“Something else? What do you mean?”
“Wasn’t there a robbery there?”
“Oh! Yes, of course, in all this I’d completely forgotten—”
“Funny how memory works,” Klematsky said. “You were out there during the robbery, weren’t you?”
“Well, no,” Max said. “Just before. He broke in again after I left. The police caught him once, when I was there, but then he escaped from the police and went back to the house, after I’d left.”
“You mean the two of you were in the house—”
Good God, he even knows about Miss September. “Yes, yes, all right, the two of us were there, for perfectly innocent reasons—”
Klematsky stared at him. “You and the burglar were there for perfectly innocent reasons?”
Max stared, lost. “What?”
Klematsky spread his hands, as though all this were obvious. “The two of you were there, we agreed on that.”
“Not me and the—Not me and the burglar ! I thought you were talking about—Well, I thought you meant someone else.”
“And the police,” Klematsky went on, as though Max hadn’t spoken at all, “came in because the house was supposed to be empty and they saw it was occupied, and—”
“Not at all, not at all,” Max said. “I called the police. I captured the burglar, I held a gun on him, and I called the police. Check their records.”
“Well, I did,” Klematsky said, “and they’re very confusing. These small-town cops, you know. First there’s a report that the police found a burglar and nobody else there. Then there’s an amended report that the police found the burglar and two other people there, you and somebody else. And after that, there’s another amended report that the police found the burglar and one other person there, meaning you. And there’s also a 911 call, originally said to be by you, and then said to be by somebody else.”
Now Max had truly had enough. Much of this was embarrassing, some of it was less than forthcoming, but none of it had anything to do with what had happened in this apartment right here on Thursday night. “Detective,” he said, putting on his stern manner, the manner that usually preceded somebody being fired, “I applaud your enterprise in digging up all this irrelevant material, but that’s what it is. Irrelevant material. Somebody broke into this place Thursday night. They took well over a million dollars’ worth of property. I’m not sure yet how much they took. Why isn’t this your concern? Why do you keep going on and on about Carrport ?”
“They’re both burglaries, aren’t they?”
“Burglaries take place all the time! Are you saying these two are connected ? That’s absurd!”
“Is it?”
Suddenly a suspicion entered Max’s brain. The burglar; the ring. Could it be the same man, come back looking for his ring, following Max around? Was that, in his bumble-footed fashion, what this clown of a detective was getting at? Max said, “You think it’s the same people.”
“I don’t think anything yet,” Klematsky said. “I see all sorts of possible scenarios.”
He doesn’t know about the ring, Max thought, that much he can’t know about. So he doesn’t know about the burglar, and could the burglar be chasing me, chasing the ring? It seemed impossible, ridiculous. Distracted, he said, “Scenarios. What do you mean, scenarios?”
“Well, here’s a scenario,” Klematsky said. “You’re bankrupt.”
That again? “I’m technically—”
“Bankrupt.”
Max sighed. “Very well.”
“There’s a house full of valuable possessions, that you’re not supposed to be in, and you are in, while there’s a burglary going on.”
Is it possible the burglar could be hanging around now, somewhere nearby? A man batting too many gnats, Max said, “Before. I was there before.”
“Before, during, after.” Klematsky shrugged. “You’re all around it. And now we come here, and at the last second you talk your wife into leaving this apartment, when she didn’t want to, and all of a sudden the coast is clear.”
“Coast? What coast? Clear? Wait a second!”
The absurdity of Klematsky’s suspicions, now that Max finally understood what they were, was so extreme that no wonder it hadn’t occurred to him what horsefeathers filled the Klematsky brain. His own wealth and, in this instance, comparative innocence, combined with the distraction of thoughts about the burglar, had kept him from grasping Klematsky’s implications before this. Now, astounded, horrified, amused, pointing at himself, Max said, “Do you think I committed these burglaries? Hired them done? For the insurance?”
“I don’t think anything yet,” Klematsky said. “I’m just looking at the scenarios.”
“You should be looking at a padded cell,” Max told him. “You think because I’m in bankruptcy court—? Do you really believe I’m poor? You—You—I could buy and sell a thousand of you!”
“Maybe you could buy and sell a thousand,” Klematsky said, unruffled, “but they wouldn’t be me.”
“From here on,” Max said, getting to his feet, “you may speak to me through my attorney, Walter Greenbaum. I’ll give you his phone number, and a number where you can reach me if you have anything sensible to say.”
As calm as ever, Klematsky turned to a fresh page in his notebook. “Fire away.”
Max gave him the numbers and said, “You’ve wasted far too much of my time, when you should have been out looking for the people who actually did this. Unless you think you have cause to stop me, I am now going back to Hilton Head.”
“Oh, I have no reason to hold you, Mr. Fairbanks,” the unflappable Klematsky said. “Not at the moment. Is your Congress thing going to be on C-Span?”
“Perhaps the congressmen were my partners in crime,” Max said, sneering. “Perhaps they’re the ones who did the actual breaking in.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Klematsky said.
31
The first thing they couldn’t agree on was how they were going to get to Washington. Dortmunder wanted to take the train, Andy wanted to drive, and May and Anne Marie both wanted to fly. As Andy had earlier suggested, May and Anne Marie hit it off right from the start, liked each other fine, and were in complete agreement about taking the plane to Washington, DC. “It’s a hop and a skip,” Anne Marie said, and May said, “See? Not even a jump. It’s over before you know it, and you’re there.”
“Where?” Dortmunder demanded. “In some farmer’s field fifty miles away, at an airport, with taxis, and another hour before you get anywhere. I don’t wanna go to Washington by taxi. The train is door to door.”
This conversation was taking place Saturday evening in Dortmunder and May’s apartment, and now Andy stood and went over to the living room archway to look down toward the apartment entrance and say, “Door to door? John? You got a train runs down the hall out there?”
“Downtown to downtown,” Dortmunder said. “You know what I mean. It’s not even a hop and a skip, it’s just a hop from here over to Penn Station, take the train, you’re right there in Washington, right where you want to be.”
“Well, no,” Anne Marie said. “Where you are is at Union Station over on Capitol Hill. The Watergate is way across town by Foggy Bottom, the other side of everything. All of the monuments, all of the official buildings, all of the tourists, everything is inbetween Union Station and the Watergate.”