What's So Funny (23 page)

Next to him. The rungs did not descend into the railed metal floor but beside it. So now he was supposed to let go of these beautiful rungs and vault over the goddam rail?

Apparently; the rungs stopped here. Lunge; one hand was on the rail. Lunge; one foot was over the rail but not reaching all the way down to the floor. Lunge; the other hand was on the rail and he tipped forward over it, landing headfirst onto the floor, which shrieked in complaint though it didn’t entirely separate from the building.

Up. Holding on to everything he could reach, Dortmunder got to his feet, turned to the wall, and found that the doorway had been bricked up many years ago. This metal structure had not been used for a long time, and it was feeling its age. It seemed to be thinking about leaving the building, what with all this new weight to carry and all.

But here was the fire escape, extending down at a diagonal across the rear of the building, down one flight to where it stopped at another metal landing, this one with a ladder mounted up against it that could be slid down to descend from there.

Descend? The Perly building was only two stories high. So this space back here went all the way down to basement level.

I’m never gonna see the upper world again, Dortmunder thought. I’m in some kind of horror story, and this is the entrance to Hell.

Well, there was nothing for it; time to descend. Dortmunder started down the fire escape and found it the least horrible part of the experience so far. It was solid iron, securely fastened to the stone of the building, with a good railing and thick gridwork steps.

Too bad it stopped before it got anywhere. Dortmunder reached the lowermost step, which was another platform, though sturdier than the one above, and next to it was the ladder. Studying this, he saw that it operated with a counterweight; if he stood on it, his weight would make it lower. If he got off, the counterweight would lift it back up again. It was clearly an anti–burglar device, operating on the theory that burglars would approach it from below and would be unable to reach up to the bottom rung.

Okay; let’s go for a ride on the ladder. Dortmunder stepped onto it, holding tight to the sides, and, after a second’s trembling hesitation, it slid smoothly downward with small mouselike chirps and squeaks, descending just like an elevator except, of course, for the elevator cab and the elevator shaft.

The bottom. Dortmunder stepped off onto the cluttered concrete, and the ladder more silently rose away. Only after it departed did he stop to think he’d just now effectively cut off his own retreat. From this point on, there was no way to turn back.

All right, let’s deal with what we’ve got, which is what, exactly? The rear of Perly’s building, with more bricked–up windows and a gray metal door, stood before him. The door was rusty, its hinges were rusty, its handle was rusty, and its keyhole was rusty, but the point was, it did have a keyhole. Dortmunder bent to study this keyhole as best he could in the darkness, and it seemed to him Kelp had done a good job in getting through this door without leaving any traces.

And Kelp had to have gone through here. There was no other way. This messy rectangular concrete area back here was one story below street level, enclosed by high walls on all sides. This door was the only way out. Kelp had been ahead of him, and wasn’t still in this hole in the ground, so Kelp had to have gone through this door. Could Dortmunder do it just as well, leaving no trace?

Now his competitive juices were stirring, and he forgot all those various aches and pains he’d picked up along the way since toppling out that window. In various interior pockets of his jacket, mostly in the back, were several small tools of his trade, skim–brushed with flat black enamel to keep them from reflecting light. Reaching back there, he brought out a number of these, bent over that lock, and went to work.

Very stiff, the lock was; it reminded him of himself. Except for Kelp, it looked as though nobody’d used this door in quite a while. But at least this stone–and–brick carton he was in was out of the wind, so he could work in relative comfort, without distraction.

And
there.
The door abruptly jolted a quarter–inch toward him, with a popping sound like a cork coming out of a bottle of wine that’s turned bad. Dortmunder pulled on it and reluctantly it opened, hinges screaking in protest. As soon as the opening was wide enough, he slid through and pulled the door shut behind himself, creating pitch–blackness.

Now from those useful pockets at the back of his jacket came a tiny flashlight, shorter than a finger. He hadn’t wanted it before this, when surrounded by apartment windows, but this kind of interior blackness was perfect for its use. It was sold for the alleged purpose of being attached to a keychain for people wanting to enter and start up their automobiles after dark, but it had other advantages as well, such as giving Dortmunder, when on the job, exactly the amount of light he needed to see that he was in a stone–walled corridor lined with metal storage shelves heaped with the kind of junk people are never going to use again but can’t quite bring themselves to get rid of.

Ignoring all that, he stepped down the corridor, and through a doorway on the right he saw a concrete staircase going up. He went up.

The door at the top of these stairs was also gray metal and locked, which seemed excessive, but Dortmunder was on a roll now and went through it with hardly a pause and leaving not a trace of his handiwork. He brushed through the doorway, elbowed the door shut behind himself, and looked around at a place that didn’t seem at all converted from its prior industrial uses.

Here was the building’s plain metal front door, and over there the garage door, gray rather than green on the inside. A concrete ramp curved upward from the garage door. The space under the ramp and stretching back through the building was taken up with storerooms facing a central corridor and all fronted by barred doors like those on jail cells; unfortunate image.

Dortmunder and his small flashlight took a quick curious look at these rooms and they were full in a way the word “miscellaneous” couldn’t quite cover. There was furniture, there was statuary, there were at least two motorcycles, there were office safes piled one atop another, there was what looked like a printing press, there were stacks of computers and other office equipment, and there was a painting of the George Washington Bridge with a truck on fire in the middle of it.

Very strange guy, this Jacques Perly. A private detective. Did people pay him in goods instead of money?

Dortmunder went back to the front of the building and was about to let himself out the street door when he glanced again at that ramp going up. The light source, dim but useful, came from up there.

Would Kelp have checked out the second floor? No. Something told him that Andy Kelp was long gone from this neighborhood. Probably he figured Dortmunder wouldn’t be agile enough to get out that window and clear of trouble and so would be somewhere in custody right about now, meaning he’d not be a good person to stand next to for some little while. Dortmunder didn’t blame him; if the situation were reversed, he himself would be halfway to Philadelphia.

But what about that ramp? As long as he was here, inside this place, shouldn’t he at least take a look–see?

Yes. He walked up the ramp, which curved sharply to the right then straightened along the front wall. This concrete area, just wide enough to K–turn a car in, was flanked on the left by a cream–colored stone wall with a very nice dark wood door. High light fixtures provided the low gleam he’d seen from the street through those industrial windows now high to his right.

Was this nice wooden door locked? Yes. Did it matter? No.

Inside, he found a neat and modest receptionist’s office illuminated by a grow light over a side table of small potted plants, all of them legal. He ambled through, and the next door wasn’t locked, which made for a change.

This was Jacques Perly’s office, very large and very elaborate, spread beneath that skylight. Aware that a private eye might have additional security here and there — even Eppick had had a couple of surprises in his office — Dortmunder tossed the room in slow and careful fashion, using his little flashlight only when he had to, very mindful of that skylight observing him from just above his head.

There were a couple of fruits from this endeavor. On a round oak table in an area away from the main desk, he found notes in a legal pad in crisp tiny handwriting that described the security arrangements to be made to accommodate the coming presence of the Chicago chess set, and those arrangements were elaborate indeed. He also found a copier, switched it on, and copied the pages of notes, putting the copies into a side pocket of his jacket and the legal pad back precisely where he’d picked it up.

There was nothing else much of interest in Perly’s office; not to Dortmunder, anyway. He left it and looked at the receptionist’s room. Would there be anything of use in here? Very unlikely, but as long as he was passing through he might as well check it out.

It was in the bottom right–hand drawer of the desk that he found it, tucked in the back of the drawer under various cold medicines and lipstick tubes. It was a garage door opener. It was dusty, it was clearly the second opener the company always gives you when the garage door is installed, but it had never been needed and so was long ago forgotten.

If this was the right opener. Dortmunder stepped out to the parking area at the top of the ramp, aimed the opener at the garage door down there, and thumbed it. Immediately the door started to lift, so he thumbed it again and it stopped, with a four–inch–wide gap. A third push of the thumb and back down it went, to close the gap.

Well, this was something. The garage door wasn’t quiet, God knew, but it was a possible way in. Dortmunder tucked the opener into the same pocket as the security notes, closed the office door behind himself, and went home.

Was there any way out of this? Could she pretend to be sick? No; Brian would just escort Mrs. W to the party anyway. And if there was one thing in Fiona’s fevered imaginings worse than being at GRODY’s March Madness party with Mrs. W at her side, it was the thought of Mrs. W at the party
without
Fiona beside her, to explain it, to smooth it as much as possible, to
shield
the woman, if that could be done.

So what could she do to make this not happen? Could she lie to everybody? Lie to Mrs. W that the party had been canceled, lie to Brian that Mrs. W had changed her mind. No; nobody would believe her. Fiona was not at all a good liar — an unfortunate trait in a lawyer — and they’d both see through her at once.

And then, how to explain
why
she’d lied? Well, she couldn’t, could she? She could barely explain it to herself, because it wasn’t merely the mismatch of GRODY and Mrs. W, it was more than that, it was …

Brian.

There wasn’t anything
wrong
with Brian, not really. He and Fiona made a very good couple, easygoing, supportive, not demanding. His passion for exotic cookery remained a happy surprise, though somehow not quite as exciting, a teeny bit less of a treat, now that she’d left Feinberg and started a job with normal hours. (She would never mention that to Brian, of course.)

The problem, which she could barely articulate inside her own head because it made her feel guilty, the problem was class. Brian did not come from the same world as Fiona. His people did not live where her people lived, did not school where her people schooled, did not vacation where her people vacationed, did not buy suits — if they bought suits — where her people bought suits. His was a rougher, scruffier, less settled universe of people who hadn’t made it, generation after generation, with no prospect for future change. When she was with Brian, Fiona was, in the very slightest way, barely noticeable to the naked eye, slumming.

If she were honest — and she wanted to be — she’d have to admit that her own great–grandfather, Hiram Hemlow, father of her dear grandfather Horace, had come from that same class, the strivers without connections. The stolen chess set might have helped Hiram move up out of the unwashed, but that opportunity was lost.

What had finally made the difference in the Hemlow family was her grandfather Horace, who happened to be an inventive genius. With the prestige and money he made through his inventions he could cut through the nearly invisible barriers of American class, so that the generation after his, the generation of Fiona’s father and her aunts and uncles, with money behind them, however fresh, could attend the right schools, move into the right neighborhoods, make the right friends.

The family had moved smoothly into the upper middle class the way it’s done in America, not with family, not with history, but with money. And now, a member of barely the third generation at this level, Fiona could look at Brian Clanson and know, with shame and embarrassment but without the slightest question, that he was beneath her.

The knowledge had her tongue–tied, and the further knowledge that she must very soon display Brian to Mrs. W as her chosen escort only made things worse. Mrs. W, as Fiona had every reason to know, was about as class–conscious as anyone she’d ever met. That rambling vitriolic memoir the woman was writing reeked of it. Was Fiona, having acted against her better judgment in a moment of weakness, about to make Mrs. W despise her forever?

Through all of her fretting Brian, of course, remained oblivious, continuing blithely along with his own usual Saturday morning routine, which was to commandeer the big room while he watched the Saturday morning cartoons, an activity he claimed counted as work but which she knew he secretly enjoyed for its own sake, the more childish the better.

Confined to the bedroom with the door closed — it didn’t help that much — she paced and worried and searched in vain for a route out of her dilemma, and, finally, a little before eleven, she decided to phone Mrs. W even though she had no idea what she intended to say. But she had to do something, had to start somewhere; perhaps hearing Mrs. W’s voice would give her inspiration.

So she sat on the bed, reached for the phone, and it rang. Startled, she picked it up, and heard Mrs. W’s voice. “Mrs. W!”

“About this question of costumes,” Mrs. W said.

“Mrs. W?”

“I understand, from what you say, many of the partygoers this evening will be in costume.”

Oh, she doesn’t want to go! Fiona thought, and her heart leaped up: “Oh,
yes,
Mrs. W, all kinds of costumes!”

“That doesn’t much help, Fiona, dear: ‘all kinds’, you see. What sort of
theme
does one encounter at these events?”

“Theme?” Arrested development, she thought, but didn’t say. “I guess,” she said, “I suppose, it’s popular culture, I guess, cartoon shows and things like that. And vampires, of course.”

“Of course,” Mrs. W agreed. “Women, I find,” she said, “don’t improve in vampire costumes.”

“The fangs, you mean.”

“That would be part of it. I know you won’t be in costume, but your friend — Brian — will he?”

“Oh, yes,” Fiona said, trying to sound perky rather than resigned. “The same one every year.”

“Really? And would it spoil things to tell?”

“Oh, no. It’s Reverend Twisted, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“A cartoon character,” Fiona explained. “From cable, you know. A little raunchy.”

“His costume is raunchy?”

“No, the cart — What it is, Mrs. W, he’s a mock priest, he blesses
all
the bad behavior, he loves the sinner
and
the sin.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Beginning to feel desperate, Fiona said, “The joke is, he’s the priest at the orgies, you see.”

“And what does he do there?”

“Blesses everybody.”

“That’s all?”

“Really, yes,” Fiona said, realizing she’d never before noticed just how small and toothless a joke the Reverend Twisted actually was.

Mrs. W, calm but dogged, said, “What does he wear in this persona?”

“Well, it’s not that — Not that different, really. Just heavy black shoes and a shiny black suit with very wide legs and very wide double–breasted jacket with a bottle of whiskey in the pocket and a kind of white dickey and white makeup on his face and a black hat with a flat brim all the way around.”

“I see.”

“It’s mostly his expression, really,” Fiona tried to explain. “You know, it’s a leer, he leers for hours, the next day his jaw is very sore.”

“For his art,” Mrs. W said, with suspect dryness.

“I suppose. He used to carry a Kama Sutra, you know, the way priests carry a Bible? But he lost it a few years ago and never got another.”

“We’ll just have to imagine it, then,” Mrs. W said. “Thank you, my dear, you may have been of help.”

“Oh, I hope so,” Fiona said, and hung up, and gave herself over to despair. Mrs. W was definitely coming to the party.