“I’m just afraid of the kind of woman he’ll get,” May said. “You know, to take care of the child.”
Dortmunder frowned. “What child?”
“The one they kidnap.”
Dortmunder shook his head. “He’ll never get it off the ground. Andy Kelp couldn’t steal third in the Little League.”
“Well, that would make it even worse,” May said. “He’s really determined to do it, you know. He’ll get the wrong people, some awful woman who doesn’t care about children, and some barfly to do the driving, and they’ll just get themselves in trouble.”
“Good,” Dortmunder said.
“But what if the child gets hurt? What if the police surround the hideout, what if there’s a shoot-out?”
“A shoot-out? With Kelp? He’s so gun-shy, he goes out to the track, he surrenders at the beginning of every race.”
“But what about the other people with him? There’s no telling who he’ll wind up with.”
Dortmunder looked pained, and May remembered that he and Kelp really were old friends; so maybe there was a chance, after all. But then Dortmunder’s expression became mulish, and he said, “Just so he doesn’t wind up with me. He’s jinxed me long enough.”
May cast around for another argument, considered a specific mention of the friendship between Dortmunder and Kelp, and finally decided not to do that. If she did, he might just be angry enough now to deny the friendship, and then later on he’d think he had to stand by the denial. Better to let the dust settle for a minute.
They were finishing the Jell-O when she started again, coming in from another direction entirely, saying, “I read that book again. It isn’t bad, you know.”
He looked at her. “What book?”
“The one Kelp showed us. The one about the kidnap. ping.”
He straightened and looked around the room, frowning. “I thought I threw that out,” he said.
“I got another copy.” She’d gotten it from Kelp, but she didn’t think she should mention that.
He turned his frown toward her. “What for?”
“I wanted to read it again. I wanted to see if maybe Kelp had a good idea after all.”
“Kelp with a good idea.” He finished his Jell-O and reached for his coffee.
“Well, he was smart to bring it around to you,” she said. “He wouldn’t be able to do it right without you.”
“Kelp brings a plan to me.”
“To make it work,” she said. “Don’t you see? There’s a plan there, but you have to convert it to the real world, to the people you’ve got and the places you’ll be and all the rest of it. You’d be the aw-tour.”
He cocked his head and studied her. “I’d be the what?”
“I read an article in a magazine,” she said. “It was about a theory about movies.”
“A theory about movies.”
“It’s called the aw-tour theory. That’s French, it means writer.”
He spread his hands. “What the hell have I got to do with the movies?”
“Don’t shout at me, John, I’m trying to tell you. The idea is-”
“I’m not shouting,” he said. He was getting grumpy.
“All right, you’re not shouting. Anyway, the idea is, in movies the writer isn’t really the writer. The real writer is the director, because he takes what the writer did and he puts it together with the actors and the places where they make the movie and all the things like that.”
“The writer isn’t the writer,” Dortmunder said.
“That’s the theory.”
“Some theory.”
“So they call the director the aw-tour,’ she explained, “because that’s French for writer.”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Dortmunder said, “but I think I’m getting caught up in it. Why do they do it in French?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s more classy. Like chifferobe.”
“Like what?”
She could sense the whole thing getting out of hand. “Never mind,” she said. “The point was, you could be the aw-tour on this kidnapping idea. Like a movie director.”
“Well, I think that whole aw-tour theory is-” He stopped, and his eyes squinted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You want me to do the job!”
She hesitated. She clutched her paper napkin to her bosom. But there was no turning back now. “Yes,” she said.
“So you can take care of the kid!”
“Partly,” she said. “And also because all of these late-night burglaries aren’t good for you, John, they really aren’t. You go out and risk life imprisonment for-”
“Don’t remind me,” he said.
“But I want to remind you. If you get caught again, you’re habitual, isn’t that right?”
“If I stay away from Kelp,” Dortmunder said, “I won’t get caught. And if I stay away from him, my luck’ll get better. I’ve had a string of bad luck, and it’s all from hanging around with Andy Kelp.”
“Like tonight? That store going out of business? You haven’t seen Kelp for two weeks, not since you threw him out of here.”
“It takes time to wear off a jinx,” he said. “Listen, May, I know I’m not pulling my weight around here, but I’ll-‘,
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. These small-time stings just aren’t right for you. You need one major job a year, that you can take some time on, do it right, and feel comfortable with a little money in the bank afterwards.”
“There aren’t any of those jobs any more,” he said. “That’s the whole problem in a nutshell. Nobody uses cash any more. It’s all checks and credit cards. You open a cash register, it’s full of nickels and Master Charge receipts. Payrolls are all by check. Do you know, right here in Manhattan, there’s a guy sells hot dogs on a street corner, he’s on Master Charge?”
May said, “Well, maybe that shows Kelp has a good idea. You can take the story in that book, and adapt it around, and turn it into something. Andy Kelp couldn’t do it, John, but you could. And it wouldn’t just be following somebody else’s plan, you’d adapt it, you’d make it work. You’d be the aw-tour.”
“With Kelp for my actor, huh?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, John, I think you’re unfair to him. I know he gets too optimistic sometimes, but I really don’t think he’s a jinx.”
“You’ve seen me work with him,” Dortmunder said. “You don’t think that’s a jinx?”
“You didn’t get caught,” she pointed out. “You’ve been collared a few times in your life, John, but it was never while you were working with Andy Kelp.”
Dortmunder glowered over that one, but he didn’t have an immediate answer. May waited, knowing she’d presented all the arguments she could, and now all she could do was let it percolate through his head.
Dortmunder frowned toward the opposite wall for a while, then grimaced and said, “I don’t remember the book so good, I don’t know if it was such a hot idea in the first place.”
“I’ve still got it,” she said. “You could read it again.”
“I didn’t like the style,” he said.
“It isn’t the style, it’s the story. Will you read it again?” He looked at her. She saw he was weakening. “I don’t promise anything,” he said.
“But you will read it?”
“But I don’t promise anything.”
Jumping to her feet, she said, “You won’t be sorry, John, I know you won’t.” She kissed him on the forehead, and ran off to the bedroom to where she’d hid the book.
6
K E L P walked into the 0. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at five minutes after ten. He hadn’t wanted to make a bad impression by showing up too early, so he’d hung back a little and the result was he was five minutes late.
Two customers at the bar, telephone repairmen with their tool-lined utility belts still on, were discussing the derivation of the word spic. “It comes from the word speak,” one of them was saying. “Like they say all the time, ‘I spic English.’ So that’s why they got the name.”
“Naw,” the other one said. “It didn’t come like that at all. Don’t you know? A spic is one of those little knives they use. Din you ever see one of the women with a spic stuck down inside her stocking?”
The first one said, “Yeah?” He was frowning, apparently trying to see in his mind’s eye a spic stuck down inside a woman’s stocking.
Kelp walked on down to the far end of the bar. Rollo the bartender, a tall meaty balding blue-jawed fellow in a dirty white shirt and dirty white apron, came moving heavily down the other side of the bar and pushed an empty glass across to him. “The other bourbon’s already here,” he said. “He’s got the bottle.”
“Thanks,” Kelp said.
Rob said, “And the draft beer with the salt on the side.”
“Right.”
“Gonna be any more of you?”
“Naw, just the three of us. See you, Rollo.”