From here, things got sudden. “Route 29, the Whitehurst Freeway.”

“Who was Whitehurst?” Andy asked, making the turn.

“President after Grover,” Anne Marie said. “Stay with 29! Don’t take any of those other things. And especially don’t take 66.”

“Get your kicks on Route 66,” Andy suggested.

“Not this time. Sixty-six goes under the Watergate. Don’t take Twenty-fifth Street, it goes the wrong way, you want the next one, down there, Twenty-fourth Street.”

“I thought that might be the next one,” Andy said.

“It isn’t always,” Anne Marie told him. She watched as Andy made the turn, and said, “That street that goes off at an angle there, that’s New Hampshire, you want that.”

“If you say so.”

They got stopped by a light and Andy peered at the street signs. “Is that One Street?”

“No, I Street. Sometimes they spell it like your eye, but it’s the letter. All the north-south streets are numbers, and all the east-west streets are letters.”

“We’re on New Hampshire. What’s that?”

“A spoke of the wagon wheel.”

Andy nodded. “I bet there’s even some way that that makes sense,” he said, and the light turned green and he drove on over I and down past H, saying, “I thought it was gonna be J.”

“Turn right on Virginia,” Anne Marie said.

“Another spoke of the wagon wheel?”

“Different wheel,” Anne Marie said.

“Some time,” Andy said, stopping at another red light, “you’ll have to tell me all about it.”

“You can turn right on red in Washington,” she told him, as the light turned green. “Or on green, for that matter.”

Andy made the turn and said, “Somehow, I have a feeling I’m going in circles here.”

“In a way,” Anne Marie said. “That’s the Watergate across the street there. Can you get over there?”

“Well, that depends,” Andy said, “on how much all these other people care about their cars.”

Fortunately, they all cared.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on Anne Marie’s door. She was in a very nice room, the largest hotel room she’d ever seen, on the fifth floor of the Watergate Hotel, with large potted shrubs flanking the broad glass door leading to the balcony and a long view out over the Potomac to Virginia on the other side. She quit looking at that view to go over to the door and let Andy in. He’d dropped them at the hotel entrance and then driven away to, as he’d said, “deal with” the car, and now he was back. “All set,” he said, coming in.

She shut the door. “What did you do with the car?”

“Well, I drove away from here,” he told her, crossing to the bed where his big battered canvas bag had been placed by the bellboy, “and I came to a stop sign, so I stopped.”

“And then what?”

“I came back here,” he said, and zipped open the bag.

She moved around until she could see his face. “You left the car at a stop sign? Just got out and left it there?”

“Wiped the steering wheel first.” The others, before getting out of the car, had also smeared any place they might have left fingerprints.

Anne Marie stared at him. “But . . . why? Why make a mess with the traffic?”

“Well, you know,” Andy said, “I feel a certain responsibility to the doctor.”

“I’m not following this,” Anne Marie admitted.

Andy changed clothes while he explained. “Well, let’s say I found a parking space and left the car there.”

“There are no parking spaces in Washington.”

“So that’s another consideration. But say I did find something like that, it could be weeks before the cops notice anything and the doctor gets his car back. This way, the cops have already noticed the situation by now, they’re probably phoning the doctor this minute, he could be reunited with that nice vehicle before sundown. How do I look?”

Andy was now wearing a short-sleeve white dress shirt open at the collar with a half-dozen pens in a white pocket protector in the shirt pocket, plus khaki pants and tan workboots and dark-framed eyeglasses with clip-on sunglasses angled up toward his forehead and a yellow hardhat. In his left hand he held a clipboard. Work gloves protruded from his right hip pocket. “Different,” Anne Marie decided.

“Good.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“Well, you and May can do some sight-seeing or shopping or whatever, figure out where we’ll eat dinner, stuff like that. And John and me,” Andy said, hefting the clipboard as he crossed to the phone, “are gonna go case the joint. What’s his room number?”

The Watergate is a complex, not one building but six, all of them odd-shaped and dropped at random onto a triangular chunk of land next to Kennedy Center, flanked by the Potomac on the west, Virginia Avenue on the northeast, and New Hampshire Avenue (with the Saudi Arabian embassy a giant gray toolbox across the street) to the southeast. The beret-shaped building at the apex of the triangle is Watergate East, a co-op apartment building divided into two addresses: Watergate East, North and Watergate East, South, which should not be confused with Watergate South, a boomerang-shaped building, also a co-op, behind Watergate East, South. The final co-op is a riverboatlike trapezoid at the angle between Virginia Avenue and the river and, in a burst of creative nomenclature, it is called Watergate West.

We’re not done. Sorry, but we’re not done. There are also two office buildings, famous in the Nixon administration. (The Democratic National Committee is no longer headquartered there.) These are called Watergate 600 and Watergate 2600, and behind the latter is the 235-room Watergate Hotel. Lest we forget, there’s also the Watergate Mall, tucked in behind Watergate East, full of all kinds of shopping opportunities. And finally, there’s an ornamental pool in the middle of the complex (probably called the Watergate Water), surrounded by the kind of landscaping usually associated with model railroad sets; trees made of cotton balls dipped in green ink, that sort of thing.

The complex is open and closed at the same time, the mall absolutely open to pedestrians (any one of whom could be a shopper), the office buildings and hotel having normally minimal security, and the apartment houses primarily guarded by security men and women in blue blazers who sit at counters in the lobbies and buzz in the acceptable arrivers while presumably rejecting the unclean.

It was in Watergate East, North that TUI maintained a two-bedroom two-bathroom fourth-floor apartment, where Max Fairbanks was scheduled to spend Sunday and Monday nights, while appearing before a congressional committee on Monday afternoon. And it was here, in that apartment, where John Dortmunder intended to find Max Fairbanks and relieve him of a certain ring.

Sunday afternoon. Dortmunder and Kelp, invisible in their engineers’ drag, prowled the complex, making notations on their clipboards and saluting the occasional security person by touching their pens to their temples. (The first time he did this, Dortmunder touched the wrong end of his pen to his temple, but after that he got it right.)

Wandering, roving, they found the two-level garage beneath the apartment building and saw that here, too, access to the elevators was monitored by building staff, but very loosely. Then they found the truck ramp that descended beneath the building and on out to the back, giving access for deliveries to the boutiques in the mall. A person could move between the truck ramp and the upper level of the garage through a door with a laughable lock.

They went on through the mall, unseen, and out to the promenades that connected all the buildings. The hotel was down to their right, the Watergate Water dead ahead. The buildings all around them were thoroughly balconied, to take advantage of the river views, and the balcony railings were composed of rows of spaced vertical white concrete stanchions, looking from the distance like very serious teeth, so that from down here the buildings were stacks of sharks’ jawbones, one atop the other, all those teeth sticking straight up.