Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

On that note the meeting concluded, having worked out about as satisfactorily as the one just ending in the park downtown.

ANDY KELP CAME home from the department store wearing three suits and two coats. It wasn't really that cold out, but it was still better to wear them than to pay for them.

Anne Marie was at her computer on her desk in the bedroom. She looked at him and said, "Did you put on weight?"

"No," he said. "I put on wool. Let me get these clothes off."

"Okay," she said, and shut her computer down, and the phone rang.

Kelp gave it a look of dislike. "It's gotta be John," he said.

"You do your strip," she told him, "and I'll talk to John."

"Deal."

He got half his new wardrobe off when she said, "It is John, and it sounds like he really does have to talk to you."

"Then I suppose he does. Hello," he told the phone.

"We've got the place where it's gonna be."

"Where it's gonna be. But it isn't there now."

"No, but it's gonna be there soon, and you and me, we should look it over, look the place over before the thing shows up. A little easier now than later."

This was unfortunately true. Looking at Anne Marie, who had started her own striptease, Kelp said, "So where is this place?"

"Down on Gansevoort Street. An office down there."

"An office? Doesn't sound right."

"I'll give you the details, you know, in other circumstances."

"Okay, but…" Kelp looked wistfully toward Anne Marie. "Anne Marie and me, we had plans for this evening, maybe a movie… I tell you what."

"Tell me."

"There's a very trendy hotel down there on Gansevoort," Kelp said, "now that the area's gentrified. I could meet you there, in the bar there."

"Fine. When?"

"We should make it pretty late," Kelp said, and looked again at Anne Marie, who was smiling. "I'll meet you in the bar there at midnight," he said, and did, and saw Dortmunder already in position there at the bar.

Kelp had to admit, even seen from behind and across the room, slouched at the bar, John Dortmunder did not go with this setting. Any observant person in the joint would have taken one look at him in this environment and called the cops on general principles.

Fortunately, this hotel did not generally cater to observant persons. It was the kind of place that attracted rail-thin persons of several genders, all of whom sandpapered their cheekbones every evening before leaving their cave. Being unaware of the existence of any other people at all, none of this rather large and very loud mob of trendoids had noticed the creature from another species who had joined their revels. Dortmunder was in perfect concealment with this crowd.

And now there were two aliens at the bar, once Kelp climbed onto the fuschia stool beside him. The bartendress, an action figure in a skintight black dress, dropped a coaster bearing an ad for condoms on the bar in front of Kelp and said, with complete indifference, "Sir?"

Kelp looked at Dortmunder's drink, recognized it, and said, "I'll have what he's having."

"Ew." She rolled her eyes and slanked away.

Kelp observed Dortmunder's glass again, from which in fact Dortmunder was now drinking. "That's bourbon, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Two cubes?"

"Yeah." Dortmunder shrugged. "They don't like to leave bourbon all by itself around here," he explained. "They like to muffle it down a little."

Kelp looked up and down the bar and saw that the things in front of the other patrons didn't look so much like drinks as like extraterrestrials. Short extraterrestrials. "Gotcha," he said.

The bartendress might have felt sullied by having to serve a high-test drink, but she did it, and only charged fourteen dollars for the indignity, sliding a five and a one back at him from his original twenty. Kelp sipped his drink, found it to be as requested, and said, "Tell me about this office where they're gonna move the thing."

"It's some hotshot private detective named Perly," Dortmunder said. "What makes it a good place to stash the thing is what we'll find out."

"And the thing's gonna get there soon."

"That's the story."

"Probly in an armored car."

"Probly."

Kelp contemplated the situation, lubricating his brain muscles with a little more bourbon. "Tough to do an armored car on a city street," he said. "Those jobs are more for the countryside."

"Oh, you can do it," Dortmunder said, "but it takes explosives. I'd rather work more quiet than that."

"Oh, you know it." Kelp took a little more of his drink and said, "You look at this place on your way here?"

"No, I figured we oughta get the good news together."

"When do you want to do that?"

"When you finish your drink," Dortmunder said, because, it seemed, he'd finished his.

GANSEVOORT STREET IS part of the far West Village, an old seafaring section, an elbow of twisted streets and skewed buildings poked into the ribs of the Hudson River. The area is still called the Meatpacking District, though it's been more than half a century since the elevated coal-burning trains from the west came down the left fringe of Manhattan to the slaughterhouses here, towing many cattle cars filled with loud complaint. After the trains were no more, some cows continued to come down by truck, but their heart wasn't in it, and gradually almost an entire industry shriveled away into history.

Commerce hates a vacuum. Into the space abandoned by the doomed cows came small manufacturing and warehousing. Since the area sits next to the actual Greenwich Village, some nightlife grew as well, and when the grungy old nineteenth-century commercial buildings started being converted into pied-à-terres for movie stars, you knew all hope was gone.

Still, the Meatpacking District, even without much by way of the packing of meat, continues to present a varied countenance to the world, part residential, part trendy shops and restaurants, and part storage and light manufacturing. Into this mix Jacques Perly's address blended perfectly, as Dortmunder and Kelp discovered when they strolled down the block.

Perly had done nothing to gussy up the facade. It was a narrow stone building, less than thirty feet across, with a battered metal green garage door to the left and a gray metal unmarked door on the right. Factory-style square-paned metal windows stretched across the second floor, fronted by horizontal bands of narrow black steel that were designed not to look like prison bars, to let in a maximum of light and view, and to slice the fingers off anybody who grabbed them.

Faint light gleamed well back of those upstairs windows. The buildings to both sides were taller, with more seriously lit windows here and there. On the right was a four-story brick tenement that had undergone recent conversion to upscale living, with a very elaborate entrance doorway flanked by carriage lamps. The building on the left, three stories high and also brick, extended down to the corner, with shops on the street floor, plus a small door that would lead up to what looked like modest apartments above.

Dortmunder and Kelp stood surveying this scene a few minutes, being occasionally passed by indifferent pedestrians, they all bundled up and hustling because the wind was pretty brisk over here by the river, and then Kelp said, "You know, I read one time, if you're stuck with a decision you gotta make, there's rules."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Depending on circumstances, you pick the most active, the earliest in time, or the one on the left."

"That's what I was thinking, too," Dortmunder said.

"That house on the right there," Kelp said, "that's shielding a very valuable family."

"I know that."

"Whereas, on the left there, the top floor apartment on the right is dark."