“Ten percent of what we get from the fence.”
“Minimum?”
Dortmunder couldn’t be sure yet, so he made a low guess: “Ten thousand.”
“When?”
“When we get it.”
A smile without humor touched her lips and went away again. She said, “How much in front?”
“Nothing.”
“No deal.”
“If we had money in front,” Dortmunder said, “we wouldn’t be in this. Either you trust that guy you called on the phone or you don’t. If you trust him and he vouches for Tiny, you know you’ll get paid.”
She frowned. “Vouched for who?”
“Mr. Bulcher.”
“They call me Tiny.”
She grinned at Tiny, and looked him slowly up and down. “Now, I wonder why,” she said.
“Never mind that,” Tiny told her.
J.C. Taylor was one of the very few people Dortmunder had ever seen who didn’t just automatically stand in awe of Tiny Bulcher. On the other hand, she didn’t look as though she much stood in awe of anybody. She said, to Dortmunder, “What if you people get caught?”
“Then nobody gets paid.”
“And I wind up with twenty years in a prison laundry.” She shook her head. “My mama didn’t raise me to be a dyke.”
“You don’t have to be here while it’s happening,” Dortmunder told her. “It can be set up to look like we broke in. Take a week’s vacation.”
“No chance,” she said. “This is a mail-order business, I have to be on top of it all the time.”
“Then if push comes to shove, we forced you into it at gunpoint.”
She looked dubious. “Maybe,” she said.
Dortmunder said, “But now I’ve got a question.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“What’s your operation here? All those names on the door; which one is you?”
“All of them.” She held up a finger and said, “Super Star Music. You send us your lyrics, we’ll find a melody to fit. On the other hand, you send us your melody, we’ll produce the lyrics to suit. In either case, find fame and fortune in the booming music industry.” A second raised finger: “Allied Commissioners’ Courses; be a detective, send for our one-volume correspondence course. No tests, no instructors, no salesman will call. Free handcuffs and badge included as a special bonus if you act now. Endorsed by police chiefs and police commissioners all across the country.”
Dortmunder said, “Endorsed?”
“They have trade magazines for police chiefs,” she said. “There’s some over there in the bookcase. They do obituaries when a chief or a commissioner dies, and that’s endorsement enough for me. You go prove a dead man didn’t give me an endorsement, and then come back and we’ll talk.”
“Ha,” Tiny said. “That’s nice, lady, that’s really nice.”
She gave him a short nod and a brief smile and said, “Thanks.”
Dortmunder said, “And the third company.”
“Intertherapeutic Research Service. Be a better lay. Get your marriage working right by studying the detailed illustrations in this marital sex manual, endorsed by famous physicians and marriage counselors and sent to you in a plain brown wrapper.”
Dortmunder nodded. He said, “Ever have any questions from the law?”
She shrugged. “Post Office people. Back when I used to do blind mailings to bought mailing lists. But not anymore. Now I stick strictly to magazine advertising. It’s safe, it’s legal, and it brings them in.”
“Who backs you?”
“Me,” she said, and she sounded a bit annoyed at the question. “I put in my time as meat,” she said, “and I saved my money. I started with nothing but the sex book, two magazine ads, and three months’ paid-for desk space down on Varick Street. I don’t owe a penny to anybody but Uncle Sam, and as long as he gets his twelve percent he doesn’t complain.”
“All right,” Dortmunder said. “So it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“The problem,” she said, “is cash. I promised my mother on her deathbed I’d never put out without the money on the dresser, and I’ve never had anything happen to make me think she was wrong.”
Tiny said, abruptly, “Hell, honey, money’s no problem.”
Dortmunder said, “It isn’t?”
Turning to Dortmunder, Tiny said, “We can get this little lady some cash, can’t we?”
Dortmunder looked at Tiny in astonishment. Where was the bad-tempered mammoth, the Sherman tank with a grudge? This was a Tiny transformed. His brow was as clear as such a corrugated surface could get, his expression was agreeable and hardly terrifying at all, and there might actually be something damn near mellow deep down inside those ball-bearing eyes. From grizzly bear to honey bear in one smooth motion; astounding.
And trouble. “Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “we don’t have ten thousand dollars.”
The girl said, “Wait a minute, I’m not asking for the whole ten. But I am talking about cash, some cash, green paper I can hold in my hand and look at, no matter what happens next.”
Tiny, being expansive, his gravel-on-a-conveyor-belt voice practically mellifluous, said, “You want a couple thousand, honey, is that it?”
“That’ll do,” she agreed.
Tiny shrugged the problem away. Looking at Dortmunder, being sweet and kindly but not in a mood to be argued with, he said, “I’m good for it, Dortmunder. I’ll give her a couple Gs now, we’ll straighten it out after the job. I’ll get my money back out of her ten percent, no vigorish, no nothing.” With a gallant gesture, as though sweeping off a Three Musketeers kind of plumed hat, he told the girl, “Just to help out, make things smooth and nice between friends.”
“You give me two thousand in cash,” she said, “you can stable sheep in here.”
“I’ll stick to girls,” Tiny said, and gave her a big grin.
Which she ignored, pointedly, saying to Dortmunder, “Anything else?”
“Not from me,” Dortmunder said, and got to his feet. “Tiny’s going to give you the cash. The job’ll be sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll let you know a couple days ahead.”
“Fine.” She stood up behind the desk, saying, “I’ll show you out.”
Tiny said, “You got a home number? I’ll call you when I got the cash.”
“You can bring it to me here,” she said.
She led the way to the outer office, Dortmunder following, the new Tiny shambling in the rear, saying, “We don’t have to be all business, do we?”
“As a matter of fact, we do,” she told him.
Dortmunder could see the new Tiny drowning in a sea of bewilderment, the old Tiny just beginning to snarl his way back to the surface. “I figured …” Tiny said.
“I know you did,” she told him, and opened the hall door. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you, gents.”
Tiny wasn’t quite ready to let go: “Do you ever eat dinner?” he asked.
She looked at him. “Are you a burglar or a caterer?”
“Come on, Tiny,” Dortmunder said, and led the baffled giant out to the corridor. She closed the door behind them.
A few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, the old Tiny, walking flat-footed and angry, said, “I hate that kind of foul-talking woman. It ain’t feminine.”
“The office looks good,” Dortmunder said.
“We’d be better off working with a man.”
“We’re not gonna get a smoother setup than that one,” Dortmunder pointed out. “She’s a pro, Tiny. If we leave her alone, she won’t make us any trouble.”
“Two thousand dollars,” Tiny said. He sounded bitter.
“Well, Tiny, that was your idea,” Dortmunder said cautiously.
“I know that, Dortmunder.” Tiny sounded as though he was thinking about blaming somebody for something.
“You’ve got two thousand dollars?”
“I’ll get it.” Tiny sounded really bitter. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it.”
&n
bsp; 17
Andy Kelp sipped his seventh cup of cappuccino and watched three more burly men walk through the grove of trees and board the elevator, crowding in together as they pulled closed behind themselves the brushed-chrome door marked MAINTENANCE. Kelp looked at his watch and wrote on the notepad beside his cup, “2:27 PM ///,” with an arrow pointing upward.
“Another cappuccino, sir?” the waitress asked.
Kelp leaned forward to survey the bottom of his cup, lightly covered with tan bubbles. “Sure.”
The waitress looked at him with something like awe—eight cappuccinos!—but made no remark as she took his empty cup away. Kelp went back to his observation of that obscure door across the way.
He was in the ground-floor garden of the Avalon State Bank Tower, surrounded by tall and slender trees, seated on a white wrought-iron chair at a small round white metal table in the garden’s little cafe. To his left was Fifth Avenue, seen through a tall wall of glass, busy and self-important in the sun. To his right was an artificial waterfall, a black stone wall twenty feet wide, down which water poured with a gentle plashing sound, so that the noises of the city disappeared, even when the glass doors to the street were opened; except, of course, for horns and sirens, of which Fifth Avenue is full. Straight ahead, through steel-sheathed pots of cherry and quince, past copses of ficus and bamboo, stood the brushed-chrome wall separating the garden from the lobby and reflecting vaguely the garden’s greenery, as in some medieval tapestry that had been washed far too often. And on that wall, barely noticeable, was the door marked MAINTENANCE, which, according to those incredible looseleaf books the nun had smuggled out, led directly to the private elevator that serviced only the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth floors.
Today was Friday, eight days after Dortmunder and May had been given those books, six days since Tiny and Stan had been brought aboard, five days since Wilbur Howey had come dancing and winking into their midst, three days since Dortmunder and Tiny had made their deal with the mail-order company in this building—Kelp wondered offhandedly why they were both so reluctant to talk about that outfit—and the seventh day of occasional surveillance of that elevator. (Between eight in the evening and seven in the morning, when the garden was closed and its entrances locked, elevator traffic had to be watched less comfortably and more sporadically from a car parked across the street.) And of all those days and nights of surveillance, today was the busiest, with very few people coming out but a whole lot of guys who looked like moving men going in.
Be a real mess if they moved the nun, just when things were almost set to save her.
Whoops; there came two more of them, tall, big-shouldered guys with close-cropped hair and bunchy jaws. Even before they went over to MAINTENANCE, even before they took a hard look left and a hard look right and then unlocked the door and went through, Kelp was already writing, “2:36 PM //,” with the arrow pointing up.
“Your cappuccino, sir,” the waitress said, at the same instant that Stan Murch appeared and said, “You got beer?”
“This isn’t beer,” Kelp told him, and the waitress said, “No, sir. We have coffee, espresso, cappuccino, tea, herb tea, peppermint tea—”
“No beer,” Stan summed up.
“No, sir.”
Stan sat down to Kelp’s right, where he could look out at the street. He liked traffic. “What’s that?” he said, pointing at Kelp’s cup.
“Cappuccino.”
“And?”
The waitress said, “It’s coffee, whipped cream and cinnamon.”
“Sounds weird,” Stan said.
“It’s really very good,” the waitress assured him. “That’s your friend’s eighth.”
“Oh, yeah?” Stan considered, then nodded. “I’ll have one of those,” he said. “And bring me some salt, will you?”
The waitress hesitated, decided not to ask, and left. Kelp said, “Stan, what do you want with salt?”
“You know what I do with salt,” Stan told him, and pointed to the whipped cream on Kelp’s cappuccino. “Look, you’re losing the head already.”
“That works with beer,” Kelp said. “You put the salt in, the head comes back. This is whipped cream.”
“So?” Brushing that aside, Stan said, “Midtown is impossible, you know? I took the Battery Tunnel because they quit on the construction today, I was fine coming up the FDR Drive, but then how do you get to the middle?”
“Tough,” Kelp agreed.
“So I got off at the UN,” Stan said, “I went up to Forty-ninth Street, I waited for the bus.”
“Smart,” Kelp said. “Just leave the car and take the bus.”
“I didn’t leave the car,” Stan said, “I followed the bus. Those bus drivers are the most fearless people on the planet Earth, Andy, they don’t care what’s happening, people, cars, trucks, they just pull out in that huge monster and go. They got a schedule, they got to get across town to the Hudson so the dispatcher can check them off on his clipboard. So what I do, I tuck in behind the bus, I just go where he goes. Fastest way across town.”
“But then when you get here, what?” Kelp asked him. “Where do you park?”
Gesturing, Stan said, “Right now, I’m in front of a fire hydrant around the corner.”
“They’ll tow you.”
“Well, no,” Stan said. “When I’m coming to midtown, I bring along a little bottle of green radiator fluid. There’s always a place to park in front of a fire hydrant, so then I pour the radiator fluid on the street under the front of the car, and open the hood, and take away the radiator cap.” He took a radiator cap from his jacket pocket, as illustration.
Kelp nodded judiciously. “Might work,” he said.
“For maybe an hour,” Stan said. “The cops come along to tow, they see all this, they start thinking about liability.”
“They figure you’re off calling AAA.”
“Exactly,” Stan said.
The waitress said, “Cappuccino,” putting it down in front of Stan, “and salt.” The last part wasn’t quite a question.
“And a check,” Stan told her.
Kelp looked at him in surprise: “You just got here.”
“We’re both going,” Stan told him, while the waitress stood over them, adding numbers. “Dortmunder says we can quit looking the joint over now, because we’re going in. Tomorrow.”
“Well, good,” Kelp said, and looked at the check the waitress gave him. “I would call this expensive,” he said.
“That’s what it costs,” the waitress said. “It says so on the menu.”
“Yeah?” Kelp shook his head. “At this price, I should get to keep the cup.” He covered the check with a lot of money, which the waitress took away.
Stan, whipped cream on his upper lip, said, “This is coffee.” He sounded like somebody who’d been cheated.
“Yeah,” Kelp agreed. “That’s what we said. Ten cents worth of coffee, two cents worth of whipped cream and a tenth of a cent of cinnamon, for two dollars and seventy-five cents.”
“I’ll stick to beer,” Stan decided, and put the cup down. “You ready?”
“Hold it.” Kelp raised his pencil and watched two bruisers cross the garden, looking around, searching for something. One saw MAINTENANCE and poked the other and they both went over. “Last two,” Kelp said, making the notation. “There must be an army up there by now. Okay, let’s go.” But then the pencil kind of jumped out of his hand and fell on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” Stan asked him. “You nervous about something?”
“I am kind of jittery,” Kelp admitted. “I think it’s all that cinnamon.”
18
“Now, be sure you phone, John,” May said, removing lint from the lapels of Dortmunder’s black business jacket.
“When I get a chance,” Dortmunder said.
“You’ll have plenty of chance,” May told him. “You’re going to be in that building over the whole weekend.”
“I’ll call,” Dortmunder promise
d. The bedroom clock said five minutes to eleven; it was Saturday morning, and he wanted to be in the building and safely tucked away in the offices of J.C. Taylor by noon. “I got to go, May,” he said.
She walked him to the front door, tugging at the tail of his jacket to make it sit better on his shoulders. Something inside the jacket went chink. “Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks, May.”
“Wait,” she said suddenly. “Let me get my key.”
Dortmunder looked at her. “May? You’re not coming with me.”
“I want to look for the mail.”
So Dortmunder waited, and they went downstairs together, and Dortmunder waited again by the mailboxes, where May went through the bills and insurance offers and said, “This is for you. From something called Civil Court.”
Dortmunder frowned. “Civil Court? There’s no such thing.”
Handing him the envelope, May said, “Is there something you haven’t told me about, John?”
“No,” he said, and looked at the official return address. “Civil Court. Hmmm.”
“Why don’t you open it?”
Because he didn’t want to open it, that’s why. Still, if he was ever going to get uptown by noon, he’d have to move on from this vestibule first, so he turned the envelope over, slit it open with the side of his thumb, and took out the legal document within. He studied it a long time. After he understood it, he studied it all over again, and he still didn’t believe it.
“John? What is it?”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “it’s Chepkoff.”
“Who?”
“The guy I was getting the caviar for. He said he wanted his three hundred advance payment back, and I told him, ‘So sue me,’ because that’s what you say to a guy in a situation like that, am I right?”
“And?”
“And I better phone him,” Dortmunder said, pushing back into the building.
May followed, saying, “John? You don’t mean it!”
“Oh, yes, I do,” Dortmunder said. “This is a summons. Chepkoff’s taking me to small claims court to get his three hundred back.”
“But he gave you that money to commit a crime!”
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