May thought about that and nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s not your fault who they put in your cell.”
“Thank you.”
“But, John, still, what do you think he’s doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?”
“I don’t even want to know,” Dortmunder said.
“John, you’re a craftsman, you’re skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training—”
“And luck,” Dortmunder added.
“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. “Not a solid experienced person like you.”
“Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said, “since I’ve been running around without it for quite a while.”
“Now, don’t get gloomy, John,” May said.
“Hard not to, around Tom,” Dortmunder told her. “And, as for what he’s doing outside right now, that’s up to him. But I was at that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It’s my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we’ll sit here and watch television, and there it’ll be on the news. You know what I mean?”
“Are those the only choices?” May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti-Os, not meeting Dortmunder’s eye. “Are you sure there’s nothing else to do?”
“Like what?” he asked. “The way I see it, I help him or I don’t help him, that’s the choice.”
“I wouldn’t normally say this, John,” May said, “you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it’s just necessary to let society fight its own battles.”
Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. “May? Turn him in? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s worth thinking about,” May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.
“But it isn’t,” Dortmunder told her. “Even if it was—even if it ever was, I mean—even then, it isn’t worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he’s gonna drown nine hundred people? They can’t take him back.” Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, “A crime isn’t a crime until it happens.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” May said. “With a character like that walking around loose—”
Dortmunder said, “May, some famous writer said it once: The law’s an asshole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson’s living here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson’s record and history was living here, they’d put me back inside. But him they can’t touch.”
“Well, that’s crazy,” May said.
“But true,” Dortmunder told her. “But let’s say I do it anyway, I’m feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it’s done. I’ve gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very best, what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn’t do it. And he’ll take about a second and a half to figure out who’s the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?”
“Well,” May said carefully, “John, it’s you he’d be mad at, actually.”
“People who play with dynamite don’t fine tune,” Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti-Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.
May had finished. She sat back, didn’t light a cigarette, didn’t blow smoke at the ceiling, didn’t flick ashes onto her plate, didn’t cough delicately twice, and did say, “Well, I just hope you can come up with something.”
“Me, too,” Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn’t come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning just a second, and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: “Me, too.”
She frowned at him. “You too what?”
“Hope I come up with something. To get the money out from under the reservoir.”
“Oh, you will,” she said. “I’m not worried about you, John.”
“Well, I wish you would be,” he said. Gazing across the room, frowning at the perfect white blankness of the refrigerator door, he said, “I think it’s time I got some help on this.”
SIX
Andy Kelp, a sharp-featured, arrow-nosed skinny kind of guy in soft-soled black shoes and dark gray wool trousers and a bulky pea coat, tiptoed through the software, quietly humming “Coke, It’s the Real Thing.” Hmmmmm, he thought, his fingers skipping among the bright packages. WordPerfect, PageMaker, Lotus, dBaseIII, Donkey Kong. Hmmmmm. From time to time a package was scooped up into his long slim fingers and stowed away in the special pocket in the back of his pea coat, and then he would move on, humming, eyes darting over the available wares. The exhibit lights left on all night in the store gave him just enough illumination to study the possibilities and make his choices. And shopping three hours after the store had closed was the sure way to avoid crowds.
Blip-blip-blip. The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp’s bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mouthpiece, “Hello?”
A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, “Who’s that?”
“John?” Kelp whispered. “Is that you?”
“What’s goin on?” demanded Dortmunder’s voice, getting belligerent. “Who is that there?”
“It’s me, John,” Kelp whispered. “It’s Andy.”
“What? Who is that?”
“It’s Andy,” Kelp whispered hoarsely, lips against the mouthpiece. “Andy Kelp.”
“Andy? Is that you?”
“Yes, John, yes.”
“Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Then stop whispering.”
“The fact of the matter is, John,” Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, “I’m robbing a store at the moment.”
“You’re what?”
“Ssssshhhhhhh, John,” Kelp whispered. “Sssshhhhhh.”
In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren’t home. You’ve done one of your phone gizmo things.”
“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “I put the phone-ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn’t miss any calls—like this one from you, right now—while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me.”
“To rob a store.”
“That’s right. And that’s what I’m doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I’d like to get on with it.”
“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “If you’re busy—”
“I’m not busy forever, John,” Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. “You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?” He was remembering to whisper again now.
“No,” Dortmunder said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out.”
“There’s problems?” In his eagerness, Kelp’s whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. “You want me to drop over there when I’m done, we can talk about it?”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, “Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it.”
“Sure I feel like it,” Kelp whispered, in falsetto. “You know me, John.”
“Yeah, I do,” Dortmunder said. “But come on over anyway.” And he hung up.
“Right, John,” Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off-white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men’s room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the basement of this building and a brief squirm through an air-conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.