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

“No,” Dortmunder said.

“I want to be there,” Gus told him, “when you get the ring. Okay? I wanna help. Just solidarity, like.”

“Well, say, Gus,” Dortmunder said, extremely uncomfortable, “that’s, uh, that’s pretty, uh . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gus said. “I’ll ride along with Andy.”

“Okay, Gus,” Dortmunder said. He felt unexpectedly pleased and cheerful and buoyed up, and at the same time he was thinking he could always alter the plan a little, do different details when it came time to do the details, and Gus would probably be a useful addition to the crew anyway, and the five man rule wasn’t written in stone, so what the heck. “See you there,” he said, and hung up, and went back to his packing, and barely had a drawer open when the phone rang.

This time, it was Fred Lartz, the one-time driver whose wife, Thelma, these days did the actual driving. “John,” he said, “I was talking to Ralph Winslow this morning, I hear you’re gonna get that ring back.”

“I hope I am.”

“The way Ralph describes it,” Fred said, “you’re gonna need more than one driver. I mean, you got Stan, am I right?”

“More than one driver? Why would I—”

“You’re gonna have vehicles comin into town,” Fred said, “and goin out of town. Think about it, John.”

“You mean, you want in.”

“Thelma and me,” Fred said, “we haven’t had a vacation out west in a long time. Nice driving out there. We’d like to do our bit with you, John. Thelma and me. We talked it over, and that’s what we think.”

So Dortmunder agreed that Fred and Thelma should take part, and this time he wasn’t even back in the bedroom when the phone rang, and it was another longtime associate, with the same story, and no way to tell the guy no.

It went on like that, phone call after phone call. And then there came a phone call from A.K.A., who said, “John, I hear you’re gonna make a trip.”

“And you want to come along.”

“John, I really would if I could,” A.K.A. said. “But you know me, I always got these little stews on the fire, stews on the fire, you gotta stick around those little stews if you got them goin, you know.”

“I remember,” Dortmunder said. “Fred Mullins of Carrport told me about that.”

“And wasn’t that a shame, John?” A.K.A. asked. “I remember that whole thing like it was yesterday.”

“So do I,” Dortmunder said. “Some of the names are fading, though.”

“What I feel,” A.K.A. said, “is I owe you a little something for things that didn’t work out, here and there, now and again, once and a while.”

“It’s good of you to feel that way,” Dortmunder assured him.

“So do you remember,” A.K.A. asked, “a guy named Lester Vogel? Used to be in the luggage business, making luggage, you know.”

“I don’t think I do,” Dortmunder said.

“Went to jail for a while, some time back.”

“For making luggage?”

“Well, you know,” A.K.A. said, “Lester liked to put his initials on his luggage, expression of pride and all that, and turns out, with the initials on, and the designs and so on, his stuff looked an awful lot like some other stuff that had the edge on him in terms of getting there first. There was this talk of counterfeit and all this, and these other people had the inside track with the law, you know, so Lester went inside, carrying his goods in a pillowcase, nobody’s initials on it.”

“Same thing,” Dortmunder said, “happened to a guy I know, making watches. He called them Rolez.”

“These things happen,” A.K.A. said, “and you’d expect a little understanding from the competition, mistakes can come along to anybody, but there you are.”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said. “Where am I?”

“Lester’s out,” A.K.A. told him. “Got out a year or so ago.”

“I’m glad,” Dortmunder said.

“Moved out west for his health,” A.K.A. said. “Moved to a place in Nevada called Henderson, near Vegas.”

We might be getting to it now, Dortmunder thought, and said, “Oh, yeah?”

“Has a little factory there.”

“Back in the luggage business?”

“No no, he’s in the household cleaner business now,” A.K.A. said. “Little stuff to make the house look shiny and nice.”

“Spic and Span,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Well, I think his is Spin and Span,” A.K.A. said. “Same color box, though. But his big seller is Clorex.”

“Ah,” said Dortmunder.

“Sells pretty well there in the southwest,” A.K.A. said, “across the border into Mexico, down along the Caribbee. One way and another, you know, he undercuts the competition pretty good.”

“I bet he does.”

“I could give him a call,” A.K.A. suggested, “tell him you might drop by.”

“Yeah?”

“The thing is,” A.K.A. said, “Lester’s got employees, he’s got buildings, he’s got trucks, it could be he could be of use to you, you know what I mean? A lot more than if I came along, even if I could. I mean, what do I know about out west?”

A sudden boulder in the stream, right there. And another. And another. This is a new idea, it uses all those volunteers keep calling on the phone. Dortmunder, remembering an interesting fact about Las Vegas, said, “This business, your friend, this is chemicals, am I right?”

“Cleaning products,” A.K.A. said. “We’re not talking drugs here, John, controlled substances, nothing like that.”

“No, I understand,” Dortmunder said. “And maybe I will get in touch with your friend. You wanna give me a number?”

A.K.A. did, and said, “I’ll call him now, say you’re on the way.”

“A guy like this,” Dortmunder said, “the business he’s in, he’s probably got industrial gas, wouldn’t he?”

“You could ask him,” A.K.A. said, “but I should think probably, yeah. All that Tex-Mex stuff they eat down there, I should think they all got industrial gas.”

It was an unexpected complication for Andy Kelp when it turned out Anne Marie wanted to come along. “Don’t tell me you know Las Vegas, too,” he said.

“Never been there in my life,” she assured him. “Politics was all the gambling we ever did in my family.”

This conversation was taking place in a cab headed uptown, late Wednesday afternoon. They’d had lunch with Gus and Gus’s friend Tillie, and then they’d taken in a movie down in the Village, and now they were on their way back uptown to what until recently had been Kelp’s apartment but which was now rapidly becoming “their” apartment, and here it turned out Anne Marie wanted to come along on the caper in Vegas. This was enough to cause Kelp to undergo a major reappraisal of the relationship right here in the taxi, with bright-eyed Anne Marie studying his profile the whole time.

Over the years, Andy Kelp had had a number of relationships with persons of the opposite sex, some of them solemnized by the authorities in various rites and rituals, others not. He didn’t divide these relationships by the degree of their solemnity, however, but by their length, and in his experience there tended to be two kinds of interpersonal intergender relationships: (1) short and sweet, and (2) long and bitter.

Kelp knew this wasn’t everybody’s experience. John and May, for instance, and others he could think of. But for himself, up until now, it had always been true that every new pairing started off on a happy high, which gradually ebbed, like the tide. Short relationships, therefore, tended to leave a residue of nostalgia, a semihappy glow in which the rough spots were gauzed over and the highlights highlighted, while longer relationships tended to come to a close with bitterness and recrimination, bruised egos and unresolvable disputes, so that only the wens and warts remained outstanding in the memory.