Donald Westlake - Bank Shot

“Just the other day. Kids, joy-riding. Managed to get into a rear-end collision somehow.”

“Kids, huh? Did they get them?”

“The police?” The doctor’s sullen baby face made a grimacing smile, as though he had gas. “Don’t make me laugh. They never get anybody.”

“Let’s hope not,” Kelp said. “But about our proposition.”

“Then I had to buy some letters back.” The doctor waggled his hands, as though to minimize what he was saying. “Ex-patient,” he said. “Didn’t mean a thing, of course, just consolation in her grief.”

“The terminal tipper’s wife?”

“What? No, I never wrote her anything, thank God. This one … Well, it doesn’t matter. Expenses have been high. That car business was the last straw.”

“Did you leave the keys in it?”

“Of course not.” He sat up straight to show how indignant he was.

“But you’re insured,” Kelp said.

“You never recover all your costs,” the doctor said. “Traveling by cab, making phone calls, getting estimates I’m a busy man. I don’t have time for all this. And now you people. What if you’re caught?”

“We’ll do our best to avoid that.”

“But what if you are? Then I’m out — how much do you want?”

“We figure four thousand.”

The doctor pursed his lips. He looked now like a baby who’d just had his pacifier plucked from him. “A lot of money,” he said.

“Eight thousand back.”

“If it works.”

“This is a good one,” Kelp said. “You know I can’t tell you the details, but —”

The doctor flung up his hands as though to ward off an avalanche. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know! I won’t be an accessory!”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “I know how you feel. Anyway, we think of this one as being a really sure thing. Money in the bank, you might say.”

The doctor rested his palms on his green blotter. “Four thousand, you say.”

“There might be a little more. I don’t think so.”

“You’re getting the whole thing from me?”

“If we can.”

“This recession …” He shook his head. “People don’t come around for every little thing any more. When I see a patient in the waiting room these days, I know that patient is sick. Drug companies getting a little stingier, too. Had to dip into capital just the other week.”

“That’s a shame,” Kelp said.

“Diet foods,” the doctor said. “There’s another problem. Used to be, I could count on gastritis from overeating for a good thirty percent of my income. Now everybody’s on diets. How do they expect a doctor to make ends meet?”

“Things sure can get rough,” Kelp said.

“And now they’re giving up cigarettes. The lungs have been a gold mine for me for years. But not any more.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what medicine is coming to,” he said. “If I had a son entering college today, and he asked me if I wanted him to follow in my footsteps, I’d say, ‘No, son. I want you to be a tax accountant. That’s the wave of the future, you ride it. It’s too late for me.’ That’s what I’d tell him.”

“Good advice,” Kelp said.

The doctor slowly shook his head. “Four thousand,” he said.

“That should do it, yes.”

“All right.” He sighed and got to his feet. “Wait here. I’ll get it for you.”

He left the room, and Kelp turned to Victor to say, “He left the keys in it.”

Dortmunder at the movies was like a rock on the beach; the story kept washing over him, in wave after wave, but never had any effect. This one, called Murphy’s Madrigal, had been advertised as a tragic farce and gave the audience an opportunity to try out every emotion known to the human brain. Pratfalls, crippled children, Nazis, doomed lovers, you never knew what was going to happen next.

And Dortmunder just sat there. Beside him May roared with laughter, she sobbed, she growled with rage, she clutched his arm and cried, “Oh!” And Dortmunder just sat there.

When they got out of the movie it was ten to eight, so they had time to get a hero. They went to a Blimpie and May treated, and when they were sitting together at a table with their sandwiches under the bright lights she said, “You didn’t like it.”

“Sure I did,” he said. He pushed bread and sauerkraut in his mouth with his finger.

“You just sat there.”

“I liked it,” he said. Going to the movies had been her idea; he’d spent most of the time in the theater thinking about that mobile home bank out on Long Island and how to take it away.

“Tell me what you liked about it.”

He thought hard, trying to remember something he’d seen. “The color,” he said.

“A part of the movie.”

She was really getting irritated now, which he didn’t want to happen. He struggled and came up with a memory. “The elevator bit,” he said. The director of the movie had tied a strong elastic around a camera and dropped the camera down a brightly lighted elevator shaft. The thing had recoiled just before hitting bottom and had bounced up and down for quite a while before coming to rest. The whole sequence, forty-three seconds of it, was run without a break in the movie, and audiences had been known to throw up en masse at that point in the picture. Everybody agreed it was great, the high point of film art up to this time.

May smiled. “Okay,” she said. “That was good, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said. He looked at his watch.

“You got time. Eight-thirty, right?”

“Right.”

“How does it look?”

He shrugged. “Possible. Crazy, but possible.” Then, to keep her from going back to the subject of the movie and asking him more questions about it, he said, “There’s still a lot of things to work out. But we maybe got a lockman.”

“That’s good.”

“We still don’t have anyplace to take it.”

“You’ll find a place.”

“It’s pretty big,” he said.

“So’s the world.”

He looked at her, not sure she’d just said something sensible, but decided to let it go. “There’s also financing,” he said.

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“I don’t think so. Kelp saw somebody today.” He hadn’t known May very long, so this was the first time she’d watched him put together a piece of work, but he had a feeling with her as though she just naturally understood the situation. He never gave her a lot of background explanations, and she didn’t seem to need any. It was very relaxing. In a funny way, May reminded Dortmunder of his ex-wife, not because she was similar but because she was so very different. It was the contrast that did it. Until he’d started up with May, Dortmunder hadn’t even thought about his former wife for years. A show-biz performer she’d been, with the professional name of Honeybun Bazoom. Dortmunder had married her in San Diego in 1952 on his way to Korea — the only police action he’d ever been in on the side of the police — and had divorced her again in Reno in 1954 on his way out of the Army. Honeybun had mostly been interested in Honeybun, but if something outside herself did attract her attention she was immediately full of questions about it. She could ask more questions than a kid at the zoo. Dortmunder had answered the first few thousand, until he’d realized that none of the answers ever stayed inside that round head.

May couldn’t have been more different; she never asked the questions, and she always held onto the answers.

Now, they finished their heroes and left the Blimpie, and on the sidewalk May said, “I’ll take the subway.”

“Take a cab.”

She had a fresh cigarette in the corner of her mouth, having lit it after finishing eating. “Naw,” she said. “I’ll take the subway. A cab after a hero gives me heartburn.”