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his beer belly on the table. “It’s pronounced Maloney,” he said. “You people can have your theories, and you can run down a lot of Greeks and Turks and Russian Orthodoxes, but I’ll tell you right now what happened. That damn fool jeweler put a sign in his window that he was leavin town. Perfect invitation to a burglar. There was a nice little piece of wire put on the alarm to bypass it. The door was jimmied open as gentle as a weddin night. The safe was cracked by a professional cracksman. He took this damn ruby ring we’re all so excited about, but he didn’t know what it was because he also took a lot of penny-ante rings and bracelets and watches. Your terrorists and dissidents and all them types don’t know how to quiet a burglar alarm or ease open a safe. All they know is machine guns and Molotov cocktails and a lot of noise and fuss and blood. It’s a nice New York hometown burglar is what we’re lookin for, and I tell you right now I’ll find him. My boys’ll toss this entire goddam city, we’ll pick up every grifter and drifter and peterman and second-story man in town, we’ll shake em all by the heels, and when you hear a plink , that’ll be the ring fallin out of somebody’s pocket. In the meantime, anybody got any questions, you deal with Sergeant Windrift here, my secretary. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a whole lot of arrestin to do.”
    And Chief Inspector Mologna followed his beer belly out of the conference room.
    9
    There was a Daily News on the seat on the subway, but Dortmunder didn’t read about the big jewel robbery out to Kennedy. Other people’s successes didn’t interest him that much. Instead he leafed through to page seven, where he read about three guys in Staten Island who went into a bar last night to hold it up and the customers jumped all over them and threw their guns into the Kill Van Kull and let the air out of the tires of their getaway car, but then when the cops showed up (called by some busybody neighbor bugged by the noise) none of the customers would say which three guys in their midst were the holdup men, so the cops arrested everybody and it still hadn’t been sorted out. The bartender, claiming it was too dim in the bar to see which of his customers was holding him up, was quoted as saying, “Anyway, it was just youthful exuberance.”
    Dortmunder was on the BMT. At 28th Street four cops came aboard and the doors stayed open until the cops found the two guys they wanted. Dortmunder sat there behind his News , reading about a pantyhose sale at Alexander’s, and the cops grabbed these two guys from just across the aisle and frisked them and marched them out of the train. Just two ordinary guys, like you see around. Then the doors closed and the train moved on, and Dortmunder came out from behind his paper to watch the cops walking the two guys away across the receding platform.
    At Times Square he changed for the Broadway IRT, and there seemed to be cops sort of strolling around all over the station—a lot more than the usual sprinkle. The plastic bag of jewelry in Dortmunder’s pocket was getting heavier and heavier. It was making, he thought, a very obvious bulge. He walked with his right arm close against his side, but that might draw attention too, so then he walked with his right arm elaborately moving, but that could also draw attention, so finally he just slunk along, not giving a damn if he drew attention or not.
    At 86th Street, when he came up out of the subway, right there by the bank building on the corner at Broadway two cops had a guy leaning against the wall and were giving him a toss. It all was beginning to seem like a bad omen or something. “Probably everything I grabbed was paste,” Dortmunder muttered to himself, and walked up to 89th Street between Broadway and West End, where Arnie had an apartment up over a bookstore. Dortmunder rang