What's So Funny by Donald Westlake Read Free Book Online

distractions.”

    “Good.”

    To get to this small conference room, she had to lead him a zigzag route through the people–boxes, and he was surprised the black composition floor wasn’t covered with lines of breadcrumbs left by previous people afraid they wouldn’t be able to find their way back.

    A perimeter of the boxes was reached, and Fiona led the way along a wall to the left with alternating closed doors and plate–glass windows, through which he could see the conference rooms within, some occupied by two or more people in intense head–thrust–forward conversation, some empty.

    Into an empty one she led the way, shut the door, and said, with a smile, “Sit anywhere. A beverage? Coke? Seltzer?”

    Dortmunder understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, “Seltzer, yeah, sounds good.”

    She went away to a tall construction on the end wall that contained everything necessary to life: refrigerator, a shelf of glasses, TV, DVD, notepads, pens, and paper napkins. She poured him a seltzer over ice and herself a Diet Pepsi over ice, brought him his drink and a paper napkin, and at last they could sit down and have their chat.

    “So you found this thing,” Dortmunder began. “This chess set.”

    She laughed. “Oh, Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end.”

    Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but okay, once again no choice in the matter, so he said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

    “When I was growing up,” she said, “there was every once in a while some family talk about a chess set that seemed to make everybody unhappy, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was gone, or lost, or something, but I didn’t know why it was such a big deal.”

    She drank Diet Pepsi and give him a warning finger–shake. “I don’t mean the family was full of nothing but talk about this mysterious chess set, it wasn’t. It was just a thing that came up every once in a while.”

    “Okay.”

    “So last summer it came up again,” she said, “when I was visiting my father at the Cape, and I asked him, please tell me what it’s all about, and he said he didn’t really know. If he ever knew, he’d forgotten. He said I should ask my grandfather, so when I got back to the city I did. He didn’t want to talk about it, turned out he was very bitter on that subject, but I finally convinced him I really wanted to know what this chess set meant in the family, and he told me.”

    “And that made you find it,” Dortmunder said, “when nobody else could.”

    “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve always been fascinated by history, and this was history with my own family in it, the First World War and invading Russia and all the rest of it. So I took down the names of everybody in that platoon that brought the chess set to America, and the other names, like the radio company they wanted to start, Chess King Broadcasting, and everything else I thought might be useful, and I Googled it all.”

    Dortmunder had heard of this; some other nosey parker way to mind everybody else’s business. He preferred a world in which people stuck to their own knitting, but that world was long gone. He said, “You found some of these people on Google.”

    “And I looked for brand names with chess words,” she said, “because why wouldn’t Alfred Northwood use that kind of name, too? A lot of the stuff I found was all dead ends, but I’m used to research, so I kept going, and then I found Gold Castle Realty, founded right here in New York in 1921, and then it turned out they were the builders of the Castlewood Building in 1948. So I looked into Gold Castle’s owners and board of directors, and there’s Northwoods all over it.”

    “The sons,” Dortmunder said.

    “And daughters. But mostly now grandsons and granddaughters. It had to be