What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  But the main topic of their evenings was Livia Northwood Wheeler, who was so rich the thought of it made Brian’s teeth hurt. She was also apparently as ditzy and over-the-top as any cartoon character you could think of. Brian wanted to meet her. He wanted to laugh, discreetly, at her antics, and he wanted from time to time to find some of her money in his pockets. If he could arrange the meeting, he was sure he could arrange the rest. If only he could arrange the meeting.

  Evening after evening, while shifting tiles or moving pegs or arranging tiles into words, he’d drop little hints that he’d like to meet the fabulous Mrs. W. Why not invite her to dinner? “I’m not that bad a cook.”

  “You’re a wonderful cook, as you very well know. ‘Quixotic’ is a word, isn’t it? But we couldn’t ask her here, Brian.”

  “Why not? Maybe she’d enjoy slumming.”

  “Mrs. W? I really doubt that.”

  If it were summer, or the weather were at least decent, he could suggest a picnic, in Riverside Park, or even on the roof of this building, which had some pretty good views and which some of the tenants did occasionally use for picnics and small parties, though Frisbee had been banned after a couple of unfortunate incidents.

  But now, at last, this Monday in March, he had his opportunity, or he thought he did. All day at the station the preparations had been under way, and that’s where he got the idea, and could hardly wait to get home, and for Fiona to get home, so he could try it on her. Maybe this time it would happen. But he should be cool about it, not just burst out with the idea, or she’d likely be turned off.

  So this evening, though they were both home before six, and moving cribbage pegs inexorably onward by half past, he waited until that game was finished—she won—to even broach the subject. “Guess what’s happening this weekend,” he said.

  She gave him a funny look. Nothing happened on the weekend in March, as all the world knew. Unless St. Patrick’s Day came on any day remotely close to the weekend, being any day except Wednesday, as everyone also knew, and as at the moment was not the case. So, “Happening?” she inquired.

  “It’s the March Madness party at the station,” he told her, with a big happy grin.

  So there was to be an occurrence on the weekend in March after all, though it didn’t actually occur in, or anywhere near, New York City. It was Spring Break, the annual pilgrimage of all America’s undergraduate scholars to Florida to take seminars on noncommitment.

  Spring Break was a big deal for Brian’s station, GRODY, because it homed right in on their target audience. One time, Fiona had asked him, “Who does watch that station?” and he’d answered, “The eighteen-to-nineteen-and-a-half-year-old males, an extremely important advertising demographic,” and she’d said, “That explains it,” whatever that meant.

  In any event, GRODY annually marked Spring Break with its March Madness party, at a rented party place down in Soho, limited to station staff and advertisers and local press and cable company minor employees and good friends and whoever else happened to hear about it. All attendees were encouraged to come costumed as one of the cartoon characters from the station, and many did. Brian’s Reverend Twisted costume was kept in the back of the closet to be brought out lovingly and hilariously every year, an old if unusual friend. “Oh, I hope it still fits,” he always said, which was his March Madness joke.

  But now Fiona began to throw cold water on his idea even before she’d heard it, saying, with an exaggerated sigh, “Oh. I suppose we have to go.”

  “Have to go? Come on, Fiona, it’s fun, you know it is.”

  “The first couple of times,” she said, “it was fun, like visiting a tribe way up the Amazon that had never been marked by civilization.”

  “Listen—”

  “But after a while, Brian,” she said, “it becomes just a teeny little bit less fun.”

  “You never—”

  “I’m not saying we won’t go,” she said. “I’m just saying I’m not as excited about it as I used to be. Brian, March Madness at GRODY does not hold many surprises for me any more.”

  He knew an opening when he heard one. “Listen,” he said, very eager, as though the thought had just this second come to him. “I know how to put the zing back in the old March Madness.”

  The look she gave him was labeled Skepticism. “How?”

  “Invite Mrs. W.”

  She stared at him as though he’d suddenly grown bat wings on the sides of his head. “Do what?”

  “Watch her watching them,” he explained, waving his arms here and there. “You know she’s never seen anything like that in her life.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Fiona said.

  “Come on, Fiona,” he said. “You know I want to meet her, and there’s never a place that’s just right.”

  “And March Madness is just right?”

  “It is. She’ll know ahead of time it’s a freak show, you’ll explain the whole thing to her, a world she never even suspected existed.”

  “And wouldn’t want to know exists.”

  “Fiona, invite her.” Brian spread his hands above the cribbage board, a supplicant. “That’s all I’m asking. Explain what it is, explain how your friend—that’s me—wants to meet her, explain it’s a goof and we promise to leave the instant she’s had enough.”

  “Any of it would be more than enough, Brian.”

  Brian did an elaborate shrug. “If she says no,” he said, “then that’s that. I won’t ever mention it again. But at least ask her. Will you do that much?”

  “She would think,” Fiona said, “I’d lost my mind.”

  “You’ll say it was my idea, your goofy boyfriend’s idea. Come on, Fiona. Ask her, will you? Please?”

  Fiona sat back, frowning into the middle distance, her fingers tap-tapping on the table beside the cribbage board. Brian waited, afraid to push any more, and at last she gave a kind of resigned sigh and said, “I’ll try.”

  Delighted, he said, “You will? Fiona, you’ll really ask her?”

  “I said I would,” Fiona said, sounding weary.

  “Thank you, Fiona,” Brian said.

  37

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, two days after his lunch with Jay Tumbril, Jacques Perly completed a very encouraging conference with two international art thieves and a sometime producer for the Discovery Channel, then drove back to the city from Fairfield County in bucolic Connecticut. The West Side Highway deposited him onto Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and a few deft maneuvers later he steered the Lamborghini onto Gansevoort Street, thumbing the beeper on his visor as he did so. The battered old green garage door that obediently lifted in response was in a low squat structure that perfectly suited the neighborhood; an old stone industrial building converted to more upscale uses without losing its original rough appearance.

  Perly steered into the building, beeped the door shut, and drove up the curving concrete ramp to where the conversion began. The high stone exterior walls up here were painted a creamy white, and ceiling spotlights pinpointed the potted evergreens in front of his office door. This space was large enough for two cars to park, though usually, as now, it contained only Perly’s. Leaving the Lamborghini, he crossed to the faux Tudor interior wall and stepped into his reception room, where Della looked up from her typing to say, “Hi, Chief. How’d it go?”

  “Well, Della,” Perly said, with justifiable pride, “I believe we’ll have an amphora on our hands in very short order. And thirty minutes of airtime.”

  “I knew you’d do it, Chief,” she said. She’d never tell him, but she loved him madly.

  “I thought I might,” he admitted. “What’s doing here?”

  “The crew’s reported on that Fiona Hemlow matter,” she said. “Jerry sent his stuff over by messenger, Margo e-mailed it in, and Herkimer stopped by with it. Fritz says he’ll have pix for you by the end of the day. It’s all on your desk.”

  “Good girl. Man the barricades.”

  “Always, Chief.”

&n
bsp; He went into his inner office, a large room with tall windows across the back and a big domed skylight in thick glass, framed in steel. The furniture was clubby and quietly expensive, the wall decorations mostly pictures of recovered art. His desk, large and old and dark wood, had come from one of the daily New York newspapers that had gone under during the final newspaper strike of 1978. He sat at it now and drew to himself the three packets of information delivered by his crew.

  Fifteen minutes later, he thumbed the intercom. “Della, get me Jay Tumbril.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  It took another six minutes, while he skimmed the reports once more, before he got the buzz, picked up his phone, and said, “Jay.”

  “I’ll put Mr. Tumbril right on,” said a girl whose English accent was probably real.

  “Fine.” Perly had forgotten that Jay Tumbril was one of those people who scored points for himself in some obscure game if he made you get on the line first.

  “Jacques.”

  “Jay.”

  “That was quick.”

  “It doesn’t take long when there’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, not much. There’s one little— But we’ll get to that. The girl first. Fiona Hemlow.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s clean, Jay. A good student, conscientious, as obedient as a nun.”

  Jay, sounding faintly displeased, said, “Well, that’s fine, then.”

  “Comes from money,” Perly went on. “Her grandfather, still alive, was an inventor, a chemist, came up with some patents made him and the rest of the family rich.”

  “So she’s not after Livia’s money, is what you’re saying.”

  “She isn’t, no.”

  “Yes? I don’t follow.”

  “For the last three years,” Perly said, putting a finger on the name on the top sheet of Herkimer’s report, “Ms. Hemlow has been shacked up with a character named Brian Clanson.”

  “He’s the one you’re dubious about.”

  “He is.” Perly tapped Clanson’s name with a fingernail, as behind him his computer dinged that an e-mail was coming in. “I ask myself,” he said, “if this character put up our little nun to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Wheeler.”

  “So he’d be after her money.”

  “It’s only a possibility,” Perly cautioned him. “At this point, I have no reason to believe anything at all. I just look at this character, and I see someone from, to be honest, a white-trash background, a community college education, no contacts of any consequence in the city, and an extremely marginal job as some sort of illustrator for a cable channel aimed at Neanderthals. I can believe Ms. Hemlow hooked up with him because he has that redneck charm and because she’s a naïf who thinks well of everybody, but I can also believe Mr. Clanson hooked up with her because she has money, or at least her grandfather does.”

  “Mmm.”

  Turning in his swivel chair, Perly saw the e-mail was from Fritz, and opened it. The photographs. “Further than that,” he said, “I can believe he came to the conclusion that Mrs. Wheeler was the likeliest prospect among your firm’s clients for him to get his hands on.”

  “So you think he set the girl to go after Mrs. W.”

  Perly opened the photo marked BC and looked at Brian Clanson, arms folded, leaning against a tree in a park somewhere, big boned but skinny, like a stray dog, with a loose untrustworthy smile. “I’ll only say this, Jay,” he said, looking Clanson in the eye, “it’s out of character for that girl to have imposed herself on Mrs. Wheeler all on her own. There has to have been a reason, and I can’t find any other reason in the world except Brian Clanson.” And he nodded at the grinning fellow, who showed no repentance.

  Jay said, “So you want to look into Clanson a little deeper.”

  “Let’s see if this is the first time,” Perly said, “he’s tried to work something funny with his betters.”

  “Go get him,” Jay Tumbril said.

  38

  AT THE SAME time that Jacques Perly and Jay Tumbril were discussing the investigation into Fiona Hemlow and Livia Northwood Wheeler, those two ladies, all unknowing of the scrutiny, were discussing the results of Fiona’s own investigations. “There’s just no record,” Fiona was saying, spreading her hands in helplessness as she stood in front of Mrs. W’s desk.

  Mrs. W had a photo of the chess set displayed on her computer, and she now frowned at it with the same mistrustful expression that Perly, downtown, wore when gazing on the photo of Brian Clanson. “It’s vexing,” she said. “It’s just vexatious.”

  “Your father, Alfred Northwood,” Fiona said, consulting her memo pad, in which she had placed careful and thorough notes of the history just as though she hadn’t had it memorized a long time ago, “came to New York from Chicago in 1921. We know that for certain. We know he was in the army in Europe in the First World War and became a sergeant, and went to Chicago after he left the army, though I couldn’t find any records of what he was doing there. There’s also no record of his having the chess set in the army or in Chicago—”

  “Well, certainly not the army,” Mrs. W snapped. “Nothing as valuable as that.”

  “No, ma’am. We know your father’s friends and business associates called it the Chicago chess set because he brought it from there, but I can’t find any circumstance in which he called it the Chicago chess set.”

  “Or anything else.”

  “Or anything else,” agreed Fiona. “There is no record that he ever said where it came from, or how he happened to own it. I’m sorry, Mrs. W, there’s just no history.”

  “Well, there, you see,” Mrs. W said, with an irritated headshake at the picture of the chess set. “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

  Alert, Fiona said, “There is?” because she found that a truly interesting idea.

  But now Mrs. W’s irritated headshake was directed at Fiona. “Balzac, dear,” she said. “Père Goriot. And I fear that the crime behind my family’s fortune may have more than a little to do with that chess set.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Again Mrs. W frowned at the picture on the computer screen. “Will the crime be found out? Is there risk in that ugly toy? Is there anything to do other than let sleeping chessmen lie?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. W.”

  “No, you don’t. Well, thank you, Fiona. I’ll think about this.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Fiona turned to go, then said, “Mrs. W, there is something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “I wasn’t even going to mention it, it’s so silly.”

  “Well, either mention it or don’t mention it,” Mrs. W told her. “You can’t dither forever.”

  “No, ma’am. It’s my boyfriend, Brian.”

  Mrs. W’s eyebrows lowered. “Is something wrong there?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Fiona assured her. “It’s just—Well, you know, he works for a cable station, and they have a party every year in March, sort of the end of winter and all, and Brian said I should invite you. He’s wanted to meet you, and—”

  “Been telling tales about me, have you?”

  Mrs. W hadn’t said that as though she were angry, yet Fiona became very flustered and felt the color rise up into her cheeks. She couldn’t think of a thing to say, but apparently her pink face said it all for her, because Mrs. W nodded and said, “That’s all right, dear. I don’t mind being an eccentric in other people’s stories. I can’t imagine what Jay Tumbril says about me, for instance. Tell me about this party.”

  “It’s really very silly,” Fiona said. “A lot of the people there dress up in costumes, not everybody. I won’t.”

  “Like Halloween,” Mrs. W suggested.

  “Sort of.”

  “And when and where is this?”

  “Saturday, down in Soho. It starts at eight, but Brian doesn’t like to get there until ten.”

  “Very sensible. Let me think about it.”

  “
Yes, ma’am.”

  “And,” with a sudden snap to her voice, “get me Jay Tumbril on the phone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Mrs. W said. “The time has come to bring in experts, to get to the bottom of this. Fiona, we are going to look at that chess set.”

  39

  GRODY WAS ALWAYS in the process of expanding, without having either the money or the space to do so. The studio in Tribeca, being the entire third floor of an old industrial building where, in the late nineteenth century, aprons and overalls were manufactured, was always undergoing renovation, the carpenters and electricians with their leather toolbelts like space-age gunbelts and their macho swagger serving as the oil to the water of the staff’s resident geeks.

  Because the brick exterior walls of the building and the unrepealable law of gravity meant they could never actually add to their territory, the only way to accommodate more offices, more studios and more storage was to keep chopping finer and finer, until the rooms were like closets and the closets had long ago been sacrificed to the need for more space. Hallways had been squeezed to within an inch of the fire code. And one result of all this adjusting and repacking and clawing for space was that many of the resulting rooms were of unusual shapes, triangles and trapezoids. Long-ago-sacrificed doorways meant many of the routes within the GRODY confines were circuitous indeed. All of which was one reason why the company found it so hard to hire or keep anybody over the age of twenty-five.

  Coming to work Thursday morning, after the astonishing news last night that Mrs. W actually would come along to Saturday’s March Madness, Brian made his roundabout way toward his own office, one of the few octagons in here thus far, in which, no matter which way you faced, the workspace shrank away in front of you. Just after squeezing past two carpenters toting over their shoulders eight-foot lengths of L-shaped metal like bowling alley gutters creased down the middle, only lined along both sides with holes—what was that for? straining beer?—Brian was distracted from his route by a knocking on a window somewhere.