What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

“No,” Tumbril said. “No, that’s true.”

  “So now, you horse’s ass,” Mrs. W said, “for once in your life do something sensible. Get on the phone. Get that poor boy out of quod.”

  62

  JOHNNY EPPICK AND Mr. Hemlow, having started north in Mr. Hemlow’s limousine after lunch, didn’t reach the compound until half past four. The trip up, with Mr. Hemlow’s wheelchair buckled to the floor so that Mr. Hemlow faced forward toward Eppick on the rear-facing seat behind Pembroke, was not devoid of accomplishment. By the time they arrived, they’d come to a number of satisfactory conclusions.

  Mr. Hemlow began, once they were north of the city, by saying, “Johnny, I must tell you, you chose well.”

  “I’m pleased with John,” Eppick agreed. “And his companions, too.”

  “There are five of them now?”

  “That does seem to be what it took.” Eppick grinned in an admiring way. “I talked with a couple friends still on the Job, and I must say what they did was as smooth as Mister Softee ice cream. They went up against half a dozen armed professional security men, and pulled the job without a shot being fired, with no violence of any kind, without even a threat. Sir, it was a heist even your granddaughter would approve.”

  “Oh, she’ll approve the result, I have no doubt of that.” Mr. Hemlow brooded out the window a bit, Eppick watching that profile that itself looked a bit like a Mister Softee ice cream. Then he turned back to Eppick to say, “They will expect to be paid.”

  “Yes, sir, they will.”

  “If I intended to sell the set,” Mr. Hemlow mused, “it would be a simple matter of giving each a percentage. And you, too, of course.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But that would require destroying the set, extracting the individual jewels and melting the gold down into ingots, which would be a far worse crime, in my opinion.”

  “Absolutely, sir,” Eppick said piously.

  “So,” Mr. Hemlow went on, “since converting the set to cash is out of the question, let us consider what we should offer these fellows as recompense for their good work.”

  “It will all be coming out of your own pocket, Mr. Hemlow.”

  “I realize that. On the other hand, my pockets are deep enough to allow me such an indulgence. And when the day is done, I and my descendents will still have the set, with all its value intact.”

  “That’s true, sir.”

  Mr. Hernlow brooded at the Hutchinson River Parkway a while, and then said, “The question is, what would constitute a proper payment? How much should I offer? What amount would fellows like that think was fair, and what would they think was insulting?”

  “That’s a very good question, sir,” Eppick said. “Give me a minute to think about it.”

  “Of course.”

  Now it was Eppick who brooded a while at the Hutch, occasionally nodding or shaking his head as the argument progressed within. Finally he turned back to Mr. Hemlow to say, “If it were me, sir, I would begin by offering them ten thousand dollars apiece. They would not be satisfied with that number.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Mr. Hemlow said.

  “So you would allow them to negotiate with you,” Eppick explained, “to argue you up to fifteen or twenty thousand. I’m believing a payout of a hundred thousand dollars would be all right with you.”

  “Of course. Let me think about this.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Mr. Hemlow took his turn studying what by now had become Route 684, and did some of his own head-shaking, just visible mixed in there with his normal head-shaking. Then he looked again at Eppick and said, “I think that’s too low. I think ten thousand dollars is not a strong enough bargaining first step, but would be seen as an insult. They know as well as we do they did more than ten thousand dollars’ worth of work last night.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I might offer them twenty, however.”

  “You’ll still have the argument, though, sir,” Eppick pointed out. “And then you’ll wind up at twenty-five or thirty.”

  “Well, thirty thousand dollars doesn’t seem out of the way, considering the job that was done.”

  “So that would make it a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar payout for you.”

  “One hundred eighty thousand,” Mr. Hemlow said.

  “Sir?”

  “You would be getting the same amount, Johnny,” Mr. Hemlow said. “In addition to the normal fees I’m paying you.”

  Astounded, Eppick said, “I would?”

  “None of this would have been possible without you, Johnny. You knew how to assemble the team, and you knew how to keep them in good order. You kept them honest.”

  “In a way,” Eppick said.

  “Yes, in a way.”

  Eppick laughed. “Mr. Hemlow,” he said, “if I’m getting the same size piece as everybody else, I’ve been negotiating on the wrong side here.”

  “It was better that way, Johnny, better for you to think your advice was disinterested. I take it you would be content with thirty thousand dollars.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “And the others?”

  “I don’t see any problem there, sir,” Eppick said. “I truly don’t.”

  “Fine.”

  When they gazed out at the Taconic State Parkway now, both were smiling.

  Pembroke buzzed them in at the gate, and they drove the winding road up through the massive pines. Pale late-afternoon light was steadily darkening, the snow around the trees looking gray and tired and old. They drove part of the way up to the house and then Mr. Hemlow barked, “Pembroke! Stop.”

  Pembroke stopped, and Eppick turned to see what Mr. Hemlow was staring at. Out there, in a small clearing beside the road, on green tarpaulins, were two armies of chessmen, one the brightest crimson, the other deepest black.

  “Beautiful,” Mr. Hemlow breathed. “No one would guess what lies beneath that paint. On, Pembroke.”

  Pembroke drove on.

  63

  MRS. W SAID, “What’s taking so long?”

  Fiona, seated on the next settee, had wanted to ask the same question, but was still somewhat intimidated by Jay Tumbril, particularly here in his own office, and so had kept silent.

  “In my experience,” Tumbril answered, “arrest is sudden, but release takes a little longer.”

  “It’s nearly six o’clock,” Mrs. W pointed out. “They’ve had nearly two hours to let poor Brian go.”

  Tumbril started, “Yes, but—” and was interrupted by his phone. “Maybe this is Michael now,” he said, reaching for it.

  While Fiona, Mrs. W, and Tumbril waited here in Tumbril’s office, another Feinberg beastie, not so wee, named Michael, a cadaverous seven-footer in a black suit that made him look like an exclamation point, had been sent to retrieve Brian from the police, after Tumbril had phoned to explain the situation to the assistant district attorney who’d been assigned the case. Now, into the phone, Tumbril said, “Yes, Felicity? Good, put him on. Michael, what’s the delay there? What? Jacques is absolutely certain of this? Put Roanoke on.” That being the name of the assistant DA. Tumbril raised baffled eyebrows at Mrs. W, then said into the phone, “Mr. Roanoke? Jay Tumbril here. Are you certain Jacques Perly’s certain? Well, if you don’t mind, we’d like to be on our way there as well. Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler, with her assistant, and I shall come along personally. We’ll get downtown just as rapidly as we can.”

  Breaking the connection, Tumbril pressed another button on the phone and said, “Felicity, call us a car. Soonest.”

  Mrs W, increasingly irritated and impatient, said, “Jay? What is this? What’s going on? Where’s Brian?”

  “Jacques Perly,” Tumbril said, “the private investigator whose office—”

  “Yes, we know who he is. What about him?”

  Tumbril spread his hands. “He says he has proof positive Clanson was part of the gang.”

  Fiona said, “That’s ridiculous.”
r />   “Jacques is on his way to the DA’s office with photographs.”

  Sounding like Queen Elizabeth the First in a testy mood, Mrs. W said, “I will wish to see these photographs.”

  “We all will,” Tumbril assured her. “That’s why I ordered the car.”

  Perly had arrived ahead of them, an outraged capon, too agitated to sit. He bounced around the small messy office of Assistant DA Noah Roanoke, and began squawking before Mrs. W and Fiona and Tumbril had even finished crossing the threshold: “You were going to let him go? You were going to release him? After what he did to my building? And your chess set!”

  “Just a minute, Jacques,” Tumbril said, and approached the balding neat metal-bespectacled man behind the room’s standard-issue gray metal desk. “Mr. Roanoke?”

  Roanoke rose, hand extended. He was as calm as Perly was excited. “Mr. Tumbril,” he suggested, as they shook hands.

  Tumbril gestured. “Ms. Livia Northwood Wheeler. Her assistant, Fiona Hemlow.”

  “Please sit,” Roanoke offered, and took his own advice.

  But nobody else did, because Perly, having vibrated through the introduction ritual, now said, “I cannot believe this! And you didn’t even consult me!”

  “If you have evidence, Jacques,” Tumbril told him, “I assure you we all want to see it.”

  “Didn’t even consult.”

  “We’re here now, Jacques.”

  “I’ve turned the photos over to Noah,” Perly said, with a quick brushing-away gesture toward Roanoke.

  Who said, “Please, ladies. Those chairs aren’t terribly comfortable, but they’re better than standing.”

  Along the wall to the left of the entrance were three gray metal armless chairs with green cushioned seats, the sort of chairs you’d associate with Department of Motor Vehicles waiting rooms rather than doctors’ waiting rooms. Since Mrs. W now took the one farthest left, Fiona took the one farthest right, as Roanoke handed a manila folder to Jay, who opened it and said, “Jacques, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what I’m looking at here.”

  “As you know, Jay,” Perly said, “we’ve had our suspicions about young Clanson for some time now, so much so that I began an investigation of the fellow.”

  Mrs. W almost but didn’t quite pop back up onto her feet. “You did what? To Brian? On whose authority?”

  “Jay’s,” Perly told her. “As your attorney.”

  “Without telling me. And who was supposed to pay for this?”

  “Mrs. Wheeler,” Perly said, “I am sure you will find the result well worth the expense.”

  “Oh, are you.”

  “Jacques,” Tumbril said, “I’d still like some help here.”

  “All right,” Perly said. “Here’s the sequence. On Saturday night, an agent of mine kept tabs on this fellow Clanson, and late that night—just twenty-four hours before the robbery!—photographed him casing my building!”

  Tumbril nodded at the folder open in his hands. “Oh, is this him in the backseat?”

  “And that is my building, just beyond him. What my man did,” Perly said, “when he saw what neighborhood Clanson was headed toward, was to take a faster route, and be in position when the car went by.”

  “Then this next picture,” Tumbril said, “is him and some others getting out of the car. We’re farther away here, hard to make it out.”

  “My man did what he could with a telephoto lens. But I can tell you that’s a low-life bar farther down my street. Meeting the rest of the gang there, no doubt.”

  Mrs. W said, “Jay, let me see those pictures.”

  As Jay handed her the folder, Fiona slid one chair to the left, so she could look at the photos, too, and Perly said, “Unfortunately, my man couldn’t get clear pictures of the others in the car, but he said one was a tough-looking older woman, some sort of harridan, a real Ma Barker type, probably the brains of the gang.”

  Fiona looked at the photos. In awe, she raised her eyes to look at the stony profile of Mrs. W as that lady said to Perly, with icy calm, “A tough-looking older woman? A harridan? A Ma Barker type?”

  “When we get our hands on her,” Perly said, “and we will, I can guarantee you she’ll have a record as long as your arm.”

  Now Mrs. W did stand, though not precipitately or with apparent excitement. She stood as a thoughtful judge might stand when about to pronounce a death sentence. “The vehicle Brian is riding in, Mr. Perly,” she said, “is mine. I am the harridan seated next to him.”

  Perly blinked at her. “What?”

  “The third member of our nefarious gang in my limousine, Mr. Perly,” Mrs. W went on, “is Fiona here, my assistant. We had come from a party given by Brian’s television station, and we were on our way to a lounge considered at the moment to be the most desirable social venue in the entire city.”

  Perly’s mouth had sagged open during Mrs. W’s speech, but nothing had come out of it, so now it closed again. He continued to stare at Mrs. W as though all cerebral function behind those eyes had come to a halt.

  Tumbril, clearing his throat, said, “Livia, I don’t think Jacques is usually in that neighborhood at night.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be all there by day, either,” Mrs. W said, turning her icy gaze on Tumbril. “And if you intend to pay him for this harassment of an innocent boy, Jay, it shall come from your pocket, because you are no longer my lawyer.”

  “Livia, you don’t want to—”

  “Mr. Roanoke,” Mrs. W said, turning toward that interested observer, her manner still steely but less aggressive, “we would like Brian returned to us now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Noah Roanoke said.

  64

  BEFORE DINNER, MR. Hemlow read to them, in the big rustic cathedral-ceilinged living room at the compound, with a staff-laid fire crackling red and orange in the deep stone fireplace, part of a paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue on the subject of chess: “Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.”

  Closing the book, nodding his red-bereted head this way and that, Mr. Hemlow said, “What Poe calls draughts is what we know as the game of checkers.”

  Kelp said, “I like checkers.”

  Eppick said, “That’s easy. Everybody likes checkers. Shall I put the book back on the shelf, Mr. Hemlow?”

  “Thank you.”

  “My Mom used to read to me,” Stan said. “When I was a kid. Mostly biographies of race car drivers.”

  “It’s good when a family shares an interest,” Mr. Hemlow said.

  No hostess in her right mind would have put together a guest list for dinner like this and hope to make it work, but somehow it wasn’t being too bad. Since nobody wanted to do the seven-hour round trip from and to New York in one day, it had been agreed that Mr. Hemlow would open the compound and he himself would spend the night in his ground floor bedroom in the main house with one or two staff members for assistance, while the other six would sleep in the simple but comfortable guesthouse, then head back to the city in the morning. Mr. Hemlow’s staff, all local part-timers but loyal over the long term to a generous boss, would make dinner and breakfast, and now, as the group waited for dinner, they were chatting together, not too easily, in the main living room.

  Eppick, having returned from putting Poe back in his place, said, “Mr. Hemlow, while we’re waiting for dinner here, maybe this is
the time to talk a little about recompense.”

  Nodding, Kelp said, “That sounds good.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Mr. Hemlow said. “Something to whet the appetite, as it were. As you gentlemen know, I do not intend to sell the set but to keep it, right over there.” And he gestured to where Kelp had earlier opened out the empty chessboard onto a large side table. “Nor,” he added, “is there an accurate figure as to the set’s value.”

  “That’s one of the things,” Eppick said, “they were gonna be working on in the private eye’s office.”

  Tiny tapped a knuckle on his oak chair arm. “The millions, we know that much,” he said. “That’s close enough for us.”

  “Yes, of course.” Mr. Hemlow was meeting most of the gang, and especially Tiny, for the first time, and seemed less taken aback than most people when initially rounding a corner to find Tiny Bulcher in their path. It may have been simply that life had already given him so many sharp lefts and rights that he couldn’t actually be jolted any more. In any case, he merely gave Tiny’s comment a benign response and went on to say, “I think we will all agree that, in this particular instance, the value to be considered is not the worth of the chess set but the worth of the skill and ingenuity and determination demonstrated by yourselves.”

  Stan said, “A fence would give us ten percent.”

  “The issue of a fence,” Mr. Hemlow said, “does not arise, as this was a commissioned work.”

  “Unlike most jobs you people pull,” Eppick added, “you aren’t grabbing something to turn around and sell it. This time, you’ve been hired to do a little something in your area of expertise. You’re like employees here.”

  Dortmunder said, “So this is the one time I’m not an independent contractor, is that it?”

  “In a way,” Eppick said. “But of course, without the retirement. Or the health program.”

  Stan said, “Or the softball team.”

  “That, too.”

  Mr. Hemlow said, “The number I was thinking of, to express my appreciation for a job well done, was twenty thousand dollars a man.”

  Tiny did that tock on the chair arm again. “No, you weren’t,” he said.