Good Behavior (24 page)

“
Oh
, no,” he said. “I couldn't fit in, that's nothing I could, no way I'm gonna …”

She was very good at ignoring him, when she was of a mind to. The dirty dishes dealt with, she pulled the lower rack out of the dishwasher, reached in and lifted the propeller-like water dispenser out of the bottom and dropped it in the rack, then carried the rack over to the stove. The wide oven ate the rack as though it were no more than a thirty-pound turkey or three pies.

Hardly believing he was doing it, Dortmunder removed the dishwasher's top rack and brought it over to Sister Mary Grace, who fed it to the other oven. Meantime, Dortmunder was saying, “See, it's this phobia, I can't, there's a phobia with places like that.”

Well, there's about a million phobias in connection with getting inside a dishwasher; about the only phobia that doesn't come into play is the fear of heights. But there's claustrophobia, the fear of small enclosed spaces; nyctophobia, the fear of the dark; dysmorphophobia, the fear of being bent out of shape; lyssophobia, the fear of going crazy; hydrophobia, the fear of someone turning the dishwasher on to rinse cycle …

Sister Mary Grace pointed at the dishwasher, her mouth a stern grim line. Dortmunder paused to marshal further arguments, and heard male voices out in the hall, crossing to search the bedroom. It wouldn't take long at all to search that bedroom, nor the bathroom beyond it. “I'll try,” Dortmunder said. “If I can't fit in, I'll just give myself up or something.”

Shoo, shoo, she gestured, and he went over to the dishwasher and tried to figure out how to get into it. If he stepped on the open door, it would break. Finally, he turned his back to the thing, spread his legs wide like a parody of a cowboy on a horse, and backed up slowly, shins brushing the sides of the door, while Sister Mary Grace held one arm to help him keep his balance.

Tight, very tight. Dortmunder sat down in the dishwasher, hit the back of his head, scrinched around, hit the back of his head, drew his left leg up inside, hit the back of his head, drew his left leg up inside, hit the back of his head, wriggled farther and farther back while his spine found an interesting curve it had never known it could make before, and then there he was, head bent down to look at his own stomach, legs tied in a granny knot, and body generally speaking doing a Lon Chaney imitation.

But he was in it, by golly, inside the dishwasher. By looking as far upward as possible, past his own eyebrows, he could see the dishwasher door closing. “Not all the way!” he said.

Not all the way. In fact, it rested gently on the top of his head just a quarter-inch from being completely closed, so there was even a bit of light in here. So much for nyctophobia. But what if I get a cramp in here, he wondered, so there's another one: crampophobia.

The dishwasher smelled of sour milk. Also something vaguely Mexican or South American. Dortmunder heard the faint rustle of Sister Mary Grace leaving the kitchen, and he spent a moment in extreme discomfort, sniffing, trying to place that somehow Latin odor, and the kitchen filled up with men talking, walking around, banging into things. “Goddamnit,” one voice said, “there's just nobody here.”

A voice that sounded to Dortmunder like the leader, the guy who'd been up on the stage last night, said, “He's got to be, boys. I doped it out, and that little quiet girl there has to be the one that helped him with the lights, and up here is the only place she could bring him.”

“Well, she won't talk.”

“I know she won't talk,” the leader's voice said. “She's took a vow of silence.”

“Vow of silence? Is that spreading around among women?” asked another voice; he sounded hopeful.

“Mr. Pickens,” said another voice, “the fella just isn't here. We've searched every room. We've left a man on duty in every room, so the fella couldn't do a flanking movement and get around behind us. He just plain and simple isn't up here.”

“And yet,” said the leader's voice, who must be Pickens, “he just has to be. I don't get it.”

Another voice suggested, “Maybe we oughta do another sweep down on seventy-four. And in that apartment on seventy-five.”

“We've
done
all that,” Pickens complained, but he could be heard weakening.

Go do it again, Dortmunder thought. I can't stay scrunched up in here much longer.

A sound of water running. Now what?

“Long as we're here,” a voice said, “anybody else want coffee?”

37

It was curiosity that brought J.C. Taylor back to her office on Sunday morning, but she told herself her motives were hard-headed and realistic. She wanted to be sure they weren't doing any irreparable damage to her place, for one thing, and she also wanted to be damn certain there wouldn't be any evidence on her territory linking her to whatever burglaries those plug-uglies were committing. But besides that, and at bottom, it was curiosity.

On Sunday, you had to sign in at the lectern in the lobby. J.C. knew the blue-uniformed security guard—she occasionally did come in anyway on Sundays, to get caught up with the mailing—and he gave her a happy smile of greeting, saying, “A real nice day.”

So nothing's gone wrong yet with their plans, she thought, no excitement or trouble. “A very nice day,” she agreed, scrawled
J.C. Taylor, 712, 10:50 AM
on the sheet, and went away to the 5–21 elevators and on up to seven.

The Avalon State Bank Tower always felt different on Sunday, huge and cavernous and echoing. There was something timeless about it then, as though it had existed forever on some asteroid out in space and human beings had just recently started to inhabit it. J.C. listened to the magnified tock-tock of her footsteps as she walked down the corridor from the elevator, and she could just
feel
the emptiness in the offices all around her.

Not total emptiness, though. Unlocking the door to 712, she stepped into the middle of a touring company production of
The Thief of Bagdad
. Inlaid chests, amphorae, statuettes, the smoothness of ivory, the glitter of jade, amethyst, alexandrite, aquamarine, drapes of necklace, bangles, armlets, anklets, pendants, gleam of garnet, jasper, peridot, heliotrope, a rainbow of crimsons and golds and fierce greens strewn about her office furniture and floor as in some Hollywood Technicolor bazaar. All it lacked was Maria Montez.

It didn't lack Sabu, however; here he came from the inner office, in the person of Wilbur Howey, carrying a teetering stack of mailers, while the ones called Kelp and Murch worked industriously away at J.C.'s desk, sorting and stowing, like minor elves in Santa's workshop, to blur the metaphor just a bit.

It was Sabu—that is, Howey—who noticed her first, gaped with surprise and delight over the top of his stack of cardboard, and cried out, “Say,
Toots!
”

That made the elves look up. “Chicky,” said Kelp, “it's the landlord.”

“I guess this must be success,” J.C. said. Something deeply acquisitive in her nature, something magpie-ish, some instinctive turning toward luxury and comfort and sybaritic satisfaction, some softness she invariably kept locked away so deeply she remained barely aware of its existence, made her reach out and pick up a smooth ivory bracelet, a simple oval, very delicately carved with a floral design. The fingers that typed the mailing labels gently caressed the design, the eyes that looked without emotion at the photographers softened as they looked at the soft white of the ivory. “Not too tough to take,” she murmured, and cleared her throat, and put the bracelet down again before these birds got the idea she was trying to steal it. Or noticed any flaw in her armor. Looking around, she said, “Where's the rest of the team?”

“Say, I'll tell you,” Howey said, dumping the empty mailers on the floor next to Kelp, “Tiny's back there,” with a thumb toward the inner door.

“And the other guy? The one with the worry lines on his head.”

“You mean Dortmunder,” Kelp told her.

“If you say so,” she said, and was becoming aware of an awkwardness in their silence when the monster appeared in the inner office doorway, glowering at her from under those throw rugs he used for eyebrows, and saying, “What's this? You come back on Monday, that's the story the way
I
heard it.”

“I wanted to check on things,” she said, and shrugged. Monsters didn't intimidate her, she'd worked with them all her adult life. “Where's the other one?” she repeated. “Dort-whatever.”

“Munder,” Kelp said.

“Gone,” Tiny Bulcher said. “Like you. We'll see you tomorrow.”

“Gentle down, big fella,” she told him, and turned to Howey, the most malleable of them. “Where is he, Wilbur?”

“Well, say,” Howey told her, and threw a worried glance at Tiny, “he's gone, you know?”

“No, I don't know.”

Tiny said, “He went upstairs to get the nun and he didn't come down, so that's it.”

“Nun?”

Kelp said, “It's very simple,” and then proceeded to tell her a story that wasn't simple at all. For some strange reason, there was a nun imprisoned at the top of this tower. For some other strange reason, Dortmunder had to go rescue her. The whole robbery business was to pay for partners to help in the rescue of the nun. Last night, Dortmunder went away to rescue the nun, and so far he hadn't come back.

J.C. said, “And?”

Everybody shifted around uneasily. The others all glanced at Tiny Bulcher, who said, belligerently, “And nothing. He's on his own.”

Slowly she looked him up and down. “So that's why they call you Tiny,” she said. With a graceful sweeping gesture of the arm that she'd learned in ballet class at the age of four—J.C. Taylor was not always as we see her now—she indicated the king's ransom strewn helter-skelter around the room. “Dort-whatever brought you all this,” she said, voice dripping with scorn, “and now you're going to just leave him.”

38

Virgil Pickens sipped cooling coffee. “I just don't like it,” he said.

The four troops sitting around the kitchen table with him were getting so bored with all this they were beginning to let him know it. “Whether you like it or not, Mr. Pickens,” one of them said, “that fella Smith just isn't up in this apartment.”

Pickens brooded, watching the Guatemalan cook who'd arrived just a few minutes ago—came to work at eleven, apparently—and who'd been throwing evil-eye hostile looks at the men gathered in her kitchen ever since. Wants us out of here so she can clean up, Pickens supposed, though with the number of half-dirty cups they'd found in the cabinets when making their coffee she wasn't exactly the best housekeeper money could buy.

Was that the story with the towels as well? When they'd looked through the Ritter girl's bathroom the tub had been half full of towels. Now, that could have been simple sloppiness, as everybody else suggested, but it did seem to Pickens he hadn't seen a whole hell of a lot of sloppiness anywhere else in this girl's quarters—except here in the kitchen, of course—and the alternative that had come to
him
was that somebody had used that tub to sleep in.

No, everybody said. The fella isn't here, everybody said. You can theorize all you want, everybody said, but until you have a fact or two to support your theories, essentially what you are is full of horseshit.

The Ritter daughter is closed away in her room. Every inch of this place has been searched. Smith isn't here.

“Oh, well,” Pickens said, and finished his coffee. Rising, he said, “I hate to be wrong when I so
feel
that I'm right. Still …”

The cook, plainly in a hurry to be rid of them, picked up Pickens' cup, carried it to the dishwasher, opened it, and the dishwasher reached arms out to close itself again.

“What bugs me,” Pickens said, and became aware of the cook. She had frozen in one place like Lot's wife, staring round-eyed. At the dishwasher.

Pickens frowned, trying to remember what he'd just seen. “
Arms?
” he asked.

The dishwasher sighed.

39

The public garden in the ground floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, so green, so lovely, so productive of tax abatements, was closed on Sunday. The few passersby on Fifth Avenue on that day of rest could still look through the tall plate-glass wall and refresh themselves with the views within of slender trees and graceful shrubbery and the cafe's delicate wrought-iron white chairs, but that was all. However, on this particular sunny Sunday in spring, just a bit after eleven in the morning, a really sharp-eyed passerby might have noticed—though none did—a few shadowy figures darting through those trees, pausing behind a bush, rushing to a copse of birch and a clump of beech, infiltrating the woods like a Civil War raiding party just before Shiloh.

Howey, with the appropriate spec sheets from the ledger books in his pocket, and with Stan Murch along as bearer of his toolbag, had led the way down the stairwell from the seventh floor, out to the silent lobby, and past the broad aisle at the far end of which the security guard sat on a stool, facing the other way, leaning on the lectern where people signed in. A little past that aisle, out of the guard's sight, was a wide door labeled
OPEN SLOWLY,
which was not actually openable at all today, since, being the door to the garden, it too was kept locked on Sunday. Howey snickered slightly when he saw this door, passed his hand over its mechanisms, and the door gaped wide without further ado. In they went; Howey, Stan, Kelp, Tiny and J.C. Taylor herself, who had broken down the last shred of Tiny's resistance to the rescue operation by volunteering to take part.

Kelp had to lead the way through the woods, Howey not having previously seen the
MAINTENANCE
door which actually opened to the special elevator. Once there, while the others huddled around him, glancing from time to time through the intervening trunks and leaves and branches toward the empty sunlit street, Howey studied the door, studied the spec sheet, studied the door some more, and said, “Now they're getting serious.”