What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were still there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.

  “Suitland?” May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, “There’s a place next to Washington called Suitland?”

  “Oh, sure,” Anne Marie said. “That’s very close in, over near District Heights.”

  “The whole place should be called Suitland,” John said.

  May said, “Are we going by there?”

  “No,” Anne Marie told her, “we’re taking the Beltway the other way around, through Bethesda.”

  Andy, driving with the nonchalance of somebody who didn’t much care if this car picked up a dent or two, said, “I’m on the Beltway? Or inside the Beltway? Or what?”

  “You’re on the Beltway,” Anne Marie told him. “Pretty soon you’ll cross the river and then turn off —”

  “What river?” Andy asked.

  Anne Marie, surprised, said, “The Potomac.”

  “Oh, right. The Potomac.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” John said, from the backseat.

  “I’m going to take you into the city from the south,” Anne Marie explained. “That’s the quickest way to get to the Watergate area. So we’ll be crossing the Potomac twice.”

  John said, “Andy, you got to introduce this person to Stan Murch.”

  Andy said, “I was just thinking the same thing.” Seeing Anne Marie’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “That’s a friend of ours that takes a particular interest in how you get from point A to point B.”

  Anne Marie said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Well, Stan kind of goes to extremes,” Andy said. “Is this your river?”

  “Yes,” Anne Marie said. “You want the exit to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.”

  “The George Washington Memorial Parkway? They really lean on it around here, don’t they?”

  “After a while, you don’t notice it,” Anne Marie assured him. “But it is a little, I admit, like living on a float in a Fourth of July parade. Here’s our turn.”

  There was a lot of traffic; this being Sunday, it was mostly tourist traffic, license plates from all over the United States, attached to cars that didn’t know where the hell they were going. Andy swivel–hipped through it all, startling drivers who were trying to read maps without changing lanes, and Anne Marie said, “Now you want the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “No, I’m not. There’s the sign. See?”

  Andy swung up and over, and there they were crossing the Potomac again, this time northbound, the city of Washington spread out in front of them like an almost life–size model of itself, as though it were all still in the planning stages and they could still decide not to go ahead with it.

  From here, things got sudden. “Route 29, the Whitehurst Freeway.”

  “Who was Whitehurst?” Andy asked, making the turn.

  “President after Grover,” Anne Marie said. “Stay with 29! Don’t take any of those other things. And especially don’t take 66.”

  “Get your kicks on Route 66,” Andy suggested.

  “Not this time. Sixty–six goes under the Watergate. Don’t take Twenty–Fifth Street, it goes the wrong way, you want the next one, down there, Twenty–Fourth Street.”

  “I thought that might be the next one,” Andy said.

  “It isn’t always,” Anne Marie told him. She watched as Andy made the turn, and said, “That street that goes off at an angle there, that’s New Hampshire, you want that.”

  “If you say so.”

  They got stopped by a light and Andy peered at the street signs. “Is that One Street?”

  “No, I Street. Sometimes they spell it like your eye, but it’s the letter. All the north–south streets are numbers, and all the east–west streets are letters.”

  “We’re on New Hampshire. What’s that?”

  “A spoke of the wagon wheel.”

  Andy nodded. “I bet there’s even some way that that makes sense,” he said, and the light turned green and he drove on over I and down past H, saying, “I thought it was gonna be J.”

  “Turn right on Virginia,” Anne Marie said.

  “Another spoke of the wagon wheel?”

  “Different wheel,” Anne Marie said.

  “Some time,” Andy said, stopping at another red light, “you’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  “You can turn right on red in Washington,” she told him, as the light turned green. “Or on green, for that matter.”

  Andy made the turn and said, “Somehow, I have a feeling I’m going in circles here.”

  “In a way,” Anne Marie said. “That’s the Watergate across the street there. Can you get over there?”

  “Well, that depends,” Andy said, “on how much all these other people care about their cars.”

  Fortunately, they all cared.

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on Anne Marie’s door. She was in a very nice room, the largest hotel room she’d ever seen, on the fifth floor of the Watergate Hotel, with large potted shrubs flanking the broad glass door leading to the balcony and a long view out over the Potomac to Virginia on the other side. She quit looking at that view to go over to the door and let Andy in. He’d dropped them at the hotel entrance and then driven away to, as he’d said, “deal with” the car, and now he was back. “All set,” he said, coming in.

  She shut the door. “What did you do with the car?”

  “Well, I drove away from here,” he told her, crossing to the bed where his big battered canvas bag had been placed by the bellboy, “and I came to a stop sign, so I stopped.”

  “And then what?”

  “I came back here,” he said, and zipped open the bag.

  She moved around until she could see his face. “You left the car at a stop sign? Just got out and left it there?”

  “Wiped the steering wheel first.” The others, before getting out of the car, had also smeared any place they might have left fingerprints.

  Anne Marie stared at him. “But … why? Why make a mess with the traffic?”

  “Well, you know,” Andy said, “I feel a certain responsibility to the doctor.”

  “I’m not following this,” Anne Marie admitted.

  Andy changed clothes while he explained. “Well, let’s say I found a parking space and left the car there.”

  “There are no parking spaces in Washington.”

  “So that’s another consideration. But say I did find something like that, it could be weeks before the cops notice anything and the doctor gets his car back. This way, the cops have already noticed the situation by now, they’re probably phoning the doctor this minute, he could be reunited with that nice vehicle before sundown. How do I look?”

  Andy was now wearing a short–sleeve white dress shirt open at the collar with a half–dozen pens in a white pocket protector in the shirt pocket, plus khaki pants and tan workboots and dark–framed eyeglasses with clip–on sunglasses angled up toward his forehead and a yellow hardhat. In his left hand he held a clipboard. Work gloves protruded from his right hip pocket. “Different,” Anne Marie decided.

  “Good.”

  “What’
s going to happen now?”

  “Well, you and May can do some sight–seeing or shopping or whatever, figure out where we’ll eat dinner, stuff like that. And John and me,” Andy said, hefting the clipboard as he crossed to the phone, “are gonna go case the joint. What’s his room number?”

  Chapter 33

  * * *

  The Watergate is a complex, not one building but six, all of them odd–shaped and dropped at random onto a triangular chunk of land next to Kennedy Center, flanked by the Potomac on the west, Virginia Avenue on the northeast, and New Hampshire Avenue (with the Saudi Arabian embassy a giant gray toolbox across the street) to the southeast. The beret–shaped building at the apex of the triangle is Watergate East, a co–op apartment building divided into two addresses: Watergate East, North and Watergate East, South, which should not be confused with Watergate South, a boomerang–shaped building, also a co–op, behind Watergate East, South. The final co–op is a riverboatlike trapezoid at the angle between Virginia Avenue and the river and, in a burst of creative nomenclature, it is called Watergate West.

  We’re not done. Sorry, but we’re not done. There are also two office buildings, famous in the Nixon administration. (The Democratic National Committee is no longer headquartered there.) These are called Watergate 600 and Watergate 2600, and behind the latter is the 235–room Watergate Hotel. Lest we forget, there’s also the Watergate Mall, tucked in behind Watergate East, full of all kinds of shopping opportunities. And finally, there’s an ornamental pool in the middle of the complex (probably called the Watergate Water), surrounded by the kind of landscaping usually associated with model railroad sets; trees made of cotton balls dipped in green ink, that sort of thing.

  The complex is open and closed at the same time, the mall absolutely open to pedestrians (any one of whom could be a shopper), the office buildings and hotel having normally minimal security, and the apartment houses primarily guarded by security men and women in blue blazers who sit at counters in the lobbies and buzz in the acceptable arrivers while presumably rejecting the unclean.

  It was in Watergate East, North that TUI maintained a two–bedroom two–bathroom fourth–floor apartment, where Max Fairbanks was scheduled to spend Sunday and Monday nights, while appearing before a congressional committee on Monday afternoon. And it was here, in that apartment, where John Dortmunder intended to find Max Fairbanks and relieve him of a certain ring.

  • • •

  Sunday afternoon. Dortmunder and Kelp, invisible in their engineers’ drag, prowled the complex, making notations on their clipboards and saluting the occasional security person by touching their pens to their temples. (The first time he did this, Dortmunder touched the wrong end of his pen to his temple, but after that he got it right.)

  Wandering, roving, they found the two–level garage beneath the apartment building and saw that here, too, access to the elevators was monitored by building staff, but very loosely. Then they found the truck ramp that descended beneath the building and on out to the back, giving access for deliveries to the boutiques in the mall. A person could move between the truck ramp and the upper level of the garage through a door with a laughable lock.

  They went on through the mall, unseen, and out to the promenades that connected all the buildings. The hotel was down to their right, the Watergate Water dead ahead. The buildings all around them were thoroughly balconied, to take advantage of the river views, and the balcony railings were composed of rows of spaced vertical white concrete stanchions, looking from the distance like very serious teeth, so that from down here the buildings were stacks of sharks’ jawbones, one atop the other, all those teeth sticking straight up.

  Kelp looked up at the balconies of Watergate East, North and said, “Hey.”

  Dortmunder looked up. “What?”

  “She’s gone now.”

  “Who?”

  “There was a woman up there, leaning over the balcony, gotta be right near where we’re going tonight, she looked like Anne Marie.”

  “Couldn’t be,” Dortmunder said. “The hotel’s over there.”

  “I know. She just looked like. Well … from this distance.”

  “And you probably don’t really know her looks yet,” Dortmunder pointed out, and added, “She’s a good sport, isn’t she.”

  “I sure hope so,” Kelp said. “Let’s look at that garage some more.”

  • • •

  A little after three, they got back to Dortmunder’s room, and May wasn’t there. “Maybe they’re both in my room,” Kelp said, and phoned, but there was no answer. So they sat down at the round table near the balcony and the view — from here, up close, the teeth looked like a highway divider — and went over the notes they’d taken, the kinds of locks they’d seen, the internal TV monitors they’d noted, the posts and routes of the security personnel. They didn’t have information, of course, about the actual apartment and the lay of the land up there, but that would come later, when they went in.

  About fifteen minutes after they’d arrived, May and Anne Marie came in, grinning, and Kelp said, “Hey, there. Have a good time?”

  “Pretty good,” Anne Marie said, and May dropped on the round table in front of them a bunch of Polaroid pictures.

  Kelp picked up one of the pictures and looked at it. A curving hall with round nearly flush ceiling lights. Gray patterned wallpaper, shiny brown wood doors, a kind of mauve carpet with a big complex medallion on it every ten feet or so. A red–lettered exit sign some distance away around the curve. Kelp said, “What’s this?”

  “The hall outside the apartment where you’re going,” May told him, and pointed. “That’s the door to it right there.”

  Anne Marie touched a couple of other pictures, saying, “This is an apartment just like the one where you’re going, only it’s two floors down. But it’s the same layout.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp went through the pictures. Interiors, exteriors, balcony shots, elevator shots. Kelp said, “What is all this?”

  “We thought it might help,” May said.

  Anne Marie said, “We weren’t doing anything else, so what the heck.”

  Kelp said, “So that was you, up on the balcony.”

  “Oh, did you see me?” Anne Marie smiled. “You should have waved.”

  Stunned, Dortmunder said, “May? How did you do this?”

  “Turns out,” May said, “there’s only certain special real estate agents are permitted to list the apartments here, because it’s all co–ops. So every Sunday afternoon, between noon and three, there’s open house.”

  “It’s over now,” Anne Marie said.

  “The way it works,” May explained, “you go to the desk downstairs and check in —”

  “I used my real name and ID,” Anne Marie said.

  “There didn’t seem to be any harm in it,” May said. “Anyway, after a couple minutes a real estate agent comes and gets you and rides up in the elevator with you and tells you what’s available, and asks what you’re interested in.”

  “There’s a lot of people at this open house,” Anne Marie said. “I got the idea a bunch of them are people already living there in that building, they just want to snoop around in their neighbors’ apartments.”

  “So after you’ve looked at a couple places,” May went on, “you just tell the real estate agent thank you, I can find the elevator on my own, and you leave. And it’s okay because she’s got half a dozen other people she’s showing around.”

  “So then you take the stairs,” Anne Marie continued, “and go wherever you want. If we knew how to pick locks, we could have gone right into that apartment you fellas want, and took pictures all over the place.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other, their mouths open. “If I’d known,” Dortmunder said, “I could have gone in there, done what they said, got into the apartment, and just wait for that son of a bitch to show up.”

  “That would have been very nice,” Kelp agreed.

  “It’s over now,” May
said. “It’s after three.”

  Anne Marie said, “But they do it every Sunday.”

  “Next Sunday,” Dortmunder said, “Fairbanks isn’t gonna be here, and neither are we.” He sighed, then more or less squared his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “No use crying over spilt blood. We can still get in, no problem.”