Why Me?

by Donald Westlake

  And Chief Inspector Mologna followed his beer belly out of the conference room.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  There was a Daily News on the seat on the subway, but Dortmunder didn’t read about the big jewel robbery out to Kennedy. Other people’s successes didn’t interest him that much. Instead he leafed through to page seven, where he read about three guys in Staten Island who went into a bar last night to hold it up and the customers jumped all over them and threw their guns into the Kill Van Kull and let the air out of the tires of their getaway car, but then when the cops showed up (called by some busybody neighbor bugged by the noise) none of the customers would say which three guys in their midst were the holdup men, so the cops arrested everybody and it still hadn’t been sorted out. The bartender, claiming it was too dim in the bar to see which of his customers was holding him up, was quoted as saying, “Anyway, it was just youthful exuberance.”

  Dortmunder was on the BMT. At 28th Street four cops came aboard and the doors stayed open until the cops found the two guys they wanted. Dortmunder sat there behind his News, reading about a pantyhose sale at Alexander’s, and the cops grabbed these two guys from just across the aisle and frisked them and marched them out of the train. Just two ordinary guys, like you see around. Then the doors closed and the train moved on, and Dortmunder came out from behind his paper to watch the cops walking the two guys away across the receding platform.

  At Times Square he changed for the Broadway IRT, and there seemed to be cops sort of strolling around all over the station — a lot more than the usual sprinkle. The plastic bag of jewelry in Dortmunder’s pocket was getting heavier and heavier. It was making, he thought, a very obvious bulge. He walked with his right arm close against his side, but that might draw attention too, so then he walked with his right arm elaborately moving, but that could also draw attention, so finally he just slunk along, not giving a damn if he drew attention or not.

  At 86th Street, when he came up out of the subway, right there by the bank building on the corner at Broadway two cops had a guy leaning against the wall and were giving him a toss. It all was beginning to seem like a bad omen or something. “Probably everything I grabbed was paste,” Dortmunder muttered to himself, and walked up to 89th Street between Broadway and West End, where Arnie had an apartment up over a bookstore. Dortmunder rang the bell, and Arnie’s voice came out of the metal grid, saying, “Who is it?”

  Dortmunder leaned close to the grid: “It’s me.”

  “Who the hell is me?”

  Dortmunder looked around the tiny vestibule. He looked out at the street. He leaned as close to the grid as he could get and mumbled, “Dortmunder.”

  Very very loud, the voice of Arnie yelled from the grid, “Dortmunder?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay? Yeah.”

  The door went click–click–click, and Dortmunder pushed on it and went into the hallway, which always smelled of old newspapers. “Next time I’ll just pick the lock,” he muttered, and went upstairs, where Arnie was waiting in his open doorway.

  “So,” Arnie said. “You scored?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure,” Arnie said. “Nobody comes to see Arnie just to say hello.”

  “Well, I live way downtown,” Dortmunder said, and went on into the apartment, which had small rooms with big windows looking out past a black metal fire escape at the brown–brick back of a parking garage maybe four feet away. Part of Arnie’s calendar collection hung around on all the walls: Januaries that started on Monday, Januaries that started on Thursday, Januaries that started on Saturday. Here and there, just to confuse things, were calendars that started with August or March; “incompletes,” Arnie called them. Above the Januaries (and the Augusts and the Marches) sunlit icy brooks ran through snowy woods, suggestively smirking girls inefficiently struggled with blowing skirts, pairs of kittens looked out of wicker baskets full of balls of wool, and various Washington monuments (the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument) glittered like teeth in the happy sunshine.

  Closing the door, following Dortmunder, Arnie said, “It’s my personality. Don’t tell me different, Dortmunder, I happen to know. I rub people the wrong way. Don’t argue with me.”

  Dortmunder, who’d had no intention of arguing with him, found Arnie rubbing him the wrong way. “If you say so,” he said.

  “I do say so,” Arnie said. “Sit down. Sit down at the table there, we’ll look at your stuff.”

  The table was in front of the parking–garage–view windows. It was an old library table on which Arnie had laid out several of his less valuable incompletes, fixing them in place with a thick layer of clear plastic laminate. Dortmunder sat down and rested his forearms on a September 1938. (A shy–but–proud boy carried a shy–but–proud girl’s schoolbooks down a country lane.) Feeling vaguely pressed to demonstrate some sort of comradeliness, Dortmunder said, “You’re lookin pretty good, Arnie.”

  “Then my face lies,” Arnie said, sitting across the table. “I feel like shit. I been farting a lot. That’s why I keep this window open, otherwise you’d faint when you walked in here.”

  “Ah,” said Dortmunder.

  “Not that a whole hell of a lot of people do walk in here,” Arnie said. “People don’t want to know me, I’m such a pain in the ass. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Uh,” said Dortmunder.

  “I read things sometimes in the Sunday News — Do Your Friends Think You’re A Turd? shit like that — I follow the advice three four days, maybe a week, but my own rotten self always comes through in the end. I could see you in a bar today, I could buy you a beer, talk about your problems, ask questions about your livelihood, express an interest in your personality, and tomorrow you’d go to a different bar.”

  That was undoubtedly true. “Uh,” repeated Dortmunder, that being the most noncommittal sound he knew how to make.

  “Well, you already know all this,” Arnie said. “The only reason you’ll put up with me, I give good dollar. And I gotta give good dollar or I’d never see anybody. There’s people right now in this city go to Stoon even though he gives a worse dollar — they’ll take smaller cash just so they don’t have to sit and talk with Arnie.”

  Dortmunder said, “Stoon? Which Stoon is this?”

  “Even you,” Arnie said. “Now you want Stoon’s address.”

  Dortmunder did. “No, I don’t, Arnie,” he said. “We got a good relationship.” Trying to change the subject, he took the plastic bag out of his pocket and emptied the goods onto the schoolchildren. “This is the stuff,” he said.

  Reaching for it, Arnie said, “Good relationship? I don’t have a good relationship with any —”

  There was a sudden loud knocking at the door. In relief, Dortmunder said, “See? There’s somebody come to visit.”

  Arnie frowned. He yelled over at the door, “Who is it?”

  A loud, firm voice yelled back, “Police, Arnie! Open up!”

  Arnie gave Dortmunder a look. “My friends,” he said. Getting to his feet, slowly strolling toward the door, he yelled, “Whadajou people want?”

  “Open it up, Arnie! Don’t keep us waiting!”

  Methodically, Dortmunder scooped the jewelry back into the plastic bag. Standing, he put the plastic bag in his jacket pocket and, as Arnie opened the door to the cops, Dortmunder stepped into the bedroom (girlie calendars, from gas stations and coal companies). Behind him, Arnie was saying, “What now?”

  “Just a little chat, Arnie. You alone?”

  “I’m always alone. Do I know you? You’re Flynn, aren’t you? Who’s this guy?”

  “This is Officer Rashab, Arnie. You happen to have any stolen goods in your possession?”

  “No. You happen to have a search warrant in yours?”

  “Would we need one, Arnie?”

  There was no fire escape outside this room. Dortmunder pressed his forehead against the window, looked down, and saw it was no good.

&
nbsp; “You guys’ll do what you wanna do anyway. You’ve tossed this place yourself before, you know that. And all you ever got was dirty socks.”

  “Maybe we’ll be luckier this time.”

  “Depends how you feel about dirty socks.”

  Dortmunder stepped into the bathroom. (Horse–print and hunting–scene calendars.) No window, only a small exhaust grid. Dortmunder sighed and stepped back into the bedroom.

  “I got enough dirty socks of my own, Arnie. Get into your coat.”

  “I’m going somewhere?”

  “We’re having a party.”

  Dortmunder stepped into the closet. (Aubrey Beardsley calendars.) It smelled very badly of dirty socks. He pushed through the coats and pants and sweaters and pressed his back against the wall. The voices came closer.

  “I went to a party once. They made me go home after twenty minutes.”

  “Maybe that’ll happen this time, too.”

  The closet door opened. Arnie, disgusted, looked past coat shoulders at Dortmunder’s eyes. “My friends,” he said.

  Behind him, the talking cop said, “What’s that?”

  “You’re my friends,” Arnie said, taking a coat out of the closet. “You’re my only friends in the world.” He shut the closet door.

  “We take an interest in you,” said the talking cop.

  The voices receded. The front door slammed. Dortmunder sighed, which he immediately regretted, because it involved taking a deep breath full of dirty socks. He opened the closet door, leaned out, breathed, and listened. Not a sound. He left the closet, shaking his head, and went back into the living room.

  All alone. And the funny thing was, the cops seemed to have picked Arnie up just for the hell of it. “Hmmm,” Dortmunder said.

  There was a phone on the end table beside the sofa. Dortmunder sat down there, said, “Stoon,” and dialed Andy Kelp’s number. “If I get that machine …”

  The phone rang twice and a girl answered: “Hello?” She sounded young and pretty. All girls who sound young sound pretty, which has led to some unfortunate later discoveries in this life.

  Dortmunder said, “Uhhh — Is Andy there?”

  “Who?”

  “Did I dial wrong? I’m looking for Andy Kelp.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I — Oh!”

  “Oh?”

  “You mean Andy!”

  So it wasn’t a wrong number, it was a dummy. Here was this girl in Kelp’s apartment, answering Kelp’s phone, and it was taking her a long long time to realize the call was for Kelp. “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “I mean Andy.”

  “Oh, I guess he didn’t turn it off,” she said.

  Then Dortmunder knew. He didn’t know what, exactly, not yet, but in a general sort of way he knew. And it wasn’t this girl’s fault, it was Kelp’s fault. Naturally. Apologizing to the girl in his head for his previous bad thoughts about her, he said, “Didn’t turn what off?”

  “See, I just met Andy last night,” she said. “In a bar. My name’s Sherri?”

  “Aren’t you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Anyway, Andy told me about all these wonderful telephone gadgets he had, and we went to his place and he showed them to me, and then he said he’d show me the phone–ahead gadget. So he put this little box on his phone, all set up with my home phone number, and then we came over here to my place to wait for somebody to call him, because then it would ring here instead of there, and he wouldn’t miss any calls.”

  “Uh–huh.”

  “But nobody ever called.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Dortmunder.

  “Yeah, isn’t it? So then he left this morning, but I guess he forgot to take the box off his phone when he got home.”

  “He called me this morning.”

  “I guess he can call out, but if you call in it gets transferred here.”

  “You live near him?”

  “Oh, no, I’m way over here on the East Side. Near the Queensboro Bridge.”

  “Ah,” said Dortmunder. “And any time I happen to dial Andy Kelp’s phone number, his phone won’t ring, but yours will, way over there by the Queensboro Bridge.”

  “Gee, I guess that’s right.”

  “He probably won’t hear that phone of yours when it rings, will he? Not even if you open your windows.”

  “Oh, no, he couldn’t possibly.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Dortmunder said. Very very gently, he hung up.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney) of the New York City Police Department and Agent Malcolm Zachary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation loved one another imperfectly. They were of course on the same side in the war between the forces of order and the forces of disorder, and they would of course cooperate fully with one another whenever that war might find them both engaged on the same field of battle, and they did of course deeply admire one another’s branch of service in this war as well as respect one another individually as long–term professionals. Apart from which, each thought the other was an asshole.

  “The man’s an asshole,” Mologna told Leon, his nigger faggot secretary, when the latter entered the former’s office to announce the arrival of the aforesaid.

  “A reigning asshole,” Leon agreed. “But he’s in my office and he’d rather be in yours, and I too would rather he was in yours.”

  “A rainin asshole? Is that one of your disgustin faggot perversions?”

  “Yes,” said Leon. “Shall I send him in?”

  “If he’s still there,” Mologna said hopefully.

  He was still there. In fact, at that very instant, in the outer office, Agent Zachary was saying, “The man’s an asshole, Bob,” to his partner, Freedly.

  “But still we have to cooperate with him, Mac,” Freedly said.

  “I know that. I just want to go on record with you, off the record, that the man’s an asshole.”

  “Agreed.”

  Leon opened the connecting door, smiled coquettishly at the two FBI men, and said, “Inspector Mologna will see you now.”

  At his desk Mologna grumbled, “I’ll never be able to see that asshole,” then smiled and heaved to his feet and presented his hand and his beer belly and his beaming face in the direction of Zachary and Freedly as they entered. Hands were shaken as Leon exited, shutting the door.

  Zachary gestured at the windows behind Mologna’s desk. “Magnificent view.”

  It was. “Yes, it is,” Mologna said.

  “Brooklyn Bridge, isn’t it?”

  It was. “Yes, it is,” Mologna said.

  So much for small talk. Zachary took one of the brown leather chairs facing the desk (Freedly took the other) and said, “So far as we can tell, the Greeks don’t have it.”

  “Of course they don’t,” Mologna said, dropping back into his padded high–back swivel chair. “I said so this mornin. Hold on just a minute.” And he pressed a button on his intercom, then looked at the door.

  Which opened. Leon said, “You want me?”

  “You might as well take notes.”

  “I’ll get my little pad.”

  Zachary and Freedly exchanged a glance. There was something funny about that secretary.

  Leon entered, shut the door, sashayed to his little chair in the corner, prettily crossed his legs, perched his notebook on the upper knee, poised his pen, and looked expectantly at everybody.

  “As I was sayin,” Mologna said (Leon did quick squiggly shorthand), “I said this mornin —”

  Zachary said, “You’ll copy to me, won’t you?”