Authors: Donald Westlake
Warily, Dortmunder moved forward to the living room doorway, where he looked in at Stan Murch, seated on the sofa, holding a beer can, his expression troubled. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Dortmunder said.
“I understand that,” Stan told him, “but things have changed.”
“
I
haven’t changed.”
“Maybe you ought to get yourself a beer,” Stan suggested.
Dortmunder studied him. Stan the driver’s personality usually matched his carrot–colored hair; optimistic, straightforward, a little aggressive. At this moment, though, he was subdued, troubled, almost gloomy; a new Stan, but not an improved one. “I’ll get myself a beer,” Dortmunder decided, and did so, and came back from the kitchen to sit in his normal chair, take a drink from his beer can, wipe his chin, and say, “Okay. You might as well tell me.”
“May moved out,” Stan said.
This was the
last
thing Dortmunder had expected. He’d been braced for more pressure about that goddamn reservoir, for Stan having been set up to talk to Dortmunder about it by May, but —
May? Moved
out?
Impossible. “Impossible,” Dortmunder said.
“Well, she did,” Stan insisted without satisfaction. “The cab left about twenty minutes ago. Take a look in the closet, if you want. Look in the dresser.”
“But —” Dortmunder couldn’t bend his mind around this idea. “She
left
me? May
left
me?”
“Nah,” Stan said. “She says you can come live with her all you want. Her and Mom both.”
No matter how closely Dortmunder listened, none of this made the slightest, tiniest, least bit of sense. “Your Mom?” he demanded. “What’s your Mom got to do with it?”
“They’re living together,” Stan said. “That was the cab May went in; Mom’s last fare.” Sounding bitter, he said, “It was even Mom’s idea. She got a leave of absence from the cab company on account of traffic burnout, and May said she was due a sabbatical from the supermarket, so they did it. They say we can both go live with them any time we want.”
Dortmunder was on his feet, slopping beer. “
Where?
” He was ready to go, wherever it was. Go there now, get an explanation he could understand, bring May home again. “Where, Stan?”
“Dudson Center,” Stan told him. With a long sigh, he shook his head and said, “In front of the dam. That’s where they’re living now.”
Anyway, in addition to the number of reservoirs, there was also the complication of Doug Berry’s regular job and life. It had been tough to get enough time free and clear so he could take several days off from the normal routine, close the dive shop, get into his customized pickup every morning, and barrel north to check out the reservoirs of the Berkshires and the Catskills and the Shawangunks and the Adirondacks and the Helderbergs. So it wasn’t until now, almost two weeks after refilling John and Andy’s air tanks, that Doug at last arrived at North Dudson to check out the Vilburgtown Reservoir.
Was he already too late? Had John and Andy and their unknown friend already reclaimed the drowned and buried loot? They’d had a long time since he’d refilled their tanks. But even so, even if they were ahead of him, if he could just find the right reservoir, find the right trail, he firmly believed he could somehow or other manage to deal himself into whatever was going on. But first he had to figure out which of New York’s myriad reservoirs the loot was or had been under.
This is how his thinking went on that: if you steal a lot of money (something he’d fantasized himself doing more than once in his life), you will either hide it or carry it, but not both; therefore the robbery would probably have taken place somewhere in the general vicinity of the reservoir, but must have happened
before
the reservoir existed.
So, in each case, he first found out how old the reservoir was, and if it was older than fifty years he immediately crossed it off, because how long ago could the original robbery have been? Then, he would look in the local paper for some big robbery to have occurred in that area not too many years before the reservoir was born. Major robberies are not that common in the kinds of rural areas that succumb to reservoirs, which meant that so far he had only two faint possibilities, both of them extremely unlikely, though he’d go back to both if nothing better showed up.
In the meantime, here he was in North Dudson, pulling to a stop in the parking lot behind the library, ready to do his Vilburgtown Reservoir research. Climbing out of the shiny black pickup in the warm June sunlight, he made a handsome picture, a fine complement to the day. With his tall and well–built frame, in his casual khaki slacks, soft blue polo shirt, and aviator–style sunglasses, with his weathered tan and carelessly wavy dark blond hair, the only thing wrong with the picture was that he didn’t look at all like somebody who would be going to the
library,
not on such a beautiful day. Nevertheless, that’s where he headed, bounding up the steps with athletic grace, pushing the sunglasses up into the hair on top of his head as he entered the cool dim interior.
The girl at the counter was pretty enough, though not as pretty as he, which he knew without gloating about it; his good looks were simply a fact of nature, a part of who he was. (Pretty men feel differently about their beauty from pretty women, are less proud of it and protective toward it and prepared to display it. Their attitude toward their looks is rather like the attitude of the old rich toward their money: they’re pleased to have it but consider mentioning it vulgar, even in their thoughts.)
Doug approached the pretty–enough girl, smiling a winning smile, and said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” she answered. As women tended to do, she perked up in his presence. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m interested in two things,” he told her, then grinned at himself and shook his head and said, “Let me rephrase that. Right
now,
there’s two things I’m interested in.”
“Two library things,” she amplified, flirting with him just slightly.
“That’s the key,” he agreed. “I’m interested in your local reservoir —”
“Vilburgtown.”
“Right. And I’m interested in your local paper. Do you have microfilm?”
“Well, that depends how far back you want to go,” she told him. “Before about 1920, we really don’t have much at all.”
“No, that’s fine.” He grinned, showing his white teeth. “I want to read about the building of the dam to begin with, so I need to find out from you how long ago that was.”
“Eighteen years,” she said promptly. “I know because I was in second grade. It was a big deal around here.”
“Eighteen years ago?” He pantomimed thinking hard. “I would have been in fourth grade,” he decided. “So I’ve got two years seniority on you.”
“Yes,
sir,
” she said, and gave him a mock salute.
“At ease,” he told her, and said, “I’ll want the local paper for the year the dam was built, and for about ten years before that.”
She gave him a suddenly watchful look, saying, “That’s a funny thing to ask for.”
The curiosity of small–town librarians knew no limits. Doug had long since had to come up with a cover story for his interest in local histories prior to the construction of dams. “I’m with the Environment Protection Alliance,” he explained. “You probably heard of us?”
“Nnnooooo.” She looked doubtful.
“We’re small, but we’re growing,” Doug assured her with his broadest grin. “A volunteer group, concerned with the environment.”
“Uh–huh.”
“What we’re trying to do,” Doug went on, embroidering the bushwah with a little eye sparkle and tooth gleam, “is help communities avoid getting taken over for things like reservoirs. So
I
look for local factors that might be a common denominator before the town was lost. Employment, local elections, all of that.”
Doug’s story, if considered with a cold clear eye, made no sense at all, but where is there a cold clear eye in this old world? The present girl, like the victims before her, distracted by his good looks and winning manner and open honest smile, simply heard the buzzwords — environment, volunteer, common denominator, communities, employment — and nodded, returning his smile, saying, “Well, I wish you luck. It was a real trauma around here when all those towns got taken over.”
“I’m sure it was,” Doug agreed. “That’s what we’re trying to help prevent in the future.”
“My mom worked in the library in Putkin’s Corners,” she went on. “That’s the biggest town that got evacuated. And my grandfather ran the funeral parlor there.”
This was more information than Doug absolutely had to possess for his purposes. “Then you know what I mean,” he said, turning down the voltage a bit on his smile.
“I sure do.”
“So, I guess I better get started. Then.”
“Oh!” Seeming to come awake, the girl said, “Of course.” Pointing across the room, she said, “That’s the microfilm viewer over there. I’m sorry it isn’t a very modern one, not like our VDT here.”
He drew a blank: “VDT?”
“Video display terminal,” she explained, and gestured at a small neat computer terminal on her side of the counter. Its dull black screen was blank. “It’s really a wonderful help to us all,” she said. “But I’m afraid we don’t have a modern microfilm viewer yet. You’ll have to crank that one.”
“I took my vitamins today,” he assured her, and grinned as he made a muscle.
She pretended not to look at his arm. “I’ll bring you the microfilm,” she said, and turned away.
Doug walked across the airy quiet room to the old table beating the old microfilm viewer. He was almost the only customer in here this morning; two or three old people read old magazines, and at one reading table sat a lone state trooper bent in agonized intense study over some thick book dense with print.
Doug faltered a second when he saw the uniform, then moved on, realizing the trooper was too deeply involved in his book to care about other patrons of the library. Besides, what did Doug have to fear from state troopers? At this stage of the game, nothing.
He sat in front of the viewer, and a couple of minutes later the girl brought him four rolls of microfilm, saying, “This is the year they built the dam, and these are the three years before. When you finish those, bring them to the desk and I’ll get you some more.”
“Thanks a lot.” Doug leaned toward her, lowering his voice to say, “Listen. Can I ask a question?”
“About the library?”
“Kind of. What’s the cop doing?”
She turned her head, as though not having noticed the state trooper before, then gave an indulgent laugh as she said, “Oh, Jimmy. He’s studying for his civil–service exam.” Bending toward Doug — a nice fresh faint aroma came from her — she lowered her own voice to say, “He’s not very good at studying. It drives him crazy.”
“That’s the way he looks, all right.” Then Doug grinned broadly and stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Doug, by the way. Doug Berry.”
Her hand in his was small and gentle, but disconcertingly bony. “Myrtle,” she told him, and then seemed to hesitate or stumble or something for just a second before she said, “Myrtle Street.”
“Myrtle’s a nice name,” he told her, holding on to her hand, getting used to it. “You don’t run into too many Myrtles anymore.”
“I think it’s old–fashioned,” she said, gently disengaging her hand from his. “But I guess I’m stuck with it. Well, I shouldn’t keep you from your research.” She gestured to the microfilm viewer, smiled, and went away to her counter.
Doug watched her go, pleased by her, then did get to his research. Like most small–town papers, this one didn’t have a useful master index, so it was simply the tedious job of going back through the first pages, week after week; the kind of robbery he had in mind would definitely have made the front page, probably more than once.
Nothing in the first four rolls. Nothing in the first of the second batch of rolls. But then, five years before the dam was built, there it was: a major armored car robbery out on the Thruway near town. Seven hundred thousand dollars stolen! Two guards killed. Police had leads. In later weeks, gang members were found dead. The mastermind and the money had both disappeared. Police had leads. Then the story faded away. Police had no more leads. The mastermind had the money.
This was it. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Doug’s mind. Seven hundred thousand dollars! That was certainly enough to make a couple of nonathletic types like Andy and John put on scuba gear and walk into a reservoir. And there was possibly a way to find out if they’d actually got their hands on that money as yet.
So let’s check. Taking all the rolls of microfilm back to Myrtle — a pretty–enough name for a pretty–enough girl, he thought unkindly, but then was sorry to have had such a thought because basically he liked girls, and in any event he found Myrtle pleasant and easy to talk to — he said, “Myrtle, I’ve got almost everything I need now, except I’ve got to take a look at the papers for the last month.”
“You mean, this year?” she asked, obviously bewildered by his abrupt leap in time.
“This year, right,” he agreed. “I’m done with the ancient past, I’m ready to get up to date, like that VCR of yours there.”
“VDT.”
“Whatever.”
“The most recent papers,” she told him, “the last six months, aren’t on microfilm yet. They’re on shelves on that aisle over there. See?”
“By golly, Myrtle,” he said, looking over there, “the technology just keeps jumping around in here. Now I’m gonna read actual
newspapers?
”
Laughing, she said, “You’ll just have to rough it, I’m afraid.”
“I can stand up to it,” he decided.
“Good.” She picked up the microfilm rolls he’d just returned, saying, “I hope this all helped.”
“You and your library have been very good to me, Myrtle,” Doug told her truthfully.
She frowned down at the microfilm rolls, saying, “You didn’t look at these two?”
“Didn’t need to,” he said airily.
“This is the year you finished with?”
“That’s right.”
She kept frowning at the little boxes containing the microfilm. Was she suspicious for some reason? Should he have gone through the motions of looking at the rest of the rolls? But then she shook her head, smiled rather vaguely at him, and turned away, carrying the microfilm back to where it was stored.
Doug crossed to the most recent newspapers and found some old geezer hogging half of them, reading through endless local announcements, keeping other papers firmly under the one he was studying, spread out on the table. Doug made do with the papers the old coot hadn’t commandeered, but found nothing in any of them about any trouble at the reservoir — his idea was that a break–in there might leave traces that would rate a report in the local paper — so at last he turned to the old fart, who hadn’t finished
one
paper in the last half hour.