The Road To Ruin

64

ONE GOOD THING ABOUT Hal Mellon: his cell phone didn’t ring. When Chester drove him on his rounds, Mellon kept his cell phone in his shirt pocket, over his heart, set to vibrate rather than ring when he got a call. “Getting me ready for the pacemaker,” he said, which might have been another joke. But there was a different joke coming at Chester this sunny Saturday afternoon in June, though he didn’t know it yet. He knew Monroe Hall had been kidnapped from his compound yesterday, because the world knew Monroe Hall had been kidnapped from his compound yesterday. He also knew they had grabbed the butler as well, but wouldn’t that be Dortmunder? He hoped Dortmunder would get himself away from those people, whoever they were, and he sure hoped the police presence at Hall’s compound wouldn’t screw up the grand theft auto planned for tonight. He didn’t want to be stuck in this car with Hal Mellon forever, Tuesdays through Saturdays, because, in Hal’s world, the managers he needed to schmooze with were likelier to be in the office on Saturday than Monday.

“Young couple walking in a graveyard,” Mellon said. “Oops, hold on.” And he dove into his shirt pocket for his phone.

Another couple, Chester thought, in another graveyard. Why don’t they spend their time at horror movies, like all the other young couples in the world?

Mellon murmured briefly into his phone, then broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and said, “Canceled the appointment, the son of a bitch. Who cares if he’s got pneumonia? I’ve got product to move. Ah, well.”

Mellon looked at the dashboard clock, so Chester did, too: 3:24.

Mellon sighed. “Let’s call it a day,” he said. “That was my last real appointment anyway, I was just gonna do drop-ins after that.”

“Sure thing,” Chester said, and U-turned in front of two trucks, an ambulance, and a cement mixer.

Mellon no longer blinked when Chester did things like that. Sitting back, half-smiling out the windshield as he took the vodka bottle from the pocket in the door, he said, “Couple pass a gravestone, says, ‘Here lies John Jones, a lawyer and an honest man.’ Girl says, ‘Is that legal, three men in one grave?’”

•

When Chester drooped into his house at four-thirty, Hal’s baseball teams and frogmen fading slowly from his brain, Dortmunder himself was seated in Chester’s living room, on Chester’s sofa, watching Chester’s television set, and wearing Chester’s overcoat and, apparently, nothing else. “What the hell is this?” Chester demanded.

“Disaster,” Dortmunder told him, and gestured at the screen.

Chester moved around the room to where he could see the television screen. Between the crawl at the bottom of the picture and the CNN logo and some other stuff at the top was a photo of a hangdog-looking guy in black suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie, giving the camera a distrustful look. “That’s you,” Chester said.

“They made us take mug shots when we got the jobs,” Dortmunder said. “Tiny was gonna cop them when we left.”

“Missing butler,” Chester read from the crawl, then gave Dortmunder-in-the-flesh the once-over. “Missing clothes, too, I see,” he said. “Where are they?”

“In your drier,” Dortmunder said. “They used to be in your washing machine. But I need something except that suit, I can’t wear that suit after it’s been all over CNN. Two, three billion people have now seen that suit.”

“There’s also the face,” Chester pointed out.

“I can squint or wear glasses or something. Listen, Chester, I couldn’t call over to the compound because maybe the wrong person says hello, recognizes my voice. You could call.”

“Why?”

“Find Andy or Tiny or somebody. Get my clothes from the house there. I can’t go back there anyway, the cops’d ask me questions for a year. I thought I’d wait till the cars moved tonight, but I can’t sit here in your overcoat like this.”

“I agree.”

“So maybe somebody could bring my stuff over to me now. Is that asking too much?”

“I’ll find out,” Chester said, and made the call, and somebody with nails in his throat said, “Front gate.”

“I’m looking for, uh, Fred Blanchard.”

“He’s at his house, I’ll forward you.”

Waiting, Chester said to Dortmunder, “Calls didn’t used to get answered at the front gate. Suppose something’s happening over there?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said.

It was Kelp who answered the phone, sounding aggravated: “Yeah?”

“An—I mean, Fred, it’s Chester.”

“I don’t care what you call me.”

“Listen, I got John here, over at my house, you know what I mean?”

“John? There? What’s he doing there?”

“Sitting in my overcoat. He says would one of you guys bring him his stuff from his room, he isn’t going back over there.”

“Good idea,” Kelp said, though he sounded angry when he said it. “We’ll bring everybody’s stuff. See you in a little while.”

Chester hung up, and Dortmunder nodded at the screen, saying, “They got one of them.”

The photo on the screen now was of a very upright businessman type in a suit and tie—a corporate headshot. The off-camera announcer was saying, “Forty-two-year-old Mark Sterling, now in police custody, has admitted his part in the kidnapping. One other alleged perpetrator, a business associate of Mark Sterling’s named Osbourne Faulk, is said by police to have fled the country. Another three conspirators are thought to have been involved, but little is known of them except that they are alleged to have belonged to the same labor union.”

“There you go,” Dortmunder said. “Now the kidnappers got a union.”