we rarely went more than a few days without a lunch from Two Guys, there were plenty of alternatives—the deli, the pizza place, the diner.
Then Two Guys From Kandahar threw in the towel, and Two Guys From Taichung opened up shop, and everything changed.
“I’LL BE CLOSING early,” I told Carolyn.
“Today’s the day, huh?”
“And tonight’s the night. I thought I might get back downtown in time to meet you at the Bum Rap, but where’s the sense in that?”
“Especially since you’d be drinking Perrier. Bern? You want me to tag along?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? Because it’d be no problem for me to close early. I’ve got a Borzoi to blow dry, and his owner’s picking him up at three, and even if she runs late I can be out of there by three-thirty. I could keep you company.”
“You were with me on the reconnaissance mission.”
“Casing the joint,” she said with relish. “Nothing to it. Piece of cake.”
“I think it’s better if I solo this time around.”
“I could watch your back.”
“I don’t want to give their security cameras a second look at you. Once is fine but twice is suspicious.”
“I could wear a disguise.”
“No, I’ll be disguised,” I said. “And a key part of my disguise is that this time around I won’t be accompanied by a diminutive woman with a lesbian haircut.”
“I guess diminutive sounds better than short,” she said. “And it’s not exactly a lesbian haircut, but I take your point. So how about if I hang out down the block? No? Okay, Bern, but I’ll have my cell with me. If you need me—”
“I’ll call. But that’s not likely. I’ll just steal the book and go home.”
“Check Amazon first,” she said. “See if it’s on Kindle. Maybe you can save yourself a trip.”
* * *
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons
The Dettweiler Solution Page 2