What's So Funny (28 page)

Dortmunder had not accompanied the van last night — that had been Stan and Judson’s duty — but he knew what to look for to find the right garage, and that was Tiny. Yes, there he stood, midblock, looking from a distance like a grand piano about to be hoisted through an upper–floor window.

Approaching, yawning — that had been a late night last night, and this meet was scheduled for 10 a.m. — Dortmunder eventually saw Judson beyond Tiny, and at that moment the kid saw him back and grinned and waved, which caused Tiny to turn around and acknowledge Dortmunder’s approach, but did not cause him to grin and wave. He did, however, say, “Kelp’s not here yet.”

“He’s probably waiting for the doctor to get out of the car,” Dortmunder said, and to Judson he said, “Stan in there?”

“He should be right out.”

“And you got the directions.”

Patting his shirt pocket, Judson said, “Andy wrote it all out for me, gave it to me when we met last night.”

Tiny said, “What about Kelp calling Eppick to call the guy, make sure the house is open?”

Dortmunder said, “He was gonna do that this morning, before he went for wheels.”

“It’s a hell of a distance to go,” Tiny suggested, “to stash one box.”

“Well, its not a stash, Tiny —”

Judson said, “Here comes Andy.”

“— it’s more of a delivery. The guy that it’s his house, he’s the customer.”

“And we do home deliveries,” Tiny commented. “That’s real good of us.”

Now out of the bowels of the garage came last night’s small black van, Stan at the wheel, as simultaneously there came to a halt nearby a bright red Cadillac Colossus with MD plates, an SUV large enough for the rear seat to accommodate a basketball team; or Tiny.

“See you up there,” Dortmunder told Judson, waved to Stan at the wheel of the van, and turned to climb into the front passenger seat of the Colossus, as Tiny occupied the rear seat in much the way the Wehrmacht once occupied France.

The van moved off first, Kelp following it down the block to the corner, where the light, for once, was green. The van went straight through the intersection, keeping to the left lane for the bridge approach.

Following, Kelp said, “What’s he doing? He’s going to Queens.”

“Maybe he knows something,” Dortmunder said.

“Maybe I do, too,” Kelp said, keeping to the right, headed for the northbound entrance to FDR Drive. “We’re not going east to Queens, we’re going north to New England.”

Dortmunder twisted around, to look back past the bulk of Tiny, but the van was already out of sight. “I wonder why he did that,” he said.

“We’ll ask him up at the compound,” Kelp said. “We’ll have to wait for them a while, though.”

The metronome that was Chick abruptly clenched. “A what?”

“A car! See what it is.”

Chick wasted seconds staring around the bedroom, as though expecting to see some car drive through here, but then at last he did hop out of her and out of bed and over to stare out the window. “It
is
a car!” he confirmed. “Two cars!”

Could this be the bozos with the chess set after all? Nessa didn’t believe it for a second. “Time to get dressed,” she said, feeling grim.

There’d been a few men in Nessa’s life since, last November, four months ago, she’d switched from the dreamer Brady to the completely unreliable Hughie the roadie, and if she were the contemplative sort, she would be contemplating right now the fact that her men had not been getting better along the way. Chick, for instance, did not have Brady’s deftness with locks, nor Hughie’s cleverness and constant cash flow, nor much of anything else to recommend him except a large strong tireless body and an amiable willingness to let Nessa lead him by the nose or some other part, but he was an easy companion in her slow drifting progress toward somewhere or other, so what the hell.

Nessa had not so much hardened in the last four months as jelled toward the person she would eventually be. Leaving Numbnuts with Brady had not been a serious life decision, but just a fun goofy thing to do, on a par with cutting school or piling into a car with a bunch of other kids some summer night to go skinny–dipping out to Lake Gillespie. Leaving Brady for Hughie the roadie had been almost as impulsive and unthinking, but calculation had begun to enter her head: the indolent and unfocused Brady was proving to be useless in her life, but Hughie appeared to be a man with uses. And when he too in very different ways disappointed, there turned out to be somebody else. By now she had become serious enough to understand that she was not yet actually serious, but would be. There was still time to grow up. At the moment, but not forever, she was with Chick, who was gaping out the window, at a loss.

So she pulled on her jeans, crossed to the window next to Chick, said, “Put something
on,
” and looked out and down at two simple sedans parked in front of the garage and, did they but know it, parked also in front of Chick’s dented gray PT Cruiser, which was at the moment stashed inside that garage. Another complication, maybe.

A total of four people, all bundled up because in Massachusetts it was still definitely winter in late March, had climbed out of the two cars and, as Nessa watched and behind her Chick finally put his clothes on, the four began to pull other things out of the cars to carry with them off to the guesthouse, away to the right. Mops, brooms, squeegees, buckets holding cans and boxes of cleaning supplies.

Servants, these were, two men and two women, come to clean the guesthouse. We’re about to have guests.

Won’t they come to this house, too? A good thing they started their work over there. Nessa and Chick wouldn’t be able to leave this vicinity while their car was bottled up in that garage, but at least they’d have time to erase their presence from this house before any of the cleaners arrived.

There wouldn’t be much evidence of their presence to eliminate, in fact, since Nessa and Chick had only slipped past the locked rear gate and into the compound last night. Driving northward, she had told him about the big empty house in the Massachusetts woods, and how Brady had found the way to circumvent the lock, which she could now do as well. She told him about the people who’d showed up at the place to choose somewhere to hide a valuable chess set they planned to bring up, but then how they never did return, with or without anything of value.

“I still think they’re bozos,” she’d said last night, “but what else’ve we got to do? We’ll stop by there, see if they actually ever did show up with that chess set, sleep in a nice bed, defrost some of the food there, and take off tomorrow.”

“Then let’s go to Ohio,” Chick had said, for no real reason, and she’d said, “Sure. Why not?”

Why not? One place was as good as another, until it would be time to get serious. In the meantime, that chess set might have come in handy, but of course it hadn’t been here. If there was one thing Nessa had learned so far in her travels it was this: Bozos are bozos.

Now what? Looking around with that sudden spasm of guilt known to all pilferers, he saw standing there in his doorway what looked very much like a plainclothes detective, fortyish, a bulky body in a rumpled suit and tie. But he couldn’t be, could he? A detective?

“Help you?”

“Brian Clanson?”

“Guilty,” Brian said, with a leftover leer.

The man drew a narrow billfold from his inside jacket pocket, flipped it open, and showed Brian an overly designed police badge; too busy. “Detective Penvolk,” he said. “I’d like you to come with me, if you would.”

More startled than frightened, at least at first, Brian said, “But I’m working here, I …”

“It won’t take long,” Detective Penvolk assured him. “You can just answer a few questions for us.”

“What questions?”

“Mr. Clanson,” the detective said, with a sudden bit of steel in his voice, “we prefer our interviews in settings other than this.”

Well, that made sense. In truth, Brian would have preferred his entire work experience in a setting other than this. However, it didn’t seem as though he were going to be given many options at the moment, so Brian obediently rose, saying, “Will this take long?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the detective said. He turned to look both ways along the corridor, then said, “You probably know the shortest way out of here.”

“Probably,” Brian agreed. “Unless they did some carpentry last night.” Nodding to the right, he said, “It should be that way.”

The corridors were too narrow to walk two abreast, though people meeting could squeeze past one another. The occasional pregnancy among the staffers was usually blamed on the corridors. Brian therefore led the way, the detective followed him, and Brian said over his shoulder, “Could you tell me what this is all about?”

“Oh, let it wait till we get there,” the detective advised.

Brian’s boss, Sean Kelly, had his office on the right along here, an elongated rectangle that looked as though it wanted to grow up to be a bowling alley. Sean was at his
Star Trek
replica control panel in there when Brian walked by, and he was deep in conversation with Detective Penvolk’s older gloomier brother. Sean rolled his eyes as Brian walked by, though Brian had no idea what he meant by that.

Had something bad happened during March Madness? There hadn’t been any overdoses, had there? That was so old century. Still, something was going on, if one detective wants to talk to Brian and another detective wants to talk to Sean.

As they continued down the angling corridor, Brian dropped unconsciously into a prison shuffle, and said over his shoulder, “The reason I asked, I mean, what this is all about, you know, this kind of thing could make you nervous. I mean, not knowing. What it’s all about.”

“Oh, don’t let it worry you,” the detective advised. “If you’re innocent, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

Irrepressible at all the wrong times, “Innocent?” Brian asked. “Moi?”

Detective Penvolk chuckled. Faintly.

Looking grim, Kelp said, “I’m not gonna ask him,” as he pulled in behind the van.

“I will,” Tiny said.

“He’ll only tell you,” Kelp warned him.

“Then I’ll know something,” Tiny said.

They all climbed out of the Colossus and said hellos back and forth, and then Tiny said, “Kelp wants to know how you went to Queens and got here first.”

“I don’t care one way or the other,” Kelp said.

“If you’re headed north,” Stan told them all, “that’s the best way out of midtown. You take the bridge and Northern Boulevard, then the BQE to Grand Central to the Triboro Bridge —”

“And there you are back in Manhattan,” Kelp said.

“They call it Triboro because it goes to three boroughs,” Stan said. “You take it north to the Bronx, to the Major Deegan, which happens to be the Thruway, which is the widest fastest road in
any
of the boroughs. Meanwhile, when you do it your way, you’re in traffic jams on the FDR, traffic jams on the Harlem River Drive
and
traffic jams on the West Side Highway, and you’re not even outa Manhattan yet. Also, I suppose you had to fill the tank on that thing six, seven times to get here.”

“It is a little thirsty, this beast,” Kelp admitted, and spread his hands, forgiving everybody. “But we’re all here now, so what difference does it make?”

Judson, admiration in his voice, said, “Stan is one heck of a driver.”

“We know,” Kelp said.

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, before any tension could develop, “you’re supposed to buzz them now, aren’t you?”

“Right.”

Kelp went off to the intercom mounted on the post beside the gate, and Dortmunder said to Stan, “There’s a flat clear spot we found the last time in there. That’s where we’ll switch.”

Stan, not sounding thrilled, said, “And I get to drive the monster.”

“It’s not so bad,” Dortmunder told him. “It’s kinda like driving a waterbed.”

As Kelp got off the intercom, the two halves of the gate swung silently outward. “They say they got lunch ready for us,” he said.

“That’s a good thing,” Tiny said.

They climbed back into the vehicles and drove through, the van moving over to let the Colossus go first. Behind them as they went, the gate closed itself.

Soon Kelp stopped once more, at a spot where, on the left side of the driveway, there was a small clearing. There might have been a little house there at one time, or just a turnaround for cars, or possibly extra parking for parties. Whatever the original idea, the space now was just a small clearing without the usual towering pines, the land at this time of year showing hardy weeds growing up through old snow.

Once again, they all piled out of the cars, but this time Stan and Judson took green plastic tarpaulins from the back of the van and spread them on the weedy patch while the other three dragged the box containing the chess set out far enough to get at the interior box containing the chess pieces. This part of the set was heavy enough all by itself for Tiny, who carried it over to the green tarps, to say, “Huh,” before putting it down.

While he was doing that, Dortmunder and Kelp were pulling several cans of spray enamel out of the van and placing them on the periphery of the tarps.

“We’ll see you up there,” Stan said, when everything was ready.

“Shouldn’t take us long,” Kelp said. “Save us some lunch.”

“Tell Tiny,” Stan suggested.

“Don’t be too long,” Tiny suggested.

Judson gestured at the tarps. “The people up at the house,” he said. “What are they supposed to think about all this?”

“They’re servants,” Tiny told him. “They’re supposed to think, what a nice job I got.”

“Oh. Okay.”

As Stan and Judson got into the front of the Colossus, Tiny resumed his usual occupation of the backseat. Dortmunder and Kelp started rattling spray paint cans, listening to the little balls bounce around inside, and the Colossus disappeared around the next curve into the pines.

Kelp said, “Hold on, I need the red queen.”

“Right.”

Now they bent to the chess pieces and distributed them into two sections on the tarps, all standing in place, the red–gem pieces over here, the white–gem pieces over there. Kelp took the Earring Man’s red queen from his pocket, put the original into his pocket in its place, and now the two of them went to work. Dortmunder sprayed his bunch black, Kelp went for the red. Fortunately, there was very little breeze, so they managed not to spray one another but still could circle the clusters of chessmen and get a pretty good shot at them from all sides.

As they sprayed, Dortmunder said, “We’re only switching the one piece. We’re leaving a lot of value up here.”

“The way I figure,” Kelp said, bending to get to the deeper crevices, “the four hundred bucks we paid for the queen was like seed money. We break up the queen and sell the parts and Anne Marie goes back to Earring Man for a few more second–team members, after the chess set heist is yesterday’s news. We know the set’s gonna stay up here. We just come back from time to time, do another little switcheroo. Money in the bank.”

“Kings and queens in the bank,” Dortmunder said. “Even better.”

The job didn’t take long. The box that had held the pieces went back into the van, along with a couple unused cans of paint, and then they got into the van, Kelp driving, to go the rest of the way to the compound.

As they started off, Dortmunder looked back at the two clusters of martial figures spread on the green tarps like a pair of abandoned armies, as though feudalism had just abruptly shut down in this part of the world. He said, “They’ll be okay there, right?”

“Sure, why not,” Kelp said. “Stay out in the air, dry overnight, tomorrow we’ll set them up in that big living room. In the meantime, what could happen?”