What's So Funny

by Donald Westlake

  “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 marginal 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.

  Chapter 38

  * * *

  At the same time that Jacques Perly and Jay Tumbril were discussing the investigation into Fiona Hemlow and Livia Northwood 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 —”

  “Well, certainly not the army,” Mrs. W snapped. “Nothing as valuable as that.”

  “No, ma’am. We know your father’s friends and business associates called it the Chicago chess set because he brought it from there, but I can’t find any circumstance in which he called it the Chicago chess set.”

  “Or anything else.”

  “Or anything else,” agreed Fiona. “There is no record that he ever said where it came from, or how he happened to own it. I’m sorry, Mrs. W, there’s just no history.”

  “Well, there, you see,” Mrs. W said, with an irritated head–shake at the picture of the chess set. “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

  Alert, Fiona said, “There is?” because she found that a truly interesting idea.

  But now Mrs. W’s irritated headshake was directed at Fiona. “Balzac, dear,” she said. “Père Goriot. And I fear that the crime behind my family’s fortune may have more than a little to do with that chess set.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Again Mrs. W frowned at the picture on the computer screen. “Will the crime be found out? Is there risk in that ugly toy? Is there anything to do other than let sleeping chessmen lie?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. W.”

  “No, you don’t. Well, thank you, Fiona. I’ll think about this.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Fiona turned to go, then said, “Mrs. W, there is something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “I wasn’t even going to mention it, it’s so silly.”

  “Well, either mention it or don’t mention it,” Mrs. W told her. “You can’t dither forever.”

  “No, ma’am. It’s my boyfriend, Brian.”

  Mrs. W’s eyebrows lowered. “Is something wrong there?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Fiona assured her. “It’s just — Well, you know, he works for a cable station, and they have a party every year in March, sort of the end of winter and all, and Brian said I should invite you. He’s wanted to meet you, and —”

  “Been telling tales about me, have you?”

  Mrs. W hadn’t said that as though she were angry, yet Fiona became very flustered and felt the color rise up into her cheeks. She couldn’t think of a thing to say, but apparently her pink face said it all for her, because Mrs. W nodded and said, “That’s all right, dear. I don’t mind being an eccentric in other people’s stories. I can’t imagine what Jay Tumbril says about me, for instance. Tell me about this party.”

  “It’s really very silly,” Fiona said. “A lot of the people there dress up in costumes, not everybody. I won’t.”

  “Like Halloween,” Mrs. W suggested.

  “Sort of.”

  “And when and where is this?”

  “Saturday, down in Soho.
It starts at eight, but Brian doesn’t like to get there until ten.”

  “Very sensible. Let me think about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And,” with a sudden snap to her voice, “get me Jay Tumbril on the phone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Mrs. W said. “The time has come to bring in experts, to get to the bottom of this. Fiona, we are going to look at that chess set.”

  Chapter 39

  * * *

  GRODY was always in the process of expanding, without having either the money or the space to do so. The studio in Tribeca, being the entire third floor of an old industrial building where, in the late nineteenth century, aprons and overalls were manufactured, was always undergoing renovation, the carpenters and electricians with their leather toolbelts like space–age gunbelts and their macho swagger serving as the oil to the water of the staff’s resident geeks.

  Because the brick exterior walls of the building and the unrepealable law of gravity meant they could never actually add to their territory, the only way to accommodate more offices, more studios and more storage was to keep chopping finer and finer, until the rooms were like closets and the closets had long ago been sacrificed to the need for more space. Hallways had been squeezed to within an inch of the fire code. And one result of all this adjusting and repacking and clawing for space was that many of the resulting rooms were of unusual shapes, triangles and trapezoids. Long–ago–sacrificed doorways meant many of the routes within the GRODY confines were circuitous indeed. All of which was one reason why the company found it so hard to hire or keep anybody over the age of twenty–five.

  Coming to work Thursday morning, after the astonishing news last night that Mrs. W actually would come along to Saturday’s March Madness, Brian made his roundabout way toward his own office, one of the few octagons in here thus far, in which, no matter which way you faced, the workspace shrank away in front of you. Just after squeezing past two carpenters toting over their shoulders eight–foot lengths of L–shaped metal like bowling alley gutters creased down the middle, only lined along both sides with holes — what was that for? straining beer? — Brian was distracted from his route by a knocking on a window somewhere.

  Oh; to the left. One of the control rooms was there, with a sealed window to the hall left over from some previous incarnation, and standing in it was Sean Kelly, Brian’s shaggy boss, who mouthed things at him through the glass; some sort of question.

  But the point of the control room was that it was soundproof, so Brian merely shrugged and pointed helplessly at his ear. Sean nodded, frowned, nodded, and pointed vaguely away with his right hand while doing a finger–up circular motion with his left. Come around and talk to me, in other words.

  Sure. Brian nodded, paused to figure out the shortest way from this side of the glass to that side of the glass, and set off, along the way passing an electrician, seated wedged in a corner, still smoking slightly, accepting sustenance in a flask from his fellows.

  Brian’s route took him past his octagon, which had a doorway but no door because there was nowhere for it to open to. He nodded at it, trekked on, and eventually came to the control room containing both Sean and an expressionless technician seated at the controls, watching a tape of a hilarious animated outer–space drunk scene to be aired at eleven tonight, in competition with the world news. (They expected to win again.)

  “Hey, Sean.”

  “Hey.” Sean seemed troubled, in some vague way. “Man,” he said, “you got any problems at home?” Hurriedly, he erased that from the imaginary blackboard between them. “I don’t mean none of my business, man, you know, I just mean, anything gonna impact us here.”

  Brian could have pointed out that a permanent construction site was all impact, but he cut to the chase: “What problem, Sean? I do something wrong?”

  “No, man,” Sean said. “Nothing I know about. It’s just, I got this call yesterday, just walking out of the office, this guy, says he’s from the enforcement arm of the Better Business Bureau.”

  “Enforcement arm?”

  “That’s what he said, man.” Sean grinned and scratched his head through his shaggy hair. “Can you see them comin’ around? ‘You gotta give the twenty percent, man, it’s right there in your ad.’ Might make a nice bit.”

  “Sean, he wanted to talk to you about me? Or just the place?”

  “No, man, you, strictly you. Do you borrow from your coworkers —”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Uh huh. Do I know where you cash your checks, have you ever had unexplained absences —”

  “Everybody does, Sean.”

  That quick grin of Sean’s came and went. “Sing it, sister. He wants to know, do I think you’re having trouble in your home life, interfering with you here, whado I think your work prospects are —”

  “Jesus.”

  “It was freaky, man.” Another grin. “Don’t worry, I covered for you.”

  Suspicion struck Brian. “You goofed on him.”

  “Naw, man, would I —”

  “You would. Wha’d you tell him?”

  “I just answered his questions, man, told him you were the number one jock in the shop.”

  “And? Come on, Sean.”

  Sean looked slightly sheepish, but still grinned. “Well, I did mention,” he said, “those Venusian bordello scenes you do …”

  “Lost It in Space. Yeah?”

  “I said, you were so good at it, it’s because you think they’re real.”

  “Sean, what did you —”

  “No, that’s all, man, honest to God. Just sometimes we find you at your desk, you’re in this trance state, you’re getting laid on Venus. That’s all I said, man.”

  “And did he believe you?”

  Sean looked amazed at the question. “Brian? What do I know how Earth people think?”

  Brian had all that day to figure out what was going on, and yet he didn’t.

  Chapter 40

  * * *

  Jay Tumbril had all Thursday night to brood about Livia Northwood Wheeler and the Chicago chess set, which didn’t leave much time for sleep, but he couldn’t very well do that in the office either, so by eleven Friday morning he was both sleep–deprived and jittering on the edge of panic. He hated to admit there might be a circumstance in which his control of the situation was less than perfect, but there were such circumstances and this was one of them, so it was time to pull the emergency cord.

  The point was, if you found yourself in a position so far outside your expertise you hadn’t the faintest bloody idea what to do next, then the thing to do next was to call upon someone who does have expertise in the area, whatever that area might be. In this case, there was only one expert in the area that Jay knew, so just after eleven he picked up the intercom and said, “Felicity.”

  “Sir.”

  “Get me Jacques Perly.”

  “Sir.”

  Three minutes later, Felicity was back on the line: “Mr. Perly says he’s in his car, northbound on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, speaking on his hands–free carphone, and wonders if he should ring you back later or will you rough it now.”

  Jay knew damn well Perly had actually said “the FDR Drive,” but Felicity was so proud of her studies to become an American citizen that he merely said, “Thank you, Felicity, I’d rather talk to him now, it’s a bit urgent.”

  “Sir.”

  Jay broke the connection, and spent the next twenty–five seconds rehearsing how he’d describe the situation. Then the buzz sounded, and he picked up and said, “Jacques.”

  “I’ll put him right on.”

  “What?”

  “Just joking,” Perly said.

  “I knew that was you, you didn’t change your voice or anything. What do you mean, joking?”

  “Your secretary said it was urgent.”

  “Yes, well — Yes, it is. Also, Jacques, extremely confidential.”

  “We kn
ow that.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you. The truth is, I’m a little tense, didn’t get much sleep last night …”

  “You, Jay?”

  “It’s Livia Northwood Wheeler again!”

  “What? The Hemlow girl? Or did Clanson make his move?”