Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder)

by Donald E. Westlake

  Two of the suites were in current occupancy – by utter pigs. Garments, cosmetic jars, open luggage, pieces of paper and other litter formed a kind of archaeological layer over the original impersonality. Mulligan and Garfield strolled through these rooms, commenting to one another on stray artifacts–"I didn't know women wore brassieres like that any more," Garfield said, and Mulligan replied, "They don't"–and also discussing their hopes for an early return to Long Island. "Two years is long enough," Mulligan said truculently. "It's time we got out of New York and back to the bigtime."

  "You couldn't be more right." Garfield said, touching his moustache. "Fenton ought to go see the Old Man for us, argue our case."

  "Absolutely," Mulligan agreed. The two of them were returning to the central corridor then, and it was at that point Mulligan suddenly felt the unmistakable pressure of a gun barrel thrust against the middle of his back, and heard the quiet voice behind him speak the words of doom. Long Island flew away on mighty wings, and the voice said:

  "Stick em up."

  Chapter 12

  It seemed to Dortmunder, looking at the faces of the two private guards through the eyeholes of the ski mask covering his own face, that he'd seen them somewhere before, but that was both unlikely and irrelevant, so he dismissed it from his mind. He and Bulcher hustled the two disarmed guards into a closet in the unused guest room; locked the door, removed their ski masks, and returned to the central corridor, where an evidently nervous Kelp said, in a jittery whisper, "I thought the guards were supposed to stay downstairs."

  "So did I," Dortmunder said. That had been quite a shock, as a matter of fact, when they'd come in from the elevator shaft to hear the sounds of conversation from one of the nearby rooms. Expecting no trouble, and not wanting to make any extra trouble for themselves in case of problems outside, none of them was carrying a gun, but fortunately a pair of socket wrenches from Chefwick's black bag had done just as well, convincing the guards long enough for Dortmunder and Bulcher to relieve them of their own artillery and put them away.

  "Let's get going," Bulcher said, the commandeered revolver toy-like in his mammoth fist, "before anything else happens." And he tucked the pistol into his hip pocket.

  "Right," Dortmunder agreed. "The stairs are this way. Chefwick and Kelp, you hit the bedrooms. Tiny and I'll get the painting."

  The robbery itself was quickly accomplished. Dortmunder and Bulcher removed the painting from the wall, turned it around, slit the canvas just beyond the edge of the painting all the way around, rolled it carefully into a tube shape, and fixed it with three rubber bands. Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes. Bulcher and Dortmunder, with Dortmunder carrying the rolled painting, did the same for Chauncey's bedroom, where the pickings were surprisingly slim. Back in the sitting room, Dortmunder found two full bottles of that bourbon that had so impressed him his first time here, tucked them inside his leather jacket, and then he and Bulcher rejoined the other two on the top floor. "Some nice stuff," Kelp whispered, grinning, his nervousness forgotten now.

  Dortmunder saw no reason to whisper. "Good," he said. "Let's get out of here."

  Chefwick used one of his handy tools to open the elevator door, and Kelp went in first, reversing the route they'd used before. The elevator shaft was concrete-lined and about six feet square, with an open grid work of metal beams inside it to support the elevator equipment. Kelp made his way via a horizontal beam on the left wall to another horizontal beam at the rear, and from there to the metal rungs set in the rear wall just opposite the doorway. Up the rungs he went, sidling past the electric motor and the chains and pulleys at the top, and out through the opened panel in the housing. Lowering a length of clothesline back through the opening, he waited while Chefwick tied his bag and the painting to the end, and then drew both up to the roof. (Dortmunder watched this part gimlet-eyed, waiting for Kelp to drop the goddam painting to the bottom of the elevator shaft – or rather to the top of the elevator, two stories below – but astonishingly enough Kelp did everything right.)

  Chefwick himself went next, over to the metal rungs and up to the roof, followed by Bulcher. Dortmunder went last, pausing on the first metal beam to release the door, allowing it to slide closed, and the faint snick of the electric lock was immediately followed by a sudden whirring sound, and the small clanking of chains.

  Yes? Dortmunder looked all around, and saw the elevator cables in motion. In motion? He looked down, and the top of the elevator was coming this way. The elevator was coming this way, sliding and clicking upward through its shaft.

  God damn, but it was coming fast.

  Chapter 13

  "I wonder if you've heard this one, Sheikh," Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi of Tuscan-Bavaria called across the table, his round-red-apple face thrust out among the candles.

  "I should think I probably had," Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, "Have you been in London recently?"

  "Not for a year or so. Oops."

  The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host's serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. "I was there two weeks ago," the Sheikh said.

  "Watch out, you clumsy fool!" Laura shrieked at the servant. "You'll get glass in my meat!"

  "I was buying a house in Belgravia," the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. "The poor English," he said pleasantly. "They can't afford their own capital any more, you know. They're all living in Woking and Hendon."

  The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. "What I've always felt about St. Louis," MuMu was saying, "is that it's somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?"

  Martha Whoopley used her tongue to clear brussels sprouts into her cheek pouches, then said, "More real? How d'ya mean?"

  "After all the flitter of New York, Deauville, Paris, Rome–" MuMu gestured gracefully, candlelight sparkling on his rings and bracelets, a fraction of his collection. "All of this," he summed up. "Isn't it somehow more, more, oh I don't know, more real to get back to St. Louis?"

  "I don't think it's more real," Martha said. She shoved a lot of French bread into her mouth and went on talking. "I grew up there. I always thought it stunk."

  "But you still live there."

  "I keep a house out by the plant. You've got to keep your eye on those manager people."

  Film star and environmental activist Lance Sheath, a rugged escarpment at Martha's right, leaned toward her with his virile confidentiality, saying in the deep voice that had thrilled billions, "You oughta spend some time in Los Angeles. Get to know the future."

  "We have a packaging facility in Los Angeles," Martha told him. "Out in Encino. I don't like it much out there. All that white stucco hurts my eyes."

  Prince Otto was finishing his joke to whoever would listen. It concerned a Jewish woman checking in at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, asking for bellboys to get the luggage from the car, and then requesting a wheelchair for her husband. "'Of course,'" said the desk clerk," concluded the Prince. "'I'm terribly sorry, can't your husband walk?' 'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank God he doesn't have to.'"

  While the Prince laughed heartily at his own joke, Chauncey's mind delivered him, intact, a variant beginning, "A sheikh's wife enters the Dorchester Hotel in London–" and ending, "'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank Allah he doesn't have to.'" Should he wait ten minutes or so, and then straight faced tell that variant? No; revenge enough was already under way.

  Meanwhile, Mavis Orfizzi was clutching her own bony
breast in assumed horror at her husband's gaucherie. "I can't stand it any more," she cried, for the benefit of the table at large, and surged to her feet, knocking over her chair, and so upstaging Laura Bathing that one gave off screeching at Thomas Jefferson, the serving boy, and gaped in astonishment. "Otto," Mavis announced over the other guests' heads, "you are as clumsy and oafish at table as you are in bed."

  "In bed?" demanded the Prince Elector, stung out of his raconteur's role, "I'm afraid to touch you in bed for fear of cutting myself," he declared.

  "I can't stand it!" Mavis cried out, but then, apparently realizing she'd become reduced to repeating herself, she clutched her brow with both hands, screamed, "No more!" and fled the room.

  Her intent didn't occur to Chauncey until, in the astounded hush at the table following her exit, all at once be heard from afar the busy whirr of machinery. Elevator machinery. "No!" he cried, half rising from his seat, arm stretching out toward the doorway through which the damned posturing woman had made her melodramatic exit. But it was too late. Too late. Arm dropping to his side, Chauncey sagged back into his chair, and from the distance the sound of whirring stopped.

  Chapter 14

  "I've been shafted," Dortmunder said.

  Well, he had. He'd moved as fast as he could to the metal ladder rungs at the rear of the elevator shaft, but there just hadn't been time to get up and out of the way. The elevator remorselessly rose, like an engine of destruction in an old Saturday-afternoon serial, and before he could climb a single rung the thing had overtaken him, pinning him to the wall.

  It was those damn bourbon bottles that trapped him. The top of the elevator had a lip around the edge, an overhang which had brushed its way up the back of his legs, shoved his rump aside, grazed his shoulder blades, and bunked him gently on the back of the head before halting just above him. There was a bit more room below the lip, but when he tried to climb the rungs to freedom he discovered that the bottles under his jacket gave him just that much extra thickness, front to back, and he couldn't clear the goddam lip. Nor did he have enough room to use his hands to open the jacket and remove the bottles. He could sidle up the rungs, bit by bit, until his head and shoulders were above the top of the elevator, but at that point he was stuck.

  From above, the harsh whisper of Kelp floated down: "Come on! Dortmunder, come on!"

  He looked up, but couldn't get his head back far enough to see the top of the shaft. Speaking to the concrete wall, he half whispered back, "I can't."

  And then, from somewhere not too far away, a woman screamed.

  "Terrific," Dortmunder muttered. Louder, he called up to Kelp, "You people go on! Stash the painting!"

  "But what about you?"

  "Go on!" And, to end the argument, Dortmunder crab-crawled his way down the ladder rungs again, putting his head out of Kelp's sight.

  By now the woman had stopped screaming, but all at once more voices sounded, male and female. Turning his head as far as possible, Dortmunder could just see an air vent, and through it the interior of the elevator, the open elevator door, and a bit of hallway. And as he looked, and listened to the raised male and female voices, one of those goddam private guards – the fat one – suddenly ran by the open elevator door.

  There was only one thing to do, and Dortmunder did it. Down he went, sidling past the back wall of the elevator, down as rapidly as he could into almost impenetrable darkness, lower and lower into the elevator shaft. Because who knew when it would occur to somebody to use the goddam elevator again.

  Whirrrrrrrrr.

  Yike. Zip zip zip zip went Dortmunder, descending and descending, but nowhere near as fast as the elevator, whose cables shushed and binkled near his right elbow, and whose dirty black metal bottom dropped toward him like an anal retentive's worst nightmare. He could sense it above his head, dropping and dropping, inexorable, closing down and down.

  Whirrrrr-clump.

  It stopped. Dortmunder's head, withdrawn like a turtle's into his neck, remained a good clear quarter-inch below the bottom of the elevator as he listened to the doors chunk open and heard the resonance of feet pounding outward; one or more of the private guards, gone to report. Meaning this was not the ground floor, but the main floor above it. Good thing they hadn't gone all the way down.

  "All right, all right," Dortmunder whispered to himself, "let's not panic," and immediately the question came into his mind, Why not?

  Well. He struggled for an answer, and finally found one:

  "Don't want to fall."

  Very good. Not panicking, Dortmunder made his way down the rest of the ladder to the bottom of the shaft, which was in such utter blackness that he knew he'd arrived only when he started to reach his left foot down for the next rung, and slammed his toes into something solid at least three inches before he'd expected anything. "Ow!" he said aloud, and the well-like walls gave the word back to him.

  So here he was at the bottom of things. Releasing the rungs, he began to move around this Stygian space and a sudden pain in his knee told him it was occupied. Another Ow went the circuit, and then he began to feel about, this way and that, and finally came to the conclusion that what was at the bottom of this elevator shaft was some sort of huge spring. Could that be right? He visualized it in his mind, like a pink cross-section drawing from The Way Things Work: elevator shaft, elevator, elevator slips its gears and plummets, hits giant spring and goes ba-roooong-a, spring absorbs major portion of impact. By God, it might even work.

  Whirrrrr.

  Oh, no. Here the son of a bitch came again, heading this way. Dortmunder dropped to the oily, cruddy floor, wrapping himself like an open parenthesis around the base of the big spring, while the elevator descended to ground-floor level, the doors opened, male voices engaged in a conference of some kind, the doors closed, and the elevator whirred its way back up to the first floor.

  Dortmunder stood, beginning to get pissed off. That crowd of Scotsmen at the theater, that was one thing, the accidents of life, you learned to roll with punches like that. But what was happening in this house was utter bullshit. He'd been promised no guards on the top floor, and there'd been two of them. He'd been promised the elevator would stay down and out of his way, and now the damn thing was treating him like an apple in a cider press. Was he going to tolerate this?

  Probably.

  Unless he could get the hell out of here. And now that his eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, he could see breaks in the black, lines of light just over there, indicating a closed door, the bottom of which would be not very far above his head. The ground-floor door. If he could get through that, then somehow he'd manage to clear out of this house. Anyway, it was worth a try. And anything, finally, was better than just sitting forever in the bottom of an elevator shaft.

  Circling the giant spring, Dortmunder approached the lines of light, touched the door, and tried to slide it open. It wouldn't go. He pushed harder, and it still wouldn't go.

  Of course not. An electric lock was holding it in place, so long as the elevator was elsewhere. He had to get at that lock, which was about five feet up on the door judging from the one he'd seen at the top level.

  Dortmunder sat on the spring – human beings are quickly adaptable to any environment, which makes them a fine stock for those interested in animal husbandry – to consider his present resources. Aside from his ski mask, clothing and those damned bourbon bottles, what did he have on his person?

  Money. Keys. He would have had cigarettes and matches, but somehow May's chain-smoking had discouraged him, and about four months ago, after nearly thirty years of smoking Camels, he'd simply stopped. There'd been none of the usual withdrawal symptoms, no nervousness or bad temper, in fact not even much desire to quit. He'd simply awakened one morning, looked at the Everest of matches and butts in the ashtray on May's side of the bed, and decided not to have a cigarette just yet. Habit had kept him carrying his crumpled Camels another two weeks, but finally he'd realized he simply wasn't smoking any more,
and that was the end of it. So he didn't have cigarettes, but more importantly under the circumstances, he also didn't have matches.

  Yes, but what did be have? He had his wallet, with driver's license, money, blood-type card (you never know), a couple of credit cards he didn't dare use and a library card May had got him for obscure reasons of her own. In other pockets he had several cufflinks and tiepins belonging to Arnold Chauncey. He had – Credit cards. Credit cards are tough plastic, they can be slipped between door and jamb to force open a latch. Could a credit card be inserted between the electric lock box and the metal plate on the elevator door, unlocking it?

  There was only one way to find out. Clutching a credit card between his teeth like a pirate's sword, Dortmunder scrambled up the ladder and around the horizontal beams to the door. Credit card in position. Credit card pushed forward. Credit card pushed harder, pushed, pushed, wriggled, edged, pushed, sidled, pushed into the goddam space between box and plate, shoved in there until all at once it went, and there was a tiny click.

  Yes? Holding on to the credit card – he didn't want to lose that into the darkness below, covered with his fingerprints – Dortmunder leaned forward against the concrete wall and used his other hand to push on the door.

  Which slid open.

  Chapter 15

  Arnold Chauncey sipped bourbon, stared at the spot on the wall where Folly Leads Man to Ruin had so lately hung, and tried not to look as pleased as he felt. The house was full of policemen, guests were shrieking in every corner, and somehow or other the plot seemed to have gone simultaneously completely wrong and completely right.

  The dismay Chauncey had felt when Mavis Orfizzi had taken off in that elevator had been nothing to the cold acid-bath of doom that had washed o'er him when he'd discovered that two private guards, in direct contradiction of his express orders, had taken up posts on the top floor. As for his own behavior, he had to give himself low marks and consider himself extremely lucky that in the clatter of events nobody seemed to have noticed any of the false notes in his performance. His crying out, "No!" for instance, when Mavis entered the elevator. Then there'd been his reaction on seeing the guards come down from upstairs: an angry cry of, "What were you doing up there?"