Jimmy The Kid

Kelp, slapping his hands to his face, yelled, “Masks! Masks! Don’t let him see your faces!”

Dortmunder didn’t believe it. He stared at the kid, looking as wet and muddy and ragged as a drowned kitten, and then he looked upstairs. And then he ran upstairs. He didn’t know what he thought, maybe that the kid was twins or something, but he just didn’t believe he wasn’t in that room.

The door was locked, and Dortmunder fumbled with the key for a few seconds before remembering he had a flashlight in his other pocket—the pocket without the revolver in it—but once he had the flashlight out and shining he swiftly unlocked the door, pushed it open, stepped inside, aimed the light beam all around, and the room was empty.

Empty. How could that be? Dortmunder looked under the bed and in the closet, and the kid was gone.

But the door had been locked. The boards were still on the windows. There were no holes in the ceiling or the floor or any of the walls. There were no other exits from the room. “It’s a locked-room mystery,” Dortmunder told himself, and stood in the middle of the room, flashing the light slowly this way and that, completely baffled.

Downstairs, Kelp was the first one to find and don his mask, and then he ran over to grab the kid. “I’m not trying to get away,” the kid said. “I’m just closing the door.”

“Well, just stay put,” Kelp told him.

“I came back, didn’t I? Why should I try to get away?”

May too had put on her mask by now, and she came over to say, “You’re drenched! You’ll catch your death! You’ve got to get out of those wet clothes right now.” To Kelp she said, “Go up and get his blankets,” and to the boy she said, “Now get out of those clothes.”

Hearing the authoritarian maternal voice, both Kelp and the kid promptly obeyed. Meantime, Murch and his Mom were squabbling over the mask they’d both been using. Murch’s Mom hadn’t worn one during the kidnapping, and when she’d gone upstairs with May earlier she’d borrowed her son’s. It hadn’t been anticipated the whole gang would be in the boy’s presence at once. Now they were both holding the mask, and tugging a little. “Stan,” Murch’s Mom said, “you give me that. I have a much more memorable face than you.”

“You do not, Mom, you look like every other cabdriver in New York. I really need that mask, and anyway it’s mine.”

Going upstairs, Kelp found Dortmunder in the kid’s room, walking around in circles, shining his flashlight here and there. Kelp said, “What are you doing?”

“It’s impossible,” Dortmunder said. “How’d he get out?”

“I du

“He must of walked through the wall,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp went out, leaving Dortmunder still making circles, and hurried downstairs. May had the boy over by the fireplace now, where there was still some heat from the char. coal in the hibachi. She had him stripped down to his underpants, and she immediately began rubbing him down with one of the blankets, using it a towel. “You’re really wet,” she said. “You’re really wet.”

“And cold,” the boy said. “It’s no-fooling cold out there.” He yawned.

On the other side of the room, Murch’s Mom was triumphantly wearing the Murch family Mickey Mouse mask. Murch, showing his irritation by the set of his shoulders, sat at the card table with his elbows on the table and his hands over his face. Lantern light glinted on his eyes as he peered between his fingers.

Dortmunder came downstairs. He marched across the living room to where May was drying the boy with a blanket, glowered down at him, and said, “All right, kid. How’d you do it?”

May, on one knee in front of the boy, folded him in her arms, glared up at Dortmunder, and said, “Don’t you strike this child.”

“What strike? I wa

Kelp whispered with harsh urgency, “Your mask! Your mask!”

Dortmunder looked around. “What?” Then he felt his bare face and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” His mask was near him, on the mantel, and when he picked it up it was warm from hibachi heat. He pulled it angrily over his head and said, “It stinks worse when it’s hot.”

May said, “You men get some wood, build a real fire in this fireplace. We need some heat in this room.”

“What wood?” Dortmunder said. “Everything outside’ll be too wet to burn.”

“There must be wood in here,” she said. “Something to make a fire.”

“All right,” Dortmunder said, looking around. “All right, I’ll find something.”

“I can’t help,” Murch said. His voice was muffled by his hands, so that he sounded as though he too had a mask on. “I can’t very well carry wood with my hands over my face,” he said, and even through the muffling effect the tone of grievance could be heard in his voice.

“So you’ll sit there,” his Mom told him.

Dortmunder and Kelp went out to the kitchen, where they found some built-in shelving they could rip out, and for a time the empty house echoed with ripping, rending, crashing sounds from the kitchen. Meantime, Murch’s Mom moved the hibachi to a corner of the fireplace and made a bed for the fire out of ripped-up pieces of cardboard from the cartons that had contained their provisions. Murch sat the card table and watched the action through his fingers, and May dressed the boy in pajamas and wrapped the other blanket around him. On the television screen, which no one was watching, the blind hermit was playing his violin for the monster.

Dortmunder and Kelp brought a lot of jagged pieces of wood in, stacked them in the fireplace, and lit the card. board underneath. The fire started up at once, and smoked terrifically for half a minute, during which time everybody coughed and waved their arms and shouted unintelligible and unfollowable orders about the flue. Then all all at once the chimney began to draw, the fire flared up, the smoke was sucked away into the rain and the wind outside, and heat wafted out across the room.

“That’s nice,” May said.

Jimmy, warm now and dry, turned at last and noticed the television set. “Oh!” he said. “Bride of Frankenstein! There’s some beautiful shots in that. It was directed by James Whale, you know, he also did the original Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Just incredible camera angles. Can I watch?”

“It’s past your bedtime,” May said.

“Oh, that can’t count now,” Jimmy said. “Besides, my room is cold, and you want to keep me warm, don’t you?”

“An exercise-yard lawyer,” Dortmunder said.

Murch said, “Put the kid upstairs, will you? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with my hands over my face.”

Dortmunder said, “And I don’t want to keep this goddam mask on any more.”

Jimmy said, “I’ll make you a deal.”

They all looked at him. Murch’s Mom said, “You’ll make us a what?”

“I already saw your faces anyway,” Jimmy said, “when I first came in. But if you let me stay and watch the movie, you can take your masks off and I promise I’ll make believe you kept them on. I’ll never identify you, and I won’t tell the police or anybody else that I ever saw you or that I know what you look like. I’ll make a solemn vow.” He held his right hand up in the three-finger Boy Scout oath sign, though he was not now and never had been a Boy Scout. But he meant it just the same.

The gang all looked at one another. Murch’s Mom said, “Well, it would be easier.”

Kelp said, “But that’s not the way it’s done. That’s not the way it’s done.”

Dortmunder said, “You mean in that goddam book?”

“I mean anywhere. But, all right, in the book. Could you imagine the gang in that book taking their masks off and sitting down with the victim and watch Bride of Frankenstein?”

“I really really promise,” Jimmy said.

Dortmunder yanked his mask off and threw it into a corner. “I’ll take the kid’s word for it,” he said.