Bad News

Everybody ran, the customers and employees from the fire, Frank with the fire, and when he got outdoors, he flung himself into the nearest snowbank and rolled there for quite a while. And when next he sat up, the casino was gone.

50

Dortmunder walked west across Tenth Street, hands in his pockets, head down as he watched his shoes scuffle along. A cold, nasty wind was in his face, having come all the way across the continent just to get up his nose before heading on eastward toward Long Island and the ocean and all of Europe, full of people to a

Sunday, December 31, 4:00 P.M. A pretty miserable year was finally slinking off, and Dortmunder was out in this nasty wind to help send it on its way. He was headed now toward the intersection of West Tenth Street and West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, the only place in the world likely to have an intersection of West Tenth Street and West Fourth Street, for what should be the final meet on the casino problem; perhaps the worst of them.

And there was the intersection up ahead, with the familiar motor home parked at the far corner on the right, facing away from him. And seated on the curb, back to Dortmunder, hunched over, scrunched in between the motor home’s rear wheel and the corner streetlight post, wasn’t that Kelp? Yes, it was.

It was Kelp who had called him to this meet. It seemed that he and Little Feather had been in unsatisfactory communication the last few days and it was time to find out what was what.

The only thing Dortmunder had known in the last two weeks was that the casino had burned to the ground. It was all over the TV news, even the national TV news, because these days, nothing happens anywhere without at least three video cameras coincidentally right there on the scene, ready to roll. At Silver Chasm Casino, both tourists and casino employees had been on tap with their cams.

Mixed in with the wobbly shots of crashing walls and gouting fireballs had been nonamateur footage of a very dumbfounded Little Feather, who, because she was the last of the Pottaknobbees and also extremely photogenic, pretty much took over the story once the ashes had cooled. By the fourth day, though, she, too, was gone from public view, and since then, Dortmunder hadn’t known nothing from nothing.

Until yesterday, when Kelp had called to tell him the story since then. After a week of silence from the North Country, Little Feather had started making collect phone calls to Kelp, he being the only coconspirator she could find. These phone calls were more irritating than informative, however, not only because Kelp had to pay for them but also because she was making them on the reservation, from the home of somebody apparently named Dog, who had taken her in now that her money had run out and she was a certified Pottaknobbee. In that house, she had to be careful what she said on the phone, which meant she couldn’t say much of anything on the phone, which made Kelp quickly begin to wish she’d quit calling all the time. As he’d explained to Dortmunder, he’d finally made an oblique reference to the problem: “If you don’t have anything to say, why do you keep saying it?”

“Well, I’m stuck here, Andy,” she’d explained. “I got no money, and no place to go. If the casino was up, I could get a job dealing, but if the casino was up, I wouldn’t need a job dealing.” But then she’d lowered her voice and said, “I think I may be getting a check at Christmas. Like a present from the tribes, now that I’m one of them. I hope it’s enough so I can put some gas in my apartment, so I can drive down and meet with you guys and we discuss the situation.”

So here it was, New Year’s Eve, yesterday being the earliest she could get away from all her new relatives, and Kelp had arranged the meet here and was just straightening up out of the confined space between motor home and lamppost as Dortmunder arrived. “That’s got it,” he said. His hands and left cheek were very dirty.

“That’s got what?” Dortmunder asked. “Your face is dirty.”

“I’ll wash it inside,” Kelp said, and gestured at the space where he’d been hunkered. “I tapped into the power cable inside the pole, so we can have light and heat in there without the engine on all the time. Too bad they don’t have a waste pipe in there. Come on in. I want to hear Little Feather’s story.”

“So do I,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I mean, I want to hear it without paying for it collect,” Kelp said, and knocked on the door.

The Little Feather who opened the door was just subtly different; still looking mostly like an action toy in a western setting, but now after a tough day in the sandbox. “You might as well come in,” she said.

“Happy New Year,” Dortmunder said glumly.

“You think so, huh? Come in, it’s cold out there. Andy, thanks for the electricity.”

“De nada,” he said. He followed Dortmunder in, shut the door behind himself, and somebody knocked on it.

“The big city,” Little Feather commented. “Always something happening.”

“That’ll be Tiny,” Kelp said as he went away to wash his face.

Little Feather opened the door, and it was. “Happy New Year’s,” Tiny snarled, climbing in.

“Another one,” Little Feather said. “I hope you didn’t bring your grenade this time.”

“I can go back for it, you want.”

“That’s okay,” she said as Kelp returned, fresh-faced as a schoolboy. “I got beer, if you want.”

They did, and then sat, Tiny on the sofa, Kelp and Little Feather on the chairs, and Dortmunder on his footstool from the kitchen. Kelp said, “Now that we’re face-to-face, Little Feather, what’s going on up north?”

“Snow,” she said.

“Thank you,” Kelp said.

“But not much else,” she went on. “The casino’s a dead loss, burnt flat. Roger Fox is gone, and so’s all the casino’s money.”

Dortmunder said, “The cash on hand, you mean.”

“Everything,” Little Feather said. “That last day, Fox was a busy man. Every bank account and IRA and money market account and anything else he could get his hands on, set-aside money for withholding taxes, everything, cleaned out. So the casino’s broke and it owes a bundle. They traced all the money to the Turks and Caicos islands, but by then, he’d moved it again. So it’s gone, and so is Fox, and nobody will ever find him.”

Dortmunder said, “And the other one’s in jail, I guess.”

Little Feather offered a sour grin. “Frank Oglanda begged to go to jail,” she said. “The tribes were go

Tiny said, “Too bad the tribes don’t have ground-to-air.”

“They wished they did,” Little Feather said. “Everybody’s plotting and pla

Dortmunder said, “Why not?”

“Well, now we get to the real problem,” Little Feather said. “Not only is the casino gone, turns out, Fox and Oglanda, they were so greedy, they didn’t even insure the place to its full value, so it’s going to take a while to get it up and going again. The people all have to get jobs, which is probably a good thing, if you ask me.”

“A while to get the casino up and going again,” Kelp echoed. “How long is a while?”

“Right now, they figure eight years.”

There was general consternation at that. Dortmunder said, “How come?”

“Casinos cost a lot to build,” Little Feather pointed out. “There’s no money in the tribe, no insurance, and Fox and Oglanda paid off as little of the debt from the first construction as they could, so the tribes can’t get any more from those banks. Everybody’s tithing, but that’s go