Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  “Jeez, that’s tough,” Kelp said.

  “You know it.” Querk shook his head. “And all along,” he said, “I’ve got a caper right there, right at the printing plant, staring me in the face, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to know about it, I gotta act like I’m deaf and dumb and blind.”

  Dortmunder couldn’t help himself; he said, “At the printing plant?”

  “Oh, sure, I know,” Querk said. “Your inside job, I’m first in line to get my old cell back. But that isn’t the way it works.” Querk seemed very earnest about this. “The only way this scheme works,” he said, “is if the plant never knows it happened. If they find out, we don’t make a thing.”

  Dortmunder said, “It’s a heist.”

  “A quiet heist,” Querk told him. “No hostages, no explosions, no standoffs. In, out, nobody ever knows it happened. Believe me, the only way this scores for us is if nobody ever knows anything went missing.”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “You oughta try cough drops,” Querk suggested. “But the point here is, this is a beautiful job, and I’m sick of getting no sleep, so maybe I’ll leave reform alone for a while. But.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said, because there was always a “but.”

  “I can’t do it alone,” Querk told them. “This is not a one-man job. So I was on the inside for six and a half years, and I’m both reformed and upstate for almost eighteen months, so I’m well and truly out of the picture. I try calling around, everybody’s inside or dead or disappeared, and finally I reach Harry Matlock, that I knew years ago, when he first partnered up with Ralph Demrovsky, and now Harry’s retired.”

  “I thought he maybe was,” Dortmunder said.

  Querk nodded. “He told me,” he said, “he’s not reformed, he’s retired. It’s a different thing. ‘I didn’t reform,’ he told me, ‘I just lost my nerve. So I retired.’”

  “Pretty much the same thing,” Kelp suggested.

  “But with more dignity,” Querk told him. “So he gave me your name, Andy Kelp, and now here we are, and we look each other over.”

  “Right,” Kelp said. “So what next?”

  “Well,” Querk said, “I check you guys out, and if you seem—”

  Dortmunder said, “What? You check us out?” He’d thought the interview was supposed to go in the other direction.

  “Naturally,” Querk said. “I don’t want us goin’ along and goin’ along, everything’s fine, and all of a sudden you yell surprise and pull out a badge.”

  “That would surprise the hell out of me,” Dortmunder told him.

  “We’re strangers to each other,” Querk pointed out. “I gave Kelp a few names, he could check on me, and he gave me a few names, I could check on him and you both—”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “So after we all meet here now,” Querk said, “and we check each other out, and we think it’s gonna be okay, I’ll call Andy here, same as this time, and if you two are satisfied, we can make another meet.”

  Dortmunder said, “You didn’t tell us what the heist is.”

  “That’s right,” Querk said. Looking around, he said, “Okay with you guys if I go first? You’ll wanna talk about me behind my back anyway.”

  “Sure,” Kelp agreed. “Nice to meet you, Kirby,” because, Querk had said, that was his first name.

  “You, too,” Querk said, and nodded at Dortmunder. “I like the way you keep your own counsel.”

  “Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

  2

  If you walk far enough into the west side, even in August, you can find a bar without tourists, ferns, or menus, and where the lights won’t offend your eyes. In such a place, a little later that afternoon, Dortmunder and Kelp hunched over beers in a black Formica booth and muttered together, while the bartender behind his bar some distance away leaned his elbows on the Daily News, and the three other customers, here and there around the place, muttered to themselves in lieu of company.

  “I’m not sure what I think about this guy,” Dortmunder muttered.

  “He seems okay.” Kelp shrugged. “I mean, I could buy his story. Reforming and all.”

  “But he’s pretty cagy,” Dortmunder muttered.

  “Well, sure. He don’t know us.”

  “He doesn’t tell us the caper.”

  “That’s sensible, John.”

  “He’s living upstate.” Dortmunder spread his hands. “Where upstate? Where’s this printing plant? All he says is he goes to some place called Hudson to see his parole officer.”

  Kelp nodded, being open-minded. “Look at it from his point of view,” he muttered. “If things don’t work out between him and us, and he’s gonna go ahead with some other guys, why does he wanna have to worry we’re somewhere in the background, lookin to cut in?”

  “I mean, what kind of heist is this?” Dortmunder complained. “You steal something from this plant, and the plant isn’t supposed to notice? ‘Hey, didn’t we use to have a whatchacallit over here?’ You take something, especially you take something with some value on it, people notice.”

  “Well, that’s an intriguing part of it,” Kelp muttered.

  “Intriguing.”

  “Also,” Kelp muttered, leaning closer, “August is a good time to get out of town. Go upstate, up into the mountains, a little cool air, how bad could it be?”

  “I’ve been upstate,” Dortmunder reminded him. “I know how bad it could be.”

  “Not that bad, John. And you were up there in the winter.”

  “And the fall,” Dortmunder muttered. “Two different times.”

  “They both worked out okay.”

  “Okay? Every time I leave the five boroughs,” Dortmunder insisted, “I regret it.”

  “Still,” Kelp muttered, “we shouldn’t just say no to this, without giving it a chance.”

  Dortmunder made an irritable shrug. He’d had his say.

  “I don’t know about your finances, John,” Kelp went on (although he did), “but mine are pretty shaky. A nice little upstate heist might be just the ticket.”

  Dortmunder frowned at his beer.

  “I tell you what we should do,” Kelp said. “We should find old Harry Matlock, get the skinny on this guy Querk, then make up our minds. Whadaya say?”

  “Mutter,” Dortmunder muttered.

  3

  Where do you find a retired guy, sometime in August? Try a golf course; a municipal golf course.

  “There he is, over there,” Kelp said, pointing. “Tossing the ball out of that sand trap.”

  Dortmunder said, “Is that in the rules?”

  “Well, remember,” Kelp said. “He’s retired, not reformed.”

  This particular municipal golf course was in Brooklyn, not far enough from the Atlantic to keep you from smelling what the ocean offers for sea air these days. Duffers speckled the greensward as Dortmunder and Kelp strolled over the fairway toward where Harry Matlock, who was fatter than he used to be and who’d always been thought of by everybody who knew him as fat, was struggling out of the sand trap, looking as though he needed an assistant to toss him up onto the grass. He was also probably as bald as ever, but you couldn’t tell because he was wearing a big pillowy maroon tam-o’-shanter with a woolly black ball on top and a little paisley spitcurl coming out the back. The rest of his garb was a pale blue polo shirt under an open white cashmere cardigan, red plaid pants very wide in the seat and leg, and bright toad-green golf shoes with little cleats like chipmunk teeth. This was a man in retirement.

  “Hey, Harry!” Kelp shouted, and a guy off to his left sliced his shot then glared at Kelp, who didn’t notice.

  Harry looked over, recognized them, and waved with a big smile, but didn’t shout. When they got closer, he said, “Hi, Andy, hi, John, you’re here about Kirby Querk.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said.

  Harry waved his golf club in a direction, saying, “Walk with me, my foursome’s up there somewhere, we can talk.” Then, pa
using to kick his golf ball toward the far-distant flag, he picked up his big bulky leather golf bag by its strap, and started to stroll, dragging the pretty full golf bag behind him, leaving a crease in the fairway.

  As they walked, Dortmunder said, “These your own rules?”

  “When only God can see you, John,” Harry told him, “there are no rules. And when it comes to Querk, I wouldn’t say I know what the rules are.”

  Sounding alarmed, Kelp said, “You mean, you wouldn’t recommend him? But you sent him to me.”

  “No, that’s not exactly what I—Hold on.” Harry kicked the ball again, then said, “Andy, would you do me a favor? Drag this bag around for a while? This arm’s gettin longer than that arm.”

  Kelp said, “I think you’re supposed to carry it on your shoulder.”

  “I tried that,” Harry said, “and it winds up, one shoulder lower than the other.” He extended the strap toward Kelp, with a little pleading gesture. “Just till we get to the green,” he said.

  Kelp had not known his visit to the golf course today would end with his being a caddy, but he shrugged and said, “Okay. Till the green.”

  “Thanks, Andy.”

  Kelp hefted the bag up onto his shoulder, and he looked like a caddy. All he needed was the big-billed cloth cap and the tee stuck behind his ear. He did have the right put-upon expression.

  Harry ambled on, in the direction he’d kicked the ball, and said, “About Querk, I don’t know anything bad about the guy, it’s only I don’t know that much good about him either.”

  Dortmunder said, “You worked with him?”

  “A few times. Me and Ralph—He didn’t retire when I did.” Harry Matlock and Ralph Demrovsky had been a burglary team so quick and so greedy they used to travel in a van, just in case they came across anything large.

  Kelp said, “Ralph’s still working?”

  “No, he’s in Sing Sing,” Harry said. “He should of retired when I did. Hold on.” He stopped, just behind his ball, and squinted toward the green, where three guys dressed from the same grab bag stood around waiting, all of them looking this way.

  “I think I gotta hit it now,” Harry said. “Stand back a ways, I’m still kinda wild at this.”

  They stood well back, and Harry addressed the ball. Then he addressed the ball some more. When he’d addressed the ball long enough for an entire post office, he took a whack at it and it went somewhere. Not toward the flag down there, exactly, but at least not behind them.

  “Well, the point of it is the walk,” Harry said. As he sauntered off in the direction the ball had gone, trailed by Dortmunder and Kelp, he said, “Ralph and me used to team up with Querk, maybe four, five times over the years. He’s never the first choice, you know.”

  “No?”

  “No. He’s competent,” Harry allowed, “he’ll get you in where you want to get in, but there are guys that are better. Wally Whistler. Herman Jones.”

  “They’re good,” Kelp agreed.

  “They are,” Harry said. “But if some time the guy we wanted was sick or on the lam or put away, there was nothing wrong with Querk.”

  Kelp said, “Harry, you sent him to me, but you don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  “I’m not not enthusiastic,” Harry said. He stopped to look at his ball, sitting there in the middle of an ocean of fairway, with the green like an island some way off, ahead and to the right. Two of the guys waiting over there were now sitting down, on the ground. “I don’t know about this thing,” Harry said. “Let me see those other clubs.”

  Kelp unshouldered the bag and put it on the ground, so Harry could make his selection. While Harry frowned over his holdings in clubs, Kelp said, “What is it keeps you from being one hundred percent enthusiastic?”

  Harry nodded, still looking at the clubs in the bag. Then he looked at Kelp. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “This is his heist. I never been around him when it’s his own thing. Ralph and me, we’d bring him in, point to a door, a gate, a safe, whatever, say, ‘Open that, Kirby,’ and he’d do it. Competent. Not an artist, but competent. How is he when it’s his own piece of work? I can’t give you a recommendation.”

  “Okay,” Kelp said.

  Harry pointed at one of the clubs in the bag, one of the big-headed ones. “That one, you think?”

  Kelp, the judicious caddy, considered the possibilities, then pointed at a different one, with an even bigger head. “That one, I think.”

  It didn’t help.

  4

  New York City made Kirby Querk nervous. Well, in fact, everything made him nervous, especially the need to never let it show, never let anybody guess, that he was scared.

  He’d been away too long, is what it was, away from New York and also away from the entire world, That last six and a half years inside had broken him, had made him lose the habit of running his own life to his own plans. Jail was so seductive that way, so comfortable once you gave up and stopped fighting the system. Live by the clock, their clock, their rules, their rhythms, just go along and go along. Six and a half years, and then all at once they give you a smile and a pep talk and a handshake and an open door, and there you are, you’re on your own.

  On his own? His two previous periods of incarceration had both been shorter, and he’d been younger, and the rhythms and routines of stir hadn’t engraved themselves so deeply into his brain. This time, when he was suddenly free, loose, on his own, he’d lost his own, didn’t have any own to be any more.

  Which was the main reason, as soon as those prison doors had clanged shut behind him, that he’d headed for Darbyville and Cousin Claude, even though he and Cousin Claude had never been close and didn’t really have that much use for one another, Claude having been a straight arrow his entire life while Querk had from the beginning been rather seriously bent.

  But it was to Darbyville that Querk had gone, on a beeline, with a warning phone call ahead of time to ask Claude where he would recommend Querk find housing. The excuse was that Querk had learned the printing trade while inside (or so he’d thought), and he’d known the Sycamore Creek Printery was in the town of Sycamore, not far from Darbyville, one hundred miles north of New York City. Claude was a decent guy, married, with four kids, two out of the nest and two still in, so he’d invited Querk to move into the bedroom now vacated by the oldest, until he found a more permanent place for himself, and now, a year and a half later, Querk was still there.

  He hadn’t known it then, and he still didn’t know it now, but the reason he’d gone to Cousin Claude in the first place was that he’d felt the need for a warden; someone to tell him when it’s exercise time, when it’s lights out. It hadn’t worked that way exactly, since Claude and his wife Eugenia were both too gentle and amiable to play warden, and the printing trade skills that were supposed to have given him a grounding had turned out to be just one more bubble blown into the air, but that was all right. He had the job at the printery, riding the forklift truck, which put some structure into his life, and he’d found somebody else to play warden.

  And it was time to phone her.

  One of the many things that made Querk nervous about New York City these days was the pay phones. He was afraid to use a phone on the street, to be talking into a phone while all these hulking people went by, many of them behind him, all of them unknowable in their intentions. You had to stop to make a call from a pay phone, but Querk didn’t want to stop on the street in New York City; he couldn’t get over the feeling that, if he stopped, a whole bunch of them would jump on him, rob him, hurt him, do who knew what to him. So if he was out and about in New York City, he wanted to keep moving. But he still had to make that phone call.

  Grand Central Station was not exactly a solution, but it was a compromise. It was indoors and, even though there were just as many people hurtling by as out on the street, maybe more, it was possible to talk on the phone in Grand Central with his back to a wall, all those strangers safely out in front.

  So that’s what he did.
First he got a bunch of quarters and dimes, and then he chose a pay phone from a line of them not far from the Metro North ticket windows, where he could stand with his back mostly turned to the phone as he watched the streams of people hustle among all the entrances and all the exits, this way, that way, like protons in a cyclotron. He could watch the buttons over his shoulder when he made the call, then drop coins into the slot when the machine-voice told him how much it was.

  One ring: “Seven Leagues.”

  “Is Frank there?”

  “Wrong number,” she said, and hung up, and he looked toward the big clock in the middle of the station. Five minutes to two in the afternoon, not a particularly hot time at Grand Central but still pretty crowded. He now had five minutes to wait, while she walked down to the phone booth outside the Hess station, the number for which he had in his pocket.

  He didn’t like standing next to the phone when he wasn’t making a call; he thought it made him conspicuous. He thought there might be people in among all these people who would notice him and think about him and maybe even make notes on his appearance and actions. So he walked purposefully across the terminal and out a door onto Lexington Avenue and around to an entrance on 42nd Street, then down to the lower level and back up to the upper level, where at last the clock said two, straight up.

  Querk dialed the pay phone number up in Sycamore, and it was answered immediately: “Hello.”

  “It’s me.”

  “I know. How’s it going?”

  “Well, I got a couple guys,” Querk said. “I think they’re gonna be okay.”

  “You tell them what we’re doing?”

  “Not yet. We all hadda check each other out. I’m seeing them today at four o’clock. If they say yes, if they think I check out, I’ll tell them the story.”

  “Not the whole story, Kirby.”

  Querk laughed, feeling less nervous, because he was talking to the warden. “No, not the whole story,” he said. “Just the part they’ll like.”