“You could blow the whole case for us right here.”
She stared at him. “I am standing in a stolen bank,” she said, “which is about
nine felonies rolled into one already, and you’re worried about a lawsuit with an
insurance company?”
“If we get picked up on this thing,” Murch said, “we’ll need all the cash we
can lay our hands on for the defense.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” May said. She was standing by the door, looking
out toward the office.
Dortmunder had gone around behind the partition to join Herman and Kelp,
and now all sound stopped from back there. A second later, Victor came out
and said, “So they’re here, are they?” He had a big smile on his face.
“Just coming out of the office,” May said. She shut the door and went over to
look out a window instead.
“Remember,” Victor said, “they can’t come in without a warrant.”
“I know, I know.”
But the troopers made no attempt to come in. They walked down the gravel
roadway between the lines of trailers, looking this way and that, and gave the
green-painted bank no more than a passing glance.
Victor was watching out another window. “It’s starting to rain,” he said.
“They’ll want to get back in their car.”
It was, and they did. A slight sprinkle had developed, and the troopers
walked a bit faster on their way back down the line of trailers toward their car.
May, looking up, saw heavy clouds coming on fast from the west. “It’s really
going to come down,” she said.
“What do we care?” Victor said. “We’re warm and dry inside this bank
here.” He looked around with that big smile on his face and said, “They even
have electric baseboard heat.”
Murch’s Mom said, “Are they gone?”
“Just getting in their car,” May said. “There they go.” She turned from the
window, and now she too was smiling. “I suddenly realize,” she said, “that I was
very nervous.” She took the stub of cigarette from her mouth and looked at it. “I
just lit this,” she said.
“Let’s play cards,” Murch’s Mom said. “Dortmunder! Come on out and play
cards.”
Dortmunder came out, Victor went back in with Herman and Kelp, the four
outside sat down to play cards again, and Murch’s Mom shot the moon. Murch
said, “See? See? I told you!”
“So you did,” Murch’s Mom said. She smiled at her son and riffled the cards
as she shuffled.
Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Everybody at the table
stared, and May quickly got up to look out the nearest window. “It’s somebody
with an umbrella,” she announced. It was really pouring out there now, puddles
everywhere.
“Get rid of him,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll go back by the safe again.”
“Right.”
May waited till Dortmunder was out of sight, then opened the door and
looked out at the nervous manager, more nervous than ever and miserable-looking under the black umbrella. “Uh,” May said. How could she avoid inviting
him in, with all that rain?
He said something, but the drumming of the rain on both the bank roof and his
umbrella drowned out the words. May said, “What?”
Shrilly, he yelled, “I don’t want any trouble!”
“That’s wonderful!” May shouted back. “Neither do I!”
“Look!”
He was pointing down. May leaned forward, getting her hair wet, and looked
at the ground beside the trailer, and it was pale green. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she
said and looked to left and right. The bank was blue and white again. “Oh, good
Christ,” she said.
“I don’t want any trouble!” the manager shouted again. May took her head in
from the rain. “Come on in,” she invited.
He took a step back, shaking his head and his free hand. “No no. No
trouble.”
May called to him, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t want you here!” he yelled. “The boss would kick me out! No trouble,
no trouble!”
“You won’t call the police?”
“Just go away! Go away and I won’t call them and it never happened!”
May tried to think. “Give us an hour,” she said.
“Too long!”
“We have to get a truck. We don’t have a truck here.”
His quandary was making him so nervous he was hopping from foot to foot,
as though he had to go to the bathroom. Maybe, with all the rain beating down,
he did. “All right,” he yelled at last. “But no more than an hour!”
“I promise!”
“I’ll have to unhook you! The water and electricity!”
“All right! All right!”
He fidgeted out there until she realized he was waiting for her to shut the door.
Should she thank him? No, he didn’t want thanks, he wanted reassurance. “You
won’t have any trouble!” she yelled at him, and waved, and shut the door.
Dortmunder was standing beside her. “I heard,” he said.
“We’ll have to take it somewhere else,” she said.
“Or give up.”
Herman and Kelp had wandered out from behind the partition. Herman said,
“Give up? I’ve just begun to fight!”
Kelp said, “What’s the problem? How’d he tip to us?”
May told him, “We used water-base paint. The rain washed it off.”
Herman said, “We can’t give up, that’s all. We just have to take it someplace
else.”
Dortmunder said, “With every cop on Long Island out looking for it. And with
the green paint gone. And with no place in mind to put it.”
Murch said, “And no truck to drive it anywhere.”
Kelp said, “That’s never a problem, Stan. Trucks are never a problem. Trust
me.”
Murch gave him a glum look.
Victor said, “In this rain, there won’t be much of a search.”
“When you’re looking,” Dortmunder said, “for something fifty feet long and
twelve feet wide, colored blue and white, you don’t need much of a search.”
May had been silent during all this, thinking about things. She had no particular
craving for money herself, and so didn’t care so much about the contents of the
safe as that the job be successful. Dortmunder was gloomy enough in his natural
state; life with him if this robbery failed would be about as cheerful as a soap
opera. “I tell you what,” she said. “I got us an hour here.”
The lights went off. Gray and rainy illumination seeped in through the
windows, depressing everyone even further.
“An hour,” Dortmunder said, “is just enough time for us all to go home and get
to bed and make believe none of this ever happened.”
“We have two cars.” May said. “We can spend that hour looking for
someplace to move. If we don’t find anything, we give up.”
“Fine,” Herman said. “And I’ll keep working on the safe.” He hurried back
behind the partition.
“It’s getting cold in here,” Murch’s Mom said.
“You’d be warmer with the brace on,” her son said.
She gave him a look.
Dortmunder sighed. “The thing that scares me,” he said, “is that we probably
will find a place.”
27
DORTMUNDER said, “I suppose it’s unfair to blame you for this job.”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. He was driving, and Dortmunder was in the front
seat beside him.
“But I do,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp gave him an aggrieved look and faced front again. “That isn’t fair,” he
said.
“Nevertheless.”
They had until nine-thirty to get back to the bank, and it was now about nine-fifteen. Kelp and Dortmunder and Murch had started out in this station wagon
together, until Kelp had found a truck big enough to do the job. It said
HORSES on the sides, and the interior had a slight smell of stable to it, but it
was empty. Kelp had started it up and turned it over to Murch, who had taken it
away to the trailer court. Now, Kelp and Dortmunder were roaming the earth
looking for somewhere to move the bank. Victor and Murch’s Mom were doing
the same thing in Victor’s Packard.
“We’d better get back,” Dortmunder said. “We aren’t going to find anything.”
“We might,” Kelp said. “Why be so pessimistic?”
“Because we covered all this ground last week,” Dortmunder said, “and there
wasn’t any place to hide the bank then. So why would there be someplace
now?”
“Just five minutes more,” Kelp said. “Then we’ll head back.”
“You can’t see anything in this rain anyway,” Dortmunder said.
“You never know,” Kelp said. “We might get lucky.”
Dortmunder looked at him, but Kelp was concentrating
– on his driving. Dortmunder considered several things he might say, but
none of them seemed adequate, so after a while he turned his head and looked
out the windshield at all the rain and listened to the wipers clicking back and
forth.
“It’s really coming down,” Kelp said. “I see it.”
“You don’t usually get a rain like this on a Friday,”
Kelp said.
Dortmunder looked at him again.
“No, I mean it,” Kelp said. “Usually you get this kind of a rain on a Sunday.”