“Rollo,” Dortmunder begged.
Sighing like an entire Marine boot camp, Rollo bestirred himself and came plodding down the duckboards. “How ya doin?” he said, flipping a coaster onto the bar.
“Keeping healthy,” Dortmunder told him.
“That’s good. The usual?”
“Carrot juice,” Dortmunder said.
“You got it,” Rollo told him, and reached for the bourbon bottle.
PARTY ANIMAL
_______________
There was no use going any farther down the fire escape. More cops were in the yard: A pair of flashlights white–lined the dark down there. From above, the clonk–clonk of sensible black shoes continued to descend on rusted metal stairs. A realist, Dortmunder stopped where he was on the landing and composed his soul for 10 to 25 as a guest of the state. American plan.
What a Christmas present.
A window, left of his left elbow. Through it, a dimly lighted bedroom, empty, with brighter light through the door ajar opposite. A pile of coats on the double bed. Faint party chatter wafting out through the top part of the window, open two inches.
An open window is not locked. It was a cold December out here. Dortmunder was bundled in a peacoat over his usual working uniform of black shoes, slacks and shirt — but with the party going on in there, the window had been opened at the top to let out excess heat.
Sliiide. Now open at the bottom. Sliiide. Now closed. Dortmunder started across the room toward that half–open door.
“Larry,” said the pile of coats in a querulous female voice. “There’s somebody in here.”
The pile of coats could do a snotty male voice, too: “They’re just going to the John. Pay no attention.”
“And putting down my coat,” Dortmunder said, dropping his peacoat with its cargo of burglar tools and knickknacks from the corner jeweler, from where he had traveled up and over rooftops to this dubious haven.
“Ouch!” said the girl’s voice.
“Sorry.”
“Get on with it, all right?” Boy’s voice.
“Sorry.”
A herd of cops went slantwise downward past the window, their attention fixed on the darkness below, the muffled clatter of their passage hardly noticeable to anyone who didn’t happen to be (a) a habitual criminal and (b) on the run. Despite the boy’s advice to get on with it, Dortmunder stayed frozen until the last of the herd trotted by, then he took a quick scan of the room.
Over there, the shut door outlined in light would lead to the bathroom. The darker one would be … a closet?
Yes. Hurried, in near darkness, Dortmunder grabbed something or other from inside the closet, then shut that door again and moved quickly toward the outlined one as the girl’s voice said, “Larry, I just don’t feel comfortable anymore.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Dortmunder entered the square, white bathroom — light–green towels, dolphins on the closed shower curtain — ignored the two voices departing from the room outside, one plaintive, the other overbearing, and studied his haberdashery selection.
Well. Fortunately, most things go with black, including this rather weary sports jacket of tweedy tan with brown leather elbow patches. Dortmunder slipped it on and it was maybe two sizes too big, but not noticeable if he kept it unbuttoned. He turned to the mirror over the sink, and now he might very well be a sociology professor — specializing in labor relations — at a small Midwestern university. A professor without tenure, though, and probably no chance of getting tenure, either, now that Marx has flunked his finals.
Dortmunder’s immediate problem was that he couldn’t hide. The cops knew he was in this building, so sooner or later some group of police officers would definitely be gazing upon him, and the only question was, how would they react when that moment came? His only hope was to mingle, if you could call that a hope.
Leaving the bathroom, he noticed that the pile of coats was visibly depleted. Seemed like everybody’s plans were getting loused up tonight.
But this gave him a chance to stash his stash, at least temporarily. Finding his peacoat at last — already it was at the bottom of the pile — he took the jeweler’s former merchandise and stowed it in the top left dresser drawer amid some other gewgaws and gimcracks. His tools went into the cluttered cabinet under the bathroom sink, and then he was ready to move on.
Beyond the partly opened bedroom door was a hall lined with national park posters. Immediately to the right, the hall ended at the apartment’s front door. To the left, it went past a couple of open and closed doors till it emptied into the room where the party was. From here, he could see half a dozen people holding drinks and talking. Motown versions of Christmas songs bubbled along, weaving through the babble of talk.
He hesitated, indecisive, struck by some strange stage fright. The apartment door called to him with a siren song of escape, even though he knew the world beyond it was badly infested by law. On the other hand, a crowd is supposed to be the ideal medium into which a lone individual might disappear, and yet he found himself reluctant to test that theory. To party or not to party — that was the question.
Two events pushed him to a decision. First, the doorbell next to him suddenly clanged like a fire engine in hell, causing him to jump a foot. And second, two women emerged from the party into the hallway, both moving fast. The one in front looked to be in her early 20s, in black slacks and black blouse and white half–apron and red bow tie and harried expression; she carried an empty round silver tray and she veered off into the first doorway on the right. The second woman was older but very well put together, dressed in baubles and beads and dangling earrings and a whole lot of Technicolor makeup, and her expression was grim but brave as she marched down the hall toward Dortmunder.
No, toward the door. This was, no doubt, the hostess, on her way to answer the bell, wondering who’d arrived so late. Dortmunder, knowing who the late arrivals were and not wanting to be anywhere near that door when it opened, jackrabbited into motion with an expression on his face that was meant to be a party smile. “How’s it goin?” he asked with nicely understated amiability as they passed each other in the middle of the hall.
“Just fine,” she swore, eyes sparkling and voice fluting, her own imitation party smile glued firmly in place. So she didn’t know everybody at her party. Dortmunder could have been brought here by an invited guest, right? Right.
The party, as Dortmunder approached it, was loud, but not loud enough to cover the sudden growl of voices behind him. He made an abrupt turn into the open doorway that the harried woman had gone through and then he was in the kitchen, where the harried woman was putting a lot of cheese–filled tarts onto the round tray.
Dortmunder tried his line again: “How’s it goin?”
“Rotten,” the harried woman said. Her ash–blonde hair was coiled in a bun in back, but much of it had escaped to lie in parabolas on her damp brow. She’d have been a good–looking woman if she weren’t so bad–tempered and overworked. “Jerry never showed up,” she snapped, as though it were Dortmunder’s fault. “I have to do it all —” She shook her head and made a sharp chopping motion with her left hand. “I don’t have time to talk.”
“Maybe I could help,” Dortmunder suggested. The growl of cop voices continued from back by the apartment door. They’d check the room next to the fire escape first, but then they’d be coming this way.
The woman looked at him as though he were trying to sell her magazine subscriptions: “Help? What do you mean, help?”
“I don’t know anybody here.” He was noticing: She was all in black, he was all in black. “I came with Larry, but now he’s talking to some girl, so why don’t I help out?”
“You don’t help the caterer,” she said.
“OK. Just a thought.” No point getting her suspicious.
But as he was turning away, she said, “Wait a minute,” and when he looked back, her sweat–beaded brow was divided in half by a vertical frown line. Sh
e said, “You really want to help?”
“Only if you could use some.”
“Well,” she said, reluctant to admit there might be something in this world for her not to be mad at, “if you really mean it.”
“Count on it,” Dortmunder told her. Shucking out of the borrowed jacket, looking around the room for a white apron like hers, he said, “It’ll give me something to do other than just stand in the corner by myself. I’ll take those things out, pass them around, you can get caught up.”
Once the jacket was off and hanging on a kitchen chair, Dortmunder looked exactly like what he was: a semihardened criminal, a hunted man, a desperate fugitive from justice and a guy who just keeps slipping the mind of Lady Luck. This was not a good image. Failing to find a white apron, he grabbed a white dish towel instead and tucked it sideways across the front of his trousers. No red bow tie like the woman’s, but that couldn’t be helped.
She watched him suiting up. “Well, if you really want to do this,” she said, and suddenly her manner changed, became much more official, commanding–even bossy. “What you have to do is remember to keep moving. It’s a jungle out there.”
“Oh, I know that,” Dortmunder said.
“You don’t want to get caught.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’ll get people,” she said, making hand gestures to demonstrate the point, “who’ll just keep grabbing and grabbing. You get into the middle of a conversational group, all of a sudden you can’t get out without knocking somebody over, and then — that’s a no–no, by the way,” she interrupted herself.
Dortmunder had been nodding, one ear cocked for the approach of society’s defenders, but now he looked quizzical and said, “A no–no?”
“Knocking over the guests.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked. You knock over jewelry stores, not guests. Everybody knows that.
“If you’re stuck in the middle of a group and there’s no way out,” she explained, “they’ll eat everything on the tray. They’re like a bunch of locusts, and there you are, and most of the other guests haven’t had anything at all.”
“I see what you mean. Keep moving.”
“And,” she said, “stick the tray into the middle, but don’t go into the middle.”
“I got it,” he promised her. “I’m ready to make the move.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“Sure,” he said, and picked up the tarts and went to the aid of the party.
The party consisted of several clumps of people, mostly crowded around the bar, which was a serve–yourself table in front of curtained windows at one end of the long living room. Most people ignored the big cut–glass bowl of eggnog and went straight for the wine or the hard stuff. At the opposite end of the room stood the Christmas tree, short and fat and shedding, with many tiny colored lights that blinked on and off as if to say chickee–the–cops, chickee–the–cops, chickee–the–cops. I know, Dortmunder thought back at them, I know about it, all right?
A sofa and some chairs had been shoved against the walls to make room for the party, so everybody was standing, except one heavy woman dressed in a lot of bright fluttery scarves who perched on the sofa holding a glass as she talked to various people’s stomachs. Occasionally, someone would bend down to say a friendly word to her forehead, but mostly she was ignored; the party was taking place at the five–foot level, not the three–foot level. And, as at most Christmas parties, everybody was looking a little tense thinking about all those lists at home.
Feeling the guard–dog eyes of the law scrape at his back, though the search party hadn’t yet made its way down the hall, Dortmunder held the tray chest high and followed it into the scrum. People parted at the arrival of food, paused in drink and talk to take a tartlet, then closed ranks again in his wake. Sidling to the center of the crush, in the party but not of it, Dortmunder began to relax and to pick up shreds of conversation as he motored along.
“There’s only twenty guys gonna be let in on this thing. We have seven already, and once we have all of the seed money …”
“She came to the co–op board in a false beard and claimed she was a proctologist. Well, naturally …”
“So then I said you can have this job, and he said OK, and I said you can’t treat people like that, and he said OK, and I said that’s it, I quit, and he said OK, and I said you’re gonna have to get along without me from here on in, buster, and he said OK … so I guess I’m not over there anymore.”
“And then these guys in a rowboat — no, wait, I forgot. First they blew up the bridge, see, and then they stole the rowboat.”
“Merry Christmas, you Jew bastard, I haven’t seen you since Ramadan.”
“And he said, ‘Madam, you’re naked’, and I said, ‘These happen to be gloves, if you don’t mind’, and that shut him up.”
“Whatever you want, Sheila. If you want to go, we’ll go.”
Wait a minute, that was a familiar voice. Dortmunder looked around, and another familiar voice, this one female, said, “I didn’t say I wanted to leave, Larry. Why do you always put it on me?”
The couple from the coats. Dortmunder steered his tart tray in that direction, and there they were, both in their mid–20s, wedged into a self–absorbed bubble inside the larger party. Larry was very tall, with unnecessarily wavy dark hair and a long thin nose and long thin lips and little widely spaced eyes. Sheila was on the short side, a pretty girl, but with an extra layer of baby fat, driveway–colored hair and not much clothes sense; either that, or she’d just recently put on those extra pounds and hadn’t bought any new clothes for the new body.
Dortmunder inserted the depleted tartlet tray into their space as Larry said, “I don’t put it on you. You weren’t happy in the other room, and now you’re not happy here. Make your own decisions, that’s all.”
She turned her worried look to the tarts, but Larry grandly waved the tray away. Neither of them looked directly at Dortmunder. In fact, nobody looked directly at the server (not servant, please, in egalitarian America) where tartlets simply appeared in one’s hand at a given point during the party.
Moving on through the throng, Dortmunder heard one last exchange behind him. (“Lately, you do this all the time.” “I’m not doing anything, Sheila, it’s up to you.”) But his attention was diverted by an event ahead: The cops had arrived.
Three of them, uniformed, stocky, mustached, irritable. They were so grumpy that the Technicolor hostess in their midst looked as though she were under arrest.
But she wasn’t under arrest, she was bird–dogging, eyeing the guests for the cops, looking for cuckoos in the nest. Unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar faces …
Meanwhile, all the faces had grown just a little more rigid. It’s hard to be aware that three bad–tempered cops are looking at you and pretend you aren’t aware of it, and at the same time present an image that shows you’re innocent of whatever it is they think you’re guilty of, when you don’t know what they think you’re guilty of, and for all you know you are. Complex. No wonder every drink in the room was being drained more rapidly, even the club sodas and ginger ales.
Someone else was also observing the scene: the harried woman caterer. She’d been circulating in another part of the room with another tray, and she’d noticed the new arrivals. Dortmunder caught her looking from him to the cops and back again, and in the space between her damp hair and perky red bow tie, her thunderclouded face was an absolute emblem of suspicion. Doesn’t anybody believe in altruism anymore?
Well, it was time to grasp the tiger by the tail and face the situation. The best defense is a good despair; Dortmunder marched directly to that dark blue cloud in the doorway, shoved his tray into its middle and said, “Tarts?”
“No, no,” they said, brushing him away — even cops don’t look at servers — and they went back to saying to the hostess, “Anybody you don’t know. Anybody at all.”
Dortmunder dallied nearby, offering his last few tarts to the close
st convivials as he eavesdropped on the manhunt. The hostess was a rich contralto; under most circumstances, she would have been a pleasure to listen to, but these were not most circumstances: “I don’t see anyone. Well, that person came with Tommy, his name is, oh, I’m so bad at names.”
“It’s faces we care about,” one of the cops said, and damn near looked at Dortmunder.
Who realized it was time to move on. Unloading the last of his tarts, he segued into the empty kitchen, where he briefly considered his circumstances, contemplated a cut–and–run and decided this was no time to become a moving target.
On a cookie sheet on the kitchen counter lay a regiment of two–inch–long celery segments, each filled with red–dyed anchovy gunk. Green and red, Christmas colors; pretty, in a way, but not particularly edible–looking. Nevertheless, he arranged these on his tray, making a spiral, getting caught up in the design, attempting to make a Santa Claus face, failing, then picking up the tray, and as he turned to leave, one of the cops walked in.
Dortmunder couldn’t help himself; he just stood there. Deep down inside, a terrific struggle was going on, invisible on the surface. You’re a waiter, he told himself in desperation, you’re with the caterer, nothing else matters to you. Trying to build a performance using the Method. But no. It didn’t matter how he spurred himself, he just went on standing there, tray in hands, waiting to be led away.
The cop glared around the room as though he were pretty sure somebody was there. His gaze slid off Dortmunder’s furrowed brow, moved on, kept searching.
I am a waiter! Dortmunder thought, and almost smiled; except a waiter wouldn’t. He took a step toward the door, and the cop said, “Whose coat is that?”
Who’s he talking to? There’s nobody here but the waiter.
“You,” the cop said, not quite looking in Dortmunder’s direction. He pointed at the jacket Dortmunder had worn in here from the bedroom. “That yours?”
“No.” Which was not only the truth, it was also the simplest possible answer. So rarely is the truth the simplest possible answer that Dortmunder, pleased by the coincidence, repeated it. “No,” he said again, then added a flourish for the hell of it. “It was here when I came in.”
Collected Stories Page 9
