Bad News

30

When things got slow, Kelp liked to go to the safes. They were in the closet in the other room, which was all he could think to call a room with a bed in it that you didn’t sleep in. Anne Marie called it the guest room, but Kelp had never happened across any guests anytime he’d ever gone in there, if you didn’t count the occasional cockroach, which can happen in even the best-cared-for apartment in New York. So it was the other room. And in its closet were the safes; four of them at the moment, in a row on the floor.

This is a kind of safe that isn’t much made anymore, but your better-quality house or apartment wall is very likely to contain one. They are round and black and made of thick iron, and are a little smaller than a bowling ball. They have a round steel door on the front with a dial in it, and they have little iron ears, pierced, that angle out for mounting the safe on the studs inside the wall.

They are very hard to get into. Being round, they are almost impervious to explosives, and being thick black iron, they are impossible to crack or break with any known tool. The round door is also thick, and inset in such a way as to make it inaccessible to any lever or pry bar. The combination dial is cunning and clever and cannot be conquered in a matter of minutes. Most slickers coming across one of these safes just pass it by and settle for the television set.

Not Kelp. His practice, if he had a vehicle handy when he discovered one of these coconuts, was to gouge it out of the wall, toss it into the vehicle, take it home, and fiddle with it from time to time when nothing much was happening. It was kind of a hobby, and also a way to keep his talents honed. Sooner or later, he managed to open every one of those doors, by which time, what he found inside was almost beside the point. And what he found inside ranged from a very nice line in jewelry all the way down through stocks of defunct corporations to absolute nothing. Still, it was the journey that mattered, not the destination.

This morning, around ten, with Anne Marie off to the New School at her course on the history of constitutional law in the Balkans, Kelp was seated lotus-style, more or less, on the floor in the other room, in front of the open closet, one of the safes having been drawn out and tilted back, so that it now looked up at him with its one skeptical eye, when the phone rang. Deep in communion with this dial before him, he almost didn’t answer, but he could never resist a ringing phone—except in a doctor’s car, when he knew it would only be the doctor, wanting his car back—so he finally sighed, shifted so he could reach into his pants pocket, brought out the little cordless, and said dubiously, “Hello?”

He’d been right to be dubious; it was Fitzroy Guilderpost. And he was excited, agitated, upset, blowing bubbles in the middles of his words: “Andy, we’re coming down! We’ve got to meet, we’ll meet at your place, call John and Tiny, we’re leaving now, we’ll be there no later than three, Irwin’s ready, we must fly, see you then!”

“Fitzroy,” Kelp said, “what are you talking about?”

There was a startled silence down the phone line, with bubbles, and then Fitzroy said, “You don’t know?”

“If you’ll think back, Fitzroy,” Kelp said, “you’ll realize you haven’t told me yet. And if you don’t tell me, Fitzroy, I can pretty well guarantee I won’t be here at three o’clock.”

“It was on the news!” Fitzroy jabbered. “Surely, if it was on the news up here, it was on the news down there!”

“It may be on the news,” Kelp pointed out, “but I don’t have the news on. So why don’t you just tell me?”

“The Indians were caught!”

This sounded like something from the world of sports, but Kelp knew that couldn’t be right. He said, “More, Fitzroy. Open it a little wider.”

“The Indians,” Fitzroy said, damping himself down, obviously as though he thought he were talking to a nincompoop, “took a coffin to the cemetery in Queens last night to switch bodies, just the way John said they would.”

Then Kelp saw it. “Oh, oh,” he said. “And they got caught?”

“Right in the middle of it, the hole dug, the three of them in the grave, standing on the box.”

“This is bad news, Fitzroy,” Kelp said.

“Yes! It is! I know it!”

“We better talk this over,” Kelp decided.

“Irwin and I are on our way, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

“And Little Feather?”

“She has to stay here, be in court, there’s a great coruscation over this.”

Kelp assumed that word was a legal term of some sort, and let it go. He said, “Okay, we’ll see you and Irwin then.”

“Because, Andy,” Fitzroy said, “because of what those idiots did, there is now a guard on that grave.”

“Oh boy.”

“The tribes have been trying to stall the DNA test,” Fitzroy said, “but this will certainly accelerate the process.”

“Uh-huh.”

“When they take that DNA sample out of that casket,” Fitzroy complained, “it will not be Little Feather’s grandfather in there.”

“It will be Burwick Moody.”

“I think I hate Burwick Moody,” Fitzroy said.

“Aw, naw, Fitzroy,” Kelp said, “he’s as much an innocent victim in this as we are.”

“I did not get involved in this operation,” Fitzroy told him, “to be an innocent victim.”

“Yeah, it does feel a little odd,” Kelp agreed. “Okay, Fitzroy, we’ll see you this afternoon. I’ll call John now, though I don’t think he’s gonna thank me for it.”