Why Me? d-5

by Donald E. Westlake

  Kelp paused in his contemplation of a seven-eighths-size modern facsimile of an old wall-type crank phone. Looking at Dortmunder, he said, "What?"

  "That." Dortmunder pointed the chicken leg at the real phone.

  "That? John, whadaya want with that?"

  "I'll talk on it."

  "John," Kelp said, "even bookmakers wouldn't use a phone like that."

  "That's the one I want," Dortmunder said.

  Kelp considered him, then sighed. "You sure can get stubborn sometimes," he said. "But, if that's what you want…"

  "It is."

  Gazing sadly at all those rejected wonders, Kelp shrugged and said, "Okay, then, that's what you'll get. The customer is always right."

  29

  "It's a pay phone," Tony Cappelletti said, "in the Village, on Abingdon Square."

  "My men," Malcolm Zachary said firmly, like an FBI man, "can have that booth staked out in five minutes."

  Mologna glowered heavily across his desk. Cooperation between law enforcement agencies had made it necessary to bring the FBI in on this phone call from the alleged thief, but it wasn't necessary to put up with a lot of disguised feds saturating the area in laundry trucks and unmarked black sedans with D.C. plates. "So far," Mologna said, "this is a crank call to the Police Department of the City of New York. We're not goin to make a federal case out of it."

  "But," Zachary said, "we have infiltratory specialists, men carefully trained to blend into any environmentalism."

  "The New York Police Department," Mologna said, "has men who can blend into the environmentalism of New York City."

  "Equipment," Zachary said, beginning to look desperate. "We have walkie-talkies that look like ice cream cones."

  "That's why we'll handle the case," Mologna told him. "Our walkie-talkies look like beer cans in brown paper bags." Having finished off Zachary, Mologna turned back to Tony Cappelletti: "Our people in position?"

  "All ready," Cappelletti promised. "We've set up our war room across the hall."

  Mologna crouched over his massive belly like a man catching a beach ball, then all at once heaved himself to his feet. "Let's go," he said, and marched out, trailed by the dour Cappelletti, the sparkling-eyed Leon, the disgruntled Zachary, and the watchful-but-silent Freedly.

  In a bare room across the hall, some long folding tables and rickety folding chairs had been set up on the scuffed linoleum floor, a few phone lines and radio equipment had been brought in (their cables flopped around underfoot), a couple of city and subway maps had been taped to the wall, and two overweight black women and an overweight white man in grungy civilian clothing sat around smoking cigarettes and discussing retirement benefits. As a war room, it would have made James Bond laugh.

  The newcomers clustered around a city map on one wall, and Tony Cappelletti described the current situation: "Abingdon Square is here in the West Village, at the meeting of Bleecker, Hudson, Bank, and Bethune streets and Eighth Avenue. Hudson and Bank are the only through streets, so we've got a total of seven entrances or exits to the square. The phone we're after—"

  "The target phone," murmured Zachary.

  "— is here at the corner of Bleecker and Bank, south side, directly in front of the children's playground. It's a very open area, because of the playground on the south and very wide Eighth Avenue to the north."

  "What's our stakeout?" Mologna asked.

  "In the playground itself," Gappelletti said, "we got two vendors, one selling hot dogs, the other selling cocaine. In a restaurant on Bleecker across the street from the phone we got a TPF squad, fully equipped, and—"

  Freedly, the less assholish FBI man, broke his long silence to say, "Excuse me. TPF?"

  "Tactical Patrol Force," Mologna told him. "Those are our head-beaters."

  Freedly frowned. "Crowd control, you mean?"

  Zachary echoed, "Crowd control? Inspector, we aren't dealing here with dissentation, some sort of anti-this, anti-that demonstration. This is a robber, in a negotiatory posture."

  Mologna sighed, shook his head, and resigned himself to patience. "Zachary," he said, "do you know what the West Village is?"

  "A part of Greenwich Village," Zachary said, frowning sternly. "Of course I know where it is."

  "Not where. What." Holding up three fingers, Mologna said, "The West Village is three separate and distinct smalltown communities all existin in the same space at the same time. They are first the ethnic community, which is mostly Italian plus Irish, and which used to be two communities that knifed each other a lot but now they've got together against numbers two and three. Two is the artsy-craftsy community, everythin from folk singers and rug hookers and candle dippers to hotshot TV personalities and writers with their own column in the papers. And three is the fag community, which makes Alice in Wonderland look like a documentary. Any time we make an arrest in that area, we run the risk of offendin one or more of those communities, and if we do offend one or more of those communities the TPF comes out and breaks heads until we can retreat back to the United States. You follow me so far?"

  While Zachary merely blinked and nodded, looking forceful though bewildered, Freedly said, "The map is not the terrain."

  Mologna nodded at him. "You're right."

  "Von Clausewitz said that," Freedly added.

  "He knew his onions." Mologna turned back to Cappelletti: "What else we got?"

  "A city bus broken down here on Eighth Avenue," Cappelletti said. "That gives us a driver and two mechanics. Two winos here on Hudson Street, lying in a doorway. Sanitation Department truck here on Bethune, four men, goofing off. Pair of chess players here, at the benches just south of the playground. Little old lady with a lot of shopping bags handing out Jesus Saves pamphlets here at the corner of Bank and Hudson."

  "Hold on," Zachary said, hitching up his trousers like an FBI man. "What is all this? Sanitationmen, little old ladies. Who is this little old lady?"

  "He's a police officer," Tony Cappelletti said, while Mologna and Leon exchanged a glance. "He's usually a decoy with the mugging detail. I've seen him, Francis," he added to Mologna, "and he does an old lady so good you wanna ask him to make you an apple pie."

  Zachary said, "The bus driver, the garbagemen—"

  "Sanitationmen," Mologna said.

  "They're all police officers?"

  Even Tony Cappelletti was prepared to exchange a glance with somebody at that one; he exchanged it with Freedly, who said, "If we were doing it, Mac, our people would also be in disguise."

  "Well, of course they would! The description was just a little confusing, that's all." Frowning manfully at the map, Zachary said, "You appear to have the target phone well encircled."

  "You bet your ass we do," Mologna told him.

  "That's fourteen men," Cappelletti said, "with visual contact on the phone. Plus the TPF in that restaurant, plus two more squads out of sight some distance away—here in a parking garage on Charles Street, and over here in a moving company garage on Washington Street."

  Leon said, "Ding dong."

  Everybody turned to look at him. Mologna, not quite believing it, said, "Leon? Was that you?"

  Leon mutely pointed at the big white clock on the wall, and when everybody turned that way they saw the time was precisely ten-thirty. "Okay," Mologna said. "Unconventional, Leon, but okay."

  Leon smiled. "I can do a perfect Big Ben, quarter hours and everything."

  "Later." Looking around, Mologna said, "Which phone do I use?"

  "This one, Francis." Cappelletti ushered Mologna to a phone on one of the long tables. Seating himself on a folding chair—it shrieked in agony—Mologna reached for the receiver, poised his finger over the push buttons, then stopped and frowned. "What's the number?"

  Everybody patted his pockets and it turned out Cappelletti had it, on a crumpled piece of paper, which he smoothed out and placed on the table. Mologna dialed, while one of the black women who'd been sitting around talking about retirement benefits spoke quietly into a mi
crophone, saying, "He's making the call now."

  Three miles away, at Abingdon Square, two winos, four sanitationmen, a bus driver, two vendors, two mechanics, a pair of chess players, and a little old lady all tensed, watching and waiting, their attention on a shiny, small telephone-on-a-stalk. Not even an enclosed booth; just a small three-sided box on one leg.

  "It's ringin," Mologna said.

  "It isn't ringing," the black woman at the microphone said.

  Mologna frowned at her. "No no, I said it is ringin."

  She shrugged. "The folks on the street say it isn't ringing."

  "What?" Mologna said, and a voice in his ear said, "Hello?"

  "Phone ain't ringing," the black woman said. "Maybe it's busted."

  "But," Mologna said, and the voice in his ear said, "Hello? Hello?" So he said it right back: "Hello!"

  "Oh, there you are," the voice said, sounding relieved.

  Mologna said, "And who the fuck are you?"

  "I'm the, uh…" He sounded rather nervous and had to stop to clear his throat. "I'm the guy, you know, the guy…with the, uh, I'm the guy with the thing."

  "The thing?" Bewildered faces were crowding around Mologna now.

  "Ring. The ring."

  Zachary said, "Who in God's name are you talking to?"

  Waving Zachary and everybody else away, Mologna said, " Where are you?"

  "Well, uh…I don't think I oughta tell you that."

  The black woman was speaking with muted hysteria into her microphone. Three miles away, the pay phone in question sparkled in morning sunlight, alone, unringing, unoccupied, innocent and virginal. A cocaine salesman drifted slowly by it and repeated the phone's number aloud to his beer can. Two winos staggered to their feet and stumbled across the square toward the children's playground. The sanitationmen started their truck engine.

  Mologna said, "God damn you, son of a bitch, what's goin on here?"

  "It's the right number," the black woman said.

  The other black woman, who'd been talking quietly but hurriedly into another phone, now said, "The phone company says the call's going through."

  "See," the voice in Mologna's ear said, "I just want to give it back, you see what I mean?"

  "Hold on," Mologna told the phone, cupped the mouthpiece, and glared at the second black woman. "What was that you said?"

  "The phone company says the call's going through. They say you're talking to somebody at that pay phone."

  Three miles away the chess players folded up their unfinished game, while their kibitzers said things like, "Are you crazy? Man, what's the matter with you? Man, you was three fuckin moves from mate, man." The pamphlet-distributing little old lady had crossed Hudson Street and now stood directly in front of the phone under surveillance. Two TPF men in uniform, regardless of all subterfuge, stood beefily in the restaurant doorway, hands on hips, and glared out at that subversive telephone.

  The voice in Mologna's ear continued, even though everybody in the war room was talking at once. "I said hold on!" Mologna yelled into the phone, then yelled at everybody else, "Shut up! Tony, saturate that neighborhood! You, tell that phone company to get its head out of its ass and tell me what's goin on. You, tell our people on the scene to close in but stay in character. You, are you recordin this?"

  The white male companion of the two black females nodded his earphoned head.

  "And are we pickin up a voice from the other end?"

  Another nod with earphones.

  "Good," Mologna said. "Otherwise, I'd think I was doin a Joan of Arc." Into the phone, he said, "Let me tell you somethin, smart boy."

  "I thought maybe we could nego—"

  "Just shut up and listen to me. Negotiate with you?" Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder, but Mologna angrily shrugged him away. "Deal with you, you son of a bitch? I wouldn't disgrace my vocal cords doin deals with you." Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder more urgently, and this time Mologna swung his arm around to shove the other man away, meantime yelling into the phone, "I'm goin to get you, you wise-ass bastard, and let me tell you this. When I get my hands on you, you'll fall downstairs for a month!" Slamming the phone down into its cradle, ignoring the voice's feeble, "But—" Mologna spun around to glare at Cappelletti: "And what did you want to say, that couldn't wait?"

  Cappelletti sighed: "Keep him on the line," he said.

  30

  "You see," Andy Kelp had explained to Dortmunder before the event, "with the phone company's own phone-ahead gizmo, you have to use their equipment and go through the operator every time you want to use it. But this one is from West Germany—see what it says on the bottom? — and with this one you just set these dials here to the number where you're gonna be, you plug it into the jack where your phone line goes, then plug the phone in on the other side here, and it does the phone-ahead thing without bothering the operator or anybody at all."

  "But," Dortmunder had pointed out, "pay phones don't have jacks."

  "They got a phone line coming in. And this gizmo, made in Japan, these little prongs squeeze down into the line and make contact, so you can set up a jack anywhere you want on any phone line in the city."

  "It sounds awful chancy," Dortmunder had said. "Where do we make this thing phone ahead to?"

  "Another pay phone."

  "Fine," Dortmunder had said. "So I'm standing there at this second pay phone, and one of the bozos they've got on stakeout reads the phone-ahead number on the little Kraut gizmo you've got stuck into your little Jap gizmo stuck into the first pay phone, and then they come to phone number two and they arrest me. And probably, because they're a little annoyed at all the trouble they're going through, they have to work very hard to subdue me."

  "Well, no," Kelp had said. "Because you aren't going to be at that second pay phone either."

  "I'm going crazy," Dortmunder had said. "Where the hell am I, some third pay phone? How many of these phone-ahead gizmos you got?"

  "No more pay phones," Kelp had promised. "John, think about the city of New York."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's our territory, John, so let's use it. And what's one of the main things about this territory?"

  "No question-answer," Dortmunder had said, squeezing his beer can so that beer slopped out onto his fingers. "Just tell your story."

  "People move," Kelp had told him. "They move all the time—uptown, downtown, across town—"

  "Outa town."

  "Right. And back into town. And every time they move they get a telephone. And they always want it someplace different from the last tenant. Not the kitchen, the bedroom. Not the living room, the—"

  "Okay, okay."

  "The point is, this city is overrun with unused telephone lines. You spend a lot of time in back yards and fire escapes yourself, didn't you ever notice all those phone lines?"

  "No."

  "Well, they're there. So what we do, our second pay phone is in Brooklyn. Indoors. In a bar or a drugstore or a hotel lobby, someplace where I can get at the phone line coming in. Then I put another of these Japanese prong gizmos on that line, and I run a line of my own to an unused phone line and from there anywhere in the neighborhood: a basement, a closet, an empty apartment, whatever's handy. And that's where you take the call, on a phone we'll bring in ourselves; so as far as the phone company's concerned that phone doesn't even exist! That second pay phone will ring just once, but your phone'll ring too, and right away you answer. Nobody answers a pay phone that rings just once, so you'll have privacy."

  Dortmunder had scratched the side of his jaw, frowning deeply. "We're three phones down the line now. Why all the complication?"

  "Time. They stake out that first phone. You start to talk, they go crazy. After a while they find my phone-ahead gizmo, maybe you're still on the line, still negotiating. They check with the phone company, they get the address on phone number two, now they got to rush down to Brooklyn, stake it out, approach it very carefully, go crazy all over again. And we're where we can see th
em, and we got time to end the call and go away before they find the new line leading to the unused line leading to us."

  "Christ on a crutch," Dortmunder had said.

  "Number A," Kelp had pointed out, "you got no alternative. Number B, this'll work, guaranteed."

  And so it did, right on down to the question of negotiation. The phone had rung, just once, and Dortmunder had picked it up and started talking, and he was just getting over his nervousness, sitting there in the for-rent empty apartment over the delicatessen (Pay Phone Inside) on Ocean Bay Boulevard, with Kelp at the front window watching the street for cops, when all of a sudden this guy on the other end of the phone, Maloney, started a lot of yelling and screaming in Dortmunder's ear, culminating in an unnecessarily loud click, and then a lot of silence.

  "Hello?" Dortmunder said. "Hello?"

  Kelp wandered over from the window: "What's wrong?"

  "He hung up on me."

  "He couldn't." Kelp frowned, gazing into the middle distance. "Could my phone system break down somewhere?"

  Dortmunder shook his head, and hung up the phone. "It could," he said, "I know damn well it could, but it didn't. Maloney did it himself. He said he wouldn't deal with me. He said he was gonna catch me, and I was gonna fall downstairs for a month."

  "He said that?"

  "He sounded a lot like Tiny Bulcher, only angry."

  Kelp nodded. "It's a challenge," he said. "The good guys against the bad guys, with a challenge and a dare and the gauntlet thrown and all like that. Like in Batman."

  "In Batman," Dortmunder pointed out, "the bad guys lose."

  Kelp looked at him in astonishment. " We aren't the bad guys, John," he said. "We're trying to correct a simple, honest mistake, that's all. We're rescuing the Byzantine Fire for the American people. And the Turkish people. We're the good guys."