Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

"Oh, I'm certain he must. His co-workers are such a jolly lot. Especially that Sean. I quite enjoyed myself with them all."

"Well, your costume was wonderful," Fiona said. "Everyone was just in love with it."

Mrs. W came as close as she could to a simper. "I must admit," she said, "I was pleased at the effect it had. Do you suppose Brian would like to go back to university?"

Surprised, Fiona said, "He has his degree, Mrs. W In broadcast communications."

"Oh, really?" Mrs. W seemed quite interested. "One obtains a degree in broadcast communications, does one?"

As Fiona looked for a response to that, the phone on Mrs. W's desk tinkled, and she picked it up: "Yes, Lucy? Thank you, dear, I'll speak to him." Smiling at Fiona and holding up one finger to indicate that this wouldn't take long, she pressed the button on the phone and said, "Yes, good morning, Jay. How are you this morning? Really? Why's that? What ? My God! Jay, how could that— That's horrible, Jay. For all of us, yes. What do the police say? Have they no idea — Yes, of course, of course. Well, obviously. Two o'clock. I will be there, Jay."

Mrs. W hung up and turned toward Fiona a thunderstruck face. At this moment, she looked less like the wicked witch of the west and more like Munch's Scream . "Unbelievable," she said.

Fiona, bursting with curiosity, said, "What is it, Mrs. W? What's happened?"

"The Chicago chess set has been stolen. '

"Oh, my God," Fiona said, and inside she was saying, Oh, my God. They did it.

BECAUSE OF ITS proximity to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge over to Queens, the easternmost part of East Sixtieth Street is pretty well lined with parking garages, for those members of the bridge and tunnel crowd who prefer to keep their Manhattan driving experience to a minimum; say, seventeen feet. The garages are large, and full, and given to heavy turnover of both customer and employee, so any one of them would make a good place to stash, for just one overnight, an anonymous little van full of chess pieces, if you didn't mind paying the exorbitant fee, just this once.

Dortmunder had not accompanied the van last night — that had been Stan and Judson's duty — but he knew what to look for to find the right garage, and that was Tiny. Yes, there he stood, midblock, looking from a distance like a grand piano about to be hoisted through an upper-floor window.

Approaching, yawning — that had been a late night last night, and this meet was scheduled for 10 a.m. — Dortmunder eventually saw Judson beyond Tiny, and at that moment the kid saw him back and grinned and waved, which caused Tiny to turn around and acknowledge Dortmunder's approach, but did not cause him to grin and wave. He did, however, say, "Kelp's not here yet."

"He's probably waiting for the doctor to get out of the car," Dortmunder said, and to Judson he said, "Stan in there?"

"He should be right out."

"And you got the directions."

Patting his shirt pocket, Judson said, "Andy wrote it all out for me, gave it to me when we met last night."

Tiny said, "What about Kelp calling Eppick to call the guy, make sure the house is open?"

Dortmunder said, "He was gonna do that this morning, before he went for wheels."

"It's a hell of a distance to go," Tiny suggested, "to stash one box."

"Well, its not a stash, Tiny—"

Judson said, "Here comes Andy."

"— it's more of a delivery. The guy that it's his house, he's the customer."

"And we do home deliveries," Tiny commented. "That's real good of us."

Now out of the bowels of the garage came last night's small black van, Stan at the wheel, as simultaneously there came to a halt nearby a bright red Cadillac Colossus with MD plates, an SUV large enough for the rear seat to accommodate a basketball team; or Tiny.

"See you up there," Dortmunder told Judson, waved to Stan at the wheel of the van, and turned to climb into the front passenger seat of the Colossus, as Tiny occupied the rear seat in much the way the Wehrmacht once occupied France.

The van moved off first, Kelp following it down the block to the corner, where the light, for once, was green. The van went straight through the intersection, keeping to the left lane for the bridge approach.

Following, Kelp said, "What's he doing? He's going to Queens."

"Maybe he knows something," Dortmunder said.

"Maybe I do, too," Kelp said, keeping to the right, headed for the northbound entrance to FDR Drive. "We're not going east to Queens, we're going north to New England."

Dortmunder twisted around, to look back past the bulk of Tiny, but the van was already out of sight. "I wonder why he did that," he said.

"We'll ask him up at the compound," Kelp said. "We'll have to wait for them a while, though."

NESSA REACHED BEHIND her to clamp Chick's thrusting hip. "A car!" she cried, her words half muffled by the pillow.

The metronome that was Chick abruptly clenched. "A what?"

"A car! See what it is."

Chick wasted seconds staring around the bedroom, as though expecting to see some car drive through here, but then at last he did hop out of her and out of bed and over to stare out the window. "It is a car!" he confirmed. "Two cars!"

Could this be the bozos with the chess set after all? Nessa didn't believe it for a second. "Time to get dressed," she said, feeling grim.

There'd been a few men in Nessa's life since, last November, four months ago, she'd switched from the dreamer Brady to the completely unreliable Hughie the roadie, and if she were the contemplative sort, she would be contemplating right now the fact that her men had not been getting better along the way. Chick, for instance, did not have Brady's deftness with locks, nor Hughie's cleverness and constant cash flow, nor much of anything else to recommend him except a large strong tireless body and an amiable willingness to let Nessa lead him by the nose or some other part, but he was an easy companion in her slow drifting progress toward somewhere or other, so what the hell.

Nessa had not so much hardened in the last four months as jelled toward the person she would eventually be. Leaving Numbnuts with Brady had not been a serious life decision, but just a fun goofy thing to do, on a par with cutting school or piling into a car with a bunch of other kids some summer night to go skinny-dipping out to Lake Gillespie. Leaving Brady for Hughie the roadie had been almost as impulsive and unthinking, but calculation had begun to enter her head: the indolent and unfocused Brady was proving to be useless in her life, but Hughie appeared to be a man with uses. And when he too in very different ways disappointed, there turned out to be somebody else. By now she had become serious enough to understand that she was not yet actually serious, but would be. There was still time to grow up. At the moment, but not forever, she was with Chick, who was gaping out the window, at a loss.

So she pulled on her jeans, crossed to the window next to Chick, said, "Put something on ," and looked out and down at two simple sedans parked in front of the garage and, did they but know it, parked also in front of Chick's dented gray PT Cruiser, which was at the moment stashed inside that garage. Another complication, maybe.

A total of four people, all bundled up because in Massachusetts it was still definitely winter in late March, had climbed out of the two cars and, as Nessa watched and behind her Chick finally put his clothes on, the four began to pull other things out of the cars to carry with them off to the guesthouse, away to the right. Mops, brooms, squeegees, buckets holding cans and boxes of cleaning supplies.

Servants, these were, two men and two women, come to clean the guesthouse. We're about to have guests.