Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Everybody sit,” Little Feather said, “and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  The way to make it possible for everybody to sit, this time around, was that the two women got the sofa, while Tiny perched like a performing elephant on the chair Little Feather had used last time. Once they were all uncomfortable, Little Feather dealt out a round of her bright, perky, untrustworthy smile, and said, “When Judge Higbee said yesterday we should go right ahead with the DNA test, no more delays, I just didn’t know what to do, so finally I told Marjorie the whole story.”

  Quickly, before anybody could say anything (like the wrong thing, for instance), she added, “I told her how I called my old friend Jack Hall in Nevada, and how he sent me to Mr. Guilderpost in New York, and he’s the one who found me the DNA specialist lawyer. And I told her how you all are friends of Mr. Guilderpost, and how you took an interest in my case, and how you, John, just somehow knew that the tribes would try to cheat and switch bodies, so you all, just to help me out, switched the tombstones, never thinking for a second that those young Indians would get caught.”

  Well, that was a nice-enough story, as far as it went. It got Marjorie Dawson aboard, and explained the presence of this mob here, sort of, and Little Feather had tap-danced it all out from a standing start. Not bad.

  The Dawson woman, now that nobody had killed her, had gotten her lawyer’s confidence back, and she said, “I have to admit that your thinking was very imaginative, very good, uh . . . John, was it?”

  “Yeah, John,” Dortmunder admitted. “Thanks.”

  Little Feather said, “Oh, let me introduce everybody. That’s Mr. Fitzroy Guilderpost, and that’s Irwin Gabel, and that’s Andy Kelly, and that’s Tiny Bulcher, and that’s John. John, I’m sorry, but I don’t know your last name.”

  He hadn’t expected that, suddenly out of left field and all. “Diddums,” he said, which was what he said every time he was abruptly asked his name. Somehow, that was the only name he could ever think of.

  Marjorie Dawson frowned. “Diddums?”

  “It’s Welsh,” he explained.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, Mr. Diddums—”

  “John.”

  “Very well. John. It was clever of you to guess what the tribes might do, but very dangerous to go into that cemetery and start moving gravestones around.”

  “It didn’t work out too good,” Dortmunder admitted.

  Dawson said, “Can any of you think of any way to reverse the procedure, to make it possible for Little Feather to be tested against her actual ancestor?”

  Dortmunder said, “When? The DNA thing’s supposed to happen right now, isn’t it?”

  Beaming, Little Feather said, “I was so lucky I talked to Marjorie! She’s on my side, John, she really is, and she did something right away to help.”

  Guilderpost, who’d been looking flabbergasted since they’d come in here, said, “Help? How can she possibly help?”

  “By buying you some time,” Dawson said.

  Guilderpost said, “But, Ms. Dawson, you can’t request a delay, that puts suspicion squarely where we don’t want it. We have to pretend we want that test at once.”

  “I realize that,” Dawson told him, acting like someone who didn’t need advice from amateurs. “Here’s what happened,” she explained. “Mr. Welles, the tribes’ main counsel, immediately appealed Judge Higbee’s ruling in the state appeals court in Albany. It’s a ridiculous argument, based on the idea that the grave robbers acted without the consent of the Tribal Council, it won’t hold up for a second.”

  Kelp said, “Then what good does it do us?”

  “As Little Feather’s primary counsel,” Dawson explained, “I received the notice of appeal in my office here in Plattsburgh. Mr. Schreck, though, would be the one to appear before the court in Albany. However, very stupidly, through an oversight, I neglected to pass the notice on to Mr. Schreck’s office in New York, so when Mr. Welles makes his argument to the appeals court, there will be no one there to make the counterargument.”

  Tiny did his rumbling chuckle and said, “Nice, lady. Nice.”

  Guilderpost said, “When is this appeal to take place?”

  “Right now,” Dawson told him. “Mr. Schreck, of course, will find out about it tomorrow, and he’ll insist on another hearing, but that’s another delay. Today is Wednesday. I don’t see how it can all be sorted out this week. I believe you now have at least until Monday to solve the problem in the cemetery.”

  Kelp said, “Aren’t you gonna get in trouble for this?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Everybody thinks I’m a dimwit anyway, I’ll just be flustered and embarrassed, and apologize to everybody, and they’ll all shrug their shoulders and get on with it.”

  Little Feather said, “So now we have five days to think of a solution. Surely one of you people can have an idea by then.”

  Irwin said, “What if we use a knockout gas and spray the guards, and we wear gas masks? Then we go in before they wake up and switch the stones back, and nobody knows the difference.”

  Kelp said, “One, they’ll know they’ve been asleep.”

  Dortmunder said, “Two, the grave is open.”

  Guilderpost said, “Three, we don’t have any knockout gas, and, Irwin, you don’t know where to get any.”

  “It was just an idea,” Irwin said.

  Dortmunder said, “No, it wasn’t. But we just might find one, somewhere, now that we got all this extra time. Thank you, Miss Dawson.”

  She blushed with pleasure. “Call me Marjorie,” she said. “And I want you all to come over to my house for take-out pizza.”

  34

  * * *

  Benny Whitefish had never been so scared in his life. Two nights in the New York City jail at Rikers Island, a terrible place, where even the name sounds like some obscure punishment: The rikers are there, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get riked.

  Benny and Herbie and Geerome, the three little Indian boys, cowered together in the middle of a great horde of mean, tough men, hoping only not to attract attention to themselves. They couldn’t sleep at night; they had to keep staring and gulping and feeling their hearts beat up in their throats while they listened to all the whuffles and snrrs and phoots of the great resting rabble all around them. And they could only catnap by day, when the herd shuffled and grunted and just kept moving around. Meals were impossible, though they did manage to drink coffee, which forced them into the lavatory a lot, all together. None of them wanted to go in there by himself.

  A very junior partner of Otis Welles, the tribes’ high-powered, high-priced New York lawyer, came to see them Tuesday afternoon, following their first night of terror, to assure them they would be spending Tuesday night at Rikers Island as well. His name was O. Osgood Osborne, and he could not have been more indifferent. He didn’t see three terrorized country boys from the reservation in front of him, way out of their depth in the big city; all he saw was a case. You handle the case this way, and it comes out that way, and you charge for your time, which includes travel time. That was how he saw it, and he made no attempt to hide the fact.

  Anyway, when Benny, through chattering teeth, begged this ally to explain at least what was going on, what was going to happen, he did oblige. They had committed, it seemed, several misdemeanors, plus a few class C felonies—which was the first Benny knew that felonies come in classes, like air travel—and they would eventually have to plea-bargain to community service or suspended sentence or possibly a brief incarceration (the three moaned in unison, which O.O.O. didn’t notice, or anyway didn’t react to), but for the moment, the first issue was to get on a judicial docket to get before a judge to have bail set. Once bail was set, Uncle Roger would pay it—the thought of Uncle Roger doubled Benny’s terror—and they would be free to depart from Rikers Island and return to the reservation. That would be leaving the United States, of course, which was technically a violation of bail terms, but they wouldn’t be leaving New York State, so tha
t made it all right.

  The other thing O.O.O. wanted to tell them, straight from Uncle Roger, was that this episode had been all their own idea; they’d done it because they were very religious and wanted to rescue Joseph Redcorn from nonsacred ground, and that’s why they chose someone not from the Three Tribes to take Redcorn’s place. DNA had had nothing to do with it, and, in fact, they’d never even thought about DNA and didn’t know what it was.

  Furthermore, no one had put them up to it, nor had anyone discussed the idea with them, nor had they discussed it with anybody else. Was that clear? The three little Indians nodded their heads convulsively, and then they were taken away from O.O.O., back to Satan’s Brigade, and another night of trembling wakefulness.

  The next and last time they saw O.O.O. was Wednesday afternoon at two, in a courtroom in Queens in a building that had been put up by the federal government during the McKinley administration, which was a long time ago. Additions and alterations had been performed on the building over the years, all as cheaply as possible, to save the taxpayers money and leave a little something for the contractor’s uncle, the alderman. Electric wires and steam-heat pipes snaked and sliced this way and that, a sprinkler system spiderwebbed overhead, and air-conditioning ducts had recently been jammed in somewhere. The result was that the courtroom looked like a basement, although it was on the third floor.

  In this courtroom, Benny and Herbie and Geerome stood penitently beside O.O.O. and before a fat, mumbling black female judge who never looked up from the writing she was doing on several documents. Benny never did understand what she was saying or what was happening, partly because of the judge and the place itself, but mostly because Uncle Roger was behind them, seated on a spectator’s bench amid a number of hookers, pimps, grandparents, people with bandages on their heads, and cops. Uncle Roger didn’t look happy.

  The ritual in front of the judge took five minutes, and then more ritual in front of a cashier’s cage took twenty minutes more. The three little Indians signed their names to things without knowing or caring what the things might say, while O.O.O. told them with bored indifference what to do but not why. Then he shook their hands, startling them all, but that, too, was apparently part of the ritual, because he did it without exactly making eye contact with anybody, and then he left, and in his place stood Uncle Roger.

  “Nice work,” he said.

  In the car, on the long drive north, Uncle Roger had more to say. Benny got the brunt of it, because Uncle Roger had made him sit in front, while Herbie and Geerome perched like choir-boys on the backseat. “A simple matter,” Uncle Roger kept saying. “It’s a simple matter. You go down there and dig a hole and fill it in again. You don’t attract attention to yourself!”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Roger.”

  “Why the hell did you do it at ten o’clock, when there’s still people around? Any idiot knows you go there at two, three in the morning.”

  Benny didn’t feel he could answer that with the truth, which was that he and Herbie and Geerome had agreed it would be too frightening to go to a cemetery that late at night, so he said, “That’s just when we got there, I guess. We just didn’t think, I guess, Uncle Roger.”

  “Didn’t think! I’ll say you didn’t think! Flashing a lot of lights around, I suppose. Were you playing the goddamn radio?”

  “No, sir!”

  It went on like that, Uncle Roger mostly chewing them out for being such meatheads, but occasionally wondering out loud what the hell they were going to do now about the Little Feather problem, with a guard on the grave and an order from the judge that their stupidity had made possible.

  After a while, during a pause in the tirade, Benny found himself thinking about his own relationship with Little Feather, which he supposed was pretty much on the rocks now. He wondered briefly if somehow that relationship, the fact that he’d gotten to know Little Feather and she’d gotten to like him and trust him, if that could be used to help Uncle Roger with this problem, but then he decided the smart move was not to mention his relationship with Little Feather at all. It would be better, most likely, if Uncle Roger never knew about that.

  Don’t volunteer, Benny told himself, inching toward wisdom. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself, and except for the occasional “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “I’m sorry, Uncle Roger,” that’s what he did.

  The one thing he knew for sure was, he never wanted to get riked again.

  35

  * * *

  At the Four Winds motel, you didn’t get a nice full stick-to-your-ribs breakfast from the cheerful likes of Gregory and Tom. At the Four Winds motel, you put on a lot of coats and boots and hats and gloves and went outdoors and down along the parking lot to the office, at the center of the place, and then indoors again and past the check-in counter to the café, a bland, pale place lit by fluorescents all day long.

  Dortmunder found Kelp and Tiny there at 8:30 Thursday morning, seated at a booth for six, with cups of coffee in front of them. He’d had a wakeful night, trying to think, trying to figure out what to do about that mix-up at the cemetery, and had just started to get some decent shut-eye half an hour ago, when Guilderpost rang him up to say everybody was gathering in the café in thirty minutes, for breakfast before heading south. A shower had helped a little, particularly because the water temperature kept changing all the time, encouraging alertness, so now here he was.

  “(grunt),” he said, as he slid in next to Kelp and across from Tiny.

  “You look like shit, Dortmunder,” Tiny said.

  “Diddums,” Dortmunder corrected. “It’s Welsh. I’ve been trying to think of what we could do. You know, we got these five days, so why don’t we do something?”

  “Four days,” Tiny said.

  “How time flies,” Kelp said. He, too, looked like shit, but Dortmunder noticed nobody was commenting on that. He grinned at Dortmunder and said, “Say, gang, we got four days, let’s put on a show!”

  Dortmunder didn’t like to start the day with humor. He liked to start the day with silence, particularly when he hadn’t had that much sleep the night before. So, avoiding Kelp’s bright-eyed look, he gazed down at the paper place mat that doubled in here for a menu, and a hand put a cup of coffee on top of it. “Okay,” he told the coffee. “What else do I want?”

  “That’s up to you, hon,” said a whiskey voice just at ten o’clock, above his left ear.

  He looked up, and she was what you’d expect from a waitress who calls strangers “hon” at 8:30 in the morning. “Cornflakes,” he said. “O—”

  Pointing her pencil, eraser end first for politeness, she said, “Little boxes on the serving table over there.”

  “Oh. Okay. Orange juice then.”

  Another eraser point: “Big jugs on the serving table over there.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Dortmunder said, and frowned at her. In the nonpencil hand, she held her little order pad. He said, “The coffee’s it? Then your part’s done?”

  “You want hash browns and eggs over, hon,” she said, “I bring ’em to you.”

  “I don’t want hash browns and eggs over.”

  “Waffles, side of sausage, I go get ’em.”

  “Don’t want those, either.”

  Eraser point: “Serving table over there,” she said, and turned away as Guilderpost and Irwin arrived.

  Most of the group said good morning, and the waitress said, “More customers. I’ll just get your coffee, fellas,” she added, which was apparently the plural of hon, but before she could leave, Irwin said, “I know what I want. Waffles, side of sausage.”

  Guilderpost said, “And I would like hash browns and eggs over, please.”

  The point end of the pencil now hovered over the pad. “Over how, hon?”

  “Easy.”

  The pencil flew over the pad. The waitress seemed pleased to have some actual customers, rather than a virtual customer like Dortmunder. “I’ll just get your coffee, fellas,” she promised again, and off she went.


  Guilderpost slid in beside Tiny. Irwin would have taken the spot next to Dortmunder, putting Dortmunder in the middle, but Dortmunder said, “Hold on, let me up. I gotta go to the serving table.”

  The serving table, he could see, when he got there, was for wimps. Orange juice was about the most manly thing on display there, among the bowls of kiwi fruit and containers of yogurt and tiny packages of sugar substitute. He found his cornflakes in little weeny boxes and took two. He found little weeny glasses for his orange juice and filled two. He found a small pitcher of milk and took it along. Back at the table, he found Irwin in his former seat, drinking coffee, so he sat at the end and started opening boxes and drinking out of glasses.

  The others were talking about the problem in vague terms. Dortmunder was thinking about the problem while clawing his way into the cornflakes boxes, but the others were all talking about it.

  “The problem with twenty-four-hour guards,” Irwin said, “is that there’s never any time when they’re not there.”

  “I believe that’s the point,” Guilderpost told him.

  “But,” Kelp said, “there’s nothing else we can do except get in there. We got to get in there, sometime between now and Monday, and get that tombstone back over Little Feather’s grandpa, where it belongs.”

  Tiny said, “You got more than that, you know. You got your hole.”

  “That’s right,” Irwin said. “The wrong grave is open. Somehow, we’d also have to get in there and fill up the wrong grave and make it look right, and then dig up the right grave, and then switch the tombstones.”

  “Take an hour,” Tiny decided. “All of us together. Maybe a little more.”

  “One hour out of twenty-four,” Kelp said, “and every one of those twenty-four hours guarded.”

  Dortmunder sighed. Although this yakking all around him was something of a distraction, it was also helpful, because it was defining what the job was not. The job was not sneaking in past guards in order to neaten up. It was too late to neaten up. So, if that wasn’t the job, what was the job?