Bad News

26

East,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder had been half-asleep. Now he turned to look at Tiny, who was spread across the Jeep’s backseat, and said, “Tiny? You say something?”

“I said ‘East,’” Tiny said.

Dortmunder looked around at the night. It had already been full dark when they’d left the Tea Cosy after dinner for the four-hour drive south, and now it was nearly one in the morning and they’d just crossed the Triborough Bridge onto Grand Central Parkway, bypassing Manhattan, juking over from the Bronx to Queens. Late on a Friday night, but there were still a lot of drivers in passenger cars all around them, most of them likely to be drunk.

“East,” Dortmunder commented. “You mean we’re driving east,” he decided.

“Southeast,” Tiny said.

Kelp, at the wheel, had just turned off onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Dortmunder nodded. “You mean now we’re going southeast,” he said.

“That’s what the car says,” Tiny told him.

Dortmunder twisted around again to get a full double-O of Tiny back there. “Whadaya mean, ‘That’s what the car says’?”

Tiny pointed to where Dortmunder’s halo would be, if he had a halo, and said, “Right there.”

So Dortmunder faced front again, put his head way back, and saw, tucked under the Jeep roof, above the windshield, a kind of black box. It had bluish white numbers and letters on the side facing the rear seat, glowing in the dark:

S E 41

As Dortmunder looked, the S E changed to S. He looked out at the road, and it was curving to the right. “So now it’s south,” he said.

“You got it,” Tiny told him. “Comin down, that’s what I been doin back here. Watchin the letters. A whole lotta S. A little N there when Kelp got confused on the Sprain.”

“The signage stunk,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile, gleaming like a Halloween mask in the dashboard lights. “Signage,” he said. “Is that a word?”

“Not for those pitiful markers they had back there,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder decided to go back to conversation number one, and said to Tiny, “And the numbers are the temperature, right? Outside the car.”

“You got it again,” Tiny told him.

Forgetting about signage, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “Did you know about that?”

“Did I know about what?”

“Southwest,” Tiny said.

“The car here,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, “it tells you which way you’re going, south, east, whatever, and what the temperature is outside. It’s up there.”

Kelp looked up there.

“Back on the road!” Dortmunder yelled.

Kelp steered around the truck he’d been going to smash into and said, “That’s not bad, is it? The temperature outside, and which way you’re going.”

“Very useful,” Dortmunder suggested.

“A car like this,” Kelp said, “you could take this across deserts, jungles, trackless wastes.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “How many of these things do you suppose have been across deserts and jungles and trackless wastes?”

“Oh, two or three,” Kelp said, and took the exit, and Tiny said, “South.”

They were coming at the cemeteries from a different highway this time, so they did get a little lost, despite everything the car could do to help. Still, eventually they found Sunnyside Street, and drove slowly down it in the darkness until they reached the broken part of the fence, where Kelp jounced them up over the curb.

Dortmunder found it was a lot easier to move the fence out of the way when Tiny was the other guy doing the lifting. Kelp drove through, they put the fence back to position one, and they walked along behind the Jeep, which from the rear still looked something like a Jeep. “It’s just a little ways along here,” Dortmunder said, moving his lips.

And there it was. Kelp angled the Jeep off the path, and its lights shone on the gravestone that was now, through no fault of its own, a liar.

Dortmunder said, “What we got to find is another one from that year or close to it.”

Peering at Redcorn’s dates, Tiny said, “Birth and death both?”

Kelp, joining them from the Jeep, said, “I don’t think so. The main thing is, he should be in the box the right length of time.”

“Well, let’s see how tough this is gonna be,” Tiny said. He walked over to Joseph Redcorn’s stone and smacked it in the middle of the name with the heel of his hand, and it fell over on its back.

“Well, don’t get too mean with it, Tiny,” Kelp said. “We don’t wanna crack it.”

Dortmunder had been looking around the neighborhood, having to squint as he moved farther from the lights of the Jeep, but now he straightened and said, “Here’s a good one.”

The other two came over to look, and stood solemnly gazing down at the tombstone. It was very like Redcorn’s, thin, a foot wide, maybe two feet tall, weather-stained, with rounded upper corners. It said:

BURWICK MOODY

Loving Son and Husband

October 11, 1904–

December 5, 1933

“That’s the day Prohibition ended,” Dortmunder commented.

Tiny looked at him. “You know stuff like that?”

“I like it when they repeal laws,” Dortmunder explained.

Kelp said, “You notice, the wife didn’t put up the stone, the mother did.”

“The wife was still drunk,” Tiny suggested.

Dortmunder said, “Whadaya think, Tiny? Can this go over there?”

Tiny stepped over to Burwick Moody’s marker and gently pushed it over onto its back. “Piece of cake,” he said. “You guys each take a corner at the bottom there, I’ll take the top.”

The bottom corner, Dortmunder found, was rough, cold, wet, and nasty. “This job has too many graveyards in it,” he muttered, but then he lifted along with the other two.

It was heavy, but not impossible. Tiny walked backward, looking over his shoulder as he detoured them around other tombstones, and Dortmunder and Kelp followed him, hunched side by side over the corners they carried, shoulders touching as they shuffled along, gasping a little, sweat already popping out on their foreheads into the cold night air.

At the former Redcorn place, they put the Moody slab on the ground, picked up the Redcorn slab, and schlepped it the other way. There, while Dortmunder and Kelp held the stone in an upright position, Tiny got to his knees and karate-chopped the loose dirt until it was solidly packed around the base and no longer looked as though anything had been disturbed.

When they’d done the same thing with Moody’s monument at Redcorn’s previous residence, Tiny stood and whapped the dirt off his hands and the knees of his trousers as he said, “And we get to do this again.”

“The night,” Dortmunder said, “before they take the sample. We’ll find out when that’s gonna be from Little Feather, and for sure the tribes, if they’re gonna pull anything, they’ll do it before then.”

“Nothing for us to do now,” Kelp said, “but leave.”

“Well, I’m ready,” Dortmunder said.

As they walked along behind the Jeep back toward the break in the fence, Tiny said, “Be a kick in the head, it turns out that isn’t her grandfather after all.”

Dortmunder said, “What? Little Feather? Why not?”

“Well, you never know,” Tiny said. “Could be nobody told her, but she’s adopted.”

“Thank you, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “I was almost beginning to relax.”