The inner office door opened and J. C. Taylor came through. A dangerous-looking black-haired beauty in her mid-thirties, she paced forward like a predator who’d just picked up a fresh scent. Behind her in her office was Maylohda, the fictitious South Pacific island nation she used in her developing-country scams. (So many people want to help!) Looking at Judson, she said, “You still here?”
“Pretty heavy today, J. C.,” he said. “I’m done with the detective course and the sex book and I’m just finishing up with the music.”
“Don’t stay too late,” she advised. “You don’t want to get stale.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
“Ma’am,” she said, with a scornful look, and left. Judson shrugged—it was so hard to know the right reactions to people when you were barely a person yourself at nineteen—and went back to, face it, work.
He always saved the music business for last, because those people were the most fun. The people who just wanted to be a detective at home in their spare time or just wanted to look at dirty pictures at home in their spare time were pretty cut-and-dried, merely sending in their money, but the people who sent music to Super Star Music to have lyrics set to it, or alternatively, lyrics for an infusion of music (sometimes A’s request meshing just fine with B’s, so what came in could be shipped right back out again, neither participant any the wiser), tended to write confessional letters of such mawkish cluelessness that Judson wished there were, somewhere in the world, a publisher gutsy enough to put out a collection of them.
But that was not to be, since dispassionate self-knowledge is not a quality held in much esteem by the majority of the human race, so not enough people would find the product funny. Oh, well; at least he could enjoy the sincerity of these simpletons, to ease his own stress in the workaday world.
Ah; this grandmother of eight had been compelled at last to her true vocation as love-song lyricist by the flaming car-crash death of her favorite seventeen-year-old grand-daughter. Well, Grandma, lucky for you she bought it.
And this is the last of today’s talents. Judson totted up the three totals and pushed his chair back from the desk, and the phone rang.
Answer? If he had already gone, the voice mail would take it. On the other hand, not too many phone calls came to this office, and he was bored enough and curious enough to pick up the receiver and deliver into it the standard patter: “J. C. Taylor. Mr. Taylor isn’t in at the moment.”
“That’s okay, Judson,” a known voice said. “We’re trying to get the book group back together again.”
“John,” Judson said, delighted. “I haven’t heard from you for a while.”
“I haven’t had anything to say for a while.”
Hope leaping in his breast, Judson said, “But now you do?”
“That’s why we wanna get the book group together,” John said. “We thought maybe the OJ at ten tonight.”
“That sounds very good, John,” Judson said, because it did, and smiled at the phone as he listened to John hang up.
Very good; yes. Though there was unlikely to be a book group involved in tonight’s meeting, Judson knew from past experience that this sort of get-together often ended in gains much more ill-gotten than these little scammed checks here, but on the other hand far much less like work.
Whistling, he double-locked the office and legged it to the elevator.
9
WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the OJ Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that Wednesday night at ten, the big low-ceilinged square room was underutilized. The booths along both sides and the tables in the middle were all empty. At the bar, along the rear of the room, Rollo the meaty bartender, off to the right, was slowly carving tomorrow’s specials onto a black blackboard with a stub of white chalk, a gray rag in his other hand. The regulars, as usual, were clustered along the left side of the bar.
It being April, the regulars were discussing taxes. “I might declare my bowling ball as an expense,” one said.
The guy to his right reared back. “Your bowling ball!”
“We wager certain amounts,” the first regular explained. “Only then I’d have to declare how much I won, and then pay tax on that. I asked the guy at the drugstore, which way do I come out ahead, he said he’d get back to me on that.”
As Dortmunder angled toward Rollo, he saw that the barman was groping in the direction of “lasagna,” but hadn’t quite reached it yet. Seeing Dortmunder, he nodded and said, “Long time no see.”
“I been semiretired,” Dortmunder told him. “Not on purpose.”
“That can be a drag.” Rollo pointed his jaw at the black-board. “Whadaya think?”
Dortmunder looked: LUHZANYA. “I don’t know about that H,” he said.
Rollo considered the entire word. “At least I’m sure of the L,” he said, as Andy Kelp joined Dortmunder and said, “How you doin? It isn’t a Z.”
Dortmunder turned to him. “What isn’t a zee?”
Kelp pointed. “That thing there. It’s an S.”
Rollo went akimbo, chalk staining the seam of his apron as he brooded at the blackboard. “It sounds like a Z,” he decided.
“Yeah,” Kelp acknowledged, “but you gotta remember, it’s a foreign tongue.”
“Oh, lasagna,” Dortmunder said, catching up. “I think you’re right. I don’t think those languages even have a Z. Except the English do.”
“And the Polish,” Kelp said. “What they don’t have is vowels. And Rollo, what I don’t have is a drink.”
Rollo at once put down rag and chalk. “You two,” he said, “are bourbon on the rocks.” Reaching for ice and glasses, he said, “Who else we got tonight?”
Understanding that Rollo preferred to know his customers by their drink preferences, as being conducive to good customer relations, Dortmunder said, “Well, we got the beer and the salt, and the vodka and red wine, and I don’t know what the kid drinks.”
“He hasn’t settled down yet,” Rollo said. “He’s still making up his mind.” And he pushed forward toward them a round metal bar tray on which appeared RHEINGOLD WORLD’S FAIR 1939, atop which now stood two glasses containing ice cubes, a white plastic bowl with more ice cubes, and a bottle labeled Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon—”Our Own Brand.” “I’ll send them back,” he said.
Picking up the tray, Kelp said, “Good luck with the menu.”
“I’ll need it.” Rollo frowned at the blackboard. “Anyway,” he said, “I know there’s got to be a Y in there somewhere.”
Dortmunder followed Kelp as he carried the tray down along the bar past the regulars, where the third was now saying, “The idea of the flat tax is, you just pay the same as one month’s rent.”
Rounding the turn at the regulars, Dortmunder and Kelp trooped down the dim-lit hall, past the doors marked POINTERS and SETTERS over black dog silhouettes, and past the crammed-full narrow storage space for boxes of deposit bottles that had been a phone booth before the communications revolution and a certain amount of vandalism. At the end, while Kelp waited, Dortmunder pushed open a door on the right to reach in and switch on the light. Then they both entered.
This was a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cartons were stacked ceiling-high against all the walls, leaving an area in the middle just big enough for a beat-up old round wooden table with a once-green felt top, surrounded by half a dozen armless wooden chairs. The light Dortmunder had switched on was a single bare bulb under a round tin reflector hanging from a long black wire over the center of the table.
Dortmunder and Kelp went around this furniture to left and right, Kelp putting down the tray as they took the chairs that most directly faced the open door. The first arrivals always took the chairs facing the door, leaving it to the latecomers to be made uneasy by the proximity of an open door behind their backs.
As he poured Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon over the ice in their glasses, Kelp said, “You tell them the story. I like to listen to it.”
“Well, Stan
already knows the story,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s only Tiny and the kid.”
“So those are the ones you tell.”
The hallway out there abruptly dimmed, as though there’d been a partial eclipse of the hall. Seeing that, Kelp said, “Here comes Tiny now.”
As Dortmunder nodded, the doorway filled with enough person to choke Jonah’s whale. This creature, who was known only to those who felt safe in considering him their friend as Tiny, had the body of a top-of-the-line SUV, in jacket and pants of a neutral gray that made him look like an oncoming low, atop which was a head that didn’t make you think of Easter Island so much as Halloween Island. In his left fist he carried a glass of what looked like, but was not, cherry soda. When he spoke it wasn’t a surprise that bass notes of an organ sounded: “I’m late.”
“Hi, Tiny,” Kelp said. “No, you’re not.”
Ignoring that, Tiny said, “I hadda take the limo driver back.”
“What, to the car service?”
“That’s where I got him. Turns out, he’s from California.” Tiny shook his Halloween Island head and came over to sit at Dortmunder’s right, so at least he had the doorway in profile.
Kelp said, “That could be okay, Tiny. There’s okay people in California.”
“In California,” Tiny said, “he’s also a limo driver.”
“So he knows how,” Kelp said.
“Every year,” Tiny said, “he drives people to the Oscars. Celebrities. He wanted to tell me, every year, every year, the celebrities he drove to the Oscars.”
“Oh,” Kelp said.
“There’s only so many,” Tiny said, “celebrities goin to the Oscars you can put up with. So finally I took him back, dropkicked him through the door, and said, gimme one doesn’t speak English. So how are you people?”
Dortmunder took over the conversational ball: “Just fine, Tiny.”
“I hope you got a good one here,” Tiny said.
“So do we,” Dortmunder said.
“It’s been a while,” Kelp said.
“Oh, I’m doin okay,” Tiny said. “I always do okay. I squeeze out a little livin here and there. But I’d like a little cushion for a while.”
“So would I,” Dortmunder said, and Stan and Judson came in together.
Stan carried a draft beer in one hand and a saltshaker in the other. As a driver, he preferred to limit his alcohol intake to the occasional sip, but beer left to its own devices soon grows flat, which nobody likes. A sparing shimmer of salt over the beer every once in a while causes the head to magically return.
Judson, on the other hand, was carrying a drink nobody recognized. It was in a tall cocktail glass with ice and was a kind of palish rose color, as though it were Tiny’s drink’s anemic sister.
When they came in, while the others were sharing greetings, Stan looked around, made a quick assessment, and said, “We’re late.” Then he homed in on the chair to Kelp’s left, leaving the kid to choose one of the chairs on the vulnerable side. But that was all right; he was a calm sort.
Once they were all seated, Kelp said, “Kid, if you don’t mind a nosy question, what’s that?”
“Campari and soda,” the kid said, with the proud smile of ownership.
“Campa—” Kelp pointed at the glass. “And what’s the yellow thing?”
“Lemon peel.”
“Uh-huh. If you don’t mind, how come?”
“Somebody had it in a movie, and it sounded nice. So I thought I’d try it.”
“And is it nice?”
“Yeah.” The kid shrugged. “Makes a change from beer.”
Everybody agreed with that, and then Kelp said, “John’s gonna tell the newcomers the story here.”
Stan said, “I picked up the kid at his place, and filled him in on the way over.”
“Oh,” Kelp said.
Looking around, Tiny said, “Does this mean I’m the last to know? I don’t like that much.”
Hastily, Stan told him, “What it is, Tiny, yesterday my Mom picked up a fare at Kennedy, he’s a reality television producer, turns out, he wants to film us pulling a heist, for twenty G a man plus per diem.”
Tiny nodded, but not as though he agreed with anything. He said, “And the get out of jail free card?”
Dortmunder said, “The guy says we’ll work around that.”
“Twenty years at hard labor,” Tiny commented. “That’s a lot to work around.”
Dortmunder said, “Andy and I had a discussion with the guy this afternoon, at his apartment.”
Stan said, “Oh? Where’s that?”
“One of those Trump buildings on the west side.”
“And how is it?”
Dortmunder shrugged. “Okay.”
“A little too bronze,” Kelp said.
Tiny said, “Over here, I’m still working around this.”
“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Andy did some computer trick—”
“It’s no trick,” Kelp said. “I Googled.”
“Oh, sure,” Stan said.
“Whatever,” Dortmunder said. “Turns out, this guy’s little company is owned by a bigger company, owned by a bigger company, and like that. Like those cartoons where every fish is getting eat by the bigger fish behind him.”
Tiny said, “So? What does this have to do with you and me?”
“We asked him,” Dortmunder said, “did he have something in particular he wanted us to boost, and he said no, dealer’s choice, he just wants to make the movie.”
“The evidence.”
“Yeah, that. So Andy had a suggestion for him.”
“I’m ready to hear it,” Tiny said.
Kelp said, “Why not boost something from one of those companies up there on top of him? That way, if law suddenly shows up, we were just foolin, never gonna do it for real.”
“That’s not bad,” Tiny admitted.
“In fact,” Stan said, “that’s good. An escape hatch.”
“So then,” Kelp said, “he asked what kind of thing we’d like to lift, and we said cash, and he said there’s no cash anywhere in all these big corporations. And all of a sudden—”
“Yeah,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp nodded. “We both saw it. All of a sudden, he remembered something. But then he clammed up, pretended like nothing happened.”
Stan said, “Why that son of a bitch.”
“Somewhere,” Dortmunder said, “somewhere in his working hours, Doug Fairkeep has seen cash.”
Tiny said, “Where?”
“That’s what we gotta figure out.”
Kelp pulled some sheets of paper from his pocket. “I printed out the companies and what they do,” he said. “Three copies. Tiny, here’s yours, Stan, you can share with the kid, and I’ll share with John.”
The room became quiet, as though it were study period. Everybody bent over the lists, looking for cash, failing to find it. Finally Tiny pushed his list away and said, “There’s no cash there. Real estate, movies, aircraft engines. Forget cash.”
“It hit him,” Dortmunder insisted. “We both noticed.”
The kid said, “What was it, like he just remembered?”
“Yeah, like that.”
The kid nodded. “So it’s not cash he’s around all the time,” he said. “It’s just some cash he happened to see a couple times. Or once.”
Tiny said, “That still doesn’t help.”
“Well, wait a minute,” the kid said. “What were you all talking about when he suddenly remembered the cash?”
Dortmunder and Kelp looked at one another. Dortmunder shrugged. “How there was no cash.”
Kelp said, “How even with Europe and Asia it was all wire transfers.”
The kid looked interested. “That’s what he was saying just before he remembered? Wire transfers to Europe and Asia?”
Dortmunder said, “No, Andy, that was after. Before, I said there were all these companies, and some of them overseas, so there had to be some cash around somewhere.”
The kid said to Dortmunder, “So you talked about overseas first.”
“Yeah, I did. And then he did that stutter-stop thing—”
“And then,” Kelp said, “he said how, even to Europe and Asia, it’s all wire transfers.”
“So it’s something foreign,” the kid said. “It’s cash, and it has something to do with Europe and Asia.”
“But Doug Fairkeep isn’t foreign,” Dortmunder said. “He doesn’t work foreign. His work is right here.”
“So where he saw the cash,” the kid said, “was here, on its way to Europe and Asia. Europe or Asia.”
Stan said, “Am I following this? We now think this Fair-keep guy at least once saw a bunch of cash around where he works, that was going to Europe or Asia. What the hell for?”
Kelp said, “They’re buying something?”
“What happened to the wire transfers?”
“Oh!” said the kid. When they all looked at him, he had a huge happy grin on his face. Lifting his glass, he toasted them all in Campari and soda, then knocked back a good swig of it, slapped the glass down onto the felt, and said, “Now I get it!”
That was the annoying thing about the kid, who was otherwise okay. Every once in a while, he’d get it before anybody else got it, and when he got it, he got it. So Tiny said to him, “If you got it, give it to us.”
“Bribes,” the kid said.
They looked at him. Stan said, “Bribes?”
“Every big company that does business in different countries,” the kid said, “bribes the locals when they want to come do business. Here, buy our aircraft engines, not that other guy’s aircraft engines, and you look like you could use another set of golf clubs. Here’s a little something for the wife. Wouldn’t you like to run our TV show on your station? I know they don’t pay you what you deserve; here, have an envelope.”
“I’ve heard about this,” Kelp said. “There’s a word everybody uses, it’s chai, it means ‘tea,’ you sit down together, you have a cuppa tea, you move the envelope.”
Tiny said, “So? That’s what they call business.”
“Somewhere around thirty years ago,” the kid said, “the US Congress passed a law, it’s illegal for an American company to bribe foreigners.”
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