Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Last chance, Frank,” Roger said.

  Frank shook his head. “I can’t do it, Roger. That’s why I gotta burn the books.”

  “Well, good luck to you,” Roger said, and came over to stick out his hand. “We had a good long run, Frank.”

  “Yes, we did,” Frank said.

  Solemnly, they shook hands. Then Roger pointed at the glass, as Frank picked it up again, and said, “I wouldn’t drink any more, Frank, if I were you.”

  “Oh, Roger,” Frank said. “If you were me, you’d drink a lot more.” And he proceeded to.

  When he next lowered the glass, he was alone in the office. Roger had gone.

  Could he get away with it? What other choice did he have? Roger had always been the sophisticated one, taking the long vacations, learning French. Frank had just liked the soft life at home. Was it somehow possible to keep that soft life, even after this disaster?

  We should have had her killed, he thought, and took our chances.

  He was suddenly feeling nostalgic for himself, as though he, too, had gone, like Roger, and now he was missing himself. Putting down his glass, he left Roger’s office to take a slow amble around the casino. He liked to do that almost every day, just walk around his domain, watch the gamblers slide their money into his pockets.

  That’s what he did now, as though for the last time, though he certainly hoped it was not for the last time. This late on a Monday night in winter, there was very sparse action, but that was okay, there was always some. One blackjack table open, one craps table, no roulette. Three or four players among the platoons of slot machines. Restaurants closed, coffee shop open but empty. Frank considered having a cup of coffee, then decided against it. Time to get to work.

  Back in Roger’s office, he dragged into the middle of the room the big mahogany coffee table with the large round hammered copper disk in the center of it. Then he went to the safe behind Roger’s desk, knelt before it to open it, and pulled out all the books, all those heavy ledgers—black for the true ones, red for the officials, green for the tribes—all those pages full of tiny inaccurate writing.

  They wouldn’t burn in clumps. They were in loose-leaf binders, and he had to open the binders and take out pages and feed them to the fire he’d started in the copper disk in the coffee table. He pulled up a chair, set the bottle and glass on the floor beside him, fed pages to the fire, fed more pages to the cheery little blaze in the middle of the coffee table, and when he woke up the office was on fire.

  This is where Frank made his Mistake. He’d made a number of mistakes before this, but this one was the Mistake. He opened the office door.

  What Frank did here, he completely forgot to consider the fact, which normally he well knew, that, like most casinos in America, between midnight and eight in the morning, the air pumped into the windowless gambling areas is sweetened with just a little extra oxygen, just enough to make the players feel awake, happy, positive, uninterested in quitting, unneedful of sleep. Just a little extra oxygen.

  Frank opened the office door, thinking to run to Security to come put out the fire, and the fire behind him lunged at that oxygen. All at once, he was running in the middle of the blaze, his clothes were catching fire, his hair was catching fire, and out in front of him the few employees and customers still around were fleeing for their lives.

  Everybody ran, the customers and employees from the fire, Frank with the fire, and when he got outdoors, he flung himself into the nearest snowbank and rolled there for quite a while. And when next he sat up, the casino was gone.

  50

  * * *

  Dortmunder walked west across Tenth Street, hands in his pockets, head down as he watched his shoes scuffle along. A cold, nasty wind was in his face, having come all the way across the continent just to get up his nose before heading on eastward toward Long Island and the ocean and all of Europe, full of people to annoy. At the moment, the wind was Dortmunder’s problem; perhaps the least of them.

  Sunday, December 31, 4:00 P.M. A pretty miserable year was finally slinking off, and Dortmunder was out in this nasty wind to help send it on its way. He was headed now toward the intersection of West Tenth Street and West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, the only place in the world likely to have an intersection of West Tenth Street and West Fourth Street, for what should be the final meet on the casino problem; perhaps the worst of them.

  And there was the intersection up ahead, with the familiar motor home parked at the far corner on the right, facing away from him. And seated on the curb, back to Dortmunder, hunched over, scrunched in between the motor home’s rear wheel and the corner streetlight post, wasn’t that Kelp? Yes, it was.

  It was Kelp who had called him to this meet. It seemed that he and Little Feather had been in unsatisfactory communication the last few days and it was time to find out what was what.

  The only thing Dortmunder had known in the last two weeks was that the casino had burned to the ground. It was all over the TV news, even the national TV news, because these days, nothing happens anywhere without at least three video cameras coincidentally right there on the scene, ready to roll. At Silver Chasm Casino, both tourists and casino employees had been on tap with their cams.

  Mixed in with the wobbly shots of crashing walls and gouting fireballs had been nonamateur footage of a very dumbfounded Little Feather, who, because she was the last of the Pottaknobbees and also extremely photogenic, pretty much took over the story once the ashes had cooled. By the fourth day, though, she, too, was gone from public view, and since then, Dortmunder hadn’t known nothing from nothing.

  Until yesterday, when Kelp had called to tell him the story since then. After a week of silence from the North Country, Little Feather had started making collect phone calls to Kelp, he being the only coconspirator she could find. These phone calls were more irritating than informative, however, not only because Kelp had to pay for them but also because she was making them on the reservation, from the home of somebody apparently named Dog, who had taken her in now that her money had run out and she was a certified Pottaknobbee. In that house, she had to be careful what she said on the phone, which meant she couldn’t say much of anything on the phone, which made Kelp quickly begin to wish she’d quit calling all the time. As he’d explained to Dortmunder, he’d finally made an oblique reference to the problem: “If you don’t have anything to say, why do you keep saying it?”

  “Well, I’m stuck here, Andy,” she’d explained. “I got no money, and no place to go. If the casino was up, I could get a job dealing, but if the casino was up, I wouldn’t need a job dealing.” But then she’d lowered her voice and said, “I think I may be getting a check at Christmas. Like a present from the tribes, now that I’m one of them. I hope it’s enough so I can put some gas in my apartment, so I can drive down and meet with you guys and we discuss the situation.”

  So here it was, New Year’s Eve, yesterday being the earliest she could get away from all her new relatives, and Kelp had arranged the meet here and was just straightening up out of the confined space between motor home and lamppost as Dortmunder arrived. “That’s got it,” he said. His hands and left cheek were very dirty.

  “That’s got what?” Dortmunder asked. “Your face is dirty.”

  “I’ll wash it inside,” Kelp said, and gestured at the space where he’d been hunkered. “I tapped into the power cable inside the pole, so we can have light and heat in there without the engine on all the time. Too bad they don’t have a waste pipe in there. Come on in. I want to hear Little Feather’s story.”

  “So do I,” Dortmunder agreed.

  “I mean, I want to hear it without paying for it collect,” Kelp said, and knocked on the door.

  The Little Feather who opened the door was just subtly different; still looking mostly like an action toy in a western setting, but now after a tough day in the sandbox. “You might as well come in,” she said.

  “Happy New Year,” Dortmunder said glumly.

  �
��You think so, huh? Come in, it’s cold out there. Andy, thanks for the electricity.”

  “De nada,” he said. He followed Dortmunder in, shut the door behind himself, and somebody knocked on it.

  “The big city,” Little Feather commented. “Always something happening.”

  “That’ll be Tiny,” Kelp said as he went away to wash his face.

  Little Feather opened the door, and it was. “Happy New Year’s,” Tiny snarled, climbing in.

  “Another one,” Little Feather said. “I hope you didn’t bring your grenade this time.”

  “I can go back for it, you want.”

  “That’s okay,” she said as Kelp returned, fresh-faced as a schoolboy. “I got beer, if you want.”

  They did, and then sat, Tiny on the sofa, Kelp and Little Feather on the chairs, and Dortmunder on his footstool from the kitchen. Kelp said, “Now that we’re face-to-face, Little Feather, what’s going on up north?”

  “Snow,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Kelp said.

  “But not much else,” she went on. “The casino’s a dead loss, burnt flat. Roger Fox is gone, and so’s all the casino’s money.”

  Dortmunder said, “The cash on hand, you mean.”

  “Everything,” Little Feather said. “That last day, Fox was a busy man. Every bank account and IRA and money market account and anything else he could get his hands on, set-aside money for withholding taxes, everything, cleaned out. So the casino’s broke and it owes a bundle. They traced all the money to the Turks and Caicos islands, but by then, he’d moved it again. So it’s gone, and so is Fox, and nobody will ever find him.”

  Dortmunder said, “And the other one’s in jail, I guess.”

  Little Feather offered a sour grin. “Frank Oglanda begged to go to jail,” she said. “The tribes were gonna string him up, they had to call in the feds, Huey him out of there.”

  Tiny said, “Too bad the tribes don’t have ground-to-air.”

  “They wished they did,” Little Feather said. “Everybody’s plotting and planning up there right now, they say the trial can’t be secret, when it starts, wherever it is, they’re gonna rush the courthouse. Which they even might, but I don’t think so, because they’re not gonna have the time for it.”

  Dortmunder said, “Why not?”

  “Well, now we get to the real problem,” Little Feather said. “Not only is the casino gone, turns out, Fox and Oglanda, they were so greedy, they didn’t even insure the place to its full value, so it’s going to take a while to get it up and going again. The people all have to get jobs, which is probably a good thing, if you ask me.”

  “A while to get the casino up and going again,” Kelp echoed. “How long is a while?”

  “Right now, they figure eight years.”

  There was general consternation at that. Dortmunder said, “How come?”

  “Casinos cost a lot to build,” Little Feather pointed out. “There’s no money in the tribe, no insurance, and Fox and Oglanda paid off as little of the debt from the first construction as they could, so the tribes can’t get any more from those banks. Everybody’s tithing, but that’s gonna take a while.”

  “Borrow from somebody else,” Kelp suggested.

  “Well, the problem with that,” Little Feather told him, “anybody that wants to invest in a casino, they gotta be investigated by the government, make sure they’re not mobbed up. Only, most people that want to invest in casinos are mobbed up, so it takes a while to prove you’re not.”

  Dortmunder said, “How long?”

  Kelp said, “She’s gonna say eight years.”

  “If everything goes smoothly,” Little Feather said.

  “Everything goes smoothly,” Dortmunder repeated in a quiet and contemplative way, as though wondering what those pretty-sounding words meant.

  Tiny said to Little Feather, “So what it comes down to is, we don’t get no money because you didn’t get no money, and you aren’t gonna get no money because there isn’t any casino.”

  Kelp said, “It sounds pretty final when you put it that way.”

  Tiny, looking like Grendel between meals, said, “How’d I wind up here anyway?”

  “Fitzroy,” Little Feather promptly answered. “Fitzroy and Irwin got us into this.”

  Kelp said, “Well, don’t leave out Oglanda and Fox.”

  “Maybe I’ll rush the courthouse, too,” Tiny decided.

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “I’m gonna forget the whole thing, if I possibly can. Tomorrow, we start a whole new year, and it’s gonna be a better year, I just believe it is, and I’m gonna start it by going over to Jersey and pick up some cameras I left there.”

  “I know you meant to ask me to come along,” Kelp told him, “and just forgot, but in fact, I’m gonna be busy. When I leave here, I gotta go over to St. Vincent’s hospital.”

  They looked at him. Little Feather said, “Why, you sick?” as though she was about to go for the Lysol.

  “No, I need a car,” Kelp said. “Anne Marie wants us to drive to Kansas, start tomorrow, there’s some people there she wants to show me to.”

  Tiny grumbled and moved his shoulders around. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” he said. “I’m goin down to Brooklyn, find a good bar, start a fight.”

  Dortmunder said, “How about you, Little Feather? You heading back north?”

  “In a few days,” she said. “We’re gonna stick around the city awhile, take in some shows.”

  Kelp said, “We?”

  “Well, if the business part of the meeting is over,” she said, “I’ll bring him out.” Turning, she called over her shoulder, “Benny!”

  Benny Whitefish appeared in the doorway, in the suit and tie he’d worn to court, but the face above the raiment was very different. His smile was both awed and grateful, like a lottery winner who hadn’t known he was playing the lottery. “Hi,” he said, and gave a little wave.

  Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny had nothing to say. Little Feather gave them her own unreadable smile and said, “Benny’s my protector now, aren’t you, Benny?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and gulped, his Adam’s apple bouncing like a golf ball.

  “That’s nice,” Dortmunder managed to say.

  “I been needing a protector,” Little Feather said. “Benny, bring out the pretzels, let’s make it a party.”

  Benny trotted off on his errand.