The Road To Ruin
( Dortmunder - 11 )
Donald E Westlake
John Dortmunder as a butler? Well, he’s not really a butler; he’s just playing one at the heavily guarded estate of crooked tycoon Monroe Hall. A corporate pariah surrounded by loot, including a fleet of priceless vintage cars, Hall soon finds his needs—from driving to cooking—eagerly fulfilled by Dortmunder and his gang. Dortmunder’s plan: to change in one fell swoop from loyal servants to merry robbers, and drive off with ill-gotten plunder. There’s just one problem. Monroe Hall has as many enemies as antiques. Before Dortmunder can go from serving to stealing, Hall disappears and the cops are knocking on the door. And after a violent crime is committed, Dortmunder is in the worst place possible. For as everyone knows, whenever there’s mischief in a mansion … the butler always did it!
DONALD E. WESTLAKE
THE ROAD TO RUIN
1
DORTMUNDER SAT IN HIS living room to watch the local evening news, and had just about come to the conclusion that every multiple-dwelling residence in the state of New Jersey would eventually burn to the ground, three per news cycle, when the doorbell rang. He looked up, surprised, not expecting anybody, and then became doubly surprised when he realized it had not been the familiar blatt of the hall doorbell right upstairs here, but the never-heard ing of the street-level bell, sounding in the kitchen.
Rising, he left the living room and stepped out to the hall, to see May looking down at him from the kitchen, her hands full of today’s gleanings from her job at Safeway as she said, “Who is it?”
“Not this bell,” he told her, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the hall door. “The street bell.”
“The street bell?”
Dortmunder clomped on back to the kitchen, to the intercom on the wall there that had never worked, that the landlord had just repaired in a blatant ploy to raise the rent. Not sure of the etiquette or operation of this piece of machinery, for so long on the inactive list, he leaned his lips close to the mouthpiece and said, “Yar?”
“It’s Andy,” said a voice that sounded like Andy being imitated by a talking car.
“Andy?”
May said, “Let him in, John.”
“Oh, yeah.” Dortmunder pressed the white bone button, and yet another unpleasant sound bounced around the kitchen.
“Will wonders never cease,” May said, because Andy Kelp, who was occasionally Dortmunder’s associate in certain enterprises, usually just walked on into their place, having enjoyed the opportunity to hone his lock-picking skills.
Dortmunder said, “What if he rings this one up here, too?”
“He might,” May said. “You never know.”
“It’s an awful sound,” Dortmunder said, and went down the hall to prevent this by opening the door, where he could listen to the echoes as Andy Kelp thudded up the stairs. When the thuds stopped, he leaned out to see Kelp himself, a sharp-nosed cheerful guy dressed casually in blacks and dark grays, come down the worn carpet in the hall.
“You rang the bell,” Dortmunder reminded him—not quite an accusation.
Kelp grinned and shrugged. “Respect your privacy.”
What an idea. “Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Comonin.”
They started down the hall and May, in the kitchen doorway, said, “That was very nice, Andy. Thoughtful.”
“Harya, May.”
“You want a beer?”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
“I’ll bring them.”
Dortmunder and Kelp went into the living room, found seats, and Dortmunder said, “What’s up?”
“Oh, not much.” Kelp looked around the living room. “We haven’t talked for a while, is all. No new acquisitions, I see.”
“No, we still like the old acquisitions.”
“So,” Kelp said, crossing his legs, getting comfortable, “how you been keeping yourself?”
“May’s been keeping me,” Dortmunder told him. “She’s still got the job at the Safeway, so we eat.”
“I figured,” Kelp said, “you didn’t call for a while, probly you didn’t have any little scores in mind.”
“Probly.”
“I mean,” Kelp said, “if you did have a little score in mind, you’d call me.”
“Unless it was a single-o.”
Kelp looked interested. “You had any single-os?”
“As a matter of fact,” Dortmunder said, as May came in with three cans of beer, “no.”
May distributed the beer, settled into her own chair, and said, “So, Andy, what brings you here?”
“He wants to know,” Dortmunder said, “have I been working without him, maybe with some other guys.”
“Aw, naw,” Kelp said, casually waving the beer can. “You wouldn’t do that, John.”
Dortmunder drank some beer, in lieu of having something to say.
May said, “What about you, Andy? Anything on the horizon?”
“Well, there is one little remote possibility,” Kelp said, which of course would be the other reason he’d happened to drop by. “I don’t know if John’d be interested.”
Dortmunder kept the beer can up to his face, as though drinking, while May said, “What wouldn’t he like about it?”
“Well, it’s in New Jersey.”
Dortmunder put the beer can down. “They got a lotta domestic fires in New Jersey,” he said. “I was just noticing on the news.”
“Family feared lost?” Kelp nodded. “I seen that sometimes. No, this is one of those big box superstores, Speedshop.”
“Oh, that,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp said, “I know you had your troubles with that store in the past, but the thing is, they’re having this giant television sale.”
“Got one,” Dortmunder said, pointing at it. (He’d turned it off when all the bell-ringing started.)
“Well, here’s my thinking,” Kelp said. “If they’re gonna have a giant sale on these things, it stands to reason they’re gonna have a bunch of them on hand.”
“That’s right,” May said. “To fill the demand.”
“Exactly,” Kelp said to May, and to Dortmunder he said, “I happen to know where there’s an empty semi we could borrow.”
“You’re talking,” Dortmunder said, “about lifting and carrying a whole lot of television sets. Heavy television sets.”
“Not that heavy,” Kelp said. “And it’ll be worth it. You see, I also happen to know a guy out on the Island, recently opened up a great big discount appliance store out there, Honest Irving, not one item in the store is from the usual channels, he’ll take everything off our hands but the semi, and I might have a guy for that, too.”
“Honest Irving,” Dortmunder said.
“His stuff is just as good as everybody else’s,” Kelp assured him, “same quality, great prices, only maybe you shouldn’t try to take the manufacturer up on the warranty.”
“Speedshop,” Dortmunder said, remembering his own after-hours visit to that place. “They got a lotta security there.”
“For a couple guys like us?” Kelp spread his hands to show how easy it would be, and the phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” May said. She stood, left her beer behind, and headed for the kitchen, as the phone rang again.
“I know I’m wasting my breath,” Kelp said, “but what a help for May it could be, I give you a nice little extension phone in here.”
“No, thank you.”
“One phone in an entire apartment,” Kelp said, and shook his head. “And not even cordless. You take back-to-basics a little too far back, John.”
“I also don’t think,” Dortmunder said, “I wanna buck Speedshop, not again. I mean, even before the question of Hone
st Irving.”
Kelp said, “Where’s a question about Honest Irving?”
“The day will come, an operation like that,” Dortmunder said, “all of a sudden you’ve got this massive police presence in the store, cops looking at serial numbers, wanting bills of sale, all this paperwork, and whadaya think the odds are, we’re there unloading television sets when it happens?”
“A thousand to one,” Kelp said.
“Yeah? I make it even money,” Dortmunder said, and May came in, looking worried. He looked at her. “What’s up?”
“That was Anne Marie,” she said, referring to Kelp’s live-in friend. “She says there’s a guy in the apartment, says he wants to see Andy, just waltzed in, won’t give a name, just sits there. Anne Marie doesn’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” Kelp said, getting to his feet. “I better go.”
“John will go with you,” May said.
There was a little silence as Dortmunder reached for his beer can. He lifted his eyes, and they were both looking at him. “Uh,” he said, and put the beer can down again. “Well, naturally,” he said, and got to his feet.
2
SINCE THE TIME, a couple years ago, when Anne Marie Carpinaw’s husband, Howard, decided to walk out on her in the middle of a vacation trip to New York City from their home in Lancaster, Kansas, and while drowning not her sorrows but her befuddlement in the hotel bar she had met and taken up with Andrew Octavian Kelp, life had become odder and more interesting than it had ever been with Howard or in Lancaster (or in D.C., for that matter, where she’d also partly grown up while her daddy the congressman was still alive), which meant things were usually pleasant and went a long way toward making life worthwhile. But now and again, in the orbit of Andy Kelp, life became a little too interesting, and this was one of those moments right now.
The guy in the living room wasn’t menacing, exactly, but he wasn’t explainable either, and that’s what had Anne Marie upset. The doorbell had rung, and when she’d opened the apartment door there he was, short, aged maybe fifty, bandy-legged and skinny-armed but with a big barrelly torso, like a cartoon spider. He was balding, with very pale skin that had maybe never seen the sun, plus watery blue sunny-side-up eyes and a kind of blunt fatalistic manner, as though he would be hard either to surprise or please. There was something in his manner that reminded her of John Dortmunder, except that John almost never got mad, but you could imagine with no trouble at all this guy getting mad.
At the moment, he was cheerful, brisk, and indifferent to her. “Hi,” he said, with a smile, when she opened the door to him. “Andy in?”
“Not at the moment. I’m—”
“I’ll wait,” the guy said, and slithered in past her.
“But—”
It was too late; he was across the threshold. With an empty smile over his shoulder at Anne Marie he said, “I’ll just sit in the living room here, wait’ll he comes back.”
“But—” Helplessly, she watched the guy look at the available furniture and go directly to the chair she thought of as hers. “I don’t know you,” she said.
Settling into Anne Marie’s chair, the guy said, “I’m a friend of Andy’s.” He smiled at the living room: “Very nice. The woman’s touch, huh?”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Not for maybe twenty years,” he said, and laughed. “Don’t mind me,” he advised her. “You go on what you’re doing.”
“I’m not sure when Andy’s coming back.”
“I got nothing but time,” he said, and suddenly looked bitter, as though he’d reminded himself of something unpleasant. Something that might make him mad.
“Well…” She thought, maybe she should placate him somehow. Even though he wasn’t at all threatening, he did look as though he might get mad, even if not at her. The truth was, he barely seemed to notice she was there. She was, she knew, an attractive person, but he gave no indication at all that he’d remarked it. Which was also unsettling.
So, not wanting to, but feeling she should, she said, “Do you want a cup of coffee? Glass of water?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said, and pulled a Daily News out of his jacket pocket, all folded in on itself like origami. Unfolding it, he said, “I’ll just sit here, read my paper, wait for Andy.”
So that’s when she left him there, went to the kitchen, and called John and May’s place, because Andy had told her he wanted to see John today, so maybe he was still there. She got May, and Andy was still there, “but I don’t need to talk to him,” Anne Marie said. “Just tell him what the situation is here.”
May said, “What is the situation there?”
So Anne Marie told her, and May said, “Ooh. I wouldn’t like that.”
“Neither do I.”
“I’ll send Andy home right now.”
Which meant Anne Marie spent the next fifteen minutes in the kitchen, a place where she normally didn’t spend a whole lot of her time. It was very small, to begin with, and what could you do in there except cook and eat?
What she did do, for the next quarter hour, was fret. Was this man a friend of Andy’s? Was it Andy he was potentially mad at? Had she inadvertently permitted all kinds of trouble into the house? It was so hard, sometimes, to know what to do in Andy’s world.
Finally, she heard the apartment door open, so she hurried out to the living room to be present for whatever happened next, because, of course, she was partly responsible for whatever happened next. As she entered the living room, suddenly breathless though it was a mere half-dozen steps from one room to the other, she saw that Andy was here, that John had come along with him and was closing the apartment door, and that the stranger was getting to his feet, doing origami again with his newspaper. And he was smiling.
And so was Andy! It was with great relief that Anne Marie saw that smile, and heard Andy say, “Chester! Whadda you doing out?”
“Believe it or not,” Chester said, “I been out almost four years.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Andy seemed genuinely happy to see this strange man, which Anne Marie knew shouldn’t surprise her, though it still did. Shaking hands with Chester, he said, “You met Anne Marie?”
“I didn’t wanna push myself forward,” Chester said, and turned to offer a smile and a nod and a “How are ya?”
“Anne Marie Carpinaw,” Andy introduced, “Chester Fallon.”
“Hello,” she said, thinking, You didn’t want to push yourself forward? You walked right into the house!
On the other hand, it was now clear Chester Fallon was not a threat or a problem, but a friend of some sort. And once he was Chester, somehow, he became much less threatening.
Meantime, Andy was saying, “I don’t think you know John,” and made the introductions, and Anne Marie noticed that John was very neutral toward Chester, like herself, shaking Chester’s hand, looking him straight in the eye, and contenting himself with a “Harya.”
“Not so good,” Chester told him, and said to Andy, “I take it Anne Marie’s with you, and John’s one of us guys.”
“You wanna tell a story?” Andy asked him. “In confidence? Be confident. Siddown. Everybody wanna beer? I’ll get them.”
So Andy left, and the other three sat, and Anne Marie said to Chester, “I wish you’d told me.”
Chester looked surprised. “Told you what? I’m a friend of Andy’s, I said that.”
“But there was no … conversation.”
“Well, Anne Marie, if I can call you Anne Marie—”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t know you, did I? It could be you’re the lady of the house, it could be you’re a bill collector, process server. No offense, I seen cops look like you.”
“Not enough of them,” John said.
“Very true,” Chester told him. “John, is it? You’re right when you’re right. Most cops, what they look like, they look like what you would look like if, your whole life, you never ate anything but Big Macs.”
Andy came back t
hen to distribute beer, take his own seat, and say, “Chester, I haven’t seen you in years. More.”
“You know I went up,” Chester said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Andy assured him.
“Of course it wasn’t my fault,” Chester said, “but I was still doing large time.” Including John and Anne Marie in his explanation, he said, “I’m the driver, it can’t be my fault, unless I turn around and drive back to the bank. The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.”
Anne Marie, surprised, said, “Really?”
“You may have seen the one,” Chester said, “where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.”
“Wow,” Anne Marie said.
“That was me,” Chester told her. “We gotta do it in one take or otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.”
John said, “Was it you in the rest of the picture?”
“Nah,” Chester said, “that was some movie star. They even had to bring in somebody else to do his swimming. Anyway, the problem was, that career dried up. They don’t need the guys like me now, they got computers to do the stunts.” He shrugged, but looked disgusted. “People wanna look at a cartoon, a car on a diagonal down the alley, nobody at the wheel, nobody’s life at stake, what I say, it isn’t the pictures got worse, it’s the audience. But don’t let me get off on that, that’s a pet grievance, or it would be, except now I got a new pet grievance.” Turning to Andy, he said, “And frankly, that’s why I’m here.”
“I was wondering,” Andy admitted. “You say you’ve been out four years, but I haven’t heard anything about you, so I don’t think you’re driving any more.”
“Not away from banks,” Chester said. “See, it isn’t that I reformed, it’s that driving in heists wasn’t my first career choice to begin with. Movies, and some television, your circus in the slow periods, industrial films, I was making out okay. But then, when the computer muscles me outa there, how else am I gonna maintain my standard of living?”
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