Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

My house. My house. No other part of the plan mattered. “That’s wonderful, Wally,” Myrtle whispered, patting the door. “I’ll be waiting, whenever you say. I’ll be right here.”

“More coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Another English muffin?”

“Yeah.”

“Marmalade again?”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay? Yeah!”

“Fine, fine, fine. Listen, try Frank.”

“Frank? You think so? Okay: Hey, Frank! I always want marmalade on my English muffin, Frank! Hey, Frank Guffey, you got that?”

Guffey, watching the English muffins in the toaster oven little by little turn brown, like Larry Talbot becoming the wolfman, pondered and pondered and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a Frank.”

“I didn’t think so, either,” Dortmunder admitted.

“I might of been better off if I was a Frank,” Guffey decided, taking out the English muffins and going to work on them with the marmalade. “More self-assertive. Not so much of a patsy.”

“Hey, Patsy!” Dortmunder called. “Give me more marmalade, Patsy! Hey, Patsy Guffey, bring that English muffin over here.”

“Could be my sister,” Guffey said, bringing the plates over to the kitchen table, where Dortmunder sat hunched over his planted elbows, contemplating his hangover. Guffey went back to the counter for the coffee cups, brought them over, and placed them on the Formica with two loud ticks that made Dortmunder flinch.

They sat in silence together while the kitchen clock moved from three-twenty P.M. to three-forty P.M. without anybody noticing or caring. Then, Dortmunder, lifting his head and his eyes while draining the last of his now lukewarm coffee, noticed the clock and found himself thinking about what was or was not going on upstate. Putting down his cup ( tick , flinch), he said, “I think I’m gonna phone them.”

Guffey looked semialert. “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

“ You make more coffee,” Dortmunder told him. “I go to the living room and make my phone call.”

“Hey, come on, Dortmunder,” Guffey said. (He wouldn’t use Dortmunder’s first name, he’d announced, until he found his own.) “That isn’t fair.”

“I’m not trying to be fair,” Dortmunder said, getting with some difficulty to his feet. “I’m trying to protect my interests.”

“Well, I got interests, too,” Guffey exclaimed.

“Not that I am trying to protect,” Dortmunder told him. “I don’t want you listening when I make my call.” Then, seeing Guffey try to be surreptitious about looking around the kitchen, he smirked a little, as much as his hangover would permit, and said, “No, there aren’t any extensions, though a particular friend of mine keeps trying to load them on me. I always said no, I didn’t want the goddamn things, and now I’m gonna be very happy to tell him I know why .”

Sitting at the table, Guffey shook his head and said, “Somehow or other, I lost the advantage around here. I mean, I had it. I had the rifle in my hands, I had the drop on you, I had you scared shitless, I had—”

“Well.”

“Never mind ‘well,’ ” Guffey told him. “I had you scared shitless, admit it.”

“You had me worried for a while,” Dortmunder allowed. “But we’re both reasonable men, so we worked things out. Or we’re working things out. Like right now, I’m gonna make my phone call and you’re gonna make more coffee.”

“It isn’t that I’m reasonable,” Guffey was saying, as Dortmunder left the room, “it’s that it always happens that way. I always lose the advantage. It’s a hell of a thing to live with.”

In the living room, Dortmunder called the number up in Dudson Center, hoping May would answer, and astonishingly enough it was May who answered. Recognizing her voice, he said, “May, it’s me.”

“John! Where are you?”

“Home, like I said I’d be.”

“Safe at home,” she said, sounding wistful.

Looking at the rifle, which still leaned against the wall beside the television set, Dortmunder said, “Well, kinda safe. Safer now, anyway. What’s happening up there?”

“John,” May said, all at once sounding excited, even admiring, “Stan and Andy and Doug came back with a boat ! It’s huge ! You wouldn’t believe how big it is!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“John, it sleeps two!”

“Sleeps two!” Dortmunder, visualizing the QEII , said, “What are they gonna do with it? Is it gonna go in the reservoir?”

“John,” May said, “it’s going to look like a toy boat in a bathtub. But Doug says it’s better, it’s quieter than an outboard motor and they can put the winch right on the boat and winch the box straight up out of the water and take it to shore on the boat.”

“Well, that part sounds okay,” Dortmunder admitted.

“On the other hand,” May said, lowering her voice, “we’ve had a little trouble around here.”

“Tom?”

“Not yet. He will be trouble, but not yet.”

“What, then?”

“There’s a girl,” May said. “Tiny found her peeking in the kitchen window. Turns out, she’s the girl Doug’s been seeing up here, and she was spying, and she knows a lot about us. And her mother’s the one Murch’s Mom’s been playing canasta with. John, did you know Murch’s Mom’s name was Gladys?”

“Go on.”

“No, it really is. Anyway, that’s what she told this girl’s mother that she plays canasta with.”

Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute. Tiny found the daughter spying?”

“Looking in the kitchen window.”

“Then what?”

“Well, one thing led to another, and now she’s locked in the attic until we’re finished.”

“And then what?”

“Well, we say we let her go. I don’t know what Tom says.”

Dortmunder could guess. He said, “What about her mother? Won’t she call the cops when her daughter doesn’t come home? Won’t they first look around the neighborhood?”

“We made her call home last night,” May said, “and say she was going away overnight with Doug. I listened on the extension, and—”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said.

“What?”

“Never mind, something I’ll tell you later about extensions. What happened next?”

“Well, John, I was astonished at that mother, let me tell you. The daughter—her name’s Myrtle Street , would you believe it?”

“Why not?”

“Because she lives on Myrtle Street.”

“Oh. No kidding.”

“Anyway, her mother said, ‘Good. About time you got your blood moving.’ Did you ever hear such a thing?”

“Weird,” Dortmunder agreed.

“ Then she wanted to talk to Doug. The mother did. So Doug got on, expecting to have to say how he was going to respect the daughter and all that, and the mother wanted to talk to him about condoms .”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said.

“I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the girl or Doug. Particularly since, you know, nothing like that was going on anyway. Apparently, Doug hasn’t been too successful with this girl. So she wasn’t even spending the night with him, she was spending the night locked in the attic.”

“I don’t know, May,” Dortmunder said. “That doesn’t sound to me like a good situation up there.”

“Well, it’ll be over soon,” May said. “And John, I do understand your feelings about all this, I’m not going to argue with you or try to change your mind or anything, but we sure could use you up here.”

“What I think is,” Dortmunder said, “I think everybody should just walk away from it right now.”