Why Me? (9 page)

“Stan'll be along,” Dortmunder said. He sat with his profile to the door, putting his glass on the felt.

“Haven't seen you since the pitcha switch,” Tiny said. Incredibly, he laughed. He didn't do it well, or as though it came quite naturally, but the effort itself was praiseworthy. “I hear you had more trouble later on,” he said.

“A little.”

“But I got mine out of it,” Tiny said. His big head nodded in slow satisfaction. “I always get mine.”

“That's good,” Dortmunder said.

“It's necessary.” Tiny gestured with a hand like a baby bear. “I was just telling Ralph here what happened to Pete Orbin.”

Ralph Winslow moodily tinkled ice. He didn't look as though he wanted to pat Tiny's back at
all
.

Dortmunder said, “Something happened to Pete Orbin?”

“I was in a little thing with him,” Tiny said. “He tried to shortchange me on the cut. Said it was a mistake, he was counting on his fingers.”

Dortmunder's brow corrugated. Reluctantly, he asked, “What happened?”

“I took off some of his fingers. Now he won't count on them any more.” Wrapping his own sausage fingers around his glass, Tiny drained the red liquid from it, while Dortmunder and Ralph Winslow exchanged an enigmatic glance.

The door opened again and they all looked up, but it wasn't Stan Murch, who had called them all to come here tonight, it was Rollo the bartender, who said, “There's an ale outside, asking for a Ralph Winslow.”

“That's me,” Winslow said, getting to his feet.

Tiny pointed at his empty glass. “Again.”

“Vodka and red wine,” Rollo agreed. To Dortmunder he said, “It wasn't Murphy's law. It's Gresham's law.”

“Oh,” said Dortmunder.

“The way we found out, we called the precinct.”

Rollo and Winslow left, closing the door behind them. Dortmunder worked some at his drink.

Tiny said, “I don't like this. I don't like to hang around—wait around.” His heavy features were arranged in a peeved expression, like an annoyed fire hydrant.

“Stan's usually on time,” Dortmunder said. He tried to stop wondering what parts Tiny removed from people who irritated him by being late.

“I got a head to break later on tonight,” Tiny explained.

“Oh?”

“The cops grabbed me this morning, hung me around at the precinct two hours, asking dumb questions about that big ruby got hit.”

“They're really leaning,” Dortmunder agreed.

“One of them leaned too heavy,” Tiny said. “Little red-headed guy. What you call your petty authority. He went too far.”

“A cop, you mean.”

“So he's a cop. There's still limits.”

“I guess so,” Dortmunder said.

“A friend of mine'll follow him home tonight,” Tiny said, “to get me the address. He's on the four to twelve. Around one, I'll put on a ski mask and go to that guy's house and put his head in his holster.”

“A ski mask,” Dortmunder echoed. He was thinking how much good a ski mask would do to disguise this monster. In order to be effectively disguised, Tiny would have to put on, at a minimum, a three-room apartment.

The door opened again and Ralph Winslow returned, with Tiny's fresh drink and with a second man, a narrow sharp-faced type with bony shoulders and quick-moving eyes and that indefinable but unmistakable aura of a man just out of prison. “John Dortmunder,” Winslow said, “Tiny Bulcher, this is Jim O'Hara.”

“Whadaya say.”

“Meetcha.”

Winslow and O'Hara sat down. Tiny said, “Irish, huh?”

“That's right,” O'Hara said.

“So's that little redheaded cop. The one I'm gonna mutilate tonight.”

O'Hara looked at Tiny more alertly. “A cop? You're gonna beat on a cop?”

“He was impolite,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder watched O'Hara absorbing Tiny Bulcher. Then the door opened once more, and they all looked up, and this time instead of Stan Murch it was Murch's Mom, a feisty little woman who drove a cab and was now in her working clothes: check slacks, leather jacket, and plaid cap. She looked hurried and impatient; speaking rapidly, she said, “Hello, all. Hello, John. Stan told me come by, tell you, the meeting's off.”

“More impoliteness,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder said, “What's up?”

“They arrested him,” Murch's Mom said. “They arrested my Stan, on nothing at all.”

“The police,” Tiny grumbled, “are getting to become a nuisance.”

“Stan says,” his Mom said, “he'll call everybody again, set up another meeting. I gotta go, my cab's double-parked, there's cops all over the place.”

“You can say that again,” said Ralph Winslow.

However, she didn't. She merely left, moving fast.

“It's a hell of a homecoming,” Jim O'Hara said. “I come back after three years upstate and there's a cop on every piece of pavement.”

“It's that ruby,” Tiny said.

“The Byzantine Fire,” Winslow said. “Whoever grabbed that, he can retire.”

“He should of retired
before
,” Tiny said.

O'Hara said, “What retire? How does he convert it to cash? Nobody'll touch it.”

Winslow nodded. “Yeah, you're right,” he said. “I hadn't thought of it that way.”

“And in the meantime,” Tiny said, “he's making trouble for everybody else, forcing me to spend valuable time teaching some cop good manners. You know what I'd do if I had that guy here?”

Dortmunder drained his glass and got to his feet. “See you all,” he said.

“I'd pull him
through
that ring,” Tiny said. He told Winslow and O'Hara, “You guys stick around. I don't like to drink alone.”

Winslow and O'Hara watched wistfully as Dortmunder went away.

17

For Chief Inspector F. X. Mologna it had been a long long day—nearly eleven at night before he could descend to the garage beneath Police Headquarters and climb into the tan Mercedes-Benz sedan parked in the slot designated, in yellow stencil letters on the blacktop,
C
INSP MOLOGNA.
A long day, but not an unpleasant one. He had given an exclusive interview
and
a general (and well-attended) press conference. He had thrown his weight around among a lot of federal and state officials. And he had given orders that would cause annoyance and harassment to thousands of people, one or two of whom might even turn out to have some involvement in the matter at hand. All in all, a good day.

Mologna backed out of his slot, drove up the ramp to the exit, and left Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway led him northeast to the Long Island Expressway, now fairly crowded with middle-class revelers returning from dinner-and-a-show in the city. As usual, Mologna listened to his police radio as he flowed eastward across Queens, hearing tonight the results of his dragnet order. One of these results was an increase in assaults on police officers, since several of the most irate arrestees had resorted to violence to express their indignation at being hauled off to the precinct for what seemed to them no good reason at all. But that too had its sunnier side; in such an incident, the cop might get a black eye, but the perpetrator would get a concussion and twenty months in Attica. Not a bad trade, from the police point of view.

Shortly after the Nassau County line, the police band faded away and Mologna switched to the regular radio, permanently tuned to an “easy listening” station—“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” played by a million violins. Mantovani lives.

Having gone public, it would now be necessary for Mologna to keep the press informed, or at least amused, between now and the recovery of the Byzantine Fire. He was the trainer, the media people were the porpoises, and the little events—arrests, press conferences, displays of weapons caches—were the fish that made the porpoises perform. If Mologna's police blitz had not turned up the ruby by tomorrow, he'd have to throw the newsboys a few more fish. In the morning, a simple update on the number of unrelated crimes solved and criminals arrested would do, but by afternoon he'd need something more. The simplest solution—and Mologna had never seen anything wrong with simple solutions—was to release a list of eight or nine known criminals in the city whom the police hadn't as yet been able to put the arm on, announcing that these were the ones the police were most interested in questioning. The implication would be that the investigation had narrowed down to these individuals—there's progress for you—but in fact the press release would not actually
say
any such thing. Easy. Simple solutions for simple people.

Soon Mologna switched to the Southern State Parkway, where the road was free of trucks and flanked by greensward and trees. All across Nassau County the traffic gradually thinned, cars peeling off at every exit, until by the Suffolk County line—less than ten miles from home—there was a mere scattering of taillights out front and headlights in the rear-view mirror. It was not quite midnight. Mologna would be in bed before one, up at nine, back behind his desk at Headquarters by ten-thirty.

Bay Shore. Mologna slowed for the exit, made the turn, and a car that had been rapidly overtaking him the last mile or so made a sharp right onto the exit as well, crowding him hard from the left.

A drunk, obviously, unfortunately not in Mologna's jurisdiction. He slowed to let the clown through.

But the clown also slowed. And there was another car also taking this exit, large in Mologna's rearview mirror. Hell of a time for a traffic jam, he thought, braked some more, and waited for the clown in the other car—green Chevrolet, absolutely unremarkable—to get under control and drive on.

But he didn't. He was angling across Mologna's lane, crowding Mologna onto the grassy shoulder, forcing Mologna to brake harder and harder—and to stop.

They all stopped. The car in front, Mologna, and the car in back. And at that point Mologna realized what was being done to him. Dry mouth, rapid heartbeat—somebody was out to get him. He reached under the dashboard for the .32 revolver he kept down there, but as he brought it out a glaring white light suddenly flooded him from the rear window of the car ahead. Blinded, blinking, he lifted the hand without the gun, shielded his eyes, turned his head away to the right, and saw movement. Outside there, having approached from the rear car, were two men, both wearing ski masks, one holding a Galil machine pistol, the other gesturing for Mologna to open the window on the passenger side.

I could pop one of them, Mologna thought. But he couldn't pop them all. And they'd made it clear—the light, the man with the machine pistol—that although they could already have popped him, they didn't intend to. At least not yet, and at least not if he didn't start popping first. So instead of popping anybody, Mologna put his revolver on the seat and pressed the button in his door that lowered the window on the other side.

The man stood well back from the car, lowering his head slightly so he could see Mologna. “Throw the gun out,” he called, his voice low but carrying. He had some sort of accent; Mologna couldn't place it.

The chief inspector threw the gun out. Saliva had returned to his mouth, and his heart had slowed again. His first terror was being replaced by a lot of other feelings: anger, curiosity, irritation with himself for having been frightened.

The man stepped forward and got into the car, and as he did so the glaring light from the front car switched off, leaving the night darker than it had been. Trying to see through that darkness, Mologna studied the man beside him, who was dressed in black corduroy trousers, a dark plaid zippered jacket, and the ski mask, which was black with light-blue elks on it. He wore black-rimmed glasses over the mask, which made him look silly but no less threatening. His eyes were large, liquid, and dark. His hands were large, with short blunt fingers, chewed nails, unusually large and knobby knuckles. A workman's hands, a clerk's head, a foreign accent, and black corduroy trousers. No one in America wears black corduroy trousers.

The man said, “You are Chief Inspector Francis Mologna.” He pronounced it right.

“That's fine,” Mologna said. “And who would you be?”

“I have seen you on television,” the man said. “You are in charge of the investigation into the disappearance of the Byzantine Fire.”

“Ah-hah,” said Mologna.

The man made a gesture to include the cars, his friend with the machine pistol, himself. “You can see,” he said, “we are well organized and capable of swift decisive action.”

“I been admirin you,” Mologna told him.

“Thank you,” said the man, ducking his ski-masked head in modest pleasure.

With the glaring light gone, Mologna could now see the license plate on the car in front, but there was no point memorizing it. That would be a rental car, to be abandoned half a mile from here.

“The Byzantine Fire,” the man was saying, leaving off the modesty to become brisk once more, “does not belong to the government of Turkey. You will re-obtain it, but you will not give it to the government of Turkey. You will give it to us.”

“And who are you?” Mologna was truly interested.

“We represent,” the man said, not exactly answering the question, “the rightful owners of the Byzantine Fire. You will give it to us when it is re-obtained.”

“Where?”

“We will contact you.” The man looked as stern as anyone could when wearing spectacles over a ski mask. “We are, as I said, decisive,” he told Mologna, “but we prefer whenever possible to avoid violence, particularly within the borders of a friendly nation.”

“Makes sense,” Mologna agreed.

“You drive a very nice car,” the man said.

Mologna wasn't familiar with the term
non sequitur
, but he recognized the thing itself when he saw it. Still, one of the lessons life had given him was this: You go along with the man with the gun. “Sure, it is,” he said.