Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder)

by Donald E. Westlake

  And now what were these people up to? While headlights in his rear-view mirror told him some other car was becoming involved in this mini traffic jam, the huge tractor-trailer that was causing all the trouble pulled completely out into the street, turning in his direction, apparently intending to start all over again in its effort to pull into the alley or loading dock or whatever it was up there. Sweeping out and around, it angled in from Zane's right until it was as close to the Cougar on that side as the delivery van was on his left, except that the tractor-trailer was headed the other way.

  When would they get this over with? The tractor-trailer just stood there, apparently unable to figure out its next move, and Zane didn't realize anything was wrong until the lighting suddenly began to change.

  First, the Rabbit's taillights went out. It was hard to tell from here, but its headlights seemed to have been switched off as well.

  Second, the Rabbit's interior light went on, because somebody had opened its door. Both doors, in fact; Dortmunder and the driver were both getting out of their car, only the back half of which was jammed between the delivery van and the tractor-trailer.

  Third, as Dortmunder and the driver shut their doors behind themselves, so that the Rabbit's interior light snapped off again, the headlights in Zane's rear-view mirror also went out.

  Where were Dortmunder and the other one going? Was this their destination? What in hell was going on?

  Some other vehicle was out front, something much larger than the Rabbit. Slowly, that vehicle was pushing the Rabbit toward Zane's Cougar. Zane instinctively switched into reverse, but with that other car behind him there was nowhere to go. Then he shifted into drive, but if he tried to push back against that larger vehicle he would simply smash his own car against the Rabbit.

  The Rabbit stopped. The other vehicle – a truck of some sort – remained where it was.

  Nothing at all happened.

  "This is ridiculous," Zane said. He honked his horn: yap yap yaaaaap. The sound disappeared in the rain. The Rabbit made no response, nor did the tractor-trailer on his right, nor did the car behind him, nor did the delivery van on his left.

  "Well," he said, and opened the door. It opened about half an inch, and then it stopped.

  At last Zane got the picture. Quickly switching off the Cougar's engine, releasing his foot from the stirrup-accelerator, he slid across to the passenger door, pushed it open, and heard the thunk when it hit the side of the tractor-trailer.

  Wider on this side; almost a full inch.

  With the engine off, the windshield wipers had stopped, and it was through tears of rain on the glass that Zane looked out at the Rabbit, with the truck parked beyond it. No way to push through. Twisting around, he tried to look through the water-smeared rear window, but though he could make out little about the vehicle blocking him from behind, he was certain in his heart about one thing: it would have too much weight for his Cougar to move it.

  Trapped. Dortmunder was up to something, that son of a bitch. He'd trapped Zane here, he was pulling something, he was doing something right now. "When I get out of here," Zane muttered, and thumped the dashboard with a closed fist.

  When he got out of here? Good God. Zane knew when he'd get out of here. When the real operators of these trucks came back to work, that's when, and not a second before.

  On Monday.

  Chapter 12

  At exactly midnight, Arnold Chauncey put the key into the inside lock of the passage door, turned it, opened the door, and nobody came in.

  What? Holding the door ajar, blinking in the misty rain, Chauncey peered out at the street and saw no one and nothing. Where was Dortmunder? Much more important, where was the painting?

  All right; no reason to panic. Anyone can be a bit late. Keeping the door partway open, turning up the skimpy collar of his suede jacket against the rain and the chill, Chauncey settled himself to wait. Dortmunder would be here. And if something went wrong with Dortmunder, then Zane would take over. Not to worry.

  The passage behind Chauncey's house was unheated, and in fact unroofed, the top only lightly covered with a trellis overgrown by vines. This offered less than no protection; the vine leaves, rather than stopping the rain, merely collected the tiny droplets into large gushes, which were dumped all at once down the back of Chauncey's neck. Meantime, his suede jacket and silk ascot and calf-height calf-leather boots, all of which had been designed primarily for indoor stylishness, were proving themselves effete and inadequate in the harsh reality of the outside world; rather like the French aristocrats of 1789.

  Fortunately, Chauncey didn't have very long to wait, shivering in the darkness just inside the passage, peeking through the slightly open door, ducking back at the appearance of every non-Dortmunder pedestrian. After barely five minutes of this, a large dark car arrived, double-parked itself outside there, and Dortmunder's unmistakable figure – fairly tall, very narrow, stoop-shouldered, with lowered head – hopped out and hurried tippy-toe in his direction, trying to avoid puddles and dogshit at the same time. Three others emerged scrambling from the car in Dortmunder's wake, and followed his progression through the minefield, but Chauncey's eye was primarily taken by the long cardboard tube in Dortmunder's hand. Folly, home from the wars.

  Dortmunder bounded through the doorway Chauncey held open for him, turned his collar down, and immediately turned it back up again, saying, "It's raining in here."

  "There's no roof," Chauncey told him, and reached for the cardboard tube. "Shall I hold that?"

  But Dortmunder held the tube out of reach, saying, "We'll switch inside."

  "Of course," said Chauncey, disappointed, and led the way to the house. At the back door, Dortmunder paused, saying, "Doesn't this trigger the alarm?"

  "I told Watson I'd use this door tonight."

  "Okay."

  The house was wonderfully warm and dry. They climbed the two flights of stairs to the sitting room where Chauncey, sounding rather more regretful than host-like, said, "I suppose you'd all like drinks."

  "You bet," everybody said. They were standing around rubbing their hands together, working their shoulders up and down, grimacing and twitching the way people do when they leave the cold and wet for the warm and dry.

  Chauncey took drink orders – they all wanted bourbon, thank you – and while he poured he said to Dortmunder, "You were late."

  "We had a little chore to take care of first."

  Chauncey handed around glasses, then raised his own in a toast: "Success to all our schemes."

  "Hear, hear. Okay. I'll drink to that."

  They did, and Chauncey had his first real opportunity to study Dortmunder's "string." And what a motley collection they were, all in all, dominated by a man monster with a face like a homicidal tomato, plus a skinny sharp-nosed bright-eyed fellow who looked like a cockney pickpocket, and a mild-mannered gent who looked like a cross between a museum curator and a bookkeeper out of Dickens. So these four – with the driver outside – were the team of burglars, were they? Except for the monster, they looked perfectly ordinary. Chauncey, who had been rather nervous at the prospect of having these people all together in his house, was almost disappointed.

  But mostly his thoughts were on Folly. He sipped at his drink, waiting impatiently for the others to finish their first tastes – with many aaahhhs and lip-smackings – and then he said, "Well. Shall we get to it?"

  "Sure," Dortmunder said. "You got the money?"

  "Of course."

  From another cabinet near the liquor supply he brought out a small black attaché case. Opening this on a side table, Chauncey revealed stacks of bills, all fifties and hundreds, neatly filling the interior of the case. "I suppose you'll want to count this," he said.

  Dortmunder shrugged, as though it didn't matter, saying, "It couldn't hurt." He nodded to the cockney pickpocket and the museum curator, who stepped over to the money, little smiles on their faces, and started flipping through the stacks. Meanwhile, Dortmunder was removing
the rolled painting from its cardboard tube. "Hold this, Tiny," he said.

  Tiny? As Chauncey stared in disbelief at the monster, who apparently did answer to that name, Dortmunder handed the fellow one corner of the painting and then backed away, unrolling it. Tiny (!) held two edges, Dortmunder held the other two, and there was Folly, revealed in all his splendor.

  Not exactly, of course. There were still creases and curves in the surface, from the rolling-up, and the light struck it differently from this angle, making everything seem slightly different, slightly strange. But it was his Folly, all right, and Chauncey smiled in welcome as he stepped toward it, leaning forward to get a better look at the details. Odd how different that market basket looked in this – "Hold it right there!"

  The voice, cold and loud and aggressive, came from the doorway behind Chauncey, and when he spun around he was absolutely astounded to see the room filling up with terrorists.

  At least, they looked like terrorists. Three of them, all wearing ski masks and brown leather jackets and all carrying machine pistols with those skimpy-looking tubular metal stocks. They moved very professionally, one hurrying to the left, one to the right, the leader remaining in the doorway, the barrel of his pistol moving lazily from side to side, prepared to stitch a line of bullets across the entire room. From his hands he was a black man, while the other two were white.

  "Good God?" Chauncey cried, and these people looked so exactly like terrorists in the weekly newsmagazines that at first he thought it was a coincidence, that he was about to be kidnapped as a capitalist oppressor and held until Outer Mongolia, say, or Lichtenstein, had released a selected list of fifty-seven political prisoners.

  But then he heard a thwap behind him, and knew that either Dortmunder or Tiny had released his end of the painting, allowing it to snap back into a roll, and all at once he understood. "Oh, no," he said, almost under his breath. "No."

  Yes. "We'll take that," the leader was saying, gesturing with the machine pistol past Chauncey, at Dortmunder behind him. Then the machine pistol angled toward Dortmunder's two partners over by the attaché case, their hands full of stacks of bills, their faces showing the most complete – under other circumstances comical – surprise. "That, too," the leader said, and the satisfaction in his voice was like molasses.

  "You son of a bitch," Dortmunder said, his voice almost a growl.

  "Dortmunder," Chauncey said, warning him. Life is better than death, said the tone of his voice. This is merely one battle, not the whole war. All of those sentiments, however expressed over the centuries, were summed up in the tone of Chauncey's voice when he spoke Dortmunder's name. And Dortmunder, who had been teetering forward on his toes, hands clenched, shoulders bunched, now slowly relaxed, settling onto his heels once more.

  From here, everything moved with professional speed and assurance. It was Tiny who held the re-rolled painting, and at the leader's orders he put it into its cardboard tube and turned it over to the man on the left. The attaché case was refilled, closed, and given to the man on the right. Those two backed from the room, leaving the leader in the doorway. "We'll watch this door for ten minutes," he said. "Check your watches. Anybody through too soon gets shot." And he was gone.

  The stairs were carpeted, so the people in the room wouldn't hear the trio leave, or know when they left, or how many stayed behind. Chauncey just stood there, gaping at the empty doorway, and the true fact of his loss – the painting and the money – didn't come home till Dortmunder was suddenly in front of him, glaring.

  "Who'd you tell?"

  "What? What?"

  "Who did you tell?"

  Tell? Tell someone about the insurance fraud, about the exchange of painting and money here tonight? But he hadn't told anyone. "Dortmunder, I swear to God – Why would I, man, think about it."

  Dortmunder shook his head: "We're pros, Chauncey, we know our job. Not one of us would say a word to anybody. You're the amateur."

  "Dortmunder, who is there for me to tell?"

  "There they go!" cried the cockney pickpocket. He and the other two were over by the front windows, looking out into the rain. "Dortmunder!"

  Dortmunder hurried to the windows, Chauncey following him. Tiny was saying, "One, two, three. They didn't leave anybody."

  "Four!" cried the cockney pickpocket. "Who's that?" Chauncey stared out the window. He couldn't believe what he was looking at. Over there, diagonally across the way, near the streetlight, three men in brown leather jackets had crowded around a fourth. Their faces were bare, now, but too far away to see. One carried the cardboard tube, another the attaché case. But it was the fourth man who held Chauncey's attention, held him frozen. Tall, narrow, dressed in black…

  "He can't move fast with that limp," Tiny was saying. "Come on, Dortmunder, we'll trail them, we'll get our goods back."

  "Z-z-z-z-z," said Chauncey, but stopped himself before making that mistake. The limping man and the other three hurried away toward the corner, out of the light.

  Dortmunder's men were running from the room. Dortmunder had paused, was staring now into Chauncey's eyes as though to read his mind. "You're sure," Dortmunder said; "You told nobody. You don't know how this happened."

  How could he admit it? What would happen to him? "Nobody," he answered, and looked Dortmunder straight in the eye.

  "I'll get back to you," Dortmunder said, and ran from the room.

  Chauncey sat down and drank half a bottle of bourbon.

  Chapter 13

  It was Christmas all over again, in May's new apartment. The same crowd as at Christmastime, the same tasty aroma of tuna casserole wafting through the air, the same spirit of joy and good fellowship.

  The gifts this time, though, weren't booze and perfume, they were solid cash and a sense of solid accomplishment, and maybe even the renewed gift of life itself. The lost painting was dealt with, Chauncey was cooled out and would be sending around no more hired killers, and on that table where once had stood the miserable fake tree the attaché case now yawned wide, gleaming with crisp new greenery.

  Dortmunder sat in his personal chair with his feet up on his old hassock and a glass of bourbon-on-the-rocks in his left hand, and he damn near smiled. Everything had worked out exactly, even the moving of all the furniture and goods from May's old apartment to this new one six blocks away. And now everybody was relaxing here, less than half an hour since they'd left Chauncey's house, and all Dortmunder could say was, it was the best worked-out goddam plan he'd ever seen in his life.

  Andy Kelp came by – good old Andy – with an open bourbon bottle in one hand, an aluminum pot full of ice cubes in the other. "Top up your drink," he said. "It's a party."

  "Don't mind if I do." Dortmunder topped up his drink, then found himself, actually grinning at good old Andy Kelp. "Whadaya think?" he said.

  Kelp stopped, paused, grinned, cocked his head to one side, and said, "I'll tell you what I think. I think you're a goddam genius. I think you been operating under a cloud too long, and it was about time your true genius shone through, and it did. That's what I think."

  Dortmunder nodded. "Me, too," he said simply.

  Kelp went away, to top up other drinks around the room, and Dortmunder settled down to sip and smile and consider the harvest, at long last, of his own genius. The original notion had been Andy's, but the plan had been all Dortmunder.

  And how well it had worked! Dortmunder always planned well, nobody could argue that, but things never worked out the way they were supposed to. This time, though, the pieces had clicked into place one after the other like a stunt drill team.

  It was at the Christmas party that Kelp had suggested to the other guests they could do an old buddy a favor and at the same time pick up some pocket money for themselves, and once they'd understood the situation they'd all agreed. Wally Whistler, the lock man whose absentmindedness in releasing a zoo lion from its cage had resulted in an only-recently-completed involuntary vacation upstate, had followed Roger Chefwick's route in byp
assing Chauncey's alarm system and coming down through the elevator shaft while Dortmunder, purposely late, had kept Chauncey out of his house. Fred Lartz, the former driver who had quit driving after he'd got run down by Eastern Airlines flight two-oh-eight, and Herman X, the radical black lock man, had completed the terrorist trio, and their timing, manner and efficiency just couldn't have been bettered. (Dortmunder raised his glass thrice: to Herman X, dancing once more with his sleek girl friend Foxy to an Isaac Hayes record; to Fred Lartz, comparing routes in a corner with Stan Murch; and to Wally Whistler, absentmindedly fumbling with the catch on the spring-leaf table. Whistler and Lartz raised their glasses in return. Herman X winked and raised his right fist.)

  A strange string, that; two lock men and a non-driving driver. The driving for that bunch, in fact, had been done by Fred Lartz's wife, Thelma, the lady in the crazy hat out in the kitchen helping May. Thelma did all Fred's driving for him now that he'd quit, but this was her first time driving professionally, and she'd been cool and reliable all the way. (Dortmunder raised his glass to Thelma, who couldn't see him because she was in the kitchen. Three or four other people saw him, though, and grinned and raised their glasses back, so that was all right.)

  But the coup de grace had been the little play put on for Chauncey's benefit on the street outside. And for that, who better than an actor? Alan Greenwood, the former heist man and now television star, had been delighted at the idea of playing the limping killer, Leo Zane. "It's the kind of role an actor can get his teeth into," he'd said, and he'd made a special trip back from the Coast just to appear in Dortmunder's private production. And what a job he'd done! For just a second, seeing him out there under that streetlight, Dortmunder had actually believed he was Zane, somehow free of the trap and ready to blow the gaffe on all of them. Wonderful performance! (Dortmunder raised his glass to Greenwood, also dancing. At first, he'd thought Greenwood was here with Doreen again, the girl from Christmas, but this time Greenwood had introduced her as Susan, so maybe she was somebody different. Anyway, they were dancing, and over Susan's shoulder Greenwood gave the English thumbs-up salute and smiled with several hundred teeth.)