What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well, she doesn’t put everything in her datebook, you—”

  Klematsky, surprised, said, “She doesn’t? You mean there’s even more stuff she does than what’s in there?”

  “I have no idea,” Max said, getting stuffy with the fellow, wondering if he dared just stand up and walk out on him, yet still curious as to what all this was about. “I don’t make a habit,” he said, “of studying my wife’s datebook.”

  “I have it here, you wanna see it?”

  “No, thank you. And, to answer your question, I think the decision to go out there was quite spur of the moment.”

  “It must have been,” Klematsky said. “Thursday night you had dinner with people named Lumley and some other people at the Lumleys’ apartment uptown.”

  “You are thorough,” Max said, not pleased.

  Klematsky’s smile was thin. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”

  “You’re going to say,” Max suggested, “that Lutetia didn’t mention to anyone at the dinner party that we were going out to Carrport later that night.”

  “Well, no,” Klematsky said. “I was going to say your wife told Mrs. Lumley she felt overtired, felt she’d been doing too much, and was looking forward to a good night’s sleep that night here in her own apartment.”

  Max opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again and said, “We made the decision in the car, coming downtown.”

  “I see. That’s when you talked to her about it.”

  “We talked about it.”

  “Who brought the subject up?”

  “Well, I suppose I did,” Max said.

  Klematsky nodded. He turned to another page in his damn notebook. He read, nodded, frowned at Max, said, “Wasn’t there a little something else about the house at Carrport recently?”

  “Something else? What do you mean?”

  “Wasn’t there a robbery there?”

  “Oh! Yes, of course, in all this I’d completely forgotten—”

  “Funny how memory works,” Klematsky said. “You were out there during the robbery, weren’t you?”

  “Well, no,” Max said. “Just before. He broke in again after I left. The police caught him once, when I was there, but then he escaped from the police and went back to the house, after I’d left.”

  “You mean the two of you were in the house—”

  Good God, he even knows about Miss September. “Yes, yes, all right, the two of us were there, for perfectly innocent reasons—”

  Klematsky stared at him. “You and the burglar were there for perfectly innocent reasons?”

  Max stared, lost. “What?”

  Klematsky spread his hands, as though all this were obvious. “The two of you were there, we agreed on that.”

  “Not me and the—Not me and the burglar ! I thought you were talking about—Well, I thought you meant someone else.”

  “And the police,” Klematsky went on, as though Max hadn’t spoken at all, “came in because the house was supposed to be empty and they saw it was occupied, and—”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Max said. “I called the police. I captured the burglar, I held a gun on him, and I called the police. Check their records.”

  “Well, I did,” Klematsky said, “and they’re very confusing. These small-town cops, you know. First there’s a report that the police found a burglar and nobody else there. Then there’s an amended report that the police found the burglar and two other people there, you and somebody else. And after that, there’s another amended report that the police found the burglar and one other person there, meaning you. And there’s also a 911 call, originally said to be by you, and then said to be by somebody else.”

  Now Max had truly had enough. Much of this was embarrassing, some of it was less than forthcoming, but none of it had anything to do with what had happened in this apartment right here on Thursday night. “Detective,” he said, putting on his stern manner, the manner that usually preceded somebody being fired, “I applaud your enterprise in digging up all this irrelevant material, but that’s what it is. Irrelevant material. Somebody broke into this place Thursday night. They took well over a million dollars’ worth of property. I’m not sure yet how much they took. Why isn’t this your concern? Why do you keep going on and on about Carrport ?”

  “They’re both burglaries, aren’t they?”

  “Burglaries take place all the time! Are you saying these two are connected ? That’s absurd!”

  “Is it?”

  Suddenly a suspicion entered Max’s brain. The burglar; the ring. Could it be the same man, come back looking for his ring, following Max around? Was that, in his bumble-footed fashion, what this clown of a detective was getting at? Max said, “You think it’s the same people.”

  “I don’t think anything yet,” Klematsky said. “I see all sorts of possible scenarios.”

  He doesn’t know about the ring, Max thought, that much he can’t know about. So he doesn’t know about the burglar, and could the burglar be chasing me, chasing the ring? It seemed impossible, ridiculous. Distracted, he said, “Scenarios. What do you mean, scenarios?”

  “Well, here’s a scenario,” Klematsky said. “You’re bankrupt.”

  That again? “I’m technically—”

  “Bankrupt.”

  Max sighed. “Very well.”

  “There’s a house full of valuable possessions, that you’re not supposed to be in, and you are in, while there’s a burglary going on.”

  Is it possible the burglar could be hanging around now, somewhere nearby? A man batting too many gnats, Max said, “Before. I was there before.”

  “Before, during, after.” Klematsky shrugged. “You’re all around it. And now we come here, and at the last second you talk your wife into leaving this apartment, when she didn’t want to, and all of a sudden the coast is clear.”

  “Coast? What coast? Clear? Wait a second!”

  The absurdity of Klematsky’s suspicions, now that Max finally understood what they were, was so extreme that no wonder it hadn’t occurred to him what horsefeathers filled the Klematsky brain. His own wealth and, in this instance, comparative innocence, combined with the distraction of thoughts about the burglar, had kept him from grasping Klematsky’s implications before this. Now, astounded, horrified, amused, pointing at himself, Max said, “Do you think I committed these burglaries? Hired them done? For the insurance?”

  “I don’t think anything yet,” Klematsky said. “I’m just looking at the scenarios.”

  “You should be looking at a padded cell,” Max told him. “You think because I’m in bankruptcy court—? Do you really believe I’m poor? You—You—I could buy and sell a thousand of you!”

  “Maybe you could buy and sell a thousand,” Klematsky said, unruffled, “but they wouldn’t be me.”

  “From here on,” Max said, getting to his feet, “you may speak to me through my attorney, Walter Greenbaum. I’ll give you his phone number, and a number where you can reach me if you have anything sensible to say.”

  As calm as ever, Klematsky turned to a fresh page in his notebook. “Fire away.”

  Max gave him the numbers and said, “You’ve wasted far too much of my time, when you should have been out looking for the people who actually did this. Unless you think you have cause to stop me, I am now going back to Hilton Head.”

  “Oh, I have no reason to hold you, Mr. Fairbanks,” the unflappable Klematsky said. “Not at the moment. Is your Congress thing going to be on C-Span?”

  “Perhaps the congressmen were my partners in crime,” Max said, sneering. “Perhaps they’re the ones who did the actual breaking in.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Klematsky said.

  31

  T he first thing they couldn’t agree on was how they were going to get to Washington. Dortmunder wanted to take the train, Andy wanted to drive, and May and Anne Marie both wanted to fly. As Andy had earlier suggested, May and Anne Marie hit it off right from the start, liked each other fi
ne, and were in complete agreement about taking the plane to Washington, DC. “It’s a hop and a skip,” Anne Marie said, and May said, “See? Not even a jump. It’s over before you know it, and you’re there.”

  “Where?” Dortmunder demanded. “In some farmer’s field fifty miles away, at an airport, with taxis, and another hour before you get anywhere. I don’t wanna go to Washington by taxi. The train is door to door.”

  This conversation was taking place Saturday evening in Dortmunder and May’s apartment, and now Andy stood and went over to the living room archway to look down toward the apartment entrance and say, “Door to door? John? You got a train runs down the hall out there?”

  “Downtown to downtown,” Dortmunder said. “You know what I mean. It’s not even a hop and a skip, it’s just a hop from here over to Penn Station, take the train, you’re right there in Washington, right where you want to be.”

  “Well, no,” Anne Marie said. “Where you are is at Union Station over on Capitol Hill. The Watergate is way across town by Foggy Bottom, the other side of everything. All of the monuments, all of the official buildings, all of the tourists, everything is inbetween Union Station and the Watergate.”

  Which is where they were headed, of course. Since the Watergate was all things to all people—a hotel and an apartment building and a shopping mall and an office building, and probably also backup guitar in a garage band on weekends—it had been decided they might as well all stay right there in the hotel part while Dortmunder and Kelp visited Max Fairbanks in the apartment part. The Williams credit card that Dortmunder had used in the N-Joy surely having crashed and burned by now, he’d bought another card from Stoon the fence that had caused him to make his telephone reservation at the hotel—1-800-424-2736—in the name of Rathbone, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Rathbone. Andy and Anne Marie, while in Washington, would be the Skomorowskis.

  Anyway, “I still like the train,” Dortmunder grumbled, although this local expert’s report on the inconvenience of the Washington depot for their particular plans did have to be taken into account, and did dampen his enthusiasm a bit.

  Which Andy now tried to dampen even more, saying, “John, you don’t want the train. The train’s Amtrak, am I right?”

  “So?”

  “And Amtrak’s the government, right?”

  “And?”

  “And the government’s Republicans right now, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And Republicans don’t believe in maintenance,” Andy explained. “Cause it costs money.”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “I can’t wait for the Democrats to get back in.”

  “Wouldn’t help,” Andy said. “The Democrats don’t know how to run a business. Forget Amtrak. I’ll get us a nice car, comfortable, an easy ride, we travel at our own pace, stop when we want for a meal or whatever, first thing you know, we’re there.”

  The local expert chimed in again at that, saying, “Andy, you don’t want to drive in Washington. The traffic’s a mess, there’s no place to park—”

  “Who’s gonna park?” Andy said. “When we get there, we leave the car someplace, when we go back I’ll get another one.”

  Anne Marie frowned at him. “You’re talking about rental cars, aren’t you?”

  “Not exactly,” Andy said.

  “Oh,” Anne Marie said.

  “So we’re gonna leave tomorrow morning,” Andy said. “I’ll pick us up a really nice car, I’ll go over to First Avenue, where the hospitals are.”

  Anne Marie said, “Hospitals?”

  “The thing is,” Andy explained, “when I feel I need a car, good transportation, something very special, I look for a vehicle with MD plates. This is one place where you can trust doctors. They understand discomfort, and they understand comfort, and they got the money to back up their opinions. Trust me, when I bring you a car, it’ll be just what the doctor ordered, and I mean that exactly the way it sounds.”

  Looking dazed, Anne Marie said, “You people are going to take a little getting used to.”

  “What I do,” May told her, sympathetically, “is pretend I’m in a bus going down a hill and the steering broke. And also the brakes. So there’s nothing to do but just look at the scenery and enjoy the ride.”

  Anne Marie considered this. She said, “What happens when you get to the bottom of the hill?”

  “I don’t know,” May said. “We didn’t get there yet.”

  Andy said, “So it’s settled. Ten in the morning, in a first-rate grade-A automobile, some model good for highway touring, Anne Marie and I will come by, pick you two up, we’ll head south.”

  “And I’ll get my ring,” Dortmunder said.

  “And more towels,” May said. Smiling at Anne Marie, she said, “One nice thing about John following this man Fairbanks around is, we get a lot of very good hotel towels.”

  32

  T he Saab not only had MD plates, they were Connecticut MD plates, the very best MD plates of all. Here, said these plates, we have a doctor with a stream on his property, running water. A tennis court? You bet. Walk-in closets. Music in every room. When you traveled in this forest-green Saab with the sunroof and the readout on the dashboard that told you the temperature outside the car, you weren’t just traveling in an automobile, you were traveling in a lifestyle, and a damn good one at that.

  Andy Kelp explained all this to Anne Marie Sunday morning, as they drove across town to pick up Dortmunder and May. Anne Marie nodded and listened and learned and, following May’s advice, spent most of her time looking out the Saab’s window at the scenery.

  She was in it now, and not just in the Saab, either. In the Rubicon, maybe. She hadn’t so much crossed the Rubicon as dived straight into that turbulent stream fully dressed. Her stay at the N-Joy—enlivened toward the end by a massively intrusive but amusing police investigation—was over now, her room occupied by some other transient. Her return ticket to KC was dead; having been a special fare, it was nontransferable, and had ceased to exist when she’d missed that Saturday plane. Nobody she knew could have any idea where she was. Friends and family back in Kansas, even Howard, should Howard decide to change his mind about their marriage, none of them could find her now. On the other hand, and this was a bit unsettling to realize, there was nobody she could think of who would try really really hard to track her down.

  So maybe this wasn’t such an insane mistake, after all, sitting here in a freshly stolen mint-condition Saab. Maybe this was a good time to start over, start fresh. These might not be the most rational people in the world with whom to begin this new life, but you can’t have everything. And, for the moment at least, hanging out with these strangers was rather fun.

  Since last night, she was living in Andy’s apartment in the West Thirties, though who knew for how long. Also, she wasn’t the first woman who’d ever lived there, as various evidences had made clear. When she’d asked him about those previous occupants he’d looked vague and said, “Well, some of them were wives,” which wasn’t an answer that would tend to prolong the conversation.

  Play it as it comes, she thought. Don’t worry about it. Watch the scenery.

  “Be right down,” Andy said, when he’d double-parked in front of the building where Dortmunder and May lived.

  “Right,” Anne Marie said.

  The scenery wasn’t moving at the moment, but she went on watching it, the scenery here being mostly sloppily dressed people in a hurry, a lot of battered and dirty parked cars, and grimy stone or brick buildings put up a hundred years ago.

  Am I going to like New York? she asked herself. Am I even going to stay in New York? Am I actually going to become involved in a crime, and probably get caught, and wind up on Court TV? What would I wear on Court TV? None of the stuff I brought with me.

  That was a strange thought. Most of her clothing, most of her possessions, were still at home at 127 Sycamore Street, Lancaster, Kansas, a modest two-story postwar wooden clapboard home on its own modest lot, with detached one-ca
r garage and weedy lawns front and back and not much by way of plantings. Anne Marie and Howard had bought the house four years ago—another of their flailing attempts to unify the marriage—with a minimum down payment and a balloon mortgage, which meant that at this point the house belonged about 97 percent to the bank, and as far as Anne Marie was concerned the bank was welcome to it. And everything in it, too, especially the VCR that never did work right. All except the dark-blue dress with the white collar; it would be nice if the bank were to send her that. It would be perfect for Court TV.

  Two hundred fifty miles between New York City and Washington, DC, give or take a wide curve or two. Through the Holland Tunnel and then New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey Del Maryland Maryland Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Maryland lunch Maryland outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington, and now it was up to Anne Marie to be the harbor pilot who would steer them to their berth.

  They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were still there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.

  “Suitland?” May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, “There’s a place next to Washington called Suitland?”

  “Oh, sure,” Anne Marie said. “That’s very close in, over near District Heights.”