What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  “I noticed that,” Dortmunder said.

  “No trap door for access to the machinery or anything.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So the machinery’s probably up above.”

  They looked upward, at the plain gray–painted roof of the elevator, and in the rear right quadrant were the clear outlines of a trap door. And in the trap door was a keyhole. “They’re beginning to annoy me,” Dortmunder said.

  “Us guys don’t give up,” Andy said.

  “That’s true,” Dortmunder said, “though I sometimes wonder why.”

  “When the going gets tough,” Andy said, “the tough get an expert. I know when a lock is beyond my simple rustic skills. What we need is a lockman.”

  “You want to bring somebody in?”

  “Why not? What we pick up in that place down there we split three ways instead of two. You don’t care anyway, you just want your ring.”

  “That’s also true,” Dortmunder admitted. “But a little profit would be nice.”

  “I’ll see if Wally Whistler’s around,” Andy said, “or Ralph Winslow, they’re both good. I’ll show them the pictures in that magazine, they’ll pay us to come along.”

  “I wouldn’t hold out for that,” Dortmunder said, and looked at the damn keyhole in the damn control panel. “Here we are, right here and all,” he said, “and the ring right down there underneath us. I can feel it.”

  “We’ll get it,” Andy assured him, and looked at his watch and said, “But not tonight. Tomorrow night.” He turned to unlock the door to the corridor. “Tonight I kinda got an appointment, I wouldn’t want to be late.”

  Dortmunder frowned at him. “An appointment? This time of night?”

  “Well, New York, you know,” Andy said, and opened the door cautiously, and stuck his head out just a bit to see if the coast was clear, and nodded back at Dortmunder, “the city that never sleeps.”

  Dortmunder followed him out to the corridor, and behind him the unmarked door snicked shut. “New York, the city with insomnia,” he said. “Is that a good idea?”

  “See you tomorrow,” Andy said.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  Most of the guests staying at the N–Joy Broadway Hotel, when they got up in the morning, went out sight–seeing, but not the Williamses. They got up and went out, like everybody else, but Mrs. Williams then became May Bellamy and went to work at the supermarket downtown, while Mr. Williams reverted to one John Dortmunder, who went home to East Nineteenth Street, where he did what he usually did at home all day long, which wasn’t much.

  It had been agreed that Dortmunder and May would get together back at the hotel at six, to add another hotel meal to the credit card tab they were running up, and then wait for Andy Kelp and X Hour to arrive, which they figured to be midnight; this evening, they’d try not to fall asleep. So at about five–thirty, Dortmunder left the apartment, and when he opened the street door downstairs who was coming up the stoop but Gus Brock. “Hello,” Dortmunder said.

  “Hello,” Gus said, and stopped there on the steps.

  Dortmunder said, “This is not a coincidence, am I right?”

  Gus scrinched up his eyes. “What isn’t a coincidence? I came over to see you.”

  “That’s what I meant. I’m walking uptown.”

  “Then so am I.”

  They started walking together, and after they made the turn onto Third Avenue and headed uptown Gus said, “I read in Newsday where we scored pretty good out on the Island last week.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “That was us, wasn’t it? Took all that stuff from that big house in Carrport?”

  “Us?” Dortmunder asked. “How do you figure ‘us’?”

  “Well, you know, John,” Gus said, “you didn’t know about that place, I did. You didn’t know about the Chapter Eleven and all that, and I did.”

  “Except the guy was there,” said Dortmunder. “So much for all your chapters.”

  “It was our little job, John,” Gus said. “I’m just asking you to consider the situation and you’ll see it would be fair I should get a piece of this. Maybe not half, I’m not a greedy guy, but —”

  Dortmunder stopped, on the sidewalk. People and traffic went by in all directions. He said, “Gus, you and I went out there to make a little visit and it didn’t happen. You went away —”

  “John, don’t fault me,” Gus said. “You would’ve went away, too.”

  “Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “And I wouldn’t come to you afterward and say we did this and we did that.”

  “Sure you would,” Gus said. “Can we walk, John? Where are we walking anyway?”

  Dortmunder started walking again, and Gus kept pace. “Uptown,” Dortmunder said.

  “Thank you. About us sharing —”

  “No, Gus,” Dortmunder said. “That little visit stopped. You went away, and I was arrested.”

  “Yeah, I read about that,” Gus said, and shook his head with empathetic concern. “Wow, that was a close one.”

  “It wasn’t a close one,” Dortmunder said, “it was a direct hit. I was arrested.”

  People going by looked at them, but kept going. Gus said, “You don’t have to shout about it, John, it isn’t like hitting the lottery or something.”

  Patiently, calmly, Dortmunder said, “After I was arrested, I escaped. Nobody helped me, and especially you didn’t help me, I just —”

  “Come on, John.”

  “— escaped. And after I escaped I went back to that house, and that was a completely different visit, that didn’t have one thing to do with you. You were gone, and I was escaped, and it was a whole new start. So what I got was what I got and not what we got.”

  They walked half a block in silence, Gus absorbing the philosophy of Dortmunder’s concept, and then he sighed and said, “John, we been friends a long time.”

  “I would say,” Dortmunder said, “we’ve been associates a long time.”

  “Okay, a little more precise, fine. I understand your position here, I’d be a little aggrieved at my partner, too, if the circumstances were reversed, but John I’m asking you to put yourself in my position for a minute. I’m still the guy that found the score, and I still have this like empty feeling that the score went down and I didn’t get bupkis for it.”

  “You should’ve stuck around,” Dortmunder said, unsympathetically. “We could’ve escaped together.”

  “John, you’re usually a reasonable kind of a guy.”

  “I’m trying to break myself of that.”

  “So that’s how you want to end it. Bad feelings all around.”

  Again, Dortmunder stopped in the flow of pedestrian traffic to turn and frown at Gus, studying him, thinking it over. Gus faced him, being dignified, and finally Dortmunder said, “Did you hear about the ring?”

  Gus looked bewildered. “Ring? What ring?”

  I’m going to tell him the story, Dortmunder decided, and if he laughs that’s it, let him walk away. “It’s the reason I went back to the house,” he said.

  “Which I thought, when I realized what must have happened,” Gus said, “was a very gutsy thing to do.”

  “It was a very necessary thing to do,” Dortmunder told him, “given what happened.”

  “Something happened?”

  “After I was arrested, the cops asked the guy, did he take anything? And the guy said, he took my ring, he’s wearing my ring. And it was my ring, that May gave me, and the cops made me take it off and give it to the guy.”

  Gus’s jaw dropped. “He stole your ring?”

  Dortmunder watched him like a hawk. “That’s what happened.”

  “Why, that bastard!” Gus cried, and pedestrians made wider detours around them as they stood there. “That son of a bitch, to do a thing like that!”

  Dortmunder said, “You think so?”

  “They’ve already got you caught,” Gus said, “they’ve got you arrested, you’re facing heavy time, and he ha
s to rub your nose in it? What a crappy guy!”

  Dortmunder said, “Let’s walk.”

  “Sure.”

  They started walking, and Gus said, “I can’t get over it. I never heard such a nasty thing to do. Kick a guy when he’s down.”

  “That’s why I had to escape,” Dortmunder said. “I had to go back there and try to get my ring back, only the guy was already gone. So I took all that other stuff instead.”

  “I get ya,” Gus said.

  “But I still want my ring,” Dortmunder said.

  “Naturally,” Gus said. “Me, I’d chase the son of a bitch around the world if I had to.”

  “It was looking like that was exactly what I was gonna have to do,” Dortmunder told him, “only now it turns out, he’s at another of his places, right here in New York.”

  “No kidding,” Gus said.

  “Also got a lot of nice stuff in it,” Dortmunder said.

  “I bet it does.”

  “We’re going in there tonight,” Dortmunder said, “try to get my ring, pick up whatever else’s around.”

  “We?”

  “Andy Kelp and a lockman, I don’t know who yet, and me. You wanna make it four?”

  Gus thought about that. “You mean, forget the Carrport thing, and come in with you on this one.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Deal me in,” said Gus.

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  Max was furious. To be talked to like that, to be chastised, by some pip–squeak stooge, was intolerable. Max was shaking when he finally left Judge Mainman’s chambers at two–thirty — an hour and a half with that moron! — shaking with frustration and rage, ready to commit a personal murder with his own two hands for the first time in years and years. “That — that — that —”

  “I wouldn’t say it, Max,” Walter Greenbaum advised, walking beside him. Walter, Max’s personal attorney with the heavy bags under his eyes, could even make a statement like that sound like profundity.

  “At least not until we’re out of the building,” said John Weisman, walking on Max’s other side.

  John Weisman was another attorney, yet another of Max’s attorneys. It seemed to Max sometimes that he had attorneys the way Chinese restaurants have roaches. Every time you turned on the light, there were more of them. This one, John Weisman, was a specialist, Max’s bankruptcy attorney. The man devoted his life to bankruptcy cases, and charged an arm and a leg, and lived very well indeed off bankruptcy, proving either that you can get blood from a turnip, or a lot of those things claiming to be turnips were lying.

  In any event, Weisman didn’t have Walter’s solonic majesty, so that his not–till–we’re–outside crack merely sounded like a not–till–we’re–outside crack. A compact lean man in tip–top physical condition, Weisman apparently spent all his spare time in rugged pursuits, hunting, camping, hiking, mountain climbing, you name it. Max personally thought it showed great restraint on Weisman’s part not to come to court in a camouflage uniform.

  Although today it was Max who might have been better in camouflage. Judge Mainman, a fat–faced petty inquisitor, had treated him with such disdain, such contempt, as though there were something wrong with a successful man wishing to avail himself of the benefits of the law. Why would successful men buy legislators, if they weren’t to make use of the resulting laws? But try to tell that to Judge Mainman.

  “I can’t do it, you know,” Max said, as they left the court building, down all those broad shallow steps that irritatingly forced you to think about every step you took — rather appropriate for a courthouse, actually — and across the sidewalk full of scruffy people in Max Fairbanks’s way, to the waiting limousine, whose waiting chauffeur in timely fashion opened the rear door.

  The attorneys waited until everybody was inside the limo and the door shut, and then Walter said, “Can’t do what?” while Weisman said, “Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks, you have no choice.”

  Walter looked at Weisman: “Has no choice in what?”

  “Selling the house.”

  “I can’t do it,” Max said. The limousine pulled smoothly and silently away from the rotten courthouse. “It’s a personal humiliation. It’s a humiliation within my own company! In front of my own employees!”

  “Still,” Weisman said, “we do have the order.”

  The order. Judge Mainman, the puny despot, had been fuming when they’d entered his chambers, petulant that anyone would treat his magnificent decisions lightly. He didn’t believe Max’s sworn statement that he’d only gone out to Carrport to pick up some important papers, and he’d made his disbelief insultingly obvious. He was so affronted, this minor little pip–squeak of a judge, he was so affronted, he spoke at first with apparent seriousness about reopening the entire Chapter Eleven proceeding, a move that could only improve his creditors’ prospects and cost Max who knows how much more money. Millions. Actual money; millions.

  So it had been necessary to grovel before the son of a bitch, to apologize, to promise to take the bastard’s orders much more seriously from now on, and then to thank the miserable cretin for backing off from an entire junking of the agreement, backing off to a mere order to sell the Carrport house.

  Yes. Sell the house, put the proceeds from the sale into the bankruptcy fund, and let it be dribbled away into the coffers of the creditors. And every single TUI employee in middle management and above, every last one of them who had ever spent a night, a weekend, a seminar afternoon, out at the Carrport house, would understand that the boss had lost the house to a miserable bankruptcy judge.

  “There’s got to be some way out of this,” Max said. “Come on, one of you, think of something.”

  Walter said, “Max, John’s right. You have to put the property on the market. The best you can do is hope it isn’t sold between now and the time we’re finished with this adjustment.”

  “Well, no,” Weisman said. “The house has now been placed in the category of assets to be disbursed, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said Walter. Even his hmmmmms sounded wise.

  Max said, “If I put it on the market at some outlandish price? So no one will ever buy it?”

  “Then you’re in contempt of court,” Weisman said. “You have to offer the house for sale at fair market price, and I have to so represent to the court. There’s nothing else to be done.”

  Bitter, brooding, Max twisted his new ring around and around and around on his finger. He wasn’t even conscious of that gesture any more, it had become so habitual so soon. “I’ve lost the goddam house,” he said.

  “Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks,” Weisman said, “but you have.”

  Walter said, “Max, you’ll just have to put this behind you, and look ahead.” Even Walter, though, couldn’t make that twaddle sound like anything but twaddle.

  Max said, “I can go out there one more time?”

  “So the court has ordered,” Weisman said. “After apprising the court, you’re permitted one final overnight visit, to gather and remove personal and corporate possessions and to make a last inventory.”

  Miss September. Maybe that goddam burglar will be there again; this time, I’ll shoot him. “It’s a hell of a small silver lining,” Max grumbled, “for such a great big fucking cloud.”

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  “Don’t look now,” May said, “but that’s Andy.”

  So of course Dortmunder did look, and it was Andy all right, across the restaurant, having dinner and a nice bottle of red wine with an attractive woman with a nice smile. The woman caught Dortmunder looking at her, so Dortmunder faced his own meal again, and said, “You’re right.”

  “I told you not to look,” May said. “Now she’s staring at us.”

  “She’ll stop after a while,” Dortmunder said, and concentrated on his lamb chop.

  May said, “Andy doesn’t want to know us at the moment, or he’d come over, or wave, or something.”

  Dortm
under shifted lamb to his cheek: “I’ve had moments, I felt the same way about him.”

  “I wonder who she is,” May said.

  Dortmunder didn’t wonder who she was, or have anything else to add on the topic, so conversation lapsed, and they both continued to eat the pretty good food.