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.”
Kelp said, “So did I. I didn’t know you went there, Tiny.”
“Neither did they,” Tiny said.
To Irwin, Kelp said, “I can tell you also, they got a generator and a floodlight, for after dark. You could play night baseball at that grave.”
Irwin said, “Could we create a distraction? Some other crime happening, someplace nearby. If they’re police, don’t they have to respond?”
“They call it in,” Kelp told him. “A hundred thousand other cops come, and roll your distraction up into a ball, and take it off to a cell.”
“This is a serious situation,” Guilderpost said. “If the comment weren’t beneath me, I would say it was a grave situation.”
“Oh, go ahead and say it, Fitzroy,” Kelp advised him. “Let yourself go.”
What if the job was from the other end? Was that possible? They were still talking, but Dortmunder wasn’t listening, and so he didn’t know or care who he interrupted when he said, “Fitzroy, this Internet thing of yours.”
Everybody stopped yakking to look at Dortmunder, not knowing what he was on about. Guilderpost said, “Yes, John?”
“You told me once,” Dortmunder reminded him, “you checked the Redcorn family out west with old phone books, you could do that on the Internet.”
“Lists, John,” Guilderpost told him. “If a topic is compiled, you can find it on the Internet.”
“Can you find out,” Dortmunder asked him, “if Burwick Moody had any descendants?”
The waitress brought waffles, sausage, hash browns, and eggs over easy while the looks of awe and either understanding or confusion slowly spread across the faces at the table. She distributed the food, along with one or two hons, a couple fellas, and departed.
Dortmunder said to Guilderpost, “Well? Can you do it?”
Guilderpost said, “If Moody left issue, I don’t see why I can’t trace it.”
Irwin, one of those whose expression had showed and still showed confusion, said, “John? What are you thinking here? Burwick Moody’s descendants demand something? Stay away from our ancestor’s grave?”
“Hair,” Dortmunder said. This was suddenly absolutely clear in his mind. “We find a descendant with black hair, we figure out a way to get a little buncha that hair, we give it to Little Feather, and when they come to take hair for the test, she gives them Moody hair.”