Bad News

35

At the Four Winds motel, you didn’t get a nice full stick-to-your-ribs breakfast from the cheerful likes of Gregory and Tom. At the Four Winds motel, you put on a lot of coats and boots and hats and gloves and went outdoors and down along the parking lot to the office, at the center of the place, and then indoors again and past the check-in counter to the café, a bland, pale place lit by fluorescents all day long.

Dortmunder found Kelp and Tiny there at 8:30 Thursday morning, seated at a booth for six, with cups of coffee in front of them. He’d had a wakeful night, trying to think, trying to figure out what to do about that mix-up at the cemetery, and had just started to get some decent shut-eye half an hour ago, when Guilderpost rang him up to say everybody was gathering in the café in thirty minutes, for breakfast before heading south. A shower had helped a little, particularly because the water temperature kept changing all the time, encouraging alertness, so now here he was.

“(grunt),” he said, as he slid in next to Kelp and across from Tiny.

“You look like shit, Dortmunder,” Tiny said.

“Diddums,” Dortmunder corrected. “It’s Welsh. I’ve been trying to think of what we could do. You know, we got these five days, so why don’t we do something?”

“Four days,” Tiny said.

“How time flies,” Kelp said. He, too, looked like shit, but Dortmunder noticed nobody was commenting on that. He grinned at Dortmunder and said, “Say, gang, we got four days, let’s put on a show!”

Dortmunder didn’t like to start the day with humor. He liked to start the day with silence, particularly when he hadn’t had that much sleep the night before. So, avoiding Kelp’s bright-eyed look, he gazed down at the paper place mat that doubled in here for a menu, and a hand put a cup of coffee on top of it. “Okay,” he told the coffee. “What else do I want?”

“That’s up to you, hon,” said a whiskey voice just at ten o’clock, above his left ear.

He looked up, and she was what you’d expect from a waitress who calls strangers “hon” at 8:30 in the morning. “Cornflakes,” he said. “O—”

Pointing her pencil, eraser end first for politeness, she said, “Little boxes on the serving table over there.”

“Oh. Okay. Orange juice then.”

Another eraser point: “Big jugs on the serving table over there.”

“Oh. Okay,” Dortmunder said, and frowned at her. In the nonpencil hand, she held her little order pad. He said, “The coffee’s it? Then your part’s done?”

“You want hash browns and eggs over, hon,” she said, “I bring ’em to you.”

“I don’t want hash browns and eggs over.”

“Waffles, side of sausage, I go get ’em.”

“Don’t want those, either.”

Eraser point: “Serving table over there,” she said, and turned away as Guilderpost and Irwin arrived.

Most of the group said good morning, and the waitress said, “More customers. I’ll just get your coffee, fellas,” she added, which was apparently the plural of hon, but before she could leave, Irwin said, “I know what I want. Waffles, side of sausage.”

Guilderpost said, “And I would like hash browns and eggs over, please.”

The point end of the pencil now hovered over the pad. “Over how, hon?”

“Easy.”

The pencil flew over the pad. The waitress seemed pleased to have some actual customers, rather than a virtual customer like Dortmunder. “I’ll just get your coffee, fellas,” she promised again, and off she went.

Guilderpost slid in beside Tiny. Irwin would have taken the spot next to Dortmunder, putting Dortmunder in the middle, but Dortmunder said, “Hold on, let me up. I gotta go to the serving table.”

The serving table, he could see, when he got there, was for wimps. Orange juice was about the most manly thing on display there, among the bowls of kiwi fruit and containers of yogurt and tiny packages of sugar substitute. He found his cornflakes in little weeny boxes and took two. He found little weeny glasses for his orange juice and filled two. He found a small pitcher of milk and took it along. Back at the table, he found Irwin in his former seat, drinking coffee, so he sat at the end and started opening boxes and drinking out of glasses.

The others were talking about the problem in vague terms. Dortmunder was thinking about the problem while clawing his way into the cornflakes boxes, but the others were all talking about it.

“The problem with twenty-four-hour guards,” Irwin said, “is that there’s never any time when they’re not there.”

“I believe that’s the point,” Guilderpost told him.

“But,” Kelp said, “there’s nothing else we can do except get in there. We got to get in there, sometime between now and Monday, and get that tombstone back over Little Feather’s grandpa, where it belongs.”

Tiny said, “You got more than that, you know. You got your hole.”

“That’s right,” Irwin said. “The wrong grave is open. Somehow, we’d also have to get in there and fill up the wrong grave and make it look right, and then dig up the right grave, and then switch the tombstones.”

“Take an hour,” Tiny decided. “All of us together. Maybe a little more.”

“One hour out of twenty-four,” Kelp said, “and every one of those twenty-four hours guarded.”

Dortmunder sighed. Although this yakking all around him was something of a distraction, it was also helpful, because it was defining what the job was not. The job was not sneaking in past guards in order to neaten up. It was too late to neaten up. So, if that wasn’t the job, what was the job?

Irwin said, “Who are these guards, anyway? Are they rent-a-cops?”

“New York City police,” Tiny told him. “Two of them, in their blue suits, in a prowl car, parked next to the grave. I went and looked.”

Kelp said, “So did I. I didn’t know you went there, Tiny.”

“Neither did they,” Tiny said.

To Irwin, Kelp said, “I can tell you also, they got a generator and a floodlight, for after dark. You could play night baseball at that grave.”

Irwin said, “Could we create a distraction? Some other crime happening, someplace nearby. If they’re police, don’t they have to respond?”

“They call it in,” Kelp told him. “A hundred thousand other cops come, and roll your distraction up into a ball, and take it off to a cell.”

“This is a serious situation,” Guilderpost said. “If the comment weren’t beneath me, I would say it was a grave situation.”

“Oh, go ahead and say it, Fitzroy,” Kelp advised him. “Let yourself go.”

What if the job was from the other end? Was that possible? They were still talking, but Dortmunder wasn’t listening, and so he didn’t know or care who he interrupted when he said, “Fitzroy, this Internet thing of yours.”

Everybody stopped yakking to look at Dortmunder, not knowing what he was on about. Guilderpost said, “Yes, John?”

“You told me once,” Dortmunder reminded him, “you checked the Redcorn family out west with old phone books, you could do that on the Internet.”

“Lists, John,” Guilderpost told him. “If a topic is compiled, you can find it on the Internet.”

“Can you find out,” Dortmunder asked him, “if Burwick Moody had any descendants?”

The waitress brought waffles, sausage, hash browns, and eggs over easy while the looks of awe and either understanding or confusion slowly spread across the faces at the table. She distributed the food, along with one or two hons, a couple fellas, and departed.

Dortmunder said to Guilderpost, “Well? Can you do it?”

Guilderpost said, “If Moody left issue, I don’t see why I can’t trace it.”

Irwin, one of those whose expression had showed and still showed confusion, said, “John? What are you thinking here? Burwick Moody’s descendants demand something? Stay away from our ancestor’s grave?”

“Hair,” Dortmunder said. This was suddenly absolutely clear in his mind. “We find a descendant with black hair, we figure out a way to get a little buncha that hair, we give it to Little Feather, and when they come to take hair for the test, she gives them Moody hair.”

Kelp said, “John, I knew you’d do it. The Moody hair matches the Moody body, and Little Feather’s in.”

“If we can find an heir,” Dortmunder said.

Irwin laughed. “This is wonderful,” he said. “The absolute accuracy of DNA testing! First, we put in a wrong body to match our wrong heiress, then we get a wrong wrong body, and now we’re gonna get the wrong wrong hair. One switched sample is gonna get compared with another switched sample. Absolutely nothing in the test is kosher.”

Kelp said, “Irwin, that’s the kind of test we like.”

Guilderpost said, “If there’s Moody issue.”

“That’s up to you to find out,” Dortmunder told him.

“I know it is, I know it is,” Guilderpost agreed. Looking at the food on his plate, brow furrowed, he said, “I can’t eat. I have to know. I have to go to my room and start the search.” Looking at Dortmunder, he said, “That was brilliant, John. Here, you have my breakfast, I can’t wait. Good-bye.” And he was up and out of there.

Dortmunder had by now drunk his coffee and both his orange juices and finished one little box of cornflakes. Tiny pushed Guilderpost’s plate toward him and said, “You don’t eat enough, Dibble.”

“John,” Dortmunder said. He looked at Guilderpost’s hash browns and eggs over easy, untouched. “What the hell,” he said, and dug in.

The waitress came by a minute later to give them all more coffee, whether they liked it or not, and she paused to frown at the plate in front of Dortmunder. “I could of brought you that, hon, if you’d asked me,” she said.

Dortmunder pointed the business end of his fork at where Guilderpost had lately sat. “He got a sudden attack a the runs.”

“Oh, that can be tough, hon,” the waitress said. “Believe me, I know. You won’t be seeing him for a while.”

An hour and five minutes, actually, before Guilderpost returned. He seemed to be smiling and frowning at the same time, as though he wasn’t sure what he thought about what he’d learned.

At this point, their breakfasts had all been cleared away, and the four had only coffee cups in front of them, from which they didn’t dare take even one sip, or the waitress would come back and fill the cup again. So everybody looked up from all that cooling coffee to try to read Guilderpost’s face, and Irwin said, “Well, Fitzroy? Did you find it?”

“It isn’t,” Guilderpost answered, “that I have good news and bad news. It’s that my good news is my bad news. Yes, I found her. No, you’ll never get close to her or her hair.”

Dortmunder, brow furrowing, said, “Why not?”

“Because she’s the Thurbush heiress,” Guilderpost told him. “She lives at Thurstead.”

Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Kelp said, “I think Fitzroy thinks he just said something.”

Guilderpost said, “You never—” and the waitress appeared beside him, solicitous, to say, “You feeling any better, hon?”

“In a way,” he said, not understanding the question.

She said, “Would you like a glass of milk, hon?”

“As a matter of fact,” he told her, “I would like another order of hash browns and eggs over easy. I find I’m famished.”

She looked dazed. “Hash browns? And eggs over easy?”

“And coffee. Thank you, dear.”

She nodded, forgot to call him hon, and left.

Guilderpost started his sentence again: “You never heard of Russell Thurbush.”

“Never,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Well, it happens I learned quite a bit about Russell Thurbush some years ago,” Guilderpost told them, “when it was happily my opportunity to sell several paintings at gratifyingly high prices that might very well have been Thurbushes, for all anybody knew.”

Dortmunder said, “He’s a painter.”

“Was a painter,” Guilderpost corrected. “His dates are 1901 to 1972, and he was one of the principal figures of the Delaware River School, portrait and landscape painters who flourished between the world wars. He became very famous and very rich, traveled throughout Europe doing portraits of royalty, made a lot of money, invested wisely during the Depression, and by the time World War Two came along and the Delaware River School was looked on as old hat, he was rich enough to retire to Thurstead, the mansion he designed himself and built in the mountains of northern New Jersey, overlooking the Delaware River.”

Dortmunder said, “And the Moody family has something to do with this guy.”

“Russell Thurbush married Burwick Moody’s only sister, Ellen,” Guilderpost told him, and took a sheet of motel stationery out of his pocket. A hasty family tree was scribbled on it. “Burwick himself died without issue,” he went on, “so the descendants have to be through Ellen, his sister.”

Dortmunder said, “But she did have descendants.”

“Oh, yes.” Guilderpost studied his notes. “The family just keeps daughtering out,” he said. “Ellen and Russell Thurbush had three daughters. Eileen became a nun. Reading between the lines, Eleanor was a lesbian. That leaves Emily Thurbush, who married Allistair Valentine in 1946, at the age of eighteen. She had two daughters. The older, Eloise, died at sixteen in an automobile accident. The younger, Elizabeth Valentine, married Walter Deigh in 1968 and produced one daughter, Viveca, in 1970. Elizabeth died in 1997, at the age of fifty, leaving Viveca the sole bearer of the Moody DNA. Viveca is also the sole inheritor of Thurstead, where she lives with her husband, Frank Quinlan, and their three daughters, Vanessa, Virginia, and Victoria.”

Dortmunder said, “In New Jersey.”

“That’s right,” Guilderpost said. “Overlooking the Delaware River, in a rustic, forested mountain area with majestic views Thurbush frequently memorialized in his paintings, or so it says on the Thurstead Web page.”

Dortmunder said, “So what we do, we go to this place—”

“Thurstead,” Irwin interpolated.

“Fitzroy knows the place I mean,” Dortmunder said. Back to Guilderpost, he said, “We go to this place, like Irwin says, and we sneak in and grab this Virginia, Viveca, whichever one it is, grab her hairbrush, and gedadda there.”

Guilderpost had been shaking his head through almost this entire sentence, which Dortmunder had been doing his best to ignore, but now Guilderpost added to the video with audio: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Thurstead is on the National Register of Historic Places,” Guilderpost told him. “It is operated by a nonprofit trust. The house and grounds are open to the public at certain prescribed hours. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, by Thurbush and others, the house also contains the jewels, the silver goblets, the rare golden stilettos, and all the other treasures Thurbush brought back with him from his travels around the world. The place is very tightly guarded, with a private security force and alarm system. The Quinlans live in a portion of the house, the rest devoted to the museum, the entire place under extremely tight protection. You’ll never get at that hairbrush, John. I’m sorry.”

“That’s awful,” Irwin said. “That’s a goddamn shame. We were so close.”

“Your idea was brilliant, John,” Guilderpost said, “but it just won’t work out.”

Irwin said, “John? Why are you smiling?”

“At last,” Dortmunder said. “A job for me.”