What's So Funny

by Donald Westlake

  Fiona said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Jacques is on his way to the DA’s office with photographs.”

  Sounding like Queen Elizabeth the First in a testy mood, Mrs. W said, “I will wish to see these photographs.”

  “We all will,” Tumbril assured her. “That’s why I ordered the car.”

  • • •

  Perly had arrived ahead of them, an outraged capon, too agitated to sit. He bounced around the small messy office of Assistant DA Noah Roanoke, and began squawking before Mrs. W and Fiona and Tumbril had even finished crossing the threshold: “You were going to let him go? You were going to release him? After what he did to my building? And your chess set!”

  “Just a minute, Jacques,” Tumbril said, and approached the balding neat metal–bespectacled man behind the room’s standard–issue gray metal desk. “Mr. Roanoke?”

  Roanoke rose, hand extended. He was as calm as Perly was excited. “Mr. Tumbril,” he suggested, as they shook hands.

  Tumbril gestured. “Ms. Livia Northwood Wheeler. Her assistant, Fiona Hemlow.”

  “Please sit,” Roanoke offered, and took his own advice.

  But nobody else did, because Perly, having vibrated through the introduction ritual, now said, “I cannot believe this! And you didn’t even consult me!”

  “If you have evidence, Jacques,” Tumbril told him, “I assure you we all want to see it.”

  “Didn’t even consult.”

  “We’re here now, Jacques.”

  “I’ve turned the photos over to Noah,” Perly said, with a quick brushing–away gesture toward Roanoke.

  Who said, “Please, ladies. Those chairs aren’t terribly comfortable, but they’re better than standing.”

  Along the wall to the left of the entrance were three gray metal armless chairs with green cushioned seats, the sort of chairs you’d associate with Department of Motor Vehicles waiting rooms rather than doctors’ waiting rooms. Since Mrs. W now took the one farthest left, Fiona took the one farthest right, as Roanoke handed a manila folder to Jay, who opened it and said, “Jacques, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what I’m looking at here.”

  “As you know, Jay,” Perly said, “we’ve had our suspicions about young Clanson for some time now, so much so that I began an investigation of the fellow.”

  Mrs. W almost but didn’t quite pop back up onto her feet. “You did what? To Brian? On whose authority?”

  “Jay’s,” Perly told her. “As your attorney.”

  “Without telling me. And who was supposed to pay for this?”

  “Mrs. Wheeler,” Perly said, “I am sure you will find the result well worth the expense.”

  “Oh, are you.”

  “Jacques,” Tumbril said, “I’d still like some help here.”

  “All right,” Perly said. “Here’s the sequence. On Saturday night, an agent of mine kept tabs on this fellow Clanson, and late that night — just twenty–four hours before the robbery! — photographed him casing my building!”

  Tumbril nodded at the folder open in his hands. “Oh, is this him in the backseat?”

  “And that is my building, just beyond him. What my man did,” Perly said, “when he saw what neighborhood Clanson was headed toward, was to take a faster route, and be in position when the car went by.”

  “Then this next picture,” Tumbril said, “is him and some others getting out of the car. We’re farther away here, hard to make it out.”

  “My man did what he could with a telephoto lens. But I can tell you that’s a low–life bar farther down my street. Meeting the rest of the gang there, no doubt.”

  Mrs. W said, “Jay, let me see those pictures.”

  As Jay handed her the folder, Fiona slid one chair to the left, so she could look at the photos, too, and Perly said, “Unfortunately, my man couldn’t get clear pictures of the others in the car, but he said one was a tough–looking older woman, some sort of harridan, a real Ma Barker type, probably the brains of the gang.”

  Fiona looked at the photos. In awe, she raised her eyes to look at the stony profile of Mrs. W as that lady said to Perly, with icy calm, “A tough–looking older woman? A harridan? A Ma Barker type?”

  “When we get our hands on her,” Perly said, “and we will, I can guarantee you she’ll have a record as long as your arm.”

  Now Mrs. W did stand, though not precipitately or with apparent excitement. She stood as a thoughtful judge might stand when about to pronounce a death sentence. “The vehicle Brian is riding in, Mr. Perly,” she said, “is mine. I am the harridan seated next to him.”

  Perly blinked at her. “What?”

  “The third member of our nefarious gang in my limousine, Mr. Perly,” Mrs. W went on, “is Fiona here, my assistant. We had come from a party given by Brian’s television station, and we were on our way to a lounge considered at the moment to be the most desirable social venue in the entire city.”

  Perry’s mouth had sagged open during Mrs. W’s speech, but nothing had come out of it, so now it closed again. He continued to stare at Mrs. W as though all cerebral function behind those eyes had come to a halt.

  Tumbril, clearing his throat, said, “Livia, I don’t think Jacques is usually in that neighborhood at night.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be all there by day, either,” Mrs. W said, turning her icy gaze on Tumbril. “And if you intend to pay him for this harassment of an innocent boy, Jay, it shall come from your pocket, because you are no longer my lawyer.”

  “Livia, you don’t want to —”

  “Mr. Roanoke,” Mrs. W said, turning toward that interested observer, her manner still steely but less aggressive, “we would like Brian returned to us now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Noah Roanoke said.

  Chapter 64

  * * *

  Before dinner, Mr. Hemlow read to them, in the big rustic cathedral–ceilinged living room at the compound, with a staff–laid fire crackling red and orange in the deep stone fireplace, part of a paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue on the subject of chess: “Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.”

  Closing the book, nodding his red–bereted head this way and that, Mr. Hemlow said, “What Poe calls draughts is what we know as the game of checkers.”

  Kelp said, “I like checkers.”

  Eppick said, “That’s easy. Everybody likes checkers. Shall I put the book back on the shelf, Mr. Hemlow?”

  “Thank you.”

  “My Mom used to read to me,” Stan said. “When I was a kid. Mostly biographies of race car drivers.”

  “It’s good when a family shares an interest,” Mr. Hemlow said.

  No hostess in her right mind would have put together a guest list for dinner like this and hope to make it work, but somehow it wasn’t being too bad. Since nobody wanted to do the seven–hour round trip from and to New York in one day, it had been agreed that Mr. Hemlow would open the compound and he himself would spend the night in his ground floor bedroom in the main house with one or two staff members for assistance, while the other six would sleep in the simple but comfortable guesthouse, then head back to the city in the morning. Mr. Hemlow’s staff, all local part–timers but loyal over the long term to a generous boss, would make dinner and breakfast, and now, as the group waited for dinner, they were chatting together, not too easily, in the main living
room.

  Eppick, having returned from putting Poe back in his place, said, “Mr. Hemlow, while we’re waiting for dinner here, maybe this is the time to talk a little about recompense.”

  Nodding, Kelp said, “That sounds good.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Mr. Hemlow said. “Something to whet the appetite, as it were. As you gentlemen know, I do not intend to sell the set but to keep it, right over there.” And he gestured to where Kelp had earlier opened out the empty chessboard onto a large side table. “Nor,” he added, “is there an accurate figure as to the set’s value.”

  “That’s one of the things,” Eppick said, “they we’re gonna be working on in the private eye’s office.”

  Tiny tapped a knuckle on his oak chair arm. “The millions, we know that much,” he said. “That’s close enough for us.”

  “Yes, of course.” Mr. Hemlow was meeting most of the gang, and especially Tiny, for the first time, and seemed less taken aback than most people when initially rounding a corner to find Tiny Bulcher in their path. It may have been simply that life had already given him so many sharp lefts and rights that he couldn’t actually be jolted any more. In any case, he merely gave Tiny’s comment a benign response and went on to say, “I think we will all agree that, in this particular instance, the value to be considered is not the worth of the chess set but the worth of the skill and ingenuity and determination demonstrated by yourselves.”

  Stan said, “A fence would give us ten percent.”

  “The issue of a fence,” Mr. Hemlow said, “does not arise, as this was a commissioned work.”

  “Unlike most jobs you people pull,” Eppick added, “you aren’t grabbing something to turn around and sell it. This time, you’ve been hired to do a little something in your area of expertise. You’re like employees here.”

  Dortmunder said, “So this is the one time I’m not an independent contractor, is that it?”

  “In a way,” Eppick said. “But of course, without the retirement. Or the health program.”

  Stan said, “Or the softball team.”

  “That, too.”

  Mr. Hemlow said, “The number I was thinking of, to express my appreciation for a job well done, was twenty thousand dollars a man.”

  Tiny did that tock on the chair arm again. “No, you weren’t,” he said.

  Mr. Hemlow gazed upon Tiny from under his red beret. “I wasn’t?”

  “A hundred G,” Tiny said, “isn’t ten percent of millions.”

  Eppick said, “It’s ten percent of one million.”

  “Let’s not forget those other millions,” Tiny told him.

  Mr. Hemlow seemed to chuckle down inside there, unless he was merely having a stroke. Then he said, “I can see why you were chosen to negotiate for the group.”

  “He chose himself, if you want to know,” Dortmunder said.

  “Nevertheless,” Mr. Hemlow said, “let me see what your friend has to say.” To Tiny he said, “How much do you think is fair?”

  “Not fair,” Tiny said. “Right. Fifty G a man.”

  Even Mr. Hemlow was startled by that one. “A quarter million dollars?”

  “Now we’re getting there,” Tiny said.

  “I couldn’t possibly,” Mr. Hemlow said, “make an outlay that lavish.”

  “We can still give the thing back,” Tiny said. “Let you try with a more economical bunch. Or just melt it down and sell it off ourselves.”

  Judson said, “That might be kinda fun, Tiny.”

  Mr. Hemlow said, “I could go to twenty–five.”

  “The funny thing about the acoustics in this place,” Tiny said, “with the high ceiling and all, sometimes you can’t hear a thing.”

  Dortmunder said, “Mr. Hemlow, I really think you gotta come up a little bit here, just so the guys have a sense of self–esteem outa this.”

  Mr. Hemlow shuddered all over, even more than usual, while his left leg tapped out a series of SOSes. Then he said, employing the number everybody in the room had known they would end on, “I will give you my absolute top offer, and that is thirty thousand dollars per man. For my own self–esteem, I can do no more.”

  A little silence. Everybody looked at Tiny, who looked around at everybody else and finally said, “You wanna let it go cheap?”

  Kelp said, “We’re not gonna give it back, Tiny, that’s not realistic.”

  Stan said, “And taking it apart, carrying it around to people like Stoon and Arnie, that’s too much like work.”

  Dortmunder said, “You got a deal, Mr. Hemlow.”

  “Good.”

  “Dinner,” the maid said.

  Chapter 65

  * * *

  Mrs. W insisted on hosting a celebratory dinner, so after Fiona and Brian went back home to the apartment so Brian could shower and change and shake like a leaf and down some medicinal vodka and generally try to get over the horrible experience of having been, for however brief a moment, in the coils of the law, they went back across town in Mrs. W’s waiting limo to meet the lady herself at Endi Rhuni, a hot new Thai–Bangladeshi fusion restaurant on East Sixty–Third Street, where the vulture wings, when a shipment had come in, were the spécialité de la maison.

  Mrs. W was already there, resplendent, as the saying goes, behind a large snowy white round table at a banquette built for six. They joined her, Fiona sliding in to Mrs. W’s left, Brian to her right, and Brian began by ordering a little more vodka, just to be certain he was keeping the dosage up to the proper level.

  The first business of the occasion was to order a meal. Vulture wings happened to be in residence, so Mrs. W and Brian both ordered some, while Fiona, feeling less adventurous, had the llama steak with yams. Then Mrs. W called for a New Zealand pinot noir she felt good about, the waiter left, and she said, “Brian. Are you quite recovered?”

  “Dickens,” he said. His voice still shook a bit, but not as much as when he’d first been released to them. “It’s Dickens, that’s what it is. I never knew what people meant when they said that, when they said Dickensian, you know, that place is Dickensian, or look down there, that’s Dickensian. But now I do. Boy, believe me, now I do. That was Dickensian.”

  “It sounds terrible, you poor boy,” Mrs. W said.

  “I even thought,” he said, with a meaningful look at Fiona, “if I knew anything I’d tell, just to get out of there. But then I thought, if I tell, I’m part of it, and I’ll never get out. So I didn’t tell. Not that I knew anything I could tell.”

  “Of course not,” Fiona said.

  He shook his head. “The place was so awful, I mean just the place. I mean cold, and hard, and dirty. But the people. Mrs. W, you don’t even want to know there are people like that.”

  “No, I’m sure I don’t.”

  “You don’t want those people out of there,” Brian told her. “You want me out of there —”

  “Of course.”

  “But not those people. You don’t want those people out of there. Ever. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key, there’s something else I never really understood. You know, I thought, for a while there I thought I was gonna have to spend the night there.”

  “Oh, Brian,” Mrs. W said, and squeezed his near forearm in sympathy.

  “I thought, how can I do this,” Brian went on. “I thought, this is going to destroy me, even if I get out of here someday someday someday, it’s going to destroy my talent, how can I ever try to draw something funny ever again or —”

  “Oh, Brian,” Fiona said, “you’ll get over it.”

  “— put on the Reverend Twisted, knowing those people are there. I mean, I’m a different person now, I can’t, I can’t be like I was —”

  “The new Brian may be even better than the old,” Mrs. W assured him, and said, “Oh, your glass is empty,” and raised a commanding hand to have his vodka refreshed.

  By then the food and wine had started to arrive, so they set to, and the conversation skirted around other topics without ever leaving Brian’s life
–changing experiences entirely unobserved, and by the end of the meal the tremor in his voice was almost completely gone. They finished with shared desserts — peanut parfait, lychee flan, bees’ nest soup — and were happily passing them around when all at once the theme music from Mighty Mouse rollicked beneath the table.

  “Oh, I forgot!” Brian cried, scrabbling around inside his clothing. “I always turn it off when — I’m just so flustered, I don’t know —” He popped the cell phone open and looked in it. “It’s the station,” he said. “Maybe they want me to take tomorrow off to recover. I better answer it.”