Authors: Donald Westlake
The first thing she noticed about the guy was that the only thing he was carrying was a little packet of lightbulbs. He was in her checkout line, the people in front of him and behind him all with carts piled up to their chins, so that at first he just looked like a very easy example of the which–one–doesn’t–belong–in–this picture quiz. She stood there, sliding items over the bar code reader, sliding them twice if she didn’t hear that
ping
the first time, pushing the items onto the belt to roll on down to tonight’s packer, an overweight kid with an overbite whom all the staff here knew only as Pudge, a name he didn’t seem to mind, and she kept looking at the guy with the lightbulbs until finally she caught his eye and gestured with her head toward the last checkout line in the row, which was for people with six items or fewer, though the sign actually said
six items or less.
The guy grinned a thank–you and spread his hands a little; he’d rather stay here.
Huh.
Ping. Ping.
Then the lightbulb inside her head went off. He’s a cop. He looks like a cop, heavy and self–confident, somebody that nobody would ever call Pudge, and he’s doing something a normal person wouldn’t do, which is wait in a long line of people buying out the store while he’s only got one item. So that would make him not only a cop, but a cop with a particular interest in May, which could not be good news.
Her first thought was that John had been arrested, but her first thought always was that John had been arrested, so her second thought was to reject the first thought. If they’d arrested John, why come
here?
And if they were going to come here, why not just do a real cop thing and jump the line entirely to say what they had to say?
Well, she’d find out soon enough. A few thousand more
pings
and here he was, pushing the little packet of four hundred–watt frosted white bulbs toward her with a ten–dollar bill as he grinned and said, “You know, you really oughta get an answering machine.”
He’s from Andy, she thought, but she knew he wasn’t. She said, “Oh, you must be the man John went to see a couple times.”
“Naturally,” he said.
Ping.
She took the ten and made change as Pudge put the packet of lightbulbs into a plastic bag, and Johnny Eppick For Hire said, “So you be my answering machine. Pass on to John, he should call me. Tell him we got ignition.”
I hope John doesn’t plan to cheat this man, she thought. I’ll have to remind him to be careful. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “Enjoy your light.”
“Better than curse the darkness,” he said, and grinned one last time, and carried his lightbulbs into the night.
May wasn’t as upset as he was, but of course she’d had longer to live with it. She said, “He wasn’t bad or anything, John. He just gave me the message for you and bought some lightbulbs.”
“Lightbulbs? Listen, he wants to talk to me, he can call
Andy,
like last time.”
“Well, he talked to me,” she said, “and I thought it was a little weird, but there wasn’t anything
wrong
about it.”
“You know what it is?” he demanded. “I’ll tell you what it is. The message isn’t lightbulbs or call me or any of that. The
message
is, ‘I can reach out to you. I not only know where you are, I know where your lady friend
works,
I’m on top of you any time I wanna be on top of you’, that’s what the message is.”
“I think we already knew all that,” May said. “Are you going to call him?”
“Some other time. Right now, I’m too irritated.”
“Well, go in the living room, and let me get on with dinner,” she said, gesturing at tonight’s sack of groceries on the kitchen table.
He was hungry. “Okay.”
“Have a beer as an appetizer.”
“I will,” he agreed, and took a can of beer with him to the living room, where he sat and frowned at the switched–off television set while he conducted several imaginary conversations with Johnny Eppick in his head, in which he was much fiercer and made much more telling points than was likely in real life, until May called him to dinner, which was a really good meat loaf, and how she’d whipped that up so fast, with all those ingredients and stuff, straight from working late hours at the Safeway, he had no idea. But it calmed him considerably, and at the end of the meal he said, “I’ll call him tomorrow. Not tonight.”
“Don’t yell at him,” she said.
He hesitated, then made the concession. “Okay.”
And late this morning, after May’d headed back to the Safeway, he called Eppick’s number and got
his
answering machine. “So this is better, is it?” he demanded. “We’re in closer communication now, are we? I’m talking to a
machine.
” And hung up.
“The dealers won’t be wherever
you
are.”
“You think I’m that obvious?” Eppick asked him, but he sounded pleased at the idea.
“See you in half an hour,” Dortmunder said, and did, walking through the park all bundled up against the raw March air, and Eppick was seated at his ease on a bench amid only civilians, and not many of them at that, because the weather was still a little below par for park bench–sitting. However, Dortmunder joined him and Eppick said, “The granddaughter has come through like a champ.”
“You shouldn’t talk to May,” Dortmunder told him. “It upsets her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eppick said, though he didn’t sound sorry. “She didn’t look upset. Maybe we could get carrier pigeons, you and me.”
They’d already veered too far from Dortmunder’s practice conversations, so he said, “Tell me about the champ.”
“Huh? Oh, the granddaughter.” Eppick grinned, pleased at the very thought of the granddaughter. “She’s our spy in the enemy camp,” he said, “and she’s worth her weight in chess sets.”
“That’s nice.”
“They don’t know exactly when they’re gonna move the set,” Eppick said, “because they’re still working on the security, but as soon as they know it she knows it, and as soon as she knows it we know it. Or I know it, and you find out when the carrier pigeon gets there.”
“Yeah, right.”
“But what we do know now,” Eppick said, “is the safe place they’re gonna move it to. So this is a very nice edge,” he pointed out, “because you can case it before the chess set even gets there.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s down on Gansevoort Street,” Eppick told him. “It’s the office of a private detective down there by the name of Jacques Perly.” With an arch look, he said, “
You
wouldn’t have any trouble getting into a private detective’s office, would you?”
Not rising to the bait, Dortmunder said, “There’s gotta be more to it than that. Some office on Gansevoort Street?”
“Well, if there’s more to it,” Eppick pointed out, “you’ve got time to find out what it is.”
“I’ll take a look,” Dortmunder said, and glanced around at the snow–flecked park. You could see everybody’s breath. “You know, it’s kinda cold out here.”
“It is,” Eppick agreed, “but we’ve got privacy. But we could leave now.”
“Good.”
They stood, Eppick not offering to shake hands this time, and Dortmunder said, “Well, anything’s gotta be better than that vault.”
“Let’s hope.” Eppick shrugged his coat and scarf up closer to his chin. “You see your friend Kelp a lot, don’t you?”
“From time to time.”
“I’ll leave messages with him.”
“That’s good,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t think May would like carrier pigeons.”
Representing both Feinberg and Livia Northwood Wheeler, and therefore more or less conducting the meeting, was Jay Tumbril, accompanied by a stenographer named Stella, who would take notes of the meeting and record it as well, on cassette. Representing the other principal law firms connected with the Northwood matter were nine senior lawyers, the men in navy–blue pinstripe, the women in navy blue pinstripe plus white ruffles. Representing the NYPD, who would monitor the chess set’s movements through the city streets, were two senior inspectors from Centre Street, both in uniforms heavy on the brass. Representing Securivan, the company whose armored car would actually transport the set from the sub–basement in this building to the second–floor office of Jacques Perly, were two sternly fit men with identical crew cuts and square jaws, and with brass Marine Corps insignia pins on the lapels of their pastel sport jackets. And finally, representing the intended destination of the set was Jacques Perly, who’d brought along his secretary Delia, who would also take notes and make a recording, and who was blinking a lot at the moment, not being used to life outside the office.
Once the necessary introductions had been made and business cards distributed, Jay, at the head of the conference table, stood and looked around at those assembled either at the table or in chairs along the wall, and decided to begin with a quip: “I’m happy that at last, after years of litigation, everyone connected with the matter of the Northwood estate has finally found one area of agreement. Everybody wants a look at that chess set.”
Apparently no one else in the room realized that was a quip, so Jay cleared his throat into the silence and said, “We all understand there’s a certain degree of peril in this move, particularly if word seeps out that it’s about to happen, so I hope everyone here realizes the need for total secrecy on this matter until the move is done.”
More silence, which this time Jay took for consent. “When a task is difficult and fraught with peril,” he went on, “the wise man turns to the experts. I hope we’re all at least that wise, and so I want to turn to the experts in our midst today, from Securivan and from the NYPD. Harry or Larry, would you share your thoughts with us?”
Harry and Larry were the Securivan men. Jay sat down and Larry remained seated as he said, “Keeping a secret that seventeen people in this room already know about, plus the judge and other people at the court, plus one or more people at the bank, plus at least one of the principals in the lawsuit means, not to offend anybody present, but it isn’t a secret you’re gonna keep secret for very long.”
The more senior of the NYPD men present, whose name was Chief Inspector Mologna (pronounced Maloney), now said, “Speakin’ for myself, and speakin’ for the great city of New York, I can tell you right now you already got your secret blowed. This city does not raise up a criminal class that don’t have its eyes open and its ears open and its hands open every blessed moment of the night and day. They’re out there already and they’re waitin’ for you. You put together a mob scene like we got in this room, of course, you’re just engravin’ an invitation.”
“Unfortunately, Chief Inspector,” Jay said, “this is the minimum number possible to obtain agreement.”
“Oh, I understand,” the chief inspector said. “You got your protocols and you got your noses that might get out of joint, so you gotta have this social before you get down to business. But when you
do
get down to business, take it from me, the crooks will be right with you, every step of the way.”
Larry of Securivan said, “Harry and I think the chief inspector’s right, so, because there are those sharp–eared crooks out there, and, because we don’t want to give them too much time to make their own plans, the sooner you make this move the better.”
“That’s right,” the chief inspector said. “Don’t shilly–shally.”
Jay said, “No, we certainly don’t want to do
that.
”
“Harry and I,” Larry said, “think the best time to do this is Sunday night.”
“
This
Sunday night?” Jay asked him. “The day after tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir,” Larry confirmed. “We’d want to get our armored car into position at the curb downstairs here at oh two hundred hours Monday morning.”
His partner Harry spoke up: “This thing weighs, so we’re told, a third of a ton. We’ll have a crew of four with the armored car, to bring the object up and place it into the vehicle.”
“And we,” Chief Inspector Mologna said, “are gonna have patrol cars on that block, and patrol cars up at the next intersection to divert traffic, so you are gonna have
no
vehicles in that area except your van and our patrols.”
“This all sounds very good,” Jay said.
Jacques Perly said, “When do you think you’d get to my shop?”
Larry considered that. “If we start at oh two hundred hours,” he said, “say it takes fifteen minutes to bring the object up and secure it. At that time of night, fifteen or twenty minutes to drive down to your area. You should count on an arrival time of oh two–thirty to oh two–forty hours.”
One of the other lawyers present said, “That means the experts could start examining the artifact Monday morning.”
“Not quite,” Jay said. “We don’t want to tell anybody else about the move until after it’s made.” With a bow toward the chief inspector, he said, “Granted that secrets are difficult or impossible to keep, we’d still like to limit the advance knowledge of the move as much as we can.”
Another lawyer said, “But they can start their inspections Tuesday morning, surely.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Some of our principals,” another lawyer said, “and some of our senior partners as well, will certainly want to take this opportunity to see the thing in the flesh, as it were.”
“We’ll make accommodations for that as we can,” Jay assured him. “But we don’t want it to become a tourist destination.”
That quip got its chuckle, and another lawyer said, “Oh, I think most of us are mature enough to show restraint.”
Another lawyer said, “However, speed in assessing the object is also a priority, of course. I understand we’re all paying Mr. Perly a per diem for the use of his space, and of course every day the object is out of the vault the risk of theft increases.”
Another lawyer said, “What we’re talking about here is not one object, but thirty–four. A theft doesn’t have to be of the entire piece.”
Jay said, “We’re arranging for private guards to stay with the object 24/7 while it’s at Mr. Perly’s. We’ll all breathe easier once the set is back in the vault downstairs.”
“Amen to that,” said another lawyer, and still another lawyer said, “In fact, the per diem is not that much. In this instance, it is truly better to be safe than sorry.”
Which caused a general murmur of agreement, followed by Jay saying, “Does that cover it all?”
“I’d like to say one thing,” said the chief inspector, and got to his feet. He also picked up his braid–rich hat from the conference table, so he apparently didn’t intend to stay much longer. “At oh two hundred hours in the ayem of this comin’ Monday morning,” he informed them all, “I am gonna be asleep in my bed in Bay Shore, Long Island. And I will not be wantin’ any phone calls.” And he put on his hat.
On that note the meeting concluded, having worked out about as satisfactorily as the one just ending in the park downtown.