“So you trusted him.”
“Not exactly,” Dortmunder said. “I thought he was crazy, but on the other hand he looked rich and he acted sure of himself, and what the hell did I have to lose anyway? So finally I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it. Things can’t get worse.’ And I did it, and the judge looked at me like he figured maybe it was time to bring back some cruel and unusual punishments, and then Stonewiler did his little number with the cop and the door, and all of a sudden you could see the judge wanted to laugh. He looked at the cop, with his ass stuck out behind him and the TV sets hanging off his hands, and he rubbed his hand over his mouth like this, and he went, ‘Rrrumph rrrumph,’ and then he said something like, ‘Counselor, you have created reasonable doubt, though I still have reason to doubt you. Case dismissed.’ And I come home.”
May’s expression, around the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, combined equal portions of wonder and delight. “What a defense,” she said. “Not every lawyer in the world could have pulled it off.”
“I’ll have to go along with that,” Dortmunder admitted.
“But why? Why’d he do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s this gonna cost?”
“I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “He didn’t say.”
“Didn’t he say anything at all?”
Dortmunder took an embossed business card from his breast pocket. “At the end there, after he shook my hand, he gave me this, he told me call this guy.” Dortmunder frowned at the card, reading off the name as though the sound of the syllables would give him a clue to what was going on: “Arnold Chauncey. What kind of a name is that?”
“Arnold Chauncey.” It sounded just as mysterious when May said it. Shaking her head, she asked, “Who’s he supposed to be?”
“I don’t know. Stonewiler gave me the card, told me to call, said good luck, and went away.”
“When are you supposed to call?”
“Today.”
“Why don’t you do it now?”
“I don’t want to,” Dortmunder said.
May frowned. “Why not?”
“People don’t do people favors just for the fun of it,” Dortmunder said. “This guy Chauncey, he wants something.”
“So?”
“The whole thing makes me nervous,” Dortmunder said. “I’m not gonna call.”
“But you’ve got to–”
“I don’t want to,” Dortmunder said, and set his jaw. Nobody could be quite as mulish as Dortmunder, when he put his mind to it.
“You took the man’s assis–” May started to say, and the phone rang. She snapped it a quick irritated glance, then got up and crossed the room and answered on the second ring. Dortmunder lapped up some more beer, and then May told the phone, “Hold on,” and turned to say, “It’s for you.”
Dortmunder hunched his shoulders, and pushed himself lower in his chair. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody on the telephone. He said, “Who is it?”
“J. Radcliffe Stonewiler.”
“Oh,” said Dortmunder. He hadn’t given Stonewiler his phone number or his right home address. “So it’s like that,” he said, and got to his feet, and went over to take the phone, saying into it, “Stonewiler?”
But it was an English-accented female voice that answered, snippily, saying, “Hold on for Mister Stonewiler, please.” And there was a click.
Dortmunder said into the phone, “Hello?” When there was no answer, he frowned at May, saying, “Who’s that?”
May, elaborately whispering, told him, “His sec-re-ter-ry.”
“Oh,” Dortmunder said, and the phone said hello to him with Stonewiler’s deep confident voice. “Yeah,” Dortmunder answered. “Hello.”
“I just spoke with Mr. Chauncey,” Stonewiler said. He sounded cheerful, but in charge. “He says you haven’t called yet.”
“I been thinking about it,” Dortmunder said.
Stonewiler said, “Mr. Dortmunder, why don’t you drop by Mr. Chauncey’s house now for a chat? It’s on East 63rd Street, you could be there in half an hour.”
Dortmunder sighed. “I suppose that’s what I’ll do,” he said. “Right.”
“The address is on the card.”
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Dortmunder.”
“Yeah, goodbye,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, and turned a bleak eye toward May, who was back in her chair, watching him through cigarette smoke. “He didn’t threaten me,” Dortmunder said.
May didn’t get it. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“He could have said, ‘I got you off the hook, I can put you back on.’ He could have said, ‘I got weight I could throw around.’ There’s lots of things he could have said, and he didn’t say any of them.”
May continued to frown at him. “So?”
“His not threatening me,” Dortmunder said, “was a lot more threatening than if he threatened me.”
“What did he want?”
“I’m supposed to go see Chauncey at his house in half an hour.”
“You’d better go.”
“I don’t like this, May.”
“Still, you’d better go.”
Dortmunder sighed. “Yeah, I know.” And he sat down, to put his shoes back on.
May watched him, frowning, thinking her own thoughts, and when he stood up to leave she said, “One thing.”
Dortmunder looked at her. “What?”
“That business about backing out a door if you’re carrying things in both hands. That is true, people do that.”
“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “That’s how I got off.”
“Then how come you were facing the police car?”
“It was a different kind of door,” Dortmunder explained. “It didn’t have a spring closer. I just opened it and picked up the TV sets and walked out.”
May’s frown deepened. “That’s all there was to it?”
“They didn’t ask about the door,” Dortmunder said. “They might have, if we just talked about it straight out, but the way Stonewiler worked things, he had everybody thinking about that cop’s ass.”
May nodded, thoughtfully. “You better watch your step with those people,” she said.
“I figure to,” Dortmunder told her.
Chapter 3
The third time Dortmunder walked past the house, in the raw November afternoon, its front door opened and a guy with long yellow hair leaned out, calling, “Mr. Dortmunder?”
Dortmunder broke stride, but didn’t quite stop walking. He quick looked across the street, as though he hadn’t seen the man or heard what he’d said, but almost immediately gave all that up and stopped and looked back.
The house was one of a row of four-story brownstones on this tree-lined quiet street off Park Avenue; an expensive house, in an expensive neighborhood. The building was fairly wide, with a dozen broad concrete steps leading up to the front door, at the second level. Flowers and ivy and a couple of small evergreen shrubs were in concrete pots in the space to the right of the steps.
It had taken Dortmunder twenty minutes to get here by subway, and he’d spent the last quarter hour casing the joint and thinking things over. The house was anonymous, beyond the obvious indication that its inhabitants must have money, and no matter how long Dortmunder stared at it he still couldn’t figure out why anybody who lived in there would strain himself to get John Dortmunder off the hook on a felony charge, and then invite him over for a chat. He’d walked around the block the first time to get the lay of the land, and the second time hoping to find a way to see the rear of the place – there wasn’t any – and the third time he’d simply walked as an aid to thought.
And now some tall slender yellow-haired guy in a dark blue pinstripe suit, white shirt and dark blue patterned tie had come out of the house, called him by name, and was standing up there grinning at him.
Dortmunder took his time. Staying where he was on the sidewalk, he studied the guy the way he’d been studying the house, and what he saw wasn’t reassuring. The fellow was about forty, deeply tanned and very fit, and everything about him suggested dignified secure wealth; his banker’s clothing, his self-confident smile, the house in which he lived. Everything, that is, except the shoulder-length yellow hair, hanging in long waves around his head, neither sloppy nor pretty, but somehow totally masculine. Like a knight in the Crusades. No; better yet, like one of those Viking raiders who used to play such hell along the English coast. Some Viking barbarian, that’s what he was, plus all the civilization money could buy.
He was also clearly willing to let Dortmunder look him over forever. He stood there grinning, studying Dortmunder in return, and it was finally Dortmunder who ended it, calling up to him, “You’re Chauncey?”
“Arnold Chauncey,” the other one agreed. Stepping to one side, he gestured at his open doorway. “Come on up, why don’t you?”
So Dortmunder shrugged and nodded and went on up, climbing the steps and preceding Chauncey into the house.
A wide carpeted hallway stretched to an open doorway at the far end, through which could be seen delicate wooden-armed chairs in a bare-floored gleaming room with tall windows. On the left side of the hallway, a staircase with a red runner and dark-wood banister extended upward. White light filtering down suggested a skylight at the top of the stairs. To the right of the hallway were two sets of dark-wood sliding doors, one near and one far, both shut. A few large paintings in heavy frames were on the pale walls, with a number of spindly occasional tables beneath. A hushed, padded quiet pervaded the house.