Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder)

by Donald E. Westlake

  "Whoever I am." She was really quite angry, as she showed by her clumsiness when stepping into her bikini panties; lavender, a very wrong color for her.

  Chauncey was about to say "don't go" when he noticed the clock on the mantel: nearly ten-thirty at night. The appointment with Dortmunder was half an hour from now, and if it hadn't been for that slip of the tongue he might well have lazed himself right through it. As it was, his carelessness had saved him once again from his carelessness, and what he did say to poor Sarah was, "Must you go?"

  She gave him a resentful glare over her shoulder, and he saw that her nose was much blunter than Linda's. Same forehead, though, same eyebrows. Same shoulder, if it came to that. Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man's taste is rather circumscribed. "You are a bastard," she said.

  Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. "Yes, I suppose I am," he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs? He watched her dress, her movements eloquent of outrage and humiliation as she paused at the mirror to touch her hair, touch up her face. Seeing that pouting face framed in the rococo gilt of the mirror, he suddenly realized how common she looked. That exquisite seventeenth-century looking glass, its darkly gleaming surface surrounded and supported by gilded twining rose bushes and cherubim, was meant to reflect more regal faces, more substantial brows, more stately eyes, but what had he placed before it? A series of pinched beauties, faces meant for reflection in commonplace mirrors in gas-station rest rooms, next to the hot-air blower. "I am a bad man," Chauncey said, mournfully.

  Immediately she turned away from the mirror, misinterpreting what he'd said. "Yes, you really are, Arnie," she said, but already forgiveness was implicit in her voice.

  "Oh, go away, Sarah," Chauncey said, abruptly irritable, angry at himself for being such an endless wastrel, angry at her for reminding him, angry in general because he knew he wouldn't change. Thrashing up out of the bed, he stalked past her astonished expression, and spent the next five minutes calming himself in a too-hot shower.

  It was his Uncle Ramsey Liammoir who had defined Arnold Chauncey, years ago while Chauncey was still a boarding school boy in softest Massachusetts. "Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot," Ramsey had written to Chauncey's mother, in a letter Chauncey never saw till he was going through her papers after the wicked old woman's death. "Our sponge was Douglas MacDouglas Ramsey, who founded our fortune and made it possible for half a dozen generations of Ramsey's and MacDouglases and Chauncey's to live in stately and respectable comfort, with here a life peerage and there a board chairmanship. Our spigot, who will piss away his patrimony before he's twenty if he's given his head, is your son Arnold."

  Which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the old lady's will had ringed Chauncey's patrimony (matrimony? since it had come from his mother?) with so many strings of barbed wire. Three accountants and two attorneys had to be brought in for approval before he could tip more than fifteen per cent; an exaggeration, but not by much.

  On the other hand, he was far from poor. Chauncey's actual income – as opposed to what it said along about page 63 of his tax return – was in fact quite substantial. The year he didn't clear three hundred thousand dollars was a bad year indeed, and usually he was comfortably above that. Or would have been comfortable were he not, in the words of his own interior monologue, such a wastrel. Piss away his patrimony he did, proving his now-departed uncle right by engaging in every kind of squander known to man. He had married badly, and paid too much for the divorce. He had supported an auto-racing stable, and had even done some driving himself until he realized he was mortal. He maintained fully staffed houses or apartments in New York, London, Paris, Antibes and Caracas. His love of beauty in furniture, paintings, sculpture, in all the fine arts, led him to purchases he could barely afford even if he were to scrimp elsewhere, and he had never been able to scrimp anywhere.

  Thus it was that Chauncey was forced from time to time into risky alternative methods of balancing his books, of which false insurance claims – such as the plot currently in preparation – was only one. Arson, bribery, blackmail, procuring and simple unadorned theft had been other techniques by which over the years he had kept himself and his expensive tastes afloat. He had, for instance, stolen about forty per cent of the royalties supposed to be paid to Heavy Leather, the rock band he had managed back in the late sixties, when running with rock musicians was the thing to do. He hadn't wanted to steal those benighted Glaswegians' money, but at the time it had seemed to him his need was greater than theirs; certainly his arithmetic was. But how his conscience had pricked him, as it pricked him now, standing in the steamy heat of his shower cursing himself for a weakling and a wastrel and a spendthrift. A spigot, in fact, just as dear departed Uncle Ramsey had said, the old fart.

  It took five minutes of hot spray to soothe Chauncey and make him forget again his disrespect for himself (he'd forgotten Sarah the instant he'd left her), and then he returned to the bedroom (Sarah was gone, of course), toweled himself dry, used the blower on his long blond hair – naturally yellow, and the envy of all his friends, male and female – and dressed himself completely in dark colors. Black suede moccasins and black socks. Black slacks and a navy blue cashmere sweater with a turtleneck. Then down the stairs (he almost never used the elevator) to the front-hall closet, where he put on a dark blue pea jacket and tucked his yellow hair inside a black knit cap, which made his tanned face look bonier, tougher. Black leather gloves completed his costume, and then he went down one more flight to the ground door, which in front was actually somewhat below ground level but which in back opened onto a small neat flagstone-covered garden. Flowering shrubs and bushes and small trees, all planted in large ornamental concrete pots, stood about in formal array. Ivy climbed the rear of the house and covered the eight-foot-high brick walls surrounding the garden on the other three sides. Now, in November, the garden was all bare branches and black stumps, but in the summer, when Chauncey was almost never in New York, it was a place of beauty.

  Chauncey was a darker shape against the dark as he crossed the garden to the knobless door in the corner of the rear wall. A key from the cluster in his pocket opened this door, and he slipped through into utter blackness. This was a passage through a thick wall separating two properties that fronted on the next street. The wall, apparently left over from some earlier construction, was actually double, two thicknesses of old chalky brick with less than three feet of space between. A trellis had been laid across the top at some later date, and a jumble of vines crawled over the trellis, making a thick and leafy roof.

  The footing underneath was treacherous with broken bits of stone and brick, but Chauncey slid along on the balls of his feet, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides, dangling ivy branches occasionally catching at his knit cap.

  At the far end was another featureless wooden door, which Chauncey opened with the same key, stepping out to a brick floored areaway in front of a townhouse very like his own. The door he'd emerged from looked as though it belonged to this house, was perhaps a basement entrance, though in fact there was no direct link between them.

  It was two and a half blocks to the meeting place with Dortmunder and the alarm specialist, and as Chauncey neared it, coming south on Madison, he moved very slowly, determined to see Dortmunder and the other one before they saw him. It was just after eleven now, the streets were full of hurtling cabs and blundering buses and cowering private cars, and the sidewalks were virtually empty. Chauncey's breath steamed in the air and he came to a complete halt partway up the block, frowning, looking forward at all four corners of the intersection. Dortmunder wasn't there.

  Had something gone wrong? Chauncey believed be understood Dortmunder, the man's low-key style, his low expectations and defeatist outlook. A man like that was ripe for direction from a stronger personality, which was the way Chauncey saw himself. He had been pleased with Stonewiler's choice, and convinced he could deal w
ith Dortmunder without fear of being outfoxed.

  Not that he intended to default. He would pay the man his hundred thousand, and welcome to it.

  On the other hand, where was he? Not sure what was going on, Chauncey backed into the darkened entranceway of a nearby boutique, and his left heel came down on something soft, which moved. "Ouch!" yelled a voice in Chauncey's ear. "Get off my foot!"

  Chauncey spun about, astonished. "Dortmunder! What are you doing in here?"

  "The same thing you are," Dortmunder said, and limped out to the sidewalk, followed by a skinny scholarly looking man wearing large spectacles and carrying the kind of black leather bag doctors used when doctors made house calls.

  Dortmunder glared back over his shoulder at Chauncey, saying, "Well? You coming?"

  Chapter 7

  Dortmunder and Chefwick nosed their way around the roof of Arnold Chauncey's house like a pair of hunting dogs in search of the scent. Illuminated by light angling up through the open trapdoor, Chauncey stood and observed, a faint expectant smile on his face.

  Dortmunder wasn't sure about this fellow Chauncey. It was all right, for instance, for Dortmunder and Chefwick to hang around in dark corners, that was more or less part of their job, but Chauncey was supposed to be a straight citizen, and not only that, a wealthy one. What was he doing lurking in doorways?

  It was Dortmunder's belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it – burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes – there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else. If Chauncey was another clown leading a rich fantasy life, Dortmunder would have to rethink this entire proposition.

  In the meantime, though, they were here and they might as well look the thing over. Even if the Chauncey deal fell through, it could be useful to know how to get into this place at some later date.

  This was one of a row of ten attached houses built shortly before the turn of the century, when New York's well-to-do were just beginning to move north of 14th Street. Four stories high, twenty-five feet wide, with facades of stone and rear walls of brick, they shared one long continuous flat roof, with knee-high brick walls delineating each property line. Three of the houses, including Chauncey's, featured roof sheds housing elevator mechanisms, added later. Television antennae sprouted like an adolescent's beard on all the roofs, but many of them were tilted or bent or utterly collapsed, marks of the spread of cable TV. The roof construction was tar over black paper. The front parapet showed marks of a fire escape, since removed.

  While Chefwick studied the wires that crossed to the roof from the nearby power and telephone poles, clucking and muttering and peering through his spectacles, Dortmunder took a stroll down the block, stepping over the low brick walls, crunching on one tarred roof after another until be reached the end of the row, where he stood facing a blank brick wall. Or, not entirely blank; here and there the outlines of bricked-in windows could be seen.

  What was this building? Dortmunder went to the front, leaned over the parapet – trying not to see, from the corner of his eye, the sidewalk forty feet below – and saw that it was some kind of theater or concert hall, which faced onto Madison Avenue. What he could see from here was the side of the building, with its fire exits and posters of coming attractions.

  Leaving the edge, Dortmunder backed off to study that blank wall, which rose another fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the row-house roofs. Near the top of the wall were several grilled vents, but none of them looked useful for a human being seeking passage.

  Finished, Dortmunder retraced his steps, finding Chauncey still waiting by the open trapdoor and Chefwick now dangling off the rear of the building, head hanging down, humming happily to himself as he fingered the wiring. A line tester glowed briefly, showing Chefwick's earnest absorbed face.

  Dortmunder continued on, walking to the other end of the row of houses, and there he found a ten-foot open space across a driveway, with an apartment building on the far side, its drapes and curtains and Venetian blinds and Roman shades and Japanese screens and New England shutters all firmly closed. The vision of a board stretched across that open space from one of those windows to where he was standing was followed immediately in Dortmunder's mind by a vision of himself crawling across that board. Turning his back on both vision and building, he returned to the Chauncey roof, where Chefwick was cleaning his hands on a Wash'n'Dri from his leather bag. "We'll come from down there," Dortmunder said, pointing toward the blank back of the concert hall.

  "Our best bet would be the elevator shaft," Chefwick said. To Chauncey he said, "It would be easier if the elevator weren't on the top floor."

  "It won't be," Chauncey promised.

  "Then there's really no problem," Chefwick said. "Not from my point of view." And he looked a question at Dortmunder.

  It was time to clear the air. Dortmunder said to Chauncey, "Tell me about that passage we came through, the one into your back yard."

  "Oh, you won't be able to use that," Chauncey said. "You'd have to go right up through the house, all full of people."

  "Tell me about it anyway."

  "I'm sorry," Chauncey said, moving closer, away from the trapdoor illumination, "but I don't understand. Tell you what about it?"

  "What's it for?"

  "Originally?" Chauncey shrugged. "I really don't know, but I suspect it began merely as a space between walls. I understand my house was a speakeasy at one point during Prohibition, and that's when the new doors were added."

  "What do you use it for?"

  "Nothing really," Chauncey said. "A few years ago, when there were some rock musicians hanging about, a certain amount of dope came in that way, but normally I have no use for the thing. Tonight was different, naturally. I don't think I should be seen with suspicious characters just before my house is robbed."

  "Okay," Dortmunder said.

  Chauncey said, "Now let me ask a question. What prompted the interest?"

  "I wanted to know if you were a comic-book hero," Dortmunder told him.

  Chauncey seemed surprised, then amused. "Ah, I see. No romantics need apply, is that it?"

  "That's it."

  Chauncey reached out to tap a finger against Dortmunder's upper arm, which Dortmunder hated. "Let me assure you, Mr. Dortmunder," he said, "I am no romantic."

  "Good," said Dortmunder.

  Chapter 8

  One of the regulars was flat on his back atop the bar at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue when Dortmunder and Kelp walked in on Thursday evening. He was holding a damp filthy bar rag to his face, and three other regulars were discussing with Rollo the best way to treat a nosebleed. "You put an ice cube down the back of his neck," one said.

  "You do and I'll flumfle your numble," the sufferer said, his threat lost in the folds of the bar rag.

  "Give him a tourniquet," another regular suggested.

  The first regular frowned. "Where?"

  While the regulars surveyed the body of their stricken comrade for a place to put an anti-nosebleed tourniquet, Rollo came down the bar, nodded at Dortmunder and Kelp over his impaired customer's steel-toed work boots, and said, "How you doing?"

  "Better than him," Dortmunder said.

  "He'll be okay." Rollo dismissed the Death-of-Montcalm scene with a shrug. "Your vodka-and-red-wine is here, your sherry is here, your beer-and-salt is here."

  "We're the last," Dortmunder said.

  Rollo nodded hello to Kelp. "Nice to see you again."

  "Nice to be back," Kelp told him.

  Rollo went off to make their drinks, and Dortmunder and Kelp watched the first-aid team. One of the regulars was now trying to stuff paper bar coasters into the bleeder's nose, while another one was trying to get the poor bastard to count backwards from one hundred. "That's for hiccups," said the third.

&
nbsp; "No no," said the second, "you drink out of the wrong side of the glass for hiccups."

  "No, that's for when you faint."

  "No no no, when you faint you put your head between your knees."

  "Wrong. If somebody faints, you slap their face."

  "You do and you'll stumbun with me," said the patient, who now had bar rag and paper coasters in his mouth.

  "You're crazy," the second regular told the third. "You slap somebody's face if they've got hysterics."

  "No," said the third regular, "if somebody's got hysterics, you have to keep them warm. Or is it cold?"

  "Neither. That's for shock. You keep them warm for shock. Or cold."

  "No, I've got it," the third regular said. "You keep them warm for hysterics, and you keep them cold if they've got a burn."

  "Don't you know anything?" asked the second regular. "For a burn you put butter on it."

  "Now I know!" the third regular cried. "Butter's for a nosebleed!"

  Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare at him, even the bleeder. The first regular, his hands full of paper coasters, said, "Butter's for a nosebleed?"

  "You stuff butter up the nose! Rollo, give us some butter!"

  "You won't dumrumbin my nose!"

  "Butter," said the second regular in disgust. "It's ice he needs. Rollo!"

  Rollo, ignoring the cries for butter and ice, carried a tray past the invalid's feet and slid it across the bar toward Dortmunder. It contained a bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, two empty glasses with ice, and a glass containing, no doubt, vodka-and-red-wine. "See you later," he said.

  "Right." Dortmunder reached for the tray, but Kelp got to it first, picking it up with such eagerness to be of help that the bourbon bottle rocked back and forth, and would have gone over if Dortmunder hadn't steadied it.

  "Thanks," Kelp said.

  "Yeah," Dortmunder said, and led the way toward the back room.

  But not directly. They had to stop for a second so Kelp could throw in his own contribution with the medics. "What you do for a nosebleed," he told them, "is you take two silver coins and put them on both sides of his nose."