Kelp said, ‘Well, that’s up to you. It looks like a good one, though.’
‘The way the market’s been …’ He looked around, as though he’d never seen his own examining room before and didn’t much like it. ‘There’s no place to sit in here,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
They followed him part way back along the same hall and into a small wood-panelled office with two maroon chairs facing the desk. All three sat down, and the doctor leaned back in his swivel chair, frowning in discontent. ‘I took a couple of headers in the market,’ he said. ‘Take my advice. Never listen to a stock tip from a terminal case. What if he turns out to be wrong?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Kelp said.
‘Then my car was stolen.’
Victor looked at Kelp, who was facing the doctor, his expression showing sympathetic interest. ‘Is that right?’
‘Just the other day. Kids, joy-riding. Managed to get into a rear-end collision somehow.’
‘Kids, huh? Did they get them?’
‘The police?’ The doctor’s sullen baby face made a grimacing smile, as though he had gas. ‘Don’t make me laugh. They never get anybody.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ Kelp said. ‘But about our proposition.’
‘Then I had to buy some letters back.’ The doctor waggled his hands, as though to minimize what he was saying. ‘Expatient,’ he said, ‘Didn’t mean a thing, of course, just consolation in her grief.’
‘The terminal tipper’s wife?’
‘What? No, I never wrote her anything, thank God. This one … Well, it doesn’t matter. Expenses have been high. That car business was the last straw.’
‘Did you leave the keys in it?’
‘Of course not.’ He sat up straight to show how indignant he was.
‘But you’re insured,’ Kelp said.
‘You never recover all your costs,’ the doctor said. ‘Travelling by cab, making phone calls, getting estimates … I’m a busy man. I don’t have time for all this. And now you people. What if you’re caught?’
‘We’ll do our best to avoid that’
‘But what if you are? Then I’m out – how much do you want?’
‘We figure four thousand.’
The doctor pursed his lips. He looked now like a baby who’d just had his pacifier plucked from him. ‘A lot of money,’ he said.
‘Eight thousand back.’
‘If it works.’
‘This is a good one,’ Kelp said. ‘You know I can’t tell you the details, but –’
The doctor flung up his hands as though to ward off an avalanche. ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know! I won’t be an accessory!’
‘Sure,’ Kelp said. ‘I know how you feel. Anyway, we think of this one as being a really sure thing. Money in the bank, you might say.’
The doctor rested his palms on his green blotter. ‘Four thousand, you say.’
‘There might be a little more. I don’t think so.’
‘You’re getting the whole thing from me?’
‘If we can.’
‘This recession …’ He shook his head. ‘People don’t come around for every little thing any more. When I see a patient in the waiting room these days, I know that patient is sick. Drug companies getting a little stingier, too. Had to dip into capital just the other week.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Kelp said.
‘Diet foods,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s another problem. Used to be, I could count on gastritis from overeating for a good thirty percent of my income. Now everybody’s on diets. How do they expect a doctor to make ends meet?’
‘Things sure can get rough,’ Kelp said.
‘And now they’re giving up cigarettes. The lungs have been a gold mine for me for years. But not any more.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what medicine is coming to,’ he said. ‘If I had a son entering college today, and he asked me if I wanted him to follow in my footsteps, I’d say, “No, son. I want you to be a tax accountant. That’s the wave of the future, you ride. It’s too late for me.” That’s what I’d tell him.’
‘Good advice,’ Kelp said.
The doctor slowly shook his head. ‘Four thousand,’ he said.
‘That should do it, yes.’
‘All right.’ He sighed and got to his feet. ‘Wait here. I’ll get it for you.’
He left the room, and Kelp turned to Victor to say, ‘He left the keys in it.’
11
Dortmunder at the movies was like a rock on the beach; the story kept washing over him, in wave after wave, but never had any effect. This one, called Murphy’s Madrigal, had been advertised as a tragic farce and gave the audience an opportunity to try out every emotion known to the human brain. Pratfalls, crippled children, Nazis, doomed lovers, you never knew what was going to happen next.
And Dortmunder just sat there. Beside him May roared with laughter, she sobbed, she growled with rage, she clutched his arm and cried, ‘Oh!’ And Dortmunder just sat there.
When they got out of the movie it was ten to eight, so they had time to get a hero. They went to a Blimpie and May treated, and when they were sitting together at a table with their sandwiches under the bright lights she said, ‘You didn’t like it.’
‘Sure I did,’ he said. He pushed bread and sauerkraut in his mouth with his finger.
‘You just sat there.’
‘I liked it,’ he said. Going to the movies had been her idea; he’d spent most of the time in the theater thinking about that mobile home bank out on Long Island and how to take it away.
‘Tell me what you like about it.’
He thought hard, trying to remember something he’d seen. ‘The color,’ he said.
‘A part of the movie.’
She was really getting irritated now, which he didn’t want to happen. He struggled and came up with a memory. ‘The elevator bit,’ he said. The director of the movie had tied a strong elastic around a camera and dropped the camera down a brightly lighted elevator shaft. The thing had recoiled just before hitting bottom and had bounced up and down for quite a while before coming to rest. The whole sequence, forty-three seconds of it, was run without a break in the movie, and audiences had been known to throw up en masse at that point in the picture. Everybody agreed it was great, the high point of film art up to this time.
May smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’
‘Sure,’ he said. He looked at his watch.
‘You got time. Eight-thirty, right?’
‘Right.’
‘How does it look?’
He shrugged. ‘Possible. Crazy, but possible.’ Then, to keep her from going back to the subject of the movie and asking him more questions about it, he said, ‘There’s still a lot of things to work out. But we maybe got a lockman.’
‘That’s good.’
‘We still don’t have anyplace to take it.’
‘You’ll find a place.’
‘It’s pretty big,’ he said.
‘So’s the world.’
He looked at her, not sure she’d just said something sensible, but decided to let it go. ‘There’s also financing,’ he said.
‘Is that going to be a problem?’
‘I don’t think so. Kelp saw somebody today.’ He hadn’t known May very long, so this was the first time she’d watched him put together a piece of work, but he had a feeling with her as though she just naturally understood the situation. He never gave her a lot of background explanations, and she didn’t seem to need any. It was very relaxing. In a funny way, May reminded Dortmunder of his ex-wife, not because she was similar but because she was so very different. It was the contrast that did it. Until he’d started up with May, Dortmunder hadn’t even thought about his former wife for years. A show-biz performer she’d been, with the professional name of Honeybun Bazoom. Dortmunder had married her in San Diego in 1952 on his way to Korea – the only police action he’d ever been in on the side of the police – and had divorced her again in Ren
o in 1954 on his way out of the Army. Honeybun had mostly been interested in Honeybun, but if something outside herself did attract her attention she was immediately full of questions about it. She could ask more questions than a kid at the zoo. Dortmunder had answered the first few thousand, until he’d realized that none of the answers ever stayed inside that round head.
May couldn’t have been more different; she never asked the questions, and she always held onto the answers.
Now, they finished their heroes and left the Blimpie, and on the sidewalk May said. ‘I’ll take the subway.’
‘Take a cab.’
She had a fresh cigarette in the corner of her mouth, having lit it after finishing eating. ‘Naw,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the subway. A cab after a hero gives me heartburn.’
‘You want to come along to the O. J.?’
‘Naw, you go ahead.’
‘The other night, Murch brought his Mom.’
‘I’d rather go home.’
Dortmunder shrugged. ‘Okay. I’ll see you later.’
‘See you later.’
She slopped away down the street, and Dortmunder headed the other way. He still had time, so he decided to walk, which meant going through Central Park. He walked along the cinder path alone, and under a street light a shifty-eyed stocky guy in a black turtle-neck sweater came out of nowhere and said, ‘Excuse me.’
Dortmunder stopped. ‘Yeah?’
‘I’m taking a survey,’ the guy said. His eyes danced a little, and he seemed to be grinning and yet not to be grinning. It was the same kind of expression most of the people in the movie had had. He said, ‘Here you are, you’re a citizen, you’re walking along in the park at night. What would you do if somebody came along and mugged you?’
Dortmunder looked at him. ‘I’d beat his head in,’ he said.
The guy blinked, and the almost grin disappeared. He looked slightly confused, and he said, ‘What if he had, uh, well, what if he was …’ Then he shook his head, waggled both hands and backed off, saying, ‘Nah, forget it. Doesn’t matter, forget it.’
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. He walked on through the park and over to Amsterdam and up to the O. J. When he went in, Rollo was having a discussion with the only two customers, a pair of overweight commission salesmen in the auto-parts line, about whether sexual intercourse after a heavy meal was medically good or medically bad. They were supporting their arguments mostly with personal anecdotes, and Rollo obviously had trouble breaking himself free from the conversation. Dortmunder waited at the end of the bar, and finally Rollo said, ‘Now, hold it now, hold it a second. Don’t start that yet. I’ll be right back.’ Then he came down the bar, handed Dortmunder the bottle called Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon – ‘Our Own Brand’ plus two glasses, and said, ‘All that’s here so far is the draft beer and salt. His mother let him out by himself tonight.’
‘There’ll be more coming,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I don’t know how many.’
‘The more the merrier,’ Rollo said sourly and went back to his discussion.
In the back room, Murch was sprinkling salt in his beer to restore the head. He looked up at Dortmunder’s entrance and said, ‘How you doing?’
‘Fine,’ Dortmunder said. He put the bottle and glasses on the table and sat down.
‘I made better time tonight,’ Murch said. ‘I tried a different route.’
‘Is that right?’ Dortmunder opened the bottle.
‘I went down Flatlands and up Remsen,’ Murch said. ‘Not Rockaway Parkway, see? Then I went over Empire Boulevard and up Bedford Avenue all the way into Queens and took the Williamsburg Bridge over into Manhattan.’
Dortmunder poured. ‘Is that right?’ he said. He was just waiting for Murch to stop talking, because he had something to say to him.
‘Then Delancey and Allen and right up First Avenue and across town at Seventy-ninth Street Worked like a dream.’
‘Is that right?’ Dortmunder said. He sipped at his drink and said, ‘You know, Rollo’s kind of unhappy about you.’
Murch looked surprised, but eager to please. ‘Why? Cause I parked out front?’
‘No. A customer that comes in and nurses one beer all night long, it doesn’t do too much for his business.’
Murch glanced down at his beer, and then looked very pained. ‘I never thought of that,’ he said.
‘I just figured I’d mention it.’
‘The thing is, I don’t like to drink and drive. That’s why I space it out.’
Dortmunder had nothing to say to that.
Murch pondered and finally said hopefully, ‘What if I bought him a drink? Would that do it?’
‘Could be.’
‘Let me give it a try,’ Murch said, and as he got to his feet the door opened and Kelp and Victor came in. The room was very small and very full of table anyway, so it took a while to bring Kelp and Victor in while getting Murch out, and during that time Dortmunder brooded at Victor. It seemed to him that Victor was becoming more and more an accepted part of this job, which he didn’t much like but couldn’t quite find the way to stop. Kelp was doing it, but he was doing it in such a sneaky quiet fashion that Dortmunder never had a clear moment when he could say, ‘Okay, cut it out.’ But how could anybody expect him to go steal a bank with some clown smiling at him all the time?
Murch finally shot himself out of the room, like a dollop of toothpaste squeezed out of a tube, and Kelp said, ‘I see Herman isn’t here yet.’
‘You talked to him?’
‘He’s interested.’
Dortmunder brooded some more. Kelp himself was all right, but he tended to surround himself with people and operations that were just a little off. Victor, for instance. And now bringing in some guy named Herman X. What could you hope for from somebody named Herman X? Had he ever done anything in this line? If he was going to turn out to be another smiler, Dortmunder was just going to have to put his foot down. Enough smiling is enough.
Sitting down next to Dortmunder and reaching for the bourbon bottle, Kelp said, ‘We got the financing set.’
Victor had taken the spot directly across from Dortmunder. He was smiling. Shading his eyes with his hand, Dortmunder ducked his head a little and said to Kelp, ‘You got the full four grand?’
‘Every penny. The light too bright for you?’
‘I just went to a movie.’
‘Oh, yeah? What’d you see?’
Dortmunder had forgotten the title. ‘It was in color,’ he said.
‘That narrows it. Probably a pretty recent one, then.’
‘Yeah.’
Victor said, ‘I’m drinking tonight.’ He sounded very pleased.
Dortmunder ducked his head a little more and looked at Victor under his fingers. He was smiling, of course, and holding up a tall glass. It was pink. Dortmunder said, ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘A sloe-gin fizz,’ Victor said.
‘Is that right?’ Dortmunder readjusted head and fingers – it was like putting down Venetian blinds – and turned firmly back to Kelp. ‘So you got the whole four thousand,’ he said.
‘Yeah. A funny thing about that …’
The door opened and Murch came back in. ‘It’s all set,’ he said. He was smiling, too, but it was easier to live with than Victor’s. ‘Thanks for setting me straight,’ he said.
‘Glad it worked out,’ Dortmunder said.
Murch sat down in front of his beer and carefully salted it. ‘Rollo’s okay when you get to know him,’ he said.
‘Sure he is.’
‘Drives a Saab.’
Dortmunder had known Rollo for years but hadn’t known about the Saab. ‘Is that right?’ he said.
‘Used to drive a Borg-Ward. Sold it because he couldn’t get parts when they stopped making the car.’
Kelp said, ‘What kind of car is that?’
‘Borg-Ward. German. Same company that makes Norge refrigerators.’
‘They’re American.’
‘The refrigerators, yeah. Th
e cars were German.’
Dortmunder finished his drink and reached for the bottle, and Rollo opened the door and stuck his head in to say, ‘There’s an Old Crow on the rocks out here asking for Kelp.’
‘That’s him now,’ Kelp said.
‘A darkish fella.’
‘That’s him,’ Kelp said. ‘Send him on in.’
‘Right.’ Rollo gave a bartender’s glance around the table. ‘Everybody set?’
They all murmured.
Rollo cocked an eye at Murch. ‘Stan, you got enough salt?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Murch said. Thanks a lot, Rollo.’
‘Any time Stan.’
Rollo went away. Dortmunder glanced at Murch, but didn’t say anything, and a minute later a tall lean guy with dark-brown complexion and a very modest Afro came into the room. What he looked most like was an Army second lieutenant on leave. He was nodding slightly and grinning slightly as he came in and shut the door, and Dortmunder wondered at first if he was on something; then he realised it was just the self-protective cool of somebody meeting a group of people for the first time.
‘Hey, Herman,’ Kelp said.
‘Hey,’ agreed Herman quietly. He closed the door behind him and stood there jiggling ice in his old-fashioned glass, like an early arrival at a cocktail party.
Kelp made the introductions: ‘Herman X, this is Dortmunder, that’s Stan Murch, that’s my nephew Victor.’
‘Hello.’
‘How are ya.’
‘Hello, Mr. X.’
Dortmunder watched Herman frown slightly at Victor and then glance at Kelp. Kelp, however, was busy being host, saying, ‘Take a seat, Herman. We were just talking about the situation.’
‘That’s what I want to hear about,’ Herman said. He sat down to Dortmunder’s right. ‘The situation.’
Dortmunder said, ‘I’m surprised I don’t know you.’
Herman gave him a grin. ‘We probably travel in different circles.’
‘I was just wondering what your experience is.’
Herman’s grin broadened into a smile. ‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘One doesn’t like to talk about one’s experiences in front of a whole room of witnesses.’
Kelp said, ‘Everybody’s okay in here. But, Dortmunder, Herman really does know his business.’
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