What's So Funny

by Donald Westlake

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder explained, and Rollo came slowly up from REM sleep, stopped his rag–wiping, focused on Dortmunder, and said, “Two nights in a row. You could become a regular.”

  “Maybe not,” Dortmunder said, echoing the joker, though not on purpose. “But tonight, yeah. Just me and the other bourbon.” Because Rollo knew his customers by their drink, which he felt was the way to inspire consumer loyalty.

  “Happy to see you both,” Rollo said.

  “It’s just the two of us, so we don’t need the back room.”

  “Woody Allen,” demanded the ever–perplexed third regular, “played James Bond?”

  “I think that was him,” said the second regular, showing a rare moment of regular doubt.

  “Fine,” said Rollo, and went away to prepare a tray containing two glasses with ice cubes and a full bottle bearing a label that read Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon — ‘Our Own Brand’. “Drink it in good health,” he said, and pushed the tray across the genie.

  “Thanks.”

  Dortmunder turned around, carrying the tray, looked to choose just the right booth, and Kelp appeared in the bar doorway. He entered, saw Dortmunder, gazed around the room, and pointed at the booth next to him, the one where last night — just last night! — Dortmunder had met his personal ex–cop doom.

  The same booth? Well, the farther from the Bondsmen the better. Dortmunder shrugged: Okay.

  Once they were seated facing one another and their glasses were no longer empty, Kelp said, “This is about that cop.”

  “You know it. Johnny Eppick For Hire.”

  “How much of that is his name?”

  “The front half.”

  “So he used to be a cop,” Kelp suggested, “and now he’s a private eye.”

  “Or whatever. He’s working for a rich guy that wants this valuable heavy golden chess set that just happens to be in a sub–basement bank vault in midtown.”

  “Forget it,” Kelp advised.

  “I’d like to,” Dortmunder said. “Only he’s got pictures of me in a compromising position.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Kelp seemed very interested. “What, is he gonna show them to May?”

  “Not that kind,” Dortmunder said. “The kind he could show to the cops that didn’t retire yet.”

  “Oh.” Kelp nodded. “Miami could be nice, this time of year.”

  “I was thinking Chicago. Only, Eppick thought of it, too. He says, him and the Internet and his cop buddies would find me anywhere I went, and I believe him.”

  “How much time you got?”

  “Before my arrest, arraignment, plea bargain, and bus ride north?” Dortmunder shrugged. “I can stall a little, I guess. But Eppick is leaning, and the guy he works for is old and sick and wouldn’t be interested in any long–term plans.”

  “Sheesh.” Kelp shook his head. “I hate to say this, but better you than me.”

  “Don’t hate to say it,” Dortmunder advised him, “because you’re already kinda involved.”

  Kelp didn’t like that. “You two’ve been talking about me?”

  “He already knows you,” Dortmunder said. “He researched me or something. Last night, when he left here, he looked down toward you and said, ‘Give my hello to Andy Kelp’. He knows about Arnie Albright. He knows us all.”

  “I don’t like this,” Kelp said. “I don’t like your friend Eppick even thinking about me.”

  “Oh, is that how it is?” Dortmunder wanted to know. “Now he’s my friend?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  Kelp looked around the room, as though to fix the location more securely in his mind. “You asked me to meet you here tonight,” he said. “Now I get it, you asked me here because you want me to help. So when are you gonna ask me to help?”

  “There is no help,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp slowly sipped some of his bourbon, while gazing at Dortmunder over the glass. Then he put the glass down and continued to gaze at Dortmunder.

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Help.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said. “Where is this bank vault?”

  “C&I International, up on Fifth Avenue.”

  “That’s a big bank,” Kelp said. He sounded faintly alarmed.

  “It’s a big building,” Dortmunder said. “Underneath it is a sub–basement, and in the sub–basement is the chess set that’s out to ruin my life.”

  “I could go up tomorrow,” Kelp offered, “and take a look.”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “I’d like you to do something else tomorrow.”

  Looking hopeful, Kelp said, “You already got a plan?”

  “No, I already got a disaster.” Dortmunder drank some of his own bourbon, more copiously than Kelp had, and said, “Let me say first, this Eppick already figures you’re in. He said to me today, ‘I suppose you’ll work with your pal Andy Kelp’.”

  “Conversations about me,” Kelp said, and shivered.

  “I know. I feel the same way. But here’s the thing. It’s just as important you get to see this Eppick as it is you get to see some bank building.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “in the rich guy’s limo, we’re going upstate somewhere, Eppick and me, to see if what the rich guy called his compound is secure enough for us to stash the chess set after we ha–ha lift it.”

  “You want me to ride upstate tomorrow,” Kelp said, “in a limo with you and Eppick.”

  “And a chauffeur.”

  Kelp contemplated that, while back at the bar, “Shaken but not slurred!” piped the joker.

  Kelp observed his glass, but did not drink. “And why,” he wanted to know, “am I doing this?”

  “Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  “Nothing we want to know, I bet.” Kelp did knock back a little more bourbon. “What time are we doing this foolish thing?”

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  Being a wee beastie in a huge corporate law firm in mid–town Manhattan meant that one did not have very many of one’s waking hours to oneself. Again tonight it was after ten before Fiona could call her home–buddy Brian and say, “I’m on my way.”

  “It’ll be ready when you get here.”

  “Should I stop and get anything?” By which she meant wine.

  “No, I got everything we need.” By which he meant he’d bought wine on his way home from the studio.

  “See you, hon.”

  “See you, hon.”

  The interior of Feinberg et al maintained the same lighting twenty–four hours a day, since only the partners and associates had offices around the perimeter of the building, and thus windows. In the rest of the space you might as well have been in a spaceship far off in the emptiness of the universe. The only differences at ten p.m., when Fiona moved through the cubicles to the elevator bank, were that the receptionist’s desk was empty, the latest Botox Beauty having left at five, and that Fiona needed her employee ID card to summon and operate the elevator. It wasn’t, in fact, until she’d left the elevator and the lobby and the building itself that she found herself back on Earth, where it was nighttime, with much traffic thundering by on Fifth Avenue.

  Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter. Walk across Fifth Avenue and down the long block to Sixth and the long block to Seventh and the short block to Broadway. Then up two blocks to the subway, where she would descend, swipe the MetroCard until it recognized itself, and then descend some more and wait for the uptown local, riding it to Eighty–Sixth Street. Another walk, one block up and half a block over, and she entered her apartment building, where she chose a different card from her bulging wallet — this was three cards for one trip — in order to gain admittance, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the long hall to 4–D. That same third card also let her into the apartment, where the smell of Oriental food — was that Thai? the smell of peanuts? — was the most welcoming thing in he
r day.

  “Honey, I’m home!” she called, which they both thought of as their joke, and he came grinning out of the galley kitchen with a dishtowel tucked in around his waist and a glass of red wine in each hand. As tall as she was short, and as blond as she was raven–haired, Brian had wide bony shoulders but was otherwise as skinny as a stray cat, with a craggy handsome face that always maintained some caution down behind the good cheer.

  “Home is the hunter,” he greeted her, which was another part of the joke, and handed over a glass.

  They kissed, they clinked glasses, they sipped the wine, which they didn’t know any better than to believe was pretty good, and then he went back to the kitchen to plate their dinners while she stood leaning in the doorway to say, “How was your day?”

  “Same old same old,” he said, which was what he usually said, though sometimes there were tidbits of interest he would share with her, just as she would with him.

  Since he worked for a cable television company, Brian actually had more frequent tidbits to offer than she did. He was an illustrator there, assembling collages and occasionally doing original artwork, all to be background for different things the cable station would air. He belonged to some sort of show business writers union, though she didn’t quite see how what he did counted as writing, but it meant that, though his income was a fraction of hers, his hours were much more predictable — and shorter — than hers. She thought wistfully from time to time that it might be nice to be in a union and get home at six at night instead of ten–thirty, but she knew it was a class thing: Lawyers would never stoop to protect themselves.

  Brian brought their dinners out to the table in what they called the big room, though it wasn’t that big. Even so, they’d crowded into it a sofa, two easy chairs, a small dining table with two armless designer chairs, a featureless gray construct containing all the elements of their “entertainment space,” two small bookcases crammed with her history books and his art books, and a small black coffee table on which they played Scrabble and cribbage.

  They’d been a couple for three years now, he moving into what had been her place after he broke up with his previous girlfriend. They had no intention of marrying, no desire for children, no yen to put down roots somewhere in the suburbs. They liked each other, liked living together, didn’t get on each other’s nerves very much, and didn’t see too much of one another because of the nature of her job. So it was all very nice and easy.

  And he was a good cook! He’d had an after–school restaurant slavey job in his teens, and had taken to the concept of cookery as being somehow related to his work as an artist. He enjoyed burrowing his way into exotic cuisines, and she almost always relished the result. Not so bad.

  Tonight, as her nose had told her, dinner came from the cuisine of Thailand, and was delicious, and over it she said, “My day wasn’t exactly same old same old.”

  Interested, he looked at her over his fork. (You don’t use chopsticks with Thai food.) “Oh, yeah?”

  “A man I talked to,” she said. “The most hangdog man I ever met in my life. You can’t imagine what he looked like when he said, ‘I’m going back to jail’.” And she laughed at the memory, as he frowned at her, curious.

  “Back to jail? You’re not defending crooks now, are you? That isn’t what you people do.”

  “No, no, this isn’t anything to do with the firm. This is something about my grandfather.”

  “Daddy Bigbucks,” Brian said.

  She smiled at him, indulging him. “Yes, I know, you’re only with me because of my prospects. Money is really all you care about, I know that.”

  He grinned back at her, but with a slight edge to it as he said, “Try going without it for a while.”

  “I know, I know, you come from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  “We were too poor to have tracks. What I’ve done, I’ve shacked–up up. Tell me about this hangdog guy.”

  So she told him the chess set saga, about which he had previously known nothing. He asked a few questions, brought himself up to speed, then said, “Is this guy really going to rob a bank vault?”

  “Oh, of course not,” she said. “It’s just silly. They’ll all see it’s impossible, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “But what if he tries?”

  “Oh, the poor man,” she said, but she grinned as she said it. “In that case, I think he probably will go back to jail.”

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  In Dortmunder’s dream, it wasn’t his old cell at all, it was much older, and smaller, and very rusty, and flooded with water knee–deep. His cellmate — a hulking guy he’d never met before, but who looked a lot like Hannibal Lecter — leered at him and said, “We like it this way.”

  Dortmunder opened his mouth to say he didn’t at all like it this way, but out from between his lips came the sudden jangle of an alarm clock, startling him awake.

  John Dortmunder was not an alarm clock kind of guy. He preferred to get out of bed when the fancy struck him, which was generally about the crack of noon. But with the necessity this morning of being way over on the Upper West Side at nine o’clock, he knew he had to make an exception. Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?

  Last night, May had helped him set the alarm for eight in the morning, and now at eight in the morning May’s foot helped him bounce out of bed, slap the alarm clock silly until it shut up, then slope off to the bathroom.

  Twenty minutes later, full of a hastily–ingested mélange of corn flakes and milk and sugar, he went out into the morning cold — it was much colder out here in the morning — and after some time found a cab to take him up to Riverside Drive, where a black limo sat in front of Mr. Hemlow’s building, white exhaust putt–putting out of its tailpipe. The skinny sour guy at the wheel, with the white hair sticking out from under his chauffeur’s cap, would be Pembroke, and the satisfied guy in the rear–facing backseat, encased like a sausage in his black topcoat, would be Johnny Eppick in person, who pushed open the extra–wide door, grinned into the cold air, and said, “Right on time. We’re all here, climb in.”

  “One to go,” Dortmunder told him.

  Eppick didn’t think he liked that. “You’re bringing somebody along?”

  “You already know him,” Dortmunder said. “So I thought he oughta know you.”

  “And he would be —”

  “Andy Kelp.”

  Now Eppick’s smile returned, bigger than ever. “Good thinking. You’re starting to put your mind to it, John, that’s good.” Slight frown. “But where is he?”

  “Coming up the street,” Dortmunder said, nodding down to where Kelp walked toward them up Riverside Drive.

  Kelp had a jaunty walk when he was going into a situation he wasn’t sure of, and it was at its jauntiest as he approached the limo, looked at that smiling head leaning out of the limo’s open door, and said, “You’re gonna be Johnny Eppick, I bet.”

  “Got it in one,” Eppick said. “And you’ll be Andrew Octavian Kelp.”

  “Oh, I only use the Octavian on holidays.”

  “Well, get in, get in, we might as well get going.”

  The interior of the limo had been adjusted for Mr. Hemlow’s wheelchair, so that a bench seat behind the chauffeur’s compartment faced backward, and the rest of the floor was covered with curly black carpet, with lines in it that showed where the platform would extend out through the doorway when it was time to load Mr. Hemlow aboard. The bench seat would really be comfortable only for two and Eppick was already on it, but when Dortmunder bent to enter the limo somehow Kelp was already in there, seated to Eppick’s right and looking as innocent as a poisoner.

  So that left the floor for Dortmunder, unless he wanted to sit up in front of the partition with the chauffeur and not be part of the conversation. He went in on all fours and then turned himself around into a seated position as Eppick closed the door. The rear wall, beneath the window,
was also covered with the black carpet, and wasn’t really uncomfortable at all, anyway not at first. So Dortmunder might be on the floor, but at least he was facing front.

  “All right, Pembroke,” Eppick said, and off they went.

  Kelp, with his amiable smile, said, “John tells me you know all about us.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Eppick said. “I only know that little part of your activities that’s made it into the filing system. The tip of the iceberg, you might say.”

  “And yet,” Kelp said, “I don’t seem to have any files on you at all. John says you’re retired from the NYPD.”