Donald Westlake - What's The Worst That Could Happen?

Dortmunder stopped, on the sidewalk. People and traffic went by in all directions. He said, “Gus, you and I went out there to make a little visit and it didn’t happen . You went away—”

“John, don’t fault me,” Gus said. “You would’ve went away, too.”

“Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “And I wouldn’t come to you afterward and say we did this and we did that.”

“Sure you would,” Gus said. “Can we walk, John? Where are we walking anyway?”

Dortmunder started walking again, and Gus kept pace. “Uptown,” Dortmunder said.

“Thank you. About us sharing—”

“No, Gus,” Dortmunder said. “That little visit stopped . You went away, and I was arrested.”

“Yeah, I read about that,” Gus said, and shook his head with empathetic concern. “Wow, that was a close one.”

“It wasn’t a close one,” Dortmunder said, “it was a direct hit. I was arrested .”

People going by looked at them, but kept going. Gus said, “You don’t have to shout about it, John, it isn’t like hitting the lottery or something.”

Patiently, calmly, Dortmunder said, “After I was arrested, I escaped. Nobody helped me, and especially you didn’t help me, I just—”

“Come on, John.”

“—escaped. And after I escaped I went back to that house, and that was a completely different visit, that didn’t have one thing to do with you. You were gone, and I was escaped, and it was a whole new start. So what I got was what I got and not what we got.”

They walked half a block in silence, Gus absorbing the philosophy of Dortmunder’s concept, and then he sighed and said, “John, we been friends a long time.”

“I would say,” Dortmunder said, “we’ve been associates a long time.”

“Okay, a little more precise, fine. I understand your position here, I’d be a little aggrieved at my partner, too, if the circumstances were reversed, but John I’m asking you to put yourself in my position for a minute . I’m still the guy that found the score, and I still have this like empty feeling that the score went down and I didn’t get bupkis for it.”

“You should’ve stuck around,” Dortmunder said, unsympathetically. “We could’ve escaped together.”

“John, you’re usually a reasonable kind of a guy.”

“I’m trying to break myself of that.”

“So that’s how you want to end it. Bad feelings all around.”

Again, Dortmunder stopped in the flow of pedestrian traffic to turn and frown at Gus, studying him, thinking it over. Gus faced him, being dignified, and finally Dortmunder said, “Did you hear about the ring?”

Gus looked bewildered. “Ring? What ring?”

I’m going to tell him the story, Dortmunder decided, and if he laughs that’s it, let him walk away. “It’s the reason I went back to the house,” he said.

“Which I thought, when I realized what must have happened,” Gus said, “was a very gutsy thing to do.”

“It was a very necessary thing to do,” Dortmunder told him, “given what happened.”

“Something happened?”

“After I was arrested, the cops asked the guy, did he take anything? And the guy said, he took my ring, he’s wearing my ring. And it was my ring, that May gave me, and the cops made me take it off and give it to the guy.”

Gus’s jaw dropped. “He stole your ring ?”

Dortmunder watched him like a hawk. “That’s what happened.”

“Why, that bastard!” Gus cried, and pedestrians made wider detours around them as they stood there. “That son of a bitch, to do a thing like that!”

Dortmunder said, “You think so?”

“They’ve already got you caught,” Gus said, “they’ve got you arrested, you’re facing heavy time, and he has to rub your nose in it? What a crappy guy!”

Dortmunder said, “Let’s walk.”

“Sure.”

They started walking, and Gus said, “I can’t get over it. I never heard such a nasty thing to do. Kick a guy when he’s down.”

“That’s why I had to escape,” Dortmunder said. “I had to go back there and try to get my ring back, only the guy was already gone. So I took all that other stuff instead.”

“I get ya,” Gus said.

“But I still want my ring,” Dortmunder said.

“Naturally,” Gus said. “Me, I’d chase the son of a bitch around the world if I had to.”

“It was looking like that was exactly what I was gonna have to do,” Dortmunder told him, “only now it turns out, he’s at another of his places, right here in New York.”

“No kidding,” Gus said.

“ Also got a lot of nice stuff in it,” Dortmunder said.

“I bet it does.”

“We’re going in there tonight,” Dortmunder said, “try to get my ring, pick up whatever else’s around.”

“We?”

“Andy Kelp and a lockman, I don’t know who yet, and me. You wanna make it four?”

Gus thought about that. “You mean, forget the Carrport thing, and come in with you on this one.”

“That’s it.”

“Deal me in,” said Gus.

Max was furious. To be talked to like that, to be chastised , by some pip-squeak stooge, was intolerable. Max was shaking when he finally left Judge Mainman’s chambers at two-thirty—an hour and a half with that moron!—shaking with frustration and rage, ready to commit a personal murder with his own two hands for the first time in years and years. “That—that—that—”

“I wouldn’t say it, Max,” Walter Greenbaum advised, walking beside him. Walter, Max’s personal attorney with the heavy bags under his eyes, could even make a statement like that sound like profundity.

“At least not until we’re out of the building,” said John Weisman, walking on Max’s other side.

John Weisman was another attorney, yet another of Max’s attorneys. It seemed to Max sometimes that he had attorneys the way Chinese restaurants have roaches. Every time you turned on the light, there were more of them. This one, John Weisman, was a specialist, Max’s bankruptcy attorney. The man devoted his life to bankruptcy cases, and charged an arm and a leg, and lived very well indeed off bankruptcy, proving either that you can get blood from a turnip, or a lot of those things claiming to be turnips were lying.

In any event, Weisman didn’t have Walter’s solonic majesty, so that his not-till-we’re-outside crack merely sounded like a not-till-we’re-outside crack. A compact lean man in tip-top physical condition, Weisman apparently spent all his spare time in rugged pursuits, hunting, camping, hiking, mountain climbing, you name it. Max personally thought it showed great restraint on Weisman’s part not to come to court in a camouflage uniform.

Although today it was Max who might have been better in camouflage. Judge Mainman, a fat-faced petty inquisitor, had treated him with such disdain , such contempt , as though there were something wrong with a successful man wishing to avail himself of the benefits of the law. Why would successful men buy legislators, if they weren’t to make use of the resulting laws? But try to tell that to Judge Mainman.

“I can’t do it, you know,” Max said, as they left the court building, down all those broad shallow steps that irritatingly forced you to think about every step you took—rather appropriate for a courthouse, actually—and across the sidewalk full of scruffy people in Max Fairbanks’s way , to the waiting limousine, whose waiting chauffeur in timely fashion opened the rear door.

The attorneys waited until everybody was inside the limo and the door shut, and then Walter said, “Can’t do what?” while Weisman said, “Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks, you have no choice.”