Nobody's Perfect

Westlake, Donald E.

“His not threatening me,” Dortmunder said, “was a lot more threatening than if he threatened me.”


He had one of those Midlantic accents that Americans think of as English and Englishmen think American. Dortmunder thought he sounded like a phony.


Dortmunder had been living on May’s salary as a cashier down at the Safeway supermarket for so long he was almost forgetting to be embarrassed about it;


Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man’s taste is rather circumscribed. “You are a bastard,” she said. Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said.


Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man’s taste is rather circumscribed. “You are a bastard,” she said. Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs?


“Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot,”


It was Dortmunder’s belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it—burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes—there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else.


a stocky stodgy fortyish styleless frump with the face of a TV dinner and the personality of a humidifier


Otto Orfizzi having attempted unsuccessfully to form an alliance with the shiekh by telling an anti-Semitic joke at which no one had laughed—not because it was anti-Semitic, but because it had been told badly, and because two of the guests happened in fact to be Jewish, and because in any case it wasn’t very funny


It used to be that policeman who displayed ineptitude or stupidity were sent from the city to the boondocks—“Pounding a beat on Staten Island” was the popular version of the threat—but as the Swinging Sixties swung more and more in the manner of a wrecker’s ball, that usual direction of transfer became reversed. The quiet safe Staten Islands of duty became more highly prized, while the terrifying city lost its former attraction.


“All right, all right,” Dortmunder whispered to himself, “let’s not panic,” and immediately the question came into his mind, Why not? Well. He struggled for an answer, and finally found one: “Don’t want to fall.”


“Bad timing, that,” Orfizzi said, gesturing upwards with his thumb. Not sure what the man meant, Chauncey said, “Was it?” “If the damned woman had gone up there ten minutes earlier,” the Prince explained, “the blighters might have shot her.” He shrugged, evidently irritated at his wife’s perverse insistence on remaining alive,


“One,” Kelp said, and suddenly flew into a frenzy at the wheel, honking his horn in a mad bebop rhythm of toots, the while yelling, “Move your goddam ass whatsa matter don’t you wanna go home!!!”


he himself would run the bar; he wasn’t sure whether to call it May’s Place or The Hideaway.


“Well, it’s too late to change it now,” Kelp said. “It won’t be that bad.” As a matter of fact, it was that bad.


inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another.


Kelp tended to get a little nervous when in the presence simultaneously of Dortmunder and Victor.


In the first place—and this is just the first place, mind, this isn’t the whole objection—in the first place, Christmas trees are green.


Foxy and Alan Greenwood’s Doreen tended to stalk in slow circles around one another, remote and wary.


most of the guests had showed up with a gift, and from the size and shape of those gifts, now under the poor excuse for a tree, Dortmunder suspected most of them were bottles of bourbon, so the party couldn’t be considered a dead loss.


“Andy, can you promise me, if I get you anything on this bird, nothing illegal will happen?” Kelp stared at him. “Nothing illegal? Bernard, you can’t be serious. Do you have any idea just how many laws there are?”


“The idea is,” Bernard said, “it like roasts the coffee beans.” “But what’s that burning?” “The alcohol, of course.” “Then why do it?” Bernard looked startled. “By God, you’re right,” he said, and blew out the flame. “I hope you made a wish,”


The woman client, whose brown skin and surly manner had made her a prima facie subject for official suspicion, had proved too clever for Authority this time, having left all her guns and bombs at home. The guard reluctantly let her through, then turned to Dortmunder,


The woman client, whose brown skin and surly manner had made her a prima facie subject for official suspicion, had proved too clever for Authority this time, having left all her guns and bombs at home.


There’s a difference between a client and a workman, and the difference holds true everywhere, not merely in the Unemployment Insurance Division of the Department of Labor of the State of New York. The difference is, the client is there because he wants something, but the workman doesn’t give a damn what happens. The workman won’t extend himself, won’t try to help, won’t provide explanations, won’t in fact do anything but just stand there. The client wants to be liked, but the workman is just as willing to go back to his boss, shrug, and say, “They wouldn’t let me in.”


Dortmunder had helped by expressing doubts. “If the Puerto Ricans all come here,” he’d said, for instance, “how come it’s such a hot idea for us to go there?”


“Jeepers,” Kelp said. “I guess you did buy some stuff.” “They had some really wonderful bargains,” May said, but like most returned travelers her expression suggested that doubt was beginning to set in.


as incontinent as Atlantis),