The Road To Ruin d-11

by Donald E. Westlake

  “It’s a funny way to do things,” Dortmunder said, “but okay.”

  They all stood, and Archie said, “Phone here tomorrow afternoon, there’ll be somebody from the family here, tell you did we get the answer yet.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said.

  As they walked to the door, Kelp said, “Tell Arnie, don’t give up. He’s on the right path, at last.”

  “I will,” Archie said. He opened the hall door, then grinned and pointed at Kelp. “Kelp,” he said. “That’s which one you are.”

  16

  IT WAS CHESTER’S WIFE, Grace, who noticed the ad, in the local paper, the Berwick Register. When they were kicked out of the Eden of Monroe Hall’s estate, Chester and Grace had found a small house in a little town called Shickshinny on the Susquehanna River, just north of Interstate 80, handy to most of North America. It wasn’t as big or as nice a place as the house they’d had at Hall’s, but it was cozy, and the smallness helped to keep Chester’s rage on the boil. Grace always took an interest in wherever she was—Chester mostly took an interest in the roads—so she subscribed to the Register, and found the ad, in the Help Wanted column. “Look at this, Chester,” she said, so he did.

  WANTED DRIVER

  Good pay, easy hours. No priors. Discreet. 436-5151

  “Grace,” Chester said, “what are you showing me this for? You want me to take this job?”

  Grace was a firm woman, firm in body and firm in attitude. “Chester,” she said, “I know you have faith in those dishonest friends of yours, but until they actually produce some swag for you to share in, yes, I think you oughta get a job. But what got my attention to this ad, it’s got a funny word in it. You see it?”

  Chester read the ad again. “Discreet,” he said.

  “And it doesn’t ask for a chauffeur,” she pointed out, “it asks for a driver. Why would they want a driver to be discreet?”

  “Maybe it’s a call girl,” Chester said.

  “If it is,” Grace said, “I don’t want you to take the job. But if it isn’t, who knows? Discreet. It might be interesting.”

  So Chester made the call, and a guy with a slurry voice gave him directions to a house across the river past Mocanaqua, and Chester drove over to find a good-sized old stone house with woods between it and the neighbors on both sides. Not rich-rich, like Monroe Hall, but not scraping along like Chester, either. So he stopped in front of the house, and as he walked toward it the door was opened by a guy with a glass in his hand. This was eleven in the morning.

  “I’m Ches—”

  “You couldn’t be anybody else,” the guy said, sounding just as slurry as he had on the phone, but at least no worse. He was maybe fifty, with a big-boned shambly body and a thick head of wavy black hair and an amiable good-ole-boy grinning face. “Comonin, I’m Hal Mellon,” he said, and switched the glass to his left so he could shake hands, then shut the door and waved generally at a large comfortable living room, saying, “Let’s sit down, get to know one another.”

  So they sat down, and Hal Mellon said, “I called this party, so I’ll go first. I’m a salesman, I sell office machinery for the office, big firms, medium-size firms, I handle computers, copiers, faxes, shredders, you name it.”

  “Uh huh,” Chester said.

  “Well, I don’t handle the products my own self,” Mellon said. “I wouldn’t know how to operate one of those things if you held a gun to my head. What I do is, I schmooze the office manager. I explain to him how the thing I sold him last year is this year a piece of shit and he should let me sell him a new one. I’m the one convinces him he doesn’t need one of this, he needs two of this, and probably one of that.”

  “You must be good at it,” Chester said.

  “I’m goddamn good at it,” Mellon told him, and swigged some of his drink. “But I got one natural advantage.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. My breath doesn’t smell.”

  Chester blinked. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I could be half in the bag—hell, I could be three-quarters in the bag—you wouldn’t smell a goddamn thing on my breath.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Chester said.

  “You see, what it is,” Mellon explained, “you can’t do what I do sober. Before those miserable stinky rotten office managers can be my best friend, I gotta get tanked.”

  “Sure,” Chester said.

  Mellon nodded, and finished his drink. “Anything for you?” he asked.

  “Not when I got driving to do, thanks.”

  Mellon burst into a huge grin. “There, you see?” he said. “There it is right there. In the offices, I can handle the situation. I don’t weave, I don’t slur more than I am right now, I can smooth it right on through. But behind the wheel? I got no reflexes, man.”

  “Not good,” Chester said.

  “My last DWI,” Mellon said, “they took away my license forever. Never gonna drive again. And if I try to, they’ll put me in jail. The judge said so, and I believed him.”

  “So that’s why you need a driver,” Chester said.

  “I got a nice Buick in the garage here,” Mellon said. “Maybe not the best car in the world, but it’s what a salesman’s got to drive.”

  “Buicks can be good.”

  “That’s what we’d use,” Mellon said. “Take me around to the offices, wait for me, keep his mouth shut.”

  “Discreet.”

  “That’s it. I can’t afford to have the word go around. Not to the managers, and not to my bosses.”

  “I got it.”

  Mellon sat back. “Your turn.”

  Chester said, “Well, started out, I was a stunt driver in the movies—”

  “No shit!”

  “—then that job dried up so I drove for some bank robbers—”

  “Holy shit!”

  “—then I got put in jail—”

  “Christamighty!”

  “—then I got a job taking care of a valuable car collection for a rich guy, but then he got in trouble with the law, so now I’m looking for a job.”

  Mellon stared at Chester as though he were a new kind of butterfly. Finally, he said, “Would you do some stunt driving for me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Mellon shrugged. “Yeah, I can see that,” he said. Then he brightened again. “Say, a guy with your background, you could be better than the radio in the car! We drive from appointment to appointment, you must have a whole lot of stories you could tell.”

  “I’m sure we both do,” Chester said.

  Mellon laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’ll remember yours.”

  17

  MONROE HALL, STARTLED, looked up. “What was that?” However, since he was alone in the library at the moment, there was no one to answer. Still, he was certain there’d been a… a … a something.

  A sound? Squinting at his signed first editions, his collection of nineteenth-century leather-bounds, his assortment of privately printed early twentieth-century erotica (under lock and key and glass), Hall felt a sudden unease. There had been a… a what?

  An absence. Yes? Yes. Some sort of absence. Something—The dog that didn’t bark in the night. Yes, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894. He had an excellent edition over there, very fine, no jacket or signature unfortunately, but still one of the more valuable bits of Sherlockiana.

  What dog? There was no dog in this house, never had been, so if it did nothing that made perfect—

  An absence of cuckoos.

  That was it. Hall looked at his Rolex and it was nine past three, and yet no cuckoos had announced the hour, not one.

  How long had this been going on, or not going on? Had he recently been only in other parts of the house, where he wouldn’t have heard the clocks anyway, and so been unaware that they were falling off, or down? Here in the library, where he liked to stand and look at his possessions, but never read them—reading is so bad for a book—he was right next to the clock room
. If the cuckoos had been on the job, he’d have known it.

  Wanting to know the worst, Hall left the library, went down the corridor, and entered the clock room, where every single clock on all the walls and standing on all the shelves was absolutely still. Not a sign of movement. They’d run down at various hours, some with their doors and birds’ mouths open, the rest shut down in mid-hour, like a medieval town under siege.

  Hall was horrified. It was like looking at a massacre. “Hubert!” he cried, Hubert being an upstairs servant one of whose jobs was to keep these clocks wound. “Hubert?”

  No answer. Hurrying to the wall phone, gleaming plastic among the dead wood, he pounded out Hubert’s extension, which would activate the man’s beeper no matter where on the grounds he might be. Then he hung up and waited, staring at the phone, because now it was Hubert’s job to call him back.

  Nothing. Where was the man? Where was Hubert? Why was there nothing in the world but all these dead cuckoo clocks?

  “Alicia!” he screamed, needing her, needing her now. “Alicia!”

  He hurried back to the corridor, where his voice would carry farther. “Alicia!” She had to be here! Where was she, off with one of those damned automobiles? “Alicia!”

  There was no one else, no one else in the world, who understood him and could give him solace at a time like this. With the rest of the world, no matter how awful things got, one had to go on pretending to be a grownup. Only with Alicia could he relax into the baby he was.

  “Alicia!”

  No answer. No answer. They all failed you, sooner or later. No one to rely on.

  He couldn’t stand to look at the clocks any more, and he’d lost the spirit to go on gazing at his books. Pouting, lower lip stuck out, he trailed away down the corridor until he saw the open door of the gym, and went in there instead.

  Ah, the gym. If only Flip Morriscone were here. Flip was a good fellow, one of the very few good fellows Hall had ever met. A good fellow, and an honest fellow, and a hardworking fellow, and the best thing of all, he liked Monroe Hall! If he were here now, he’d be supportive about the cuckoos, he’d know what to do next.

  At loose ends—well, he was always at loose ends these days—Hall went over to the treadmill, set it at a very leisurely pace indeed, far more languid than Flip would ever allow, and went for a little walk.

  A little walk to nowhere, that’s what his life had come down to. He could walk, he could walk all he wanted, but he couldn’t actually go anywhere.

  Treadmill to Oblivion, 1954, Fred Allen’s grim-titled memoir of his life writing and starring in a weekly radio show. Hall had a copy of it, of course, signed first edition with a dust jacket in almost perfect condition. He’d been told it was a very good book.

  He didn’t need to read those books. He didn’t need to exercise on all these intimidating machines. He didn’t need to drive all these cars. He needed to have them, that’s all, have everything, have the complete set of everything ever made. Then he’d be happy.

  It was almost two hours later that Alicia, back from her drive, found him there, still ambling in place on the treadmill, humming a mournful little tune. “Why, Monroe,” she said.

  “Oh, Alicia,” he said tragically. He stopped walking and bumped painfully into the front of the machine. “Damn! Drat! Oh, why can’t I—” He hopped off the treadmill, which ambled on without him. “This is so awful!” he cried.

  Switching off the machine, Alicia said, “You’re all upset, Monroe. What’s happened?”

  “The clocks,” he told her. “They’ve all stopped.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “I called for Hubert, but no answer. Where is he? He doesn’t have days off, does he?”

  “Oh, Monroe,” Alicia said, “I’m afraid Hubert has left us.”

  “Left us? Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “His family talked against us,” she said. “They found him a different job, so he won’t have to associate with us.”

  “With you?” Hall cried. “Everybody likes to associate with you!”

  “Well, yes, dear,” she said. “I didn’t want to make too much of it, but yes, it was mostly you he was talking about. His family talking about.”

  “So he’s just gone off, and left the cuckoos to die. What a cruel heartless thing to do.”

  “I tell you what, Monroe,” she said, “why don’t we go in and wind them up again? The two of us?”

  “We can’t wind all those clocks! Alicia, we need servants!”

  “Well, I’m afraid we’re having fewer… and fewer.”

  “You go wind cuckoos if you want,” Hall told her. “I’m going to call Cooper.”

  “I don’t think Cooper can do much for us, Monroe.”

  “He’s an employment agent,” Hall pointed out. “He’s supposed to find employees for people who need employees, and God knows that’s us. I’m going to call him now.”

  Hall’s office was farther down the corridor. Entering it, he made straight for the mid-nineteenth-century partners desk with its green felt inserts on both sides. (He used both sides himself, of course.) Rolodexes were placed here and there, but he didn’t need them. He well knew Cooper’s number. He dialed it, gave his name to the receptionist, waited a very long time, and then the cheeky girl came back and said, “Mr. Cooper isn’t in at the moment. Woodja like to leave your name and number?”

  “Mr. Cooper certainly is in,” Hall told her, “and he already knows my name and number. He’s ducking me. He’s avoiding me. You can give him a message for me.”

  “Sure thing. Shoot.”

  “Monroe Hall needs staff. Did you get that? Did you write that down?”

  “Monroe Hall needs staff,” she repeated, deadpan.

  “Tell him,” Hall said, and slammed the phone down. Somewhere, a cuckoo rang.

  18

  WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Kelp was seated at the kitchen table, reading a recent safe manufacturer’s catalog, enjoying the full-color illustrations. He knew Anne Marie was somewhere else in the apartment, and figured the doorbell was for her anyway, because it was probably her friend Jim Green, come to talk about new identities. So he finished reading a “burglar-proof” paragraph, smiling faintly to himself, then closed the catalog and was getting to his feet when Anne Marie called, “Andy?”

  “On my way.”

  In the living room, Anne Marie smiled and said, “Andy Kelp, this is Jim Green.”

  “Whadaya say?” Kelp said, and stuck out his hand.

  “How do you do,” Jim Green said. He had a gentle voice, a mild manner, a small smile, a soft handshake.

  Looking Green over, Kelp decided he wasn’t impressed. Anne Marie had been going on about how this was some kind of man of mystery or something, nobody knows his real name, he’s the spook’s spook, whatever. To Kelp, he just seemed like some average joe. Maybe even more average than most.

  “Anne Marie tells me,” Green was saying, with a toothy smile in Anne Marie’s direction, “you and some pals are looking for new paper.”

  “That’s it,” Kelp agreed. “You know, it doesn’t have to hold up forever, only a few months.”

  Still smiling, Green shook both his head and a hand, saying, “No, excuse me, Andy, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  Anne Marie said, “Why don’t we sit? Jim, get you some coffee? A drink?”

  “Nothing right now, Anne Marie,” Green told her, and Kelp again found himself wondering what impressed her so much about this guy. Anyway, they sat, and Green said, “An identity isn’t the same as like a counterfeit passport or something like that. An identity isn’t really even something you carry around with you. Mostly, it’s a new you we put into the files.”

  “Okay,” Kelp said.

  “So it isn’t a question,” Green went on, “how long is this thing good for. It’s good forever, unless you burn it. It won’t burn itself. You get a new identity, it’s always there waiting for you, it happens so
meday you can no longer go on being who you were before.”

  “Sounds good,” Kelp said.

  “And,” Green said, “as with most things that sound good, it also sounds expensive.”

  “That’s why,” Kelp said, “I was hoping for something maybe shorter term, because that might not be so expensive.”

  Green nodded, frowning a little. Then he grinned at Anne Marie and said, “You come up with a cute one this time, Anne Marie.”

  “I know,” she said, grinning back.

  “I tell you what, Anne Marie,” Green said, “maybe I will take a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure,” she said, rising. “That was black no sugar, right?”

  “What a memory,” Green said.

  Kelp said, “Anne Marie, while you’re pouring, I might accept a beer.”

  “Fine.”

  She went away, and Green leaned back on the sofa and said, “What can you tell me about what you need this for?”

  “I can tell you a lot,” Kelp said, “since Anne Marie says you’re solid.”

  “And I say the same for her. So what are we looking at?”

  “Four guys,” Kelp told him, “have to get employed by a guy that’s under federal court observation and bankruptcy and ongoing investigations and all of this.”

  “You’re going to work for this guy?”

  “It’s the only way to get to where he is, and get what we want.”

  “Interesting,” Green said.

  “Because of this guy’s situation,” Kelp said, “he can’t hire anybody with a record.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Because of our situation, we can’t apply.”

  “What you need,” Green said, “is identities without felonies.”

  “You got it.”

  “Let me think about this.” Green nodded to himself, while Kelp’s mind wandered. Then Green nodded more emphatically. “I suspect,” he said, “what we’re also talking about here is short money up front, and a guaranteed big killing after it’s all over.”