Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  Chauncey spun about, astonished. “Dortmunder! What are you doing in here?”

  “The same thing you are,” Dortmunder said, and limped out to the sidewalk, followed by a skinny scholarly looking man wearing large spectacles and carrying the kind of black leather bag doctors used when doctors made house calls.

  Dortmunder glared back over his shoulder at Chauncey, saying, “Well? You coming?”

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Dortmunder and Chefwick nosed their way around the roof of Arnold Chauncey’s house like a pair of hunting dogs in search of the scent. Illuminated by light angling up through the open trapdoor, Chauncey stood and observed, a faint expectant smile on his face.

  Dortmunder wasn’t sure about this fellow Chauncey. It was all right, for instance, for Dortmunder and Chefwick to hang around in dark corners, that was more or less part of their job, but Chauncey was supposed to be a straight citizen, and not only that, a wealthy one. What was he doing lurking in doorways?

  It was Dortmunder’s belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it — burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes — there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else. If Chauncey was another clown leading a rich fantasy life, Dortmunder would have to rethink this entire proposition.

  In the meantime, though, they were here and they might as well look the thing over. Even if the Chauncey deal fell through, it could be useful to know how to get into this place at some later date.

  This was one of a row of ten attached houses built shortly before the turn of the century, when New York’s well–to–do were just beginning to move north of 14th Street. Four stories high, twenty–five feet wide, with facades of stone and rear walls of brick, they shared one long continuous flat roof, with knee–high brick walls delineating each property line. Three of the houses, including Chauncey’s, featured roof sheds housing elevator mechanisms, added later. Television antennae sprouted like an adolescent’s beard on all the roofs, but many of them were tilted or bent or utterly collapsed, marks of the spread of cable TV. The roof construction was tar over black paper. The front parapet showed marks of a fire escape, since removed.

  While Chefwick studied the wires that crossed to the roof from the nearby power and telephone poles, clucking and muttering and peering through his spectacles, Dortmunder took a stroll down the block, stepping over the low brick walls, crunching on one tarred roof after another until be reached the end of the row, where he stood facing a blank brick wall. Or, not entirely blank; here and there the outlines of bricked–in windows could be seen.

  What was this building? Dortmunder went to the front, leaned over the parapet — trying not to see, from the corner of his eye, the sidewalk forty feet below — and saw that it was some kind of theater or concert hall, which faced onto Madison Avenue. What he could see from here was the side of the building, with its fire exits and posters of coming attractions.

  Leaving the edge, Dortmunder backed off to study that blank wall, which rose another fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the row–house roofs. Near the top of the wall were several grilled vents, but none of them looked useful for a human being seeking passage.

  Finished, Dortmunder retraced his steps, finding Chauncey still waiting by the open trapdoor and Chefwick now dangling off the rear of the building, head hanging down, humming happily to himself as he fingered the wiring. A line tester glowed briefly, showing Chefwick’s earnest absorbed face.

  Dortmunder continued on, walking to the other end of the row of houses, and there he found a ten–foot open space across a driveway, with an apartment building on the far side, its drapes and curtains and Venetian blinds and Roman shades and Japanese screens and New England shutters all firmly closed. The vision of a board stretched across that open space from one of those windows to where he was standing was followed immediately in Dortmunder’s mind by a vision of himself crawling across that board. Turning his back on both vision and building, he returned to the Chauncey roof, where Chefwick was cleaning his hands on a Wash’n’Dri from his leather bag. “We’ll come from down there,” Dortmunder said, pointing toward the blank back of the concert hall.

  “Our best bet would be the elevator shaft,” Chefwick said. To Chauncey he said, “It would be easier if the elevator weren’t on the top floor.”

  “It won’t be,” Chauncey promised.

  “Then there’s really no problem,” Chefwick said. “Not from my point of view.” And he looked a question at Dortmunder.

  It was time to clear the air. Dortmunder said to Chauncey, “Tell me about that passage we came through, the one into your back yard.”

  “Oh, you won’t be able to use that,” Chauncey said. “You’d have to go right up through the house, all full of people.”

  “Tell me about it anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chauncey said, moving closer, away from the trapdoor illumination, “but I don’t understand. Tell you what about it?”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Originally?” Chauncey shrugged. “I really don’t know, but I suspect it began merely as a space between walls. I understand my house was a speakeasy at one point during Prohibition, and that’s when the new doors were added.”

  “What do you use it for?”

  “Nothing really,” Chauncey said. “A few years ago, when there were some rock musicians hanging about, a certain amount of dope came in that way, but normally I have no use for the thing. Tonight was different, naturally. I don’t think I should be seen with suspicious characters just before my house is robbed.”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said.

  Chauncey said, “Now let me ask a question. What prompted the interest?”

  “I wanted to know if you were a comic–book hero,” Dortmunder told him.

  Chauncey seemed surprised, then amused. “Ah, I see. No romantics need apply, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Chauncey reached out to tap a finger against Dortmunder’s upper arm, which Dortmunder hated. “Let me assure you, Mr. Dortmunder,” he said, “I am no romantic.”

  “Good,” said Dortmunder.

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  One of the regulars was flat on his back atop the bar at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue when Dortmunder and Kelp walked in on Thursday evening. He was holding a damp filthy bar rag to his face, and three other regulars were discussing with Rollo the best way to treat a nosebleed. “You put an ice cube down the back of his neck,” one said.

  “You do and I’ll flumfle your numble,” the sufferer said, his threat lost in the folds of the bar rag.

  “Give him a tourniquet,” another regular suggested.

  The first regular frowned. “Where?”

  While the regulars surveyed the body of their stricken comrade for a place to put an anti–nosebleed tourniquet, Rollo came down the bar, nodded at Dortmunder and Kelp over his impaired customer’s steel–toed work boots, and said, “How you doing?”

  “Better than him,” Dortmunder said.

  “He’ll be okay.” Rollo dismissed the Death–of–Montcalm scene with a shrug. “Your vodka–and–red–wine is here, your sherry is here, your beer–and–salt is here.”

  “We’re the last,” Dortmunder said.

  Rollo nodded hello to Kelp. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Nice to be back,” Kelp told him.

  Rollo went off to make their drinks, and Dortmunder and Kelp watched the first–aid team. One of the regulars was now trying to stuff paper bar coasters into the bleeder’s nose, while another one was trying to get the poor bastard to count backwards from one hundred. “That’s for hiccups,” said the third.

  “No no,” said the second, “you drink out of the wrong side of the glass for hiccups.”

 
“No, that’s for when you faint.”

  “No no no, when you faint you put your head between your knees.”

  “Wrong. If somebody faints, you slap their face.”

  “You do and you’ll stumbun with me,” said the patient, who now had bar rag and paper coasters in his mouth.

  “You’re crazy,” the second regular told the third. “You slap somebody’s face if they’ve got hysterics.”

  “No,” said the third regular, “if somebody’s got hysterics, you have to keep them warm. Or is it cold?”

  “Neither. That’s for shock. You keep them warm for shock. Or cold.”

  “No, I’ve got it,” the third regular said. “You keep them warm for hysterics, and you keep them cold if they’ve got a burn.”

  “Don’t you know anything?” asked the second regular. “For a burn you put butter on it.”

  “Now I know!” the third regular cried. “Butter’s for a nosebleed!”

  Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare at him, even the bleeder. The first regular, his hands full of paper coasters, said, “Butter’s for a nosebleed?”

  “You stuff butter up the nose! Rollo, give us some butter!”

  “You won’t dumrumbin my nose!”

  “Butter,” said the second regular in disgust. “It’s ice he needs. Rollo!”

  Rollo, ignoring the cries for butter and ice, carried a tray past the invalid’s feet and slid it across the bar toward Dortmunder. It contained a bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, two empty glasses with ice, and a glass containing, no doubt, vodka–and–red–wine. “See you later,” he said.

  “Right.” Dortmunder reached for the tray, but Kelp got to it first, picking it up with such eagerness to be of help that the bourbon bottle rocked back and forth, and would have gone over if Dortmunder hadn’t steadied it.

  “Thanks,” Kelp said.

  “Yeah,” Dortmunder said, and led the way toward the back room.

  But not directly. They had to stop for a second so Kelp could throw in his own contribution with the medics. “What you do for a nosebleed,” he told them, “is you take two silver coins and put them on both sides of his nose.”

  The regulars all stopped squabbling among themselves to frown at this outsider. One of them, with great dignity, pointed out, “There haven’t been any silver coins in circulation in this country since 1965.”

  “Oh,” said Kelp. “Well, that is a problem.”

  “Sixty–six,” said another regular.

  Dortmunder, several paces ahead, looked back at Kelp to say, “Are you coming?”

  “Right.” Kelp hurried in Dortmunder’s wake.

  As they went past POINTERS and SETTERS, Dortmunder said, “Now, remember what I told you. Tiny Bulcher won’t be happy about you because you’re costing him five grand, so just be quiet and let me do the talking.”

  “Definitely,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder glanced at him, but said nothing more, and then went through the green door and into the back room, where Stan Murch and Roger Chefwick and Tiny Bulcher were all seated at the green–felt–topped table, with Tiny Bulcher saying, “… so I went to his hospital room and broke his other arm.”

  Chefwick and Murch, who had been gazing at Bulcher like sparrows at a snake, looked up with quick panicky smiles when Dortmunder and Kelp came in. “Well, there you are!” Chefwick cried, with a kind of mad glitter in his eyes, and Murch actually spread his arms in false camaraderie, announcing, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

  Talking more rapidly than usual, his words running together in his haste, Murch said, “I did a new route entirely, that’s why I’m so early, I was coming from Queens, I took the Grand Central almost to the Triborough —”

  Meanwhile, Kelp was putting the tray on the table and placing Bulcher’s fresh drink in front of him, cheerily saying “There you go. You’re Tiny Bulcher, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Bulcher said. “And who are you?”

  “— then I got off, and turned left under the El, and, uh …” And Murch ran down, becoming aware of the new tension in the room as Kelp, still cheery, answered Bulcher’s question.

  “I’m Andy Kelp. We met once seven or eight years ago, a little jewelry–store job up in New Hampshire.”

  Bulcher gave Kelp his flat look. “Did I like you?”

  “Sure,” Kelp said, taking the chair to Bulcher’s left. “You called me pal.”

  “I did, huh?” Bulcher turned to Dortmunder. “What’s my pal doing here?”

  “He’s in,” Dortmunder said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Bulcher looked around at Murch and Chefwick, then back at Dortmunder. “Then who’s out?”

  “Nobody. It’s a five–man string now.”

  “It is, huh?” Bulcher nodded, glancing down at his fresh vodka–and–red–wine as though there might be some sort of explanation engraved on the glass. Looking at Dortmunder again, he said, “Where does his cut come from?”

  “Same as everybody else’s. We’ll get twenty thousand a man.”

  “Uh huh.” Bulcher sat back — the chair squealed in fear — and brooded at Kelp, whose cheery expression was beginning to wilt. “So,” said Bulcher, “you’re my five thousand dollar pal, are you?”

  “I guess so,” Kelp said.

  “I never liked anybody five grand worth before,” Bulcher said. “Remind me; where were we pals?”

  “New Hampshire. A jewelry —”

  “Oh, yeah.” Bulcher nodded, his big head going back and forth like a balancing rock on the mountain of his shoulders. “There was a second alarm system, and we never got into the place. All the way up to New Hampshire for nothing.”

  Dortmunder looked at Kelp, who did not look back. Instead, he kept smiling at Bulcher, saying, “That’s the one. The finger screwed up. I remember you hit him a lot.”

  “Yeah, I would of.” Bulcher took a long slow taste of his fresh drink, while Kelp continued to smile at him, and Dortmunder brooded at him, and Murch and Chefwick went on doing their hypnotized–sparrow number. Putting the glass down at last, Bulcher said to Dortmunder, “What do we need him for?”

  “I already been at work,” Kelp said, bright and eager, and ignoring Dortmunder’s shut–up frown.

  Bulcher observed him. “Oh, yeah? Doing what?”

  “I checked out the theater. Hunter House, it’s called. How we get in, how we get out.”

  Dortmunder, who was wishing Kelp would get laryngitis, explained, “We get to the roof through a theater nearby.”

  “Uh huh. And we’re paying this guy twenty grand to go find out how we get in a theater.” Bulcher leaned forward, resting one monstrous forearm on the table. He said, “I’ll tell you the secret for ten grand. You buy a ticket.”

  “I bought tickets,” Kelp assured him. “We’re gonna see the Queen’s Own Caledonian Orchestra.”

  Dortmunder sighed, shook his head a bit in irritation, and paused to pour some Our Own Brand bourbon into one of the glasses on the tray. He sipped, watched moodily as Kelp poured his own drink, and then said, “Tiny, I make the plan. That’s my job. Your job is to carry heavy things and to knock people down that get in the way.”

  Bulcher jabbed a thumb the size of an ear of corn in Kelp’s direction. “We’re talking about his job.”

  “We need him,” Dortmunder said. Under the table, he crossed his ankles.

  “How come we didn’t need him the first time we got together?”

  “I was out of town,” Kelp said brightly. “Dortmunder didn’t know where to find me.”

  Bulcher gave him a look of disgust. (So did Dortmunder.)

  “Bull,” he said, and turned back to Dortmunder, saying “You didn’t mention him at all.”

  “I didn’t know yet I needed him,” Dortmunder said. “Listen, Tiny, I’ve been to the place now. We have to get in through the top of an elevator shaft, we got a fifteen– or twenty–foot brick wall to go down and then b
ack up, and we don’t have all night to do it. We need a fifth man. I’m the planner, and I say we need him.”

  Bulcher turned his full attention on Kelp again, as though trying to visualize a circumstance in which he would find himself needing this person. His eyes still on Kelp, he spoke to Dortmunder, saying, “So that’s it, huh?”

  “That’s it,” Dortmunder told him.

  “Well, then.” A ghastly smile turned Tiny’s face into a cross between a bad bayonet wound and a six–month–old Halloween pumpkin. “Welcome aboard, pal,” he said. “I’m sure you’re gonna be very helpful.”