What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Oh; to the left. One of the control rooms was there, with a sealed window to the hall left over from some previous incarnation, and standing in it was Sean Kelly, Brian’s shaggy boss, who mouthed things at him through the glass; some sort of question.

  But the point of the control room was that it was soundproof, so Brian merely shrugged and pointed helplessly at his ear. Sean nodded, frowned, nodded, and pointed vaguely away with his right hand while doing a finger-up circular motion with his left. Come around and talk to me, in other words.

  Sure. Brian nodded, paused to figure out the shortest way from this side of the glass to that side of the glass, and set off, along the way passing an electrician, seated wedged in a corner, still smoking slightly, accepting sustenance in a flask from his fellows.

  Brian’s route took him past his octagon, which had a doorway but no door because there was nowhere for it to open to. He nodded at it, trekked on, and eventually came to the control room containing both Sean and an expressionless technician seated at the controls, watching a tape of a hilarious animated outer-space drunk scene to be aired at eleven tonight, in competition with the world news. (They expected to win again.)

  “Hey, Sean.”

  “Hey.” Sean seemed troubled, in some vague way. “Man,” he said, “you got any problems at home?” Hurriedly, he erased that from the imaginary blackboard between them. “I don’t mean none of my business, man, you know, I just mean, anything gonna impact us here.”

  Brian could have pointed out that a permanent construction site was all impact, but he cut to the chase: “What problem, Sean? I do something wrong?”

  “No, man,” Sean said. “Nothing I know about. It’s just, I got this call yesterday, just walking out of the office, this guy, says he’s from the enforcement arm of the Better Business Bureau.”

  “Enforcement arm?”

  “That’s what he said, man.” Sean grinned and scratched his head through his shaggy hair. “Can you see them comin around? ‘You gotta give the twenty percent, man, it’s right there in your ad.’ Might make a nice bit.”

  “Sean, he wanted to talk to you about me? Or just the place?”

  “No, man, you, strictly you. Do you borrow from your co-workers—”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Uh huh. Do I know where you cash your checks, have you ever had unexplained absences—”

  “Everybody does, Sean.”

  That quick grin of Sean’s came and went. “Sing it, sister. He wants to know, do I think you’re having trouble in your home life, interfering with you here, whadoI think your work prospects are—”

  “Jesus.”

  “It was freaky, man.” Another grin. “Don’t worry, I covered for you.”

  Suspicion struck Brian. “You goofed on him.”

  “Naw, man, would I—”

  “You would. Wha’d you tell him?”

  “I just answered his questions, man, told him you were the number one jock in the shop.”

  “And? Come on, Sean.”

  Sean looked slightly sheepish, but still grinned. “Well, I did mention,” he said, “those Venusian bordello scenes you do . . .”

  “Lost It in Space. Yeah?”

  “I said, you were so good at it, it’s because you think they’re real.”

  “Sean, what did you—”

  “No, that’s all, man, honest to God. Just sometimes we find you at your desk, you’re in this trance state, you’re getting laid on Venus. That’s all I said, man.”

  “And did he believe you?”

  Sean looked amazed at the question. “Brian? What do I know how Earth people think?”

  Brian had all that day to figure out what was going on, and yet he didn’t.

  40

  JAY TUMBRIL HAD all Thursday night to brood about Livia Northwood Wheeler and the Chicago chess set, which didn’t leave much time for sleep, but he couldn’t very well do that in the office either, so by eleven Friday morning he was both sleep-deprived and jittering on the edge of panic. He hated to admit there might be a circumstance in which his control of the situation was less than perfect, but there were such circumstances and this was one of them, so it was time to pull the emergency cord.

  The point was, if you found yourself in a position so far outside your expertise you hadn’t the faintest bloody idea what to do next, then the thing to do next was to call upon someone who does have expertise in the area, whatever that area might be. In this case, there was only one expert in the area that Jay knew, so just after eleven he picked up the intercom and said, “Felicity.”

  “Sir.”

  “Get me Jacques Perly.”

  “Sir.”

  Three minutes later, Felicity was back on the line: “Mr. Perly says he’s in his car, northbound on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, speaking on his hands-free carphone, and wonders if he should ring you back later or will you rough it now.”

  Jay knew damn well Perly had actually said “the FDR Drive,” but Felicity was so proud of her studies to become an American citizen that he merely said, “Thank you, Felicity, I’d rather talk to him now, it’s a bit urgent.”

  “Sir.”

  Jay broke the connection, and spent the next twenty-five seconds rehearsing how he’d describe the situation. Then the buzz sounded, and he picked up and said, “Jacques.”

  “I’ll put him right on.”

  “What?”

  “Just joking,” Perly said.

  “I knew that was you, you didn’t change your voice or anything. What do you mean, joking?”

  “Your secretary said it was urgent.”

  “Yes, well— Yes, it is. Also, Jacques, extremely confidential.”

  “We know that.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you. The truth is, I’m a little tense, didn’t get much sleep last night . . .”

  “You, Jay?”

  “It’s Livia Northwood Wheeler again!”

  “What? The Hemlow girl? Or did Clanson make his move?”

  “No, nothing to do with them. This is something completely different.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jay forced a deep breath, assembled his thoughts, and said, “Among the items under dispute in the law case involving Mrs. Wheeler and several of her relatives is a chess set, never I believe properly evaluated, but said to be worth in the millions.”

  “Worth fighting over, in other words.”

  “Yes. Since the suits began—I’ll only say by now they sue and countersue and cross-sue one another to a degree of complexity you could only otherwise find in a map of the New York City subway system—the courts have placed this asset in the care of the law firms involved, four of whom, including us, have offices in this building, so that for the last few years the chess set, called for some reason the Chicago chess set, though I doubt it was made there, has been in the sub-cellar vaults beneath this building.”

  “And likely to stay there for a while, I should think.”

  “Except,” Jay said, “now Mrs. Wheeler wants it brought up and placed somewhere that experts of various stripes may examine it.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “Infuriating,” Jay corrected him. “As her attorney in this matter, it is up to me to take this request to the court. I unfortunately see no reason why the court would deny it, nor why any of the other litigants would object. I can see that every blessed soul concerned with this matter would like to take a look at that bloody chess set.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Jacques asked.

  “Where it is now,” Jay told him, “in that vault beneath this building, it is safe as houses.”

  “But a little too inaccessible,” Jacques suggested, “for perusal by experts.”

  “Exactly. Nor will the bank accept the concept of various people trooping through their vaults. It must come up. But whose task will it be to keep the damn thing safe while it’s up and about, like the groundhog looking for its shadow?”

  “Oh, I see.”

&nb
sp; “Yes, you do. It is up to this firm to find a site both accessible to the experts and agreeable to, if not the other litigants, at least to their legal representatives.”

  “And still be safe as houses,” Perly suggested.

  “If only we could.” If Jay had had hair, he’d have torn it. “Not in these offices,” he said. “We can’t keep track of the copiers around here. And no other firm has more secure offices. It’s not an official investigation, and so we can’t ask the police to step in, and in fact for various potential ownership rights and inheritance liabilities, we’d rather leave officialdom out of this matter.”

  “When does she want to make this move?”

  “Now! Yesterday!”

  “Well, that’s not possible. I could make a suggestion, Jay.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid it— Excuse me, there’s a multiple-car collision up ahead, I’ll just steer around— Oh, good, the police are on the scene, I’m being waved through— Oh, my God! Jay, you never want to see anything like that your whole life long.”

  “Don’t describe it to me.”

  “I will not.”

  “You were going to make a suggestion.”

  “Oh, Lord. Give me a second, Jay.”

  “Of course.”

  That must have been horrendous, Jay thought, to rattle Jacques Perly. How much simpler life was when people couldn’t tell us what they could see from their cars.

  “What I was going to say, Jay—”

  “Yes, Jacques.”

  “—That I was hesitant to make my suggestion because it could seem self-serving.”

  “You want to guard the piece? You’re not a sentry, Jacques.”

  “I wanted to suggest my offices,” Jacques said. “Extremely safe, extremely secure, but absolutely accessible. You’ve been there.”

  “Well, yes, but— I don’t know what to say.”

  “You would hire private security, of course, 24/7, but the building itself is ideal for you, and I’m sure we could work out a rental acceptable to all concerned. I would have to keep my own business going at the same time, of course.”

  “Of course. Jacques, the more I think about this—”

  “Well, think about one more thing,” Jacques told him. “Ah, we’re in the snowbelt now.”

  “Are we?”

  “Ask yourself this, Jay. Why now? You said Mrs. Wheeler now wanted this, and wanted it at once. Why, Jay? After all these years, why now?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “Could it be, Jay, because of her recent hire?”

  “You mean—?”

  “Has Fiona Hemlow put that suggestion into Mrs. Wheeler’s head? And did Brian Clanson set the whole thing up? Is Brian Clanson just sitting there, waiting for that chess set to come up out of that vault?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m already on Clanson, Jay, because of that other thing you asked me to do, though of course he has no idea he’s under surveillance. We’ll intensify that, study his associates. If your Chicago chess set is in my offices, and Brian Clanson makes a move to snatch it, we’ll have him, Jay, in the of our .”

  “Jacques? You’re breaking up.”

  “We’ll later.” And Jacques Perly was gone.

  41

  THURSDAY EVENING WAS a busy time at the Safeway. The store stayed open late, and people stocked up on their groceries for the weekend. May didn’t usually work the evening shift, since the one regularity John really liked in his life was dinner, but sometimes people got sick or fired or mislaid themselves somewhere, and May might be asked to fill in, like tonight. A little after seven now; she could quit at eight, pick out something nice for their evening repast in the deli department that wouldn’t take a lot of preparation, and home she’d go. Easy.

  The first thing she noticed about the guy was that the only thing he was carrying was a little packet of lightbulbs. He was on her checkout line, the people in front of him and behind him all with carts piled up to their chins, so that at first he just looked like a very easy example of the which-one-doesn’t-belong-in-this picture quiz. She stood there, sliding items over the bar code reader, sliding them twice if she didn’t hear that ping the first time, pushing the items onto the belt to roll on down to tonight’s packer, an overweight kid with an overbite whom all the staff here knew only as Pudge, a name he didn’t seem to mind, and she kept looking at the guy with the lightbulbs until finally she caught his eye and gestured with her head toward the last checkout line in the row, which was for people with six items or fewer, though the sign actually said six items or less. The guy grinned a thank-you and spread his hands a little; he’d rather stay here.

  Huh. Ping. Ping. Then the lightbulb inside her head went off. He’s a cop. He looks like a cop, heavy and self-confident, somebody that nobody would ever call Pudge, and he’s doing something a normal person wouldn’t do, which is wait in a long line of people buying out the store while he’s only got one item. So that would make him not only a cop, but a cop with a particular interest in May, which could not be good news.

  Her first thought was that John had been arrested, but her first thought always was that John had been arrested, so her second thought was to reject the first thought. If they’d arrested John, why come here? And if they were going to come here, why not just do a real cop thing and jump the line entirely to say what they had to say?

  Well, she’d find out soon enough. A few thousand more pings and here he was, pushing the little packet of four hundred-watt frosted white bulbs toward her with a ten-dollar bill as he grinned and said, “You know, you really oughta get an answering machine.”

  He’s from Andy, she thought, but she knew he wasn’t. She said, “Oh, you must be the man John went to see a couple times.”

  “Naturally,” he said.

  Ping. She took the ten and made change as Pudge put the packet of lightbulbs into a plastic bag, and Johnny Eppick For Hire said, “So you be my answering machine. Pass on to John, he should call me. Tell him we got ignition.”

  I hope John doesn’t plan to cheat this man, she thought. I’ll have to remind him to be careful. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “Enjoy your light.”

  “Better than curse the darkness,” he said, and grinned one last time, and carried his lightbulbs into the night.

  42

  BY FRIDAY MORNING, Dortmunder’s irritation had cooled without disappearing. When May had come home last night and told him Eppick had actually braced her right there in the store with his message to call, Dortmunder had at first been outraged. “He talked to you? In the store? He’s not supposed to have anything to do with you at all!”

  May wasn’t as upset as he was, but of course she’d had longer to live with it. She said, “He wasn’t bad or anything, John. He just gave me the message for you and bought some lightbulbs.”

  “Lightbulbs? Listen, he wants to talk to me, he can call Andy, like last time.”

  “Well, he talked to me,” she said, “and I thought it was a little weird, but there wasn’t anything wrong about it.”

  “You know what it is?” he demanded. “I’ll tell you what it is. The message isn’t lightbulbs or call me or any of that. The message is, ‘I can reach out to you. I not only know where you are, I know where your lady friend works, I’m on top of you any time I wanna be on top of you,’ that’s what the message is.”

  “I think we already knew all that,” May said. “Are you going to call him?”

  “Some other time. Right now, I’m too irritated.”

  “Well, go in the living room, and let me get on with dinner,” she said, gesturing at tonight’s sack of groceries on the kitchen table.

  He was hungry. “Okay.”

  “Have a beer as an appetizer.”

  “I will,” he agreed, and took a can of beer with him to the living room, where he sat and frowned at the switched-off television set while he conducted several imaginary conversations with Johnny Eppick in his head
, in which he was much fiercer and made much more telling points than was likely in real life, until May called him to dinner, which was a really good meat loaf, and how she’d whipped that up so fast, with all those ingredients and stuff, straight from working late hours at the Safeway, he had no idea. But it calmed him considerably, and at the end of the meal he said, “I’ll call him tomorrow. Not tonight.”

  “Don’t yell at him,” she said.

  He hesitated, then made the concession. “Okay.”

  And late this morning, after May’d headed back to the Safeway, he called Eppick’s number and got his answering machine. “So this is better, is it?” he demanded. “We’re in closer communication now, are we? I’m talking to a machine.” And hung up.

  Eppick phoned just after two that afternoon. “I’ll give you a place you can walk to,” he said. “Meet me at Union Square in half an hour. I’ll be on a bench wherever the dealers aren’t.”

  “The dealers won’t be wherever you are.”

  “You think I’m that obvious?” Eppick asked him, but he sounded pleased at the idea.

  “See you in half an hour,” Dortmunder said, and did, walking through the park all bundled up against the raw March air, and Eppick was seated at his ease on a bench amid only civilians, and not many of them at that, because the weather was still a little below par for park bench–sitting. However, Dortmunder joined him and Eppick said, “The granddaughter has come through like a champ.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to May,” Dortmunder told him. “It upsets her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Eppick said, though he didn’t sound sorry. “She didn’t look upset. Maybe we could get carrier pigeons, you and me.”

  They’d already veered too far from Dortmunder’s practice conversations, so he said, “Tell me about the champ.”

  “Huh? Oh, the granddaughter.” Eppick grinned, pleased at the very thought of the granddaughter. “She’s our spy in the enemy camp,” he said, “and she’s worth her weight in chess sets.”