Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (19 page)

“And Laura Penney’s
killer?”

“He probably regrets it,” she said. “Because of the inconvenience. But I don’t suppose he’s
ashamed of himself, do you?”

“Ashamed?” What an odd word.

She gave me another flash of her bad teeth.
“Nobody’s ashamed of anything any more, are they?”

“Well, there’s a lot in what you
say,” I said. “Woops, looks like I need a new drink. Excuse me.”
And I fled.

While I was making that new drink, which in
fact I did need, Grace Stokes, extremely drunk, got into a sudden
unintelligible loud argument with her husband Perry and then stormed out,
thumping her right shoulder against the doorpost on the way by. Jack Meacher,
the Don Juan of East St. Louis, kept his attentions firmly fixed on his current
date, Audrey Feebleman, until Perry Stokes also left, following his wife’s
trail but not repeating the shoulder-doorpost thump.

Time passed. I made a date with Honey Hamilton
for lunch and an afternoon screening next Tuesday. Jay English and Dave Poumon
shook everybody’s hand and left, taking their moral fruit fly with them. Lou,
the apparent train robber, shot up in the John, an action of which we all
disapproved; Claire Wallace apologized for him and took him away. Feeling
mellow after my successful gambit with Honey Hamilton, I gave Jack Freelander
fifteen minutes of my valuable time and the son of a bitch actually took notes.
He and Ellen Richter left shortly afterward, and I heard Kit trying to talk
about Laura’s murder with Mark Banbury, whose reaction was to tell her how he
was coming along with his analysis: “Doctor Glund says I’m very nearly
ready to start dealing with my repressed hostilities.”

Repressed hostilities; the world could use
more of those.

*

“We’ll clean up in the morning,” Kit
said.

“Good,” I said, and yawned. Mark
Banbury and Honey Hamilton, the last of our guests, had just departed, and the
old clock on the wall read two-fifteen.

“What we’ll do now,” she went on,
“is put down on paper everything we got.”

“Everything we got?” Then I
remembered; we were investigating a murder. “Have mercy, Kit,” I
said. “We’ll do that in the morning, too.”

“No, we might forget things.” She
was already opening her secretary-desk, sitting down, gathering pencils and
sheets of blank paper. “One thing I know for sure,” she said.
“It isn’t Irv Leonard.”

Intrigued despite myself, I drew up a chair
and said, “Why not?”

“If the killer was a man,” she explained,
“then it follows that he was the secret lover, and Irv wasn’t the secret
lover.”

“How can you be so sure? He and Karen
both play around on the side, you know that as well as I do.
They’re the biggest marital hypocrites in New York.”

“Yes,” Kit agreed, “and each of
them always knows exactly what the other one’s doing. Neither of them ever
admits it, but they always know who the other one is hanging around with. So I had a little chat with Karen, and I just kept mentioning names
until she froze up, and she froze up when I mentioned Susan Rasmussen.
Remember the New Year’s party at Hal’s place? Irv was hanging around with Susan
then, so if he’s still hanging around with her he definitely wasn’t involved
with Laura.”

“Why not? Why
couldn’t he have two girls?”

“Not Irv Leonard,” she said.
“Some men might do that. You could do it, for instance. But
not Irv Leonard.”

I didn’t much care for that crack. “If you say so, Sherlock.”

“Oh, and it isn’t Jack Meacher
either.” She made another note.

“How do you figure that?”

“I talked with Audrey,” she told me.
“Jack was with her that evening, but she hadn’t split with Mort yet, so
Jack lied to the police. But if the police ever come back and ask again, he’ll
tell the truth this time.”

“Not Sherlock,” I said. “I was
wrong. You’re Inspector Maigret.”

“I knew I’d get somewhere, if I could
only bring all the suspects together in one place.”

“And now you’ve cut the list to six, out
of an original nine. Fast work.”

“Oh, we can cut more than that.” She
was scribbling furiously on her sheets of paper now. “Like, it isn’t Jay
English or Dave, so that’s two more gone.”

“And what made them go?”

“They got married last month,” she
said. “To each other, in San Francisco. Dave showed me their newspaper clipping.
The only way either of them could have been a suspect was if Jay was trying to
go straight by having an affair with Laura, and he obviously wasn’t.”

“Out of the closet and
off the hook.”

But Kit was in no mood for jokes. “That
leaves four,” she said. “No, three; it wasn’t Claire Wallace.”

“Not Maigret either,” I said. “Maybe Miss Marple. Why isn’t it Claire Wallace?”

“Because the only reason she would have
had for fighting with Laura was over Jerry Fishback, assuming Jerry was the
secret lover. But I found out tonight she broke up with Jerry just after New
Year’s, and started going with that whatever-his-name-was…”

“Lou. The shooting
gallery king.”

“Dreadful man.”

“The last survivor of the sixties,”
I agreed.

“They’ve been going together for two
weeks. So Claire didn’t have any motive.”

“I stand in awe of you,” I said.

“So that leaves Jack Freelander and Mark
Banbury and Perry Stokes.” She gave me a quick look, saying, “You
were talking with Jack Freelander. Did you get anything?”

I was in a quandary. I hadn’t actually been
engaged in sleuthing tonight, since I knew damn well there was nothing to
sleuth about, but wouldn’t it look strange if I had nothing at all to report?
So I took the plunge and said, “Well, you can cross him off your
list.”

She pounced on that. “I can? How do you
know for sure?”

How did I know for sure? “Well,” I
said, “you know he’s doing that piece on pornographic movies for
Esquire.”

“I think everybody on earth knows that,”
she said, “except the people at Esquire.”

“Well, um—He borrowed that Farber book
from me,
Negative Space
. I hadn’t thought of it before, but he borrowed it that
afternoon and he called me that night to ask—”

“What night? You mean the night Laura was
killed?”

“Right. He
borrowed the book from me that afternoon I gave it to him at the screening I took Laura
to.” Which was perfectly true. Everything I’d
said so far was true, but the conversation I was about to report as having
taken place the night of the killing had actually taken place two hours ago in
this room. “So he called that same night,” I said, “and
he—”

“But you had your machine on. Remember?
You were running a film.”

Damn. Suddenly things were getting complicated, it was hard to remember the safe places to put
my feet. “That would have been later,” I said. “Around,
uhh, eleven-thirty. Anyway, he called and he’d read most of the book by
then, and he had a million questions to ask. You can imagine, reading the
collected reviews of Manny Farber. But the thing is, he couldn’t possibly have
done that much reading in the Farber book and at the same time have gone off
and gotten into a quarrel with a girl friend and killed her and all the rest of
it.”

Kit continued to peer closely at me. She said,
“What movie was that you were running?”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“You told me what it was, and I’m trying
to remember.”

So was I. The titles of the twenty-four prints
I own blurred together in my mind.
“Gaslight
,” I guessed. “I
think that was it.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Anyway,” I pointed out, “that
eliminates Jack Freelander. So all we have left is Mark Banbury and Perry
Stokes.”

“No, we don’t,” she said. With a
strange little smile on her lips, she drew a big pencil X through the notes
she’d just made.

I said, “What’s that for?”

“It was
Top Hat
,” she said.

I looked at her. I knew what she was talking
about, but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge it. I said, “What was
Top Hat
?”

She looked at me, studying me as though trying
to guess my weight. “I knew you were the secret lover,” she said.
“I knew it all along. But I thought there had to be somebody else besides
you.”

“Kit,” I said. “Hold on a
minute. Are you accusing me?”

“You were seeing an awful lot of Laura
Penney,” Kit said. “And the only reason the police think I’m guilty
is because even they know you’re the likeliest one to have been the secret
lover.”

“But I’ve been exonerated, remember? I’m
the one with the cast-iron alibi.”

“Are you really? Let’s look at that alibi
again, why don’t we?”

“Kit,” I said, “this isn’t
doing either one of us any good. It’s late, we’re both tired, we’ve both been
drinking, we’re both likely to say foolish
things.”

“I want to talk about your alibi,
Carey.”

“Well, I don’t.” And then I was on
my feet, irritated beyond endurance. “What the hell does Laura Penney’s
death mean to you anyway?” I remembered the fat girl and her talk of
morality and sin, and I said, “You aren’t involved in this out of any
moral anguish or anything like that. The cops got down on you, that’s all,
that’s the only reason you’re even thinking about the subject or asking the
question.”

Kit, very quiet, was watching me pace back and
forth. She said, “Meaning what?”

“Meaning you know you’re innocent, and
you know they can’t prove you guilty, so leave it alone. Don’t play detective,
leave that to the pros.”

“Meaning I might get hurt?”

“Meaning were
already into B-movie dialogue,” I pointed out. “Don’t complicate things,
all right?”

“You killed her, Carey.”

It was said, stated out loud, hanging there in
the air between us. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again she was
watching me. I said, “The private detective saw me leave.”

“You bribed him,” she said.
“And he’s disappeared. But the police are looking for him, and when they
find him maybe he’ll tell a different story.”

So she didn’t yet know that Edgarson was dead.
But when she found out—and the way she was poking around, she was bound to find
out—she would not make Staples’ mistake. She would draw the lines correctly,
and they would lead straight to me.

“Oh, Kit,” I said. “Why did you
have to get into all this?” And I took a step toward her.

“I’ll scream,” she said.

“Only once,” I told her.

*

What a mess. I hadn’t wanted any of this, and
one thing had led to the next, and now I had the death of Kit Markowitz to deal
with. And she was the best girl friend I ever had.

All the way uptown in the cab, dabbing at the
new scratches on my face and wrists, I tried to figure out what to do, and by
the time I got home I had a plan. It was desperate and dramatic, but under the
circumstances I didn’t see what else there was to do.

I left my overcoat on when I entered the
apartment, went directly to the kitchen, blew out the two pilot lights on the
top of the stove, and switched on all four burners. With gas hissing into the
room, I went back to the living room, picked up my heaviest glass ashtray, and
prepared to hit myself on the back of the head with it.

Which turned out to be very
difficult to do. In the first place, I had this automatic tendency to
duck, combined with this other automatic tendency to pull my punches. Also, I
didn’t want to hit myself hard enough to knock myself out. All I wanted was a
bump, a bruise, some indication that violence had taken place, and finally,
after three painful glancing blows, I gave myself a good one that hurt like
fury. “Ow ow ow ow ow,” I said, dancing around the room, dropping the
ashtray and clutching at my head, getting so angry from the pain that I
actually went back and kicked the ashtray, and then I hurt at both ends.

Well, anyway, the job was done, and when I
touched the sore spot on the back of my head a minute later my fingertips came
away a little damp with blood. Fine. Now we give the
seeping gas five minutes or so to make some headway in the apartment, and then
we throw that rotten ashtray through a window and we stagger out into the hall
yelling
help help help
, and the obvious conclusion is that the murderer of
Laura Penney, believing that Kit and I were getting too close to him, had
attempted to murder us both, succeeding with Kit and nearly succeeding with me.

If there had only been some point at which
everything could have been reversed. Sitting in the black leather director’s
chair with my overcoat still on and my head still aching, I kept going over and
over the events of the last ten days, trying to find something that could have
been done differently, some decision that would have ended with Kit still alive
now, and the more I thought about it the more
inevitable it all became. From the moment I’d lost my temper and punched Laura
and she’d slipped on that shiny floor, every step had followed with the
regularity and inevitability of a heartbeat.

Funny smell the gas company adds to their
product, so you’ll know when it’s in the air. I’ll wait till it gets a bit
stronger, then get up from here and find the ashtray…kicked it under the
sofa…throw it out the window…run out to the hall…stagger out
to the hall…sleepy…very heavy body in this chair…stagger out
to hall soon…be able to relax after this…danger all gone…relax
…relax…head doesn’t hurt so much any more…

TEN

Memoirs of a Master Detective

“You were lucky,”
Staples said.

“I sure
was.”

I sure was. The explosion
had saved my life. I’d gone to sleep in that damn chair, overcome by the gas, and
if I hadn’t forgotten about the pilot light in the oven Staples would have had
two unsolved murders that night. As it was, the explosion knocked out windows and
summoned help just as efficiently and much more dramatically than I could have done,
and when I woke up I was in a private room in a city hospital with a policeman on
the door, and I was swathed in enough bandages to make me qualify as snow sculpture.