Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (8 page)

Barry McGivern told her indulgently, “I
must say, Ruth, you startled me more than the gunshot did.”

Bray said, “You screamed?”

“I’m sorry,” Ruth Carr said, but her
smile was more proud than sheepish. “I’ve always been that way, I’m a real sucker for movies. They catch me every
time.”

“All right.”
Bray’s disinterest in Ruth Carr’s little personality traits was so total that
even she noticed it, and looked offended. He ignored that, too, saying to the
group at large, “Were there any other loud noises in the course of the
film? Anything else that might have covered the sound of a
shot?”

Gideon Fergus said, “There were two or
three door slams, but I don’t know that they were that loud.”

Ruth Carr said, “And the jet taking off. That
one hurt my eardrums.”

A little discussion ensued among Gideon
Fergus, Ruth Carr and Barry McGivern as to whether or not the wail of a jet
taking off was the kind of sound that would cover the noise of a gun being
fired. Hugo and Jennifer Lanisch, I noticed, took no part in this discussion, nor in any of the talk that had preceded it. They sat fairly
close together, but not touching and not looking at one another, and though God
knows they were far from twins—he with his gleaming round bald head and
deeply-lined face, she with her oval face framed by heavy ash-blonde hair—their
expressions were nearly identical. Both were defensive, blank, rigidly
controlled, tightly held in check. Looking at them,
the thought came to me:
Was Jennifer playing around with young Jim Wicker?

This same thought had apparently occurred to
both Bray and Staples, and once the sound-effects discussion ran itself out the
two detectives began poking delicately into the general question of motive. How
long had each of our suspects known Jim Wicker, what was the state of each
relationship, how had the relationship been formed? The questions were general,
and ostensibly aimed at all the suspects equally, but it was plain that the
questions were focusing more and more frequently on Jennifer Lanisch.

Were Bray and Staples doing this out of
perversity? Or was it possible they didn’t know who the murderer was? Finally
it seemed to me the only thing to do was break my promise of silence, which I
did by saying, “Well, of course Jack March is the killer, but that still
leaves the question of why. I suppose once we find out his real name the motive
will become more clear.”

Everybody stared at me, even the uniformed cop
in the corner. Bray looked as though he might burst a blood vessel, but Staples
was merely bewildered, and when he said, “What are you talking
about?” I heard in his voice the forlorn prayer that I would actually know
what I was talking about.

I did. “I suggest his real name isn’t
Jack March,” I said, “because he’s so obviously in disguise. You’ll
notice the tan on the lower half of his face is lighter than on the upper half,
meaning he’s just recently shaved off a full beard. Also, his clothing is all brand spanking new, suggesting he’s been used to a different
sort of garb. That short haircut also looks very recent, and those spectacles
are fakes, with clear glass. I have a pair myself, they were a prop in a movie,
and they reflect light differently.”

By now, everybody was staring at young March
instead of at me, and March didn’t like it at all. “That’s silly,” he
said. “Yes, I shaved off my beard when I got this job, but that doesn’t
mean I killed anybody.”

“You were the only one behind Wicker
while the film was being screened,” I pointed out.

Staples, looking at me with hope and terror
and warning all mixed in his expression, said, “Any of the others could
have crawled around behind Wicker, we already established that.”

“Taking a chance on being seen by the
projectionist? Besides, I haven’t yet mentioned the real proof.”

“Then I wish you would,” Staples
said, and I could see Bray silently agreeing.

“The gun was fired,” I said,
“in conjunction with a loud sound in the film, probably a gunshot. But the
gunshot in the film was so unexpected that Miss Carr screamed when it happened.
Only someone who had seen the picture before would know about that gunshot and
be able to anticipate it and use it. And only March, who carried the print here
from Los
Angeles,
had seen the picture before. Only March knew the film.”

“I knew it, all right,” March said,
and by the sudden harshness in his voice I knew we’d be hearing the truth now.
“I knew it because I wrote it! And that son of a bitch stole it from me! I
trusted him, I—I—This was my only chance to get even
with him, while he’s watching it himself, sitting there watching the script he,
he—” And March dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

I turned smiling to Staples. “Elementary,
my dear Watson,” I said.

FOUR

The Problem of the Copywriter’s Island

Staples went
whee-whee-whee all the way home. “Did you see Al Bray’s face?” he
demanded, and answered his own question by laughing out loud and slapping his gloved
palm against the steering wheel.

I had in fact seen Al
Bray’s face, and he’d looked as though a movie marquee had fallen on him. He
didn’t say anything to me, but he kept looking in my direction like a Flat
Earther faced with an astronaut. I, on the other hand, had sense enough to
remain modest and to fade into the background after I’d done my little turn.

There was no point
preening; any man who intends to rub a cop’s nose in it had better be on safer
ground than I was.

Anyway, March’s breakdown and confession had
essentially finished that job, so Staples soon took me away, leaving Bray to
care for the details. Morgue and technical people were just arriving as we
reached the sidewalk, and while Staples had a word or two with them I scanned
the block for Edgarson. He was nowhere to be seen; had the presence of the
police scared him off?

Now Staples was driving me home, crowing all
the way, and not sobering till he’d parked again next to the fire hydrant near
my building. Then he said, “If you could do the same thing on the Laura
Penney killing, it would be a great help.”

I could do the same thing, as a matter of
fact, but I wasn’t going to. Young Jack March had been a great lesson to me,
had I been in need of a great lesson: he’d demonstrated the folly of quitting.
I had made a very nice circumstantial case against him, and no doubt in time
the police would have established his true identity and his motive for killing
Jim Wicker, but without the confession would it ever have been proved? If the
gun couldn’t be traced directly to March—and my guess was that it couldn’t—some
small doubt would have to remain, and with a halfway decent defense attorney
that small doubt could surely be turned into an acquittal. March, the
premeditated murderer, had planned everything up to the crime itself, but then
had lost his moorings, his sense of purpose and his nerve. I, the
unpremeditated murderer, hadn’t planned anything until after the event, but
because I’d retained my nerve and my sense of purpose I was now the only human
being on Earth who had been fully cleared in that killing.

But what Staples wanted was an expression of
cooperation and sincerity of purpose. I obliged, telling him, “By God, I
wish I could just point a finger and say, ‘That’s the killer,’ I was very fond
of Laura, you know, I’ve realized that more and more since her death.”

Sympathetic understanding gleamed in Staples’
eyes. “I know what you mean. But we do have those photographs. We could go
over them now, and maybe something’ll click for you.”

“Fine.”
Then, because hospitality seemed necessary under the circumstances, and also
because it was damn cold in Staples’ unheated car, I said, “Want to come
up? We can have coffee and be comfortable.”

“Good idea.”

So the two of us climbed the stairs to my
apartment and spent a while uncoating ourselves. Then I went to the kitchenette
to make coffee, while Staples wandered around the living room, looking at my
memorabilia. Seeing him near the desk, I called, “Would you mind switching
on the phone machine? I want to hear my messages.”

“Sure.” He hovered over it, willing
but unschooled. “What do I do?”

“Turn the switch to playback and press
the rewind button.”

He did both, and I
went on with my coffeemaking while the machine gibberished itself backward at
high speed and then began to unreel my latest messages: “Hi, Carey, it’s,
urn, Jack Freelander. Um. It looks as though, um,
Esquire, um, might want that piece, um, um, I told you about, um, about the
pornographic movie biz. Um. Would you be, um, free
some time soon? I’d like to, um, pick your brains. Also, um.
Do you happen to know, um, where Laura Penney is? Um.
She doesn’t answer her phone. Um. See you later. Um. Um.”

I called, through the final stutters of Jack
Freelander’s message, “How do you like your coffee?”

“Regular.” Staples came to the
kitchenette doorway, saying, “I feel like I’m eavesdropping, listening to
all that.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve
got nothing to hide.”

Meantime, the second message had started.
“Hi, sweetie, it’s Kit. I’ll be tied up this evening, but give me a call
tomorrow. And I still say Jay English did it.”

“Christ,” I muttered. I gave Staples
his coffee, and the two of us went back to the living room and message number
three:

“Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it feel to
be a murderer?”

*

After I put the mop away and made myself
another cup of coffee, Staples insisted we listen to that last message another
half dozen times, in hopes I’d eventually recognize the voice:

“Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it feel to
be a murderer? Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it Hello, Mr. Thorpe feel to be a
how does it Hello, Mr. how does it feel, how does it,
Mr. Thorpe, feel to be a murderer? a murderer? a murderer?”

“I just don’t know,” I said.
“The voice sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

Finally Staples gave up, saying, “He
called you ‘Mr. Thorpe’, so I guess whoever he is he doesn’t know you all that
well.”

“I guess he doesn’t. Excuse me a
minute.” And off I went to the John, to pop a Valium. What did humanity do
before these wonderful pills?

Back in the living room Staples was reading my
movie posters, but his mind was still on the message, because he said,
“Would you run it just once more? I’m sorry, I know it upsets you, but I
want to record it.”

Turned out he had a cassette recorder in his
overcoat pocket. Damn it to hell. I considered accidentally erasing the message
but I was afraid I’d trigger Staples’ suspicions, so we played the thing one
last time while his little machine turned a beady ear on my little machine, and
then at last I could erase the bastard and sit down with my coffee, waiting for
the Valium to take hold.

Staples tried to reassure me: “We run
into a lot of nuts like that, Mr. Thorpe. They get an idea in their heads, and
they don’t want to be distracted by facts.”

I said, “What if you hadn’t already
cleared me, what would you be thinking now?”

He chuckled. “I’d be a lot more
interested in talking with that particular nut, to tell the truth.” Then
he said, “Forget about it, Mr. Thorpe, it’s a closed incident. Let’s look
at those photos.”

So we did. Six pictures of Laura, with as many
men, all of whom I knew to one extent or another. Going through them one at a
time, I gave Staples a name and capsule biography for each, and resisted the
temptation to plant suspicion in his mind about any specific one of these prime
suspects.

That was a question I hadn’t as yet resolved
in my own mind. If I hadn’t killed Laura—and the official line was that I had
not—then someone else must have done it. Would it be better
to provide that someone else, or could we content ourselves with a simple
unsolved murder? There are hundreds of unsolved murders every year, why
shouldn’t Laura Penney’s be among them? For the moment, at least, that seemed
the better way, so I made none of the leading remarks that occurred to me
concerning each of these escorts, but simply provided Staples with basic
uncolored information: name, occupation, relationship with the deceased.

And one of them turned out to be that same Jay
English whose name Staples had heard Kit mention on my answering machine, in
the sentence, “I still say Jay English did it.” He remembered that
comment, of course, and asked several questions, with me assuring him the whole
thing had been a joke, if not in very good taste, considering the unequivocal
homosexuality of its subject. Joke or not, Staples made sure to get the
roommate’s name spelled right: David Poumon.

One of the other photos was of Laura with her
father, a straight-backed well-preserved old gent I’d met once several months
ago, when he was in town from upstate. If Staples was so interested in unusual
sexual relationships, how about intimating something incestuous there to keep
his busy mind occupied? No; once again I restrained myself and moved on to the
next, which happened to be the same stammering Jack Freelander who’d just left,
um, a message on my machine.

After I’d done all the pictures once, with
Staples making notes in his small pad and giving each suspect his own page, he
led me back through all six again, asking leading questions, poking here and
there in search of motive, and damn if he didn’t suggest father-daughter incest
himself. He led up to it gradually, with questions about whether Laura saw her
father seldom or often, what she had to say about him, and so on, and finally
he asked the question straight out: “Do you think there was anything going
on there?”

“Going on?”

“Well, you say he’s a widower, and she’s
separated from her husband.”

I was astounded, not at the concept but that
Staples should voice it. Apparently he specialized in thinking the unthinkable.
I said, “He’s her father! You don’t think—I mean, what do you
think?”