Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (2 page)

“You say Miss Penney threatened to tell
your wife about this affair?”

Mm. I was right to
get clear of this, as quickly and quietly as I could. So out of the apartment I
went, smearing the doorknobs with my gloved hand, checking the street before
leaving the building, and walking all the way over to Sheridan Square before
hailing a cab to take me home.

Where I found several
messages waiting on my telephone answering machine. After divesting
myself of my coats and excess wardrobe I made a drink and sat at the desk to
listen.

The first was a nice female voice with a
British accent: “Mr. Gautier’s office calling Mr. Thorpe, in re screening
on the twentieth. Could you possibly make it at four instead of two?”

I’d rather. And since I was unexpectedly
dateless for that screening, perhaps the owner of the nice British accent would
like to join me. Reaching for pencil and paper, I made a note to call back,
while listening to the second message, from Sogeza “Tim” Kinywa,
editor of
Third World Cinema
: “Sogeza here, Carey. Have you got a title
yet on the Eisenstein piece?”

No, I didn’t. I was about to make another note
when the third message started: “Oh, you’ve left already. I wanted to
remind you to bring the Molly Haskell book, but never mind.”

Well. A strange sensation
that, hearing a voice from beyond the grave. I erased the tape, finished
my drink, and went to bed.

*

My street door intercom doesn’t work. I’ve
talked to the super about it, but he only speaks some fungoid variant of
Spanish understood exclusively on a six-mile stretch of the southern coast of Puerto Rico. I’ve also talked to the landlord, an old
man with a nose like a tumor, and his response was the same as to anything his
tenants say to him; a twenty-five minute diatribe on economics, expounding a
theory so arcane, so foolish, so contradictory and so absurd that I’m surprised
the government has never tried it. Or maybe they have.

In any event, when the bell rang at
nine-thirty the morning after Laura’s accident I couldn’t find out who it was before letting them in, but who could it be other
than the police? Wouldn’t they automatically question all of Laura’s friends,
everybody in her address book? Bracing myself, I left my half-eaten omelet and
buzzed them in.

Him in. When I opened
the apartment door and listened, only one set of footsteps was trudging up the
stairs. But didn’t cops always travel in pairs?

Apparently not. When
he rounded the turn at the landing I saw a stranger, a chunky middle-aged man
in brown topcoat and black hat, looking something like Martin Balsam in
Psycho
.
And coming up the stairs toward me; so I should quick put on
my Granny drag and run shrieking out to stab him.

In fact I should have, but of course I didn’t.
Instead, I stood in my doorway looking open and honest and innocent and
friendly, and when he reached the top of the stairs I said, in a we’re-here-to-help-you manner, “Yes?”

“Morning,” he said, and smiled. He
was puffing a bit from the climb, and seemed in no hurry to get his words out.
“Mr. Thorpe, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Can I help you?”

“Well, sir,” he said, “I think
it’s the other way around. I think I can help
you
.”

Not
a cop? What was he, some sort of salesman?
I said, “What’s this about?”

“This,” he said. Taking a white
envelope from inside his coat, he extended it toward me.

Frowning, I said, “What’s that supposed
to be?”

“You left it behind.” He was still
smiling, in a casual self-contained way. “Last night,” he added.

“Last night?” Unwillingly I took the
thing from him and turned it over to see what was written on the other side.
Return address:
Warner Brothers, 666 Fifth Ave
. Neatly centered,
neatly typed, my own name and address.

The envelope! I’d remembered the damn letter,
but not the envelope. Where had it been?

He answered my unasked question: “Under
her.”

“Urn,” I said.

“Why don’t we talk inside?” he
suggested, still smiling, and walked into the apartment. I had to move aside or
we would have bumped. Then I closed the door and followed him into the living
room, where he stood nodding and smiling, looking at the movie posters, the one
wall of exposed brick, the mirrored alcove that gives the apartment its
illusion of space, the projector and screen set up at opposite ends of the
room, the unfinished breakfast on the small table by the kitchenette.
“Nice place,” he said. “Very nice.”

I moved reluctantly closer to him. He didn’t
look like cops in the movies, but what else could he be? “Are you from the
police?”

He gave me a quick amused glance. “Not
exactly,” he said, and sat down on the sofa. “The fact of the matter
is, I’m a private investigator.”

“A private
detective?” Several thousand private eye films swirled through my
head, most of them starring Dick Powell.

“I was on surveillance last night,”
he told me, “outside that apartment.”

I didn’t feel like standing any more. Sinking
into my leather director’s chair I said, “So she did put a tail on me.

His smile grew puzzled. “What say?”

“My wife.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “I
wouldn’t want to make trouble for an innocent party. No, sir, it didn’t have
anything to do with you. It was Mrs. Penney’s husband put the agency on the
job.”

“Husband?”
I’d known Laura had at one time been married, but
everybody
has a marriage or
two somewhere in their past and I’d always assumed hers was long since over and
done with. “You mean, she was still married?”

“That’s my understanding,” he said.
“Legally separated, I believe.”

And she’d been nagging
me
to break the old
ties. Now I saw the whole plot; she’d hold on to husband number one until I was
lined up to take his place. Devious devious women, they’re all alike. Josef Von
Sternberg knew what he was talking about.

The detective spoke through my interior
monologue. “The point is, I was there. I watched
the two of you go into the building, and then quite some time later I watched
you come out alone, and I must say, Mr. Thorpe, rarely have I seen a man act as
guilty as you did. I didn’t know what it was all about, of course, but I
thought probably I ought to keep an eye on you.”

“You followed me.”

“That’s just what I did,” he agreed.
“And I noticed another peculiar thing. You must have let half a dozen
empty cabs go by, but then when you got to Sheridan Square you were suddenly in a real frantic rush to
hail a cab and jump in and holler out your address.”

He paused, with a bright alert smiling look,
as though offering me a chance to compliment him on his powers of observation.
I refrained.

He went on. “Well, it seemed to me you
didn’t want anybody tracing you from Mrs. Penney’s apartment, and I thought
that
a little peculiar. So I followed you uptown here, and waited to see which
lights went on, and got your name from the doorbell. You really ought to ask who’s there before you let anybody in, you know, just as a
by-the-by.”

“The intercom’s broken.”

“Then you ought to get it fixed. Believe
me, it’s my business and I know, you can’t have too
much security.”

“I’ve talked to the super and the
landlord both. Wait a minute! What are we talking about?”

“You’re right,” he said, “I got
myself off the subject. I’m a bug on safety, I take all kinds of precautions
for myself and I’m all the time pushing safety on everybody else. Let me see,
now. After I got your name from the doorbell I went back downtown and let
myself into Mrs, Penney’s apartment.”

That surprised me. “You had a key?”

“Well,” he said, with another of his
little smiles, “I have a whole lot of keys. Generally there’s one for the
job.”

“You broke in, in other words.”

“Well, sir, Mr. Thorpe,” he said,
“I don’t think you ought to start using harsh words, you know. There’s two
of us could do that.”

“All right, all right.
Get to the point.”

“Well, you know what I found in the
apartment.”

“This envelope,” I said, waggling
the fist in which I had it imprisoned.

“Yes,” he said, “and a body on
top of it. From the marks on the coffee table and the floor, it looked to me as
though there’d been some sort of fracas. You struck her—there’s a bit of a gray
spot on the side of the jaw, she was dead before it could swell up any—and she
hit her head on the coffee table going down.”

“It was an accident,” I said.

He did a judicious pose, pursing out his lips
and stroking the line of his jaw; Sidney Greenstreet. “That’s a
possibility,” he said. “On the other hand, you did run away, and you
did try to cover your presence in the apartment, and if you’ll look at this
picture here you’ll see you
do
just look guilty as all hell.”

From inside his coat he had taken a
photograph, which he now leaned forward to extend toward me. I took it, with
the hand not crushing the envelope, and looked at a grainy but recognizable
black-and-white picture of myself emerging from Laura’s apartment building. By
God, I
did
look guilty as all hell, with my mouth open and eyes staring and
head half-twisted to look over my shoulder. I also looked very bulky, as though
I’d just stolen all the silver. Mostly I reminded me of Peter Loire in
M.
“I see,” I said.

“Infra red,” he told me. He seemed
very pleased with himself. “The negative’s in my desk at the office.”

I looked up from my own staring eyes into his
calmly humorous ones. “What now? What are you going to do?”

“Well, sir,” he said, “I think
of that as being up to you.”

And suddenly we were in a situation I
recognized from the movies. “Blackmail,” I said.

He looked a bit offended. “Well,
now,” he said, “there you go with the harsh words again. I just
thought you might be interested in buying the negative, that’s all.”

“And your
silence?”

“I wouldn’t want to get a man in trouble,
if I could avoid it.” He shifted his bulk on the sofa. “Now, I’m
supposed to turn in my report by twelve noon, and it seems to me I could handle it one
of two ways. Either I could say a gentleman—that would be you—brought Mrs.
Penney home but left her at the street door and went away, or I could report
that you went in with her and came out without her and please see photo
attached.”

I said, “How much?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s a very
rare photograph.”

“And I’m a very poor man.”

He chuckled at me, disbelievingly. “Oh,
come along now. You’ve got a nice place in a rich part of town, you’ve—”

“This isn’t a rich part of town. A couple
blocks west of here is rich, but not here.”

“This is the Upper East Side,” he informed me, as though I didn’t
know where I lived.

“Look,” I said. “You just
walked up the stairs yourself, do you think they have
walk-ups in a rich part of town?”

“On the Upper East Side of Manhattan they
do. Besides, you’re a writer.”

“I’m a movie reviewer. There isn’t any
money in that.”

“You’ve had books out.”

“Film criticism.
Did you ever see a book of film criticism on the best-seller list?”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the
best-seller list,” he said, “but I do know from my years with the
agency that successful writers tend to have nice pieces of money about
themselves.”

“I don’t,” I said. “For God’s
sake, man, you’re a detective, surely you could check into that, find out if
I’m a liar or not. I’ll show you my checkbook, I’ll
show you letters from my wife screaming for money, I’ll show you my old income
tax returns.”

“Well, sir,” he said, “if you’re
too
poor, I think I’d be better off going for the
glory of making the arrest.”

A cold breeze touched me. “Wait a
minute,” I said. “I didn’t say I don’t have
any
money. Obviously, if
I can afford to pay I’d rather do that than go to jail. It just depends how
much you want.”

He frowned at me. He studied me and thought it
over and glanced around the living room—and to think I’d been pleased at how
expensive I’d made the place look—and at last he came to a decision: “Ten
thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand dollars!
I don’t have it.”

“I won’t bargain with you, Mr.
Thorpe.” He sounded rueful but determined. “I couldn’t falsify my
report for a penny less.”

“I don’t have the money,
it’s as simple as that.”

He heaved himself to his feet. “I’m truly
sorry, Mr. Thorpe.”

“I’ll tell them, you know. That you tried to blackmail me.

He gave me a mildly curious frown.
“So?”

“They’ll know it’s the truth.” I
jammed the photograph into my trouser pocket. “I’ll have this picture for
evidence.”

He shrugged and smiled and shook his head.
“Oh, they’d probably believe you,” he said, “but they wouldn’t
care. Funny thing about police, they’d rather catch a murderer than a
blackmailer any day in the week.”

“They’ll have both. I may go to jail, but
you’ll go right along with me.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” He could not
have been more calm. “I’d be their whole case,
you know,” he said. “Their star witness. I
don’t think they’d want to cast any aspersions on their own star witness, do
you? I think you’d generally be called a liar. I think generally people would
say you were doing it out of spite.”

I thought. He watched me thinking, with his
curly little smile, and finally I said, “Two thousand. I could raise that somewhere, I’m sure I could.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Thorpe, I told you I
won’t bargain. It’s ten thousand or nothing.”

“But I don’t
have
it! That’s the Lord’s
own truth!”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Thorpe, surely you’ve
got something set aside for a rainy day.”