“Sure,” Dortmunder said. Polite guy, anyway.
It took Fitzroy, being portly, a while to get at his wallet, and then to hand over some bills to the attendant and wait for his change. Dortmunder leaned his chin down to his knees again to look in the outside mirrors, and the car with the one fainter headlight was moving very slowly toward another open booth. Very slowly. That driver must be trying to get to his money before he reached the booth. The car was a gray Plymouth Voyager, a passenger van, the kind of suburban vehicle mostly used for hauling Little League teams around and about, though this one had only the driver, a guy, indistinct inside there.
Fitzroy at last got them moving again, and Dortmunder sat up to say, “So this is the linchpin, huh?”
“We couldn’t do the operation without it,” Fitzroy assured him. “But with it, we win. We have to be absolutely secret about it, though, absolutely. We daren’t risk a word getting out.”
Kelp said, “Well, you know you can count on John and me. We’ll never say a thing about this.”
“Oh, I haven’t the slightest doubt on that score,” Fitzroy said, and turned his head to smile at Kelp. Seen in profile like that, from the back of the van, smiling, he looked more like a hungry wolf and less like a portly man.
It was only ten minutes along the Long Island Expressway, and then they were passing among the cemeteries, a huge necropolis spread across Queens, different cemeteries for different religions and ethnicities, clustered together for companionship, like campfires on the Great Plains. For the one they wanted, they had to stay on the highway to the far end, then take the exit there and circle back. Dortmunder, who’d been getting bored again, once Fitzroy wouldn’t talk about his scam anymore, had gone back to the chin-on-knee posture, and now he saw that same Plymouth Voyager with the gimpy headlight, well back there, but with his right turn signal on, preparing to take the same exit as them.
Is this guy following us? Dortmunder wondered if he should mention it to Fitzroy, if this was maybe some problem with his secrecy that he should know about, but then he thought, Fitzroy’s been looking in the same mirrors as me. I’ve seen him check those mirrors a lot, all the way out, so if he’s that hipped on secrecy tonight, he’s already noticed that car. So if it’s somebody that is following us, Fitzroy already knows about it.
Dortmunder thought about that.
Taking a side street that cut between two different cemeteries, Fitzroy said, “They lock these places at night for some reason, which could be a problem for us. We don’t want anyone ever to know that anything happened here tonight. Fortunately, up ahead here, a portion of the fence is broken. Not done by us. Much earlier. Drug dealers possibly, or lovers.”
“Or vampires,” Kelp said.
“Yes, very good,” Fitzroy told him. “But more likely ghouls, I think. Vampires prey on the living. It’s ghouls that eat dead flesh.”
“Well, so do we,” Kelp said. “You know, beef and like that.”
To distract himself from the conversation, Dortmunder leaned down again to look in the mirrors. No lights but the wide-apart streetlights, so the Voyager had voyaged elsewhere. No, here it came, around the corner, well back. Came around the corner, and right away the headlights switched off.
Funny place to park.
Dortmunder looked out front. They were on a bumpy blacktop street flanked by eight-foot-tall wrought-iron fences of two different designs, with tombstones visible beyond them both. The street ran straight up a gradual slope, and it looked to Dortmunder as though the land tipped down again farther ahead.
But they didn’t go that far. On the right, a section of fence sagged inward, away from one of the support bars, leaving an opening wide enough for a person to walk through, or maybe even two people abreast, but not wide enough for a car. Nevertheless, Fitzroy angled toward this opening, bumping up over the curb and sidewalk—why had the city bothered to put sidewalks on a street like this?—and stopping just short of the fence.
“Now, Andy,” Fitzroy said, “if you and John get out and pull on that fence, you can open it wide enough for me to drive through. Once I’m in there, it would be best to close it up again.”
“Sure,” Kelp said, and opened his door.
Fitzroy said, “You’ll have to open the back door for John, there’s no knob on the inside there.”
The optician at Speedshop again. Dortmunder wriggled about to face the back, trying not to lean on the coffin more than absolutely necessary, and Kelp came around to open the door. Dortmunder clambered out and the two of them walked over to the fence, which was black wrought iron designed with daisy shapes between the vertical bars at waist level and again at head level. These shapes made good grips. As they grasped handfuls of daisies, Dortmunder said, without moving his lips, “A car followed us.”
“I know,” Kelp said, without moving his lips.
The fence moved more easily than they’d expected. It was heavy, but once they got the end lifted from the ground, it swung without trouble.
There were a few old graves here, sunken, with tilting tombstones, but they weren’t in the way. Fitzroy steered slowly around them and stopped when he reached the gravel roadway.
Dortmunder and Kelp moved the fence back to position number one, and Dortmunder said, without moving his lips, “He likes absolute secrecy.”
“Absolutely,” Kelp said, without moving his lips.
They walked over to the van, where Fitzroy had opened his window so he could tell them, “It isn’t far, it’ll be just as easy to follow me.”
“Lead away,” Kelp said.
Fitzroy drove slowly along the gravel roadway, and Kelp and Dortmunder walked behind, speaking without moving their lips. “They can try whatever they want,” Dortmunder said, “just so he’s actually got that dough.”
“He’s got some dough,” Kelp said. “I took a look at his wallet at the tollbooth.”
“They won’t make their move until the switch is done,” Dortmunder said, “so we still gotta do all this digging.”
“Maybe that’s good,” Kelp said. “Maybe their scam gets to be our scam.”
“I dunno about that,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t like hanging out with dead bodies.”
“Well, they’re quiet,” Kelp said, “and you can trust them. We’ll see how it plays.”
The brake lights went on in front of them, and Fitzroy angled off onto the grass so that his headlights shone on a small pale stone in front of another slightly sunken grave. Dortmunder and Kelp walked around the van, read the stone, which said:
JOSEPH REDCORN
July 12, 1907–
November 7, 1930
“Died young,” Kelp commented.
“There’s a lesson in that,” Dortmunder said.
Fitzroy had gotten out of the van to go around back and open both its doors. Now he came toward them, carrying a folded canvas tarp, saying, “We want to be very careful we leave no traces of our digging. We’ll spread this on the next grave and put all the dirt there. Also, I’ll ask you to remove the sod very carefully, so we’ll be able to put it back.”
Meaning somebody else would be coming along, probably pretty soon, to dig the guy up again. And for Fitzroy’s scam, the guy they dug up had to be the ringer from out west, instead of the actual Joseph Redcorn. Almost seventy years he’d been lying down there, old Joseph, minding his own business, and now he was getting evicted so somebody else could pull a fast one. Dortmunder almost felt sorry for the guy.
Kelp said to Fitzroy, “I was saying to John, he died young, this fella.”
“Well, he was an American Indian, from upstate,” Fitzroy told him. “You know, those are the people that work in construction on the skyscrapers, up on the tall buildings. Mohawks, mostly, some others.”
“This one was a Mohawk?”
“No, one of the minor tribes the Iroquois controlled, the Pottaknobbee. But Redcorn was a steelworker alongside them, on what they call ‘the high iron.’”