“That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “You use some other gases around here, too.”

“If it hisses out of a big torpedo-shaped canister,” Vogel said, “we got it. I take it this is the area where you got an interest.”

“It is,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, come along, Dortmunder, and you come along, too, Kelp,” Vogel said, starting off, not seeming to care that his shiny shoes were already getting dusty out here, “let me show you fellas what we got here, and you can tell me what you want, and then you can tell me what’s in it for me.”

45

Anne Marie undertipped the bellman, because she knew women are expected to undertip and she didn’t want to call attention to herself. The bellman, seeing she’d lived down to his expectations, wrote her off as another cheap bitch, and had already forgotten her before he was well out of the room.

Once she was alone, Anne Marie went over to draw the drapes back from the room’s all-window end wall, and there it was. The Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino. Well, no, not the casino, that part was somewhere down underneath her.

Twelve stories down. They had given her a room on what they called the fourteenth floor, because there are no thirteenth floors almost anywhere in America, and certainly none in Las Vegas. But they could call it fourteen all they wanted; it was the thirteenth floor, and Fate knew it.

And so, from here, thirteen stories up, Anne Marie looked out and down, and there was the Battle-Lake, looking more like a Battle-Pond, flanked by its bleachers, with the cottages beyond, all laid out like a model in a war room, ready for combat. A swimming pool was also out there, and a wading pool, and miniature golf, and miniature plantings, and many tourists, most of them far from miniature. From up here, the tourists looked like rolling blobs of Playdoh in their bright vacation colors.

Also from up here, the many many security people in their tan uniforms stood out like peanuts in a bowl of M&M’s. Looking down at them, watching their steady progress through the dawdling crowd, Anne Marie was convinced more than ever that the scheme was doomed.

The trip to Washington, on the other hand, had been a lark. It had seemed as though it would be a lark beforehand, and it had turned out to be a lark while it was going on, and John’s friend May had been just the perfect companion for those times when Andy and John were off doing their thing. But when Andy had told her about this! When Andy had explained to her that they were all off this time to rob a casino in Las Vegas as a diversion from their attempt to get John’s ring back, Anne Marie had understood, finally and completely, that these people were crazy. Bonkers. Nuts. Rob a Las Vegas casino, a place more determinedly guarded than Fort Knox, as a diversion.

I’m getting out of this, Anne Marie told herself. I am definitely leaving these March hares. But not quite yet.

The fact was, she did enjoy being with Andy, no matter how crazy he was. So, at least until everybody was in Las Vegas, and the diversion failed, and the whole crowd of them except her was carted off to jail, she would continue to pal around with Andy, and just watch the scene unfold. And at the same time she would do what was necessary to protect herself.

The reason was, she’d changed her mind about Court TV. It wasn’t so much that she minded making an appearance on Court TV—that might also be fun, in a way—it was the eight-and-a-third to twenty-five years that would follow her appearance that she didn’t care for. If there was one destiny open to her that was likely to be worse than marriage to Howard Carpinaw, it was a woman’s prison for approximately a quarter of her life. No; not worth it.

So she’d taken steps. She had seen to it that, when the time came to cut loose from Andy Kelp and his lunatic friends, she could go ahead and cut, and be safe as houses.

First of all, she was traveling alone. Second, absolutely nobody on earth except Andy’s friends had the slightest idea she even knew Andy Kelp. And third, before leaving New York she had written letters to two friends back in Lancaster, in both of them breaking the news that Howard had left her, and that she had stayed on in New York City a while to try to figure out what to do next with her life, and that she had now decided to come home but would spend a week in Las Vegas on the way. (Not that Las Vegas was exactly on the way from New York, New York, to Lancaster, Kansas. She was overshooting Lancaster by about eleven hundred miles. But who’s counting?)

So that’s what would happen. She had come to Las Vegas, as announced, and she would spend a week, and then she would go home. And the fact that a major failed casino robbery—diversion!—would have taken place in the hotel while she was in residence would be no more than a coincidence, an exciting extra on her vacation to make up for the loss of her husband. After all, hundreds of other people would have been staying in the same hotel at the same time.

She unpacked, briskly and efficiently. Life had been one hotel room after another recently—this motel-box in the sky couldn’t hold a candle to that terrific room at the Watergate—and she’d become very adept at the transitions. Then, looking out the window once more at the near view of the hotel grounds and the far view of out-of-focus tan flatness and the distant view of low gray ridges at the horizon line, she wondered what she would do with herself in the quiet time until Andy reappeared.

The pool down there did look as though it might be fun. Normally, she’d be doubtful about the pool, because she felt she was about fifteen pounds overweight to be acceptable in a bathing suit, but from what she’d seen of the Gaiety’s customers so far she believed her nickname around here would be Slim, so the pool it was.

She changed into her suit and packed a small purse, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. It was—who else would it be?—Andy: “Hey, Anne Marie, I heard you were in town. It’s Andy.”

“Andy!” she said, being surprised on cue. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, a little convention, the usual. I’m here with John.”

“You want to come over?” she asked him. “Say hello?” And look out my window, of course, while you’re here.

“Maybe later,” he said, surprisingly. She’d expected them to want to case the joint right away. “Maybe tomorrow morning,” he said. “We gotta get John dressed, a couple other things. Midmorning, okay?”

“I’ll probably be somewhere around the pool,” she said, with furrowed brow.

“See you then.”

Anne Marie hung up and left the room and headed for the pool, to check it out. And all the way down in the elevator she kept thinking: Get John dressed?

46

“I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t know about those knees, to begin with.”

“You brought those knees in with you, John,” Kelp reminded him. “Look at the clothes.”

It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount-store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a bum rap. On the other hand, with these clothes, it was very hard to look at the clothes anyway.

This was the end result of Dortmunder’s having told Kelp, in the car on the way to Henderson, how everybody in this town seemed to gaze upon him with immediate suspicion. If he’d known that admission was going to lead to this he’d have kept the problem to himself, just resigned himself to being a suspicious character, which is in fact what he was.

But, no. Despite the absolute success of the meeting with Lester Vogel—that scheme was going to work out perfectly, he almost believed it himself—here he was, humiliated, in this discount mall on the fringes of the city, in front of a mirror, his knees frowning at him in reproof, wearing these clothes.