Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Everybody asleep down there,” Dortmunder said, musing, imagining it, “and here comes the water. That’s your idea.”

  Tom looked through the chain-link fence at the peaceful valley. His gray cold eyes gleamed in his gray cold face. “Asleep in their beds,” he said. “Asleep in somebody’s beds anyway. You know who those people are?”

  Dortmunder shook his head, watching that stony profile.

  Tom said, “Nobodies. Family men hustlin for an extra dollar, an extra dime, sweatin all over their shirts, gettin nowhere. Women turnin fat. Kids turnin stupid. No difference between day and night because nobody’s goin anywhere anyway. Miserable little small-town people with their miserable little small-town dreams.” The lips moved in what might have been a smile. “A flood,” he said. “Most excitin thing ever happened to them, am I right?”

  “No, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

  “No?” Tom asked, misunderstanding. “You think there’s a lot of excitement down there? Senior proms, bankruptcy auctions, Fourth of July parades, gang bangs, all that kind of thing? That what you think?”

  “I think you can’t blow up the dam, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I think you can’t drown a whole lot of people—hundreds and hundreds of people—in their beds, or in anybody’s beds, for seven hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Three hundred fifty thousand,” Tom corrected. “Half of it is yours, Al. Yours and whoever else you bring in on the caper.”

  Dortmunder looked frankly at his old cellmate. “You’d really do that, Tom? You’d kill hundreds and hundreds of people for three hundred fifty thousand dollars?”

  “I’d kill them at a dollar apiece,” Tom told him, “if it meant I could get outta this part of the world and get down to Mexico and move into my goddamn golden years of retirement.”

  Dortmunder said, “Tom, maybe you were inside too long. You can’t do things like that, you know. You can’t go around killing hundreds and hundreds of people just like snapping your fingers.”

  “It isn’t just like snapping my fingers, Al,” Tom said. “That’s the problem. If it was like snapping my fingers, I’d go do it myself and keep the whole seven hundred. If I learned anything on the inside, you know, it’s that I can’t be a loner anymore, not on something like this. Except at the very beginning, with Dilly and Baby and them, I was always a loner, you know, all my life. That’s why I talked so much when we were together in the cell. Remember how I used to talk so much?”

  “I don’t have to remember,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m listening to it.” But what he did remember was how odd he used to find it, back in the good old days in the cell, that a man who did so much talking was (a) famous as a loner, and (b) managed to get all those words out without once moving his lips.

  “Well, the reason,” Tom went on, “the reason I’m such a blabbermouth is that I’m mostly alone. So when I got an ear nearby, I just naturally bend it. You see, Al,” Tom explained, and gestured at the sweet valley spread out defenseless below them, “those aren’t real people down there. Not like me. Not even like you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If I go hungry three, four days, you know, not one of those people down there is gonna get a bellyache. And when the water comes down on them some night pretty soon, I’m not gonna choke at all. I’m gonna be busy digging up my money.”

  “No, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t care what you say, you just can’t do it. I’m not a real law-abiding citizen myself, but you go too far.”

  “I just follow the logic, Al.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Dortmunder told him. “I can’t do something like this. I can’t come out here and deliberately drown a whole lot of people in their beds, that’s all. I just can’t do it.”

  Tom considered that, looking Dortmunder up and down, thinking it over, and finally he shrugged and said, “Okay. We’ll forget it, then.”

  Dortmunder blinked. “We will?”

  “Sure,” Tom said. “You’re some kind of goodhearted guy, am I right, been reading the Reader’s Digest or something all these years, maybe you joined the Christophers on the inside, something like that. The point is, I’m not too good at reading other people—”

  “I guess not,” Dortmunder said.

  “Well, none of you are that real, you know,” Tom explained. “It’s hard to get you into focus. So I read you wrong, I made a mistake, wasted a couple of days. Sorry about that, Al, I wasted your time, too.”

  “That’s okay,” Dortmunder said, with the awful feeling he was missing some sort of point here.

  “So we’ll drive back to the city,” Tom said. “You ready?”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Sorry, Tom, I just can’t.”

  “S’okay,” Tom said, crossing the road, Dortmunder following.

  They got into the car, and Dortmunder said, “Do I U-turn?”

  “Nah,” Tom said, “go on across the dam and then there’s a left, and we’ll go down through the valley and back to the Thruway like that.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  They drove across the rest of the dam, Dortmunder continuing to have this faintly uneasy feeling about the calm, gray, silent, ancient maniac seated beside him, and at the far end of the dam was a small stone building that was probably the entry to the offices down below. Dortmunder slowed, looking at it, and saw a big bronze seal, and a sign reading CITY OF NEW YORK—DEPT. OF WATER SUPPLY—CITY PROPERTY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “City property?” Dortmunder asked. “This is part of New York City up here?”

  “Sure,” Tom said. “All the city reservoirs belong to the city.”

  A New York City police car was one of three vehicles parked beside the building. Dortmunder said, “They have city cops?”

  “The way I understand it,” Tom said, “it’s not duty that’s given to the sharpest and the quickest. But don’t worry about it, Al, you wanted out and you’re out. Let the next guy worry about New York City cops.”

  Dortmunder gave him a look, feeling a sudden lurch in his stomach. “The next guy?”

  “Naturally.” Tom shrugged. “You weren’t the only guy on the list,” he explained equably. “The first guy, but not the only. So now I’ll just have to find somebody with a little less milk in his veins, that’s all.”

  Dortmunder’s foot came off the gas. “Tom, you mean you’re still gonna do it?”

  Tom, mildly surprised, spread his hands. “Do I have my three hundred fifty grand? Has something changed I don’t know about?”

  Dortmunder said, “Tom, you can’t drown all those people.”

  “Sure I can,” Tom said. “You’re the one can’t. Remember?”

  “But—” Just beyond the stone building, with the reservoir still barely visible behind them and the forest starting again on both sides of the road, Dortmunder came to a stop, pulling off onto the gravel verge and saying, “Tom, no.”

  Tom scowled, without moving his lips. “Al,” he said. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me what I can do and what I can’t do.”

  “It isn’t that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, although in fact it was that, and realizing it, Dortmunder also realized how hopeless this all was. “It’s just,” he said, despairing even as he heard himself say it, “it’s just you can’t do that, that’s all.”

  “I can,” Tom said, colder than ever. “And I will.” That bony finger pointed at Dortmunder’s nose. “And you are not gonna queer the deal for me, Al. You are not gonna call anybody and say, ‘Don’t sleep at home tonight if you wanna stay dry.’ Believe me, Al, you are not gonna screw me around. If I think there’s the slightest chance—”

  “No, no, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I wouldn’t rat on you, you know me better than that.”

  “And you know me better than that.” Looking out his side window at forest, Tom said, “So what’s with the delay? How come we aren’t whippin along the highway, headin back to the city, so I can make the call on the second guy on my list?”

  “Because,” Dortmunder said, and licked his
lips, and looked back at the peaceful water sparkling in the sun. Peaceful killer water. “Because,” he said, “we don’t have to do it that way.”

  Tom looked at him. “We?”

  “I’m your guy, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “From the old days, and still today. We’ll do it, we’ll get the money. But we don’t have to drown anybody to do it, okay? We’ll do it some other way.”

  “What other way?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Dortmunder admitted. “But I just got here, Tom, I just came aboard this thing. Give me some time to look the situation over, think about it. Give me a couple weeks, okay?”

  Tom gave him a skeptical look. “What are you gonna do?” he demanded. “Swim out with a shovel and dive and hold your breath?”

  “I don’t know, Tom. Give me time to think about it. Okay?”

  Tom thought it over. “A quieter way might be good,” he acknowledged. “If it could be done. Less runnin around afterward. Less chance of your massive manhunt.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

  Tom looked back at the reservoir. “That’s fifty feet of water, you know.”

  “I know, I know,” Dortmunder said. “Just give me a little time to consider the problem.”

  Tom’s gray eyes shifted this way and that in his skull. He said, “I don’t know if I want to stay on your sofa that long.”

  Oh. Dortmunder stared, agonized. The thought of May came into his mind but was firmly repressed, pushed down beneath the hundreds and hundreds of drowned people. “It’s a comfortable sofa, Tom,” he said, his throat closing on him as he said it but managing to get the words out just the same.

  Tom took a deep breath. His lips actually twitched; a visible movement. Then, the lips rigid again, he said, “Okay, Al. I know you’re good at this stuff, that’s why I came to you first. You want to find another way to get down to the stash, go ahead.”

  “Thank you, Tom,” Dortmunder said. Relief made his hands tremble on the wheel.

  “Any time,” Tom told him.

  “And in the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “no dynamite. Right?”

  “For now,” Tom agreed.

  FOUR

  Joe the mailman came whistling down Myrtle Street in the bright sunshine, his tune blending with the songs of birds, the hiss of sprinklers, the far-off murmur of a lawn mower. “Myrtle!” shouted Edna Street, turning away from her regular spot in the upstairs front bedroom window. “Here comes the mailman!”

  “I’ll get it, Mother!” Myrtle Street called, and went skipping down the well-polished mahogany staircase toward the front door. A pretty person of twenty-five—no longer really a pretty girl but somehow not quite a pretty woman either—Myrtle had lived most of her life in this old sprawling beautiful clapboard house here in Dudson Center, and was barely conscious anymore of the oddity of having the same name as her home address. At least some of the mail Joe would be bringing up onto the porch this afternoon would be addressed:

  Myrtle Street

  27 Myrtle Street

  Dudson Center, NY 12561

  A few things, such as Modern Maturity and Prevention magazine, would be addressed to Edna Street, plus a ton of stuff addressed to somebody named CAR-RT SORT, or to Current Resident.

  Joe the mailman smiled roguishly as he climbed the stoop to the wide front porch of 27 Myrtle Street and saw Myrtle Street pushing open the screen door. He liked the way her legs moved inside her loose cotton dresses, the demure but lush swell of her breasts within the gray cardigan she always wore, the pale softness of her throat, the healthy animal sparkle in her eye. Joe the mailman was forty-three years old, with a family at home, but he could dream, couldn’t he? “Lovely as ever,” he greeted Myrtle as she smiled hello and reached for today’s messages from the world. “We must run away together one of these days.”

  Myrtle, who had no idea of the actual depth of depravity lurking within Joe’s plain-to-lumpish exterior in his badly fitting blue-gray uniform, laughed lightly and said, “Oh, we’re both much too busy, Joe.”

  “What’s he want?” screeked Edna’s voice from upstairs. “Don’t you give him anything for postage due, Myrtle! Make him take it back!”

  Myrtle indulgently rolled her eyes and laughed, saying, “Mother.”

  “She sure is something,” Joe agreed. He was imagining his head between those legs.

  “See you tomorrow,” Myrtle said, and went back inside, the screen door slamming on Joe’s creative study of her behind.

  Climbing the stairs, Myrtle went quickly through the mail. Myrtle Street, Myrtle St. She and her mother had been Myrtle and Edna Gosling when Edna had inherited the place from her mortician father and moved in with her not-yet-two-year-old baby. To be Myrtle Gosling of Myrtle Street would have been perfectly ordinary and unremarkable, but she hadn’t remained that for long. She’d been not-yet-four when Edna met Mr. Street—Mr. Earl Street, of Bangor, Maine, a salesman in stationery and school-and-library supplies—and not-yet-five when Edna married Mr. Street and decided to give her only daughter her new husband’s name. Myrtle had been not-yet-seven when Mr. Street up and ran away with Candice Oshkosh from down at the five-and-dime, never to be heard from again, but by that time Edna had firmly become Mrs. Street, and her daughter was just as firmly Myrtle Street, and that was simply the way it was.

  Entering the front bedroom, Myrtle found her mother putting on one of her many black hats at the oval pier-glass mirror, staring with suspicion and mistrust at her own hands as they jammed the hat in among her steel-gray knotted curls. “Here’s the mail,” Myrtle said, unnecessarily, and Edna turned to snatch the thin sheaf of circulars and bills from her hands. It was required that Edna look at all the mail, that Myrtle not throw away the most pointless sale announcement or congressional report before her mother had seen it, looked at it, touched it, possibly even smelled it. “We have to go soon, Mother,” Myrtle said. “I don’t want to be late for work.”

  “Pah!” Edna said, greedily fingering the mail. “Make them wait for you. They waited for me when I worked there. Watch him, will you?”

  So Myrtle hurried to the front window to stand watch while her mother examined the mail. Out there, Joe the mailman was just crossing the street down at the corner to start his delivery to the houses across the way. A Mrs. Courtenay, a fiftyish widow, lived over there, just two doors from the corner. A woman who wore bright colors and hoop earrings, she had thus earned Edna’s utter condemnation. Edna was convinced that some day Joe the mailman would enter that house—and that widow, no doubt—rather than merely drop off the mail there, thus committing—among other things—a gross dereliction of his sworn Federal duty to deliver the mail, and Edna would at once phone the main post office downtown and have Joe the mailman dealt with. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would, it would.

  Well, of course, Myrtle knew it would never happen at all. Joe wasn’t like that. True, on occasion Mrs. Courtenay would appear at her door when Joe arrived, decked in her bright colors and her hoop earrings, and she and Joe would chat a minute, but the same identical thing sometimes happened between Joe and Myrtle herself—today, for instance—which didn’t mean Joe would ever come in here and perform… anything. It was all just silly.

  But it was better, in the long run, to go along with Mother’s little idiosyncrasies. “He’s on Mrs. Courtenay’s porch now,” she reported to the rattling sound of Edna tearing open an electric company bill. “He’s putting the mail in the box. He’s leaving.”

  “She didn’t come out?”

  “No, Mother, she didn’t come out.”

  Edna, hatted and still clutching the mail, scampered over to glare out the window at Joe the mailman taking a shortcut across Mrs. Courtenay’s lawn to the next house on his route. “Probably having her period,” Edna commented, and switched her glare to Myrtle. “Are you ready or not? You don’t want to be late for work, you know.”

  “No, Mother,” Myrtle agreed.

  The two went downstairs together and out the ba
ck door and over the gravel to the unattached garage containing their black Ford Fairlane. This part of their day was such a foregone routine they barely even thought about it while going through the motions: Myrtle opened the right-hand garage door, while Edna opened the left. Myrtle entered the garage and climbed into the Ford and backed it out while Edna stood to the left, hands folded in front of her. Myrtle made a backing U-turn on the gravel while Edna closed both garage doors. Then Edna walked around the car, got in beside Myrtle, and they left home.

  Myrtle was going to work. She was an assistant (one of three) at the North Dudson branch of the New York State Public Library. Edna was going to her Senior Citizens Center down on Main Street, where she was something of a power. At sixty-two, Edna was three years too young to even be a member of the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, but there was nothing else doing all day in this dead town, so she’d got herself in by lying about her age.

  Myrtle was a good, if cautious, driver; cautious mostly about her mother, who was not reticent about remarking on any flaw she might find in Myrtle’s judgment or performance skills along the way. She was quiet today, however, all the way from Myrtle Street to Spring Street to Albany Street to Elm Street to Main Street, where they had to stop and wait for the light to change before making their left turn. While they were waiting there, a car drove wanderingly by from left to right, with two men in it; they didn’t seem to know exactly where they were going.

  And suddenly Edna’s bony sharp hand was clutching Myrtle’s forearm and Edna was crying, “My God!”

  Myrtle immediately stared into the rearview mirror; were they about to be crashed? But Elm Street was empty behind them. So she stared at her mother, who was gaping after that car that had just gone by. The whites were visible all around the pupils of Edna’s eyes. Was she having some sort of attack? “Mother?” Myrtle asked, firmly burying that first irrepressible instant of hope. “Mother? Are you all right?”

  “It couldn’t be,” Edna whispered. She was panting in her anxiety, mouth hanging open, eyes staring. Voice hoarse, she cried, “But it was! It was!”