How on earth had the fellow found that out, and what in h.e.l.l did it have to do with this burglary? Max said, "Well, as a matter of fact, she's always wanted to get out there, but her own schedule, you know, so that was the last opportunity."

"Before you sold the house."

"That's right."

"Why are you selling the house, Mr. Fairbanks?"

Be careful, Max told himself. This man knows the most unexpected irrelevant things. But why does he care about them so much? "It's part of a court settlement," he said. "A legal situation."

"Bankruptcy," Klematsky said.

Ah hah; so he did know that. "We're in," Max said, "part of my holdings are in a Chapter Eleven."

"Bankruptcy."

"Well, it's a technical procedure that -"

"Bankruptcy. Isn't it bankruptcy, Mr.

Fairbanks?"

"Well...... " yes.

"You're a bankrupt."

"Technically, my-."

"Bankrupt."

Sighing, Max conceded the point: "If you want to put it like that."

Klematsky flipped a page. "When did you and your wife decide to make this sentimental journey to Carrport, Mr. Fairbanks?"

"Well, I don't know, exactly," Max said. He was beginning to wonder if he should have an attorney present, any attorney at all, perhaps even a couple of them. On the other hand, what essentially did he have to hide from this fellow? Nothing. He's here to investigate a burglary, nothing more. G.o.d knows why he's going into all this other stuff, but it doesn't mean anything. "The sale of the house was decided... recently," he said. "So our going out there had to be a recent decision."

"Very recent," Klematsky said. "There's nothing about it in your wife's datebook."

"Well, she doesn't put everything in her datebook, you -"

Klematsky, surprised, said, "She doesn't? You mean there's even more stuff she does than what's in there?"

"I have no idea," Max said, getting stuffy with the fellow, wondering if he dared just stand up and walk out on him, yet still curious as to what all this was about. "I don't make a habit," he said, "of studying my wife's datebook."

"I have it here, you wanna see it?"

"No, thank you. And, to answer your question, I think the decision to go out there was quite spur of the moment."

"It must have been," Klematsky said. "Thursday night you had dinner with people named Lumley and some other people at the Lumleys' apartment uptown."

"You are thorough," Max said, not pleased.

Klematsky's smile was thin. "That's why I get the big bucks."

"You're going to say," Max suggested, "that Lutetia didn't mention to anyone at the dinner party that we were going out to Carrport later that night."

"Well, no," Klematsky said. "I was going to say your wife told Mrs. Lumley she felt overtired, felt she'd been doing too much, and was looking forward to a good night's sleep that night here in her own apartment."

Max opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again and said, "We made the decision in the car, coming downtown."

"I see. That's when you talked to her about it."

"We talked about it."

"Who brought the subject up?"

"Well, I suppose I did," Max said.

Klematsky nodded. He turned to another page in his d.a.m.n notebook. He read, nodded, frowned at Max, said, "Wasn't there a little something else about the house at Carrport recently?"

"Something else? What do you mean?"

"Wasn't there a robbery there?"

"Oh! Yes, of course, in all this I'd completely forgotten -"

"Funny how memory works," Klematsky said. "You were out there during the robbery, weren't you?"

"Well, no," Max said. "Just before. He broke in again after I left. The police caught him once, when I was there, but then he escaped from the police and went back to the house, after I'd left."

"You mean the two of you were in the house -" Good G.o.d, he even knows about Miss September. "Yes, yes, all right, the two of us were there, for perfectly innocent reasons."

Klematsky stared at him. "You and the burglar were there for perfectly innocent reasons?"

Max stared, lost. "What?"

Klematsky spread his hands, as though all this were obvious. "The two of you were there, we agreed on that."

"Not me and the - Not me and the burglar! I thought you were talking about - Well, I thought you meant someone else."

"And the police," Klematsky went on, as though Max hadn't spoken at all, "came in because the house was supposed to be empty and they saw it was occupied, and -" "Not at all, not at all," Max said. "I called the police. I captured the burglar, I held a gun on him, and I called the police. Check their records."

"Well, I did," Klematsky said, "and they're very confusing. These smalltown cops, you know. First there's a report that the police found a burglar and n.o.body else there. Then there's an amended report that the police found the burglar and two other people there, you and somebody else. And after that, there's another amended report that the police found the burglar and one other person there, meaning you. And there's also a 911 call, originally said to be by you, and then said to be by somebody else."

Now Max had truly had enough. Much of this was embarra.s.sing, some of it was less than forthcoming, but none of it had anything to do with what had happened in this apartment right here on Thursday night. "Detective," he said, putting on his stern manner, the manner that usually preceded somebody being fired, "I applaud your enterprise in digging up all this irrelevant material, but that's what it is. Irrelevant material. Somebody broke into this place Thursday night. They took well over a million dollars' worth of property.

I'm not sure yet how much they took. Why isn't this your concern? Why do you keep going on and on about Carrport?"

"They're both burglaries, aren't they?"

"Burglaries take place all the time! Are you saying these two are connected? That's absurd!"

"Is it?"

Suddenly a suspicion entered Max's brain. The burglar; the ring. Could it be the same man, come back looking for his ring, following Max around? Was that, in his b.u.mble footed fashion, what this clown of a detective was getting at? Max said, "You think it's the same people."

"I don't think anything yet," Klematsky said. "I see all sorts of possible scenarios."

He doesn't know about the ring, Max thought, that much he can't know about. So he doesn't know about the burglar, and could the burglar be chasing me, chasing the ring? It seemed impossible, ridiculous. Distracted, he said, "Scenarios. What do you mean, scenarios?"

"Well, here's a scenario," Klematsky said. "You're bankrupt."

That again? "I'm technically -"

"Bankrupt."

Max sighed. "Very well."

"There's a house full of valuable possessions, that you're not supposed to be in, and you are in, while there's a burglary going on."

Is it possible the burglar could be hanging around now, somewhere nearby? A man batting too many gnats, Max said, "Before. I was there before."

"Before, during, after."

Klematsky shrugged. "You're all around it. And now we come here, and at the last second you talk your wife into leaving this apartment, when she didn't want to, and all of a sudden the coast is clear."

"Coast? What coast? Clear? Wait a second!"

The absurdity of Klematsky's suspicions, now that Max finally understood what they were, was so extreme that no wonder it hadn't occurred to him what horsefeathers filled the Klematsky brain. His own wealth and, in this instance, comparative innocence, combined with the distraction of thoughts about the burglar, had kept him from grasping Klematsky's implications be fore this. Now, astounded, horrified, amused, pointing at himself, Max said, "Do you think I committed these burglaries? Hired them done? For the insurance?'

"I don't think anything yet," Klematsky said. "I'm just looking at the scenarios."

"You should be looking at a padded cell," Max told him. "You think because I'm in bankruptcy court -? Do you really believe I'm poor? You - You - I could buy and sell a thousand of you!"

"Maybe you could buy and sell a thousand," Klematsky said, unruffled, "but they wouldn't be me."

"From here on," Max said, getting to his feet, "you may speak to me through my attorney, Walter Greenbaum. I'll give you his phone number, and a number where you can reach me if you have anything sensible to say."

As calm as ever, Klematsky turned to a fresh page in his notebook. "Fire away."

Max gave him the numbers and said, "You've wasted far too much of my time, when you should have been out looking for the people who actually did this. Unless you think you have cause to stop me, I am now going back to Hilton Head."

"Oh, I have no reason to hold you, Mr. Fairbanks," the unflappable Klematsky said. "Not at the moment. Is your Congress thing going to be on C-Span?"

"Perhaps the congressmen were my partners in crime," Max said, sneering. "Perhaps they're the ones who did the actual breaking in."

"Wouldn't surprise me," Klematsky said.

31.

The first thing they couldn't agree on was how they were going to get to Washington. Dortmunder wanted to take the train, Andy wanted to drive, and May and Anne Marie both wanted to fly. As Andy had earlier suggested, May and Anne Marie hit it off right from the start, liked each other fine, and were in complete agreement about taking the plane to Washington, DC. "It's a hop and a skip," Anne Marie said, and May said, "See? Not even a jump. It's over before you know it, and you're there."

"Where?" Dortmunder demanded. "In some farmer's field fifty miles away, at an airport, with taxis, and another hour before you get anywhere. I don't wanna go to Washington by taxi. The train is door to door."

This conversation was taking place Sat.u.r.day evening in Dortmunder and May's apartment, and now Andy stood and went over to the living room archway to look down toward the apartment entrance and say, "Door to door? John? You got a train runs down the hall out there?"

"Downtown to downtown," Dortmunder said. "You know what I mean. It's not even a hop and a skip, it's just a hop from here over to Penn Station, take the train, you're right there in Washington, right where you want to be."

"Well, no," Anne Marie said. "Where you are is at Union Station over on Capitol Hill. The Watergate is way across town by Foggy Bottom, the other side of everything. All of the monuments, all of the official buildings, all of the tourists, everything is inbetween Union Station and the Watergate. " Which is where they were headed, of course. Since the Watergate was all things to all people - a hotel and an apartment building and a shopping mall and an office building, and probably also backup guitar in a garage band on weekends - it had been decided they might as well all stay right there in the hotel part while Dortmunder and Kelp visited Max Fairbanks in the apartment part. The Williams credit card that Dortmunder had used in the N-Joy surely having crashed and burned by now, he'd bought another card from Stoon the fence that had caused him to make his telephone reservation at the hotel - 1-800-424-2736 - in the name of Rathbone, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Rathbone. Andy and Anne Marie, while in Washington, would be the Skomorowskis.

Anyway, "I still like the train," Dortmunder grumbled, although this local expert's report on the inconvenience of the Washington depot for their particular plans did have to be taken into account, and did dampen his enthusiasm a bit.

Which Andy now tried to dampen even more, saying, "John, you don't want the train. The train's Amtrak, am I right?"

So? "And Amtrak's the government, right?"

"And?"

"And the government's Republicans right now, right?"

"Yeah?"

"And Republicans don't believe in maintenance," Andy explained. "Cause it costs money."

"Well," Dortmunder said, "I can't wait for the Democrats to get back in."

"Wouldn't help," Andy said. "The Democrats don't know how to run a business. Forget Amtrak. I'll get us a nice car, comfortable, an easy ride, we travel at our own pace, stop when we want for a meal or whatever, first thing you know, we're there."

The local expert chimed in again at that, saying, "Andy, you don't want to drive in Washington. The traffic's a mess, there's no place to park -"

"Who's gonna park?"

Andy said. "When we get there, we leave the car someplace, when we go back I'll get another one."

Anne Marie frowned at him. "You're talking about rental cars, aren't you?"

"Not exactly," Andy said.

"Oh," Anne Marie said.

"So we're gonna leave tomorrow morning," Andy said. "I'll pick us up a really nice car, I'll go over to First Avenue, where the hospitals are."

Anne Marie said, "Hospitals?"