Thieves' Dozen

This made very little sense at all; in fact, none. Kelp said, "Come again, cuz?"

"So you talk to him, Andy," cousin Bohker said. He wasn't looking at Dortmunder, but his head seemed to incline slightly in Dortmunder's direction. He seemed like a man torn between anger and fear, anger forbidding him to show the fear, fear holding the anger in check; constipated, in other words. "You talk to your friend" cousin Bohker said in a strangled way, "you explain about hospitality in the country, and you tell him we'll forget-"

"If you mean, John," Kelp said, "he's right here. This is him here."

"That's OK," the cousin said. "You just tell him we'll forget all about it this once, and all he has to do is give it back, and we'll never say another word about it."

Kelp shook his head. "I don't get what you mean," he said. "Give what back?"

"The receipts!" cousin Bohker yelled, waving madly at his ticket office. "Two hundred twenty-seven paid admissions, not counting freebies and house seats like you fellas had, at twelve bucks a head; that's two thousand, seven hundred twenty-four dollars, and I want it back"

Kelp stared at his cousin. "The fox-office receipts? You can't-" His stare, disbelieving, doubtful, wondering, turned toward Dortmunder. "John? You didn't!" Kelp's eyes looked like hubcaps. "Did you? You didn't! Naturally, you didn't. Did you?"

The experience of being unjustly accused was so novel and bewildering to Dortmunder that he was almost drunk from it. He had so little experience of i

"Who else was out here?" the cousin demanded. "All alone out here while everybody else was inside with the play. 'Couldn't stand Shakespeare,' was that it? Saw his opportunity, by God, and took it, and the hell with his host!"

Kelp was begi

Maybe i

Kelp turned to his cousin: "Are you sure it's gone?"

"Andy," said the cousin, drawing himself up-or in-becoming even more dignified than Dortmunder, topping Dortmunder's king of dignity with his own ace, "this fellow is what he is, but you're my wife's blood relative."

"Aw, cuz," Kelp protested, "you don't think I was in it with him, do you?"

And that was the unkindest cut of all. Forgetting dignity, Dortmunder gazed on his former friend like a betrayed beagle. "You, too, Andy?"

"Gee whiz, John," Kelp said, twisting back and forth to show how conflicted all this made him, "what're we supposed to think? I mean, maybe it just happened accidental-like; you were bored, you know, walking around, you just picked up this cash without even thinking about it, you could. ..."

Wordlessly, Dortmunder frisked himself, patting his pockets and chest, then spreading his arms wide, offering himself for Kelp to search.

Which Kelp didn't want to do. "OK, John," he said, "the stuff isn't on you. But there wasn't anybody else out here, just you, and you know your own rep-"

"The donkey," Dortmunder said.

Kelp blinked at him. "The what?"

"The guy in the donkey head. He walked around from the back to the front, and then he walked around again from the front to the back. We nodded at each other."

Kelp turned his hopeful hubcaps in his cousin's direction.

"The guy with the donkey head, that's who you-"

"What, Kelly?" demanded the cousin. "Kelly's my junior partner in this operation! He's been in it with me from the begi

"Maybe he did it for a joke," Dortmunder said vengefully. "Or maybe he's absentminded."

Kelp, it was clear, was prepared to believe absolutely anything, just so they could all get past this social pothole. "Cuz," he said, "maybe so, maybe that's it. Kelly's your partner; maybe he took the money legit, spare you the trouble, put it in the bank himself."

But Bohker wouldn't buy it. "Kelly never touches the money," he insisted. "I'm the businessman, he's the ar-tiste, he's- Kelly!" he shouted through the entranceway, toward the stage, and vigorously waved his fat arm.

Kelp and Dortmunder exchanged a glance. Kelp's look was filled with a wild surmise; Dortmunder's belonged under a halo.

Kelly came out to join them, wiping his neck with a paper towel, saying, "What's up?" He was a short and ski

"I'll tell you what's up," Bohker promised him and pointed at Kelp. "I introduced you to my wife's cousin from the city."

"Yeah, you did already." Kelly, an impatient man probably wanting to get out of his work clothes and into something a little more actorly, nodded briskly at Kelp and said, "How's it goin'?"

"Not so good," Kelp said.

"And this," Bohker went on, pointing without pleasure at Dortmunder, "is my wife's cousin's pal, also from the city, a fella with a reputation for being just a little light-fingered."

"Aw, well," Dortmunder said.

Kelly was still impatient: "And?"

"And he lifted the gate!"

This slice of jargon was just a bit too showbizzy for Kelly to grab on the fly like that; he looked around for a lifted gate, his facial pleats increasing so much he looked as though his nose might fall into one of the excavations. "He did what?"

Bohker, exasperated at having to use lay terminology, snapped, "He stole the money out of the box office."

"I did not," Dortmunder said.

Kelly looked at Dortmunder as though he'd never expected such treatment. "Gee, man," he said, "that's our eating money."

"I didn't take it," Dortmunder said. He was going for another run at dignity.

"He's got the gall, this fella," Bohker went on, braver about Dortmunder now that he had an ally with him, "to claim you took it!"

Kelly wrinkled up like a multicar collision: "Me?"

"All I said," Dortmunder told him, feeling his dignity begin to tatter, "was that you went around to the front of the theater."

"I did not," Kelly said. Being an actor, he had no trouble with dignity at all.

So he did do it, Dortmunder thought, and pressed what he thought of as his advantage: "Sure, you did. We nodded to each other. You were wearing your donkey head. It was about ten minutes before the show was over."