What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  So she’d taken steps. She had seen to it that, when the time came to cut loose from Andy Kelp and his lunatic friends, she could go ahead and cut, and be safe as houses.

  First of all, she was traveling alone. Second, absolutely nobody on earth except Andy’s friends had the slightest idea she even knew Andy Kelp. And third, before leaving New York she had written letters to two friends back in Lancaster, in both of them breaking the news that Howard had left her, and that she had stayed on in New York City a while to try to figure out what to do next with her life, and that she had now decided to come home but would spend a week in Las Vegas on the way. (Not that Las Vegas was exactly on the way from New York, New York, to Lancaster, Kansas. She was overshooting Lancaster by about eleven hundred miles. But who’s counting?)

  So that’s what would happen. She had come to Las Vegas, as announced, and she would spend a week, and then she would go home. And the fact that a major failed casino robbery — diversion! — would have taken place in the hotel while she was in residence would be no more than a coincidence, an exciting extra on her vacation to make up for the loss of her husband. After all, hundreds of other people would have been staying in the same hotel at the same time.

  She unpacked, briskly and efficiently. Life had been one hotel room after another recently — this motel–box in the sky couldn’t hold a candle to that terrific room at the Watergate — and she’d become very adept at the transitions. Then, looking out the window once more at the near view of the hotel grounds and the far view of out–of–focus tan flatness and the distant view of low gray ridges at the horizon line, she wondered what she would do with herself in the quiet time until Andy reappeared.

  The pool down there did look as though it might be fun. Normally, she’d be doubtful about the pool, because she felt she was about fifteen pounds overweight to be acceptable in a bathing suit, but from what she’d seen of the Gaiety’s customers so far she believed her nickname around here would be Slim, so the pool it was.

  She changed into her suit and packed a small purse, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. It was — who else would it be? — Andy: “Hey, Anne Marie, I heard you were in town. It’s Andy.”

  “Andy!” she said, being surprised on cue. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, a little convention, the usual. I’m here with John.”

  “You want to come over?” she asked him. “Say hello?” And look out my window, of course, while you’re here.

  “Maybe later,” he said, surprisingly. She’d expected them to want to case the joint right away. “Maybe tomorrow morning,” he said. “We gotta get John dressed, a couple other things. Midmorning, okay?”

  “I’ll probably be somewhere around the pool,” she said, with furrowed brow.

  “See you then.”

  Anne Marie hung up and left the room and headed for the pool, to check it out. And all the way down in the elevator she kept thinking: Get John dressed?

  Chapter 46

  * * *

  “I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t know about those knees, to begin with.”

  “You brought those knees in with you, John,” Kelp reminded him. “Look at the clothes.”

  It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount–store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a bum rap. On the other hand, with these clothes, it was very hard to look at the clothes anyway.

  This was the end result of Dortmunder’s having told Kelp, in the car on the way to Henderson, how everybody in this town seemed to gaze upon him with immediate suspicion. If he’d known that admission was going to lead to this he’d have kept the problem to himself, just resigned himself to being a suspicious character, which is in fact what he was.

  But, no. Despite the absolute success of the meeting with Lester Vogel — that scheme was going to work out perfectly, he almost believed it himself — here he was, humiliated, in this discount mall on the fringes of the city, in front of a mirror, his knees frowning at him in reproof, wearing these clothes.

  The pants, to begin with, weren’t pants, they were shorts. Shorts. Who over the age of six wears shorts? What person, that is, of Dortmunder’s dignity, over the age of six wears shorts? Big baggy tan shorts with pleats. Shorts with pleats, so that he looked like he was wearing brown paper bags from the supermarket above his knees, with his own sensible black socks below the knees, but the socks and their accompanying feet were then stuck into sandals. Sandals? Dark brown sandals? Big clumpy sandals, with his own black socks, plus those knees, plus those shorts? Is this a way to dress?

  And let’s not forget the shirt. Not that it was likely anybody ever could forget this shirt, which looked as though it had been manufactured at midnight during a power outage. No two pieces of the shirt were the same color. The left short sleeve was plum, the right was lime. The back was dark blue. The left front panel was chartreuse, the right was cerise, and the pocket directly over his heart was white. And the whole shirt was huge, baggy and draping and falling around his body, and worn outside the despicable shorts.

  Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, “Who wears this stuff?”

  “Americans,” Kelp told him.

  “Don’t they have mirrors in America?”

  “They think it looks spiffy,” Kelp explained. “They think it shows they’re on vacation and they’re devil–may–care.”

  “The devil may care for this crap,” Dortmunder said, “but I hate it.”

  “Wear it,” Kelp advised him, “and nobody will look at you twice.”

  “And I’ll know why,” Dortmunder said. Then he frowned at Kelp, next to him in the mirror, moderate and sensible in gray chinos and blue polo shirt and black loafers, and he said, “How come you don’t dress like this, you got so much protective coloration.”

  “It’s not my image,” Kelp told him.

  Dortmunder’s brow lowered. “This is my image? I look like an awning!”

  “See, John,” Kelp said, being kindly, which only made things worse, “what my image is, I’m a technician on vacation, maybe a clerk somewhere, maybe behind the counter at the electric supply place, so what I do when I’ve got time off, I wear the same pants I wear to work, only I don’t wear the white shirt with the pens in the pocket protector, I wear the shirt that lets me pretend I know how to play golf. You see?”

  “It’s your story,” Dortmunder said.

  “That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “And your story, John, you’re a working man on vacation. You’re a guy, every day on the job you wear paint–stained blue jeans and big heavy steel–toe workboots — probably yellow, you know those boots? — and T–shirts with sayings on them, cartoons on them, and plaster dust like icing all over everything. So when you go on vacation, you don’t wear nothing you wear at work, you don’t want to think about work —”

  “Not the way you describe it.”

  “That’s right. So you go down to the mall, and here we are at the mall, and you walk around with the wife and you’re supposed to pick up a wardrobe for your week’s vacation, and you don’t know a thing about what clothes look like except the crap you wear every day, and the wife picks up this shirt out of the reduced bin and says, ‘This looks nice,’ and so you wear it. And when we leave here, John, I want you to look around and see just how many guys are wearing exactly that shirt, or at least a shirt just like it.”

  Dortmunder said, “And is that who I want people to think I am?”

  “Well, John,” Kelp said, “it seems to me, it’s either that, or it’s you’re a guy that, when people look at you, they think nine and one and one. You know what I mean?”

  “And this,” Dortmunder said, as he and his knees glared at one another, “is something else Max Fairbanks owes me.”

  Chapter 47

  * * *

  When Stan Murch felt the need for tem
porary wheels, he liked to put on a red jacket and go stand in front of one of the better midtown hotels, preferably one with its own driveway past the entrance. It was usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes before some frazzled out–of–towner, vibrating like a whip antenna after his first experience driving in Manhattan traffic, would step out of his car and hand Stan the keys. One nice thing about this arrangement was that it wasn’t technically car theft, since the guy did give Stan the keys. Another nice thing was that such people were usually in very nice, clean, new, comfortable cars. And yet another nice thing was that the former owner of the car would also give Stan a dollar.

  Thursday afternoon, the eighteenth of May, while thousands of miles to the west Andy Kelp was dressing John Dortmunder in the dog’s breakfast, Stan Murch drove away from the Kartel International Hotel on Broadway in the Fifties, at the wheel of a very nice cherry–red Cadillac Seville, and headed downtown to Ninth Avenue and Thirty–Ninth Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he was to meet Tiny Bulcher, the mountain shaped something like a man. There was a brief delay at that location, because Tiny was in the process of explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. “You didn’t earn this money,” Tiny was saying. “You see what I mean?”

  The way Tiny was holding the panhandler made it impossible for the fellow to answer questions, but that was okay; Tiny’s questions were all rhetorical, anyway. “For instance,” he was saying, for instance, “the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it? Huh? I’ll tell you where I got it. I stole it from some people uptown. It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it. Did you earn it? Did you risk anything? Did you work hard?”

  In fact, the panhandler at that moment was at some risk, and was working quite hard merely to breathe, for which Tiny wasn’t giving him credit. And now some taxis honked at Stan, which made Tiny look away from his life lesson. He saw Stan there in the cherry–red Cadillac, patiently waiting, ignoring all those cab horns. “Be right there,” Tiny called, and Stan waved a casual hand, meaning: take your time.

  Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to give him some parting advice. “Get a job,” he said, “or get a gun. But don’t beg. It’s rude.”

  Allowing the panhandler to collapse gratefully onto the sidewalk, Tiny stepped over him — displaying politeness — and walked around the cherry–red Caddy to insert himself into the passenger seat. “Quiet car you got.”

  “It’s those cabs that are noisy,” Stan told him, and drove away from there and on down to the Holland Tunnel and through it to New Jersey, and then deeper into New Jersey to an avenue of auto dealers and similar enterprises, among which was Big Wheel Motor Home Sales. Stan drove on by Big Wheel an extra block, and then pulled over to stop at the curb. “See you,” he said.

  “Stan,” Tiny said, “I want to thank you. This is a roomy car. I’m not used to roomy in a car. I remember one time I had to make a couple people ride on the roof, I got so cramped in the car.”

  “How’d they like that?” Stan asked.

  “I never asked them,” Tiny said. “Anyway, I appreciate you picking out this car, and I don’t even mind the color. Just so it’s roomy.”

  “We’ll get roomier before we’re done,” Stan assured him, and got out of the Caddy to walk back to Big Wheel, where he got into a conversation with a salesman in which the salesman told some little lies and Stan told some great big lies, mostly about being a married construction worker off to different job sites all the time around the country, tired of renting little furnished houses here and there, deciding to get a motor home for himself and Earlene and the kids. So what’ve we got here?

  “You’re gonna love the Interloper,” the salesman said.

  • • •

  So that was another lie. The Interloper was big, which was what Stan had asked for, but it was kind of tinny, and none of the individual rooms in the motor home were very big, and there was only one toilet. Stan and the salesman — who said his name was Jerry, which was probably true — took the Interloper for a spin, but it just didn’t satisfy.

  Next they tried the Wide Open Spaces XJ. It was also big enough, and it had a good–size living room and two small bathrooms, so Stan took that one for a spin, too, with Jerry again on the front seat beside him and a cherry–red Cadillac again trailing along in the outside mirror.

  But Stan didn’t like the way the XJ drove, big and boxy, like it would fall over any second, so back they went to the lot, where Stan rejected the Indian Brave because it wasn’t self–contained enough; you had less than an hour of electricity available in the motor home, before you’d have to find a trailer park somewhere and hook up.

  Then they got to the Invidia. Unlike most motor homes, which are either chrome or tan, the Invidia was a pale green, like fresh spring grass. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a good–size living room, built–in furniture that folded away to make more space, plenty of septic capacity, and all the water storage and electric batteries you could possibly want.

  Off for another test drive, and Stan got happier and happier. The Invidia held the road well enough in city traffic that he felt he could probably let it out pretty good on the highway, if need be, big though it was.

  They drove here and there, back and forth, and then Stan said, “What’s that noise?”

  “Noise?” Jerry looked startled. “What noise?”

  “Something in the back, when we were stopped at that light. Lemme pull over here.”

  Stan stopped at the curb as a cherry–red Cadillac drove slowly by, parking just ahead. Jerry got out of the curbside door, while Stan dropped the ignition key out the open driver–side window. Then Stan got out, and he and Jerry went around to the back, where Stan tugged on the license plate — being a dealer plate, it actually was loose, but didn’t really rattle — and tugged on the plastic housing for the spare wheel, and on the ladder going up to the roof, and finally said, “Well, I don’t know what it could have been.”

  “Some other car, maybe,” Jerry suggested. “Stopped there at that light.”

  “You could be right. Sorry about that.”

  They went back around to get into the Invidia again, and Stan found the ignition key on the driver’s seat. When he palmed it, it was warm and waxy. He put it in the ignition, started the engine, and said, “Well, I don’t hear it any more.”

  “Good,” Jerry said.

  Stan drove back to the lot, and assured Jerry he didn’t have to see any more motor homes, he was pretty confident the Invidia was the one for him and his family, “though I’ll have to clear it with Earlene, you know how it is. I’ll bring her around on Monday.”

  They shook hands before Stan left. “See you Monday,” Jerry said.

  Well, no.

  Chapter 48

  * * *

  Well, it seemed to work. Dortmunder went here and there around Las Vegas, wearing this horrible clothing Andy Kelp had foisted on him, and nobody gave him a second glance. Cops drove by on the street and didn’t even slow down. Hotel security people frowned right past him at boisterous kids. Citizens walked on by without snickering or pointing him out to one another as something that must have escaped from Toon–town, and the reason for that, he could now see, was that most of them were dressed just as foolishly as he was. More.

  In fact, the only comment he received, pro or con, was on Friday morning, when he came out of his room at the Randy Unicorn and the mummified woman was standing there, outside her office, squinting in the sunlight as though she’d just vaguely remembered that sunlight was bad for her, and when she saw Dortmunder in his new togs she looked him up and down, said, “Uh huh,” and went back into her office.

  The acid test came when Dortmunder and Kelp went over to the Gaiety. They walked around the Battle–Lake, and studied the cottages where Max Fairbanks would be staying come Monday, and while they were doing all that the exact same rent–a–cops never gave Dortmunder a tumble, didn’t even recognize
him from two days ago. It was amazing, this protective coloration stuff, simply amazing. Dortmunder said, “What if I wear this crap in New York?”

  “Don’t,” Kelp advised.

  They called Anne Marie’s room from the lobby, but she wasn’t in, so they wandered some more, looking at the casino, which was shaped mostly like a Rorschach inkblot. From the front entrance, if you came into the hotel and angled to the right you’d find the doors out to the pool and the Battle–Lake and the rest of the outdoor wonders, and if you went straight ahead you soon reached the broad check–in desk, with half a dozen clerks on duty, but if you angled to the left you entered a kind of cave, low–ceilinged and indeterminate and endless, with all the light you needed at any one specific spot and yet nevertheless an impression of overall darkness.