Chapter 17

Stan Murch eased the Caddy around the corner and came to a stop in front of Hunter House. As far as he was concerned, this job was a piece of cake. Nothing to do but sit here like some hired chauffeur out front of a concert hall, then when the guys came out drive calmly away. Piece of cake.

The car itself was a piece of sponge cake, with MD plates. Kelp had picked it up for Murch this afternoon. A pale blue Cadillac, it was loaded with options. Kelp preferred doctors' cars whenever available, believing that doctors baby themselves by buying cars loaded with every power-assisting gadget and padded with every creature comfort known to the engineers of Detroit. "Driving a doctor's car," he sometimes said, "is like taking a nice nap in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon. In the summer." He could wax quite lyrical on the subject.

Movement attracted Murch's attention, and he glanced over toward the concert hall, on his right. Was something happening in there? It seemed to him, looking through the row of glass doors, that activity of some sort had begun in the lobby; a lot of running around or something. Murch squinted, trying to see more clearly, and one of those doors snapped open and a body sailed out like a glider without wings, hit the pavement, rolled, popped to its feet and ran back into the lobby.

Murch said, "What?"

By golly, there was a fight going on in there. The same body – or another one – hurtled out again, this time followed by three men struggling and reeling in one another's arms like a rugby scrum, and then all at once the entire dispute boiled out of the theater and spread all over the sidewalk.

"Holy Jesus!" said Murch, and watched a body bounce off the hood of the Caddy and back into the fray.

A face appeared at the windshield, and because of the face's contortion and his own astonishment it took Murch a minute to realize it was Kelp, struggling to get away from a whole lot of people who wanted him to stay. Murch honked the horn, which startled Kelp's friends, and Kelp scrambled off the hood and ducked into the Caddy.

Murch stared at him. Kelp's clothing was ripped, his cheek was smudged, and he looked as though he might be getting a black eye. Murch said, "What in hell is going on?"

"I don't know," Kelp said, gasping for breath. "I just don't know. Here comes Chefwick."

And so he did, tiptoeing across the sidewalk, clutching his black bag to his chest, moving like a ballet dancer in a minefield, and when at last he slipped into the Caddy and shut the door behind himself all he said, wide-eyed, was, "Oh, my. Oh, my."

Kelp asked him, "Where's Bulcher?"

"Here he comes," Murch said.

Here came Bulcher. He could be awesome when he was annoyed, and at the moment he was very annoyed. He had two of his opponents by the neck, one in each great ham-fist, and he was using them as battering rams to clear a path for himself through the melee, poking the two bodies out ahead of himself as he walked, battering them against raiding parties at his flanks, and generally cutting a swath. The path he'd bulldozed on his way into the hall was as nothing to the scorched-earth March To The Curb he effected on the way out. Reaching the Cadillac, he flung his assistants back into the riot while Chefwick opened a rear door for him. Then he hopped into the Caddy, slammed the door, and said, "That's enough of that."

"Okay, Stan," Kelp said. "Let's go."

"Go?" Murch looked around, at Kelp beside him on the front seat and Chefwick and Bulcher in back, and said, "What about Dortmunder?"

"He's not with us. Come on, Stan, they'll take the car apart next. Drive somewhere and I'll tell you on the way."

The car was rocking more than somewhat, from the bodies bouncing off it, and a few of Bulcher's recent playmates were beginning to look hungrily at him through the windows, so Murch put the Caddy in gear, pressed on the horn, eased away from the curb, and drove them away from there.

It took Kelp two right turns and a red light to explain Dortmunder's situation, finishing, as they headed downtown, "We can only hope he'll figure something."

"He's stuck in an elevator shaft, with private guards running around?"

"He's been in tighter spots than that before," Kelp assured him.

"Yeah," Murch said. "And wound up in jail."

"Don't talk defeatist. Anyway, the guy who lives there is on our side. Maybe he can give Dortmunder a hand."

"Yeah, maybe," Murch said doubtfully. Then, deciding to look on the bright side, he said, "But anyway, you did get the painting, right?"

"That part was easy," Kelp said. "Except when Bulcher thought it was a baseball bat."

"I got carried away," Bulcher said.

"All's well that end's well," Kelp said. "Let's see it, Roger."

Chefwick said, "Beg pardon?"

Kelp turned a suddenly glassy smile on Chefwick. "The painting," he said. "Let's see it."

"I don't have it."

"Sure you do. I gave it to you."

"No, you didn't. Bulcher had it"

"Kelp took it away from me," Bulcher said.

"That's right. And I threw it to Roger."

"Well, I didn't get it." Chefwick was sounding prissier and prissier, as though defending himself against unjust accusations.

"Well, I threw it to you," Kelp insisted.

"Well, I didn't get it," Chefwick insisted.

Kelp glared at Chefwick, and Chefwick glared at Kelp, and then gradually they stopped glaring and started frowning. They looked each other over, they frowned at Bulcher, they looked around the interior of the car, and all the time Bulcher watched them with his head cocked to one side while Murch tried to concentrate simultaneously on the Friday-night traffic and the events Inside the car.

It was Murch who finally said the awful truth aloud. "You don't have it."

"Something–" Kelp lifted up and looked beneath himself, but it wasn't there either. "Something happened," he said. "In that fight. I don't know, all of a sudden there was this huge fight going on."

"We don't have it," Bulcher said. He sounded stunned. "We lost it."

"Oh, my goodness," Chefwick said.

Kelp sighed. "We have to go back for it," he said. "I hate the whole idea, but we just have to. We have to go back."

Nobody argued. Murch took the next right, and headed uptown.

The scene in front of the theater was not to be believed. The police had arrived, ambulances had arrived, even a fire engine had arrived. Platoons of Scotsmen were being herded into clumps by wary policemen, while other policemen in white helmets trotted into the hall, where the controversy was apparently continuing.

Slowly Murch drove past Hunter House along the one lane still open to traffic, and was waved on by a cop with a red-beamed long flashlight. Sadly Kelp and Chefwick and Bulcher gazed at the concert hall. Kelp sighed. "Dortmunder is going to be very upset," he said.