Thieves' Dozen

Over there, the shut door outlined in light would lead to the bathroom. The darker one would be ... a closet?

Yes. Hurried, in near darkness, Dortmunder grabbed something or other from inside the closet, then shut that door again and moved quickly toward the outlined one as the girl's voice said, "Larry, I just don't feel comfortable anymore."

"Of course you don't."

Dortmunder entered the square, white bathroom-light-green towels, dolphins on the closed shower curtain-ignored the two voices departing from the room outside, one plaintive, the other overbearing, and studied his haberdashery selection.

Well. Fortunately, most things go with black, including this rather weary sports jacket of tweedy tan with brown leather elbow patches. Dortmunder slipped it on and it was maybe two sizes too big, but not noticeable if he kept it unbuttoned. He turned to the mirror over the sink, and now he might very well be a sociology professor-specializing in labor relations-at a small Midwestern university. A professor without tenure, though, and probably no chance of getting tenure, either, now that Marx has flunked his finals.

Dortmunder's immediate problem was that he couldn't hide. The cops knew he was in this building, so sooner or later some group of police officers would definitely be gazing upon him, and the only question was, how would they react when that moment came? His only hope was to mingle, if you could call that a hope.

Leaving the bathroom, he noticed that the pile of coats was visibly depleted. Seemed like everybody's plans were getting loused up tonight.

But this gave him a chance to stash his stash, at least temporarily. Finding his peacoat at last-already it was at the bottom of the pile-he took the jeweler's former merchandise and stowed it in the top left dresser drawer amid some other gewgaws and gimcracks. His tools went into the cluttered cabinet under the bathroom sink, and then he was ready to move on.

Beyond the partly opened bedroom door was a hall lined with national park posters. Immediately to the right, the hall ended at the apartment's front door. To the left, it went past a couple of open and closed doors till it emptied into the room where the party was. From here, he could see half a dozen people holding drinks and talking. Motown versions of Christmas songs bubbled along, weaving through the babble of talk.

He hesitated, indecisive, struck by some strange stage fright. The apartment door called to him with a siren song of escape, even though he knew the world beyond it was badly infested by law. On the other hand, a crowd is supposed to be the ideal medium into which a lone individual might disappear, and yet he found himself reluctant to test that theory. To party or not to party-that was the question.

Two events pushed him to a decision. First, the doorbell next to him suddenly clanged like a fire engine in hell, causing him to jump a foot. And second, two women emerged from the party into the hallway, both moving fast. The one in front looked to be in her early 20s, in black slacks and black blouse and white half-apron and red bow tie and harried expression; she carried an empty round silver tray and she veered off into the first doorway on the right. The second woman was older but very well put together, dressed in baubles and beads and dangling earrings and a whole lot of Technicolor makeup, and her expression was grim but brave as she marched down the hall toward Dortmunder.

No, toward the door. This was, no doubt, the hostess, on her way to answer the bell, wondering who'd arrived so late. Dortmunder, knowing who the late arrivals were and not wanting to be anywhere near that door when it opened, jackrabbited into motion with an expression on his face that was meant to be a party smile. "How's it goin?" he asked with nicely understated amiability as they passed each other in the middle of the hall.

"Just fine," she swore, eyes sparkling and voice fluting, her own imitation party smile glued firmly in place. So she didn't know everybody at her party. Dortmunder could have been brought here by an invited guest, right? Right.

The party, as Dortmunder approached it, was loud, but not loud enough to cover the sudden growl of voices behind him. He made an abrupt turn into the open doorway that the harried woman had gone through and then he was in the kitchen, where the harried woman was putting a lot of cheese-filled tarts onto the round tray.

Dortmunder tried his line again: "How's it goin?"

"Rotten," the harried woman said. Her ash-blonde hair was coiled in a bun in back, but much of it had escaped to lie in parabolas on her damp brow. She'd have been a good-looking woman if she weren't so bad-tempered and overworked. "Jerry never showed up," she snapped, as though it were Dortmunder's fault. "I have to do it all-" She shook her head and made a sharp chopping motion with her left hand. "I don't have time to talk."

"Maybe I could help," Dortmunder suggested. The growl of cop voices continued from back by the apartment door. They'd check the room next to the fire escape first, but then they'd be coming this way.

The woman looked at him as though he were trying to sell her magazine subscriptions: "Help? What do you mean, help?"

"I don't know anybody here." He was noticing: She was all in black, he was all in black. "I came with Larry, but now he's talking to some girl, so why don't I help out?"

"You don't help the caterer," she said.

"OK. Just a thought." No point getting her suspicious.

But as he was turning away, she said, "Wait a minute," and when he looked back, her sweat-beaded brow was divided in half by a vertical frown line. She said, "You really want to help?"

"Only if you could use some."

"Well," she said, reluctant to admit there might be something in this world for her not to be mad at, "if you really mean it."

"Count on it," Dortmunder told her. Shucking out of the borrowed jacket, looking around the room for a white apron like hers, he said, "It'll give me something to do other than just stand in the corner by myself. I'll take those things out, pass them around, you can get caught up."

Once the jacket was off and hanging on a kitchen chair, Dortmunder looked exactly like what he was: a semihardened criminal, a hunted man, a desperate fugitive from justice and a guy who just keeps slipping the mind of Lady Luck. This was not a good image. Failing to find a white apron, he grabbed a white dish towel instead and tucked it sideways across the front of his trousers. No red bow tie like the woman's, but that couldn't be helped.

She watched him suiting up. "Well, if you really want to do this," she said, and suddenly her ma

"Oh, I know that," Dortmunder said.

"You don't want to get caught."

"Absolutely not."

"You'll get people," she said, making hand gestures to demonstrate the point, "who'll just keep grabbing and grabbing. You get into the middle of a conversational group, all of a sudden you can't get out without knocking somebody over, and then-that's a no-no, by the way," she interrupted herself.

Dortmunder had been nodding, one ear cocked for the approach of society's defenders, but now he looked quizzical and said, "A no-no?"

"Knocking over the guests."

"Why would I do that?" he asked. You knock over jewelry stores, not guests. Everybody knows that.

"If you're stuck in the middle of a group and there's no way out," she explained, "they'll eat everything on the tray. They're like a bunch of locusts, and there you are, and most of the other guests haven't had anything at all."

"I see what you mean. Keep moving."

"And," she said, "stick the tray into the middle, but don't go into the middle."