And suddenly Edna’s bony sharp hand was clutching Myrtle’s forearm and Edna was crying, “My God!”
Myrtle immediately stared into the rearview mirror; were they about to be crashed? But Elm Street was empty behind them. So she stared at her mother, who was gaping after that car that had just gone by. The whites were visible all around the pupils of Edna’s eyes. Was she having some sort of attack? “Mother?” Myrtle asked, firmly burying that first irrepressible instant of hope. “Mother? Are you all right?”
“It couldn’t be,” Edna whispered. She was panting in her anxiety, mouth hanging open, eyes staring. Voice hoarse, she cried, “But it was! It was!”
“Was what? Mother?”
“That was your father in that car!”
Myrtle’s head spun about. She too stared after the car with the two men in it; but it was long gone. She said, astonished, “Mr. Street, Mother? Mr. Street’s come back?”
“Mr. Street?” Edna’s voice was full of rage and contempt. “That asshole? Who gives a fuck about him?”
Myrtle had never heard such language from Edna. “Mother?” she asked. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Edna said, hunching forward, staring hollowly out the windshield, all at once looking plenty old enough to be a member of the Senior Citizens Center. “It couldn’t happen, but it did. The dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Bleakly, Edna gazed at the sunny world of Dudson Center. “He’s back,” she said.
FIVE
“They should never have let him out of prison,” May said.
“They shouldn’t have let him out of the cell,” Dortmunder said. “As long as I’m not in it with him.”
“You are in it with him,” May pointed out. “He’s living here.”
Dortmunder put down his fork and looked at her. “May? What could I do?”
They were in the kitchen together, having a late lunch or an early supper, hamburgers and Spaghetti-Os and beer, grabbing their privacy where they could find it. After the run back from Vilburgtown Reservoir, after they’d actually given the rental car back to its owners (yet another new experience today for Dortmunder), Tom had said, “You go on home, Al, I’ll be along. I gotta fill my pockets.” So Dortmunder had gone on home, where May had been waiting, having come back early from her cashier job at the supermarket to meet him, and where, with a hopeful expression as she’d looked over Dortmunder’s shoulder, she’d said, “Where’s your friend?”
“Out filling his pockets. He said we shouldn’t wait up, he’d let himself in.”
May had looked alarmed. “You gave him a key?”
“No, he just said he’d let himself in. May, we gotta talk. I also gotta eat, but mostly and mainly we gotta talk.”
So now they were eating and talking, sometimes simultaneously, and May wasn’t liking the situation any more than Dortmunder. But what were they to do about it? “May,” Dortmunder said, “if we leave Tom alone, he really will blow up that dam and drown everybody in the valley. And for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he’ll find guys to help.”
“John,” May said, “wherever he is right now, your friend Tom, filling his pockets—”
“Please, May,” Dortmunder interrupted, “don’t do that. Don’t keep calling him my friend Tom. That’s unfair.”
May thought about that and nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s not your fault who they put in your cell.”
“Thank you.”
“But, John, still, what do you think he’s doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?”
“I don’t even want to know,” Dortmunder said.
“John, you’re a craftsman, you’re skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training—”
“And luck,” Dortmunder added.
“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. “Not a solid experienced person like you.”
“Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said, “since I’ve been running around without it for quite a while.”
“Now, don’t get gloomy, John,” May said.
“Hard not to, around Tom,” Dortmunder told her. “And, as for what he’s doing outside right now, that’s up to him. But I was at that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It’s my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we’ll sit here and watch television, and there it’ll be on the news. You know what I mean?”
“Are those the only choices?” May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti-Os, not meeting Dortmunder’s eye. “Are you sure there’s nothing else to do?”
“Like what?” he asked. “The way I see it, I help him or I don’t help him, that’s the choice.”
“I wouldn’t normally say this, John,” May said, “you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it’s just necessary to let society fight its own battles.”
Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. “May? Turn him in? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s worth thinking about,” May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.
“But it isn’t,” Dortmunder told her. “Even if it was—even if it ever was, I mean—even then, it isn’t worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he’s gonna drown nine hundred people? They can’t take him back.” Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, “A crime isn’t a crime until it happens.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” May said. “With a character like that walking around loose—”
Dortmunder said, “May, some famous writer said it once: The law’s an asshole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson’s living here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson’s record and history was living here, they’d put me back inside. But him they can’t touch.”
“Well, that’s crazy,” May said.
“But true,” Dortmunder told her. “But let’s say I do it anyway, I’m feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it’s done. I’ve gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very best, what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn’t do it. And he’ll take about a second and a half to figure out who’s the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?”
“Well,” May said carefully, “John, it’s you he’d be mad at, actually.”
“People who play with dynamite don’t fine tune,” Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti-Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.
May had finished. She sat back, didn’t light a cigarette, didn’t blow smoke at the ceiling, didn’t flick ashes onto her plate, didn’t cough delicately twice, and did say, “Well, I just hope you can come up with something.”
“Me, too,” Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn’t come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning just a second, and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: “Me, too.”
She frowned at him. “You too what?”