Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (15 page)

Al Bray wasn’t along, which I took as another
hopeful sign. He came up the stairs, we smiled at one another, and said hello
and shook one another’s hands, and then he came on in without apparently
noticing anything about anything. I poured coffee for both of us, he sat on the
sofa where Patricia lately had lain, and I settled tensely into the director’s
chair.

“I called Patricia before I came
over,” he told me. “She said she had a terrific time.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It was
my pleasure.”

“She asked me to tell you she really
loved
Gaslight
.”

In my own recent conversation with Patricia,
the word ‘gaslight’ had become a kind of double entendre private joke. Was she
deciding to play a dangerous game? Hoping she wasn’t, I made some sort of
conventional response and then said, “But you’ve got to tell me why you
went to see Kit. I’m burning with curiosity.”

He said, “Well, she did know Mrs. Penney,
of course.”

“Not all that well.”

Was he being evasive? He said, “When a
case doesn’t break right away, you tend to reach out farther and farther,
hoping to pick up one end of the string.”

“Kit’s only relationship with Laura was
through me,” I pointed out.

“That’s right. And you’re from Boston.”

Good God; was he suspecting me? Carefully I
said, “I don’t think I follow.”

“Here’s the anonymous letter.” He
extended it toward me.

A sheet of ordinary white paper, with a
typewritten message and no signature:

Laura Penney died in New York while her husband was in Chicago. He doesn’t know anything about it. Look
the other way. Think about the Boston connection. If A got too close to B, what would C do?

I cleared my throat. “That’s the least
intelligible letter I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said, noticing that that
bastard Edgarson had even managed to use my own first initial in the right
place. “C,” indeed.

Taking the letter back, putting it away inside
his jacket, Staples said, “You and Kit Markowitz have been going together
for five or six months, haven’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“But you’ve been keeping
it quiet, because you’ve got this divorce under way with your wife.”

“Right again.”

“That’s why you’d go out with other women
sometimes, Laura Penney and different other women.”

“Sure.” I shrugged, being casual if
it killed me. “Kit knows all about that. The idea was,
if I went out with a number of different women it would make less trouble in
dealing with my ex-wife. But if I seemed to be heavily involved with just one
girl, then Shirley might start to act like a woman scorned, if you know what I
mean.”

“Shirley. That’s your wife.”

“Right.”

Nodding, thinking things over, Staples said,
“The other day, you told me you missed Laura Penney more than you’d
thought you would. She was closer to you than you realized.”

“Yes?”

Staples leaned forward, his face much more
serious than usual. “Women understand emotions a lot more quickly than
men. I’ve noticed it time and again.”

“You’re probably right. But I don’t know
where you’re heading.”

“Kit Markowitz understood more than you
did about your feelings for Laura Penney.”

“She did?”

“What if,” he said, and he was watching
my face as though he expected to see words form on it, “what if Kit
thought you were even closer with Laura Penney than you were?”

“I don’t know. What if she did?”

But he had another hypothetical question to
ask: “What if I told you she went through her date book for the last four
months, and she’d seen you less than one-quarter of those days?”

“Well, we both work, we both have lives
of our own.”

“But she did that with the date book
before I ever talked with her,” Staples said. “She was thinking about
it, you see what I mean?”

Which was an insight into
Kit I could have lived without. I said, “Maybe she feels
neglected.”

“I think she does.”

“She never let me know about it.”

“Well, she’s an independent woman, isn’t
she? She wouldn’t, uh, what’s that saying? Wear her heart on her sleeve.”

“I suppose she wouldn’t.”

Back he went to his hypothetical questions:
“But what if she looked around,” he said, “to see what you were
doing that three-quarters of the time you weren’t with her? Wouldn’t she see
that you were spending a lot of time with Laura Penney?”

“Oh, not that
much.”

“As a matter of fact,
yes. Al Bray went through Laura Penney’s calendar again this afternoon,
and she saw a lot of you, Carey. A lot of you. Over a
four month period, you had dates with Kit Markowitz forty-three times and with
Laura Penney forty-five times. That’s two more.”

I coughed, and cleared my throat, and said,
“What’s all this building up to, Fred?”

He said, “Maybe we’ve been making a
mistake all this time, Carey. We’ve been concentrating on men friends, but it
doesn’t have to be that way.”

Now what in hell was he talking about?
“I’m just not following you, Fred.”

So he explained: “Laura Penney died when
she hit her head on the glass coffee table in her living room. It was the fall
that killed her, and it didn’t necessarily have to be a very strong punch that
knocked her down. A little struggle, she loses her balance, it could happen
just like that.”

“Meaning what? Come on, Fred, for God’s
sake what are you driving at?”

“A woman could have done it,” he
said.

He suspected Kit! Kit!

I stared at him. Relief washed through me like
sunrise, and I barely restrained myself from laughing in his face.

He said, “Think about it. Here’s a woman
thinks Laura Penney is taking her man away. She goes over to have it out. They
argue, they fight, Laura falls and is killed. The other woman is frightened,
she’s going to run away, but then she looks around and finds male clothing in
the bedroom. Either she thinks the clothing belongs to her boy friend, or she
decides to confuse the issue. In either case, she takes the clothing away with
her. Or there’s Al Bray’s theory that she just leaves and then the boy friend
shows up, finds the body, and clears his stuff out himself. But in any case,
the woman did the killing.”

I said, “You mean Kit? Kit wouldn’t kill
anybody, that’s just ridiculous.”

“Not on purpose, maybe.
But an accident, in the middle of a fight? She has a
pretty good temper, doesn’t she?”

“She isn’t violent, for God’s sake.”

“Nevertheless,” Staples insisted,
“of all the Boston connections, that’s the one that shows the most promise.”

“But there isn’t any Boston connection,” I told him. “Kit’s a
New Yorker.”

“The Boston connection is you.” Pulling out the
anonymous letter again, he said, “Listen to this, if we put your names in
here instead of these letters, making Laura Penney ‘A’ and you ‘B’ and Kit
Markowitz ‘C.’ Then it reads, ‘If Laura Penney got too close to Carey Thorpe, what would Kit Markowitz do?’”

“Call me up and yell at me,” I said.
“That’s what she’d do.”

“Did she call you up and tell you about
her date book?”

“No. So what?”

“So she’s maybe a little more secretive
than you think.” Satisfied with himself, he leaned back on the sofa,
putting the letter away again as he said, “Tomorrow we’ll get hold of that
private detective who was watching Mrs. Penney’s building, and we’ll run Kit
Markowitz through a lineup and see if he recognizes her.”

Oh, you will, eh? And good luck to you, too.
Aloud I said, “I just don’t believe any of it.”

“We’ll see.” Staples nodded, and
sipped at his coffee. “We were making too quick an assumption,” he
told me. “Assuming it had to be a man.” He patted the pocket
containing Edgarson’s troublemaking letter. “This tip may have put us on
the right track after all.”

“Not if it makes you believe Kit
Markowitz killed anybody,” I said. “Is that really what you’ve been
working on all day?”

“We started with half a dozen possibilities,
but pretty soon they narrowed down to her. For one thing, she doesn’t have an
alibi.”

“Why? Where does she say she was?”

“At home, alone.
No witnesses.”

“Didn’t anybody call her? Didn’t she talk
to anybody on the phone?”

“She tried calling you, she says,”
Staples told me, “but she got your answering machine and she didn’t leave
any message.”

“That’s right,” I said. “She
told me that the next day. I was home, but I was screening a film.”

Staples finished his coffee, then said, “I’ll tell you something else, Carey. You’re
an absolutely brilliant natural detective, the most fantastic I’ve ever seen.
You’ve got a real knack for it. But you can’t get anywhere with this case, and
do you know why?”

I did know, as a matter of fact, but it would
be interesting to hear what he thought so I said, “No. Why?”

“You’re too close to it. You’re
emotionally involved.”

“You may be right,” I said.

*

I phoned Kit and she said, “Is he
gone?”

“Staples? Just left.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said, and
hung up, and arrived fifteen minutes later, looking angry and determined.
Taking off her coat, she said, “He thinks I did it.”

“Slow down,” I advised her.
“You want a drink?”

“I will not slow down.” She hung up
her coat and marched into the living room. “That damn fool thinks I killed
Laura Penney. Over you!” And she turned to glare
at me as though it were my fault. (Well, I suppose it was, at that.)

“Absurd on the face of it,” I said.

“There’s only one thing to do.”

I didn’t like her glower. “And what would
that be?” I asked.

“We have to find the killer
ourselves.”

“What?”

“That idiot Staples is out there right
now,” she said, waving an arm at the window and the cold dark snowy world
beyond it, which as it happened did not at this moment contain Staples, who had
gone home for dinner with his Patricia, “and all he’s trying to do is find
evidence to convict me.”

“Which he’ll never
find.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” she
said. “I have no alibi.”

“Millions could say the same.”

“He could build up a case against
me.”

“Staples? I
don’t see how. You didn’t do it, so where’s his proof?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” she said,
in the manner in which people in Victorian novels used to say “madness in
the family.”

“What circumstantial evidence?”

“How do I know?” She was pacing
around my room, waving her arms. “Remember
The Wrong Man
?”

“The Hitchcock film,
with Henry Fonda?”

“He was convicted of murder, and he
didn’t do it.”

“That was a mistaken identification.”

“How about
Call
Northside 777
? Jimmy Stewart as the reporter.
And both of those movies were based on real life cases.”

“You need a drink,” I decided,
because I needed a drink, and headed for the kitchenette.

She followed me, still waving her arms.
“And while he’s spending all his time trying to railroad me, who’s looking for the real killer? Nobody! And he’ll get
away.”

Amen. I said, “Kit, you’re making a
mountain out of a molehill. This is just another one of Staples’ brainstorms, he gets one a day, like rain in Mexico City. The other day he thought Laura was having
an affair with her father, and the father killed her.”

“Well, now he’s convinced that I killed
her. And it’s up to us to prove him wrong.”

I made the drinks while she raved on, and
carried them back to the living room. Kit wasn’t prepared to sit, but I was,
and when she paused briefly to deal with her drink I said, “Life doesn’t
work like the movies, Kit. The innocent person getting off the hook by finding
the real killer, that doesn’t happen.”

“Well, it’s going to happen this
time.” She stood in front of me, straddle-legged with determination.
“And you’re going to help.”

“How? There
isn’t even anything to do.”

“Of course there is. For one thing, we’ll
go to the funeral.”

“Funeral?”

“Laura’s funeral,
tomorrow morning at ten.”

Laura’s funeral.
She’d been dead almost a week by now, and I’d taken it for granted she’d
already been dispatched to her final resting place, but probably the coroner
had delayed things. In any event, I certainly didn’t want to go to the funeral.
“What on earth do you want to go there for?”

“We’ll see who shows up.” She
plopped down beside me on the sofa, eager and intent. “And you’ve been
talking with Staples, you know what’s been done in the
investigation so far. Have they definitely eliminated anybody? I mean, besides
you.”

“Well, they were hot on the idea of the
secret lover for a while,” I said. “And they narrowed that down to
five.”

“Five? Terrific! Just a minute, let me
get pen and paper.” And up she jumped.

Gloomily I watched her cross the room to
rummage through my desk. This was ridiculous, but what could I do about it?

Back she came, bristling with pen and paper.
“I’ll stay here tonight, all right?”

“Wonderful,” I said, with less than
my usual enthusiasm.

“Then we can go to the funeral together
in the morning.” She readied the pen. “Now, who are these five?”

EIGHT

The Secret of the Locked Door

Oddly enough, all
five were at the funeral. And so were Kit and I, and so was Staples.

It was quite a large
turnout, in fact, mostly with faces I was used to seeing at cocktail parties.
Laura’s father was in the front row with a heavy-faced black-haired gent I took
to be the husband from Chicago. There appeared to be no other family members in attendance.

This funeral was
taking place in some Croatian or Ukrainian chapel on East 9th Street. The style
of the place was early
Frankenstein
, and so were the huddled old charladies
intermixed with the mourners, mumbling to themselves like so many Madame
Khrushchevs in a bad mood. These people had been ethnic since before the word
was popular.