Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  Chauncey brought the fresh drink, and stood next to him a moment, smiling at the painting, finally saying, “It is good, isn’t it?” His tone was fond, almost paternal.

  Dortmunder hadn’t been looking at the painting at all, just at the paint. “Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, and turned to frown at Chauncey. “You got to trust me, don’t you?”

  Raising an eyebrow, Chauncey grinned on one side of his mouth and said, “In what way?”

  “That I won’t just walk off with this, and not bring it back.”

  Chauncey smiled broadly, nodding. “That is a consideration, but there are two things that ease my mind. The first is, with a painting as well–known and valuable as this one, you couldn’t possibly find another buyer to give you more than the twenty–five per cent I’m offering. And the other is, the list of requirements I gave our friend Stonewiler.”

  “Such as?”

  “In fact, I asked Stonewiler to find me two men,” Chauncey said. “The first, which turned up you, was for a professional thief without a record of violence. You are not a dangerous man, Mr. Dortmunder.”

  Nobody likes to be told he isn’t dangerous. “Um,” said Dortmunder.

  “The other man I asked him to find,” Chauncey went on, “was a professional killer.” His smile was very bright, very sure of itself. “It was amazing,” he said. “That part took practically no time at all.”

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  When Dortmunder walked into the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at eleven that night, three of the regulars were deep in discussion with Rollo the bartender about private versus public education. “I tell ya what’s wrong widda private schools,” one of the regulars was saying. “You put your kid in there, it’s like a hothouse, ya know what I mean? The kid don’t get to know all kinds a people, he don’t get prepared for real life.”

  One of the others said, “Real life? You wanna know about real life? You put your kids in a public school they get themselves mugged and raped and all that shit. You call that real life?”

  “Sure I do,” the first one said. “Meeting all kinds, that’s what real life is all about.”

  The second one reared back in disbelieving contempt. “You mean you’d put your kid in a school with a lotta niggers and kikes and wops and spics?”

  “Just a minute there,” the third regular said. “I happen to be of Irish extraction myself, and I think you oughta just give me an apology there.”

  The other two stared at him, utterly bewildered. The main offender said, “Huh?”

  “Or maybe you’d like a swift left to the eye,” said the Irishman.

  “Not in here,” Rollo the bartender said, and he left the discussion to stroll down the bar and say to Dortmunder, “How you doin?”

  “Just fine,” Dortmunder said.

  “You’re a double bourbon,” Rollo told him, and made a generous drink, from a bottle labeled Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon — “Our Own Brand.” Pushing it across to Dortmunder, he said, “Settle up on your way out.”

  “Right. Anybody here?”

  “A vodka–and–red–wine.” Rollo nodded his head toward the rear, saying, “He went on back.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said. “There’ll be two more. The sherry — you haven’t seen him for a while —”

  “Little skinny fella? Professor type?”

  “That’s the one. And the draft–beer–and–salt.”

  Rollo made a face. “He’s terrific for business, that one.”

  “He doesn’t like to drink too much,” Dortmunder explained. “He’s a driver.”

  “I’m an advocate of mass transit myself,” Rollo said. “I’ll send them back when they show.”

  “Thanks,” Dortmunder said. Picking up his bourbon, he walked on by the discussion group — they had switched from education through ethnics to religion by now, and tempers were beginning to fray — and headed for the bar’s back room. Going past the two doors with the dog silhouettes on them (POINTERS and SITTERS), and past the phone booth (which smelled as though some pointers had missed their turnoff), he went through the green door at the end and into a small square room lined to the ceiling all around with beer and liquor cases. On the concrete floor in the middle of the small open space stood a battered old table with a green felt top and half a dozen chairs. Over the table hung a bare bulb with a round tin reflector, the only light source in the room. And sitting at the table was a monster in semi–human form, his great hairy hand wrapped around a tall glass holding what looked like cherry soda.

  Dortmunder, closing the door behind himself nodded at this prodigy and said, “Whadaya say, Tiny?”

  “Hello, Dortmunder.” Tiny had the voice of a frog in an oil drum, but less musical. “Long time no see.”

  Dortmunder sat opposite him, saying, “You look good, Tiny,” which was a palpable lie. Tiny, hulking on the little chair, his great meaty shoulders bulging inside his cheap brown suit, a shelf of forehead bone shadowing his eyes, looked mostly like something to scare children into going to bed.

  But Tiny apparently agreed with Dortmunder that he looked good, because he nodded, thoughtfully and judiciously, and then said, “You look like shit, on the other hand. You looked better in stir.”

  “Things have been a little slow,” Dortmunder admitted. “How long you on the street?”

  “Ten days.” Tiny wrinkled a fistful of his own suit lapel, saying in disgust, “I’m still in the state’s threads.”

  “I think I’ve got a good one,” Dortmunder told him. “But wait’ll the others get here, so we’ll go over it just once.”

  Tiny lifted his shoulders in a shrug — seismograph needles trembled all over the Northern Hemisphere — and said, “I got nothing but time.” And he knocked back about a third of the red liquid in his glass.

  “How have things been inside?” Dortmunder asked.

  “Bout the same. You remember Baydlemann?”

  “Yeah?”

  Tiny chuckled, like far–off thunder. “Fell in a vat of lye.”

  “Yeah? Get hurt?”

  “His left thumb come out pretty good.”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “Baydlemann had a lot of enemies on the inside.”

  “Yeah,” Tiny said. “I was one a them.”

  There was a little silence after that, while both men thought their own thoughts. Dortmunder sipped at his drink, which didn’t taste even remotely like the nectar called bourbon that Chauncey had given him. Maybe there’d be a bottle or two of the stuff upstairs the night of the heist; not to drink on the job, but to take away for the celebration afterwards.

  Dortmunder was tasting one kind of bourbon, and dreaming about another kind, when the door opened and a stocky open–faced fellow with carroty hair came jauntily in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “Hey, there, Dortmunder,” he said. “Am I late?”

  “No, you’re right on time,” Dortmunder told him. “Tiny Bulcher, this is —”

  The newcomer said, “I took a different route. I wasn’t sure how it’d work out.”

  “Your timing is good,” Dortmunder assured him. “Tiny, this is Stan Murch — he’ll be our —”

  “You see,” said Stan Murch, putting his glass and shaker on the table and taking a chair, “with the West Side Highway closed it changes everything. All the old patterns.”

  Tiny said to him, “You the driver?”

  “The best,” Murch said, matter–of–factly.

  “It was a driver got me sent up my last stretch,” Tiny said. “Took back roads around a roadblock, made a wrong turn, come up behind the roadblock, thought he was still in front of it. We blasted our way through, back into the search area.”

  Murch looked sympathetic. “That’s tough,” he said.

  “Fella named Sigmond. You know him?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Murch said.

  “Looked a little like you,” Tiny said.

  “Is that right?”
/>   “Before we got outa the car, when the cops surrounded us, I broke his neck. We all said it was whiplash from the sudden stop.”

  Another little silence fell. Stan Murch sipped thoughtfully at his beer. Dortmunder took a mouthful of bourbon. Tiny Bulcher slugged down the rest of his vodka–and–red–wine. Then Murch nodded, slowly, as though coming to a conclusion about something. “Whiplash,” he commented. “Yeah, whiplash. That can be pretty mean.”

  “So can I,” said Tiny, and the door opened again, this time to admit a short and skinny man wearing spectacles and a wool suit, and carrying a round bar tray containing the bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, plus a glass with something that looked like but was not cherry soda, and a small amber glass of sherry. “Hello,” said the skinny man. “The barman asked me to bring all this.”

  “Hey, Roger!” Stan Murch said. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

  “Oh,” said the skinny man, vaguely. “Just around. Here and there.” He put the tray on the table and seated himself, and Tiny reached at once for his new vodka–and–red–wine.

  Dortmunder said, “Tiny Bulcher, this is Roger Chefwick.” Tiny nodded over his glass, and Roger said, “How do you do?”

  Dortmunder explained to Tiny, “Roger is our lock–and–alarm man.”

  “Our terrific lock–and–alarm man!” Stan Murch said.

  Roger Chefwick looked pleased and embarrassed. “I do my best,” he said, and delicately lifted his sherry from the tray.

  Tiny washed down some red stuff and said, “I’m the smash–and–carry man. The terrific smash–and–carry man.”

  “I’m sure you’re very good at it,” Chefwick said, politely. Then he pointed at the glass of red stuff and said, “Is that really vodka and red wine?”

  “Sure,” said Tiny. “Why not? Gives the vodka a little taste, gives the wine a little body.”

  “Ah,” said Chefwick, and sipped sherry.

  Murch said, “Roger, somebody told me you were in jail in Mexico.”

  Chefwick seemed both embarrassed and a bit annoyed at the subject having come up. “Oh, well,” he said. “That was just a misunderstanding.”

  “I heard,” Murch insisted, “you tried to hijack a subway car to Cuba.”

  Chefwick put his sherry glass on the felt surface of the table with some force. “I really don’t see,” he said, “how these silly rumors spread so far so fast.”

  “Well,” Murch said, “what did happen?”

  “Hardly anything,” Chefwick said. “You know I’m a model–train enthusiast.”

  “Sure. I seen the layout in your cellar.”

  “Well,” Chefwick said, “Maude and I were in Mexico on vacation, and in Vera Cruz there were some used New York City subway cars awaiting shipment to Cuba, and I — well — I actually merely intended to board one and look around a bit.” A certain amount of discomfort was evident in Chefwick’s face now. “One thing led to another,” he said, “and I’m afraid the car began to move, and then it got out of control, and the first thing I knew I was on the main line to Guadalajara, having a great deal of difficulty staying ahead of the two–thirty express. But, so far from hijacking a subway car to Cuba, the Mexican police at first accused me of stealing the car from Cuba. However, with Maude’s help we got it all straightened out in a day or two. Which,” Chefwick concluded petulantly, “I’m afraid I can’t say for the rumors and wild stories.”

  Tiny Bulcher abruptly said, “I did a bank job once with a lock man that thought he was a practical joker. Give me a dribble glass one time, exploding cigar one time.”

  Dortmunder and Murch both looked at Tiny a bit warily. Dortmunder said, “What happened?”

  “After we emptied the vault,” Tiny said, “I pushed him in and shut the door. He thought he was such hot stuff, let him get himself out from the inside.”

  Dortmunder said, “Did he?”

  “The bank manager let him out, Monday morning. I hear he’s still upstate.”

  “That wasn’t very funny,” Roger Chefwick said. His expression was very prim.

  “Neither was the cigar,” Tiny said, and turned to Dortmunder, saying, “We’re all here now, right?”

  “Right,” Dortmunder said. He cleared his throat, sipped some more bourbon, and said, “What I got here is a simple breaking and entering. No fancy caper, no helicopters, no synchronize–your–watches, just come in through an upstairs window, take what we pick up along the way, and go after our main thing, which happens to be a painting.”

  Tiny said, “Valuable painting?”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Do we have a buyer?”

  “That we got,” Dortmunder said, and went on to explain the whole story, finishing, “So our only problems are the burglar alarm and the private guards, but we got the best kind of inside help, and a guaranteed buyer.”

  “And twenty–five thousand a man,” said Stan Murch.

  “Plus,” Dortmunder reminded him, “whatever we pick up on the upper floors.”

  Tiny said, “I don’t know about that six–month wait. I like my money right away.”

  “The guy has to get it from the insurance company,” Dortmunder said. “He said to me, and it makes sense, if he had a hundred thousand cash on him he wouldn’t have to pull anything like this.”

  Tiny shrugged his huge shoulders. “I guess it’s okay,” he said. “I can make a living in the meantime. There’s always heads to crack.”

  “Right,” Dortmunder said, and turned to Roger Chefwick. “What about you?”

  “I’ve seen Watson Security Services and their installations,” Chefwick said, with some disdain. “The easiest thing in the world to get through.”

  “So you’re with us?”

  “With pleasure.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said. He looked around at his string — an erratic genius lock–and–alarm man, a compulsive one–track–mind driver, and a beast from forty fathoms — and found it good. “Fine,” he repeated. “I’ll work out the timing with the owner, and get back to you.”

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  Dortmunder was sitting on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table, a beer in his right hand and a luncheon–loaf sandwich on white with mayo in his left hand, his sleepy eyes more or less focused on Angels with Dirty Faces, being screened this afternoon on WNEW–TV, channel five, when the doorbell rang. Dortmunder blinked slowly, but otherwise didn’t move, and a minute later May walked through the living room, trailing a thin wavy line of smoke from the cigarette in the corner of her mouth as she dried her sudsy hands on a dishtowel. She crossed the line of vision between Dortmunder and the television set — he blinked again, as slowly as before — and went on out to the foyer to open the door.

  A loud and rather angry voice cut through the background music of Angels with Dirty Faces: “Where is he?”

  Dortmunder sighed. He filled his mouth with bread and mayo and luncheon loaf, sat up a bit straighter on the sofa, and waited for the inevitable.

  Out in the foyer, May was saying something soothing, which was apparently not doing its job. “Just let me at him,” insisted the loud angry voice, and then there were heavy footsteps, and in came a wiry sharp–nosed fellow with a chip on his shoulder. “You!” he said, pointing at Dortmunder.

  May, looking worried, followed the sharp–nosed fellow into the room, saying, in a ghastly attempt at cheeriness, “Look who’s here, John. It’s Andy Kelp.”

  Dortmunder swallowed white bread and luncheon loaf and mayo. “I see him,” he said. “He’s between me and the TV set.”

  “You got a job!” Kelp yelled, in tones of utter outrage.

  Dortmunder gestured with his sandwich, as though shooing a fly. “Would you move over a little? I can’t see the picture.”

  “I will not move over.” Kelp folded his arms firmly over his chest and stamped his shoes down onto the carpet, legs slightly spread, to emphasize his immobility. Dortmunder could now see abou
t a third of the screen, just under Kelp’s crotch. He scrunched down in the sofa, trying to see more, but then his own feet on the coffee table got in the way.

  And Kelp was repeating, “You got a job, Dortmunder. You got a job, and you didn’t tell me.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. He sipped beer.

  “I brought you a lotta jobs,” Kelp said, aggrieved. “And now you got one, and you cut me out?”