Authors: Donald Westlake
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Andy Kelp agreed, nodding. Seated on the brown Naugahyde sofa in Wally’s cluttered living room, he munched cheese and crackers while Wally sat facing him, frowning in agony. Andy said, “I felt kind of embarrassed, too, Wally. Talking you up to John the way I did. And then we get Zog and all this.”
Wally squirmed. His big wet eyes blinked over and over in discomfort. His little pudgy hands made vague unhappy gestures. He felt very awkward in this whole situation. He said, “Gee, Andy, I think … well, I just think maybe I ought to tell you the truth.”
Andy raised an eyebrow, gazing at him over a cheese–topped cracker. “The truth, Wally?”
Wally hesitated. He hated having to trust his own instincts, particularly when it meant disagreeing with the computer. But on the other hand, this was a computer that didn’t know the difference between Zog and Earth, which was perfectly all right in some applications but kind of a problem in others. So maybe Wally was right to override the computer’s decision this time. On the
other
other hand, exposing himself to these people was definitely scary. “The warlord has no pity,” the computer had reminded him, more than once.
Did Andy have pity? His eyes seemed very bright, very alert, as he looked at Wally, waiting for the truth, but he didn’t really look — Wally had to admit to himself, reluctantly — what you could call
sympathetic.
As Wally hesitated, Andy put the cracker and its shipment of cheese back on the plate on the coffee table and said, “What truth was that, Wally?”
So there was nothing for it but to go forward. Wally took a deep breath, swallowed once more, and said, “The treasure is seven hundred thousand dollars in cash stolen from a Securivan armored car in a daring daylight robbery on the New York State Thruway near the North Dudson exit on April twenty–sev —”
Andy, staring at him, said, “
What?
”
“Tom was one of the robbers,” Wally rushed on, “and he’s been in jail ever since, but not for that, because they never found the people who robbed the armored car.”
Wally, blinking more and more rapidly, sank back in his chair, exhausted. He looked at the plate of cheese and crackers and suddenly desperately wanted to eat all of them; but he was afraid to. He’d have to leave his mouth clear in case he had to talk, in case he had to, for instance, plead for his life. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he looked up away from the food at Andy’s face, and saw him grinning in admiration and astonishment. “Wally!” Andy said in unmistakable pleasure. “How’d you
do
that?”
Wally gulped and grinned in combined relief and delight. “It was easy,” he said.
“No, come on, Wally,” Andy said. “Don’t be modest. How’d you do it?”
So Wally explained the reasoning he’d worked out with the computer, and then demonstrated his access to the
New York Times
data bank, and actually brought up the original news item about the armored car robbery, which Andy read with close attention and deep interest, commenting to himself, “Not much finesse there. Just smash and grab.”
“I wanted to tell you so we’d have better communication,” Wally explained, “and better input to help solve the problem. But I was afraid. And the computer advised against.”
“The comput — ?” Andy seemed startled, but then he grinned again and said, “How come?” Walking back over to the sofa, he said, “Computer doesn’t like me?”
Wally followed, and they took their seats again, Wally saying, “It wasn’t so much you, Andy. It was mostly Tom the computer was worried about.”
“Smart computer,” Andy said, and frowned, thinking it over. “Do we let Tom in on this?” he asked himself. Absentmindedly he picked up a cheese and cracker, pushed it into his mouth, and talked around it. “In some ways it’s simpler,” he said, more or less intelligibly. “We can talk up front with each other. On the other hand, I can see Tom getting a little testy.”
“That’s what the computer and I thought, too,” Wally agreed.
Andy swallowed his cheese and cracker, thinking. “I tell you what we say,” he decided.
Wally leaned forward, all ears. Well, mostly ears.
Andy reached for another cheese and cracker and pointed at himself with it. “
I
told you,” he said. “I decided the only way to get good input from you was to give you the whole picture. So I explained to you how Tom had been involved in this robbery years and years ago, brought in to it by bad companions and all, and how now he’s old and not wanting to be a robber anymore, and how he was let out of prison, and all he wants to do is retire, and this money’s all he’s got for his golden years, so we’re all getting together to help him get it back. Because, by now, whose money is it, anyway? So that’s what I told you. Right?”
Wally nodded. “Okay, Andy,” he said. “But, Andy?”
“Yeah?”
“Is, uh,” Wally said. He
craved
a cracker piled with cheese. “Is, uh,” he said, “any of that the truth?”
Andy laughed, calm and innocent and obviously easy in his mind. “Why, Wally,” he said. “Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it’s
all
the truth.”
In the week since Edna had blurted out that astonishing sentence — “That was your
father
in that car!” — Myrtle had thought of nothing else. Suddenly she burned with the desire — no, the
need
— to know her true origins. But Edna was no help at all. After that initial sudden outburst and that quick (equally startling) string of profanity, Edna had shut up like a safe on the subject, had refused to talk about it, had refused even to let Myrtle talk about it. Clearly she regretted that flare–up, that window into the past she’d inadvertently and briefly opened, and was waiting only for that out–of–control moment to be forgotten.
Well, it wasn’t going to be forgotten. Myrtle had the bit well and truly in her teeth now and was determined to learn
everything.
From knowing
nothing,
she wanted to know
all.
Her earlier complacence now astonished her. She’d always known, of course, that Gosling was her mother’s maiden name, that Street was the only other name Edna had ever possessed, and that she herself had entered the world long before Edna and Mr. Street had ever met. She had known it, but she’d never actually thought about it, wondered about it, followed through the implications. And now?
Now, she had to know. The window was open, and there was no shutting it. If Edna wouldn’t talk, there had to be another way. Myrtle had two elderly female cousins in the area, one a widow in a nursing home in Dudson Falls, the other an old maid still in her family’s farmhouse (though without the farm acreage) outside North Dudson. Myrtle had tried talking to both of them this last week but had gotten nowhere. The frustrating thing about trying to deal with doddering oldsters was that it was impossible to know for sure whether they were lying or merely feeble–minded. Both old ladies had sworn ignorance of Myrtle’s male parentage, though, so that was that.
What else was there, what other way to learn about the past? Twenty–six years ago. Who was spending time then with Edna Gosling, already thirty–six years of age and chief librarian at the Putkin’s Corners municipal library? It was really too bad the Vilburgtown Reservoir had drowned Putkin’s Corners a few years later; there might have been clues there. Well, they were unreachable now.
And the
County Post
seemed to contain no clues at all. No photos of the younger Edna Gosling on the arm of this gentleman or that at VFW Post clambakes or Dudson Consolidated School reunions, no “and passenger Edna Gosling” in stories of automobile accidents, no “accompanied by Miss Edna Gosling” in social–page wedding reports.
What else had Edna said about the man she claimed to be Myrtle’s father back there at her first startled instant of recognition? “It couldn’t happen, but it did,” she’d said, meaning, presumably, that she hadn’t believed the man would — no,
could
— ever return to this part of the world. Because she’d thought he was dead? Out of the country? Permanently hospitalized? But then she’d called the man, as Myrtle remembered it, a “dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Was that because he’d left her, pregnant and unwed, so many years ago?
If
only
Edna would open up!
But she wouldn’t, that’s all. But there was nothing. And now it was nearly six o’clock, time for Myrtle to leave work and go pick up Edna at the Senior Citizens Center. Having finished going through for the third time the papers covering the year before her birth, Myrtle sighed, fast–cranked the roll of microfilm back onto its reel, put it away in its box, said good evening to Janice (the employee who would steer the library through the twilight hours), went out to the employee parking area behind the library, got behind the wheel of the black Ford Fairlane, and drove across town and down Main Street to where Edna stood irritably on the curb, waiting.
The clock on the Fairlane’s dashboard assured Myrtle she wasn’t late, so Edna’s irritation was simply at its normal level of background static and nothing for Myrtle to worry about. Therefore, she had a welcoming smile on her face as she pulled to the curb before the dour old lady and pushed open the passenger door, calling, “Hello, Mother!”
“Hm,” Edna commented. She stepped forward to climb into the car, then glanced up over its top at a passing vehicle and suddenly shouted, “
Goddamn!
”
Now, “
goddamn
” was not something Edna said. It certainly wasn’t something she ever shouted, and it absolutely positively wasn’t something she would shout in the middle of the public street. Astounded, Myrtle gaped at her mother as Edna clambered into the car, slammed the door, pointed a trembling and bony finger at the windshield, and cried, “Follow that son of a bitch!”
Then she understood. Peering out, seeing a clean new tan automobile driving away from them down Main Street, Myrtle said, “My father again?”
“
Follow
him!”
Myrtle was, God knows, willing. Putting the Fairlane in gear, she pulled out onto Main Street just about a block behind that tan car, with only one other automobile in between. Weaving left and right to see past that intervening car, she could make out that the tan car was a new Cadillac Sedan de Ville, with MD plates. Myrtle, waiting impatiently for a chance to pass the extraneous car, said, “Is my father a doctor?”
“Hah!” Edna said. “He liked to
play
doctor plenty enough. Don’t you lose him, now.”
“I won’t,” Myrtle promised.
“What’s he up to?” Edna muttered, beating her bony fist against the dashboard.
The car up ahead had four people in it, two in front and two in back. Maybe I’m going to get to know my father after all these years, Myrtle thought.
“Prick son of a bitch cocksucker.”
And she was sure as heck getting to know her mother better, too.
Dortmunder, in the backseat with Wally, twisted around to look out the rear window. They’d just put yet another little town behind them, and three vehicles were visible back there, strung out along this country road flanked by forest and small clearings containing tiny aluminum–sided houses with dead automobiles in their front yards. “Which one?” Dortmunder asked. “The black Fairlane. The one right behind us.”
The Fairlane was about three car lengths back; pretty close for a tail. Frowning at it, Dortmunder tried to make out the people inside through the sky–reflecting windshield. “You sure?” he said. “Looks to me like a couple women in there.”
“Been right on our ass for miles,” Kelp said.
“They don’t act like pros,” Dortmunder said.
Wally, excitement making his eyes and mouth wetter than usual, said, “Do you think they really are, Andy? Following us?”
Tom, up front next to Kelp, said, “One way to be sure. We’ll circle once. If they’re still with us, we’ll take them out. Anybody carrying?”
“No,” Dortmunder said.
Wally, very eager, said, “Carrying what?”
“You aren’t,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But what is it?” Wally asked. “Carrying what, John? What aren’t I carrying?”
“A gun,” Dortmunder explained, to shut him up, and Wally’s eyes grew huge and even wetter with this new thrill.
Meanwhile, up front, Tom was saying, “There’s a left just up ahead. You’ll take it, then the next left, and it’ll swing us back to this road just this side of that town we went through. If your Fairlane’s still with us then, we’ll have to get rid of them.” Twisting around, he frowned at Dortmunder and said, “This peaceful impulse of yours, Al, you’re letting it take over your life. You don’t want to go around all the time without heat.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Dortmunder told him.
Tom grimaced and shook his head and faced front. They made the left, onto a smaller and narrower and curvier road. “The Fairlane made the turn,” Kelp said, looking at the rearview mirror.
They drove along quietly then, the four of them in the purring Cadillac. Kelp had, as Dortmunder had known he would, come up with excellent transportation. And an extra passenger, too, since Kelp on his own had decided it would be a good idea to tell Wally the actual story here (which Tom hadn’t liked one bit, but it was already done, so there you are) and bring the little butterball along so he could have a look at the actual terrain, to help him and his computer think about the problem better. So here they all were, the Unlikely Quartet, driving around the countryside.
Around and around. A few miles farther along this secondary road, just after a steep downgrade and a one–lane stonewalled bridge, they came to the second left, as Tom pointed out. Kelp took it, and looked in the mirror. “Still with us,” he said.
“Heat would solve this problem,” Tom commented.
“Heat brings heat,” Dortmunder told the back of his head. Tom didn’t bother to answer.
“I’ll go around again,” Kelp suggested, “and when we get to that one–lane bridge from before, I can squeeze them.”
“A Caddy can beat a Fairlane,” Tom pointed out. “Why not just floor this sucker?”
“I don’t break speed limit laws in a borrowed car,” Kelp told him.
Tom snorted but made no comments about the superior qualities of rented cars.
Dortmunder looked back, and the Fairlane was still on their tail, far too close for anybody who knew anything about surveillance. Unless somebody
wanted
them to know they were being followed. But why? And who were those two women? He said, “Tom, why would anybody follow you?”
“Me?” Tom said, looking over his shoulder. “Whadaya mean, me? How come it isn’t one of you guys? Maybe they’re computer salesmen, want to talk to Wally.”
“The rest of us aren’t known around here,” Dortmunder said.
“Neither am I,” Tom said. “Not after twenty–six years.”
“I don’t like it,” Dortmunder said. “Right here in the neighborhood where we’re supposed to do the main job, and we’ve got new players in the game.”
“Here’s the turn,” Kelp said, and took it. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and said, “They kept going!”
Dortmunder looked back, and now there was no one behind them at all. “I don’t get it,” he said.
Wally, tentative about making suggestions among this crowd, said, “Maybe they were lost.”
“No,” Dortmunder said.
“Well, wait a second,” Kelp said. “That’s not entirely crazy, John.”
“No?” Dortmunder studied Kelp’s right ear. “How much crazy is it?” he asked.
“People get lost,” Kelp said, “particularly in the country. Particularly in places like this, where everything’s got the same name.”
“Dudson,” commented Tom.
“That’s the name, all right,” Kelp agreed. “How many Dudsons are there, anyway?”
“Let’s see,” Tom said, taking the question seriously. “North, East, Center, and Falls. Four.”
“That’s a lot of Dudsons,” Kelp said.
“There used to be three more,” Tom told him. “Dudson Park, Dudson City, and Dudson. They’re all under the reservoir.”
“Good,” Kelp said. “Anyway, John, how about that? You go out for a nice ride in the country, all of a sudden everywhere you look another Dudson, you’re lost, you don’t know how to get back, you’re driving in circles.”
“
We
were the one driving in circles,” Dortmunder said.
“I’m coming to that,” Kelp promised. “So there you are, driving in circles, and you decide you’ll pick another car and follow it until it
gets
somewhere. Only they picked us. So when we start going in circles, too, they figure we’re
also
lost on account of all the Dudsons, so off they go.”
“Sounds good to me,” Tom said.
Timidly, Wally said, “It does make sense, John.”
“I never seen that to matter much,” Dortmunder commented. “But, okay, maybe you’re all right. Nobody around here knows any of us, those two women didn’t act like they knew how to tail anybody, and now they’re gone.”
“So there you are,” Kelp said.
“There I am,” Dortmunder agreed, frowning.
Tom said, “So
now
can we go pick up my stash?”
“Yes,” Kelp said.
“Just the same,” Dortmunder said, mostly to himself, “something tells me we got that Ford in our future.”