Good Behavior

Westlake, Donald E.

The caviar was so close he could almost taste it—if he knew what caviar tasted like.


“They tell me you’re the best in the business,” Frank Ritter had said, at their first meeting, when Hendrickson had been hired to save his youngest child from the toils of organized religion. “They tell me I’m the best, too,” Hendrickson had replied amiably.


Dortmunder propped the door open with his back and stood chicky,


“The heart of it all is down in the basement and the sub-basement,” Kelp said, “and believe me it is very well guarded.” “I believe you,” Dortmunder said. “Good. You should believe me.”


“Lie down with wolves, you get up with toothmarks.” Frank Ritter sat at his desk in the corner office suite of Margrave Corporation and studied this addition he’d just made to his commonplace book. Was that truly an aphorism? Possibly it was merely a low-level epigram or even, God help us, just a joke.


“As time is the fourth dimension of space, so patience is the fourth dimension of confidence.”


Frank Ritter came across that aphorism on the subject of patience, done at some time in the past, and he considered it without pleasure. It was too long, too many words, and the analogy seemed strained.