Watch Your Back!

Arnie's apartment, small underfurnished rooms with big dirty windows showing the airshaft, was decorated mostly with his calendar collection, walls covered with Januarys of all times, combined with pictures of leggy girls, icy brooks, cuddly kittens, and classic cars. Here and there were the ones he called incompletes, years that had apparently started in June or September.

"Sit down at the table by the window there," Arnie offered. "It's the only place in the apartment where you don't get that smell."

So they sat on opposite sides of a kitchen table with incompletes laminated onto it, and Arnie dragged over another wooden chair to join them. Dortmunder said, "It doesn't smell so bad in here, Arnie."

"Not here," Arnie said. "But try the bedroom. Lemme tell you about the intervention."

"Sure, if you want to."

"It's what you call the background to the proposition," Arnie said. "I went down there, because my nearest and dearest made it pretty plain the alternative was sudden death, and believe me, it was not an experience I would wish on anybody."

"Sorry to hear that," Dortmunder said.

"In the first place, sun." Arnie scratched an ecru arm reminiscently. "It's overrated," he assured them. "You can't look at it, you can't get away from it, and it makes you itch. Or anyway, me. Then there's the ocean."

Kelp said, "You were on an island, I hear."

"Boy, was I. Any direction you go, ten feet, splash. But the thing I never got about the ocean, you think it's water, it isn't."

Kelp, interested, curious, said, "It isn't?"

"Looks like water, sounds like water." Leaning in close, Arnie half-whispered the secret: "It's salt."

"Sure," Kelp said. "Salt water."

"Forget the water, it's salt." Arnie made a face that did not improve his looks. "Yuk. I couldn't believe how much beer I had to drink to get that taste outa my mouth. Then somebody said, 'You don't want all that beer in the sun, you want a margarita, so I took a margarita and that's salt. Come on. All the salt down there, you could curl up like a mummy."

"This is a lotta background, Arnie," Dortmunder said.

"You're right," Arnie said. "Now that I'm not so obnoxious any more, I'm garrulous instead. You know, like an old uncle after he goes straight. So let me cut to the chase, and the chase is a guy called Preston Fareweather."

Dortmunder repeated the name: "Never heard of him."

"Well, he isn't a movie star," Arnie said, "he's a venture capitalist. He's got more money than the mint, he invests in your up-and-coming operation, when the dust settles, hey, look, you got a partner, he's even richer. The reason he's down there, he's hiding out from lawyers and process servers."

"From the people he screwed?" Kelp asked.

"In a way," Arnie said. "But not the businesspeople. Seems, one way or another, Preston Fareweather married most of the really good-looking women in North America, and they banded together to get revenge. So he went to this island where nobody can get at him, waiting for the wives to get over their mad, which is not likely. But the thing about him is, his personality's even worse than mine used to be. Everybody down there hates him because he's so snotty and in your face, but he has all this money, so people put up with him. He insulted me a couple times, and I shrugged it off, he's just another bad taste, like ocean, but then a couple people there told me about this place he has."

"A place," Dortmunder echoed. "I have the feeling we're getting somewhere."

"We are," Arnie agreed. "Preston Fareweather has a big luxury duplex penthouse apartment on top of a building on Fifth Avenue, views of the park, all that, and in that apartment he's got his art collection and his Spanish silver and all this stuff. Well, you know, I'm interested in stuff, that's been the basis of our relationship over the years, so I went back to this guy. I hung around with this guy, I drank with him, pretended I was drunk, pretended his snotty little remarks got under my skin, and all along I'm getting the details of this apartment, because it occurs to me I know some people — namely, you people — who might be interested in this apartment."

"It sounds possible," Dortmunder agreed.

Kelp said, "Depending on this and that. Like getting in and getting out, for instance."

"Which is why I hung around the bastard so much," Arnie said. "He has this guy with him, personal secretary or assistant or something, I du

Kelp said, "Preston cured you?"

"I watched him," Arnie said. "I watched the people around him, how they acted, and I suddenly got it, those are the expressions I used to see on the faces of people looking at me. I was never obnoxious in the same way as Preston, on purpose to hurt and embarrass other people, but it all comes down to the same place. 'I don't wa

"I'm ready," Dortmunder allowed.

"I'm sure you are. I despise that Preston so much, I put up with so much crap from that guy while I'm casing his apartment long-distance, that my reward is the thought of the expression on his face the next time he walks into his house. So what I'm offering is this: Anything you take outa there, I'll give you seventy per cent of whatever I get for it, which is way up, you gotta know, from the well, uh, twenty-five, thirty per—"

"Ten," Kelp said.

"Well, even if," Arnie said. "Seventy this time. And not only that, the thing's a piece a cake. Lemme show you."

Arnie jumped to his feet and left the room, and Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance. Kelp whispered, "He is less obnoxious. I wouldn't have believed it."

"But this place does smell," Dortmunder whispered, and Arnie returned, with a kid's black-and-white composition book.

"I did all this on the plane coming back," he told them, and sat down to open the book, which was full of crabbed handwriting in ink. Following his route with a stubby fingertip, he said, "The building's eighteen stories high, at Fifth and Sixty-eighth. There's two duplex penthouses on top, north side and south side, both front to back. He's got the south side, views of the park, midtown Manhattan, the east side. His neighbor's probably got just as much money, what's his view? Spanish Harlem. And don't think Preston didn't chortle over that."

"Nice guy," Dortmunder said.

"In every way. Now, here's the wrinkle that makes the difference. Behind this building, on Sixty-eighth street, there's a four-story town house converted to apartments. Preston bought that building, rents it out, keeps getting richer. In the bottom of that building, where it's against the back of the big corner building, he put in a garage. Out of the garage, going up the outside of the bigger building, he put an elevator shaft and an elevator. His own elevator, just from his garage to his apartment."

"Not bad," Dortmunder acknowledged.

"Not bad for you guys," Arnie assured him. "Everybody else in that building, they've got this high-tech security stuff, doormen, closed-circuit TV. What Preston's got is a private entrance, a private garage, a private elevator."

Dortmunder said, "Who's in this apartment now?"

"Twice a month," Arnie said, "on the first and the fifteenth, building security does a sweep, spends maybe two hours. Twice a month, on the tenth and the twenty-fifth, a cleaning service comes in, spends seven hours. The other twenty-seven days of every month, the place is empty."