Benny didn’t feel he could answer that with the truth, which was that he and Herbie and Geerome had agreed it would be too frightening to go to a cemetery that late at night, so he said, “That’s just when we got there, I guess. We just didn’t think, I guess, Uncle Roger.”
“Didn’t think! I’ll say you didn’t think! Flashing a lot of lights around, I suppose. Were you playing the goddamn radio?”
“No, sir!”
It went on like that, Uncle Roger mostly chewing them out for being such meatheads, but occasionally wondering out loud what the hell they were going to do now about the Little Feather problem, with a guard on the grave and an order from the judge that their stupidity had made possible.
After a while, during a pause in the tirade, Benny found himself thinking about his own relationship with Little Feather, which he supposed was pretty much on the rocks now. He wondered briefly if somehow that relationship, the fact that he’d gotten to know Little Feather and she’d gotten to like him and trust him, if that could be used to help Uncle Roger with this problem, but then he decided the smart move was not to mention his relationship with Little Feather at all. It would be better, most likely, if Uncle Roger never knew about that.
Don’t volunteer, Benny told himself, inching toward wisdom. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself, and except for the occasional “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “I’m sorry, Uncle Roger,” that’s what he did.
The one thing he knew for sure was, he never wanted to get riked again.
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.”