His lips tightened.
"You do," she insisted.
"I need Andy Kelp," Dortmunder said, "the way I need ten-to-twenty upstate."
"Wait a minute, John," she said, resting a hand on his wrist. "It's true the big jobs you've tried in the last few years didn't go well–"
"And Kelp brought me every one of them."
"But that's the point," May told him. "He didn't bring you this one. This is yours, you got it yourself. Even if he is a jinx in his own jobs – and you know you don't really believe in jinxes, any more than I do – but even if–"
Dortmunder frowned at her. "What do you mean, I don't believe in jinxes?"
"Well, rational people–"
"I do believe in jinxes," Dortmunder told her. "And rabbit foots. And not walking under ladders. And thirteen. And–"
"Feet," May said.
"–black cats crossing your – What?"
"Rabbits' feet," May said. "I think it's feet, not foots."
"I don't care if it's elbows," Dortmunder said. "I believe in it whatever it is, and even if there aren't any jinxes Kelp is still one, and he's done me enough."
"Maybe you're the jinx," May said, very softly.
Dortmunder gave her a look of affronted amazement. "Maybe what?"
"After all," she said, "those were Kelp's jobs, and he brought them to you, and you can't really blame any one person for all the things that went wrong, so maybe you're the one that jinxes his jobs."
Dortmunder had never been so basely attacked in his life. "I am not a jinx," he said, slowly and distinctly, and stared at May as though he'd never seen her before.
"I know that," she said. "And neither is Andy. And besides, this isn't you coming in on a job he found, it's him coming in on a job you found."
"No," Dortmunder said. He glowered at the TV screen, but he didn't see any of the shadows moving on it.
"Damn it, John," May said, getting really annoyed now, "you'll miss Andy and you know it."
"Then I'll shoot again."
"Think about it," she said. "Think about having nobody to talk it over with. Think about having nobody on the job who really understands you."
Dortmunder grumped. He sat lower and lower in the chair, staring at the volume button instead of the screen, and his jaw was so clenched his mouth was disappearing up his nose.
"Work with him," May said. "It's better for both of you." Silence. Dortmunder stared through a lowered curtain of eyebrow.
"Work with him, John," May repeated. "You and Andy, the same as ever. John?"
Dortmunder moved his shoulders, shifted his rump, recrossed his ankles, cleared his throat. "I'll think about it," he muttered.
"I knew you'd come around!" Kelp yelled, bounding in from the foyer.
Dortmunder sat bolt upright. He and May both stared at Kelp, who leaped around in front of them with a huge smile on his face. Dortmunder said, "I thought you left."
"I couldn't go," Kelp said. "Not with that misunderstanding between us." He grabbed a chair, towed it over to the sofa, sat at Dortmunder's left and leaned eagerly forward. "So what's the setup?" Then he suddenly sat back, looking concerned, glancing toward the TV. "No, not yet. Watch the rest of your movie first."
Dortmunder frowned almost wistfully at the screen. "No," he said. "Turn it off. I think it ends badly."
Chapter 6
"Linda," murmured Arnold Chauncey, snuggling the girl closer to his side.
"Sarah," she responded, and bit him rather painfully on the cheek, then got out of bed.
"Sarah?" Rubbing his cheek, Chauncey gazed up over the jumbled sheets and blankets at the tapered bare back of the girl reaching now for her blue jeans draped on a Louis Quinze chair. Astonishing how much Sarah and Linda look alike, he thought, at least from a back view. But then, so many attractive women have that elongated-cello look from behind. "How beautiful you are," he said, and since lust had very recently been satiated it was purely the comment of a connoisseur.
"Whoever I am." She was really quite angry, as she showed by her clumsiness when stepping into her bikini panties; lavender, a very wrong color for her.
Chauncey was about to say "don't go" when he noticed the clock on the manteclass="underline" nearly ten-thirty at night. The appointment with Dortmunder was half an hour from now, and if it hadn't been for that slip of the tongue he might well have lazed himself right through it. As it was, his carelessness had saved him once again from his carelessness, and what he did say to poor Sarah was, "Must you go?"
She gave him a resentful glare over her shoulder, and he saw that her nose was much blunter than Linda's. Same forehead, though, same eyebrows. Same shoulder, if it came to that. Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man's taste is rather circumscribed. "You are a bastard," she said.
Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. "Yes, I suppose I am," he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs? He watched her dress, her movements eloquent of outrage and humiliation as she paused at the mirror to touch her hair, touch up her face. Seeing that pouting face framed in the rococo gilt of the mirror, he suddenly realized how common she looked. That exquisite seventeenth-century looking glass, its darkly gleaming surface surrounded and supported by gilded twining rose bushes and cherubim, was meant to reflect more regal faces, more substantial brows, more stately eyes, but what had he placed before it? A series of pinched beauties, faces meant for reflection in commonplace mirrors in gas-station rest rooms, next to the hot-air blower. "I am a bad man," Chauncey said, mournfully.
Immediately she turned away from the mirror, misinterpreting what he'd said. "Yes, you really are, Arnie," she said, but already forgiveness was implicit in her voice.
"Oh, go away, Sarah," Chauncey said, abruptly irritable, angry at himself for being such an endless wastrel, angry at her for reminding him, angry in general because he knew he wouldn't change. Thrashing up out of the bed, he stalked past her astonished expression, and spent the next five minutes calming himself in a too-hot shower.
It was his Uncle Ramsey Liammoir who had defined Arnold Chauncey, years ago while Chauncey was still a boarding school boy in softest Massachusetts. "Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot," Ramsey had written to Chauncey's mother, in a letter Chauncey never saw till he was going through her papers after the wicked old woman's death. "Our sponge was Douglas MacDouglas Ramsey, who founded our fortune and made it possible for half a dozen generations of Ramsey's and MacDouglases and Chauncey's to live in stately and respectable comfort, with here a life peerage and there a board chairmanship. Our spigot, who will piss away his patrimony before he's twenty if he's given his head, is your son Arnold."
Which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the old lady's will had ringed Chauncey's patrimony (matrimony? since it had come from his mother?) with so many strings of barbed wire. Three accountants and two attorneys had to be brought in for approval before he could tip more than fifteen per cent; an exaggeration, but not by much.
On the other hand, he was far from poor. Chauncey's actual income – as opposed to what it said along about page 63 of his tax return – was in fact quite substantial. The year he didn't clear three hundred thousand dollars was a bad year indeed, and usually he was comfortably above that. Or would have been comfortable were he not, in the words of his own interior monologue, such a wastrel. Piss away his patrimony he did, proving his now-departed uncle right by engaging in every kind of squander known to man. He had married badly, and paid too much for the divorce. He had supported an auto-racing stable, and had even done some driving himself until he realized he was mortal. He maintained fully staffed houses or apartments in New York, London, Paris, Antibes and Caracas. His love of beauty in furniture, paintings, sculpture, in all the fine arts, led him to purchases he could barely afford even if he were to scrimp elsewhere, and he had never been able to scrimp anywhere.