Thieves Dozen (11 page)
W
HEN
D
ORTMUNDER WALKED INTO THE
O.J. B
AR
& G
RILL ON
Amsterdam Avenue that afternoon, the regulars were talking about health and exercise, pro and con. “A healthy regime is very important,” one of the regulars was saying, hunched over his beer.
“You don’t mean ‘regime,’” a second regular told him. “A healthy regime is like Australia. You mean ‘regimen.’”
“‘Regimen’ is women,” a third regular put in. “Something about women.”
The other regulars frowned at that, trying to figure out if it meant anything. In the silence, Dortmunder said, “Rollo.”
Rollo the bartender, observing the world from a three-point stance—large feet solidly planted on the duckboards behind the bar, elbow atop the cash register drawer—seemed too absorbed either by the conversation or in contemplation of the possibility of health to notice the arrival of a new customer. In any event, he didn’t even twitch, just stood there like a genre painting of himself, while the first regular said, “Well, whatever the word is, the point is, if you got your health you got everything.”
“I don’t see how that follows,” the second regular said. “You could have your health and still not have a Pontiac Trans Am.”
“If you got your health,” the first regular told him, “you don’t need a Pontiac Trans Am. You can walk.”
“Walk where?”
“Wherever it was you were gonna go.”
“St. Louis,” the second regular said, and knocked back some of his tequila sunrise in satisfaction.
“Well, now you’re just being argumentative,” the first regular complained.
“Some of that health stuff can get dangerous,” the third regular put in. “I know a guy knew a guy had a heart attack from the Raquel Welch workout video.”
“Well, sure,” the first regular agreed, “it’s always possible to exercise too
much,
but—”
“He wasn’t exercising, he was just watching.”
“Rollo,” Dortmunder said.
“When I was in the Army,” the first regular said, “they used to make us do sailor jumps.”
“If you were in the Army,” the second regular told him, “they were soldier jumps.”
“Sailor jumps,” insisted the first regular.
“We used to call those jumping jacks,” the third regular chimed in.
“You did not,” the second regular told him. “Jumping jacks is that little girl’s game with the lug nuts.”
“Rollo,” Dortmunder demanded, and this time Rollo raised an eyebrow in Dortmunder’s direction, but then he was distracted by movement from the third regular, the jumping jacks man, who, with a scornful “
Lug
nuts!” climbed off his stool, paused to wheeze and then said, “
This
is jumping jacks.” And he stood there at a kind of crumpled attention, arms at his sides, heels together, chest in.
The second regular gazed upon him with growing disgust. “That’s
what?
”
“It isn’t sailor jumps, I know that much,” the first regular said.
But the third regular was unfazed. “This is first position,” he explained. “Now watch.” Carefully, he lifted his right foot and moved it about 18 inches to the side, then put it back down on the floor. After stooping a bit to be sure he had both feet where he wanted them, he straightened up, more or less, faced forward, took a deep breath you could hear across the street and slowly lifted both arms straight up into the air, leaning his palms against each other above his head. “Position two,” he said.
“That’s some hell of an exercise,” said the second regular. The third regular’s arms dropped to his sides like fish off a delivery truck. “When you’re really into it,” he pointed out, “you do it faster.”
“That
might
be sailor jumps,” the first regular admitted.
“In my personal opinion,” the second regular said, twirling the dregs of his tequila sunrise, “diet is the most important part of your personal health program. Vitamins, minerals and food groups.”
“I don’t think you got that quite right,” the third regular told him. “I think it goes, animal, vitamin or mineral.”
“Food groups,” the second regular contended. “This isn’t twenty questions.”
The first regular said, “I don’t get what you mean by this food groups.”
“Well,” the second regular told him, “your principal food groups are meat, vegetables, dessert and beer.”
“Oh,” the first regular said. “In that case, then, I’m OK.” “Rollo,” Dortmunder begged.
Sighing like an entire Marine boot camp, Rollo bestirred himself and came plodding down the duckboards. “How ya doin?” he said, flipping a coaster onto the bar.
“Keeping healthy,” Dortmunder told him.
“That’s good. The usual?”
“Carrot juice,” Dortmunder said.
“You got it,” Rollo told him, and reached for the bourbon bottle.
T
HERE WAS NO USE GOING ANY FARTHER DOWN THE FIRE ESCAPE
. More cops were in the yard: A pair of flashlights white-lined the dark down there. From above, the
clonk-clonk
of sensible black shoes continued to descend on rusted metal stairs. A realist, Dortmunder stopped where he was on the landing and composed his soul for 10 to 25 as a guest of the state. American plan.
What a Christmas present.
A window, left of his left elbow. Through it, a dimly lighted bedroom, empty, with brighter light through the door ajar opposite. A pile of coats on the double bed. Faint party chatter wafting out through the top part of the window, open two inches.
An open window is not locked. It was a cold December out here. Dortmunder was bundled in a peacoat over his usual working uniform of black shoes, slacks and shirt—but with the party going on in there, the window had been opened at the top to let out excess heat.
Sliiide.
Now open at the bottom.
Sliiide.
Now closed. Dortmunder started across the room toward that half-open door.
“Larry,” said the pile of coats in a querulous female voice. “There’s somebody in here.”
The pile of coats could do a snotty male voice, too: “They’re just going to the john. Pay no attention.”
“And putting down my coat,” Dortmunder said, dropping his peacoat with its cargo of burglar tools and knickknacks from the corner jeweler, from where he had traveled up and over rooftops to this dubious haven.
“Ouch!” said the girl’s voice.
“Sorry.”
“Get on with it, all right?” Boy’s voice.
“Sorry.”
A herd of cops went slantwise downward past the window, their attention fixed on the darkness below, the muffled clatter of their passage hardly noticeable to anyone who didn’t happen to be (a) a habitual criminal and (b) on the run. Despite the boy’s advice to get on with it, Dortmunder stayed frozen until the last of the herd trotted by, then he took a quick scan of the room.
Over there, the shut door outlined in light would lead to the bathroom. The darker one would be . . . a closet?
Yes. Hurried, in near darkness, Dortmunder grabbed something or other from inside the closet, then shut that door again and moved quickly toward the outlined one as the girl’s voice said, “Larry, I just don’t feel comfortable anymore.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Dortmunder entered the square, white bathroom—light-green towels, dolphins on the closed shower curtain—ignored the two voices departing from the room outside, one plaintive, the other overbearing, and studied his haberdashery selection.
Well. Fortunately, most things go with black, including this rather weary sports jacket of tweedy tan with brown leather elbow patches. Dortmunder slipped it on and it was maybe two sizes too big, but not noticeable if he kept it unbuttoned. He turned to the mirror over the sink, and now he might very well be a sociology professor—specializing in labor relations—at a small Midwestern university. A professor without tenure, though, and probably no chance of getting tenure, either, now that Marx has flunked his finals.
Dortmunder’s immediate problem was that he couldn’t hide. The cops knew he was in this building, so sooner or later some group of police officers would definitely be gazing upon him, and the only question was, how would they react when that moment came? His only hope was to mingle, if you could call that a hope.
Leaving the bathroom, he noticed that the pile of coats was visibly depleted. Seemed like everybody’s plans were getting loused up tonight.
But this gave him a chance to stash his stash, at least temporarily. Finding his peacoat at last—already it was at the bottom of the pile—he took the jeweler’s former merchandise and stowed it in the top left dresser drawer amid some other gewgaws and gimcracks. His tools went into the cluttered cabinet under the bathroom sink, and then he was ready to move on.
Beyond the partly opened bedroom door was a hall lined with national park posters. Immediately to the right, the hall ended at the apartment’s front door. To the left, it went past a couple of open and closed doors till it emptied into the room where the party was. From here, he could see half a dozen people holding drinks and talking. Motown versions of Christmas songs bubbled along, weaving through the babble of talk.
He hesitated, indecisive, struck by some strange stage fright. The apartment door called to him with a siren song of escape, even though he knew the world beyond it was badly infested by law. On the other hand, a crowd is supposed to be the ideal medium into which a lone individual might disappear, and yet he found himself reluctant to test that theory. To party or not to party—that was the question.
Two events pushed him to a decision. First, the doorbell next to him suddenly clanged like a fire engine in hell, causing him to jump a foot. And second, two women emerged from the party into the hallway, both moving fast. The one in front looked to be in her early 20s, in black slacks and black blouse and white half-apron and red bow tie and harried expression; she carried an empty round silver tray and she veered off into the first doorway on the right. The second woman was older but very well put together, dressed in baubles and beads and dangling earrings and a whole lot of Technicolor makeup, and her expression was grim but brave as she marched down the hall toward Dortmunder.
No, toward the door. This was, no doubt, the hostess, on her way to answer the bell, wondering who’d arrived so late. Dortmunder, knowing who the late arrivals were and not wanting to be anywhere near that door when it opened, jackrabbited into motion with an expression on his face that was meant to be a party smile. “How’s it goin’?” he asked with nicely understated amiability as they passed each other in the middle of the hall.
“Just
fine,
” she swore, eyes sparkling and voice fluting, her own imitation party smile glued firmly in place. So she didn’t know everybody at her party. Dortmunder could have been brought here by an invited guest, right? Right.
The party, as Dortmunder approached it, was loud, but not loud enough to cover the sudden growl of voices behind him. He made an abrupt turn into the open doorway that the harried woman had gone through and then he was in the kitchen, where the harried woman was putting a lot of cheese-filled tarts onto the round tray.
Dortmunder tried his line again: “How’s it goin’?”
“Rotten,” the harried woman said. Her ash-blonde hair was coiled in a bun in back, but much of it had escaped to lie in parabolas on her damp brow. She’d have been a good-looking woman if she weren’t so bad-tempered and overworked. “Jerry never showed up,” she snapped, as though it were Dortmunder’s fault. “I have to do it all—” She shook her head and made a sharp chopping motion with her left hand. “I don’t have time to talk.”
“Maybe I could help,” Dortmunder suggested. The growl of cop voices continued from back by the apartment door. They’d check the room next to the fire escape first, but then they’d be coming this way.
The woman looked at him as though he were trying to sell her magazine subscriptions: “Help? What do you mean, help?”
“I don’t know anybody here.” He was noticing: She was all in black, he was all in black. “I came with Larry, but now he’s talking to some girl, so why don’t I help out?”
“You don’t help the caterer,” she said.
“OK. Just a thought.” No point getting her suspicious.
But as he was turning away, she said, “Wait a minute,” and when he looked back, her sweat-beaded brow was divided in half by a vertical frown line. She said, “You really want to help?”
“Only if you could use some.”
“Well,” she said, reluctant to admit there might be something in this world for her not to be mad at, “if you really mean it.”
“Count on it,” Dortmunder told her. Shucking out of the borrowed jacket, looking around the room for a white apron like hers, he said, “It’ll give me something to do other than just stand in the corner by myself. I’ll take those things out, pass them around, you can get caught up.”
Once the jacket was off and hanging on a kitchen chair, Dortmunder looked exactly like what he was: a semihardened criminal, a hunted man, a desperate fugitive from justice and a guy who just keeps slipping the mind of Lady Luck. This was not a good image. Failing to find a white apron, he grabbed a white dish towel instead and tucked it sideways across the front of his trousers. No red bow tie like the woman’s, but that couldn’t be helped.
She watched him suiting up. “Well, if you really want to do this,” she said, and suddenly her manner changed, became much more official, commanding—even bossy. “What you have to do is remember to keep moving. It’s a jungle out there.”
“Oh, I know that,” Dortmunder said.
“You don’t want to get caught.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’ll get people,” she said, making hand gestures to demonstrate the point, “who’ll just keep grabbing and grabbing. You get into the middle of a conversational group, all of a sudden you can’t get out without knocking somebody over, and then—that’s a no-no, by the way,” she interrupted herself.
Dortmunder had been nodding, one ear cocked for the approach of society’s defenders, but now he looked quizzical and said, “A no-no?”
