What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Everybody calls dances ‘formals.’”

  “Not around here.”

  “Well, that’s true,” she admitted.

  And something else she had to admit, if only to herself, was that, while the GRODY party was the same old party it always had been, somehow this year it seemed more benign, more interesting, more fun. It was still the same completely unhomogenized crowd, the callow staff nearly invisible in the sea of outsiders, the twentysomethings dressed as X-Men or Buffy, the thirtysomethings with their more creative versions of roadkill or Messalina, the fortysomethings in their fangs and harlequin masks, the fiftysomethings in their red bow ties and shipboard gowns, the sixtysomethings dressed for some completely different party, but this year it didn’t seem fake and strained, it just seemed like people letting their hair down at the end of another damn long winter.

  Fiona realized that the only thing that had really changed was her perception. It really still was the same old party, too loud and too late and far too much of a mixed bag, with no coherent reason to exist, but this year that was okay. And it was okay because of Mrs. W.

  Fiona watched Mrs. W swirl by, having learned by now how to dance while holding her green broom aloft, and now paired with Brian’s shaggy boss, Sean Kelly, who this year had come either as a hobbit or Yoda; impossible to tell. In any case, he danced like a man in a gorilla suit, but nobody seemed to mind. Mrs. W beamed upon him as they swirled along, and Sean, his grinning face as red as a stoplight, yakked away nonstop.

  “Brian,” Fiona said, “this is fun.”

  He leered at her in surprise. “You didn’t know?”

  Mrs. W didn’t want to go home. The party was winding down, the bar closed, the band endlessly packing up like NASA after a moonshot, one a.m. just a memory, and so few people left in the place you could hear each other at a normal tone of voice. But Mrs. W didn’t want to go home.

  “I have just the place,” she said, as they descended in the elevator after she’d called her driver to come pick them up. “I’ve never been there, but I’ve read about it. It’s supposed to be the most in place ever, in the West Village.”

  “Oh, Mrs. W,” Fiona said. “Are you sure? It’s so late.”

  “New York,” Mrs. W reminded her, “is the city that never sleeps.”

  “And tomorrow,” Brian said, still with a residual leer, “is a day off.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “But, the . . . the costumes.”

  “Our hats can stay in the car, Brian’s and mine,” Mrs. W said, “and so can my wart. We’ll keep our coats on.”

  “Fiona,” Brian said, as he held the limo door for the ladies, “let’s do it.”

  “I guess we’re going to,” she said.

  The ride up and over from Soho to the West Village didn’t take long, and Mrs. W, more girlish than Fiona had ever seen her, chatted away the whole time. She had apparently been particularly taken by Sean Kelly. “A remarkable comic mind,” she pronounced.

  “He can be pretty funny,” Brian agreed.

  And now they were in the West Village, driving slowly down Gansevoort Street while the driver looked for house numbers, and when Fiona looked ahead she saw a group of men coming out of a building up there, and thought, well, we’re not the only night owls.

  They’d come out of a garage, in fact, those five men, and as they stood on the pavement talking together the green garage door slid downward behind them. They were so animated, even at this hour, all talking at once, pointing this way and that, shrugging their shoulders, shaking their heads, that Fiona couldn’t look away. The limo drove slowly past them, and Fiona watched out the window, and one of them was Mr. Dortmunder.

  No. Could it be? She tried to look out the back window, but it was hard to tell at this angle.

  Could that really have been Mr. Dortmunder? The five men walked off in the opposite direction, all still gesticulating and talking a blue streak. They were certainly passionate about something or other.

  Fiona faced front. There were so many things she didn’t understand. Mrs. W had shown an entirely different side of her personality tonight. And now, had that really been John Dortmunder?

  “There it is!” Mrs. W sang out.

  “Oh, good,” Fiona said, and swallowed a yawn.

  51

  IN THE CAREFUL chronology Perly had written for himself, he would return to his office on Sunday night at ten, to lock away many of his files and personal possessions and wait for the people from Continental Detective Agency to arrive with their equipment at eleven. But the tensions of the week had built up so much that by Sunday he couldn’t stand it any more. Sunday evening was traditionally the one night of the week he could set aside for a quiet dinner at home in Westchester with his wife, but tonight he was just too much on edge. He wolfed his dinner, without his usual wine, and shortly before eight he said, “I’m sorry, Marcia, I’m too keyed up to just sit here. I’ve got to get down to the office.”

  “There’s nothing to do there, Jacques,” she pointed out. She was often the sensible one.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve got to be there.”

  And so it was that, an hour ahead of schedule, he and the Lamborghini were headed south on the Hutchinson River Parkway. Just to be in motion was an improvement.

  Also, traffic was lighter on the Hutch inbound toward the city on Sunday night, so he made better than usual time. It was only ten minutes to nine when he turned onto Gansevoort Street and thumbed the opener clipped to his visor, and down the block his green garage door rattled upward.

  The ceiling lights outside his office at the top of the ramp were kept on all the time, so by their light he drove up the steep ramp as the garage door lowered behind him, and parked in front of his door.

  Unlocking that door, he stepped inside, switched on the lights there, and shrugged out of his coat. Fortunately, he didn’t hang the coat up in the closet, because at the moment there was a very large and irritable person standing in there, muttering to himself about people who show up an hour early. He draped his coat instead over the chair at Della’s desk, and it’s also fortunate he didn’t happen to look under that desk, or he would surely have noticed a lithe young guy curled around the wastebasket under there.

  The door between Della’s office and his own was normally kept unlocked, so he just opened it and entered and left it open as he switched on more lights in there. He then went over to sit at his own desk, under which there weren’t any people. However, lying on his left side behind the sofa, squeezed between sofa and wall in a place Perly had never intentionally gazed upon, was a carrot-topped guy who looked almost as put out as the big fellow in the other room’s closet.

  Once at his desk, Perly switched on one more light, the gooseneck lamp there, which gave him concentrated illumination at the desk area but somehow made the rest of the room seem a little darker, though of course not as dark as the night outside his two large well-draped windows facing the rear of the apartment building on the next block. He often closed those maroon drapes at night, and briefly considered doing so again tonight, but then decided the security people would want to know what was out there, so he left the drapes open, which was just as well, because that way he didn’t notice the sharp-nosed, keen-eyed guy standing behind the right-side drape of the right-hand window, farthest from his desk. That person had originally taken up a position facing the drape, but at the last instant had turned around, so that now he faced the window, in which he could examine at his leisure the reflection of most of the room, but in which his own dark presence against the dark drape could not be seen from any distance at all.

  There had been a third person, another returnee from last night’s reconnaissance mission, who had been in this room when the racket of the garage door lifting had alerted everybody to Perly’s untimely arrival. This person had been near a closed interior door he’d already established as leading to a bathroom, so he’d popped open the door, popped into the bathroom, popped the door shut,
popped it open again while he found the light switch and popped the light on, then popped the door shut again.

  It was only when he heard Perly enter the office out there that it occurred to him that (a) Perly might want to utilize this bathroom at some point in the evening, and (b) there was nowhere to hide in the bathroom.

  Well, was there? He looked around at a small simple utilitarian bathroom with white-painted walls and white tile floor, white toilet and small white sink and a white-tiled shower the size of the former phone booth back in the O.J.

  Could he make use of the shower? Perly wasn’t going to take a shower here tonight, was he? The shower had a plastic curtain across the opening, but the curtain was a translucent gray; shapes could be seen through it.

  He had to do something. He had to get this light turned off, soon, and he had to find some way to disappear. How?

  Above the toilet were two shelves, with white hand towels and bath towels. Hurriedly, he grabbed a bath towel, switched off the light, and felt his way into the shower, where he lowered himself until he was seated, knees up to his chin, on the white shower pan in the rear corner away from the drain. As best he could, he covered himself with the bath towel and scrunched up to become as small as possible. White tile, white pan, white towel; with any luck, no foreign shapes would call attention to themselves through the curtain. Sighing, reflecting on how nobody could be trusted, not even people with handwriting as neat as Perly’s, he settled down to see what happened next.

  Meanwhile, in his office, Perly was opening desk drawers, deciding what he wanted to remove from here and store in the safe in the corner until his visitors should move back out. Absorbed, he didn’t hear the small click of the closet door opening in the other room, nor the faint rustle of the lithe young guy unwrapping himself from the wastebasket under Della’s desk, nor even the tiny tick of the outer office door opening, but he did hear the quick snip of that door as it closed, and looked up from his desk, frowning.

  Had security got here this early? Impossible. He rose, crossed to the doorway between the offices, and looked out at unchanged normality.

  It must have been his imagination. Shaking his head, he crossed back to his desk, unaware that the fellow from behind the drape had sped silently across the room to stand behind the door while Perly frowned at his empty outer office, then looped silently around the door and through the doorway as Perly walked back to his desk.

  Perly sat; the outer office door tocked shut.

  Perly reared back and stared at the doorway. Wasn’t that definitely the sound of the door? Was he hearing things?

  Something’s funny, he thought, and stood again, and this time walked both across his office and across Della’s office to open that outer door, lean out, and see nothing out there but his own Lamborghini.

  He frowned at the ramp, listening hard, but heard and saw nothing, while the carrot-topped fellow who’d been on the floor behind the sofa squeezed out of there and scampered across both offices to tuck himself into the recently vacated closet.

  Perly frowned, still in his doorway, facing his ramp. Nothing. Nobody there. Could temperature changes at night do it?

  This time, on returning to his office, Perly resolved to pay no more attention to tiny anonymous noises. They meant nothing. Everything was fine. Nothing could go wrong.

  52

  THE WHOLE THING’S going to hell from the get-go,” Tiny said. He didn’t sound happy.

  “It’s goddam Perly’s own schedule,” Stan complained. “Can’t he read his own writing?”

  The four had retreated down the ramp to take up a position over by the stairs to the basement. But this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. Relying on Perly’s schedule, they’d fitted their own schedule into it like a burglar’s hand in a stolen glove. They would get here a little before nine, and they’d have a leisurely time to study the offices for unknown problems—or opportunities, you never knew—and then come down here and continue on down to the basement about a quarter to ten.

  Then Perly was supposed to show up, not now. Then he would show up, at ten, dammit, and do his packing and his filing until eleven, when Continental Detective Agency people would show up with the security stuff. A little five-handed poker would be played in the basement while Perly and the security guys set things up, and then left, and the office would be in the charge of the two uniformed Continentals, who would call their people at the bank.

  Shortly before two in the morning, according to the plan, the game would be ended, and they’d come up from the basement and go on up the ramp to persuade the Continentals to cooperate—Tiny was particularly good at that part. The uniforms would be borrowed from their previous wearers, and whichever of the group they fit best would become the new security detail. When the set showed up, they would accept delivery, then go get the borrowed van they’d stashed around the corner.

  Simple. Plain. Nice. No trickery, no complications. But now?

  “I think the whole job’s in the tank,” Tiny said. “And if it is, where we all go is home.”

  Kelp said, “John’s still up there, you know.”

  Tiny looked around. “Dortmunder? Where is he?”

  “He went into the bathroom,” Kelp said.

  “At a time like this?”

  “He went to hide in the bathroom.”

  “You can’t hide in bathrooms,” Judson said.

  Tiny said, “The kid’s right.”

  Kelp, looking for a ray of hope, said, “Does this bathroom have a window?”

  Stan, who’d studied all the territory up there as carefully as if he were going to drive around in it, said, “No. One of those exhaust fan things.”

  “Jump-the-gun Perly,” Tiny said, “is gonna take a leak, and guess what. We don’t wanna be here when that happens.”

  Stan said, “What if we just went up and take him prisoner now? There’s five of us.”

  Kelp shook his head. “Perly has to front the operation until the chess set’s here.”

  Tiny said, “So it’s time to say good night.”

  Kelp didn’t want to leave with John still stuck up there. “No, wait, Tiny,” he said. “Nothing bad’s happened yet. We can still hope.”

  Tiny doubted it. “Hope? Hope what? Hope Perly’s blind? Hope he doesn’t take leaks? Forget it, Kelp, Dortmunder’s history. Where’s that door zapper?”

  “The garage door opener?” Kelp pointed upward. “John’s got it.”

  “Perfect,” Tiny said, then looked around and pointed. “That looks like a door.”

  “Tiny,” Kelp said, “why not wait a little while, see what happens.”

  “We don’t want to be here,” Tiny said, “when Perly makes the phone call. You know the precinct in this neighborhood already has this address on their minds tonight. When Perly calls the precinct, it’s already too late to leave here.”

  “I tell you what,” Kelp said. “I’ll just go back up there, take a look, see what’s going on.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Stan said. “What the hell, we’re here,”

  “And if there’s a problem,” Kelp said, “we can always go out the way John came in last night, the back door out of the basement. Could be some other rich apartments across the way, so it isn’t a total loss.”

  Tiny considered, then shrugged. “Five minutes,” he said. “Then I’m outa here, and I won’t mind making noise.”

  “Thanks, Tiny,” Kelp said, and turned toward the ramp.

  “If you two wind up upstate,” Tiny said after him, “I don’t visit.”

  Not feeling that needed an answer, Kelp went on up the ramp. The office door had an automatic lock on it, but he’d already automatically unlocked it once tonight, so he just breezed through it, being very quiet, then tiptoed across the outer office to peek around the corner of the doorway.

  There was Perly, seated at his desk, taking folders out of a side drawer. He sorted the folders into two stacks, then reached for more. And just beyond him was the bathroom d
oor.

  A distraction might help John, but a distraction would also ruin the heist. Kelp held his position and watched, and Perly stood, picked up one of the stacks of folders, and carried it over to an open safe along the same wall as the bathroom. He stooped to put the folders into the safe, turned around, and went back to the desk.

  Twice more Kelp watched Perly sort folders and carry some to the safe. Then he put the rest of the folders back in the drawer, locked the drawer, and stood up to go over to some bookshelves full of tall binders, all neatly marked on their spines with tape. He stood looking at the binders, then turned to look at the bathroom door instead.

  Uh oh. Did John make a noise in there?

  Perly crossed to the bathroom door and opened it. He switched on the light, stepped in, and closed the door.

  Kelp didn’t know what to do. Stay here and see if he could help John? Or get fast down the ramp to warn the others?

  The toilet flushed.

  Kelp frowned at the bathroom door. Water ran in a sink in there. Perly came out, switched off the light, and went back to the bookcase, where he started to sort through the binders as Kelp raced down the ramp and over to the others. In a shrill half-whisper, he said, “Perly went in there!”

  “We’re gone,” Tiny said.

  “No, listen,” Kelp said. “He went in there, he took a leak, he came out, calm as ever. He never saw John!”

  “Impossible,” Tiny said.

  “But that’s what happened, Tiny, I saw it.”

  Judson said, “Are you sure he’s in there?”

  “I watched him go in,” Kelp said. “And he didn’t come back out, or where is he?”

  “If he come out,” Stan said, “even if Perly didn’t see him, we would.”

  “Tiny,” Kelp said, “we can stick around, because somehow John made himself invisible in there.”

  “Then I will stick around,” Tiny said. “I’ll want him to tell me how he did it.”