Good Behavior

by Donald E. Westlake

  “That I can believe,” Kelp said.

  “Well, this girl, this new one, she has a very rich father, and he tracks her down, finds out she’s in this convent being a nun, and he kidnaps her.”

  Kelp was astonished at this turn in the story. “Right out of the convent?”

  “Right out of the convent.”

  “How old is this girl?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Kelp shrugged. “So she’s a grown-up, she can do what she wants.”

  Dortmunder said, “Except her father’s treating her like one of those kids goes off with the cults, you know, the Moonies and like that. He’s got her locked up, and he’s got this deprogrammer in there, doing his number on her.”

  Kelp said, “He’s deprogramming her out of the Catholic Church?”

  “That’s the idea. She writes all these letters to the convent, they showed me some, and this guy’s just steady deprogramming, day after day. And what she wants, what she says in the letters is, she wants to go back to the convent.”

  “And her old man’s got her locked up? He can’t do that, not if she’s twenty-three.”

  “Well, he’s doing it,” Dortmunder said. “So the nuns went to a lawyer to see what can you do, and the lawyer came back and said this guy is very very rich, he has deep pockets like you wouldn’t believe, and if they try anything legal he’ll just tie them up in court until the girl’s seventy-three.”

  “So she’s stuck,” Kelp said.

  “So that was why they figured I was from God, being a burglar and all,” Dortmunder explained. “They figured I could sneak into the rich guy’s place and bust her out.”

  “What kind of place?” Kelp asked.

  “Penthouse suite on top of a building up in midtown. Armed guards all over. Access limited to one elevator, where you got to use a key. The guy owns the whole building.”

  Kelp said, “No way you’re going to get into that penthouse.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Dortmunder said.

  “And if you did get in,” Kelp went on, “no way you’re going to carry any twenty-three-year-old girl out.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Dortmunder told him, and sighed.

  “So what did you do? Sign something?”

  “No. We shook hands on it.”

  Kelp didn’t get it. “So what have they got on you? A confession?”

  “No.”

  “Your name? Home address?”

  “Nothing. Just that I made the deal, I said I’d do it.”

  “Well, you can’t do it,” Kelp said, and grinned, saying, “But that’s okay, because you don’t have to do it. You’re home free.”

  “Well, maybe not,” Dortmunder said.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Kelp told him. “You’re away and clean, and they can’t find you.”

  “Ahem,” said May.

  Kelp glanced over at May, and right now she looked like one of the statues on the Washington Square arch; unblinking, determined and made of stone. “Ah,” said Kelp.

  “Now you see the problem,” Dortmunder said.

  6

  Hendrickson opened the door, then promptly stepped back and reclosed it, and the plate smashed itself to pieces against the other side. Opening the door again, entering the large, neat, plainly furnished living-cum-dining room, stepping over the burritos and the china shards, Hendrickson said, “Well, Elaine. Still at it, eh?”

  The furious girl on the other side of the refectory table held up the sign she’d printed her third day here, on the back of a shirt cardboard, in angry red ink: Sister Mary Grace.

  Hendrickson nodded pleasantly. “Yes, Elaine, I know. But your father would rather I called you by the name he chose for you, when you were born.”

  She made an elaborate pantomime of throwing up, suggesting that mere mention of her father made her sick, while Hendrickson crossed to the highbacked wooden chair over by the windows, noticing that the Bible on the side table was closed today. Good. He should probably take the damn book out of here, but that would be too obvious an admission of defeat.

  In the first few weeks of this assignment, Hendrickson had plied Elaine Ritter with selected biblical quotations, standard practice for a professional deprogrammer like himself, but it turned out the girl knew the Holy Word better than he did, and would top every quotation of his with one of her own. The Bible was left here all the time for her perusal—there were no other books in this apartment, there was no television or radio—but soon she’d started the practice of leaving it open, some scathing rejoinder circled in red ink, for him to find at the beginning of each session. As a result, in the last few weeks he’d ignored the Bible, whether open or shut, had refrained from quotation, and she was gradually letting up her counter-campaign in that department.

  A small victory, that, but Hendrickson’s only one so far, and probably the only one forever. Privately, he didn’t expect to win this particular war. Sometime in the future, surely long after Frank Ritter had fired Hendrickson for non-accomplishment, Elaine Ritter would most likely simply go mad from rage and boredom and would thereafter be of no use to anyone, including her father and herself, but in the meantime the pay was excellent, the fringe benefits included a fine apartment in this same building and a chauffeured car always on call and a liberal drawing account, and apart from the occasional flung object the work was not unpleasant. Elaine Ritter was a good-looking girl, particularly since her hair had grown back, and except for Thursdays she was silent as the tomb; not a bad companion, all in all, on these long and drowsy afternoons.

  It was almost three months now. “They tell me you’re the best in the business,” Frank Ritter had said, at their first meeting, when Hendrickson had been hired to save his youngest child from the toils of organized religion.

  “They tell me I’m the best, too,” Hendrickson had replied amiably. A large stout man who dressed casually but not sloppily, Walter Hendrickson was forty-two years old and had been a professional deprogrammer for eleven years. Little surprised or baffled him anymore; but that, of course, was before he’d met Elaine Ritter.

  “I hire the best,” Frank Ritter had said, “because I can afford it, and because I won’t accept anything less. Pour your Drano into my girl’s head; I want her unclogged and functioning.”

  “Consider it done,” Hendrickson had said, with an airy assurance he now found amusing to remember. Consider it done. Lord, lord. There were times when Hendrickson almost felt like praying.

  The fact is, Elaine Ritter was not at all the sort of person he usually contended with. His clients were almost always vague and confused, with very poor self-image and only a scattering of half-remembered education. Generally, they had left their homes and gone off with Swami This or Guru That mostly because they were looking for a parent other than the parents they’d left, feeling some need for a parent who was more strict, or less demanding, or more attentive, or less cloying. Different, that was the point. Different parents, a different tribe, the growth of a different self who would be so much more satisfactory than the miserable original. Religion and philosophy had little or nothing to do with those kids’ actions and decisions, and Hendrickson’s task, really, was not much more than to wake them up to the world around them and hold a mirror to their own potential for selfhood. Easy.

  Elaine Ritter was something else. No self-image problem for her, and religion and philosophy had everything to do with her decision to renounce the world and join that convent down in Tribeca. On the religious side, she firmly believed in God and the Catholic Church. Philosophically, she just as firmly renounced the world that men like her father had made. Vocation was a fabulous beast as far as Hendrickson was concerned, but if the beast ever did live, it was in this girl. She knew her own mind, and she would take no shit from Walter Hendrickson.

  Too bad. Shit was all he had for her.

  He paused a moment beside the highbacked wooden chair and looked out the window at the towers of midtown Manhattan. Se
venty-six stories down crawled the busy street. Up here, the gray towers were the only reality. Hendrickson no longer even saw the few faint scratches on the unbreakable windows where Elaine had beat on them uselessly with chairs and lamp bases the first few days she was here. She too had learned to accept the present impasse; he would not alter her into something her father could use and understand, and she would not in the foreseeable future be leaving this apartment atop the Avalon State Bank Tower on Fifth Avenue.

  Hendrickson settled himself in the chair. The idea of the high wooden back, and the idea of placing it in front of the window so that his features would be harder to see, was that it depersonalized him, would tend to make his statements more authoritative. A parliamentary trick, and useless here, but there was also nothing to be gained at this stage by moving. “I understand your father’s coming home the end of this week,” he said blandly.

  She curled her lip and pantomimed spitting on the carpet. She wouldn’t actually spit on the carpet, of course, she was too well brought up for that.

  Hendrickson said, “What shall we talk about today?”

  Elaine gave him an icy smile and pointed ceilingward.

  Hendrickson’s smile was much warmer than hers. “God?” he asked. “No, I thought the topic I’d like to bring up today is filial piety, the duty each of us owes our parents. And the examples I thought I would dwell upon,” he said, as she started the pacing back and forth, glowering at nothing, which was her usual reaction to his sermons and which was beginning to wear a noticeable path in the carpet, “the examples I thought might be of clearest meaning to you, are your six older brothers and sisters, their roles and functions in Templar International, your father’s company, and their attitudes toward their privileges and responsibilities.”

  While Hendrickson’s calm and confident voice went on, Elaine continued to pace and to glower, undoubtedly storing up various statements to whack him with this coming Thursday afternoon, when once again the monologue would briefly become a dialogue, with a vengeance.

  Oh, well, what the hell, it’s a job.

  7

  Dortmunder stumped along Fifth Avenue with his cane and his bad temper while Andy Kelp jogged along beside, saying, “The problem is, where’s the profit in this thing? You try to put together a string, somebody to drive, somebody to lift and carry, somebody to show guns to the guards, these people are gonna want to know what’s in it for them. I mean, these are professional people, these are not people who’re gonna drive and lift and bust heads and unlock doors for free. I mean, you got to do this on account of May, and I’ll come along because we’re old pals and it’s kind of interesting, but other than us, I don’t see where you’ve got your manpower. I mean, that’s the problem.”

  “That’s the problem, is it?” Dortmunder asked him.

  “One of the problems.”

  And here was another of the problems; the Avalon State Bank Tower itself on Fifth Avenue, just a couple of blocks from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The people who invent places like Tribeca don’t ever go to places like Tribeca; they come here.

  The Avalon State Bank Tower rose up from the cement sidewalk like a cross between a massive old oak tree and a squared-off spaceship. The first four floors were sheathed in alternating rectangles of glass and black marble with little dots and strings of green in it, the rectangles edged with copper. Starting from the fifth floor and going on up, the building’s skin was gray stone, unadorned. No cornices, lintels, arches, gables or gargoyles interrupted the flow of stone. From poles jutting out at an angle over the sidewalk at the fourth floor level hung three large flags: the United States, New York State and Templar International, this last being, on a yellow field, a black stylized figure that might have been either a tree or the letter T.

  Dortmunder stood by the curb, leaned back on the cane, and peered up as high as he could, his mouth open. The blue spring sky was half-obscured by running little puffy white clouds. Somewhere up there, the building stopped. “She’d have to let her hair down a hell of a distance, wouldn’t she?” he said.

  Kelp said, “What?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go in.”

  The street level of the building was half bank and half garden, both with forty-foot ceilings, the garden being more or less open to the public though enclosed, with a small cafe among the birches and beeches and bamboo. The bank was modern and marble and full of the latest ideas in security. Between bank and garden was the entrance to the lobby and its rows of elevators. Dortmunder and Kelp went in there, and stood staring for a while at the column after column of the directory lining one long wall, like a war memorial.

  “Lots of people in business,” Kelp commented, looking at all those corporate names.

  “Mm hm,” Dortmunder said.

  “Wonder how many are legit.”

  “The dentists,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  There were elevators marked 5–21, elevators marked 22–35, elevators marked 36–58, and elevators marked 59–74. Kelp said, “I thought you said she was on seventy-six.”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  So they took one of the 59–74s, and Dortmunder pushed 74. Two messenger boys and a blonde in a red dress and a pair of lawyers discussing a tax deal—“They’ll take seven mil and go away, but will they come back?”—shared the long vibrating ride with them in this functional metal closet. A messenger boy got off at sixty. The blonde sprayed her throat with breath freshener and sashayed off on sixty-three. The other messenger boy got off on sixty-eight, and the lawyers—“Just so they don’t start talking felony, we’re basically in the same ballpark”—got off on seventy-one. Dortmunder and Kelp rode on up to the top.

  Except it wasn’t the top. The helpful “you-are-here” map next to the elevators showed them where the stairwell was, just around the corner, and when they went there and opened the door the plain broad metal stairs, painted battleship gray, continued on up. However, a locked chainlink gate blocked the stairs in that direction. The stairs going down were clear.

  “I figured,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp leaned his cheek against the chainlink gate and strained to see upward. “Two more flights,” he reported. “At least two more.”

  “Well, it’s this,” Dortmunder said. “Or it’s the special elevator that needs a key, that I don’t even know where it is. Or we go up through the ceiling.”

  “Through two ceilings.”

  “Let’s look around.”

  They wandered the halls and found they were in the shape of an H, with the elevators in the crossbar. Four companies stretched themselves up here, taking a lot of space. There was a firm of architects, with a golden bridge symbol on their main door. A law partnership simply had a list of names on its entrance, while an engineering company sported on its door a black and gold bee inside the huge capital B of its name. The fourth company, taking up one quarter of the H, had a plain white door with very small raised letters on it reading: MARGRAVE.

  For five minutes or so they wandered the halls, looking at doors, most of them marked with arrows pointing toward that firm’s entrance. At one point, they watched a young woman, looking worried and carrying a handful of papers, come out of one office, cross the hall, and enter another office, but other than that they were alone. There were no windows anywhere, and the feeling after a while was of being underground rather than nearly a thousand feet up in the air.

  “The thing to do,” Kelp finally said, “is bring May here, show her the proposition, let her make her own mind up.”

  “She’s made her own mind up. Let’s look at one of those elevators.”

  So they went back to the middle of the H and rang for an elevator, which arrived empty. While Dortmunder propped the door open with his back and stood chicky, Kelp dragged the sandtopped butt can in to stand on, stood on it, opened the trapdoor in the ceiling, shoved it out of the way, and looked.

  “Well?” Dortmunder said. The elevator door kept bunking him in the back,
wanting to close. His ankle was sore and wanted to be placed in a raised position on something soft for a while, like maybe a month. “What do you see?”

  “Machinery.”

  “How close?”

  “Right here.”

  “The shaft doesn’t go up to the top?”

  “No,” Kelp said, peering and peering. “That might be a door there, so they can get to the motor and all, but that’d just get you into seventy-five. This thing doesn’t go to seventy-six.”

  “Figures,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s take another look at the stairs.”

  Kelp put the butt can back, Dortmunder released the now-buzzing elevator, and they went to take another look at the stairs. Dortmunder was brooding at the wall and Kelp was examining the lock on the gate when a man appeared in the hall doorway behind them and said, cheerfully, “Help you, gentlemen?”

  Dortmunder leaned more heavily on his cane, in order to look inoffensive. “Trying to find the men’s room,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the man said, smiling at them. He was about thirty, large, built like a football player with a neck wider than his head and hands made of balloons. He was neatly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and slender yellow tie, but there was something bulky under the left side of his jacket. “There are no public restrooms up here,” he said. “You’ll have to go back down to the lobby, turn left, and go into the garden.”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said.

  “It’s just around behind the ficus,” the man said helpfully, as they headed for the elevators, their tails between their legs. “You can’t miss it.”

  “Really appreciate it,” Kelp said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Dortmunder told him.

  8

  There’s so much unhappiness in this world. The strong prey upon the weak, injustice is rampant, evil succeeds everywhere and good is trampled in the dust. Ai, caramba, it makes you just want to piss!