Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (18 page)

“Well, for instance, what if Laura had a
secret yen for Jack Freelander, but—”

“That’s ridiculous. Jack?”

“Wait a minute. What if she thought
Claire Wallace was the competition? Then that sentence could read, If Claire Wallace got too close to Jack Freelander, what
would Laura Penney do?’”

Kit mouthed the words, vertical frown lines in
her forehead. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning Laura might have Claire over to
her place to talk it out. There’s an argument, Claire hits her, and that’s
it.”

“Claire? Is that possible?”

“It could be a lot of people. Let’s
see.” I ran a finger down column A. “Now, what if—?”

“Oh, I’ve had enough! Let’s have
dinner.” Kit flung down her pencil, got up from her desk, and gave me a puzzled
frown. “What happened to your face?”

“You noticed,” I said, touching the
bandage. “A girl fell out of a ceiling and scratched me.”

“What?”

So at last I had her attention away from the
anonymous letter, and over dinner I told her my latest exploit, and she was
properly impressed. Of course, after dinner we had to play with the names and
the columns again for another hour or so, but I didn’t mind, now that I’d been
fed. This detective business could be rather restful at times.

*

The whole week was very restful, in fact, much
more so than the preceding seven days. By Tuesday afternoon Kit had finished
inviting all her suspects to the Friday night party, and all had agreed to
come. (No reason for the get-together was given, the guests being allowed to
believe it was simply an ordinary Thank-God-It’s-Friday &
Isn’t-Winter-Awful party.) After I’d delivered to Kit the copy of the anonymous
letter, plus Staples’ answers to her other questions, she had no further active
role for me to play other than as the sounding board who listened every evening
to that day’s sleuthing and conclusions. At different times between Tuesday
morning and Friday afternoon she conclusively demonstrated the guilt of four
different people, and subsequently just as conclusively exonerated all four of
them again. It was a pleasure to observe all of this deducing and detecting,
particularly since I had already peeked at the last chapter.

When I wasn’t being Dr. Watson with Kit, I was
playing a very different kind of doctor with Patricia Staples. Fascinating
woman! My initial impression could not have been more wrong. I had thought of
her as the ultimate mousy housewife, totally absorbed in husband and
casseroles, when in fact her absorption was totally with Patricia Staples. She
was incredible to watch, a woman with no more concept of the world outside
herself than a canary. She agreed with everything Fred said—and now with
everything I said—not because she was lost in her man but because she was lost
in herself. Fred admired her and kept her comfortable, so she responded by
being agreeable. If he said a particular movie was wonderful or a particular
politician was no good, why not agree with him? Neither the movie nor the
politician mattered at all, even existed at all, insofar as she was concerned,
so what difference did it make what anybody said about them?

This self-absorption might have been annoying
if it had taken some other form—selfishness, for instance, or arrogance. As it
was, her pleasure in her own existence kept her sunny in temperament, and left
her with no great requirement for anything more. Should someone—Fred, me,
whoever it might be—do something to make her happy (give her a compliment, say,
or take her out to dinner, or screw her inventively), she accepted it as her
due, and with gratitude returned the favor fourfold. Make her happy, she’ll
make you happy.
Gaslight
, it turned out, made us both very happy indeed,
several times that week.

At the same time, the riskiness of our game—my
game—kept me from ever fully concentrating on its rewards.
I am the quarry
, I
kept reminding myself, i
n a murder investigation which is still very much
alive. It is insane for me to he cuckolding the
primary investigating officer
. And yet I could never bring myself to kick Patricia
Staples out of bed.

As for her husband and Bray, they came up with
no more “interesting” homicides, though Staples did call from time to
time with some piece of news about one or another of our recent cases. Jack St.
Pierre, for instance, the fellow I’d pegged as the murderer of the copywriter,
Bart Ailburg (misplaced island), had run away but had been found staying with a
cousin in San Diego, and when apprehended had immediately confessed. As to the
Visaria murder, the assassin had now been identified as one Kora Haaket, and
two of her co-conspirators had been found lurking in a Volkswagen up the block
from the mission. Their guilt had been established by their Visarian
nationality, their history of anti-government politics, the
presence in their Beetle of a woman’s coat with Kora Haaket’s name sewn in it,
and their mistake of not only carrying guns but actually shooting these guns at
the police who approached their car to question them. A double mistake, that;
one of the guns, a defective American product bought locally, had blown up in
its operator’s hand. Both co-conspirators were now in the hospital and doing
well, though their future was in doubt. Since legally the Visarian mission was
considered Visarian territory rather than American, the Visarians were asking
for extradition of Kora Haaket and the other two for trial in their native
land. Since trial in Visaria would inevitably lead to execution, and since
execution in Visaria was by flaying, the Legal Aid defense attorney assigned to
the trio was trying to obfuscate due process in every way he could. It was
likely the three Visarians would remain in jail for the rest of their natural
lives, awaiting a final decision on the extradition order.

On the Laura Penney murder, Staples continued
to have no further news, except that he’d followed Kit’s idea about Ellen
Richter, and had found her to have an unimpeachable alibi for the time of the
killing.

Oh, and the matter of Edgarson. He was found,
in a TWA storage room at the Seattle airport, sometime Wednesday night, as
Staples informed me over the phone on Thursday afternoon. “His office
isn’t sure what he was going out to Seattle for,” he said, “but apparently
one of his cases had got him involved with some mob types. He bought the ticket
himself, at the airport, three hours before takeoff, but then apparently he got
lured to some quiet place and was murdered. Hit on the head. He had one of
those big folding suitcase things, and they stuffed his body in it and checked
it through to Seattle on Edgarson’s own ticket.”

“Mob types, you say?”

“It has all the earmarks. We’re putting
the question out to some of our informants now.”

“This is bad news for Kit,” I said.
“I know for sure he would have exonerated her.”

“Well, it keeps the situation pretty much
the way it was,” he said. “We’ll keep working on it.”

That day also I got the substitute set of
papers from Shirley—I never had found the first set—and I immediately signed
them and sent them back to Boston.

I also got some work done at last. The first
several days after Laura’s death I’d been so busy with these other things that
almost none of my real work got done, but during the course of this week I
finished the Cassavetes piece and made major headway in carving a rational interview
out of the block of wood left me by Big John Brant.

Then came Friday, and Kit’s party.

*

I don’t much like parties. Too many people in
too small a space, drinking too much and talking too loudly and usually
creating at least one new set of permanent enemies. No matter how carefully the
guest list is assembled, there’s usually one social gaffe to start the ball
rolling—or roiling—and the discontent breeds like maggots in a dead horse.

This time, the guest list had been compiled
with no reference at all to the usual social niceties. Jack Meacher and Perry
Stokes were both invited, for instance, even though Perry would naturally bring
his wife Grace, who had run away briefly to East St. Louis with that same Jack Meacher three summers
ago. But Jack and Perry were among the male suspects, so here they were, willy-nilly,
glowering at one another across Kit’s living room while Grace sat unobtrusively
near the bar, putting away the cheap Scotch with a funnel.

Jack Meacher provided an added fillip by
showing up with Audrey Feebleman; the first hint to anybody that there was
trouble between Audrey and her husband Mort. Irv and Karen Leonard, who had
managed to keep their marriage green—if not to say gangrenous—for nine
wonderful years by combining moral disapproval of others with very tight
security on their own peccadilloes, spent most of the party standing in a
corner together back-biting everyone else present, until Karen suddenly went
off to dance the hustle with Mark Banbury, who had arrived with Honey Hamilton,
an absolutely luscious blonde I had always coveted.

Let’s see; and who else? Ellen Richter, who
had been invited as a suspect but who had since been cleared by Staples,
arrived with Jack Freelander, who was still a suspect and who was still
determined to pick my brains for that asinine magazine piece of his. He hummed
and stuttered at me all evening, like a defective hearing aid.

The other female suspect, Claire Wallace, a
tall cool girl of the sort who models long skirts in the women’s magazines,
showed up with a lurking shifty-eyed fellow introduced as Lou, who had long
graying hair and heavy bags under his eyes, who wore dungarees and a flannel
shirt and a leather vest, and who looked generally like an unsuccessful train
robber. And the representatives of the sexual Third World, Jay English and Dave Poumon, brought along
some messy fag hag named Madge Stockton; one of those plump girls who wears forty shawls and combs her hair with barbed wire.

So there we were, eighteen oddly assorted
people in one smallish living room, with February taking place outside. Kit had
a stack of easy rock music on the turntable, to fill in the sound until
conversation should commence, and I served as bartender for the first hour,
until the guests were properly lubricated. The secret of a successful party, if
there is any such thing, is to get some alcohol into each guest right away, but
then slow the liquor and provide some food, to keep them from becoming
dysfunctional. Also hide the chairs; if everybody sits down, the party dies.
Also have the food and liquor tables as far from one another as possible; that
way, the drinkers will cluster in one place, the eaters will cluster in
another, and the well-rounded types will circulate. Keep them standing and
walking and drinking and eating, and pretty soon they’ll act as though they’re
at a party.

Which they did. The
usual conversations took place, I traveled around trying unsuccessfully to
avoid Jack Freelander, and Kit prowled among her suspects like a choirmaster
through a chorus in which one voice is singing flat. Her method was fairly
direct; she just kept talking with people about Laura Penney’s murder, which
was now an event ten days in the past, so it could be discussed as unsolved
history, like the John F. Kennedy assassination. Fairly early on, I passed her
in conversation with Jack Meacher and heard her say, “One of the people in
this room is a murderer.”

“Oh, I think it was a burglar did
it,” Jack said. “Do these little sandwiches come from Smiler’s?”

I didn’t listen to Kit’s response, since Jack
Freelander was gliding toward me again, but several times later that evening I
heard her deliver the same old-movie line to several other guests, and the
responses ranged from Karen Leonard’s jaded, “Well, I’m never surprised by
anything anybody does,” to Jay English’s avid, “Who?”

“One of them.
One of the people in this room is a murderer.”

Well, it was true, wasn’t it? I danced with
Honey Hamilton while her date, Mark Banbury, was busy dancing with Karen
Leonard, and Kit just kept hacking through the underbrush. And the party,
despite its origins, became a party.

My flight from Jack Freelander made me unwary
in other directions, and I abruptly found myself in conversation with Madge
Stockton, the pudgy girl brought by Jay English and Dave Poumon. “I
understand a friend of yours was murdered recently,” she said.

“Most of us knew her,” I admitted,
nodding my head to include the other party goers.

“It’s so hard to keep track of an individual
death, isn’t it?” she said. “There are so many deaths, so many
injustices, they all blend together.”

“Well, that depends how closely they
affect you.”

She smiled; she had bad teeth. “That’s
right,” she said. “It isn’t morality at all, it’s
personal convenience, personal emotions. None of us really care how many
strangers get killed.”

Well, if you’re going to a cocktail party you
have to expect cocktail party conversation. I said, “Naturally, it affects
you more if it happens to somebody you know.” And even as I was saying it,
I knew I was giving this girl an irresistible opportunity to quote John Donne.

Which she took. I
received the tolling of the bell with my best glazed smile, and she said,
“But the point really is morality, isn’t it? People are liberal or
conservative these days, they believe in women’s rights or property rights or
whatever, some of them are even still ethical, but
nobody’s actually moral any more. Nobody hates sin.” Then she nodded,
looking amused at herself, and said, “See? People
smile if you even use the word sin.”

Was I smiling? Yes, I was. Wiping it off, I
tried another catch phrase: “The only sin is getting caught.”

But I wasn’t to get off so lightly. “Not
even that,” she said. “That was twenty years ago, when people were
much more naive. Now we know what happens if you get caught. A
lecture tour and a best-seller.”