Why Me?

by Donald Westlake

  Dortmunder was on line now. A door at the far end of the corridor, where the two cops leaned, would open every once in a while, and the next person on the bench would get up and go in. Nobody ever came out, though, which meant either another exit or the minotaur was inside there, eating everybody.

  Dortmunder sat with his hands in his lap, fingers curled, the ruby burning a slow inexorable hole in his hand, like a laser beam. Every time the person at the end of the line went away to see the minotaur, everybody else moved leftward, wriggling their asses along the plastic benches. From time to time newer fish would arrive and be seated to Dortmunder’s right. Whenever anyone spoke to his neighbor, the cops at the far end said, “Shut up, down there.” The silence was heavy, muggy, discontented.

  And what was the point in dragging this out? Dortmunder knew that if he simply got to his feet and showed his left hand, palm up, the suspense would be over and done with. All these semi–innocent people could go on home, and Dortmunder himself could stop worrying about when the ax would fall. Everybody would be better off — even he would.

  And yet he couldn’t do it. There was no hope, and yet he hoped.

  Well, no. He didn’t so much hope as merely refuse to assist Destiny in its fell designs. Every lawman in the northeast was looking for the Byzantine Fire, and Dortmunder was seated in his local precinct wearing it. Disaster would arrive when it would arrive; it wasn’t up to John A. Dortmunder to rush it along.

  Three hours then passed, one moss–covered second at a time. Dortmunder came to know that opposite wall; he was familiar with every crack, every blemish. That particular color of cream was permanently fixed in his brain, like a mosaic tile. The knees of his neighbors were also well known to him; he could probably pick them out in a lineup of hundreds of knees. Thousands.

  There were a few familiar profiles to left and right along the line, but since nobody was permitted to talk (and since who knew what trouble you might inherit by acknowledging in front of the cops that you did know this person or that person), Dortmunder did no socializing. He just sat there, and from time to time he wriggled his ass leftward on the plastic seat, and very very slowly time passed. The cops at the end of the hall were replaced by identical cops — neither better nor worse — and more time grudgingly slipped through the needle’s eye of the present into the camel’s stomach of the past, until at last there was no one at all to Dortmunder’s left, which meant he was next on line. And which also meant his left hand was extremely visible to the two cops.

  Who didn’t look at it. They didn’t actually look at anything at all, these cops. All they did was stand there, and from time to time murmur to one another about beer and hot dogs, and from time to time tell somebody to shut up, and from time to time send the next victim through the door — but they never did look at anything, or show curiosity about anything, or give vent to a facial expression, or in any way produce at all what you could call true vital signs. They were like a memory of cops rather than the actual cops themselves.

  “Next.”

  Dortmunder sighed. He got to his feet, left hand at his side, ringers curled, and he walked through the doorway into a pale green room lit by ceiling fluorescents, where three jaundiced men looked at him with utter cynical disbelief. “All right, John,” the one behind the desk said, “come on over here and sit down.”

  In addition to the desk and its occupant, who was a heavyset plainclothes detective with a stubble of beard on his cheeks and some frizzy black hair around the sides of his head below the bald spot, there was on a wooden chair to the left a skinny younger plainclothes detective dressed for a picnic in jeans and Adidas and a T–shirt with a Budweiser label on it and a blue denim jacket, and on a typist’s chair at the right a glum–looking, round–shouldered male stenographer in a black suit, with a little black Stenotype machine on a small wheeled metal desk in front of him. Finally in the room was a black wooden armless chair facing the desk. Like a farm horse entering its stall at the end of a long day, Dortmunder plodded to that chair and sat down.

  The older detective looked very tired, but in a hostile, aggressive way, as though it were Dortmunder’s fault he was so weary. He shuffled folders on his desk, then looked up. “John Archibald Dortmunder,” he said. “You have been asked to come here to give the police any assistance you can in the matter of the theft of the Byzantine Fire. You volunteered to come here and talk to us.”

  Dortmunder frowned. “I volunteered?”

  The detective looked at him as though surprised. “You weren’t arrested, John,” he said. “Had you been arrested, your rights would have been read to you. Had you been arrested, you would have been permitted your statutory phone call. Had you been arrested, you would have been booked and you would now have the right to have an attorney present during this conversation. You were not arrested. You were asked to cooperate, and you agreed to cooperate.”

  Dortmunder said, “You mean, for the last three hours out there in that hall, I’ve been a volunteer? All those guys out there are volunteers?”

  “That’s right, John.”

  Dortmunder considered that. He said, “What if I’d changed my mind? Out there. What if I’d decided not to volunteer after all, but just got up and left?”

  “Then we would have arrested you, John.”

  “For what?”

  The detective smiled a very thin smile. “We would’ve thought of something,” he said.

  “Right,” said Dortmunder.

  The detective looked down at the papers on his desk. “Two robbery convictions,” he commented. “Two terms in prison. Lots of arrests. Recently off parole, with a positive rating from the parole officer which I personally consider a piece of shit.” Looking up, he said, “You got the ruby on you, John?”

  Dortmunder very nearly said yes, realizing just in time that this was cop humor, and that he wasn’t supposed to respond to it at all. Cops don’t like it when civilians laugh at their jokes; they only want other cops to laugh, which the one in the Budweiser T–shirt did, with a kind of half–sneeze snort, followed by, “He won’t make it that easy for us. Will you, John?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “Do you know why we picked you up, John?” the older detective asked.

  “No,” said Dortmunder.

  “Because we’re picking up known criminals,” the older detective said. Then he looked across the desk at Dortmunder, obviously waiting for some sort of response.

  “I’m not a known criminal,” Dortmunder said.

  “You’re known to us.”

  It’s terrible to be straight man for the cops, but they all love it so. Dortmunder sighed, then said, “I went straight, after my second fall. I got rehabilitated there in prison.”

  “Rehabilitated,” said the detective, the way a priest might say, “Astrology.”

  “Yeah,” said Dortmunder. “That parole report is right.”

  “John, John, you were picked up just last year on a TV store burglary charge.”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” Dortmunder said. “I was found not guilty.”

  “According to this,” the detective said, “you had some very high–powered legal help. How’d you afford that, John?”

  “He didn’t bill me,” Dortmunder said. “I was like a charity case.”

  “You? Why would a hotshot lawyer come defend you for a charity case?”

  “He was interested,” Dortmunder said, “from a justice point of view.”

  The detectives looked at one another. The stenographer made delicate little finger pecks at his machine, glancing at Dortmunder from time to time in baleful disbelief and disgust. Dortmunder sat with his hands folded in his lap, his right thumb touching the Byzantine Fire. The older detective said, “Okay, John. You’re an honest individual now, you only get mixed up with the law by mistake. Misunderstandings.”

  “It’s my past,” Dortmunder said. “It’s hard to live down a bad past. Like you guys, right now.”

  “Tough,”
said the detective. “I feel very sorry for you.”

  “Me, too,” said Dortmunder.

  The younger detective said, “Where do you work, John?”

  “I’m between jobs at the moment.”

  “Between jobs. What are you living on?”

  “Savings.”

  The detectives looked at one another. Simultaneously they sighed. The older one turned his cynical eye back on Dortmunder: “Where were you last night, John?”

  “Home,” Dortmunder said.

  “Really?” The detectives exchanged another look, and then the older one said, “Most of the boys I’ve talked to were playing poker last night, at each other’s houses. Everybody alibis everybody else. It’s like a cat’s cradle.” He laced his fingers, for illustration.

  “I was home,” Dortmunder said.

  “Lots of friends and relatives there?”

  “Only the woman I’m living with.”

  The younger detective said, “Not your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Isn’t that a wedding ring?”

  Dortmunder looked down at the gold band on the third finger of his left hand. He resisted the urge to fall on the floor and froth at the mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is. I used to be married.”

  “A long time ago,” the older detective said, tapping the folder in front of him, “according to this.”

  Dortmunder did not want to talk about the ring, he really and truly didn’t. He didn’t want people looking at the ring, thinking about it, having it in their minds. “It’s stuck on my finger,” he said. His heart in his mouth, he risked tugging at it a little, hoping nobody would catch a wink of ruby–red between his fingers. “That’s why it didn’t go with my other valuables at the desk,” he explained. “It won’t come off. I wear it all the time.”

  The younger detective chuckled. “Those old mistakes again, huh? The past just won’t let go, will it, John?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said. He hid his left hand in his crotch.

  The older detective said, “And you were not robbing any jewelry stores last night, is that right, John?”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

  The detective rubbed his eyes, and yawned, and stretched, and shook his head. “Maybe I’m getting tired,” he said. “I almost feel like believing you, you know that, John?”

  Some straight lines should be left alone, some rhetorical questions should be left unanswered. Dortmunder didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t say a word if the four of them were to sit in this room together until the end of time, until Hell froze over, until all the rivers ran dry and our love was through. He would sit here, and he would not say a word.

  The detective sighed. “Surprise me, John,” he said. “Give us some help. Tell us something about the Byzantine Fire.”

  “It’s very valuable,” Dortmunder said.

  “Thank you, John. We appreciate that.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dortmunder said.

  “Go home, John.”

  Dortmunder looked at him in utter astonishment. “Go home?”

  The detective pointed at a door in the side wall. “Go, John,” he said. “Go and sin no more.”

  Dortmunder got to his trembling feet, palmed the Byzantine Fire, and went home.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  It was three–thirty in the morning, and when Rollo the bartender at the O.J. Bar and Grill got off the phone the regulars were discussing Dolly Parton. “And I say she doesn’t exist,” said one of them.

  Another regular said, “Whadaya mean, doesn’t exist? She’s right there.”

  “All of a sudden,” said the first regular. “I tell you what, you go to the library, you look in —”

  “The what?”

  “All right,” the first regular said, “you go ahead and make jokes, but I’m tellin ya. You go look in the newspapers, the magazines, even a couple years ago, there was no such thing as a Dolly Parton. Then all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe not only there is a Dolly Parton, there always was a Dolly Parton.”

  A third regular, bleary–eyed but interested, said, “So what’s your interpretation, Mac?”

  “It’s that thing,” the first regular said, and waved his arms in the air. “Where everybody believes something when it isn’t so. What’s that? Mass hysteria?”

  “No no,” said the second regular. “Mass hysteria, that’s when everybody’s scared of the plague. What you’re thinking of is folie a deux.”

  “It is?”

  The third regular said, “It is not. Folie a deux is when you see double.”

  A fourth regular, asleep till now, lifted his head from the bar to say, “Delirium tremens.” Then his head lowered again.

  The other regulars were still trying to decide whether or not that had been a contribution to the discussion when a big, gruff–looking man in a leather jacket came in and ordered a draft. Rollo drew it, handed it over, was paid for it, and was not at all surprised when the gruff–looking man said, “I’m looking for a fellow called Tiny.”

  A lot of more or less gruff–looking men had showed up in the last few hours, looking for Tiny or one of the others already in the back room, which must be pretty crowded by now. “I was just going back there myself,” Rollo said. “Come along.” And to the regulars he said, “It’s mass delusion. Watch the joint a minute.”

  The second regular said, “I thought mass delusion was when you see the Virgin Mary in church.”

  The first regular said, “Where’d you expect to see her, dummy, in a disco?”

  Rollo walked down to the end of the bar, raised the flap, stepped through, and he and the gruff–looking man walked back past POINTERS and SETTERS and TELEPHONE. Rollo opened the door and said, “Somebody here for Tiny.”

  “Whadaya say, Frank?”

  “Not much,” said Frank.

  Rollo didn’t know exactly what was going on back here, and he didn’t want to know, but he never objected to the boys having their meetings here. And they could use the phone all they wanted: local calls only, of course. At the moment there were a dozen or so crowded in here, many of them smoking, all of them drinking. The air was somewhat ripe, and a lot of papers were scattered around on the table, and one of the boys was making a call. That is, he was holding the phone to his face and politely waiting for Rollo to go away.

  “Listen, gents,” Rollo said. “I just got a phone call I thought I’d pass along, in case anybody’s interested. It’s about that Byzantine Fire ruby.”

  There was a general stir in the room. Tiny growled.

  “There’s some foreign people the landlord knows,” Rollo said. “It was the landlord called me. These people, they’re religious or something, and they think the ruby’s theirs, and they’re offering a reward. Twenty–five grand for the ruby and another twenty–five grand if they get the guy who stole it. All private, you know? Under the counter, no publicity.”

  One of the gents said, “What do they want the guy for?”

  “It’s some kinda religious thing,” Rollo explained. “He’s desecrated the ruby, whatever. They want revenge.”

  Tiny said, “If I find the guy, I’ll be happy to sell him, but he’s likely to be damaged. They’ll have to take him as is.”

  Rollo said, “My understanding is, that’s okay, just so there’s enough left so they can do their religious ceremonies on him.”

  “That’s one church service I’d go to,” Tiny said.

  “If anybody hears anything,” Rollo said, “I can put you in touch with the people offering the reward.”

  “Thanks, Rollo,” Tiny said.

  Which was a clear dismissal. Rollo went back to the bar, where the regulars were now discussing whether jogging had a bad effect on a person’s sex life. There was also an older man down at the other end of the bar, patiently waiting. Rollo went behind the bar, walked down to the older man, and said, “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

  The older man
looked surprised and pleased. “You remember me?”

  “You’re a whisky–and–ginger–ale.”