What's So Funny

by Donald Westlake

  “No, nothing to do with them. This is something completely different.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jay forced a deep breath, assembled his thoughts, and said, “Among the items under dispute in the law case involving Mrs. Wheeler and several of her relatives is a chess set, never I believe properly evaluated, but said to be worth in the millions.”

  “Worth fighting over, in other words.”

  “Yes. Since the suits began — I’ll only say by now they sue and countersue and cross–sue one another to a degree of complexity you could only otherwise find in a map of the New York City subway system — the courts have placed this asset in the care of the law firms involved, four of whom, including us, have offices in this building, so that for the last few years the chess set, called for some reason the Chicago chess set, though I doubt it was made there, has been in the sub–cellar vaults beneath this building.”

  “And likely to stay there for a while, I should think.”

  “Except,” Jay said, “now Mrs. Wheeler wants it brought up and placed somewhere that experts of various stripes may examine it.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “Infuriating,” Jay corrected him. “As her attorney in this matter, it is up to me to take this request to the court. I unfortunately see no reason why the court would deny it, nor why any of the other litigants would object. I can see that every blessed soul concerned with this matter would like to take a look at that bloody chess set.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Jacques asked.

  “Where it is now,” Jay told him, “in that vault beneath this building, it is safe as houses.”

  “But a little too inaccessible,” Jacques suggested, “for perusal by experts.”

  “Exactly. Nor will the bank accept the concept of various people trooping through their vaults. It must come up. But whose task will it be to keep the damn thing safe while it’s up and about, like the groundhog looking for its shadow?”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes, you do. It is up to this firm to find a site both accessible to the experts and agreeable to, if not the other litigants, at least to their legal representatives.”

  “And still be safe as houses,” Perly suggested.

  “If only we could.” If Jay had had hair, he’d have torn it. “Not in these offices,” he said. “We can’t keep track of the copiers around here. And no other firm has more secure offices. It’s not an official investigation, and so we can’t ask the police to step in, and in fact for various potential ownership rights and inheritance liabilities, we’d rather leave officialdom out of this matter.”

  “When does she want to make this move?”

  “Now! Yesterday!”

  “Well, that’s not possible. I could make a suggestion, Jay.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid it — Excuse me, there’s a multiple–car collision up ahead, I’ll just steer around — Oh, good, the police are on the scene, I’m being waved through — Oh, my God! Jay, you never want to see anything like that your whole life long.”

  “Don’t describe it to me.”

  “I will not.”

  “You were going to make a suggestion.”

  “Oh, Lord. Give me a second, Jay.”

  “Of course.”

  That must have been horrendous, Jay thought, to rattle Jacques Perly. How much simpler life was when people couldn’t tell us what they could see from their cars.

  “What I was going to say, Jay —”

  “Yes, Jacques.”

  “— That I was hesitant to make my suggestion because it could seem self–serving.”

  “You want to guard the piece? You’re not a sentry, Jacques.”

  “I wanted to suggest my offices,” Jacques said. “Extremely safe, extremely secure, but absolutely accessible. You’ve been there.”

  “Well, yes, but — I don’t know what to say.”

  “You would hire private security, of course, 24/7, but the building itself is ideal for you, and I’m sure we could work out a rental acceptable to all concerned. I would have to keep my own business going at the same time, of course.”

  “Of course. Jacques, the more I think about this —”

  “Well, think about one more thing,” Jacques told him. “Ah, we’re in the snowbelt now.”

  “Are we?”

  “Ask yourself this, Jay. Why now? You said Mrs. Wheeler now wanted this, and wanted it at once. Why, Jay? After all these years, why now?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “Could it be, Jay, because of her recent hire?”

  “You mean —?”

  “Has Fiona Hemlow put that suggestion into Mrs. Wheeler’s head? And did Brian Clanson set the whole thing up? Is Brian Clanson just sitting there, waiting for that chess set to come up out of that vault?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m already on Clanson, Jay, because of that other thing you asked me to do, though of course he has no idea he’s under surveillance. We’ll intensify that, study his associates. If your Chicago chess set is in my offices, and Brian Clanson makes a move to snatch it, we’ll have him, Jay, in the of — our —”

  “Jacques? You’re breaking up.”

  “We’ll — later.” And Jacques Perly was gone.

  Chapter 41

  * * *

  Thursday evening was a busy time at the Safeway. The store stayed open late, and people stocked up on their groceries for the weekend. May didn’t usually work the evening shift, since the one regularity John really liked in his life was dinner, but sometimes people got sick or fired or mislaid themselves somewhere, and May might be asked to fill in, like tonight. A little after seven now; she could quit at eight, pick out something nice for their evening repast in the deli department that wouldn’t take a lot of preparation, and home she’d go. Easy.

  The first thing she noticed about the guy was that the only thing he was carrying was a little packet of lightbulbs. He was in her checkout line, the people in front of him and behind him all with carts piled up to their chins, so that at first he just looked like a very easy example of the which–one–doesn’t–belong–in–this picture quiz. She stood there, sliding items over the bar code reader, sliding them twice if she didn’t hear that ping the first time, pushing the items onto the belt to roll on down to tonight’s packer, an overweight kid with an overbite whom all the staff here knew only as Pudge, a name he didn’t seem to mind, and she kept looking at the guy with the lightbulbs until finally she caught his eye and gestured with her head toward the last checkout line in the row, which was for people with six items or fewer, though the sign actually said six items or less. The guy grinned a thank–you and spread his hands a little; he’d rather stay here.

  Huh. Ping. Ping. Then the lightbulb inside her head went off. He’s a cop. He looks like a cop, heavy and self–confident, somebody that nobody would ever call Pudge, and he’s doing something a normal person wouldn’t do, which is wait in a long line of people buying out the store while he’s only got one item. So that would make him not only a cop, but a cop with a particular interest in May, which could not be good news.

  Her first thought was that John had been arrested, but her first thought always was that John had been arrested, so her second thought was to reject the first thought. If they’d arrested John, why come here? And if they were going to come here, why not just do a real cop thing and jump the line entirely to say what they had to say?

  Well, she’d find out soon enough. A few thousand more pings and here he was, pushing the little packet of four hundred–watt frosted white bulbs toward her with a ten–dollar bill as he grinned and said, “You know, you really oughta get an answering machine.”

  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 pla
stic 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.

  Chapter 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.”

  Chapter 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 happen, 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?”