Read Why Me? for Free Online Page A

the bell, and Arnie’s voice came out of the metal grid, saying, “Who is it?”
    Dortmunder leaned close to the grid: “It’s me.”
    â€œWho the hell is me?”
    Dortmunder looked around the tiny vestibule. He looked out at the street. He leaned as close to the grid as he could get and mumbled, “Dortmunder.”
    Very very loud, the voice of Arnie yelled from the grid, “ Dortmunder ?”
    â€œYeah. Yeah. Okay? Yeah.”
    The door went click-click-click, and Dortmunder pushed on it and went into the hallway, which always smelled of old newspapers. “Next time I’ll just pick the lock,” he muttered, and went upstairs, where Arnie was waiting in his open doorway.
    â€œSo,” Arnie said. “You scored?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œSure,” Arnie said. “Nobody comes to see Arnie just to say hello.”
    â€œWell, I live way downtown,” Dortmunder said, and went on into the apartment, which had small rooms with big windows looking out past a black metal fire escape at the brown-brick back of a parking garage maybe four feet away. Part of Arnie’s calendar collection hung around on all the walls: Januaries that started on Monday, Januaries that started on Thursday, Januaries that started on Saturday. Here and there, just to confuse things, were calendars that started with August or March; “incompletes,” Arnie called them. Above the Januaries (and the Augusts and the Marches) sunlit icy brooks ran through snowy woods, suggestively smirking girls inefficiently struggled with blowing skirts, pairs of kittens looked out of wicker baskets full of balls of wool, and various Washington monuments (the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument) glittered like teeth in the happy sunshine.
    Closing the door, following Dortmunder, Arnie said, “It’s my personality. Don’t tell me different, Dortmunder, I happen to know. I rub people the wrong way. Don’t argue with me.”
    Dortmunder, who’d had no intention of arguing with him, found Arnie rubbing him the wrong way. “If you say so,” he said.
    â€œI do say so,” Arnie said. “Sit down. Sit down at the table there, we’ll look at your stuff.”
    The table was in front of the parking-garage-view windows. It was an old library table on which Arnie had laid out several of his less valuable incompletes, fixing them in place with a thick layer of clear plastic laminate. Dortmunder sat down and rested his forearms on a September 1938. (A shy-but-proud boy carried a shy-but-proud girl’s schoolbooks down a country lane.) Feeling vaguely pressed to demonstrate some sort of comradeliness, Dortmunder said, “You’re lookin pretty good, Arnie.”
    â€œThen my face lies,” Arnie said, sitting across the table. “I feel like shit. I been farting a lot. That’s why I keep this window open, otherwise you’d faint when you walked in here.”
    â€œAh,” said Dortmunder.
    â€œNot that a whole hell of a lot of people do walk in here,” Arnie said. “People don’t want to know me, I’m such a pain in the ass. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
    â€œUh,” said Dortmunder.
    â€œI read things sometimes in the Sunday News —Do Your Friends Think You’re A Turd? shit like that—I follow the advice three four days, maybe a week, but my own rotten self always comes through in the end. I could see you in a bar today, I could buy you a beer, talk about your problems, ask questions about your livelihood, express an interest in your personality, and tomorrow you’d go to a different bar.”
    That was undoubtedly true. “Uh,” repeated Dortmunder, that being the most noncommittal sound he knew how to make.
    â€œWell, you already know all this,” Arnie said. “The only reason you’ll put up with me, I give good dollar. And I gotta give good