Free What's So Funny by Donald Westlake Page A

copiously than Kelp had, and said, “Let me say first, this Eppick already figures you’re in. He said to me today, ‘I suppose you’ll work with your pal Andy Kelp’.”

    “Conversations about me,” Kelp said, and shivered.

    “I know. I feel the same way. But here’s the thing. It’s just as important you get to see this Eppick as it is you get to see some bank building.”

    “Oh, yeah?”

    “Tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “in the rich guy’s limo, we’re going upstate somewhere, Eppick and me, to see if what the rich guy called his compound is secure enough for us to stash the chess set after we ha–ha lift it.”

    “You want me to ride upstate tomorrow,” Kelp said, “in a limo with you and Eppick.”

    “And a chauffeur.”

    Kelp contemplated that, while back at the bar, “Shaken but not slurred!” piped the joker.

    Kelp observed his glass, but did not drink. “And why,” he wanted to know, “am I doing this?”

    “Maybe we’ll learn something.”

    “Nothing we want to know, I bet.” Kelp did knock back a little more bourbon. “What time are we doing this foolish thing?”

Chapter 13
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    Being a wee beastie in a huge corporate law firm in mid–town Manhattan meant that one did not have very many of one’s waking hours to oneself. Again tonight it was after ten before Fiona could call her home–buddy Brian and say, “I’m on my way.”
    “It’ll be ready when you get here.”

    “Should I stop and get anything?” By which she meant wine.

    “No, I got everything we need.” By which he meant he’d bought wine on his way home from the studio.

    “See you, hon.”

    “See you, hon.”

    The interior of Feinberg et al maintained the same lighting twenty–four hours a day, since only the partners and associates had offices around the perimeter of the building, and thus windows. In the rest of the space you might as well have been in a spaceship far off in the emptiness of the universe. The only differences at ten p.m., when Fiona moved through the cubicles to the elevator bank, were that the receptionist’s desk was empty, the latest Botox Beauty having left at five, and that Fiona needed her employee ID card to summon and operate the elevator. It wasn’t, in fact, until she’d left the elevator and the lobby and the building itself that she found herself back on Earth, where it was nighttime, with much traffic thundering by on Fifth Avenue.

    Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter. Walk across Fifth Avenue and down the long block to Sixth and the long block to Seventh and the short block to Broadway. Then up two blocks to the subway, where she would descend, swipe the MetroCard until it recognized itself, and then descend some more and wait for the uptown local, riding it to Eighty–Sixth Street. Another walk, one block up and half a block over, and she entered her apartment building, where she chose a different card from her bulging wallet — this was three cards for one trip — in order to gain admittance, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the long hall to 4–D. That same third card also let her into the apartment, where the smell of Oriental food — was that Thai? the smell of peanuts? — was the most welcoming thing in her day.

    “Honey, I’m home!” she called, which they both thought of as their joke, and he came grinning out of the galley kitchen with a dishtowel tucked in around his waist and a glass of red wine in each hand. As tall as she was short, and as blond as she was raven–haired, Brian had wide bony shoulders but was otherwise as skinny as a stray cat, with a craggy handsome face that always maintained some caution down behind the good cheer.

    “Home is the hunter,” he greeted her, which was another part of the joke, and handed over a glass.

    They kissed, they clinked glasses, they sipped the wine, which they didn’t know any better than to believe was pretty good, and then he went