“I knew you’d come around!” Kelp yelled, bounding in from the foyer.
Dortmunder sat bolt upright. He and May both stared at Kelp, who leaped around in front of them with a huge smile on his face. Dortmunder said, “I thought you left.”
“I couldn’t go,” Kelp said. “Not with that misunderstanding between us.” He grabbed a chair, towed it over to the sofa, sat at Dortmunder’s left and leaned eagerly forward. “So what’s the setup?” Then he suddenly sat back, looking concerned, glancing toward the TV. “No, not yet. Watch the rest of your movie first.”
Dortmunder frowned almost wistfully at the screen. “No,” he said. “Turn it off. I think it ends badly.”
Chapter 6
“Linda,” murmured Arnold Chauncey, snuggling the girl closer to his side.
“Sarah,” she responded, and bit him rather painfully on the cheek, then got out of bed.
“Sarah?” Rubbing his cheek, Chauncey gazed up over the jumbled sheets and blankets at the tapered bare back of the girl reaching now for her blue jeans draped on a Louis Quinze chair. Astonishing how much Sarah and Linda look alike, he thought, at least from a back view. But then, so many attractive women have that elongated-cello look from behind. “How beautiful you are,” he said, and since lust had very recently been satiated it was purely the comment of a connoisseur.
“Whoever I am.” She was really quite angry, as she showed by her clumsiness when stepping into her bikini panties; lavender, a very wrong color for her.
Chauncey was about to say “don’t go” when he noticed the clock on the mantel: nearly ten-thirty at night. The appointment with Dortmunder was half an hour from now, and if it hadn’t been for that slip of the tongue he might well have lazed himself right through it. As it was, his carelessness had saved him once again from his carelessness, and what he did say to poor Sarah was, “Must you go?”
She gave him a resentful glare over her shoulder, and he saw that her nose was much blunter than Linda’s. Same forehead, though, same eyebrows. Same shoulder, if it came to that. Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man’s taste is rather circumscribed. “You are a bastard,” she said.
Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs? He watched her dress, her movements eloquent of outrage and humiliation as she paused at the mirror to touch her hair, touch up her face. Seeing that pouting face framed in the rococo gilt of the mirror, he suddenly realized how common she looked. That exquisite seventeenth-century looking glass, its darkly gleaming surface surrounded and supported by gilded twining rose bushes and cherubim, was meant to reflect more regal faces, more substantial brows, more stately eyes, but what had he placed before it? A series of pinched beauties, faces meant for reflection in commonplace mirrors in gas-station rest rooms, next to the hot-air blower. “I am a bad man,” Chauncey said, mournfully.
Immediately she turned away from the mirror, misinterpreting what he’d said. “Yes, you really are, Arnie,” she said, but already forgiveness was implicit in her voice.
“Oh, go away, Sarah,” Chauncey said, abruptly irritable, angry at himself for being such an endless wastrel, angry at her for reminding him, angry in general because he knew he wouldn’t change. Thrashing up out of the bed, he stalked past her astonished expression, and spent the next five minutes calming himself in a too-hot shower.
It was his Uncle Ramsey Liammoir who had defined Arnold Chauncey, years ago while Chauncey was still a boarding school boy in softest Massachusetts. “Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot,” Ramsey had written to Chauncey’s mother, in a letter Chauncey never saw till he was going through her papers after the wicked old woman’s death. “Our sponge was Douglas MacDouglas Ramsey, who founded our fortune and made it possible for half a dozen generations of Ramsey’s and MacDouglases and Chauncey’s to live in stately and respectable comfort, with here a life peerage and there a board chairmanship. Our spigot, who will piss away his patrimony before he’s twenty if he’s given his head, is your son Arnold.”
Which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the old lady’s will had ringed Chauncey’s patrimony (matrimony? since it had come from his mother?) with so many strings of barbed wire. Three accountants and two attorneys had to be brought in for approval before he could tip more than fifteen per cent; an exaggeration, but not by much.
On the other hand, he was far from poor. Chauncey’s actual income – as opposed to what it said along about page 63 of his tax return – was in fact quite substantial. The year he didn’t clear three hundred thousand dollars was a bad year indeed, and usually he was comfortably above that. Or would have been comfortable were he not, in the words of his own interior monologue, such a wastrel. Piss away his patrimony he did, proving his now-departed uncle right by engaging in every kind of squander known to man. He had married badly, and paid too much for the divorce. He had supported an auto-racing stable, and had even done some driving himself until he realized he was mortal. He maintained fully staffed houses or apartments in New York, London, Paris, Antibes and Caracas. His love of beauty in furniture, paintings, sculpture, in all the fine arts, led him to purchases he could barely afford even if he were to scrimp elsewhere, and he had never been able to scrimp anywhere.
Thus it was that Chauncey was forced from time to time into risky alternative methods of balancing his books, of which false insurance claims – such as the plot currently in preparation – was only one. Arson, bribery, blackmail, procuring and simple unadorned theft had been other techniques by which over the years he had kept himself and his expensive tastes afloat. He had, for instance, stolen about forty per cent of the royalties supposed to be paid to Heavy Leather, the rock band he had managed back in the late sixties, when running with rock musicians was the thing to do. He hadn’t wanted to steal those benighted Glaswegians’ money, but at the time it had seemed to him his need was greater than theirs; certainly his arithmetic was. But how his conscience had pricked him, as it pricked him now, standing in the steamy heat of his shower cursing himself for a weakling and a wastrel and a spendthrift. A spigot, in fact, just as dear departed Uncle Ramsey had said, the old fart.
It took five minutes of hot spray to soothe Chauncey and make him forget again his disrespect for himself (he’d forgotten Sarah the instant he’d left her), and then he returned to the bedroom (Sarah was gone, of course), toweled himself dry, used the blower on his long blond hair – naturally yellow, and the envy of all his friends, male and female – and dressed himself completely in dark colors. Black suede moccasins and black socks. Black slacks and a navy blue cashmere sweater with a turtleneck. Then down the stairs (he almost never used the elevator) to the front-hall closet, where he put on a dark blue pea jacket and tucked his yellow hair inside a black knit cap, which made his tanned face look bonier, tougher. Black leather gloves completed his costume, and then he went down one more flight to the ground door, which in front was actually somewhat below ground level but which in back opened onto a small neat flagstone-covered garden. Flowering shrubs and bushes and small trees, all planted in large ornamental concrete pots, stood about in formal array. Ivy climbed the rear of the house and covered the eight-foot-high brick walls surrounding the garden on the other three sides. Now, in November, the garden was all bare branches and black stumps, but in the summer, when Chauncey was almost never in New York, it was a place of beauty.
Chauncey was a darker shape against the dark as he crossed the garden to the knobless door in the corner of the rear wall. A key from the cluster in his pocket opened this door, and he slipped through into utter blackness. This was a passage through a thick wall separating two properties that fronted on the next street. The wall, apparently left over from some earlier construction, was actually double, two thicknesses of old chalky brick with less than three feet of space between. A trellis had been laid across the top at some later date, and a jumble of vines crawled over the trellis, making a thick and leafy roof.
The footing underneath was treacherous with broken bits of stone and brick, but Chauncey slid along on the balls of his feet, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides, dangling ivy branches occasionally catching at his knit cap.