Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (16 page)

And Laura, it turned out, had been one of
them. She had introduced her father to me once as “Frank Ward,” but
now I learned another seven or eight Eastern syllables had been lurking behind
that Anglo brevity all the time. And what about that husband,
the alleged Penney? Did those flat cheekbones look Wasp? They did not.

Poor Laura. Born in
upstate New
York,
she’d spent her life as a full-fledged American, only to depart as an
immigrant. Remembering her bigotry—I don’t think there were any groups she
cared for—I knew this ceremony would only upset her. It was just as well she
wasn’t here to see it.

Kit kept whispering and murmuring to me
throughout the service, but I paid little attention, since all she was doing
was adding to the original list of five suspects. Taking a leaf from Staples’
book, she was casting a critical eye on the women in attendance and finding
most of them suspicious. She’d bought a steno pad on the way down, and did a
lot of cramped note-taking, as though she’d be writing up this affair for the
old home town paper.

The box containing the remains was prominent in
the center aisle, on a wheeled bier draped in purple and black. Gazing at it, I
did regret my touch of bad temper.

After the ceremony, a dozen cars would follow
the hearse out to the graveyard in Queens, but
Kit’s detective ardor, I’m happy to say, didn’t extend that far. Nor did
Staples’; seeing him move away from the line of mourners shuffling out to the
cars, I went over to him and said, “Anything new?”

“Not with me. How about
you?”

“Well, you got Kit mad.”

He seemed amused. “I did?”

“She’s decided to find the killer
herself, and show you up.”

“Fine. But if
Edgarson says he saw her last Tuesday night, it’ll be all over.”

Edgarson? Was I
supposed to know that name? Playing it safe, I repeated it with a question
mark, and Staples explained he was the detective, etc. “Oh,” I said.
“Is that all set up?”

“Not yet. He’s supposed to call me next
time he checks in with his office.”

Don’t hold your breath. I said, “Let me
know when you switch to a new theory, okay? Kit’s about to
drive me crazy.”

Grinning, he said, “Why don’t you come up
with something? If you can’t show that somebody else is guilty, at least prove
to my satisfaction that your girl is innocent.”

“I’ll work on it,” I promised.

“Come along with me,” he suggested. “If
we spend one concentrated day on this case maybe we can crack it.”

“Sorry. I’ve already promised Kit I’d
play Mr. and Mrs. North.” I gestured to where she was standing in a corner
of the chapel, arms folded as she glowered in our direction.

“Later on, then, Around
two?”

At two, Patricia would be dropping by for more
Gaslight
“I don’t think so, Fred. I’ll be with Kit most of the day.”

“Well, I wish you luck.”

“I believe I’m going to need it.” I
left Staples and rejoined Kit, who wanted to know everything that had been
said. “Let’s go back to the States first,” I suggested, “and
have a cup of coffee.”

Which we did, in a Second Avenue health food restaurant
full of heroin addicts.
Kit went through her expanded list of suspects and I managed to contract it
again slightly by removing three of the women who I knew happened to be a part
of the alibis of various former male suspects. Another of the female suspects I
eliminated by simply laughing the idea to scorn, but that
still left two women and five men on the list. Six men, since she insisted on
adding Jay English, the famous homosexual. Seven men; Jay’s boy friend Dave
Poumon was swept ashore on the next tide.

“Nine suspects,” I said. “What
are you going to do with all those people?”

“Throw a party,” she said.
“We’ll get them all drinking and relaxed, and ask some penetrating
questions.”

“God help us,” I said. “And
when will this overdone scene take place?”

“Today’s Monday.
Why not Friday? Everybody spends their weekends in town this time of
year.”

“Friday’s a long way off,” I pointed
out. “I thought you were feeling a certain
urgency about all this.”

“Oh, we have lots to do before the
party.” She had this all thoroughly planned, I could see that much.
“We’ll want to know which penetrating questions to ask,” she
explained.

“Ah, of course.”

She ruminated over her list. “I’ll make
some phone calls this afternoon. I can ask Betty about Claire.” She made a
note, then another, saying, “And Lucy Fishman used to go with Jack
Henderson, so I’ll find out about him from her.” She frowned at her list,
made another note, made a question mark, underlined something, and switched her
frown to me. “You can start with Staples,” she said. “I
can?”

“There was something about an anonymous
letter. See if you can get a look at it.”

“I’ll try,” I promised.

She tapped her list with the pencil point.
“There’s a possibility he already checked out Jay English and Dave. Could
you find out?”

“Clever questioning might turn the
trick,” I said.

“Also Claire and Ellen.
See if he has anything on them.”

“Will do.”

“Could you get to him this
afternoon?”

An unexpected mobile of deceit suspended
itself delicately in my brain. “I think maybe I could,” I said.

“Then come down to my place for dinner
and we’ll compare notes.”

“Lovely idea.”

“Around seven?”

“Perfect,” I said.

Between two and three, when Staples thought I
was with Kit and Kit thought I was with Staples, I was with Patricia, enjoying
Gaslight
. At twenty past three, alone and refreshed and energetic from the shower, I popped a Valium
and phoned Staples at his office, but he wasn’t there. I left a message and
worked on the Cassavetes article until four-thirty, when Staples called.
“I thought you were with Miss Markowitz.”

“We laid our plans,” I said,
“but then she went off to do some girl-talk type sleuthing of her
own.”

“Would you like to do some boy-type
sleuthing? We’ve got another one.”

“New York must be on the verge of depopulation.”

“This one’s imported. From
Visaria.”

“From what?”

“Visaria.”
He spelled it, which didn’t help.

“Is that a country?”

“I don’t know if they’ve got a
country,” he said, “but they’ve got a mission at the UN, and the head
of it just got himself killed. You feel ready for a
locked room mystery?”

*

Staples had sent a car for me again, which
delivered me to a small remodeled brick town house on 46th Street between First and Second Avenues. This
entire neighborhood was full of United Nations missions and foreign embassies,
each nation putting on as much show as it could afford. At East Side prices, the smaller countries couldn’t
afford much, and this narrow four-story architectural nonentity was about par
for a modest mission like that from Visaria.

If I’d hoped for some insight into the style
and culture of Visaria from the interior of the mission I was doomed to
disappointment. The building, probably in advanced disrepair when Visaria
bought it, had apparently been purchased as a Handyman’s Special and furnished out
of Sears, Roebuck. The floors, which felt spongy and unreliable underfoot, had
all been covered with cheap solid-color wall-to-wall carpeting. Dropped
ceilings, those fiberboard rectangles in a white metal grid, screened off the
no-doubt-hideous original ceilings with clean new hideousness, and the original
walls were covered with pale-tone panelings in simulated wood grain. Light was
provided by fluorescent panels in the dropped ceilings. It was like being in a
real estate office in a shopping center, with furnishing to match;
imitation-wood formica desks, imitation-leather vinyl
sofas, and real metal square wastebaskets.

The building was narrow, and not very deep, so
there was minimal floor-space. One entered from the street into a vestibule
with a staircase leading up; the staircase too was covered with cheap
carpeting. A sign hanging over the stairs was neatly hand-printed
AUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL ONLY.
Another sign, waist-height, standing on its own chrome leg in
front of the stairs, said
INFORMATION,
with an arrow pointing to the right.

An interior wall had apparently been removed
here, so that the vestibule and the former living room had become one
oddly-shaped receptionist’s office. It was appropriately furnished, including
paintings that might have been views of the forests and lakes of Visaria but
that looked to me like the forests and lakes of northern Michigan. A small rack of tourist literature near
the entrance had an indefinably scraggy and hopeless air about it, as though
even the Visarians could think of no sensible reason for anyone to visit their
country.

Several people were now in this room. Two of
them were Staples and Bray, several others appeared also to have some sort of
official connection with today’s event, and the last two were a weepy-eyed
heavyset girl sitting at the receptionist’s desk and a truculent-looking
bruiser hulking on one of the vinyl sofas. He reminded me for some reason of
this morning’s funeral, probably because he seemed ethnic in much the same way.
If Laura’s husband had grown up big enough to play professional football he
might have looked a lot like this fellow.

Staples, seeing me arrive, came over and said,
quietly, “I won’t introduce you. We’ll just take a little walk through and
I’ll describe the situation.”

“Right.”

“You see the girl sitting at the
desk?”

“The
receptionist?”

“Right. She came
back from lunch at one o’clock this afternoon. So did the guard.”

“The blocking back on
the sofa?”

“That’s the one. Visaria has its own
political problems, just like everybody else. His job is to sit out here and
make sure there aren’t any incidents.”

“No wonder he doesn’t look happy.”

“The point is,” Staples said,
“both of those characters were in this room from one o’clock until after the body was found. Neither of
them left for a second, not to go to the John, not for anything. They both
swear to it.”

“Could they be in cahoots with one
another?”

“Look at them,” Staples suggested.

I looked at them. Judging from
appearances—generally a good way to judge, by the way—between them they might
just be able to figure out how to open a box of corn flakes. “Okay,”
I said.

“Now let’s go to the scene of the
crime.”

Staples led the way. We had to walk through
the little cluster of people near the inner door, and it turned out that at
least two of them were Visarian. Or anyway foreign, since
they were speaking together in some language that seemed to consist principally
of the letter “k,” spoken with varying degrees of emphasis.
One of these two intercepted Staples on his way by, saying, “You are
making progress?”

“We are making progress,” Staples
told him. They smiled at one another, and Staples moved on, me following. I too
smiled at the Visarian, and he smiled back.

Staples paused at the door. “As you see,
it had to be broken in.”

“Locked from the inside, eh?”

“Locked and bolted. The door fit snugly. There’s no way to throw that bolt
except from this side.”

I studied the door, the wrenched wood, the
hardware. I said, “And I assume the only fingerprints on the bolt belonged
to the dead man.”

“Of course.”

“This is a pretty elaborate setup,”
I said. “What’s it all about?”

“There’d been threats on this fellow’s
life,” Staples said. “Some political thing at home.
So he spent his working hours in this room with the door locked on the inside.
If anyone wanted to see him, the receptionist would buzz, tell him who was
waiting, and he’d come over and unlock the door.”

“All right.”
I looked hesitantly into this inner room. “The body
still here?”

“No, it was taken away. He’d been
strangled with wire, sitting there at his desk.”

My adam’s apple gave a little twinge.
“Charming,” I said, and roved around the room a bit.

It was almost identical with the room outside;
same ceiling, same paneled walls, same spongy carpeted floor. A little money
had been spent on the desk, but the other furnishings were still
bottom-of-the-line from some office furniture discount house. There was,
however, a paper shredder in one corner, to show that this was a serious
diplomatic operation.

A pair of tall windows at the back had a clear
close view of a brick wall. Heavy iron bars masked both windows on the outside.
I said, “I assume those bars have been checked.”

“Just as solid as they look,”
Staples assured me.

A door behind the desk led to a small bathroom
done in the same minimal style as everything else. This would be the corner of
the house directly behind the staircase. The one window in the bathroom was
also guarded by iron bars, and was in any event too small to crawl through. I
noticed two dirt smudges on the vinyl tile floor, but nothing else in here of
interest.

When I returned to the office, Bray had come
in looking glum and harassed. “I hope you feel brilliant,” he told
me.

“Not yet,” I admitted.

Staples said to Bray, “Give the man
time.”

“All he wants,” Bray said. To me he
said, “By the way, in that Templeton case, the woman that went off the
terrace, it looks as though you and Fred were right.”

“Oh, really?”

Bray shrugged. “We never came up with
anything,” he said. “I resisted the idea, but I guess it really was
suicide after all.”

So George had gotten away with it. Good for
him. I said, “They can’t all be murders, can they?”

“I suppose not,” Bray said.

Staples said, “But this one definitely
is. Let me tell you the situation, Carey. The chief of mission, Ivor Kaklov,
lived here in the building, up on the top floor. The receptionist and the guard
also live here. They spent an ordinary morning, Kaklov in this office and the
other two outside, and at twelve Kaklov came out and they went upstairs for
lunch.”