Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder)

by Donald E. Westlake

"Anyway," Kelp went on, "you know me, you know my family, we've never been violence-prone."

  "That's true," Bernard said. "That's one of the nice things about you, Andy."

  "My cousin's the same way. Anyway, he has the idea these people put a hitman on him."

  Bernard looked interested. "Really? Does he want police protection?"

  "Excuse me, Bernard," Kelp said, "but from what I can see, all police protection ever does for anybody is they get to fall out the window of a better class hotel."

  "We won't argue the point," Bernard said, which was what he said any time he lacked arguments on his own side. "Tell me more about your cousin."

  "He wants to do his own protecting," Kelp said. "And in order to do it, he has to identify this guy for sure. Now, he knows some things about him, but he doesn't have the guy's name and address. That's where we need help."

  Bernard looked somber. He said, "Andy, maybe now you should tell me the truth. Is this cousin of yours figuring to hit the hitman? Because if so, I can't–"

  "No no no!" Kelp said, and his eyes didn't blink at all. "I told you, Bernard, non-violence, it's an old family tradition. There's more than one way to skin a cat."

  "They all leave the cat dead."

  "I swear to God, Bernard," Kelp said, and actually raised his hand in the Boy Scout pledge. "My cousin strictly wants to know for sure who the guy is, and his dealing with the problem will absolutely one hundred per cent not include physical violence."

  "He wants to outbid the other side?"

  "I have no idea what's in my cousin's mind," Kelp said, blinking like mad.

  "All right," Bernard said. "Tell me what you know about the guy."

  "He's white," Kelp said. "He's tall, skinny, black haired, he's got a game leg. The right foot's in a big orthopedic shoe, and he limps. Also, he got picked up for something late in October, I don't know for what, and a very famous lawyer called J. Radcliffe Stonewiler got him off."

  Bernard frowned deeply. "You know a lot of funny details about this guy," he said.

  "Please, Bernard," Kelp said. "Don't ask me where I get my information, or I'll have to make up some cockamamie lie, and I'm no good at that."

  "Oh, Andy," Bernard said, "you underestimate yourself." And the food and wine arrived. "Nice," Bernard said. "Let's eat a while, and I'll think about this."

  "Great idea," said Kelp.

  So they ate, and they drank wine, and at the end of the meal Bernard said, "Andy, can you promise me, if I get you anything on this bird, nothing illegal will happen?"

  Kelp stared at him. "Nothing illegal? Bernard, you can't be serious. Do you have any idea just how many laws there are?"

  "All right," Bernard said, patting the air. "All right."

  But Kelp had momentum, and couldn't stop all at once. "You can't walk down the street without breaking the law, Bernard," he said. 'Every day they pass new laws, and they never get rid of any of the old laws, and you can't live a normal life without doing things illegal."

  "Okay, Andy, okay. I said okay, didn't I?"

  "Bernard, just off the top of your head, how many laws would you say you broke so far today?"

  Bernard pointed a stern finger across the table. "Lay off, Andy," he said. "Now I mean it."

  Kelp stopped, took a deep breath, got hold of himself, and said, "I'm sorry. It's a subject that's close to my heart, that's all"

  Bernard said, "Let me rephrase it, Andy, okay? No major crimes. No, wait, you'll be talking about industrial pollution in a minute. No violent crimes. Is that a fair request?"

  "Bernard," Kelp said, with solemnity, "it is not my intention, or my cousin's intention, to harm one hair of this fellow's head. He won't get killed, he won't get wounded. All right?"

  "Thank you," Bernard said. "Let me make a phone call, see what I can do." He pushed his chair back and said, "While I'm gone, order me an espresso and a Sambuca, okay?" And he got to his feet and headed toward the phone booth in the back.

  "Bernard," Kelp muttered after his departing back, "you're a highway robber." But he ordered the espresso and Sambuca from Sal the waiter, and the same for himself, and was chewing on one of the coffee beans from the Sambuca when Bernard came back. Kelp gave him an alert look, but first Bernard had to taste his Sambuca, then he had to put a sugar cube in his espresso. Finally, stirring the espresso, he looked seriously at Kelp and said, "Your cousin's tangled with a wrong guy."

  "I thought so," said Kelp.

  "His name's Leo Zane," Bernard said, "and he has the worst kind of no record."

  "I don't think I follow."

  "Picked up lots of times, always on very serious stuff – murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, twice for arson – but never convicted."

  "Slippery," Kelp suggested.

  "Like a snake. And twice as dangerous. If your cousin wants to deal with this guy, he better wear gloves."

  "I'll tell him. Did you happen to get an address while you were on the phone?"

  Bernard shook his head. "Zane isn't a homebody," he said. "He lives in furnished rooms, residence hotels, he's a loner and moves around a lot."

  "Drat."

  "There's one thing that might help," Bernard said. "There's a clinic up in Westchester he goes to sometimes. On account of his foot. Apparently, that's the only place he ever goes for treatment, that one clinic."

  "What's it called?"

  "Westchester Orthopedic."

  "Thanks, Bernard," Kelp said. "I'll tell my cousin."

  Bernard pointed a serious finger at Kelp. "If anything happens to Zane," he said, "anything at all, I'll connect it back to you, Andy, I swear I will."

  Kelp spread his hands in utter innocence. Not a blink marred his eyes. "Don't you think I know that, Bernard? I know you're a straight guy. I wouldn't have called you if I figured to pull something like that."

  "All right," said Bernard. Relaxing, he looked down at his Sambuca, smiled, and said, "You ever try this?"

  "Try what?"

  Bernard took out a pack of matches, lit one, held it over the Sambuca, and a small blue flame formed on top of the liqueur, where the coffee beans floated. Bernard shook out the match, and sat smiling at the blue flame.

  Kelp didn't get it. "What's that for?" he asked.

  "The idea is," Bernard said, "it like roasts the coffee beans."

  "But what's that burning?"

  "The alcohol, of course."

  "Then why do it?"

  Bernard looked startled. "By God, you're right," he said, and blew out the flame.

  "I hope you made a wish," Kelp said.

  Chapter 6

  The scrawny black cat jumped from the floor up to the windowsill, where Leo Zane was pouring milk into the saucer. Setting the milk carton on the table nearby, Zane stood at the window a minute longer, scratching the cat behind the ear as it lapped up milk. A dreary March rain dribbled down the glass, and Zane's foot continued to ache. It was the weather, of course, the dampness of the end of winter, and the trip to the clinic, his first in almost six months, had done no good at all.

  He ought to go away for a while, somewhere warm and dry. Maybe Los Angeles, sit in the sun, absorb some warmth into the bones of his foot. Absorb warmth into his body, his entire body was cold and achy now; the damp pain, like death, crept up through his frame from his foot, filling him with chills and cramps. No matter how much clothing he wore, no matter how warm the room or how much hot coffee he drank, the cold torment was still there, deep in his bones.

  What was keeping him in New York? Very little, beyond his own lethargy. Every year around this time he made the same vague plans to leave, but he never went, he always found some excuse, he seemed wedded to the climate that made him sick. And this year?

  Well, in fact, this year there were one or two jobs still open. The psychiatrist's wife, for instance; she was turning out to be surprisingly difficult to dispatch. Of course, the jobs that had to look like accident or natural causes were always the most difficult. And then there was the
Chauncey job, that was still on tap.

  Not that Zane expected actually to do anything on the Chauncey job. His one conversation with that fellow Dortmunder, plus the occasional interval of observing the man, had convinced him Dortmunder would try no tricks. Once Chauncey collected from the insurance company – possibly next month, more likely in May – Dortmunder would assuredly turn over the painting, Chauncey would pay Zane the remaining fifteen thousand due on the contract, and that would be that.

  The psychiatrist's wife. If only she drove a car. You'd think, in this day and age – Movement beyond the window attracted Zane's attention.

  Down below, a man hunched against the rain as he entered his automobile, a dark blue Jaguar sedan, parked by the fire hydrant. It had MD plates, from over in New Jersey, and Zane reflected again on what a dodge that was. Put MD plates on a car, you could park anywhere you wanted, just as though doctors still made house calls. Up at the clinic they were parked all over the – Hadn't there been a Jaguar sedan parked outside the clinic?

  Dark blue, like this one?

  Down below, the Jaguar's windshield wipers clicked into motion, swiping back and forth. As Zane watched, the Jaguar moved away, rolling sedately down the block, its yellow right directional blinking, an intermittent bright spot in the rain. He wasn't positive it was the same sort of car as he'd seen near the clinic. Same color, perhaps, but a different make?

  "Grrowww!" said the cat, and scratched at Zane's wrist.

  Startled, Zane released his grip – lost in thought, he'd been strangling the thing – and the cat ran away to hide under the daybed. Zane picked up the milk carton, for something to do, and limped with it to the refrigerator. The cat's eyes peered out at him from under the bed, but he ignored it. His mind was moving again, away from the unanswerable questions about the car, on to other concerns. He sat at the formica table, brooding, his eyes vague, his hands relaxed with curved fingers on the tabletop, the aching in his foot forgotten for the moment, everything forgotten for the moment.

  The psychiatrist's wife. An accident, a fall. Hmmmmmm…

  Chapter 7

  Kelp was so happy he was crowing. "Don't say I never did anything for you, Dortmunder," he said. "Not after this."

  "All right," Dortmunder said. Owing a debt of gratitude to another person always made him nervous, and that other person being Kelp didn't improve the situation.

  "Over two months I staked out that clinic," Kelp pointed out. "I musta gone through a thousand paperback books. Day after day, three, four days a week, and boy, I finally hit it."

  "For sure," Dortmunder said. "This time it's positively for sure." In the last two months Kelp had three times followed limping men home from the Westchester Orthopedic Clinic, a site that by the very nature of things would be bound to provide a certain steady quota of limping men, and all three times Kelp had insisted Dortmunder accompany him on expeditions to remote neighborhoods to look at these guys, and none of them had been even remotely like the killer Dortmunder had met back in November.

  But this time Kelp was sure. "Absolutely," he said. "And you know why? Because I waited after he went in his building, and then I followed him and looked at the mailboxes, and there it was: Zane, room thirteen."

  "All right," Dortmunder said.

  "So we got him."

  "We'll have to check every once in a while," Dortmunder said. "Be sure he doesn't move."

  "Oh, sure." Kelp then looked slightly pained and said, "Maybe the other guys could do some of that, huh? I spent more time in cars the last two months than A. J. Foyt."

  "Oh, naturally," Dortmunder said. "We'll all take our turns."

  "Good," said Kelp, and then there was a little silence.

  Dortmunder sniffed. He rubbed a knuckle against his nose. He hitched his pants. "Kum, kak," he said, and coughed, and cleared his throat.

  Kelp said, "What?" He was leaning forward, looking alert and helpful.

  "Urn," said Dortmunder. He stuck his finger in his ear and jiggled it, looking for wax. He took a deep breath. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together tight. "Thanks, uh, Andy," he said.

  "Oh, sure," Kelp said. "Don't mention it."

  Chapter 8

  "That's pretty good," Dortmunder said.

  Griswold Porculey gave him a look. "Pretty good? Dortmunder, I'll tell you what this is. It's a work of genius."

  "I said it was pretty good," Dortmunder said.

  They were both right. The nearly finished painting on Porculey's easel was an incredible piece of work, a forgery so brilliant, so detailed, that it suggested true genius perhaps did reside within the unlikely corpus of Griswold Porculey after all, just as genius has so often in the past chosen other unlikely vessels for its abode. The paint-smeared hand holding the paint-smeared brush, the bleary washed-out eye observing the work, these had turned a lumpish array of pigment into a painting Jan Veenbes himself might have been proud to claim.

  Tacked and taped on the wall to Porculey's left were nearly two dozen representations of Folly Leads Man to Ruin, ranging from full-size photographic reproductions to reduced-size copies torn from art books. The differences in color and detail among these many imitations were enough to discourage the most determined copyist, but somehow Porculey had maneuvered this minefield and had made so many right choices that Dortmunder, looking at the almost-completed work, thought he was seeing an exact duplicate of the painting in Arnold Chauncey's sitting room. He wasn't, of course, but the differences, though pervasive, were minute.

  Porculey was contemplating now that darkness in the lower right, where the road curved away and down a dim slope. This was the most difficult part because it was the vaguest, with the least specific detail and yet it was far from being a featureless wash of umbra. It was a peopled gloom, its obscurity filled with faintly seen writhings, hints of grotesquerie, suggestions of shape and form and movement. Porculey's brush moved cautiously over these deeps, touching lightly, pausing, returning, moving on.

  It was early April, three weeks since Kelp had finally found the killer, and Dortmunder was back in this garret-boutique for the first time since that night in December when Porculey had thrown such cold water on Kelp's original idea. Dortmunder had wanted to return, several times, to see for himself what Porculey was up to, but his exploratory phone calls to the painter had received unrelenting negatives. "I don't want a lot of amateurs breathing down my neck," Porculey had said, and when Dortmunder had tried to point out it was his own neck that was being breathed down, and by a professional killer at that, Porculey had merely said, "I'll call you when there's something to see," and had hung up on him.

  So it came as a surprise this morning, and a very happy one, when Porculey himself had gotten in touch, calling Dortmunder at home and saying, "If you still want to see what I'm doing, come along."

  "I will, right away."

  "You can bring your partners, if you want."

  But Dortmunder hadn't wanted; this painting was too important to him, and he preferred to see it without a lot of conversation going on all over the place. "I'll come by myself," he said.

  "Up to you. Bring a bottle of wine, you know the stuff." So Dortmunder had brought a gallon of Hearty Burgundy, some of which Cleo Marlahy had at once poured into the usual disparity of drinking vessels, and now he stood holding his white mug of wine and watching Porculey's brush make small tentative decisions on the surface of the painting. In the last four months, it seemed, laboring away in his shopping-center sanctuary, Porculey had been bringing forth a miracle.

  Which he was willing to talk about. Stepping back from the easel, frowning at that troublesome darkness in the lower right, he said, "Do you know how I did it?"

  Porculey nodded. "I began," he explained, continuing to brood at the painting as he spoke, "with research. The Frick has one Veenbes, and three more hang in the Metropolitan. I studied those four, and I looked at every copy of them I could find."

  Dortmunder said, "Copies? Why?"

  "
Every artist has his own range of colors. His palette. I wanted to see how Veenbes' other pictures reproduced, to help me get back to the original colors in this one."

  "I get the idea," Dortmunder said. "That's pretty good."

  Cleo, sipping her wine and musing at Porculey and the painting as though she herself had invented both and was pleased with the result of her labors, said, 'Porky's had a wonderful time with this. He got to rage and carry on and throw things and make disgusting statements about art, and then preen himself at being better than anybody."

  "Better than most, at any rate," Porculey said comfortably. His brush tip, having grazed briefly at his palette, darted out at the gloom again, altered it infinitesimally. "Because I did more than just dry research," he went on. "I looked at the paintings, but more than that I tried to look through them, past them. I tried to see Veenbes in his studio, approaching the canvas. I wanted to see how he held his brush, how he stroked the paint into place, how he made his decisions, his changes. Did you know his brush strokes move diagonally upward to the left? That's very rare, you might think he was left-handed, but there are two portraits done by his contemporaries that show him at his easel with the brush in his right hand."

  Dortmunder said, "What difference does it make?"

  "It changes the way the picture takes the light," Porculey told him. "Where it reflects, and how the eye is led through the story."

  All of which was over Dortmunder's head. "Well, whatever you did," he said, "it looks terrific."

  Porculey was pleased. Smiling briefly over his shoulder, he said, "I wanted to wait till I had something worth showing. You see that, don't you?"

  "Sure. And it's just about done, huh?"

  "Oh, yes. Another two or three weeks, probably no more." Dortmunder stared at the back of Porculey's head, then at the painting. "Two or three weeks? That's a whole painting there already, you could fool a lot of people the way it is right now."

  "But not Arnold Chauncey," Porculey said. "Not even for a second. I did some research on your customer while I was about it, and you chose a difficult man to fool. He isn't just another culture merchant, buying and selling works of art as though they were coin collections. He's a connoisseur, be knows art, and he certainly knows his own paintings."