Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Andy!” this fellow said, with the kind of rich voice that goes with that kind of rich hair, and stuck out a portly hand.

  “Fitzroy,” agreed Kelp, and they shook, and then Kelp said, “Fitzroy, this is John. John, Fitzroy.”

  “Harya.”

  “How do you do,” said Fitzroy, with a gleaming but brisk smile, and when offered his hand, Dortmunder found it warm and pulpy, like a boneless chicken breast in a sock.

  Kelp said, “Right on time.”

  “Of course,” Fitzroy said, and to Dortmunder, he said, “I’m sorry, John, you’ll have to ride in back.”

  “That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. At this point, what difference did it make?

  Fitzroy led the way to the back of the van and opened one of the doors there. “Nothing to sit on but the floor, I’m afraid.”

  Naturally. “That’s okay,” Dortmunder said, and bent forward to climb in on all fours, feeling the rough carpeting beneath his palms.

  “All set?” Fitzroy asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer, instead slamming the door the instant Dortmunder’s heels had cleared the area.

  Dortmunder propped his left forearm on a wooden box taking up most of the space back here, so he could scrunch around and get into a seated position, legs folded in an extremely loose version of the lotus position. Then he looked around himself in the dimness.

  There were no windows back here, only up front, the windshield and the windows in the doors flanking the front seats. In this space back here were two shovels, a coil of thick rope, some other stuff, and this long box he was leaning his forearm on, which was . . .

  A coffin. Very dark brown wood, scuffed-looking, with pocked brass handles and a faint redolence about it like basements, like a greenhouse in winter, like freshly turned earth, like, well, like a grave.

  Dortmunder took his forearm off the box and put it on his knee. Of course; this was the coffin that would go into the grave once they took the original inhabitant out. And I, Dortmunder thought, get to ride out to the cemetery with him. Great.

  The other two got into the front of the van, and Fitzroy made the left onto Lex, then the left onto Thirty-sixth, and headed for the Midtown Tunnel. The darkened city bounced by, beyond those two heads.

  It was May’s fault, Dortmunder decided. So long as she’d been against him taking this job, it’d been easy to say no. But when she came to the conclusion there was something mystical or something about this being exactly a thousand dollars, the exact same amount as the profit he’d had to leave behind in the Speedshop, there was no hope for him. He wasn’t a ditchdigger, he wasn’t a grave robber, and he wasn’t a guy given to manual labor, but none of that mattered. It was the thousand dollars coming around again, so he was supposed to grab it.

  All right, so he’d do it and get it over with, and come back with the thousand, and never touch a shovel again for the rest of his life, so help him. In the meantime, Kelp and Fitzroy sat up front, jabbering about how useful the Internet was—sure, you could meet people like Fitzroy Guilderpost there, with shovels—while Dortmunder and the fellow beside him in the back had nothing to say to each other.

  Dortmunder found, if he raised his knees and put his crossed forearms on them, and then rested his chin on his forearms, he could look out the windshield past those two happy heads and watch the city unreel. Also, in this position, he could watch their recent history in the large rearview mirrors beyond both side windows; large because there was no interior mirror, since there were no windows at the back of the van.

  They were approaching the tunnel now. Traffic was light, mostly big panel trucks with 800 numbers on the back that you could call to rat on the driver if he wasn’t doing a perfect job. Dortmunder wondered if anybody was ever fink enough to call one of those numbers. Then he wondered if anybody ever called one of those numbers to say the driver was doing a great job. Then he wondered at how bored he was already, and they weren’t even out of Manhattan yet.

  They ran through the tunnel, and Dortmunder noticed there was no one on duty at any of the glassed-in police posts along the way; a hardened criminal could actually change lanes in here. He looked in the rearview mirrors and saw a car appear, way back there. He noticed that the left headlight on that car was a little dimmer than the right. He realized he had to break out of this tedium right now; it wasn’t healthy.

  So he sat up straighter, ignored the rearview mirrors, and broke into the Internet conversation—they’re doing E-mail in person up there—to say, “This box here come a long way?”

  Fitzroy automatically looked at where the interior mirror would be, to see the passenger in back, then looked out at the tunnel again and said, “Out west.”

  “Oh, yeah? A long way. You don’t have to, uh, refrigerate it or anything?”

  “No, that’s old in there,” Fitzroy assured him. “That’s almost seventy years old. Nothing more’s going to change in there.”

  “I guess not. And the one we’re switching? That’s old, too?”

  “Two or three years older, in fact,” Fitzroy said. “You won’t mind, John, if I don’t tell you the entire operation.”

  “Not me,” Dortmunder said. “I’m just making conversation.”

  But Fitzroy was full of his caper, whatever it was, and both wanted to talk about it and didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s the linchpin, I’ll tell you that much,” he said. Then they were out of the tunnel and at the tollbooths, and he said, “Excuse me.”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said. Polite guy, anyway.

  It took Fitzroy, being portly, a while to get at his wallet, and then to hand over some bills to the attendant and wait for his change. Dortmunder leaned his chin down to his knees again to look in the outside mirrors, and the car with the one fainter headlight was moving very slowly toward another open booth. Very slowly. That driver must be trying to get to his money before he reached the booth. The car was a gray Plymouth Voyager, a passenger van, the kind of suburban vehicle mostly used for hauling Little League teams around and about, though this one had only the driver, a guy, indistinct inside there.

  Fitzroy at last got them moving again, and Dortmunder sat up to say, “So this is the linchpin, huh?”

  “We couldn’t do the operation without it,” Fitzroy assured him. “But with it, we win. We have to be absolutely secret about it, though, absolutely. We daren’t risk a word getting out.”

  Kelp said, “Well, you know you can count on John and me. We’ll never say a thing about this.”

  “Oh, I haven’t the slightest doubt on that score,” Fitzroy said, and turned his head to smile at Kelp. Seen in profile like that, from the back of the van, smiling, he looked more like a hungry wolf and less like a portly man.

  It was only ten minutes along the Long Island Expressway, and then they were passing among the cemeteries, a huge necropolis spread across Queens, different cemeteries for different religions and ethnicities, clustered together for companionship, like campfires on the Great Plains. For the one they wanted, they had to stay on the highway to the far end, then take the exit there and circle back. Dortmunder, who’d been getting bored again, once Fitzroy wouldn’t talk about his scam anymore, had gone back to the chin-on-knee posture, and now he saw that same Plymouth Voyager with the gimpy headlight, well back there, but with his right turn signal on, preparing to take the same exit as them.

  Is this guy following us? Dortmunder wondered if he should mention it to Fitzroy, if this was maybe some problem with his secrecy that he should know about, but then he thought, Fitzroy’s been looking in the same mirrors as me. I’ve seen him check those mirrors a lot, all the way out, so if he’s that hipped on secrecy tonight, he’s already noticed that car. So if it’s somebody that is following us, Fitzroy already knows about it.

  Dortmunder thought about that.

  Taking a side street that cut between two different cemeteries, Fitzroy said, “They lock these places at night for some reason, which could be a problem for us. We don’t want an
yone ever to know that anything happened here tonight. Fortunately, up ahead here, a portion of the fence is broken. Not done by us. Much earlier. Drug dealers possibly, or lovers.”

  “Or vampires,” Kelp said.

  “Yes, very good,” Fitzroy told him. “But more likely ghouls, I think. Vampires prey on the living. It’s ghouls that eat dead flesh.”

  “Well, so do we,” Kelp said. “You know, beef and like that.”

  To distract himself from the conversation, Dortmunder leaned down again to look in the mirrors. No lights but the wide-apart streetlights, so the Voyager had voyaged elsewhere. No, here it came, around the corner, well back. Came around the corner, and right away the headlights switched off.

  Funny place to park.

  Dortmunder looked out front. They were on a bumpy blacktop street flanked by eight-foot-tall wrought-iron fences of two different designs, with tombstones visible beyond them both. The street ran straight up a gradual slope, and it looked to Dortmunder as though the land tipped down again farther ahead.

  But they didn’t go that far. On the right, a section of fence sagged inward, away from one of the support bars, leaving an opening wide enough for a person to walk through, or maybe even two people abreast, but not wide enough for a car. Nevertheless, Fitzroy angled toward this opening, bumping up over the curb and sidewalk—why had the city bothered to put sidewalks on a street like this?—and stopping just short of the fence.

  “Now, Andy,” Fitzroy said, “if you and John get out and pull on that fence, you can open it wide enough for me to drive through. Once I’m in there, it would be best to close it up again.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said, and opened his door.

  Fitzroy said, “You’ll have to open the back door for John, there’s no knob on the inside there.”

  The optician at Speedshop again. Dortmunder wriggled about to face the back, trying not to lean on the coffin more than absolutely necessary, and Kelp came around to open the door. Dortmunder clambered out and the two of them walked over to the fence, which was black wrought iron designed with daisy shapes between the vertical bars at waist level and again at head level. These shapes made good grips. As they grasped handfuls of daisies, Dortmunder said, without moving his lips, “A car followed us.”

  “I know,” Kelp said, without moving his lips.

  The fence moved more easily than they’d expected. It was heavy, but once they got the end lifted from the ground, it swung without trouble.

  There were a few old graves here, sunken, with tilting tombstones, but they weren’t in the way. Fitzroy steered slowly around them and stopped when he reached the gravel roadway.

  Dortmunder and Kelp moved the fence back to position number one, and Dortmunder said, without moving his lips, “He likes absolute secrecy.”

  “Absolutely,” Kelp said, without moving his lips.

  They walked over to the van, where Fitzroy had opened his window so he could tell them, “It isn’t far, it’ll be just as easy to follow me.”

  “Lead away,” Kelp said.

  Fitzroy drove slowly along the gravel roadway, and Kelp and Dortmunder walked behind, speaking without moving their lips. “They can try whatever they want,” Dortmunder said, “just so he’s actually got that dough.”

  “He’s got some dough,” Kelp said. “I took a look at his wallet at the tollbooth.”

  “They won’t make their move until the switch is done,” Dortmunder said, “so we still gotta do all this digging.”

  “Maybe that’s good,” Kelp said. “Maybe their scam gets to be our scam.”

  “I dunno about that,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t like hanging out with dead bodies.”

  “Well, they’re quiet,” Kelp said, “and you can trust them. We’ll see how it plays.”

  The brake lights went on in front of them, and Fitzroy angled off onto the grass so that his headlights shone on a small pale stone in front of another slightly sunken grave. Dortmunder and Kelp walked around the van, read the stone, which said:

  JOSEPH REDCORN

  July 12, 1907–

  November 7, 1930

  “Died young,” Kelp commented.

  “There’s a lesson in that,” Dortmunder said.

  Fitzroy had gotten out of the van to go around back and open both its doors. Now he came toward them, carrying a folded canvas tarp, saying, “We want to be very careful we leave no traces of our digging. We’ll spread this on the next grave and put all the dirt there. Also, I’ll ask you to remove the sod very carefully, so we’ll be able to put it back.”

  Meaning somebody else would be coming along, probably pretty soon, to dig the guy up again. And for Fitzroy’s scam, the guy they dug up had to be the ringer from out west, instead of the actual Joseph Redcorn. Almost seventy years he’d been lying down there, old Joseph, minding his own business, and now he was getting evicted so somebody else could pull a fast one. Dortmunder almost felt sorry for the guy.

  Kelp said to Fitzroy, “I was saying to John, he died young, this fella.”

  “Well, he was an American Indian, from upstate,” Fitzroy told him. “You know, those are the people that work in construction on the skyscrapers, up on the tall buildings. Mohawks, mostly, some others.”

  “This one was a Mohawk?”

  “No, one of the minor tribes the Iroquois controlled, the Pottaknobbee. But Redcorn was a steelworker alongside them, on what they call ‘the high iron.’”

  Dortmunder said, “And something went wrong.”

  “He was working on the Empire State Building, while they were putting it up,” Fitzroy explained, “and one day in November, it started to rain. Help me spread this tarpaulin, will you, John?”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said.

  They spread the tarp while Kelp got the shovels out of the van. Dortmunder looked around, saw nobody, knew there was somebody nearby just the same, and took the shovel Kelp handed him.

  5

  * * *

  Irwin sat on a tombstone, but the stone made his butt cold and there was nowhere to lean his back. So he sat on the ground in front of the stone, leaning against it, but the ground made his pants wet and the stone made his back cold. So he stood and leaned against a tree, but the bark was rough and uncomfortable, and his legs got tired. So he tried sitting on the stone again.

  Meanwhile, over there, in the glare of the van’s headlights, the bozos were working up a pretty good sweat. They were stripped to the waist now, both excessively unlovely, both shovels working, dirt flying up and out of the hole and onto the tarp on the grave next door. These two were better than the bozos in Nevada, harder workers, more willing, and much more trusting.

  Irwin walked around in the darkness, trying to dry the seat of his pants, and thinking how the word trust and the name Fitzroy Guilderpost just naturally didn’t belong together. Well, he was no bozo, Irwin Gabel was no bozo, and when he outlived his usefulness for Guilderpost, he’d have something to say about it.

  His partners had no idea that Irwin had routinely wired himself for every single one of their meetings, including the events in Nevada and including the events yet to come tonight. All those tapes were very safely and securely tucked away, not to be mentioned until that inevitable moment when Fitzroy Guilderpost thought he and Irwin Gabel had come to the parting of the ways.

  If only he could team up with Little Feather, but the bitch was so cold and hard, it was like trying to chat up one of these tombstones here. But she was the one he’d need, when the end of the partnership with Guilderpost was reached. It was Little Feather who was going to be the rich one, and if Guilderpost really thought he had her tied up with that contract they’d all signed, he was crazy. Try enforcing that in court.

  But if Irwin and Little Feather could combine, life would be a lot easier and a lot safer. Guilderpost would be out and gone and forgotten, and Irwin would be in, and life would be easy forever after. Millions, an eventual payout of millions, and coming in steadily, endlessly, over their lifetimes and beyo
nd. It was worth all the effort they were putting into it.

  The problem was, Little Feather’s relationships with men had been too narrowly focused over the years. She just naturally assumed Irwin’s interest in her was sexual, which it emphatically was not. Get into bed with that, you’d probably break something. But until he got her on his side, it was too dangerous to tell her what he really had in mind. She would probably believe she’d be better off siding with Guilderpost, who’d thought up this scheme in the first place, not realizing that Irwin Gabel was the real brains of the operation.

  Well, there was still time to sort everything out.

  Over there at the grave, Guilderpost was now turning the van around, so they were ready for the switch. Yes, here came the Redcorn coffin up out of the grave, the two bozos tugging and hauling on the ropes attached to the thick canvas strap they’d lashed around the middle of the box. Out it came, with a certain amount of heavy breathing and muttered curses, and now they removed the strap and headed for the open van.

  Irwin dared to move cautiously a little closer to the scene, because this was the part that mattered. How they banged around the Redcorn coffin didn’t concern him, but the Elkhorn coffin had to be used gently. It shouldn’t go into the grave with any fresh dents or dings on it. Irwin had explained that very carefully to Guilderpost, and he could only hope Guilderpost was explaining it just as carefully to the bozos.

  Well, apparently so. Good. The two pulled the box out of the van, laid it carefully on the ground, strapped it, roped it, then lowered it with care into the grave. Excellent.

  The rest took no time at all. The dirt went back into the hole a lot more quickly than it had come out. When the bozos went to their knees to start carefully replacing the sod, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, Irwin turned away. Nothing would go wrong from this point. At the end, they’d put the Redcorn coffin in the van, to be taken to the disposal site, and then they’d leave.