Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  But this time Kelp was sure. “Absolutely,” he said. “And you know why? Because I waited after he went in his building, and then I followed him and looked at the mailboxes, and there it was: Zane, room thirteen.”

  “All right,” Dortmunder said.

  “So we got him.”

  “We’ll have to check every once in a while,” Dortmunder said. “Be sure he doesn’t move.”

  “Oh, sure.” Kelp then looked slightly pained and said, “Maybe the other guys could do some of that, huh? I spent more time in cars the last two months than A.J. Foyt.”

  “Oh, naturally,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll all take our turns.”

  “Good,” said Kelp, and then there was a little silence.

  Dortmunder sniffed. He rubbed a knuckle against his nose. He hitched his pants. “Kum, kak,” he said, and coughed, and cleared his throat.

  Kelp said, “What?” He was leaning forward, looking alert and helpful.

  “Urn,” said Dortmunder. He stuck his finger in his ear and jiggled it, looking for wax. He took a deep breath. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together tight. “Thanks, uh, Andy,” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” Kelp said. “Don’t mention it.”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  “That’s pretty good,” Dortmunder said.

  Griswold Porculey gave him a look. “Pretty good? Dortmunder, I’ll tell you what this is. It’s a work of genius.”

  “I said it was pretty good,” Dortmunder said.

  They were both right. The nearly finished painting on Porculey’s easel was an incredible piece of work, a forgery so brilliant, so detailed, that it suggested true genius perhaps did reside within the unlikely corpus of Griswold Porculey after all, just as genius has so often in the past chosen other unlikely vessels for its abode. The paint–smeared hand holding the paint–smeared brush, the bleary washed–out eye observing the work, these had turned a lumpish array of pigment into a painting Jan Veenbes himself might have been proud to claim.

  Tacked and taped on the wall to Porculey’s left were nearly two dozen representations of Folly Leads Man to Ruin, ranging from full–size photographic reproductions to reduced–size copies torn from art books. The differences in color and detail among these many imitations were enough to discourage the most determined copyist, but somehow Porculey had maneuvered this minefield and had made so many right choices that Dortmunder, looking at the almost–completed work, thought he was seeing an exact duplicate of the painting in Arnold Chauncey’s sitting room. He wasn’t, of course, but the differences, though pervasive, were minute.

  Porculey was contemplating now that darkness in the lower right, where the road curved away and down a dim slope. This was the most difficult part because it was the vaguest, with the least specific detail and yet it was far from being a featureless wash of umbra. It was a peopled gloom, its obscurity filled with faintly seen writhings, hints of grotesquerie, suggestions of shape and form and movement. Porculey’s brush moved cautiously over these deeps, touching lightly, pausing, returning, moving on.

  It was early April, three weeks since Kelp had finally found the killer, and Dortmunder was back in this garret–boutique for the first time since that night in December when Porculey had thrown such cold water on Kelp’s original idea. Dortmunder had wanted to return, several times, to see for himself what Porculey was up to, but his exploratory phone calls to the painter had received unrelenting negatives. “I don’t want a lot of amateurs breathing down my neck,” Porculey had said, and when Dortmunder had tried to point out it was his own neck that was being breathed down, and by a professional killer at that, Porculey had merely said, “I’ll call you when there’s something to see,” and had hung up on him.

  So it came as a surprise this morning, and a very happy one, when Porculey himself had gotten in touch, calling Dortmunder at home and saying, “If you still want to see what I’m doing, come along.”

  “I will, right away.”

  “You can bring your partners, if you want.”

  But Dortmunder hadn’t wanted; this painting was too important to him, and he preferred to see it without a lot of conversation going on all over the place. “I’ll come by myself,” he said.

  “Up to you. Bring a bottle of wine, you know the stuff.” So Dortmunder had brought a gallon of Hearty Burgundy, some of which Cleo Marlahy had at once poured into the usual disparity of drinking vessels, and now he stood holding his white mug of wine and watching Porculey’s brush make small tentative decisions on the surface of the painting. In the last four months, it seemed, laboring away in his shopping–center sanctuary, Porculey had been bringing forth a miracle.

  Which he was willing to talk about. Stepping back from the easel, frowning at that troublesome darkness in the lower right, he said, “Do you know how I did it?”

  Porculey nodded. “I began,” he explained, continuing to brood at the painting as he spoke, “with research. The Frick has one Veenbes, and three more hang in the Metropolitan. I studied those four, and I looked at every copy of them I could find.”

  Dortmunder said, “Copies? Why?”

  “Every artist has his own range of colors. His palette. I wanted to see how Veenbes’ other pictures reproduced, to help me get back to the original colors in this one.”

  “I get the idea,” Dortmunder said. “That’s pretty good.”

  Cleo, sipping her wine and musing at Porculey and the painting as though she herself had invented both and was pleased with the result of her labors, said, “Porky’s had a wonderful time with this. He got to rage and carry on and throw things and make disgusting statements about art, and then preen himself at being better than anybody.”

  “Better than most, at any rate,” Porculey said comfortably. His brush tip, having grazed briefly at his palette, darted out at the gloom again, altered it infinitesimally. “Because I did more than just dry research,” he went on. “I looked at the paintings, but more than that I tried to look through them, past them. I tried to see Veenbes in his studio, approaching the canvas. I wanted to see how he held his brush, how he stroked the paint into place, how he made his decisions, his changes. Did you know his brush strokes move diagonally upward to the left? That’s very rare, you might think he was left–handed, but there are two portraits done by his contemporaries that show him at his easel with the brush in his right hand.”

  Dortmunder said, “What difference does it make?”

  “It changes the way the picture takes the light,” Porculey told him. “Where it reflects, and how the eye is led through the story.”

  All of which was over Dortmunder’s head. “Well, whatever you did,” he said, “it looks terrific.”

  Porculey was pleased. Smiling briefly over his shoulder, he said, “I wanted to wait till I had something worth showing. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Sure. And it’s just about done, huh?”

  “Oh, yes. Another two or three weeks, probably no more.” Dortmunder stared at the back of Porculey’s head, then at the painting. “Two or three weeks? That’s a whole painting there already, you could fool a lot of people the way it is right now.”

  “But not Arnold Chauncey,” Porculey said. “Not even for a second. I did some research on your customer while I was about it, and you chose a difficult man to fool. He isn’t just another culture merchant, buying and selling works of art as though they were coin collections. He’s a connoisseur, he knows art, and he certainly knows his own paintings.”

  “You’re making me unhappy,” Dortmunder said.

  Cleo, friendly and sympathetic, was immediately at his elbow, holding up the glass jug of wine. “Have some more,” she suggested. “Everything’ll work out. Porky’s doing you proud.”

  “It isn’t Pork, uh, Porculey I’m worried about,” Dortmunder told her. “I got talked into another Andy Kelp Special, that’s what I’m worried about.”

  “Seems like a nice fellow, Kelp,” Porculey said.

 
; “Doesn’t he,” said Dortmunder.

  Porculey stepped back to give his work the critical double–O. “You know,” he said, “I really am quite good at this sort of thing. Better even than those twenties. I wonder if there’s a future in it.”

  “There’s ten thousand from us,” Dortmunder reminded him, “if the scheme works and we get Chauncey’s money. That’s the only future I know about.”

  “Ah,” Porculey said, “but what if I took my knowledge of Veenbes, his subject matter, his palette, his style, and what if I did a Veenbes of my own? Not a copy, but a brand–new painting. Unknown old masters crop up all the time, why not one by me?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Dortmunder said.

  Porculey nodded, thinking it over. “A lot better than drawing twenties,” he said. “Very dull, that was. No palette at all. A few greens, a black, and that’s it. But a Veenbes, now.” His eyes were half–closed, no longer seeing the semi–Veenbes in front of him. “A medieval convent,” he said. “Stone walls and floor. Candles. The nuns have just removed their habits …”

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  Eight days later, Dortmunder entered the main borough office of the Unemployment Insurance Division and waited his turn to be inspected by the guard just inside the door. The guard was examining the purse of a woman client in search of guns or bombs or other expressions of political discontent, and he was in no hurry to finish. Dortmunder was dressed today in dark green work pants, a flannel jacket and a heavy workman’s belt festooned with tools, and he was carrying a clipboard.

  The woman client, whose brown skin and surly manner had made her a prima facie subject for official suspicion, had proved too clever for Authority this time, having left all her guns and bombs at home. The guard reluctantly let her through, then turned to Dortmunder, who plunked his clipboard onto the rostrum and said, “Typewriter repair.”

  “Which department?” Since Dortmunder was tall and male and white and not a client and not carrying any packages that might conceal guns or bombs, the guard had no reason to suspect him of anything.

  “Beats me,” Dortmunder said. Running a finger down the top sheet on his clipboard, he said, “They just give me this address, that’s all. The typing pool, it says.”

  “We got four typing pools in this building,” the guard said.

  “I’m just the guy they send around,” Dortmunder told him.

  “Well, how do I know what department?”

  “Beats me,” Dortmunder said.

  There’s a difference between a client and a workman, and the difference holds true everywhere, not merely in the Unemployment Insurance Division of the Department of Labor of the State of New York. The difference is, the client is there because he wants something, but the workman doesn’t give a damn what happens. The workman won’t extend himself, won’t try to help, won’t provide explanations, won’t in fact do anything but just stand there. The client wants to be liked, but the workman is just as willing to go back to his boss, shrug, and say, “They wouldn’t let me in.”

  Everybody knows this, of course, including the guard on the door, who looked unhappily into Dortmunder’s unhelpful eyes for a moment, then sighed, and said, “All right. I’ll call around.” And he picked up his phone from the rostrum, simultaneously scanning his list of interior phone numbers.

  The guard struck gold the first try, which didn’t surprise Dortmunder at all. “I’ll send him right up,” he told the phone, cradled it, and said to Dortmunder, “Osro.”

  “What?”

  “Out–of–State Resident Office, upstairs. Go to the end of that hall there, take the elevator to the third floor.”

  “Right.”

  Dortmunder, following instructions, eventually found himself in Osro, a large room full of desks and clerks and typewriters, semi–separated from one another by clusters of filing cabinets. He went to the nearest desk, bearing the sign INFORMATION, and told the girl there, “Typewriter repair. They just called up from downstairs.”

  “Oh, yes.” She pointed. “The typing pool. Down past the second bunch of filing cabinets and turn right.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said, and went to the typing pool, where the woman in charge, a tall gray–haired person with a face and body the texture of concrete, frowned at him, and said, “Do you know it’s been nearly three weeks since we put in our Form Two–Eighty–B?”

  “I just do my job, lady,” Dortmunder said. “Where is it?”

  “Over here,” she said, grumping, and led the way.

  Of course, every large bureaucracy has many typing pools, and every typing pool’s typewriters break down from time to time, and no request for repairs ever takes less than four months to filter through that particular bureaucracy, so the woman in charge should have been grateful to Dortmunder for being so prompt, instead of complaining; but there’s too little gratitude in this world.

  The woman left Dortmunder alone at the typewriter, a large Royal electric. He plugged it in and turned it on and the thing buzzed at him. He hit a few keys in his normal terrible typing style, and found that the machine’s problem was a refusal to automatically return when the automatic return button was pushed. He spent another two or three minutes fiddling with it, then unplugged it, picked it up — the thing weighed a ton — carried it over to the ungrateful woman’s desk, and said, “I’ll have to take it to the shop.”

  “We never get machines back that go to the shop,” the woman said, which was probably true. It was certainly true of the last machine Dortmunder had taken from this building, about two years ago.

  Dortmunder said, “I’ll leave it if you want, but it needs work in the shop.”

  “Oh, very well,” she said.

  “Do I need a pass or something with the guard on the door?”

  “I’ll phone down.”

  “Okay.”

  Dortmunder carried the typewriter downstairs, where the guard nodded hello and waved him through. Outside, he put the machine on the passenger seat of the Plymouth he’d stolen for this trip, then drove back to Manhattan and to a friend of his who ran a pawn shop off Third Avenue. This man had never been known to ask anybody any question other than, “How much?” Dortmunder handed him the machine, accepted forty dollars, and went out to the street.

  It was a pleasant day late in the month of April, one of the few days all month without rain, so Dortmunder decided to leave the Plymouth where he’d parked it and walk home. He’d gone about half a block when he suddenly realized he was looking at Stan Murch through the windshield of a car parked next to a fire hydrant. He started to grin and wave a big hello, but Stan made a tiny negative gesture with his head and the hand on the steering wheel, so Dortmunder converted his own movement into a cough, and walked on.

  May wasn’t at home, since she had the afternoon shift down at the Safeway, but a note was Scotch–taped to the front of the TV set: Call Chauncey.

  “Oog,” said Dortmunder, and went out to the kitchen to pop open a can of beer. He stayed in the kitchen, not wanting to be reminded of that message on the TV, and was working on his second beer when the doorbell rang.

  It was Stan Murch. “Yeah, I’d love one,” he said, looking at the beer in Dortmunder’s hand.

  “Sure. Sit down.”

  Dortmunder brought a beer from the kitchen to the living room, where Murch was now seated, looking at the TV. “You call yet?”

  “He wasn’t home,” Dortmunder lied. “How come you give me the office out there?”

  “I was following Zane,” Murch said, and swigged some beer. “Oh.” Since they believed that so far Zane hadn’t positively identified any of Dortmunder’s partners in the robbery, the group had been taking turns occasionally trailing Leo Zane around, trying to find the right handle to use on him later.

  Then Dortmunder frowned. “What was he doing down around there?”

  “Following you,” Murch said. “Someday you’ll have to tell me how you do that typewriter bit.”

  “Foll
owing me?”

  “Yeah.” Murch drank beer and said, “I’m following him and he’s following you. Pretty funny, in a way.”

  “Hysterical,” Dortmunder said, and went to the phone to call Chauncey.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  Chauncey had called Zane first, upon arrival in New York: