Donald E. Westlake

Dortmunder slumped on the hard wooden chair, watching his attorney try to open a black attaché case. Two little catches were supposed to release when two bright buttons were pressed, but neither of them worked. In other cubicles all around this one, defendants and their court-appointed attorneys murmured together, structuring threadbare alibis, useless mitigations, attenuated extenuations, mathematically questionable plea bargains, chimerical denials and hopeless appeals to the mercy of the court, but in this cubicle, with its institutional green walls, its black linoleum floor, the great hanging globe of light, the frosted-glass window in its door, its battered wooden table and two battered wooden chairs and one battered metal waste-basket, nothing was happening at all, except that the attorney assigned to Dortmunder by an uncaring court and a malevolent fate couldn’t get his goddam attaché case open. “Just a—” he muttered. “It’s always a—I don’t know why it—I’ll—It’s just a—”
Dortmunder shouldn’t have been here at all, of course, waiting for his preliminary hearing on several hundred counts of burglary and knowing he was merely the victim of another accident of fate. Two weeks, two solid weeks, he’d cased that TV repair shop—he’d even brought in a perfectly good Sony table model and let them charge him for six new tubes and nine hours’ labor—and not once had any police patrol gone down the alley behind the row of stores. A prowl car cruised past the front from time to time, but that was all. And the cops were definitely never there when the pornographic movie house around the corner let out; at those moments they were always parked across the street from the theater, glaring through their windshield as the patrons came slinking past, as though their moral disapproval would somehow make up for their legal inef