Thieves Dozen (21 page)
“Took you a while,” O’Hara said.
Dortmunder didn’t like to be criticized. “I had to find the tapes,” he said.
“As the fella says, time well spent,” Pete assured him.
Dortmunder’s faithful companion, May, came home from her cashier’s job at the supermarket the next evening to say, “That fellow you told me about, that Martin Gillie, he’s in the newspaper.” By which, of course, she meant the
Daily News.
“That’s called ink,” Dortmunder informed her.
“I don’t think so,” she said, and handed him the paper. “This time, I think it’s called felony arrest.”
Dortmunder smiled at the glowering face of Three Finger Gillie on page five of the
News.
He didn’t have to read the story, he knew what it had to say.
May watched him. “John? Did you have something to do with that?”
“A little,” he said. “See, May, when he told me that all he wanted was publicity, it was the truth. It was a stretch for Three Finger to tell the truth, but he pulled it off. But his idea was, every day he talks another ex-con into walking through that gallery, looking it over for maybe a burglary. He’s going to do that every day until one of those guys actually robs the place. Then he’s going to show what a reformed character he is by volunteering to look at the surveillance tapes. ‘Oh, there’s a guy I used to know!’ he’ll say, feigning surprise. ‘And there’s another one. They must of all been in it together.’ Then the cops roust us all, and one of us actually does have the stolen paintings, so we’re all accomplices, so we all go upstate forever, and there’s steady publicity for Three Finger, all through the trials and the appeals, and he’s this poster boy for rehabilitation, and he’s got ink, he’s on television day and night, he’s famous, he’s successful, and we probably deserved to go upstate anyway.”
“What a rat,” May said.
“You know it,” Dortmunder agreed. “So we couldn’t just walk away, because we’re on those tapes, and we don’t know when somebody else is gonna pull the job. So if we have to go in, get the tapes, we might as well make some profit out of it. And give a little zing to Three Finger while we’re at it.”
“They decided it was him pretty fast,” she said.
“His place was the only one not hit,” Dortmunder pointed out to May. “So it looks like the rehabilitation didn’t take after all, that he just couldn’t resist temptation.”
“I suppose,” she said.
“Also,” he said, “you remember that little postcard with his painting that I showed you but I wouldn’t let you touch?”
“Sure. So?”
“Myself,” Dortmunder said, “I only held it by the edges, just in case. The last thing we did last night, I dropped that postcard on the floor in front of the cash register in the leather store. With his fingerprints all over it. His calling card, he said it was.”
In the introduction to this volume, I recorded that bleak period of time, some years ago, when it looked as though I might lose the rights to John Dortmunder’s name to marauding bands of Hollywood lawyers. Fortunately, that threat did eventually recede, but before that happy deliverance I’d settled on a substitute name for John, in case he should have to go underground for a while and come back under an alias, with fake ID. That name, found after an extensive search and taken from an exit sign on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County, just north of New York City, was John Rumsey.
The only problem, I soon realized, is that John Rumsey is a shorter person than John Dortmunder; don’t ask me why. Dortmunder’s, oh, say, an even six foot. John Rumsey’s five seven at best.
From time to time, I wondered if Rumsey would be different in any other ways, not through my conscious choice, but simply because of the changed indicator. And what about the other regulars in his crew? I didn’t
have
to know the answer to that, happily, but the question just kept poking at me.
In assembling this volume, I realized that if I were to add just one more story, I could use the present title for the book. I’d had a story title, “Fugue for Felons,” in mind for some time, and now I saw how it would play out, and also that it would be a great laboratory. Here was my chance for an experiment to solve that age-old question: What’s in a name?
A lot, as it turns out. Halfway through writing the story, I realized it wasn’t an experiment that could be reversed or undone. I couldn’t simply put the original names back on the name tags, because these weren’t the original people. In small but crucial ways, they were their own men. John Rumsey was not John Dortmunder, and not merely because he was shorter. Similarly, Algy was not Andy Kelp, Big Hooper was not Tiny Bulcher, and Stan Little was not Stan
Murch. (“Murch,” it turns out, is an obsolete medieval term for “dwarf,” which I hadn’t known until I looked in the OED in conjunction with writing the story.)
Names
are
important. And so, although “Fugue for Felons” is the most recent Dortmunder story, it is also not a Dortmunder story at all. In some parallel universe, where the sky is a little paler, the streets a little cleaner, the laws of probability a little chancier, where the roses don’t smell quite the same, there exist John Rumsey and his friends, the closest that other cosmos can come to Dortmunder et al. And now I have visited them.
J
OHN
R
UMSEY, A SHORT BLUNT MAN WITH THE LOOK OF A ONE
-time contender about him, was eating his breakfast—maple syrup garnished with French toast—when his faithful companion June looked up from her
Daily News
to say, “Isn’t Morry Calhoun a friend of yours?”
“I know him,” Rumsey admitted; that far he was willing to go.
“Well, they arrested him,” June said.
“He made the paper?” In Rumsey’s world, there was nothing worse than reading your own name in the newspaper, particularly the
Daily News
, which all one’s friends also read.
“It’s a little piece,” June said, “but there’s a picture of the car in the bank, and then his name caught my eye.”
“The car
in
the bank?”
“Police,” June told him, “came across Morry Calhoun last night, breaking into the Flatbush branch of Immigration Trust. A high-speed chase from Brooklyn to Queens ended when Calhoun crashed his car into the Sunnyside branch of Immigration Trust.”
“Well, he’s got brand loyalty anyway,” Rumsey said. “They’re holding him without bail,” June went on.
“Yeah, they do that,” agreed Rumsey. “It’s kind of an honor, in a way, but it’s also confining. There’s a picture of this car in this bank?”
June passed the paper over her plate of dry toast and his bowl of wet syrup, and Rumsey looked at a picture of the ass end of an Infiniti sticking out of the front of a branch bank that had been mostly glass until Calhoun arrived.
“The car was stolen,” June said.
“Sure, it would be,” Rumsey said, and squinted at the photo. “Bank’s closed.”
“Naturally,” June said. “Until they fix the front.”
“You know,” Rumsey said, “it might be a good idea, wander out there, see is there anything lying around.”
“Don’t get in trouble,” June advised.
“Me? I’ll just call Algy,” Rumsey decided, getting to his feet, “see would he like to take a train ride.”
But there was no answer at Algy’s place.
Algy, in fact, a skinny sharp-nosed guy, was already on the subway, heading back toward Manhattan from Queens after a night of very little success at breaking and entering. He’d broken, all right, and he’d entered, but everywhere he went, the occupant had just moved out, or had a dog, or didn’t have anything at all. It could be a discouragement at times.
About the only thing Algy scored, in fact, other than half a liverwurst on rye in Saran Wrap in a refrigerator in Queens, was a
Daily News
some other passenger had left behind on the seat. He glanced through it, saw the picture of the car in the bank, recognized Morry Calhoun’s name, got off at the next stop, and took the first train going the other way.
Big Hooper was called Big because he was
big
. You could say he looked like an elephant in sweats, or an Easter Island statue no longer buried up to the neck, but what he mostly looked like was the Chicago Bears front line—not a lineman, the line.
Big Hooper had just bent to his will the front door of a Third Avenue tavern not yet open for business, intending to give himself a morning vodka-and-Chianti before carrying away the cash register, when he realized he wasn’t alone. The clinking and tinking from the back room suggested the owner was using this morning downtime to do inventory, having left his jacket and newspaper on the bar.
Big went ahead and made his breakfast, then leafed through the paper while trying to decide whether to deal with the jangling offstage owner or come back another time, when he could have some privacy. He saw the Infiniti impaled on the bank, recognized the name Calhoun, finished his drink, and left. He took the paper.
Stan Little was a driver. If you’ve got it, he’ll drive it. When he wasn’t working for various crews around town on their little errands, sometimes he drove for himself, picking up an example of your better-quality automotive cream puff and tooling it to Astoria in Queens, where he would have business dealings with Al Gonzo, an automotive importer-exporter, who would eventually find the merchandise a good home somewhere in the Third World. This morning, while discussing with Al the probable offshore value of a loaded Saab with less than three K on the odometer, Stan took the opportunity of Al’s strategic long silences to eyeball the
Daily News.
“All right, four,” Al said.
“Well, look at that,” Stan said. “Morry Calhoun.”
The reason Rumsey got off the F train early was because two transit cops went through his car and they both looked at him funny. Rumsey didn’t like cops to look at him at all, much less funny, so he quick got off at the next station, even though it wasn’t his but was in fact Queens Plaza, which is one of those giant bow ties in the bowels of the New York City subway system.
There are 24 separate subway lines in New York, and four of them converge on Queens Plaza, distributing thousands and thousands of people this way and that every second. There’s the F, the 6th Avenue local that Rumsey had been on, which begins in nethermost Brooklyn, wanders northward to run under 6th Avenue in Manhattan, then heads on to outermost Queens; the R, the Broadway local, which is similar except its part of Manhattan is lower Broadway; the 8th Avenue E, which only has to deal with Manhattan and Queens; and the poor G, the Brooklyn Queens Crosstown, which never gets into Manhattan at all but just shuttles back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens, full of people wearing hats.
Having got off the F, there was nothing for Rumsey to do but wait for another F, or some other letter, and so continue his journey in peace, but lo and behold, here were two more transit cops, and now
they
were looking at him funny. Maybe, he thought, he’d take the escalator upstairs to where the surface part of the bow tie was a lot of bus routes starting with “Q,” but as he turned away, with millions of people rushing all around him in this great echoing iron cavern, this paean to 19th-century engineering at its sternest, a voice cut through the din and the roar to say, “You. Yeah, you. Wait there.”
Now the cops were
talking
to him; this was very bad. Feeling guilty, even though he hadn’t committed any crimes yet today, Rumsey turned about, hunched his shoulders in that automatic way that tells police officers everywhere that you
are
guilty, and said, “Me?”
It is impossible for two human beings to completely surround one human being, and yet these two cops did it. They were big bulky guys with big dark bulky uniforms festooned with serious extras like a gun in a holster and a ticket book and handcuffs (Rumsey didn’t like to look at handcuffs) and a little black radio fastened up high on the black belt that angled down across their chests. Their very presence said
authority
; it said
you’re in for it now, Jack
; it said
fuggedaboudit
.
“See s’ ID,” one of the cops said.
“Oh, sure,” Rumsey said, because, no matter what, you never disagree when authority is this close into your personal space. He remembered he’d packed somebody’s ID when he’d left the house, so he went to his hip pocket for his wallet, while the cops watched him very carefully, and as he handed over somebody’s credit card and the same somebody’s library card from the branch in Canarsie, he said, “Uh, what’s the problem, officers?”
The cop who took the ID said, “How about your driver’s license?”
“They took my license,” Rumsey explained. “Just temporary, you know.”
The other cop chuckled. “You were a bad boy, huh?”
That was cop humor. Rumsey acknowledged it with a sheepish grin, saying, “I guess so. But what’s wrong here?”
The cop with the ID said, “We’re looking for a guy, Mr. Jefferson.”
So he was Mr. Jefferson today. Trying to feel Jeffersonian, Rumsey said, “Well, why pick me? There’s a lotta guys here.” Millions, in fact—on escalators, in subway trains, on platforms ...
“The description we got,” the humorous cop said, “looks like you.”
“A lotta guys look like me,” Rumsey said.
“Not really,” the cop said, and all at once their two radios squawked, making Rumsey flinch like a rabbit hearing a condor.
Police radios are the aural equivalent of doctor’s handwriting. All of a sudden, the little black metal box goes
squawk-squawk-squawk
, and the cops understand it! Like these two—they understood it when their little metal boxes went
squawk-squawk-squawk
, and this information they’d just received made them relax and even grin at each other. One of them pushed the button on his metal box and told his shoulder, “Ten-four,” while the other one handed Rumsey Mr. Jefferson’s ID and told him, “Thanks for your cooperation.”
Rumsey said, “Huh? Listen, you don’t mind, would you tell me? Wha’d they just say there?”