Good Behavior (27 page)

Or was it merely that this was a moment when he didn't feel like hearing patience extolled? He wanted to know what was going on upstairs, he wanted to hear about it, and he wanted it to be done and over with. Skipping past his previous wisdoms to the most recent page, just beyond, “Lie down with wolves …,” he wrote, “Patience is sloth ennobled.” There;
that
took care of it.

A knock on the door. Pickens at last! “Come in,” Ritter called.

But it wasn't Pickens. It was a middle-aged woman, the Sunday receptionist and telephone answerer whose post was at the desk just within the Margrave Corporation entrance. Ritter frowned at her, had time to notice her worried expression, and then she said, “Mr. Ritter, the police are—”

And two uniformed New York City patrolmen came in, sloppy young men with black hair over their collars and scuffed shoes and ill-fitting dark blue trousers. “Frank Ritter?” one of them said.

Ritter got to his feet; he was used to dealing with men in livery. “Yes, officers? What can I do for you?”

“We have a report,” one of the policemen said, “of a paramilitary organization assembling in these offices, armed with illegal weapons.”

Ritter's spine stiffened. “I
beg
your pardon,” he said coldly. “This is a legitimate business office, with some respect and, if I may say so, influence in the world at large.”

“And lots of activity on a Sunday,” the second police officer said, unabashed.

The first one was also unabashed. “We have to follow up a report like this,” he said.

Ritter glared. “And do your superiors know you're following up such an absurd accusation?”

A female police officer, just as sloppy as the males, with blonde hair messily over her collar, appeared in the doorway (where the worried receptionist still lingered, fretfully washing her hands) and said, “Door down here to some kind of theater, all shot up.”

The first policeman cocked an arrogant eye at Ritter. “Running off a few practice rounds?”

“You people can't do this!” Ritter insisted. “Come marching in here—Do you have a warrant?”

“We have probable cause,” the second policeman said.

“You most certainly do not!” Ritter still believed he could drive these interlopers out by force of will alone. “A man's office is his castle!” he declared. “You can't trample on my rights like this! Your law stops in the lobby!”

“Right now, Mr. Ritter,” the first policeman said, “in this office, we
are
the law.”

A second female police officer, this one with red hair curling over her collar, appeared carrying a Valmet with both hands. “There's a bunch of them,” she said. “No ammo.”

A third male police officer, even younger than the others, and looking flushed with excitement, appeared and said to his comrades, “This army couldn't wait to get started. A report just came in of looting in this building last night.”

That last remark made no sense to Ritter, and he was too bedeviled by the things he
did
understand to think about it. He put his hand on his telephone, glaring at the first policeman, whom he had decided was in charge of this farrago. “The mayor of this city is a personal friend of mine,” he said. “What do you suppose he'll say to you if I call him now and tell him what's happening here?”

The policeman grinned at the Valmet, and grinned at Ritter. “I think he'd call me sergeant,” he said.

44

Stan Murch, forehead pressed to the unopenable glass in the window in J.C. Taylor's inner office, watched the activity on the street seven stories below. “There goes the last busload,” he said, as another Department of Corrections bus, dark blue with barred windows, pulled away from the curb in front of the Avalon State Bank Tower, taking the last of Pickens' Army away to its final ignominious defeat.

“Hey, Stan,” Kelp called from the floor, “come on back to work, huh?”

Kelp was a little out of sorts because, while J.C. Taylor had been phoning the police, he was the one who'd been chosen to go back downstairs with Howey to the special elevator and back up to the top floor, carrying one plastic bag of swag to be distributed around the apartment up there; salting the felony mine, as it were. It had been Dortmunder's idea, once he'd gotten over the personal humiliation of having been rescued
twice
by the putative rescuee, and everyone agreed it was a good one. It would distract the police, give them every reason to suppose there were no crooks in the building except the ones they already had, and suggest the rest of the loot had already been exfiltrated from the building via elevator.

All well and good. What had Kelp's nose out of joint was the fact that when he and Howey had been coming back down in the elevator, it had all at once stopped, somewhere in the middle of the vertical tunnel between the basement and the roof. It turned out later that some building maintenance man had seen the mess of wires sticking from the keypad in
MAINTENANCE
—what was he doing in
there?
—and echoing that Watergate guard who removed the burglars' black tape from the door latch without telling anybody, had taken away the wires, merely to tidy up.

It wasn't so much that Kelp had immediately panicked, bouncing around the stalled elevator like a neutrino in a lab experiment, loudly declaiming that they would be stuck there until Kingdom Come or, even worse, until De Police Come, while Howey methodically unscrewed the control panel plate and got them moving again. No, what really browned Kelp's toast on both sides was the fact that when they returned safely to J.C.'s office Howey had
reported
Kelp's panic, complete with piping laughter and exaggerated imitations of Kelp in full cry. Howey had continued this entertainment for some time, until Tiny closed a hand around his head and quietly suggested he stop.

That was more than an hour ago, but Andy Kelp was still to some extent a bird of ruffled plumage, which was why, rather than argue, Stan Murch simply said, “Here I come, Andy,” left the window, and went back over to sit on the floor beside Kelp and return to addressing packages.

They were all addressing packages now, Dortmunder and Tiny at J.C.'s desk, Kelp and Stan seated on the floor, and on the floor in the other room Wilbur Howey, with J.C. Taylor and Sister Mary Grace at the receptionist's desk out there. Some discussion had taken place as to whether it was appropriate for Sister Mary Grace to be an accessory to grand larceny by addressing packages full of stolen goods, but she had resolved the issue herself with a note reading:
I
obey a higher law. It says I can address packages in a good cause
.

There were nine different convenience addresses to which the packages were being sent, various cousins and attorneys who would restrain their curiosity. Now, when each of the addressers completed a batch, he or she carried them to the table in the inner room with the scale and meter, and added the appropriate postage. Then the packages were stored here, there and everywhere, ready to start going out, some tomorrow, some later in the week. In the days to come, packages would be retrieved from those convenience addresses and turned over to one of four different fences alerted and waiting. Very soon now, in a matter of just a few weeks, everybody in these rooms—except Sister Mary Grace, of course, another of whose vows embraced poverty—would be very rich.

Not rich
rich
RICH! But not bad, either.

45

Howey didn't want to take his clothes off. “Say, listen,” he protested, “do I got my dignity or what?”

“Or what,” Stan Murch told him.

“Sez you.”

“Try not to panic, Wilbur,” Kelp said nastily.

“Look, Wilbur,” Dortmunder explained. “The odds are, Sister Mary Grace's father has people out looking for her already. Including he'd certainly have a couple guys hanging around the lobby, just in case she didn't get away yet. So the thing to do is disguise her as somebody else, and you're the only one around her size.”

“And you don't want those rotten rags anyway,” Kelp told him.

“Say, I
like
these duds,” Howey complained, looking down to admire himself in his baggy tan chinos and penny loafers and bright plaid polyester shirt. “When I got out of the big house, the state gave me that suit, you know, that suit they give you, that suit was out of style when I went
in
. I went out to this snazzy new place in the suburbs, this K mart place, I got the latest threads. I
need
these togs, I got a front to keep up.”

“Keep
this
crap up,” Tiny told him, “you're not gonna have any front at all. Strip.”

Howey looked around at the grim determined faces ringing him about. Dortmunder, Tiny, Kelp, Murch. These were, after all, desperate men, hardened criminals. If they wanted his grade-A best casual attire, they were going to get it. “Say,
I'm
gonna look like some fruitcake,” he muttered unhappily, starting to undo his belt buckle, “going out of here in my skivvies.”

“You'll get her stuff,” Dortmunder assured him. “And it isn't skirts or anything, it's regular blue jeans and a shirt.”

Howey thought about that. “The stuff she's wearing right now, huh?”

Stan Murch shook his head. “This man is disgusting,” he said. “Don't ever cross the street in front of me, Wilbur.”

“Wha'd I say? Wha'd I say?”

They wouldn't tell him what he'd said. Finally his clothing was off, and then there was a brief argument about the Coors cap—“To put her
hair
in,” Dortmunder pointed out, while Tiny ostentatiously mimed the wringing of a chicken's neck—and then Dortmunder took the rolled-up duds to the closed door leading to the outer office and knocked on it. J.C. opened it partway and said, “
That
took long enough. We've been ready a long time out here.”

“There was some discussion,” Dortmunder said, handing over the clothing. J.C. went away and came back with another little pile of clothing, and Dortmunder closed the door again.

Howey didn't like Sister Mary Grace's clothes after all. He said the shoes were too tight, and the blue jeans were too tight around the knees but too loose around the hips, and the blouse was too loose around the torso but too tight around the shoulders. And he felt naked without a hat. “You could wear the wastebasket if you want,” Tiny told him, so then he shut up and just stood there, looking in the high-necked long-sleeved black blouse and oddly baggy jeans like a defrocked Druid.

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?”

“Say,” Howey said, “I don't want to get in the habit, do I?” But his heart didn't seem to be in it.

J.C. appeared in the doorway. “Okay,” she said.

They all trooped out there, Howey last, to discover that Sister Mary Grace had been less severely dealt with by the transformation. J.C. had glued some of the girl's own cut-off hair onto her upper lip, which at first glance looked enough like a moustache to pass. With the rest of her hair tucked up inside the Coors cap, and wearing Howey's shirt and chinos and loafers, the worst you could say for her was that she looked like a tourist from Eastern Europe. But male.

“It's a different guard down there now,” J.C. said, “so I'll sign out like we came in together. Just remember,” she told the girl, “to let me do the talking.” Then she shook her head: “Sorry. I forgot.”

Sister Mary Grace went over to Dortmunder, smiled up at him, and held out her hand. Dortmunder shook it, and said, “Thanks for rescuing me.” She did a graceful pointing-finger-rolling-over-pointing-finger gesture:
Thanks for rescuing me, too
.

Everybody then told the sister goodbye. “Pleasure,” Tiny told her, briefly engulfing her hand and forearm in his version of a handshake. “If you take a cab,” Stan Murch told her, “tell him to go straight down Ninth.” Andy Kelp said, “It was fun, you know?” And Howey, lingering over the handshake, said, “I gotta admit it, Sister Toots, you look better in that rig than I do myself.”

J.C. said, “I'll be back around nine tomorrow morning.”

“We'll probably be gone,” Dortmunder told her.

Tiny said, “Listen, Josie, I'll stick around, right? Help you mail this stuff.”

Josie? Everybody looked at Tiny with astonishment, but he ignored them, grinning at J.C, who smiled casually back and said, “Sure, Tiny, that'd be nice.”

Hmm, everybody thought.

46

“And here's the thing,” Dortmunder said. “It's over, you know? And nothing went wrong.”

“John,” Kelp told him, “sometimes things work out, okay?”

“But I don't understand this,” Dortmunder said, looking around J.C. Taylor's now-clean outer office. It was ten minutes since J.C. and Sister Mary Grace had left, and a pleasant calm had descended everywhere. In the other room, Stan Murch watched early Sunday afternoon traffic out the window, Tiny Bulcher was taking the Allied Commissioners' Course final exam (and cheating), and Wilbur Howey was trying to decide if he looked worse with his shirt—that is, Sister Mary Grace's shirt—tucked in or hanging out. “We got the loot,” Dortmunder pointed out. “We saved the nun. Nobody in our bunch got hurt or killed or even caught by the law. We're home free.”

Kelp said, “Well, that was the plan, wasn't it?”

“Yeah, but—” Dortmunder shook his head. “I just don't get it.”

The door opened, and J.C. and the nun came in. The nun looked very pale and round-eyed, and J.C. looked grim. “Trouble,” J.C. said, closing the door, and the nun nodded.

“Ah,” Dortmunder said. “Now I get it.”

Kelp said, bright with false hope, “What, you need carfare, something like that?”

“
Big
trouble,” J.C. said, and the nun nodded hugely. She looked mainly like a deer who'd just heard a gunshot.