What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  “Maybe it’s a political statement,” Kelp suggested, and the door opened, and in came a hearty heavyset fellow in a tan check sports jacket and open–collar shirt. He had a wide pleasant mouth and a big round pleasant nose, and he carried a glass full of ice cubes that clinked pleasantly as he moved. This was Ralph Winslow, the lockman, who was taking Wally Whistler’s place this time because Wally, since their work together at the N–Joy, had fallen upon a mischance. He’d been waiting for a crosstown bus and hardly even noticing the armored car parked there, in the bus stop because it was also in front of the bank, and when the armored car’s alarm went off he hadn’t at first realized it had anything to do with him, so he was still standing there when the guards came running out of the bank, all of which he was still explaining to various officials deep in the bowels of authority, which meant Ralph Winslow had been phoned and was free.

  “Whadaya say, Ralph?” Kelp said, and Ralph stood a moment, glass in hand, ice cubes tinkling, as though he were at a cocktail party. Then, “I say, evening, gents,” he decided, and closed the door.

  “Now,” Dortmunder said, “all we need is Tiny.”

  “Oh, he’s outside,” Ralph said, coming around to sit to Dortmunder’s left, where he too could watch the door.

  “What, is he getting a drink?”

  “Tiny? He’s got his drink,” Ralph said. “When I came back, he was explaining to some fellas there how you could cure a cold right away by squeezing all the air out of a person.”

  “Uh oh,” Dortmunder said.

  “Bad air out, good air in, that’s what he was saying,” Ralph explained.

  Standing, Kelp said, “I’ll go get him.”

  “Good,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp left the room, and Ralph said, “I understand this one’s out of town.”

  “Vegas,” Dortmunder told him.

  Nodding, Ralph said, “Not a bad place, Vegas. Not as good as the old days, when they were going for the high rollers. Back then, you could put on a sheet and be an oil billionaire and unlock your way through half the safes in town. These days, they’ve gone family, family oriented, mom and pop and the kids and the recreational vehicle. Your best bet now, out there, is be a midget and dress like a schoolkid off the bus.”

  “I don’t think,” Dortmunder said, “it’s gone entirely Disneyland.”

  “No no,” Ralph agreed, “they still got all the old stuff, only it’s adapted. The ladies on the stroll are all cartoon characters now. Polly Pross, Howdy Hooker.”

  “And the twins,” Stan said, “Bim and Bo.”

  “Them, too,” Ralph agreed, and the door opened, and Kelp came in, looking a little dazed. “They’re layin’ around on the floor out there,” he said, “like a neutron bomb.”

  “Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp continued to hold the door open, and in came a medium range intercontinental ballistic missile with legs. Also arms, about the shape of fire hydrants but longer, and a head, about the shape of a fire hydrant. This creature, in a voice that sounded as though it had started from the center of the earth several centuries ago and just now got here, said, “Hello, Dortmunder.”

  “Hello, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “What did you do to Rollo’s customers?”

  “They’ll be all right,” Tiny said, coming around the table to take Kelp’s place. “Soon as they catch their breath.”

  “Where did you toss it?” Dortmunder asked.

  Tiny, whose full name was Tiny Bulcher and whose strength was as the strength of ten even though his heart in fact was anything but pure, settled himself in Kelp’s former chair and laughed and whomped Dortmunder on the shoulder. Having expected it, Dortmunder had already braced himself against the table, so it wasn’t too bad. “Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “you make me laugh.”

  “I’m glad,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp, expressionless, picked up his glass and went around to the wrong side of the table, where he couldn’t see the door without turning his head.

  “You should be glad,” Tiny told him. “So you got something, huh?”

  “I think so,” Dortmunder said.

  “Well, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “you know me. I like a sure thing.”

  “Nothing’s sure in this life, Tiny.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Tiny said, and flexed his arms, and drank, so that for the first time you could see that he had a tall glass tucked away inside that hand. The glass contained a bright red liquid that might have been cherry soda, but was not. Putting this glass, now half empty, on the table, Tiny said, “Lay it on us, Dortmunder.”

  Dortmunder took a deep breath, and paused. The beginning was the difficult part, the story about the goddam ring. He said, “Does everybody know about the ring? The ring I had?”

  “Oh, sure,” Stan said, and Ralph said, “I called you, remember?” and Stan said, “I called you, too,” and Tiny, who had not called, laughed. This was a laugh, full–bodied and complete, the real thing, a great roaring laugh that made all the cartons around the walls vibrate, so that he laughed to a kind of distant church bell accompaniment. Then he got hold of himself and said, “Dortmunder, I heard about that. I wish I could’ve seen your face.”

  “I wish so, too, Tiny,” Dortmunder said, and Tiny laughed all over again.

  There was nothing to be done about Tiny; you either didn’t invite him to the party, or you indulged him. So Dortmunder waited till the big man had calmed himself down — caught his breath, so to speak — and then he said, “I been trying to get that ring back. I tried out on Long Island, and I tried here in the city, and I tried down in Washington, DC. Every time I missed the guy, so I never got the ring, but every time I made a profit.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Kelp said, and glanced over his shoulder at the door.

  “But by now,” Dortmunder said, “the problem is, all the stuff I lifted from this guy, he knows I’m on his tail.”

  Kelp said, “John? Do you think so?”

  “The fifty thousand we took from the Watergate,” Dortmunder said. “I think that’s the one that did it.”

  Tiny said, “Dortmunder? You took fifty G outta the Watergate? That’s no third–rate burglary.”

  Once again, Dortmunder let that reference sail on by, though by now he was coming to recognize its appearances, like Halley’s Comet. He said, “I think the guy was suspicious before that, when we cleaned out his place in New York —”

  “Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “you have been busy.”

  “I have,” Dortmunder agreed. “Anyway, after that, the guy changed his MO. Before then, he was very easy to track, he’s this rich guy that tells his companies where he’s gonna be every second, and Wally — Remember Wally Knurr?”

  “The butterball,” Tiny said, and smiled in fond recollection. “He was amusing, too, that Wally,” he said. “Could be fun to play basketball with him.”

  Not sure he wanted to know exactly what Tiny meant by that, Dortmunder went on, “Well, anyway, Wally and his computer tracked the guy for us, until all of a sudden — the guy’s name is Max Fairbanks, he’s very rich, he’s an utter pain in the ass — he went to the mattresses. Nobody’s supposed to know where he is, nobody gets his schedule, he shifted everything around, Wally can’t find him no matter what.”

  “You got him scared, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, grinning, and gave him an affectionate punch in the arm that drove Dortmunder into Ralph, to his left.

  Regaining his balance, Dortmunder said, “The one place he’s still scheduled for that everybody knows about is next week in Vegas.”

  Ralph said, “That’s the only exception?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Ralph tinkled ice cubes. “How come?”

  “I figure,” Dortmunder said, “it’s a trap.”

  Kelp said, “John, you don’t have to be paranoid, you know. The Vegas stuff was set up before he went secret, that’s all.”

  “He’d change it,” Dortmunder said. “He’d switch things around, l
ike he did in Washington and like he’s doing in Chicago. But, no. In Vegas, he’s right on schedule, sitting out there fat and easy and obvious. So it’s a trap.”

  Tiny said, “And you want to walk into it.”

  “What else am I gonna do?” Dortmunder asked him. “It’s my only shot at the guy, and he knows it, and I know it. If I don’t get the ring then, I’ll never get it. So I got to go in, saying, okay, it’s a trap, how do I get around this trap, and I figure the way how I get around this trap is with the four guys in this room.”

  “Who,” Tiny said, “you want to amble into this trap with you.”

  Ralph said, “This won’t be a Havahart trap, John.”

  Stan said, “What do I drive?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Dortmunder promised him, and turned to Tiny to say, “We go into the trap, but we know it’s a trap, so we already figured a way out of it. And when we come out, I got my ring, and you got one–fifth of the till at the Gaiety Hotel.”

  Tiny pondered that. “That’s one of the Strip places, right? With the big casino?”

  “It makes a profit,” Dortmunder said.

  “And so will we,” Kelp said, looking over his shoulder.

  Tiny contemplated the proposition, then contemplated Dortmunder. “You always come up with the funny ones, Dortmunder,” he said. “It’s amusing to be around you.”

  “Thank you, Tiny.”

  “So go ahead,” Tiny said. “Tell me more.”

  Chapter 39

  * * *

  The wood–cabinet digital alarm clock on the bedside table began to bong softly, a gentle baritone, a suggestion rather than a call, an alert but certainly not an alarm. In the bed, Brandon Camberbridge moved, rolled over, stretched, yawned, opened his eyes, and smiled. Another perfect day.

  Over the years since he’d first arrived out here, Brandon Camberbridge had tried many different ways to rouse himself at the appropriate moment every day, but it wasn’t until his dear wife, Nell, had found this soothing but insistent clock on a shopping expedition to San Francisco that his awakenings had become as perfect as the rest of his world.

  At first, long ago, he had tried having one of the hotel operators call him precisely at noon each day, but he hadn’t liked it; the prospect of speaking to an employee the very first thing, even before brushing one’s teeth, was unpleasant, somehow. Later, he’d tried various alarm clocks of the regular sort, but their beepings and squawkings and snarlings had made it seem as though he were forever coming to consciousness in some barnyard rather than in paradise, so he’d thrown them all out, or given them away to employees who were having trouble getting to work on time; the gentle hint, before the axe. Then he’d tried radio alarms, but no station satisfied; rock music and country music were far too jangling, and religious stations too contentious, while both E–Z Lisnen and classical failed to wake him up.

  Trust Nell. The perfect wife, in the perfect setting, off she went into the wilds of America to come back with the perfect alarm clock, and again this morning it bonged him gently up from Dreamland.

  Responding to its unaggressive urge, up rose Brandon Camberbridge, a fit and tanned forty–seven, and jogged to the bathroom, then from there to the Stairmaster, then from there to the shower, then from there to his dressing room where he fitted himself into slacks (tan), polo shirt (green, with the hotel logo:), and loafers (beige), and then from there at last out to the breakfast nook, where, along with his breakfast, there awaited his perfect secretary, Sharon Thistle, and the view out from his bungalow to his perfect paradise, the Gaiety Hotel, Battle–Lake and Casino, here in sunny sunny Las Vegas.

  “Good morning,” he cried, and seated himself before half a grapefruit, two slices of crispy dry toast, a glass of V–8 juice, and a lovely pot of coffee.

  “Good morning,” Sharon said, returning his smile. A pleasantly stout lady, Sharon combined the motherly with the quick–witted in a way that Brandon could only think of as perfect. She had her own cup of coffee before her at the oval table placed in front of the view, but she would have had her real breakfast hours ago, since she still lived the normal hours that Brandon had given up seven years back when he’d taken over this job as manager of the Gaiety. The life of the hotel was centered primarily in the evening hours, spilling both backward to the afternoon and forward to late night, and it seemed to Brandon that the man responsible for it all should be available when activity in his realm was at its height. Thus it was that he had trained himself to retire no later than four every morning, and spring back out of bed promptly at noon. It was a regimen he had come to relish, yet another part of the perfection of his paradise.

  The view before him as he ate his breakfast was of his life, and his livelihood. From here, he could see over manicured lawns and plantings and wandering asphalt footpaths to the swimming pool, already filled with children no doubt shrieking with joy. (In this air–conditioned bungalow, with the double–paned glass in every window, one didn’t actually hear the shrieking, but one could see all those wide–open mouths, like baby birds in a nest, and guess.)

  Beyond the pool and some more plantings rose the sixteen–story main building of the hotel, sand–colored and irregularly shaped so as to give every room in the hotel a view of some other part of the hotel, there not being much of anything beyond the hotel that could reasonably have been called a view.

  To the left he could just glimpse the tennis courts, and to the right a segment of the stands circling the Battle–Lake. Above shone the dry blue sky of Las Vegas, a pale thin blue like that of underarm stick deodorant. From the trees, had the windows been open and the children in the pool silenced, one could have heard the recorded trills of bird song. Who could ask for anything more?

  Not Brandon. Smiling, happy, he ate a bit of grapefruit — the boss’s grapefruit was always perfectly sectioned, of course — and then said, “Well, what have we today?”

  “Nothing much,” Sharon told him, leafing through her ever–present steno pad, “except Earl Radburn.”

  “Ah.”

  Earl Radburn was head of security for all of TUI, which meant he was technically in charge of the security staff here. But their own chief of security, Wylie Branch, was a very able man, which Earl understood, so Earl, except for the occasional drop–in, more or less left Wylie alone to do the job. So Brandon said, “Just touching base, is he?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sharon said, surprisingly. “He wants to meet with you.”

  “Does he? And what do you suppose that’s all about?” But even as he asked the question, Brandon realized what the answer must be, so he amended his statement, saying, “Oh, of course. The big cheese.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Sharon said, with her understanding smile. The rapport between Brandon and Sharon, it sometimes seemed to him, was almost as perfect as that between himself and his dear wife, Nell, who at the moment was away on another of her shopping expeditions into the wilds of America, this time to Dallas.

  Brandon picked up his toast and said, “Has he arrived?”

  “Flew in from the East this morning,” Sharon reported. “We had a cottage open.”

  “Good,” Brandon said, and bit off some toast, and ruminated on the state of his world.

  For instance, of course they had a cottage open. In the old days, the six cottages around the Battle–Lake were almost always completely booked, with clients ranging from oil sheiks to rock stars, but since the shift in emphasis all over this city to a family trade, and the shift of those splendid high rollers of yesteryear to other oases of relaxation, mostly outside the United States, the cottages — two and three bedrooms, saunas, whirlpools, satellite TV, private atria, completely equipped kitchen, private staff available on request, all far beyond the budget of the average family — were empty more often than not, and were used these days mostly by TUI executives and other businesspersons having some relationship with TUI. In fact, when the big cheese himself, Max Fairbanks, arrived next Monday, he too would be put in one
of the cottages — the best one.

  But here was Earl Radburn already, on Wednesday, a full five days in advance of the big cheese, which did seem like overdoing it a bit. Swallowing a smooth taste of coffee, Brandon said, “Have you set up an appointment?”

  “Three P.M.,” the irreplaceable Sharon told him, consulting her steno pad. “With Wylie Branch, in cottage number one.”

  Where the big cheese would stay. “Ah, well,” Brandon said. “Into every life a little boring meeting must fall. We’ve survived worse.”

  Outside, the silent children shrieked.