What's So Funny? d-14

by Donald E. Westlake

  "All of it," he said, looking at the cover sheet on the screen, which showed the chess set brightly lit on a black velvet background, set up and waiting, gleaming, looking exactly like something created by royal gold-lust.

  "All of it?" She reared back to look at him. "You can't want all of it. The court hearings? There are hundreds of pages on this item of the suits, all by themselves, maybe thousands. You couldn't read all that."

  "No, I don't wanna read all that," he said. "I want all the pictures and all the measurements."

  "All right, let's see—" She checked the table of contents. "There's individual photos of the pieces—"

  "Sounds good."

  "Pages of dimensions of each piece."

  "Not bad."

  "Shots from different angles in different lighting."

  "Lay it on me."

  "In all," she said, "sixty-four pages."

  "I'll borrow an envelope," he said.

  Later that evening, over burritos with shrimp and rice — very nice — at their table in their candlelit big room, she told Brian about her latest encounter with John Dortmunder, and he laughed and said, "Is he really gonna try to go down in there and get that thing?"

  "Well, he doesn't want to," she said, "but it looks like my grandfather and that other man are pressing him very hard. I just keep hoping they'll all realize it's just impossible and give it up."

  "Hard to give up all that gold," Brian said. "I'd know how to get down in that vault."

  "You would? How?"

  "Say I'm shooting a documentary," he said. "Movie people can get in anywhere. 'Hi, we're doing a Discovery Channel special on bank vaults. How did you spell your name again? You're right in."

  Laughing around her burrito, she said, "Oh, Brian, I don't think Mr. Dortmunder could convince anybody he was making a movie for the Discovery Channel."

  "No, probably not," Brian said. His eyes glittered just slightly in the candlelight. "Too bad."

  21

  SATURDAY MORNING, AFTER May left for the Safeway, Dortmunder sat at the kitchen table and spread out the photos and spec sheets he'd been given by Fiona Hemlow last night. The chess set turned out to be a little smaller than he'd imagined, but also heavier: 680 pounds. Yeah, that would take more than one guy.

  According to what it said on the description sheets, the chess pieces weren't actually gold all the way through, which would make them even heavier, but gold poured into forms around wood dowels, with three to five jewels set into each piece to make the two teams: pearls for the white gang, rubies for the red. The kings and queens were just under four inches tall, the others shorter. The gold had been shaped with extreme delicacy and care, as you would do if you were working for an absolute monarch.

  Dortmunder had been looking at the pictures and reading the specs about half an hour when the phone rang, over there on the wall next to the refrigerator. It was going to be Andy Kelp, of course, and when Dortmunder got to his feet and walked to the phone and said into it, "Harya," it was.

  "What's happening?"

  "Well, I got the pictures," he said, reluctantly, looking over at the papers spread out on the table. He knew it was dumb to want to save that little trove of information for himself, but there it was.

  "The pictures? Already?"

  "And the specs, sizes, all that."

  "I'll be right there," Kelp said, and was, walking into the kitchen, saying, "I didn't want to disturb you with the bell."

  "I appreciate that," Dortmunder said. "How are my door locks holding up?"

  "Oh, they're fine," Kelp assured him. "Let's see what we got here."

  "One little puzzle," Dortmunder said.

  Kelp had picked up a photo of the complete chess set, but now he looked at Dortmunder. "You mean, aside from how do we get our hands on it?"

  "One of the rooks," Dortmunder told him, "is light."

  "Light? How do you mean, light?"

  Using the photo Kelp was holding, Dortmunder pointed to white king's rook and said, "That one's about three pounds lighter than this one," pointing to white queen's rook, "but that one's the same as the two on the other side."

  While Dortmunder riffled through more photos, Kelp stared at the picture of the entire set. "You mean all of these others weigh the same?"

  "Almost. There's little tiny differences because there's different jewels in each one. Here, here's the separate pictures of those two. The one on the right there is the light one."

  "King's rook," Kelp read the caption at the bottom of the picture and looked at the squat golden castle decorated with four sparkly pearls. "I thought rook meant to cheat somebody."

  "Outa three pounds, I know. But one of these pages here uses the word 'rook' and then that thing, that para thing…" He finger-drew in the air the icon of a lying-down smile face.

  "I know what you mean," Kelp said.

  "Good, (or castle) it says. So that's a word for it."

  Kelp bent over the individual pictures of the two white rooks, then leaned back and shook his head. "Maybe," he said, "we'll be able to tell more when we've got 'em in our hands. Heft them."

  Dortmunder frowned at him. "Got 'em in our hands? Don't you remember, they're still in that vault. This is just so Eppick and Hemlow think something's happening, but Andy, nothing is happening."

  "I don't know why you're so negative," Kelp told him. "Look at these pictures. Every day, we get closer."

  "Yeah, and I know to what," Dortmunder said, and the phone rang. "That's probably Eppick now," he said, getting to his feet. "Wanting to know is it time to send the arresting officers."

  "Give the man credit for a little patience," Kelp suggested.

  Dortmunder barked into the phone and Stan Murch's voice said, "The kid and I just finished breakfast, in a place over by his place."

  "That's nice," Dortmunder said, and told Kelp, "Stan and Judson just had breakfast together."

  "Why's he telling you that?"

  "We didn't get there yet," Dortmunder said, and into the phone he said, "Why are you telling me that? This isn't something else about that dome, is it?"

  "No, no," Stan said. "I gave that up."

  "Good."

  "Kind of like a lost love."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "I'm traveling strictly Flatbush Avenue these days."

  "Well, it's still Brooklyn."

  "But no dome. Listen, the kid and me," Stan said, "were wondering, since the dome thing's no good, did you maybe have something going on with that cop."

  "Mostly," Dortmunder said, "he's got something going on with me."

  "If we could help—"

  "I'm beyond help."

  Kelp said, "Tell them come over. The more brains the merrier."

  "Andy says you should come over to my place, bring your brains."

  "We'll be right there," Stan said, and they were, but they used the traditional entry method of ringing the street doorbell, and it so happened they did so just as the phone rang again.

  "You get the phone," Kelp suggested, standing, "and I'll get the door."

  "Good." Dortmunder crossed to the phone and said, "Harya," into it as Kelp pressed the release button on the wall and walked away down the hall to wait for the arrivals to climb the two flights.

  A voice that could only belong to Tiny Bulcher said, "Dortmunder, I worry about you."

  "Good," Dortmunder said. "I wouldn't want to worry about me all alone."

  "You having trouble with that cop?"

  "Yes. Listen, Andy's here and now Stan and Judson are just showing up."

  "You're having a meeting without me?"

  "It didn't start out to be a meeting. People just keep showing up, like a wake. You wanna come over?"

  "I'll be right there," Tiny said, and was.

  There were four chairs around the kitchen table, and Judson could sit on the radiator, so once Tiny had been added to the mix they were all more or less comfortable. Since Dortmunder had just finished describing the current situation to Stan and
Judson, Kelp did the honors with Tiny, including a description of Eppick's apparently broad and entirely unnecessary background data bank on everybody in the room.

  "There are people," Tiny commented, "who, when they retire, they oughta retire."

  "Tiny," Dortmunder said, "the way it looks, I'm the only one he's really putting the pressure on. When I don't get that chess set, I'm the one he's gonna blame, nobody else."

  "San Francisco isn't a bad place to hang out sometimes," Tiny observed.

  "I was thinking Chicago," Dortmunder told him, "and Andy suggested Miami, but Eppick knows all about that. He tells me, with all the millions of cops all connected now, he'll find me wherever I go."

  Tiny nodded, thinking it over. "It's true," he said. "It's harder to disappear than it used to be in the old days. In the old days, you just burn your fingerprints off with acid and there you are."

  "Ow," Judson said. "Wouldn't that hurt?"

  "Not for twenty-five years," Tiny told him. "Anyway, you can't burn DNA off. Not and live through it."

  Kelp said, "You know, we got another little conundrum here. I know it isn't as important as the main problem—"

  "The vault," Dortmunder said.

  "That's the problem I was thinking of," Kelp agreed. "Anyway," he told the others, "you see these pictures of these two rooks."

  "Those are castles," Stan said.

  "Yes, but," Kelp said, "rook is a name for them in chess. Anyway, everything weighs the way it's supposed to, except this one rook here is three pounds lighter than the other rooks."

  They all leaned over the pictures, including Judson, who got up from the radiator and came over to stand beside the table, gazing down. Stan said, "They look alike."

  "But you see the weight," Kelp said. "They wrote it down right there."

  Stan nodded. "Maybe it's a typo."

  "This stuff is all pretty careful," Kelp said.

  Dortmunder said, "I don't find this as gripping as the main problem."

  "No, of course not," Kelp said. "It's just a mystery, that's all."

  "No, it isn't," Judson said. "That part's easy."

  They all watched him go back to sit on the radiator again. Kelp said, "You know why this one's different."

  "Sure." Judson shrugged. "You just got to put yourself in that sergeant's place, Northwood. There he is in Chicago with this thing, very valuable but it weighs almost seven hundred pounds. He's as broke as the other guys, but he's gotta get out of there fast before the platoon gets back. So he has a guy, maybe a jeweler, somebody, make up a fake, looks just like the real thing. That way, he can sell the pearls, sell the gold, get on that train, show up in New York in style and start his wheeling and dealing."

  Everybody thought that was brilliant. Tiny said, "Kid, you're an asset."

  "Thank you, Tiny."

  Judson beamed all over. Since he also looked as though any second he might start to blush, everybody else went back to looking at the pictures and talking to one another, Kelp saying, "So when we do our own little switcheroo, we want to make sure we don't do this guy."

  Dortmunder said, "What do you mean, our own switcheroo? We got a vault between us and them, remember?"

  Stan said, "I gotta say, from my perspective, it does seem worth the effort."

  "Effort isn't the question," Dortmunder said. "The vault is the question."

  "So let's ask the kid," Tiny said. "Kid, you solved the mystery of the rook; very good. Here's question number two: How do we get into the vault?"

  Judson looked surprised. "We can't," he said.

  22

  DORTMUNDER JUST SAT there and let the conversation wash over him, like a hurricane over a levee. To have his own conviction of the impregnability of the C&I International vault confirmed by Judson Blint — out of the mouths of babes, as it were — merely put the rat poison on the cake. It was all over, in the immortal words of Charles Willeford, except the paperwork.

  The others around the table didn't want to believe it. "There's always a way to do anything," Stan insisted.

  "And if there isn't," Kelp said, "you make one up."

  "Exactly."

  "So make one up," Tiny suggested.

  The silence that ensued was brief but telling, before Stan said, "Well, you can't do a bomb scare."

  "Nobody," Tiny pointed out, "said you could."

  "The idea with a bomb scare," Stan went on, "is they evacuate the building, then you can do what you gotta do, but it doesn't work that way. You try a bomb scare around this town, the building doesn't evacuate, it fills up to the brim, with cops, firemen, insurance adjusters, short con artists, farmers' markets, and documentary filmmakers. So forget the bomb scare."

  "I'll do that," Tiny said.

  "And you can't overpower the lobby guards," Kelp said, "you know, with handguns and masks and sets of cuffs and all that, on account of the camera surveillance."

  "That's too bad," Tiny said. "It sounds like it might've been fun."

  "Well, it won't work that way," Kelp advised him.

  "So here's a question," Tiny said, and everybody except Dortmunder looked alert. "Let's say," Tiny said, "somebody went in there in disguise, to look like one of the people got the okay to go down to this vault. Not me, one of you guys. In a suit, shine up your shoes, like that."

  Kelp said, "I think you gotta show ID."

  "ID is not a complete impossible," Tiny said. "For instance, you follow one of the bank execs home one night, out to Connecticut, you come back with the ID, family finds him next morning, healthy but tied up and gagged in a car in a commuter railroad parking lot."

  They thought about that, then turned to Dortmunder. Kelp said, "John?"

  It was his own house, so he couldn't even go home. He roused himself to say, "Special elevator down from the lobby, special card stick into the elevator door, don't know what extra stuff they got downstairs, but the lobby guards know all the execs or they get fired."

  "Also," Judson said, just to sink that boat one more time, "it weighs almost seven hundred pounds. You're gonna look funny carrying that in your suit."

  Into the next silence, Stan inserted, "What if—?"

  They all, except Dortmunder, looked at him. Kelp said, "And?"

  "I was just thinking," Stan said. "About safe-deposit boxes, you know. One of us gets a safe-deposit box, then we got a legitimate reason, go down to the vault."

  "I think," Kelp said carefully, "it's a different vault, or a different part of the vault. Am I right, John?"

  "Yes," Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, "Dortmunder, I didn't see this place, I don't have it in my mind. We've got a lobby, we've got a bank, what've we got here? Walk me through it."

  "It's a big building," Dortmunder told him. "Sixty stories high, half a block wide. The bank branch is on the corner, with its own way in and out. Lobby's in the middle, no door, anyway no public door, between them. On the side of the lobby away from the bank wall you got shops, inside shops, no street doors. At the back of the lobby you got your elevators and the special elevator."

  "These lobby guards?"

  "On the left, by the wall separates you from the bank."

  Tiny nodded. "All very open," he said. "You're not gonna wheel that thing on a dolly across that lobby."

  "As," Dortmunder said, "I said."

  "Air ducts," Stan said.

  Tiny looked at him. "You wanna push a seven-hundred-pound chess set through a building's air ducts? What about when they go vertical?"

  Kelp said, "Street repair crew. Set up outside, dig down, run your tunnel under the sidewalk to the—"

  "On Fifth Avenue," Judson said.

  Kelp paused, frowned deeply, and shook his head. "Never mind."

  Stan said, "I know where I can get hold of a helicopter."

  Tiny said, "I don't know what you're gonna do with it."

  Kelp said, "What if we did set fire to the lobby? We come in dressed like firemen—"

  Dortmunder said, "Marble doesn't burn."


  The silence this time was uncomfortable from the very beginning, because everybody knew at once it was the final silence, but nobody wanted to be the one to declare the session over, the cure not found. Finally, Judson cleared his throat and said, "You got a nice warm radiator here, but maybe I oughta, I don't know, probably time to…"

  "Me, too," Stan said, stretching as though he'd been asleep a long time.

  So then everybody moved and stood up and walked around, except Dortmunder, to whom they all said good-bye as though he were somehow both the bereaved and the dearly departed. Dortmunder nodded, but did not stand.

  Tiny, on his way out, rested a giant paw on Dortmunder's shoulder, adding to the weight of his burdens, and said, "If you don't like San Francisco, I got another suggestion. Biloxi."

  Dortmunder shook his head. "Eppick—"

  "I said Biloxi," Tiny reminded him. "Biloxi, Mississippi. Trust me, Dortmunder, they still won't talk to a Northern cop down there."

  23

  THE LOBBY OF the C&I International building did not look as Judson had expected from John's description. The openness, largeness, and airiness had somehow been left out. The space must have been three stories tall, sheathed in creamy mottled marble, with a sweeping wall of glass to face the street. The place mostly reminded Judson of a cathedral, particularly on a cloudless Sunday morning like this, with the thousand rays of thin November sun reverberating every which way through the lobby, reflected from all the other glass-and-steel buildings along the avenue.

  It was like standing inside a halo. How could anybody ever bring himself to steal anything in a place like this? Never mind all the light, it was the saintliness that deterred.

  And yet it was a bank. Over there were the two guards, behind their chest-high counter, the monitor screens set into the wall up behind them.

  Would one of those screens show the vault, or at least the entrance to the vault? Why not?

  Judson moved in the direction of the monitor screens, looking at black-and-white pictures of hallways and empty elevators, until he became aware that the guards were, in their turn, looking at him. Not because they suspected him of anything, but because he was the only thing they could see that was in motion. The shops on the other side of the lobby were closed on Sundays, and so were many of the offices on the floors above.