What's So Funny? d-14

by Donald E. Westlake

  And many headaches between now and then, while he replaced everything that had gone away, integrated the new systems, estimated just how much his personal and professional privacy had been violated, and worked out what additional security measures he would have to take to keep the bastards from coming back for a second dip.

  The cops who came to make the report were unknown to him, he never having worked in this precinct. They were sympathetic and professional and just a little scornful, exactly as he would be if the roles were reversed. He hated the interview, and ground his teeth in rage once his responders had departed.

  Now, the next thing to do was hide this disaster from his two current clients. It would never do for a professional private detective to himself become a crime victim; all credibility would be lost forever. Therefore, after a quick trip farther downtown to an area of electronics stores, he came back with a new telephone — answering machine, which he set up on his ravaged desk and into which, using a much more grating voice than normal, he placed this message:

  "Hi. Johnny Eppick here. I came down with something over the weekend I hope isn't flu, so I'm not in the shop today. Leave a message and I hope I'll be here and healthy first thing tomorrow."

  The rest of the replacement equipment he'd buy out on the Island, to avoid New York City's sales tax, so he might as well get to it. There was no point hanging around the ransacked office all day.

  It was while driving out the LIE, just east of the city line, that the penny finally dropped and one word came into his mind, as though in neon: Dortmunder.

  Of course. In the first shock, he hadn't been thinking straight, hadn't connected the dots, but what else could this be? Dortmunder. He had to get even for not scoring anything out of the chess set caper. And, whining all the time about something as minor league as taxi fares, that gave you the measure of the man.

  The son of a bitch had waited exactly two weeks, Monday to Monday, just long enough so Eppick wouldn't be able to prove it but he'd have to know it.

  And there was more to it than that. All of the other things that were taken were just smoke screen, just icing on the cake. The only theft that really mattered was the computer. That little box where the incriminating pictures of John Dortmunder were stored.

  Yes, and when he got back to the office tomorrow and looked in his files — a thing that hadn't occurred to him until just this minute — the copies of those pictures that he'd printed out would also be gone.

  I no longer have a handle on John Dortmunder's back, Eppick thought. Dortmunder had needed that handle off of there. Why? Because he's up to something. What is he up to?

  Eppick frowned mightily as he drove east toward home.

  32

  "THEY'RE NEVER COMING back!"

  "Nessa," Brady said, over their lunch of nuked frozen fish fingers, nuked frozen french fries, and canned beer, "of course they're coming back. They came all the way up here just to be sure everything was all right."

  "Then when they left here," Nessa said, leaning belligerently over her fish fingers in this large elaborate dining room constructed for more diners but less volume, "they must have made sure everything was wrong, because they aren't coming back!"

  "Come on, Nessa, you don't have to holler, I'm right here in front of you."

  "Yet somehow you don't hear me," she said. "Those bozos are not coming back."

  Surprised, almost offended on their behalf, he said, "What do you mean, bozos? Those were very serious people."

  "Hah."

  "They were up here to discuss hiding a very valuable chess set," Brady reminded her. "And here was where they meant to hide it. They even pointed out the table in the living room."

  "Where they were going to hide it."

  "Yes."

  "Right out on a table in the living room."

  "I told you, Nessa, it was the something letter. You remember Edgar Allan Poe."

  "We read The Raven," she said, being sulky. "It was very boring."

  "Well, he did something else," Brady said, "that said, if you want to hide something, put it right out in plain sight where nobody expects to see it."

  "Put it right out in plain sight," Nessa said, "where I won't expect to see it, and guess what happens next."

  "Well, Edgar Allan Poe is what they were doing," Brady said, "and they're definitely coming back."

  "Brady," she said, around a mouthful of fish fingers, as she waved a melodramatic arm toward the far windows, "it's snowing."

  "I know that."

  "Again."

  "I know that."

  "We're in the mountains in New England in December. Brady, on the TV they're talking about accumulations. You know what accumulations are?"

  "Listen, Nessa—"

  "You wanna wait here till spring? Here?"

  The fact was, Brady wouldn't mind if he had to wait here forever. He had this huge house all to himself, he had no responsibilities, he had this really cute girl to go to bed with all the time — though not so much lately, unfortunately — and he had the prospect of this amazingly valuable chess set at the end of the rainbow. So what was the problem?

  Well, he'd better not put it that way, because, the truth is, the problem was Nessa. She had some kind of cabin fever or something. She got bored too easily, that's what it came down to. He screwed her as much as he could, or these days as much as she'd put up with, but still she got bored.

  He just had to keep his calm, that's all. This was just a phase Nessa was going through, and soon she'd be fine again. Maybe in the spring, when the flowers started to grow, though he sensed it wouldn't be a really smart move to phrase it quite that way.

  "Honey," he said, "I heard those guys talk, and I know they meant it, and I know they're coming back, and I know they're serious."

  "They're bozos," she said, and filled her mouth with french fries.

  He paused, a fish finger in midair. "Why do you keep saying that?"

  "They pranced through here," she reminded him, "the four of them, looking all over for just the right place to hide their precious chess set, and they never even saw us."

  "Well, neither do those maintenance guys. We're too smart for them, that's all. Just last week the maintenance guys came through and we've been here for months now and they still don't know we're here."

  These were two guys who drove up the first Friday of every month to check the house, flush the toilets, check the smoke alarms, that kind of thing. They were easy to evade, and so Brady and Nessa evaded them.

  The very point she now made. "We know they're coming," she said. "They're not searching the place, they're just doing their rounds. Those other bozos suddenly showed up when we didn't know they were coming, they went all through the house with us underfoot—"

  "They never went upstairs."

  "They went all over downstairs, Brady, and they never even got a glimpse of us, and you say they're serious?"

  "They'll be back," he insisted.

  "Not this winter," she insisted right back. "And I don't want to still be here next spring."

  "Where do you want to be?"

  She looked at him. It was a disquieting look, and it went on quite a long while, during which she consumed most of the rest of the greasy food on her plate. He instinctively felt he shouldn't speak during this examination, shouldn't do anything but let her work out her own thought processes inside her own head. He had no idea why she was so discontented with their paradise — she hadn't been at first — but if he just kept very quiet and very attentive, maybe this whole thing would blow over and they'd get back to the way things used to be. Having fun. Not worrying about anything. Not nagging people all the time.

  She licked grease from her fingers. They never could remember napkins, so she rubbed her fingers down the leg of her jeans. She said, "I want to go home."

  "What?"

  "Not right away," she said.

  "Wha, wha, we, you, I—"

  "But I want to see something first, be somewhere, have things going
on around me."

  "We, we—"

  "I think," she said, "I'd like to go south first, maybe down to Florida. Then we can circle back and head for home."

  "Nebraska? Nessa? Numbnuts, Nebraska?"

  "I miss all the kids," Nessa said.

  "No, you don't," Brady told her. "Those were the bozos. You don't miss those morons any more than I do."

  "I miss something," she insisted. "But anyway, we've got to leave here. I will not be snowed in on this mountain, so we just have to go, that's all."

  Being reasonable, he said, "How? We don't have any money."

  "We'll steal things from here," she said. "Things we can sell to pawnshops. Things like mantel clocks and, and toaster ovens. We'll leave here while we can still get out to the main road, and drive south until we get warm, and then maybe in the spring we'll drive by home again and just look at it, just see what it looks like after we've been away."

  "In the world, you mean."

  She looked around the big empty dining room. "This isn't the world, Brady," she said.

  In the spring, he thought, I'll come back here, the chess set will be on the table where they said, and I'll see it because I know the secret. So for now, let's just keep Nessa happy.

  "Okay," he said. "We'll drive south. We'll drive to Florida. We can start tomorrow morning."

  "Good." Nessa looked comfortably around at the table. "So at least," she said, "we won't have to wash these plates."

  It was beside the pool at a motel in Jacksonville, Florida, that they got into conversation with the advance man for an alternative rock band on tour that would be playing in town that weekend. "Come by the room after lunch, I'll give you a couple ducats," he said, and they thanked him, and he grinned and walked off, hairy shoulders, pool water glistening in his beard and ponytail.

  A little later Nessa was ready to leave the pool, but Brady was enjoying himself, mostly looking at college girls on spring break, so he said, "I'll just stick around here a little longer." If he wasn't getting as much as he used to from Nessa, at least he could look at these girls, maybe sneak off with one at some point.

  But nothing happened, as he'd more or less realized it wouldn't, so an hour later he went back to the room and Nessa wasn't there. Neither was her little suitcase, nor the cash from his wallet.

  Brady never saw Nessa again. Without her, he made his circuitous way back home to Numbnuts, was forgiven, got a job in Starbucks, and was a good boy the rest of his life. There came a time when he never even thought about Nessa any more, but still, every once in a while, he did wonder: Whatever happened to that chess set?

  PART TWO

  Pawn's Revenge

  33

  FIONA HAD A window. She had a window just to the right of her reproduction Empire desk here on the upper floor of Livia Northwood Wheeler's duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and she never tired of looking out her window at the sweep of Central Park down below, not even when it was snowing, which it was doing right now. Not a heavy snow like those of January and February, turning the world white and thick and hard to move around in, this was a tentative March snow, the snow of a season that knows its end is near, a mere dusting of white to freshen the mounds of old snow gathered beneath the trees and against the low stone wall that separated the park from Fifth Avenue.

  Fiona's job as Livia Northwood Wheeler's personal assistant was interesting in its diversity, but it did leave time for gazing out the window at the park, imagining what the view would be when they came to spring and then to summer. When she wasn't park-gazing, though, there was enough to keep her busy in Mrs. Wheeler's affairs, which were many and varied and mostly uncoordinated.

  Mrs. W (as she preferred to be called by the staff) was, for instance, on the boards of many of the city's organizations, as well as a director of a mind-boggling array of corporations. Beyond that, she was a tireless litigant, involved in many more lawsuits than merely those involving her immediate family. Solo, or as a very active member of a class, she was at the moment suing automobile manufacturers, aspirin makers, television networks, department stores, airlines, law firms that had previously represented her, and an array of ex-employees, including two former personal assistants.

  While passionately involved in every one of these matters, Mrs. W was not at all coordinated or methodical and never knew exactly where she was in any ongoing concern, whom she owed, who owed her, and where and when the meeting was supposed to take place. She really needed a personal assistant.

  And Fiona was perfect for the job. She was calm, she had no ax to grind, and she had a natural love for detail. Particularly for all the more reprehensible details of Mrs. W's busy life, the double-dealing and chicanery, the stories behind all the lawsuits and all the feuds and all the shifting loyalties among Mrs. W's many rich-lady friends. And, just to make Fiona's life complete, Mrs. W was writing an autobiography!

  Talk about history in the raw. Mrs. W had total recall of every slight she'd ever suffered, every snub, every shortchanging, every encounter in which the other party had turned out to be even more grasping, shrewder, and more untrustworthy than she was. She dictated all these steaming memories into a tape recorder in spurts of venom, which Lucy Leebald, Mrs. W's current secretary, had to type out into neat manuscript.

  Fiona's role in all this was to read the finished sections of manuscript and establish the chronology of events, since Mrs. W recalled things in no sequence at all and didn't personally care a rap when this or that event had occurred. To put her story in chronological order purely on the basis of internal evidence was, of course, impossible, but it was just exactly the kind of impossibility a history nut goes nuts for.

  Fiona, still astonished by the fact three months later, was in heaven. The day she'd been fired by Mr. Tumbril at Feinberg had been a frightening one, somehow liberating but mostly perilous, with no solid future in sight. She'd had to tell Brian, of course (he'd responded with black pudding for dinner), but she told no one else, not even her grandfather, until the following week, when he called her because he'd received that set of names of Northwood heirs she'd mailed on her way out the Feinberg door. Then she'd had to confess, weeping a bit, and he was so repentant, so appalled, so positive it was all his fault, that she was forced to cheer up just so he would feel a little better.

  He was also responsible for her being here, in this job. It's true Mrs. W had said, at the end of that awful experience, "Call me," but Fiona had had no intention of doing any such thing until Grandfather, hearing her story, insisted she make the call: "Always follow up, Fiona, it's a rule of the world."

  So she'd followed up, to find that the invitation to call had been an act of contrition by a woman not at all used to being contrite. She hadn't thought twice about heaving the lackey Fiona Hemlow at the head of Jay Tumbril, only to discover — mirabile dictu! — the girl was innocent! And a victim! Mrs. W's victim as much as Jay Tumbril's, in fact.

  So here she was, and if Mr. Tumbril knew who answered Mrs. W's office phone these days, those few times he'd left messages here, he gave no sign. Nor, of course, did she.

  Tink-tink.

  Not the office phone. There were three phones on Fiona's desk, each with its own ring — blip-blip for the outside line, bzzzork for the in-house line, and tink-tink for Mrs. W's private line from her desk in her own office across the hall. So: "Good morning, Mrs. W It's still snowing."

  "Thank you, my dear, I have the Weather Channel for that. Come in and bring your pad."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Fiona left the office she shared with Lucy Leebald, crossed the hall with its elevator at the far end and window at this end with its identical park view to her own, and into Mrs. W's office, in which the same windows somehow offered more light, more air and more park, and where Mrs. W herself sat at her more ornate desk and nodded at Fiona like the queen bee she was. "Good morning, dear."

  "Good morning, Mrs. W."

  "Close the door, dear, and sit on the sofa here. You have
your pad; good."

  The little settee next to Mrs. W's desk was far less comfortable than it looked. Fiona perched on it and looked expectant.

  Mrs. W seemed more ruminative than usual this morning. Frowning a little, she watched her hands move small figurines around on her desk as she said, "As I remember, in addition to your law degree, you have a strong interest in the study of history."

  "Your memoir is fascinating, Mrs. W"

  "Of course it is. But it's a different history I want you to think about now."

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "Do you remember a discussion we had — two discussions, I think — about the Chicago chess set?"

  Oh, dear. Fiona had been afraid to even mention the chess set, but wanting to help her grandfather in his quest — even if at the moment he believed he'd given it up — she had given it a try. She'd even — when they were looking together at the photos of the pieces on Mrs. W's computer — managed to «discover» the mismatch in weight among the rooks.

  But that had been some time ago. She'd given the effort up when she'd seen she was getting nowhere and might even be putting herself at risk. But now Mrs. W herself had raised the issue; for good, or for ill? Heart in her mouth but expression as innocent as ever, Fiona said, "Oh, yes, ma'am. That beautiful chess set."

  "You noticed one of the pieces was the wrong weight."

  "Oh, I remember that."

  "Very observant of you," Mrs. W said, and nodded, agreeing with herself. "That fact kept bothering me, after our discussions, and I soon realized there was far more mystery surrounding that chess set than merely one unexpectedly lighter rook."

  Looking alert, interested, Fiona said, "Oh, really?"

  "Where is that chess set from?" Mrs. W demanded, glaring severely at Fiona. "Who made it? Where? In what century? It just abruptly appears, with no history, in a sealed glass case in the lobby of my father's company, Gold Castle Realty, when they moved into the Castlewood Building in 1948. Where was it before 1948? Where did my father get it, and when? And now that we know the one piece is lighter than the rest, and is a castle, now we wonder, where did my father get his company name?"