He’d been standing there about five minutes when a distinguished gent in an astrakhan hat and white moustache and fur-collared coat paused in front of him, stuffed something into the breast pocket of Dortmunder’s overcoat, and said, “Cheer up, old chap. And a merry Christmas to you.” And walked on.
Dortmunder stared after him, nonplussed, then fingered his pocket and drew out a neatly folded dollar bill. “Well, Jesus H. Jumping Christ,” he said.
A car was honking. Dortmunder looked past the dollar and saw a tan Mercedes-Benz at the curb, and somebody inside it waving. Kelp?
Kelp. And, yes, the Mercedes had MD plates; from Connecticut, as it happened. Dortmunder trotted around to the passenger side, slid into the car, and felt dry warmth bask over him as Kelp shot the Mercedes forward. “Ahhh,” said Dortmunder.
“Impossible traffic,” Kelp said. “Even Stan Murch wouldn’t get anywhere in this stuff. I picked up this beast a block away, can you believe it? Took me that long just to come back.” He glanced over. “What’s with the dollar bill?”
Dortmunder was still holding it in his hand, and now he shoved it away in his side pocket. “I found it,” he said.
“No kidding. Maybe this is your lucky day.”
What an idea. “Yeah,” said Dortmunder.
“In fact,” Kelp said, “this is your lucky day.” Dortmunder closed his eyes. He could enjoy the comfort of the car, and just not listen to anything Kelp had to say.
“For instance,” Kelp said, “there’s that question of the painting, and what happens six months from now.”
“Four and a half,” Dortmunder said. His eyes were still closed.
“Okay, four and a half.”
“And I figure maybe I can leave the country,” Dortmunder said. “Go to South America, maybe. Me and May, we could open up a bar or something. Is the guy gonna follow us all over the world for twenty grand?”
“Yes,” said Kelp. “So long as they’re looking for the painting, they’ll look for you, and you know it.”
Inside his closed eyes, Dortmunder sighed. “You could let me at least have my little dreams,” he said.
“I got something better,” Kelp told him. “I got an out.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. Not unless you got the painting, and you don’t. When Chauncey comes around and wants it back, there aren’t gonna be any outs.”
“One,” Kelp said, and suddenly flew into a frenzy at the wheel, honking his horn in a mad bebop rhythm of toots, the while yelling, “Move your god darn ass whatsa matter don’t you wanna go home?”
Dortmunder opened his eyes. “Take it easy,” he said.
“They give anybody a license,” Kelp grumbled, subsiding. Then he said, “Listen, I can’t talk in this traffic. You got any of that good bourbon left?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I tell you what,” Kelp said. “I’ll buy a bottle of bourbon on the way downtown – not Chauncey’s brand, but something nice. Something bottled in Kentucky.”
“Yeah?”
“Invite me up to your place,” Kelp said. “We’ll have a drink, I’ll give you my idea.”
“You know what I think of your ideas,” Dortmunder told him.
“Can it be worse than a visit from Chauncey’s friend?”
Dortmunder sighed.
“I’ll buy two bottles,” Kelp said.
Chapter 2
“You remember my nephew Victor,” Kelp said.
“The FBI man,” Dortmunder said.
“The ex-FBI man,” Kelp corrected him. “It makes a difference.”
“They threw him out,” Dortmunder said, “because he kept putting a suggestion in the FBI suggestion box that they oughta have a secret handshake, so they’d be able to recognize each other at parties.”
“That’s not necessarily so,” Kelp said. “That’s just a theory.”
“It’s good enough for me,” Dortmunder told him. “It helps me remember the guy. What about him?”
“I was talking to him at Thanksgiving,” Kelp said, “at my grandmother’s. She makes the most fantastic turkey, you wouldn’t believe it.”
What was there to say to a remark like that? Nothing; so that’s what Dortmunder said. He settled himself more comfortably in his personal easy chair in his warm dry living room – May was out at the Safeway, where she was a cashier – and he sipped a little more bourbon. It was bottled in Kentucky (as opposed to being distilled in Kentucky, shipped north in railroad cars and bottled in Hoboken) and it was pretty good; a firm stride upward from the stuff at the O.J. Bar and Grill, which was probably also distilled in Hoboken, from a combination of Hudson and Raritan waters.
Kelp was going on with his story. “The point is,” he said, “Victor was telling me about a guy that lives in his neighborhood now, that he’d worked on his case back in the FBI. The guy was a counterfeiter.”
“Yeah?”
“Only he didn’t print the money,” Kelp said. “He drew it.” He made vague drawing gestures in the air. “One bill at a time. All twenties.”
Dortmunder frowned past his glass at Kelp. “This guy drew individual twenty-dollar bills?”
“Apparently he was terrific at it. He’d take a sheet of paper, he’d paint five or six bills on it, cut them out, paint the other side, pass em all over town.”
“Strange fella,” Dortmunder decided.
“But terrific,” Kelp said. “According to Victor, you couldn’t tell his bills from the real thing. Every one of them, a work of art”
“Then how’d they get him?”
“Well, a couple ways. First off, he always worked in watercolor. With oils, you get too much build-up on the paper, the texture’s wrong. So his bills, they were fine when he first passed them, but pretty soon they’d begin to run.”
“This sounds exactly like the kind of guy you’d know,” Dortmunder said.
“I don’t know him,” Kelp said. “My nephew Victor knows him.”
“And you know Victor.”
“Well, he’s my nephew.”
“I rest my case,” Dortmunder said. “What was the other way they caught this guy?”
“Well, he usually stayed right there in his own neighborhood,” Kelp said. “He’s a very unworldly sort of guy, he’s really an artist, he just did these twenties to keep himself in potatoes and blue jeans while he did his own art. So like, when all these twenties kept getting traced back to the same Shop-Rite, the same drugstore, the same liquor store, the Feds staked out the neighborhood, and that’s how Victor met this guy Porculey.”
“Porculey?”
“Griswold Porculey. That’s his name.”
“It is, huh?”
“Absolutely. Anyway, the Feds nailed Porculey, but all he got was a suspended sentence when he promised not to do it any more.”
“They believed him?”
“Well, yeah,” Kelp said. “Because it made sense. Once they got him, and they figured out how he was doing those things, they talked to him, and it turned out he was spending five hours just to do one side of one bill. You know, those twenties, they’re all full of tricky little stuff.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen some,” Dortmunder said.
“Well, anyway, that means ten hours per bill, and not even counting the cost of materials and overhead, paper, paint, depreciation on the brushes, all the rest of it, the most he’s making is two bucks an hour. He could do better than that delivering for the Shop-Rite, part time.”
Dortmunder nodded. “Crime doesn’t pay,” he said. “I’m gradually coming to that conclusion.”
“Well, the point is,” Kelp went on, “this guy used to live up in Washington Heights, he had his studio up there and all, but the rent kept going up, they priced him out of the neighborhood and he moved out to Long Island. Victor ran into him in the shopping center.”
“Passing twenties?”
“No,” Kelp said, “but he’s thinking about it. He told Victor he was looking for some way to do a bunch of bills all at once. Victor figures he’s about halfway to inventing the printing press, and he’s worried the guy’ll get in trouble. And that’s where we come in.”
“I was wondering where we came in,” Dortmunder said.
“We can put a little honest cash his way,” Kelp said, “help him avoid temptation.”
“How do we do that?”
“You don’t get it?” Kelp was so pleased with himself he was about to run around in front and kiss himself on both cheeks. Leaning forward, gesturing with his half-full bourbon glass, he said. “We fake the painting!”
Dortmunder frowned at him past his own half-empty glass. “We what?”
“This is a famous painting, right, the one we copped from Chauncey? So there’ll be pictures of it, copies of it, all that stuff. Porculey’s a real artist, and he can imitate anything. So he runs up a copy of the painting and that’s the one we give back!”
Dortmunder studied Kelp’s words one by one. “There’s something wrong with that,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know yet. I just hope I find it before it’s too late.”
“Dortmunder, it’s better than getting shot in the head.”
Dortmunder winced. “Don’t talk like that,” he said. Already in anticipation, the last few weeks, he was getting headaches every time he passed a window.