Good Behavior by Donald E. Westlake Page A

dialect got in there), that Sister Mary Grace gave up anorexia at once.
    Giving up despair, however, took a little longer. She was trapped, probably forever, in a high tower, surrounded by people who did not and would not understand her and who were determined to turn her into something she could never be. She was the butterfly, and this was the rack, and they would eventually break her, but to no one’s satisfaction.
    She had always felt herself to be different, both from her siblings and from the rest of the world she knew. She didn’t care about what the others cared about. She didn’t want things . She didn’t know what she did want until, when she was sixteen, she visited a sanatorium operated by nuns where her mother was “resting.” Asking about a separate building she’d noticed on the property, she was told that was where the cloistered members of the order lived, those who had renounced the world entirely and devoted themselves exclusively to contemplation of the All-Powerful.
    Around Elaine’s house, until then, the concept of all-powerful had meant only the Ritter family, personified by Frank Ritter himself. Her older brothers and sisters, great galumphing things, bowled one another over for the privilege of serving this ideal. But was there a better ideal? Was there a better way to spend one’s only transit here on Earth?
    She sought counsel and instruction, and bided her time. Six years it had taken to be sure of her vocation, to be sure she believed in God and loved God and wanted to serve Him contemplatively the rest of her life. Six years, in short, to be absolutely sure she wasn’t merely running away from her father.
    She was twenty-two, legally and allegedly an adult and capable of making her own decisions, when she went back to that sanatorium and applied to enter the cloister. But the order’s rules were that service in the community came first; only after so many years would the cloister be open to her. Frank Ritter’s daughter was a semi-public figure; if she were to break from the world it would have to be completely and all at once. And that led her to the Little Sisterhood of St. Filumena and the convent on Vestry Street from which, three months ago, on her biweekly turn to go to the neighborhood grocery store, she was kidnapped by her father’s goons and locked away in this tower.
    Why shouldn’t she despair? But she fought against it, as she fought against Hendrickson and her father and every other target she could find, and at last the news had come from Mother Mary Forcible: a man named John would rescue her. Blessed John! Was there anything she could do to help?
    Down in the Margrave Corporation, in one of the offices she could prowl at night, were the thick looseleaf books showing the tower’s security systems. Would those help? Similar books, though empty, were in a supplies closet. She took the records, left the blank books in their place, and Enriqueta smuggled them out beneath her voluminous skirts. And now Sister Mary Grace waited, despair all gone, for Blessed John to appear.
    On the surface, she was silent. But inside, she sang.

16
    Dortmunder and Tiny Bulcher walked up Fifth Avenue together, the Avalon State Bank Tower rising up ahead of them, bleak and gray and stern. When they reached the tower, a green-uniformed man was washing the glass entry doors to the lobby. “That means rain,” Tiny said. “Never fails.”
    They went on inside, and over to enter one of the 5–21 elevators, joining two Orientals in expensive black topcoats, holding attaché cases and talking together very earnestly in Japanese. They paused briefly to look at Tiny, and one of them muttered something that sounded like “Godzilla.” Then they went back to their conversation.
    Tiny pushed the button for the seventh floor and said, “Now, remember. I don’t know this bozo myself. Maybe it’s no good.”
    â€œSo