He also seemed to subscribe to the usual cop belief that the male body was supposed to have bulges around the middle, like a sack of potatoes, the better to hang the equipment belt on, so that your average law enforcement officer does present himself to the public as a person with a lot of Idaho inside.

As Dortmunder moved around the corner from the end of the bar and started past the clenched backs of the interior monologists, two things happened which he found disturbing. First, the lumpy features of the cop over there suddenly became even more bland, his eyes even less focused, the movement of his arm bringing club soda to his mouth even more relaxed and even.

It's me! Dortmunder screamed inside, without letting anything — he certainly hoped — appear on the surface, it's me he's after, it's me he wants, it's me he's got the tag sale duds on for.

And the second thing that happened, Andy Kelp, with such studied nonchalance he looked like a pickpocket on his day off, stood from his barstool, picked up his glass — and the bottle! their shared bottle! — and turned, meeting no one's eye, to sit in the nearest of the side booths, as though to be more comfortable there. Not only that, but, once seated, he contrived to lift his feet under the table and put them on the bench seat on the other side, so that not only was he more comfortable here, he was alone.

They all know it's me, Dortmunder acknowledged to himself. Even Rollo, the meaty bartender, his back to the room as he taped a home-lettered-on-shirt-cardboard-in-red-Crayola WE DON'T ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS sign to the back-bar mirror, even Rollo, by the unusually cementish appearance of those stocky shoulders, made it clear that he too knew why Cap'n Club Soda was here, which happened to be himself, the individual who had just entered the arena.