What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  As for Johnny Eppick and his employer, Mr. Hemlow, Dortmunder assumed the granddaughter was having a little trouble collecting the information he’d requested on all the other heirs, which was also okay, because, once he did get that information, he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was going to do with it. So, let sleeping Eppicks lie.

  Which he did, until late the following Monday morning, shortly after May had gone off to the Safeway. That’s when the phone decided to ring, so Dortmunder put down the Daily News—there didn’t seem to be anybody he knew in it today—got to his feet, walked to the kitchen, grabbed the receiver, and said, “Yar.”

  “Mr. Hemlow wants to see us. His place.”

  Fatalistic, Dortmunder said, “I’m springing for another cab, am I?”

  “I don’t think you have time to walk,” Eppick said, and hung up.

  Poker-faced, the doorman said, “The other gentleman is already here.”

  “Yeah, I see him,” Dortmunder said. He was in a bad mood because of having to spend so much of Arnie Albright’s money just to get here.

  Eppick’s manner was not bad-tempered, actually, just guarded. Rising from the rhinoceros-horn chair, he said, “He didn’t sound happy.”

  “Like usual, you mean.”

  “Maybe worse.”

  As they rode up in the elevator with its extraneous operator, Eppick said, “We’ll just see how it goes.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Dortmunder agreed.

  It was not going to go well. Mr. Hemlow in his wheelchair waited in his usual position on the polished floor of his penthouse, but when they emerged from the elevator he did not spin around, did not zoom over to the view, did not invite them to take a seat. Instead, he stayed where he was, with them on their feet in front of him, and after the elevator had gone away he said, “I wanted to tell you both in person. I don’t blame either of you for what happened.”

  Eppick, sounding alarmed, said, “Something happened?”

  “Last Wednesday,” Mr. Hemlow said, “my granddaughter was fired. Embarrassed, she didn’t tell me, but this morning, in the mail, arrived the list of heirs you asked for.”

  “You mean John asked for,” Eppick said, dodging a bullet.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Mr. Hemlow seemed shrunken this morning, as though some of the stuffing had leaked out of the medicine ball. His eyes and brow were more troubled than hawklike today, and even the red beret perched atop him like a maraschino cherry didn’t do much to improve the bad vibe he exuded.

  “I phoned her when I received the envelope,” he said, “and she explained she’d been fired, had been escorted from the offices by an armed guard, and had just barely time to mail me the envelope before the guard searched her belongings.”

  “Searched her belongings!” Eppick sounded equal parts astounded and outraged.

  Mr. Hemlow’s tempo-setting knee kept double time to the slow sad shake of his head. “That is the corporate form of the farewell interview these days, it appears,” he said. “Particularly if the employee has been caught breaking the rules, as Fiona had, and on my account. That’s what I blame myself for, and no one else.”

  Dortmunder, who had kind of liked Fiona Hemlow, said, “What kinda rule did she break?”

  “She sought out Livia Northwood Wheeler. She had no right to speak to Mrs. Wheeler, no justification for approaching her. A person in Fiona’s position—in Fiona’s former position—is not to speak until spoken to.”

  “That’s terrible, Mr. Hemlow,” Eppick said. He sounded sincerely upset by the news.

  “It’s my own selfishness caused this to happen,” Mr. Hemlow said. “My egotism. Who cares about ancient grudges, ancient history? Who can correct a one-hundred-year-old wrong? Nobody. The guilty aren’t there any more. The people who are there, whatever else they may have done, have never done me an injury. And now all I’ve done is harm my own granddaughter.”

  “We’ll make up for that, Mr. Hemlow,” Eppick said, all at once eager. “When we get that—”

  “No.”

  Dortmunder had seen this coming, but apparently Eppick had not. He blinked, and rocked back half a step toward the elevator door. “No? Mr. Hemlow, you don’t—”

  “I do.” For a sagging sack of guts, Mr. Hemlow sounded pretty damn firm. “The chess set can stay where it is,” he said. “It’s done enough harm in this world, let it rot in that vault.”

  You bet, Dortmunder thought.

  But Eppick was not a man to give up without a fight. “Sir, we’ve been working on—”

  “I know you have, Johnny,” Mr. Hemlow said, “and I appreciate it, but the job is over. Send my accountant your final bill, you’ll be paid at once.”

  “Well . . .” Eppick said. “If you’re sure.”

  “I am, Johnny. So thank you, and good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, sir.”

  Eppick turned to push the elevator button, but Dortmunder said, “Hey. What about me?”

  “Mr. Dortmunder,” Mr. Hemlow said, “you have not been in my employ. Johnny has.”

  “Don’t look at me, John,” Eppick said, though that’s exactly what Dortmunder was doing.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, John,” Eppick said, as though explaining to a bonehead, “you didn’t do anything.”

  Dortmunder couldn’t believe it. “I didn’t do anything? I drove all around New England, sitting on the floor. I wracked my brains, trying to figure out the way to get my hands on that chess thing. I done more taxi time than an escort service. I been working my brain on this.”

  “That’s between you gentlemen,” Mr. Hemlow said. “Good morning.” And now he did spin the wheelchair around and sped off, this time through a doorway into a side hall.

  Pushing the elevator button at last, Eppick said, “Well, John, I just think you have to count this one up to profit and loss.”

  Dortmunder didn’t say anything. The elevator arrived, they rode down together, and he still didn’t say anything. No expression at all appeared on his face.

  Out on the sidewalk, Eppick said, “You don’t want to make trouble, John. I’ve still got those pictures.”

  “I know it,” Dortmunder said.

  “The least I can do,” Eppick said, “I’ll spring for a cab for us, downtown.”

  “No, thanks,” Dortmunder said. He needed to be alone, to think. About revenge. “I’ll walk,” he said.

  31

  LIKE MANY MEMBERS of the NYPD, past and present, Johnny Eppick had not lived within the actual five boroughs of New York City for many years; not, in fact, since his second year on the force, when he’d married and left his parents’ home in Queens to set up his own new family—two boys and one girl, eventually, now all starting families of their own, none following him into the Job—farther out on Long Island.

  Unlike some of his fellows, Eppick had never maintained a little apartment in the city, containing one or a string of surrogate wives, he being of the sort who was content with one family and one home, just so it was completely separate from the Job. The place on East Third Street was new, since his retirement, since he and Rosalie had come to the realization that, while they still loved one another and had no desire for change, it was also true that neither of them could stand his being around the house all the time. He was retired from the Job. Tough; go there anyway. Thus Johnny Eppick For Hire.

  He wasn’t the first ex-cop to go into private detectiving. The city pension was good, but there isn’t a pension anywhere that couldn’t use a little supplement, though that wasn’t the primary reason so many ex-cops wound up with security companies or armored car outfits or banks. The primary reason was boredom; after the tensions and horrors and pleasures of the Job, it was tough to sit around all day with the remote in one hand and a beer can in the other. Leave that life to the young slobs who hadn’t come out of their cocoons yet.

  In the earliest days of his retirement years, Eppick had thought about hiring on somewhere, but a life on wage
s after so many years on the Job had just seemed too much of a comedown. It was time to be his own boss for a while, see how that would play out. So he got his private investigator’s license, not hard for an ex-cop, and set up the office down on East Third because it was inexpensive and he didn’t feel he was going to have to impress anybody. All he needed was files and a phone. Besides, private eyes were expected to office in grungy neighborhoods.

  Once he had his tag and his address, Eppick had caused there to be made letterhead stationery and a business card. He’d spread the word through the cops and the lawyers and the other people he’d met over the years through the Job, and the first fish in the net was Mr. Horace Hemlow.

  And what a fish. A keeper, Eppick had thought, rich and honest and dedicated to his obsession. Putting every other potential client on hold, changing his answering machine message to deflect other possible business, he’d devoted himself to Mr. Hemlow, even researching that scuzzy band of crooks to handle the actual dirty work without any possibility of double-cross.

  And look what he got for it. Time and expenses. He might as well deliver newspapers, for that kind of money; that would also keep him out of the house.

  Okay. After the chess set debacle, Eppick changed his answering machine message once more, made another round of soliciting phone calls, and started to receive smaller but at least not irritating offers of work. Here a jealous wife, there a health freak searching, for genome reasons, for his natural father. It kept him on the move.

  On a blustery Monday two weeks after the farewell in Mr. Hemlow’s apartment, the first Monday in December, Eppick drove to the city, left his Prius in its monthly parking spot in a garage a block from his office, walked the block, took the elevator to his office, entered, and saw in an instant he’d been robbed. Burgled. Cleaned out solid.

  Just about everything was gone. Phone, fax, printer, computer, TV, DVD, toaster oven, even the less heavy half of his exercise equipment.

  The whole thing had been done with an economy and a professionalism that, even through his outrage, he had to recognize and admire. There was barely a mark on the locks. His three alarm systems, including the one that should have phoned the precinct, had been dismantled or bypassed with casual, almost disdainful, assurance. Everything was gone, and not a footprint was left to mark its passing.

  Eppick of course immediately phoned the precinct—on his cell phone, the office phone and answering machine being gone—though he hadn’t the slightest expectation anybody would ever track down those crooks. But he needed the report for his insurance, and this haul would certainly lead to a very hefty insurance company check.

  And many headaches between now and then, while he replaced everything that had gone away, integrated the new systems, estimated just how much his personal and professional privacy had been violated, and worked out what additional security measures he would have to take to keep the bastards from coming back for a second dip.

  The cops who came to make the report were unknown to him, he never having worked in this precinct. They were sympathetic and professional and just a little scornful, exactly as he would be if the roles were reversed. He hated the interview, and ground his teeth in rage once his responders had departed.

  Now, the next thing to do was hide this disaster from his two current clients. It would never do for a professional private detective to himself become a crime victim; all credibility would be lost forever. Therefore, after a quick trip farther downtown to an area of electronics stores, he came back with a new telephone–answering machine, which he set up on his ravaged desk and into which, using a much more grating voice than normal, he placed this message:

  “Hi. Johnny Eppick here. I came down with something over the weekend I hope isn’t flu, so I’m not in the shop today. Leave a message and I hope I’ll be here and healthy first thing tomorrow.”

  The rest of the replacement equipment he’d buy out on the Island, to avoid New York City’s sales tax, so he might as well get to it. There was no point hanging around the ransacked office all day.

  It was while driving out the LIE, just east of the city line, that the penny finally dropped and one word came into his mind, as though in neon: Dortmunder.

  Of course. In the first shock, he hadn’t been thinking straight, hadn’t connected the dots, but what else could this be? Dortmunder. He had to get even for not scoring anything out of the chess set caper. And, whining all the time about something as minor league as taxi fares, that gave you the measure of the man.

  The son of a bitch had waited exactly two weeks, Monday to Monday, just long enough so Eppick wouldn’t be able to prove it but he’d have to know it.

  And there was more to it than that. All of the other things that were taken were just smoke screen, just icing on the cake. The only theft that really mattered was the computer. That little box where the incriminating pictures of John Dortmunder were stored.

  Yes, and when he got back to the office tomorrow and looked in his files—a thing that hadn’t occurred to him until just this minute—the copies of those pictures that he’d printed out would also be gone.

  I no longer have a handle on John Dortmunder’s back, Eppick thought. Dortmunder had needed that handle off of there. Why? Because he’s up to something. What is he up to?

  Eppick frowned mightily as he drove east toward home.

  32

  THEY’RE NEVER COMING back!”

  “Nessa,” Brady said, over their lunch of nuked frozen fish fingers, nuked frozen french fries, and canned beer, “of course they’re coming back. They came all the way up here just to be sure everything was all right.”

  “Then when they left here,” Nessa said, leaning belligerently over her fish fingers in this large elaborate dining room constructed for more diners but less volume, “they must have made sure everything was wrong, because they aren’t coming back!”

  “Come on, Nessa, you don’t have to holler, I’m right here in front of you.”

  “Yet somehow you don’t hear me,” she said. “Those bozos are not coming back.”

  Surprised, almost offended on their behalf, he said, “What do you mean, bozos? Those were very serious people.”

  “Hah.”

  “They were up here to discuss hiding a very valuable chess set,” Brady reminded her. “And here was where they meant to hide it. They even pointed out the table in the living room.”

  “Where they were going to hide it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right out on a table in the living room.”

  “I told you, Nessa, it was the something letter. You remember Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “We read The Raven,” she said, being sulky. “It was very boring.”

  “Well, he did something else,” Brady said, “that said, if you want to hide something, put it right out in plain sight where nobody expects to see it.”

  “Put it right out in plain sight,” Nessa said, “where I won’t expect to see it, and guess what happens next.”

  “Well, Edgar Allan Poe is what they were doing,” Brady said, “and they’re definitely coming back.”

  “Brady,” she said, around a mouthful of fish fingers, as she waved a melodramatic arm toward the far windows, “it’s snowing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Again.”

  “I know that.”

  “We’re in the mountains in New England in December. Brady, on the TV they’re talking about accumulations. You know what accumulations are?”

  “Listen, Nessa—”

  “You wanna wait here till spring? Here?”

  The fact was, Brady wouldn’t mind if he had to wait here forever. He had this huge house all to himself, he had no responsibilities, he had this really cute girl to go to bed with all the time—though not so much lately, unfortunately—and he had the prospect of this amazingly valuable chess set at the end of the rainbow. So what was the problem?

  Well, he’d better not put it that way, because, the truth is, the problem was Ne
ssa. She had some kind of cabin fever or something. She got bored too easily, that’s what it came down to. He screwed her as much as he could, or these days as much as she’d put up with, but still she got bored.

  He just had to keep his calm, that’s all. This was just a phase Nessa was going through, and soon she’d be fine again. Maybe in the spring, when the flowers started to grow, though he sensed it wouldn’t be a really smart move to phrase it quite that way.

  “Honey,” he said, “I heard those guys talk, and I know they meant it, and I know they’re coming back, and I know they’re serious.”

  “They’re bozos,” she said, and filled her mouth with french fries.

  He paused, a fish finger in midair. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “They pranced through here,” she reminded him, “the four of them, looking all over for just the right place to hide their precious chess set, and they never even saw us.”

  “Well, neither do those maintenance guys. We’re too smart for them, that’s all. Just last week the maintenance guys came through and we’ve been here for months now and they still don’t know we’re here.”

  These were two guys who drove up the first Friday of every month to check the house, flush the toilets, check the smoke alarms, that kind of thing. They were easy to evade, and so Brady and Nessa evaded them.

  The very point she now made. “We know they’re coming,” she said. “They’re not searching the place, they’re just doing their rounds. Those other bozos suddenly showed up when we didn’t know they were coming, they went all through the house with us underfoot—”