Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  Dortmunder released held breath, his shoulders sagging in relief. So that was over. “Now,” he said, “about tomorrow night. Stan Murch will drive us to this Hunter House a little before eight–thirty …”

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  The hall was full of Scotsmen. Hundreds of them gamboled in the aisles and thronged the lobby, with more arriving every minute. Some were in kilts, some were singing, some were marching arm in arm, most were clutching mugs, flasks, bottles, cups, glasses, jars, demijohns, goblets and jugs, and all were calling out to one another in strange and barbarous tongues. Around many necks and trailing down many backs were long scarves in the colors of favorite soccer or rugby teams. Tam o’ Shanters with bright wool balls on top were jauntily cocked over many a flashing eye. Hunter House bulged with Highland bonhomie.

  “Well, now what the hell?” said Dortmunder.

  Tiny Bulcher said, “That guy’s wearing a dress.”

  “It’s a kilt,” Roger Chefwick told him. A level crossing of English manufacture in one part of Chefwick’s model–train lay–out featured a man in a kilt who would glide out and wave a red flag every time a train went by. Chefwick was very familiar with kilts. “These are all Scotsmen,” he explained.

  “I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t know about this.”

  “I’ve got the tickets,” Kelp said, in a hurry to get them all upstairs and on about their business. “Follow me.”

  Except it wasn’t quite that easy. Kelp tried to lead, but everywhere he turned there were another six Scotsmen in his path. Also, the two fifty–foot rolls of vinyl clothesline he had tucked inside his coat didn’t increase his maneuverability. For all his efforts they remained becalmed, four innocent bystanders abroad on a roiling sea of Scotsmen.

  And now some of them were fighting. Over there by the head of the second aisle, two or three lads were rounding and punching and clutching at one another, while another half dozen tried to either stop them or join in, hard to tell which. “What are they fighting about?” Kelp cried.

  A passing Scot paused to answer: “Well, you know,” he said, “if it’s neither football nor politics, it’s more than likely religion.” And away he waded, to join the discussion.

  Dortmunder, sounding ominously bad–tempered, said, “Kelp, give me those tickets.”

  What was be going to do, ask for his money back? Apprehensive, Kelp gave him the tickets, but Dortmunder immediately turned and handed them to Tiny Bulcher, saying “You lead the way.”

  “Right,” Bulcher said. Clutching the tickets in one enormous fist, he waded forward, moving his shoulders and elbows, tamping startled Scotsmen left and right, the other three in his wake.

  When they reached the balcony, it was so full they couldn’t possibly open the door leading to the roof stairs without being noticed. “We’ll sit down and wait,” Dortmunder decided, and Bulcher ushered them through the throng to their seats. “You’d make a wonderful locomotive,” Chefwick told him as they sat down.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  In Wednesday’s New York Post — in the section that in the unenlightened past was known as the Woman’s Page, but which today operates under a discreet anonymity, offering Fashion, Social Notes, and Recipes to an audience presumably no more than fifty–two per cent female — the following item appeared:

  Spending a few days in town are the Princess Orfizzi (the former Mrs. Wayne Q. Trumbull) with her husband, Prince Elector Otto of Tuscan–Bavaria, here for the opening of the Hal Foster Retrospective at MOMA, staying at the townhouse of jet–setter Arnold Chauncey, just back from his whirlwind tour of Brasilia. Also houseguesting with Chauncey are MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, here to confer with designer Humphrey LeStanza at his new salon on East 61st Street. A Friday bash is planned, with guests to include Sheikh Rama el–Rama el–Rama El, film star Lance Sheath and cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley.

  What a dinner party, what a ghastly affair. Arnold Chauncey sat at the head of the table, behind his false–face host’s smile, and observed his guests with all the affability of Dortmunder observing the Scotsmen. Mavis and Otto Orfizzi, to begin with, hated one another so uncordially, so spitefully, and with such unremitting verbal venom, that no one could be said to be truly safe in their presence, while MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville were both too absorbed in themselves to be much help under the best of circumstances. As for the dinner guests, they approached the unbearable, except for Major General (Ret.) and Mrs. Homer Biggott, both of whom seemed merely to be dead. Sheikh Rama, on the other hand, was very much alive, cheerfully and suavely insulting everyone his glittering oily eye lit upon, making jokes about the West’s incipient decline and the Arab world’s upcoming dominance, name–dropping shamelessly and endlessly, and generally behaving like the well–educated (Cambridge) snotty little nouveau riche he was.

  But the worst of all was Laura Bathing. “I don’t mind a bit, sweetheart,” she’d said upon arrival, when Chauncey had apologized for her inadvertent omission from the item in the Post, and in the last two hours she had made perfectly clear just how little she’d minded by breaking three glasses, two plates, an ashtray and a table lamp, all in small clumsy accidents, smearing whiskey, wine and gravy in her wake, and screaming almost without respite at Chauncey’s staff, until be had very nearly been driven to point out that these days servants were much harder to find than dinner guests. It wasn’t much help that both Lance Sheath and MuMu deCharraiveuneuirauville were quite obviously courting — no, probably stalking was the better word — cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley, a stocky stodgy fortyish styleless frump with the face of a TV dinner and the personality of a humidifier and the ownership of eleven million dollars in her own right. MuMu was obviously interested in marrying up, but Chauncey had planned Lance for Laura Bathing, unaware that Lance was currently in search of backing for a film. Laura, placed at table between the insulting sheikh and the back of Lance Sheath (whose front was determinedly toward Martha Whoopley, on his other side), was not taking her situation calmly. In fact, Laura more and more seemed determined to strip Chauncey’s house of all its breakables before the meal was finished.

  Otto Orfìzzi having attempted unsuccessfully to form an alliance with the sheikh by telling an anti–Semitic joke at which no one had laughed — not because it was anti–Semitic, but because it had been told badly, and because two of the guests happened in fact to be Jewish, and because in any case it wasn’t very funny — Mavis Orfizzi turned her imitation–pitying smile toward Chauncey, saying, “I do apologize for Otto. He can be such an incredible boor.”

  It was only the thought that these witches and toadies were about to be burgled through his own intervention that kept the smile on Chauncey’s face. “Oh, well, Mavis,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account. I think we should all take life as it comes.”

  “Do you?” An imitation–self–pitying smile took its place on Mavis’s lips. “It must be comforting to have that philosophy.”

  “It is,” Chauncey assured her. “After all, we never know what misfortunes may be heading our way, do we?” And for the first time all evening, the smile he bestowed on his guests was absolutely genuine.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  Stately, plump Joe Mulligan paused in the privacy of the hallway to pull his uniform trousers out of the crease of his backside, then turned to see Fenton watching him. “Mp,” he said, then nodded at Fenton, saying, “Everything okay down here.”

  Fenton, the senior man on this detail, made a stern face and said, “Joe, you don’t want any of them princes and princesses see you walking around with your fingers up your ass.”

  “Aw, now,” Mulligan said, embarrassment combining with a trace of indignation. “They’re all at table up there. Besides, every man has to give a tug to his trousers from time to time.”

  “Stately plump men more than others,” said Fenton, himself a skinny little dried–up man with porcelain teeth
in his head. A bit of a martinet and a stickler for regulations, he liked the boys to call him Chief, but none of them ever did.

  “Have another look at that back door while you’re down here,” he added, gave a sort of casual one–finger–to–forehead salute, and turned back to the stairs.

  Joe Mulligan was one of the team of seven private guards on duty in the Chauncey house tonight, dressed like the others in a dark blue police–like uniform with a triangular badge on the left shoulder reading Continental Detective Agency. In his flatfooted walk and meaty bigness, Mulligan himself was police–like, as well he might be, having spent twelve years on the New York City force before deciding to get out of the city and joining Continental’s Long Island office in Hempstead.

  It used to be that policemen who displayed ineptitude or stupidity were sent from the city to the boondocks — “Pounding a beat on Staten Island” was the popular version of the threat — but as the Swinging Sixties swung more and more in the manner of a wrecker’s ball, that usual direction of transfer became reversed. The quiet safe Staten Islands of duty became more highly prized, while the terrifying city lost its former attraction. For instance, Mulligan and his team were working in Manhattan now as direct punishment for having lost a bank out on Long Island two years ago. None of them had quit, all seven were still together, and Fenton himself had summed it up for all of them: “We’ll do the job the same as ever. We’re good men and we know it, and sooner or later we’ll get back to the top. Out of New York and back to Long Island where we belong.”

  So they treated every unimportant minor assignment, every wedding, dog show and book fair, as though it were the D–Day landing. Tonight, they operated in three two–man teams, with Fenton roving among them. Each team was responsible for one area of the house, including the upper floors, though this last part was against the stated wishes of the client, who’d said, “Concentrate on the entrances downstairs, and let the upstairs go.” But, as Fenton had told the team, “The reason they hire us is because we know the job and they don’t.”

  Also, the teams traded places every half hour, to keep from becoming stale, too used to a single environment. Mulligan was alone now because his partner, Garfield, had gone to the second floor to replace Morrison and Fox, who would transfer to the first floor, releasing Dresner and Block to come down here, so Mulligan could go upstairs and rejoin Garfield.

  But first the rear door, which continued as locked and unsullied as ever. Mulligan peeked through the tiny diamond–pane window at the dark back yard, saw nothing, and let it go at that.

  Footsteps on the stairs; Mulligan turned and here came Dresner and Block. “Hello, boys,” Mulligan said.

  Block nodded. “What say?”

  Dresner said, “All quiet?”

  “I believe we could have phoned in our part,” Mulligan said. “See you, boys.” And, with a certain amount of puffing he made his way up two flights of stairs to where Garfield, whose law–enforcement career had begun when he was a Military Policeman in Arizona and Paris, and who sported a Western–Marshall moustache of amazing ferocity, was practicing his quick draw before the full–length mirror in Chauncey’s bathroom. “Well, now,” Mulligan said, a bit out of sorts from the combination of Fenton’s remarks and the long climb upstairs, “it’s Wyatt Earp you’re expecting, is it?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” Garfield said, holstering his pistol and fingering his moustache, “that I’d be a natural for the movies?”

  “No,” Mulligan said. “Let’s make our rounds.”

  So they went up another flight of stairs. The top floor, oddly enough, was grander than any of the others, possibly because its being strictly for guests had meant the decorators hadn’t needed to worry overmuch about comfort and function. Chauncey’s own bedroom suite on the next floor down was also sumptuously furnished, of course, but it was clearly a working bedroom, whereas the rooms on the top floor, with their delicate chairs and tables, canopy beds, Persian carpets, hand–ironed cotton curtains, complementary wallpapers and upholstery and bedspreads, were like display models in a museum; one expected a plush rope across each doorway, permitting the visitor to look without touching.

  Two of the suites were in current occupancy — by utter pigs. Garments, cosmetic jars, open luggage, pieces of paper and other litter formed a kind of archaeological layer over the original impersonality. Mulligan and Garfield strolled through these rooms, commenting to one another on stray artifacts — “I didn’t know women wore brassieres like that any more,” Garfield said, and Mulligan replied, “They don’t” — and also discussing their hopes for an early return to Long Island. “Two years is long enough,” Mulligan said truculently. “It’s time we got out of New York and back to the bigtime.”

  “You couldn’t be more right.” Garfield said, touching his moustache. “Fenton ought to go see the Old Man for us, argue our case.”

  “Absolutely,” Mulligan agreed. The two of them were returning to the central corridor then, and it was at that point Mulligan suddenly felt the unmistakable pressure of a gun barrel thrust against the middle of his back, and heard the quiet voice behind him speak the words of doom. Long Island flew away on mighty wings, and the voice said:

  “Stick em up.”

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  It seemed to Dortmunder, looking at the faces of the two private guards through the eyeholes of the ski mask covering his own face, that he’d seen them somewhere before, but that was both unlikely and irrelevant, so he dismissed it from his mind. He and Bulcher hustled the two disarmed guards into a closet in the unused guest room; locked the door, removed their ski masks, and returned to the central corridor, where an evidently nervous Kelp said, in a jittery whisper, “I thought the guards were supposed to stay downstairs.”

  “So did I,” Dortmunder said. That had been quite a shock, as a matter of fact, when they’d come in from the elevator shaft to hear the sounds of conversation from one of the nearby rooms. Expecting no trouble, and not wanting to make any extra trouble for themselves in case of problems outside, none of them was carrying a gun, but fortunately a pair of socket wrenches from Chefwick’s black bag had done just as well, convincing the guards long enough for Dortmunder and Bulcher to relieve them of their own artillery and put them away.

  “Let’s get going,” Bulcher said, the commandeered revolver toy–like in his mammoth fist, “before anything else happens.” And he tucked the pistol into his hip pocket.

  “Right,” Dortmunder agreed. “The stairs are this way. Chefwick and Kelp, you hit the bedrooms. Tiny and I’ll get the painting.”

  The robbery itself was quickly accomplished. Dortmunder and Bulcher removed the painting from the wall, turned it around, slit the canvas just beyond the edge of the painting all the way around, rolled it carefully into a tube shape, and fixed it with three rubber bands. Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes. Bulcher and Dortmunder, with Dortmunder carrying the rolled painting, did the same for Chauncey’s bedroom, where the pickings were surprisingly slim. Back in the sitting room, Dortmunder found two full bottles of that bourbon that had so impressed him his first time here, tucked them inside his leather jacket, and then he and Bulcher rejoined the other two on the top floor. “Some nice stuff,” Kelp whispered, grinning, his nervousness forgotten now.

  Dortmunder saw no reason to whisper. “Good,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chefwick used one of his handy tools to open the elevator door, and Kelp went in first, reversing the route they’d used before. The elevator shaft was concrete–lined and about six feet square, with an open grid work of metal beams inside it to support the elevator equipment. Kelp made his way via a horizontal beam on the left wall to another horizontal beam at the rear, and from there to the metal rungs set
in the rear wall just opposite the doorway. Up the rungs he went, sidling past the electric motor and the chains and pulleys at the top, and out through the opened panel in the housing. Lowering a length of clothesline back through the opening, he waited while Chefwick tied his bag and the painting to the end, and then drew both up to the roof. (Dortmunder watched this part gimlet–eyed, waiting for Kelp to drop the goddam painting to the bottom of the elevator shaft — or rather to the top of the elevator, two stories below — but astonishingly enough Kelp did everything right.)

  Chefwick himself went next, over to the metal rungs and up to the roof, followed by Bulcher. Dortmunder went last, pausing on the first metal beam to release the door, allowing it to slide closed, and the faint snick of the electric lock was immediately followed by a sudden whirring sound, and the small clanking of chains.

  Yes? Dortmunder looked all around, and saw the elevator cables in motion. In motion? He looked down, and the top of the elevator was coming this way. The elevator was coming this way, sliding and clicking upward through its shaft.