“A grave,” Andy said.
“No,” said May.
John said, “Grave robbing? Andy, I’m a robber, I’m not a grave robber.”
“It’s not grave robbing,” Andy said, “it’s more, you know, switching.”
“Switching,” John said, while May just sat there, saucer-eyed, looking at Andy Kelp, her grapefruit and her job at Safeway both forgotten. She didn’t like graves, and she certainly didn’t like the thought of people digging in graves.
Meanwhile, Andy explained a little more, saying, “See, what it is, out in that big cemetery out in Queens, one of them out there, there’s this grave. Kind of an old grave, guy’s been in there quite a while.”
“I don’t think I wanna hear about this,” John said, and May nodded in silent agreement.
“We’re not gonna look at him, John,” Andy said.
“Well, I’m not.”
“We don’t open the box at all,” Andy assured him. “We dig down to it, we pull it outta there, we put it in the van.”
“We got a van.”
“It’s the employer’s van.”
“We got an employer.”
“I’ll get to that,” Andy promised. “What we do, we go out there with this van, and there’s already a coffin in it.”
“I bet this coffin is full,” John said.
“You got it,” Andy told him. “Absolutely. This guy was already dug up out west someplace, and whatever they had to do to fix him up for whatever this is—”
“Whatever what is?” John asked.
“The scam, what’s going down.”
“And?” John asked. “What is this scam? What’s going down?”
“Well, I’m not in the loop on that,” Andy said. “We’re dealing with a real pro here, John, and he does this on a need-to-know basis, and that’s something we don’t need to know.”
“I don’t need to know any of it,” John told him.
But by now, May had gotten over her first shock and disgust, and she did want to know. She said, “Andy, what is this? You dig a coffin out of a grave and put another coffin down in there instead?”
“That’s it,” Andy agreed.
John said, “So, what is it? These guys look alike?”
“They do now,” Andy said.
May decided not to follow that thought. Instead, she said, “Andy, what are you and John supposed to do? Just do the digging and that’s it?”
“And the filling in again,” Andy told her. “And put the other coffin in the van, and I guess it goes back out west, or wherever.”
May said, “And nobody opens any of these coffins.”
Andy said, “Not while I’m around.”
John said, “Why us? Why me? Why you?”
Andy explained, “He needs people in our kinda business, you know, on the bent, that’ll keep their mouths shut and not ask any questions or show up to the party wearing a wire, and then maybe he’ll have another job somewhere down the line.”
May said, “Well, at least it would be healthful.”
John looked at her in disbelief. “Healthful? Hanging around a graveyard?”
“Out in the air,” she said. “Getting some exercise. You don’t get enough exercise.”
“I don’t want enough exercise,” he said.
Andy said, “He’ll pay us a gee apiece.”
Pleased, May said, “There you are, John! It’s your cameras!”
Alert, Andy said, “Cameras?”
“He had to leave them behind,” May explained.
“The point is,” John said, “I escaped.” Then, obviously preferring to change the subject, he said, “Who is this employer guy?”
“I met him on the Internet,” Andy said.
“Oh boy,” John said.
“No, come on, he’s okay,” Andy insisted. “As soon as he understood the situation, he stopped scamming me. That second.”
“Great.”
“And offered me the job.”
“And what’s this peach’s name?” John asked.
Andy said, “Fitzroy Guilderpost.”
3
Fitzroy Guilderpost said, “Do we have the shovels?”
“In the van,” Irwin said.
“Both shovels?”
“In the van,” Irwin said.
“And the Mace? The pistol? The duct tape?”
“In the van. In the van. In the van,” Irwin said. “And so’s the tarpaulin and the rope and the canvas strap.”
“In other words, what you’re saying,” Guilderpost summed up, “is that everything is in the van.”
“Except you,” Irwin said.
Little Feather said, “Shouldn’t you boys get moving?”
“Just dotting our eyes, Little Feather,” Guilderpost assured her. “Crossing our tees.”
“Before you start tilding your ens,” Little Feather told him, “maybe you oughta get moving.”
“I love these little glimpses of your education, Little Feather,” Guilderpost told her, and patted her leathery cheek, not too hard.
The three conspirators were gathered here, just before midnight, in a motel room on Long Island, just over the border from New York City, not far from Kennedy Airport. They’d been here two days, in three consecutive but nonconnecting rooms, of which this was Guilderpost’s. It was still as neat as when he’d first entered it, or even neater, since he’d more perfectly aligned the phone and its pad on the bedside table. The only evidence of his occupancy, other than himself, was the slightly ajar ThinkPad on the round table beneath the swag lamp; the ThinkPad glowed quietly to itself down in there, thinking its own slow thoughts.
By contrast, Irwin’s room next door, within half an hour of their arrival, had begun to look like a men’s shop after the explosion, and Little Feather’s room, one beyond, while comparatively neat, was, nevertheless, piled high with her possessions, her clothing, her cosmetics, her exercise tapes.
Guilderpost had interposed Irwin between himself and Little Feather deliberately. It was his rule never to mix business with pleasure, and that went double when dealing with as attractive a package of rat poison as Little Feather.
The three were more than an odd couple; they were an odd trio. Little Feather, the former showgirl, Native American Indian, was beautiful in a chiseled-granite sort of way, as though her mother were Pocahontas and her father Mount Rushmore. Irwin Gabel, the disgraced university professor, was tall and bony and mostly shoulder blades and Adam’s apple, with an aggrieved and sneering look that used to work wonders in the classroom but was less useful in the world at large.
As for Guilderpost, the mastermind looked mostly like a mastermind: portly, dignified, white hair in waves above a distinguished pale forehead. He went in for three-piece suits, and was often the only person in a given state wearing a vest. He’d given up his mustache some years ago, when it turned gray, because it made him look like a child molester, which he certainly was not; however, he did look like a man who used to have a mustache, with some indefinable nakedness between the bottom of his fleshy nose and the top of his fleshy lip. He brushed this area from time to time with the side of his forefinger, exactly as though the mustache were still there.
Now he said, “No need to be overly hasty, Little Feather. The reason my operations invariably succeed is because I am an absolute stickler for detail.”
“Hurray,” Little Feather commented.
Irwin said, “What about the bozos? They gonna be as easy as the ones in Elko?”
“Easier,” Guilderpost assured him. “I’ve only met the one, of course, but he’s bringing a friend, and it isn’t hard to imagine what a friend of Mr. Andy Kelly’s will be.”
“Another bozo,” Irwin said.
“A couple of gonifs,” Guilderpost agreed. “Strong backs and weak minds. They do the heavy lifting, and then we’re done.”
Little Feather cleared her throat and said, “Tempus fugg-it.”
Guilderpost smiled upon her. “Very well, Little Feather,” he said, “you’re undoubtedly right. Traffic into Manhattan can be uncertain, even at this hour. If Irwin is ready—”