Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (6 page)

“You sound
very
jittery. Want me to come
over?”

Did I? The half-finished page in the
typewriter grayed before my eyes. “I’d love it,” I said.

*

“I love your pubic hair,” I said.

She came over to the bed, carrying the two
drinks. “What kind of compliment is that?”

“A sincere one.”
I took my drink and made room for her beside me in the bed. Looking at the
feature in question, I said, “It’s furry, but not too much. It has a
friendly quality.”

“I bet you say that to all your
girls.”

I did, as a matter of fact, so I remained
silent while she arranged the covers over herself. On the TV facing the bed the
fifty all-time greatest hits of some obsolescent teenage castrati were being
peddled in an extremely hard sell. “As somebody once said about Marion
Davies,” I said, nodding at the screen, “‘Forgotten, but not gone.’”

It was nearly midnight, and if that Kallikak on the tube would
ever stop yowling we would go on watching
The Thin Man
, a film I was enjoying
this evening in a very new and different way. The day was ending far better
than it had begun. Kit had come over around nine-thirty, we’d gone at once to
bed, and then I’d been subjected to an hour’s conversation on the general
subject What Happened To Laura Penney And Why? Kit,
like Detective Staples, believed that Laura had a secret boy friend and that he
was the killer. I couldn’t tell her she was absolutely right, of course, but on
the other hand I didn’t want to be suspiciously negative, so I maintained a thoughtful neutrality on the subject and let Kit do most
of the talking.

A good girl, Kit, all in
all, about the best of my recent women. An acquisitions editor for a
reprint publisher, she was attractive, divorced, childless, bright, funny and self-supporting;
what more could a liberated male want?

William Powell returned, with Asta. They put
Myrna Loy in a cab headed for Grant’s Tomb and went off hunting the murderer by
themselves. Kit said, “Could it be Jay English?”

I looked at her. “Could what be Jay
English?”

“The secret
lover.”

“He’s a fag,” I pointed out.

“Well, maybe he’s trying to go
straight.” She squinted at the TV, but it was Laura’s murder she was
trying to solve, not Julia Wolfe’s. “That’s why they kept it secret, because they weren’t sure it would work out.”

“In the first place,” I said,
“Jay English doesn’t want to go straight. And in the second place, he’s
still living with that fellow whatsisname.”

“Dave Something.”

“That’s the one.”

“Ah!” Sitting up straighter in the
bed, she said, “He’s the killer!”

“Who?”

“Dave. Because he found
out about Jay and Laura!”

“You’re a madwoman,” I told her.

“Then who do you think it is?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

She studied me, as though trying to guess my
weight. “You were hanging around her a lot lately,” she said.
“Maybe you’re the one.”

“If I am,” I said, “you’re in a
lot of trouble right now.”

There was no way to tell from her expression
whether she was serious or joking. “You took her to that press screening
yesterday.”

“Only because you
couldn’t go.”

“What did you do after?”

“We went to dinner, I took her home, I came back here.”

“You weren’t here at ten o’clock.”

“Of course I was.”

“I called at ten and got your machine.”

I put my drink on the bedside table and
half-turned to face her. “Are you serious?”

“I called at ten,” she repeated,
“and I got your machine.” Yet she didn’t look or act as though she
thought of herself as being in bed with a murderer.

I said, “I was running a film, for a
piece I’m doing.
Top Hat
. You know I turn the machine
on when I do that.”

“I bet the police suspect you,” she
said.

“Do you?”

“What?” She stared at me, startled,
and said, “Hey! You’re really upset.”

“Of course I am.”

“I don’t
really
think it’s you,
silly,” she said, thumping me on the belly. “I think it’s Jay’s boy
friend Dave.”

“So do I,”
I said. “But the big question is, who do you
think killed Julia Wolf?”

“Who?”

I nodded at the TV screen, where Asta was
finding another body. “In the movie we’re allegedly watching.”

“Oh.” She shrugged, not very
interested. “I’ve seen it before,” she said. “It’s the
lawyer.”

THREE

The Wicker Case

In the morning Kit
called her office with some he, and then we went to the screening together;
some French
ancien vague
item called
L’Abbé de Lancaster
, full of reaction shots and shrugged shoulders. “They
smoke a lot in the provinces, don’t they?” Kit said after a while.

Following a quick
lunch together, Kit went on to work and I returned to the apartment to put
together my review of
L’Abbé de Lancaster
for
The Kips Bay Voice
. But before
that I had telephone messages to run.

Three
of them. The first, from Tim Kinywa, thanked me for the title and told
me there were no problems, while the third was from a “friend” of
mine, a fellow film critic, saying, “Nothing important, I’ll call
again.” I knew what that was; he had a collection of his magazine pieces
coming out, and he wanted a plug.

But it was the second call that disturbed me.
“That recording sounds exactly like you, Mr. Thorpe,” said the cheery
voice of Detective Sergeant Fred Staples. “When you get home, would you
give Detective Staples a call? The number is seven seven five, five four nine
nine. Thanks a lot.”

Now what? Kit’s casual unsuspicious
questioning last night had shaken my confidence, and I was no longer sure I
could keep ahead of the team of dour-methodical-Bray and
cheerful-intuitive-Staples. Why would he be calling me? What had I forgotten?

So I swallowed a Valium and returned the call.
He was in, and he said, “Hi, Mr. Thorpe. You free for a while this
afternoon?”

“I, well, yes, I suppose so. Why?”

“I’d like to ask your help,” he
said.

The recurring police line from British mystery
movies came into my head:
“We’d like you to help us with our
inquiries
.” That line was never spoken to anybody but the murderer. I
said, “I’ll be happy to help, if I can. I’ll be in all afternoon.”

“I’ll come over in about, oh, half an
hour. Okay?”

“Fine,” I said.

I spent the half hour doing the film review,
and I’m afraid I gave the poor Abbé of Lancaster a heavier drubbing than he
deserved. I was still pounding away when the bell rang. Taking it for granted
this was Staples, I buzzed to let him in and popped
another Valium while he came upstairs.

It was Staples; cheerful and bouncy as ever,
but puffing a bit from the climb. He shook my hand and greeted me merrily
enough, but was there a hint of suspicion deep within his eyes? Remembering the
movie lore that policemen don’t drink with people they intend to arrest—wasn’t
that from
Beat The Devil
?—I said, “Care for a
drink? A beer? Some wine?”

“No, thanks,” he
said, still smiling. “Too early in the day for
me.”

Hell and damnation. Hoping only that he would
turn out to be another blackmailer, I closed the door and offered him a chair.
Taking it, he said, “First off, I might as well tell you you’re off the
hook. Not that you were ever on it, at least not very much.”

I looked at him, not sure I understood. “Off the hook?”

“Your innocence has been
established,” he said.

I sat down in the director’s chair.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

“The funny thing is,” he told me,
“it was through that fella that Laura Penney told you about. The one she
said was following her.”

“It was?”

“We got in touch with the husband last
night. Mr. Penney. And darn if he didn’t have private detectives watching his
wife. He’d just put them on the case a few days ago.”

“They don’t seem to have helped
much.”

“They were supposed to collect evidence
for a divorce or something.” Shaking his head, he said, “I can’t
understand anybody like that, can you? Sneaking around, putting detectives to
watch their wife. Maybe it’s because my own marriage is so good, but I just
can’t comprehend a man who’d do a thing like that.”

Nodding, I said, “I know, it doesn’t seem
right. But if you look in the Yellow Pages, there’s a
lot of agencies specializing in that sort of thing. They must get their
customers somewhere.”

“I suppose so.” This insight into a
darker corner of human nature had
robbed Staples almost entirely of his sunny smile, but now he rallied, saying,
“But in this case it did us some good.”

“You found the killer?”

“Not yet, but we’ve narrowed things down.
We got in touch with the detective agency this morning, and they gave us their
dossier. We have photographs of just about everybody Mrs. Penney saw in the
last few days. We even have a picture of you. Want to see it?”

Peter Lorre in
M.
“I’d be
fascinated.”

He took from his jacket pocket a white
envelope with a red rubber band around it. First he transferred the rubber band
to his wrist, then he opened the envelope and took out a little bunch of
photographs; small ones, about two-and-a-half by four-and-a-half. He selected
one of these, chuckled at it, and handed it over.

Not Peter Lorre in
M
. Rock Hudson and Doris
Day in
Pillow Talk
. That was me there, seeing Laura chastely to her door, and
this photograph did not suggest that I would next go upstairs with her and
commit murder.

“Nice picture,” Staples suggested.

I sighed. “The last time Laura was alive.
May I keep this?”

“Well, sure,” he said. “We
don’t need it, because you aren’t the killer.”

“This picture tells you that?”

“No, the fellow who took the picture told
us. He was on watch outside the apartment building until one in the morning,
and he’s willing to swear you never went back into the place during that
time.”

Why wouldn’t he swear to it? Never went back
in; that was the simple truth. (And how it must have galled
Edgarson that he couldn’t put my head in the noose.)

Could I still make a little trouble for him? I
said, “Then the private detective must have
seen the killer.”

“If he did,” Staples said, “he
didn’t recognize him. Or it’s possible the killer was already in the apartment,
waiting for Mrs. Penney, and he used another way out of the building. Say
through the side exit from the basement. Which would suggest
premeditation.”

“From Sergeant Bray’s description,”
I said, “it didn’t sound like premeditation. It sounded more like a fight,
an angry flare-up or something.”

Staples nodded. “Everything points to a
sudden argument with a friend. That’s why I’d like you to take a look at the
rest of these pictures—” extending them across to me “—and see how
many of the men you can identify.”

“Ah. You think it might be one of
these.” Half a dozen photos; I riffled through them and saw a succession
of blurred but familiar faces.

“We’re not limiting ourselves to
those,” Staples told me. “At this point, it could be anybody.”

“Except me,” I said, and the phone
rang.

Chuckling and nodding, Staples said,
“That’s right, except you.”

I got to my feet, crossing toward the desk,
saying over my shoulder, “I’ll turn on my answering machine, so we won’t
be interrupted.”

But, through the phone’s second ring, Staples
said, “I’d rather you did answer it, if you don’t mind. I left this number
at the office, so it might be for me.”

“Oh. Fine.”

And damned if it wasn’t.
When I picked up the receiver and said hello, a gruff male voice that might
have been Sergeant Bray said, “Staples there?”

“Coming up.”
I turned and extended the receiver, saying, “You were right.”

He came smiling over to take the phone and
announce himself cheerily into it. To be polite I pretended absorption in the
photographs—cold faces, bulky overcoated bodies, Laura in several unimportant
public moods,
cinema verite
at its absolute lowest—while I listened to Staples’
share of the conversation.

It turned out to be the wrong share; the meat
was with the other participant. Staples limited himself
mostly to
yeah
and
nope
and
got it
, while making quick pencil notes in a small
pad. Finishing with, “Be right there,” he hung up and put his pad
away.

He was leaving? Good; exonerated or not, I
still felt nervous in his presence.

But even though he’d promised to be right
there, he showed no hurry about moving on. Turning to me, he said, “Would
you know a movie director named Jim Wicker?”

“Two features,” I said.
“Neither very good. I don’t know him personally,
he’s a West Coast type. Young, up from television commercials, hasn’t shown
much promise vet.

“Well, he won’t show any at all from now
on,” Staples told me. “Somebody just shot him.”

“Shot
him?”

“About four blocks from here, while he
was watching his new movie.” Chuckling in his bubbly way he said, “I
guess that’s
real
criticism, huh?”

“New movie?”
I tried to remember what I’d read in the trades recently about Jim Wicker.
“Oh, that would be
The Sound Of Distant Drums
,
for Lanisch-Sanssky.”

“Lanisch-Sanssky?
Do you know these people?”

“I know who they are, they’re in my
field.”

“Would that be Hugo Lanisch?”

“Yes, of course. He ran Twentieth Century
Fox for six weeks three or four years ago. Why?”

“Because it was in his house that Wicker
got killed,” Staples said. Then, apparently struck by a sudden thought, he
said, “Listen, Mr. Thorpe, how would you like to come along?”