A Good Story and Other Stories
Donald E. Westlake
Sinner or Saint
Everyone agreed that the Reverend Mister Wimple, the new minister, had done wonders for the town, none of them more wondrous than the taming of Miss Grace Pettigrew, who had been known to argue with the grocer over the price of Dixie cups. At the age of seventy-four, she still mowed the entire length and breadth of lawn surrounding her rundown manor, employing for the task a handmower badly in need of repair, to save herself the expense of hiring a boy to do the job, and she could have easily shattered the Lanesville Merchants and Farmers Bank, as she often threatened to do, simply by closing her account. It was even rumored that Miss Grace Pettigrew had been so softened by the good Reverend that she was about to make a handsome donation to the new hospital building fund, Reverend Mister Wimple’s pet project ever since he had first arrived in Lanesville some eight months before. The wildest rumor of all had it that Miss Pettigrew’s donation was to be the famous and almost priceless Pettigrew diamond, valued at something over one and a quarter million dollars.
The rumor was quite true. At this very moment, old lady Pettigrew (as the coming generation referred to her) sat quietly and patiently in the Reverend Mister Wimple’s office, her hands folded demurely in her lap, a pious, gentle look on her crotchety old face. In the purse on the floor beside her chair lay a cigarette box of the flip-top variety, containing a lot of stuffed cotton and, in the very center of all the cotton, a large and flawless diamond, the family diamond, named for the Pettigrew who had first smuggled it out of Africa and into Baltimore some two hundred years before. Miss Grace Pettigrew, three score and fourteen, had reformed.
The Reverend Mister Wimple came to his office and paused on the threshold, smiling beatifically at the diamond-toting sinner before him. The Reverend Mister Wimple was a tall man, stocky, well-upholstered though not fat, rosy-cheeked and bulb-nosed, bristly-eyebrowed with gentle eyes and a great shock of white hair rising above and to both sides of a high, shining forehead. His well-scrubbed hands were folded across his full stomach; he had pleasant laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, and upstairs in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom there was a bottle of white hair dye.
Reverend Wimple stood unnoticed in the doorway behind Miss Pettigrew, and his eyes rested absently on the purse Miss Pettigrew had set on the floor beside her chair. Reverend Wimple knew what was in that purse, knew what Miss Pettigrew was about to say to him and what he was about to reply, and it was the culmination of almost a year of difficult and heart-breaking labor. Reverend Wimple paused in the doorway, smiling and elated, allowing the warm feeling that comes from success to spread through his body like alcohol, and in his mind he traveled backward in time and space to two men speaking in hushed tones in a cool and quiet library in a cool and quiet state penitentiary, and he smiled the more broadly.
The two men were prisoners and partners. The taller, heavier and older of the pair was named Joe Docker and his profession was that of the confidence man. He had sold gold-mine stock, oil-well stock, pension plans, municipal statues and methods for beating the horses in every state of this broad and fertile land except Alabama. It wasn’t that he had anything against Alabama. He just hadn’t happened to go there yet.
Joe Docker’s partner in crime was named Archibald (Lefty) Denker, and he was a jack of all trades. Through the years, many of them lean ones, Lefty Denker had unfortunately developed a quirk of the eye and lip which could only be called shifty, a circumstance which handicapped him in the confidence man trade, where the operative word is “confidence.” No one trusts a man who looks like Lefty Denker. Nature, however, moves in devious ways, and always makes up for a handicap by replacing the loss by a special skill of some sort. Lefty, his friends swore, could get into Fort Knox with a used toothpick. His hands were living creatures, and locks, pockets and all kinds of machinery were known and conquerable.
And so the team of Docker and Denker prospered. Where Docker’s voice and looks could not obtain entry, Denker’s hands could. It was only due to the negligence of a menial in an auto rental agency, who had neglected to fill the gas tank before renting a sedan to Joe Docker, that the car had stopped in the middle of a four-lane highway with five state police cars in hot pursuit. The pair had found themselves wards of the state, with a mailing address at the big house and a future that suddenly looked rather drab.
Joe Docker was a man devoted to his job, and he refused to allow himself to become disheartened. He had long known that a good confidence man is a good conversationalist, and that a good conversationalist is a man who is well read. On this conviction, Joe began to haunt the prison library, where he read everything he could find, books, magazines, old newspapers, everything. He spent so much time in the library, in fact, that he was soon made a trustee and an assistant librarian. This post was due, in part at least, to Joe’s long and pleasant conversations with the chief librarian, a hatchet murderer named Simpson, a tiny, bespectacled gentleman who blinked constantly and had the Dewey Decimal System memorized, including his own improvements thereon.
Lefty, meanwhile, in order to keep his own hand in, got himself assigned to the prison machine shop, where he wiled away the idle hours in building and dismantling locks. Occasionally, he and Joe would get together in the library, the only place inside the prison where one could safely whisper, and Lefty would plead, sotto voce, “Joe, let’s get outa here. I been studyin’ the locks.”
Joe would smile and shake his head. “Lefty, you’re too eager. Take it easy. You’re eating well. You’ve got a bed. Why complain?”
“It’s the principle of the thing, Joe. I been studyin’ the locks and I could get us outa this joint with my fingernail. Not only that, I been busy down at the machine shop. I made myself a coupla tools. Little things, you know.”
“That’s not good, Lefty. What if the bulls find them?”
“Joe, what am I, a beginner? I could hide a tank so these bulls wouldn’t find it.”
Again, Joe would smile. “Pride,” he would say, shaking his finger in mock sternness, “pride, Lefty, has been the downfall of—”
“Joe, let’s scram outa this place. I don’t like state pens.”
“Patience, Lefty. Wait till we have somewhere to scram to. Wait, in a word, until we have a plan, a motive, a reason, a goal.”
“I got a goal. I wanta get outa this joint.”
And so the idle months passed, Joe improving his mind, Lefty improving his hands, until one day Joe read a notice in a pictorial published by one of the smaller religious denominations. Joe pocketed the notice and continued to putter around the library beside Simpson, whose conversation was almost totally limited to a mumbled string of numbers. Each time Simpson looked at a book, he automatically and unconsciously placed it in the Dewey Decimal System and just as automatically and unconsciously spoke the appropriate number aloud. Libraries being by nature full of books, and Simpson being, by job, normally in the library, his unconscious was kept pretty busy saying numbers, and poor Simpson had a sore throat he couldn’t explain.
Eventually, Lefty came down to the library for the normal afternoon chat, and he and Joe sat down at one of the tables.
Joe smiled and handed Lefty the magazine, opened to page fifty-two. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at a small, black-encircled notice near the bottom of the page.
Lefty read the notice, an announcement of the death of the pastor of the Lanesville Rural Church, concluding with the remark that a replacement had not as yet been made, and then he looked at Joe, a puzzled expression on his face, and he said, “So what?”