Donald Westlake - Why Me?

"I'll remember that," Dortmunder said. "You want a beer?"

"Yes, I do," Stan said. "Hiya, Kelp."

Kelp was on the sofa, watching the end of a prime time rerun. "Whadaya say, Stan?"

"I bought a car," Stan said.

"You bought a car?"

"A Honda with a Porsche engine. The thing flies. You gotta throw out a parachute to stop it."

"I believe you."

Dortmunder came back with Stan's beer as the doorbell rang again, and this time it was Ralph Winslow and Jim O'Hara, the two guys Dortmunder had met at that first aborted meeting at the O.J. Everybody said hello, and Dortmunder went back to the kitchen for two more beers. On his return, handing them out, he said, "We're all here but Tiny."

"He won't be along," Ralph Winslow said. He didn't sound unhappy.

"Why not?"

"He's in the hospital, sick. When the cops raided the O.J. last night, Tiny was alone in the back room with all those files listing everybody's crimes and whereabouts and whatnot for Wednesday night."

Dortmunder stared. "Did the cops get all that?"

"No," Winslow said. "That's just it. Tiny barricaded the door. He didn't have any matches to burn the papers, so he ate them. All of them. The last batch, the cops broke through the door, they're beating on him with sticks, he's chewing and swallowing and fighting them off with chairs."

O'Hara said, "The word is, he'll be in the hospital at least a month."

Winslow said, "Some of the guys are getting up a collection. I mean, that was a noble act."

"I'll contribute," Dortmunder said. "In a kind of a way, I almost feel some responsibility, you know?"

"I hate to tell you this, John," Stan Murch said, "but even I began to think you were the guy with the mark on his back."

"Everybody did," Dortmunder said. His eye was level, his voice was clear, the hand holding his beer can was steady. "I don't blame people, it was just one of those things. It was circumstantial evidence."

"Don't tell me about circumstantial evidence," O'Hara said. "I did a nickel-dime once for hitting a lumberyard safe, and all they had on me was sawdust in my cuffs."

"That's terrible," Kelp said. "Where'd they nab you?"

"In the lumberyard office."

"So that's the way it was with me," Dortmunder said. "And the bad mood everybody was in, I didn't dare come out and explain myself."

"Wasn't that Klopzik something?" Winslow grinned in something like admiration, swirling his beer can as though it might contain ice cubes to clink. "Working both sides against the middle. Wired up for the cops, and he knocked over that jeweler all along."

"Without even taking the Byzantine Fire," O'Hara said. "A thing as famous as that. How dumb can you get?"

"It's coming on," Kelp said.

So they all sat down to watch. The anchorman introduced the story, and then a tape of the six o'clock report came on, starting with Tony Costello seated at a desk in front of a blue drape, his head and right hand bandaged but his expression cheerfully triumphant. He said, "The intensive nationwide search for the missing Byzantine Fire came to an abrupt and bizarre end this afternoon, back where it all started, at Skoukakis Credit Jewelers on Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park."

Then there was film of the jewelry store, showing Tony Costello—unbandaged—with a woman identified as Irene Skoukakis, wife of the store's owner. While a voice-over narration explained that Benjamin Arthur Klopzik himself, object of the most intense manhunt in New York Police Department history, had phoned this reporter earlier today with the astounding revelation that had led to the recovery of the missing priceless ruby ring, the camera showed Costello watch Irene Skoukakis unlock the front door and then go inside and open the safe. The camera panned in close as she pulled open the tray—here's where the voice-over repeated Dortmunder's story about having left the Byzantine Fire behind—and there it was, the goddam ruby, big as life, huge and gleaming and red amid the little gold menagerie.

Next there came a cut back to the bandaged Costello at his desk, saying, "Naturally, we informed both the police and the FBI the instant we'd verified Klopzik's story. The result was, to this reporter at least, something of an astonishment."

More film: official cars slamming to a stop in front of the jeweler's, uniformed and plainclothes cops milling around. And then the astonishment: film showing a man identified by the voice-over as FBI Agent Malcolm Zachary, on the sidewalk in front of the store, in the process of punching Tony Costello in the face. Costello went down and, while the camera ground on, the stout form of Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna came running into the scene and started kicking the fallen journalist.

"Holy cow," Dortmunder said.

Another cut back to Costello at his desk, now looking serious and judicious and just a teeny bit sly. "This unfortunate incident," he told the viewers at home, "merely shows how tempers can fray when the heat is really on. This network has already accepted the apologies of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Mayor of the City of New York, and I personally have accepted the apologies of Agent Zachary and Chief Inspector Mologna, both of whom have been granted leaves of absence for reasons of health. In all of this, only one minor element truly pains me, and that was Chief Inspector Mologna's reference to this reporter, in the heat of the moment, as a 'dirty Wop. Now, it happens that I am one hundred percent Irish extraction, though of course that doesn't matter one way or the other, but even if I weren't Irish, even if I were Italian which I am not, or if I were a Scotsman, such as Jack Mackenzie, my opposite number on another network, no matter what ethnic group I might belong to, I would still have to be saddened and distressed at this suggestion of ethnic stereotyping. Even though I'm Irish, I must say I would be proud to be called a Wop or a Dago or anything else such misguided people might choose to say. Some of my best friends are Italian. Back to you, Sal."

"Right on," said Andy Kelp, as Dortmunder switched off the set.

"Okay," Stan Murch said. "Enough of the past. We ready to talk about the future?"

Kelp said, "Sure we are. You got a caper, Stan?"

"Something very nice," Stan said. "I'll drive, of course. Ralph, there's some very tough locks to get through."

"I'm your man," Ralph Winslow said.

"Jim, Andy, there'll be climbing and carrying."

"Sure thing," Kelp said, and Jim O'Hara, his prison gray already receding, said, "I'm ready to get back into action. Believe me."

"And, John," Stan said, turning to Dortmunder, "we're gonna need a detailed plan. You feel good?"

"I feel very good," Dortmunder said. It was too bad he couldn't tell the world about his greatest triumph, but since his greatest triumph had turned out to be no more than a circle in which he wound up putting his most magnificent haul back where he'd found it, maybe it was just as well to keep it to himself. Still, a triumph is a triumph is a triumph. "In fact," he said, "I would say I'm at the beginning of a lucky streak."