Drowned Hopes Part 3

"See you tomorrow," Myrtle said, and went back inside, the screen door slamming on Joe's creative study of her behind.

Climbing the stairs, Myrtle went quickly through the mail. Myrtle Street, Myrtle St. She and her mother had been Myrtle and Edna Gosling when Edna had inherited the place from her mortician father and moved in with her not-yet-two-year-old baby. To be Myrtle Gosling of Myrtle Street would have been perfectly ordinary and unremarkable, but she hadn't remained that for long. She'd been not-yet-four when Edna met Mr. Street-Mr. Earl Street, of Bangor, Maine, a salesman in stationery and school-and-library supplies-and not-yet-five when Edna married Mr. Street and decided to give her only daughter her new husband's name. Myrtle had been not-yet-seven when Mr. Street up and ran away with Candice Oshkosh from down at the five-and-dime, never to be heard from again, but by that time Edna had firmly become Mrs. Street, and her daughter was just as firmly Myrtle Street, and that was simply the way it was.

Entering the front bedroom, Myrtle found her mother putting on one of her many black hats at the oval pier-gla.s.s mirror, staring with suspicion and mistrust at her own hands as they jammed the hat in among her steel-gray knotted curls. "Here's the mail," Myrtle said, unnecessarily, and Edna turned to s.n.a.t.c.h the thin sheaf of circulars and bills from her hands. It was required that Edna look at all the mail, that Myrtle not throw away the most pointless sale announcement or congressional report before her mother had seen it, looked at it, touched it, possibly even smelled it. "We have to go soon, Mother," Myrtle said. "I don't want to be late for work."

"Pah!" Edna said, greedily fingering the mail. "Make them wait for you. They waited for me when I worked there. Watch him, will you?"

So Myrtle hurried to the front window to stand watch while her mother examined the mail. Out there, Joe the mailman was just crossing the street down at the corner to start his delivery to the houses across the way. A Mrs. Courtenay, a fiftyish widow, lived over there, just two doors from the corner. A woman who wore bright colors and hoop earrings, she had thus earned Edna's utter condemnation. Edna was convinced that some day Joe the mailman would enter that house-and that widow, no doubt-rather than merely drop off the mail there, thus committing-among other things-a gross dereliction of his sworn Federal duty to deliver the mail, and Edna would at once phone the main post office downtown and have Joe the mailman dealt with. It hadn't happened yet, but it would, it would.

Well, of course, Myrtle knew it would never happen at all. Joe wasn't like that. True, on occasion Mrs. Courtenay would appear at her door when Joe arrived, decked in her bright colors and her hoop earrings, and she and Joe would chat a minute, but the same identical thing sometimes happened between Joe and Myrtle herself-today, for instance-which didn't mean Joe would ever come in here and perform... anything. It was all just silly.

But it was better, in the long run, to go along with Mother's little idiosyncrasies. "He's on Mrs. Courtenay's porch now," she reported to the rattling sound of Edna tearing open an electric company bill. "He's putting the mail in the box. He's leaving."

"She didn't come out?"

"No, Mother, she didn't come out."

Edna, hatted and still clutching the mail, scampered over to glare out the window at Joe the mailman taking a shortcut across Mrs. Courtenay's lawn to the next house on his route. "Probably having her period," Edna commented, and switched her glare to Myrtle. "Are you ready or not? You don't want to be late for work, you know."

"No, Mother," Myrtle agreed.

The two went downstairs together and out the back door and over the gravel to the unattached garage containing their black Ford Fairlane. This part of their day was such a foregone routine they barely even thought about it while going through the motions: Myrtle opened the right-hand garage door, while Edna opened the left. Myrtle entered the garage and climbed into the Ford and backed it out while Edna stood to the left, hands folded in front of her. Myrtle made a backing U-turn on the gravel while Edna closed both garage doors. Then Edna walked around the car, got in beside Myrtle, and they left home.

Myrtle was going to work. She was an a.s.sistant (one of three) at the North Dudson branch of the New York State Public Library. Edna was going to her Senior Citizens Center down on Main Street, where she was something of a power. At sixty-two, Edna was three years too young to even be a member of the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, but there was nothing else doing all day in this dead town, so she'd got herself in by lying about her age.

Myrtle was a good, if cautious, driver; cautious mostly about her mother, who was not reticent about remarking on any flaw she might find in Myrtle's judgment or performance skills along the way. She was quiet today, however, all the way from Myrtle Street to Spring Street to Albany Street to Elm Street to Main Street, where they had to stop and wait for the light to change before making their left turn. While they were waiting there, a car drove wanderingly by from left to right, with two men in it; they didn't seem to know exactly where they were going.

And suddenly Edna's bony sharp hand was clutching Myrtle's forearm and Edna was crying, "My G.o.d!"

Myrtle immediately stared into the rearview mirror; were they about to be crashed? But Elm Street was empty behind them. So she stared at her mother, who was gaping after that car that had just gone by. The whites were visible all around the pupils of Edna's eyes. Was she having some sort of attack? "Mother?" Myrtle asked, firmly burying that first irrepressible instant of hope. "Mother? Are you all right?"

"It couldn't be," Edna whispered. She was panting in her anxiety, mouth hanging open, eyes staring. Voice hoa.r.s.e, she cried, "But it was! It was!"

"Was what? Mother?"

"That was your father in that car!"

Myrtle's head spun about. She too stared after the car with the two men in it; but it was long gone. She said, astonished, "Mr. Street, Mother? Mr. Street's come back?"

"Mr. Street?" Edna's voice was full of rage and contempt. "That a.s.shole? Who gives a f.u.c.k about him?"

Myrtle had never heard such language from Edna. "Mother?" she asked. "What is it?"

"I'll tell you what it is," Edna said, hunching forward, staring hollowly out the windshield, all at once looking plenty old enough to be a member of the Senior Citizens Center. "It couldn't happen, but it did. The dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of a b.i.t.c.h." Bleakly, Edna gazed at the sunny world of Dudson Center. "He's back," she said.

FIVE.

"They should never have let him out of prison," May said.

"They shouldn't have let him out of the cell," Dortmunder said. "As long as I'm not in it with him."

"You are in it with him," May pointed out. "He's living here."

Dortmunder put down his fork and looked at her. "May? What could I do?"

They were in the kitchen together, having a late lunch or an early supper, hamburgers and Spaghetti-Os and beer, grabbing their privacy where they could find it. After the run back from Vilburgtown Reservoir, after they'd actually given the rental car back to its owners (yet another new experience today for Dortmunder), Tom had said, "You go on home, Al, I'll be along. I gotta fill my pockets." So Dortmunder had gone on home, where May had been waiting, having come back early from her cashier job at the supermarket to meet him, and where, with a hopeful expression as she'd looked over Dortmunder's shoulder, she'd said, "Where's your friend?"

"Out filling his pockets. He said we shouldn't wait up, he'd let himself in."

May had looked alarmed. "You gave him a key?"

"No, he just said he'd let himself in. May, we gotta talk. I also gotta eat, but mostly and mainly we gotta talk."

So now they were eating and talking, sometimes simultaneously, and May wasn't liking the situation any more than Dortmunder. But what were they to do about it? "May," Dortmunder said, "if we leave Tom alone, he really will blow up that dam and drown everybody in the valley. And for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he'll find guys to help."

"John," May said, "wherever he is right now, your friend Tom, filling his pockets-"

"Please, May," Dortmunder interrupted, "don't do that. Don't keep calling him my friend Tom. That's unfair."

May thought about that and nodded. "You're right, it is. It's not your fault who they put in your cell."

"Thank you."

"But, John, still, what do you think he's doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?"

"I don't even want to know," Dortmunder said.

"John, you're a craftsman, you're skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training-"

"And luck," Dortmunder added.

"No, it doesn't," she insisted. "Not a solid experienced person like you."

"Well, that's good," Dortmunder said, "since I've been running around without it for quite a while."

"Now, don't get gloomy, John," May said.

"Hard not to, around Tom," Dortmunder told her. "And, as for what he's doing outside right now, that's up to him. But I was at that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It's my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we'll sit here and watch television, and there it'll be on the news. You know what I mean?"

"Are those the only choices?" May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti-Os, not meeting Dortmunder's eye. "Are you sure there's nothing else to do?"

"Like what?" he asked. "The way I see it, I help him or I don't help him, that's the choice."

"I wouldn't normally say this, John," May said, "you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it's just necessary to let society fight its own battles."

Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. "May? Turn him in? Is that what you're saying?"

"It's worth thinking about," May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.

"But it isn't," Dortmunder told her. "Even if it was-even if it ever was, I mean-even then, it isn't worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he's gonna drown nine hundred people? They can't take him back." Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, "A crime isn't a crime until it happens."

"Well, that's stupid," May said. "With a character like that walking around loose-"

Dortmunder said, "May, some famous writer said it once: The law's an a.s.shole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson's living here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson's record and history was living here, they'd put me back inside. But him they can't touch."

"Well, that's crazy," May said.

"But true," Dortmunder told her. "But let's say I do it anyway, I'm feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it's done. I've gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very best, what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn't do it. And he'll take about a second and a half to figure out who's the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?"

"Well," May said carefully, "John, it's you he'd be mad at, actually."

"People who play with dynamite don't fine tune," Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti-Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.

May had finished. She sat back, didn't light a cigarette, didn't blow smoke at the ceiling, didn't flick ashes onto her plate, didn't cough delicately twice, and did say, "Well, I just hope you can come up with something."

"Me, too," Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn't come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning just a second, and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: "Me, too."

She frowned at him. "You too what?"

"Hope I come up with something. To get the money out from under the reservoir."

"Oh, you will," she said. "I'm not worried about you, John."

"Well, I wish you would be," he said. Gazing across the room, frowning at the perfect white blankness of the refrigerator door, he said, "I think it's time I got some help on this."

SIX.

Andy Kelp, a sharp-featured, arrow-nosed skinny kind of guy in soft-soled black shoes and dark gray wool trousers and a bulky pea coat, tiptoed through the software, quietly humming "c.o.ke, It's the Real Thing." Hmmmmm, he thought, his fingers skipping among the bright packages. WordPerfect, PageMaker, Lotus, dBaseIII, Donkey Kong. Hmmmmm. From time to time a package was scooped up into his long slim fingers and stowed away in the special pocket in the back of his pea coat, and then he would move on, humming, eyes darting over the available wares. The exhibit lights left on all night in the store gave him just enough illumination to study the possibilities and make his choices. And shopping three hours after the store had closed was the sure way to avoid crowds.

Blip-blip-blip. The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp's bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mouthpiece, "h.e.l.lo?"

A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, "Who's that?"

"John?" Kelp whispered. "Is that you?"

"What's goin on?" demanded Dortmunder's voice, getting belligerent. "Who is that there?"

"It's me, John," Kelp whispered. "It's Andy."

"What? Who is that?"

"It's Andy," Kelp whispered hoa.r.s.ely, lips against the mouthpiece. "Andy Kelp."

"Andy? Is that you?"

"Yes, John, yes."

"Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?"

"No, I'm fine."

"Then stop whispering."

"The fact of the matter is, John," Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, "I'm robbing a store at the moment."

"You're what?"

"Ssssshhhhhhh, John," Kelp whispered. "Sssshhhhhh."

In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, "Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren't home. You've done one of your phone gizmo things."

"That's right," Kelp agreed. "I put the phone-ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn't miss any calls-like this one from you, right now-while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me."

"To rob a store."

"That's right. And that's what I'm doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I'd like to get on with it."

"Okay," Dortmunder said. "If you're busy-"

"I'm not busy forever, John," Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. "You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?" He was remembering to whisper again now.

"No," Dortmunder said. "Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out."

"There's problems?" In his eagerness, Kelp's whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. "You want me to drop over there when I'm done, we can talk about it?"

"Well," Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, "Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it."

"Sure I feel like it," Kelp whispered, in falsetto. "You know me, John."

"Yeah, I do," Dortmunder said. "But come on over anyway." And he hung up.

"Right, John," Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off-white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men's room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the bas.e.m.e.nt of this building and a brief squirm through an air-conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.

John should have a personal computer, Kelp thought, but even as he thought it, he knew just how hard a sell John was likely to be. Tough to get him to accept anything new; like his att.i.tude toward telephones, for instance.

But a personal computer, a good PC of your very own, that was something else. That was a tool, as useful, indeed as necessary, as a Toast-R-Oven. Wandering back over to the software displays, Kelp picked up a copy of Managing Your Money. Surely, even John would be able to see the advantage in a program like that. If he seemed at all interested, they could go out together tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight, and shop for a PC and a printer and a mouse. Maybe come back here, in fact. Kelp, so far, had enjoyed doing business with Serious Business.