What's So Funny? d-14

by Donald E. Westlake

  "Nevertheless," Mr. Hemlow said, "let me see what your friend has to say." To Tiny he said, "How much do you think is fair?"

  "Not fair," Tiny said. "Right. Fifty G a man."

  Even Mr. Hemlow was startled by that one. "A quarter million dollars?"

  "Now we're getting there," Tiny said.

  "I couldn't possibly," Mr. Hemlow said, "make an outlay that lavish."

  "We can still give the thing back," Tiny said. "Let you try with a more economical bunch. Or just melt it down and sell it off ourselves."

  Judson said, "That might be kinda fun, Tiny."

  Mr. Hemlow said, "I could go to twenty-five."

  "The funny thing about the acoustics in this place," Tiny said, "with the high ceiling and all, sometimes you can't hear a thing."

  Dortmunder said, "Mr. Hemlow, I really think you gotta come up a little bit here, just so the guys have a sense of self-esteem outa this."

  Mr. Hemlow shuddered all over, even more than usual, while his left leg tapped out a series of SOSes. Then he said, employing the number everybody in the room had known they would end on, "I will give you my absolute top offer, and that is thirty thousand dollars per man. For my own self-esteem, I can do no more."

  A little silence. Everybody looked at Tiny, who looked around at everybody else and finally said, "You wanna let it go cheap?"

  Kelp said, "We're not gonna give it back, Tiny, that's not realistic."

  Stan said, "And taking it apart, carrying it around to people like Stoon and Arnie, that's too much like work."

  Dortmunder said, "You got a deal, Mr. Hemlow."

  "Good."

  "Dinner," the maid said.

  65

  MRS. W INSISTED on hosting a celebratory dinner, so after Fiona and Brian went back home to the apartment so Brian could shower and change and shake like a leaf and down some medicinal vodka and generally try to get over the horrible experience of having been, for however brief a moment, in the toils of the law, they went back across town in Mrs. W's waiting limo to meet the lady herself at Endi Rhuni, a hot new Thai-Bangladeshi fusion restaurant on East Sixty-third Street, where the vulture wings, when a shipment had come in, were the spécialité de la maison.

  Mrs. W was already there, resplendent, as the saying goes, behind a large snowy white round table at a banquette built for six. They joined her, Fiona sliding in to Mrs. W's left, Brian to her right, and Brian began by ordering a little more vodka, just to be certain he was keeping the dosage up to the proper level.

  The first business of the occasion was to order a meal. Vulture wings happened to be in residence, so Mrs. W and Brian both ordered some, while Fiona, feeling less adventurous, had the llama steak with yams. Then Mrs. W called for a New Zealand pinot noir she felt good about, the waiter left, and she said, "Brian. Are you quite recovered?"

  "Dickens," he said. His voice still shook a bit, but not as much as when he'd first been released to them. "It's Dickens, that's what it is. I never knew what people meant when they said that, when they said Dickensian, you know, that place is Dickensian, or look down there, that's Dickensian. But now I do. Boy, believe me, now I do. That was Dickensian."

  "It sounds terrible, you poor boy," Mrs. W said.

  "I even thought," he said, with a meaningful look at Fiona, "if I knew anything I'd tell, just to get out of there. But then I thought, if I tell, I'm part of it, and I'll never get out. So I didn't tell. Not that I knew anything I could tell."

  "Of course not," Fiona said.

  He shook his head. "The place was so awful, I mean just the place. I mean cold, and hard, and dirty. But the people. Mrs. W, you don't even want to know there are people like that."

  "No, I'm sure I don't."

  "You don't want those people out of there," Brian told her. "You want me out of there—"

  "Of course."

  "But not those people. You don't want those people out of there. Ever. Lock 'em up and throw away the key, there's something else I never really understood. You know, I thought, for a while there I thought I was gonna have to spend the night there."

  "Oh, Brian," Mrs. W said, and squeezed his near forearm in sympathy.

  "I thought, how can I do this," Brian went on. "I thought, this is going to destroy me, even if I get out of here someday someday someday, it's going to destroy my talent, how can I ever try to draw something funny ever again or—"

  "Oh, Brian," Fiona said, "you'll get over it."

  "— put on the Reverend Twisted, knowing those people are there. I mean, I'm a different person now, I can't, I can't be like I was—"

  "The new Brian may be even better than the old," Mrs. W assured him, and said, "Oh, your glass is empty," and raised a commanding hand to have his vodka refreshed.

  By then the food and wine had started to arrive, so they set to, and the conversation skirted around other topics without ever leaving Brian's life-changing experiences entirely unobserved, and by the end of the meal the tremor in his voice was almost completely gone. They finished with shared desserts — peanut parfait, lychee flan, bees' nest soup — and were happily passing them around when all at once the theme music from Mighty Mouse rollicked beneath the table.

  "Oh, I forgot!" Brian cried, scrabbling around inside his clothing. "I always turn it off when— I'm just so flustered, I don't know—" He popped the cell phone open and looked in it. "It's the station," he said. "Maybe they want me to take tomorrow off to recover. I better answer it."

  The women agreed, and Brian spoke into the phone: "Here I am, out of custody." He grinned. "Hi, Sean, I'm here with Mrs. W and Fiona, we're making the bad memories go away over weird desserts." He nodded at the phone, switched his grin to the women, and said, "Sean says hello."

  "And so do we," said Mrs. W.

  "What? Sure I can talk." Brian looked alert, then confused, then terribly hurt. "But why? I was innocent! Sean, they let me go."

  Fiona, startled for him, said, "Brian?"

  "But, Sean, it wasn't my fault. You've gotta go? You lay this on me, and then you've gotta go? Sean? Sean?" Staring helplessly at the women, he said, "He went."

  "But what was it, dear boy?" Mrs. W wanted to know.

  Turning his cell phone off, closing it, moodily returning it to its recess on his person, he said, "They fired me."

  "What?"

  "I knew it," Fiona said.

  Mrs. W reared around to glare at her with a disbelieving, almost angry look. "You knew it? How could you have known it?"

  "Just from how Brian looked."

  Leaving that side-issue, Mrs. W turned back to say, "Brian, what on earth did they fire you for?"

  "Cops all over the station, asking questions. Turns out, that private eye'd been doing stuff there, maybe phone taps, nobody knows."

  "But what has that to do with you?"

  "I was what it was all about." Brian gave a hopeless shrug. "At GRODY, they don't wanna be around anything heavy."

  "But it wasn't your fault."

  "I'd just be a bad reminder."

  Fiona said, "Can't your union do anything?"

  "They'll try to find me another job."

  "Well, this is intolerable," Mrs. W said, and whipped out her own cell phone. "We're not going to take this lying down, Brian. Never take anything lying down.".

  "No, ma'am."

  With the deftness of a master knitter, Mrs. W navigated her cell phone, marching through its address book to the person she wanted, then making the call. Fiona watched and said, "Who are you calling, Mrs. W?"

  "Jay. We're not going to put up with this, my dear."

  "But, you fired Jay today."

  "Oh, nonsense," she said. "I fire him all the time, that doesn't— Jay? Livia. Well, we are also just finishing dinner. Half an hour? Perfect. Call me at home." Slapping the phone shut, she said, "We've finished our desserts. Fiona, dear, we'll have to go on ahead, so I'm afraid I must ask you to put this meal on your credit card and take a taxi home. I'll reimburse you, of course, tomorrow."


  "But—"

  "Come along, Brian," Mrs. W said, hurrying him ahead of her around the banquette and onto his feet.

  Fiona said, "Should I come on to your place, Mrs. W?"

  "I do not intend to spend all night on this, my dear," Mrs. W told her. "You go on home, and Brian will be along after he's explained the situation to Jay." She started off, then turned back to say, "Dear. Don't overtip."

  The reason Fiona overslept is because Brian, having lived a normal regular life far longer than she had, was always the first one out of bed. This morning, without Brian, she slept until nearly nine o'clock, then woke from confused bad dreams with a sudden start.

  Without Brian? No, his side of the bed wasn't rumpled. He hadn't…

  He hadn't come home last night.

  First things first. When she came out of the bathroom, she immediately phoned Mrs. W, and recognized Lucy's voice. "Hi, it's Fiona, can I talk to Mrs. W?"

  "Oh, you just missed them."

  "Just missed? Them?"

  "They're on their way to Newark, they're flying to Palm Beach. For about a week, Mrs. W says."

  "But who—"

  "She says I should find out what she owes you for last night and she'll send you a check."

  "But who—"

  "She says," Lucy went on, "you had a terrible time of it, and you should take the rest of this week off, and everybody can start all over again next week."

  "But who—"

  "On salary, she said," Lucy explained.

  "Lucy! Who did Mrs. W go to Palm Beach with?"

  Sounding surprised, Lucy said, "You didn't know? You had to know. She's taking your friend Brian down there to find him a much better job than he had at that cable station. Do you know how much you spent last night?"

  "I'll have to, uh, I'll have to figure that out and call you back."

  "Fine," Lucy said. "Mrs. W says she'll check in with me when they get to Palm Beach."

  "They."

  "Enjoy your vacation," Lucy said, and hung up.

  So, a little later, did Fiona, though she continued to sit on the sofa in the big room, naked, alone, without breakfast, just looking around at what had suddenly become a very different space.

  It must be in their genes, she thought. Her father stole my great-grandfather's future. And now she's stolen my boyfriend.

  66

  MR. HEMLOW'S STAFF specialized in the kind of breakfast that didn't merely stick to your ribs but weighed them down so much it was a real effort to keep your chin above the level of the table. As a result, it was nearly ten on Tuesday morning before anybody in the compound began to show any vital signs at all, and that was Tiny, whose storage capacity, of course, was larger than everyone else's, so his recovery time tended to be more rapid as well. At last he stood, roamed around the big living room, paused to gaze at the chessboard waiting for its armies, strolled over to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. He left the door open, since the crisp mountain air, while cold, was also a tonic for that logy feeling. A minute later he came back to the doorway to say, "Who moved the Caddy?"

  Several mumbles answered him, and then Kelp said, "Nobody, it's over there by the garages."

  Standing in the doorway, Tiny looked that way. "The van is over there by the garages. A couple little staff cars are over there by the garages. The Caddy isn't there."

  "Impossible," Kelp said. "That's where I left it."

  "The Caddy," Tiny told him, "is not something you don't notice."

  "I don't get this," Kelp said. Struggling to his feet, he followed Tiny back out into the cold.

  Dortmunder roused himself. "I don't like that," he said.

  Stan, chin slipping below table level, said, "What don't you like?"

  "None of us moved it," Dortmunder said. "That's what I don't like."

  Pushing himself two-handed up from the table, he weaved toward the open door. Behind him, Mr. Hemlow said to the hovering servant girl, "Was the upstairs seen to here?"

  "No, sir," she said. "Everybody was at the guesthouse and you stayed down here."

  "Have somebody look around up there."

  "Yes, sir, I'll go."

  Dortmunder went out onto the porch. Tiny and Kelp stood where lately the Colossus had stood. They seemed to be discussing the garage, and now Kelp lifted that door, and a car was in there.

  Dortmunder went down off the porch and walked over to the garage, and it was a beat-up gray PT Cruiser with New Jersey plates that had been scuffed up with mud to make them hard to read.

  Kelp was just closing the driver's door when Dortmunder arrived. "The key's in it," he said, "but nothing personal."

  "They were staying here," Dortmunder said, as Judson walked over to join them from the house. "Empty house in the woods, they were smart enough to get in without setting off the alarm."

  Tiny said, "Who?"

  "We'll never know," Dortmunder said. "The Caddy was in their way, to get at their car. I figure, first they just wanted to move the Caddy over, then they said, what the hell, our car's stolen anyway, let's take the nice one."

  Judson said, "How's the chess set?"

  Kelp, horror-struck, looked away downhill. "The chess set!"

  "Gone," Dortmunder told him.

  "I gotta go— I gotta—"

  Kelp, with Judson right behind him, climbed into the van. Dortmunder and Tiny turned and made their silent way back to the house, where Dortmunder found a nice old rocking chair not too close to the fire and sat there and waited for events to unfold.

  They didn't take long. Kelp and Judson came back with the news that the green tarps were still there. The servant girl came downstairs with a slender pair of cherry-red panties. "They were under a pillow," she said. "What made me look, the bed wasn't made the way we make it."

  "How could this have happened?" Mr. Hemlow wanted to know. He'd developed an extra two or three rumba routines this morning.

  The answer arrived soon, in the person of Eppick, who came back from inspecting the rear entrance to the compound. "It's been rigged so you can bypass it, if you know how. It doesn't show itself to the eye, but if you know how you can get in. And out."

  Mr. Hemlow said, "Johnny, you came up here with John to make sure the place was still secure."

  "That was four months ago, Mr. Hemlow. I didn't do any sweep this time. We're all staying here."

  Kelp said, "Mr. Hemlow, this is a blow to everybody, but at least you know one thing for sure. The chess set isn't ever going back to the Northwoods."

  "Nor is it going," Mr. Hemlow said, "in any fashion at all, to its rightful inheritors."

  Tiny, not sympathetic, said, "They can't miss what they didn't have."

  "I keep reminding myself," Mr. Hemlow said, "just yesterday, I saw all those pieces, out there, beside the driveway. The lost chess set. I saw it, if only just the once, with these eyes."

  "Hold the thought," Tiny suggested. "And before the rest of us get on the road here, let's work out how you're gonna get us our money."

  Astonished, Mr. Hemlow said, "Are you serious? The set is gone."

  "We delivered it," Tiny said. "We found it and we got it and we delivered it. If this place of yours is a sieve, that's no skin off our nose."

  Mr. Hemlow said, "I am not without resources."

  "That's right, so you can—"

  "No, I mean, resources of self-defense." Mr. Hemlow glowered around at all the faces glowering right back at him. "I am not going to pay one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a chess set I do not have."

  Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow, be fair. They worked hard. They delivered it to your door. And this isn't their fault. You gotta give them something."

  Mr. Hemlow brooded. Never before in the history of the world has a wheelchair-bound sick man surrounded by hostile professional criminals looked less troubled by his situation. The loss of the chess set troubled him. About the attitudes and potential threats of the half-dozen men gathered around him he couldn't have cared less.

&
nbsp; But he did finally say, "They deserve something, that's true.

  Smiling, Stan said, "I knew you were a decent guy, Mr. Hemlow."

  "I do not have the chess set, nor will I ever, but it is true the work was done, and as you point out the Northwoods will never have the set again either. I will pay ten thousand dollars per man."

  Stan, no longer smiling, said, "That's a third!"

  "Take it or leave it," Mr. Hemlow said. "You'll have a third of the original price. I'll have the chessboard. Fifty thousand dollars is a mighty steep price for a chessboard, gentlemen."

  A long slow sigh circled the room. "We'll take it," Dortmunder said.

  67

  THE DOCTOR, WHEN Trooper Hemblatt reached him by phone at his hospital down in New York City, was pretty steamed, and the trooper didn't see as how he could blame the man. "They just came right into the hospital parking lot and waltzed out with my car."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I had less than seven K on that car."

  "Just over seven K now, sir. But at least they didn't bang it up."

  "I'll want my garage to do a complete diagnostic on it, as soon as I get it towed down here."

  "That's up to you, sir."

  "But you got the thieves, did you?"

  "We do have two individuals in custody, yes, sir, but we're still sorting that out."

  "What do you mean, sorting out?"

  "Well, there's little question about the man who was operating the vehicle when it was stopped. Chester Wilcox doesn't deny he took it, sir."

  "He was driving it! How could he deny it?"

  "Exactly, sir. The one oddity is, he claims he didn't pick it up in New York City, but down in Massachusetts, in some estate down there."

  "Massachusetts! I don't even know anybody in Massachusetts. He took it from the hospital parking lot, right here on Third Avenue, yesterday morning. You say he was with a woman?"

  "She claims to be a hitchhiker who boarded the vehicle this morning near New Lebanon, just this side of the New Hampshire state line."

  "Is she telling the truth?"

  "That's hard to say, sir. Wilcox claims she was with him at the estate, that she was the one, not him, who knew how to find the place, and that it was in fact her idea to take your vehicle, but he doesn't seem to know much about her, other than her first name. He may be telling the truth, but I doubt we'll develop sufficient cause to hold her."