Good Behavior (11 page)

Tiny said, “J.C. Taylor, please.”

“I'm afraid he isn't in right now. Did you call for an appointment?”

“I don't like phones,” Tiny said. “My friend told me just come over.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Your friend?”

“Fella named Murtaugh,” Tiny said. “Pete Murtaugh.”

“Ah.” Her attitude changed, became both more interested and more guarded. “And your name?”

“Mr. Bulcher. My friend said he'd call here, talk to Taylor for me.”

“Yes, he did.” She glanced quickly at Dortmunder, as though making up her mind about something, then said briskly to Tiny, “One moment, please,” and got to her feet.

Tiny nodded toward the door marked
PRIVATE,
saying, “You mean, maybe Taylor's in after all?”

“It could be,” she said, and suddenly grinned, as though at some private joke. The grin eased the hardness out of her features and made her much better looking. “I'll be with you boys in just a minute,” she said, and walked around the desk and through the inner door, closing it behind herself.

Tiny glanced at Dortmunder and said, “What do you think?”

Dortmunder said, “Is this the same kind of funny feeling you got from your friend?”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Tiny said. Then he frowned and gestured at the telephone on the desk. “That button just lit up.”

“They're making a call,” Dortmunder said. “Checking on us with your friend. Did you tell him there'd be a second guy?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Then that's what it is.”

The light on the telephone remained on a minute longer, during which time Tiny browsed amid the cartons on the metal shelves. “Hey, look at this,” he said, and turned toward Dortmunder with a book in his hand. “Some kind of dirty book.”

Inside the book's brown paper wrapper was a maroon pebbled cover, with the title in gold lettering:
Scandinavian Marriage Secrets
. The title page explained that the book was an illustrated sex manual intended for the use of psychiatrists, marriage counselors “and other professionals” in the course of their work. It also said the text had been translated from the Danish.

There wasn't much text, but there were a lot of illustrations. Tiny leafed slowly through them, nodding in agreement, then stopped and said, “Hey. Isn't that her?”

“Who?”

“The receptionist. That's her.”

Dortmunder looked. The emphasis of the photograph was on other parts of the two bodies, but the girl's face was clear enough to be recognizable. “That's her,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Son of a bitch.” Tiny studied the picture some more. “Underneath here,” he said, “it calls the guy ‘the husband' and her ‘the wife.' She didn't have any rings on, did she?”

“I didn't notice.” Dortmunder looked over at the desk. “They're off the phone,” he said.

“Oh.” With guilty haste, Tiny closed the book and moved to put it back where he'd found it. He was just bringing his hand back when the inner door opened and the girl came out. She glanced at Tiny's moving hand and guilty face, but kept her own face expressionless. She looked briefly at Dortmunder, and said to them both, “You can come in now.”

“Right,” Tiny said. He seemed to be finding himself even larger and more awkward than usual; he had trouble getting around the edge of the desk. But then he made it and went on to the inner office, Dortmunder following him and the receptionist holding the door.

The inner office was also small and cluttered. A large scarred wooden desk stood in front of a big dusty window with a Venetian blind half-lowered over it. Large cardboard cartons were stacked up everywhere. A library table against one wall contained envelopes, a postage scale and postage meter, a stamp pad and various rubber stamps, and other necessities for a mailing operation. A small upright piano on the opposite wall was crammed between a tall narrow bookcase and a gray metal filing cabinet. A large audio cassette player and speaker stood atop the piano. The bookcase was packed full, mostly with what seemed to be law books, and the filing cabinet featured a complicated rod-and-padlock locking arrangement. There were only three places to sit: an ordinary old swivel chair behind the desk, a tattered brown leather chair with wooden arms in front of the desk, and a metal folding chair open in front of the piano. There was no one in the room.

Tiny and Dortmunder stopped in the middle of the clutter and looked back at the receptionist, who had followed them in and was closing the door behind her. Tiny said, “What's going on? Where's Taylor?”

Dortmunder pointed at the receptionist, who was grinning again, looking almost but not quite like a schoolgirl playing a joke. “You're it,” he said.

Tiny said, “What?”

“That's right,” the receptionist said, and edged past them to move around behind the desk. “Grab chairs,” she invited.

Tiny said, “What's going on?” He was beginning to look as though he wanted to bite somebody.

Dortmunder, gesturing toward the girl now seated behind the desk, said, “That's J.C. Taylor.”

She said, “Josephine Carol Taylor, at your service. Sit down, fellows.”

Dortmunder turned the folding chair in front of the piano around to face the desk, sat in it, and said, “You called this Murtaugh guy to check on us.”

“Naturally. He hadn't said there'd be two.” She was just as briskly efficient as before, when she'd been in her receptionist role, but now without the air of disinterested impatience.

Tiny belatedly dropped into the leather chair, which groaned once and sagged in defeat. “Pete should of told me,” he said. “I'm going to mention this to him a little later.”

“I guess he thought it was a joke,” she said. Her smile turned down at the corners, to show she didn't necessarily agree.

Dortmunder said, “How much did Murtaugh tell you?”

“He said there was a fellow named Bulcher coming over, had a proposition for me, using my office for something on the gray side.”

“He didn't say what?”

Tiny said, “He didn't know what. I didn't give him any details he didn't need.”

“Same thing he did for you,” J.C. Taylor pointed out. She sounded amused.

Dortmunder said to her, “So you don't know if it's something you'll go along for.”

She shrugged and said, “As long as I don't have to screw anybody or kill anybody, I don't much care what you do.”

“All right.” Dortmunder glanced at Tiny to see if he'd take it from here, since he was the one who'd made the first contact, but Tiny was still too dazed by J.C. Taylor's changes of pace, from cold receptionist to hot porno star to cool businesswoman. He sat frowning at the girl with great intensity, as though he'd been given till sundown to either figure her out or go before the firing squad.

So Dortmunder explained it himself: “We're going to do a little burglary.”

She was surprised, and showed it. “Oh,
that
kind of thing,” she said. “I had the idea you were maybe con artists, you needed a store to show the mark, something like that. That's why you two guys surprised me, you just don't look the type.”

“We're not,” Dortmunder agreed. “We're going to hit some jewelry places upstairs. We need a place—”

“
Some
places?”

Tiny said, “A couple floors' worth.” He'd apparently recovered from his befuddlement enough to decide the thing to do with this woman was impress her.

He succeeded. “Well,” she said, “you fellows think big.”

Dortmunder said, “We need a place to operate out of beforehand, so we can be in the building through the night. And then we need a place to stash the goods after the job. And then we'll want to mail the stuff out with your own regular goods.”

“Accessory before,” she said, “and accessory after. What are you offering for these services?”

“Ten percent of what we get from the fence.”

“Minimum?”

Dortmunder couldn't be sure yet, so he made a low guess: “Ten thousand.”

“When?”

“When we get it.”

A smile without humor touched her lips and went away again. She said, “How much in front?”

“Nothing.”

“No deal.”

“If we had money in front,” Dortmunder said, “we wouldn't be in this. Either you trust that guy you called on the phone or you don't. If you trust him and he vouches for Tiny, you know you'll get paid.”

She frowned. “Vouched for who?”

“Mr. Bulcher.”

“They call me Tiny.”

She grinned at Tiny, and looked him slowly up and down. “Now, I wonder why,” she said.

“Never mind that,” Tiny told her.

J.C. Taylor was one of the very few people Dortmunder had ever seen who didn't just automatically stand in awe of Tiny Bulcher. On the other hand, she didn't look as though she much stood in awe of anybody. She said, to Dortmunder, “What if you people get caught?”

“Then nobody gets paid.”

“And I wind up with twenty years in a prison laundry.” She shook her head. “My mama didn't raise me to be a dyke.”

“You don't have to be here while it's happening,” Dortmunder told her. “It can be set up to look like we broke in. Take a week's vacation.”

“No chance,” she said. “This is a mail-order business, I have to be on top of it all the time.”

“Then if push comes to shove, we forced you into it at gunpoint.”

She looked dubious. “Maybe,” she said.

Dortmunder said, “But now I've got a question.”

“Oh? What's that?”

“What's your operation here? All those names on the door; which one is you?”

“All of them.” She held up a finger and said, “Super Star Music. You send us your lyrics, we'll find a melody to fit. On the other hand, you send us your melody, we'll produce the lyrics to suit. In either case, find fame and fortune in the booming music industry.” A second raised finger: “Allied Commissioners' Courses; be a detective, send for our one-volume correspondence course. No tests, no instructors, no salesman will call. Free handcuffs and badge included as a special bonus if you act now. Endorsed by police chiefs and police commissioners all across the country.”

Dortmunder said, “Endorsed?”

“They have trade magazines for police chiefs,” she said. “There's some over there in the bookcase. They do obituaries when a chief or a commissioner dies, and that's endorsement enough for me. You go prove a dead man
didn't
give me an endorsement, and then come back and we'll talk.”

“Ha,” Tiny said. “That's nice, lady, that's really nice.”

She gave him a short nod and a brief smile and said, “Thanks.”

Dortmunder said, “And the third company.”

“Intertherapeutic Research Service. Be a better lay. Get your marriage working right by studying the detailed illustrations in this marital sex manual, endorsed by famous physicians and marriage counselors and sent to you in a plain brown wrapper.”

Dortmunder nodded. He said, “Ever have any questions from the law?”

She shrugged. “Post Office people. Back when I used to do blind mailings to bought mailing lists. But not anymore. Now I stick strictly to magazine advertising. It's safe, it's legal, and it brings them in.”

“Who backs you?”

“Me,” she said, and she sounded a bit annoyed at the question. “I put in my time as meat,” she said, “and I saved my money. I started with nothing but the sex book, two magazine ads, and three months' paid-for desk space down on Varick Street. I don't owe a penny to anybody but Uncle Sam, and as long as he gets his twelve percent he doesn't complain.”

“All right,” Dortmunder said. “So it shouldn't be a problem.”

“The problem,” she said, “is cash. I promised my mother on her deathbed I'd never put out without the money on the dresser, and I've never had anything happen to make me think she was wrong.”

Tiny said, abruptly, “Hell, honey, money's no problem.”

Dortmunder said, “It isn't?”

Turning to Dortmunder, Tiny said, “We can get this little lady some cash, can't we?”

Dortmunder looked at Tiny in astonishment. Where was the bad-tempered mammoth, the Sherman tank with a grudge? This was a Tiny transformed. His brow was as clear as such a corrugated surface could get, his expression was agreeable and hardly terrifying at all, and there might actually be something damn near mellow deep down inside those ball-bearing eyes. From grizzly bear to honey bear in one smooth motion; astounding.

And trouble. “Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “we don't
have
ten thousand dollars.”

The girl said, “Wait a minute, I'm not asking for the whole ten. But I am talking about cash,
some
cash, green paper I can hold in my hand and look at, no matter what happens next.”

Tiny, being expansive, his gravel-on-a-conveyor-belt voice practically mellifluous, said, “You want a couple thousand, honey, is that it?”

“That'll do,” she agreed.

Tiny shrugged the problem away. Looking at Dortmunder, being sweet and kindly but not in a mood to be argued with, he said, “I'm good for it, Dortmunder. I'll give her a couple Gs now, we'll straighten it out after the job. I'll get my money back out of her ten percent, no vigorish, no nothing.” With a gallant gesture, as though sweeping off a Three Musketeers kind of plumed hat, he told the girl, “Just to help out, make things smooth and nice between friends.”

“You give me two thousand in cash,” she said, “you can stable sheep in here.”

“I'll stick to girls,” Tiny said, and gave her a big grin.

Which she ignored, pointedly, saying to Dortmunder, “Anything else?”

“Not from me,” Dortmunder said, and got to his feet. “Tiny's going to give you the cash. The job'll be sometime in the next few weeks, we'll let you know a couple days ahead.”