Дональд Уэстлейк - A Good Story and Other Stories

Joe Docker stood in the doorway, listening to the sound of Reverend Martin trotting down the stairs, and he felt a great loss, a great ache, and a great emptiness, and he had to remind himself that he was about to become the most famous con man in history, that he was now immortal.

Lefty said, “We gotta pack.” He pushed by Joe. “Come on, Joe, start packin’. We gotta be gone by the time Paul gets back.”

Joe made a sudden decision. “Lefty,” he said, “you pack and get away. I’ve got one more thing to take care of. Remember that diner we stopped at on the way in?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll meet you there. If I’m not there by sundown, I’ll meet you at George’s in Detroit just as soon as I can.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Lefty, this is only half of it, only half the take. The rest is downtown, in the bank, in the hospital account.”

“You goin’ after that, too?”

Joe Docker laughed. “Sure, I’m going after that. We don’t want to leave anything behind, do we?”

“Why can’t I go with you?”

“Lefty, I usually know what I’m doing, don’t I?”

“Yeah, sure, only—”

“Well, I know what I’m doing this time, too. Now you get moving. I’m going down to the bank.”

“Okay.”

Lefty trudged away toward his room, and the Reverend Wimple, looking very solemn, very intent and perhaps a bit frightened as well, left his home and turned toward downtown. He walked all the way, graciously refusing rides from various members of his congregation, and arrived at the bank long before closing time. He filled out a slip, took it to a window, and deposited the check in the special hospital account. Then he walked across to where a short, pudgy gentleman in a wrinkled suit was filling out a withdrawal slip, and said, “You’ve been following me for the last three weeks. Would you like to walk with me this time?”

The pudgy man looked surprised. He considered denial, but then shrugged. “Okay,” he said.

“Fine.”

As they walked out of the bank together, the pudgy man said, “Make a withdrawal?”

“No. A deposit. I deposited the money for the Pettigrew diamond. By the way, my name is Joe Docker.”

“Bert Smith.”

“You Federal?”

“No,” said Bert Smith. “State. You got a record, Joe?”

“Long as your arm. I’m a bigger plum than you know. I’m an escaped con.”

Bert raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Are you the only one on this case? I mean, at the moment.”

“Yeah. Why?”

“My partner’s lamming.”

Bert stopped. He looked surprised. “Was that a dummy check?”

“No, it was the real check. Lefty isn’t taking anything out of this town except Lefty.”

Bert looked hurriedly around, as though he expected to find a pay phone on a nearby tree.

“Forget it,” Joe told him. “Lefty’s an expert at cutting out. You’ll never even get a whiff of him.”

Bert stared hard at Joe Docker, and then shrugged. “You’re an oddball,” he said.

They started to walk again. “I suppose I am,” admitted Joe. “Tell me, my assistant, Reverend Martin — is he a cop, too?”

“No, he’s a regular minister. But he’s there to keep an eye on you.”

“How did you get onto me?”

“Combination of events. Your Archbishop got a letter telling all about what a great job you were doing. He’d never heard of you. Then, we got an anonymous phone tip that something was buggy in the Lanesville Rural Church. We put one and one together and got you. But now I’ve got nothing on you. Not on this job, anyway. You deposited the haul.”

“That’s right.”

“You could of told me to go fly a kite. You could of taken a plane, and by the time I found out you were wanted for prison break, you’d be nothing but a memory.”

“I could even have cashed the check in some other town.”

Bert nodded. “You could have. Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s with your partner?”

“Look. I don’t understand myself why I did it. How could I get him to understand? I told him I’d meet him. I won’t make it. He’ll read the papers.”

They had reached Reverend Wimple’s house. Joe said, “Come on in.”

Bert said, “I intended to.”

Inside was pandemonium. Three uniformed cops, locals, were running around with fingerprint powder. Reverend Martin was pacing the floor, rubbing his hands agitatedly together. Miss Grace Pettigrew was sitting in a corner, talking away at the policemen, Reverend Martin, and the world in general, complaining about police inefficiency and stupidity and that this was the second time they had allowed a criminal who had swindled her to make good his escape. And, in state in the living room, sitting silently and majestically, was the Archbishop.

At Joe’s and Bert’s entrance, everybody shut up and stopped running around. The Archbishop rose and said, “You got him.”

Bert shook his head. “No. He went down to the bank, deposited the check, and came back here. He brought me. ”

Everyone looked amazed. The Archbishop was the first to recover. “Mister Wimple?” he said.

“Docker.”

“Is that your real name? I prefer Wimple. You impersonated a minister. At least, I have no record of your ordination. You weren’t sent here by me. Frankly, it was assumed that you were a swindler.”

“I realize that.”

“I’m told you have done very fine work during your stay here.”

Reverend Martin piped up, “Excellent work, Archbishop. Magnificent work.”

Grace Pettigrew scuttled close to Joe and stared in his face “If you weren’t here to steal my diamond, why did you come?”

“I did come to steal your diamond. I changed my mind.”

The Archbishop said, “You changed your mind?”

“Yes.”

Reverend Martin said, “Archbishop, don’t you suppose Mister uh, Docker, could be sent to the seminary and then continue as minister here?”

“I’m sorry,” said Joe Docker. “I’m wanted for prison break.”

There was general consternation, but the Archbishop waded through the startled chatter, took Joe Docker by the arms and gazed into his eyes. “You have good in you,” he said. “Some day, you will be a free man again.”

Joe nodded. “Two years. I’m due for parole. Unless they give me another sentence for the breakout.”

“In your absence,” said the Archbishop, “Reverend Martin will carry on for you. Your congregation will eagerly await your return.”

Grace Pettigrew was back. “We’ll hire the best lawyers. Expense means nothing.”

Joe looked at them. “Are you sure—”

A voice beside him said, with mild reproof, “Joe, you know how much I hate jail.”

Joe turned. “Lefty! What did you come back for?”

Lefty shrugged his shoulders and looked shifty and guilty. “Same reason you didn’t take the dough. No reason. I felt like it, and no locks to pick — everything is open.”

Bert Smith, state cop, tapped Joe Docker, wanted criminal, gently on the arm. “Reverend,” he said, “would you mind if I used your phone?”

There is a perennial cartoon idea which begins, “Two men on a desert island. One of them says...” And there follows a more or less funny gag line delivered by one of the men. This situation can be potentially funny because, after all, there are two people present. But how would it be if there were only one man on that desert island?

Jim Kilbride was one man on a desert island, the largest of a group of four islands off by themselves in the middle of the Pacific, south of the major sea lanes. A mile wide by a mile and a half long, the island was mainly unshaded sand, washed by the ocean during high tide, but with two small hillocks near its center on which grew stunted trees and dark green shrubbery. On the eastern side of the island there was a small curving indentation in the beach, forming a natural cove in miniature, a pool surrounded by a half-circle of sand and a half-circle of ocean. A few birds soared among the islands, calling to one another in raucous voices. The caws of the birds and the whisper of the surf against the beach were the only sounds in the world.