Watch Your Back (25 page)

Dortmunder, at the foot of the stairs, having just been buzzed into the building by Arnie, looked up at him and said, “Arnie, the idea is, you’re coming down, I’m taking you to the place.”

“I’ve been having second thoughts about that,” Arnie said. “Come on up.”

Not going on up, Dortmunder said, “Don’t do that, Arnie. Never have second thoughts, they just ball you up. Come on, we don’t wanna be late, Stan’s gonna be there with the truck nine–thirty, got the remote opener and everything, he zaps the opener, zip, zip, everybody’s in.”

“This is where I’m having second thoughts,” Arnie said. “What am
I
doing in? Come to that, what am I doing
out?
Look at me, I’m still the color of a roll of burlap.”

This was true, but Dortmunder said, “Arnie, don’t even think like that, it’s fading away to nothing.”

“And we got more sun
today,
I heard the warning on the radio.”

“You’ll be indoors, in an entire penthouse. Come on, Arnie, we can’t stand here in the stairwell forever, some neighbor’s gonna call the cops.”

“So come up, we’ll discuss it.”

Dortmunder well knew, if he were to go up these stairs, he would never get Arnie down them, so, without moving, he said, “Arnie, come down, we’ll talk it over while we walk through the park, you’ll see where —”

“Walk?” Astonished, Arnie said, “I don’t walk, Dortmunder! I don’t even walk anyway, and you’re talking through the
park?
It’s all sun out there.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll meet you halfway. No walking, we’ll take a cab. I’ll buy.”

“A cab. Over to the place, you mean, with the thing and the thing and everybody zips in.”

“Sure. Come on.”

“How’s this meeting me halfway? You want the cab to go halfway there and come back?”

“Arnie,” Dortmunder said, “I’m not coming up.”

“I just don’t see —”

“Preston Fareweather, Arnie.”

Arnie shook all over and looked agonized. His hand clutched to the banister in front of him.

Dortmunder pressed his advantage. “Those guys were so brilliant, they even got the Seersucker.”

“The what?”

Dortmunder said, “Didn’t you say he had one of those?”

“I don’t even know what the hell it is!”

“Well, we’ll go look for it. Come on, Arnie, Preston Fareweather. Broadway’s out there, Arnie, it’s full of taxicabs, and every one of them has a roof. Don’t let Preston Fareweather think we’re bozos, Arnie.”

“Preston Fareweather thinks everybody’s bozos,” Arnie said with disgust.

“Including you,” Dortmunder reminded him. “And that’s the mistake he made, that he’s gonna find out what a mistake it is. That’s the whole point here, isn’t it? We’re not gonna let Preston Fareweather forget what happens when he messes around with
you.
”

Alarmed, Arnie said, “Wait a minute, I don’t want him to know I had anything to do with it.”

“Of course not, Arnie. Just some unnamed, unknowable genius he mistreated in the past. Can you see his face, Arnie? Picture it in your mind, Preston Fareweather’s face, the next time he walks into that penthouse.”

Arnie thought. “Let me get my hat,” he said.

It was a deep, broad shop full of crannies and nooks and little rooms, two stories of costumes and props, anything you might want in a stage show or on a movie set or shooting a commercial or running another day of a soap opera — all things that happen in that neighborhood just about every day. Kelp was always careful not to harm any locks here or otherwise be intrusive, and since they had so much and he took so little, he doubted they were even aware of his visits. Which was nice — he liked the opportunity to be a loyal customer, and wouldn’t like them to feel the need to increase their security.

Ordinary yellow hard hats without logos were harder to find than cowboy hats and Nazi officer hats and football helmets and graduation caps, but eventually, on a low shelf upstairs near the rear, he came across a cluster of them, looking like the world’s largest canary eggs. He put two in the plastic bag he’d brought for the purpose, let himself gently out of the place, took a cab home, had a brief pleasant chat with Anne Marie, slept peacefully, and at nine–thirty in the morning was crossing Fifth Avenue at Sixty–eighth Street when Tiny called to him, “Kelp!”

Kelp looked, and Tiny was waving from a limo waiting for the light to change so it could make the left turn onto Sixty–eighth Street. Kelp waved back, and Tiny called, “Come wait in the limo.”

“Will do.”

Kelp finished crossing Fifth and turned left to cross Sixty–eighth, because the driver of the limo was stopping it at the fire hydrant across the street from the garage entrance they’d be aiming at, but before he could step off the curb, a cab stopped at his feet, and out of it, astonishingly, stepped Arnie Albright, wearing the kind of cloth cap with a soft brim all around it that really terrible golfers wear, except without the comical pins.

Kelp said, “Arnie? You sprang for a cab?”

“Not on your life,” Arnie said, and from behind him, putting his wallet away, out crawled Dortmunder, looking nettled and saying, “
I
paid for the cab. It was the only way to get him here.”

“Though I still got my doubts,” Arnie said as the cab hurtled away.

“Well,” Kelp said, “let’s go over there and wait in the limo with Tiny.”

Arnie said, “Limo?” but then a white truck, sneaking around the corner just as the light turned red, made the left, then a right toward the garage door, which began to lift. Stan could be seen in the truck cab, putting the remote back down on the seat.

So instead of everybody getting into the limo, Tiny got out of it, and it drove away. Now that all the traffic had stopped, Tiny crossed the street to join them, and everybody followed the truck into the garage, where Stan thumbed the door shut again.

Stan was the only one who’d been in this place before, so everybody else had to look it over for a minute. They also had to study the truck. Kelp put the bag of hard hats on the passenger seat, and Tiny said, “Very clean. Better than I figured. What did it used to carry?”

“People,” Stan said, and when they all looked at him, he said, “It’s a long story, I’ll tell you later, over a beer. The elevator’s over there.”

“We’ll have to do a little alarm stuff first,” Kelp said, “before we ride it anywhere.”

Turned out, the alarm system for the elevator was a simpler problem than switching on the motor to run the elevator, which wanted a key they didn’t have, which would fit in a slot to the right of the two buttons lined up vertically on the control panel and marked
Top
and
Bot.
Looking at those buttons, Stan said, “Did the manufacturer think the customer was gonna get confused?”

“Their lawyer made them add that,” Kelp explained.

The problem with the key meant that both Dortmunder and Kelp produced leather toolkit bags and took the metal cover off the control panel, then found the way to bypass the ignition. When they checked it, it worked fine, but Dortmunder and Kelp were the only ones aboard, and the elevator just went up to the top without waiting for anybody else.

“We’ll send it back down,” Dortmunder said as they rose.

“And have the alarms taken care of by the time they get here,” Kelp agreed.

Which they did. The second time the elevator opened at the top level, it was very full, mostly with Tiny, who seemed to be wearing Stan and Arnie as earmuffs. (The three long rumbles of the elevator motor had not reached Preston in the master bedroom but had made a faint drone in the guest room, causing Alan to frown and shift position and have a brief, pointless dream about being in a submarine.)

“We’ll just walk it through the first time,” Dortmunder said, “and, Arnie, then you can tell us which things to take.”

“I brung red dots,” Arnie said. When everybody gave him blank looks, he said, “I got the idea from art galleries. When they have a show, if somebody buys a painting they don’t get to take it home until the show is over, so the gallery has these little red dot stickers that they put on, to say, ‘this one already sold.’ ” Taking a sheet of such stickers from his pants pocket, he said, “That’s what I figured I’d do here. When I see something good, I slap a red dot on it, you guys take it away.”

“I like that,” Stan said. “Clear, simple and classy.”

“So let’s take a look around,” Dortmunder said.

All the floors of the penthouse were carpeted, in Persian and other antique rugs that were themselves worthy of red dots, though Arnie wouldn’t be thinking primarily in terms of furnishings. But the rugs made their progress through the penthouse silent until they entered the big living room with its airplane views of Manhattan and its array of art and antiques.

Everybody stopped, impressed, staring around at the room and the view, and Arnie said, “Forget the dots. Just take the living room.”

Stan said, “Arnie, the living room is bigger than the truck.”

Dortmunder said, “We like the red–dot thing, Arnie, stick with it.”

“Okay, then,” Arnie said, and stepped over to the nearest Picasso and whacked its frame with a red dot. Sold.

She hung up, shifted to a more relaxed at–ease position, and looked over at Judson, who had remained standing beside her desk, waiting to attract her attention. “Something?”

“I wondered,” he said, feeling he had to tiptoe around this topic because he didn’t want to push himself forward too aggressively but, on the other hand, didn’t want to be left out, either, “if Mr. Tiny said when they were going to do that thing on Sixty–eighth Street.”

J.C. didn’t seem bothered by the question. In fact, she seemed, if anything, indifferent. “They’re doing it now,” she said.

Surprised, hurt, Judson said, “But — Nobody told me.”

The look she gave him was not warm. “Why should they?”

“Well — I was helping, Mr. Kelp taught me about that burglar alarm, I thought …” He moved his hands around, no longer sure what he thought.

“Look, Judson,” she said, “you aren’t a part of that group.”

“But I thought …”

“Tiny told me how you volunteered, and how he tried to let you know the volunteer isn’t always necessarily right.”

“Oh, he let me know that, all right. But they did let me help.”

“And if they need some more help,” she said, “they’ll ask you again. Right now they know what they’re doing, so they don’t need any help. Okay?”

“Well …”

It was just a fantasy, then, an assumption, and he’d been wrong. For one moment he’d held their coat, that’s all. His position here was “the kid” and nothing else.

But if he wanted to at least keep
that
position, he’d better be careful here. So he stood up straighter and wiped the worried look from his face. “Sure,” he said, as though it were no big deal. “They know — Mr. Kelp and Mr. Tiny and all of them — they know I’m here if they ever need some help again.”

“They know that,” J.C. agreed. “And, when they get their profit on what they’re doing today, you’ll get a piece, don’t worry about it.”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” he told her, with a big self–confident grin.

Her own smile was wry as she studied him. “Well,” she said, “maybe worry a little bit.”

He had all day, surrounded by the incoming and outgoing mail, to wonder what she meant by that.