Watch Your Back!

by Donald E. Westlake

Genres: Black Humor; Mystery

Synopsis

Hapless criminal John Dortmunder returns in another rollicking tale of disorganized crime from Grand Master of Mystery Donald E. Westlake. It’s the score of a lifetime: easy access to a lavish New York City apartment, hordes of valuables, and an absentee owner avoiding the lawyers of his unhappy ex-wives. But before they pull the job, Dortmunder’s crew is startled to find their beloved gin joint, the OJ, in the clutches of the Mafia—who consider it perfect for a little fraud, courtesy of a nice big fire. For tactical and highly superstitious reasons, the fate of the OJ is even more important to the crew than the enormous score. Now, Dortmunder and his gang are determined to split their time, fighting the mob and robbing the rich simultaneously.

Release date: September 3, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

WHEN JOHN DORTMUNDER, a free man, not even on parole, walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that Friday night in July, just before ten o’clock, the regulars were discussing the afterlife. “What I don’t get,” said one of them, as Dortmunder angled toward where Rollo the bartender was busy with something far over to the right end of the bar, “is all these clouds.”

A second regular put down his foaming beerglass to say, “Clouds? Which clouds are these?”

“That they’re sitting on!” The first regular waved an arm dangerously, but did no damage. “You look at all these pictures, Jesus sitting on a cloud, that other God sitting on a cloud, Mary sitting on a cloud—”

“A little lower down,” suggested a third.

“Well, yeah, but the point is, can’t Heaven come up with furniture?”

As Dortmunder approached Rollo, he saw that the beefy bartender in his once-white apron was deeply absorbed in making five very complicated drinks in glasses Dortmunder had never seen before and would not have suspected the O.J. of possessing: curled, twisted, wider than deep, they looked mostly like crystal hubcaps, though smaller. But not much smaller.

Another regular, meantime, was objecting to the concept of furniture in the beyond, saying, “Whadaya want with furniture? Heaven isn’t Westchester, you know.”

A fifth regular weighed in, saying, “Yeah? What about all those fields of plenty?”

“Land of milk and honey,” added the third regular, as though it were an indictment.

The first regular lifted a skeptical glass and a skeptical brow to say, “Do they give out overshoes?”

What Rollo was doing with those glasses was just about everything. He had already sluiced in some crushed ice, and now he was adding some red liquid and some yellow liquid and some brown liquid and some clear liquid, all of them channeling around through the shards of ice and combining to form pools that looked like a lab test you didn’t want the results of.

The second regular was now saying, “What gets me is this fruitcake Muslim Heaven with the seventy-two virgins.”

“There aren’t seventy-two virgins,” the first regular objected.

“Well, no,” the second regular conceded, “not all at one time, but still, what kinda Heaven is this? It would be like being assigned to an all-girls’ high school.”

“Ouch,” said the third regular.

“Can you imagine,” the second regular said, “what it sounds like in the cafeteria at lunchtime?”

The fourth regular, the one with something against Westchester, said, “Would you have to learn volleyball?”

This introduction of sports stymied everybody for a minute, as Dortmunder watched Rollo slice up a banana and drop the chunks into the glasses like depth charges. Next he reached for a lime, as Dortmunder looked around and saw what must have happened. It was summertime in New York City, late July, and the sluggish tide of tourists had washed up on this unlikely shore five ladies who did each other’s silvery wavy hair, and who were seated now at one of the booths on the right. They perched very straight on just the front edge of the seat, their backs not touching the seatbacks, like freshmen in military academy, and they gazed around the unlovely precincts of the O.J. with an anthropologist’s guarded delight. Their clothing combined many of the colors Rollo was injecting into their drinks. One of them, Dortmunder saw, had a cell phone-camera and was sending pictures of the O.J. to the folks back home.

Well, being a free person and not on parole was all well and good, but there was no point in overdoing it. Hunching a shoulder against the spy-cam, Dortmunder said, “Whadaya say, Rollo?”

“With you in a minute,” Rollo said. Inside each glass now, it looked as though an elf had blown up, but Rollo was not done. To cap it all, he dropped a shiny red spheroid on top of each; could those be related to cherries somehow?

Surely that was all even these glasses could stand, but no. Turning to a little-used drawer under the backbar, Rollo came up with five Oriental pastel parasols and plopped one onto each drink, as though some poor shipwrecked son of a bitch were marooned on each of them.

And now they actually were done. Since apparently total concentration was not necessary while loading glasses onto a tray—not even glasses like these—while Rollo did that operation he said, “You already got the beer and salt back there.”

“Good.”

Tray full, Rollo reached under the bar and came up with a bottle of sluggish brown liquid behind a label reading,

 

Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon

“Our Own Brand”

 

Placing this bottle on the bar before Dortmunder, he said, “The other bourbon and ice? He coming?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get you two glasses,” Rollo said, and while he did, Dortmunder told him, “Also the rye and water, the one that tinkles his ice cubes all the time.”

“Haven’t seen him for a while.” Rollo knew everybody not by their name but by their drink, which struck him as the professional way to go about things.

“He’s the one called this meeting,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s hope it’s good news.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Rollo said, though he didn’t. Instead, he carried the tray of weirdness toward the five tourist ladies, who filmed his approach.

Picking up the bottle and the two glasses with their own discrete burdens of ice cubes, Dortmunder made his way around the regulars, who were still gnawing the same bone, the third regular now saying, “What if you can’t play cards in Heaven? What if you can’t dance?”

“Big deal,” the second regular said. “I can’t dance on Earth.”

Leaving the theologians, Dortmunder made his way down the hall, past the doors defined by neat dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth that was now a helplessly gaping unofficial portal to cyberspace, and into a small square room with a concrete floor. The walls were fronted, floor to ceiling, by beer and liquor cases, leaving just room for a battered old round table with a stained green felt top and half a dozen armless wooden chairs, at one of which—the one most completely facing the door—sat a carroty-headed guy with a glass of beer in front of his right hand, a salt shaker in front of where his left hand should be, and his left hand actually holding a cell phone to his ear. “Here’s John now,” he said into it. “I’ll tell him.”

“Hello, Stan,” Dortmunder said, and sat to his left, so he, too, could have an unobstructed view of the door.

Hanging up and secreting his cell on his person, Stan said, “I think the Williamsburg is gonna be all right.”

“That’s good,” Dortmunder said. Stan Murch was a driver, and as a result he gave more than the usual consideration to the routes he chose.

“For many years,” Stan said, “the Williamsburg Bridge was where you went if you wanted to sleep in your car. Only now the construction’s done, turns out, that humongous expressway Robert Moses wanted to put across Manhattan from the Williamsburg to the Holland Tunnel, slice the island in half like the Great Wall of China, only he didn’t get it, that’s fine, turns out it didn’t have to happen anyway. Canal Street’s a great run across, the West Side Highway’s a snap coming up, I’m here so early this is my second saltshaker.” Being a driver, Stan liked to pace his alcohol intake, but he hated it when his beer went flat; hence the salt. Every once in a while, a judicious spray, the head comes right back.

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

“However,” Stan said, “that was Ralph on the phone, the meet is off.”

Ralph was Ralph Winslow, the rye-and-water-in-a-tinkling-glass. Dortmunder said, “He called the meeting, now he calls to say it’s off.”

“Some cops found something in his car,” Stan explained. “He couldn’t go into details.”

“No, I know.”

“In fact,” Stan said, “he’s got me on his speed-dial, so the cops think he’s still on his one permitted call to his lawyer.”

“Call Andy,” Dortmunder suggested. “He’s on his way, save him some time.”

“Good idea. He’s on my speed-dial. You don’t have one of these, do you?” Stan asked, unleashing his cell.

“No,” Dortmunder said simply.

As Stan made the call to warn off the final attendee of the non-meeting, he and Dortmunder walked back down the hall and around the regulars and over to where Rollo was firmly wiping with a dirty rag the part of the bar where he’d made all those strange drinks. At the booth, the ladies were gone and those glasses were all empty except for some dirty ice. That was fast. They’d taken the parasols with them.

“Sorry, Rollo,” Dortmunder said, returning the bottle and glasses. “Change of plan.”

“You’ll be back,” Rollo said.

As Dortmunder and Stan headed for the street, the first regular was saying, “You want my idea of Heaven? You go there, you take a nap.”

The third regular veered half around on his barstool to get a better look at things. “Yeah? Then what?”

“What what? It’s over. The Last Nap. Can you think of anything better?”

Into the profound silence that followed upon that, Dortmunder, on his way out the door, said, “I was counting on this. I could use something.”

“Me, too,” Stan said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Thank you. Maybe,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll get another phone call.”

2

DORTMUNDER! JOHN DORTMUNDER! ARE YOU THERE, JOHN DORTMUNDER?”

“Aack!” Dortmunder recoiled, flinging his telephone hand as far from his body as he could without surgery.

“JOHN DORTMUNDER! IS THAT YOU?”

“Don’t shout!”

“What?”

“Don’t shout!”

The phone muttered something. Cautiously Dortmunder allowed it to approach his head. The phone muttered, “This is it? I come back and the phones don’t work?”

“Arnie?” This was three weeks since the non-meeting at the O.J.

“There you are! Hello to you, John Dortmunder!”

“Yeah, hello, Arnie. So you’re back, are you?”

“Not ten minutes since I finished unlockin the door.”

“So it didn’t work, huh?” Dortmunder was not surprised.

But Arnie, not quite shouting, cried, “Whadaya mean, it didn’t work? A course it worked! I graduated with honors, John Dortmunder. What you see before you is a changed man.”

“Well, I’m not seeing you,” Dortmunder pointed out, “and I have to say, you don’t sound that different.”

“Well, it’s a makeover, that’s all,” Arnie explained, as Dortmunder’s faithful companion, May, came into the living room with a pen in her hand (she’d been doing a crossword puzzle in the kitchen) and an expression of concern on her face, wondering what all the racket was about. “It’s not like they slid a new chassis in,” Arnie went on. “I’m still the same physical plant like I was before, except my skin is all this khaki color.”

“Well, you been in the tropics,” Dortmunder said, as he showed May an elaborate combined shoulder shrug, head shake, eyebrow waggle, and torso twist, to indicate that he didn’t know so far exactly what was going on, but it didn’t seem to include any imminent threat.

“That’s it, all right,” Arnie agreed. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to leave the house again. But listen to me, what I’m saying, I never leave the house anyway.”

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said.

“In fact,” Arnie said, “the reason I’m calling, fresh offa the plane, I want you to come here.”

“There? Your apartment, you mean?”

“That’s where I’m gonna be, John Dortmunder, and that’s where I’m gonna put before your eyes a proposition so good you’ll fall right over.”

“What do you mean, a proposition?”

“Dortmunder, not to go into details on this public instrument here, this telephone—”

“No no, I follow that.”

“But you know,” Arnie said, “in our transactions, me and you, I always give top dollar.”

“That’s true.”

“I always had to give top dollar,” Arnie reminded him, “because if I gave medium dollar like that goniff Stoon, nobody would ever come to do business with me, because of my basic unpleasantness.”

“Yrm.”

“Which is in the past, John Dortmunder,” Arnie promised him. “Wait’ll you see. You come over, I’ll lay it out, you’re never gonna even thought about a dollar as large as this one. Come over, I’m here, until I get my pallor back I am not leaving the apartment. Come over any time, John Dortmunder. And I’ll tell you this, it’s good to be back. Good-bye to you.”

“Good-bye,” Dortmunder told the phone after Arnie hung up. Then he also hung up, and shook his head.

“I’ve been patient,” May reminded him.

“Let’s sit down,” Dortmunder said.

So they sat, and May looked alert, and Dortmunder said, “I mentioned, from time to time, a character called Arnie Albright.”

“A fence,” she said, and put her pen on the coffee table. “You sell him things sometimes. You don’t like him.”

“Nobody likes him,” Dortmunder said. “He doesn’t like himself. He told me once, he finds himself so disgusting, he shaves with his back to the mirror.”

“But you sell him things.”

“He makes up for his personality,” Dortmunder explained, “by paying a better percentage than anybody else.”

May said, “Is he really that bad?”

“Well,” Dortmunder told her, “he just came back from the intervention.”

“Intervention? He’s a drunk, too?”

“No, he’s just obnoxious, but it’s enough. Turns out, his family couldn’t stand it any more, it was either drop him out of an airplane or intervent. I don’t think any of them had a plane, so they went for the other.”

“John,” May said, “when a group of people do an intervention, they go to the drunk or the druggie or whatever he is, they tell him you have to go into rehab now, or detox, or whatever it is, or nobody wants you around here any more. If they did an intervention for obnoxiousness, where would they send him?”

“Club Med,” Dortmunder told her. “Down in the Caribbean somewhere. They figured, all the good weather, all the smiley faces, maybe it’d soak in. He called me once when he was there, he hated it. I figured, it’s not gonna work, but now he’s back and he says it did work, so go know.”

“Did he sound like it worked?”

Dortmunder thought back to the recent conversation. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Could be. He was still loud, but maybe he didn’t grate quite so much. Still and all, he wants me to go over to his place, he’s got a proposition for me, he called me as soon as he got home, but I dunno about that.”

May said, “Did you say you’d go?”

“I don’t think I said one way or the other.”

“But he called you right away when he got home. I think you’ve got to do it.”

Dortmunder sighed, long and heartfelt. “I don’t think I can go over there by myself, May.”

“Call Andy,” she advised.

He nodded, slow and heavy. “That’s what it comes down to,” he agreed.

3

WHEN HIS VIBRATOR went off, Andy Kelp was standing in an elevator with a bunch of people he didn’t know. He was on his way to an upscale furrier whose display space was on the eleventh floor of this midtown Manhattan building, and he was going there today because, this being a Tuesday in mid-August, the entire staff of that exclusive boutique was away on vacation, as he’d verified this morning by listening to their answering machine. A good day, therefore, to shop.

Now, riding the elevator, feeling the vibration against his leg, he thought, this is a bad time for this, but on the other hand, in the hall in front of Gogol’s Sables would be even worse, so he pulled the phone from his pocket, opened it, and murmured into it, “Yes?”

Around him, all the other people put that face on that pretends they’re not listening, the way they always do, while they leaned in a little closer just the same.

“You doing anything?”

“Naturally I’m doing something,” Kelp said, having recognized the voice as belonging to his sometime associate, John Dortmunder. “I’m usually doing something.”

“Oh.” Voice now reeking with suspicion, Dortmunder said, “On your own?”

Meaning, of course, was Kelp freezing him out of something good. “Sure, single-o,” he said, while around him the other people began to clear their throats and rub their noses and move their feet around on the floor to express their dissatisfaction with the interest level of the phone call so far. “It happens.”

Two people coughed so loudly, Kelp had trouble hearing Dortmunder’s response: “So call me when you get a little time off.”

“Hour, maybe maybe.”

“I’ll be home,” Dortmunder said, he being someone who, Kelp knew, very often did nothing at all.

“Done,” Kelp said, and hung up as the elevator stopped at 11. He got off, and the elevator continued on up, full of sneezing, nose-blowing and elbow scratching, and fifty-five minutes later Kelp walked into his own little apartment in the west Thirties, carrying a big shopping bag from Wal-Mart, full but not too heavy, with a polyester sweater in lime green on top. He went through into the bedroom, and his close personal friend Anne Marie Carpinaw looked up from the computer, where she was lately in frequent hyperspace correspondence with history freaks who wanted trivia answers about her daddy, who had for a long time been a congressperson from the greatish state of Kansas.

“Shopping?” she asked, fingers still on the keys. “At Wal-Mart? You?”

“Not exactly,” he told her, as he put the shopping bag on the bed. “I was more hunting for the pot.” Tossing the sweater into the wastebasket, he reached into the bag and brought out a short silver sable coat of a style that’s never out of fashion. “I think this one’s your size.”

She leaped up from the computer. “Sable in August! How appropriate.”

“I got three of them,” he told her, admiring the way she snuggled into the coat. Taking two similar trophies from the bag, he said, “One for you and two for the rent.”

“Well, this is the best of them,” she said, smiling as her hand smoothed the fur down her front.

“John wants me to call, I’ll do it in the living room.”

“These people,” she said, with a dismissive wave of the hand at the computer. “They want to know where Daddy stood on the Cold War. As though Daddy ever stood on anything. He was a politician, for God’s sake.”

“Tell them,” Kelp suggested, “your daddy felt the Cold War was an unfortunate necessity and he prayed every night that it would come out okay.”

He left her standing there in the sable but with a sudden fraught expression on her face, as though wondering if she’d wound up with her father after all, and in the living room he sat on the sofa, looked at the television set, and called John.

Who answered on the fifth ring, sounding out of breath. “Ern?”

“You hadda run from the kitchen.”

“It turns out, snacking’s a good thing. Many small meals all day long, easier on the system.”

“Still, you hadda run from the kitchen.”

“You aren’t going to,” Dortmunder said, “talk to me about extra telephones.”

“I am not,” Kelp agreed. “I gave up on you long ago. Besides, you’re the one wanted to talk, so you get to pick the subject.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “Arnie Albright.”

Kelp waited, then said, “That’s the subject?”

“It is.”

“He’s down south, for the intervention.”

“He’s back, he called me, he says it worked.”

“I’ll want a second opinion.”

“You can have one,” Dortmunder offered. “Your very own opinion. He wants to see us, he says he’s got a great proposition for us.”

“Us?” Kelp watched Anne Marie walk through the room toward the kitchen, smiling. She still wore the coat. Into the phone, he said, “Arnie didn’t call me, John, he called you.”

“But he knows we’re a team.”

“Arnie Albright didn’t call me,” Kelp said, “so I don’t need to go over there.”

“He says it’s a really great offer.”

“Fine,” Kelp said. “You go over, if it turns out it really is a really great offer, then you call me. You can even come here and describe it to me.”

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “I’m gonna level with you.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“I just can’t do it alone,” Dortmunder admitted. “I’m afraid to know what Arnie is after Club Med. Either we go together, or I’m not going.”

Kelp was beginning to feel trapped. “Look, John,” he said, and Anne Marie walked through the room again, from the kitchen toward the bedroom, still smiling and still wearing the sable coat. She stopped midway and opened the coat, and she didn’t have anything on underneath it. “Uuuuu,” Kelp said.

“So you’ll meet me there,” Dortmunder said.

It was unfair; life was too full of distractions. How could a person figure a way to weasel out of a thing? Anne Marie walked on to the bedroom, the coat twitching behind her legs, and Kelp said, “Only not right now. Later on today, say four o’clock.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Dortmunder said. “Out front.”

“I can hardly wait,” Kelp said, and hung up.

4

ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY in paradise.”

“You say that every day.”

“Well, of course I say it every day,” Preston said, flicking sand off his belly. “That’s the point, isn’t it? The unchanging sameness, the lack of surprise, the loss of suspense, the eternal undifferentiated pleasantness of it all, of course I have to respond in the character of the setting, with the same hackneyed phrase every single pointless, drifting, inane day. The wonder of it is that you don’t say it every day.”

Alan frowned. Preston suspected, not for the first time, that Alan had not been paying strict attention. “Say what every day?”

“‘You say that every day.’”

Alan scrunched his monkey face into a walnut, a walnut wearing a Red Sox hat and sunglasses. “I say what every day?”

“Oh, Lord,” Preston said. Should he try to get back to the beginning of the thread, untangle the snarl? What for? Instead, he said, “You’re not quite the thing as a paid companion, are you?”

“I’m every bit a companion,” Alan insisted. “I’m here at your beck and call, I engage in conversation with you, I fetch and carry, I completely subordinate my own preferences and personality, and I never argue with you.”

“You’re arguing with me now.”

“No, I’m not.”

Another dead end. Preston sighed and looked out over his own supine form on the chaise longue, past his mounded pink belly cresting at the waist of his scarlet swimming trunks, past the tops of his toes, just visible way down there this side of the white wood rail enclosing the porch, past the bit of sand and neat plantings and brick path that paralleled the shoreline, past the shoreline out there and then to the green and foamy sea, speckled with snorkelers, wh. . .