Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (10 page)

A policeman; exactly what I needed. Not
waiting to listen to any more, I picked up the phone, switched off the machine,
and said, “Here I am. I’m here.”

Staples, headed off in mid-message, floundered
briefly before saying, “Hello? Carey?”

“I was working,” I told him,
“so I left the machine on.”

“Oh, I won’t bother you, then, I
just—”

“No, no, that’s fine,
I’m ready to take a break. What’s happening?”

“Well, we’ve got another one,” he
said. “Feel brilliant today?”

“Another murder?”

“Another tricky murder.
Regular murders we get all the time. Want to come along?”

With Staples I would be safe from Edgarson.
“Absolutely,” I said.

*

This time, happily, the body had been removed.
In fact, Staples and I had the small apartment on West 76th Street entirely to ourselves.

The victim was a thirty-three-year-old
bachelor, an advertising copywriter named Bart Ailburg. His one-bedroom
apartment on the third floor of a brownstone half a block from Central Park featured a pleasant large living room with
windows overlooking back gardens featuring plane trees.

Much could be gathered about Ailburg from his
home. The excessive masculinity of his imitation lion-skin bed throw and all
those hoofs and horns scattered about as paperweights, ashtrays, lamps and
general decoration, combined with the sloppy pile of male physique magazines
under the bed, suggested rather strongly a homosexual tendency. The travel
posters on the walls, the two shelves of travel reference books handy to his
desk, and the small souvenirs grouped on the mantle over the nonfunctional
fireplace indicated that his job was connected with travel advertising. And the
three locks on his front door, taken with the fact that he had two medicine
chests in the bathroom, both crammed with prescription bottles and all kinds of
patent medicines, suggested a timid hypochondriac, a cautious unassertive sort
of man.

Staples reconstructed the crime for me. This
living room was rectangular, with sofa, TV and so on at the end near the
kitchen and with the desk and bookcase at the end by the windows. The desk was
centered in front of the windows, and Ailburg had been sitting at it, facing
the room, working. Doing a travel ad, in fact, writing
out a draft in pencil on a lined yellow legal pad; his writing was spidery,
neat, rather small. The killer had picked up a
bone-handled letter opener from the desk and had stabbed Ailburg six times in
the neck and back. Ailburg, bleeding a terrific amount, had fallen forward onto
the desk and had shortly afterward died, leaving most of the desk drenched in
blood except for the legal pad, which had been under him.

Judging from stains on the bathroom floor, the
killer had become smeared with blood and had next taken a bath. Since it had
been necessary for him to take a bath rather than merely wash at the sink, it
was a reasonable presumption that he had been naked when he’d done the killing.

The apartment had not been ransacked,
nothing appeared to have been stolen.

The ad Ailburg had been working on had been
due this morning, for a deadline later today. When Ailburg, invariably a prompt
and reliable worker, had failed to show up and also failed to answer his phone,
one of the partners in the ad agency sent a messenger, who persuaded the building’s
superintendent to enter the apartment. They discovered first that only the
door’s regular lock was fastened, leaving both the chainlock and the police
lock undone, and then they discovered Ailburg himself.

The report had reached Staples and Bray shortly
after ten this morning. All of the normal things had been done, neighbors
questioned, movements checked, and nothing interesting had turned up. Ailburg,
a man of regular habits, had apparently come home directly from the office
yesterday, had spent a quiet evening at home, and had then been murdered
sometime between midnight and
three in the morning.

“Al Bray,” Staples finished,
“is ready to put it down to one of your fag murders. Rough
trade. You know, where a fellow goes cruising in Central Park and comes back with some tough young stud who bumps him off.”

“No,” I said. “Not this
time.”

Staples grinned at me. “That’s what I
say, too.”

“In the first place,” I said,
“Ailburg might have gone cruising, but he wouldn’t come back with anybody
tough. That wasn’t his style.”

“Well, you can’t
say that for sure,” Staples said. “When you get into people’s sex
lives, it’s hard to make predictions.”

“Ailburg had a deadline this
morning,” I said. “If he was such a conscientious type, he might go
out looking for a friend after he got the work done, but not before.”

“There I agree with you,” Staples
said. “That was my point exactly with Al.”

“Also,” I said, “a cautious man
wouldn’t let a stranger behind him with a sharp letter opener.”

“No, he wouldn’t. But the killer was
probably naked, don’t forget that.”

“A lover,” I said. “But someone
Ailburg knew, not some pick-up. You don’t go get
yourself a brand new sex partner and then sit down calmly to do some work while
this new body prances around naked.”

Staples said, “That’s right. The feeling
I had in this room was that it was somebody Ailburg was comfortable with,
somebody he didn’t have to play host to.”

I said, “I don’t see the problem. It was
one of Ailburg’s boy friends. How many did he have?”

Staples held up a well-thumbed black address
book. “There are over sixty men’s names in here,” he said.
“Homosexuals still tend to be pretty secretive about who their lovers are.
We’ve got no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It would be a long,
hard, dull job to check out every one of these guys, and we could still never
come up with the right one.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s why
Bray’s content to think it’s a pick-up killing.”

“Sure,” Staples said. “If the
job’s tough, we have to do it, but if it’s impossible we can forget it.”

Walking around the room, I said, “I
suppose you’ve looked for letters, anything that could give you specific names
of boy friends.”

“Nothing,” Staples said.

I’d been avoiding the desk,
which was still smeared with caked brown blood. The rough outline of
Ailburg’s torso and arms was clear in the center, with the pencil and the legal
pad. Going over at last to that part of the room, I saw that both windows were
securely locked, that there was no fire escape here, and that we were too high
for anyone to have climbed in from the back. Finally I turned my reluctant
attention to the desk.

Other than the bloodstains, it was neat, the
work space of a methodical man. A small Olympia portable typewriter was pushed to one side,
near the beige telephone. And on the legal pad was written:

“St. Martin!

Carefree days, exotic nights!

The peace of
the beaches, the thrill of the casinos!

And only a mile and a
half away, the charming capital city of Antigua.”

“A very rough draft, apparently,” I
said. “There weren’t any other worksheets around?”

Staples shook his head. “From the looks
of things, he’d just started to work when he was killed.”

I said, “Which was sometime between midnight and three in the morning. That wasn’t in
character for the man, not to start work until so late at night on something
that was supposed to be turned in the next morning.”

“That bothered me, too,” Staples
said. “But I’m not sure what it means.”

“An argument,” I suggested.
“The killer came here probably in the early evening, and they had one of
those droning dragged-out arguments that lovers get into.”

“Most lovers,” Staples said, with a
big smile, suggesting that he and his Patricia should be exempted.

“Certainly,” I said. “Anyway,
Ailburg had this work to do, so finally he just told his boy friend, ‘I’m going
to work’ and he sat down here and started writing. And not doing very well,
either, probably because he was still troubled about the fight. I mean, ‘The peace
of the beaches,’ that’s a terrible line.”

“It does sound funny,” Staples said.

“Now, the boy friend,” I went on,
“got really mad when Ailburg started to ignore him. The fight wasn’t
settled, and there Ailburg was at his desk, writing away just as though nothing
had happened. So the boy friend came over, in a rage, and let him have
it.”

“Fine.”
Staples waved the address book again. “Which one?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

We spent another five minutes looking at the
place, but there was nothing left to see. Staples, who’d been expecting me to
come up with another of my little magic turns, watched me with fading hope, but
I knew I wasn’t going to repeat my success. Finally I said, “I guess the
Wicker case was just beginner’s luck.”

“I knew this was a tough one,”
Staples said, with a game smile, “that’s why I called you.”

“Sorry I couldn’t—” Then I stopped,
and frowned over at the desk.

Staples was saying,
“Oh, come on, Carey, if I can’t do my job there’s no reason you should—
What’s up?”

“There’s something wrong,” I said. “Just a minute.”

I went back to the desk, Staples following me,
and frowned again at that bit of copywriting. “That isn’t right,” I
said.

“What isn’t right?”

“I’ve been to the Caribbean, and Antigua isn’t that close to St. Martin. Not at all. Wait,
hold on.”

Sitting at Ailburg’s desk, forgetting for the
moment any squeamishness I might have felt, I looked through his reference
books for an atlas. Finding one, I turned to a map of the Caribbean and said, “See? Here’s St. Martin, and here’s Antigua way down here.”

Staples touched the map with a blunt finger.
“What’s that little island there? The one by St. Martin.”

When he removed his finger, I bent to read the
lettering: “Anguilla.”

“Anguilla, Antigua.”
Staples shrugged, saying, “He was upset from the argument, that’s all, he
just got mixed up.”

“Does that make sense?” I studied
Ailburg’s writing again, shaking my head. “No, it doesn’t. This was his job, he knew what island was where. And look how he broke
that sentence, starting a new line after the word ‘charming.’ It looks
awkward.”

Staples said, “I don’t see what you’re
driving at.”

I was sitting now where Ailburg had been, and
I rested my forearms on a blood-free part of the desk. “Ailburg is sitting
here,” I said. “The boy friend comes around behind him, Ailburg sees
him pick up the letter opener. He isn’t sure what’s happening, but he’s afraid.
And he quick starts a new line of copy, telling us who the boy friend is.”

Staples leaned over my shoulder to read aloud. “‘Capital city of Antigua.’ You mean that’s supposed to be a message?”

“Let’s see.” Back to the atlas I
went. “The capital city of Antigua is St. John. Is there anybody named St. John in that address book?”

Staples, obviously unsure whether I was a
genius or a lunatic, leafed through the address book, ran his finger down a
column, and gave me a slow smile. “How about Jack St.
Pierre?”

“That’s your man,” I said.
“It’s up to you to prove it, but he’s the guy to concentrate on.”

FIVE

The Footprints in the Snow

Staples drove me
home, and on the way we discussed the murder that had first brought us
together. All of Laura’s male friends and acquaintances had been interviewed by
now, several had been eliminated via unassailable alibis, and the active list
had been reduced to five; not including, I was happy to see, Laura’s father.

But further reduction
from five was proving difficult, if not impossible. No one of the suspects was
more or less likely to be the elusive secret boy friend, none would admit to
any but the most casual relationship with Laura, and unfortunately this victim
had not left behind a clue to the boy friend’s identity. (Using Ailburg as an
example, Laura might have been found, for instance, clutching a publicity still
of Cary Grant. Or Harry Carey. Or perhaps a tattered
paperback copy of
Herself Surprised
. )

In any event, the investigation was currently
at a standstill. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up,” Staples
assured me. “Whenever you’ve got a good-looking career girl murdered,
there’s always a lot of media pressure to keep the case alive. Channel five
won’t even mention Bart Ailburg, but they still talk about Laura Penney on the
news every night.”

“From my point of view, of course,”
I said, “I’m glad to hear that. That’s one killer I really want
found.”

“Well, I told you our five
suspects,” he said, and reeled off the names again. (There’s no point my
giving the list; the killer’s name wasn’t on it.) “If you could come up
with another of your brilliant deductions,” Staples told me, “we
could really use it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Shortly thereafter he dropped me at my
apartment, and went on to pick up Al Bray and go question Jack St. Pierre. It was still daylight, though rapidly growing dark with heavy clouds
and the threat of impending snow, and no one was lurking for me in the
vestibule. I let myself into the building, climbed the stairs, unlocked my
apartment door, and entered to find Edgarson sitting in my leather director’s
chair, reading this afternoon’s Post. “Well, there you are,” he said,
folded his paper, and got to his feet.

I went down the steps three at a time, out the
front door, and directly into a passing cab.

*

I spent the night at Kit’s place on East 19th Street. We awoke late—it was Saturday, so Kit
didn’t have to work—and found that the promised snowstorm had indeed arrived,
creating a cold slushy world of difficulty and discomfort. Fat white flakes
were still drifting endlessly downward from a dirty gray sky, the radio weather
forecast spoke of “gradual clearing”—by April, probably—and Kit had
decided she had the flu.