Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder)

by Donald E. Westlake

  The regulars all stopped squabbling among themselves to frown at this outsider. One of them, with great dignity, pointed out, "There haven't been any silver coins in circulation in this country since 1965."

  "Oh," said Kelp. "Well, that is a problem."

  "Sixty-six," said another regular.

  Dortmunder, several paces ahead, looked back at Kelp to say, "Are you coming?"

  "Right." Kelp hurried in Dortmunder's wake.

  As they went past POINTERS and SETTERS, Dortmunder said, "Now, remember what I told you. Tiny Bulcher won't be happy about you because you're costing him five grand, so just be quiet and let me do the talking."

  "Definitely," Kelp said.

  Dortmunder glanced at him, but said nothing more, and then went through the green door and into the back room, where Stan Murch and Roger Chefwick and Tiny Bulcher were all seated at the green-felt-topped table, with Tiny Bulcher saying, "…so I went to his hospital room and broke his other arm."

  Chefwick and Murch, who had been gazing at Bulcher like sparrows at a snake, looked up with quick panicky smiles when Dortmunder and Kelp came in. "Well, there you are!" Chefwick cried, with a kind of mad glitter in his eyes, and Murch actually spread his arms in false camaraderie, announcing, "Hail, hail, the gang's all here!"

  "That's right," Dortmunder said.

  Talking more rapidly than usual, his words running together in his haste, Murch said, "I did a new route entirely, that's why I'm so early, I was coming from Queens, I took the Grand Central almost to the Triborough–"

  Meanwhile, Kelp was putting the tray on the table and placing Bulcher's fresh drink in front of him, cheerily saying "There you go. You're Tiny Bulcher, aren't you?"

  "Yeah," Bulcher said. "And who are you?"

  "–then I got off, and turned left under the El, and, uh…" And Murch ran down, becoming aware of the new tension in the room as Kelp, still cheery, answered Bulcher's question.

  "I'm Andy Kelp. We met once seven or eight years ago, a little jewelry-store job up in New Hampshire."

  Bulcher gave Kelp his flat look. "Did I like you?"

  "Sure," Kelp said, taking the chair to Bulcher's left. "You called me pal."

  "I did, huh?" Bulcher turned to Dortmunder. "What's my pal doing here?"

  "He's in," Dortmunder said.

  "Oh, yeah?" Bulcher looked around at Murch and Chefwick, then back at Dortmunder. "Then who's out?"

  "Nobody. It's a five-man string now."

  "It is, huh?" Bulcher nodded, glancing down at his fresh vodka-and-red-wine as though there might be some sort of explanation engraved on the glass. Looking at Dortmunder again, he said, "Where does his cut come from?"

  Same as everybody else's. We'll get twenty thousand a man."

  "Uh huh." Bulcher sat back – the chair squealed in fear – and brooded at Kelp, whose cheery expression was beginning to wilt. "So," said Bulcher, "you're my five thousand dollar pal, are you?"

  "I guess so," Kelp said.

  "I never liked anybody five grand worth before," Bulcher said. "Remind me; where were we pals?"

  "New Hampshire. A jewelry–"

  "Oh, yeah." Bulcher nodded, his big head going back and forth like a balancing rock on the mountain of his shoulders. "There was a second alarm system, and we never got into the place. All the way up to New Hampshire for nothing."

  Dortmunder looked at Kelp, who did not look back. Instead, he kept smiling at Bulcher, saying, "That's the one. The finger screwed up. I remember you hit him a lot."

  "Yeah, I would of." Bulcher took a long slow taste of his fresh drink, while Kelp continued to smile at him, and Dortmunder brooded at him, and Murch and Chefwick went on doing their hypnotized-sparrow number. Putting the glass down at last, Bulcher said to Dortmunder, "What do we need him for?"

  "I already been at work," Kelp said, bright and eager, and ignoring Dortmunder's shut-up frown.

  Bulcher observed him. "Oh, yeah? Doing what?"

  "I checked out the theater. Hunter House, it's called. How we get in, how we get out."

  Dortmunder, who was wishing Kelp would get laryngitis, explained, "We get to the roof through a theater nearby."

  "Uh huh. And we're paying this guy twenty grand to go find out how we get in a theater." Bulcher leaned forward, resting one monstrous forearm on the table. He said, "I'll tell you the secret for ten grand. You buy a ticket."

  "I bought tickets," Kelp assured him. "We're gonna see the Queen's Own Caledonian Orchestra."

  Dortmunder sighed, shook his head a bit in irritation, and paused to pour some Our Own Brand bourbon into one of the glasses on the tray. He sipped, watched moodily as Kelp poured his own drink, and then said, "Tiny, I make the plan. That's my job. Your job is to carry heavy things and to knock people down that get in the way."

  Bulcher jabbed a thumb the size of an ear of corn in Kelp's direction. "We're talking about his job."

  "We need him," Dortmunder said. Under the table, he crossed his ankles.

  "How come we didn't need him the first time we got together?"

  "I was out of town," Kelp said brightly. "Dortmunder didn't know where to find me."

  Bulcher gave him a look of disgust. (So did Dortmunder.)

  "Bull," he said, and turned back to Dortmunder, saying "You didn't mention him at all."

  "I didn't know yet I needed him," Dortmunder said. "Listen, Tiny, I've been to the place now. We have to get in through the top of an elevator shaft, we got a fifteen- or twenty-foot brick wall to go down and then back up, and we don't have all night to do it. We need a fifth man. I'm the planner, and I say we need him."

  Bulcher turned his full attention on Kelp again, as though trying to visualize a circumstance in which he would find himself needing this person. His eyes still on Kelp, he spoke to Dortmunder, saying, "So that's it, huh?"

  "That's it," Dortmunder told him.

  "Well, then." A ghastly smile turned Tiny's face into a cross between a bad bayonet wound and a six-month-old Halloween pumpkin. "Welcome aboard, pal," he said. "I'm sure you're gonna be very helpful."

  Dortmunder released held breath, his shoulders sagging in relief. So that was over. "Now," he said, "about tomorrow night. Stan Murch will drive us to this Hunter House a little before eight-thirty…"

  Chapter 9

  The hall was full of Scotsmen. Hundreds of them gamboled in the aisles and thronged the lobby, with more arriving every minute. Some were in kilts, some were singing, some were marching arm in arm, most were clutching mugs, flasks, bottles, cups, glasses, jars, demijohns, goblets and jugs, and all were calling out to one another in strange and barbarous tongues. Around many necks and trailing down many backs were long scarves in the colors of favorite soccer or rugby teams. Tam o' Shanters with bright wool balls on top were jauntily cocked over many a flashing eye. Hunter House bulged with Highland bonhomie.

  "Well, now what the hell?" said Dortmunder.

  Tiny Bulcher said, "That guy's wearing a dress."

  "It's a kilt," Roger Chefwick told him. A level crossing of English manufacture in one part of Chefwick's model-train lay-out featured a man in a kilt who would glide out and wave a red flag every time a train went by. Chefwick was very familiar with kilts. "These are all Scotsmen," he explained.

  "I don't know," Dortmunder said. "I don't know about this."

  "I've got the tickets," Kelp said, in a hurry to get them all upstairs and on about their business. "Follow me."

  Except it wasn't quite that easy. Kelp tried to lead, but everywhere he turned there were another six Scotsmen in his path. Also, the two fifty-foot rolls of vinyl clothesline he had tucked inside his coat didn't increase his maneuverability. For all his efforts they remained becalmed, four innocent bystanders abroad on a roiling sea of Scotsmen.

  And now some of them were fighting. Over there by the head of the second aisle, two or three lads were rounding and punching and clutching at one another, while another half dozen tried to either stop them or join in, hard to tell wh
ich. "What are they fighting about?" Kelp cried.

  A passing Scot paused to answer: "Well, you know," he said, "if it's neither football nor politics, it's more than likely religion." And away he waded, to join the discussion.

  Dortmunder, sounding ominously bad-tempered, said, "Kelp, give me those tickets."

  What was be going to do, ask for his money back? Apprehensive, Kelp gave him the tickets, but Dortmunder immediately turned and handed them to Tiny Bulcher, saying "You lead the way."

  "Right," Bulcher said. Clutching the tickets in one enormous fist, he waded forward, moving his shoulders and elbows, tamping startled Scotsmen left and right, the other three in his wake.

  When they reached the balcony, it was so full they couldn't possibly open the door leading to the roof stairs without being noticed. "We'll sit down and wait," Dortmunder decided, and Bulcher ushered them through the throng to their seats. "You'd make a wonderful locomotive," Chefwick told him as they sat down.

  Chapter 10

  In Wednesday's New York Post – in the section that in the unenlightened past was known as the Woman's Page, but which today operates under a discreet anonymity, offering Fashion, Social Notes, and Recipes to an audience presumably no more than fifty-two per cent female – the following item appeared:

  Spending a few days in town are the Princess Orfizzi (the former Mrs. Wayne Q. Trumbull) with her husband, Prince Elector Otto of Tuscan-Bavaria, here for the opening of the Hal Foster Retrospective at MOMA, staying at the townhouse of jet-setter Arnold Chauncey, just back from his whirlwind tour of Brasilia. Also houseguesting with Chauncey are MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, here to confer with designer Humphrey LeStanza at his new salon on East 61st Street. A Friday bash is planned, with guests to include Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El, film star Lance Sheath and cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley.

  What a dinner party, what a ghastly affair. Arnold Chauncey sat at the head of the table, behind his false-face host's smile, and observed his guests with all the affability of Dortmunder observing the Scotsmen. Mavis and Otto Orfizzi, to begin with, hated one another so uncordially, so spitefully, and with such unremitting verbal venom, that no one could be said to be truly safe in their presence, while MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville were both too absorbed in themselves to be much help under the best of circumstances. As for the dinner guests, they approached the unbearable, except for Major General (Ret.) and Mrs. Homer Biggott, both of whom seemed merely to be dead. Sheikh Rama, on the other hand, was very much alive, cheerfully and suavely insulting everyone his glittering oily eye lit upon, making jokes about the West's incipient decline and the Arab world's upcoming dominance, name-dropping shamelessly and endlessly, and generally behaving like the well-educated (Cambridge) snotty little nouveau riche he was.

  But the worst of all was Laura Bathing. "I don't mind a bit, sweetheart," she'd said upon arrival, when Chauncey had apologized for her inadvertent omission from the item in the Post, and in the last two hours she had made perfectly clear just how little she'd minded by breaking three glasses, two plates, an ashtray and a table lamp, all in small clumsy accidents, smearing whiskey, wine and gravy in her wake, and screaming almost without respite at Chauncey's staff, until be had very nearly been driven to point out that these days servants were much harder to find than dinner guests. It wasn't much help that both Lance Sheath and MuMu deCharraiveuneuirauville were quite obviously courting – no, probably stalking was the better word – cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley, a stocky stodgy fortyish styleless frump with the face of a TV dinner and the personality of a humidifier and the ownership of eleven million dollars in her own right. MuMu was obviously interested in marrying up, but Chauncey had planned Lance for Laura Bathing, unaware that Lance was currently in search of backing for a film. Laura, placed at table between the insulting sheikh and the back of Lance Sheath (whose front was determinedly toward Martha Whoopley, on his other side), was not taking her situation calmly. In fact, Laura more and more seemed determined to strip Chauncey's house of all its breakables before the meal was finished.

  Otto Orfìzzi having attempted unsuccessfully to form an alliance with the sheikh by telling an anti-Semitic joke at which no one had laughed – not because it was anti-Semitic, but because it had been told badly, and because two of the guests happened in fact to be Jewish, and because in any case it wasn't very funny – Mavis Orfizzi turned her imitation-pitying smile toward Chauncey, saying, "I do apologize for Otto. He can be such an incredible boor."

  It was only the thought that these witches and toadies were about to be burgled through his own intervention that kept the smile on Chauncey's face. "Oh, well, Mavis," he said. "Don't trouble yourself on my account. I think we should all take life as it comes."

  "Do you?" An imitation-self-pitying smile took its place on Mavis's lips. "It must be comforting to have that philosophy."

  "It is," Chauncey assured her. "After all, we never know what misfortunes may be heading our way, do we?" And for the first time all evening, the smile he bestowed on his guests was absolutely genuine.

  Chapter 11

  Stately, plump Joe Mulligan paused in the privacy of the hallway to pull his uniform trousers out of the crease of his backside, then turned to see Fenton watching him. "Mp," he said, then nodded at Fenton, saying, "Everything okay down here."

  Fenton, the senior man on this detail, made a stern face and said, "Joe, you don't want any of them princes and princesses see you walking around with your fingers up your ass."

  "Aw, now," Mulligan said, embarrassment combining with a trace of indignation. "They're all at table up there. Besides, every man has to give a tug to his trousers from time to time."

  "Stately plump men more than others," said Fenton, himself a skinny little dried-up man with porcelain teeth in his head. A bit of a martinet and a stickler for regulations, he liked the boys to call him Chief, but none of them ever did.

  "Have another look at that back door while you're down here," he added, gave a sort of casual one-finger-to-forehead salute, and turned back to the stairs.

  Joe Mulligan was one of the team of seven private guards on duty in the Chauncey house tonight, dressed like the others in a dark blue police-like uniform with a triangular badge on the left shoulder reading Continental Detective Agency. In his flatfooted walk and meaty bigness, Mulligan himself was police-like, as well he might be, having spent twelve years on the New York City force before deciding to get out of the city and joining Continental's Long Island office in Hempstead.

  It used to be that policemen who displayed ineptitude or stupidity were sent from the city to the boondocks – "Pounding a beat on Staten Island" was the popular version of the threat – but as the Swinging Sixties swung more and more in the manner of a wrecker's ball, that usual direction of transfer became reversed. The quiet safe Staten Islands of duty became more highly prized, while the terrifying city lost its former attraction. For instance, Mulligan and his team were working in Manhattan now as direct punishment for having lost a bank out on Long Island two years ago. None of them had quit, all seven were still together, and Fenton himself had summed it up for all of them: "We'll do the job the same as ever. We're good men and we know it, and sooner or later we'll get back to the top. Out of New York and back to Long Island where we belong."

  So they treated every unimportant minor assignment, every wedding, dog show and book fair, as though it were the D-Day landing. Tonight, they operated in three two-man teams, with Fenton roving among them. Each team was responsible for one area of the house, including the upper floors, though this last part was against the stated wishes of the client, who'd said, "Concentrate on the entrances downstairs, and let the upstairs go." But, as Fenton had told the team, "The reason they hire us is because we know the job and they don't."

  Also, the teams traded places every half hour, to keep from becoming stale, too used to a single environment. Mulligan was alone now because his partner, Garfield, had gone to the second floor to replac
e Morrison and Fox, who would transfer to the first floor, releasing Dresner and Block to come down here, so Mulligan could go upstairs and rejoin Garfield.

  But first the rear door, which continued as locked and unsullied as ever. Mulligan peeked through the tiny diamond-pane window at the dark back yard, saw nothing, and let it go at that.

  Footsteps on the stairs; Mulligan turned and here came Dresner and Block. "Hello, boys," Mulligan said.

  Block nodded. "What say?"

  Dresner said, "All quiet?"

  "I believe we could have phoned in our part," Mulligan said. "See you, boys." And, with a certain amount of puffing he made his way up two flights of stairs to where Garfield, whose law-enforcement career had begun when he was a Military Policeman in Arizona and Paris, and who sported a Western-Marshall moustache of amazing ferocity, was practicing his quick draw before the full-length mirror in Chauncey's bathroom. "Well, now," Mulligan said, a bit out of sorts from the combination of Fenton's remarks and the long climb upstairs, "it's Wyatt Earp you're expecting, is it?"

  "Has it ever occurred to you," Garfield said, holstering his pistol and fingering his moustache, "that I'd be a natural for the movies?"

  "No," Mulligan said. "Let's make our rounds."

  So they went up another flight of stairs. The top floor, oddly enough, was grander than any of the others, possibly because its being strictly for guests had meant the decorators hadn't needed to worry overmuch about comfort and function. Chauncey's own bedroom suite on the next floor down was also sumptuously furnished, of course, but it was clearly a working bedroom, whereas the rooms on the top floor, with their delicate chairs and tables, canopy beds, Persian carpets, hand-ironed cotton curtains, complementary wallpapers and upholstery and bedspreads, were like display models in a museum; one expected a plush rope across each doorway, permitting the visitor to look without touching.