Why Me? (4 page)

“What's the
matter
with you?”

“I was making coffee.”

“You need an extension in the kitchen.”

“No, I don't. Who was your other call?”

“A wrong number.”

“Good thing you didn't miss it.”

“Well, anyway. Where were you last night?”

“Where you said. Out by Kennedy.”

“Come on, John,” Kelp said. “Don't milk the joke.”

“Milk what joke?”

Sounding exasperated, Kelp said, “You did not steal some twenty-million-dollar ruby from Kennedy Airport last night.”

“That's right,” Dortmunder said. “Who said I did?”

“
You
did. I make a joke about the big heist at Kennedy last night, and you—”

“I was out near Kennedy. Right.”

“Not
near
Kennedy.
At
Kennedy.”

“Oh. It was a misunderstanding.”

“So what you hit was a—”

“Andy.”

“What?”

“You maybe aren't the only one who puts little extras on their phones.”

“There's something you want?”

“You ever hear of wiretap?”

“Who do you want tapped?”

“Nobody. But let's just pretend, just for fun, let's just make believe the police or somebody have tapped your phone or my phone or whatever.”

“For what?”

“Oh, to find out if either one of us happened to commit a crime recently.”

“Oh. I see what you mean.”

“Also,” Dortmunder said, “there is no such thing as a twenty-million-dollar ruby.”

“Valuable,” Kelp said. “Priceless. It's in the papers and on television and everything.”

“I wasn't thinking that big last night,” Dortmunder said, and the phone went
guk-ick, guk-ick, guk-ick
. “That's it,” Dortmunder said. “Good-bye.”

“John! Just hold on a second!”

Dortmunder hung up and carried his coffee back to the kitchen and sat at the table and studied the watch some more. 6:10:42:08.

The phone rang.

Dortmunder turned the watch around and around in his hands. He sipped coffee.

The phone went on ringing.

Dortmunder hit the watch against the tabletop, then pressed the button on its side: 6:10:42:09. “Ah-hah,” Dortmunder said. He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall—eleven-fifteen, more or less—and waited while the sweep second hand went halfway round the face. (The phone still rang.) Then he pressed the button on the side of the watch. 6:10:42:09.

“Mm,” said Dortmunder. He hit the watch against the tabletop, pressed the button. 6:10:42:10. Hit; press. 6:10:42:11.

Fine. If you started at ten minutes after six, and if you hit this watch against the tabletop six thousand times a minute, it'd keep perfect time. Leaving the watch on the table, Dortmunder went to the living room, walked past the ringing phone, put on his other jacket—the one with no tools in it—put the plastic bag with last night's proceeds in his pocket, and left the apartment.

8

You don't get to be top cop in the great city of New York by squattin back on your heels and spittin between your knees; no, sir. You get to be top cop in the great city of New York by standin up four-square with your fists at the ready and smash-in the face of every pest and nuisance as gets in your way, bedad. And by then you're makin enough money—with your salary and what dibs of undeclared cash happen to fall from time to time into your open palm—so you no longer have to
live
in that smelly awful city of New York at all any more, but can have a lovely big house in Bay Shore, out in Suffolk County on Long Island, a nice water-frontage house lookin out at Great South Bay. And you can have your own power boat (called
Lucille
, after your wife, to keep her quiet), and three ungrateful children, and a summer cottage over on the beach at Fire Island, and a beer belly, and the satisfaction of knowin you've done about the best any man could do with the hand you were dealt.

Nine-thirty a.m. Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney), having driven into the city three hours earlier than his usual habit, and having been rigorously briefed for the last thirty minutes, followed his beer belly into the big conference room at Headquarters (One Police Plaza, downtown behind City Hall, a lovely building, all tall and dark brick, built like a giant pinup), and got introduced to a lot of damn new faces. There was no way a man could remember all those names, but fortunately Chief Inspector Mologna didn't have to; he was accompanied by Leon, his secretary, whose job it was to remember things like that and who happened to be very good at it.

But what a lot of people had crowded into this conference room for this conference. Most of them men, most of them white, but here and there women, here and there black. In addition to Chief Inspector Mologna and Leon and two detectives from New York's finest, there were also representatives from the Housing Police, the Transit Police, the DA's office, the State CID, the FBI, the CIA, the United States Mission to the United Nations, United States Customs, the Chicago Natural History Museum, Turkish Intelligence, and the Turkish Mission to the United Nations. The first fifteen or twenty minutes of the meeting was just spent with people introducing themselves to one another. “Pronounced Maloney,” Mologna kept saying, and relied on Leon to remember who everybody was.

An FBI man named—Mologna raised an eyebrow at Leon, seated to his left at the long oval conference table, who wrote
Zachary
on his yellow pad—Zachary got the ball rolling by standing up and telling them what they all already knew: some son of a bitch had stolen the Byzantine Fire, and some
other
son of a bitch had stolen it from the first son of a bitch. Zachary had a graphic display—charts and blown-up photographs one after another on an easel—and a pointer, and a kind of stiff mechanical way of pointing at things with the pointer, as though he weren't quite a human being but was a model put together by the Walt Disney people. A Walt Disney FBI man. “We know,” this fellow (squint at legal pad) Zachary said, “that the first group was Greek Cypriot. Several individuals are already in custody, and the rest should be rounded up soonest. So far, no hard information is available on the second group, though several theories have been advanced.”

You just bet they have, Mologna thought. He caught Leon's eye and they shared a millisecond twinkle. It was amazing how their minds meshed like that. Here was Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney), 53 years of age, a God-fearing white male Long Island Irishman, and be
damned
if the person in all of life whose thought processes most closely matched his own wasn't some damn 28-year-old smart-aleck faggot nigger called Sergeant Leon Windrift. (Had Leon been only homosexual, he would have been bounced out of New York's finest long ago. Had he been only black, he'd be a patrolman forever. Being a faggot
and
a nigger, he could neither be fired nor kept in some damn precinct, which is why he'd risen so rapidly through the ranks to a sergeantcy and a job at Headquarters, where Mologna had first noticed him and stolen him for himself.)

“One suggestion,” the FBI man—Zachary—was saying, “has been that a
second
Greek Cypriot group was responsible for the second purloinment.”

Purloinment?

“The advantage of this theory is that it explains how the second group had so thoroughly infiltrated the first group as to be aware of their intended disposition of the ruby. There are contending factions, of course, within the umbrella groupage of Greek Cypriot nationalism.”

Groupage?

“A second theory proposed has been that agents of the Soviet Union, pursuant to the claims earlier put forward by the Russian Orthodox Church in re annexment of the Byzantine Fire, were responsible for the second theft.”

Annexment?

“In support of this theory is the fact that the USSR Mission to the United Nations has already denied Russian complicacy in the events of last evening. However, a third potentialism would be a transactage by a dissident factor within the Turkish populace.”

Complicacy?

Potentialism?

Transactage
?

“Colonel Bubble of Turkish Intelligence—”

Mologna raised an eyebrow at Leon, who wrote on his yellow pad
Bubul
.

“—has assured us of the unlikelihood of this eventuation, but he will keep it under some advisement.”

Oh, well.

“Fourthly, there is always the possibility of coincidentalistic activity. A mere burglar may have stumbled upon the Byzantine Fire whilst engaged in his own depredatory activities. If there are any further suggestions anyone here might care to make, additional theories as to the perpetrators, their motivations, their future intentionisms, we'll all be happy to hear them.”

Oh, will we? Mologna and Leon did the eye thing again.

“In the meantime,” Zachary was saying, pointing this way and that randomly with his pointer, “as both felonies were perpetrated within the parameters of the city of New York, they come within the primary jurisdiction of the New York City police force, which will coordinate interagency activities and assume transcendent responsibility for the investigation. Therefore, I am happy at this time to turn the meeting over to Chief Inspector Mo-log-na of the New York City police.”

Grunting, Mologna heaved himself to his feet and rested his beer belly on the table. “It's pronounced Maloney,” he said. “You people can have your theories, and you can run down a lot of Greeks and Turks and Russian Orthodoxes, but I'll tell you right now what happened. That damn fool jeweler put a sign in his window that he was leavin town. Perfect invitation to a burglar. There was a nice little piece of wire put on the alarm to bypass it. The door was jimmied open as gentle as a weddin night. The safe was cracked by a professional cracksman. He took this damn ruby ring we're all so excited about, but he didn't know what it was because he
also
took a lot of penny-ante rings and bracelets and watches. Your terrorists and dissidents and all them types don't know how to quiet a burglar alarm or ease open a safe. All they know is machine guns and Molotov cocktails and a lot of noise and fuss and blood. It's a nice New York hometown burglar is what we're lookin for, and I tell you right now I'll find him. My boys'll toss this entire goddam city, we'll pick up every grifter and drifter and peterman and second-story man in town, we'll shake em all by the heels, and when you hear a
plink
, that'll be the ring fallin out of somebody's pocket. In the meantime, anybody got any questions, you deal with Sergeant Windrift here, my secretary. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a whole lot of arrestin to do.”

And Chief Inspector Mologna followed his beer belly out of the conference room.

9

There was a
Daily News
on the seat on the subway, but Dortmunder didn't read about the big jewel robbery out to Kennedy. Other people's successes didn't interest him that much. Instead he leafed through to page seven, where he read about three guys in Staten Island who went into a bar last night to hold it up and the customers jumped all over them and threw their guns into the Kill Van Kull and let the air out of the tires of their getaway car, but then when the cops showed up (called by some busybody neighbor bugged by the noise) none of the customers would say which three guys in their midst were the holdup men, so the cops arrested everybody and it still hadn't been sorted out. The bartender, claiming it was too dim in the bar to see which of his customers was holding him up, was quoted as saying, “Anyway, it was just youthful exuberance.”

Dortmunder was on the BMT. At 28th Street four cops came aboard and the doors stayed open until the cops found the two guys they wanted. Dortmunder sat there behind his
News
, reading about a pantyhose sale at Alexander's, and the cops grabbed these two guys from just across the aisle and frisked them and marched them out of the train. Just two ordinary guys, like you see around. Then the doors closed and the train moved on, and Dortmunder came out from behind his paper to watch the cops walking the two guys away across the receding platform.

At Times Square he changed for the Broadway IRT, and there seemed to be cops sort of strolling around all over the station—a lot more than the usual sprinkle. The plastic bag of jewelry in Dortmunder's pocket was getting heavier and heavier. It was making, he thought, a very obvious bulge. He walked with his right arm close against his side, but that might draw attention too, so then he walked with his right arm elaborately moving, but that could also draw attention, so finally he just slunk along, not giving a damn if he drew attention or not.

At 86th Street, when he came up out of the subway, right there by the bank building on the corner at Broadway two cops had a guy leaning against the wall and were giving him a toss. It all was beginning to seem like a bad omen or something. “Probably everything I grabbed was paste,” Dortmunder muttered to himself, and walked up to 89th Street between Broadway and West End, where Arnie had an apartment up over a bookstore. Dortmunder rang the bell, and Arnie's voice came out of the metal grid, saying, “Who is it?”

Dortmunder leaned close to the grid: “It's me.”

“Who the hell is me?”

Dortmunder looked around the tiny vestibule. He looked out at the street. He leaned as close to the grid as he could get and mumbled, “Dortmunder.”

Very very loud, the voice of Arnie yelled from the grid, “
Dortmunder
?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay? Yeah.”

The door went click-click-click, and Dortmunder pushed on it and went into the hallway, which always smelled of old newspapers. “Next time I'll just pick the lock,” he muttered, and went upstairs, where Arnie was waiting in his open doorway.

“So,” Arnie said. “You scored?”