The Road To Ruin

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Their names will do,” Detective Cohan said.

  “Well, they’re Nac, Thuddy and Ace.”

  Both Eldron and Detective Cohan leaned in closer. Detective Cohan said, “Would that be Mac, Buddy, and Ace?”

  “Yes. Os knows Thuddy’s real nane, I think, I don’t know ith he knows the others.” Then Mark sighed, his story told, happy to be unburdened.

  It took Detective Cohan a while to realize the story was now complete. He had another half hour of questions, intermixed with useless objections from Lawyer Gold, but Mark had essentially told the whole story right at the beginning. Once he’d done so, he felt much better about things. He knew he’d been first to turn state’s evidence, which would mean they’d come to him first for testimony against the others, which meant he would be treated more leniently than everybody else. What a relief.

  Such a relief, in fact, that when Detective Cohan and Lawyer Gold finally left, Mark fell immediately and deeply asleep, and remained asleep for most of the day. The shadows outside the hospital room window were long and amber when at last he stirred, stretched, smiled, stopped smiling because it made his jaw hurt, and then remembered where he was and everything that had happened.

  What a terrific sleep, after so much tension and worry! That was the moment he told himself it was probably the best day’s sleep of his life, and just the fact of it reassured him he’d made the right decision. Betraying one’s friends and associates, it turned out, wasn’t something to agonize over or regret. No, it was merely an unfortunate possibility in life, as much so for Os and the union men as for himself. One was sorry to find that one had reached that point in one’s life, but then one accepted the reality and got on with it. He had got on with it, and everything was better—for him—as a result.

  Smiling again, though more carefully, he turned his head, and there was Detective Cohan, smiling right back at him from the visitor’s chair. He was a very happy boy.

  “So you’re awake, are you?”

  “Oh, yes. God, I theel rested.”

  “Good.” Detective Cohan rose and came over to smile down on Mark. “A lot has happened while you’ve been asleep,” he said.

  “I thought it would.”

  “We went looking for this Osbourne Faulk,” Detective Cohan told him, “and it turns out, he’d already fled the country.”

  Mark blinked. “Thled?”

  “Went straight to Brazil. I doubt we’ll ever get our hands on him.”

  “Di-ruh—Thra—” No; impossible to say the name of that country. “Why not?” he asked instead.

  “Well, there’s no extradition treaty between the United States and Brazil,” Detective Cohan explained. “Once he’s there, there’s no way we can get our hands on him.”

  “There are Territories!” Mark cried.

  “Sure,” Detective Cohan said, “a number of territories around the world without that extradition treaty. Most of them you wouldn’t want to go to, but Brazil isn’t bad. Rio, you know. Very tall women in bikinis, the way I understand it.”

  “What athout—What athout Nac and Thuddy and Ace?”

  “Well, you don’t know their real names, and you don’t know what union they’re in,” Detective Cohan pointed out. “Your friend Osbourne may have known at least one real name, but he’s long gone, and believe me, there are dozens of Macs and Buddies and Aces in every union in the United States.”

  “So I’m the only one you’ve got.”

  “I’m afraid it gets worse, Mark,” Detective Cohan said, with his pleasant smile.

  Mark had always hated it when policemen called him by his first name, thinking they were doing it only because he was upper-class and they weren’t, but he suspected this was not the time to make an issue of it. He said, “How could it get worse?”

  “Well, they found Monroe Hall,” Detective Cohan told him. “Found him wandering around, had some concussions, hit his head a lot.”

  “I didn’t do that. None oth us did that.”

  “No, no, nobody’s accusing you, don’t worry about that. The point is, all those bumps to the head, Monroe Hall’s got amnesia.”

  “Well, if anythody deserthes—” But then it hit him. “He what?”

  “No memory,” Detective Cohan said, and waved a hand beside his head as though saying good-bye to his brain. “The doctors say, he’ll never get his memory back, it’s all gone.”

  “Inthossi—Inthoss—”

  “But true. Also, just by the way, it seems the butler has disappeared. John Howard Rumsey. Nowhere to be found. It’s beginning to look like, up there in the wilderness where he ran away from you people, a city man like that, something went wrong. Maybe he fell in a mountain tarn, or could be he met up with a bear. Anyway, gone. We’ll keep looking, but it doesn’t seem hopeful.”

  “Tough,” Mark said, not seeing any connection with himself, and already bitter about not learning of Monroe Hall’s amnesia until too late.

  But Detective Cohan was not finished with his cheerful smiles and his bad news. “All in all, Mark,” he said, “it’s a good thing you spoke. Without you, we’d never have found that lodge, or you, or your friend Faulk’s name, or anything. Yes, sir, Mark, without you coming forward the way you did, the entire Monroe Hall kidnapping would have remained a complete mystery forever. I’ll send your lawyer in now, shall I?”

  63

  AT LEAST WHEN HE chauffeured Mrs. Hall, Stan got to drive a good car, a black Daimler like a sofa converted to a tank. Also, while she was in the hospital and while she was at her lawyer’s office, instead of trailing after her as with Mrs. Parsons, he got to stay at the wheel and read his newspaper, his wrong-size hat on the seat beside him. And driving between the hospital and the lawyer’s office, he got to hear at least parts of her several telephone conversations, which didn’t sound at all good.

  She told more than one person that “poor Monroe” had lost his memory forever, and it wasn’t ever coming back, and that meant there was permanently no way to get at “you know,” which he guessed would be money in banks where she didn’t know the secret word. She also talked about “liquidating” this and that, which from a mob guy would have meant somebody was gonna die but which from a respectable married lady meant something along the lines of a visit to the hock-shop. She also told a few people she’d be “coming home,” which after a while he realized didn’t mean the compound but somewhere else.

  But the main thing she kept saying, in conversation after conversation, was that she wanted this or that “taken care of today. I mean today. I know it’s Saturday, but I don’t want to have to still be in that compound tomorrow. Or any other day. So I want it taken care of today.”

  She said that several times, and though she never raised her voice or sounded angry, Stan somehow had the feeling she was going to get her way. Whatever it was she wanted done today, it would get itself done today.

  What it added up to, when he put it all together, there was no Monroe Hall any more. Everything that had been fixed tight around him, his wife, his compound, his employees, the people there to steal his cars, everything was now untied, off and away, as though Hall’s gravity had been turned off.

  So far as Stan could see, this was bad news for the heist. He supposed they could still do it, still collect the cars, deal with the insurance company, but somehow it felt different now. How would the other guys feel about it? How would Chester feel about it? It was Chester’s need for revenge against Hall that had got them into this thing in the first place.

  On the other hand, did they want to go through all this for nothing?

  It was just after twelve-thirty when they got back to the compound, sailing past the guardshack where the brown-uniformed plug-ugly on duty saluted, not very well, when he saw Mrs. Hall in the backseat. Stan drove her up to the house, got out, opened her door, and when she climbed out she looked very sad, “I believe this is good-bye, Warren,” she said.

  On a sudden impulse, he said, “My friend’s call me Stan.”<
br />
  She liked that. Smiling, she said, “Then I hope we’ve become friends, in this very short time.” She stuck her hand out. “Good-bye, Stan.”

  She had a strong handclasp, but he treated it gently anyway. “Good-bye, Mrs. Hall,” he said, and walked down the road, heading for the green house and lunch, when ahead of him, out of the side road, came a flatbed truck with a yellow convertible Triumph Stag on it, its black hardtop in place. Stan had studied the list of Hall’s cars, and remembered that one; it was from 1976.

  But where was it going? Toward the gate. As he walked on, Stan watched the truck go through the gate, out to the county road, and turn left.

  Stan turned left, too, onto the side road toward the green house, and here came another flatbed, this one bearing a 1958 Studebaker Golden Hawk, creamy white with black trim on its roof, hood, and tail fins. The truck driver, a skinny guy in a straw cowboy hat, gave Stan a casual wave on the way by. Automatically, but not really meaning it, Stan waved back.

  What was going on here? Where were they taking those cars? Come on here, Stan thought, those are our cars.

  He walked faster, hoping Kelp or Tiny would be at the house to tell him what was going on. Or maybe Dortmunder would be back by now. Ahead of him he saw the house, and then saw, on its tiny porch, Kelp and Tiny standing against the rail, like people watching a parade.

  Well, they were watching a parade. Another flatbed truck, this one bearing a 1967 Lamborghini Miura, all gleaming white, a flat-nosed front like a predator fish, was next in line. This truck, like the ones before it, had Pennsylvania license plates, so they’d been hired locally. But where were they going?

  Stan was practically running by the time he reached the house. The bitter expressions on Kelp’s and Tiny’s faces were not encouraging. As a black Lincoln Continental Club Coupe from 1940 sailed by, the vehicle Frank Lloyd Wright once described as “the most beautiful car in the world,” and that the Museum of Modern Art chose as one of the top eight automobile designs in history, Stan said, “What’s going on?”

  “Our heist,” Kelp said, “Out the window.”

  “Off the property,” Tiny said. He looked as if he wanted to eat that Lincoln, flatbed truck and all.

  Stan said, “But where to?”

  “Florida,” Kelp said. “A car museum in Florida.”

  Tiny growled, and the red 1955 Morgan Plus 4 was trucked by. Stan said, “All of them?”

  “Every last one,” Kelp said. “Except the Pierce-Arrow. The missus is taking that with her to Maryland.”

  “They’re closin shop,” Tiny said.

  Stan found it hard to look at the cars going past, but then it was even harder not to look. Frowning at the house instead, he said, “John not back?”

  “Nobody knows where he is,” Kelp said.

  “Dortmunder always shows up,” Tiny said. Clearly, he didn’t want anything to deflect from his irritation.

  “Well, wherever he is, he’s better off than here,” Stan said. 1950 Healey Silverstone, white, the car Mrs. Hall most often drove, was next. Stan shook his head. “John wouldn’t like to see this,” he said.

  64

  ONE GOOD THING ABOUT Hal Mellon: his cell phone didn’t ring. When Chester drove him on his rounds, Mellon kept his cell phone in his shirt pocket, over his heart, set to vibrate rather than ring when he got a call. “Getting me ready for the pacemaker,” he said, which might have been another joke. But there was a different joke coming at Chester this sunny Saturday afternoon in June, though he didn’t know it yet. He knew Monroe Hall had been kidnapped from his compound yesterday, because the world knew Monroe Hall had been kidnapped from his compound yesterday. He also knew they had grabbed the butler as well, but wouldn’t that be Dortmunder? He hoped Dortmunder would get himself away from those people, whoever they were, and he sure hoped the police presence at Hall’s compound wouldn’t screw up the grand theft auto planned for tonight. He didn’t want to be stuck in this car with Hal Mellon forever, Tuesdays through Saturdays, because, in Hal’s world, the managers he needed to schmooze with were likelier to be in the office on Saturday than Monday.

  “Young couple walking in a graveyard,” Mellon said. “Oops, hold on.” And he dove into his shirt pocket for his phone.

  Another couple, Chester thought, in another graveyard. Why don’t they spend their time at horror movies, like all the other young couples in the world?

  Mellon murmured briefly into his phone, then broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and said, “Canceled the appointment, the son of a bitch. Who cares if he’s got pneumonia? I’ve got product to move. Ah, well.”

  Mellon looked at the dashboard clock, so Chester did, too: 3:24.

  Mellon sighed. “Let’s call it a day,” he said. “That was my last real appointment anyway, I was just gonna do drop-ins after that.”

  “Sure thing,” Chester said, and U-turned in front of two trucks, an ambulance, and a cement mixer.

  Mellon no longer blinked when Chester did things like that. Sitting back, half-smiling out the windshield as he took the vodka bottle from the pocket in the door, he said, “Couple pass a gravestone, says, ‘Here lies John Jones, a lawyer and an honest man.’ Girl says, ‘Is that legal, three men in one grave?’”

  •

  When Chester drooped into his house at four-thirty, Hal’s baseball teams and frogmen fading slowly from his brain, Dortmunder himself was seated in Chester’s living room, on Chester’s sofa, watching Chester’s television set, and wearing Chester’s overcoat and, apparently, nothing else. “What the hell is this?” Chester demanded.

  “Disaster,” Dortmunder told him, and gestured at the screen.

  Chester moved around the room to where he could see the television screen. Between the crawl at the bottom of the picture and the CNN logo and some other stuff at the top was a photo of a hangdog-looking guy in black suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie, giving the camera a distrustful look. “That’s you,” Chester said.

  “They made us take mug shots when we got the jobs,” Dortmunder said. “Tiny was gonna cop them when we left.”

  “Missing butler,” Chester read from the crawl, then gave Dortmunder-in-the-flesh the once-over. “Missing clothes, too, I see,” he said. “Where are they?”

  “In your drier,” Dortmunder said. “They used to be in your washing machine. But I need something except that suit, I can’t wear that suit after it’s been all over CNN. Two, three billion people have now seen that suit.”

  “There’s also the face,” Chester pointed out.

  “I can squint or wear glasses or something. Listen, Chester, I couldn’t call over to the compound because maybe the wrong person says hello, recognizes my voice. You could call.”

  “Why?”

  “Find Andy or Tiny or somebody. Get my clothes from the house there. I can’t go back there anyway, the cops’d ask me questions for a year. I thought I’d wait till the cars moved tonight, but I can’t sit here in your overcoat like this.”

  “I agree.”

  “So maybe somebody could bring my stuff over to me now. Is that asking too much?”

  “I’ll find out,” Chester said, and made the call, and somebody with nails in his throat said, “Front gate.”

  “I’m looking for, uh, Fred Blanchard.”

  “He’s at his house, I’ll forward you.”

  Waiting, Chester said to Dortmunder, “Calls didn’t used to get answered at the front gate. Suppose something’s happening over there?”

  “Yes,” Dortmunder said.

  It was Kelp who answered the phone, sounding aggravated: “Yeah?”

  “An—I mean, Fred, it’s Chester.”

  “I don’t care what you call me.”

  “Listen, I got John here, over at my house, you know what I mean?”

  “John? There? What’s he doing there?”

  “Sitting in my overcoat. He says would one of you guys bring him his stuff from his room, he isn’t going back over there.”

>   “Good idea,” Kelp said, though he sounded angry when he said it. “We’ll bring everybody’s stuff. See you in a little while.”

  Chester hung up, and Dortmunder nodded at the screen, saying, “They got one of them.”

  The photo on the screen now was of a very upright businessman type in a suit and tie—a corporate headshot. The off-camera announcer was saying, “Forty-two-year-old Mark Sterling, now in police custody, has admitted his part in the kidnapping. One other alleged perpetrator, a business associate of Mark Sterling’s named Osbourne Faulk, is said by police to have fled the country. Another three conspirators are thought to have been involved, but little is known of them except that they are alleged to have belonged to the same labor union.”

  “There you go,” Dortmunder said. “Now the kidnappers got a union.”

  65

  “LITTLE IS KNOWN OF US,” Mac said. “You hear that?”

  “We’re royally screwed,” Ace insisted. “That guy Faulk was right. What we gotta do is flee the country.”

  “To where?” Mac wanted to know. “And using what for cash? We wouldn’t last a week, Ace, in some foreign country, and once they look at us and start to wonder how come we’re on the lam, then we are screwed.”

  The television had moved on to commercials. “More beer,” Buddy said, offed the set, and got heavily to his feet. So far, he hadn’t come down on one side or the other in the current dispute over whether, in the current crisis, they should (1) vamoose, or (2) do nothing.

  They were in Buddy’s rec room again, and with some trepidation they’d been watching CNN on the old rabbit-ears antenna television set against the unfinished wall under the big silk banner that lived here when it wasn’t being used at union rallies or on picket lines. Against a royal blue background, the bright yellow words curved above and below the initials:

  Amalgamated Conglomerated Workers

  ACWFFA

  Factory Floor Alliance

  As Buddy went to the World War II refrigerator for some up-to-date beer, Ace said, “If that guy Faulk thinks he oughta run, we oughta listen. Those were smart guys, educated guys, remember? Harvard, or maybe Buddy’s right, Dartmouth, but not dummies.”