Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

Won't they come to this house, too? A good thing they started their work over there. Nessa and Chick wouldn't be able to leave this vicinity while their car was bottled up in that garage, but at least they'd have time to erase their presence from this house before any of the cleaners arrived.

There wouldn't be much evidence of their presence to eliminate, in fact, since Nessa and Chick had only slipped past the locked rear gate and into the compound last night. Driving northward, she had told him about the big empty house in the Massachusetts woods, and how Brady had found the way to circumvent the lock, which she could now do as well. She told him about the people who'd showed up at the place to choose somewhere to hide a valuable chess set they planned to bring up, but then how they never did return, with or without anything of value.

"I still think they're bozos," she'd said last night, "but what else've we got to do? We'll stop by there, see if they actually ever did show up with that chess set, sleep in a nice bed, defrost some of the food there, and take off tomorrow."

"Then let's go to Ohio," Chick had said, for no real reason, and she'd said, "Sure. Why not?"

Why not? One place was as good as another, until it would be time to get serious. In the meantime, that chess set might have come in handy, but of course it hadn't been here. If there was one thing Nessa had learned so far in her travels it was this: Bozos are bozos.

AS BRIAN SAW it, the problem was how to make Mother Mean, the new consort for the Reverend Twisted, recognizably enough the Wicked Witch of the West for the viewer to get it but not so recognizable that all the property rights lawyers of the world would rise up en masse to smite him, and so he was hard at work in his octagonal office at GRODY late this Monday morning, forgetting all about lunch, deeply engrossed in his petty piracy, when someone knocked on the frame of his doorless doorway.

Now what? Looking around with that sudden spasm of guilt known to all pilferers, he saw standing there in his doorway what looked very much like a plainclothes detective, fortyish, a bulky body in a rumpled suit and tie. But he couldn't be, could he? A detective?

"Help you?"

"Brian Clanson?"

"Guilty," Brian said, with a leftover leer.

The man drew a narrow billfold from his inside jacket pocket, flipped it open, and showed Brian an overly designed police badge; too busy. "Detective Penvolk," he said. "I'd like you to come with me, if you would."

More startled than frightened, at least at first, Brian said, "But I'm working here, I…"

"It won't take long," Detective Penvolk assured him. "You can just answer a few questions for us."

"What questions?"

"Mr. Clanson," the detective said, with a sudden bit of steel in his voice, "we prefer our interviews in settings other than this."

"Well, that made sense. In truth, Brian would have preferred his entire work experience in a setting other than this. However, it didn't seem as though he were going to be given many options at the moment, so Brian obediently rose, saying, "Will this take long?"

"Oh, I don't think so," the detective said. He turned to look both ways along the corridor, then said, "You probably know the shortest way out of here."

"Probably," Brian agreed. "Unless they did some carpentry last night." Nodding to the right, he said, "It should be that way."

The corridors were too narrow to walk two abreast, though people meeting could squeeze past one another. The occasional pregnancy among the staffers was usually blamed on the corridors. Brian therefore led the way, the detective followed him, and Brian said over his shoulder, "Could you tell me what this is all about?"

"Oh, let it wait till we get there," the detective advised.

Brian's boss, Sean Kelly, had his office on the right along here, an elongated rectangle that looked as though it wanted to grow up to be a bowling alley. Sean was at his Star Trek replica control panel in there when Brian walked by, and he was deep in conversation with Detective Penvolk's older gloomier brother. Sean rolled his eyes as Brian walked by, though Brian had no idea what he meant by that.

Had something bad happened during March Madness? There hadn't been any overdoses, had there? That was so old century. Still, something was going on, if one detective wants to talk to Brian and another detective wants to talk to Sean.

As they continued down the angling corridor, Brian dropped unconsciously into a prison shuffle, and said over his shoulder, "The reason I asked, I mean, what this is all about, you know, this kind of thing could make you nervous. I mean, not knowing. What it's all about."

"Oh, don't let it worry you," the detective advised. "If you're innocent, you've got nothing to be afraid of."

Irrepressible at all the wrong times, "Innocent?" Brian asked. "Moi?"

Detective Penvolk chuckled. Faintly.

WHEN KELP STEERED the Colossus up to the closed gate to Mr. Hemlow's compound in Massachusetts around one-thirty that afternoon, the van was already there, parked in front of the gate. Stan and Judson, with all the time in the world, strolled back and forth on the recently snow-cleared drive, working out the kinks after all those hours in the car.

Looking grim, Kelp said, "I'm not gonna ask him," as he pulled in behind the van.

"I will," Tiny said.

"He'll only tell you," Kelp warned him.

"Then I'll know something," Tiny said.

They all climbed out of the Colossus and said hellos back and forth, and then Tiny said, "Kelp wants to know how you went to Queens and got here first."

"I don't care one way or the other," Kelp said.

"If you're headed north," Stan told them all, "that's the best way out of midtown. You take the bridge and Northern Boulevard, then the BQE to Grand Central to the Triboro Bridge—"

"And there you are back in Manhattan," Kelp said.

"They call it Triboro because it goes to three boroughs," Stan said. "You take it north to the Bronx, to the Major Deegan, which happens to be the Thruway, which is the widest fastest road in any of the boroughs. Meanwhile, when you do it your way, you're in traffic jams on the FDR, traffic jams on the Harlem River Drive and traffic jams on the West Side Highway, and you're not even outa Manhattan yet. Also, I suppose you had to fill the tank on that thing six, seven times to get here."

"It is a little thirsty, this beast," Kelp admitted, and spread his hands, forgiving everybody. "But we're all here now, so what difference does it make?"

Judson, admiration in his voice, said, "Stan is one heck of a driver."

"We know," Kelp said.

"Andy," Dortmunder said, before any tension could develop, "you're supposed to buzz them now, aren't you?"

"Right."

Kelp went off to the intercom mounted on the post beside the gate, and Dortmunder said to Stan, "There's a flat clear spot we found the last time in there. That's where we'll switch."

Stan, not sounding thrilled, said, "And I get to drive the monster."

"It's not so bad," Dortmunder told him. "It's kinda like driving a waterbed."

As Kelp got off the intercom, the two halves of the gate swung silently outward. "They say they got lunch ready for us," he said.

"That's a good thing," Tiny said.

They climbed back into the vehicles and drove through, the van moving over to let the Colossus go first. Behind them as they went, the gate closed itself.

Soon Kelp stopped once more, at a spot where, on the left side of the driveway, there was a small clearing. There might have been a little house there at one time, or just a turnaround for cars, or possibly extra parking for parties. Whatever the original idea, the space now was just a small clearing without the usual towering pines, the land at this time of year showing hardy weeds growing up through old snow.