What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Lutetia laughed, and clucked her disapproval, and went away to put the vase in her overnight bag, while Max went to the library to get the only thing he actually cared about in this building. The Book, his guide, the source of his self-image and strength, the home of Tui, the Joyous. It was called the I Ching, and it was the soul of the wisdom of the East, and Max put it in his bag.

  Then they were ready to go. They had sent Chalmers and the limo back to the city last night. The burglar had made off with the Lexus, of course, leaving in the garage the Honda van for the transportation of middle management in manageable groups, and the Mazda RX-7, the very paradigm of the little red foreign sports car. (Little red foreign sports cars used to be Italian or French, but times change, times change.) The Chapter Eleven judge could have the Honda, and be damned to him, but the Mazda would stay with Max, definitely, and no arguments.

  It was without a backward glance that Max left the Carrport house for the last time, at the wheel of the little red Mazda, Lutetia beside him, his mind full of plans for the yacht—to be called Joyous—as he also idly wondered where they’d stop for lunch. Somewhere on the water, for preference.

  A lovely day, all in all, whizzing around Long Island in the little red car, finding an acceptable seafood restaurant with a view southward over the Atlantic, chatting and joshing with Lutetia, the two of them in a jolly mood. It was, in fact, delightful to Max, that in his uxorious moments, at those times when, out of necessity or conviction, he wanted to be a husband, he had found for the role such a wife as Lutetia. (The I Ching had helped him choose her, of course, from the then-available herd.)

  Then at last they made their way to Kennedy Airport for Max’s midafternoon flight. He would enplane to Savannah, to be met there by the car that would take him to Hilton Head, while Lutetia drove the Mazda back to the city and stashed it in the basement garage at the N-Joy.

  “I have a few stops to make along the way,” she told him. “Antique shops and whatnot, you’ll probably get to the island before I make it home. I’ll phone you when I get there.”

  She did, too.

  29

  D ortmunder was under the bathroom sink when the phone rang. He was down there, with hammer and screwdrivers and pliers and grout, because of the responsibility of having money all of a sudden. Before this, the space behind the top drawer in the bedroom dresser had always been enough for whatever stash he had to tuck away, but not now.

  It was rolling in, all at once, just rolling in. First the twenty-eight grand for the stuff he took out of the house in Carrport, then the thirteen fifty for the Lexus that also came from the same house, and now twenty-four and a half large was his share of the proceeds from the last visit to the N-Joy Broadway Hotel night before last, where it turned out Mrs. Fairbanks’s taste was both exquisite and expensive. Even after spending a little on himself and May, Dortmunder still had over fifty thousand dollars American in his kick. A lot to take care of.

  So that’s why he was under the sink, constructing a new bank down there, when the phone rang. It’s Andy, he thought, struggling backward out from under the sink. Ouch! Dammit! That hurt. I know it’s Andy.

  Only it wasn’t. “Hey, John,” said a hearty voice to Dortmunder’s surly hello. “Ralph here.”

  Ralph. Dortmunder knew a couple of Ralphs; which one was this? “Oh, yeah,” he said. “How you doing?”

  “Just fine,” said Ralph, and faintly in the background ice cubes could be heard, clinking against a glass.

  Oh. So this was Ralph Winslow, another lockman, the one Andy would have gone to if Wally Whistler had been unavailable. Unless working on a particularly complex safe, Ralph Winslow at all times had a glass of rye and water in his hand, ice cubes clinking.

  Was this another visit somewhere? If so, he’d have to turn it down. Max Fairbanks was a full-time occupation. “What’s up?” Dortmunder asked.

  “Well, I’m just calling,” Ralph said, “to tell you I’m with you one hundred percent.”

  This sentence didn’t seem to have any content. Dortmunder said, “Thanks, Ralph.”

  “I heard about the business with the ring,” Ralph explained.

  Dortmunder’s eyebrows came together at the middle of his nose. “Oh, you did, did you?”

  “And I want you to know,” Ralph said, “it coulda happened to any one of us.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said, full of belligerence.

  “And whoever it might have happened to,” Ralph went on, “it was a shitty thing the guy did.”

  “Right again,” Dortmunder said, softening a bit.

  “And I wish ya the best with gettin it back.”

  “Thanks, Ralph,” Dortmunder said. “I appreciate that.”

  “Any time, if there’s anything I can do,” Ralph said, “help out a little, just let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “He can’t treat us that way, you know what I mean?”

  Us. Dortmunder almost felt like saluting. “I know what you mean,” he said, “and thanks, Ralph.”

  “That’s all,” Ralph said. “I gotta go. See you around.”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said, and went back under the sink, feeling a little better about life, not even much minding the little nicks and bloodlettings that were a part of his carpentry, and five minutes later the phone rang.

  “Now, that one’s Andy,” Dortmunder muttered, backing out from under the sink. “Ouch. Why doesn’t he just come over, he’s got so much to say? Come over and help.”

  But this one wasn’t Andy either: “John? Fred Lartz here.”

  “Oh, yeah, Fred. How you doing?”

  Fred Lartz was a driver, or at least he used to be a driver, and the unspoken agreement among his friends was that he still was a driver, though the truth was he’d lost his nerve ever since that unfortunate afternoon, coming back from a cousin’s wedding on Long Island, when he happened to take a wrong turn on the Van Wyck Expressway—there had been alcohol at this wedding—and wound up on taxiway 17 at Kennedy Airport, with an Eastern Airlines flight, just in from Miami, coming fast the other way. After he got out of the hospital he was never quite the same, but he was still Fred Lartz the driver, the guaranteed best getaway specialist in the business. Only these days it was his wife, Thelma, who did the actual driving, while Fred sat beside her to give advice. The two of them still only got one split, so nobody minded. (And though nobody would ever say so, Thelma was better than Fred had ever been.)

  Now, Fred said, “I’m doing fine, John. I just wanted to tell you, Thelma and me, we heard about your trouble, and we just want to say, it was a rotten thing to happen, and you don’t want to let it get you down.”

  “Oh,” said Dortmunder. “You mean the, uh, the, uh, the ring, uh . . .”

  “That’s it,” Fred said. “Thelma and me, we feel for you, John, and if there’s anything either of us can do, any way we can help out, you just give us a call.”

  “Well, thanks, Fred.”

  “Will you do that?”

  “Count on it,” Dortmunder said, and they said their good-byes, and five minutes later the phone rang.

  “I think I’m getting too much sympathy,” Dortmunder told his hammer, put it down, backed out from under the sink—ouch—and this time it was Jim O’Hara, a general purpose workman like Gus Brock or Andy Kelp, and he too had heard about the stolen ring and wished to offer his condolences and expressions of solidarity. Dortmunder thanked him, and hung up, and decided not to try going under the sink for a while. Instead, he got himself a beer and sat in the living room by the phone, and waited.

  Somebody had been doing a lot of gossip; Gus, maybe, or Wally Whistler. Or both. Or everybody by now.

  In the next half hour, he heard from five more guys, all associates in the job, all expressing their best wishes in his troubles. It was like being in the hospital, only without the flowers. He was gracious, within his limitations, and had two more beers, and decided not to work on the bank under the sink at all
today. Until tomorrow, the money could stay where it was, in a brown paper supermarket bag, closed with masking tape and shoved up against the wall behind the sofa where Dortmunder sat.

  Again, the phone rang. Dortmunder answered, in his new gracious voice, saying, “Hi.”

  “Hello, John, it’s Wally.”

  Wally? Wally Whistler? Why would Wally Whistler call to offer sympathy, when they’d already been through all this together at the N-Joy? “Hello, there, Wally,” Dortmunder said.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Wally said, sounding as though he had a cold or something, “your friend isn’t at Hilton Head any more.”

  Wally. In Dortmunder’s mind, Wally now morphed from Wally Whistler, the lockman, to Wally Knurr, the computer genius who was tracking Max Fairbanks for him. Catching the sense of what this Wally had just said, Dortmunder lunged upward, wide-eyed. “What? Where is he?”

  “Don’t know,” this Wally said. “A fax just went out to his people that he’s unavailable from now, Saturday, until Monday morning.”

  “And where’s he gonna be Monday morning?”

  “Oh, that doesn’t change,” Wally said. “He still has to appear before that committee, so from Monday morning his schedule’s the same. It’s just over the weekend.”

  “Thanks, Wally,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, and sat brooding at his empty beer can. This didn’t change anything, since he’d never for a second had it in mind to attack an island off the South Carolina coast—piracy was not part of his job description—but it was still confusing, and maybe worrisome.

  Unavailable? Max Fairbanks unavailable? To his own people, Max Fairbanks was never unavailable. So what’s going on? What’s happened?

  And where is Max Fairbanks?

  30

  “I ’m not even supposed to be here,” Max complained to the detective. Running distraught fingers through rumpled hair, he said, “I’m supposed to be preparing for my testimony before Congress on Monday. I have to talk to Congress on Monday. I don’t see what I’m accomplishing here at all. I don’t see it at all. What am I accomplishing? I’m not accomplishing anything here, I’m not even supposed to be here.”

  The detective calmly but disinterestedly waited for Max to run down. He was a thirtyish chunky fellow with bushy black hair and a long fleshy nose, and he had introduced himself as Detective Second Grade Bernard Klematsky. He didn’t look much like a detective of any grade, but more like a high school math teacher, with his rumpled gray suit and rumpled blue tie. But he was the detective in charge of the burglary at the N-Joy apartment, he was laconic as hell, and he just had a few questions to ask.

  Well, for that matter, so did Max. What the hell happened here? It’s as though a tornado had been through, and cleaned the place out. Nothing large had been taken, not the grand piano or the antique armoire in the master bedroom or the medieval refectory table here in the reception room, or anything like that. But everything, everything, every item of any value at all small enough to fit into the overhead bin or under the seat in front of you was gone. Stripped clean, the one night Lutetia wasn’t home.

  Well, thank God she wasn’t home, come to think of it. Horrible that would have been, to be actually present when they came breaking in. As it was, Lutetia was now asleep in her bedroom—or, rather, unconscious—and had been so for many hours, heavily sedated by one of her doctors, leaving Max alone in the denuded reception room to deal with this rather thick-witted detective, who didn’t seem to realize who he was dealing with here.

  Max couldn’t quite bring himself to utter the words Do you know who I am? but he was close. In fact, probably the main consideration keeping him from voicing that question was the suspicion that this slow-moving blunt-minded bored detective more than likely already had a smart-aleck answer waiting on the shelf.

  Nevertheless, though, this was ridiculous, to sit here hour after hour at the whim of some detective. Certainly, when Lutetia’s screaming voice on the telephone last night had at last managed to communicate to him something of the enormity of what had occurred, he had at the earliest opportunity this morning reversed his travel—car to Savannah, private plane to JFK, limo to the N-Joy—to be with her in this traumatic situation. And certainly he’d been happy to see this detective, Bernard Klematsky, happy to answer his questions, happy to help in any way he could, happy to see the man so obviously earnest in his work, but enough was enough.

  There should by now have come a point at which Max could shake the detective’s hand, wish him well, give him a telephone number where Max could be reached if necessary, and leave. Back to Hilton Head, back to the extremely attractive secretary waiting there to help him prepare his testimony before Congress on Monday, back to his normal life.

  Instead of which, this fellow Klematsky, this roadshow Columbo, was holding him here. Gently, yes; indirectly, yes; but nevertheless, that was what was happening.

  “If you’ll just give me a little of your time, Mr. Fairbanks. I’m expecting some phone calls, then you can help me with one or two little details.”

  “Why don’t I help you with those details now, so I can leave?”

  “I wish we could do it that way, Mr. Fairbanks,” Klematsky said, not even trying to look sympathetic, “but I’ve got to wait for these phone calls before I know exactly what it is I need to ask you.”

  So here he was, hour after hour, all of Saturday going by, Saturday evening coming up, Lutetia unconscious in the other room, the apartment raped, and Detective Klematsky as bland as an ulcer diet—which Max would be needing, if things kept on like this.

  But what could he do? He’d called his New York office, told them to hold all messages for the weekend—nothing else in his business life could possibly matter between now and Monday—and he remained hunkered down in this place, waiting, and every time the phone rang, which it did from time to time, it was for Klematsky. Who lives here, anyway?

  But now at last Klematsky, having come back from yet one more phone call, seemed ready to get on with it. He’d always taken his calls in some other room, so Max could hear nothing but murmuring without words, so he had no idea what all this hugger-mugger was about, but he was glad that finally they might be getting down to it. Ask the bloody questions, and let me go. It’s my plane, and my pilot, and he’ll fly whenever I say, whenever I get there, so let me get there.

  And here came the first question: “Your wife, Lutetia, lives in this apartment?”

  “Well, we both do,” Max said, “though this isn’t my legal residence, and I suppose she’s here more than I am. Business keeps me traveling a great deal.”

  “She’s here more than you are.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “She’s here almost all the time, isn’t she, Mr. Fairbanks?” Klematsky had some sort of notebook, was riffling through it, looking at little handwritten notes in it. “She’s something of a hostess in New York, isn’t she?”

  “My wife entertains a great deal,” Max said. And what was the point of all this?

  “But Thursday night she wasn’t here.”

  “No. Thank God for that, too.”

  “You and she went away together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for the one night?”

  “That was all the time I had, as I say, I’m supposed to be in Washington—”

  “And where did you go?”

  “My corporation owns—well, it did own, we’re giving it up, selling it—a house out on Long Island, we’ve used for management sessions, that sort of thing. I suppose we were saying good-bye to it. Sentimental; you know how it is.”

  “You were sentimental about giving up the house on Long Island.”

  “We’d had it for some years, yes.”

  “And your wife was sentimental about giving it up.”

  “Well, I suppose so,” Max said, trying to find his way through the obscurity of these questions, not wanting to compromise himself with an outright lie either. “I suppose she felt about it much the same way
I did.”

  “So you were saying good-bye to the house.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your wife was also saying hello to it, wasn’t she?”

  Max gaped. “What?”

  “Wasn’t that the first time your wife had ever been in that house, the first time she’d ever seen it?”

  How on earth had the fellow found that out, and what in hell did it have to do with this burglary? Max said, “Well, as a matter of fact, she’s always wanted to get out there, but her own schedule, you know, so that was the last opportunity.”

  “Before you sold the house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why are you selling the house, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  Be careful, Max told himself. This man knows the most unexpected irrelevant things. But why does he care about them so much? “It’s part of a court settlement,” he said. “A legal situation.”

  “Bankruptcy,” Klematsky said.

  Ah hah; so he did know that. “We’re in,” Max said, “part of my holdings are in a Chapter Eleven—”

  “Bankruptcy.”

  “Well, it’s a technical procedure that—”

  “Bankruptcy. Isn’t it bankruptcy, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  “Well yes.”

  “You’re a bankrupt.”

  “Technically, my—”

  “Bankrupt.”

  Sighing, Max conceded the point: “If you want to put it like that.”

  Klematsky flipped a page. “When did you and your wife decide to make this sentimental journey to Carrport, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  “Well, I don’t know, exactly,” Max said. He was beginning to wonder if he should have an attorney present, any attorney at all, perhaps even a couple of them. On the other hand, what essentially did he have to hide from this fellow? Nothing. He’s here to investigate a burglary, nothing more. God knows why he’s going into all this other stuff, but it doesn’t mean anything. “The sale of the house was decided . . . recently,” he said. “So our going out there had to be a recent decision.”

  “Very recent,” Klematsky said. “There’s nothing about it in your wife’s datebook.”