Donald Westlake: Drowned Hopes

Dortmunder and I received more than our normal share of help in this piece of work. Here is where our worthy assistants receive the warm handshake ILOS: In Lieu of Salary.

Through the fine efforts of New York Is Book Country, whose auction of usually useful objects aids the New York Public Library, Doron Levy came along to assist with a drive-through at a semicrucial point. Justin Scott accepted a phone call from my characters when I could help them no more, thus assisting both us guys here and the Mystery Writers of America. Batesville’s Bob Smith kept us all warm and dry. And Joe Gores even sent a fella from his own crowd to help out. To them, to the more usual suspects, and to you, my thanks.

Why to you? Because, unless you read this novel, all of these efforts will remain incomplete. You close the circle. Peace.

As gray dawn crawled over the city, Dortmunder went home to find May still up, dressed in a baggy sweater and green plaid slacks. She came out of the living room into the hall when she heard him open the door, but instead of asking, as she usually did, “How’d it go?” she said, sounding nervous but relieved, “You’re back.”

He answered the usual question anyway, being tired and out of sorts and not at his most observant. “Not so good,” he said, opening the closet door. With slow and tired motions, he took tools from the many inside and outside pockets of his black jacket, placing them with muffled clanks on the closet shelf. “The jeweler’s gone, moved to Rhinebeck; there’s a pasta restaurant in there now. The antique guy’s switched to Disney collectibles. And the check-cashing place got a dog.” Taking his jacket off, he held it up and looked at the new ragged tear at the bottom in the back. “Mean goddamn dog,” he said.

“John,” May said. She sounded tense. Her left hand pretend-smoked, fiddling with an imaginary cigarette, flicking ghost ashes on the floor, something she hadn’t done since just after she’d quit.

But Dortmunder was full of his own problems. Hanging up his torn jacket, he said, “It’s almost enough to make you rethink a life of crime. I did get a little , though, after I locked the dog out and he ran away.” He began pulling crumpled money from inside his shirt, putting it on the hall table.

“ John ,” May said, her eyes very round and white, “there’s somebody here .”

He paused, hand over the money. “What?”

“He says—” May glanced at the doorway to the living room, apprehension and mistrust defining her features. “He says he’s an old friend of yours.”

“Who does?”

“This man.”

“Al?” The voice, hoarse and ragged but somehow self-confident, came from the living room. “Is that you, Al?”

Dortmunder looked bewildered, and then startled. “No,” he said.

A man appeared in the living room doorway. He was as gray and cold as the dawn outside, a thin gristly bony old guy of just over six feet tall, dressed in a gray windbreaker over a faded blue workshirt, and baggy gray pants and black worn shoes. He had a craggy rectangular head sitting up on top of his stony body like a log redan full of guards. His eyes were bleak, cheeks ravaged, brow furrowed, hair gray and thin and dead and hanging down over his large leathery ears. “Hello, Al,” he said, and when he spoke his lips didn’t move; but what ventriloquist would use this for an alter ego? “How you doin, Al,” the hoarse gray voice said through the unmoving lips. “Long time no see.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Dortmunder said. “They let you out.”

The gray man made a sound that might have been meant for a laugh. “A surprise, huh?” he said. “Surprised me, too.”

May said, “So you do know him.” She sounded as though she wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news.

“Tom and I were inside together,” Dortmunder told her, unwillingly. “We were cellmates for a while.”

The gray man, who looked too flinty and stringy and knotted to be named anything as simple and friendly as Tom, made that laugh sound again, and said, “Cellmates. Pals. Right, Al? Thrown together by the vagaries of fortune, right?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“Why don’t we sit in the living room,” Tom suggested, his lips a thin straight line. “My coffee’s gettin cold in there.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

Tom turned away, going back into the living room, walking rigid, like a man who’s been broken and then put back together a little wrong, using too much Krazy Glue. Behind his stiff back, May waggled eyebrows and shoulders and fingers at Dortmunder, asking, Who is this person, why is he in my house, what’s going on, when will it end ? and Dortmunder shrugged ears and elbows and the corners of his mouth, answering, I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know if this is some kind of trouble or not, we’ll just have to wait and see . Then they followed Tom into the living room.

Tom sat on the better easy chair, the one that hadn’t sagged all the way to the floor, while Dortmunder and May took the sofa, sitting facing Tom with the look of a couple who’ve just been asked to think seriously about life insurance. Tom sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, lifting his cup from the coffee table, sipping with deep concentration. He looked like the background figure in a Depression movie, a guy hunkered over a small fire in a hobo encampment. Dortmunder and May watched him warily, and when he put the cup down he leaned back and sighed faintly, and said, “That’s all I drink now. Lost my taste on the inside.”

Dortmunder said, “How long were you in, Tom, all in all?”

“All in all?” Tom made that sound again. “All my life, all in all. Twenty-three years, this last time. It was supposed to be for good, you know. I’m habitual.”

“I remember that about you,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, the answer is,” Tom said, “while I been eating regular meals and getting regular exercise and a good night’s sleep all these years on the inside, the world’s managed to get worse without me. Maybe I’m not the one they should of been protecting society from all along.”

“How do you mean, Tom?”

“The reason I’m out,” Tom said. “Inflation, plus budget cuts, plus the rising inmate population. All on its own, Al, without any help from yours truly, society has raised up a generation of inmates. Sloppy ones, too, Al, fourth-rates you and me wouldn’t use to hold the door open.”

“There is a lot of that around,” Dortmunder agreed.

“These are people,” Tom went on, “that don’t know a blueprint from a candy wrapper. And to pull a job with a plan ? When these bozos take a step forward with the right foot, they have no really clear idea what they figure to do with the left.”

“They’re out there, all right,” Dortmunder said, nodding. “I see them sometimes, asleep on fire escapes, with their head on a television set. They do kinda muddy the water for the rest of us.”

“They take all the fun outta prison, I can tell you that,” Tom said. “And the worst of it is, their motivation’s no damn good. Now, Al, you and me know, if a man goes into a bank with a gun in his hand and says gimme the money and a five-minute start, there’s only two good reasons for it. Either his family’s poor and sick and needs an operation and shoes and schoolbooks and meat for dinner more than once a week, or the fella wants to take a lady friend to Miami and party. One or the other. Am I right?”