“It’s all yours,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp said, “John and Tiny and me got involved with some people doing an Anastasia, and we need a right DNA sample, and it’s gonna be on a comb in a place with hundreds of thousands of dollars of valuable stuff, so while we’re there, anyway, why don’t we take it all.”
“Sounds good,” Murch said.
“I’m glad you called,” his Mom said.
Dortmunder said, “That’s it? Now you’re satisfied?”
“Well, when it’s explained,” Murch’s Mom said.
Kelp said, “Okay, what I got here is the stuff from the Thurstead Web site.” Pulling a stack of papers from his envelope, he said, “All in color, and it’s free. What we got here is a whole brand-new way to case a joint.” Dealing out stapled-together pages, he said, “We can all take a look at this place.”
The top page was a very nice color photograph of an imposing and vaguely Oriental building, made of stone blocks, different sizes and different colors, so that one wall was a kind of rusty rosy red, while the other wall you could see in this picture was more of a faded pea-soup green. The photo had been taken in the summer, and muted purple-and-gold awnings angled out over all the windows. The windows themselves were different sizes and shapes, and some of them had panes of colored glass. The roof was molasses-colored shingles, and the three onion domes were different shades of dark blue. It all came together, somehow, probably because all the colors were muted and calm.
“Some snazzy place,” Murch’s Mom decided.
Murch said, “I don’t remember ever driving past this place. Where is it?”
“Jersey,” Kelp told him. “Way out by the Delaware Water Gap. In fact, if you look at what it says under the picture, it’s inside the national park there, the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.”
Murch said, “So what’ve you got there, park rangers?”
“No,” Kelp said, “they were there before the park went in, so they’re like grandfathered. Read about it. On page two is very nice.”
They all read about it, how Russell Thurbush, the famous painter, had designed and built the house high on a hilltop overlooking the Delaware River, how he’d filled it with valuable art and stuff he brought back from his worldwide travels, how it was on the National Register of Historic Places and was maintained by a nonprofit private foundation run by Thurbush’s great-granddaughter and her husband, Viveca and Frank Quinlan, who live on the property. Most of the downstairs was open to the public, with guided tours, from April until November.
“So it’s shut now,” Murch’s Mom said.
“Another reason we case it on the Web,” Kelp pointed out.
Page two, as Kelp had promised, was very nice. Among the paragraphs about the art and the history and the architectural innovations and all the rest of it was a paragraph concerning security:
The Thurstead Foundation maintains its own private security arrangements, with support available from the New Jersey State Police. Motion-activated floodlights encircle the house. In addition, security cameras are mounted in trees about the property, monitored at all times in the security office in the barn, just behind the visitor center.
“How do you like that?” Kelp said. “They tell us their security.”
Tiny said, “They don’t say what’s inside the house.”
“That’s on page three.”
Page two had been almost completely print, with only one small photo of a hookah at center left, part of Russell Thurbush’s worldwide swag, but page three was half-devoted to a photo of a room so crammed with art, paintings in big frames all over the walls, fur rugs all over the floors, whatnots and knickknacks all over every flat surface, ornate furniture and lamps like hussars, that it was a true relief for the eye to move on down to the words, in which the key sentences were: “Although the private quarters have been modernized, the areas open to the public have been left exactly as Russell Thurbush knew them. Modern heat is delivered through the original grates, and even electricity has not been added to these spaces.”
Dortmunder said, “All their security is outside.”
“But it’s pretty good,” Murch said. “Floodlights with motion sensors, observation cameras in the trees. Maybe we oughta do this thing in April, when they’re open, when we can go look it over.”
“Well, that’s the problem,” Dortmunder said. “Normally, that’s the way I’d like to do it, visit once or twice, maybe take some of our own pictures, see what’s what on the scene. The only reason I’m going along with Andy here on this World Wide Web thing is, we got kind of a deadline.”
Murch’s Mom said, “Before April, I bet.”
“Well, yeah,” Dortmunder agreed. “Today is Friday, and we gotta get that hair sample back upstate by Monday.”
Murch said, “Whoops. You wanna plan it, and organize it, and do it, all this weekend?”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” Dortmunder said, “but that’s what we got.”
“Then,” Murch said, “I don’t know we got much.”
“Well, it could be that luck is with us,” Dortmunder told him. Then he stopped and looked around at everybody and said, “I can’t believe what I just heard me say.”
Kelp said, “I’m a little taken aback myself, John.”
“And yet, and yet,” Dortmunder said, “it might even be the truth. See, the thing is, I looked at the weather report, the old-fashioned way, on the television, and comin outta Pennsylvania on Sunday is supposed to be our first winter storm of the season. A nice big one.”
Murch said, “This is the luck? We’ve also got a storm?”
“That’s right,” Dortmunder told him. “You know what happens when a big snowstorm goes through? In a rural part of the world? The electricity goes out. And nobody thinks a thing about it.”
38
Everything that happens with weather in the greater New York City area has already happened in Cleveland two days before, so on Saturday morning, when Kelp and Murch flew from La Guardia Airport in New York to Hopkins Airport in Cleveland, they sailed over the storm, which was then ruffling feathers in Pittsburgh, and landed in an exhausted city that no longer had any present use for the vehicle they intended to borrow.
In fact, the municipal parking lot where they went looking for what they needed was deserted. City workers had just finished a twenty-seven-hour war against the snowstorm, and they were now all home in bed, with their beepers on the bedside table. The locks on the gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot did not hold Kelp’s and Murch’s attention for long, and then off they went, down the rows of garbage trucks, snowplows, morgue vans, and cherry pickers, till they found just the vehicle they’d had in mind.
It was big, with big tires. It was red and had many sparkly yellow and white and red lights mounted all over it. It had begun life as an ordinary dump truck, but it had been fitted to a specific use: sand spreader. On the front of it was a big yellow V-shaped snowplow blade, and inside the open bed was a slanting metal floor with runnels that led back to the spigots where salt or sand would be ejected onto the roadway behind the truck, with controls operated by the driver. The rear wall of the truck body was mostly a pair of metal doors that would swing open outward from the center to give maintenance access to the spigots and other equipment inside.
The spreader’s most recent operator had been too tired to top up the gas tank when he’d brought the machine back from its municipal duty, so that was another lock they had to go through, on the gas pump, before the computer inside it would give them any fuel. Then they took time out for a quick lunch, and were on the road by one.
It’s just about four hundred miles from Cleveland to Port Jervis, New York, where New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet, just a little north of the Delaware Water Gap. On an ordinary day, in an ordinary car, traveling Interstate 80, they’d have made it in under six hours, but this was not an ordinary car, and straight ahead of them was something that would keep this from being at all an ordinary day. The storm they’d flown over, they would now drive through, which would slow them down a bit. On the other hand, you couldn’t ask for better wheels than this, if what you planned to do was drive through a snowstorm.