Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (9 page)

He shrugged, his
expression as open and cheerful as ever. “I think people have love lives,”
he told me. “One way or the other, they make that connection. Now, here’s
a woman, she’s thirty-two years old, she’s been married, she’s separated from
her husband, all she has is these casual non-sexual dates with a number of
different men. She doesn’t seem to have anybody that’s really important to
her.”

“That’s possible,” I said.
“There are people who prefer to be alone.”

“Not many. And not
Laura Penney. It doesn’t feel right, Mr. Thorpe. She had a lover, I’m
sure of it.” Gesturing at the photos on the table next to me, he said,
“In among all those men in her life was the man in her life. But he was
kept hidden. Why?”

“I see what you mean,” I said.
“A lover wouldn’t be kept hidden unless there was a reason for it.”

“Right.” He
checked off the possibilities on his fingers. “He’s married. He’s
homosexual and doesn’t want to make a complete break with the homosexual world.
He’s her father.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I,” Staples assured me.
“But at this stage of the game, I keep an open mind.”

I was beginning to feel a bit wary of that
open mind of Staples’. If he was so eager to think the unthinkable, why
wouldn’t it occur to him to play with the thought that my guaranteed innocence
might in itself be an indication of guilt? I was, after all, the Least Likely
Suspect. And as with all Least Likely Suspects, I was in reality the Murderer.

Staples and I talked for half an hour more,
with him drawing another three or four names from me of men who knew Laura but
whose pictures had not been snapped by the private detectives. Finally he
seemed satisfied that he’d squeezed me dry, and he made ready to leave, saying,
“I do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Thorpe. And the coup you pulled in
the Wicker killing this afternoon was really beautiful. You made my day.”

“It’d be interesting to find out the rest
of that story.”

“Oh, I’m sure Al Bray’s got the whole
thing by now.” Then, seeming to be struck by a sudden thought, he said,
“Say. That girl friend of yours is tied up tonight, isn’t she?”

Meaning Kit, who had said so on the machine. “Yes, I guess she is.”

“Why not have dinner
with us? Patricia and me. She’d love to meet you, she’s as big a fan as I am. And I’ll have the story
from Al by then, I can tell it to you at dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t think I should—”

“Listen, you’re not imposing.” He
was very eager, very determined. “And Patricia’s a wonderful cook. I tell
you what, I’ll call her from here, you’ll see there’s
no problem. Okay?”

I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I wanted to
be near Staples as much as possible, I wanted to know what he was thinking so I
could steer him away from dangerous shallows. On the other hand, his presence
made me nervous. As to the grubby details of Jack March and his fatal grudge
against Jim Wicker, they interested me not at all.

But Staples was waiting for an answer, all
eagerness and bounce. “All right,” I said. “If
it’s all right with your wife.”

“Patricia’s gonna flip,” he assured
me. “Okay if I use your phone?”

“Go right ahead.”

He did, and though he kept his voice too low
for me to hear the exact words—I had politely removed myself to the far end of
the room—the syrupy note in everything he said suggested he couldn’t have been
a husband more than fifteen minutes. True love birds, icky-wickies together.
But it was too late now to back out.

Cradling the phone at last, Staples turned his
beaming smile toward me and said, “It’s all set, Mr. Thorpe. I’ll pick you
up around seven-thirty, okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “But if I’m going
to eat at your table, I think you’d better call me Carey.”

“Terrific.” He stuck out his hand,
saying, “And I’m Fred.”

The hunter and the quarry shook hands.

*

It was like being stuck in one of the sweeter
Disney cartoons, one of the early ones where the sentimentality really cloys.
Great pink clouds of love floated everywhere, and tiny bluebirds seemed to
flutter just beyond my peripheral vision.

Patricia Staples wasn’t at all difficult to
look at, but God have mercy if she wasn’t a penance to listen to. Of medium
height and weight, with silky blonde hair and clear innocent blue eyes, pert
lips and straight nose, she looked like something on a corn flakes box or on
the cover of a 1943 issue of Liberty Magazine, and in the course of dinner
alone she called her husband “sweetness” and “honey” and
“sugar” often enough to produce terminal diabetes. (Even though he
did send nearly half of them back.)

Staples had told me that he and his Patricia
had been married almost three years, yet they looked and sounded and acted like
the most simpering of honeymooners.

Staples later claimed this aspect was the
result of their decision not to have children, apparently allowing them to be
infantile without competition, but I prefer to believe that Staples was
attracted to her lavish wholesomeness because of its contrast with the seamier
side of his own work.

The gilded cage enclosing this contented
canary was a seventh-floor co-op apartment in a grim red-brick building in
Corona, Queens, not far enough from the Long Island Expressway. One saw it out
there, churning away in the blighted darkness beyond the living room windows
like a diorama of life on the planet Jupiter. The apartment itself was warm and
yellow and bright, with furniture that must have looked just as flimsy and just
as tacky in the various Long Island
showrooms from which it had been purchased. A great rectangular
green-and-yellow painting of a meadow glade in spring, the grandmother of all
jigsaw puzzles, dangled over the sofa like an eavesdropper, while Staples and I
sat daringly beneath it, drinking Corona Hills Scotch with club soda and
chatting about great murder mysteries of fact and fancy.

Patricia, meantime, bustled about. Queen of
her domain, a housewife so utterly satisfied with her lot as to make all the
efforts of Women’s Lib seem like an exercise in counting grains of sand,
Patricia Staples spent that entire evening, it seemed to me, with a white apron
over her pale blue dress, carrying a casserole to the table between two
heat-mittened hands. This, by God, was what the boys of
Guadalcanal Diary
had
been fighting for.

Well of course it wasn’t
quite
that bad. It
doesn’t take that long to carry a casserole, nor to cook one, but even when
Patricia Staples was sitting in the uneasy chair on her husband’s left hand her
mind and heart appeared to be still in the kitchen.

As to her being a fan of mine, I saw early on
that she was a fan of no one and nothing but her husband. She gave eager
agreement to everything he said, whether sensible or foolish, and he gave her
the blind compliment of assuming that all her parrot responses were the product
of an independent but wonderfully sympatico mind.

Staples apparently preferred not to talk shop
in his wife’s presence, so when we all sat down to dinner-chicken, rice,
tomatoes, celery and much much more, all in the same Corning ovenproof bowl—the
talk turned to movies, and I’m afraid I found it impossible not to become a
pompous bore. But they did keep demanding it; Patricia invariably agreed with
Fred, who invariably agreed with me, who had no one to agree with but myself. It would take a far more Calvinist personality than
mine to resist such an opportunity for pontification. I spoke in long compound
sentences, like an early draft of one of my own articles, and in fact I quoted
from my previous works several times. Patricia didn’t mind, since she wasn’t
particularly aware of my existence anyway, but Fred for all his eagerness did
begin to glaze after a while.

Dinner, like all good things, came to an end,
and while Patricia retired again to her kitchen to “tidy up” (a
phrase they both used, both of them) Staples and I seated ourselves once more
beneath the leaning painting, this time with Corona Hill VSOP Olde Brandy, and
after the few obligatory propaganda remarks from Staples about how good it must
be for a bachelor to eat a real meal for a change we went back to shoptalk, the
subject being murder. This time, though, it was murder closer to home:
“You haven’t asked,” Staples pointed out, “about the Wicker
case.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “I
haven’t.”

He took that to mean I wanted to know, so he
told me. It was one of those convoluted stories of betrayal, disguise,
coincidence and overly-complicated scheming that mystery stories always end
with, and though I nodded a lot while Staples reeled it off I didn’t retain a
word of it, except the fact that Jack March’s real name turned out to be Andrew
Thomas Cauldenfield. (Ever since Lee Harvey Oswald, murderers have had
prominent middle names, just as tall farm youths used to have prominent adam’s apples.)

Patricia joined us soon after that, and the
talk switched back to movies, and that was when
Gaslight
came up. Staples
announced it to be one of his all-time favorite pictures, “but Patricia’s
never seen it.”

“I have a print,” I said. And I
found myself extending an invitation: “Would you like to come see
it?”

Staples stared at me. “A
print? You mean you own that movie, you have it right there in your
apartment?”

“I have copies of more than twenty
films,” I told him, “and access to almost anything else I’d like to
see. The studios loan prints to people in the field.”

Staples viewed me with something like awe, and
even Patricia seemed impressed. Staples said, “By golly, if I had that I
don’t think I’d ever leave the house.”

“It’s like anything else,” I told
him. “You get used to it after a while.”

We then discussed the best time for them to
come see
Gaslight
and decided on Sunday afternoon at three. Staples would be
working earlier that day, but Patricia could take the subway to Manhattan, meet her husband for lunch, and then the
two would come over to my place for the screening.

Soon after that it was time to leave. Staples
suggested he drive me back to Manhattan, and though I insisted I’d be perfectly
content in the subway he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So I thanked Patricia
for a delicious dinner, shook her cool hand, and her husband and I rode the
elevator down to the basement garage where he kept his car.

The ride back was full of conversation, by
which I mean that Staples kept up a cheerful flow of talk to which I added
occasional appropriate punctuation. It was becoming clear that in Staples’ eyes
I was a celebrity, and he was delighted to have collected me. My own feelings
were too complicated for me to think about, so I simply floated on the surface
of my mind, letting it all happen.

At my door, Staples pulled to a stop and shook
my hand, saying, “It was really nice to have you out, Carey. Really nice.”

“I appreciated it, Fred. And that’s a
wonderful girl you have there.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said, with a
big grin.

“See you Sunday, Fred,” I said, and
opened the car door.

“Right you are. Goodnight, Carey.”

“Goodnight, Fred.”

I stepped out onto the street, closed the door
after me, and the Ford growled away, its exhaust thick and white in the cold
air. I crossed the sidewalk, went up the stoop reaching for my keys, and a dark
figure came out of a corner of the vestibule to hit me very hard in the
stomach. I doubled over in pain and shock, trying not to lose my balance and
fall backwards down the steps, and he hit me again, this time in the side, just
above the waist.

It was brief, but horrible, and I suspect very
professional. Grabbing a handful of my coat, he pulled and tugged and crowded
me into the darkness of the vestibule and then punched and kicked and kneed me
half a dozen times in quick succession, as I sagged down the wall. All of the
blows were to my body, and all seemed placed with some kind of anatomical
precision, and all were very painful.

Then it was over and he was gone, without my
ever seeing his face or hearing his voice; though of course I knew at once who
it was. I sat on the floor of the vestibule, having trouble breathing, and a
while later I found the keys I’d dropped and let myself into the building and
up several thousand stairs to the apartment, where Edgarson’s voice on my
answering machine said, “We’re calling about your debt, Mr. Thorpe. We
look forward to early payment.”

*

Two hours in a hot tub helped somewhat, and so
did both Valium and bourbon, but when I dragged myself out of bed Friday
morning I was as stiff and sore as though Edgarson had just finished kicking me
that very second.

I was supposed to go to a noon screening at MGM, but I found myself
reluctant to leave the apartment. Also to answer the phone; so I turned on the
answering machine with the monitor button pushed, enabling me to hear my
callers as they were leaving their messages. That way, I could speak to anyone
I chose, and avoid the rest. Meaning Edgarson.

Even such painful clouds as this one have
silver linings. After another long soak in the tub, followed by more pills, I
decided to table the problem of Edgarson for a while, and actually managed to
get some work done on my next projected piece for
Third World Cinema
, with the
tentative title, “John Cassavetes: The Apotheosis Of The
Inarticulate.” Though Edgarson didn’t call, several other people did, but
I wasn’t in the mood for any of them and I ignored their messages and went on
with my work.

Then, just as I had written, “Onset improvisation sounds so good in theory that it’s a shame it sounds so bad in
practice,” the phone rang again, and after my recorded announcement
(“Hi. Carey Thorpe’s answering machine here. Please leave your name and a
phone number where I can reach you, and I’ll be back to you first chance I
get.”) Staples’ voice said, “Fred here, Carey. I was hoping to catch
you at home. We’ve got another—”