What's So Funny by Donald Westlake Page B

houses around it. The outbuildings were all shut down, but the big house had water and electricity and even useful food in a freezer, as though the owner hadn’t realized he wouldn’t be coming back, and maybe still didn’t know it. They had made good use of the freezer food, and supplemented it by little late–night visits to towns fifteen and twenty miles away. They’d been here three weeks now, in a place that, from the dust all over everything when they arrived, had not been occupied for years and showed no signs of potential future occupancy as well. It was all theirs. Heaven, they called it, and they were probably right.

    But now their heaven had been invaded by some very dubious people lounging around in the big living room by the big fireplace, talking about where to hide whatever it was. Which, he noticed, whatever it was, they didn’t have it here with them. From what they said to one another, this trip was to find the hiding place, then another trip would be to bring the thing itself. Kind of roundabout, Brady thought, but that was their business.

    Which they weren’t in much hurry to get done and over with, so Brady and Nessa could go back to bed. They just talked along, and then the one that thought he was in charge, that the others called Johnny, finally said, “What I’ve been thinking, you want to hide something, why not the kitchen? Lots of places there.”

    The weary one said, “We don’t know how big this is yet, so how do we know what size place we gotta put it?”

    “Just big enough,” Johnny said. “I mean, how big could it be?”

    “The purloined letter,” the chipper one said.

    Both of the others seemed stymied by that. Johnny finally said, “Was that supposed to be something?”

    “Short story by Edgar Allan Poe,” the chipper one said. “Whatsamatta, Johnny, you never went to high school?”

    “Yeah, that’s all right,” Johnny said. “What’s this letter? We’re not talking about a letter.”

    So what, Brady asked, are you talking about?

    “We’re talking about something where you hide it,” the chipper one told him, “that nobody’s gonna find it. In the story, it’s a letter. And where the guy hid it, turns out, was right there on the dresser, where nobody’s gonna see it because what they’re looking for is something hidden. ”

    “Crap,” Johnny announced.

    The weary one said, “You know, Johnny, maybe not. You got something, you can’t find it, turns out, it’s right in front of you. Happens all the time.”

    “Nobody’s gonna look at that set,” Johnny insisted, “and not notice it.”

    Set? What the hell is it? Brady was about to go out and ask, unable to stand it any more.

    But then the chipper one said, “How about this? We get it. On the way up here, we get cans of spray paint, black enamel and red enamel. We paint ‘em all over, this team red, this team black, nobody sees any gold, nobody sees any jewels, it just looks like any chess set. We can leave it right out, like on that big table over there with all that other stuff.”

    Gold. Jewels. Any chess set.

    Tiptoeing as fast as the first night he ever sneaked into Nessa’s house back in Numbnuts, Brady made his way to the second floor, where Nessa, tired and sweaty, was just finished bringing all their dirty used stuff up from the kitchen. “Baby!” he whispered, exulting. “We’re in!”

    “They still here?”

    “Just for a little while. Then we can go back to bed and I’ll tell you everything.”

    “ Oh, no.”

    This being the first time Nessa had ever said no to the idea of going back to bed, Brady stumbled to a halt on his way to the front window to watch and wait for the interlopers’ departure, turned back, and said, “What?”

    She gestured. Dirty kitchen detritus was all over the upstairs hall floor. “The first thing we’re gonna do,” she said, “is clean up this stuff. We can’t go on living like this, Brady, we gotta have it neater around