Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  Stung from his lethargy, Dortmunder sat up straighter, spilled beer on his thumb, and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. You brought me jobs. A kid that kidnaps us.”

  “He never did.”

  “A bank,” Dortmunder said, “and we lose it in the goddam Atlantic Ocean.”

  “We took over two thousand apiece out of that bank,” Kelp pointed out.

  Dortmunder gave him a look of disgusted contempt. “Two thousand apiece,” he repeated. “Remind me, was that dollars or pesos?”

  Kelp abruptly shifted gears. Switching from antagonism to conciliation, he spread his hands and said, “Aw, come on, Dortmunder. That isn’t fair.”

  “I’m not trying to be fair,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m not a referee. I’m a thief, and I’m trying to make a living.”

  “Dortmunder, don’t be like that,” Kelp said, pleading now. “We’re such a terrific team.”

  “If we were any more terrific,” Dortmunder said, “we’d starve to death.” He looked at the sandwich in his left hand. “If it wasn’t for May, I would starve to death.” And he took a big bite of sandwich.

  Kelp stared in frustration, watching Dortmunder chew. “Dortmunder,” he said, but then he just helplessly moved his hands around, and finally turned to May, saying, “Talk to him, May. Was it my fault the bank fell in the ocean?”

  “Yes,” said Dortmunder.

  Kelp was thunderstruck: “B–b–b–b–b– How?”

  “I don’t know how,” Dortmunder said, “but it was your fault. And it was your fault we had to steal the same emerald six times. And it was your fault we kidnapped some child genius that boosted the ransom off us. And it was your fault —”

  Kelp reeled back, stunned by the number and variety of charges. Hands spread wide, he lifted his head and appealed to Heaven, saying, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing in this room.”

  “Then go to some other room.”

  Having had no help from Heaven, Kelp appealed again to May, saying, “May, can’t you do something?”

  She couldn’t, and she must have known she couldn’t, but she tried anyway, saying, “John, you and Andy have been together so long —”

  Dortmunder gave her a look. “Yeah,” he said. “We just been reminiscing.”

  Then he stared at the television set, which was now showing a commercial in which ballerinas in tutus danced on top of a giant can of deodorant spray, to the music of Prelude a l’après midi d’un faune.

  May shook her head. “I’m sorry, Andy.”

  Kelp sighed. His manner now was stern and statesmanlike. He said, “Dortmunder, is this final?”

  Dortmunder kept watching the ballerinas. “Yes,” he said. Kelp drew his tattered dignity about himself like a feather boa. “Goodbye, May,” he said, with great formality. “I’m sorry it ended like this.”

  “We’ll still see you around, Andy,” May said, frowning unhappily.

  “I don’t think so, May. Thanks for everything. Bye.”

  “Bye, Andy,” May said.

  Kelp exited, without looking again at Dortmunder, and a few seconds later they heard the front door slam. May turned to Dortmunder, and now her frown showed more annoyance than unhappiness. “That wasn’t right, John,” she said.

  The ballerinas had at least been replaced by the angels with dirty faces. Dortmunder said, “I’m trying to watch this movie here.”

  “You don’t like movies,” May told him.

  “I don’t like new movies in movie houses,” Dortmunder said. “I like old movies on television.”

  “You also like Andy Kelp.”

  “When I was a kid,” Dortmunder said, “I liked gherkins. I ate three bottles of gherkins one day.”

  May said, “Andy Kelp isn’t a gherkin.”

  Dortmunder didn’t reply, but he did turn away from the television screen to give her a look. When they’d both contemplated May’s remark for a little while, he returned his attention to the movie.

  May sat down next to him on the sofa, staring intently at his profile. “John,” she said, “you need Andy Kelp, and you know you do.”

  His lips tightened.

  “You do,” she insisted.

  “I need Andy Kelp,” Dortmunder said, “the way I need ten–to–twenty upstate.”

  “Wait a minute, John,” she said, resting a hand on his wrist. “It’s true the big jobs you’ve tried in the last few years didn’t go well —”

  “And Kelp brought me every one of them.”

  “But that’s the point,” May told him. “He didn’t bring you this one. This is yours, you got it yourself. Even if he is a jinx in his own jobs — and you know you don’t really believe in jinxes, any more than I do — but even if —”

  Dortmunder frowned at her. “What do you mean, I don’t believe in jinxes?”

  “Well, rational people —”

  “I do believe in jinxes,” Dortmunder told her. “And rabbit foots. And not walking under ladders. And thirteen. And —”

  “Feet,” May said.

  “— black cats crossing your — What?”

  “Rabbits’ feet,” May said. “I think it’s feet, not foots.”

  “I don’t care if it’s elbows,” Dortmunder said. “I believe in it whatever it is, and even if there aren’t any jinxes Kelp is still one, and he’s done me enough.”

  “Maybe you’re the jinx,” May said, very softly.

  Dortmunder gave her a look of affronted amazement. “Maybe what?”

  “After all,” she said, “those were Kelp’s jobs, and he brought them to you, and you can’t really blame any one person for all the things that went wrong, so maybe you’re the one that jinxes his jobs.”

  Dortmunder had never been so basely attacked in his life. “I am not a jinx,” he said, slowly and distinctly, and stared at May as though he’d never seen her before.

  “I know that,” she said. “And neither is Andy. And besides, this isn’t you coming in on a job he found, it’s him coming in on a job you found.”

  “No,” Dortmunder said. He glowered at the TV screen, but he didn’t see any of the shadows moving on it.

  “Damn it, John,” May said, getting really annoyed now, “you’ll miss Andy and you know it.”

  “Then I’ll shoot again.”

  “Think about it,” she said. “Think about having nobody to talk it over with. Think about having nobody on the job who really understands you.”

  Dortmunder grumped. He sat lower and lower in the chair, staring at the volume button instead of the screen, and his jaw was so clenched his mouth was disappearing up his nose.

  “Work with him,” May said. “It’s better for both of you.” Silence. Dortmunder stared through a lowered curtain of eyebrow.

  “Work with him, John,” May repeated. “You and Andy, the same as ever. John?”

  Dortmunder moved his shoulders, shifted his rump, recrossed his ankles, cleared his throat. “I’ll think about it,” he muttered.

  “I knew you’d come around!” Kelp yelled, bounding in from the foyer.

  Dortmunder sat bolt upright. He and May both stared at Kelp, who leaped around in front of them with a huge smile on his face. Dortmunder said, “I thought you left.”

  “I couldn’t go,” Kelp said. “Not with that misunderstanding between us.” He grabbed a chair, towed it over to the sofa, sat at Dortmunder’s left and leaned eagerly forward. “So what’s the setup?” Then he suddenly sat back, looking concerned, glancing toward the TV. “No, not yet. Watch the rest of your movie first.”

  Dortmunder frowned almost wistfully at the screen. “No,” he said. “Turn it off. I think it ends badly.”

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  “Linda,” murmured Arnold Chauncey, snuggling the girl closer to his side.

  “Sarah,” she responded, and bit him rather painfully on the cheek, then got out of bed.

  “Sarah?” Rubbing his cheek, Chauncey gazed up over the jumbled sheets and blankets at the tapered bar
e back of the girl reaching now for her blue jeans draped on a Louis Quinze chair. Astonishing how much Sarah and Linda look alike, he thought, at least from a back view. But then, so many attractive women have that elongated–cello look from behind. “How beautiful you are,” he said, and since lust had very recently been satiated it was purely the comment of a connoisseur.

  “Whoever I am.” She was really quite angry, as she showed by her clumsiness when stepping into her bikini panties; lavender, a very wrong color for her.

  Chauncey was about to say “don’t go” when he noticed the clock on the mantel: nearly ten–thirty at night. The appointment with Dortmunder was half an hour from now, and if it hadn’t been for that slip of the tongue he might well have lazed himself right through it. As it was, his carelessness had saved him once again from his carelessness, and what he did say to poor Sarah was, “Must you go?”

  She gave him a resentful glare over her shoulder, and he saw that her nose was much blunter than Linda’s. Same forehead, though, same eyebrows. Same shoulder, if it came to that. Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man’s taste is rather circumscribed. “You are a bastard,” she said.

  Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs? He watched her dress, her movements eloquent of outrage and humiliation as she paused at the mirror to touch her hair, touch up her face. Seeing that pouting face framed in the rococo gilt of the mirror, he suddenly realized how common she looked. That exquisite seventeenth–century looking glass, its darkly gleaming surface surrounded and supported by gilded twining rose bushes and cherubim, was meant to reflect more regal faces, more substantial brows, more stately eyes, but what had he placed before it? A series of pinched beauties, faces meant for reflection in commonplace mirrors in gas–station rest rooms, next to the hot–air blower. “I am a bad man,” Chauncey said, mournfully.

  Immediately she turned away from the mirror, misinterpreting what he’d said. “Yes, you really are, Arnie,” she said, but already forgiveness was implicit in her voice.

  “Oh, go away, Sarah,” Chauncey said, abruptly irritable, angry at himself for being such an endless wastrel, angry at her for reminding him, angry in general because he knew he wouldn’t change. Thrashing up out of the bed, he stalked past her astonished expression, and spent the next five minutes calming himself in a too–hot shower.

  It was his Uncle Ramsey Liammoir who had defined Arnold Chauncey, years ago while Chauncey was still a boarding school boy in softest Massachusetts. “Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot,” Ramsey had written to Chauncey’s mother, in a letter Chauncey never saw till he was going through her papers after the wicked old woman’s death. “Our sponge was Douglas MacDouglas Ramsey, who founded our fortune and made it possible for half a dozen generations of Ramsey’s and MacDouglases and Chauncey’s to live in stately and respectable comfort, with here a life peerage and there a board chairmanship. Our spigot, who will piss away his patrimony before he’s twenty if he’s given his head, is your son Arnold.”

  Which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the old lady’s will had ringed Chauncey’s patrimony (matrimony? since it had come from his mother?) with so many strings of barbed wire. Three accountants and two attorneys had to be brought in for approval before he could tip more than fifteen per cent; an exaggeration, but not by much.

  On the other hand, he was far from poor. Chauncey’s actual income — as opposed to what it said along about page 63 of his tax return — was in fact quite substantial. The year he didn’t clear three hundred thousand dollars was a bad year indeed, and usually he was comfortably above that. Or would have been comfortable were he not, in the words of his own interior monologue, such a wastrel. Piss away his patrimony he did, proving his now–departed uncle right by engaging in every kind of squander known to man. He had married badly, and paid too much for the divorce. He had supported an auto–racing stable, and had even done some driving himself until he realized he was mortal. He maintained fully staffed houses or apartments in New York, London, Paris, Antibes and Caracas. His love of beauty in furniture, paintings, sculpture, in all the fine arts, led him to purchases he could barely afford even if he were to scrimp elsewhere, and he had never been able to scrimp anywhere.

  Thus it was that Chauncey was forced from time to time into risky alternative methods of balancing his books, of which false insurance claims — such as the plot currently in preparation — was only one. Arson, bribery, blackmail, procuring and simple unadorned theft had been other techniques by which over the years he had kept himself and his expensive tastes afloat. He had, for instance, stolen about forty per cent of the royalties supposed to be paid to Heavy Leather, the rock band he had managed back in the late sixties, when running with rock musicians was the thing to do. He hadn’t wanted to steal those benighted Glaswegians’ money, but at the time it had seemed to him his need was greater than theirs; certainly his arithmetic was. But how his conscience had pricked him, as it pricked him now, standing in the steamy heat of his shower cursing himself for a weakling and a wastrel and a spendthrift. A spigot, in fact, just as dear departed Uncle Ramsey had said, the old fart.

  It took five minutes of hot spray to soothe Chauncey and make him forget again his disrespect for himself (he’d forgotten Sarah the instant he’d left her), and then he returned to the bedroom (Sarah was gone, of course), toweled himself dry, used the blower on his long blond hair — naturally yellow, and the envy of all his friends, male and female — and dressed himself completely in dark colors. Black suede moccasins and black socks. Black slacks and a navy blue cashmere sweater with a turtleneck. Then down the stairs (he almost never used the elevator) to the front–hall closet, where he put on a dark blue pea jacket and tucked his yellow hair inside a black knit cap, which made his tanned face look bonier, tougher. Black leather gloves completed his costume, and then he went down one more flight to the ground door, which in front was actually somewhat below ground level but which in back opened onto a small neat flagstone–covered garden. Flowering shrubs and bushes and small trees, all planted in large ornamental concrete pots, stood about in formal array. Ivy climbed the rear of the house and covered the eight–foot–high brick walls surrounding the garden on the other three sides. Now, in November, the garden was all bare branches and black stumps, but in the summer, when Chauncey was almost never in New York, it was a place of beauty.

  Chauncey was a darker shape against the dark as he crossed the garden to the knobless door in the corner of the rear wall. A key from the cluster in his pocket opened this door, and he slipped through into utter blackness. This was a passage through a thick wall separating two properties that fronted on the next street. The wall, apparently left over from some earlier construction, was actually double, two thicknesses of old chalky brick with less than three feet of space between. A trellis had been laid across the top at some later date, and a jumble of vines crawled over the trellis, making a thick and leafy roof.

  The footing underneath was treacherous with broken bits of stone and brick, but Chauncey slid along on the balls of his feet, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides, dangling ivy branches occasionally catching at his knit cap.

  At the far end was another featureless wooden door, which Chauncey opened with the same key, stepping out to a brick floored areaway in front of a townhouse very like his own. The door he’d emerged from looked as though it belonged to this house, was perhaps a basement entrance, though in fact there was no direct link between them.

  It was two and a half blocks to the meeting place with Dortmunder and the alarm specialist, and as Chauncey neared it, coming south on Madison, he moved very slowly, determined to see Dortmunder and the other one before they saw him. It was just after eleven now, the streets were full of hurtling cabs and blundering buses and cowering private cars, and the sidewalks were virtually empty. Chauncey’s breath steamed in the air
and he came to a complete halt partway up the block, frowning, looking forward at all four corners of the intersection. Dortmunder wasn’t there.

  Had something gone wrong? Chauncey believed be understood Dortmunder, the man’s low–key style, his low expectations and defeatist outlook. A man like that was ripe for direction from a stronger personality, which was the way Chauncey saw himself. He had been pleased with Stonewiler’s choice, and convinced he could deal with Dortmunder without fear of being outfoxed.

  Not that he intended to default. He would pay the man his hundred thousand, and welcome to it.

  On the other hand, where was he? Not sure what was going on, Chauncey backed into the darkened entranceway of a nearby boutique, and his left heel came down on something soft, which moved. “Ouch!” yelled a voice in Chauncey’s ear. “Get off my foot!”