Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

Now, the next thing to do was hide this disaster from his two current clients. It would never do for a professional private detective to himself become a crime victim; all credibility would be lost forever. Therefore, after a quick trip farther downtown to an area of electronics stores, he came back with a new telephone — answering machine, which he set up on his ravaged desk and into which, using a much more grating voice than normal, he placed this message:

"Hi. Johnny Eppick here. I came down with something over the weekend I hope isn't flu, so I'm not in the shop today. Leave a message and I hope I'll be here and healthy first thing tomorrow."

The rest of the replacement equipment he'd buy out on the Island, to avoid New York City's sales tax, so he might as well get to it. There was no point hanging around the ransacked office all day.

It was while driving out the LIE, just east of the city line, that the penny finally dropped and one word came into his mind, as though in neon: Dortmunder.

Of course. In the first shock, he hadn't been thinking straight, hadn't connected the dots, but what else could this be? Dortmunder. He had to get even for not scoring anything out of the chess set caper. And, whining all the time about something as minor league as taxi fares, that gave you the measure of the man.

The son of a bitch had waited exactly two weeks, Monday to Monday, just long enough so Eppick wouldn't be able to prove it but he'd have to know it.

And there was more to it than that. All of the other things that were taken were just smoke screen, just icing on the cake. The only theft that really mattered was the computer. That little box where the incriminating pictures of John Dortmunder were stored.

Yes, and when he got back to the office tomorrow and looked in his files — a thing that hadn't occurred to him until just this minute — the copies of those pictures that he'd printed out would also be gone.

I no longer have a handle on John Dortmunder's back, Eppick thought. Dortmunder had needed that handle off of there. Why? Because he's up to something. What is he up to?

Eppick frowned mightily as he drove east toward home.

"THEY'RE NEVER COMING back!"

"Nessa," Brady said, over their lunch of nuked frozen fish fingers, nuked frozen french fries, and canned beer, "of course they're coming back. They came all the way up here just to be sure everything was all right."

"Then when they left here," Nessa said, leaning belligerently over her fish fingers in this large elaborate dining room constructed for more diners but less volume, "they must have made sure everything was wrong, because they aren't coming back !"

"Come on, Nessa, you don't have to holler, I'm right here in front of you."

"Yet somehow you don't hear me," she said. "Those bozos are not coming back."

Surprised, almost offended on their behalf, he said, "What do you mean, bozos? Those were very serious people."

"Hah."

"They were up here to discuss hiding a very valuable chess set," Brady reminded her. "And here was where they meant to hide it. They even pointed out the table in the living room."

"Where they were going to hide it."

"Yes."

"Right out on a table in the living room."

"I told you, Nessa, it was the something letter. You remember Edgar Allan Poe."

"We read The Raven ," she said, being sulky. "It was very boring."

"Well, he did something else," Brady said, "that said, if you want to hide something, put it right out in plain sight where nobody expects to see it."

"Put it right out in plain sight," Nessa said, "where I won't expect to see it, and guess what happens next."

"Well, Edgar Allan Poe is what they were doing," Brady said, "and they're definitely coming back."

"Brady," she said, around a mouthful of fish fingers, as she waved a melodramatic arm toward the far windows, "it's snowing ."

"I know that."

"Again."

"I know that."

"We're in the mountains in New England in December. Brady, on the TV they're talking about accumulations. You know what accumulations are?"

"Listen, Nessa—"

"You wanna wait here till spring? Here ?"

The fact was, Brady wouldn't mind if he had to wait here forever. He had this huge house all to himself, he had no responsibilities, he had this really cute girl to go to bed with all the time — though not so much lately, unfortunately — and he had the prospect of this amazingly valuable chess set at the end of the rainbow. So what was the problem?

Well, he'd better not put it that way, because, the truth is, the problem was Nessa. She had some kind of cabin fever or something. She got bored too easily, that's what it came down to. He screwed her as much as he could, or these days as much as she'd put up with, but still she got bored.

He just had to keep his calm, that's all. This was just a phase Nessa was going through, and soon she'd be fine again. Maybe in the spring, when the flowers started to grow, though he sensed it wouldn't be a really smart move to phrase it quite that way.

"Honey," he said, "I heard those guys talk, and I know they meant it, and I know they're coming back, and I know they're serious."

"They're bozos," she said, and filled her mouth with french fries.

He paused, a fish finger in midair. "Why do you keep saying that?"

"They pranced through here," she reminded him, "the four of them, looking all over for just the right place to hide their precious chess set, and they never even saw us ."

"Well, neither do those maintenance guys. We're too smart for them, that's all. Just last week the maintenance guys came through and we've been here for months now and they still don't know we're here."

These were two guys who drove up the first Friday of every month to check the house, flush the toilets, check the smoke alarms, that kind of thing. They were easy to evade, and so Brady and Nessa evaded them.

The very point she now made. "We know they're coming," she said. "They're not searching the place, they're just doing their rounds. Those other bozos suddenly showed up when we didn't know they were coming, they went all through the house with us underfoot—"

"They never went upstairs."

"They went all over downstairs, Brady, and they never even got a glimpse of us, and you say they're serious ?"

"They'll be back," he insisted.

"Not this winter," she insisted right back. "And I don't want to still be here next spring."

"Where do you want to be?"

She looked at him. It was a disquieting look, and it went on quite a long while, during which she consumed most of the rest of the greasy food on her plate. He instinctively felt he shouldn't speak during this examination, shouldn't do anything but let her work out her own thought processes inside her own head. He had no idea why she was so discontented with their paradise — she hadn't been at first — but if he just kept very quiet and very attentive, maybe this whole thing would blow over and they'd get back to the way things used to be. Having fun. Not worrying about anything. Not nagging people all the time.

She licked grease from her fingers. They never could remember napkins, so she rubbed her fingers down the leg of her jeans. She said, "I want to go home."

" What ?"

"Not right away," she said.

"Wha, wha, we, you, I—"

"But I want to see something first, be somewhere, have things going on around me."

"We, we—"

"I think," she said, "I'd like to go south first, maybe down to Florida. Then we can circle back and head for home."

"Nebraska? Nessa? Numbnuts, Nebraska?"