Too late to change. Just stagger forward and hope for the best. Dortmunder jumped to his feet, then ran to the door, reaching for the nonexistent knob, bruising his knuckles against the chrome frame surrounding the glass because it wasn’t exactly where he saw it, then licked his knuckles. Cops crowded close out there, the other side of the glass, calling, intensely staring.
Dortmunder showed them his most baffled face. He spread his hands, then pointed at the door, then made a knob-turning gesture, then shrugged like Atlas with an itch.
They didn’t get it yet. They kept yelling at him to open up. They kept pointing at the door as though he didn’t know where it was. He did his little repertoire of gestures some more, and then two of them pressed their faces to the glass, so that they now looked like fish in police uniform, and squinted to try to see the inside of the door.
Now they got it. And now Dortmunder, once they understood he was locked in here — it’s a locked room mystery! — began to exhibit signs of panic He’d been feeling panic all along: it was nice to be able to show it, even though under false colors.
He bobbed back and forth along the wall, waving frantically, gesturing that they should release him. He pointed at his watch — do you people realize what time it is? He mimed making rapid phone calls — I got responsibilities at home! He tried to tear his hair, but it was too wispy to get a grip on.
Now that he was excited, the cops became calm. They patted the air at him, they nodded, they made walkie-talkie calls, they came up to the glass to mouth, “Take it easy.” Easy for them to say.
It took them 15 minutes to unlock the door; apparently, none of them was a good credit risk. While more and more of them, cops and rent-a-cops both, came streaming in from all the aisles of Speedshop to stare into this one-man zoo, Dortmunder kept ranting and raving in pantomime. Hinging his arms about, stomping back and forth. He even ran around behind the counter and found the phone, intending to call his faithful companion. May, sleeping peacefully at home in their nice little apartment on West 19th Street — would he ever see it again? — just so the cops could see the frantic husband was calling his worried wife. But a recorded announcement told him he could only make local calls from that phone, which was even better. Let May sleep.
At last another team of cops arrived, with special vinyl jackets in dark blue to show they were supercops, and they had several strange narrow metal tools with which they had at the door.
God, they were slow. Dortmunder was just looking around for a helpful brick when at last the door did pop open and maybe 20 of them came crowding in.
“I gotta call my wife!” Dortmunder veiled, but everybody else was yelling, too, so nobody could hear anybody. But then it turned out there actually was somebody in authority, a gruff potbellied older guy in a different kind of important uniform, like a blue army captain, who roared over everybody else, “That’s enough! Pipe down!”
They piped down, surprisingly enough, all of them except Dortmunder, who, in the sudden silence, once again shouted, “I gotta call my wife!”
The man in charge stood in front of Dortmunder as though he were imitating a slammed door “Name,” he said.
Name. What was that name? “Austin Humboldt,” Dortmunder said.
“You got identification?”
“Oh, sure.”
Dortmunder pulled out his wallet, nervously dropped it on the floor — he didn’t have to pretend nervousness, not at all — picked it up and handed it to the boss cop, saying. “Here it is, you look at it. I’m too jumpy.”
The cop spent a couple of minutes looking at several documents the real Austin Humboldt would be reporting stolen six hours from now. Then, handing the wallet back, waiting while Dortmunder dropped ii again and picked it up again and returned it to his pocket, he said, “You broke into this building half an hour ago, came in here, got locked in. What were you after?”
Dortmunder gaped at him. “What?”
“What were you after in this shop?” the cop demanded.
Dortmunder stared around at all the displayed eyeglass frames. “My glasses!”
“You break into a store at—”
“I didn’t break in!”
The cop gave him a jaundiced look. “The loading dock just happened to be open?”
Dortmunder shook his head, a man besieged by gnats. “What loading dock?”
“You came in through the loading dock—”
“I did not!”
Another look. “All right,” the cop decided, “suppose you tell me what happened.”
Dortmunder rubbed his brow. He scuffed his shoes on the industrial carpet. He stared at his feet. “I don’t know what happened.” he said. “I must have fell asleep.”
A different cop said, “Captain, he was asleep there when we got here.” He pointed to the settee. “Over there.”
“That’s right,” said several of the other cops. “Right over there.” They all pointed to the settee. Outside the plate glass, some of the cops pointed at the settee, too, without knowing why.
The captain didn’t like this at all. “Asleep? You broke in here to sleep?”
“Why do you keep saying,” Dortmunder answered, drawing himself up with what was supposed to be an honest citizen’s dignity, “I broke in here?”
“Then what did you do?”
“I came in to get my prescription reading glasses,” Dortmunder told him “I paid for them with a credit card — two pair, sunglasses and regular — and they told me to sit over there and wait. I must have fell asleep, but how come they didn’t tell me when my glasses were ready?” Looking around, as though suddenly realizing the enormity of it all, he cried, “They left me here! They walked out and locked me in and left me here! I could have starved!”
The captain, sounding disgusted, said. “No, you couldn’t have starved. They’re gonna open again in the morning, you can’t starve overnight.”
“I could get damn hungry,” Dortmunder told him. “In fact, I am damn hungry, I never had my dinner.” Struck by another thought, he cried, “My wife is gonna kill me, I’m this late for dinner!”
The captain reared back to study his prisoner. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You came in earlier today—”
“Around four this afternoon. Yesterday afternoon.”
“You bought two pairs of glasses, you fell asleep, and you want me to believe the staff left without seeing you and locked you in. And it was just coincidence that somebody else broke into this building tonight.”
“Somebody broke in?”
Nobody answered, they all just kept looking at him, looming outside these glasses, so finally Dortmunder said, “How often does it happen, somebody breaks in here?”
The captain didn’t deign to answer. Dortmunder looked around, and another, younger cop said. “Not a lot.” But he sounded defensive.
“So it happens,” Dortmunder said.
“Sometimes,” the younger cop admitted, while the captain glowered at this underling, not pleased.
Dortmunder spread his hands. “So w hat kind of a coincidence is that?”
The captain leaned closer; now the glasses made him look like a tank with eves. “How did you pay for these glasses? Cash?”
“Of course not.” Now the damn glasses slipped down his nose, and he finger-pushed them back, a little too hard. Ooh. Blinking, eyes watering, which didn’t help, “I used my credit card,” he said.