Short Stories

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I’m done,” I said at last to the woman cabdriver in her unusual hat; berries and leaves, on black straw. “Take me to Universal Parking Garage at E Street.”

  “The instruction sheet,” she said.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I handed it to her, and she drove me to my car.

  By the time I got home, the attache case was safely stashed in the trunk. Late that night, after my wife had gone to sleep, I went out to the garage and transferred the cash to my coffee cans. For several years I have saved Maxwell House coffee cans, piling them up on a shelf above my workbench, using a few of them to store nails and washers and whatnot, vaguely convinced I’ll be using the others for something eventually. Well, now was that eventually. Into the coffee cans went the twenty thousand dollars, and back into the trunk went the empty attache case.

  The actual photographing of the documents was simplicity itself. I took the documents away to my office—Harry told me a racial joke—switched my desk lamp on, and took the pictures in quick succession, five of them. The documents were merely pages of figures, tabulations, specifications, dry as dirt and no doubt meaningless to most people. Essentially meaningless to me as well, although necessary to me from time to time in connection with my administrative duties.

  The tiny camera, full of treasonous film, seemed hot in my trouser pocket, branding my thigh. All afternoon I kept holding my watch to my ear, unable to believe it hadn’t stopped. Was it only, was it only, was it only…?

  Was it at last four-thirty? Thank God.

  The same cab was there again, but this time as I entered it, carrying the empty attache case, I discovered another passenger already occupying the far side of the rear seat. As I hesitated, he said, “Not to worry, Mr. Stilmont. I am merely to accompany you.”

  He didn’t look dangerous. Quite the reverse, he was a pale and slender lad, the kind brought to mind by the word ‘effete.’ I slid in beside him and said, “Where’s the money?”

  “On the seat beside our driver,” he said. “You can put that case on the floor there.”

  I put the case on the floor, leaned forward, and saw an identical case on the front seat. I said, “I assume I can look at it now.”

  “If I might have the camera,” he said.

  “I’m glad to get rid of it.” I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. Then—we were in motion by now, darting through Washington traffic—I took the new case onto my lap, and determined that it contained twenty thousand dollars in genuine, old, small bills.

  Wonderful, wonderful.

  We stopped in front of an elderly boarding house on 8th Street NE. “Wait here,” said the young man, and left the cab, and went into the building.

  In a way, I wanted to make conversation with the woman driver, merely to have the reassurance of the sound of voices, but in another way I felt as though I didn’t want to talk to anyone again.

  I’d been over it and over it, rationalized it to the last detail. This information I was selling, this would help the opponents, the enemy, the other side—whoever and whatever they were—but only to a small extent, and surely to a degree easily counterbalanced by similar spy networks in their camp. What I had sold was not decisive. I would feel guilty about it the rest of my life, no doubt, but it would be a guilt of manageable size.

  The woman, for her part, sat stolid and unmoving, gazing straight ahead through the windshield, her hands resting easily on the steering wheel.

  After ten minutes or so, the young man appeared in the doorway, came trotting down the stairs, smiled at me, said to the woman, “Fine,” and went walking away.

  The woman said, “Where to?”

  “Universal Parking Garage,” I said.

  That night I filled the rest of my coffee cans. On Saturday I purchased a new set of tires for my car, paying cash, and also bought a power saw. On Sunday, I took the family to a drive-in. Monday morning I phoned into the office that I was sick, and went shopping. I bought two suits, some other clothing, a decent fishing rod, a pair of sunglasses, and a case of good scotch. I deposited three hundred dollars in our checking account, went home, and explained to my wife I’d won a boxing pool in the office. This was to be my only splurge. From now on, my extra money would be inserted into my income ten, twenty, thirty dollars at a time. It would make the difference, all the difference, give us just that little extra to get us over the hump of our economic bind.

  I was beginning to feel better than I had in years.

  Tuesday evening they came and arrested me. State police, not Federal. They wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t explain a thing, until they had me in an office surrounded by serious looking men in plain clothes. Then one of the—gray-haired, trim, a pipe smoker—said, “You seem to have come into bit of money all of a sudden, Mr. Stilmont.”

  “Money?” I said.

  He picked up some bills from the desk; old, small denominations. “You passed these bills Saturday,” he said, “at Ben Franklin Shopping Center. And these you deposited in your personal checking account just yesterday.”

  “Counterfeit,” I said.

  He said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “They did it to me anyway,” I said. “That’s what I was afraid of all the time, counterfeit bills. But I thought, old bills, used bills, how could they be counterfeit? Did you get them, too? Just so you got them, too.”

  He said, “I’m not entirely sure I understand, Mr. Stilmont.”

  I said, “Those bills. They’re counterfeit, right? Just as I thought they would. That’s how you got onto me.”

  “These bills,” he said, holding them up so I could see them, “are perfectly valid. Excellent bills.”

  I said, “But—”

  “These bills,” he said, “were part of the two hundred thousand dollar haul in the armored car robbery in Baltimore last Wednesday. The numbers of those bills were known, Mr. Stilmont.” He leaned toward me. “Now,” he said, “let’s talk about the rest of the money, Mr. Stilmont.”

  THE DORTMUNDER WORKOUT

  or

  CRIMINAL EXERCISE

  The Sunday edition of The New York Times doesn’t weigh enough all by itself to satisfy its editors, so they add special sections now and again, and sometimes this special section is a Health supplement to the Magazine. An editor from there phoned me, one day in 1989, wondering if John Dortmunder had any thoughts about health, and I had to admit I didn’t know but I’d ask. I did, and when “The Dortmunder Workout” was published in the Health supplement to the New York Times Magazine in the spring of 1990 John was the only guy in the issue without a sweatband around his brow. The editor told me afterward that the staffers who already knew Dortmunder thought it was a nice piece, but those who hadn’t previously met my boy were baffled. Well, that seems fair.

  ~DEW

  When Dortmunder walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that afternoon the regulars were talking about health and exercise, pro and con. “A healthy regime is very important,” one of the regulars was saying, hunched over his beer.

  “You don’t mean regime,” a second regular told him. “A healthy regime is like Australia. You mean regimen.”

  “Regimen is women,” a third regular put in. “Something about women.”

  The other regulars frowned at that, trying to figure out if it meant anything. In the silence, Dortmunder said, “Rollo.”

  Rollo the bartender, observing the world from a three-point stance—large feet solidly planted on the duckboards behind the bar, elbow atop the cash register drawer—seemed too absorbed either by the conversation or in contemplation of the possibility of health to notice the arrival of a new customer. In any event, he didn’t even twitch, just stood there like a genre painting of himself, while the first regular said, “Well, whatever the word is, the point is, if you got your health you got everything.”

  “I don’t see how that follows,” the second regular said. “You could have your health and still not have a Pontiac Trans Am.”

  “If yo
u got your health,” the first regular told him, “you don’t need a Pontiac Trans Am. You can walk.”

  “Walk where?”

  “Wherever it was you were gonna go.”

  “St. Louis,” the second regular said, and knocked back some of his tequila sunrise in satisfaction.

  “Well, now you’re just being argumentative,” the first regular complained.

  “Some of that health stuff can get dangerous,” the third regular put in. “I know a guy knew a guy had a heart attack from the Raquel Welch workout videos.”

  “Well, sure,” the first regular agreed, “it’s always possible to exercise too much, but—”

  “He wasn’t exercising, he was just watching.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder said.

  “When I was in the Army,” the first regular said, “they used to make us do sailor jumps.”

  “If you were in the Army,” the second regular told him, “they were soldier jumps.”

  “Sailor jumps,” insisted the first regular.

  “We used to call those jumping jacks,” the third regular chimed in.

  “You did not,” the second regular told him. “Jumping jacks is that little girls’ game with the lug nuts.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder demanded, and this time Rollo raised an eyebrow in Dortmunder’s direction, but then he was distracted by movement from the third regular, the jumping jacks man, who, with a scornful, “Lug nuts!” climbed off his stool, paused to wheeze, and then said, “This is jumping jacks.” And he stood there at a kind of crumpled attention, arms at his sides, heels together, chest in.

  The second regular gazed upon him with growing disgust. “That’s what?”

  “It isn’t sailor jumps, I know that much,” the first regular said.

  But the third regular was unfazed. “This is first position,” he explained. “Now watch.” Carefully, he lifted his right foot and moved it about 18 inches to the side, then put it back down on the floor. After stooping a bit to be sure he had both feet where he wanted them, he straightened up, more or less, faced forward, took a deep breath you could hear across the street and slowly lifted both arms straight up into the air, leaning his palms against each other above his head. “Position two,” he said.

  “That’s some hell of an exercise,” said the second regular.

  The third regular’s arms dropped to his sides like fish off a delivery truck. “When you’re really into it,” he pointed out, “you do it faster.”

  “That might be sailor jumps,” the first regular admitted.

  “In my personal opinion,” the second regular said, twirling the dregs of his tequila sunrise, “diet is the most important part of your personal health program. Vitamins, minerals and food groups.”

  “I don’t think you got that quite right,” the third regular told him. “I think it goes, animal, vitamin or mineral.”

  “Food groups,” the second regular contended. “This isn’t twenty questions.”

  The first regular said, “I don’t get what you mean by this food groups.”

  “Well,” the second regular told him, “your principal food groups are meat, vegetables, dessert and beer.”

  “Oh,” the first regular said. “In that case, then, I’m okay.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder begged.

  Sighing like an entire Marine boot camp, Rollo bestirred himself and came plodding down the duckboards. “How ya doin?” he said, flipping a coaster onto the bar.

  “Keeping healthy,” Dortmunder told him.

  “That’s good. The usual?”

  “Carrot juice,” Dortmunder said.

  “You got it,” Rollo told him, and reached for the bourbon bottle.