Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You know,” said a third regular, joining the conversation, “some people confuse that line with the Naked City motto.”

  A fourth chimed in: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”

  “Exactly,” said the third.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Dortmunder said.

  Stan had brought home a dark blue Lincoln Atlantis, a huge old steamboat of a car, which he was “fixing up” in the driveway beside the house. Along about the third day, May came out onto the porch with her hands in a dish towel—she’d never done that before, was doing it unconsciously now—and looked with disapproval at what Stan, with help from Tiny, was wroughting. On newspapers spread on the lawn squatted any number of automobile parts, all of them caked with black oily grime. The Lincoln’s huge hood had been removed from the car and now leaned against the chain-link fence like a Titan’s shield. The moth-eaten old backseat was out and lying on the gravel between the car and the street in plain sight of the entire neighborhood.

  “Stan,” May said, “I’ve got two phone calls already today.”

  Stan and Tiny lifted their heads out of the hoodless engine compartment. They were as grimy and oil-streaked as the auto parts. Stan asked, “Yeah?”

  “About this car,” May told him.

  “Not for sale,” Stan said.

  “One, there’s no papers,” Tiny added.

  Stan was about to dive back into his disassembled engine when May said, “Complaints about the car.”

  They looked at her in surprise. Stan said, “Complaints?”

  “It’s an eyesore. The neighbors think it detracts from the tone.”

  Tiny scratched his oily head with an oily hand. “Tone? Whadaya mean, tone?”

  “The quality of the neighborhood,” May told him.

  “That’s some quality,” Stan said, getting a little miffed. “Down where I live in Brooklyn, I got two, three cars I’m working on at a time, I never get a complaint. All over the neighborhood, guys are working on their cars. And it’s a terrific neighborhood. So what’s the big deal?”

  “Well, look around this neighborhood,” May advised him, taking one hand out from under the dish towel to wave it generally about. “These people are neat, Stan, they’re clean. That’s the way they like it.”

  Gazing up and down the street, Stan said, “How do they fix their cars?”

  “I think,” May said carefully, “they take them to the garage for the mechanic to fix, when something goes wrong.”

  Appalled, Stan said, “They don’t fix their own cars? And they complain about me?”

  Tiny said, “May, I tell you what we’ll do. On accounta the fence, we can’t move the car around in the back, but we’ll put everything in front of it, so you won’t see all this mess and stuff from the street. Okay?”

  “That would be wonderful, Tiny,” May said.

  Stan still couldn’t get over it. “Hand your car to some stranger,” he said, “then take it out, drive it sixty, sixty-five miles an hour. They got no more brains than that hood over there, and they’re complaining about me.”

  “Come on, Stan,” Tiny said, picking up auto parts from the lawn. “Help out.”

  Stan did so, muttering and griping all the time. Before going back into the house, May leaned out from the porch and looked up. Not a cloud in the sky.

  Murch’s Mom came stomping in to dinner late and bugged. “They don’t fight back, dammit,” she said, flinging herself into her chair.

  They were seven tonight, crowded around the dining room table, all but Doug and Tiny, who’d be back up from the city later. Kelp looked over at Murch’s Mom and said, “I thought that’s what you liked about driving the cab up here.”

  “I’m losing my edge,” she snarled. “I’m getting soft, I can feel it.”

  “I told you so,” her son said.

  She gave him a look. “Don’t start with me, Stanley. And pass the white stuff. What is it?”

  “Mashed potatoes,” Dortmunder said, passing it to her.

  “Oh, yeah?” She looked at the creamy white mound in the oval bowl, then shrugged and spooned a couple plops of it onto her plate.

  The cooking was being done by an ad hoc committee chaired by May, with Wally, Stan, and Tiny as primary committee members, and noncommittee members responsible for clean-up. The opening of packages was the principal culinary method. The result was acceptable, but no one was anxious to prolong the experience.

  Tom broke a silence composed of munching and swallowing to say, “Anybody hear the weather report?”

  “I did, in the cab,” Murch’s Mom told him. “It’s gonna be fair forever.”

  “Aw, come on, Mom,” Stan said.

  “Extended forecast,” his Mom said, implacable, “sun, moon, sun, moon, sun, moon, sun and moon. Pass the round green things.”

  “Peas,” Dortmunder said, passing her the bowl.

  Murch’s Mom rolled a bunch of peas onto her plate, then held them down with bits of mashed potato. “I met an old lady in the cab today,” she said, “lives the next block over. I’m gonna go play canasta with her tonight. Not for money, just for fun.”

  She ate a pea—she couldn’t get more than one of the little devils onto her fork at a time—then looked up at the silence and the surprised eyes. “Well?” she demanded.

  Dortmunder cleared his throat. “Maybe the weather forecast’s wrong,” he said.

  The worst of it for Doug was, he didn’t have anyplace to take her. Myrtle, that is. He couldn’t take her to the house on Oak Street, of course, not with it full of people all the time, and not with his own bed being merely a sleeping bag on the floor of Tom’s room. And that incident of the horrible interruption from John was the only time he’d been at Myrtle’s house when her mother was away.

  Movie theaters and the interior of the pickup both allowed for a certain amount of personal interaction, but by no means enough. Nor could he convince Myrtle to grab a blanket one day and come with him for a nice picnic in the woods. It was extremely frustrating.

  Well, at least he didn’t have to lie to her anymore; or anyway not so much. Her curiosity about the environmental protection group he’d claimed to be a volunteer researcher for had been so intense and so unrelenting that first he’d told her it was merely a minor part of his life, not as important as she’d at first thought, that he was mostly a diving instructor out on Long Island. And then he’d told her he’d quit his volunteer work with that group because he didn’t like their attitude. (John, in this scenario, became a demanding regional head of the environmental group, an autocratic ideologue who Doug had simply been unable to stand anymore, the last straw having been that unfortunate scene on Myrtle’s front porch.)

  So now, as far as Myrtle was concerned, Doug was in fact who he really was, and his trips up to Dudson Center from Long Island three or four days a week were simply because he was crazy about her. Since Myrtle seemed to be more or less crazy about him as well, the situation should progress swimmingly from here, and it would, too, if there were only someplace they could be alone together.

  Now, after another evening of sweet hot frustration at the movies—the one local movie house was never more than half full, mostly old people and kids, people who didn’t have VCRs—they were walking home, hand in hand, and Doug was trying yet again to figure out some way to get Myrtle alone.

  If only the weather would break so he and the others could make the descent into the reservoir and salvage Tom’s money, life would surely become easier. Doug would no longer have anything active to conceal from Myrtle, and with time and leisure and full attention to devote to this project, surely he could make it all happen. After all, summer was fast approaching; high season in his line of work. From Fourth of July weekend through Labor Day, he was going to be busy, far too busy to make six-hour round trips in pursuit of some girl.

  It was a beautiful night in Dudson Center, clear and crisp, a velvety sky with a great milk-glass moon, temperature in the low sixties, h
umidity nonexistent. A playful breeze rustled and breathed in the dark green branches of trees, and below the mysterious upper reaches of those trees the old-fashioned streetlamps spread a yellow glow on sidewalks flanked by green lawns. Gentle music sounded from open windows here and there, late sprinklers could be heard whispering their rhythmic secrets, and the romantic in Doug just swelled with sensual delight.

  But when he approached Myrtle’s front porch, expecting at least to spend a little time with her on the glider, the porch light was on and someone was already out there. In fact, two people. With a table in front of them, doing something there, playing some kind of game.

  Doug hadn’t been present at dinner the other night when Murch’s Mom had announced the news of her new local pal, so it was with a real sense of dislocation that he recognized who that was on the glider with Myrtle’s mother. Oh, my God, he thought, am I supposed to know her? What’s she doing here? What does Myrtle know?

  “There you are,” her mother said. “How was the movie?”

  “Okay,” Myrtle said, a bit listlessly. She’d been rather quiet and withdrawn all the way home, come to think of it.

  “Gladys,” the old bitch said to Murch’s Mom (Gladys?), “this is my daughter, Myrtle.”

  “How do you do.”

  “Hello.”

  “And a beau of hers.” Smiling like a shark at Doug, she added, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  She never did. Doug had met Myrtle’s mother half a dozen times in brief passages at the beginning or ending of dates, and Myrtle always introduced him, and her mother always immediately cast his name out of her memory bank.

  This time, before Myrtle could say anything, Doug smiled hugely at the nasty old witch and said, “That’s okay, Mrs. Street.” To Murch’s Mom, he said, “It’s Jack Cousteau. Nice to meet you.”

  All three women gave him funny looks, which he affected not to notice, turning his smile on Myrtle, saying, “See you in a couple days?”

  “Sure,” she said, but still looked confused.

  “I’ll call you at the library,” he promised, shook her hand as though they’d just finished a really productive Kiwanis meeting together, and turned to say, “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Street. Nice to meet you, Gladys.” And he went whistling away in the dark.

  “One word!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  “One word to anybody about ‘Gladys,’ and I run you down with the cab!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  Murch’s Mom released the bunch of Doug’s shirt she’d held clutched in her fist and stepped back, aiming her glare out the kitchen window instead. “If it doesn’t cloud up soon,” she said, “I may run you down anyway.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  Driving herself home from work and her mother home from the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, Myrtle brooded about Doug Berry and, as usual, came to no conclusion. Was there really an Environment Protection Alliance, even though she could find it in absolutely no reference books or directories? Or was Doug completely and totally false, some sort of con man engaged in some secret nefarious pursuit (other than the nefarious pursuit of her body, that is)?

  His having called himself Jacques Cousteau with Edna and Edna’s new friend the other night had really brought the whole problem into focus. Myrtle had been feeling more and more depressed, not even noticing the change in herself, just sliding away into gloom; and all, of course, because she couldn’t make up her mind about Doug Berry. And he’d used that false name, she understood, because her mother refused to remember his real name, which she did because she didn’t trust him, either. And Edna was very often right about such things.

  If Myrtle could be sure Doug wasn’t a fake—or at least not a fake about anything except his extravagant claims of desire for and obsession with her own self—they would have progressed beyond the get-acquainted stage long ago. The weather was perfect, for instance, for a nice picnic up on Hochawallaputtie Hill, overlooking the reservoir. But how could she go up there with him when her heart was so full of mistrust?

  “Go down Oak Street,” Edna suddenly said, breaking their long silence.

  Surprised, Myrtle glanced at her mother and then out the windshield toward Oak Street, still two blocks ahead. “But that’s out of our way,” she said.

  “Some gypsies moved in there,” Edna told her. “They’ve got a wrecked old car out front and everything. We’re all calling and complaining. We’re going to get up a petition next. Can’t have gypsies here running down the neighborhood.”

  “Gypsies,” Myrtle repeated with a laugh. “Oh, Mother, what makes you think they’re gypsies?”

  “Mrs. Kresthaven found a tambourine in their garbage,” Edna said. “Go on, Myrtle, turn. I want to see if that awful car is still there. It’s in the second block.”

  As they made the turn onto Oak Street, the world ahead suddenly grayed, losing color and tone. Myrtle leaned forward over the steering wheel to look up at the sky. “Cloud,” she reported.

  “Never trust the weather report,” Edna commented. “Slow down, now, it’s up there on the right. See that blue car?”

  “It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” Myrtle said, slowing as per instructions, looking at an ordinarily neat house with an ordinarily plain automobile parked beside it.

  “They moved some of the junk,” Edna said with mixed satisfaction and regret. Clearly, she was both glad the small-town peer pressure had done its job and sorry she couldn’t keep exerting it. “But you can still see some by the fence,” she added hopefully.

  “It’s hidden by the car,” Myrtle said, slowing more and more so she could look at the place as they went by.

  As they came abreast of the house, its front door opened and people abruptly started to emerge. Lots of people. They came pouring out of the house as though it were on fire, except that their expressions were happy, delighted, surprised. Running down the stoop and onto the lawn, they pointed skyward, laughing and capering and patting one another on the back.

  Astounded, Myrtle watched the people cavort in her rearview mirror. Beside her, Edna said in doubtful surprise, “Was that Gladys?” but Myrtle paid no attention. She had recognized others among that group of people.

  Doug? And Wally Knurr? Together? Holding hands and dancing in a circle, like something in a Breughel painting? What’s going on?

  “Couldn’t be Gladys,” Edna decided, and craned around to look back. “What are they doing out there?”

  “Looking at the cloud,” Myrtle told her, distracted.

  Back there, too far away for identification, an older man, who had probably been napping upstairs, came hurrying out of the house, looked up, and nodded in agreement with the sky.

  “Maybe they’re farmers,” Edna said, but she sounded doubtful.

  SIXTY

  With mixed feelings of relief and guilt, Dortmunder watched Kelp, in the living room of the house on Oak Street, work himself yet again into a wetsuit. “I couldn’t do that, Andy,” he said.

  “I know you couldn’t,” Kelp said, zipping zippers. “It’s okay, John, don’t worry about it.”

  “I just couldn’t do it.”

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Kelp said. “Doug’s a real pro. We’ll be perfectly fine down there. And he’s right about one thing: even a total professional like he is shouldn’t make a dive like this by himself.”

  “A dive,” Dortmunder echoed. Then he was sorry he’d said it, because maybe Kelp hadn’t thought about that part of it yet.

  The fact is, this time into the reservoir was going to be different, unlike anything either Dortmunder or Kelp had ever done. On both previous attempts, they’d walked in. This time, Doug and Kelp were going to plop out of a boat in the middle of the reservoir and sink in. Only of course when a professional does it, the word for sink is dive.

  Sure.

  Tiny came back in from the porch, having just finished shlepping out all the equipment. “The track’s here,” he said.

&n
bsp; “All set,” Kelp told him. Carrying his flippers under his arm, he followed Tiny out of the living room, Dortmunder trailing, and all three went out to the porch, where May, Murch’s Mom, Wally, Tom, and Doug (he had also suited up for the dive) were watching Stan maneuver a large slat-sided open-topped truck backward up on to the driveway in the dark.

  The very dark. Today’s single cloud had by now become a cloud cover stretching from horizon to horizon like an extra-thick icing on the birthday cake of the Earth. Not a glimmer of light reached the surface of the planet from the heavens. Stan’s only visual aid, in fact, beyond the truck’s own back-up lights, was a streetlight some little distance away; it was by that faint gleam he was doing his best to bring the rear of the truck reasonably close to the porch without either driving on the lawn (his Mom had warned him about that) or ramming the Lincoln he still hadn’t quite finished fixing up (she hadn’t bothered to warn him about that). The porch light would have helped, but it would also have attracted unwelcome attention if it were on with all this activity around it at one-thirty in the morning. Small-town people are so nosy.

  With confusing and at times contradictory advice from Tiny, Stan managed at last to place the truck where he wanted it, and then he climbed down from the cab to help load the equipment. Once all the gear was aboard, Stan got back into the cab, this time with Tom, while Dortmunder and Kelp and Doug and Tiny all clambered up into the back, which smelled faintly of several things: pine trees, possibly sheep, maybe one or two less pleasant things.

  May and Murch’s Mom and Wally stood on the dark porch and watched the slat-sided truck bounce and jounce back to the street and drive away toward the reservoir. None of them waved, but all of them thought of it.

  Once the truck was out of sight, May sighed and said, “I hope we know what we’re doing.”

  “No, you don’t,” Murch’s Mom told her, and nodded after the truck. “You hope they know what they’re doing.”

  Wally said, “The trouble with real life is, there’s no reset button.”