Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (21 page)

“Probably was,” Staples agreed. And
that should have been the end of it, except that he stood there holding the
anonymous letter in one hand, rapping the folded edge of it against his other
thumbnail and frowning as though unhappy about something.

I said, “Is there more?”

“I’m afraid there is, Carey. You know
we’re pretty much at a dead end in this case, so we have to follow any lead we
get. I’m sorry.”

“Well, sure. I understand that.”

Into his jacket he went again, and came out
with a folded document that looked vaguely like a lease. “So we went to
court,” he said, “and got a search warrant. I’m sorry, Carey, but we
have to look for that key.”

I was surprised, and more than a little
annoyed. “For God’s sake, Fred, I told you I never had such a key.”

“We’re going to have to search the
premises. I’m sorry,” he added, saying that for the fourth or fifth time.
He kept being sorry, but on the other hand he was obviously determined to
search the apartment.

Patricia. Had she left any
little something-or-other that her husband shouldn’t see? No, I didn’t
think so, but what a hell of a complication that would make.

Al Bray now finally spoke. “Do you have a
key ring, Carey?”

“Yes, of course.” I took it from my
pocket and handed it to him. From his own trouser pocket he took an ordinary
Yale-type brass key, and compared it with all of mine.

What if one matched? But it couldn’t, I didn’t
have any goddam basement key. This whole thing was absurd.

Nevertheless, I felt a surprising rush of
relief when at last he shook his head, handed me back my keys, and said,
“Not there.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“We’ll want to search now, Carey,”
Staples said.

“Go right ahead. Do you want me to
help?”

Staples grinned, but not with much humor.
“I don’t think so,” he said.

Al Bray said to me, “Why not just sit
down on the sofa there? We won’t take very long.”

So that’s what I did. I sat on the sofa, and
Al Bray went into the bedroom to conduct the search there while Fred Staples searched
in the living room, and I tried to figure out just what the hell was going on
around here.

In the first place, who had sent that
anonymous letter, and why? And what was all this about a key? What was
happening? For the first time, I didn’t feel in control of the situation, and
that was frightening.

I understand the police slang word for a
search is “toss,” though Staples and Bray hadn’t used that word with
me. In any event, they tossed my place for about five minutes before Staples
looked up from my bottom desk drawer to call, “Hey, Al? I think I got
it.”

I stared at him across the room, and as Bray
came hurrying out of the bedroom I got to my feet. But Staples pointed a severe
finger at me, saying, “You wait there for just a minute, Carey.”

So I waited. Whatever key Staples had just
found in my desk drawer was matched against the key from Bray’s pocket, and I
could see by the looks they gave one another that it was a match. I said,
“Fred, what have you got there? Let me see it, will you?”

So they brought it over to me, and both of
their faces were much harder now. Al Bray had the two keys in the palm of one
hand, and he held it out so I could see them.

Two keys. Both Yale-type, both brass. The hills and valleys looked
identical. The only difference was that one of them—the one Staples
had just found—was shiny and new.

I said, “I never saw that key before in
my life.” And even as I was saying it, I could hear what a weak cliche
line it was. How many movies had contained that line, and how many times had it
been believed?

Also my next remark: “Somebody planted it
there!”

“I’m sorry, Carey,” Staples said.
But this time he didn’t sound sorry at all.

I said, “Wait a minute. Look at it, it’s
brand new.”

Bray said, “Only used once, maybe.”

“But it’s not mine.”

Bray put the two keys away in his pocket.
Staples said, “Better get your coat on, Carey.”

*

In the car, heading downtown through the
pelting rain, I figured it out. Al Bray drove, up front with the police radio
intermittently squawking, and Staples rode in back with me. I spent the first
dozen blocks trying to get my bearings, trying to understand what had happened
and why—had
Edgarson
planted that key there?—and then I turned my head and saw
Staples* stony profile, saw him looking straight ahead with no expression at
all on his face, and all at once I got it.

“Oh, damn it to hell,” I said. I
didn’t speak loudly enough for Bray to hear, not over the radio and the
windshield wipers and the rain, but Staples heard me all right. A muscle moved
in his jaw.

I said, “You were afraid the killer might
try for me again anyway, regardless of what I’d said. So you were keeping an
eye on me, without letting me know. Being a pal.”

Staples neither moved nor spoke. The hard gray
glass of the window beyond him streamed with rainwater.

I could see it, I
could see exactly how it had happened. Tuesday afternoon he’d been watching,
and Patricia had come into my building, and two hours later Patricia had come
out again, and when he’d questioned her casually that evening she’d undoubtedly
said she’d been home all day.

In fact…In fact, now that I thought about
it, there was that annoying phone call about ten minutes after Patricia’d
arrived. Without my answering machine, we’d had to put up with the ringing
until the caller had quit. Eighteen rings, I remember counting them.

Staples in a phone booth,
counting the eighteen rings.

But what a hell of a
revenge. All right, all right, he used to carry on so much about how
perfect Patricia was, what a perfect couple they were,
so this thing had to leave him with a certain amount of egg on his face, but
wasn’t he overreacting just a little? I mean, he was framing me for murder.

He was
framing
me. For
murder.

He had written that anonymous letter himself.
He had carried that incriminating key into my apartment in his own pocket.

All right. What man
does, man can undo. I had to persuade him, that’s all,
I had to convince him that he didn’t want to do this thing. And I only had a
few minutes, because once we got downtown and the official business started,
there wouldn’t be any way for him to change his mind.

But how? What should
I say to him? Tell him that Patricia loves him, that we’d had one brief crazy
mistake and—?

No. That expressionless rockbound face told me
one thing for sure; I should not mention Patricia’s name. Somehow I had to get
him to stop doing this thing without ever saying out loud his reason for doing
it.

What, then? Friendship?
No; it wasn’t long enough or deep enough. Danger to himself?
There wasn’t any, to begin with, and in any event I was sure he didn’t care.

Professionalism.
Pride of accomplishment, that was my only chance.
Leaning closer to him, speaking softly enough so Bray wouldn’t be able to hear,
I said, “You don’t want to do this, Fred. If you do this, the real killer
will get away.”

Nothing. No response.

“You don’t want that to happen, Fred.
Think of poor Laura Penney, think of Kit. If you do this, their deaths will go
unpunished.”

Nothing.

“Fred,” I said, becoming more
desperate, “don’t you care who killed Laura and Kit? Don’t you care?”

He looked at me, at last. He studied me for
five seconds with his very cold eyes, and then he said, “No.” And faced front.

I couldn’t believe it. “But that’s your
job,” I said. “That’s your vocation. Doesn’t it matter to you?”

Apparently he was finished expressing himself.
He sat silent, facing front.

I kept trying for another twenty blocks,
talking at him every time the radio blare cut Al Bray out of earshot, appealing
to Staples’ moral sense, his ethics, his pride in a job well done, and I might
as well have been talking to an Easter Island statue. The only time he spoke or
moved or did anything at all was when I skirted the subject of Patricia, just
hinting slightly at the reason for all this, and when I did that he said, while
still facing front, “Better be careful. You could get yourself shot trying
to escape.”

He meant it, too.

After that I subsided, casting about in my
mind for some other way off this hook, and gradually I became very annoyed. I
had done everything right, everything. I had committed three murders and
covered myself brilliantly and gotten away with all three of them clean, and
now this overly-possessive husband, this damned jealous—Framed for a murder I
committed! It isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” I
said at last, driven by exasperation. “The wrong one of us is a detective,
that’s for sure. The only way you can make an arrest is to frame somebody.
Who’s going to solve your crimes for you after I’m gone?”

He didn’t respond to that either, so I gave
him some more: “You can’t do anything right, do you know that? No
wonder—” But, no; I did not want to be shot trying to escape. So I started
again: “You couldn’t even get George Templeton.”

He frowned at that, and turned finally to give
me a puzzled look. “Templeton?”

“The fellow whose wife
went off the terrace in the snow.”

“I remember him. What about him?

“I only took your side because I thought
you were my friend,” I told him. “But Al Bray was right, Templeton
killed his wife.”

Staples squinted, apparently trying to read on
my face whether I was lying or not. “You’re just saying that,” he
decided. “Because you’re sore.”

“Am I? I’ll tell you the two things that
prove it. The frostbitten plants in the window, and the fact
that the only disturbances in the snow on the terrace were the
footprints.”

“Explain,” he said.

“Templeton hit her and she died,” I
explained. “Hours before he threw her out. He kept the terrace doors open
and the body nearby to delay rigor mortis, so she’d look as though she died
later than she did. He put on her shoes and walked out to the end of the
terrace, being very careful not to touch anything, and then walked backwards
off the terrace in the same footprints. And then put the shoes back on the
body.”

“That’s just a theory,” Staples
said. “There isn’t any proof.”

“Not now, not any more.
The only way you’ll get Templeton is to frame him. But that morning there was
proof, only you were too dumb to see it.”

He was stung, but controlling himself.
“What proof?”

“Drunk or sober,” I told him, “there was no way for Mrs. Templeton to leave that terrace
without disturbing the snow on top of the railing. And it was untouched.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

“She never went off that terrace,” I
told him. “Templeton carried her downstairs and threw her out the living
room window.”

“You’re right.” He shook his head and
looked at me in obvious admiration, and actually smiled at me. “I’m going
to miss you, Carey,” he said.

Which was when it finally
became real for me. The chill air of prison touched the nape of my neck,
and I crouched more miserably inside my coat. Staples meant what he said; he
would miss me. He liked me, he was pleased to think of
himself as my friend, despite everything. But he would also frame me for Laura
Penney’s murder, frame me solid and convincing, and nothing on earth would stop
him.

I couldn’t talk any more. I turned away,
staring out the side window at the rain, looking at my future. How different it
would be from my past. All my cleverness, buried inside a
stone.

Staples was still
marveling over my final deduction. “You really are something, Carey,”
he told the back of my head. “In a lot of ways I don’t care for you very
much, but you sure are one hell of a detective.”

ORDO

ONE

My name is Ordo Tupikos, and I was born in
North Flat, Wyoming on November gth, 1936. My father was part Greek and part Swede and part
American Indian, while my mother was half Irish and half Italian. Both had been
born in this country, so I am one hundred per cent American.

My father, whose first name was Samos, joined the United States Navy on February
17th, 1942, and he
was drowned in the Coral
Sea on May 15th, 1943. At that
time we were living in West Bowl, Oklahoma, my mother and my two sisters and my
brother and I, and on October 12th of that year my mother married a man named Eustace St. Claude, who claimed to be half
Spanish and half French but who later turned out to be half Negro and half
Mexican and passing for white. After the divorce, my mother moved the family to
San Itari, California. She never remarried, but she did maintain a long-term relationship
with an air conditioner repairman named Smith, whose background I don’t know.

On July 12th, 1955, I followed my father’s footsteps by
joining the United States Navy. I was married for the first time in San Diego, California on March 11th, 1958, when I was twenty-one, to a girl named
Estelle Anlic, whose background was German and Welsh and Polish. She put on the
wedding license that she was nineteen, having told me the same, but when her
mother found us in September of the same year it turned out she was only
sixteen. Her mother arranged the annulment, and it looked as though I might be
in some trouble, but the Navy transferred me to a ship and that was the end of
that.

By the time I left the Navy, on June 17, 1959,
my mother and my half brother, Jacques St. Claude, had moved from California to
Deep Mine, Pennsylvania, following the air conditioner repairman named Smith,
who had moved back east at his father’s death in order to take over the family
hardware store. Neither Smith nor Jacques was happy to have me around, and I’d
by then lost touch with my two sisters and my brother, so in September of that
year I moved to Old Coral, Florida, where I worked as a carpenter (non-union)
and where, on January 7th, 1960, I married my second wife, Sally Fowler, who
was older than me and employed as a waitress in a diner on the highway toward
Fort Lauderdale.