Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (12 page)

There. Let Edgarson play with his keys now, it
would take more than a key to come through that door. He could open it wide
enough to reach his arm in, but that was all.

Safe at last, I turned my attention back to
the apartment. Surely Edgarson would have done something to commemorate his
visit. Excrement on the floor? Mousetraps
in the bed? Something destructive, or nasty, or both?

But I’d misjudged him. The man had beaten me
up Thursday night, and yet when he’d had a full day and night to himself in my
apartment he’d done nothing to it at all. He seemed to have no pattern, no
consistency in his behavior, and if that was deliberately planned to increase
my nervousness it was very successful. If I’d found all my dishes broken or all
the furniture knocked over in the living room I would have been more angry but
less tense, because I would have known what I was up against and what he was
likely to do next. This way, it was impossible to guess where or when Edgarson
would once more pop up, or what his manner would be when he did make his next
appearance.

This time, he had contented himself with going
through my personal papers and with leaving me a short but complete note,
typewritten and sitting on my answering machine:

You have until noon Monday.

*

The phone woke me at nine-thirty Sunday
morning and it was Staples, sounding slightly irritated through his normal
cheeriness. “Do you feel brilliant this morning, Carey?”

“What?
What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“No, but you might. What time is it?”

“Nine twenty-seven. Up late last
night?”

Yes, as a matter of fact. I’d stayed up till nearly three,
distracting myself from thoughts of Edgarson by trying to make a sensible
interview out of Brant’s twaddle. But I was awake now, so I sat straighter in
the bed and said, “That’s okay, I ought to get up anyway. What’s happening?

“Another little
problem.”

“Problem? You
mean a murder?”

“Well, that’s the question. I say it’s a
clear-cut case of suicide, but Al Bray keeps saying it feels funny. He doesn’t
have a bit of evidence, it just feels funny.”

So that was why Staples was annoyed. It wasn’t
so much that Bray disagreed with him, which surely must have happened more than
once in the course of their partnership, as that Bray was disagreeing on
Staples’ grounds. It was Staples who was supposed to have feelings and be
intuitive, while Bray was assigned the role of the methodical plodder. To have
the plodder suddenly intuit all over the place could be unsettling.

I said, “You mean you think it’s suicide and he thinks it’s murder?”

“He doesn’t know what he thinks,”
Staples said. “It just doesn’t feel right. So he asked me to call
you.”

“He asked? Al Bray?”

“We made a deal. If you agree with me it
was suicide, Al won’t make any more fuss and we’ll put in our report and that’s
the end of it.”

“What if I think it’s
murder?”

He chuckled; a bit challengingly, I thought.
“Then you’ll have to prove it,” he said.

*

They sent a car for me, with a uniformed
policeman as chauffeur. I hadn’t been happy about leaving the apartment
untended, since the chainlock only works when there’s someone inside to attach
it, but then I remembered a stunt from several hundred spy movies. I took a
paper match, bent it double, and wedged it between door and frame just below
the bottom hinge. It protruded just enough to be seen, if you knew where to
look, and if anyone opened my apartment door the match would fall. It wouldn’t
keep Edgarson out, but it would warn me in time if he’d returned. If the match
was on the floor when I came back I’d know Edgarson was once again in
residence, and off I’d go for Romeo.

Outside, the policeman was standing beside his
unmarked black Plymouth, his breath steaming in the cold air. The snow had stopped but the sky
was still gray and heavy with low clouds, and the temperature was dropping.

Our destination was Central Park West near 89th Street, and on the way the cop filled me in on the
situation. At eight-twenty this morning, a tenant of the building in question
had come out to walk his dog, and found the crushed body of a woman lying face
up on the sidewalk. The tenant returned immediately to the building and
informed the doorman, who called the police. The doorman also obtained a
blanket and went out to cover the body, at which point he realized the victim
was someone he knew, a tenant who had occupied one of the penthouse duplexes atop
the building. Apparently she had fallen or jumped or been pushed from the
terrace up there.

A patrol car responded to the first call, but
no one went up to the dead woman’s apartment until the precinct detectives
arrived, and then it took considerable banging and doorbell-ringing to rouse
the woman’s husband, who had been asleep and had not been aware of his wife’s
absence from the apartment. According to the husband, his wife had been
despondent and depressed recently and had spoken of suicide.

The couple’s name was Templeton, George and
Margo, and they were both in their early fifties. He was a millionaire in the
real estate business in the city, with ownership of office buildings and
Broadway theaters among his holdings, and she was a one-time actress who had
given up her career twenty-five years ago to marry him. They had two sons, both
now grown and living away from New York. They had been to a party last night where
both had become very drunk and where George Templeton freely admitted they had
quarreled publicly over whether or not he had ruined her life twenty-five years
ago by marrying her. They had returned home, continuing the argument in their
chauffeur-driven limousine and in their bedroom, until Templeton had either
gone to sleep or passed out from drink. And he had known nothing more until the
pounding of the police at his door had awakened him.

The Templetons kept a staff of three servants,
but only one of these—the maid—lived in the apartment, and she invariably spent
her Saturday nights and Sundays with her family in New Hyde Park.

As to the time of death, the Weather Bureau
said the snow had stopped at just about eight o’clock this morning. The body had been found at
eight-twenty, and both the tenant who’d found it and the doorman who’d covered
it swore there was no snow on top of the body. After eight
o’clock, then, and before eight-twenty.

I was primed with all of this by the time we
reached the building, and I was happy to see the body was no longer on the
sidewalk. Clean and neat, that’s the way I like my murders.

My chauffeur-cop accompanied me into the
building and up in the elevator. Going up I reviewed what he’d told me, and
decided Al Bray was probably right. It not only sounded like murder, it sounded
like my murder, plus a terrace. I mean the murder I’d committed. Argumentative
women don’t commit suicide, they don’t want to give
the opposition the satisfaction. What most likely happened was that George
Templeton, tired and drunk and getting older by the second, had finally popped
Margo a good one to shut her up and she’d done herself a fatal injury in
hitting the floor. Not wanting the scandal or the trouble of a manslaughter
trial, George had chucked her over the terrace, pretended to be asleep, and
then told the police his wife had been suicidal lately.

I felt ambivalent about exposing old George;
in a way, we were members of the same fraternity.

*

It was a two-story apartment, with a spiral
staircase.

The elevator let me off directly into the
living room, on the apartment’s lower floor, where Staples and Bray were
sitting together on green velvet sofas, having a stiff-necked discussion. It
ended when they saw me, and they both got up and came
over, Staples looking a bit cocky and defiant, Bray awkward but determined.

It was Bray who did the talking, after we’d
exchanged ritual hellos. “I feel a little funny about this situation, Mr.
Thorpe,” he said. “It goes against the grain with me. But there’s
something wrong here, I know there is, and I just can’t put my finger on it.
You’ve come up with a couple of off-the-wall solutions the last week, so maybe
you can do something this time.”

Staples added, “Even if it’s just to put
those feelings of Al’s to rest.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I
admitted. “You people are trained, I’m not. I’ve just had beginner’s
luck.”

“Maybe you’ve still got it,” Bray
said. “Come along.”

We went up the spiral staircase in single
file, Bray and then me and then Staples, who said, “Templeton isn’t here
right now. His doctor’s in this building and he’s down there,
under sedation. If you need to talk with him, we can work something
out.”

At the head of the stairs was the master
bedroom, large and ornately furnished, with french doors leading to the
terrace. Windows flanking the french doors featured hanging plants, with
frost-blackened leaves.

Staples now took over, saying, “No one’s
gone out on the terrace yet. It’s exactly the way we found it. Come take a
look.”

I went with him. He opened the french doors
and I stood in the doorway as he pointed out the obvious, saying, “You’ll
notice there’s footprints in the fresh snow. But there’s only one set of them,
and they lead straight out to the railing, and they don’t come back.”

I nodded. “So I see.”

“We took the shoes off the body,” he
went on, “and compared them with the nearest prints, and those prints were
definitely made by those shoes.”

“Ah.”

I stood frowning at the terrace. The recent
windless snow, the current bitter cold, had combined to create an almost
perfect tableau for us, as though it were a model made out of papier-mâché. Two
lawn chairs were folded away to one side of the terrace, which was otherwise
unfurnished. The layer of snow on the floor was two to three inches thick, and
in it the footprints showed clearly. There was no other disturbance of the snow
of any kind out there. Beyond the snow-topped wrought iron railing was Central Park, far below, shrouded in grayish white.

Cold air was seeping in, despite the lack of
wind. I stepped back from the doorway, shivering a little and looking again at
the frostbitten hanging plants. I said, “Have you been keeping this door
open very much?”

“Not much at all,” Bray said.
“Why? Does it matter?”

“I don’t know if anything matters,”
I told him. “I’m just trying to get a picture of the situation.”

Staples said, “Shall I close it
now?”

“Might as well.”

Staples closed the french doors and then he
and Bray watched me as I wandered around the bedroom, studying things at random
and trying to come to a decision. Finally I turned to Bray and said, “I’m
sorry, Sergeant Bray. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this time inspiration
just refuses to hit.”

He frowned at me, and I could feel his
confusion and his mistrust. He believed I was lying, but he didn’t know why. He
said, “You don’t see any indication of murder, eh?”

“Indication? I
don’t see any proof. There’s plenty of indication, but you already know that.
The argument at the party, the amount of alcohol they’d drunk, all the rest of
it.”

“But no proof.”
Now it was Bray’s turn to wander the room, glowering at this and that.
“There’s something here,” he said. “I know it, but I just can’t
get hold of it.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help,” I told
him. “I hate to spoil a perfect batting average.”

“You’re not spoiling it,” Staples
assured me. Now that he was being vindicated his manner was bluff and hearty.
“If there’s nothing here, and you find nothing, then you’re still batting
a thousand.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not
saying Sergeant Bray is wrong. I do know what he means, that there’s a certain
something about all this that doesn’t feel just right. But I don’t know what it
is any more than he does.”

That mollified Bray, without spoiling Staples’
pleasure, and soon afterwards they sent me off again to be driven home.
Staples’ farewell to me was, “See you at three.”

“What? Oh,
Gaslight
.” That had entirely slipped my mind. “You
and your wife at three. Absolutely.”

Bray being present for this exchange, it
became necessary to widen the
invitation to include him, and he thanked me and said he’d try to make it. But
his mind was still on the death of Margo Templeton, and his vague conviction
that something was wrong.

Well, he would find it or he wouldn’t. I’d
done what I could for my fraternity brother.

Good luck, George.

SIX

The Chainlock Mystery

I was rewriting my
questions to match Big John Brant’s answers when Staples called again. “It
looks like I’m going to be late,” he said. “We’ve had a new
development.”

Poor
George. “In the Templeton case?”

Not poor George.
“No, as a matter of fact, it’s in the Laura Penney case.”

Why did my heart
flutter? I was the one in the clear.

“A
new development? That’s wonderful.”

“We’re not sure
yet,” Staples told me. “It’s an anonymous letter with a tip in
it.”

Edgarson! That son of a bitch,
that rotten filthy bastard! Clutching the phone so tightly that my fingers
hurt, I said, “A tip? What kind of tip?”

“It’s all very vague and roundabout. But
it isn’t just some crank who read about it in the papers, because it’s got
details in it that only an insider would know.” Then he dropped the other
shoe: “Do you know any friend of Mrs. Penney’s with connections in Boston?”

“Boston? You mean, besides me?”

Staples said, “You? I thought you were a
native New Yorker.”

“No, I’m a Boston boy.”

“Well, it can’t be you. Can you think of
anybody else?”

“I’ll put my mind to it,” I
promised.

“Fine. Anyway,
the reason I called, I might be a little late for the movie. Patricia’s coming
direct to your place and I’ll meet her there. If that’s okay
with you.”