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

Walter looked at Weisman: “Has no choice in what?”

“Selling the house.”

“I can’t do it,” Max said. The limousine pulled smoothly and silently away from the rotten courthouse. “It’s a personal humiliation. It’s a humiliation within my own company! In front of my own employees!”

“Still,” Weisman said, “we do have the order.”

The order. Judge Mainman, the puny despot, had been fuming when they’d entered his chambers, petulant that anyone would treat his magnificent decisions lightly. He didn’t believe Max’s sworn statement that he’d only gone out to Carrport to pick up some important papers, and he’d made his disbelief insultingly obvious. He was so affronted, this minor little pip-squeak of a judge, he was so affronted, he spoke at first with apparent seriousness about reopening the entire Chapter Eleven proceeding, a move that could only improve his creditors’ prospects and cost Max who knows how much more money. Millions. Actual money; millions.

So it had been necessary to grovel before the son of a bitch, to apologize, to promise to take the bastard’s orders much more seriously from now on, and then to thank the miserable cretin for backing off from an entire junking of the agreement, backing off to a mere order to sell the Carrport house.

Yes. Sell the house, put the proceeds from the sale into the bankruptcy fund, and let it be dribbled away into the coffers of the creditors. And every single TUI employee in middle management and above, every last one of them who had ever spent a night, a weekend, a seminar afternoon , out at the Carrport house, would understand that the boss had lost the house to a miserable bankruptcy judge.

“There’s got to be some way out of this,” Max said. “Come on, one of you, think of something.”

Walter said, “Max, John’s right. You have to put the property on the market. The best you can do is hope it isn’t sold between now and the time we’re finished with this adjustment.”

“Well, no,” Weisman said. “The house has now been placed in the category of assets to be disbursed, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

“Hmmmmm,” said Walter. Even his hmmmmms sounded wise.

Max said, “If I put it on the market at some outlandish price? So no one will ever buy it?”

“Then you’re in contempt of court,” Weisman said. “You have to offer the house for sale at fair market price, and I have to so represent to the court. There’s nothing else to be done.”

Bitter, brooding, Max twisted his new ring around and around and around on his finger. He wasn’t even conscious of that gesture any more, it had become so habitual so soon. “I’ve lost the goddam house,” he said.

“Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks,” Weisman said, “but you have.”

Walter said, “Max, you’ll just have to put this behind you, and look ahead.” Even Walter, though, couldn’t make that twaddle sound like anything but twaddle.

Max said, “I can go out there one more time?”

“So the court has ordered,” Weisman said. “After apprising the court, you’re permitted one final overnight visit, to gather and remove personal and corporate possessions and to make a last inventory.”

Miss September. Maybe that goddam burglar will be there again; this time, I’ll shoot him. “It’s a hell of a small silver lining,” Max grumbled, “for such a great big fucking cloud.”

“Don’t look now,” May said, “but that’s Andy.”

So of course Dortmunder did look, and it was Andy all right, across the restaurant, having dinner and a nice bottle of red wine with an attractive woman with a nice smile. The woman caught Dortmunder looking at her, so Dortmunder faced his own meal again, and said, “You’re right.”

“I told you not to look,” May said. “Now she’s staring at us.”

“She’ll stop after a while,” Dortmunder said, and concentrated on his lamb chop.

May said, “Andy doesn’t want to know us at the moment, or he’d come over, or wave, or something.”

Dortmunder shifted lamb to his cheek: “I’ve had moments, I felt the same way about him.”

“I wonder who she is,” May said.

Dortmunder didn’t wonder who she was, or have anything else to add on the topic, so conversation lapsed, and they both continued to eat the pretty good food.

It was just after eight o’clock in the evening, and the restaurant in the N-Joy Broadway Hotel was thinning out, most tourists eating early because they ate early at home, or because they were going to a show afterward, or because they were exhausted and wanted to go to bed. May was having wine with dinner but Dortmunder was not, partly because he generally didn’t drink before going to work and partly because May would be going home after dinner and it would be up to Dortmunder to keep himself awake until midnight.

They’d talked it over this evening, upstairs, before coming down to dinner. There was a possibility there would be complications tonight, since it was impossible to know ahead of time just what they would meet when the maid service elevator doors opened down below at the apartment level. If they met trouble of some kind, and if the law got involved, and if the law came to understand that the interlopers had descended from the hotel, it would probably not be a good idea for May to be asleep somewhere in that same hotel under a false name, riding on a false credit card. So after dinner she would pack up a small amount of her stuff, leaving her large suitcase for Dortmunder with any luck to fill later with items once belonging to Max Fairbanks, and she would take a taxi home, hoping to hear from Dortmunder in person in the morning rather than via the morning news.

Dortmunder hadn’t known Andy Kelp intended to be in the hotel this early in the evening, nor that he’d be with a woman. Was she the lockman? There were some very good female lockmen, with slender and agile fingers, but in taking that one look over his shoulder Dortmunder didn’t think he’d recognized her as anybody he’d ever seen before. And if she were the lockman, wouldn’t Andy bring her over and introduce her, so maybe they could all have dinner together? So she was probably a civilian, which made it less than brilliant for Andy to have brought her here, but who knew why Andy did what he did?

“Probably,” Dortmunder said, finishing his lamb chop and dabbing his mouth with his napkin, “she’s an undercover cop and he doesn’t know it.”

May looked over that way, past Dortmunder’s shoulder. She could look, but he wasn’t supposed to. “I doubt it,” she said. “Are we going to have dessert?”

“I always did before,” Dortmunder said.

The waiter came over, at his signal, and it turned out there wasn’t an actual dessert menu, nor even one of those dessert carts they wheel around so you can point at what you want. Instead, what the waiter had was all the desserts memorized, and he was so proud of this accomplishment he was happy to reel them off as many times as the customer wanted. Unfortunately, he had them memorized in order, so if you said, for instance, “The third one, with the butterscotch on top. Was that chocolate or vanilla underneath?” he didn’t know. All he could do was reel off all the desserts again, and go more slowly when he got to the third one.

But eventually Dortmunder got them all memorized in his own mind as well, and then he could choose, the pecan swirl vanilla cake with the raspberry sauce, and May could have the rocky road ice cream, and they could both have coffee, and the waiter went away, and Dortmunder wondered how long it would be before he could clear his head of all those desserts. It was worse than the Anadarko family of Carrport, Long Island.