“Hey,” Rob said, in a confidential manner, and made a head gesture for Kelp to come in closer.
Kelp went in closer, leaning toward him over the bar. Was there trouble? He said, “Yeah?”
Rob, in an undertone, said, “They’re both crazy,” and made another head gesture, this one indicating the two telephone repairmen down at the other end of the bar.
Kelp looked down that way. Crazy? With all those screwdrivers and things, they could get kind of dangerous.
Rollo murmured, “It comes from Spic-and-Span.”
A confused vision of people eating a detergent and going crazy entered Kelp’s head. Like sniffing airplane glue He said, “Yeah?”
“On account of the cleaning women,” Rollo said.
“Oh,” Kelp said. Cleaning women had started it apparently, drinking the stuff. Maybe it was a kind of high. “I’ll stick to bourbon,” he said, and picked up the empty glass.
“Sure,” Rollo said, but as Kelp turned away Rollo began to look confused.
Kelp walked on down past the end of the bar and past the two doors marked with silhouettes of dogs and the words POINTE and SETTERS, and then on past the phone booth and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. All the walls of the room were lined floor to ceiling with beer and liquor cases, leaving only enough space in the middle for a battered old table with a green felt top, half a dozen chairs, and a dirty bare bulb with a round green tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.
Dortmunder and Murch were seated together at the table. A glass was in front of Dortmunder, next to a bottle whose label said AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON- “OUR OWN BRAND.” In front of Murch were a full glass of beer with a fine head on it, and a clear glass saltshaker. Murch was saying to Dortmunder, “. – . through the Midtown Tunnel, and-oh, hi, Kelp.”
“Hi. How you doing, Dortmunder?”
Fine,” Dortmunder said. He nodded briefly at Kelp, but then looked away to pick up his glass. Kelp could sense that Dortmunder was still feeling very prickly about this, still wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be friends or go along with this kidnapping idea or anything. May had told Kelp to go slow and easy, not push Dortmunder too hard, and Kelp could see that May had been right.
Murch said, “I was just telling Dortmunder, as long as they’ve got that construction on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I give up on the Midtown Tunnel at all. At night like this, I can come right up Flatbush, take the Manhattan Bridge, FDR Drive, come through the park at Seventy-ninth Street, and here I am.”
“Right,” Kelp said. He sat down not too near Dortmunder, and put his glass on the table. “Could I, uh…” He gestured at the bottle.
“Help yourself,” Dortmunder said. It was brusque, but not really unfriendly.
“Thanks.”
While Kelp poured, Murch said, “Of course, going back, what I might try is go down the west side, take the Battery Tunnel, then Atlantic Avenue over to Flatbush, down to Grand Army Plaza, then Eastern Parkway and Rockaway Parkway and I’m home.”
” � ,,
Is that right, Kelp said.
Dortmunder pulled a paperback book out of his hip pocket and slapped it down on the table. “I read this thing again,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” Kelp sipped at his bourbon.
Dortmunder spread his hands. He shrugged. He seemed to be considering his words very carefully, and finally he said, “It could maybe be used a little.”
Kelp found himself grinning, even though he was trying to remain low key. “You really think so?” he said.
“It could maybe be adapted,” Dortmunder said. He glanced at Kelp, then looked at the book on the table and gave it a brushing little slap with his fingertips. “We could maybe take some of the ideas,” he said, “and work up a plan of our own.”
“Well, sure,” Kelp said. “That’s what I figured.” He had his own copy of the book in his jacket pocket. Pulling it out, he said, “The way I saw it-”
“The point is,” Dortmunder said, and now he looked directly at Kelp, and even shook a finger, “the point is,” he said, “what you got with this book is a springboard. That’s all, just a springboard.”
“Oh, sure,” Kelp said.
“It still needs a plan,” Dortmunder said.
“Absolutely,” Kelp said. “That’s why the first thing I thought of, I thought to bring it to you.”
Murch said, “What, are we back with that book? I thought we weren’t gonna do that.”
Dortmunder was being very dignified, very judicious, and Kelp was hanging back and letting him have his head. Turning to Murch now, Dortmunder said, “I give the book another reading. I wanted to be fair, and we don’t have that much on the fire that we ought to turn something down without giving it a chance.”
“Oh,” Murch said. He pulled out a copy of the book and said, “I brought this along to give back to Kelp.”
“Well, hold onto it,” Kelp told him.
He was immediately sorry, because Dortmunder apparently hadn’t liked that. “Hold onto the book if you want,” he said, “but what we’ll do is, we’ll work out our own plan from it. We do what we do, not what the book does.”
“Sure thing,” Kelp said, and tried to flash Murch a high sign that he should go along with it.
Whether Murch saw the sign or not, all he did next was shake his head, look baffled, and say, “Fine with me. You want my Mom in on it?”
“Right. She and May can take care of the kid.”
“Okay,” Murch said. “Only, where’s the kid?”
“Up till now,” Dortmunder said, “we’re going along with the idea this book can tell us how we get one.”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. “How to find just the kid we want, it’s all in the book here.”
Picking up his copy, Dortmunder said, “Well, I got an open mind. I’m always ready to have a book writer tell me my business. Let’s take a look at that part.”
Kelp, riffling hurriedly through his own dog-eared copy, said, “It’s chapter four. Page twenty-nine.”
Dortmunder said, “Thanks,” and turned to the right page. He read slowly and patiently, his lips not quite moving, his blunt fingertip following the words from line to line.
Kelp watched him for a few seconds, then began to read the same chapter in his own copy of the book.
Murch sat there by himself. He looked at Dortmunder, and then at Kelp. It took him quite a while to figure out what they were doing; until, in fact, both of them had turned a page. Then he shrugged, picked up his own copy of the book, shook a little salt into his beer to get the head back, drank a bit, and settled down to read.
7
CHAPTER FOUR::
When Parker walked into the apartment, Krauss was at the window with the binoculars. He was sitting on a metal folding chair, and his notebook and pen were on another chair next to him. There was no other furniture in the room, which had gray plaster walls from which patterned wallpaper had recently been stripped. Curls of wallpaper lay against the molding in all the corners. On the floor beside Krauss’s chair lay three apple cores.
Krauss turned when Parker shut the door. His eyes looked pale, the skin around them wrinkled, as though he’d spent too long in a swimming pool. He said, “Nothing.”
Parker crossed the room and looked out the window. A clear blue cloudless day. Three stories down and one block to the north was the Manhattan exit of the Midtown Tunnel. Two lanes of cars and trucks streamed out of the tunnel, fanning apart into half a dozen lanes of traffic, curving away to the left or the right. Parker watched for a few seconds, then picked up the notebook and studied the entries. The numbers were license plates and dates and times of day. Parker said, “The Pontiac came through today, huh?”
“So did the Mercedes,” Krauss said. “But there isn’t any phone in either of them.”
“We may have to change things around.” Parker dropped the notebook on the chair and said, “We’ll try the Lincoln today, if it comes through.”
Krauss looked at his watch. “Ten, fifteen minutes,” he said.
“If it isn’t any good,” Parker said, “Henley will come take over here at four. If he doesn’t show up, that means we’re on the Lincoln, so just pack in everything here.”
“Right,” Krauss said.
Parker glanced out the window again. “See you later,” he said, and left the apartment. He went down the warped wooden stairs and out to the street, then crossed Second Avenue and got into a blue Plymouth just around the corner on Thirty-seventh Street.