Donald Westlake - The Road To Ruin

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Chester, what’s the layout?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Chester said. “It isn’t easy. I wish it was, but it isn’t.”

Tiny said, “Just tell us.”

“Sure,” Chester said. “It’s a big place, don’t know how many thousands acres, rolling land, some woods, different buildings, roads. It’s like its own little country. In fact, it’s almost the entire county.”

“Everything,” Kelp suggested, “except the ‘R.’”

“Uh, yeah,” Chester said, and told the rest: “Part of it used to be a dairy farm, there’s still a part with horses, there’s these special buildings for the cars, other buildings for the other collections—”

Kelp said, “Collections?”

“This guy’s a collector,” Chester explained. “Not just cars. Some of the collections he keeps in the main house, like the music boxes and the cuckoo clocks, but some have their own buildings, like the model trains and the nineteenth-century farm equipment.”

Dortmunder said, “Wait a second, Chester. While we’re there taking these cars, is there stuff we should be putting in the cars?”

Kelp said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Small, valuable, fit right in the car, backseat and trunk. Chester? They got stuff like that?”

Chester said, “I’m not a collector, I don’t know what all that stuff is worth.”

“We know people that do know,” Dortmunder told him. “Give us a list of the collections. Not now, later.”

“Okay.”

Tiny said, “Okay, never mind what we put in the cars, we know we can deal with that. But let’s say we got the cars , these six cars you think are the best, worth a lot of cash. Who do we sell them to?”

“Insurance company,” Chester said, so promptly it was obvious he’d been thinking about it.

Dortmunder said, “That’s what I figured, too. That’s the natural customer.”

Kelp said, “And they don’t argue, insurance companies, all they want is to minimize the expense.”

Stan said, “They do cooperate with the authorities, though.”

Kelp shrugged. “We expect that, we account for that. But all along they know, they give us ten percent of the value, it’s better than giving Monroe Hall a hundred percent.”

“Twenty percent,” Dortmunder said.

“No, John,” Kelp said, “they gotta reimburse the owner the full value.”

“Twenty percent to us ,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp perked up. “You think so? We could hit ‘em for that much?”

Chester said, “All they have to do is say no once, we pick the least valuable of the six, put it in a field, burn it up, call the insurance company, say you can go pick up that one right now, and by the way, the rest’ll cost you twenty-five percent.”

Admiring, Dortmunder said, “Chester, that’s pretty tough. Somewhere you learned to be a hell of a negotiator.”

“From watching Monroe Hall,” Chester said. “He’d coin-toss his mother for a returnable soda bottle, and knife her if he lost.”

Stan said, “So we just need a place to stash these cars while everybody talks it over.”

Tiny looked doubtful. “Then it’s like a kidnapping,” he said. “It’s step after step, the phone calls, the ransom, the pickup, the return.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. “We can handle that.”

“No problem,” Kelp said.

Tiny considered that. “Maybe,” he decided. “Maybe no problem. But before that there’s a problem.” He turned to Chester. “Tell us about the problem.”

“Well, the security,” Chester said.

Tiny nodded. “There’s always gonna be security,” he said, “where you got valuable stuff.”

“But they beefed it up,” Chester said, “since the scandal broke. You got a lotta people out there, not just us, wouldn’t mind chastising Monroe Hall. He’s what they call a pariah. So now they got electric fence around the whole compound, miles of it, motion sensors, big lights that light up, private guards.”

“So the first question is,” Stan said, “how do we drive a bunch of cars off the property without anybody seeing us or hearing us.”

“Well, no,” Chester said. “The first question is, how do you get on the property.”

“I give up,” Stan said. “How do we?”

“I never planned any stuff,” Chester told him, “back in my life of crime. I was just the driver.”

“So what you’re saying,” Stan suggested, “is, you don’t know how we get in.”

“Come on, Stan,” Chester said. “You said you’re the driver. Do you ever know stuff like that?”

“I leave that to John here,” Stan said.

Chester nodded. “Good. Then so do I.”

Everybody looked at Dortmunder. He nodded, accepting the weight. “So we gotta see the place,” he said.

They looked alert, watching him, waiting.

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “So the first thing we do, we steal a car.”

THEY WHILED AWAY THE empty hours in the little brown Taurus singing the union anthem:

“Who will always guide the way?

Give us comfort in the fray?

Gain us benefits and pay?

The ACWFFA!”

At which point Mac interrupted, saying, “Here comes the Healey.” He was in the backseat, looking toward the guard-shacked entrance to the Monroe Hall compound that stretched away behind them.

“And here we go again,” Buddy said, pessimistic as hell, but he did switch on the Taurus engine.

“You know it’s just the wife,” Ace said, up front in the passenger seat.

“It is,” Mac said, seeing her blond hair fly as the Healey picked up speed once it reached the county road, coming this way as the compound’s gate closed behind her.

“Follow her,” Ace said.

Buddy said, “Again? Why? What’s the point?”

“Maybe he’s hiding in there,” Ace suggested.

Buddy snorted. “In a two-seater? Where? Besides, he never did before.”

The Healey zipped past then, still accelerating, and Buddy’s point was made. The Healey was so small and so open you could see the wife’s brown suede purse on the passenger seat to her left, the Healey being a British car, with right-hand steering. It was a beautiful car, in truth, small and neat, over fifty years old and still looking like a spring chicken. It was topless, with a wide rectangular windshield—windscreen, its makers would say—edged in chrome and tilted back. The slightly raised air scoop on the hood, like a retroussé nose, had twin low flaring nostrils over a gleaming grill shaped like an Irish harp. The body was a creamy white, like very good porcelain, and the fenders, standing out to the side of the body, were arched like white leaping dolphins. With the beautiful long-haired blonde at the wheel, flashing through the lush green Pennsylvania countryside on the first day of June, it was a sight to make you glad there’s evolution.

Mac and Buddy and Ace had seen that sight enough—in fact, too much. What they wanted to see, and so far had not seen, was the man himself at the wheel, Monroe Hall, come out to meet his judgment.

Once or twice a week the wife emerged, usually in the Healey though sometimes in one of the other cars, the 1967 Lamborghini Miura or the 1955 Morgan Plus 4, for example, and in her automobile of choice she would drive apparently aimlessly around the rural back roads surrounding the compound.

Mac and Buddy and Ace had discussed among themselves whether or not these trips actually were aimless, merely the random actions of a bored woman stuck in a gilded cage the size of Catalina Island, or if there were some purpose to them after all. So far as they knew, she’d never stopped anywhere on any of these jaunts, never met anybody, never did anything but drive around for an hour or so, and then back to the Monroe Hall compound.