“Well, I understand what you’re saying, John,” A.K.A. said. “I’ll get somebody else. I just thought, you know, you went down that road the once.”
“That was enough for me,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, as May came in, empty-handed. “How are things?” he asked her.
She sat down, said, “Whoosh,” and said, “Ah. The feet do get tired.”
“I told you, you know,” he said, “you could quit there for a while.”
“Then what do I do with my day? There’s all these people working there, John, they’ve got lives you wouldn’t believe, they’re like soap operas, that’s what we talk about all day, I wouldn’t want to miss any chapters. So I’m okay, John. Is that the ring?”
“Yeah,” he said, picking it up, turning it again in the sunlight. “I was just looking at it.”
“You don’t wear it.”
“I don’t,” he agreed. “That’s what I was thinking about. Now, you know I’m not superstitious.”
May knew he was superstitious, deeply superstitious, but she also knew he didn’t know he was, so she said, “Uh huh.”
“But this was supposed to be the lucky ring, right?” He looked at it, and shook his head. “And what happened the first time I put it on? Bang, right out of the chute, I got caught, I got arrested. It wasn’t till Max Fairbanks stole the thing from me that I started to get some luck. Good luck, I mean. And once he had it, look what happened to him.”
“He’s still in trouble,” May said, “and he doesn’t have the ring any more. It was in today’s paper.”
Dortmunder frowned. “For what? They don’t still think he set up all those robberies, do they?”
“That’s kind of on the back burner,” she told him. “What it is, he’s one of those guys, he could go along for a long time, pull a lot of stuff, get away with it all, because nobody ever looked close. Now they’re looking close. He’s gonna be in jail the rest of his life, for stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the robberies. They just started the cops looking.”
“Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Dortmunder said, as Andy Kelp walked in, saying, “You mean me?”
May said, “We were talking about Max Fairbanks.”
Dortmunder said, “Why don’t you ring the bell?”
“I don’t want to startle you,” Kelp said. “What I was wondering, you wanna go out to the track?”
Dortmunder looked at May, who spread her hands and said, “It’s your money, John.”
“At the moment,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe I’ll go and just watch.”
Kelp said, “Is that the ring?”
“Yeah. We were just looking at it.”
“I never saw it,” Kelp said, and picked it up, turning it in the ray of sunlight. “Doesn’t look like such a big deal, does it? How come you don’t wear it?”
“Well, here’s what I think,” Dortmunder said. “I think it used up all the good luck it ever had keeping Uncle Gideon solvent. I think the only luck it has left is the other kind.”
“Oh.” Kelp put it down, and went over to sit in the chair by the TV, saying, “So what are you gonna do? Give it away?”
“If I find somebody I really don’t like,” Dortmunder said. “Otherwise, it can just stay in the drawer there.” And he put it back in the drawer, away from the sunlight.
May said, “John, it’s all right with me if you want to go to—” and the phone rang.
“Second,” Dortmunder said, reaching for the phone, wondering if this was A.K.A. again, having failed to find another Fred Mullins, but Kelp said, “John, no, that’s me.”
Dortmunder looked at him. Kelp pulled a small telephone out of his pocket, a thing that folded together to become hardly anything at all. Opening this machine, putting it to his face, he said, “Hello?” Then he smiled all over. “Hi, Anne Marie,” he said. “What’s up?”
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What's The Worst That Could Happen? d-9 Page 30