Put a Lid on It

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I was brought in as your lawyer,” she reminded him.

  “By me.”

  “And I'm grateful. It's been fun.”

  “But now it's over,” he said.

  “You don't need a lawyer any more. I hope you don't need a lawyer any more.”

  “I get it,” he said.

  He looked at the chauffeur and tried to think about needing a limo tomorrow. After a few minutes, he actually was thinking about needing that limo tomorrow, and thinking the thing to do might be go up to Massachusetts tonight with Bernie, find a limo company in the yellow pages, see what was what.

  “Meehan,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Yeah?”

  Her face was wrinkled into a very complicated frown. “Were you hitting on me?”

  “What? You can't hit on your lawyer, that isn't one—That isn't done.” He'd almost said something about the ten thousand rules, which would have been a very stupid thing to do.

  “I'm not your lawyer any more,” she pointed out. “Not since we came out of Judge Foote's chambers.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He gave her a happy grin. “Then I can hit on you!”

  She sat there watching him, not saying anything, until he became uncertain. “Goldfarb,” he said, “you've got me insecure.”

  “I have?”

  “I'm not usually insecure,” he told her.

  “I've noticed that,” she said.

  He nodded, thinking it over, then said, “I tell you what. Let's swing around my hotel first, let me pick up a couple things, then I'll come up to your place with you, I mean, your place is also your office—”

  “It is.”

  “—and we can discuss it,” he said. “Clear the air.”

  “That's a good idea,” she said. “I think we ought to clear the air.”

  “Good.”

  “I don't want you insecure,” she said.

  Damn if the red light on the phone wasn't blinking again! He almost didn't answer it, having other things on his mind, but then he did, and it was Jeffords, and he sounded awful. Whispering, gulping, hurried, terrified: “Francis, for God's sake, call me! Call me as soon as you can!”

  So he did, and Jeffords answered on the first ring, sounding even worse: “What?” A ragged but loud shrill whisper, right next to the phone.

  “I can hear you,” Meehan said. “Take it easy.”

  “Francis! Thank God! Come get me, Francis! Come get me out of here!”

  “Get you out of where? What happened to you?”

  “They kidnapped me! Quick, come get me!”

  Then Meehan got it: “What, Yehudi and Mostafa?”

  “I don't know who they are, I only want—”

  “So much for your president and his ultimate threat.”

  “Don't lord it over me now, Francis, I'm in desperate trouble! They're going to cut my fingers off!”

  “Who is? Why?”

  “These people! If I don't tell them where you are and what you're after!”

  “All right,” Meehan said. “Run it by me once, beginning to end, and I'll see what I can do.”

  Jeffords gulped, made a strangled sound, then said, “Right after lunch, in the restaurant parking lot, they grabbed me, threw me in a delivery van, held a gun on me, drove me here, said they're waiting for their expert to come up from DC, he's the one cuts the fingers off, if I don't tell them before he gets here he'll cut one finger off an hour, and then one toe, and then the ears. I don't know what he does after the ears.”

  “I doubt the question ever comes up,” Meehan said. “So where are you?”

  “Upper West Side, off Broadway. I could see Broadway down the street when they took me out of the van, there's a Sloan's supermarket on the corner, I'm in a little building, there's a red neon sign READER in the front window, they shoved me down in the basement here, some kind of storage room, it's very dark, they took my wallet and my watch but I hid the phone in my sock when I was in the van, and I have it on vibrate so it won't ring, and you're the only one I can think of—”

  “Cops,” Meehan advised.

  “No!”

  “Dial 911,” Meehan suggested.

  “It'll go public! It'll all go public!”

  “You'll have all your fingers.”

  “But I won't have a job, ever again. I won't have an entire administration! Do you want to see the Other Side in the White House? Do you know what a disaster that would be?”

  “Actually, I don't,” Meehan said.

  “Come get me, Francis,” Jeffords begged. “I'm begging you.”

  “Change of plans,” Meehan said, as he got into the limo.

  Goldfarb gave him a fish-eye Judge Foote would have been proud of. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Jeffords on the answering machine. I called him, and Yehudi and Mostafa kidnapped him, they're waiting for a specialist to come cut his fingers off if he doesn't talk about me and the package. He won't call the cops, so I gotta go rescue him.”

  “You have to rescue Pat Jeffords,” she said, in an extremely flat way.

  “That's the story,” he said, and shrugged, because that was the story.

  She thought about it, then shook her head. “There have to be easier ways to avoid commitment.”

  “And I know all of them,” he assured her. “They've got him in a building up in your neighborhood, in a place with a Reader, you know, one of those Gypsy psychics, down the block from a Sloan's.”

  “There's a couple of Sloan's up there,” she said, still frowning very hard.

  “Well, he's near one of them.”

  “I'll come with you,” she said.

  “Don't be crazy,” he told her.

  “I'm not,” she said, and called to the chauffeur, “We want to go up Broadway.”

  He saluted in the mirror, and started them away from the curb. She turned back to Meehan: “You carrying?”

  “Carrying what?”

  “Heat!” she exclaimed. “A rod! A gat!”

  “I never carry a gun,” he said.

  “Well, I do,” she said. “We'll go to my place first.” Leaning forward again, she called to the chauffeur, “Never mind Broadway, we'll go back to where you picked me up,” and the chauffeur saluted in the mirror again.

  They rolled northward, and Meehan said, “Jeffords'll like this, being rescued by a lawyer in a limo.”

  36

  AFTER GOLDFARB WENT into her building, Meehan moved to the rear-facing seat, up by the chauffeur, and said, “This is really a nice clean car you got here.”

  The chauffeur, surprised but amiable, smiled at him in the mirror and said, “Yes, it is. Thanks.”

  “You keep it in a garage?”

  The chauffeur grinned, shaking his head. “It's not my car,” he said, “belongs to a big outfit up in the Bronx.”

  “Oh.”

  “They got everything,” he said. “They got buses and vans and limos and even ambulances.”

  “Big outfit,” Meehan guessed.

  “You know it,” the chauffeur said. “But no garages, just the one big lot.”

  “Thinka that,” Meehan said.

  “The limos,” the chauffeur told him, “get run through the car wash every time they go out on a job. The rest of the time, they're just in there with everything else, the buses and the vans and the Dobermans.”

  “Ambulances, you said.”

  “Right, ambulances, too,” the chauffeur agreed.

  Meehan said, “Dobermans?”

  “You got graffiti kids up there,” the chauffeur explained. “If they didn't have all those Dobermans on the lot, those kids'd crawl over the fence, they don't even care about razor wire, they'd be in there spray-painting initials over everything in sight. Even a nice limo like this,” he said. “They got no respect at all, those kids.”

  “Dobermans,” Meehan said.

  “They sure keep those kids out,” the chauffeur said, “you can bet on that.”

  “I'm sure they do,” Meehan said, and when Goldf
arb came out of her building, clutching her big bag close to her side, Meehan was back in his own seat, brooding out at the traffic, thinking about limos. Limos without Dobermans.

  The chauffeur hopped out to open Goldfarb's door, and she got in, giving Meehan a meaningful look as she patted her bag. Now she was carrying.

  The chauffeur returned behind the wheel of this unobtainable limo and Goldfarb called to him, “Now we want to cruise Broadway, kind of slow. We're looking for a Sloan's.”

  The chauffeur said, “Uptown or downtown?”

  They looked at one another, and Meehan called, “We'll go downtown first. If we don't find anything by Seventy-second, we'll come back up.”

  “Done,” the chauffeur said, and did his mirror salute.

  As they started across toward Broadway, Goldfarb said, “You didn't get your stuff from your room.”

  “Jeffords distracted me,” he said. “I'll get it later.”

  “Jeffords,” she said. “That's unbelievable, to kidnap a man in broad daylight.”

  “Where they're from,” Meehan said, “I think that's standard operating procedure. You kidnap somebody, that's the way you start a dialogue.”

  “I'll stick to the phone,” she said.

  They found a wrong Sloan's in the 70s, with no Reader nearby, and the right Sloan's in the 90s. Down the block from the Reader was a fire hydrant, beside which the chauffeur stopped the car.

  “We won't be long,” Goldfarb told him, which Meehan hoped was right, and they walked back to the building, one of a row of narrow four-story brick places, this the only one with a shop front on the ground floor. Tarot symbols and dolls and globes and a sleeping cat were in the display window, along with the narrow-lettered red neon READER sign suspended behind the glass, all framed by what looked like a shower curtain with moons and stars painted on it swagged open. Beyond the window was a small empty living room, pale little furniture on light green industrial carpet, crucifixes and other religious ornamentation on the wall, and beside the window was the door, which was locked and bore a sign RING BELL under the hand-painted golden MADAME SYLVIA.

  “I'll step to one side,” Meehan said. “They won't realize you're the dangerous one.”

  “They will soon,” she said, and pushed the button.

  Meehan had thought the bell would be answered by Madame Sylvia, but when he slid through the widening space behind Goldfarb what he looked at was very unlikely to be called either Madame or Sylvia. This was a bulky guy, hairy shoulders revealed by his dirty white strap undershirt above shapeless dark blue work pants and black work boots. He wore rings and bracelets and a watch and various tattoos, and he'd started to say, “Madame Sylvia will—” when he saw Meehan come in, and went into hostile mode: “What's this?”

  “Show him the rod, sugar,” Meehan said, elbowing the door shut behind him.

  “Victor!” the guy yelled at the curtained doorway behind him, but then he backed away as Goldfarb unpacked the iron. “What's goin on?”

  As Victor, a slightly uglier version of the first one, but in a T-shirt that advertised beer, came pushing through the curtain, and as Goldfarb gripped the pistol in her right hand, resting its butt on the cupped palm of her left hand to show she'd taken some lessons somewhere, not quite pointing the barrel at anybody, Meehan reached into her big bag hanging from her left shoulder and muttered, “Your cellphone.”

  Victor and the first one asked each other questions in a language all their own, while Meehan pulled out the cellphone and punched in Jeffords' number. He had to be fast before they agreed on a counterattack, which they would definitely do once they got over the first shock.

  “Hello?” Still terrified.

  “Jeffords!” Meehan yelled, a name that made Victor and his friend stop talking to stare wide-eyed. “Hang up, switch your phone to ring, and I'll call you back.” He broke the connection, said to the two guys, “Listen for the ring,” punched redial, and they all heard the faint faraway ding-a-ling in the basement.

  “Hello!”

  “Jeffords,” Meehan said, “if you hear any trouble up here, or this phone hangs up, dial 911 right then and we'll figure it out later. You got me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “We're upstairs, you idiot, where do you think we are?” Pointing his free hand at Victor, he said, “Go down and let him out, or we fill the place with cops.”

  The two guys babbled together, and a woman in a scarlet ball gown and gold turban came through the curtain, carrying an ax. Now all three babbled together.

  Meehan said, “Goldfarb, can you shoot that picture of Satan over there on the wall?”

  “Is that what that ugly thing is?” she said, and shot it in the belly. The clap ricocheted around the room. Glass from the frame spattered all over the place, and three barefoot children ran through the curtain, screaming. They immediately switched over to loud crying, while the woman with the ax told them to shut up and Meehan yelled at Victor, “Get down there now before the elephants show up!”

  “We got a guy comin,” Victor said, “explain everything.”

  “The guy from DC, to cut off his fingers,” Meehan said, and Jeffords on the cellphone moaned. “I know all about him, we'll take a raincheck. What do you want, Victor? Right now, this second, you let him go, or we fill the place with cops.”

  The woman with the ax yelled at Goldfarb, who responded by pointing the pistol directly at her forehead. The woman sneered. “You wouldn't shoot nobody.”

  “She's a lawyer, lady,” Meehan told her, “she's capable of anything.” Then, into the phone, since nobody was moving, he yelled, “All right, screw it, Jeffords, they aren't going to release you, we'll both hang up, we'll both call 911, we don't want to be here—”

  “Wait!” It was Victor, at last getting the idea, holding his hands out as though to stop a stampede. “I'll get him! I'll get him!”

  “Victor's coming to get you,” Meehan told the phone. “Don't hang up, I wanna hear everything that happens.”

  Victor left, and the woman pointed her ax at the shot picture. “That was an antique,” she said. “You gotta pay for that.”

  “Send me a bill,” Goldfarb told her.

  “I could take you to small-claims court.”

  “I wish you would,” Goldfarb said. “What a nice list of witnesses we could have.”

  The woman looked sulky. “I bet you are a lawyer,” she said, and Jeffords hurtled into the room, his own cellphone to his ear, his face and clothing streaked with dirt. “I'm here!” he yelled into his phone and into Meehan's ear, and Meehan recoiled, shouting, “Jee-zis, moderate it, will ya?”

  “Out,” Goldfarb said to Jeffords, keeping both hands on the gun, nodding her head backward at the door, as Victor reappeared. Meehan opened the door, and Jeffords exited at a dead run, Meehan telling him, “Hang a left,” as he tore by. Then Meehan followed, and Goldfarb backed out last, the men and the woman with the ax glaring, the three kids having tantrums.

  Goldfarb slid the gun into her bag as she and Meehan hurried after Jeffords, who would have shot right on by their wheels if Meehan hadn't yelled, “The limo!” Jeffords turned on a dime, yanked open the limo door, and hurled himself in headfirst.

  Goldfarb and Meehan followed, more sanely, and when Meehan looked back, there was a taxi pulling up at Reader, and Victor and the other guy were running out to the sidewalk, both pointing toward the limo.

  “Back to the hotel,” Meehan called to the chauffeur, as he pulled the door shut.

  Goldfarb was in her usual seat, with Jeffords on the floor, scrambling around. Meehan took his own seat and saw the discussion continue back there, two new ones having climbed out of the cab. “Your doctors just arrived,” he said.

  The traffic light at the corner being miraculously green, the limo took the left onto West End. Jeffords sorted himself out, and climbed onto the rear-facing seat, then said, “Why the hotel?”

  “Because they haven't found me yet,” Meehan told him. “So it's safe.
” To Goldfarb he said, “Your place isn't.”

  “God damn it,” she said. “I have to check in there again?”

  “I will, too,” Jeffords said. “They have my wallet, they know my address, I don't dare go home. In fact,” to Goldfarb, “I'm going to have to ask you to sign for my room. You'll get it back.”

  Meehan said, “What are you gonna do about your wallet?”

  “Call Arthur,” said Jeffords. With grim satisfaction, he said, “And I shall tell him that his access to the president is history. And I want my wallet and my watch back from those friends of his. And there's a certain History of Steam museum,” he went on, with savage gusto now that he wasn't being held by the bad guys any more, “in some certain someone's congressional district, that is very unlikely to be constructed after all.”

  37

  OF COURSE THE red light was winking on the telephone, but it could possibly be either Goldfarb or Jeffords, both of whom he'd left in the lobby, checking in. But could they have gotten to their rooms this fast?

  No. Bernie's voice: “We've got the truck. Bob and I'll drive up in the morning, let me know where and when we meet. And how you doing with the limo?”

  “I'll get back to you on that,” Meehan told the dead phone, capped it, and when it rang again eight minutes later he was actually in the room to pick up the receiver and say, “Here.”

  It was Goldfarb: “You know it's time for lunch.”

  Surprised, he looked at the bedside clock, and it told him 2:13. Eleven this morning the meeting with Judge Foote, then home, then running around rescuing Jeffords from the pedicurists, and now it was after two. Meehan's stomach growled, for confirmation. “We should do something about that,” he said.

  She said, “With Jeffords or without?”

  There were things to talk about with Jeffords. “I tell you what,” Meehan said. “Lunch with, dinner without.”

  “Smart,” she said.

  Jeffords chose the place, a Greek diner tucked into the bottom corner of an old stone apartment building a couple blocks north of the Crowne Royale. They sat in a pale blue vinyl-and-chrome booth with a pale blue Formica table and read a menu sixty-four pages long, at the end of which Goldfarb told the Vietnamese waiter she wanted the Greek salad with feta cheese, Jeffords wanted the feta cheese omelet, and Meehan wanted a hamburger with everything and french fries. The waiter sloped away and Goldfarb told Meehan, “That isn't healthy.”