Good Behavior (28 page)

“Tell me,” Dortmunder said. “Tell me every bit of it.”

“There's policemen at the exits,” she said, “checking everybody's ID. I sweet-talked the security man at the desk down there, and he told me what's going on. The police know there's a lot of stuff missing from the robbery, and they're not sure they got every one of those soldiers up there, so they're doing a sweep.”

“A sweep,” Dortmunder said. Tiny and Stan and Wilbur had come out from the other room to listen.

“They got a quick warrant to search the entire building,” J.C. went on. “They're starting at the top and sweeping down. They figure it'll take hours.”

Dortmunder looked around this little two-room suite; a moment ago, a safe haven, but now a mousetrap and they the mice. “We can't get out of the building,” he said, “because they're checking IDs at the exits. And we can't stay here, because they'll find us when they sweep through.”

“I'm the only one signed in,” J.C. said. She looked and sounded bitter. “I could get out of the building, but what good does it do me? They'll find you clowns, and then they'll find my offices full of stolen property, and then they'll find
me
. And I never did look good in gray.”

Tiny said, “Josie, if it's any consolation at all, I promise you that before the law gets here I will personally run Dortmunder through the pencil sharpener.”

Kelp said, “Tiny, that isn't fair! John did every—”

“John, huh?” Tiny lowered his head and gazed without love at Kelp. “John and his
Sisters
,” he said. “We had a nice simple little robbery, very sweet and very smart, we could come in, we could go out, not a problem in the world. But your
John
here, he has to go up to the tower and knock over a hornet's nest. All the trouble we got, we got it because of John and this
nun
. It's
Come to the Stable
all over again. And your pal Dortmunder's the one brought in the nun.”

Kelp turned desperately to Dortmunder. “John,” he said, “there's a way out, right?”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Dortmunder told him. He was wondering if Tiny actually did have a method whereby he could run a human being through a pencil sharpener. Knowing Tiny, it was possible.

“No, no,” Kelp said, jittering. “I mean,
you've
got a way out, right? A solution? You know what we can do?”

“We could give ourselves up, I guess,” Dortmunder said. “End the suspense.” He sat down at the receptionist's desk and waited to be taken away.

“John,” Kelp said. “You're the one with the plans, the ideas. Come
up
with something.”

“There isn't anything,” Dortmunder told him. “It's all over.” There was a certain relief, a kind of relaxation, in giving in to despair.

“Say,” Wilbur Howey said, bobbing up and down, glinting and winking, “prison ain't so bad, once you get used to it. Maybe we could all get in the same cellblock. Say, I was with a swell bunch this last time. We all got together and subscribed to
Playboy
, read all about hi-fi sets and everything, time passes before you know it.”

Tiny growled, “Wilbur,
you
are gonna pass before you know it.”

“Nothing to drive,” Stan Murch said. His voice was so sepulchral it seemed to have an echo in it.

“From time to time,” the irrepressible Howey assured him, “we could escape for a while, the whole bunch of us together. You could drive then.”

“The same cellblock,” Kelp said, looking with horror first at Tiny and then at Howey. “John,” he said, “think about it.”

Dortmunder was thinking about it. He sighed. No rest for the wicked. “All right,” he said. “I'll do it. Tiny's pencil sharpener is one thing, but forty-eight years in a cellblock with Wilbur Howey? No way.”

“John?” Hope glittered madly in Kelp's eyes. “You've done it? You found it?”

“I'm thinking,” Dortmunder told him, “but people keep interrupting.”

“Stop interrupting,” Tiny told Kelp.

“That's right,” Stan said.

J.C. said, “Everybody just pipe down.”

“Say,” Wilbur said, “give this fella room.”

“
Everybody's
interrupting me,” Dortmunder said.

So then everybody shut up, and just looked at him. Dortmunder sat there at the receptionist's desk and thought. He looked at J.C., and then at Sister Mary Grace, and then at Tiny, and then at Wilbur, and then at Kelp, and then at Stan Murch, and he thought. He got up and wandered into the back room and looked at everything there, and thought. He looked out the window at the carefree people driving down Fifth Avenue in their cars, going anywhere they wanted, and he thought. He went back to the other room, where twelve eyes looked at him, and Wilbur Howey shifted position, and a pin was heard to drop. “Sister,” Dortmunder said. “Is there a telephone down there in that convent?”

Wide-eyed, she nodded.

“Is there somebody with a, whadaya call it, a, a, compensation, decoration …”

Sounding almost timid, J.C. said, “You mean dispensation?”

“That's the thing,” Dortmunder said. To the nun he said, “Does somebody have one of those down there, so they can break the vow of silence and talk on the phone if it rings?”

She nodded.

Dortmunder pointed at the telephone. “Call the convent,” he said.

Sister Mary Grace, holding her breath, picked up the phone and started dialing.

Tiny looked disgruntled. “
More
nuns?” he said.

Dortmunder nodded. “More nuns.”

47

There was a time when Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna (pronounced Maloney) of the New York Police Department didn't have to come into the goddamn city on a Sunday in May no matter
what
happened. That was when the chief inspector had been the top cop of the City of New York, master of all he goddamn surveyed and you'd better not forget it. But then, some little time ago, the chief inspector stubbed his toe on a case, let the object of a massive manhunt slip through his massive fingers, got mad, punched a TV reporter
on camera
, and in general behaved counter-productively. He didn't so much blot his copybook as crap all over it. He was still powerful enough to be let off with a mere slap on the wrist, but in effect he was no longer the top cop of the City of New York, and he knew it, and everybody else knew it. Until the stink faded, Mologna was on display duty, which was wearin, time-consumin and humiliatin.

This is display duty: Whenever some major crime occurs in the City of New York—not some second-rate murder or bank robbery or an arson confined to one side of one block, but a major big-time big city felony—whenever a crime occurs so large and interestin that the media show up, it is necessary to have present there a high-rankin uniformed police official with braid on his hatbrim to conduct the investigation. This display inspector or display captain is usually somebody so old and so dumb and so racked by alcohol they won't let him have bullets for his gun anymore, and for Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna to be given such duty cut deep. Deep.

And now here it was springtime, out in his home in Bay Shore on Long Island. Mologna's motorboat was in the water of the Great South Bay, just beyond his own backyard. His tomato plants and geraniums were in their beds in that yard. The sun was warm, the days were growin longer, and today was Sunday. And here in the middle of Manhattan, in the Avalon State Bank Tower, displayin his bulk to the media (but not punchin any goddamn reporters,
oh
, no), stood the fat and perspirin Francis X. Mologna, walkin around under his hat with the braid on the brim.

A hell of a mess, this one. Mologna was just glad he
wasn't
actually conductin the investigation, because the parts of this story didn't fit. Up on the top of the buildin were a whole lot of soldiers of fortune, mercenaries enough to change the administration in Hell. On the twenty-sixth floor were half a dozen burglarized importers. Some of the burglary loot was on the top floor with the mercs, who claimed to know nothin about it. And in fact, burglary was not their MO; slaughter of the innocents was more along the lines of their trade.

While seated in his chauffeured official car, takin a break from displayin himself, restin in the open door with his feet on the curb while he brooded unhappily about the clear and beautiful and sunlit water of the Great South Bay, Mologna was approached by a young black police officer with the righteous dew of the Police Academy still gleamin in his eyes and shinin on his forehead. This whippersnapper saluted and said, “Sir, we have a woman.”

Mologna never returned salutes; he just nodded and kept them. Noddin, he said, “Good for you.”

“She's right over there, sir.”

Mologna frowned. Was he actually expected to
do
somethin? “What is she?” he asked. “A burglar or a soldier?”

“A song producer, sir.”

Mologna considered this young black police officer. He was too young to know better and too black to yell at and unlikely to be pullin even a display inspector's leg. “And just what, in the Holy Virgin's holy name,” he wanted to know, “should I be doin with a song producer?”

“It's about some nuns,” the young man said, blinkin rapidly. “Maybe she ought to tell you herself.”

“Nuns? Why would I—” But then his eye caught sight of a woman over by the Avalon Tower entrance, and he stopped, and for a second he just stared. Years and years ago he'd met a judo instructor who'd looked like that. By the good lord harry, but that woman could contort herself! That's one of the ones Mrs. Mologna never did find out about. “Her?” Mologna asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And what would
she
be havin' to do with nuns?”

“She wants to make a record with them, sir.”

“That'll be a hell of a record,” Mologna decided. “That'll get into Guinness for sure. Bring that record producer over here.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man saluted (Mologna nodded) and off he went, returnin in a moment with the woman, sayin, “Mrs. Taylor, sir.”

The woman smiled, seductive but not coarse, and said, “How do you do, Chief Inspector?”

Mologna had already struggled out of the car and onto his feet, and now he smiled his avuncular smile and put out his hand, and she placed a card in it. He'd expected a hand, not a card, but recovered and read it:
Super Star Music
—
J.C. Taylor, President
. The address was this Avalon Tower here. “Was you robbed, too?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “I'm hoping there won't be any trouble about these Sisters coming to see me.”

“They'll be in no danger,” Mologna assured her. “The crimes here are all over for the moment.”

“Then I can bring them in?” Mrs. Taylor smiled again, radiantly, and seemed about to end the conversation.

“Wait a minute,” Mologna said. The fear of makin
another
mistake was still very much alive in his breast. “Maybe you better tell me the whole story.”

“I'm an independent record producer,” J.C. Taylor said, “and I'd arranged to do a demo tape today with a group of nuns from a convent down in Tribeca.”

“So you want to go down there?”

“No, they're on their way here. It was arranged weeks ago. Their contact at the archdiocese offices is Father Angelo Caravoncello.”

Mologna bowed his head, as though he'd heard the holy name. The New York Police Department and the New York Archdiocese tend to be pretty tight. Well, in the first place, they are after all on the same side in the war between good and evil. And in the second place they both tend to assay out at a high percentage of Irish and Italian. And in the third place, they share the same turf, so they goddamn well
better
get along. Mologna didn't know Father Angelo Caravoncello, but just hearin the name and the connection with the archdiocese offices was good enough for him. “I see,” he murmured.

“The idea,” she said, “is a nun's chorus doing a pop album, like that French nun who did ‘Amazing Grace' several years ago. Top of the charts, with a bullet.”

Mologna frowned. “Bullet?”

“Oh, that's just trade talk,” she said. “When a record moves very fast, up through the sales charts, we say it's with a bullet.”

“We police have trade talk like that, too,” Mologna told her. “Only when we say somethin's with a bullet, it usually isn't movin at all. So when do these sisters of yours get here?”

“About half an hour.”

The young black policeman piped up, sayin, “The building records show Mrs. Taylor signed in this morning, well after the robbery, and wasn't in the building at all last night.”

“Well, of course I wasn't,” she said, smilin again, her eyes twinklin at Mologna. “I don't love my job
that
much.”

“Sure you don't,” Mologna agreed, smilin back. He wished they'd had an actual handshake. “A pretty woman like you,” he said, “you'll be wantin a private life of your own.”

“Oh, now, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, gigglin and wagglin a naughty-naughty finger at him. “You just never mind my private life.”

The woman's flirtin with me! “Oh, I mean nothin at all by it, Mrs. Taylor,” he said, turnin red in the face, pleased all over. “Why,” he said, “I'm old enough to be your big brother.” Aware of somethin more acute, possibly even ironic, suddenly present in the young patrolman's eyes, Mologna ended the conversation, sayin, “You run along now, and when these Sisters of yours arrive we'll escort them right to your door.”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, and now she did extend her hand, and Mologna happily shook it, and it was just as warm and soft and enjoyable as he'd anticipated.

An interestin walk the lady had, too, returnin to the buildin.
Exactly
like that judo instructor. Mologna sighed and gave himself over to thoughts of yesteryear, and just about half an hour later a battered old ex-school bus pulled up immediately behind his car. Still painted yellow, but with its original identification replaced by black letters readin
SILENT SISTERHOOD OF ST. FILUMENA,
it was driven by a large round-faced nun and contained a whole bunch more. Traditional nuns, Mologna was happy to see, still in the old black-and-white habit, several luggin satchels undoubtedly filled with their sheet music. Strugglin again out of his car, Mologna signaled a nearby patrolman and gave him orders to escort the nuns to their recordin session.