Watch Your Back (4 page)

“We’ll call you,” Dortmunder promised.

“I’m looking forward,” Arnie said, “to your call.”

“What, after the non–meet?” Kelp shrugged. “Believe it or not, I was three blocks from the O.J. when Stan called.”

“There was no reason to hang around.”

“I know that.” Kelp ducked a passing Frisbee and said, “A couple days later, Ralph’s brother called, he said Ralph talked himself out of the problem later that night, but then he decided to take his attorney’s advice, which was to move to a location for his health, which happens to be not in New York State.”

“So whatever Ralph had,” Dortmunder said, “it’s gone now.”

“Seems that way. The brother didn’t know what it was.” This time, Kelp caught the Frisbee and tossed it back, then called, “Whoops. Sorry.”

“The brother didn’t know what it was.”

“Well, the brother’s a civilian,” Kelp said, and nodded toward Fifth Avenue. “Maybe this’ll make up for it.”

“Let’s hope.”

The building, up ahead, taller than its neighbors, built in the real–estate flush of the 1950s, when details and ornamentation and style and grace were considered old–fashioned and unprofitable, hulked like a stalker over the park, a pale gray stone structure pocked with balconies. Dortmunder and Kelp studied it as they waited at the light, then crossed over to it and walked down the side street, past its hugeness. Then they stopped, in front of the smaller town house back there, and looked up at the tall black box running up the back of the apartment building.

“You can’t get up the outside,” Dortmunder pointed out. “No ladder rungs or anything.”

“John,” Kelp said, “would you want to go up seventeen flights of ladder rungs?”

“I’m just saying.”

Deciding to let that go, Kelp turned his attention to the smaller building behind the big apartment house, the one either from which the elevator shaft rose like a postmodern tree trunk or into which it was sunk like a sword hilt, depending on your general view of life. This twenty–five–foot–wide building, on the wide side for New York City town houses, was four stories high, with large windows and with the lowest floor halfway below sidewalk level. It was faced with the tannish–gray limestone New Yorkers call brown–stone, and was probably older than the monster on the corner. In fact, the monster on the corner had probably replaced another half–dozen town houses just like this, from a lower–horizoned age.

The facade of this structure had a broad staircase centered, flanked by wrought–iron railings and leading up half a flight to an elaborate dark wood front door with beveled windows.

Under the staircase a more modest staircase led from left to right, down half a flight to the ground–floor apartment.

On the right front of the building, the symmetry was destroyed by a recent addition, a featureless metal overhead garage door, painted a little darker tan–gray than the building. A driveway indentation lay in the curb fronting this door, and there appeared to be two locks above the simple brass handle at waist height in the middle. Above the right corner of the door was an unobtrusive dark green metal box, one foot high, six inches wide, three inches deep.

“Pipe the alarm box,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder said, “I see it. We seen boxes like that before.”

“You just have to be a little careful, is all,” Kelp said.

“On the other hand,” Dortmunder said, “an alarm like that, you gotta get in there with foam, if you’re gonna muffle the bell and short the wires.”

“Naturally.”

“Which means a ladder.”

“Not necessarily,” Kelp said.

“Well, let’s just say necessarily,” Dortmunder said. “A ladder, in this neighborhood, whadawe gonna do? Wear Con Edison coveralls and helmets? To lean on an alarm box?”

“What I was thinking, John,” Kelp said, “instead of a ladder —”

“You’ll fly.”

“No, John,” Kelp said, not losing his patience. “I think Arnie’s right, what we should do to begin with, and that’s take the BMW outa there and put a truck in. Now, this truck’s gonna be a little tall.”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “I get it.”

“Drive around the corner with one of us on the roof —”

“One of us.”

“We’ll figure that out later,” Kelp said, and did hand gestures to demonstrate his thought. “Back it up to the garage door, do the alarm box. Truck drives away, around the corner, time he’s back, the BMW’s outa there, truck goes in.”

“Maybe,” Dortmunder said.

“Everything’s a maybe,” Kelp told him, “until you do it.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“Have we seen enough?”

Dortmunder looked up at the long elevator shaft one last time. “For now.”

For protective coloration, by tacit agreement they walked to the corner and back across Fifth Avenue and into the park, this time strolling southward instead of back toward Arnie’s place. In the park you were anonymous, just two other guys among all the other citizens enjoying the summer air: the joggers, the skateboarders, the bicyclists, the stroller pushers, the dog walkers, the Frisbee tossers, the unicyclists, the tree worshippers, the Hare Krishnas, and the lost Boy Scout troops. But back on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, they couldn’t have been anything but what they were, which was not a good fact to advertise.

Strolling along southward, they both contemplated what they had heard and seen today, until Kelp said, “So we need two drivers.”

“You can be one of them.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Kelp said. “How about we call Stan Murch?”

“He isn’t two drivers. He’s good, but he isn’t that good.”

“He has a mom,” Kelp reminded him, “and she’s been known to drive.”

“Mostly that cab of hers.”

“But for us, too, sometimes. Anyway, I feel my own talents, with locks and suchlike, would be better availed of inside the building.”

“You may be right,” Dortmunder said. “So us two and Stan and his mom. There’s gonna be heavy lifting.”

“You’re talking about Tiny.”

“I am.”

Kelp said, “You wanna call everybody? We’ll make a meet at the O.J., tomorrow night.”

“Good.”

They walked a bit more in the sunshine, among the happy crowds, and then Dortmunder said, “Who knew? That Arnie’s intervention would turn out to have an upside.”

Yes. Unobtrusive on the dashboard, because it wasn’t at the moment in use, was the little screen of the Global Positioning System. This was a car, unfortunately, that knew where it was. And would tell.

That was the snag lately. If you grabbed some old clunker, it didn’t have enough resale value to be worth the risk involved in taking it away from its former owner, but a shiny new, valuable piece of tin was more than likely to be leashed to a satellite. And there was no known way to jam a satellite.

That’s the problem, Stan thought. The law’s got all the labs.

How long had he been in possession of this bigmouth? Twenty minutes by the dashboard clock — no, twenty–one.

He’d picked up this untrustworthy beauty at a seafood restaurant in Sea Gate at 1:27, and it was now 1:48. Was the original purchaser of this vehicle an early luncher or a late luncher? Once he completed his piscatory blowout and moved from restaurant to parking lot to find an empty space where his wheels were supposed to be, how long would it take to get the law on the case? And then how long before that nosy satellite up in the sky, the one whose weight on the top of his head was now giving Stan a migraine, would be telling every cop in the five boroughs that the dark green Lincoln Navigator they all so much wanted to meet was at this very instant east–bound on the Belt Parkway, just past Aqueduct racetrack, with JFK Airport coming up on the right? Thirty seconds.

I gotta get outa here, Stan informed himself, even though he knew he already knew that. I do not want to be on a highway, he advised himself. Yeah, yeah, shut up, he snapped at himself, getting a little edgy, here comes Lefferts Boulevard.

Slow
damn traffic around JFK all the time. Nobody wants to take a train to the plane, that’s the problem, one form of tubular transport a day is enough. Still, the exit ramp did creep closer on the right; Stan signaled — always be law–abiding, when possible — and onto Lefferts Boulevard he swung, headed north into South Ozone Park. Three minutes later, he pulled to a stop next to the yellow curb of a bus zone, pulled two tissues from the Navigator’s dispenser, wiped the steering wheel and whatever other parts he might have touched, and exited.

And just in time, too. He’d walked barely two minutes farther along Lefferts when a cop cruiser pulled in beside him as he waited for traffic to stop or the light to change, whichever came first. The passenger cop, a blonde woman who got her iron supply by eating nails for breakfast, said, “You. Sir.” The “you” was a little more believable than the “sir.”

Stan kept an innocent look for just such occasions as this. Strapping it on, he said, “Yes?”

“D’jou park that car back there?”

Stan frowned, looking back toward but not directly at the Navigator. “Car? What car?”

“That isn’t your car?”

“What, that Lincoln?” Stan chuckled, which was part of the innocent look. “Don’t I wish. I’m on my way up to the subway.”

“I thought you were the one just got outa that car,” the cop persisted.

All right, he’d have to give her more. He said, “Wait a minute, do I look Chinese?”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “So what?”

“Just before I got there,” Stan told her, “there was a Chinese guy stopped that car, got out, went up this way. I remember thinking, ‘He’s gonna get a ticket, that’s a bus zone.’ ”

“That wasn’t you.” Still skeptical.

“He passed me,” Stan explained. “Moving fast. Listen, the light’s with me now, okay?”

“Go on,” she said, but she wasn’t happy about it.

So he went on, headed for the subway as he’d said, because maybe today wasn’t a good day for private wheels, and damn if, three minutes later, she wasn’t back again, pulling in next to a fire hydrant, both cops getting out of the car, hitching their gunbelts, the driver male, skinny, bored.

It was still the woman doing the talking: “You. Sir.”

“Hello, again,” Stan said. “Still on my way to the subway,” he said, and pointed up the boulevard. Just a couple blocks to go.

“Tell us more about this Chinese guy,” she said.

So then he understood he’d made another mistake. He’d given her the Chinese guy to distract her, throw a little fairy dust in her eyes, and now the Chinaman was coming back to bite him on the ass, because guess what? The first time, they were only interested in an illegally parked car, but since then the satellite has been at its busybody work, and now they’ve got a stolen car, and Stan has already declared himself a witness who saw the perp. Crap — a double scoop, please.

“Well,” he said, picking his words carefully now that it was too late, “I don’t know he was Chinese, exactly. Oriental, though. I think. Could be Japanese, Burmese. Maybe Thai.”

“Dressed?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Dressed
how?
”

“Oh.” This part he could get right. “Kind of like me,” he said. “You know, normal. Chinos and a light T–shirt. I don’t think his T–shirt said anything.” Stan’s, in fact, said NASCAR, with smoke coming out of tailpipes on all the letters.

The woman cop gave this shirt a flat look, then said, “And which way did this Oriental person go?” She was still skeptical about the existence of the Oriental person, but so long as she contented herself with sarcasm, Stan didn’t care.

“Up to the corner and turned right,” he said, and pivoted to point back to where he’d come from. “Back there, that would have been.”

“How old —”

The cell in Stan’s pocket ripped off the race–starting jingle, and the woman cop gave him a severe look. “Sorry,” he said, took out the cell, and managed to button it before it announced the second race. “Yeah?”

It was John Dortmunder’s voice — Stan recognized it right away — saying, “You wanna make a meet tonight? You and your mom.”

“Oh, hi, John,” Stan said, with a bigger smile than he’d usually offer John, put on mostly for the cops’ benefit. “Oh, you wanna play poker again, huh?”

“No, I —”

Stan wasn’t sure whether the cops could hear what John was saying, so it would be better if he didn’t say it. Interrupting he said, “Wanna win your money back, huh? Fat chance. Listen, I’m here helping a couple cops with a car in a no–parking zone —”

“Ok,” — “so maybe we could talk later.”

“You gonna be in jail tonight?”

“I don’t see why, John.”

“O.J. at ten,” John said, and broke the connection.

So did Stan. “Friendly game,” he assured the cop. “Nickel–and–dime.”

She nodded. “May I see some ID?”

Stan frowned, honestly sorry not to be more helpful. “Gee, I don’t think so,” he said.

“No?” Skepticism doubled, she said, “You got something to hide?”

“Not that I know of,” Stan said. “But I don’t believe I have to show ID to walk on the sidewalk, and what else am I doing?”

“You’re a witness.”

“To a car in a no–parking zone?”

“To a
stolen
car in a no–parking zone.”

“Oh,” Stan said, showing surprise. “In that case, I’m not a witness at all. I forget everything. Sorry I can’t be more help. Listen, I don’t wanna miss my subway. You probably want to get back to your evidence before it’s towed.”

And he walked very briskly indeed to the Ozone Park–Lefferts Boulevard subway station, end of the A line, which, before it reaches its other terminus, in the Bronx, burrows through four of the five boroughs. But we don’t have to go there.