What's So Funny? d-14

by Donald E. Westlake

  He's from Andy, she thought, but she knew he wasn't. She said, "Oh, you must be the man John went to see a couple times."

  "Naturally," he said.

  Ping. She took the ten and made change as Pudge put the packet of lightbulbs into a plastic bag, and Johnny Eppick For Hire said, "So you be my answering machine. Pass on to John, he should call me. Tell him we got ignition."

  I hope John doesn't plan to cheat this man, she thought. I'll have to remind him to be careful. "I'll tell him," she said. "Enjoy your light."

  "Better than curse the darkness," he said, and grinned one last time, and carried his lightbulbs into the night.

  42

  BY FRIDAY MORNING, Dortmunder's irritation had cooled without disappearing. When May had come home last night and told him Eppick had actually braced her right there in the store with his message to call, Dortmunder had at first been outraged. "He talked to you? In the store? He's not supposed to have anything to do with you at all!"

  May wasn't as upset as he was, but of course she'd had longer to live with it. She said, "He wasn't bad or anything, John. He just gave me the message for you and bought some lightbulbs."

  "Lightbulbs? Listen, he wants to talk to me, he can call Andy, like last time."

  "Well, he talked to me," she said, "and I thought it was a little weird, but there wasn't anything wrong about it."

  "You know what it is?" he demanded. "I'll tell you what it is. The message isn't lightbulbs or call me or any of that. The message is, 'I can reach out to you. I not only know where you are, I know where your lady friend works, I'm on top of you any time I wanna be on top of you, that's what the message is."

  "I think we already knew all that," May said. "Are you going to call him?"

  "Some other time. Right now, I'm too irritated."

  "Well, go in the living room, and let me get on with dinner," she said, gesturing at tonight's sack of groceries on the kitchen table.

  He was hungry. "Okay."

  "Have a beer as an appetizer."

  "I will," he agreed, and took a can of beer with him to the living room, where he sat and frowned at the switched-off television set while he conducted several imaginary conversations with Johnny Eppick in his head, in which he was much fiercer and made much more telling points than was likely in real life, until May called him to dinner, which was a really good meat loaf, and how she'd whipped that up so fast, with all those ingredients and stuff, straight from working late hours at the Safeway, he had no idea. But it calmed him considerably, and at the end of the meal he said, "I'll call him tomorrow. Not tonight."

  "Don't yell at him," she said.

  He hesitated, then made the concession. "Okay."

  And late this morning, after May'd headed back to the Safeway, he called Eppick's number and got his answering machine. "So this is better, is it?" he demanded. "We're in closer communication now, are we? I'm talking to a machine." And hung up.

  Eppick phoned just after two that afternoon. "I'll give you a place you can walk to," he said. "Meet me at Union Square in half an hour. I'll be on a bench wherever the dealers aren't.

  "The dealers won't be wherever you are."

  "You think I'm that obvious?" Eppick asked him, but he sounded pleased at the idea.

  "See you in half an hour," Dortmunder said, and did, walking through the park all bundled up against the raw March air, and Eppick was seated at his ease on a bench amid only civilians, and not many of them at that, because the weather was still a little below par for park bench-sitting. However, Dortmunder joined him and Eppick said, "The granddaughter has come through like a champ."

  "You shouldn't talk to May," Dortmunder told him. "It upsets her."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," Eppick said, though he didn't sound sorry. "She didn't look upset. Maybe we could get carrier pigeons, you and me."

  They'd already veered too far from Dortmunder's practice conversations, so he said, "Tell me about the champ."

  "Huh? Oh, the granddaughter." Eppick grinned, pleased at the very thought of the granddaughter. "She's our spy in the enemy camp," he said, "and she's worth her weight in chess sets."

  "That's nice."

  "They don't know exactly when they're gonna move the set," Eppick said, "because they're still working on the security, but as soon as they know it she knows it, and as soon as she knows it we know it. Or I know it, and you find out when the carrier pigeon gets there."

  "Yeah, right."

  "But what we do know now," Eppick said, "is the safe place they're gonna move it to. So this is a very nice edge," he pointed out, "because you can case it before the chess set even gets there."

  "That's good."

  "It's down on Gansevoort Street," Eppick told him. "It's the office of a private detective down there by the name of Jacques Perly." With an arch look, he said," You wouldn't have any trouble getting into a private detective's office, would you?

  Not rising to the bait, Dortmunder said, "There's gotta be more to it than that. Some office on Gansevoort Street?"

  "Well, if there's more to it," Eppick pointed out, "you've got time to find out what it is."

  "I'll take a look," Dortmunder said, and glanced around at the snow-flecked park. You could see everybody's breath. "You know, it's kinda cold out here."

  "It is," Eppick agreed, "but we've got privacy. But we could leave now."

  "Good."

  They stood, Eppick not offering to shake hands this time, and Dortmunder said, "Well, anything's gotta be better than that vault."

  "Let's hope." Eppick shrugged his coat and scarf up closer to his chin. "You see your friend Kelp a lot, don't you?"

  "From time to time."

  "I'll leave messages with him."

  "That's good," Dortmunder said. "I don't think May would like carrier pigeons."

  43

  AT JUST ABOUT the same time that Dortmunder and Eppick were consulting about the Chicago chess set en plein air, another meeting was coming to order on the exact same topic, but with a very different membership and in a very different setting. The setting, in fact, was the largest conference room in the offices of Feinberg et al, and still it felt crowded. It was a hush-hush top secret meeting attended only by those who absolutely had to be a party to it, and still that meant seventeen people.

  Representing both Feinberg and Livia Northwood Wheeler, and therefore more or less conducting the meeting, was Jay Tumbril, accompanied by a stenographer named Stella, who would take notes of the meeting and record it as well, on cassette. Representing the other principal law firms connected with the Northwood matter were nine senior lawyers, the men in navy-blue pinstripe, the women in navy blue pinstripe plus white ruffles. Representing the NYPD, who would monitor the chess set's movements through the city streets, were two senior inspectors from Centre Street, both in uniforms heavy on the brass. Representing Securivan, the company whose armored car would actually transport the set from the sub-basement in this building to the second-floor office of Jacques Perly, were two sternly fit men with identical crew cuts and square jaws, and with brass Marine Corps insignia pins on the lapels of their pastel sport jackets. And finally, representing the intended destination of the set was Jacques Perly, who'd brought along his secretary Delia, who would also take notes and make a recording, and who was blinking a lot at the moment, not being used to life outside the office.

  Once the necessary introductions had been made and business cards distributed, Jay, at the head of the conference table, stood and looked around at those assembled either at the table or in chairs along the wall, and decided to begin with a quip: "I'm happy that at last, after years of litigation, everyone connected with the matter of the Northwood estate has finally found one area of agreement. Everybody wants a look at that chess set."

  Apparently no one else in the room realized that was a quip, so Jay cleared his throat into the silence and said, "We all understand there's a certain degree of peril in this move, particularly if word seeps out that it's about to ha
ppen, so I hope everyone here realizes the need for total secrecy on this matter until the move is done."

  More silence, which this time Jay took for consent. "When a task is difficult and fraught with peril," he went on, "the wise man turns to the experts. I hope we're all at least that wise, and so I want to turn to the experts in our midst today, from Securivan and from the NYPD. Harry or Larry, would you share your thoughts with us?"

  Harry and Larry were the Securivan men. Jay sat down and Larry remained seated as he said, "Keeping a secret that seventeen people in this room already know about, plus the judge and other people at the court, plus one or more people at the bank, plus at least one of the principals in the lawsuit means, not to offend anybody present, but it isn't a secret you're gonna keep secret for very long."

  The more senior of the NYPD men present, whose name was Chief Inspector Mologna (pronounced Maloney), now said, "Speakin for myself, and speakin for the great city of New York, I can tell you right now you already got your secret blowed. This city does not raise up a criminal class that don't have its eyes open and its ears open and its hands open every blessed moment of the night and day. They're out there already and they're waitin for you. You put together a mob scene like we got in this room, of course, you're just engravin an invitation."

  "Unfortunately, Chief Inspector," Jay said, "this is the minimum number possible to obtain agreement."

  "Oh, I understand," the chief inspector said. "You got your protocols and you got your noses that might get out of joint, so you gotta have this social before you get down to business. But when you do get down to business, take it from me, the crooks will be right with you, every step of the way."

  Larry of Securivan said, "Harry and I think the chief inspector's right, so, because there are those sharp-eared crooks out there, and, because we don't want to give them too much time to make their own plans, the sooner you make this move the better."

  "That's right," the chief inspector said. "Don't shilly-shally."

  Jay said, "No, we certainly don't want to do that."

  "Harry and I," Larry said, "think the best time to do this is Sunday night."

  "This Sunday night?" Jay asked him. "The day after tomorrow?"

  "Yes, sir," Larry confirmed. "We'd want to get our armored car into position at the curb downstairs here at oh two hundred hours Monday morning."

  His partner Harry spoke up: "This thing weighs, so we're told, a third of a ton. We'll have a crew of four with the armored oar, to bring the object up and place it into the vehicle."

  "And we," Chief Inspector Mologna said, "are gonna have patrol cars on that block, and patrol cars up at the next intersection to divert traffic, so you are gonna have no vehicles in that area except your van and our patrols."

  "This all sounds very good," Jay said.

  Jacques Perly said, "When do you think you'd get to my shop?"

  Larry considered that. "If we start at oh two hundred hours," he said, "say it takes fifteen minutes to bring the object up and secure it. At that time of night, fifteen or twenty minutes to drive down to your area. You should count on an arrival time of oh two-thirty to oh two-forty hours."

  One of the other lawyers present said, "That means the experts could start examining the artifact Monday morning."

  "Not quite," Jay said. "We don't want to tell anybody else about the move until after it's made." With a bow toward the chief inspector, he said, "Granted that secrets are difficult or impossible to keep, we'd still like to limit the advance knowledge of the move as much as we can."

  Another lawyer said, "But they can start their inspections Tuesday morning, surely."

  "I don't see why not."

  "Some of our principals," another lawyer said, "and some of our senior partners as well, will certainly want to take this opportunity to see the thing in the flesh, as it were."

  "We'll make accommodations for that as we can," Jay assured him. "But we don't want it to become a tourist destination."

  That quip got its chuckle, and another lawyer said, "Oh, I think most of us are mature enough to show restraint."

  Another lawyer said, "However, speed in assessing the object is also a priority, of course. I understand we're all paying Mr. Perly a per diem for the use of his space, and of course every day the object is out of the vault the risk of theft increases."

  Another lawyer said, "What we're talking about here is not one object, but thirty-four. A theft doesn't have to be of the entire piece."

  Jay said, "We're arranging for private guards to stay with the object 24/7 while it's at Mr. Perly's. We'll all breathe easier once the set is back in the vault downstairs."

  "Amen to that," said another lawyer, and still another lawyer said, "In fact, the per diem is not that much. In this instance, it is truly better to be safe than sorry."

  Which caused a general murmur of agreement, followed by Jay saying, "Does that cover it all?"

  "I'd like to say one thing," said the chief inspector, and got to his feet. He also picked up his braid-rich hat from the conference table, so he apparently didn't intend to stay much longer. "At oh two hundred hours in the ayem of this comin Monday morning," he informed them all, "I am gonna be asleep in my bed in Bay Shore, Long Island. And I will not be wantin any phone calls." And he put on his hat.

  On that note the meeting concluded, having worked out about as satisfactorily as the one just ending in the park downtown.

  44

  ANDY KELP CAME home from the department store wearing three suits and two coats. It wasn't really that cold out, but it was still better to wear them than to pay for them.

  Anne Marie was at her computer on her desk in the bedroom. She looked at him and said, "Did you put on weight?"

  "No," he said. "I put on wool. Let me get these clothes off."

  "Okay," she said, and shut her computer down, and the phone rang.

  Kelp gave it a look of dislike. "It's gotta be John," he said.

  "You do your strip," she told him, "and I'll talk to John."

  "Deal."

  He got half his new wardrobe off when she said, "It is John, and it sounds like he really does have to talk to you."

  "Then I suppose he does. Hello," he told the phone.

  "We've got the place where it's gonna be."

  "Where it's gonna be. But it isn't there now."

  "No, but it's gonna be there soon, and you and me, we should look it over, look the place over before the thing shows up. A little easier now than later."

  This was unfortunately true. Looking at Anne Marie, who had started her own striptease, Kelp said, "So where is this place?"

  "Down on Gansevoort Street. An office down there."

  "An office? Doesn't sound right."

  "I'll give you the details, you know, in other circumstances."

  "Okay, but…" Kelp looked wistfully toward Anne Marie. "Anne Marie and me, we had plans for this evening, maybe a movie… I tell you what."

  "Tell me."

  "There's a very trendy hotel down there on Gansevoort," Kelp said, "now that the area's gentrified. I could meet you there, in the bar there."

  "Fine. When?"

  "We should make it pretty late," Kelp said, and looked again at Anne Marie, who was smiling. "I'll meet you in the bar there at midnight," he said, and did, and saw Dortmunder already in position there at the bar.

  Kelp had to admit, even seen from behind and across the room, slouched at the bar, John Dortmunder did not go with this setting. Any observant person in the joint would have taken one look at him in this environment and called the cops on general principles.

  Fortunately, this hotel did not generally cater to observant persons. It was the kind of place that attracted rail-thin persons of several genders, all of whom sandpapered their cheekbones every evening before leaving their cave. Being unaware of the existence of any other people at all, none of this rather large and very loud mob of trendoids had noticed the creature from another species who had joined their revels. Dortmu
nder was in perfect concealment with this crowd.

  And now there were two aliens at the bar, once Kelp climbed onto the fuschia stool beside him. The bartendress, an action figure in a skintight black dress, dropped a coaster bearing an ad for condoms on the bar in front of Kelp and said, with complete indifference, "Sir?"

  Kelp looked at Dortmunder's drink, recognized it, and said, "I'll have what he's having."

  "Ew." She rolled her eyes and slanked away.

  Kelp observed Dortmunder's glass again, from which in fact Dortmunder was now drinking. "That's bourbon, isn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Two cubes?"

  "Yeah." Dortmunder shrugged. "They don't like to leave bourbon all by itself around here," he explained. "They like to muffle it down a little."

  Kelp looked up and down the bar and saw that the things in front of the other patrons didn't look so much like drinks as like extraterrestrials. Short extraterrestrials. "Gotcha," he said.

  The bartendress might have felt sullied by having to serve a high-test drink, but she did it, and only charged fourteen dollars for the indignity, sliding a five and a one back at him from his original twenty. Kelp sipped his drink, found it to be as requested, and said, "Tell me about this office where they're gonna move the thing."

  "It's some hotshot private detective named Perly," Dortmunder said. "What makes it a good place to stash the thing is what we'll find out."

  "And the thing's gonna get there soon."

  "That's the story."

  "Probly in an armored car."

  "Probly."

  Kelp contemplated the situation, lubricating his brain muscles with a little more bourbon. "Tough to do an armored car on a city street," he said. "Those jobs are more for the countryside."

  "Oh, you can do it," Dortmunder said, "but it takes explosives. I'd rather work more quiet than that."

  "Oh, you know it." Kelp took a little more of his drink and said, "You look at this place on your way here?"