Watch Your Back

by Donald Westlake

  Dortmunder put down his coffee mug. “Is that what we’re trying for?” he asked.

  “Right just this minute it is,” Medrick told him. “You see, with smoke signals, that was the very first time in the whole history of the human race that you could tell somebody something that he couldn’t see you when you told him. You get what I mean?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “Before smoke signals,” Medrick said, “I wanna tell you something, I gotta come over to where you are, and stand in front of you, and tell you. Like I’m doing now. And you get to look at my face, listen to how I talk, read my body language, decide for yourself, is this guy trying to pull a fast one. You get it?”

  “Eye contact.”

  “Exactly,” Medrick said. “Sure, people still lied to each other back then and got away with it, but it wasn’t so easy. Once smoke signals came in, you can’t see the guy telling you the story, he could be laughing behind his hand, you don’t know it.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Dortmunder agreed.

  “Every step up along the way,” Medrick said, “every other kind of way to communicate, it’s always behind the other guy’s back. For thousands of years, we’ve been building ourselves a liar’s paradise. That’s why the video phones weren’t the big hit they were supposed to be, nobody wants to go back to the eyeball.”

  “I guess not.”

  “So that means they’ll never get rid of the rest of it,” Medrick concluded. “All the way back to smoke signals.”

  “I don’t think they use those so much any more,” Dortmunder said.

  “If they did,” Medrick said darkly, “they’d lie.”

  “Seating rows six forty–three to six fifty–two,” said the announcement, so they boarded the damn plane.

  Their third seatmate, next to the window over beyond Medrick, turned out to be okay, a very neat little old lady who put her own robin’s egg blue Samsonite bag in the overhead rack, tucked her worn old black leather shoulderbag under the seat in front of her, kicked off her shoes, and opened a paperback novel by Barbara Pym, which she then proceeded to read with such intensity you’d think there was going to be a test on it when the plane reached Newark.

  All Dortmunder wanted was the experience over with. He strapped himself in as though this were the electric chair and he’d just received word the governor was on the golf course, closed his eyes to pretend he was unconscious, experienced the rinse cycle of the plane taking off, listened to the announcements even though he knew in his heart he would never willingly associate himself with a flotation device, and at last the stew, who’d warned them ahead of time about futzing around with electronics during takeoff and landing, said, “Electronic equipment may now be used,” and Medrick said, “Good.”

  Dortmunder opened his eyes. The phone was a neat gray plastic hotdog inset in the back of the middle seat ahead. Medrick yanked it out, did some credit card stuff, then did some dialing stuff, and then said, “Frank? Otto. It’s nine–seventeen in the morning — what, you don’t have any clocks on Long Island? I’m calling you about your son. Well, Frank, I’m in an airplane and I’m headed for Newark, which is not what I had planned for today, but while you been looking around for a clock the last four months your boy Raphael has been robbing me blind. Of course he wouldn’t do that, and in fact — Frank, I know he’s a good boy, and the reason I know he’s a good boy, same as you know he’s a good boy, is, he’s too stupid to be anything else. Now, listen to me, Frank, I’m not blaming you, and I’m not blaming Maureen, you and me got the same genes inside us, so if there’s moon–child genes floating around inside Raphael, which you damn well know there is, they’re just as likely to come from our side of the family as hers.”

  Medrick listened for a minute, nodding impatiently, while a whole lot of nothing went by outside the window, past the Barbara Pym fan, and the stews started serving the beverage from the other end of the plane. Then Medrick said, “I wouldn’t be giving you tsouris, Frank, but the fact is, the O.J. is gonna go into bankruptcy in like fifteen minutes unless we do something about it, and I happen to be in this airplane, and you happen to be on the ground, so what you can do — All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on. Raphael hooked up with some Jersey kid that’s mobbed up or something, and he turned over running the joint to that kid, and now the kid —”

  More pause. More impatient nodding. Then Medrick said, “I don’t doubt that, Frank, Casper the Friendly Ghost is probably a better businessman than Raphael, but there’s businessmen and businessmen, and what this businessman is doing, he’s bleeding the joint white. If you’ll listen to me, Frank, I’ll tell you how he’s doing it. He’s using up the corporation’s credit, he’s buying stuff, not paying for it, he’s gonna strip it all out, sell it to somebody else, walk away. Wait.”

  Medrick shook his head. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “Like what is he buying?”

  “Well, I happened to notice, four cash registers.”

  Medrick blinked. “Four cash registers?”

  “They’re all in the back room.”

  Into the phone, Medrick said, “Four cash registers, Frank, all in the back room.”

  “Maybe thirty barstools.”

  “Maybe thirty barstools.”

  “Already,” Dortmunder said, “they took out a lot of French champagne and Russian vodka for a wedding.”

  Medrick, phone pressed to the side of his head, turned that head to give Dortmunder an outraged look: “A wedding? Now I’m paying for a wedding?”

  “Looks like.”

  Into the phone, Medrick said, “Thank you, Frank, I’m glad you asked me. So I’ll tell you what I want from you. Remember the phony doctor they made Raphael go to when he was on probation? Leadass, that’s right, the psychiaquack, Oh, Ledvass, I beg your pardon, Ledvass the distinguished nut doctor. Call him, Frank, call him now, you’ll get an answering service, tell them it’s an emergency, when Leadass calls back you — I know, Frank — you tell him the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is delusions of grandeur, it’s making him buy things he’s got no use for, and for his own protection you want Leadass should commit Raphael today, so when I get off this plane —”

  “Hurray,” Dortmunder said.

  “— I can go to all the vendors been unloading this stuff on the O.J., whado they care, I can say, take it all back, you been selling to a fellow mentally deficient, here’s the commitment papers. You’ve got keys to the place, Frank, after you talk to Leadass go there — Frank, you want me to be your dependent? If the O.J. goes down, Frank, I’ve got nothing but what the government gives me, I got no choice, I’m moving in with you and Maureen.”

  Dortmunder noticed that several people in nearby seats were openly staring by now, and it seemed to him at least one of them had brought out an audio recording thing, though with the usual airplane background garble it was unlikely he’d wind up with anything he could bring into court. Anyway, the Barbara Pym lady was still deep in her book, and if Medrick didn’t care how the whole world knew his business, what skin was it off Dortmunder’s nose?

  Now Medrick was saying, “So you’re going to the O.J., you’ll look at all this stuff piled up in there, you’ll find the paperwork, receipts, vouchers, invoices, whatever, with all of that you and Leadass can get Raphael committed, and I mean today, I want him inside from now until we get this whole mess straightened out. Frank, it’s okay, don’t apologize, I understand, we’re all busy, like you say. Well, not me, in Florida we’re not what you could call busy, but I know you are, and Maureen is, and everybody on Long Island is, and I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, Frank, because it is serious, and — No, no, Frank, forget that, don’t worry about it, just save me the O.J., and that’s where I’m going just as soon as I get off this plane —”

  “Hurray.”

  “— and I’m bringing with me this back–room crook that —”

  “Hey.”

  “— told me about it, he’s the one rescued the O.J., if in fact
we’re getting it in time, we owe him a debt of gratitude, I’ll see you at the O.J. before one.”

  With a certain savage satisfaction, Medrick slammed the phone back into its cave. Ignoring the cry of pain from the seat in front, he said, “Oh–kay.”

  “Beverage?” asked the stew.

  “Yes,” said Dortmunder.

  “I will have a frosty beer,” Medrick said.

  “Me, too,” said Dortmunder.

  “A Bloody Mary for me,” said the Barbara Pym lady. Smiling sweetly at Dortmunder and Medrick, she said, “It’s called a bust–out joint, and I hope you pin those cocksuckers good.”

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  Big JosÉ and Little José, as the most recent security hires at the Imperiatum apartment house at Fifth Avenue and Sixty–eighth Street, got all the drudgery. They were the ones who had to carry Mrs. Windbom’s groceries from the lobby to her apartment, since she was afraid the supermarket’s delivery boys would rape her. It was they who periodically checked the anti–pigeon electric tapes on the roof, and who carried to its separate disposal bin the hazmat materials from the two doctors’ offices with their own street–level building entrances around on the Sixty–eighth street side, and who walked the two stairways once a week in search of blown lightbulbs or other anomalies. And twice a month they did a security sweep of Penthouse A.

  Monday, August 16, ten A.M. Big José wrote P–A sweep in the security office logbook, and he and Little José rode the elevator to the top. The uniformed elevator operator this trip was a surly Serb named Marko, who saved his smiles and chitchat for the tenants, so on the way up, the two Josés continued in Spanish their lies about their sexual conquests over the weekend, ignoring Marko, who just as thoroughly but more silently ignored them right back.

  Penthouse A was empty yet full, vacant yet occupied. The owner was some rich guy named Fareweather who was out of the country somewhere, and had been out of the country for so long that neither of the Josés had yet been hired for this job the last time Fareweather had been in residence. Imagine, a guy so rich he can own a huge penthouse on top of a big, rich building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and not even live in it. Not even sublet. Not even have a cousin in to house–sit.

  Since on the top floor of the building this elevator only served Penthouse A, it opened not into a public hall but into a small reception room with white marble floor, Empire chairs, twisty–legged little occasional tables, and four Picassos on the walls. Pocket doors, always kept open by the Josés, led to the main living room beyond — a huge space with big, bright windows straight ahead and to the right, to give views of Manhattan and the park as though you were in a low–flying plane.

  From the Persian carpets through the plushly antique furniture and the marble statues on pedestals and the old masters in massive dark frames all the way to the elaborate plaster moldings on the ceiling, this living room screamed money and luxury and comfort. Big José had been known, at slow moments, to come up and nap on that eight–foot–long golden sofa; Little José would beep him if a problem came up.

  Anyway, the security sweep was not the time to stretch out on any sofas. For the next two hours, as they did twice every month, they went through a standard routine. They checked to be sure that the refrigerator, empty but running, was still doing its job, with trays of ice cubes waiting in the freezer. They flushed the toilets and ran water in the sinks in all four bathrooms, they made sure all the windows were still firmly shut and locked, they verified that the two alarm systems — a simple electric eye for the entrance from the elevator, a more complicated motion sensor in the long corridor down the apartment’s north side, with its doors opening onto the south–facing bedrooms — were both working properly, and they saw to it that the two fireplaces, in living room and master bedroom, had not let in any dirt or rodents and that the flues were still properly shut. Also, they checked that the answering machine was still functioning, responding to any callers but also letting those callers know that no messages would be taken.

  There were two bars in the apartment, one off the living room and the other at the far end of the place, next to a kitchen big enough for a hotel, with the equipment to match. There was hard liquor in both bars, though no wine or mixers. The Josés knew better than to tap into that supply, and in fact they weren’t even tempted. This job was too good and too easy and too low–stress to risk.

  Steadily they made their way through the apartment, which they figured they must know by now better than the actual owner did. The master bedroom was full of the missing master’s clothes: a dozen expensive suits ranging from dark blue to light gray, drawers of shirts and sweaters, racks of neckties. Trying on some of the nicer pieces, they came to the conclusion that Fareweather was shorter than Big José, taller than Little José, and fatter than either of them. Also, there was not much by way of casual wear. If the guy played golf, either he did it in a suit or he’d carried his golf stuff with him when he left.

  The other bedrooms were obviously all for guests, not live–ins, though the owner did treat those guests very well, if he’d ever had any. Wrapped toothbrushes in the bathrooms, white terry–cloth robes and backless slippers in the closets. All of the beds were kept made, with an extra–large sheet over each to catch dust; the cleaning crew that came in twice a month must change those from time to time.

  At the very rear of the vast apartment, past the kitchen and next to the small but completely equipped bar back there, was another entrance, never used. Or at least never used when Fareweather wasn’t around. This was an ordinary door that looked like a closet door, except that it had a small rectangular window in it at eye level, at Big José’s eye level, that is. He’d shone his flashlight in there one time and had seen a small, dark squarish space with what looked like grimy metal walls, and thick black cables hanging down in the middle. It had taken him a minute to figure out that he was looking at an elevator shaft. At the top of the shaft, that is — angling the flashlight beam upward, he could just see the bottom of the big metal wheel up there with the cable wrapping around it.

  So this was some private entrance of Fareweather’s, not used by anybody else. What was clearly the button to summon the elevator was mounted discreetly in the wall near the doorknob, but when Big José experimentally gave it a push, nothing happened, so it must be shut off while the boss was gone. But he would use it, all right. That’s why there were an extra two alarm keypads next to that button, matching the keypads beside the elevator up front.

  The Josés had no idea where the elevator went, but occasionally would make up salacious stories about it anyway. Even though they had not yet seen doors to that elevator in any of the other apartments they’d entered in the course of their duty, which was nearly half of them by now, they liked to tell each other that Fareweather used to sneak down in his private elevator to 4–C, where that hot television news–woman lived with her rich fashion designer husband that anybody could see with half an eye wasn’t straight.

  Or maybe there was a Batcave in the basement, and back in the old days off he’d go, late at night, to fight crime. But if so, where were his capes? You don’t take your capes along on vacation.

  Anyway, among the grunge duties the Josés were handed on account of being the newbies around here, the twice–monthly sweep of Penthouse A was certainly the easiest. Finished again today, they buzzed for the regular elevator, and both of them hoped the bad–tempered Marko would be on his break by now, replaced by Teresa, fat and too black, but at least with a sense of humor. You could kid around with her.

  Thinking about what they might say if it did turn out to be Teresa running the elevator, trying to remember some good dirty jokes they might have heard recently, they looked back through the open pocket doors at what had to be one of the premier living rooms in all of New York City. And to think that man stayed away from it for years at a time. Good. Let him stay away forever. Big José and Little José — they lived here now, as much as anybody. And no reason to ch
ange.

  The elevator door opened, and they turned away from the view of their living room. “Hey, Teresa! Listen, you hear about the Russian lady and the dog?”

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  Howie Carbine, CAPO of southeast Morris County, New Jersey, part–owner of several restaurant chains — Grandmamama’s Fish ‘n’ Fillet, six outlets, New Jersey; Salty Pete’s Sea–tacular, four outlets, Staten Island; Leaning Tower of Pizza and Pasta, seven outlets, Queens and Brooklyn; many more — sat at his kitchen island in his very nice if slightly gaudy McMansion, dressed in bathrobe and slippers and peach jockey shorts, and scoffed down some Cap’n Crunch with half–and–half. He looked over to watch as down the stairs from all the bedrooms above came Mikey, fourth of his five sons and, if truth be told, not the brightest apple on the tree. “So,” said the father, “how’d it go last night?”

  “It didn’t,” muttered Mikey. He’d been born sullen, he would die sullen, and he was doing a whole lot of sullen in between.