Put a Lid on It

by Donald E. Westlake

“I know.”

  She leaned toward him, eyes wide behind the big specs: “Did you listen? On the phone?”

  He didn't get it. “What do you mean?”

  “When I told you listen, did you listen?”

  “Yeah, and you didn't say anything.”

  “The crackles,” she said.

  “The crackles,” he repeated. Was there maybe a screw loose in there somewhere?

  She leaned even closer, and hissed the next sentence: “They're tapping my phone!”

  “Oh, for Christ's sake.” Yehudi and Mostafa, had to be.

  “I think they probably bugged the apartment, too.”

  “Let's find a phone booth,” Meehan said, “and make Jeffords' morning.”

  “I knew it was you,” Jeffords said, not sounding happy. “On a Sunday morning.”

  “They're bugging Goldfarb's phone,” Meehan said.

  “What?”

  “And probably the apartment.”

  “Oh, Jesus, why don't they get wise to themselves?”

  “Idle hands,” Meehan explained, “are the devil's workshop.” Which was in the addendum to the ten thousand rules.

  “Well, that explains it, anyway,” Jeffords said.

  Meehan hated non sequiturs. He said, “I'm glad it does.”

  “You wouldn't know about this,” Jeffords told him, “but a known criminal was nabbed up at, uh, the place you're going.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A known criminal,” Jeffords repeated. “At a political rally there. Alfonso Gorman, he's got a record as long as your arm, there were arrest warrants out for him all over.”

  Alfonso; so that was Woody's civilian name. Meehan said, “They nabbed him at a political rally?”

  “That's right.”

  “Then how come he was the only one they nabbed?”

  There was a brief silence until Jeffords got it; then he said, “Very funny. But you see what this means. One of you two must have mentioned it. The name of the place.”

  Meehan looked at Goldfarb, standing next to him here on Broadway at the phone-on-a-stick, looking as though the half of the conversation she was in on wasn't really nourishing somehow. He said to Jeffords, “Goldfarb doesn't know that name, and I haven't said it.”

  “Well, somehow,” Jeffords insisted, “somebody knows something, and they sent somebody, just the way”—his voice lowered—“just the way we're sending you.”

  “I'll worry about that,” Meehan said, finding no need to bring Jeffords up to date on his own relationship with Woody “Alfonso” Gorman. “You worry about getting those bugs out of Goldfarb's apartment.”

  “Damn right,” Goldfarb said.

  “I don't know what I can do on a weekend,” Jeffords complained.

  “Oh,” Meehan said. “Law enforcement's on a five-day week? I wish I'd known that years ago.”

  “I'll see what I can do,” Jeffords promised. “Call me in an hour.”

  “Goldfarb will.”

  “Not from the apartment!”

  “No, not from the apartment.”

  “Of course not,” Goldfarb said.

  Jeffords said, “In the meantime, she should just hang tight, not say anything important to anybody.”

  “I'll tell her,” Meehan said, and hung up, and told Goldfarb, “Call him in an hour. From here, I guess. In the meantime, don't say anything important to anybody.”

  “Well, it's Sunday,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “I know what,” she said. “My mother always says I don't call her enough. I'll call her.”

  “Let Yehudi and Mostafa listen to an hour of your mother.”

  “You got it,” Goldfarb said.

  “Revenge is sweet,” Meehan agreed.

  26

  BACK IN ROOM 318, Meehan looked at his shrunken list of initials. Seven left. He hoped the next guy he found had more staying power than Woody.

  He felt he needed one more preliminary look at Burnstone Trail, when it wasn't the setting for a Breughel villagers-partying genre picture. He didn't want to go back today, because today would be when the staff was doing cleanup—the part they leave out of the genre pictures—but maybe tomorrow the party staff would be gone and the owner wouldn't yet be back from wherever he'd fled to avoid the hoi polloi, so maybe the job could be done just like that, lickety-split. But first another reconnoiter. With at least one partner, preferably one without an argumentative nature.

  Meehan sat on the bed with the phone and the remaining sets of initials, and started his calls.

  “Hello?” Tough-guy voice, wary.

  “Hi, is Eddie there?”

  “This is Eddie. Who's this?”

  It was not Eddie; Meehan quietly hung up.

  “Bismark residence.” Female voice this time, brisk, in a hurry.

  “Hi, is Lou there?”

  “I don't expect to see Lou for five to fifteen years.”

  “Oh. Then I'll try again later.”

  “Hello?” Female voice, motherly.

  “Hi, is Bernie there?”

  “Oh, you just missed him, I think he's already—Hold on!”

  “Sure,” he said, hearing shoes run away over a linoleum floor, hearing the woman's receding voice yell, “Bernie! Bernie!” Then silence. Then heavy breathing, out of breath: “No, he's already gone. In the car. He went bowling.”

  “Bowling.”

  “He's in a Sunday afternoon league. You know, he has to keep his evenings free.”

  “Sure.”

  “He'll be back at six, but that's when we eat supper.”

  “You don't want me to call at six.”

  “I could have him call you.”

  “Nah, that's okay.” Very casual: “Where's he bowl?”

  “Who's this?” Suddenly not the motherly voice any more.

  “It's okay,” he assured her. “I'm an old evening pal of Bernie's, my name's Meehan, he may have mentioned me.”

  “Bernie doesn't mention people,” she said, still sounding suspicious, “unless he bowls with them.”

  “Well, he never bowled with me,” Meehan said. “Just tell me, when can I call?”

  “Sometimes he—Oh, wait a minute!”

  “What?”

  But she was off again, cloppety-clop, “Bernie! Bernie!”

  Meehan listened to indistinct talk, some of it definitely a male voice, and then what was recognizably Bernie suddenly said in his ear, “Meehan?”

  “Yeah. Bernie, hi, how are you?”

  “I forgot the ball,” Bernie said confidentially. “Can you believe it?”

  “Happens,” Meehan said.

  “I'd forget my head, it wasn't screwed on.”

  “It isn't!” sallied the woman from away.

  Ignoring that, Bernie said, “So what's up?”

  “A little something. We could talk, if you're free.”

  “As a bird,” Bernie said. “Where do you wanna talk?”

  “You say.”

  “Come to the bowling alley.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure. There's a bar there, always plenty of time between games. Also”—a his voice dropping—“it's so loud in there, you can have a private conversation, you know what I'm saying?”

  “I hear you,” Meehan said.

  The bowling alley, like Bernie's home, was in Queens, which meant Meehan first took a subway under the East River and way to hell and gone out to neighborhoods that haven't seen a stranger since Prohibition ended. From there, he had to take a bus through more neighborhoods of the same, until he debussed at an intersection where Atomic Lanes hunched like a war-surplus airplane hangar opposite him across six lanes of boulevard.

  Sometimes a commercial operation's name places it in history. Atomic Lanes would be circa l946 to 1949, the war over, atomic bombs good, the guys home from the military and wanting to bowl. Most of the Atomic Diners and Atomic Car Washes and Atomic Shoe Repairs from that period were long gone, but here remained Atomic Lanes, unchanged, much like
the neighborhood in which it was situated, also still circa 1946 to 1949.

  Meehan had an opportunity to do several grafs of his monograph on commercial names in history in his head, just reaching the point of trying to figure out what the first set of changes would have been—Swingers Dry Cleaners?—before the traffic lights changed, and it became possible to cross the boulevard and enter Atomic Lanes.

  Noise. That was the first thing that struck him, almost literally, when he pushed through one of the glass doors into the place, a continuous echoing racket bouncing off nothing but hard surfaces, a cacophony he associated with indoor municipal swimming pools.

  There were wide steps dead ahead, and a high ceiling full of bright lights beyond. Meehan went up the steps, and the interior revealed itself to him a little more with each step. There must have been 40 lanes 40, every one of them in use. Mostly it was bowling leagues, the teams all in the same shirt, some male leagues, some female, some mixed. Everybody bowled, and everybody talked, and everybody shouted encouragement to everybody else. Everybody shrieked with triumph and cried out in despair.

  I couldn't find a hundred Bernies in here, Meehan told himself, but then all at once he did. One, anyway. Six, seven lanes off to the right, dressed like his teammates—all male—in white short-sleeved shirt with maroon stripes on the sleeves and neck and ADDISON'S FUNERAL HOME in maroon italic on the back. That was Bernie there, skinny, quick-moving, mostly bald with pepper-and-salt steel wool around the edges. He was standing on the banquette seat, the better to see what his teammate was going to do with that 7-10 split, which was miss them both, causing four roars of triumph and four wails of agony. Then Bernie grabbed his ball off the return—a sparkly red-white ball, a popular auto color circa Atomic Lanes—and poised himself, waiting for the automatic pin-setter to finish fussing about, which was probably the only real change in here since opening day, the replacement of the pin boys who used to be back there, scrambling desperately out of the way of the oncoming balls.

  Meehan walked along the raised aisle behind the banquettes until he was directly behind Bernie and his team, and watched Bernie knock over seven pins, leaving three on the left, then knock down the three. When he turned back to his team, shaking his head, he glanced up and saw Meehan. With a grin, he waved and pointed to something behind Meehan to his right. Meehan looked and it was the bar, open on this side, with tables next to it.

  Meehan looked back to nod at Bernie, but Bernie was already again deeply involved with his team, so Meehan went to the bar, got a Rolling Rock, and sat with it at a table where he could watch Bernie's game without entirely understanding it.

  By the time Bernie came trotting up, also wearing nonskid bowling shoes the same color as his bowling ball, Meehan was used to the racket. “Whadayasay,” Bernie greeted him on arrival, and Meehan heard him fine.

  “I say that's a very healthful thing you got going there,” Meehan said.

  “Yeah, thank God for the bar,” Bernie said. “Be right back.” And he was, with his own Rolling Rock, saying, “How you been?”

  “Bad, until a few days ago,” Meehan told him, “but I'll get to that.” After having tried out his story on Woody, he'd decided this time to go at it from a different direction. “I got a lead on something,” he said, “that Leroy from Cargo's gonna take in a second. And it isn't even that hard to get at.”

  “Sounds great,” Bernie said. “What is it?”

  “Antique guns.”

  Bernie cocked his head. “And again?”

  “There's this rich guy up in Massachusetts,” Meehan explained, “he collects antique guns from early American wars. Famous collection, goes on tour and everything. Lot of valuable rifles and shit, full of history, Minute Men, Johnny Reb, all that.”

  “And you've got a way to get it.”

  “I know where it is,” Meehan said. “I gotta case it a little more.”

  “There's gonna be locks for me,” Bernie suggested. He was a lockman, usually.

  “Oh, yeah,” Meehan said.

  “Sounds interesting,” Bernie admitted. “Do you know how much is in it?”

  “I didn't ask Leroy,” Meehan said. “You want, give him a call, tell him you're coming in with me, it's the Burnstone collection.”

  “No, I don't need to,” Bernie decided. “Leroy wouldn't get excited if it wasn't pretty good.”

  “That's what I figured.”

  Glancing away, Bernie said, “Can you stick around? I'll be back next game.”

  “Sure,” Meehan said.

  When next he saw Bernie heading toward the bar, Meehan said to Mona, “There's my friend. I gotta talk to him. So we're on for dinner?”

  “Sure,” she said, with a grin he was learning to like. She was with an all-girl league.

  Meehan paused at the bar for a new Rolling Rock, joined Bernie, and Bernie said, “You're still a bachelor, huh?”

  “No,” Meehan told him, “I'm still an ex-husband. Our needs are greater.”

  “I can see that,” Bernie said. “So how did you come on to this gun thing?”

  “Well, that's the weird story,” Meehan said. “It was brought to me by a guy.”

  “You can count on him?”

  “Wait'll you hear,” Meehan assured him. “The thing is, though, there's a deadline involved. The guy's got his own problems, and we gotta pull the job no later than Thursday.”

  “This Thursday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jeez,” Bernie said.

  “I been up there once,” Meehan told him, “and it looks good. I figure we drive up there tomorrow, be certain sure. Could we use your car?”

  “Fine,” Bernie said. “Only, who's this guy with the deadline?”

  So Meehan told him.

  When Meehan was finished, there was as much silence at their table as had ever happened in that bowling alley. Then Bernie said, “Took you out of the MCC.”

  “They needed somebody in a federal facility.”

  “Is this guy setting you up? Is he who he says he is?”

  “He is,” Meehan said. “They're paying for my lawyer, six thou already, plus one for me, walking around money. I'm flying in corporate jets contributed to the campaign. They put me up in a United States Parks Department complex down in North Carolina. They're weird, but they're real.”

  “The weather's supposed to be nice tomorrow,” Bernie said. “I'm not tied up, a drive might be nice. Massachusetts, you say?”

  “Two and a half hours, no more.”

  “Okay,” Bernie said, and grinned. “What the hell. It's worth it just to be part of that story.”

  “That's my man.”

  “So where and when do you want to meet?”

  Meehan glanced over toward Mona. “I'll call you in the morning,” he said. “We'll set a rendezvous.”

  27

  MEEHAN WAS FINISHING his breakfast at the diner two blocks along the boulevard from Atomic Lanes—the California Dreamin Diner, a more recent vintage—when he saw Bernie pull into the parking lot in a gray Honda Accord with Maryland license plates. Meehan rose, left a dollar on the table, paid the cashier, and went out to where Bernie sat at the wheel, reading the Daily News. Meehan slid in beside him and said, “Maryland?”

  “Oh, sure,” Bernie said. Tossing the paper onto the back seat, steering out to the boulevard, he said, “I put those on if I'm working, going out of town. Those or the Florida plates. I got ID to go with both of them.” Stopping at a red light, he grinned and said, “One time, I found out at the end of the day, I had the Florida plates on the car, the Maryland ID in my wallet. Good thing I wasn't stopped.”

  “Yeah,” Meehan said. “You got it right today, though, huh?”

  “Ever since then, I double-check.”

  Bernie drove over to the Van Wyck Expressway, and they did the Whitestone Bridge and the Hutch and on north, and two and a half hours later, as Meehan had promised, they turned off US 7 onto Spring Road. A couple miles later, they came to Burnstone Trail on the
ir left, with a sawhorse across it bearing a sign NO ACCESS. “Aha,” Meehan said.

  Bernie had stopped, to consider the road and the sign. There was no other traffic on Spring Road today. He said, “That wasn't there, the last time you came up?”

  “There was a picnic kind of thing going on last time. Let's see what happens, we go on down Spring Road.”

  They went on down Spring Road and nothing happened; no houses, no turnoffs, nothing but increasingly thick forest and increasingly steep hill. When the blacktop switched to dirt, Bernie said, “What more do you want to see?”

  “Let's go back.”

  Bernie K-turned, and they looked at the same scenery from the other direction. Driving along, Bernie said, “You think it's better, go in at night?”

  “Security's gonna be more serious at night,” Meehan said. “And anyway, I wanna give it the double-o.”

  “Sure.”

  They kept driving, and then Bernie said, “There it is, up ahead.”

  “Stop by it,” Meehan said, so Bernie did, and Meehan frowned out the Honda window at the sawhorse and the blacktop road beyond it, meandering away. “We gotta get in there,” he said.

  “Sure,” Bernie said.

  Meehan frowned some more at the sawhorse, and all at once he said, “Wait a minute. What are we worried about? That isn't a burglar alarm, it's just a sawhorse.”

  “That's true,” Bernie said.

  “It doesn't even block the whole road.”

  “True.”

  “There's nobody here, nobody going in, nobody coming out.”

  “Also true.”

  Meehan looked away from the sawhorse. “You got a map of Connecticut?”

  “We're in Massachusetts.”

  “I know. That's why I want Connecticut.”

  Bernie considered that for a second, then grinned. “I get it. We're lost.”

  “That's exactly it.”

  Bernie rooted around in the pocket of his door, and at last came up with a Connecticut map. “Got it.”

  “Great. And I tell you what,” Meehan said. “Take the key, but don't lock.”

  “'Cause we're innocent.”

  “Just passing through.”

  They got out of the Honda, walked around the sawhorse, and headed down Burnstone Trail, Bernie folding the map to show northwestern Connecticut, near where they were. All the bunting and election posters had been removed.