Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

  Irwin said, “Who are these guards, anyway? Are they rent-a-cops?”

  “New York City police,” Tiny told him. “Two of them, in their blue suits, in a prowl car, parked next to the grave. I went and looked.”

  Kelp said, “So did I. I didn’t know you went there, Tiny.”

  “Neither did they,” Tiny said.

  To Irwin, Kelp said, “I can tell you also, they got a generator and a floodlight, for after dark. You could play night baseball at that grave.”

  Irwin said, “Could we create a distraction? Some other crime happening, someplace nearby. If they’re police, don’t they have to respond?”

  “They call it in,” Kelp told him. “A hundred thousand other cops come, and roll your distraction up into a ball, and take it off to a cell.”

  “This is a serious situation,” Guilderpost said. “If the comment weren’t beneath me, I would say it was a grave situation.”

  “Oh, go ahead and say it, Fitzroy,” Kelp advised him. “Let yourself go.”

  What if the job was from the other end? Was that possible? They were still talking, but Dortmunder wasn’t listening, and so he didn’t know or care who he interrupted when he said, “Fitzroy, this Internet thing of yours.”

  Everybody stopped yakking to look at Dortmunder, not knowing what he was on about. Guilderpost said, “Yes, John?”

  “You told me once,” Dortmunder reminded him, “you checked the Redcorn family out west with old phone books, you could do that on the Internet.”

  “Lists, John,” Guilderpost told him. “If a topic is compiled, you can find it on the Internet.”

  “Can you find out,” Dortmunder asked him, “if Burwick Moody had any descendants?”

  The waitress brought waffles, sausage, hash browns, and eggs over easy while the looks of awe and either understanding or confusion slowly spread across the faces at the table. She distributed the food, along with one or two hons, a couple fellas, and departed.

  Dortmunder said to Guilderpost, “Well? Can you do it?”

  Guilderpost said, “If Moody left issue, I don’t see why I can’t trace it.”

  Irwin, one of those whose expression had showed and still showed confusion, said, “John? What are you thinking here? Burwick Moody’s descendants demand something? Stay away from our ancestor’s grave?”

  “Hair,” Dortmunder said. This was suddenly absolutely clear in his mind. “We find a descendant with black hair, we figure out a way to get a little buncha that hair, we give it to Little Feather, and when they come to take hair for the test, she gives them Moody hair.”

  Kelp said, “John, I knew you’d do it. The Moody hair matches the Moody body, and Little Feather’s in.”

  “If we can find an heir,” Dortmunder said.

  Irwin laughed. “This is wonderful,” he said. “The absolute accuracy of DNA testing! First, we put in a wrong body to match our wrong heiress, then we get a wrong wrong body, and now we’re gonna get the wrong wrong hair. One switched sample is gonna get compared with another switched sample. Absolutely nothing in the test is kosher.”

  Kelp said, “Irwin, that’s the kind of test we like.”

  Guilderpost said, “If there’s Moody issue.”

  “That’s up to you to find out,” Dortmunder told him.

  “I know it is, I know it is,” Guilderpost agreed. Looking at the food on his plate, brow furrowed, he said, “I can’t eat. I have to know. I have to go to my room and start the search.” Looking at Dortmunder, he said, “That was brilliant, John. Here, you have my breakfast, I can’t wait. Good-bye.” And he was up and out of there.

  Dortmunder had by now drunk his coffee and both his orange juices and finished one little box of cornflakes. Tiny pushed Guilderpost’s plate toward him and said, “You don’t eat enough, Dibble.”

  “John,” Dortmunder said. He looked at Guilderpost’s hash browns and eggs over easy, untouched. “What the hell,” he said, and dug in.

  The waitress came by a minute later to give them all more coffee, whether they liked it or not, and she paused to frown at the plate in front of Dortmunder. “I could of brought you that, hon, if you’d asked me,” she said.

  Dortmunder pointed the business end of his fork at where Guilderpost had lately sat. “He got a sudden attack a the runs.”

  “Oh, that can be tough, hon,” the waitress said. “Believe me, I know. You won’t be seeing him for a while.”

  An hour and five minutes, actually, before Guilderpost returned. He seemed to be smiling and frowning at the same time, as though he wasn’t sure what he thought about what he’d learned.

  At this point, their breakfasts had all been cleared away, and the four had only coffee cups in front of them, from which they didn’t dare take even one sip, or the waitress would come back and fill the cup again. So everybody looked up from all that cooling coffee to try to read Guilderpost’s face, and Irwin said, “Well, Fitzroy? Did you find it?”

  “It isn’t,” Guilderpost answered, “that I have good news and bad news. It’s that my good news is my bad news. Yes, I found her. No, you’ll never get close to her or her hair.”

  Dortmunder, brow furrowing, said, “Why not?”

  “Because she’s the Thurbush heiress,” Guilderpost told him. “She lives at Thurstead.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Kelp said, “I think Fitzroy thinks he just said something.”

  Guilderpost said, “You never—” and the waitress appeared beside him, solicitous, to say, “You feeling any better, hon?”

  “In a way,” he said, not understanding the question.

  She said, “Would you like a glass of milk, hon?”

  “As a matter of fact,” he told her, “I would like another order of hash browns and eggs over easy. I find I’m famished.”

  She looked dazed. “Hash browns? And eggs over easy?”

  “And coffee. Thank you, dear.”

  She nodded, forgot to call him hon, and left.

  Guilderpost started his sentence again: “You never heard of Russell Thurbush.”

  “Never,” Dortmunder agreed.

  “Well, it happens I learned quite a bit about Russell Thurbush some years ago,” Guilderpost told them, “when it was happily my opportunity to sell several paintings at gratifyingly high prices that might very well have been Thurbushes, for all anybody knew.”

  Dortmunder said, “He’s a painter.”

  “Was a painter,” Guilderpost corrected. “His dates are 1901 to 1972, and he was one of the principal figures of the Delaware River School, portrait and landscape painters who flourished between the world wars. He became very famous and very rich, traveled throughout Europe doing portraits of royalty, made a lot of money, invested wisely during the Depression, and by the time World War Two came along and the Delaware River School was looked on as old hat, he was rich enough to retire to Thurstead, the mansion he designed himself and built in the mountains of northern New Jersey, overlooking the Delaware River.”

  Dortmunder said, “And the Moody family has something to do with this guy.”

  “Russell Thurbush married Burwick Moody’s only sister, Ellen,” Guilderpost told him, and took a sheet of motel stationery out of his pocket. A hasty family tree was scribbled on it. “Burwick himself died without issue,” he went on, “so the descendants have to be through Ellen, his sister.”

  Dortmunder said, “But she did have descendants.”

  “Oh, yes.” Guilderpost studied his notes. “The family just keeps daughtering out,” he said. “Ellen and Russell Thurbush had three daughters. Eileen became a nun. Reading between the lines, Eleanor was a lesbian. That leaves Emily Thurbush, who married Allistair Valentine in 1946, at the age of eighteen. She had two daughters. The older, Eloise, died at sixteen in an automobile accident. The younger, Elizabeth Valentine, married Walter Deigh in 1968 and produced one daughter, Viveca, in 1970. Elizabeth died in 1997, at the age of fifty, leaving Viveca the sole bearer of the Moody DNA. Viveca is also t
he sole inheritor of Thurstead, where she lives with her husband, Frank Quinlan, and their three daughters, Vanessa, Virginia, and Victoria.”

  Dortmunder said, “In New Jersey.”

  “That’s right,” Guilderpost said. “Overlooking the Delaware River, in a rustic, forested mountain area with majestic views Thurbush frequently memorialized in his paintings, or so it says on the Thurstead Web page.”

  Dortmunder said, “So what we do, we go to this place—”

  “Thurstead,” Irwin interpolated.

  “Fitzroy knows the place I mean,” Dortmunder said. Back to Guilderpost, he said, “We go to this place, like Irwin says, and we sneak in and grab this Virginia, Viveca, whichever one it is, grab her hairbrush, and gedadda there.”

  Guilderpost had been shaking his head through almost this entire sentence, which Dortmunder had been doing his best to ignore, but now Guilderpost added to the video with audio: “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Thurstead is on the National Register of Historic Places,” Guilderpost told him. “It is operated by a nonprofit trust. The house and grounds are open to the public at certain prescribed hours. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, by Thurbush and others, the house also contains the jewels, the silver goblets, the rare golden stilettos, and all the other treasures Thurbush brought back with him from his travels around the world. The place is very tightly guarded, with a private security force and alarm system. The Quinlans live in a portion of the house, the rest devoted to the museum, the entire place under extremely tight protection. You’ll never get at that hairbrush, John. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s awful,” Irwin said. “That’s a goddamn shame. We were so close.”

  “Your idea was brilliant, John,” Guilderpost said, “but it just won’t work out.”

  Irwin said, “John? Why are you smiling?”

  “At last,” Dortmunder said. “A job for me.”

  36

  * * *

  There’s no point driving the getaway car if nobody’s going to get away. Stan Murch, a stocky, open-faced guy with carroty hair, had been sitting in the black Honda Accord, engine idling, just up the block from the bank, for maybe five minutes after his passengers had gone in there, when the three cop cars arrived. No sirens; they just arrived, two angling into the No Parking area in front of the bank, the third angling curbward just past the Accord’s front bumper.

  At the first flash of arriving white, Stan had switched off the engine, and as the men in blue piled out of their cars, putting on their hats and pulling out their gats, Stan pocketed his big ball of car keys and slowly eased out to the street. Not a good idea to make rapid movements around excited people with guns in their hands.

  One cop from the nearest car gave Stan a quick suspicious glare over his shoulder, but Stan rested a forearm on the Honda’s roof and looked very interested in what all the cops were doing, so he gave up that suspicion and trotted on with his pals. They all went on into the bank, and Stan walked around the corner.

  He hadn’t known any of those guys well, and he doubted he’d be getting to know them any better, not for several years, anyway. But none of them would expect their chauffeur still to be there, outside the bank, amid the cop cars, when they were led out. All the surprises would be over by then.

  This bank and this town were way the hell and gone out on Long Island, so those had been Suffolk County cops who would be taking a belated look at the recently stolen Accord, in which Stan had worn nice leather driving gloves, only partly because it was December. If the one cop who’d glared at him tried to reconstruct the suspect from memory later, all he’d come up with would be a bland and unremarkable pale face under a black knit cap; not even the red hair had been visible.

  On the other hand, this was no longer a neighborhood and a town—and a county—in which Stan wanted to linger, so once he was out of sight of the bank, he walked briskly, looking for wheels.

  A supermarket. In front of it and to one side of it, a blacktop parking lot. A bunch of cars clustered in the general area of the entrance, and another smaller clump of cars were gathered in the far corner around the side. Those would belong to the employees, ordered to leave the better parking spaces for the customers. None of them would pop out the supermarket door, arms full of grocery sacks, while Stan was choosing his next transportation, so that’s where he went, deciding on the manager’s car, a blue Chrysler Cirrus—much nicer and more expensive than the resold clunkers all around it—which his third key opened like a flip-top box.

  If he had noticed when he switched on the engine that the damn car was almost out of gas, he’d have left it where it sat and taken one of the cashiers’ cars instead. But he was busy looking for other things, like Suffolk County cops or the supermarket manager, so he was all the way to the on-ramp for the Long Island Expressway before the lit Fuel warning attracted his attention.

  Well, hell. It was miles from here to Maximilian’s Used Cars, where Stan had decided he would deliver the Cirrus, so that the day wouldn’t be a total loss. But first he would have to put in a couple bucks’ gas.

  The next exit, three miles west of where he’d gotten on the LIE, had two huge gas stations handy on the service road, both with convenience stores and car washes attached, plus gigantic signs stuck high enough up in the air to interfere with planes landing at La Guardia. Both were doing very good business.

  Stan pulled in behind a late-model black Mercedes-Benz, whose driver, a big bulky bald man in a creamy tan camel’s hair coat, was just finishing at the pump. As Stan got out of the Cirrus behind the Mercedes, he could hear that guy juking those last few drops into the tank: gluk-gluk-gluk.

  Stan stood at his pump and read all the options, the different grades of gasoline and the different payment methods, cash or credit, as the bald guy put his nozzle away and screwed on his tank cap. Stan chose cash, and so did the bald guy, who was walking over to the convenience store. Stan put the nozzle in the gas tank filler neck of the Cirrus, then walked over to the Mercedes, got behind the wheel, and drove off.

  The Mercedes was a much better car. Also, the gas tank was full.

  Maximilian’s Used Cars existed in a kind of neverland that was not quite Brooklyn, not quite Queens, and certainly not Nassau County. A small pink stucco structure blushed at the rear of the lot, behind a display of clapped-out gas guzzlers horrible enough to make any self-respecting building blush. Triangular plastic pennants in gaudy colors strung around the perimeter of the lot did their best to distract attention from the heaps on offer, as did the sentiments scrawled on many of the windshields with whitewash: !!ultraspecial!! !!better than new!! !!a gift!!

  Stan Murch drove past this automotive fool’s paradise, turned at the side street just beyond it, and turned again into an anonymous weedy driveway. He pulled to a stop in a scraggly area of beaten ground flanked by the white clapboard walls of garages. Leaving the Benz, he stepped through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence, followed a path through winter’s dead leaves and weeds, and entered the pink building through its rear door.

  He was now in a simple gray-paneled office, where Max himself stood like a snarling beast over the seated figure of his secretary, Harriet, a skinny, severe, hatchet-faced woman who typed away like a robot while Max barked words into her ear: “And I don’t wanna hear from you birds again. Screw you, Maximilian Charfont.”

  Stan said, “Charfont?”

  “Hi, Stan,” Harriet said.

  “Hi, Harriet.”

  “What’s it to you?” Max wanted to know. “Read that back to me, Harriet.”

  Leaving the paper in the typewriter, Harriet read while Max, a bulky older man with heavy jowls and thin white hair, his white shirt under the black vest smudged from leaning against used cars, listened and paced. He no longer smoked his old cigars, but ethereal cigar smoke wafted behind him anyway as he paced.

  Harriet read: “‘Better Business Bureau of Greater New York. Gentlemen: When you firs
t made contact with me, I assumed it was your purpose to bring me better business. Now I see your hope is to drive me out of business entirely, by aligning yourselves with these malcontents and mouth-breathers who apparently can neither see the particular automobile they are in the process of purchasing nor read the standard contract relating to that purchase. The Royally Mounted A-One Collection Agency knows these people better than you do, and I suggest you check with them before leaving any of them alone in your office. As for me, the laws of the State of New York are good enough for me, and your Boy Scout pledges are not needed, thank you very much. I would prefer that our correspondence end at this point. Sincerely, Maximilian Charfont.’”

  Max stopped his pacing. He said, “Didn’t I have some swear words in there?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Well, what happened to them?”

  “This is a very old typewriter,” Harriet pointed out. “From the Victorian era. It won’t type dirty words. If you got me a nice new computer, I could type Portnoy’s Complaint in here.”

  “You don’t want a computer,” Max informed her, “and I don’t want no complaint.” Rounding on Stan, he said, “And wadda you want?”

  “Well, I’d like to call my Mom, if it’s okay.”

  Max lowered an eyebrow. “Local call?”

  “Sure, a local call,” Stan said. “You expect my Mom to leave the five boroughs?”

  “I don’t expect anything,” Max said. “That’s it, you drop by, use the phone? You wanna flush the toilet, too, drop a few notes to absent loved ones?”

  “No, just the phone call,” Stan said. “And out back, there’s a Mercedes you might like.”

  “Ah-huh,” Max said.

  “Gas tank’s full,” Stan told his departing back.

  Harriet had replaced Max’s letter with some Motor Vehicle form and was typing again, full tilt. She said, “Use the phone over there, okay?”

  Meaning the room’s second desk. “Sure,” Stan said, and sat at desk number two and dialed his Mom’s cell phone, which she now kept in her cab, while she was working, so they could keep in constant touch.