Good Behavior (16 page)

“Thanks a bunch,” Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp went through and down the corridor to Super Star Music, etc. Using the key Taylor had given him, Dortmunder locked the door, which he discovered when he tried to open it. “I guess Howey left it unlocked,” he said, clenching his teeth.

“So he could get back in,” Kelp suggested.

“That must be it.” Dortmunder unlocked the door and they went into the outer office, where the phone on the receptionist's desk reminded him of an obligation. “Taylor said not to use the phone,” he said, “but this is just a local call.”

“And it's still kind of business hours,” Kelp said, “lots of offices still open on Saturday afternoon.”

“I promised May I'd call,” Dortmunder explained, reaching for the phone. But when he dialed, there wasn't any answer.

23

May stood across the street from the battered old warehouse building. Three stories high, of crumbling brick with the mortar flaking out, it had rows of small-paned windows across the front, all of them black with dust, their wooden frames still showing some remnant of an ancient coat of green paint. No lights showed behind those windows, no plants, no curtains, no movement.

But this was definitely the address, in an old corner of Brooklyn that looked as though civilization had been tried here, had failed, and had moved on, leaving behind hulks that were less interesting than but just as dead as any Aztec ruin in the jungles of Mexico. In the six-block walk from the subway, May had seen more cats than people, and none of them, animal or human, had seemed particularly well fed. And now, in front of the warehouse itself, for just a second, her resolve faltered. What hope could there be inside any building that looked like that?

Still, she'd come this far. Taking a deep breath, May reached into her purse for a cigarette, found none, remembered, made a face, and got annoyed at herself. This annoyance carried her across the potholed street, where she had a choice between a lumpy green door in the middle of the facade or a trash-strewn blacktopped driveway running down the side of the building to a loading dock. She turned toward the door, and found thumbtacked to it a 5x7 card still bearing the faded words in once-red magic marker:
TIPTOP A-1 CHOICE FOODS
—
OFFICE.
Going up the two flaking slate steps, she pushed open this door, which contained three visible locks, and stepped inside.

Now she found herself in a small square room with gray linoleum on the floor and paneled walls, each sheet of paneling different, presenting an anthology of poor imitations of various woods; cedar, walnut, oak, and something unidentifiable and silver. There was absolutely no furniture in this space, though a lot of cigarette butts and scraps of paper on the floor suggested occasional occupancy and a three-year-out-of-date calendar on one wall was sort of decorative, showing an illustration of boys at a swimming hole over some other August.

A small window in the opposite wall was covered by a clear plastic panel with round holes in it to permit air or conversation to get through. May went over there and looked through into an even smaller space, crammed with filing cabinets and a small wooden table, at which sat a small wrinkle-faced woman in a black sweater, gold necklace chains and earrings and a bright red wig. She was talking intently on the phone, and when she saw May she made a disgusted face and said, “Hold on, Helen.” Shaking her head at May, she called, “Not hiring!”

May put her mouth close to a couple of the airholes and said, slowly and distinctly, “Mr. Chepkoff, please.”

This irritated the woman even more. “Who's he?” she yelled. Before May could answer, she said into her phone again, “Hold on, Helen.”

“He's the owner here,” May said, and took the Civil Court document out of her purse to read aloud what it said: “Otto Chepkoff, Tiptop A-One Choice Foods, two seven three dash one four Scunge Avenue, Brooklyn, one one six six six.”

Somehow, the woman's wig managed to get even more red, as she shouted, “You serving papers?”

“No, no,” May said, and turned the document around to press it against the plastic so the woman could read it. “
We
were served,” she said. “That's what I'm here about.”

“Oh, you want to
pay
,” the woman said, leaping to another wrong conclusion. Saying into the phone once more, “Hold on, Helen,” then switching it to her other hand, she waved largely off toward her left, shouting, “Go round the loading dock!”

“Is Mr. Chepkoff there?”

“Hold on, Helen,” the woman said, and waved again. “Just go round there, go round there, he's there, just go round!”

“Thank you,” May said. Putting the document away in her bag, she turned toward the door as the woman said into the phone, “Helen, where were we? Helen? Helen?” Glaring at May, she yelled, “She hung up!”

“So would I,” May told her, and left the office and walked around the front of the building and down the filthy blacktop drive to where dog-eared concrete steps led up to one end of the loading dock. Beyond it, through a large wide opening, was a dim storage space filled with cardboard cartons in great piles and the sounds of men shouting. May went in there and waited for her eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.

Most of the space, and most of the yelling, was off to her left. Looking down that way, she saw aisles formed by great stacks of boxes and mounds of sacks, and in one of the aisles two men were loading crates onto a large wooden cart while a man with a clipboard yelled at a man in a knee-length white lab coat, who yelled just as forcefully back.

May walked down there to join the scene, though at first no one noticed her, and even up close she couldn't figure out what the yelling was about. The two chunky men loading the crates, who had been ignoring the argument, ignored May as well, while the arguers only had eyes for each other. The clipboard man was big and burly, with a dead cigar in his teeth and a black wool cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a way of slashing the air with his clipboard that suggested he was on the verge of some truly awesome violence. The man in the long white (very dirty) lab coat was small and narrow and older, with a pinched-in gray face and a russet-colored Kennedy-style wig that was, if possible, even more astonishing than the office woman's red monstrosity. Inside his white coat he was wearing a dark three-piece suit and white shirt and black tie. He was the one who finally noticed May standing there, and his reaction was to point first at the clipboard man and bellow, “SHUT UP!” (astonishingly, the astonished clipboard man shut up) then point at May and bellow, “NOT HIRING!”

“I wouldn't work for you,” May told him, “for a million dollars an hour.”

The clipboard man gave her a surprised look. “Then you're crazy,” he said. “For a million dollars an hour, you could put up with certain things.”

“Not rudeness,” May said. “I have an aversion to rudeness.”

The white-coated man said, “That's why you walk into a private conversation uninvited? That's why you eavesdrop on a business discussion? That's why you trespass on private property?”

May looked at him. “I bet you're Mr. Chepkoff,” she said.

“He's out today,” the white-coated man said, and the two crate-loaders stopped to give a sardonic laugh. The white-coated man glared at them: “This is a holiday? This is a vacation? Here I am, I'm at the beach, I didn't know it, I didn't bring my suntan lotion?” The crate-loaders gave each other long-suffering looks and went back to their work, and the white-coated man glared at May instead. “So he's out,” he said. “So who should I tell him popped in unannounced and without an appointment, to tell us all about her aversion to rudeness?”

Not trusting herself to speak, May took the Civil Court paper from her pocket and extended it toward Chepkoff—for it was indeed he—who recoiled like a vampire seeing a cross. “Get her away!” he shouted. “Get her away!”

“This isn't a summons,” May told him, tired of the whole business. “Or, it is, but it isn't for you. It's the one you served on John Dortmunder.” She opened it and held it out for him to read. “See?”

He squinted. He took heavy black-rimmed glasses out of his lab coat and put them on and leaned forward and squinted again. “Ah,” he said. Stepping back, he put the glasses away and said, “So you'll come into my office.”

The clipboard man, bristling, said, “Wait a minute. What about—”

Chepkoff rounded on him: “What
about?
” he yelled, outraged. “What about
what?
Look at your order form! You paid for
shit!
You're
getting
shit!” And he spun around, in a swirl of white coat-tail, and stomped away, while the clipboard man gaped after him, dead cigar sagging down onto his chin.

Assuming she was to follow, May followed, and Chepkoff led her to an open space in the middle of the warehouse, the hub of all the aisles, where a small glass room had been constructed, containing a cramped but functioning office. Chepkoff yanked open the glass door to this cubicle, gestured impatiently for May to precede him in, followed her, slammed the glass door with a sound one decibel below total destruction, and said, quietly for him, “So you've got my three hundred dollars.”

“No, Mr. Chepkoff, I—”

“
No?
” Chepkoff's eyes bulged, as though he were being strangled. “
Noooo???
What are you
doing
here?”

“I thought we could talk about the—”

“Talk? Listen, whoever, Mrs. Dortmunder, whoever you are, there's an expression, I want to know do you know this expression, you'll tell me if you've ever heard an expression along the lines of this expression, I'm gonna tell it to you right now, are you listening?” He stared. “Well?”

“I'm listening,” May said.

“Good.” Chepkoff opened his mouth wide and enunciated with great elaboration, at the same time writing the letters in the air with the first finger of his right hand. “Mon-ney,” he said, and paused, and said, “talks. You got it? You heard this somewhere?”

The clipboard man, having followed, now started pounding on the glass door out there, waving his clipboard and yelling. May said, “Mr. Chep—”

“
You
don't talk,” Chepkoff told her. “
I
don't talk. John
Dortmunder
doesn't talk. This asshole here”—with a gesture at the furious clipboard man—“doesn't talk.
Money
talks.”

“You don't understand the business John's in,” May said. “He takes a—”

“I know the business this John is in,” Chepkoff said, “but do you know the business
I'm
in?”

“Mr. Chep—”

“Just look, just take a look,” Chepkoff invited, waving his arms at the warehouse all around them. “You see what we got out there?”

“Food,” May said. “But what I'm—”

“
Details
,” Chepkoff insisted. “Not just food, but
what
food? Let me tell you what I got out there, let me just give you a rundown on this. Let's have a meeting of minds here.”

“You don't have to—”

But he was going on, unstoppable: “What I got in this building, lady, whoever you are, let me tell you what I got in my
business
, what with what I make my
living
.” While the clipboard man continued to shout and yell and bang on the glass outside, Chepkoff pointed this way and that at the merchandise, saying, “I'll tell you what I got. I got dented canned goods. I got week-old bread. I got frozen foods that thawed in the train, packager over-runs, hijacked toilet paper, grade Z vegetables, meat they didn't want at the orphanage, and dairy goods with doctored dates. That's what I
got
here, you follow me?”

“Mr. Chep—”

Leaning closer to May, his eyes as mad as Raskolnikov's, Chepkoff said, “Lady, I work with a margin narrow enough to slit your wrist. Are you getting the
sense
of this? I do not give three hundred dollars to somebody, he should
maybe
bring me some salable merchandise. I get delivery, or I get—” And abruptly he spun around and screamed through the glass at the clipboard man, “
Shaddap shaddap shaddap!
”

The clipboard man didn't shaddap. He yelled instead something about not accepting delivery, and Chepkoff yelled something back, and May stepped a bit closer to the desk. Examples of various kinds of forms on the desk she put in her purse, then stepped closer to Chepkoff and politely said, “Excuse me.”

Chepkoff paid no attention. He and the clipboard man were back at it full-tilt by now, hampered not at all by the sheet of glass between them. “Excuse me,” May said again, and when Chepkoff still ignored her she kicked him in the ankle.

He jumped, spun around, stared at her in astonishment, stared at his ankle, stared at her. “You—” he said. He was overcome with horror. “You—You touched my body!”

“I'll wash my shoe later,” she assured him. “I'm trying to leave now, you see, and you're blocking the door.” She stepped around him—he continued to stare, not believing it—and opened the door. The clipboard man was also silent, trying to figure out what was going on. May stepped through the doorway, looked back at Chepkoff, and said, “I was hoping we could have a civilized discussion, but no. John should never have had dealings with you.” To the clipboard man she said, “Neither should you.” And she walked away toward the loading dock, leaving a lengthening silence in the background.

As she passed the crate-loaders, one of them grinned and winked and handed her a can of chicken gumbo soup, but the ends of it were a little bulged so when she got to the street she threw it away.

24

Dortmunder smelled mayonnaise. Opening his eyes, he saw the small jar not far from his nose and thought: Why is there a bottle of mayonnaise in bed? “May—” he said, and sat up, and his back gave a terrible twinge of pain as he realized he wasn't in bed after all, he was asleep on a desk under the flat white glare of a fluorescent ceiling fixture. Sleeping on a desk, seated on a chair, slumped forward, next to a bottle of mayonnaise.