What's The Worst That Could Happen? d-9

by Donald E. Westlake

  And now the lockmen were finished, at least in here. They made their way back out to the main casino area, past doors carefully propped open, and the other six guys in gas masks nodded and went on in. Wally and Ralph walked away through the casino, tossing their gas masks under blackjack tables, and went back out the front door, giving the OK sign to the doorman on their way by, who grinned and forgot for just a second to look stupid.

  The six now in the counting room and the money room took black plastic garbage bags out from under their uniform shirts and began stuffing them with money.

  Wally and Ralph made their way to the Invidia and entered it, and from inside came a small but rousing cheer. Then Wally and Ralph came out again, each carrying a big plastic gallon bottle of spring water, and they walked from the parking lot around the side of the casino, past the swimming pool and the kiddie pool to the Battle-Lake, where they found Ralph Demrovsky pacing slowly along, looking exactly like a cop on the beat. Wally and Ralph grinned at the other Ralph, and then went on about their business, while Ralph Demrovsky turned and made his deliberate way to the cottages, paused on the path between cottages one and three, and took off his hat. He scratched his head, and put his hat back on.

  Dortmunder, in the window of cottage three, lit a match and blew it out. Then he checked the glowing numbers on the dial of the watch he’d borrowed for this evening’s work.

  Ralph Demrovsky strolled back to the Battle-Lake, in time to see Wally and the lockman Ralph reunite, neither now carrying a bottle of spring water. Ralph Demrovsky took a little machine from his pants pocket, pressed a button on its top and tossed it into the lake, where it floated inobtrusively. Then Wally and Ralph and Ralph all strolled off to the Invidia and climbed aboard. Laughter sounded from within. Then the door opened, and an extremely trussed and irritated Earl Radburn was carried out and laid gently on the tarmac between two parked cars, his head cradled by his hat. His eyes shot sparks, but nobody seemed to care.

  Herman had some doors to unlock. The first led from a corridor near the kitchens to a side corridor that angled around behind the casino to a second door that needed his services, which led to the casino manager’s office, where the night-shift manager slept cozily, head on desk. There were two other doors in this office. The one leading via the manager’s secretary’s office to the casino floor was not locked, nor was it of interest. The other one was of interest, since it led to the cashier’s cage.

  This last door was the only one Herman had to deal with while breathing tonight’s enriched air, though he wouldn’t be in here long enough to feel any real effect. The knowledge, however, did make him a little nervous and caused him to slip slightly and take a few seconds longer than he should have, which annoyed him. He thought of himself as cooler than that.

  When Herman opened this last door, it was to find the six guys in guard uniforms and gas masks standing there waiting for him, now all holding full and heavy black plastic bags. There were muffled greetings, and Herman led the others back the way he’d come.

  In the security offices, the monitors showed all this activity, none of which disturbed the sleepers at all, though the two recently inserted guards, being still awake, did stare at the monitors, and at one another, goggle-eyed.

  Stan Murch steered the big garbage truck onto Gaiety property and around back, where Gus waved from his post at the barrier. Stan waved back, drove on in, made a U-turn, backed up against the loading dock, and Herman and the six guards came out. All the plastic bags and all the gas masks were thrown into the back of the garbage truck. Jim and Gus joined Stan in the garbage truck cab, and he drove them away from there.

  Most of the people who’d come here in the Invidia, except the substitute doorman, went back to the Invidia, and Fred and Thelma drove them away.

  The three guys who’d dealt with the security offices joined Herman and they walked through the hotel and past the check-in desk, and the other three went on out the front door while Herman paused at the house phones, dialed Anne Marie’s room, and let it ring once.

  Anne Marie’s phone rang once. She and Andy Kelp turned away from the window. “I’m off,” Kelp said.

  “You must be,” Anne Marie told him.

  They kissed, and Kelp said, “Will I see you in the city?”

  “I’ll phone you.”

  “Okay.”

  He left, and she went back to the window, to look at the nothing outside and think some more, while Kelp took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped outside. The limo waited, with Herman at the wheel, in his chauffeur’s cap. The side windows of the limo were shaded dark, so nothing could be seen inside there. The doorman came over to open the door for Kelp to get aboard, which he did. Then the doorman got aboard after him, and pulled the door shut behind him. Herman put the limo in gear, and it hummed away into the night.

  Five minutes later, Dortmunder looked at his watch. “They’re done by now,” he told himself, and went over to the cottage phone. He dialed 9 for an outside line, and then dialed police headquarters. “I want to report a robbery,” he said.

  61

  Max dreamt of Elsie Brenstid, the brewer’s daughter. She still loved him, but she wanted him to drink warm beer. Then the phone rang. Odd; it was an American phone, not British. Then there were excited voices, disturbances somewhere, and Max opened his eyes. The burglar!

  Where am I? Las Vegas, the Gaiety, cottage one, waiting for the burglar. Dark in this bedroom, the door outlined in light. But all the lights in the cottage had been switched off when at last he’d come to bed, too exhausted by tension to stay up any longer.

  He’d been sleeping in most of his clothes, having taken off only pants and shoes. Now he hurried back into both, listening to the raised voices outside. What was going on? Was this the burglar, or wasn’t it? Why didn’t somebody come in here to tell him what was happening?

  Max hurried from the bedroom, just a second before the bathroom window behind him was pushed open and a dark figure, made cumbersome by what he was wearing, climbed cautiously inside.

  The scene in the living room was utter confusion. His guards moved this way and that, bumping into one another, hands hovering near holstered sidearms, as they stared at doors and at draped windows, waiting for who knows what. Other guards jittered in the open doorway, looking stunned; the darkness beyond them was full of running people and voices shouting.

  On the telephone in the conversation area was Earl Radburn, looking both messier and more furious than Max had ever seen him. The messiness he remarked on first, because Earl was always so neat, so inhumanly perfect in his appearance. But look at him now, grease-smeared, pebble-dotted, dirt-daubed. He looked as though he’d been rolling around in parking lots, for God’s sake.

  And as filthy as he was, that’s how angry he was. Enraged. Yelling into the phone, demanding action, finally slamming the receiver down, spinning around, glaring at Max, shrieking, “Well, this is what we get!”

  “What we get? Earl? What’s going on here?”

  “The casino was robbed!”

  Max couldn’t believe it. Robbed? The casino? Stunned, he looked down at his right hand, and the ring was still there, where it was supposed to be. It was still there.

  So what could have gone wrong? “Earl? Robbed the casino? Who did? And what on earth for?”

  Acidly, Earl said, “For the money, if you ask me. Probably two million, maybe more.”

  “The money? But—But it was this ring he was after!”

  “That’s the goddam beauty of it,” Earl snarled, and with some astonishment (and resentment) Max realized that Earl Radburn was mad at him, at Max Fairbanks, at his employer! “You’ve got us all,” Earl snarled, “bending ourselves out of shape to keep an eye on you and that goddam ring, and that’s just the chance those sons of bitches needed! It couldn’t have worked out better if you were in it with them!”

  “Which he was, of course,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Max turned, blinking, trying to ab
sorb one astonishment after another, and be damned if it wasn’t that insane New York City policeman, Klematsky, whatever his name was. Walking in here, bold as brass, with a pair of Las Vegas uniformed cops behind him.

  Max shook his head at this new wonder, saying, “What are you doing here?”

  One of the Las Vegas cops said, “You’ve got yourself a strong gasoline smell out there.”

  But nobody listened to him; there was too much else going on. And particularly what was going on was Detective Klematsky, who came over to Max, smiled in a knowing fashion, and said, “Been busy, haven’t you? Up to your old tricks.”

  “What now, Klematsky?” Max demanded. “I have no time for you and your nonsense now, this hotel has just been robbed.”

  “Which you’ll be telling us all about, a little later,” Klematsky said. “Or was this robbery, while you were actually in residence here, another of your coincidences?”

  “What? What?”

  “I was going to get here a little later this morning,” Klematsky went on. “I didn’t figure the local department to wake me at four-thirty, but that’s okay. Max Fairbanks, you are under arrest for grand theft, filing false statements and insurance fraud.”

  “What? What?”

  “Here is the warrant for your arrest,” the insane and implacable Klematsky went on, “and here is the extradition from a Nevada judge. Come along, we’ll have a nice little cell for you to wait in until our flight back to New York.”

  “Get your hands off me! You’re out of your mind!”

  Max flailed around, not wanting to be touched, and inadvertently bopped Klematsky on the nose. Klematsky, no man to be trifled with, reached for his blackjack.

  And that’s when the Battle-Lake caught fire.

  62

  If all those trees and shrubs and ferns around the Battle-Lake had been real they probably would have contained the fire to some extent, since it hadn’t been that big a fire to begin with, and real plant life does contain some percentage of water. But they were plastic, all those green leaves and fronds, those brown stems and trunks, they were plastic, and they burned like blazes.

  The desert wind is sometimes strong, sometimes light, but it’s constant. The wind wasn’t particularly strong tonight, but it was very dry, and it had no trouble wafting shreds of burning plastic flowers and burning plastic leaves across to the cottages, which were made of wood.

  In the chaos and confusion, Detective Klematsky tried desperately to keep hold of Max Fairbanks, but it was impossible, particularly after the lights went out. Max moved around in the increasingly smoky darkness, with that acrid petroleum smell of burning plastic, afraid he was doing irreparable damage to his lungs, when all of a sudden, seeming almost to appear out of the bedroom, there was a fireman in front of him, illuminated by the burning lake, dressed in firehat and smoke mask and heavy black rubber coat and heavy black boots. At once he grabbed Max by the arm, his muffled voice professional but urgent as he said, “This way, sir. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “Oh, yes! Thank you! Out of here!”

  “Clear the way,” ordered the fireman, and they moved through the milling guards, while the crackle of the fire grew louder. The cottage roof had caught.

  Somewhere in the darkened rooms, the crazed Klematsky was crying, “Where is he? Where’s Fairbanks? Don’t let him get away!”

  I have to get away, Max thought, blundering forward out the cottage door, clutching to the fireman who was guiding him by the arm. I have to get away, I have to find a phone and find a lawyer. I need a lawyer, two lawyers, maybe ten lawyers, to protect me from that utterly mad detective.

  “This way,” said the fireman’s muffled voice. “The fire’s spreading. This way.”

  “Yes, yes, let’s get away from here.”

  The fireman led him down the path between the cottages, and Max could see that two more of them had now caught fire. This whole part of the hotel complex would burn to the ground soon, if the fire department didn’t get to work on it, didn’t start hosing it down.

  From far away, the sound of fire engine sirens screamed, coming closer.

  The fireman led Max through the gate in the hedge, into the employee’s parking lot, floodlit at night. “Thank you, thank you,” Max babbled, as the sirens got closer. “You saved me—”

  Wait a minute. The fire department is still on its way, it hasn’t got here yet. Who is this fireman?

  Even as Max formed that question, and even as he instantly knew the answer, the false fireman spun around at him in the middle of the employee parking lot, under that garish white light. Grabbing for Max’s right hand, he bellowed, “Give me that ring!”

  “You!” Max cried. “You’re the one!” And he whacked the false fireman across the head, which only hurt his left hand when it struck the smoke mask.

  “Give me that ring!”

  “No! You’ve ruined everything, you’ve destroyed—”

  “Give me the ring!”

  “Never!”

  Max, inflamed by the injustice of it all, leaped on the false fireman and drove him to the blacktop. They rolled together there, the false fireman trying to get the ring, Max trying to rip that mask off so he could bite the fellow’s face, and Max wound up on top.

  Straddling him. Winning, on top, as he always was, as he always would be. Because I am Max Fairbanks, and I will not be beaten, not be beaten.

  You didn’t expect this, did you, Mr. Burglar? You didn’t expect me to be on top, did you, holding you down with my knees, ready now to give you what you deserve, kill you with my bare hands, rip this mask—

  “YOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!”

  Startled, Max looked up, and here came Brandon Camberbridge, tearing across the parking lot, running full tilt and screaming like a banshee: “You! You destroyed my hotel! My beautiful hotel!”

  “I’ve got him,” Max started, to reassure the man, but it was Max that Brandon attacked, hurtling into him headlong, tackling him, the two of them flying over and over across the parking lot, away from the cause of it all, the false fireman, the burglar. The burglar! Him! Over there!

  Max tried to say so, but Brandon was strangling him, pummeling him, beating his head on the blacktop. Max shrieked, and Brandon shrieked louder, and they clawed at one another, and Max felt himself blacking out.

  “Excuse me.”

  The calm voice stopped them both. They turned their heads, and the fireman was there, hat gone, mask dangling from the left side of his face. “This is mine,” he said, and reached down, and plucked the ring off Max’s limp finger. “Thank you,” he said, and straightened. “Carry on,” he suggested, and walked away across the parking lot, and Brandon grasped Max by the throat and screamed terrible words into his nose.

  By the time many hands arrived to drag Brandon free and help Max to his feet and pound his back until he started breathing again, the burglar, of course, was long gone.

  And so was the ring.

  63

  There were about three days a year, all of them in June, when the sun, if the sun were shining at all over the island of Manhattan, could angle down and shine into the living room of Dortmunder’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street. Thursday, June 8, two and a half weeks after the Las Vegas spectacular, it happened again, at a time when Dortmunder chanced to be present in the living room, still not quite having decided what to do with himself today. The sun shone in through the window near the sofa, bounced off the end table by Dortmunder’s right elbow, and reflected itself in the gray face of the TV set. Becoming aware of that unusual light, Dortmunder put his right hand out to catch the ray, and turned the hand back and forth, watching how warm and yellow everything looked. Then he opened the drawer in the end table and took out the ring.

  Still the same ring. Shield-shaped top with those little glittery lines on it. Dortmunder held the ring in the ray of sunlight, and gave it a good long look.

  Funny. He hadn’t worn that ring once since he’d got it back, just n
ever exactly felt like it. On the plane home, it had been in his pocket, and ever since, it had been in this drawer here. Now he looked at it, and thought about it, and he was just about to put it on when the phone rang. So he put the ring on the end table in the sunlight and leaned over the other way to pick up the phone and say, “Yeah?”

  “A.K.A., John.”

  “Oh, A.K.A. How you doing?”

  “Well, I’m fine. Remember the Anadarko family?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “John, would you like to remember them? That deal’s comin alive again, same as before.”

  May walked by the doorway, home from work, carrying her daily bag of groceries from the Safeway, headed for the kitchen. She and Dortmunder nodded to each other, and Dortmunder said into the phone, “I don’t think so, A.K.A.”

  The whole idea of rememorizing life on Red Tide Street in Carrport just didn’t appeal. Also, there was the fact that he was flush these days. After expenses, the return on the Las Vegas trip had worked out to just over seventy-two thousand dollars a person, which was a lot more than Dortmunder was used to realizing from a job. In fact, most of the time, just getting himself out of a heist with not too many rips and tears and dog bites was what he considered a good return on investment, so this was a pretty nice feeling to have, being flush. He didn’t need to remember the Anadarko family for five hundred bucks, so why do it? “Sorry, A.K.A.,” he said. “I’m in semiretirement at the moment.”