Drowned Hopes

He answered the usual question anyway, being tired and out of sorts and not at his most observant. “Not so good,” he said, opening the closet door. With slow and tired motions, he took tools from the many inside and outside pockets of his black jacket, placing them with muffled clanks on the closet shelf. “The jeweler’s gone, moved to Rhinebeck; there’s a pasta restaurant in there now. The antique guy’s switched to Disney collectibles. And the check–cashing place got a dog.” Taking his jacket off, he held it up and looked at the new ragged tear at the bottom in the back. “Mean goddamn dog,” he said.

“John,” May said. She sounded tense. Her left hand pretend–smoked, fiddling with an imaginary cigarette, flicking ghost ashes on the floor, something she hadn’t done since just after she’d quit.

But Dortmunder was full of his own problems. Hanging up his torn jacket, he said, “It’s almost enough to make you rethink a life of crime. I did get a
little,
though, after I locked the dog out and he ran away.” He began pulling crumpled money from inside his shirt, putting it on the hall table.

“
John,
” May said, her eyes very round and white, “there’s somebody
here.
”

He paused, hand over the money. “What?”

“He says —” May glanced at the doorway to the living room, apprehension and mistrust defining her features. “He says he’s an old friend of yours.”

“Who does?”

“This man.”

“Al?” The voice, hoarse and ragged but somehow self–confident, came from the living room. “Is that you, Al?”

Dortmunder looked bewildered, and then startled. “No,” he said.

A man appeared in the living room doorway. He was as gray and cold as the dawn outside, a thin gristly bony old guy of just over six feet tall, dressed in a gray windbreaker over a faded blue workshirt, and baggy gray pants and black worn shoes. He had a craggy rectangular head sitting up on top of his stony body like a log redan full of guards. His eyes were bleak, cheeks ravaged, brow furrowed, hair gray and thin and dead and hanging down over his large leathery ears. “Hello, Al,” he said, and when he spoke his lips didn’t move; but what ventriloquist would use
this
for an alter ego? “How you doin, Al,” the hoarse gray voice said through the unmoving lips. “Long time no see.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Dortmunder said. “They let you out.”

May said, “So you do know him.” She sounded as though she wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news.

“Tom and I were inside together,” Dortmunder told her, unwillingly. “We were cellmates for a while.”

The gray man, who looked too flinty and stringy and knotted to be named anything as simple and friendly as Tom, made that laugh sound again, and said, “Cellmates. Pals. Right, Al? Thrown together by the vagaries of fortune, right?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“Why don’t we sit in the living room,” Tom suggested, his lips a thin straight line. “My coffee’s gettin cold in there.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

Tom turned away, going back into the living room, walking rigid, like a man who’s been broken and then put back together a little wrong, using too much Krazy Glue. Behind his stiff back, May waggled eyebrows and shoulders and fingers at Dortmunder, asking,
Who is this person, why is he in my house, what’s going on, when will it end?
and Dortmunder shrugged ears and elbows and the corners of his mouth, answering,
I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know if this is some kind of trouble or not, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Then they followed Tom into the living room.

Tom sat on the better easy chair, the one that hadn’t sagged all the way to the floor, while Dortmunder and May took the sofa, sitting facing Tom with the look of a couple who’ve just been asked to think seriously about life insurance. Tom sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, lifting his cup from the coffee table, sipping with deep concentration. He looked like the background figure in a Depression movie, a guy hunkered over a small fire in a hobo encampment. Dortmunder and May watched him warily, and when he put the cup down he leaned back and sighed faintly, and said, “That’s all I drink now. Lost my taste on the inside.”

Dortmunder said, “How long were you in, Tom, all in all?”

“All in all?” Tom made that sound again. “All my life, all in all. Twenty–three years, this last time. It was supposed to be for good, you know. I’m habitual.”

“I remember that about you,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, the answer is,” Tom said, “while I been eating regular meals and getting regular exercise and a good night’s sleep all these years on the inside, the world’s managed to get worse without me. Maybe I’m not the one they should of been protecting society from all along.”

“How do you mean, Tom?”

“The reason I’m out,” Tom said. “Inflation, plus budget cuts, plus the rising inmate population. All on its own, Al, without any help from yours truly, society has raised up a
generation
of inmates. Sloppy ones, too, Al, fourth–rates you and me wouldn’t use to hold the door open.”

“There is a lot of that around,” Dortmunder agreed.

“These are people,” Tom went on, “that don’t know a blueprint from a candy wrapper. And to pull a job with a
plan?
When these bozos take a step forward with the right foot, they have no really
clear
idea what they figure to do with the left.”

“They’re out there, all right,” Dortmunder said, nodding. “I see them sometimes, asleep on fire escapes, with their head on a television set. They do kinda muddy the water for the rest of us.”

“They take all the fun outta prison, I can tell you that,” Tom said. “And the worst of it is, their motivation’s no damn good. Now, Al, you and me know, if a man goes into a bank with a gun in his hand and says gimme the money and a five–minute start, there’s only
two
good reasons for it. Either his family’s poor and sick and needs an operation and shoes and schoolbooks and meat for dinner more than once a week, or the fella wants to take a lady friend to Miami and party. One or the other. Am I right?”

“That’s the usual way,” Dortmunder agreed. “Except it’s mostly Las Vegas now.”

“Well,
these
clowns can’t even get that much right,” Tom said. “The fact is, what they steal for is to feed their veins, and they go right on feeding their veins inside, they buy it off guards and trusties and visitors and each other and probly even the chaplain, but if you
ask
them why they ignored the career counselor and took up this life of crime for which they are so shit–
poor
fitted, they’ll tell you it’s political. They’ll tell you
they’re
the victims.”

Dortmunder nodded. “I’ve heard that one,” he said. “It’s useful in the sentencing sometimes, I think. And in the parole.”

“It’s a crock, Al,” Tom insisted.

Gently, Dortmunder said, “Tom, you and I’ve told the authorities a couple fibs in our time, too.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Granted. Anyway, the result is, inflation makes it cost more to feed and house a fella in the pen in the manner to which we’ve all become accustomed, and budget cuts — Did you know, Al,” he interrupted himself, “that health–wise, long–term cons are the healthiest people in America?”

“I didn’t know that,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Well, it’s the truth,” Tom said. “It’s the regularity of the life, the lack of stress, the sameness of the food intake, the handiness of the free medical care, and the organized exercise program. Your lifers are the longest–lived people in the society. Any insurance company will tell you so.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said; “that must be some kind of consolation, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Tom made that laugh sound again. “Just knowing if you were out somewhere having fun you’d die sooner.” Tom slurped coffee without apparently opening his lips, and said, “So, anyway, with all of those things coming together, with its costing more to house me and feed me, plus you’ve got these budget cuts so they got
less
money to do this housing and feeding, plus you’ve got the entire male population between seventeen and twenty–six clamoring to come in to be housed and fed, the governor decided to give me a seventieth birthday present.” Grinning closed–mouthed at May, he said, “You wouldn’t think I was seventy, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” May said.

“I look younger than Al here,” Tom told her.

May frowned at Dortmunder. “John,” she said, “why does he keep calling you Al? If you do really know him, and if he really knows you, and if you really lived in the same cell together, and if your name is John — and it
is
John — why does he call you
Al?
”

Tom made a sound that might have been meant for a chuckle. “It’s a kind of an inside joke between Al and me,” he said.

Dortmunder explained, “It’s Tom’s idea of comedy. He found out my middle name’s Archibald, and I don’t much love that name —”

“You hate it,” May said.

“It’s one of the worst things about being arrested,” Dortmunder said. “When they look at me and say, ‘John Archibald Dortmunder, you are under arrest,’ I always cave in right away, and that’s why.”

May said, “And when this man found out how much you hated that name, that’s what he decided to call you from then on?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“And his idea of a nickname for Archibald is Al?”

“Right again,” Dortmunder said.

“Inside joke,” Tom said, and made the chuckle sound again.

“That,” May said, “is his idea of humor.”

“You’re beginning to get the picture,” Dortmunder told her.

“Al,” Tom said, “are you really close with this woman? I mean, can I talk in front of her?”

“Well, Tom,” Dortmunder said, “if you plan on talking much in front of
me,
you’ll be talking in front of May. I mean, that’s the way it is.”

“That’s okay,” Tom said. “I got no problem with that. I just wanted to be sure you were secure in your mind.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, you want something.”

“Of course I want something,” Tom told him. “What do you think I am? You think I do
reunions?
You think I make my way around the country, drop in on old cellmates, but up a lot of old jackpots? Al, do I look to you like a guy sends out
Christmas cards?
”

“Like I said, Tom,” Dortmunder answered patiently, “you’re here because you want something.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I want something.”

“What?”

“Help,” Tom said simply.

“You mean money?” Dortmunder asked him, though he didn’t think that could be it. Tom Jimson was not a borrower type; he’d rather shoot you and rob the body than be reduced to begging.

“Well, it’s money in a way,” Tom said. “Let me explain, okay?”

“Go right ahead.”

“You see,” Tom said, “it’s like this. What I always did when I made a good–sized haul, I always stashed some or all of it, hid it somewhere so I’d have it if I needed it later on. I learned that when I was just a kid, from Dilly.”

May said, “Dilly?”

Dortmunder told her, “John Dillinger. Tom started out with Dillinger, and that’s what he called him.”

May said, “To his face?”

“Lady,” Tom said, “I never had a lot of trouble gettin my own way. I want to call this fella here Al, I call him Al. I wanted to call Dilly Dilly, that’s what I called him.”

“All right,” May said. The wary look in her eyes was on the increase.

“So anyway,” Tom said, “Dilly and I kind of come out together, in a way of speaking. What I mean, he got out of the pen in Indiana in ‘thirty–three, and that’s when I was just gettin started myself. I was fourteen. I learned a lot from Dilly that year, before he pulled that fake death of his, and one of the things I learned was, always stash some of it away for a rainy day.”

“I remember that,” Dortmunder said. “I remember, while we were cellmates, every once in a while you had to tell some lawyer where another of those stashes was so he could go dig it up and pay himself what you owed him.”

“Lawyers,” Tom said, his voice rasping more than usual, and his lips moved slightly, just enough to give a glimpse of small, white, sharp–looking teeth. “They got their hands on a lot of my stashes over the years,” he admitted, “and they never gave me a thing for it all. But they didn’t get the
big
stash, and they weren’t going to. That one I held out, even from the lawyers. That one’s my retirement. There’s a place in Mexico I’m goin, way down below Acapulco on the west coast. That money’s gonna get me there, and once I’m there that money’s gonna keep me happy and healthy for a good long time. I’m gonna be an
old
man, Al, that’s the one ambition in life I got left.”

“Sounds good,” Dortmunder said, wondering why Tom didn’t just get on that southbound plane. Why come
here?
Why tell this story to
Dortmunder?
Where was the part he wasn’t going to like?

“What it was,” Tom was saying, “it was an armored car on the Thruway, taking money from Albany on down to New York. We had a nice clean hit, but then my partners ran into some trouble later on, and it wound up I had the whole seven hundred thousand.”

Dortmunder stared at him. “Dollars?”

“That’s what they were using back then,” Tom agreed. “Dollars. This was a year or two before I went up the last time. I was pretty flush, and what with one thing and another I didn’t have any partners to share the stuff with, so I got me a casket —”

“A box, you mean,” Dortmunder said.

“A
casket,
I mean,” Tom told him. “The best kind of box there is, Al, if you want to keep something safe. Airtight, watertight, steel–encased.”

“Sounds great,” Dortmunder said.

“It is,” Tom said. “And, you know, you can’t just go out and
buy
one of those. The company that makes them, they keep those babies under very tight control.”

Dortmunder frowned. “They do?”

“They do. See, they don’t want you to take it into your head to buy a box and stick old granny in it and shove her in a hole in the back yard. Free–lance burial, you see. The law doesn’t like that.”