Two Much! (30 page)

I reached into the envelope again, and a Birthday came to me. At once I wrote it down: “Your birthday stone—is hanging around my neck.”

What? I frowned at what I had written, like a coughing romantic composer looking at blood in his handkerchief. What the hell was
this
? “Your birthday stone—is hanging around my neck.” Not only wasn't it funny, it wasn't even sensible. It didn't
mean
anything. What did it mean?

I muttered aloud, “I've lost it, I've lost it, it's all gone.” I stared at my former product on the walls, and none of it was funny. None of
it
was funny. Here and there shreds of meaning clung to the sentences, like meat to a well-gnawed bone, but they weren't
funny
.

“I'm becoming Volpinex.” I'm afraid I also said that one aloud, and God knows what else I would have announced if Gloria hadn't buzzed me again at that moment. I depressed the switch. “Hah?”

“Got him.”

“Who?”

“Ralph Minck. Remember?”

“Oh.” I averted my eyes from the birthday non-greeting I'd just written. “Right,” I said. Ralph: time to cool him out in re twins. Rolling myself into one, I pushed the button and said, “Hello, Ralph?”

“Hello,” he said, in a voice so faint and tremulous I could barely hear him. He didn't sound sick, he sounded suicidal.

I said, “Ralph? What's happening?”

“I'm afraid I can't talk to anybody right now.” Dignity tottered among garbage cans in his voice.

“Wait, wait! Don't hang up. It's me, Ralph, your best friend Art. What's the problem, boy?”

A long sigh. A silence. And then: “She's left me, Art.”

Oh, wonderful. “I'll be right there, pal,” I said. “Don't you go anywhere.”

Slamming the phone down, I noticed again the birthday greeting, stone and neck, and this time I took it for no more than what it was: a bummer. I'd had losers before, and I'd never turned into a six-foot cockroach. Distraction had dried the fount of my humor, it was as simple as that, a temporary drought. Crumpling the useless Birthday, I tossed it into the wastebasket, then fondly patted the envelope that was not in fact anything like Volpinex's. “Get to you later, sweetheart,” I said.

On the way out, I told Gloria, “If my sister calls, I'm just out for a while. If anybody else calls, I'm in mourning. If we never meet again, I want you to know you've been a brick.”

“And I want you to know,” she said, “you've been a real change from Met Life.”

T
HE LAST TIME I
'
D BEEN
in the Minck apartment was my wedding night. It looked much different now; somehow, Ralph had managed in two days to create a setting that looked as though he'd been abandoned for three months. Dirty dishes all over the living room, ashtrays piled high with horrible butts, a stink of mildew and dirt and decay in every room, and a bathroom I won't attempt to describe.

The children, it turned out, were temporarily with some handy cousin in Queens. Candy was somewhere out in the great wild world, having left no forwarding address, and Ralph was sitting around in the kind of undershirt men haven't worn since the draft started in 1940. “She's gone for good,” he said.

“Did she say so? Did she, well, leave a note, a letter, anything like that?”

“Yes. She's gone for good.”

“Yes what? She left a letter?”

“Yes.”

Oh, God. Not the famous letter I'd read at dinner the other night “Where is it, Ralph?”

“She's gone for good, Art.”

“Yes, but where's the letter? Her letter, Ralph, the letter she left you.”

“It's over …” He gestured toward the planet earth.

I finally found it on the kitchen table, formerly crumpled but later resmoothed, smeared with stains of butter, coffee, tomato juice, liquor of some sort, and what might have been tears. Reading it, I found that it was and yet it was not the same letter Candy had shown me the other night. That is, it was the same letter except for me; “your dearest friend and mine, Art Dodge,” as I had been previously billed, was no longer a character in this version of the epic. The appropriate paragraphs had been rewritten, quite neatly, as follows:

Ralph, I have a confession to make. I am a woman, with the needs and desires of a woman, and in my frustration and anguish I have turned to another man. You do not know him, Ralph, I would not humiliate you or myself either by a cheap adultery with some so-called “friend.” He is a man of honesty and value, Ralph, and in his arms I have found the fulfillment that fled me within my marriage.

Ralph, I hate to cheat and lie. Desperation drove me to another, but love has kept me with him. I do not know what the future holds for he and I, but I only know I cannot go on as before. I had hoped against hope that you and I could somehow make a go of it, but this summer at Fair Harbor has convinced me that it cannot happen.

You will find a better woman than me, Ralph, I am sure. All I want is the children and child support, you know I would never be greedy. And try not to think too harshly of me. I have loved you, in my fashion.

Hail and farewell,
    
Candy

I went back to the living room, carrying the letter. It was sticky, rather like my apartment
après
-Feeney. “Well, that doesn't sound so bad, Ralph,” I said cheerily, and plopped into the cleanest chair I could find.

“She's gone for good,” he said.

“I just don't believe it,” I said. “Ralph, I look at this letter, and what I see is a cry from a woman's heart”

He gazed at me, blearily. “A what?”

“A cry for help, Ralph.”

“She's gone for good, Art.”

“She loves you, Ralph, she says so right here. And she wants you to understand her, care about her, love her in the romantic way you did when it was just the two of you. No kids, no legal papers being drafted on the dining room table, none of this extra stuff. Romance, that's what she wants, Ralph, and she wants it from you.”

“From somebody else,” he said, and growled a little. “If I could find the guy, Art—”

“He doesn't matter, Ralph. He probably doesn't even exist, she just put that in there to make you jealous. Like my twin brother.”

“I'll find him some day, and—” He blinked, slowly, twice. “Like what?”

“My twin brother.”

“What twin brother?”

Good. I had his attention. I probably wouldn't have it for long, so I plunged right ahead. “It's a con, Ralph,” I said. “Somebody's setting me up for something, but I don't know what I was hoping you'd be able to help me, but I can see you've got troubles of your own.”

He was bewildered, naturally. “Well, what happened? What's the matter?”

“That girl I was engaged to,” I said. “Elizabeth Kerner, you looked her up for me.”

“The heiress,” he said.

“I went ahead and married her, Ralph. Just a week ago today.”

Joy for me commingled with pity for himself, and he began to cry. “Congratulations,” he blubbered. “May you be as happy as I used to be.”

“Listen, Ralph,” I said. “A week ago I married her, and the night before last somebody murdered her twin sister.”

I had his attention again. The waterworks dried up and he said, “Murdered? Are you sure?” Sniffing, he wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve.

“Bang bang,” I said. “With a gun. Out at Point O' Woods. Then the killer burned the house down, trying to cover his tracks.”

“Good God!” He'd forgotten Candy completely by now.

“But here's the crazy part,” I said. “There was another body with her, and the general opinion is that it was my twin brother.”

“What? You don't have a twin brother.”

“There are documents,” I said, “to prove that my bride's twin sister was married last month to somebody who called himself Robert Dodge and who claimed to be my twin brother. And now that guy is dead.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” he said.

“It gets crazier,” I promised him. “Because the killer turned out to be that lawyer, Volpinex. Fingerprints on the gun, and he's disappeared, and there just isn't any question.”

He sat back, wiping snot from his cheek with his other sleeve. “None of it makes sense, Art,” he said.

“I'm afraid of it,” I told him. “I don't know what's going on, Ralph, but I figure I'm the patsy if I'm not damn careful. So I haven't said anything to anybody. I haven't even denied the twin brother.”

He frowned at me. “Why not?”

“Because I don't know what it means. Listen, there's a lot of money in that Kerner family, and somebody's after it. You know me, Ralph, I've done some pretty cute conniving in my day, I'm not sure I could stand a really tough police investigation. I mean, things that were perfectly innocent at the time could be made to look pretty incriminating right now.”

“The truth is usually best, Art,” he said doubtfully.

“I know that, Ralph. But this is all so weird, I'm afraid to make any move at all. If I just sit tight, maybe I'll find out what's going on.”

“Don't sign any false statements,” he told me.

“Ralph, I wouldn't sign a birthday card right now.” (Or write one either, apparently.)

He nodded, thinking it over. “That's probably best,” he said. “You aren't a witness or anything, are you?”

“I was in Manhattan with my bride while it was going on. I'm just an in-law. Or a relative, if you want to believe the twin brother story.”

“Then you're probably right,” he said. “Sit tight, and wait to see what happens next.”

“And if something does happen, Ralph, can I come to you?”

“You know that, Art. How can you even ask? Aren't we friends?”

“I was just thinking.… under the circumstances …” And he began to dissolve again. “Ralph,” I said, leaning forward to pat his knee, to console him. “She'll be back, Ralph.”

“She's gone for good, Art.”

“Ralph, I'll look for her.”

He gazed at me in bleary hope. “You will?”

“I'll talk to her, if I can. I'll do anything I can to help, Ralph.”

“Art, if you could—Art, I just—”

“We'll help each other,” I suggested. “I'll help you with Candy, and you'll help me with this crazy twin brother thing.”

And we fell into one another's arms.

T
HE NEXT FOUR DAYS WERE
lived on tiptoe, but by God not a single egg got broken. The police seemed to have swallowed my Volpinex-as-murderer playlet, and lacking a denial from Volpinex himself there was nothing to jar their sweet certainty. Bart's death certificate was as legitimate as the coroner's office could make it; he had been such stuff as dreams are made on, and his little life was rounded with a sleep, as he rested, an unidentifiable mound of ashes, in a brass urn in the Kerner family vault, beside his bride.

The cat's cradle of stories I'd told here and there held up very well, mostly because it was never really tested. No cop ever talked to Gloria or Ralph or Doris or Joe Gold, and why should they? My ex-wife Lydia was cooled out with the same coincidence gambit that had worked with Doris, and everybody else went on believing the various fantasies and half-truths I'd already delivered. With no arrests or other postmurder development, the news media lost interest in the BIZARRE SLAYING within two days, and that also helped.

Gloria continued to run Those Wonderful Folks, with no assistance from me other than erratic phone calls; I did not drop by my office, any more than I visited my former apartment. Ralph, based on the evidence of my few calls to him, continued to drink and mope and feel sorry for himself, with not the slightest thought for the outside world. As for Candy, the only loose end left to be tied, I had a story to tell her, of course, but she was unavailable to listen to it. She had dropped, as the saying goes, from the face of the earth, and could stay dropped forever for all of me.