Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (5 page)

“Yesterday. We
had dinner together.”

“You brought her home?”

“Yes, of course.”

“At about what
time?”

“Possibly nine, nine-thirty, I don’t know
exactly.”

“And when did you leave?”

“Oh, I didn’t stay,” I said.
“In fact, I didn’t come up, I simply saw her to the door.”

“You didn’t come up?” He sounded
mildly surprised. “Wasn’t that unusual?”

“Not at all. I
wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression about our relationship, we weren’t…lovers, or anything like that. I have a steady girl friend, named Kit
Markowitz.”

“You and Mrs. Penney were just good
friends,” he suggested.

Was there irony in that remark? His manner
seemed bland, unsuspicious; I took him at face value and said, “That’s
right. But are you suggesting—” I paused, as though struck by a sudden
disquieting thought. “Did somebody do something to her?”

He frowned. “Such as
what, Mr. Thorpe?”

“I don’t know, I was just—I just
remembered what she was saying last night.”

“And what was that?”

“It was all very vague,” I said.
“She had the idea there was a man hanging around, following her. She
pointed him out last night, standing on the sidewalk across the street.”

“You saw this man?”

“He was just a man,” I said.
“He didn’t seem interested in Laura or me in particular. She had the idea
her ex-husband had hired somebody to make trouble for her.”

“Do you know Mr. Penney?”

“No. I believe he’s in Chicago or
somewhere.”

He nodded. “Could you describe the man
you saw last night?”

“I only saw him for a minute. Across the street.”

“As best you can.”

“Well, I’d say he was in his mid-forties.
Wearing a brown topcoat. He seemed heavyset, and I got
the impression of a large nose. Sort of a W. C. Fields
nose.”

Bray nodded throughout my description, but
wrote nothing down. “And you say Mrs. Penney seemed afraid of this
man?”

“Well, not afraid, exactly. Upset, I
suppose. I offered to come upstairs with her if she was worried, but she said
she wanted to phone her husband. I had the idea she wanted privacy for
that.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Sergeant Bray, uh—Is
it Sergeant Bray?”

“That’s right.”

“Well—Could you
tell me what happened?”

“We’re not entirely sure as yet,” he
told me. “Mrs. Penney fell in this room and struck her head. She might
have been alone here, she might have slipped. On the other hand, it seems
likely there was someone with her.”

“Why?” I asked, and movement to my
left made me turn my head.

It was another one, in black pea jacket and
brown slacks, coming into the room from deeper in the apartment and carrying
what I recognized immediately as my socks. As I caught sight of him he said,
“Al, I found these and—Oh, sorry.”

“Come on in, Fred. This is Carey
Thorpe.”

Fred grinned in recognition. “Right. Dinner, seven-thirty.”

“Mr. Thorpe,” Bray said, “my
partner, Detective Sergeant Staples.”

I got to my feet, unsure whether or not we
were supposed to shake hands. “How do you do?”

“Fair to
middling.” This one was a bit younger than Bray and looked more
easygoing. He said, “Would you be the movie reviewer?”

“As a matter of fact,
yes.”

“I read you all the time,” Staples
told me. “In
The Kips Bay Voice
. My wife and I
both, we think you’re terrific, we swear by you.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“If you say a movie’s good, we go. If you
say it stinks, we stay away from it.”

“I hardly know what to say,” I
admitted, and it was the truth. Such extravagant praise had never come my way
before.

“Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby, we just
don’t care.”

Even praise can reach a surfeit, and I was
happy to be rescued by Bray, who interrupted his partner by saying, “What
have you got there, Fred?”

“Oh, yeah.”
He held them up like a dead rabbit. “Socks.”

Bray seemed to find that significant. “Ah
hah,” he said. “I thought so.”

I said, “Excuse me, is that a clue?”

Staples probably would have answered, but Bray
asked me a question first: “Was Mrs. Penney involved with any man in
particular, that you know of?”

“A lover?”
I shook my head, frowning with thought. “I don’t think so. She was usually
available for an evening out, and I never heard her talk about any steady boy
friend.”

“Well, there was one,” Staples said.
“And he looks like our man, doesn’t he, Al?”

“Could be.”

I found myself watching these two as though
they were characters in a movie I’d be writing up, noticing with approval the
complementary types they offered. Bray was the slower and more methodical,
while Staples was intuitive and emotional. Bray, in character, now said,
“On the other hand, he could have come in afterward, found the body, and
figured he ought to keep himself out of it.”

“I still think it’s the boy friend,”
Staples said.

“Except for the glass,” Bray told
him. “If he lived here, wouldn’t he have known about that?”

Something trembled in my stomach. Trying to
sound no more than ordinarily curious, I said, “Glass?”

This time Staples got to answer the question.
“There was one glass in the living room here,” he said, “with a
partly-consumed drink in it. But in the kitchen cabinet was another glass that
had been washed and put away. So the killer had a drink with her, and then
after she was dead he washed his glass.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “How did
you know all that? If he washed the glass, how did you find out?”

“He put it in the cabinet right side up.
Mrs. Penney stored her glasses upside down, so that one glass was put away by
somebody else.”

“By God,” I said, “real-life
detectives are just like the movies.”

Staples grinned like an Irish setter. “We
get lucky sometimes.”

“No, I can see it’s a special kind of
talent,” I insisted, giving him a return overdose of praise while at the
same time cursing myself for that stupidity about the glass. Of course she kept
her damn glasses upside down, I knew that, but I must have been more rattled
than I’d thought. The shelf is high, and the damn glasses look the same right
side up or upside down.

Bray said to his partner, “If the guy was
living here, he’d know which way the glasses went.”

“Not if he got rattled,” Staples
said. “Besides, I don’t think he actually lived here, I think he just
stayed overnight sometimes.”

I said, “That’s the significance of the
socks?”

Staples grinned again; by golly, this was
another chance to dazzle me with his sleuthing. “They’re more significant
than that,” he said, and when he went on he addressed himself equally to
his partner and to me. “These socks were the only male clothing in the
bedroom. Now, the razor and stuff in the bathroom don’t mean much, they could
even belong to the victim herself. But these socks mean a man, and one that
stayed here often enough to keep some extra clothing around. And you see what
else they mean?”

I had to admit I didn’t, but Bray already
knew. “He cleaned his stuff out,” he said.

Staples pointed an approving finger at him. “Right! He left the socks because there’s no way to
trace anybody from socks like these. But he took everything else because maybe
they could be traced. Laundry marks, initials, whatever.” Turning his
beaming face toward me, he said, “Now, you see what that means. That means
guilty knowledge.”

“Ah,” I said.

Bray, the cautious one, said, “I agree
with you, Fred, up to a point. There is a boy friend and he did clear his stuff
out after the victim was killed. But I still think there’s a good chance he
came in after she was dead, realized he could be in a lot of trouble, and tried
to cover his tracks.”

“Maybe so,” Staples said.
“Maybe there’s two guys out there in front of us,
but I still think there’s only one.”

“And there’s something else,” Bray
told him. He then had me repeat my story about the mysterious man across the
street, after which he said, “So he could be the killer, too.”

I said, “Excuse me, I’m not trying to
play detective with you, but she didn’t know who that man was, so she wouldn’t
sit down and have a drink with him, would she?”

Staples now did his finger-pointing in my
direction, saying, “Very good, Mr. Thorpe, very good. Of course it’s
possible, the guy could have come up and said he had a message from her husband
or whatever, she asks him in for a drink and he kills her. That’s possible, but
it isn’t very likely.”

I said, “Or maybe the killer did the
thing with the glass to throw you off, make you think it was somebody Laura
knew socially.”

This time Staples’ smile was condescending.
“Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I hate to say this, but you’ve been
seeing too many movies. In real life killers don’t get that cute. Visualize it
for yourself; the guy gets in the apartment, kills Mrs. Penney, then he comes
into the kitchen and turns over one glass so we’ll think he knows her socially.
People just don’t act that way.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

Bray said, “I guess that’s about all
we’ll need you for at the moment, Mr. Thorpe. If we want to talk to you again,
I suppose you’ll be around.”

“Of course.”
Smiling at them both I said, “I wasn’t planning on going out of
town.”

Staples smiled back, but Bray didn’t.

*

Home again, I swallowed a Valium with bourbon
and sat down to listen to the messages on my answering machine. The first was from
Shirley, in her harsh ex-wife’s voice with its recently-acquired Boston accent: “There are some papers for you
to sign, whether you like it or not. I’m sending them today, special delivery,
and if we don’t get them back by Tuesday your father says I should hire a New York attorney. At your
expense.”

Lovely. Next came the voice of Tim Kinywa of
Third World Cinema
, also
sounding petulant: “Sogeza here, Carey. Could you possibly give us a title
on the Eisenstein piece? I need it before noon tomorrow if at all possible.”

Damn; I’d forgotten about that. Here before me
was the note I’d made, along with the note about the changed time for the
screening. I underlined both, while listening to my next message. A
secretary-type voice: “Mr. Thorpe, Mr. Brant will be in New York for a week, arriving Friday. If you’d care
to arrange an appointment, would you phone the Sherry-Netherland sometime
Saturday morning?”

I would. For six months I’d been trying to set
up an interview with Big John Brant, famous old-time director of such classics
as
Fury At Sundown, Tank Command, Fatal Lady
and
Smart
Alex
, and finally it was going to happen. Good.

The last message was from Kit: “Hello,
machine. Just wondered what your master was doing tonight. I’ll be in if he
feels like calling.”

Did I feel like calling? I considered the
question while I dialed Tim’s number and listened to his recorded announcement:
“Hello, caller, this is the number of Sogeza Kinywa and
Third World
Cinema
. We aren’t answering the phone just now, but if you’ll leave your name
and phone number on this tape well get back to you very soon. Kwaheri, and peace.”

Nobody talks to anybody any more. We just talk
to each other’s machines. “Hello, Tim,” I said to the machine.
“This is Carey, and the title is ‘The Influence of Eisenstein: Stairway To The Stars.’ I have an early screening tomorrow, but if
there’s any problem you can reach me at home after one.”

And now Kit. After
the day I’d had I wasn’t sure I could handle the warm-human-being role tonight,
but I ought to call her back anyway and see if anything developed. So I dialed,
and damn if I didn’t get her machine: “Kit Markowitz here, on tape. I’m
really sorry not to answer in person, but if you’ll leave a message right after
the little beep, I’ll call you back just as soon as I can. Wait for it now, wait for it. Here it comes.”

She’d changed her announcement; the previous
one had been more standard. After the little beep I said, “Too cute, Kit.
This is Carey, and I’m home for the evening.”

After that, I settled down for a little work.
A new
New York
-type magazine called
The Loop
had started in Chicago, and I’d promised them a piece called
“Bogdanovitch: The Kid Brother As Leader Of The
Pack.” Linking Bogdanovitch and Ryan O’Neal through the seminal figure of
Lee Tracy was turning out to be more complicated than I’d anticipated.

Kit phoned half an hour later to say, “I don’t think it’s too cute.”

“It’s the wait for it that gets
me.”

“But that’s the whole idea.”

“I know.”

“You’re too linear,” she said; one
of her
au courant
but meaningless insults, the result of reading too many trade
paperbacks. “You doing anything tonight?”

I’d decided by now how to handle my news.
“The fact is,” I said, “I’m mostly getting over a shock. You
remember Laura Penney?”

“The girl with the
mouse-brown hair? The one you’ve been seeing so much of lately?”

Ah. Maybe I hadn’t been covering my tracks
quite so well as I’d thought. “Well, I won’t see
much of her any more,” I said. “She’s dead.”

“Good God!”

“Killed, in fact.”

“Oh, Jesus. One of those rape things?”

“I don’t think so. It happened in her
apartment. I was suppose to take her to dinner tonight, I went over th—”

“You
found
her! Oh, my
God!
”

“Not quite that bad. The police were
there.”

“Oh, baby, what an experience. Do they
suspect you?”

I was shocked—truly shocked—at the suggestion.
“Why would they do that?”

“I thought the police were supposed to
suspect everybody.”

“Oh. Then maybe they do suspect me, I
don’t know. They didn’t act that way.”