“No, I don’t know.”
Tiny said, “He went upstairs to get the nun and he didn’t come down, so that’s it.”
“Nun?”
Kelp said, “It’s very simple,” and then proceeded to tell her a story that wasn’t simple at all. For some strange reason, there was a nun imprisoned at the top of this tower. For some other strange reason, Dortmunder had to go rescue her. The whole robbery business was to pay for partners to help in the rescue of the nun. Last night, Dortmunder went away to rescue the nun, and so far he hadn’t come back.
J.C. said, “And?”
Everybody shifted around uneasily. The others all glanced at Tiny Bulcher, who said, belligerently, “And nothing. He’s on his own.”
Slowly she looked him up and down. “So that’s why they call you Tiny,” she said. With a graceful sweeping gesture of the arm that she’d learned in ballet class at the age of four—J.C. Taylor was not always as we see her now—she indicated the king’s ransom strewn helter-skelter around the room. “Dort-whatever brought you all this,” she said, voice dripping with scorn, “and now you’re going to just leave him.”
38
Virgil Pickens sipped cooling coffee. “I just don’t like it,” he said.
The four troops sitting around the kitchen table with him were getting so bored with all this they were beginning to let him know it. “Whether you like it or not, Mr. Pickens,” one of them said, “that fella Smith just isn’t up in this apartment.”
Pickens brooded, watching the Guatemalan cook who’d arrived just a few minutes ago—came to work at eleven, apparently—and who’d been throwing evil-eye hostile looks at the men gathered in her kitchen ever since. Wants us out of here so she can clean up, Pickens supposed, though with the number of half-dirty cups they’d found in the cabinets when making their coffee she wasn’t exactly the best housekeeper money could buy.
Was that the story with the towels as well? When they’d looked through the Ritter girl’s bathroom the tub had been half full of towels. Now, that could have been simple sloppiness, as everybody else suggested, but it did seem to Pickens he hadn’t seen a whole hell of a lot of sloppiness anywhere else in this girl’s quarters—except here in the kitchen, of course—and the alternative that had come to him was that somebody had used that tub to sleep in.
No, everybody said. The fella isn’t here, everybody said. You can theorize all you want, everybody said, but until you have a fact or two to support your theories, essentially what you are is full of horseshit.
The Ritter daughter is closed away in her room. Every inch of this place has been searched. Smith isn’t here.
“Oh, well,” Pickens said, and finished his coffee. Rising, he said, “I hate to be wrong when I so feel that I’m right. Still …”
The cook, plainly in a hurry to be rid of them, picked up Pickens’ cup, carried it to the dishwasher, opened it, and the dishwasher reached arms out to close itself again.
“What bugs me,” Pickens said, and became aware of the cook. She had frozen in one place like Lot’s wife, staring round-eyed. At the dishwasher.
Pickens frowned, trying to remember what he’d just seen. “Arms?” he asked.
The dishwasher sighed.
39
The public garden in the ground floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, so green, so lovely, so productive of tax abatements, was closed on Sunday. The few passersby on Fifth Avenue on that day of rest could still look through the tall plate-glass wall and refresh themselves with the views within of slender trees and graceful shrubbery and the cafe’s delicate wrought-iron white chairs, but that was all. However, on this particular sunny Sunday in spring, just a bit after eleven in the morning, a really sharp-eyed passerby might have noticed—though none did—a few shadowy figures darting through those trees, pausing behind a bush, rushing to a copse of birch and a clump of beech, infiltrating the woods like a Civil War raiding party just before Shiloh.
Howey, with the appropriate spec sheets from the ledger books in his pocket, and with Stan Murch along as bearer of his toolbag, had led the way down the stairwell from the seventh floor, out to the silent lobby, and past the broad aisle at the far end of which the security guard sat on a stool, facing the other way, leaning on the lectern where people signed in. A little past that aisle, out of the guard’s sight, was a wide door labeled OPEN SLOWLY, which was not actually openable at all today, since, being the door to the garden, it too was kept locked on Sunday. Howey snickered slightly when he saw this door, passed his hand over its mechanisms, and the door gaped wide without further ado. In they went; Howey, Stan, Kelp, Tiny and J.C. Taylor herself, who had broken down the last shred of Tiny’s resistance to the rescue operation by volunteering to take part.
Kelp had to lead the way through the woods, Howey not having previously seen the MAINTENANCE door which actually opened to the special elevator. Once there, while the others huddled around him, glancing from time to time through the intervening trunks and leaves and branches toward the empty sunlit street, Howey studied the door, studied the spec sheet, studied the door some more, and said, “Now they’re getting serious.”
“You get serious, too,” Tiny suggested.
“Say, you know me,” Howey reminded him. “Show me a lock, and I’ll show you an open door.”
It wasn’t quite that simple. It took three minutes and four tools and a lot of low irritable whistling from the kneeling Howey until at last he popped up onto his feet, tossed his tools with a clank into the open bag held by Stan Murch, and said, “She’s yours.”
Kelp opened the door to what seemed a bare closet. But the rear wall was a sliding door, with a telephone-style keypad beside it. Soft amber light came from a recessed ceiling fixture. “Now, that’s gonna take a few seconds,” Howey said, nodding at the keypad. “I’ll need somebody to hold the light.”
“Me,” Stan told him.
“Fine. The rest of you fellas and gals, just wait outside there, we’ll knock when we’re ready.” Howey winked at J.C. “Don’t you go too far, Toots.”
“I always go too far,” she told him, and he blinked and giggled and took that thought into the closet with him.
Inside, while Stan held the flashlight—“Say, pal, not on my knuckles, you know, on my work”—Howey brought out a small battery-operated drill and made two holes in the cover plate of the keypad, above the numbers 1 and 3. The narrow ends of a line tester were inserted, and the line tester lit up. So did Howey, saying, “Say, there, I got it in one. Listen, am I my mama’s favorite child, or what?”
“Or what,” Stan told him.
“Sez you,” Howey riposted.
Outside, Kelp hunkered behind a planter, watching the street, remembering a war movie called Guadalcanal Diary that he’d seen on TV. The American Marines were hunkered like this in their foxholes. Low thick fog cover on the ground, all you could see was the shiny dark round helmets on the Japanese, crawling toward the Marine position. Scary. Kelp peered through shiny-leaved shrubbery and tall slender tree trunks, and out on the sunny sidewalk a Japanese tourist family of four went by, in their Sunday best, taking one another’s pictures.
Tiny and J.C. leaned against the wall near MAINTENANCE and near each other. Breaking a long silence, Tiny muttered, “I didn’t want to embarrass him, that’s all.”
J.C. considered this. “Oh?”
“Dortmunder,” Tiny explained. “Maybe he don’t need to be rescued.”
“He’ll be glad to see us, just the same.”
“Maybe so,” Tiny said reluctantly. His brow was extremely furrowed. He was trying to be conciliatory, a thing he’d never attempted before. “Maybe,” he said, “it was good to get another point of view. Somebody come in, see it like with new eyes.”
Aware of the strain of Tiny’s efforts, J.C. decided to meet him halfway. “Thank you, Tiny,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was just being nosy or bossy or anything.”
“Aw, naw,” Tiny assured her. “Like
I said, a second opinion. It’s good with doctors, why not with everybody?”
“That’s true.”
Which was as far as Tiny could carry good fellowship without relief. Moving away from the wall, he glared at MAINTENANCE and said, “What’s taking that scrawny chicken so goddamn long?”
“He’ll get there,” J.C. said.
He was, in fact, almost there. Stan Murch’s flashlight now shone on a contraption of wires messily sticking out of the two holes Howey had made, and Howey’s tongue was between his teeth, poking out the corner of his mouth, as he held two ends of bare wire just apart from each other. He moved his tongue out of the way long enough to say, “Well, here goes nothin.”
“I don’t like to hear things like that,” Stan told him.
Howey put the wire ends together. Far off, something, some machine, went chuh-uhhhhhhhhhh. “Say,” Howey said, grinning, his relieved eyes dancing, “you like to hear things like that? That’s our elevator coming.”
40
“Straighten up when I talk to you,” Virgil Pickens said.
“I can’t,” Smith said.
So Pickens sat down at the kitchen table, where his head was at least at the same level as Smith’s. Somewhere else in the apartment, the Guatemalan cook could be heard, still sobbing, while the Ritter girl tried to console her. The ten men of Pickens’ search unit were gathered in the kitchen, along with the three private guards normally assigned here, all of them studying this crumpled-up man they’d found in the dishwasher.
Smith. Still Smith, unfortunately, since he carried no identification and so far refused to give any other name. “I’ll tell you, Smith,” Pickens said, gazing severely at the top of Smith’s head, “I hate torture as much as the next man.”
“So do I,” said Smith.
“So that’s why,” Pickens told him, “I’m hoping you’re gonna cooperate with me and—goddamnit, man! I can’t talk to your head!”
“Let’s straighten him,” said one of the troops. A couple of the boys picked Smith up and unbent him somewhat, but when they put him down again he slowly folded back to his former shape, like plastic after you heat it.
“Well, shit,” Pickens said. “Seat him in a chair here, then. It’s goddamn unorthodox, questioning a prisoner, having the prisoner sit down, but maybe— There. That’s better.”
It seemed to be better for Smith, too; he sighed a bit, and settled, like an old house on muddy ground. Seated on the chair, he almost looked like a normal human being, with only a slight curvature around the neck and shoulders to suggest he’d been through anything unusual.
Pickens brooded, studying this sorry specimen. There’s some way or another to break any human being in the world, and from the look of this fellow every one of those ways ought to work this time around. On the other hand, there was a kind of fatalism in Smith’s bearing that was maybe more than dishwasher slump. A man who’s already despaired before you ever start on him can sometimes be a very tough nut to crack. Probing for an opening, Pickens said, “You’ve run out your string, Smith, and there’s nobody gonna come help, so you might as well tell us the whole story.”
Smith looked around at the troops. His expression said he’d expected to meet up with them sooner or later; he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t even seem particularly troubled by it all. Frank Putter’s three private guards, having elected not to deal themselves into this hand, stood to one side with folded arms and impassively watched.
Pickens leaned forward to tap a knuckle on Smith’s knee, recapturing his attention. Looking Smith in the eye, speaking very softly, he said, “You’re all alone with us, Smith. And you’re gonna stay alone with us. And we’re not your friends.”
Smith sighed.
The five people crowded into the elevator stared past one another’s ears at their dim amber reflections in the copper walls. All was silent, save for the hum of machinery, until J.C. Taylor calmly said, “I know that was you, Wilbur, and if you do it again, I’ll ask Tiny to sit on your head when we get out of here.”
“Say, Toots, can’t a fella, gunnngg!” Howey said.
Tiny nodded, and shifted position a second time. “He won’t bother you no more,” he said.
“That’s right,” said a high-pitched voice. Everybody looked around, then realized it had come from Howey. “Say,” he said, sounding somewhat more normal, “I know when I’m not wanted.”
“Good,” said Tiny.
Non culpar, Sister Mary Grace wrote on the notepad, wishing her Spanish were better, and underneath did it in English as well: It’s not your fault. Gently tugging the dish towel away from Enriqueta Tomayo’s eyes, Sister Mary Grace waved the notepad in front of the weeping woman’s crumpled face until Enriqueta focused on it, gazing ruefully and tearfully at the words, then shaking her head, her face crumpling even more, tears running down her round cheeks. Once again the dish towel, now sopping, was pressed to that wet face.
The two women sat on the narrow vinyl sofa in the plain and Spartan reception room, where the elevator opened. To their right was the doorway leading to the combination living/dining room where most of her encounters with the departed Walter Hendrickson had taken place, and beyond that the rest of the apartment, and at last the kitchen, where poor John was now surrounded by her father’s hired mercenaries and assassins.
It was my fault. I should have found a way to, Sister Mary Grace wrote, and paused, listening. Hhhmmmmmmmmm … The elevator. She gazed at its door, across the room, and wondered who this might be. More reinforcements for the mercenaries? Possibly even her father himself, who she knew was in the building? Her face stiffened, and she sat hunched on the sofa, watching the elevator door. Enriqueta, aware less of the approaching elevator than of the difference in Sister Mary Grace, slackened in her weeping, peered over the top of the dank dish towel at the girl, then followed her gaze to the elevator.
Which opened, and out from it emerged the motleyest crew this side of the yellow brick road. A man monster came first, with a face like the radiator of a 1933 Ford and two clenched fists like angry basketballs. He was followed by a skittering little dancing old man, popping up and down on his toes, eyes searching in thirty directions at once. An extremely exotic-looking woman followed, very attractive and sensual but also hard, as though one could strike a match on her; not convent material, Sister Mary Grace thought. After her came a sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, skinny man who looked like the untrustworthy small animal in a Disney cartoon; the pack rat or weasel. And last out was a red-haired chunky man who looked around with great interest and attention, as though expecting to be given a memory test on the contents of this room later.
Enriqueta gasped, and stared wide-eyed, and clasped the soggy dish towel to her throat. Everybody looked at everybody else, while the elevator door slid shut, and then the man monster came over, glowering as though he felt Sister Mary Grace were to blame for something, and growled, “You the nun?”
Could this be—? Quickly, Sister Mary Grace wrote, Are you John’s friends? and held up the notepad.
“That’s the nun, all right,” said the sharp-nosed man.
Could they be heard in the kitchen? Warningly, Sister Mary Grace put her fingers to her lips.
They misunderstood, unfortunately; the man monster said, “You’re the one with the vow of silence, lady, not us.” Meantime, the skittery little old man peeked bright-eyed around the man monster’s elbow and said, “Say, there, Sister Toots. Heard any good prayers lately?”
The man monster frowned at the little man. “Wilbur,” he said, “I don’t need you to open any locks anymore. You go on annoying me, I’m gonna unlock your nose and watch your brains fall out.”
The little man, Wilbur, blinked at the man monster, daunted for a second, but then he turned aside and gave Sister Mary Grace a surreptitious grin and wink.
Meantime, the sharp-nosed man had understood the reason for Sister Mary Grace’s desire for quiet. Pointing at the doorway leading to the rest of the apartment, he said in
a low voice, “They got Dortmunder back there?”
Dortmunder? Not knowing that name, Sister Mary Grace wrote on her pad, John? and showed it to them.
“Yeah,” the man monster said, sounding very irritable. “Saint John, that’s him.”
Sister Mary Grace nodded, and pointed at the doorway, and nodded again.
The sharp-nosed man said, “Who else is with him?”
10 armed mercenary soldiers, Sister Mary Grace wrote, and 3 armed private guards.
They looked at that note when she held it up, then looked at one another, and Sister Mary Grace could see them comparing the forces arrayed against them with themselves: four extremely varied men, and three extremely varied women. No wonder everyone looked a bit apprehensive, and that the little man, Wilbur, sounded shakier than before when he said, “Well, Tiny? How strong do you feel?”
That was the man monster, oddly enough. He took a deep breath, for answer, and gazed at the doorway, clearly intending to simply march in there and do his best. Sister Mary Grace wrote fast, and held up the note:
Excuse me. I have a suggestion.
41
Dortmunder gazed at Pickens’ heavy and unsympathetic face, and saw little to like there. Just what sort of story would this guy believe? It seemed perfectly clear that Pickens wouldn’t for a second believe the truth, that John Dortmunder was merely a professional burglar doing some nuns a favor by rescuing Sister Mary Grace. So what sort of story might he be likely to believe?
The question had some urgency, because Pickens was talking about torture again. “It’s kind of amazing,” he was saying, “just how many things there are in the ordinary kitchen that can cause a fella pain, if that fella isn’t polite enough to answer a decent question. That electric stove over there, for instance. Jocko, go turn on the left front burner about halfway.”
One of the tough guys went over and turned on the left front burner, about halfway. Dortmunder didn’t watch, because his head wouldn’t turn in that direction, but he knew it was happening.
Good Behavior Page 19
