Watch Your Back!

5

DORTMUNDER WAS five minutes early and Kelp five minutes late — par for the course. Dortmunder was well aware that Arnie's nasty little apartment, up on the second floor, had no street-facing windows but was wrapped like a dirty scarf around an unpleasant airshaft, but nevertheless he felt exposed out here on West 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, as though Arnie might be able somehow to see through the front apartment and down to the street, where Dortmunder was not rushing to come up and see him.

But then Kelp did get there, whistling up the street with his hands in his chino pockets, wearing a light blue polo shirt with the ghostly echo of a panther on the left front, where Anne Marie had removed the manufacturer's logo. "Waiting long?" he wanted to know.

"Nah, I just got here," Dortmunder said, to give him no satisfaction. "Let's go."

He turned toward the building, but Kelp said, "Shouldn't we discuss it first?"

Dortmunder frowned at him. "Discuss what?"

"Well, what the plan is, what's our approach, like that."

"Andy," Dortmunder said, "he hasn't told us the proposition yet. We discuss after we got something to talk about. You're just trying to stall here. Comon."

Dortmunder turned toward the entrance again, and this time Kelp followed. The ground floor of Arnie's building was a storefront, at the moment selling video games, with the most astonishing posters about sex and violence in the window and with a tiny vestibule to its left. Dortmunder and Kelp crowded into the vestibule; Dortmunder pushed the button next to the dirty card that said Albright, then gave a fatalistic look at the metal grid beside it, knowing what was coming next.

Which it did. "Dortmunder?"

"That's right," Dortmunder said to the metal grid, sorry he couldn't deny it, and the nasty buzzer sounded that would unlock the door.

Inside, a narrow hall was filled with the fragrance of old, damp newspapers, and the steep stairs led up to the second floor, where Arnie Albright himself stood and gazed down, a very strange expression on his face that he might have intended for a welcoming smile. "So," he called. "Two of you."

"I knew he didn't mean me," Kelp muttered as they went up the stairs. Dortmunder did not dignify that with a reply.

When they reached the top, Arnie turned away toward the open door of his apartment, saying, "Well, come on in, but try not to look at me, I still look like an army uniform."

Well, it was slightly worse than that, in fact. The way a tan manifested itself on Arnie Albright's city-bred skin was to look like the kind of makeup the mortician uses when there's going to be a viewing. If anybody wanted to know what Arnie Albright would look like in his coffin, this was the chance.

Otherwise he seemed unchanged, a grizzled, gnarly guy with a nose like a tree root. He was dressed in a Soho Film Festival T-shirt, bright blue cotton shorts, and Birkenstocks that looked as though they came from the same tree as his nose.

Arnie's apartment, small underfurnished rooms with big dirty windows showing the airshaft, was decorated mostly with his calendar collection, walls covered with Januarys of all times, combined with pictures of leggy girls, icy brooks, cuddly kittens, and classic cars. Here and there were the ones he called incompletes, years that had apparently started in June or September.

"Sit down at the table by the window there," Arnie offered. "It's the only place in the apartment where you don't get that smell."

So they sat on opposite sides of a kitchen table with incompletes laminated onto it, and Arnie dragged over another wooden chair to join them. Dortmunder said, "It doesn't smell so bad in here, Arnie."

"Not here," Arnie said. "But try the bedroom. Lemme tell you about the intervention."

"Sure, if you want to."

"It's what you call the background to the proposition," Arnie said. "I went down there, because my nearest and dearest made it pretty plain the alternative was sudden death, and believe me, it was not an experience I would wish on anybody."

"Sorry to hear that," Dortmunder said.

"In the first place, sun." Arnie scratched an ecru arm reminiscently. "It's overrated," he assured them. "You can't look at it, you can't get away from it, and it makes you itch. Or anyway, me. Then there's the ocean."

Kelp said, "You were on an island, I hear."

"Boy, was I. Any direction you go, ten feet, splash. But the thing I never got about the ocean, you think it's water, it isn't."

Kelp, interested, curious, said, "It isn't?"

"Looks like water, sounds like water." Leaning in close, Arnie half-whispered the secret: "It's salt."

"Sure," Kelp said. "Salt water."

"Forget the water, it's salt." Arnie made a face that did not improve his looks. "Yuk. I couldn't believe how much beer I had to drink to get that taste outa my mouth. Then somebody said, 'You don't want all that beer in the sun, you want a margarita, so I took a margarita and that's salt. Come on. All the salt down there, you could curl up like a mummy."

"This is a lotta background, Arnie," Dortmunder said.

"You're right," Arnie said. "Now that I'm not so obnoxious any more, I'm garrulous instead. You know, like an old uncle after he goes straight. So let me cut to the chase, and the chase is a guy called Preston Fareweather."

Dortmunder repeated the name: "Never heard of him."

"Well, he isn't a movie star," Arnie said, "he's a venture capitalist. He's got more money than the mint, he invests in your up-and-coming operation, when the dust settles, hey, look, you got a partner, he's even richer. The reason he's down there, he's hiding out from lawyers and process servers."

"From the people he screwed?" Kelp asked.

"In a way," Arnie said. "But not the businesspeople. Seems, one way or another, Preston Fareweather married most of the really good-looking women in North America, and they banded together to get revenge. So he went to this island where nobody can get at him, waiting for the wives to get over their mad, which is not likely. But the thing about him is, his personality's even worse than mine used to be. Everybody down there hates him because he's so snotty and in your face, but he has all this money, so people put up with him. He insulted me a couple times, and I shrugged it off, he's just another bad taste, like ocean, but then a couple people there told me about this place he has."

"A place," Dortmunder echoed. "I have the feeling we're getting somewhere."

"We are," Arnie agreed. "Preston Fareweather has a big luxury duplex penthouse apartment on top of a building on Fifth Avenue, views of the park, all that, and in that apartment he's got his art collection and his Spanish silver and all this stuff. Well, you know, I'm interested in stuff, that's been the basis of our relationship over the years, so I went back to this guy. I hung around with this guy, I drank with him, pretended I was drunk, pretended his snotty little remarks got under my skin, and all along I'm getting the details of this apartment, because it occurs to me I know some people — namely, you people — who might be interested in this apartment."

"It sounds possible," Dortmunder agreed.

Kelp said, "Depending on this and that. Like getting in and getting out, for instance."

"Which is why I hung around the bastard so much," Arnie said. "He has this guy with him, personal secretary or assistant or something, I dunno, named Alan Pinkleton, and he's actually pretty sharp, I thought once or twice he might have piped to what I was doing, but it turned out okay. And by the time I had everything I needed to know, I realized this Preston son of a bitch had cured me, can you believe it?"

Kelp said, "Preston cured you?"

"I watched him," Arnie said. "I watched the people around him, how they acted, and I suddenly got it, those are the expressions I used to see on the faces of people looking at me. I was never obnoxious in the same way as Preston, on purpose to hurt and embarrass other people, but it all comes down to the same place. 'I don't wanna be Preston Fareweather, I told myself, 'not even by accident, so that was it. I was cured and I come home, and I called you, John Dortmunder, because here's my proposition."

"I'm ready," Dortmunder allowed.

"I'm sure you are. I despise that Preston so much, I put up with so much crap from that guy while I'm casing his apartment long-distance, that my reward is the thought of the expression on his face the next time he walks into his house. So what I'm offering is this: Anything you take outa there, I'll give you seventy per cent of whatever I get for it, which is way up, you gotta know, from the well, uh, twenty-five, thirty per—"

"Ten," Kelp said.

"Well, even if," Arnie said. "Seventy this time. And not only that, the thing's a piece a cake. Lemme show you."

Arnie jumped to his feet and left the room, and Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance. Kelp whispered, "He is less obnoxious. I wouldn't have believed it."

"But this place does smell," Dortmunder whispered, and Arnie returned, with a kid's black-and-white composition book.

"I did all this on the plane coming back," he told them, and sat down to open the book, which was full of crabbed handwriting in ink. Following his route with a stubby fingertip, he said, "The building's eighteen stories high, at Fifth and Sixty-eighth. There's two duplex penthouses on top, north side and south side, both front to back. He's got the south side, views of the park, midtown Manhattan, the east side. His neighbor's probably got just as much money, what's his view? Spanish Harlem. And don't think Preston didn't chortle over that."

"Nice guy," Dortmunder said.

"In every way. Now, here's the wrinkle that makes the difference. Behind this building, on Sixty-eighth street, there's a four-story town house converted to apartments. Preston bought that building, rents it out, keeps getting richer. In the bottom of that building, where it's against the back of the big corner building, he put in a garage. Out of the garage, going up the outside of the bigger building, he put an elevator shaft and an elevator. His own elevator, just from his garage to his apartment."

"Not bad," Dortmunder acknowledged.

"Not bad for you guys," Arnie assured him. "Everybody else in that building, they've got this high-tech security stuff, doormen, closed-circuit TV. What Preston's got is a private entrance, a private garage, a private elevator."

Dortmunder said, "Who's in this apartment now?"

"Twice a month," Arnie said, "on the first and the fifteenth, building security does a sweep, spends maybe two hours. Twice a month, on the tenth and the twenty-fifth, a cleaning service comes in, spends seven hours. The other twenty-seven days of every month, the place is empty."

Dortmunder said, "Arnie, you're sure of all these details."

"I paid for them, John Dortmunder," Arnie assured him. "With emotional distress."

Kelp said, "You know, I gotta admit it, it does sound possible. But we'll have to look it over."

"Of course you gotta look it over," Arnie said. "Now, if I was you guys, I know what I'd do. I'd ease into that garage — there's alarms, but you know how to do with that—"

"Sure," Kelp agreed.

"In there now," Arnie said, "is Preston's BMW, top of the line. If I was you, I'd go in there, take out that car, sell it, put a truck in there, take a ride up in the elevator."

Dortmunder had been interested in the story, but now it was over, and he was beginning to realize that the smell Arnie had mentioned was more insidious than he'd thought. It really was not to be borne, not for very long. Maybe it was the last lingering trace of Arnie's former obnoxiousness, or maybe it was just August, but the time had come to leave. Pushing his chair back from the table, he said, "Is that it, then? Any more details?"

"What more details could there be?"

Kelp stood, so Dortmunder stood, so Arnie stood. Kelp said, "We'll look it over."

"Sure," Arnie said. "But it looks like we've got a deal, right?"

Kelp said, "You wanna know, should you offer this to any other of your clients, I'd say, not yet."

"We'll call you," Dortmunder promised.

"I'm looking forward," Arnie said, "to your call."