"They'll get no thanks if they succeed, and they'll feel the wrath of my fist if they fail."
"Yes, Chief Inspector. Thank you, Chief Inspector."
"And when I say—"
The door opened and Leon drifted in, like Venus toward shore. "You'll never believe this one," he announced, while Tony Cappelletti surveyed him with the gloomy frustration of a muzzled St. Bernard studying a cat.
"Hold it, Leon," Mologna said, and went on with his sentence: "When I say tomorrow, Klopzik, do you know what I mean?"
Wrinkles of bewilderment further marred the little man's features. "Yes, Chief Inspector?"
"I'll tell you what I mean," Mologna warned him. "I do not mean whenever it is you drag your miserable carcass out of your vermin-infested bed."
"No, Chief Inspector."
"I mean one second after midnight, Klopzik. That's tomorrow."
Klopzik nodded, extremely alert and receptive. "Midnight," he echoed.
"Plus one second."
"Oh, yes, Chief Inspector. I'll tell Tuh-my friends. I'll tell them just what you said."
"You do that." To Cappelletti, Mologna said, "Take it away, Tony, before I forget myself and polish my shoes with it."
"Right, Francis." Cappelletti cuffed Klopzik almost amiably across the top of the head. "Come along, Benjy."
"Yes, sir, Captain," Klopzik said, spurting to his feet. "Good morning, Chief Inspector."
"Go fuck yourself."
"Yes, sir!" Klopzik turned his happy face toward Leon: "Good mor, morn, uh…"
"Out, Benjy," Cappelletti said.
"You're cute," Leon told Klopzik, who left the room looking suddenly glazed and uncertain.
When they were alone, Mologna said, "Leon, don't you overstep the bounds of good taste."
"Oh, I couldn't."
"That's good. Now, tell me what it is I won't believe."
"The thief just called," Leon said, with the kind of little smirk that means there's more than that to the story.
"The thief. The thief?"
"The man with the ruby in his bellybutton," Leon agreed. "The very one."
"But that's not the part I'll not believe."
"Oh, no," Leon said, and actually giggled. "See, he called asking for you—he got the pronunciation right and everything—so they put him through to me."
"How'd he sound?"
"Nervous."
"He damn well oughta be. So what happened?"
"I said you were in conference and could you call him back at ten-thirty, and he said yes."
Leon stopped there, swaying, dancing in place to some inner rhythm, grinning with barely repressed mirth. Mologna frowned at him, feeling stupid, not getting it. "So? What happened next?"
"Nothing," Leon said. "He hung up. But don't you see? I said you'd call him back. He gave me his phone number!"
28
When Dortmunder got off the phone with Chief Inspector Maloney's (he also thought it was spelled that way) secretary—an odd-sounding guy for a cop—he was so drenched in perspiration that he took a shower in Andy Kelp's bathroom, emerging clad in Andy's robe (too short) to find a note on the kitchen table: "Out for lunch. Back in 10 min." So he sat with the Daily News and read about the manhunt for himself until Kelp came back with Kentucky Fried Chicken and a six-pack. "You're looking more relaxed already," Kelp said.
"I am not," Dortmunder told him. "I look like somebody with a disease. I look like somebody's been in a dungeon for a hundred years. I've seen myself in your mirror, and I know what I look like, which is exactly what I am: a man that made Tiny Bulcher mad."
"Look on the bright side," Kelp advised, distributing beer and chicken legs here and there on the kitchen table. "We're fighting back. We're working on a plan."
"If that's the bright side," Dortmunder said, cutting his thumb as he opened a beer can, "there's no point looking at it."
"While I was out," Kelp said, touching all the chicken legs in the bucket before making his choice, "I set things up for the phone call."
"I don't even like to think about it."
Kelp ate chicken. "It's a piece of cake."
Dortmunder frowned at the kitchen clock. "Half an hour." He picked up a chicken leg, studied it, put it down again. "I can't eat." Standing, he said, "I'll go get dressed."
"Drink your beer," Kelp suggested. "It's got food value."
So Dortmunder took his beer away and got dressed, and when he came back Kelp had eaten all the chicken legs but one. "I saved that for you," he said, pointing at the thing, "in case you changed your mind."
"Thanks a lot." Dortmunder opened another beer without cutting himself and gnawed a bit on the chicken leg.
Getting to his feet, Kelp said, "Lemme show you my access. Bring the leg."
Kelp's bedroom was behind the kitchen. Carrying the chicken leg and the new beer, Dortmunder followed him back there and into the closet, which turned out to have a false rear wall made of a single piece of Sheetrock. Removing this, revealing a brick wall with an irregular opening about five feet high and a foot and a half wide, Kelp grasped two suction-cup handles attached to a piece of wallboard beyond the bricks and did a complicated little lift-tug-twist-push which made that wallboard recede, exposing a dim, crowded-looking space beyond.
Kelp took a step through the hole into this space, still grasping the wallboard by the suction-cup handles, and twisted his body sidewise to get through the narrow opening in the bricks. Dortmunder watched him, dubious, but when Kelp was all the way through with no alarms or shouts or other hooraw, Dortmunder followed, slithering through into an obvious warehouse, lined with rows of rough-plank shelves and bins, all piled high with large or small cardboard cartons. Gray light hovered in the air from distant grimy windows.
Kelp, sliding the wallboard segment back into its slot, whispered, "We got to be quiet now. There's workers down at the front of the building."
"You mean now? There's people in here now?"
"Well, sure," Kelp said. "It's Friday, right? A working day. C'mon."
Kelp led the way down the nearest aisle, Dortmunder tiptoeing after. Kelp moved with absolute assurance even when the echoing sound of semidistant voices was heard, and eventually Dortmunder followed him through a windowed door into a smallish room where telephones and telephone equipment were displayed on tiny walnutish shelves on orange pegboard fronting all four walls. "Here we go," Kelp said, the compleat salesman. "Phones here, add-ons there, recording and playback equipment over there."
"Andy," Dortmunder said, "let's do it and get it over with."
"Well, make your selection," Kelp told him. "Whadaya want? Here we got a nice pink Princess, light in the dial, remember the Princess?"
"I remember the Princess," Dortmunder agreed. "You couldn't dial it, and you couldn't hang it up."
"Not one of our best designs," Kelp admitted. "Now, over here we got something Swedish. I notice this particular model is avocado, but you're not limited in color, we got every color you want. Here, give this a heft."
Dortmunder, having put down his beer can with the chicken leg balanced atop it, found himself holding the avocado something Swedish. It looked like minimalist modern sculpture, shaped somewhat like a horse's neck, curving and narrowing up from a not-quite-round base, then arcing at the top into what was apparently the part you listened to. And the little black holes down near the base were probably where you talked. Turning this object upside down, Dortmunder saw the dial on the bottom, surrounding a large red button. He pushed the button, then released it.