What's So Funny? d-14

by Donald E. Westlake

  "Possibly," Jay said. "The more willful sex, in any event."

  "Speaking of sex," Perly said, now studying his own roll, "is there any chance…?"

  "What? No, no! That's not the issue at all!"

  Fortunately, the soup arrived at that moment, and when they continued the conversation it was from a slightly different angle. "This young woman," Jay said. "Her manner of forcing herself on the client made me suspicious. What was her motive?"

  "To be hired by the client?"

  "I don't think so, not at first." Jay shook his head. "I doubt she could have guessed that turn of events in a million years."

  "Then what did she have in mind?"

  "That's the question," Jay said, fixing Perly with a meaningful stare. "That's the question in a nutshell."

  "The question that brings us to this lunch."

  "Exactly. What is the young woman's ulterior motive? What, if any, risk is there to my client?"

  "Yes, of course. And how long ago did this happen?"

  "I fired the young woman in December."

  "Ah. In time for Christmas."

  "That was not ad rem."

  "No, of course not." Perly smiled, man to man. "A pleasantry," he said.

  "It happened to be when I learned the facts," Jay said, feeling faintly defensive but firmly strangling the feeling in its crib. "As I say, I acted impetuously."

  "And what has happened in the three months since?"

  "She — the young woman — is ensconced in my client's apartment — not living there, working there, living somewhere else — and every time I phone my client only to hear that young woman's voice and have to leave a confidential message for my client with her, it gives me a twinge, a sense of foreboding."

  "Yes."

  "Finally," Jay explained, "it seemed to me I had to act on my instincts, if only to assure myself there was no real… problem here."

  Perly nodded. Surreptitiously he looked around for the arrival of the entree while saying, "Just the level of attention and concern I'd expect from you, Jay. But you have no specific fears or doubts in connection with this young woman."

  "I know nothing about her," Jay complained. "She filled out the usual applications and took the usual tests. I've brought copies of all that for you."

  "Good."

  "She has a decent education, comes so far as I know from a decent family, has no previous link that I can find with my client at all. But it was that client and no other that the young woman went after."

  "Wherever there's an action, there is always a motive," Perly said. "What is her motive? That is what you want me to find out."

  "Yes."

  Perly nodded. "How will I be billing this?"

  "To me, at the firm," Jay said. "I'll pass it on to the client's account."

  "We are acting on her behalf, after all," Perly agreed. "Even if I don't come up with anything… reprehensible."

  "Whatever you come up with," Jay told him, "if it at least answers my question about her reasons, I'll be content. And so will the client."

  "Naturally."

  From within his sleek dark jacket, Perly withdrew a slender black notebook that contained within a strap its own gold pen. Drawing this pen, he said, "I'll need names and addresses and some little details concerning these two ladies."

  "Of course."

  Seeing Jay hesitate, Perly leaned forward into his arriving main course, smiled, and said, "Confidentiality, Jay. It's considered my greatest virtue."

  36

  WHAT BRIAN MISSED most was the evenings alone. It had been fun, in those days, to come back to the apartment from the cable station before six, futz around with his music, browse in his cookbooks, prepare tonight's dinner in a slow and leisurely fashion, and know that, probably after ten o'clock, he'd get that call: "I'm on my way." He'd turn up the heat under the pots or in the oven, bring out tonight's wine and a couple of glasses and be ready when she walked in the front door.

  Being fired from Feinberg had been bad for Fiona but ultimately it had been worse for Brian, because she was over it by now but he was never going to be. He'd never have those evenings to himself, ever again. Or the sense of freedom they had given him, in more ways than one.

  As he well knew, it was the irregularity of her days that had made the regularity of his own easier to stand. What had attracted him to both cartooning and cooking in the first place was that both were art, not science. He could cook but he couldn't bake, because baking was chemistry; get one little thing wrong and you've ruined it. The same with cartooning; he couldn't do an exact face or even an exact building, but he could give you the feel of it, and that's what made it art.

  What he liked about art was that there were no rules. He liked living with no rules. The regularity of his mornings and evenings struck him as too uncomfortably close to living within the rules, so he'd been lifted by Fiona's goofy hours; they'd freed him from the temporal rules by osmosis. But he would of course never tell her that her being fired had taken that pleasure out of his life.

  Besides, he was happy for her. She had a better job now, which meant not just more money and better hours but more entertaining things for her to talk about over dinner, Mrs. Wheeler being an endlessly diverting character. He wished sometimes he could figure out a way to turn her into a cartoon and sell it to the station, or maybe some other channel further up the animation food chain. He was creative in some ways, but not in that way, and he regretted it.

  Now that they had these longer evenings together, another question was what to do to fill the time between getting home and actually sitting down to dinner, which couldn't possibly happen until two or three hours later. Much of the time was spent with Fiona detailing Mrs. W's latest follies while he worked on dinner, and the rest of the time they'd been filling in with games: Scrabble, backgammon, cribbage.

  But the main topic of their evenings was Livia Northwood Wheeler, who was so rich the thought of it made Brian's teeth hurt. She was also apparently as ditzy and over-the-top as any cartoon character you could think of. Brian wanted to meet her. He wanted to laugh, discreetly, at her antics, and he wanted from time to time to find some of her money in his pockets. If he could arrange the meeting, he was sure he could arrange the rest. If only he could arrange the meeting.

  Evening after evening, while shifting tiles or moving pegs or arranging tiles into words, he'd drop little hints that he'd like to meet the fabulous Mrs. W Why not invite her to dinner? "I'm not that bad a cook."

  "You're a wonderful cook, as you very well know. 'Quixotic' is a word, isn't it? But we couldn't ask her here, Brian."

  "Why not? Maybe she'd enjoy slumming."

  "Mrs. W? I really doubt that."

  If it were summer, or the weather were at least decent, he could suggest a picnic, in Riverside Park, or even on the roof of this building, which had some pretty good views and which some of the tenants did occasionally use for picnics and small parties, though Frisbee had been banned after a couple of unfortunate incidents.

  But now, at last, this Monday in March, he had his opportunity, or he thought he did. All day at the station the preparations had been under way, and that's where he got the idea, and could hardly wait to get home, and for Fiona to get home, so he could try it on her. Maybe this time it would happen. But he should be cool about it, not just burst out with the idea, or she'd likely be turned off.

  So this evening, though they were both home before six, and moving cribbage pegs inexorably onward by half past, he waited until that game was finished — she won — to even broach the subject. "Guess what's happening this weekend," he said.

  She gave him a funny look. Nothing happened on the weekend in March, as all the world knew. Unless St. Patrick's Day came on any day remotely close to the weekend, being any day except Wednesday, as everyone also knew, and as at the moment was not the case. So, "Happening?" she inquired.

  "It's the March Madness party at the station," he told her, with a big happy grin.

  So th
ere was to be an occurrence on the weekend in March after all, though it didn't actually occur in, or anywhere near, New York City. It was Spring Break, the annual pilgrimage of all America's undergraduate scholars to Florida to take seminars on noncommitment.

  Spring Break was a big deal for Brian's station, GRODY, because it homed right in on their target audience. One time, Fiona had asked him, "Who does watch that station?" and he'd answered, "The eighteen-to-nineteen-and-a-half-year-old males, an extremely important advertising demographic," and she'd said, "That explains it," whatever that meant.

  In any event, GRODY annually marked Spring Break with its March Madness party, at a rented party place down in Soho, limited to station staff and advertisers and local press and cable company minor employees and good friends and whoever else happened to hear about it. All attendees were encouraged to come costumed as one of the cartoon characters from the station, and many did. Brian's Reverend Twisted costume was kept in the back of the closet to be brought out lovingly and hilariously every year, an old if unusual friend. "Oh, I hope it still fits," he always said, which was his March Madness joke.

  But now Fiona began to throw cold water on his idea even before she'd heard it, saying, with an exaggerated sigh, "Oh. I suppose we have to go."

  "Have to go? Come on, Fiona, it's fun, you know it is."

  "The first couple of times," she said, "it was fun, like visiting a tribe way up the Amazon that had never been marked by civilization."

  "Listen—"

  "But after a while, Brian," she said, "it becomes just a teeny little bit less fun."

  "You never—"

  "I'm not saying we won't go," she said. "I'm just saying I'm not as excited about it as I used to be. Brian, March Madness at GRODY does not hold many surprises for me any more."

  He knew an opening when he heard one. "Listen," he said, very eager, as though the thought had just this second come to him. "I know how to put the zing back in the old March Madness."

  The look she gave him was labeled Skepticism. "How?"

  "Invite Mrs. W."

  She stared at him as though he'd suddenly grown bat wings on the sides of his head. "Do what?"

  "Watch her watching them," he explained, waving his arms here and there. "You know she's never seen anything like that in her life."

  "Yes, I do know that," Fiona said.

  "Come on, Fiona," he said. "You know I want to meet her, and there's never a place that's just right."

  "And March Madness is just right?"

  "It is. She'll know ahead of time it's a freak show, you'll explain the whole thing to her, a world she never even suspected existed."

  "And wouldn't want to know exists."

  "Fiona, invite her." Brian spread his hands above the cribbage board, a supplicant. "That's all I'm asking. Explain what it is, explain how your friend — that's me — wants to meet her, explain it's a goof and we promise to leave the instant she's had enough."

  "Any of it would be more than enough, Brian."

  Brian did an elaborate shrug. "If she says no," he said, "then that's that. I won't ever mention it again. But at least ask her. Will you do that much?"

  "She would think," Fiona said, "I'd lost my mind."

  "You'll say it was my idea, your goofy boyfriend's idea. Come on, Fiona. Ask her, will you? Please?"

  Fiona sat back, frowning into the middle distance, her fingers tap-tapping on the table beside the cribbage board. Brian waited, afraid to push any more, and at last she gave a kind of resigned sigh and said, "I'll try."

  Delighted, he said, "You will? Fiona, you'll really ask her?"

  "I said I would," Fiona said, sounding weary.

  "Thank you, Fiona," Brian said.

  37

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, two days after his lunch with Jay Tumbril, Jacques Perly completed a very encouraging conference with two international art thieves and a sometime producer for the Discovery Channel, then drove back to the city from Fairfield County in bucolic Connecticut. The West Side Highway deposited him onto Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and a few deft maneuvers later he steered the Lamborghini onto Gansevoort Street, thumbing the beeper on his visor as he did so. The battered old green garage door that obediently lifted in response was in a low squat structure that perfectly suited the neighborhood; an old stone industrial building converted to more upscale uses without losing its original rough appearance.

  Perly steered into the building, beeped the door shut, and drove up the curving concrete ramp to where the conversion began. The high stone exterior walls up here were painted a creamy white, and ceiling spotlights pinpointed the potted evergreens in front of his office door. This space was large enough for two cars to park, though usually, as now, it contained only Perly's. Leaving the Lamborghini, he crossed to the faux Tudor interior wall and stepped into his reception room, where Delia looked up from her typing to say, "Hi, Chief. How'd it go?"

  "Well, Delia," Perly said, with justifiable pride, "I believe we'll have an amphora on our hands in very short order. And thirty minutes of airtime."

  "I knew you'd do it, Chief," she said. She'd never tell him, but she loved him madly.

  "I thought I might," he admitted. "What's doing here?"

  "The crew's reported on that Fiona Hemlow matter," she said. "Jerry sent his stuff over by messenger, Margo e-mailed it in, and Herkimer stopped by with it. Fritz says he'll have pix for you by the end of the day. It's all on your desk."

  "Good girl. Man the barricades."

  "Always, Chief."

  He went into his inner office, a large room with tall windows across the back and a big domed skylight in thick glass, framed in steel. The furniture was clubby and quietly expensive, the wall decorations mostly pictures of recovered art. His desk, large and old and dark wood, had come from one of the daily New York newspapers that had gone under during the final newspaper strike of 1978. He sat at it now and drew to himself the three packets of information delivered by his crew.

  Fifteen minutes later, he thumbed the intercom. "Delia, get me Jay Tumbril."

  "Right, Chief."

  It took another six minutes, while he skimmed the reports once more, before he got the buzz, picked up his phone, and said, "Jay."

  "I'll put Mr. Tumbril right on," said a girl whose English accent was probably real.

  "Fine." Perly had forgotten that Jay Tumbril was one of those people who scored points for himself in some obscure game if he made you get on the line first.

  "Jacques."

  "Jay."

  "That was quick."

  "It doesn't take long when there's nothing there."

  "Nothing?"

  "Well, not much. There's one little— But we'll get to that. The girl first. Fiona Hemlow."

  "Yes."

  "She's clean, Jay. A good student, conscientious, as obedient as a nun."

  Jay, sounding faintly displeased, said, "Well, that's fine, then."

  "Comes from money," Perly went on. "Her grandfather, still alive, was an inventor, a chemist, came up with some patents made him and the rest of the family rich."

  "So she's not after Livia's money, is what you're saying."

  "She isn't, no."

  "Yes? I don't follow."

  "For the last three years," Perly said, putting a finger on the name on the top sheet of Herkimer's report, "Ms. Hemlow has been shacked up with a character named Brian Clanson."

  "He's the one you're dubious about."

  "He is." Perly tapped Clanson's name with a fingernail, as behind him his computer dinged that an e-mail was coming in. "I ask myself," he said, "if this character put up our little nun to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Wheeler."

  "So he'd be after her money."

  "It's only a possibility," Perly cautioned him. "At this point, I have no reason to believe anything at all. I just look at this character, and I see someone from, to be honest, a white-trash background, a community college education, no contacts of any consequence in the city, and an extremely m
arginal job as some sort of illustrator for a cable channel aimed at Neanderthals. I can believe Ms. Hemlow hooked up with him because he has that redneck charm and because she's a naif who thinks well of everybody, but I can also believe Mr. Clanson hooked up with her because she has money, or at least her grandfather does."

  "Mmm."

  Turning in his swivel chair, Perly saw the e-mail was from Fritz, and opened it. The photographs. "Further than that," he said, "I can believe he came to the conclusion that Mrs. Wheeler was the likeliest prospect among your firm's clients for him to get his hands on."

  "So you think he set the girl to go after Mrs. W."

  Perly opened the photo marked BC and looked at Brian Clanson, arms folded, leaning against a tree in a park somewhere, big boned but skinny, like a stray dog, with a loose untrustworthy smile. "I'll only say this, Jay," he said, looking Clanson in the eye, "it's out of character for that girl to have imposed herself on Mrs. Wheeler all on her own. There has to have been a reason, and I can't find any other reason in the world except Brian Clanson." And he nodded at the grinning fellow, who showed no repentance.

  Jay said, "So you want to look into Clanson a little deeper."

  "Let's see if this is the first time," Perly said, "he's tried to work something funny with his betters."

  "Go get him," Jay Tumbril said.

  38

  AT THE SAME TIME that Jacques Perly and Jay Tumbril were discussing the investigation into Fiona Hemlow and Livia North wood Wheeler, those two ladies, all unknowing of the scrutiny, were discussing the results of Fiona's own investigations. "There's just no record," Fiona was saying, spreading her hands in helplessness as she stood in front of Mrs. W's desk.

  Mrs. W had a photo of the chess set displayed on her computer, and she now frowned at it with the same mistrustful expression that Perly, downtown, wore when gazing on the photo of Brian Clanson. "It's vexing," she said. "It's just vexatious."

  "Your father, Alfred Northwood," Fiona said, consulting her memo pad, in which she had placed careful and thorough notes of the history just as though she hadn't had it memorized a long time ago, "came to New York from Chicago in 1921. We know that for certain. We know he was in the army in Europe in the First World War and became a sergeant, and went to Chicago after he left the army, though I couldn't find any records of what he was doing there. There's also no record of his having the chess set in the army or in Chicago—"