The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Donald E. Westlake Take It Away from Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine

“Nice night for a stakeout.”

Well, that startled me, let me tell you. I looked around and saw I was no longer the last person on line. Behind me now was a goofy-looking guy more or less my age (thirty-four) and height (six feet) but maybe just a bit thinner than me (190 pounds). He wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and a dark-blue baseball cap turned around backward, with bunches of carroty-red hair sticking out under it on the sides and back.

He was bucktoothed and grinning, and he wore a gold-and-purple high school athletic jacket with the letter X hugely on it in Day-Glo white edged in purple and gold. It was open a bit at the top, to show a bright lime green polo shirt underneath.

His trousers were plain black chinos, which made for a change, and on his feet were a pair of those high tech sneakers complete with inserts and gores and extra straps and triangles of black leather here and there that look as though they were constructed to specifications for NASA. In his left hand he held an X-Men comic book folded open to the middle of a story. He was not, in other words, anybody on the crew, or even like anybody on the crew. So what was this about a stakeout? Who was this guy?

Time to employ my interrogation techniques, which meant I should come at him indirectly, not asking “Who are you?” but saying “What was that again?”

He blinked happily behind his glasses and pointed with his free hand. “A stakeout,” he said, cheerful as could be.

I looked where he pointed, at the side wall of this Burger Whopper, where it was my turn tonight to get food for the crew, and I saw the poster there advertising this month’s special in all twenty-seven hundred Burger Whoppers all across the United States and Canada, which was for their Special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, made with U.S. government-inspected steak guaranteed to be a full quarter-inch thick.

I blinked at this poster, with its glossy color photo of the special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, and beside me the goofy guy said, “A steak out, right? A great night to come out and get one of those steak sandwiches and take it home and not worry about cooking or anything like that because, who knows, the electricity could go off at any second.”

Well, that was true. The weather had been miserable the last few days, hoveringjust around the freezing point, with rain at times and sleet at times, and at the moment — 9:20 P.M. (2120 hours) on a Wednesday — outside the picture windows of the Burger Whopper, there was a thick, misty fog, wet to the touch, kind of streaked and dirty, that looked mostly like an airport hotel’s laundry on the rinse cycle.

Not a good night for a stakeout — not my kind of stakeout. All the guys on the crew had been complaining and griping on our walkie-talkies, sitting in our cars on this endless surveillance, getting nowhere, expecting nothing, except maybe we’d all have the flu when this was finally over.

“See what I mean?” the goofy guy said, and grinned his bucktoothed grin at me again and gestured at that poster like the magician’s girl assistant gesturing at the elephant. See the elephant?

“Right,” I said, and I felt a sudden quick surge of relief. If our operation had been compromised, after all this time and energy and effort, particularly given my own spotty record, I don’t know what I would have done. But at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.

Well, it hadn’t happened, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. My smile was probably as broad and goofy as the other guy’s when I said, “I see it, I see it. A steak out on a night like this — I get you.”

“I’m living alone since my wife left me,” he explained, probably feeling we were buddies since my smile was as moronic as his. “So mostly I just open a can of soup or something. But weather like this, living alone, the fog out there, everything cold, you just kinda feel like you owe yourself a treat, know what I mean?”

Mostly, I was just astonished that this guy had ever had a wife, though not surprised she’d left him. I’ve never been married myself, never been that fortunate, my life being pretty much tied up with the Bureau, but I could imagine what it must be like to have been married, and then she walks out, and now you’re not married anymore. And what now? It would be like if I screwed up real bad, much worse than usual, and the Bureau dropped me, and I wouldn’t have the Bureau to go to anymore — I’d probably come out on foggy nights for a steak sandwich myself and talk to strangers in the line at the Burger Whopper.

Not that I’m a total screwup — don’t get me wrong. If I were a total screwup, the Bureau would have terminated me (not with prejudice, just the old pink slip) a long time ago; the Bureau doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. But it’s true I have made a few errors along the way and had luck turn against me, and so on, which in fact was why I was on this stakeout detail in the first place.

All of us. The whole crew, the whole night shift, seven guys in seven cars blanketing three square blocks in the Meridian Hills section of Indianapolis. Or was it Ravenswood? How do I know? — I don’t know anything about Indianapolis. The Burger Whopper was a long drive from the stakeout site — that’s all I know.

And we seven guys, we’d gotten this assignment, with no possibility of glory or advancement, with nothing but boredom and dyspepsia (the Burger Whopper is not my first choice for food) and chills and aches and no doubt the flu before it’s over, because all seven of us had a few little dings and dents in our curricula vitae. Second-raters together, that’s what we had to think about, losing self-esteem by the minute as we each sat alone there in our cars in the darkness, waiting in vain for Francois Figuer to make his move.

Art smuggling: has there ever been a greater potential for boredom? Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child. Who cares what wall they hang on, as long as it isn’t mine, those cow-faced Madonnas and fat-kneed Childs? Still, as it turns out, there’s a lively illegal trade in stolen art from Europe, particularly from defenseless churches over there, and that means a whole lot of Madonnas und Kinder entering America rolled up in umbrellas or disguised as Genoa salamis.

And at the center of this vast illegal conspiracy to bore Americans out of their pants was one Francois Figuer, a Parisian who was now a resident of the good old U.S. of A. And he was who we were out to get.

We knew a fresh shipment of stolen art was on its way, this time from the defenseless churches of Italy and consisting mostly of the second-favorite subject after M&C, being St. Sebastian — you know, the bird condo, the saint with all the arrows sticking out of him for the birds to perch on. Anyway, the Bureau had tracked the St. Sebastian shipment into the U.S. through the entry port at Norfolk, VA, but then had lost it. (Not us seven — some other bunch of screwups.) It was on its way to Figuer and whoever his customer might be, which is why we were there, blanketing his neighborhood, waiting for him to make his move. Meanwhile, it was, as my goofy new friend had suggested, a good night for a steak out.

Seven men, in seven cars, trying to outwait and outwit one wily art smuggler. In each car we had a police radio (in case we needed local backup); we had our walkie-talkie; and we had a manila folder on the passenger seat beside us, containing a map of the immediate area around Figuer’s house and a blown-up surveillance photo of Figuer himself, with a written description on the back.

We sat in our cars, and we waited, and for five days nothing had happened. We knew Figuer was in the house, alone. We knew he and the courier must eventually make contact. We watched the arrivals of deliverymen from the supermarket and the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant, and when we checked, they were all three the normal deliverymen from those establishments. Then we replaced them with our own deliverymen and learned only that Figuer was a lousy tipper.

Did he know he was being watched? No idea, but probably not. In any event, we were here, and there was no alternative. If the courier arrived with a package that looked like a Genoa salami, we would pounce. If, instead, Figuer were to leave his house and go for a stroll or a drive, we would follow.

In the meantime, we waited, with nothing to do. Couldn’t read, even if we were permitted to turn on a light. We spoke together briefly on our walkie-talkies, that’s all. And every night around nine, one of us would come here to the Burger Whopper to buy everyone’s dinner. Tonight was my turn.

Apparently everybody in the world felt thick fog created a good night to eat out, to counteract a foggy night’s enforced slowness with some fast food. The line had been longer than usual at the Burger Whopper when I arrived, and now it stretched another dozen people or so behind my new friend and me. A family of four (small, sticky-looking children, dazed father, furious mother), a young couple giggling and rubbing each other’s bodies, another family, a hunched fellow with his hands moving in his raincoat pockets, and now more in line beyond him.

Ahead, however, the end was in sight. Either the Whopper management hadn’t expected such a crowd on such a night, or the fog had kept one or more employees from getting to work; whatever the cause, there was only one cash register in use, run by an irritable fat girl in the clownish garnet-and-gray Burger Whopper costume. Each customer, upon reaching this girl, would sing out his or her order, and she would punch it into the register as if stabbing an enemy in his thousand eyes.

My new friend said, “It can get really boring sitting around in the car, can’t it?”

I’d been miles away, in my own thoughts, brooding about this miserable assignment, and without thinking I answered, “Yeah, it sure can.” But then I immediately caught myself and stared at the goof again and said, “What?”

“Boring sitting around in the car,” he repeated. “And you get all stiff after a while.”

This was true, but how did he know? Thinking, What is going on here? I said, “What do you mean, sitting around in the car? What do you mean?” And at the same time thinking, Should I take him into protective custody?

But the goof spread his hands, gesturing at the Burger Whopper all around us, and said, “That’s why we’re here, right? Instead of four blocks down the street at Radio Special.”

Well, yes. Yes, that was true. Radio Special, another fast-food chain with a franchise joint not far from here, was set up like the drive-in deposit window at the bank. You drove up to the window, called your order into a microphone and a staticky voice told you how much it would cost. You put the money into a bin that slid out and back in, and a little later the bin would slide out a second time with your food and your change.

A lot of people prefer that sort of thing because they feel more secure being inside their own automobile, but us guys on stakeout find it too much of the same old same old. What we want, when there’s any kind of excuse for it, is to be out of the car.

So I had to agree with my carrot-topped friend. “That’s why I’m here, all right,” I told him. “I don’t like sitting around in a car any more than I have to.”

“I’d hate a job like that, I can tell you,” he said.

There was no way to respond to that without blowing my cover, so I just smiled at him and faced front.

The person ahead of me on line was being no trouble at all, for which I was thankful. Slender and attractive, with long, straight, ash-blond hair, she was apparently a college student and had brought along a skinny green loose-leaf binder full of her notes from some sort of math class. Trying to read over her shoulder, I saw nothing I recognized at all. But then she became aware of me and gave a disgusted little growl, and hunched farther over her binder, as though to hide her notes from the eavesdropper. Except that I realized she must have thought I was trying to look down the front of her sweater — it would have been worth the effort, but in fact I hadn’t been — and I suddenly got so embarrassed that I automatically took a quick step backward and tromped down squarely on the goof’s right foot.

“Ouch,” he said, and gave me a little push, and I got my feet back where they belonged.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just — I don’t know what happened.”

“You violated my civil rights there,” he told me. “That’s what happened.” But he said it with his usual toothy grin.

What was this? For once, I decided to confront the weirdness head-on. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m not a cop, then,” I told him, “so I can violate your civil rights.”

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’ve been wondering what you do for a living. I know it’s nosy of me, but I can’t ever help trying to figure people out. I’m Jim Henderson, by the way. I’m a high school math teacher.”

He didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I, because I was mostly trying to find an alternate occupation for myself. I decided to borrow my sister’s husband’s. “Fred Barnes,” I lied. “I’m a bus driver. I just got off my tour.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’ve been scoring math tests. Wanted to get away from it for a while.”

Mathematicians in front of me and behind me — another coincidence. It’s all coincidence, I told myself, nothing to worry about.

“I teach,” Jim Henderson went on, “up at St. Sebastian’s.”

I stared at him. “St. Sebastian’s?”

“Sure. You know it, don’t you? Up on Rome Road.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

The furious mother behind us said, “Move the line up, will ya?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, and looked around, and my girl math student had moved forward and was now second on line behind the person giving an order. So I was third, and the goof was fourth, and I didn’t have much time to think about St. Sebastian’s.

Was something up, or not? If I made a move and Jim Henderson was merely Jim Henderson, just like he’d said, I could be in big trouble, and the whole stakeout operation would definitely be compromised. But if I didn’t make a move, and Jim Henderson actually turned out to be the courier or somebody else connected to Francois Figuer, and I let him slip through my fingers, I could be in big trouble all over again.

I realized now that it had never occurred to any of us that anybody else might listen in on our walkie-talkie conversations, even though we all knew they weren’t secure. From time to time, on the walkie-talkies, we’d heard construction crews, a street-paving crew, even a movie crew on location, as they passed through our territory, talking to one another. But the idea that Francois Figuer, inside his house, might have his own walkie-talkie, or even a scanner, and might listen to us had never crossed our minds. Not that we talked much, on duty, back and forth, except to complain about the assignment or arrange for our evening meal…

Our evening meal.

Who was Jim Henderson? What was he? I wished now I’d studied the picture of Francois Figuer more closely, but it had always been nighttime in that damn car. I’d never even read the material on the back of the picture. Who was Francois Figuer? Was he the kind of guy who would do… whatever this was?

Was all this — please, God — after all, just coincidence?

The customer at the counter got his sack of stuff and left. The math girl stood before the irritable Whopper girl and murmured her order, her voice too soft for me to hear — on purpose, I think. She didn’t want to share anything, that girl.

I didn’t have much more time to think, to plan, to decide. Soon it would be my turn at the counter. What did I have to base a suspicion on? Coincidence, that’s all. Odd phrases, nothing more. If coincidences didn’t happen, we wouldn’t need a word for them.

All right. I’m ahead of Jim Henderson. I’ll place my order, I’ll get my food, I’ll go outside, I’ll wait in the car. When he comes out, I’ll follow him. We’ll see for sure who he is and where he goes.

Relieved, I was smiling when the math girl turned with her sack. She saw me, saw my smile and gave me a contemptuous glare. But her good opinion was not as important as my knowing I now had a plan, I could now become easier in my mind.

I stepped up to the counter, fishing the list out of my pants pocket. Seven guys and we all wanted something different. I announced it all, while the irritable girl spiked the register as though wishing it were my eyes, and throughout the process I kept thinking.

Where did Jim Henderson live? Could I find out by subtle interrogation techniques? Well, I would say to him, we’re almost done here. You got far to go?

I turned, “Well,” I said, and watched the mother whack one of the children across the top of the head, possibly in an effort to make him as stupid as she was. I saw this action very clearly because there was no one else in the way.

Henderson! Whoever! Where was he? All this time on line and just when he’s about to reach the counter, he leaves?

“That man!” I spluttered at the furious mother, and pointed this way and that way, more or less at random. “He— Where— He—”

The whole family gave me a look of utter, unalterable, treelike incomprehension. They were going to be no help at all.

Oh, hell, oh, damn, oh, goldarn it! Henderson, my eye! He’s, he’s, he’s either Figuer himself or somebody connected to him, and I let the damn man escape!

“Wennysen fory-three.”

I started around the family, toward the distant door. The line of waiting people extended almost all the way down to the exit. Henderson was nowhere in sight.

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

The first “hey” was from the irritable Whopper girl, who’d also been the one who’d said “Wennysen fory-three,” and the second “hey” was from the furious mother. Neither of them wanted me to complicate the routine.

“You gah pay futhis.”

Oh, God, oh, God. Time is fleeting. Where’s he gotten to? I grabbed at my hip pocket for my wallet, and it wasn’t there.

He’d picked my pocket. Probably when I stepped on his foot. Son of a gun. Money. ID…

“Cancel the order!” I cried, and ran for the door.

Many people behind me shouted that I couldn’t do what I was already doing. I ignored them, pelted out of the Burger Whopper, ran through the swirling fog toward my car, my face and hands already clammy when I got there, and unlocked my way in.

Local police backup, that’s what I needed. I slid behind the wheel, reached for the police-radio microphone and it wasn’t there. I scraped my knuckles on the housing, expecting the microphone to be there, and it wasn’t.

I switched on the interior light. The curly black cord from the mike to the radio was cut and dangling. He’d been in the car. Damn him. I slapped open the manila folder on the passenger seat and wasn’t at all surprised that the photo of Francois Figuer was gone.

Would my walkie-talkie reach from here to the neighborhood of the stakeout? I had no idea, but it was my last means of communication, so I grabbed it up from its leather holster dangling from the dashboard — at least he hadn’t taken that — thumbed the side down and said, “Tome here. Do you read me? Calling anybody. Tome here.”

And then I noticed, when I thumbed the side down to broadcast, the little red light didn’t come on.

Oh, that bastard. Oh, that French—

I slid open the panel on the back of the walkie-talkie, and of course the battery pack that was supposed to be in there was gone. But the space wasn’t empty, oh no. A piece of paper was crumpled up inside there, where the battery pack usually goes.

I took the paper out of the walkie-talkie and smoothed it on the passenger seat beside me. It was the Figuer photo. I gazed at it. Without the thick black eyeglasses, without the buckteeth, without the carroty hair sticking out all around from under the turned-around baseball cap, this was him. It was him.

I turned the paper over, and now I read the back, and the words popped out at me like neon: “reckless,” “daring,” “fluent, unaccented American English,” “strange sense of humor.”

And across the bottom, in block letters in blue ink, had very recently been written: “THEY FORGOT TO MENTION ‘MASTER OF DISGUISE.’ ENJOY YOUR STEAK OUT. FF.”