“Okay, Andy, okay. I said okay, didn’t I?”
“Bernard, just off the top of your head, how many laws would you say you broke so far today?”
Bernard pointed a stern finger across the table. “Lay off, Andy,” he said. “Now I mean it.”
Kelp stopped, took a deep breath, got hold of himself, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s a subject that’s close to my heart, that’s all”
Bernard said, “Let me rephrase it, Andy, okay? No major crimes. No, wait, you’ll be talking about industrial pollution in a minute. No violent crimes. Is that a fair request?”
“Bernard,” Kelp said, with solemnity, “it is not my intention, or my cousin’s intention, to harm one hair of this fellow’s head. He won’t get killed, he won’t get wounded. All right?”
“Thank you,” Bernard said. “Let me make a phone call, see what I can do.” He pushed his chair back and said, “While I’m gone, order me an espresso and a Sambuca, okay?” And he got to his feet and headed toward the phone booth in the back.
“Bernard,” Kelp muttered after his departing back, “you’re a highway robber.” But he ordered the espresso and Sambuca from Sal the waiter, and the same for himself, and was chewing on one of the coffee beans from the Sambuca when Bernard came back. Kelp gave him an alert look, but first Bernard had to taste his Sambuca, then he had to put a sugar cube in his espresso. Finally, stirring the espresso, he looked seriously at Kelp and said, “Your cousin’s tangled with a wrong guy.”
“I thought so,” said Kelp.
“His name’s Leo Zane,” Bernard said, “and he has the worst kind of no record.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“Picked up lots of times, always on very serious stuff – murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, twice for arson – but never convicted.”
“Slippery,” Kelp suggested.
“Like a snake. And twice as dangerous. If your cousin wants to deal with this guy, he better wear gloves.”
“I’ll tell him. Did you happen to get an address while you were on the phone?”
Bernard shook his head. “Zane isn’t a homebody,” he said. “He lives in furnished rooms, residence hotels, he’s a loner and moves around a lot.”
“Drat.”
“There’s one thing that might help,” Bernard said. “There’s a clinic up in Westchester he goes to sometimes. On account of his foot. Apparently, that’s the only place he ever goes for treatment, that one clinic.”
“What’s it called?”
“Westchester Orthopedic.”
“Thanks, Bernard,” Kelp said. “I’ll tell my cousin.”
Bernard pointed a serious finger at Kelp. “If anything happens to Zane,” he said, “anything at all, I’ll connect it back to you, Andy, I swear I will.”
Kelp spread his hands in utter innocence. Not a blink marred his eyes. “Don’t you think I know that, Bernard? I know you’re a straight guy. I wouldn’t have called you if I figured to pull something like that.”
“All right,” said Bernard. Relaxing, he looked down at his Sambuca, smiled, and said, “You ever try this?”
“Try what?”
Bernard took out a pack of matches, lit one, held it over the Sambuca, and a small blue flame formed on top of the liqueur, where the coffee beans floated. Bernard shook out the match, and sat smiling at the blue flame.
Kelp didn’t get it. “What’s that for?” he asked.
“The idea is,” Bernard said, “it like roasts the coffee beans.”
“But what’s that burning?”
“The alcohol, of course.”
“Then why do it?”
Bernard looked startled. “By God, you’re right,” he said, and blew out the flame.
“I hope you made a wish,” Kelp said.
Chapter 6
The scrawny black cat jumped from the floor up to the windowsill, where Leo Zane was pouring milk into the saucer. Setting the milk carton on the table nearby, Zane stood at the window a minute longer, scratching the cat behind the ear as it lapped up milk. A dreary March rain dribbled down the glass, and Zane’s foot continued to ache. It was the weather, of course, the dampness of the end of winter, and the trip to the clinic, his first in almost six months, had done no good at all.
He ought to go away for a while, somewhere warm and dry. Maybe Los Angeles, sit in the sun, absorb some warmth into the bones of his foot. Absorb warmth into his body, his entire body was cold and achy now; the damp pain, like death, crept up through his frame from his foot, filling him with chills and cramps. No matter how much clothing he wore, no matter how warm the room or how much hot coffee he drank, the cold torment was still there, deep in his bones.
What was keeping him in New York? Very little, beyond his own lethargy. Every year around this time he made the same vague plans to leave, but he never went, he always found some excuse, he seemed wedded to the climate that made him sick. And this year?
Well, in fact, this year there were one or two jobs still open. The psychiatrist’s wife, for instance; she was turning out to be surprisingly difficult to dispatch. Of course, the jobs that had to look like accident or natural causes were always the most difficult. And then there was the Chauncey job, that was still on tap.
Not that Zane expected actually to do anything on the Chauncey job. His one conversation with that fellow Dortmunder, plus the occasional interval of observing the man, had convinced him Dortmunder would try no tricks. Once Chauncey collected from the insurance company – possibly next month, more likely in May – Dortmunder would assuredly turn over the painting, Chauncey would pay Zane the remaining fifteen thousand due on the contract, and that would be that.
The psychiatrist’s wife. If only she drove a car. You’d think, in this day and age – Movement beyond the window attracted Zane’s attention.
Down below, a man hunched against the rain as he entered his automobile, a dark blue Jaguar sedan, parked by the fire hydrant. It had MD plates, from over in New Jersey, and Zane reflected again on what a dodge that was. Put MD plates on a car, you could park anywhere you wanted, just as though doctors still made house calls. Up at the clinic they were parked all over the – Hadn’t there been a Jaguar sedan parked outside the clinic?
Dark blue, like this one?
Down below, the Jaguar’s windshield wipers clicked into motion, swiping back and forth. As Zane watched, the Jaguar moved away, rolling sedately down the block, its yellow right directional blinking, an intermittent bright spot in the rain. He wasn’t positive it was the same sort of car as he’d seen near the clinic. Same color, perhaps, but a different make?
“Grrowww!” said the cat, and scratched at Zane’s wrist.
Startled, Zane released his grip – lost in thought, he’d been strangling the thing – and the cat ran away to hide under the daybed. Zane picked up the milk carton, for something to do, and limped with it to the refrigerator. The cat’s eyes peered out at him from under the bed, but he ignored it. His mind was moving again, away from the unanswerable questions about the car, on to other concerns. He sat at the formica table, brooding, his eyes vague, his hands relaxed with curved fingers on the tabletop, the aching in his foot forgotten for the moment, everything forgotten for the moment.
The psychiatrist’s wife. An accident, a fall. Hmmmmmm…
Chapter 7
Kelp was so happy he was crowing. “Don’t say I never did anything for you, Dortmunder,” he said. “Not after this.”
“All right,” Dortmunder said. Owing a debt of gratitude to another person always made him nervous, and that other person being Kelp didn’t improve the situation.
“Over two months I staked out that clinic,” Kelp pointed out. “I musta gone through a thousand paperback books. Day after day, three, four days a week, and boy, I finally hit it.”
“For sure,” Dortmunder said. “This time it’s positively for sure.” In the last two months Kelp had three times followed limping men home from the Westchester Orthopedic Clinic, a site that by the very nature of things would be bound to provide a certain steady quota of limping men, and all three times Kelp had insisted Dortmunder accompany him on expeditions to remote neighborhoods to look at these guys, and none of them had been even remotely like the killer Dortmunder had met back in November.
But this time Kelp was sure. “Absolutely,” he said. “And you know why? Because I waited after he went in his building, and then I followed him and looked at the mailboxes, and there it was: Zane, room thirteen.”
“All right,” Dortmunder said.
“So we got him.”
“We’ll have to check every once in a while,” Dortmunder said. “Be sure he doesn’t move.”