What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter. Walk across Fifth Avenue and down the long block to Sixth and the long block to Seventh and the short block to Broadway. Then up two blocks to the subway, where she would descend, swipe the MetroCard until it recognized itself, and then descend some more and wait for the uptown local, riding it to Eighty-sixth Street. Another walk, one block up and half a block over, and she entered her apartment building, where she chose a different card from her bulging wallet—this was three cards for one trip—in order to gain admittance, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the long hall to 4-D. That same third card also let her into the apartment, where the smell of Oriental food—was that Thai? the smell of peanuts?—was the most welcoming thing in her day.

  “Honey, I’m home!” she called, which they both thought of as their joke, and he came grinning out of the galley kitchen with a dishtowel tucked in around his waist and a glass of red wine in each hand. As tall as she was short, and as blond as she was raven-haired, Brian had wide bony shoulders but was otherwise as skinny as a stray cat, with a craggy handsome face that always maintained some caution down behind the good cheer.

  “Home is the hunter,” he greeted her, which was another part of the joke, and handed over a glass.

  They kissed, they clinked glasses, they sipped the wine, which they didn’t know any better than to believe was pretty good, and then he went back to the kitchen to plate their dinners while she stood leaning in the doorway to say, “How was your day?”

  “Same old same old,” he said, which was what he usually said, though sometimes there were tidbits of interest he would share with her, just as she would with him.

  Since he worked for a cable television company, Brian actually had more frequent tidbits to offer than she did. He was an illustrator there, assembling collages and occasionally doing original artwork, all to be background for different things the cable station would air. He belonged to some sort of show business writers union, though she didn’t quite see how what he did counted as writing, but it meant that, though his income was a fraction of hers, his hours were much more predictable—and shorter—than hers. She thought wistfully from time to time that it might be nice to be in a union and get home at six at night instead of ten-thirty, but she knew it was a class thing: Lawyers would never stoop to protect themselves.

  Brian brought their dinners out to the table in what they called the big room, though it wasn’t that big. Even so, they’d crowded into it a sofa, two easy chairs, a small dining table with two armless designer chairs, a featureless gray construct containing all the elements of their “entertainment space,” two small bookcases crammed with her history books and his art books, and a small black coffee table on which they played Scrabble and cribbage.

  They’d been a couple for three years now, he moving into what had been her place after he broke up with his previous girlfriend. They had no intention of marrying, no desire for children, no yen to put down roots somewhere in the suburbs. They liked each other, liked living together, didn’t get on each other’s nerves very much, and didn’t see too much of one another because of the nature of her job. So it was all very nice and easy.

  And he was a good cook! He’d had an after-school restaurant slavey job in his teens, and had taken to the concept of cookery as being somehow related to his work as an artist. He enjoyed burrowing his way into exotic cuisines, and she almost always relished the result. Not so bad.

  Tonight, as her nose had told her, dinner came from the cuisine of Thailand, and was delicious, and over it she said, “My day wasn’t exactly same old same old.”

  Interested, he looked at her over his fork. (You don’t use chopsticks with Thai food.) “Oh, yeah?”

  “A man I talked to,” she said. “The most hangdog man I ever met in my life. You can’t imagine what he looked like when he said, ‘I’m going back to jail.’” And she laughed at the memory, as he frowned at her, curious.

  “Back to jail? You’re not defending crooks now, are you? That isn’t what you people do.”

  “No, no, this isn’t anything to do with the firm. This is something about my grandfather.”

  “Daddy Bigbucks,” Brian said.

  She smiled at him, indulging him. “Yes, I know, you’re only with me because of my prospects. Money is really all you care about, I know that.”

  He grinned back at her, but with a slight edge to it as he said, “Try going without it for a while.”

  “I know, I know, you come from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  “We were too poor to have tracks. What I’ve done, I’ve shacked-up up. Tell me about this hangdog guy.”

  So she told him the chess set saga, about which he had previously known nothing. He asked a few questions, brought himself up to speed, then said, “Is this guy really going to rob a bank vault?”

  “Oh, of course not,” she said. “It’s just silly. They’ll all see it’s impossible, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “But what if he tries?”

  “Oh, the poor man,” she said, but she grinned as she said it. “In that case, I think he probably will go back to jail.”

  14

  IN DORTMUNDER’S DREAM, it wasn’t his old cell at all, it was much older, and smaller, and very rusty, and flooded with water knee-deep. His cellmate—a hulking guy he’d never met before, but who looked a lot like Hannibal Lecter—leered at him and said, “We like it this way.”

  Dortmunder opened his mouth to say he didn’t at all like it this way, but out from between his lips came the sudden jangle of an alarm clock, startling him awake.

  John Dortmunder was not an alarm clock kind of guy. He preferred to get out of bed when the fancy struck him, which was generally about the crack of noon. But with the necessity this morning of being way over on the Upper West Side at nine o’clock, he knew he had to make an exception. Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?

  Last night, May had helped him set the alarm for eight in the morning, and now at eight in the morning May’s foot helped him bounce out of bed, slap the alarm clock silly until it shut up, then slope off to the bathroom.

  Twenty minutes later, full of a hastily-ingested mélange of corn flakes and milk and sugar, he went out into the morning cold—it was much colder out here in the morning—and after some time found a cab to take him up to Riverside Drive, where a black limo sat in front of Mr. Hemlow’s building, white exhaust putt-putting out of its tailpipe. The skinny sour guy at the wheel, with the white hair sticking out from under his chauffeur’s cap, would be Pembroke, and the satisfied guy in the rear-facing backseat, encased like a sausage in his black topcoat, would be Johnny Eppick in person, who pushed open the extra-wide door, grinned into the cold air, and said, “Right on time. We’re all here, climb in.”

  “One to go,” Dortmunder told him.

  Eppick didn’t think he liked that. “You’re bringing somebody along?”

  “You already know him,” Dortmunder said. “So I thought he oughta know you.”

  “And he would be—”

  “Andy Kelp.”

  Now Eppick’s smile returned, bigger than ever. “Good thinking. You’re starting to put your mind to it, John, that’s good.” Slight frown. “But where is he?”

  “Coming up the street,” Dortmunder said, nodding down to where Kelp walked toward them up Riverside Drive.

  Kelp had a jaunty walk when he was going into a situation he wasn’t sure of, and it was at its jauntiest as he approached the limo, looked at that smiling head leaning out of the limo’s open door, and said, “You’re gonna be Johnny Eppick, I bet.”

  “Got it in one,” Eppick said. “And you’ll be Andrew Octavian Kelp.”

  “Oh, I only use the Octavian on holidays.”

  “Well, get in, get in, we might as well get going.”

  The interior of the limo had been adjusted for Mr. Hemlow’s wheelchair, so that a be
nch seat behind the chauffeur’s compartment faced backward, and the rest of the floor was covered with curly black carpet, with lines in it that showed where the platform would extend out through the doorway when it was time to load Mr. Hemlow aboard. The bench seat would really be comfortable only for two and Eppick was already on it, but when Dortmunder bent to enter the limo somehow Kelp was already in there, seated to Eppick’s right and looking as innocent as a poisoner.

  So that left the floor for Dortmunder, unless he wanted to sit up in front of the partition with the chauffeur and not be part of the conversation. He went in on all fours and then turned himself around into a seated position as Eppick closed the door. The rear wall, beneath the window, was also covered with the black carpet, and wasn’t really uncomfortable at all, anyway not at first. So Dortmunder might be on the floor, but at least he was facing front.

  “All right, Pembroke,” Eppick said, and off they went.

  Kelp, with his amiable smile, said, “John tells me you know all about us.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Eppick said. “I only know that little part of your activities that’s made it into the filing system. The tip of the iceberg, you might say.”

  “And yet,” Kelp said, “I don’t seem to have any files on you at all. John says you’re retired from the NYPD.”

  “Seventeen months ago.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where was it in the NYPD,” Kelp wondered, “did they make use of your talents?”

  “The last seven years,” Eppick told him, not seeming to mind the interrogation at all, “I was in the Bunco Squad.”

  “They still call it that? ‘Say, did you drop this wallet?’ That kinda thing?”

  Eppick laughed. “Oh, there’s still some street hustle,” he said, “but not so much any more. You watch television half an hour, you know every scam there is.”

  “Not every.”

  “No, not every,” Eppick conceded. “But these days, it’s mostly phone and Internet.”

  “The Nigerians.”

  “All that money they’re trying to get out of Lagos and into your bank account,” Eppick agreed. “Amazing how often we find the sender in Brooklyn.”

  “Amazing you find the sender,” Kelp told him.

  “Oh, now,” Eppick said. “We do have our little successes.”

  “That’s nice,” Kelp said. “But now you’re out on your own. John tells me you got a card and everything.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Eppick said. “I should of given you one.” And, sliding two fingers under the lapel of his topcoat, he brought out another of his cards and gave it to Kelp.

  Who studied it with interest. “‘For Hire,’” he read. “Doesn’t narrow it much.”

  “I didn’t want the clients to feel constricted.”

  “You had many of those?”

  “Mr. Hemlow is my first,” Eppick said, “and naturally the most important.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I don’t want to let him down.”

  “No, of course not,” Kelp agreed. “Here at the beginning of your second career.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yet John tells me,” Kelp said, “this little thing you put him on the send for, he tells me it isn’t gonna be easy.”

  “If it was gonna be easy,” Eppick said, “I woulda sent a boy.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I got every confidence in your friend John,” Eppick said. Looking at Dortmunder, who was at that moment shifting position this way and that because after a while and a few stops at red lights the limo floor and back weren’t quite as comfortable as he’d thought at first, he said, “I believe also that John has every confidence in me.”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said. When he crumpled himself into the corner, it was a little better.

  15

  JUDSON BLINT TYPED names and addresses into the computer. Here it was, nearly ten in the morning, and he still hadn’t finished with Super Star Music, while stacked up beside his left elbow were the letters, the applications, and the checks—lovely checks—for Allied Commissioners’ Courses and Intertherapeutic Research Service. What a long way to go.

  For some reason, the mail was always heaviest on Fridays. Maybe the post office just wanted to clear everything out before the weekend. For whatever reason, Friday was always the day that made this job seem most like a job, instead of what it actually was, which was three extremely profitable felonies.

  Take Super Star Music, on which he was still working at ten in the morning. Advertising in magazines likely to draw in the young and the gullible, Super Star Music promised to make you rich and famous by setting your song lyrics to music. Alternately, if it’s music you got, they’ll give you lyrics. Now, most amateurs do simple marching-beat doggerel, so there’s lots of music out there to match; just shift the rhythms around a bit. As for lyrics, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations has some pretty good ones, or there’s always what’s in the next envelope right here.

  Allied Commissioners’ Courses, on the other hand, would teach you everything you needed to know to make a fine living as a detective; sure. And if Intertherapeutic Research Service’s dirty book doesn’t improve your sex life, check your pulse; maybe you died.

  Judson Blint’s task in this triple threat ongoing skimming of the pittances of the reality impaired was simple. Each day, he opened the envelopes, typed the return addresses into the computer and attached the labels to the right packages. Then he carried the outgoing mail on a large dolly down to the post office in the lobby of this building, brought up the next batch of suckers, and carried the checks to the inner office of J.C. Taylor, who’d originally thought up all this stuff and would give him twenty percent of the intake simply for doing the clerical work—usually between seven and eleven hundred a week.

  He’d been at this scam since July, when he’d first come to Manhattan out of Long Island, fresh out of high school and convinced he was the best con artist of all time, until J.C. saw through him in a New York minute but gave him this job anyway, for which he would be forever grateful. Also, it had already led a bit to even better things.

  He was thinking about those better things, feeling sorry again that Stan Murch’s idea at the O.J. the other night had been such a loser, because it was time to pick up a little extra coinage here and there before winter set in, when the hall door opened and, before Judson could do his spiel— “J.C. Taylor isn’t in at the moment, have you an appointment, I’m terribly sorry”—Stan Murch himself walked in. He shut the door behind himself, nodded at Judson, and said, “Harya.”

  “Hi.”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  Of the seventh floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower on Fifth Avenue near St. Patrick’s Cathedral? Sure. “Glad you could drop by,” Judson said.

  There were chairs in this small crowded room, other than the one at the desk where Judson sat, but they were all piled high with books, either detective or sex. Stan looked around, accepted reality, and leaned back against a narrow clear spot of wall beside the door. Folding his arms, he said, “That was really too bad about the other night.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “I just had the feeling, you know, the guys didn’t quite get the concept.”

  “I had that feeling, too.”

  “You in particular,” Stan said. “A bright young guy, not stuck with old-fashioned thinking.”

  “Well, it just seemed to me,” Judson said, wanting to get out of this without acknowledging there was anything to get out of, “the other guys had a lot more expertise than me, so I oughta go along with the way they saw things.”

  “I got a certain expertise, too, you know,” Stan said, and looked as though he were thinking about getting irritated.

  “Driving expertise, Stan,” Judson said. “You got the most driving expertise I ever saw in my life.”

  “Well, yeah,” Stan said, but would not be deflected. “On the other hand,” he said
, and the inner door opened.

  They both turned to look as J.C. herself walked in from her office, saying, “I heard voices. Hello, Stan. Keeping my staff from their work?” A striking if tough-looking brunette of around thirty, who moved in a style somewhere between a runway model’s strut and a cheetah’s lope, J.C., when she came into a room, particularly dressed as now in pink peasant blouse and a short black leather skirt and heeled sandals with black leather straps twining halfway up to the knee, it was impossible to look away.

  Stan didn’t even try. “Just exchanging a word or two, J.C.,” he said. “Exercising our chins.”

  “Talking about the golden dome?” J.C. asked him.

  Stan didn’t like that. “Oh, Tiny told you,” he guessed, Tiny Bulcher being J.C.’s roommate somewhere around town, a pairing that seemed to those who knew them to have been made, if not in Heaven, possibly in Marvel Comics.

  “Tiny told me,” she agreed. “He said it was the dumbest idea he’d heard since Lucky Finnegan decided to walk from the Bronx to Brooklyn stepping only on the third rail.” To Judson she explained, “Lucky was very proud of his sense of balance.”

  “If no other sense,” Stan said.

  Judson said, “Somehow, I have the feeling he didn’t make it.”

  “They’re trying to find another nickname for him,” J.C. said. “Something about barbeque.”

  “The golden dome,” Stan said, his eye being on it, “is not as dumb an idea as some people think it is.”

  J.C. gave him a frank look. “Which people, Stan, don’t think it’s a dumb idea?”

  “Me for one,” he said. “My Mom, for two.”

  J.C. pointed a scarlet-tipped finger at him. “Do not get your Mom involved.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Judson said, “It’s too bad John couldn’t be there to hear the idea.”