“Anything?” Dortmunder asked.
May had been gazing toward the street, thinking about kitchens and food and coffee. She switched her attention to Dortmunder and said, “No, I was just daydreaming.”
“You’re tired, that’s why,” Murch’s Mom said. “We all are, staying up all night. I’m not as young as I used to be.” She played the ace of diamonds.
“Ho ho,” her son said. “Not shooting the moon, huh?”
“I’m too clever for you,” she told him. “While you big-mouth, I get rid of all my dangerous winners.” She had taken her neck brace off, despite her son’s complaints, and was now hunched over her cards like a gambling squirrel.
“Here comes somebody,” May said.
Dortmunder said, “Law?”
“No. The manager, I think.”
A blue-and-white station wagon had just turned in at the entrance and stopped beside the small white-clapboard office shack. A smallish man in a dark suit got out of the car, and when May saw him start to unlock the office door she put down her cards and said, “That’s him. I’ll be back.”
Murch said, “Mom, put the brace on.”
“I will not.”
They still didn’t have steps for the trailer. May clambered awkwardly down to the ground, flipped a cigarette ember away from the corner of her mouth and lit a new one as she walked down the row to the office.
The man at the sloppy desk inside had the thin, nervous, dehydrated look of a reformed drunk — the look of a man who at any instant may go back to sleeping in alleys while clutching a pint bottle of port. He gave May a terrified stare and said, “Yes, Miss? Yes?”
“We’re moving in for a week,” May said. “I wanted to pay you.”
“A week? A trailer?” He seemed baffled by everything. Maybe it was just the early hour that was getting to him.
“That’s right,” May said. “How much is it for a week?”
“Twenty-seven fifty. Where’s the, uh, where do you have your trailer?”
“Back there on the right,” May said, pointing through the wall.
He frowned, bewildered. “I didn’t hear you drive in.”
“We came in last night.”
“Last night!” He leaped to his feet, knocking a pile of forms slithering from the desk to the floor. While May watched him in some amazement, he raced out the front door. She shook her head and stooped to pick up the fallen papers.
He was back a minute later, saying, “You’re right. I never even noticed it when I … Here, you don’t have to do that.”
“All done,” May said. Straightening, she put the pile of forms back on the desk, causing some sort of seismic disturbance, because another stack of papers promptly toppled off the desk on the other side.
“Leave them, leave them,” the nervous man said.
“I think I will.” May moved over to let him get back to his seat behind the desk, and then she sat in the room’s only other chair, facing him. “Anyway,” she said, “we want to stay for a week.”
“There’s some forms to fill out.” He started opening and slamming desk drawers, doing it far too rapidly to see anything inside them in the milliseconds when they were open. “While you’re doing that,” he said, opening and closing, opening and closing, “I’ll go hook up the utilities.”
“We already did that.”
He stopped, with a drawer open, and blinked at her. “But it’s locked,” he said.
May took the padlock out of her sweater pocket, where it had been stretching the material even worse than her usual cigarettes. “This was on the ground beside it,” she said and reached forward to put it on a pile of papers in front of him. “We thought it might be yours.”
“It wasn’t locked?” He stared at the padlock in horror, as though it were a shrunken head.
“Nope.”
“If the boss …” He licked his lips, then stared at May in mute appeal.
“I won’t tell,” she promised. His nervousness was making her nervous, too, and she was in a hurry to get finished with him and out of here.
“He can be very …” He shook his head, then glanced down at the open drawer, seemed surprised to see it open, then frowned at it and drew out some papers. “Here they are,” he said.
May spent the next ten minutes filling out forms. She wrote that the trailer had four occupants: Mrs. Hortense Davenport (herself); her sister, Mrs. Winifred Loomis (Murch’s Mom); and Mrs. Loomis’ two sons, Stan (Murch) and Victor (Victor). Dortmunder and Kelp and Herman did not exist on the forms May filled out.
The manager grew gradually calmer as time went by, as though slowly getting used to May’s presence, and was even risking shaky little smiles when May handed over the last of the forms and the twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. “I hope your stay at Wanderlust is just great,” he said.
“Thank you, I’m sure it will be,” May said, getting to her feet, and the manager suddenly looked terrified again and moved all his extremities at once, causing great land shifts of paper on his desk. May, baffled, looked over her shoulder and saw the room filling with state troopers. May stifled a nervous start of her own, but she didn’t need to; the manager’s contortions had riveted the troopers’ attentions.
“Well, bye now,” May said and walked through the troopers — there were only two of them after all — toward the door. The thump behind her was either the padlock or the manager hitting the floor; she didn’t turn to see which, but kept going, and strode hurriedly up the gravel drive toward the bank. As she approached it, she saw it suddenly rock slightly on its wheels, and then settle down again. Another of Herman’s explosions, she thought, and a few seconds later a puff of white smoke came out a vent on the trailer roof. They’ve picked a Pope, she thought.
Dortmunder was waiting in the doorway to give her a hand up. “Whoop, thanks,” she said. “The cops are here.”
“I saw them. We’ll get back of the partition.”
“Right.”
Murch’s Mom said, “Let’s not get those cards mixed up. Everybody hold onto your own hand.”
Murch said, “Mom, will you please put the brace on?”
“For the last time, no.”
“You could blow the whole case for us right here.”
She stared at him. “I am standing in a stolen bank,” she said, “which is about nine felonies rolled into one already, and you’re worried about a lawsuit with an insurance company?”
“If we get picked up on this thing,” Murch said, “we’ll need all the cash we can lay our hands on for the defense.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” May said. She was standing by the door, looking out toward the office.
Dortmunder had gone around behind the partition to join Herman and Kelp, and now all sound stopped from back there. A second later, Victor came out and said, “So they’re here, are they?” He had a big smile on his face.
“Just coming out of the office,” May said. She shut the door and went over to look out a window instead.
“Remember,” Victor said, “they can’t come in without a warrant.”
“I know, I know.”
But the troopers made no attempt to come in. They walked down the gravel roadway between the lines of trailers, looking this way and that, and gave the green-painted bank no more than a passing glance.
Victor was watching out another window. “It’s starting to rain,” he said. “They’ll want to get back in their car.”
It was, and they did. A slight sprinkle had developed, and the troopers walked a bit faster on their way back down the line of trailers toward their car. May, looking up, saw heavy clouds coming on fast from the west. “It’s really going to come down,” she said.