Why Me?

by Donald Westlake

  The older man sadly shook his head. “No longer,” he said. “The doctors won’t let me do anything any more. These days I’m a club–soda–on–the–rocks.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “It certainly is.”

  Rollo went away and made a club soda on the rocks and brought it back. The older man gave it a look of hatred and said, “What do I owe you, Rollo?”

  “When you start drinking,” Rollo told him, “I’ll start charging you.”

  “Then I’ll never go broke in here.” The older man lifted the glass. “To happier days, Rollo.”

  “Amen,” said Rollo.

  The older man sipped club soda, made a face, and said, “I’m looking, in fact, for a gentleman named Ralph.”

  Rollo was about to give him directions when he glanced toward the front windows and the sidewalk and street outside. “No, you’re not,” he said.

  The older man looked confused. “I’m not?”

  “Just sit tight,” Rollo told him, as the fourteen uniformed cops swept into the place and made a beeline for the back room.

  “Oh, dear,” said the older man. “The doctor warned me off policemen as well.”

  With the fourteen uniformed cops were two plainclothes cops, one of whom came over to Rollo and said, “You’re serving a lot of the wrong people here.”

  Rollo looked at him in mild amaze. “I am?”

  “A criminal element,” the plainclothesman said. “You want to watch that.”

  “Surprisingly enough,” Rollo said, as the boys from the back room were herded past by the fourteen cops, “very few of the people who come in here tell me much about their criminal records.”

  “Just take it as a friendly warning,” said the plainclothesman, who didn’t look at all friendly.

  “You guys rousted me once already!” Tiny yelled, on the way by. “I’m getting very irritated!”

  “I tell you what,” Rollo said to the plainclothesman. “Why don’t you send me a list of the people you don’t want me to serve?”

  “Merely a word to the wise,” the policeman said.

  “Better send me two copies,” Rollo told him. “I’ll have to give one to the American Civil Liberties Union.”

  “You wanny pay attention, not pay attention,” the plain–clothesman said, “it’s all the same to me.” Outside, there seemed to be some difficulty convincing Tiny to join his friends in the paddy wagon. The two plainclothesmen went out there, withdrawing leather–covered black saps from their rear pockets, and soon the paddy wagon and the bus and the unmarked car all went away.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t be out this late,” the older man said. He pushed his nearly full club soda away across the bar.

  “Closing time,” Rollo called to the regulars. They looked thunderstruck; now they’d have to find somewhere else to go.

  “It’s all because of that ruby,” the older man said.

  “It is that,” agreed Rollo.

  “Whoever took it,” the older man said, “I believe he’ll regret it.”

  “He will that,” agreed Rollo.

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  Dortmunder poured beer on a bowl of Wheaties and ate, all with his right hand, since his left rested in a pot of Palmolive Liquid.

  May said, “Are you absolutely certain I’m not asleep and dreaming?” She sat across the kitchen table from him and simply stared and stared.

  “Maybe we both are,” Dortmunder said, through a mouthful of Wheaties and beer. He looked at his left hand. The red ruby in the green detergent looked like a toad Cardinal in a swamp.

  “Let’s try it again,” May said.

  Dortmunder lifted his green–oozing hand out of the pot, and while he chewed beer–soggy Wheaties, May twisted and struggled with the ring. Simple soap hadn’t done it, hot soapy water hadn’t done it — maybe Palmolive Liquid would do it.

  “If I can’t get that off,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll never be able to leave the house again. I’ll be a prisoner in here.”

  “Don’t talk about prison,” May said. Shaking her head, she said, “Let it soak some more.”

  Dortmunder looked with loathing at the toad Cardinal in its swamp. “My greatest triumph,” he said, in disgust.

  “Well, in a way it is,” May said. “If you stop and think about it. This has got to be just about anybody’s biggest heist ever. Particularly for one man working alone.”

  “I can see me boasting,” Dortmunder said. “To all those guys getting rousted by the law.”

  “Some day you’ll be able to,” she assured him. “This too will blow over.”

  Dortmunder understood that May was trying to make him feel better. What May didn’t understand was that Dortmunder didn’t want to feel better. Given the circumstances, any attitude in Dortmunder’s mind at this moment other than frustration, helpless rage, and blank despair would be both inappropriate and a sign of mental incompetence. Dortmunder might be doomed, but he wasn’t crazy.

  “The day will come,” May went on, “when you’ll look back on all this —”

  “— and get drunk,” Dortmunder finished. Lifting the offending hand out of the Palmolive Liquid, he said, “Try again.”

  She tried again. The beveled edge of the ring grated against his knuckle. “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe after —”

  “Enough,” Dortmunder said, put his hand in his mouth, and chomped down.

  May stared, horrified. “Dortmunder!”

  Palmolive Liquid tastes like used tires. Dortmunder chewed and tugged, chewed and tugged, flesh scraped raw, red blood mixed with the green detergent, and May sat there in shock, eyes as round as manhole covers. The goddamned thing fought back, but Dortmunder struggled grimly on, and at last determination won the day; removing his ringless hand from his mouth, he spat the Byzantine Fire into the pot of detergent. He would have stood up, except that May grabbed his hand in both of hers and out loud, in a shaky whispery voice, counted his fingers: “One, two, three, four, five. Thank God!”

  Dortmunder stared at her. “Whadja think?”

  “I thought — Never mind, it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

  “Get that thing out of my sight,” Dortmunder said, in re the ring, and went away to the kitchen to wash out his mouth. He was getting bubbles in his nose.

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  “Excellent prints,” Zachary said, “on the envelope containing the, uh.”

  Mologna glinted in cold triumph across his desk at the FBI man. “Containin the bribe” he said. He wasn’t going to let Zachary forget last night’s phone call and his incredible gaffe — not for a long long time. And this was a lovely way to start a new morning: ethically and morally unimpeachable, at peace with the world, at ease in his own sunny office, toying with a couple of assholes from the FBI. “The attempted bribe,” he went on, turning the knife.

  Zachary nodded, in that manly, official, not–quite–real manner of his. “They certainly chose the wrong man, didn’t they?” (Freedly gave a confirming nod.)

  “They certainly did,” Mologna said. “For a bribe. Who were they?”

  “No idea, unfortunately,” Zachary said.

  Mologna frowned at him. “What about these excellent prints? On the envelope containin the attempted bribe?”

  “Excellent prints,” Zachary reconfirmed. “Unhopefully, they don’t match any prints in FBI files.”

  “So maybe he was a child,” Mologna said. “A very tall ten–year–old, never been printed.”

  “We assume he was a foreign agent,” Zachary said, rather stiffly. “We have turned the prints over to Interpol and to the national police forces of Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Lebanon.”

  Mologna nodded. “A timewaster, but it’ll look good on the official record.” Leon pranced in, winked at Freedly, and slid a note onto Mologna’s desk.

  Zachary, with an annoyed little chuckle, said, “A time–waster, Chief Inspector? Do you really think these people are also local
citizens, like your happenstantial burglar?”

  “No, I don’t,” Mologna said, exchanging a glance with the departing Leon. “Nobody in America wears black corduroy trousers. These were some sort of Ayrabs, all right. I say what you done is a timewaster because I figure these were probably employees of the national police force of Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, or Lebanon.”

  “Mm,” said Zachary.

  Surprisingly, Freedly said, “You’re probably right, Chief Inspector, but it isn’t a waste of time.”

  Mologna transferred his attention to Freedly. Having known that Zachary was an asshole, he’d naturally been assuming the assistant was another one — was that an overly hasty judgment? Yes, it was. Getting Freedly’s point, Mologna nodded at him and said, “You’re right.”

  Zachary said, “What?”

  “What your partner means,” Mologna told Zachary, “is now the bribers will know the bribe didn’t take. Wasn’t taken.”

  “Oh,” said Zachary.

  Mologna looked down at the note Leon had left: “Get rid of them,” it said. Looking at Freedly again, he said, “Don’t put a tail on me.”

  Zachary said, “What?”

  Grinning at Mologna, Freedly said, “Do you want me to promise?”

  “Better be ready with bail money,” Mologna said.

  Freedly laughed.

  Zachary was becoming very red in the face. “What is all this?” he demanded. “Just speak it out in clear and simple terminology.”

  Freedly explained: “Mologna sees we’ve set him up as a decoy.”

  “We have? He has?”

  “And he’s threatened,” Freedly went on, “to have our men arrested if we put them on surveillance behind him.”

  “Arrested!” Zachary was shocked. “FBI men? For what?”

  “Loiterin,” Mologna suggested. “Public indecency. Not usin a pooper scooper. Possession for sale of a controlled substance. Traffic ticket scofflaw. Litterin the public highway.”

  “Well” Zachary said. “That isn’t what I call interagency cooperation!”

  Looking at Freedly, Mologna said, “He didn’t think it through, but you did, and you should of talked it over with me first. I got children. I got a St. Bernard dog. I got a wife.”

  Zachary said, “What?”

  Freedly said, “That’s why we’ll want to keep you under surveillance.”

  “At this stage of my life,” Mologna told him, “I will not be shadowed and tailed by FBI men. You think you’ll keep the newsies out? That wop Costello on the TV, he’s been gunnin at me for years. Chief Inspector Mologna’s under surveillance by the FBI.”

  “But only for your own protection,” said Zachary, who’d caught up again.

  “That’s worse than suspicion of malfeasance in office,” Mologna told him. “The top cop in the city of New York, and he has to be protected by FBI men.”

  Freedly said, “Sorry, Chief Inspector. You’re right, of course.”

  “I’ll watch my own back,” Mologna said. “Now go away and talk to your Turks and your Greeks and your Lebanese.”

  “And our Armenians,” added Freedly, getting to his feet.

  Mologna gave Freedly a grudging nod and smile; Freedly was also an asshole, but less so than Zachary, who now also stood and said, “Chief Inspector, I assure you the FBI would never knowingly —”

  “I’m convinced of that,” Mologna said. “Get out of my office, I got work to do.”

  Zachary would have stayed, struggling for a dignified exit, but Freedly opened the door and said, “Good morning, Chief Inspector.”

  “Good mornin,” Mologna ordered.

  “We’ll talk later,” Zachary threatened, and at last the FBI assholes left and Leon cantered in, saying, “They do overstay their welcome.”

  Mologna brooded at him. “Who wears black corduroy pants?”

  “Nobody I know. Captain Cappelletti’s here.”

  Frowning, Mologna said, “That’s what couldn’t wait? Tony Cappelletti?”

  “This time you’ll like it,” Leon said, and went away, returning half a minute later with Captain Anthony Cappelletti, Chief of Burglary Detail, a heavy–shouldered, big–handed, bushy–eyebrowed, bad–tempered son of a bitch with a huge blue jaw and with great spiky growths of black hair all over his person. “Good morning, Francis,” he said, and pounded his feet toward the chair lately occupied by Zachary, while Leon winked over the captain’s shoulder at Mologna and again exited, snicking the door shut as quiet as anything.

  Early in Anthony Cappelletti’s police career, it had seemed to somebody in a position of authority that he’d be an excellent man to put on the Organized Crime Detail. Not only was he Italian, he even spoke Italian, he’d grown up downtown in Little Italy, he’d gone to school with the sons and nephews of the capos and button men (who would some day be the next generation of capos and button men), and most important of all, Anthony Cappelletti hated the Mafia. Hated it. Just flat–out couldn’t stand the whole idea of it. That of all the nationalities simmering together in this wonderful melting pot of New York City only the Italians should have their own major organized crime syndicate with its own name struck him as a personal affront. Was Dutch Schultz Italian? No. Was Bugsy Siegel Italian? No. Was Dion O’Bannion Italian? Hell, no! But do the Germans, the Jews, the Irish have to walk around under a cloud of suspicion, as though all Germans, all Jews, all Irish are mobsters? They do not! Only the Italians have to live with this general assumption that all Italians (with the possible exception of Mother Cabrini) are in the Mafia. Anthony Cappelletti found this intolerable, as though he were locked into a really bad marriage — himself and his ethnicity. It had been revulsion from the Mafia that had directed him into the police force in the first place, and the sheer obvious sincerity of his revulsion that had led the force to assign him to the Organized Crime Detail.

  Where he lasted four months. “I give ‘em what they understand,” Cappelletti told his superiors on one of his trips to the carpet during those four months, and he sure did. He gave them so much of what they understood that in only four months he created an absolute crisis of law and order in the city of New York. Because what Cappelletti gave them, crystal–clear to their understanding, was: planted evidence, false testimony, intimidated witnesses, simple frameups, re–suborned jurors, illegal wiretaps, strongarm interrogations, and the occasional shotgun blast through a restaurant window. What he seemed to have in mind was to eliminate the Mafia completely from the Earth — that is, from New York — to do it single–handed, and to finish the job by Christmas. Within four months, though Cappelletti hadn’t quite killed anybody, he’d broken so many bones, demolished so many automobiles and funeral parlors, and railroaded so many Mafiosi behind bars that the mob leaders got together at a very special private meeting in the Bahamas and there decided on the most drastic counterattack in mob history.

  They threatened to leave New York.

  The word got around, whispered but clear. New York might think it had lost this and that in the past — the New York Giants left for the Jersey swamps, American Airlines left for Dallas, dozens of corporate headquarters left for Connecticut, for a while even the Stock Exchange threatened to leave — but if you want real trouble, imagine New York if the Mafia got up and left. Think of all those mob–infiltrated businesses — with the gangsters gone, who would operate them? The same clowns who’d run them into the ground in the first place, bailing themselves out with the black–money loans that had made the mob infiltration possible, that’s who. Think of all those restaurants, linen services, finance companies, automobile dealerships, private garbage collectors, supermarkets, truck lines, and janitorial companies without the discipline, expertise, and financial depth of mob control. Think of what New York would be like with its businesses run by their nominal owners.

  Beyond that, think how many policemen, politicians, newspapermen, union officials, city inspectors, attorneys, accountants, and public relations men are on the direct mob payroll. Would th
e City of New York like to lose that large an employer, disrupt the workforce to that great an extent?

  At first the threat wasn’t believed, as it hadn’t been when the Stock Exchange used to talk the same way. Where would the mob move? the smart guys asked. And the answer was, anywhere they liked. The offers came in, unofficial but very tempting: Boston would be delighted to switch over from its present unreliable mix of Irish and black mobs. Miami would be overjoyed to give its Cubans the boot. Philadelphia, with nobody in charge for hundreds of years, was so desperate by now they offered to pay all moving expenses, and Baltimore was prepared to turn over four solid miles of waterfront, no questions asked. But it wasn’t until Wilmington, Delaware (the “anybody–can–be–a–corporation” state), opened negotiations for the transfer of the Metropolitan Opera that New York City officials realized this was serious. “Anthony,” they told Cappelletti, “you’ve done such a fine job on Organized Crime that we want you to take on a really tough assignment. Burglary Detail.” Unorganized crime, in other words.