Thieves Dozen (12 page)

“Knocking over the guests.”

“Why would I do that?” he asked. You knock over jewelry stores, not guests. Everybody knows that.

“If you’re stuck in the middle of a group and there’s no way out,” she explained, “they’ll eat everything on the tray. They’re like a bunch of locusts, and there you are, and most of the other guests haven’t had anything at all.”

“I see what you mean. Keep moving.”

“And,” she said, “stick the tray into the middle, but don’t go into the middle.”

“I got it,” he promised her. “I’m ready to make the move.” “You’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” he said, and picked up the tarts and went to the aid of the party.

The party consisted of several clumps of people, mostly crowded around the bar, which was a serve-yourself table in front of curtained windows at one end of the long living room. Most people ignored the big cut-glass bowl of eggnog and went straight for the wine or the hard stuff. At the opposite end of the room stood the Christmas tree, short and fat and shedding, with many tiny colored lights that blinked on and off as if to say
chickee-the-cops, chickee-the-cops, chickee-the-cops.
I know, Dortmunder thought back at them, I know about it, all right?

A sofa and some chairs had been shoved against the walls to make room for the party, so everybody was standing, except one heavy woman dressed in a lot of bright fluttery scarves who perched on the sofa holding a glass as she talked to various people’s stomachs. Occasionally, someone would bend down to say a friendly word to her forehead, but mostly she was ignored; the party was taking place at the five-foot level, not the three-foot level. And, as at most Christmas parties, everybody was looking a little tense thinking about all those lists at home.

Feeling the guard-dog eyes of the law scrape at his back, though the search party hadn’t yet made its way down the hall, Dortmunder held the tray chest high and followed it into the scrum. People parted at the arrival of food, paused in drink and talk to take a tartlet, then closed ranks again in his wake. Sidling to the center of the crush, in the party but not of it, Dortmunder began to relax and to pick up shreds of conversation as he motored along:

“There’s only twenty guys gonna be let in on this thing. We have seven already, and once we have all of the seed money. . . .”

“She came to the co-op board in a false beard and claimed she was a proctologist. Well, naturally. . . .”

“So then I said you can have this job, and he said OK, and I said you can’t treat people like that, and he said OK, and I said that’s it, I quit, and he said OK, and I said you’re gonna have to get along without me from here on in, buster, and he said OK . . . so I guess I’m not over there anymore.”

“And then these guys in a rowboat—no, wait, I forgot. First they blew up the bridge, see, and then they stole the rowboat.”

“Merry Christmas, you Jew bastard, I haven’t seen you since Ramadan.”

“And he said, ‘Madam, you’re naked,’ and I said, ‘These happen to be
gloves,
if you don’t mind,’ and that shut him up.”

“Whatever you want, Sheila. If you want to go, we’ll go.” Wait a minute, that was a familiar voice. Dortmunder looked around, and another familiar voice, this one female, said, “I didn’t say I wanted to leave, Larry. Why do you always put it on me?”

The couple from the coats. Dortmunder steered his tart tray in that direction, and there they were, both in their mid-20s, wedged into a self-absorbed bubble inside the larger party. Larry was very tall, with unnecessarily wavy dark hair and a long thin nose and long thin lips and little widely spaced eyes. Sheila was on the short side, a pretty girl, but with an extra layer of baby fat, driveway-colored hair and not much clothes sense; either that, or she’d just recently put on those extra pounds and hadn’t bought any new clothes for the new body.

Dortmunder inserted the depleted tartlet tray into their space as Larry said, “I don’t put it on you. You weren’t happy in the other room, and now you’re not happy here. Make your own decisions, that’s all.”

She turned her worried look to the tarts, but Larry grandly waved the tray away. Neither of them looked directly at Dortmunder. In fact, nobody looked directly at the server (
not
servant, please, in egalitarian America) where tartlets simply appeared in one’s hand at a given point during the party.

Moving on through the throng, Dortmunder heard one last exchange behind him. (“Lately, you do this all the time.” “
I’m
not doing anything, Sheila, it’s up to you.”) But his attention was diverted by an event ahead: The cops had arrived.

Three of them, uniformed, stocky, mustached, irritable. They were so grumpy that the Technicolor hostess in their midst looked as though she were under arrest.

But she wasn’t under arrest, she was bird-dogging, eyeing the guests for the cops, looking for cuckoos in the nest. Unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar faces. . . .

Meanwhile, all the faces had grown just a little more rigid. It’s hard to be aware that three bad-tempered cops are looking at you and pretend you aren’t aware of it, and at the same time present an image that shows you’re innocent of whatever it is they think you’re guilty of, when you don’t know what they think you’re guilty of, and for all you know you are. Complex. No wonder every drink in the room was being drained more rapidly, even the club sodas and ginger ales.

Someone else was also observing the scene: the harried woman caterer. She’d been circulating in another part of the room with another tray, and she’d noticed the new arrivals. Dortmunder caught her looking from him to the cops and back again, and in the space between her damp hair and perky red bow tie, her thunderclouded face was an absolute emblem of suspicion. Doesn’t anybody believe in altruism anymore?

Well, it was time to grasp the tiger by the tail and face the situation. The best defense is a good despair; Dortmunder marched directly to that dark blue cloud in the doorway, shoved his tray into its middle and said, “Tarts?”

“No, no,” they said, brushing him away—even cops don’t look at servers—and they went back to saying to the hostess, “Anybody you don’t know. Anybody at all.”

Dortmunder dallied nearby, offering his last few tarts to the closest convivials as he eavesdropped on the manhunt. The hostess was a rich contralto; under most circumstances, she would have been a pleasure to listen to, but these were not most circumstances: “I don’t see anyone. Well, that person came with Tommy, his name is, oh, I’m so bad at names.”

“It’s faces we care about,” one of the cops said, and damn near looked at Dortmunder.

Who realized it was time to move on. Unloading the last of his tarts, he segued into the empty kitchen, where he briefly considered his circumstances, contemplated a cut-and-run and decided this was no time to become a moving target.

On a cookie sheet on the kitchen counter lay a regiment of two-inch-long celery segments, each filled with red-dyed anchovy gunk. Green and red, Christmas colors; pretty, in a way, but not particularly edible-looking. Nevertheless, he arranged these on his tray, making a spiral, getting caught up in the design, attempting to make a Santa Claus face, failing, then picking up the tray, and as he turned to leave, one of the cops walked in.

Dortmunder couldn’t help himself; he just stood there. Deep down inside, a terrific struggle was going on, invisible on the surface. You’re a waiter, he told himself in desperation, you’re with the caterer, nothing else matters to you. Trying to build a performance using the Method. But no. It didn’t matter how he spurred himself, he just went on standing there, tray in hands, waiting to be led away.

The cop glared around the room as though he were pretty sure somebody was there. His gaze slid off Dortmunder’s furrowed brow, moved on, kept searching.

I
am
a waiter! Dortmunder thought, and almost smiled; except a waiter wouldn’t. He took a step toward the door, and the cop said, “Whose coat is that?”

Who’s he talking to? There’s nobody here but the waiter. “You,” the cop said, not quite looking in Dortmunder’s direction. He pointed at the jacket Dortmunder had worn in here from the bedroom. “That yours?”

“No.” Which was not only the truth, it was also the simplest possible answer. So rarely is the truth the simplest possible answer that Dortmunder, pleased by the coincidence, repeated it. “No,” he said again, then added a flourish for the hell of it. “It was here when I came in.”

The cop picked up the jacket and patted its pockets. Then he turned, draping the jacket over his arm, and Dortmunder, in the part at last, extended the tray. “You want a, a thing?”

The cop shook his head. He still wasn’t looking at Dortmunder. He went away with the jacket, and Dortmunder sat on the now jacketless chair to have a quiet nervous breakdown. The hostess was going to say, “Why, that’s my husband’s jacket. In the kitchen? What was it doing there?” Then all the cops would come back and lay hands on him, and he would never be heard from again.

The harried woman steamed in, her own tray empty. Dortmunder got to his feet and said, “Just resting a minute.”

She raised a meaningful brow in his direction.

Which he pretended not to see. “The cops didn’t want the tarts,” he said.

“I wonder what they did want,” she said, still with that meaningful look.

“Maybe the party’s too noisy,” Dortmunder suggested. “Maybe the neighbor upstairs complained.”

“That many cops? The neighbor upstairs must be the police commissioner.”

“That’s probably it,” Dortmunder said. “What do you think? Should I make a special tray for them?”

“For the police?” This question brought her back to earth, and to business. “Nonguests are not our concern,” she said. “What’s that you’re taking out there?” She peered at his tray much more suspiciously than she’d peered at him; good. “Ah, the anchovy logs,” she said, nodding her approval.

“Anchovy logs?”

“You don’t have to mention the name, just distribute them. And stick to the area at the other end of the room from the bar to move people away from the drinks.”

“These logs,” Dortmunder pointed out, “will drive them right back to the drinks.”

“That’s OK. Circulation’s the name of the game.”

The hostess came fluttering in, saying, “We have to
do
something. Can you
believe
this? Police!”

“We noticed,” the harried woman said.

“Police ruin a party,” the hostess announced.

“They sure do,” Dortmunder agreed.

He should have kept his mouth shut; this just made the hostess focus on him, saying, “Jerry, what you should do is—” She blinked. “You’re not Jerry.”

“Sure I am,” Dortmunder said, and flashed the tray of logs. “I better get out there,” he said, scooting through the door. From behind he heard the harried woman say, “A different Jerry.”

In the living room, the party wasn’t really ruined at all. The cops were nowhere in sight and the partygoers were peacefully at graze once more. Dortmunder moved his tray hither and yon, away from the bar, and soon the hostess returned, but she was not at ease. She kept flashing worried looks toward the hall.

Hmmm. His tray still half full of logs, Dortmunder eased away from the party, skirted the hostess at some little distance and proceeded down the hall to reconnoiter, tray held out in front of himself as a
carte d’identité.

He heard them before he saw them, a cop voice saying, “Which coat is yours?” Then he made the turn into the bedroom and there were the three cops, plus two more cops, plus two male partygoers, who looked worried and guilty as hell as they pawed through the pile of coats. “Snack?” Dortmunder inquired.

All
the cops looked at him, but with annoyance, not suspicion. “Geddada here,” one of them said.

“Right.” Dortmunder bowed from the waist, like butlers in the old black-and-white movies on TV, and backed out of the room. Moving down the hall toward the party, he considered the possibility that one or both of those suspects would prove to have some sort of illegal substance in his coat. A happy thought, but would it sufficiently distract the law? Probably not.

Back at the party, Dortmunder unloaded more anchovy logs, and then somebody put two glasses onto his not-quite-empty tray and said, “Two white wines, pal.”

Dortmunder looked at the glasses, then looked up, and it was his buddy Larry again, who turned away to continue pistol-whipping his girlfriend, saying, “Make your own decisions for yourself, Sheila, don’t put the blame on me.”

Bewildered, she said, “The blame for what?”

The waiter wasn’t supposed to get drinks for people, was he? Everybody else was getting his own. Dortmunder considered tucking the two glasses inside Larry’s shirt, but then he glanced over and saw a cop briefly in the doorway, looking around. He decided a waiter was somebody who waited on people, not somebody who knocked people around, so he carried the tray to the drinks table. The cop was gone again. Dortmunder filled one glass with white wine and the other with tonic and carried them back on the tray, being careful to give Sheila the wine. She was saying wistfully, “It just seems as though you’re trying to push me away, but making it my fault.”

So she was catching on, was she? Airily, Larry smirked at her and said, “It’s all in your mind.”

Dortmunder made a rapid retreat to the kitchen, not wanting to be in sight when Larry tasted the tonic, and now this room was absolutely full of cops talking to the harried woman, one of them saying, “You been here since the beginning of the party?”

“We’re
catering
the party,” she said. “We had to be here an hour before it started, to set up the food and the bar.”

The cop gave Dortmunder a full frontal stare. “Both of you?” “Of course both of us,” the harried woman said. To Dortmunder she said, “Tell them, Jerry. We got here at six-thirty.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder told the cops, then turned to his partner in crime to say, “They’re still hungry out there.”

“We’ll give them the shrimps now,” she decided, and gestured for Dortmunder to join her at the counter next to the sink, where plastic pots of cold peeled shrimp and glass bowls of red sauce awaited.