What this required was to move a desk under that bit of ceiling, then put a second desk on top of it, then carry a chair— non-wheeled, non-swivel—up onto the top of the second desk, climb from desk to desk to chair, and there it was.
At this spot, directly above the original point of impact, the front wall had sagged down away from the ceiling, pulling a piece of ceiling after it. Big could reach that Sheetrock ceiling from here, and when he tugged, a big, irregular chunk of it fell away, missed him, hit both desks, and smacked onto the floor.
What was above? A two-by-six beam, also sagging down at this end, since the wall it had always been attached to wasn’t in the right place any more. Big tugged tentatively at the beam, not wanting the whole place to come crashing down on him, and the beam moved in a spongy way, still firmly attached at other spots along its length but willing to angle down now if Big insisted.
He did. The floorboards above the beam popped free, not wanting to come down, but then, they would push up. And now Big needed more height.
The loan officer’s four-drawer filing cabinet. He pulled out the drawers, dragged the cabinet to his desk-and-chair construction, lifted it up onto the second desk, then put the chair on top of the cabinet, climbed the open front of the cabinet, where the drawers used to be, climbed the chair, pushed some floorboards and some rug out of the way, then tossed the money bag up there. When it didn’t come back, he used the dangling beam and the front wall of the building for leverage and worked his way up through ceiling/floor into a small, austere living room with not much more than a narrow sofa, a small TV and reproductions of race horse paintings on the walls.
A back way out. Big picked up the money bag, walked through the apartment to the bedroom, and there he saw a big, ugly dog seated in front of a closed closet door. The dog saw Big, curled his upper lip back over his teeth, turned and hurled himself at Big, who sidestepped, grabbed the hurtling dog by the throat, spun him around, opened the closet door, tossed the dog in, shut the door.
He was just turning toward the rear windows when pandemonium started in the closet: yelling, screaming, crashing around. Now what?
Big turned back to frown at the door, against which there was now a staccato rat-a-tat of frenzied knocking—wasn’t there a handle on the inside? Apparently not, since muffled voices— more than one?—hoarsely begged from in there, “Lemme out!”
It was curiosity that made Big go back to reopen that door, and out tumbled three men and a dog. “Not you again,” Big said, grabbed the dog in the same throat hold as before, and tossed him back onto the pile of clothing now messed up on the closet floor instead of lined up neatly on hangers. Slamming the door yet again, he turned to the three men on the floor, flopping around down there like caught fish in a bucket, and said, “And what the hell is all this?”
Rumsey blinked like an owl in the wrong barn. Around him, everybody was in confused, chaotic motion. On his right, “I can explain!” Algy yelled, while on his left, “Who are you people?” Stan demanded.
Rumsey gazed upward. “Big?” He withdrew Algy’s elbow from his right eye, Stan’s knee from his solar plexus. “Big?” It was like a dream. A very strange dream.
The big man who’d rescued them, whether he wanted to or not, looked around at the three doing their Raggedy Andys on the floor. “I know you birds,” he said.
“Of course you do,” Stan said, having recovered his memory. Rumsey, climbing up Algy to get to his feet, said, “I saw this thing in the News about Morry Calhoun—”
Stan, climbing up the bed to get to his feet, said, “—great shot of the car in the bank—”
Algy, scrambling around on the floor until Big grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and set him upright, said, “—so I thought I’d come see, is there any spillage.”
“There was some,” Big told him. “Not much.” He gestured at the gray canvas money bag on the bed.
They all looked at it. Unfortunately, they understood, that bag belonged to Big now.
Rumsey spoke for them all—except Big—when he said, “All this, for nothing.”
“I got mine, anyway,” Big said comfortably. “I always get mine.”
Algy said to the others, “And Big did come in handy with the dog, you got to admit.”
“And I got wheels,” Stan told them, “anybody wants a lift anywhere.”
Rumsey was not consoled. He said, “What I come out here for wasn’t wheels, or to get saved from some dog. What I come out here for was a score.”
“Well, you know,” Algy said, “I happen to be aware”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes ago, a bank three blocks from here was knocked over by a couple not very skillful guys. They didn’t get much.”
Rumsey said, “I don’t have to hear about other guys’ scores, not even little ones.”
“The point I’m making here,” Algy said, “is twenty minutes ago. The plainclothes detectives didn’t get there yet. You know, the victim interviews.”
Rumsey’s head and eyes and spirits lifted. “Everybody’s rattled,” he said. “They’ve shut the bank, but they’re still there.”
Stan said, “The security tape’s been taken away for evidence.” Algy whipped a hand into and out of his trouser pocket, flashed at them a gold badge in a brown leather case, pocketed it again, said, “I always carry a little ID. You never know.”
Big said, “Algy? What if a cop frisks you one time, takes a look at that?”
Algy grinned at him. “It says, ‘Love Detective, Licensed To Kiss.’”
Rumsey segued into a look that was very caring, very concerned, very earnest. In a voice like a funeral director, he said, “Mr. Manager, are you certain those felons didn’t gain access to your vault? We’d better check that out.”
Big laughed. “Nice to run into you fellas,” he said.
Ten minutes after the apartment was empty, the dog finally started howling, but there was nobody around to listen.
CODA
When the vault door was at last reopened at three-thirty that afternoon to release the imprisoned bank employees, one of them, Rufold Hepple, had to be carried out by five fellow tellers, one at each limb and one at his head. (Fortunately, he was a skinny little fellow and didn’t weigh much.) “I’ll be all right,” he kept telling everybody who looked down at him. “Just as soon as I get home, I’ll be fine.”
There were white-clad ambulance attendants in among the blue police officers and black-and-yellow firefighters, and they kept asking him, as he lay supine on the faux marble floor, head cushioned by several empty money sacks, if he didn’t want to go to the hospital, be looked at, checked over; but his fears of
(a) hospitals, (b) doctors, and (c) people dressed completely in white, kept him saying over and over, “No, I’ll be fine; I’ll be fine. Get my strength back in a minute. I’ll be fine as soon as I get home.”
The nearly four hours in the pitch-black vault had been the worst experience of Rufold Hepple’s life, calling into play simultaneously so many of his deep-seated fears, it was as though he’d been strapped into one of those machines for mixing paint. There was his fear of darkness, for instance, and his fear of crowds, his fear of unusual smells (several of his coworkers, when confined for a long time in a small, dark space, had turned out to have very unusual smells indeed), his fear of small, confined spaces. (It was his fear of long words derived from the Greek that kept him from even thinking the proper medical terms for all these fears.)
Lying there on the floor, with only his fear of being noticed by other people still actively searing him, Rufold Hepple continued to give himself, as he had in the vault, the courage to survive this ordeal, by thinking only of his own little home, so near, so soon to protect him again. It was the great paradox of his life that only the comfort and security of his very own little apartment gave him the strength necessary to leave it every day, for his job here at the bank, or to shop, or to make his twice-weekly visits to Dr. Bananen, just around the corner.
In just
a few minutes now, he would be ready. He would stand, smile, show them all nothing, leave the bank, march the three blocks home and up the stairs and through the many locks, to be greeted by his only friend, his dear dog Sigmund. In just a few minutes. Just a few minutes, and he would be safe and sound.
“Party Animal,” first published in Playboy, January 1993, copyright Donald E. Westlake.
“Give Till It Hurts,” first published as a pamphlet by The Mysterious Bookshop, November 1993, copyright Donald E. Westlake.
“Jumble Sale,” first published in The Armchair Detective, 1994, copyright by Donald E. Westlake.
“Now What?” first published in Playboy, December 1999, copyright Donald E. Westlake.
“Art and Craft,” first published in Playboy, August 2000, copyright Donald E. Westlake.
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