Good Behavior (6 page)

Dortmunder shook his head. “I don't know, May,” he said. “The more I hear—I know, I go along with you, I owe these nuns a little something—”

“Every day you're not in prison the rest of your life, that's what you owe them.”

“Yeah, I know that, I know that. But look at this place.” He poked at those Polaroids with the rubber-tipped cane, aggressively, the pictures sliding around on the coffee table. “I can't even find the
elevator
.”

“You can't?”

“It'll look like something else, right? The special elevator, goes just to the top floor.” Dortmunder gave the photos a dirty look. “There's the lobby, every bit of the lobby. There's the garden, with all the skinny trees. I don't know what anybody looks like that goes up to that top floor, so I don't have anybody I can follow and see where they go that doesn't look like an elevator but is an elevator. But even if I find the goddamn thing, May, what then?”

May nodded. “If you just ride it up to the top, that won't help.”

“Not much. And it's just me, with maybe Andy Kelp. I can't put together a string on this because what's in it for anybody?”

May watched Dortmunder brood at the pictures of the lobby and the garden and the exterior of the building and the top several floors as seen from a high floor in a nearby skyscraper. “It's very difficult, isn't it, John?” she said.

“That's a terrific description,” he agreed, and poked a couple more pictures toward her, saying, “Here's another thing. On the directory here. You know how companies of the same kind always hang out together in this city? All the garment makers in one place, all the diamond merchants in one place, like that. Well, what we've got in this building is a lot of importers and wholesalers from Asia, tons of them all over the building, people that deal in jewelry and ivory and jade and all this very valuable stuff, that they've got right there with them. Maybe almost ten percent of the tenants are like that, in with all the regular doctors and lawyers and accountants. So besides the Frank Ritter private army up on the top, we've got the whole
building
is security conscious.”

May sighed. “John,” she said, “you've been very conscientious about this.”

“Well, I said I'd do it.”

“You told
me
you'd do it,” May reminded him. “I know that's the only reason you're even trying, and I know you're giving it every bit of your attention, but I guess I'm willing to go along if you say it can't be done.”

Instead of smiling with relief, as she'd half-expected, he frowned more deeply than ever, glaring at those photographs. “I don't know, May,” he said. “I hate to admit defeat, you know what I mean?”

“It's been five days, John, and you aren't getting anywhere.”

“I don't like to believe,” Dortmunder said, “there's a place I can't get in and back out again.”

“John,” May said, “if you decide it can't be done, all I ask is you go back and tell those nuns about it, so they don't go on hoping.”

Dortmunder sighed. “Well, I've got to give them back this cane anyway,” he said. “I don't really need it anymore. But I still don't want to have to walk away from this thing, not unless I absolutely have to.”

“It's your decision,” May assured him. “I won't push at all.”

“I tell you what,” Dortmunder said. “Andy's up there now looking into the question of burglar alarms, electronic responses, all that. If there's a way to cut the building out from city services for a while, maybe, I don't know, maybe I could figure something.”

May smiled at him in admiration. “You mean, take over the entire building,” she said.

“Yeah, for a while. Late at night.”

“I like it when you think big, John,” she said.

“Well, let's just see—” Dortmunder started, and the doorbell rang.

“I'll get it,” May said, but as she got to her feet Andy Kelp appeared in the doorway, saying, “It's only me, don't get up.” He was in blue Consolidated Edison coveralls and white hardhat, with the words
WILLIS, ENG DEPT
stencilled on the hat and the very realistic laminated photo ID pinned to the left breast pocket. He said, “Beer, anybody?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said.

“I have coffee,” May said, so Kelp went away and came back with two beers and May said, “Andy? You let yourself in again, and then you rang the bell?”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “On account of, you know, that tender moment you were talking about.”

May took a deep breath. She reached for a cigarette, scratched, and said, “Thank you, Andy.”

Dortmunder said, “What's the story up there?”

Kelp took his hardhat off. “I take my hat off to those people,” he said, and sat down, and drank beer.

Dortmunder looked at him. “Which people?”

“The people who set up security in that building, some outfit called Global Security Systems.”

“That's Frank Ritter's company,” May said.

“Well, they know their onions,” Kelp said. “The entire building is wired for anything you could possibly want. Simple burglar alarms, closed-circuit TV, silent alarms that trigger in the building security offices in the basement
and
over at the police precinct four blocks away. Automatic time locks, heat sensors, sound-activated videotape machines. You name it, they got it.”

Dortmunder stared at him in angry disbelief. “The
ad agencies
have this? The
travel agents?
”

“No no no,” Kelp said, “what you've got is, the building is wired through the main stairwell to every floor. Every tenant taps in and rents as much or as little security as he wants.”

“Oh, fine,” Dortmunder said. “So maybe on such-and-such a floor there's nothing at all, but maybe there's everything in the world.”

“You got it,” Kelp told him.

“And no way to tell which.”

“Exactly. Also, they got their own back-up generator, so don't think about knocking out the power.”

“Oh, I wouldn't,” Dortmunder said.

“The heart of it all is down in the basement and the sub-basement,” Kelp said, “and believe me it is
very
well guarded.”

“I believe you,” Dortmunder said.

“Good. You should believe me.” Kelp turned to May. “I don't want to sound a sour note here, May,” he said, “but I wouldn't send
my
boyfriend into that place, if I had one, if I wanted him back.”

May put two fingers to her mouth and drew on a non-existent cigarette. She could smell the nicotine on her fingers. “John,” she said, “Andy's right.”

“I don't know enough about the place,” Dortmunder complained. “That's the problem. Every place in the world has little gaps, little corners not as strong as everywhere else, but I don't know where they are in this place, and there's no way to find out.”

“You did your best,” May assured him. “Tomorrow's Thursday, isn't that the day the nuns can talk?”

“Yeah.”

“I'll go with you,” May offered. “I'll explain you did your best.”

“My best,” Dortmunder said. He drank beer and slapped the Polaroid pictures with his cane.

10

You could hear her from the elevator.
Welcome home
, Frank Ritter thought, and clenched his teeth as he faced the bronze door, waiting for it to open and the onslaught to begin.

Bronze does not make the best mirror. The lone figure reflected in the four bronze walls of this small private elevator appeared to be soft, rounded and apish, none of which was true about the actual Frank Ritter. Sixty-four years old, six feet two inches tall, Ritter kept his body in fine trim with a combination of careful diet, professionally monitored exercise and occasional plastic surgery. In certain lights, he could look younger than his oldest son, Charles, who was just forty.

“In order to
be
vital, you must
look
vital.”

“Nobody wants to shake a shaking hand.”

“Think about tomorrow and today will take care of itself.”

“Work in the twentieth century; rest in the twenty-first.”

These were among the self-generated aphorisms included in the commonplace book which Frank Ritter carried with him always, in his left inside jacket pocket, over his heart. With a binding of hand-tooled leather over sheets of thin steel, the commonplace book also served as protection against a well-aimed assassin's bullet; ineptly aimed assassins' bullets Ritter had overcome in the past and was ready to overcome in the future. Most attempted assassins, working out of emotion rather than reason, were likely to be inept, but one might as well prepare for every eventuality.

“In a tough world, be tougher.”

Here's how tough Frank Ritter was: One of the printed memo pads on his desk, in addition to
From the desk of Frank Ritter
and
For your immediate attention from Frank Ritter
, was one printed simply
You'll never work in this town again
, with room above for the recipient's name and address and room below for Ritter's small tight signature. Frank Ritter (A) was not given to empty threats, and (B) was on his second hundred-sheet
You'll never
… pad.

In all the world, it seemed, full of animate and inanimate objects, the only object he could neither buy nor destroy was his own youngest daughter, Elaine. “The sharpest thorns are in your own roses,” read another aphorism in that commonplace book, and he did mean Elaine. Now, as the elevator slid smoothly to a stop and the doors prepared to open, Ritter's face became even harder and stonier and more unforgiving than usual, and his sphincter automatically clenched. The doors slid open; here it came.

She was in full cry, striding back and forth in front of the fat deprogrammer, Hendrickson, who merely stood there with hands folded, an amiable smile on his face like a father indulgently watching his small child sing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Ritter's eyelids half-closed, as though his daughter were playing a bright light on him instead of a piercing voice.

It would be easy, of course, simply to avoid the damn girl for the two hours every Thursday afternoon when her so-called vow of silence permitted her to speak, and in his weakest moments—which weren't very weak—Ritter wished it were possible to take that easy path. But to avoid her during those brief intervals when she would permit herself to give voice would be to imply that she was a prisoner, that she was being merely
stored
here, which was definitely not the case.

As Ritter himself had told the recalcitrant wretch a million times, she was being
saved
here,
rescued
from childish folly and misguided emotion. She was here because he
loved
her, God damn her to hell and back, and that's why, whenever he was anywhere near New York City on a Thursday afternoon, he made it a point to come up here and listen to the stupid, inane, ungrateful, infuriating little sweetheart. If she weren't his daughter and he didn't love her like his own flesh and blood—well, she was, of course—if his feelings toward her weren't so basically paternal and tender he'd have the goddamn girl blacklisted on the planet Earth.

She was in mid-sentence directed at Hendrickson—something about soft being the way of the transgressor until God got His Hands on you, and then, oh, boy—when she became aware of this new target for her venom and spleen—not very saintly, eh?—and she swung about, yelling, “
There's
the defier now! In the Middle Ages the barons thought
they
could defy God, they thought
their
puny temporal power made them God's equals, God's
superiors
, so they could beat and kick and torture God's emissaries here below, and where are they
now?
”

“They'd be dead anyway, Elaine.”

“They're in
Hell!
Burning and roasting endlessly in Hell! Their eyes boiling in their skulls, the charred flesh peeling back ever and ever from their melting bones, the flames clutching and clutching at their screaming tongues, breaths of fire drawn into their suppurating lungs—”

Ugh; whenever the girl got into one of her gloating descriptions of Hell it just made Ritter's stomach churn. Well, that's what the Tums in his pocket were for. Reaching for one, tuning the girl's shrill voice out, he said beneath her diatribe, “Hendrickson, Hendrickson, when is this going to end?”

“Lord knows, Mr. Ritter.”

That
redirected her fire at Hendrickson: “You dare call upon the God you defile with your every …” And so on. Sighing, sucking a Turn, Ritter said to Hendrickson, “Just how much progress do you think you've made so far?”

“Absolutely none, to be bluntly honest,” Hendrickson said, without embarrassment.

“You're supposed to be the best.”

“Since there are none better at what I do, I
am
the best. If you'd like to try
some
people I can think of, Mr. Ritter, who'd take your money and sneak around behind your back and rape your daughter and claim it was sex therapy—”

“No no no no no,” Ritter said, shaking his head and both hands. “I just want to see some sign we're getting somewhere.”

“This is, as I've told you before,” Hendrickson said, “by far the toughest case I've ever had.”

Elaine stood in front of her father, hands on hips, bent forward at the waist, thrusting her agitated face into his, screaming, “
When
are you going to give this up?”

“Never!”

“
When
are you going to let me live my own
life?
”

Ritter was astonished. “That's what I'm
trying
for,” he said, in absolute sincerity. “That isn't
your
life, down there with those scruffy nuns!
Your
life is fur coats in the summer!
Your
life is Gstaad and Palm Beach!
Your
life is as wife to a powerful, well-educated man and mother to his children!”