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

She unpacked, briskly and efficiently. Life had been one hotel room after another recently—this motel-box in the sky couldn’t hold a candle to that terrific room at the Watergate—and she’d become very adept at the transitions. Then, looking out the window once more at the near view of the hotel grounds and the far view of out-of-focus tan flatness and the distant view of low gray ridges at the horizon line, she wondered what she would do with herself in the quiet time until Andy reappeared.

The pool down there did look as though it might be fun. Normally, she’d be doubtful about the pool, because she felt she was about fifteen pounds overweight to be acceptable in a bathing suit, but from what she’d seen of the Gaiety’s customers so far she believed her nickname around here would be Slim, so the pool it was.

She changed into her suit and packed a small purse, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. It was—who else would it be?—Andy: “Hey, Anne Marie, I heard you were in town. It’s Andy.”

“Andy!” she said, being surprised on cue. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, a little convention, the usual. I’m here with John.”

“You want to come over?” she asked him. “Say hello?” And look out my window, of course, while you’re here.

“Maybe later,” he said, surprisingly. She’d expected them to want to case the joint right away. “Maybe tomorrow morning,” he said. “We gotta get John dressed, a couple other things. Midmorning, okay?”

“I’ll probably be somewhere around the pool,” she said, with furrowed brow.

“See you then.”

Anne Marie hung up and left the room and headed for the pool, to check it out. And all the way down in the elevator she kept thinking: Get John dressed?

“I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t know about those knees, to begin with.”

“You brought those knees in with you, John,” Kelp reminded him. “Look at the clothes.”

It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount-store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a bum rap. On the other hand, with these clothes, it was very hard to look at the clothes anyway.

This was the end result of Dortmunder’s having told Kelp, in the car on the way to Henderson, how everybody in this town seemed to gaze upon him with immediate suspicion. If he’d known that admission was going to lead to this he’d have kept the problem to himself, just resigned himself to being a suspicious character, which is in fact what he was.

But, no. Despite the absolute success of the meeting with Lester Vogel—that scheme was going to work out perfectly, he almost believed it himself—here he was, humiliated, in this discount mall on the fringes of the city, in front of a mirror, his knees frowning at him in reproof, wearing these clothes.

The pants, to begin with, weren’t pants, they were shorts. Shorts. Who over the age of six wears shorts? What person, that is, of Dortmunder’s dignity, over the age of six wears shorts? Big baggy tan shorts with pleats. Shorts with pleats, so that he looked like he was wearing brown paper bags from the supermarket above his knees, with his own sensible black socks below the knees, but the socks and their accompanying feet were then stuck into sandals. Sandals? Dark brown sandals? Big clumpy sandals, with his own black socks, plus those knees, plus those shorts? Is this a way to dress?

And let’s not forget the shirt. Not that it was likely anybody ever could forget this shirt, which looked as though it had been manufactured at midnight during a power outage. No two pieces of the shirt were the same color. The left short sleeve was plum, the right was lime. The back was dark blue. The left front panel was chartreuse, the right was cerise, and the pocket directly over his heart was white. And the whole shirt was huge, baggy and draping and falling around his body, and worn outside the despicable shorts.

Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, “Who wears this stuff?”

“Americans,” Kelp told him.

“Don’t they have mirrors in America?”

“They think it looks spiffy,” Kelp explained. “They think it shows they’re on vacation and they’re devil-may-care.”

“The devil may care for this crap,” Dortmunder said, “but I hate it.”

“Wear it,” Kelp advised him, “and nobody will look at you twice.”

“And I’ll know why,” Dortmunder said. Then he frowned at Kelp, next to him in the mirror, moderate and sensible in gray chinos and blue polo shirt and black loafers, and he said, “How come you don’t dress like this, you got so much protective coloration.”

“It’s not my image,” Kelp told him.

Dortmunder’s brow lowered. “This is my image? I look like an awning!”

“See, John,” Kelp said, being kindly, which only made things worse, “what my image is, I’m a technician on vacation, maybe a clerk somewhere, maybe behind the counter at the electric supply place, so what I do when I’ve got time off, I wear the same pants I wear to work, only I don’t wear the white shirt with the pens in the pocket protector, I wear the shirt that lets me pretend I know how to play golf. You see?”

“It’s your story,” Dortmunder said.

“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “And your story, John, you’re a working man on vacation. You’re a guy, every day on the job you wear paint-stained blue jeans and big heavy steel-toe workboots—probably yellow, you know those boots?—and T-shirts with sayings on them, cartoons on them, and plaster dust like icing all over everything. So when you go on vacation, you don’t wear nothing you wear at work, you don’t want to think about work—”

“Not the way you describe it.”

“That’s right. So you go down to the mall, and here we are at the mall, and you walk around with the wife and you’re supposed to pick up a wardrobe for your week’s vacation, and you don’t know a thing about what clothes look like except the crap you wear every day, and the wife picks up this shirt out of the reduced bin and says, ‘This looks nice,’ and so you wear it. And when we leave here, John, I want you to look around and see just how many guys are wearing exactly that shirt, or at least a shirt just like it.”

Dortmunder said, “And is that who I want people to think I am?”

“Well, John,” Kelp said, “it seems to me, it’s either that, or it’s you’re a guy that, when people look at you, they think nine and one and one. You know what I mean?”

“And this,” Dortmunder said, as he and his knees glared at one another, “is something else Max Fairbanks owes me.”

When Stan Murch felt the need for temporary wheels, he liked to put on a red jacket and go stand in front of one of the better midtown hotels, preferably one with its own driveway past the entrance. It was usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes before some frazzled out-of-towner, vibrating like a whip antenna after his first experience driving in Manhattan traffic, would step out of his car and hand Stan the keys. One nice thing about this arrangement was that it wasn’t technically car theft, since the guy did give Stan the keys. Another nice thing was that such people were usually in very nice, clean, new, comfortable cars. And yet another nice thing was that the former owner of the car would also give Stan a dollar.

Thursday afternoon, the eighteenth of May, while thousands of miles to the west Andy Kelp was dressing John Dortmunder in the dog’s breakfast, Stan Murch drove away from the Kartel International Hotel on Broadway in the Fifties, at the wheel of a very nice cherry-red Cadillac Seville, and headed downtown to Ninth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he was to meet Tiny Bulcher, the mountain shaped something like a man. There was a brief delay at that location, because Tiny was in the process of explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. “You didn’t earn this money,” Tiny was saying. “You see what I mean?”