Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (7 page)

“Come along? In what
way?”

“You could see the way a police
investigation works in real life,” he said. “And you could fill us in
on who these people are. I wouldn’t introduce you or anything,
you’d just be that sort of quiet cop in the corner. What do you say?”

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. I had become
the detective’s sidekick. “I say, lead on!” I told him.

*

Edgarson was in a car across the street. He
was bundled up in there, but I recognized him right away, with his glinting
little eyes glaring out from around the sides of his nose.

I turned my back, and Staples and I,
barrel-shaped in our overcoats, stuffed ourselves into his battered green Ford
with the police ID on the sun visor, and then we waited quite a while for
Staples to get the engine going. He kept flooding it, but remained cheerful,
with continuing comments about the cold weather. “I’d like to go down to Puerto Rico right after New Year’s,” he said,
“and not come back till St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Amen,” I said.

“If only I could afford it.”

“Amen again.”

He looked surprised. “Really?
Not prying or anything, Mr. Thorpe, but I had the idea you were sort of well
off.”

“I suppose I give that impression,”
I said. (And didn’t I know it.) “But I pretty much live up to
the hilt of my income. And then, I don’t have a family to support. Or a
car,” I added, as the Ford’s engine at last turned over.

“That makes a difference,” Staples
agreed. He gunned the motor a lot, and finally we got under way, with Staples
saying, “There’s no point turning on the heater. Takes it ten minutes to
warm up, and we’ll be there by then.”

I’d brought the Laura photos with me, and now
I said, “Did you want to talk about these pictures first, or the Jim
Wicker business?”

“Fill me in on Wicker,” he said. “And this fellow Hugo Whatsit.”

“Lanisch,” I said, and went on to
tell him what I knew of Lanisch-Sanssky Productions and Jim Wicker. Hugo
Lanisch and Gregor Sanssky, both old-line movie executives who’d been with the
studios thirty or thirty-five years ago when the studios really meant
something, had gone into independent production about fifteen years back,
turning out whatever was popular at the moment. They’d made some
science-fiction movies in England at one time, and more recently they’d done
a few period murder mysteries. They’d done well enough, but they’d never had a
major success.

Nor had Jim Wicker, a young man of about
thirty, a Californian who had served his apprenticeship grinding out television
commercials, graduated to a season of television adventure shows, and then made
two unremarkable theatrical feature films, the first for American International
and the second for some independent producer down in Florida. Wicker was a
technician, a man who did unexciting work but who always brought his projects
in on time and within budget. He was a perfect choice for Lanisch-Sanssky;
dependable and inexpensive.

All the time I was telling Staples this
unoriginal set of film lives I was also feeling the peevish stare of Edgarson on
the back of my neck. Was he following us? I didn’t dare turn around to look,
and the doubt made it hard to keep track of what I was saying.

Staples asked a few questions about Wicker and
Lanisch, but once he moved from the business level to the personal I was no
longer any help to him. I didn’t know if Wicker was married or even
heterosexual. I didn’t know if Lanisch was in debt.

“Well, here we are,” Staples said,
and pulled in at a handy hydrant on 67th Street between Madison and Park. “It’s that town
house there. You just keep silent and leave everything to me.”

“Right.”

We got out of the car and I chanced a quick
look back. I didn’t see Edgarson anywhere, but I could still feel him.

*

Bray didn’t like my presence, and he made no
bones about it. Staples and I met him just inside the front door, where he’d
been chatting with a uniformed policeman, and he gave me one quick disapproving
glance before saying to his partner, “What’s this?”

“Mr. Thorpe can be very helpful,
Al,” Staples said “He knows a lot about these people.”

Bray studied me. “You know Lanisch?”

“I don’t know any of them
personally,” I said. “But I do know who they are.”

Staples said, “He filled me in on the way
over. Don’t worry, Al, he’ll stand in the corner and he won’t say a word.”

“He’s your guest,” Bray said, as
though saying
he’s your responsibility
. Turning away, he said, “They’re
all upstairs.”

Staples gave me an encouraging smile, which I
hesitantly returned. Leaving the uniformed cop to his guard duty at the front,
we followed Bray through a stark high-ceilinged living room to a small elevator
with a porthole window in the door.

The movie business had apparently been very
good indeed to Huga Lanisch, if it had bought him this town house. It was quite
some place, five stories high, done in a kind of Bauhaus-modern style, full of
white walls and chrome balls and sharp diagonals. There was also this elevator,
which the three of us crowded into and which rose at a
slow enough pace for Bray to give us the full story en route. “There’s a
special room upstairs where they show movies,” he said. “Six people
were in there, including Wicker, and when the movie was over Wicker was dead in
his chair. He’d been shot in the back of the head and the gun was on the floor
behind him. No prints.”

Staples said, “Could anybody else get in
during the movie?”

“No. There’s only one door, and anybody
coming in has to walk right in front of the screen.”

“So the killer’s definitely one of the
five others watching the movie.”

Bray looked sour. “One of them,” he
agreed, and the elevator stopped. He pushed open the door and we followed him
into a square high-ceilinged room with black carpeting and puffy white low
chairs and another uniformed cop. “This way,” Bray said, and the
three of us trooped across the room and through an open doorway on the far
side.

The scene of the crime.
Oh, my God, and the victim himself, lying sprawled in a white leather chair and
looking perfectly ghastly. His eyes were open and staring ceilingward, but the
eyeballs were sunk too deep in the sockets, as though everything inside there
had shriveled. A great sticky-looking stain the color of beaujolais
smeared the white leather back of the chair.
My
victim had been much more
discreet.

With difficulty, I forced myself to look at
the rest of the place, which was a very plush little screening room. Ten of the
white leather chairs, on chrome rollers, were scattered about the gray carpet,
intermixed with small white formica parsons tables. The
entire wall to the left of the entrance formed the screen, flanked by drapes
which would probably close when no movie was being shown. Framed movie posters
were mounted on the side walls, and a small but generous bar was built in at
the back.

Staples said, “I thought you said there
was only one door.” He nodded toward a second door, next to the bar.

“Projection booth,” Bray told him.
“It’s like a little closet in there, and no other way out.”

“Ah.” Staples walked around the body
in the chair, studying it from different angles. “Deader’n hell, isn’t
he?”

Bray said to me, “If you’re going to
throw up, there’s a John back past the elevator.”

“I’m not going to throw up.” In
fact, I wasn’t at all queasy, though I preferred not to look at the dead man.
Bray had simply been letting me know again that he didn’t like my being here.

Staples, having studied the corpse long enough
to memorize it, now said, “Fine. Where’s our suspects?”

“Back this way.”

We went out through the other room again, past
the elevator, down a short white hall, and into a bookcase-enclosed room done
in shades of orange and brown. Tall narrow windows at the far end of the room
showed the February nakedness of tree branches and the rear of some building on
68th
Street. The low chrome-armed chairs in here were covered with brown corduroy
and on them were sitting half a dozen distressed-looking people. I saw no one I
knew, but two or three of the faces were familiar, probably from press parties.
All of the faces were troubled and nervous, as though we were tax men here for
an audit. Another uniformed policeman stood stolidly in a corner, pretending to
be a guard in a bank.

Bray addressed the group: “I’m sorry for
the delay, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll try not to take
much longer. I’m Detective Sergeant Bray, and this is Detective Sergeant
Staples. We’d like to find out what happened. Does anybody have any
suggestions?”

The troubled faces turned toward one another,
this way and that, but the only one who spoke was a tall slender ash-blonde
woman in black slacks and a pearl gray sweater, who asked, as though hoping
against hope, “I suppose it must have been one of us?”

“It does seem that way,” Bray told
her. “I’m sorry. Unless someone has another
theory?”

But no one did. The faces remained troubled,
and attentive.

Bray said, “All right. Then we might as
well begin.”

The interrogation that followed was informal
in style but very thorough, starting with the names and functions of everyone
present. The oldest man here, sixtyish, almost completely bald, stocky, with a
vaguely Mittel-European accent, was our host, Hugo Lanisch, co-producer of the
film they’d been watching. The slender blonde in the black slacks was his most
recent wife, Jennifer; in her early thirties, cool and beautiful and well-bred,
she looked as though she’d come with the town house, and probably she had.

There was one black among the white faces, a
bearded plump fortyish man named Gideon Fergus, who’d been hired to write the
music for the film. I remembered his work from several black exploitation
movies; mostly bongos and electric guitars.

Then there were two people from United Films,
the company that had financed the movie and would be its distributor. The stout
black-haired mid-forties woman with the serious hornrim glasses and the overly
loud way of speaking was Ruth Carr, the East Coast story editor and presumably
the one who had interested United Films in the project in the first place. And
the 35-year-old slender fag in the leather pullover and big yellow glasses and
long blond hair was Barry McGivern, the company’s assistant advertising
director.

Finally there was the projectionist, a neatly
dressed young man of about 25 named Jack March. An executive in embryo, March
had an earnest expression, short blond hair, metal-rim glasses and a modest California tan. He had apparently decided his role at
a murder was to look very alert, in case anybody should want coffee.

Having established names and pedigrees, Bray
turned the floor over to Staples, who cheerfully but insistently worked out
where everybody had been seated during the screening. With only six in the
audience, they had not clustered together but had been fairly widely
distributed through the room. Staples eventually had to produce paper and
pencil and do a sketch plan of everybody’s position, but when he was finished
the layout was clear. Wicker had been the farthest from the screen, so that any
of the others could have left his or her seat, traveled on hands and knees, and
approached him from behind without being seen by anyone else.

Except the projectionist.
Young March had been watching the film through a small window next to the
projector, but it turned out he’d seen the movie before—he was the messenger
who’d brought it here from the cutting room on the west coast—and he hadn’t
been completely attentive. He explained there were always things to be done in
the projection booth, but that was undoubtedly a polite falsehood; the second
time through,
A Sound Of Distant Drums
was probably more than a bit boring.
Besides, if the killer had stayed on his knees behind Wicker the projectionist
would have been unlikely to see him in any case.

So now the characters and the setting had been
established. A rich old movie producer, his rich young wife, a third-rate black
composer, two studio functionaries and a reliable small-time director had
gathered in a room to watch for the first time a film in which they were all
interested. What they were seeing was a rough cut, still several minutes too
long and with no musical score. In the course of this screening, one of the
others had shot the director, for reasons yet to be established.

But before getting to motive, Bray was
interested in one more physical aspect of the crime: the sound of it. Taking
over from Staples, he said, “Mr. Wicker was killed with a. 25 calibre
revolver. Now, that wouldn’t make as much noise as a. 45 automatic, but it
wouldn’t exactly be quiet either. Just how loud is this movie you were
watching?

It was Gideon Fergus, the black composer, who
answered: “Not very loud at all. It’s much more of a mood piece than Jim’s
other films, probably because it’s the first time he was doing his own original
script. And there wasn’t any music yet, of course.”

Barry McGivern, the advertising man from
United Films, said, “Well, there was that one shot in the movie. Remember?
Just after they get off the train.”

Ruth Carr, the stout story editor with the
loud voice, loudly said, “Do I remember? I’ll say I remember, it scared me half to death.”

Bray, the patient bulldog, said, “There
was a gunshot in the movie?”

There was general agreement; yes, there had
been one gunshot in the movie. Barry McGivern drove home the obvious point:
“The killer could have fired his gun at the same precise moment.”

“Very tricky to get it that close,”
Bray said. “But possible, I suppose. Did anybody hear Wicker make any kind
of sound just after the shot?”

Ruth Carr said, “I’m afraid nobody heard
anything just after the shot, because I gave out a yell.”