What's The Worst That Could Happen (26 page)

“You brought those knees in with you, John,” Kelp reminded him. “Look at the clothes.”

It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount–store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a bum rap. On the other hand, with these clothes, it was very hard to look at the clothes anyway.

This was the end result of Dortmunder’s having told Kelp, in the car on the way to Henderson, how everybody in this town seemed to gaze upon him with immediate suspicion. If he’d known that admission was going to lead to this he’d have kept the problem to himself, just resigned himself to being a suspicious character, which is in fact what he was.

But, no. Despite the absolute success of the meeting with Lester Vogel — that scheme was going to work out
perfectly,
he almost believed it himself — here he was, humiliated, in this discount mall on the fringes of the city, in front of a mirror, his knees frowning at him in reproof, wearing these
clothes.

The pants, to begin with, weren’t pants, they were shorts. Shorts. Who over the age of six wears shorts? What person, that is, of Dortmunder’s dignity, over the age of six wears shorts? Big baggy tan shorts with
pleats.
Shorts with pleats, so that he looked like he was wearing brown paper bags from the supermarket above his knees, with his own sensible black socks below the knees, but the socks and their accompanying feet were then stuck into
sandals.
Sandals? Dark brown sandals? Big clumpy sandals, with his own black socks, plus those knees, plus those shorts? Is this a way to dress?

And let’s not forget the shirt. Not that it was likely anybody ever could forget this shirt, which looked as though it had been manufactured at midnight during a power outage. No two pieces of the shirt were the same color. The left short sleeve was plum, the right was lime. The back was dark blue. The left front panel was chartreuse, the right was cerise, and the pocket directly over his heart was
white.
And the whole shirt was huge, baggy and draping and falling around his body, and worn outside the despicable shorts.

Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, “Who wears this stuff?”

“Americans,” Kelp told him.

“Don’t they have mirrors in America?”

“They think it looks spiffy,” Kelp explained. “They think it shows they’re on vacation and they’re devil–may–care.”

“The devil may care for
this
crap,” Dortmunder said, “but I hate it.”

“Wear it,” Kelp advised him, “and nobody will look at you twice.”

“And I’ll know why,” Dortmunder said. Then he frowned at Kelp, next to him in the mirror, moderate and sensible in gray chinos and blue polo shirt and black loafers, and he said, “How come
you
don’t dress like this, you got so much protective coloration.”

“It’s not my image,” Kelp told him.

Dortmunder’s brow lowered. “This is
my
image? I look like an awning!”

“See, John,” Kelp said, being kindly, which only made things worse, “what
my
image is, I’m a technician on vacation, maybe a clerk somewhere, maybe behind the counter at the electric supply place, so what I do when I’ve got time off, I wear the same pants I wear to work, only I don’t wear the white shirt with the pens in the pocket protector, I wear the shirt that lets me pretend I know how to play golf. You see?”

“It’s your story,” Dortmunder said.

“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “And
your
story, John, you’re a working man on vacation. You’re a guy, every day on the job you wear paint–stained blue jeans and big heavy steel–toe workboots — probably yellow, you know those boots? — and T–shirts with sayings on them, cartoons on them, and plaster dust like icing all over everything. So when
you
go on vacation, you don’t wear
nothing
you wear at work, you don’t want to
think
about work —”

“Not the way you describe it.”

“That’s right. So you go down to the mall, and here we are at the mall, and you walk around with the wife and you’re supposed to pick up a
wardrobe
for your week’s vacation, and you don’t know a thing about what clothes look like except the crap you wear every day, and the wife picks up this shirt out of the reduced bin and says, ‘This looks nice,’ and so you wear it. And when we leave here, John, I want you to look around and see just how many guys are wearing exactly that shirt, or at least a shirt just like it.”

Dortmunder said, “And is that who I want people to think I am?”

“Well, John,” Kelp said, “it seems to me, it’s either that, or it’s you’re a guy that, when people look at you, they think nine and one and one. You know what I mean?”

“And this,” Dortmunder said, as he and his knees glared at one another, “is something else Max Fairbanks owes me.”

Thursday afternoon, the eighteenth of May, while thousands of miles to the west Andy Kelp was dressing John Dortmunder in the dog’s breakfast, Stan Murch drove away from the Kartel International Hotel on Broadway in the Fifties, at the wheel of a very nice cherry–red Cadillac Seville, and headed downtown to Ninth Avenue and Thirty–Ninth Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he was to meet Tiny Bulcher, the mountain shaped something like a man. There was a brief delay at that location, because Tiny was in the process of explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. “You didn’t
earn
this money,” Tiny was saying. “You see what I mean?”

The way Tiny was holding the panhandler made it impossible for the fellow to answer questions, but that was okay; Tiny’s questions were all rhetorical, anyway. “For instance,” he was saying, for instance, “the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it? Huh? I’ll tell you where I got it. I stole it from some people uptown. It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it. Did you earn it? Did you risk anything? Did you work hard?”

In fact, the panhandler at that moment was at some risk, and was working quite hard merely to breathe, for which Tiny wasn’t giving him credit. And now some taxis honked at Stan, which made Tiny look away from his life lesson. He saw Stan there in the cherry–red Cadillac, patiently waiting, ignoring all those cab horns. “Be right there,” Tiny called, and Stan waved a casual hand, meaning: take your time.

Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to give him some parting advice. “Get a job,” he said, “or get a gun. But don’t beg. It’s rude.”

Allowing the panhandler to collapse gratefully onto the sidewalk, Tiny stepped over him — displaying politeness — and walked around the cherry–red Caddy to insert himself into the passenger seat. “Quiet car you got.”

“It’s those cabs that are noisy,” Stan told him, and drove away from there and on down to the Holland Tunnel and through it to New Jersey, and then deeper into New Jersey to an avenue of auto dealers and similar enterprises, among which was Big Wheel Motor Home Sales. Stan drove on by Big Wheel an extra block, and then pulled over to stop at the curb. “See you,” he said.

“Stan,” Tiny said, “I want to thank you. This is a roomy car. I’m not used to roomy in a car. I remember one time I had to make a couple people ride on the roof, I got so cramped in the car.”

“How’d they like that?” Stan asked.

“I never asked them,” Tiny said. “Anyway, I appreciate you picking out this car, and I don’t even mind the color. Just so it’s roomy.”

“We’ll get roomier before we’re done,” Stan assured him, and got out of the Caddy to walk back to Big Wheel, where he got into a conversation with a salesman in which the salesman told some little lies and Stan told some great big lies, mostly about being a married construction worker off to different job sites all the time around the country, tired of renting little furnished houses here and there, deciding to get a motor home for himself and Earlene and the kids. So what’ve we got here?

“You’re gonna love the Interloper,” the salesman said.

Next they tried the Wide Open Spaces XJ. It was also big enough, and it had a good–size living room and two small bathrooms, so Stan took that one for a spin, too, with Jerry again on the front seat beside him and a cherry–red Cadillac again trailing along in the outside mirror.

But Stan didn’t like the way the XJ drove, big and boxy, like it would fall over any second, so back they went to the lot, where Stan rejected the Indian Brave because it wasn’t self–contained enough; you had less than an hour of electricity available in the motor home, before you’d have to find a trailer park somewhere and hook up.

Then they got to the Invidia. Unlike most motor homes, which are either chrome or tan, the Invidia was a pale green, like fresh spring grass. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a good–size living room, built–in furniture that folded away to make more space,
plenty
of septic capacity, and all the water storage and electric batteries you could possibly want.

Off for another test drive, and Stan got happier and happier. The Invidia held the road well enough in city traffic that he felt he could probably let it out pretty good on the highway, if need be, big though it was.

They drove here and there, back and forth, and then Stan said, “What’s that noise?”

“Noise?” Jerry looked startled. “What noise?”

“Something in the back, when we were stopped at that light. Lemme pull over here.”

Stan stopped at the curb as a cherry–red Cadillac drove slowly by, parking just ahead. Jerry got out of the curbside door, while Stan dropped the ignition key out the open driver–side window. Then Stan got out, and he and Jerry went around to the back, where Stan tugged on the license plate — being a dealer plate, it actually was loose, but didn’t really rattle — and tugged on the plastic housing for the spare wheel, and on the ladder going up to the roof, and finally said, “Well, I don’t know what it could have been.”

“Some other car, maybe,” Jerry suggested. “Stopped there at that light.”

“You could be right. Sorry about that.”

They went back around to get into the Invidia again, and Stan found the ignition key on the driver’s seat. When he palmed it, it was warm and waxy. He put it in the ignition, started the engine, and said, “Well, I don’t hear it any more.”

“Good,” Jerry said.

Stan drove back to the lot, and assured Jerry he didn’t have to see any more motor homes, he was pretty confident the Invidia was the one for him and his family, “though I’ll have to clear it with Earlene, you know how it is. I’ll bring her around on Monday.”

They shook hands before Stan left. “See you Monday,” Jerry said.

Well, no.

In fact, the only comment he received, pro or con, was on Friday morning, when he came out of his room at the Randy Unicorn and the mummified woman was standing there, outside her office, squinting in the sunlight as though she’d just vaguely remembered that sunlight was bad for her, and when she saw Dortmunder in his new togs she looked him up and down, said, “Uh huh,” and went back into her office.

The acid test came when Dortmunder and Kelp went over to the Gaiety. They walked around the Battle–Lake, and studied the cottages where Max Fairbanks would be staying come Monday, and while they were doing all that the
exact same
rent–a–cops never gave Dortmunder a tumble, didn’t even recognize him from two days ago. It was amazing, this protective coloration stuff, simply amazing. Dortmunder said, “What if I wear this crap in New York?”

“Don’t,” Kelp advised.

They called Anne Marie’s room from the lobby, but she wasn’t in, so they wandered some more, looking at the casino, which was shaped mostly like a Rorschach inkblot. From the front entrance, if you came into the hotel and angled to the right you’d find the doors out to the pool and the Battle–Lake and the rest of the outdoor wonders, and if you went straight ahead you soon reached the broad check–in desk, with half a dozen clerks on duty, but if you angled to the left you entered a kind of cave, low–ceilinged and indeterminate and endless, with all the light you needed at any one specific spot and yet nevertheless an impression of overall darkness.

The first part of the cave was a ranked army of slot machines, brigade after brigade, all at attention, many being fed by acolytes in clothing like Dortmunder’s, but with cups full of coins in their left hands. They were like sinners being punished in an early circle of Hell, and Dortmunder passed by with gaze averted.

Beyond the slots, the same room spread left and right, with the crap tables to the left, extending for some surprising distance, and the blackjack tables to the right. Following the crap tables leftward would funnel you back to the lounge, a dark room with low tables and chairs where drained holidaymakers dozed in front of a girl singer belting
your
favorites in front of a quartet of Prozaced musicians. If you went the other way, past the blackjack tables, you came to the more exotic dry–cleaning methods: roulette, keno, and, in a roped–off area staffed with men in tuxes and women in ball gowns, baccarat. The keno section was actually the back of the lounge, so you could continue on through and wind up at the crap tables again.

This was all one continuous room, without a single window. The ceiling was uniformly low, the lighting uniformly specific and soothing, the air uniformly cool and crisp, the noise level controlled so thoroughly that the shouters at the crap tables could hear and be excited by one another but would hardly be noticed by the intense memorizers at the blackjack tables.

In here it was neither day nor night, but always the same.

Dortmunder went through it feeling like an astronaut, far out in the solar system, taking a walk through the airless reaches of space, and he wished he were back on his native planet; even the protective spacesuit he was wearing, with its many colors and its white pocket, didn’t seem like enough.

Eventually they found themselves outdoors again, where the nice bushy green plantings along the rambling blacktop paths at least were reminiscent of Earth. They roamed a bit more, breathing the airlike air, and then Kelp said, “There she is,” and pointed to Anne Marie, swimming in the pool.

They went over and stood by the pool, crowded with kids of all ages, until she saw them; then she waved and swam over and climbed out, trim in a dark blue one–piece suit. “Hi, guys,” she said. “This way.”

They followed her around to her towel, on a white plastic chaise longue. She dabbed herself, then gave Kelp a moist kiss and Dortmunder a skeptical look, saying, “Who dressed
you?
”

Dortmunder pointed at Kelp. “He did.”

“Get to know who your friends are,” she advised.

Kelp said, “It’s protective coloration. Before, people kept wanting to make citizen arrests.”

“It seems to work,” Dortmunder said.

“Good,” she said. “I suppose you want to see the view.”

“Yes, please.”

They rode up in the elevator together, and Anne Marie unlocked her way into the room. Dortmunder immediately went over to look out the window, and there it was. The field of play, laid out for him like a diagram.

“I took some pictures,” Anne Marie said, bringing them out. “Up here, and down there, too.”

“I love your camera, Anne Marie,” Kelp said, and went over to stand beside Dortmunder and look out the window. They contemplated the scene down there together for a minute, and then Kelp said, “So? Whadaya think?”

Dortmunder made shrugging motions with head and eyebrows and hands and shoulders. “We might get away with it,” he said.