What's The Worst That Could Happen (17 page)

They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the
same
pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were
still
there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.

“Suitland?” May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, “There’s a place next to Washington called Suitland?”

“Oh, sure,” Anne Marie said. “That’s very close in, over near District Heights.”

“The whole place should be called Suitland,” John said.

May said, “Are we going by there?”

“No,” Anne Marie told her, “we’re taking the Beltway the other way around, through Bethesda.”

Andy, driving with the nonchalance of somebody who didn’t much care if this car picked up a dent or two, said, “I’m on the Beltway? Or inside the Beltway? Or what?”

“You’re on the Beltway,” Anne Marie told him. “Pretty soon you’ll cross the river and then turn off —”

“What river?” Andy asked.

Anne Marie, surprised, said, “The Potomac.”

“Oh, right. The Potomac.”

“I’ve heard of that,” John said, from the backseat.

“I’m going to take you into the city from the south,” Anne Marie explained. “That’s the quickest way to get to the Watergate area. So we’ll be crossing the Potomac twice.”

John said, “Andy, you got to introduce this person to Stan Murch.”

Andy said, “I was just thinking the same thing.” Seeing Anne Marie’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “That’s a friend of ours that takes a particular interest in how you get from point A to point B.”

Anne Marie said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Well, Stan kind of goes to extremes,” Andy said. “Is this your river?”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said. “You want the exit to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.”

“The George Washington Memorial Parkway? They really lean on it around here, don’t they?”

“After a while, you don’t notice it,” Anne Marie assured him. “But it is a little, I admit, like living on a float in a Fourth of July parade. Here’s our turn.”

There was a lot of traffic; this being Sunday, it was mostly tourist traffic, license plates from all over the United States, attached to cars that didn’t know
where
the hell they were going. Andy swivel–hipped through it all, startling drivers who were trying to read maps without changing lanes, and Anne Marie said, “Now you want the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“No, I’m not. There’s the sign. See?”

Andy swung up and over, and there they were crossing the Potomac again, this time northbound, the city of Washington spread out in front of them like an almost life–size model of itself, as though it were all still in the planning stages and they could still decide not to go ahead with it.

From here, things got sudden. “Route 29, the Whitehurst Freeway.”

“Who was Whitehurst?” Andy asked, making the turn.

“President after Grover,” Anne Marie said. “Stay with 29! Don’t take any of those other things. And especially don’t take 66.”

“Get your kicks on Route 66,” Andy suggested.

“Not this time. Sixty–six goes
under
the Watergate. Don’t take Twenty–Fifth Street, it goes the wrong way, you want the next one, down there, Twenty–Fourth Street.”

“I thought that might be the next one,” Andy said.

“It isn’t always,” Anne Marie told him. She watched as Andy made the turn, and said, “That street that goes off at an angle there, that’s New Hampshire, you want that.”

“If you say so.”

They got stopped by a light and Andy peered at the street signs. “Is that One Street?”

“No, I Street. Sometimes they spell it like your eye, but it’s the letter. All the north–south streets are numbers, and all the east–west streets are letters.”

“We’re on New Hampshire. What’s that?”

“A spoke of the wagon wheel.”

Andy nodded. “I bet there’s even some way that that makes sense,” he said, and the light turned green and he drove on over I and down past H, saying, “I thought it was gonna be J.”

“Turn right on Virginia,” Anne Marie said.

“Another spoke of the wagon wheel?”

“Different wheel,” Anne Marie said.

“Some time,” Andy said, stopping at another red light, “you’ll have to tell me all about it.”

“You can turn right on red in Washington,” she told him, as the light turned green. “Or on green, for that matter.”

Andy made the turn and said, “Somehow, I have a feeling I’m going in circles here.”

“In a way,” Anne Marie said. “That’s the Watergate across the street there. Can you get over there?”

“Well, that depends,” Andy said, “on how much all these other people care about their cars.”

Fortunately, they all cared.

She shut the door. “What did you do with the car?”

“Well, I drove away from here,” he told her, crossing to the bed where his big battered canvas bag had been placed by the bellboy, “and I came to a stop sign, so I stopped.”

“And then what?”

“I came back here,” he said, and zipped open the bag.

She moved around until she could see his face. “You left the car at a stop sign? Just got out and left it there?”

“Wiped the steering wheel first.” The others, before getting out of the car, had also smeared any place they might have left fingerprints.

Anne Marie stared at him. “But … why? Why make a mess with the traffic?”

“Well, you know,” Andy said, “I feel a certain responsibility to the doctor.”

“I’m not following this,” Anne Marie admitted.

Andy changed clothes while he explained. “Well, let’s say I found a parking space and left the car there.”

“There are no parking spaces in Washington.”

“So that’s another consideration. But say I did find something like that, it could be weeks before the cops notice anything and the doctor gets his car back. This way, the cops have already noticed the situation by now, they’re probably phoning the doctor this minute, he could be reunited with that nice vehicle before sundown. How do I look?”

Andy was now wearing a short–sleeve white dress shirt open at the collar with a half–dozen pens in a white pocket protector in the shirt pocket, plus khaki pants and tan workboots and dark–framed eyeglasses with clip–on sunglasses angled up toward his forehead and a yellow hardhat. In his left hand he held a clipboard. Work gloves protruded from his right hip pocket. “Different,” Anne Marie decided.

“Good.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“Well, you and May can do some sight–seeing or shopping or whatever, figure out where we’ll eat dinner, stuff like that. And John and me,” Andy said, hefting the clipboard as he crossed to the phone, “are gonna go case the joint. What’s his room number?”

We’re not done. Sorry, but we’re not done. There are also two office buildings, famous in the Nixon administration. (The Democratic National Committee is no longer headquartered there.) These are called Watergate 600 and Watergate 2600, and behind the latter is the 235–room Watergate Hotel. Lest we forget, there’s also the Watergate Mall, tucked in behind Watergate East, full of all kinds of shopping opportunities. And finally, there’s an ornamental pool in the middle of the complex (probably called the Watergate Water), surrounded by the kind of landscaping usually associated with model railroad sets; trees made of cotton balls dipped in green ink, that sort of thing.

The complex is open and closed at the same time, the mall absolutely open to pedestrians (any one of whom could be a shopper), the office buildings and hotel having normally minimal security, and the apartment houses primarily guarded by security men and women in blue blazers who sit at counters in the lobbies and buzz in the acceptable arrivers while presumably rejecting the unclean.

It was in Watergate East, North that TUI maintained a two–bedroom two–bathroom fourth–floor apartment, where Max Fairbanks was scheduled to spend Sunday and Monday nights, while appearing before a congressional committee on Monday afternoon. And it was here, in that apartment, where John Dortmunder intended to find Max Fairbanks and relieve him of a certain ring.

Wandering, roving, they found the two–level garage beneath the apartment building and saw that here, too, access to the elevators was monitored by building staff, but very loosely. Then they found the truck ramp that descended beneath the building and on out to the back, giving access for deliveries to the boutiques in the mall. A person could move between the truck ramp and the upper level of the garage through a door with a laughable lock.

They went on through the mall, unseen, and out to the promenades that connected all the buildings. The hotel was down to their right, the Watergate Water dead ahead. The buildings all around them were thoroughly balconied, to take advantage of the river views, and the balcony railings were composed of rows of spaced vertical white concrete stanchions, looking from the distance like very serious teeth, so that from down here the buildings were stacks of sharks’ jawbones, one atop the other, all those teeth sticking straight up.

Kelp looked up at the balconies of Watergate East, North and said, “Hey.”

Dortmunder looked up. “What?”

“She’s gone now.”

“Who?”

“There was a woman up there, leaning over the balcony, gotta be right near where we’re going tonight, she looked like Anne Marie.”

“Couldn’t be,” Dortmunder said. “The hotel’s over there.”

“I know. She just looked like. Well … from this distance.”

“And you probably don’t really know her looks yet,” Dortmunder pointed out, and added, “She’s a good sport, isn’t she.”

“I sure hope so,” Kelp said. “Let’s look at that garage some more.”