Transgressions Vol. 3: Merely Hate/Walking the Line/Walking Around Money

by Ed McBain

  “Well,” May said, “there isn’t any fish downstream in the city.”

  “Oh, yes, there is,” Dortmunder said. “I just hope I’m not one of them.”

  8

  As Querk walked toward Cousin Claude’s van, he thought what a pity it was he couldn’t phone now, give this progress report. But it was after five, so Seven Leagues was closed, and he couldn’t call her at home, even if she’d got home so soon. Well, he’d see her in the morning, when he drove up to Sycamore, so he’d tell her then.

  And what he’d tell her was that it was all coming together. Yes, it was. The two guys he’d wound up with were sharp enough to do the job without lousing anything up, but not so sharp as to be trouble later. He had a good feeling about them.

  Walking along, he kept his hands in his pockets, even though it was a very hot August afternoon, because otherwise they’d shake like buckskin fringe at the ends of his arms. Well, when this was over, when at last they’d be safe—and rich—he wouldn’t tremble at all. Hold a glass of wine, not a single wave in it.

  Traveling from Dortmunder’s place on East 19th Street to where he’d parked the van in the West Village seemed to just naturally lead Querk along West 14th Street, the closest thing Manhattan has to a casbah. Open-fronted stores with huge signs, selling stuff you never knew you wanted, but cheap. Gnomish customers draped with gnomish children and lugging shopping bags half their size roamed the broad littered sidewalk and oozed in and out of the storefronts, adding more and more things to their bags.

  What got to Querk in this spectacle, though, was the guard on duty in front of every one of those stores. Not in a uniform or anything, usually in just jeans and a T-shirt, bulky stern-looking guys positioned halfway between the storefront and curb, some of them sitting on top of a low ladder, some of them just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, but all of them doing nothing but glaring into their store. Usually, they had their arms folded, to emphasize their muscles, and a beetle-browed angry look on their faces to emphasize their willingness to dismember shoplifters.

  Walking this gauntlet, Querk was sorry his hands were in his pockets, because those guys could see that as a provocation, particularly in this August heat, but he figured, if they saw him trembling all over instead that would not be an improvement in his image.

  Finally, he got off 14th Street and plodded on down to 12th, which was much more comforting to walk along, being mostly old nineteenth-century townhouses wellmaintained, intermixed with more recent bigger apartment buildings that weren’t as offensive as they might be. The pedestrians here were less frightening, too, being mostly people either from the townhouses or who had things to do with the New School for Social Research, and therefore less likely to be homicidal maniacs than the people on 14th Street or up in Midtown.

  When Greenwich Village becomes the West Village, the numbered grid of streets common to Manhattan acts all at once as though it’s been smoking dope, at the very least. Names start mingling with the numbers—Jane, Perry, Horatio, who are these people?—and the numbers themselves turn a little weird. You don’t, for instance, expect West 4th Street to cross West 10th Street, but it does … on its way to cross West 11th Street.

  Cousin Claude’s van was parked a little beyond that example of street-design as funhouse mirror, on something called Greenwich Street, lined with low dark apartment buildings and low dark warehouses, some of those being converted into low dark apartment buildings. The van was still there—it always surprised him, in New York City, when something was still there after he’d left it—and Querk unlocked his way in.

  This was a dirty white Ford Econoline van that Claude used mostly for fishing trips or other excursions, so behind the bucket front seats he had installed a bunk bed and a small metal cabinet with drawers that was bolted to the side wall. Querk could plug his electric razor into the cigarette lighter, and could wash and brush teeth and do other things in restaurant bathrooms.

  It was too early for dinner now, not yet six, so he settled himself behind the wheel, looked at the books and magazines lying on the passenger seat, and tried to decide what he wanted to read next. But then, all at once, he thought: Why wait? I’m done here. I don’t have to wait here all night and drive up there in the morning. It’s still daylight, I’m home before eight o’clock.

  Home.

  Janet.

  Key in ignition. Seatbelt on. Querk drove north to West 11th Street, seeming none the worse for wear after its encounter with West 4th Street, turned left, turned right on the West Side Highway, and joined rush hour north. Didn’t even mind that it was rush hour; just to be going home.

  After a while he passed the big Fairway billboard on top of the Fairway supermarket. Those two guys sure know the city, don’t they?

  Well, Querk knew Sycamore.

  9

  In the end, Kelp decided to leave the medical profession alone this morning and rent a car for the trip upstate, which would mean fewer nervous looks in the rearview mirror for a hundred miles up and a hundred miles back. Less eyestrain, even though this decision meant he would have to go promote a credit card, which in turn meant a visit to Arnie Albright, a fence, which was the least of the things wrong with him.

  Kelp truly didn’t want to have to visit with Arnie Albright, but when he dropped by at John’s apartment at eight-thirty in the morning, just in time to wish May bon voyage on her journey to Safeway, to suggest that John might be the one to go promote the credit card, John turned mulish. “I’ve done my time with Arnie Albright,” he said. “Step right up to the plate.”

  Kelp sighed. He knew, when John turned mulish, there was no arguing with him. Still, “You could wait out front,” he suggested.

  “He could look out the window and see me.”

  “His apartment’s at the back.”

  “He could sense me. You gonna use O’Malley’s?”

  “Sure,” Kelp said. O’Malley’s was a single-location car rental agency that operated out of a parking garage way down on the Bowery near the Manhattan Bridge. Most of the clientele were Asians, so O’Malley mostly had compact cars, but more important, O’Malley did not have a world-wide interconnected web of computers that could pick up every little nitpick in a customer’s credit card and driver’s license, so whenever Kelp decided to go elsewhere than doctors for his wheels it was O’Malley got the business.

  “I’ll meet you at O’Malley’s,” John demanded, “at nine-thirty.”

  So that was that. Kelp walked a bit and took a subway a bit and walked a bit and pretty soon there he was on 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, entering the tiny vestibule of Arnie’s building. He pushed the button next to Albright, waited a pretty long time, and suddenly the intercom snarled, “Who the hell is that?”

  “Well, Andy Kelp,” Kelp said, wishing it weren’t so.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  He wants me to tell him here? Leaning confidentially closer to the intercom—he’d been leaning fastidiously away from it before this—Kelp said, “Well, I wanna come upstairs and tell you there, Arnie.”

  Rather than argue any more, Arnie made the awful squawk happen that let Kelp push the door open and go inside to a narrow hall that smelled of cooking from some ethnicity that made you look around for shrunken heads. Seeing none, Kelp went up the long flight of stairs to where the unlovely Arnie stood at his open door, glaring out. A grizzled gnarly guy with a tree-root nose, he had chosen to welcome summer in a pair of stained British Army shorts, very wide, a much-too-big bilious green polo shirt, and black sandals that permitted views of toes like rotting tree stumps; not a wise decision.

  “It’s buy or sell,” this gargoyle snarled as Kelp neared the top of the stairs, “buy or sell, that’s the only reason anybody comes to see Arnie Albright. It’s not my lovable personality is gonna bring anybody here.”

  “Well, people know you’re busy,” Kelp said, and went past Arnie into the apartment.

  “Busy?” Arnie snarled, and
slammed the door. “Do I look busy? I look like somebody where the undertaker said, ‘Don’t do the open coffin, it would be a mistake,’ and the family went ahead anyway, and now they’re sorry. That’s what I look like.”

  “Not that bad, Arnie,” Kelp assured him, looking around at the apartment as a relief from looking at Arnie, who, in truth, would look much better with the lid down.

  The apartment was strange in its own way. Small underfurnished rooms with big dirty viewless windows, it was decorated mostly with samples from Arnie’s calendar collection, Januarys down the ages, girls with their skirts blowing, Boy Scouts saluting, antique cars, your ever-popular kittens in baskets with balls of wool. Among the Januarys starting on every possible day of the week, there were what Arnie called his “incompletes,” calendars hailing June or September.

  Following Kelp into the living room, Arnie snarled, “I see John Dortmunder isn’t with you. Even he can’t stand to be around me anymore. Wha’d you do, toss a coin, the loser comes to see Arnie?”

  “He wouldn’t toss,” Kelp said. “Arnie, the last time I saw you, you were taking some medicine to make you pleasant.”

  “Yeah, I was still obnoxious, but I wasn’t angry about it anymore.”

  “You’re not taking it?”

  “You noticed,” Arnie said. “No, it made me give money away.”

  Kelp said, “What?”

  “I couldn’t believe it myself, I thought I had holes in my pockets, the super was coming in to lift cash—not that he could find the upstairs in this place, the useless putz—but it turned out, my new pleasant personality, learning to live with my inner scumbag, every time I’d smile at somebody, like out in the street, and they’d smile back, I’d give them money.”

  “That’s terrible,” Kelp said.

  “You know it is,” Arnie said. “I’d rather be frowning and obnoxious and have money than smiling and obnoxious and throwing it away. I suppose you’re sorry you didn’t get some of it.”

  “That’s okay, Arnie,” Kelp said, “I already got a way to make a living. Which by the way—”

  “Get it over with, I know,” Arnie said. “You want outa here, and so do I. You think I enjoy being in here with me? Okay, I know, tell me, we’ll get it over with, I won’t say a word.”

  “I need a credit card,” Kelp said.

  Arnie nodded. As an aid to thought, he sucked at his teeth. Kelp looked at Januarys.

  Arnie said, “How long must this card live?”

  “Two days.”

  “That’s easy,” Arnie said. “That won’t even cost you much. Lemme try to match you with a signature. Siddown.”

  Kelp sat at a table with incompletes shellacked on the top—aircraft carrier with airplanes flying, two bears and a honeypot—while Arnie went away to rummage and shuffle in some other room, soon returning with three credit cards, a ballpoint pen, and an empty tissue box.

  “Hold on,” he said, and ripped the tissue box open so Kelp could write on its inside. “I’ll incinerate it later.”

  Kelp looked at his choice of cards. “Howard Joostine looks pretty good.”

  “Give it a whack.”

  Kelp wrote Howard Joostine four times on the tissue box, then compared them with the one on the credit card. “Good enough for O’Malley,” he said.

  10

  Dortmunder’s only objection to the car was the legroom, but that was objection enough. “This is a sub-compact,” he complained.

  “Well, no,” Kelp told him. “With the sub-compact, you gotta straddle the engine block.”

  They were not the only people fleeing the city northbound on this bright hot morning in August, but it is true that most of the other people around them, even the Asians, were in cars with more legroom. (O’Malley’s bent toward Oriental customers was because his operation was on the fringe of Chinatown. However, he was also on the fringe of Little Italy, but did he offer bulletproof limos? No.)

  In almost every state in the Union, the state capital is not in the largest city, and the reason for that is, the states were all founded by farmers, not businessmen or academics, and farmers don’t trust cities. In Maryland, for instance, the city is Baltimore and the capital is Annapolis. In California, the city is Los Angeles and the capital is Sacramento. And in New York, the capital is Albany, a hundred fifty miles up the Hudson.

  When the twentieth century introduced the automobile, and then the paved road, and then the highway, the first highway in every state was built for the state legislators; it connected the capital with the largest city, and let the rest of the state go fend for itself. In New York State, that road is called the Taconic Parkway, and it’s still underutilized, nearly a century later. That’s planning.

  But it also made for a pleasant drive. Let others swelter in bumper-to-bumper traffic on purpose-built roads, the Taconic was a joy, almost as empty as a road in a car commercial. The farther north of the city you drove, the fewer cars you drove among (and no trucks!), while the more beautiful became the mountain scenery through which this empty road swooped and soared. It was almost enough to make you believe there was an upside to the internal combustion engine.

  After a while, the congeniality of the road and the landscape soothed Dortmunder’s put-upon feelings about legroom. He figured out a way to disport his legs that did not lead immediately to cramps, his upper body settled comfortably into the curve of the seat, and he spent his time, more fruitfully than fretting about legroom, thinking about what could go wrong.

  An emergency in town while they were in possession of the generator truck, that could go wrong. The woman travel agent who was running Querk, and whose bona fides and motives were unknown, she could go wrong. (Harry Matlock’s instincts had been right, when he’d said he could recommend Querk as a follower but not as a leader. He was still a follower. The question was, who vouched for the leader?)

  Other things that could go wrong. Rodrigo, for one. No, Rodrigo for four or five. Described as mostly a hustler down on his home turf, he could run foul of the law himself at just the wrong moment, and have neither the cash nor the leisure to take delivery on the print job. Or, as unknown as the travel agent, he could be planning a double-cross from the get-go. Or, he could be reasonably trustworthy himself, but unaware of untrustworthy friends waiting just out of sight. Or, he could get one of those South American illnesses that people get when they leave the five boroughs, and die.

  All in all, it was a pleasant drive.

  Querk’s instructions had said to exit the Taconic at Darby Corners and turn east and then north, following the signs past Darbyville, where Querk lived temporarily with his cousin, and on to Sycamore, where the Sycamore Creek Printery stood in woodland disguise beside Sycamore Creek.

  They approached Sycamore from the south, while the creek approached the town from the north, so for the last few miles they were aware of the stream in the woods and fields off to their right, spritzing in the sun as it rushed and tumbled the other way.

  There were farmhouses all along the route here, some of them still connected to farms, and there were fields of ripe corn and orchards of almost-ripe apples. The collapse of the local dairy farming industry due to the tender loving care of the state politicians meant several of the farms they passed were growing things that would have left the original settlers scratching their heads: Ilamas, goats, anemones, ostriches, Christmas trees, Icelandic horses, long-horn cattle.

  The town was commercial right from the city line: lumberyard on the left, tractor dealership on the right. Far ahead was the only traffic light. As they drove toward it, private housing was mixed with shops on the left, but after the tractor man it was all forested on the right almost all the way to the intersection, where an Italian restaurant on that side signaled the return of civilization.

  “That’ll be it in there,” Kelp said, taking a hand off the steering wheel to point at the dubious woodland.

  “Right.”

  “And all evergreens, so people don’t have to look at it
in winter, either.”

  “Very tasteful,” Dortmunder agreed.

  It wasn’t quite eleven-thirty. The traffic light was with them, so Kelp drove through the intersection, and just a little farther, on the right, they passed Sycamore House, where they would eat lunch. It was a very old building, two stories high, the upper story extending out over and sagging down toward an open front porch. The windows were decorated with neon beer logos.

  A little beyond Sycamore House a storefront window proclaimed SEVEN LEAGUES TRAVEL. This time, Kelp only pointed his nose: “And there she is.”

  “Got it.”

  Kelp drove to the northern end of town—cemetery on left, church on right, “Go and Sin No More” the suggestion on the announcement board out front—where he made a U-turn through the church’s empty parking lot and headed south again. “We’ll see what we see from the bridge,” he said.

  Here came the traffic light, this time red. Moderate traffic poked along, locals and summer folk. Kelp turned left when he could, and now the pocket forest was on their right, and the creek up ahead. Just before the creek, where the bosk ended, a two-lane road ran off to the right, between the evergreens and creek, marked at the entrance by a large black-on-white sign:

  PRIVATE

  SYCAMORE CREEK PRINTERY

  NO TRESPASSING

  Right after that, there was what seemed to be a lake on their left, and a steep drop to a stream on their right, so the road must be the dam. Dortmunder craned around, banging his legs into car parts, trying to see something other than pine trees along the streamside back there, and just caught a glimpse of something or other where the private road turned in. “Pretty hid,” he said.

  There were no intersections on the far side of the creek, and in fact no more town over here. All the development was behind them, along the west side of the creek. On this side the land climbed steeply through a more diversified woods, the road twisting back and forth, and when they finally did come to a turnoff, seven miles later, it was beyond the crest, and the turnoff was to a parking area where you could enjoy the view of the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, farther east.