Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

Very strange guy, this Jacques Perly. A private detective. Did people pay him in goods instead of money?

Dortmunder went back to the front of the building and was about to let himself out the street door when he glanced again at that ramp going up. The light source, dim but useful, came from up there.

Would Kelp have checked out the second floor? No. Something told him that Andy Kelp was long gone from this neighborhood. Probably he figured Dortmunder wouldn't be agile enough to get out that window and clear of trouble and so would be somewhere in custody right about now, meaning he'd not be a good person to stand next to for some little while. Dortmunder didn't blame him; if the situation were reversed, he himself would be halfway to Philadelphia.

But what about that ramp? As long as he was here, inside this place, shouldn't he at least take a look-see?

Yes. He walked up the ramp, which curved sharply to the right then straightened along the front wall. This concrete area, just wide enough to K-turn a car in, was flanked on the left by a cream-colored stone wall with a very nice dark wood door. High light fixtures provided the low gleam he'd seen from the street through those industrial windows now high to his right.

Was this nice wooden door locked? Yes. Did it matter? No.

Inside, he found a neat and modest receptionist's office illuminated by a grow light over a side table of small potted plants, all of them legal. He ambled through, and the next door wasn't locked, which made for a change.

This was Jacques Perly's office, very large and very elaborate, spread beneath that skylight. Aware that a private eye might have additional security here and there — even Eppick had had a couple of surprises in his office — Dortmunder tossed the room in slow and careful fashion, using his little flashlight only when he had to, very mindful of that skylight observing him from just above his head.

There were a couple of fruits from this endeavor. On a round oak table in an area away from the main desk, he found notes in a legal pad in crisp tiny handwriting that described the security arrangements to be made to accommodate the coming presence of the Chicago chess set, and those arrangements were elaborate indeed. He also found a copier, switched it on, and copied the pages of notes, putting the copies into a side pocket of his jacket and the legal pad back precisely where he'd picked it up.

There was nothing else much of interest in Perly's office; not to Dortmunder, anyway. He left it and looked at the receptionist's room. Would there be anything of use in here? Very unlikely, but as long as he was passing through he might as well check it out.

It was in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk that he found it, tucked in the back of the drawer under various cold medicines and lipstick tubes. It was a garage door opener. It was dusty, it was clearly the second opener the company always gives you when the garage door is installed, but it had never been needed and so was long ago forgotten.

If this was the right opener. Dortmunder stepped out to the parking area at the top of the ramp, aimed the opener at the garage door down there, and thumbed it. Immediately the door started to lift, so he thumbed it again and it stopped, with a four-inch-wide gap. A third push of the thumb and back down it went, to close the gap.

Well, this was something. The garage door wasn't quiet, God knew, but it was a possible way in. Dortmunder tucked the opener into the same pocket as the security notes, closed the office door behind himself, and went home.

ALL DAY SATURDAY Fiona fretted over tonight's GRODY party. How had she ever let Brian talk her into inviting Mrs. W to March Madness? And what had possessed Mrs. W to say yes?

Was there any way out of this? Could she pretend to be sick? No; Brian would just escort Mrs. W to the party anyway. And if there was one thing in Fiona's fevered imaginings worse than being at GRODY's March Madness party with Mrs. W at her side, it was the thought of Mrs. W at the party without Fiona beside her, to explain it, to smooth it as much as possible, to shield the woman, if that could be done.

So what could she do to make this not happen? Could she lie to everybody? Lie to Mrs. W that the party had been canceled, lie to Brian that Mrs. W had changed her mind. No; nobody would believe her. Fiona was not at all a good liar — an unfortunate trait in a lawyer — and they'd both see through her at once.

And then, how to explain why she'd lied? Well, she couldn't, could she? She could barely explain it to herself, because it wasn't merely the mismatch of GRODY and Mrs. W, it was more than that, it was…

Brian.

There wasn't anything wrong with Brian, not really. He and Fiona made a very good couple, easygoing, supportive, not demanding. His passion for exotic cookery remained a happy surprise, though somehow not quite as exciting, a teeny bit less of a treat, now that she'd left Feinberg and started a job with normal hours. (She would never mention that to Brian, of course.)

The problem, which she could barely articulate inside her own head because it made her feel guilty, the problem was class. Brian did not come from the same world as Fiona. His people did not live where her people lived, did not school where her people schooled, did not vacation where her people vacationed, did not buy suits — if they bought suits — where her people bought suits. His was a rougher, scruffier, less settled universe of people who hadn't made it, generation after generation, with no prospect for future change. When she was with Brian, Fiona was, in the very slightest way, barely noticeable to the naked eye, slumming.

If she were honest — and she wanted to be — she'd have to admit that her own great-grandfather, Hiram Hemlow, father of her dear grandfather Horace, had come from that same class, the strivers without connections. The stolen chess set might have helped Hiram move up out of the unwashed, but that opportunity was lost.

What had finally made the difference in the Hemlow family was her grandfather Horace, who happened to be an inventive genius. With the prestige and money he made through his inventions he could cut through the nearly invisible barriers of American class, so that the generation after his, the generation of Fiona's father and her aunts and uncles, with money behind them, however fresh, could attend the right schools, move into the right neighborhoods, make the right friends.

The family had moved smoothly into the upper middle class the way it's done in America, not with family, not with history, but with money. And now, a member of barely the third generation at this level, Fiona could look at Brian Clanson and know, with shame and embarrassment but without the slightest question, that he was beneath her.

The knowledge had her tongue-tied, and the further knowledge that she must very soon display Brian to Mrs. W as her chosen escort only made things worse. Mrs. W, as Fiona had every reason to know, was about as class-conscious as anyone she'd ever met. That rambling vitriolic memoir the woman was writing reeked of it. Was Fiona, having acted against her better judgment in a moment of weakness, about to make Mrs. W despise her forever?

Through all of her fretting Brian, of course, remained oblivious, continuing blithely along with his own usual Saturday morning routine, which was to commandeer the big room while he watched the Saturday morning cartoons, an activity he claimed counted as work but which she knew he secretly enjoyed for its own sake, the more childish the better.

Confined to the bedroom with the door closed — it didn't help that much — she paced and worried and searched in vain for a route out of her dilemma, and, finally, a little before eleven, she decided to phone Mrs. W even though she had no idea what she intended to say. But she had to do something, had to start somewhere; perhaps hearing Mrs. W's voice would give her inspiration.