What's The Worst That Could Happen Part 16

"The thing is," Andy explained, "when I feel I need a car, good transportation, something very special, I look for a vehicle with MD plates. This is one place where you can trust doctors. They understand discomfort, and they understand comfort, and they got the money to back up their opinions. Trust me, when I bring you a car, it'll be just what the doctor ordered, and I mean that exactly the way it sounds."

Looking dazed, Anne Marie said, "You people are going to take a little getting used to."

"What I do," May told her, sympathetically, "is pretend I'm in a bus going down a hill and the steering broke. And also the brakes. So there's nothing to do but just look at the scenery and enjoy the ride."

Anne Marie considered this. She said, "What happens when you get to the bottom of the hill?"

"I don't know," May said. "We didn't get there yet."

Andy said, "So it's settled. Ten in the morning, in a first-rate grade-A automobile, some model good for highway touring, Anne Marie and I will come by, pick you two up, we'll head south."

"And I'll get my ring," Dortmunder said.

"And more towels," May said. Smiling at Anne Marie, she said, "One nice thing about John following this man Fairbanks around is, we get a lot of very good hotel towels."

32.

The Saab not only had MD plates, they were Connecticut MD plates, the very best MD plates of all. Here, said these plates, we have a doctor with a stream on his property, running water. A tennis court? You bet. Walk-in closets. Music in every room. When you traveled in this forest-green Saab with the sunroof and the readout on the dashboard that told you the temperature outside the car, you weren't just traveling in an automobile, you were traveling in a lifestyle, and a d.a.m.n good one at that.

Andy Kelp explained all this to Anne Marie Sunday morning, as they drove across town to pick up Dortmunder and May. Anne Marie nodded and listened and learned and, following May's advice, spent most of her time looking out the Saab's window at the scenery.

She was in it now, and not just in the Saab, either. In the Rubicon, maybe. She hadn't so much crossed the Rubicon as dived straight into that turbulent stream fully dressed. Her stay at the N-Joy - enlivened toward the end by a ma.s.sively intrusive but amusing police investigation - was over now, her room occupied by some other transient. Her return ticket to KC was dead; having been a special fare, it was nontransferable, and had ceased to exist when she'd missed that Sat.u.r.day plane. n.o.body she knew could have any idea where she was. Friends and family back in Kansas, even Howard, should Howard decide to change his mind about their marriage, none of them could find her now. On the other hand, and this was a bit unsettling to realize, there was n.o.body she could think of who would try really really hard to track her down.

So maybe this wasn't such an insane mistake, after all, sitting here in a freshly stolen mint-condition Saab. Maybe this was a good time to start over, start fresh. These might not be the most rational people in the world with whom to begin this new life, but you can't have everything. And, for the moment at least, hanging out with these strangers was rather fun.

Since last night, she was living in Andy's apartment in the West Thirties, though who knew for how long. Also, she wasn't the first woman who'd ever lived there, as various evidences had made clear. When she'd asked him about those previous occupants he'd looked vague and said, "Well, some of them were wives," which wasn't an answer that would tend to prolong the conversation.

Play it as it comes, she thought. Don't worry about it. Watch the scenery.

"Be right down," Andy said, when he'd double-parked in front of the building where Dortmunder and May lived.

"Right," Anne Marie said.

The scenery wasn't moving at the moment, but she went on watching it, the scenery here being mostly sloppily dressed people in a hurry, a lot of battered and dirty parked cars, and grimy stone or brick buildings put up a hundred years ago.

Am I going to like New York? she asked herself. Am I even going to stay in New York? Am I actually going to become involved in a crime, and probably get caught, and wind up on Court TV? What would I wear on Court TV? None of the stuff I brought with me.

That was a strange thought. Most of her clothing, most of her possessions, were still at home at 127 Sycamore Street, Lancaster, Kansas, a modest two-story postwar wooden clapboard home on its own modest lot, with detached one-car garage and weedy lawns front and back and not much by way of plantings. Anne Marie and Howard had bought the house four years ago another of their flailing attempts to unify the marriage - with a minimum down payment and a balloon mortgage, which meant that at this point the house belonged about 97 percent to the bank, and as far as Anne Marie was concerned the bank was welcome to it. And everything in it, too, especially the VCR that never did work right. All except the dark-blue dress with the white collar; it would be nice if the bank were to send her that. It would be perfect for Court TV.

Two hundred fifty miles between New York City and Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, give or take a wide curve or two. Through the Holland Tunnel and then New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey Del Maryland Maryland Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Maryland lunch Maryland outskirts of Was.h.i.+ngton outskirts of Was.h.i.+ngton outskirts of Was.h.i.+ngton, and now it was up to Anne Marie to be the harbor pilot who would steer them to their berth.

They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide gra.s.sy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the G.o.ddam green hills were still there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road's design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.

"Suitland?"

May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, "There's a place next to Was.h.i.+ngton called Suitland?"

"Oh, sure," Anne Marie said. "That's very close in, over near District Heights."

"The whole place should be called Suitland," John said.

May said, "Are we going by there?"

"No," Anne Marie told her, "we're taking the Beltway the other way around, through Bethesda."

Andy, driving with the nonchalance of somebody who didn't much care if this car picked up a dent or two, said, "I'm on the Beltway? Or inside the Beltway? Or what?"

"You're on the Beltway," Anne Marie told him. "Pretty soon you'll cross the river and then turn off."

"What river?" Andy asked.

Anne Marie, surprised, said, "The Potomac."

"Oh, right. The Potomac."

"I've heard of that," John said, from the backseat.

"I'm going to take you into the city from the south," Anne Marie explained. "That's the quickest way to get to the Watergate area. So we'll be crossing the Potomac twice."

John said, "Andy, you got to introduce this person to Stan Murch."

Andy said, "I was just thinking the same thing."

Seeing Anne Marie's raised eyebrow, he explained, "That's a friend of ours that takes a particular interest in how you get from point A to point B."

Anne Marie said, "Doesn't everybody?"

"Well, Stan kind of goes to extremes," Andy said. "Is this your river?"

"Yes," Anne Marie said. "You want the exit to the George Was.h.i.+ngton Memorial Parkway."

"The George Was.h.i.+ngton Memorial Parkway? They really lean on it around here, don't they?"

"After a while, you don't notice it," Anne Marie a.s.sured him. "But it is a little, I admit, like living on a float in a Fourth of July parade. Here's our turn."

There was a lot of traffic; this being Sunday, it was mostly tourist traffic, license plates from all over the United States, attached to cars that didn't know where the h.e.l.l they were going. Andy swivel-hipped through it all, startling drivers who were trying to read maps without changing lanes, and Anne Marie said, "Now you want the Francis Scott Key Bridge."

"You're putting me on."

"No, I'm not. There's the sign. See?"

Andy swung up and over, and there they were crossing the Potomac again, this time northbound, the city of Was.h.i.+ngton spread out in front of them like an almost life-size model of itself, as though it were all still in the planning stages and they could still decide not to go ahead with it.

From here, things got sudden. "Route 29, the Whitehurst Freeway."

"Who was Whitehurst?"

Andy asked, making the turn.

"President after Grover," Anne Marie said. "Stay with 29! Don't take any of those other things. And especially don't take 66."

"Get your kicks on Route 66," Andy suggested.

"Not this time. Sixty-six goes under the Watergate. Don't take Twenty-fifth Street, it goes the wrong way, you want the next one, down there, Twenty-fourth Street."

"I thought that might be the next one," Andy said.

"It isn't always," Anne Marie told him. She watched as Andy made the turn, and said, "That street that goes off at an angle there, that's New Hamps.h.i.+re, you want that."

"If you say so."

They got stopped by a light and Andy peered at the street signs. "Is that One Street?"

"No, I Street. Sometimes they spell it like your eye, but it's the letter. All the north-south streets are numbers, and all the east-west streets are letters."

"We're on New Hamps.h.i.+re. What's that?"

"A spoke of the wagon wheel."

Andy nodded. "I bet there's even some way that that makes sense," he said, and the light turned green and he drove on over I and down past H, saying, "I thought it was gonna be J."

"Turn right on Virginia," Anne Marie said.

"Another spoke of the wagon wheel?"

"Different wheel," Anne Marie said.

"Some time," Andy said, stopping at another red light, "you'll have to tell me all about it."

"You can turn right on red in Was.h.i.+ngton," she told him, as the light turned green. "Or on green, for that matter."

Andy made the turn and said, "Somehow, I have a feeling I'm going in circles here."

"In a way," Anne Marie said. "That's the Watergate across the street there. Can you get over there?"

"Well, that depends," Andy said, "on how much all these other people care about their cars."

Fortunately, they all cared.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on Anne Marie's door. She was in a very nice room, the largest hotel room she'd ever seen, on the fifth floor of the Watergate Hotel, with large potted shrubs flanking the broad gla.s.s door leading to the balcony and a long view out over the Potomac to Virginia on the other side. She quit looking at that view to go over to the door and let Andy in. He'd dropped them at the hotel entrance and then driven away to, as he'd said, "deal with" the car, and now he was back. "All set," he said, coming in.

She shut the door. "What did you do with the car?"

"Well, I drove away from here," he told her, crossing to the bed where his big battered canvas bag had been placed by the bellboy, "and I came to a stop sign, so I stopped."

"And then what?"

"I came back here," he said, and zipped open the bag.

She moved around until she could see his face. "You left the car at a stop sign? Just got out and left it there?"

"Wiped the steering wheel first."

The others, before getting out of the car, had also smeared any place they might have left fingerprints.

Anne Marie stared at him. "But... why? Why make a mess with the traffic?"

"Well, you know," Andy said, "I feel a certain responsibility to the doctor."

"I'm not following this," Anne Marie admitted.

Andy changed clothes while he explained. "Well, let's say I found a parking s.p.a.ce and left the car there."

"There are no parking s.p.a.ces in Was.h.i.+ngton."

"So that's another consideration. But say I did find something like that, it could be weeks before the cops notice anything and the doctor gets his car back. This way, the cops have already noticed the situation by now, they're probably phoning the doctor this minute, he could be reunited with that nice vehicle before sundown. How do I look?"

Andy was now wearing a short-sleeve white dress s.h.i.+rt open at the collar with a half-dozen pens in a white pocket protector in the s.h.i.+rt pocket, plus khaki pants and tan workboots and darkframed eyegla.s.ses with clip-on sungla.s.ses angled up toward his forehead and a yellow hardhat. In his left hand he held a clipboard. Work gloves protruded from his right hip pocket. "Different," Anne Marie decided.

"Good."

"What's going to happen now?"

"Well, you and May can do some sight-seeing or shopping or whatever, figure out where we'll eat dinner, stuff like that. And John and me," Andy said, hefting the clipboard as he crossed to the phone, "are gonna go case the joint. What's his room number?"

33.

The Watergate is a complex, not one building but six, all of them odd-shaped and dropped at random onto a triangular chunk of land next to Kennedy Center, flanked by the Potomac on the west, Virginia Avenue on the northeast, and New Hamps.h.i.+re Avenue (with the Saudi Arabian emba.s.sy a giant gray toolbox across the street) to the southeast. The beret-shaped building at the apex of the triangle is Watergate East, a co-op apartment building divided into two addresses: Watergate East, North and Watergate East, South, which should not be confused with Watergate South, a boomerang-shaped building, also a coop, behind Watergate East, South. The final co-op is a riverboat like trapezoid at the angle between Virginia Avenue and the river and, in a burst of creative nomenclature, it is called Watergate West.

We're not done. Sorry, but we're not done. There are also two office buildings, famous in the Nixon administration. (The Democratic National Committee is no longer headquartered there.) These are called Watergate 600 and Watergate 2600, and behind the latter is the 235-room Watergate Hotel. Lest we forget, there's also the Watergate Mall, tucked in behind Watergate East, full of all kinds of shopping opportunities. And finally, there's an ornamental pool in the middle of the complex (probably called the Watergate Water), surrounded by the kind of landscaping usually a.s.sociated with model railroad sets; trees made of cotton b.a.l.l.s dipped in green ink, that sort of thing.

The complex is open and closed at the same time, the mall absolutely open to pedestrians (any one of whom could be a shopper), the office buildings and hotel having normally minimal security, and the apartment houses primarily guarded by security men and women in blue blazers who sit at counters in the lobbies and buzz in the acceptable arrivers while presumably rejecting the unclean.

It was in Watergate East, North that TUI maintained a two-bedroom two bathroom fourth-floor apartment, where Max Fairbanks was scheduled to spend Sunday and Monday nights, while appearing before a congressional committee on Monday afternoon. And it was here, in that apartment, where John Dortmunder intended to find Max Fairbanks and relieve him of a certain ring.

Sunday afternoon. Dortmunder and Kelp, invisible in their engineers' drag, prowled the complex, making notations on their clipboards and saluting the occasional security person by touching their pens to their temples. (The first time he did this, Dortmunder touched the wrong end of his pen to his temple, but after that he got it right.) Wandering, roving, they found the two-level garage beneath the apartment building and saw that here, too, access to the elevators was monitored by building staff, but very loosely. Then they found the truck ramp that descended beneath the building and on out to the back, giving access for deliveries to the boutiques in the mall. A person could move between the truck ramp and the upper level of the garage through a door with a laughable lock.