Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (13 page)

“Of course. No
problem.”

“Fine. See you
then.”

*

I was in the kitchenette, putting together a
quick lunch prior to the screening, when it seemed to
me I heard some scratching sounds at the front door. Stepping out to the living
room, a piece of baloney in my hand, I saw the door partway open and a hand
reaching through to poke at the chainlock.

“Hah!” I cried. “Hah, you son
of a bitch, you won’t get in now!”

The hand withdrew and the door closed. He’d
given up, the bastard.

Wait a minute. Was there something on the
chainlock? Squinting, trying to see, I moved toward the door as the man on the
other side gave it a sudden loud thump. The door shook, and the chainlock ball
fell out of its slot. The chain swung free, and the door opened wide, and
Edgarson came walking into my apartment.

“Yak!” I
ran back to the kitchenette, exchanged the slice of baloney for my longest and
sharpest knife—which was neither particularly long nor particularly sharp—and
then I crouched in the doorway, snarling and at bay. “Don’t come any
closer!”

Edgarson gave me a pitying smile. “Do you
want to see how I’d take that knife away from you?”

“I’m serious about this,” I said.

So he came over and took the knife away and
tossed it into the sink and released my arm. “Now we can talk,” he
said.

I headed toward the door, but he didn’t
follow. Instead, he stood in the kitchenette doorway and called after me,
“It’s mighty cold out there.”

And I in my shirtsleeves.
Hand on the doorknob, I looked back at him and saw he wasn’t behaving in a
threatening manner. He was simply standing there by the kitchenette, watching
me, waiting for me to settle down. Also, he hadn’t been more physical than
necessary in disarming me of the knife. Hesitant, not sure what I should do
next, I said, “What do you want, Edgarson?”

“You know what I want.”

“I have friends coming here pretty
soon,” I told him. “Including two policemen.”

“I’ve noticed that about you, Mr.
Thorpe,” he said, and crossed the room casually to sit on my sofa. “You’ve gotten real chummy with those two officers.”

“They told me about that anonymous letter
you wrote.”

That produced a happy smile. “Oh, you
know about that already, do you? I was going to mention it.”

Releasing the doorknob, I moved back into the
living room, saying, “This isn’t fair, you know. It really isn’t
fair.”

He spread his hands. “What isn’t fair,
Mr. Thorpe? You owe me ten thousand dollars. You’ll pay me before twelve o’clock noon tomorrow.”

“I don’t owe you! The evidence is destroyed, you don’t have anything on me any more.”

“Oh, that little razzle-dazzle you pulled,
about what story you’d tell.” He shook his head, his smile turning down at
the corners. “Well, that’s in the past now, isn’t it, Mr. Thorpe? You’ve
already told your story, haven’t you? And you can’t change your story any more
than I can change mine.”

“So it’s a stalemate,” I said.

“Not quite.” His smile became
happier again. “There’s still one difference between us,” he said.
“I didn’t kill Mrs. Laura Penney, but you did. And I know you did.”

“But you can’t do anything about it. You
just admitted as much, you can’t change your story.”

“That’s right, Mr. Thorpe. About the only
way I can be a good citizen now is anonymously.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

“Well, sir, Mr. Thorpe, what proof do I
have to have to write an anonymous letter? All I need do is attract
their attention, wouldn’t you say so? And leave the rest to them?”

“You already did that.”

“Oh, that one.”
Modestly he smiled and shook his head. “I could do a lot better than that,
Mr. Thorpe.”

“Is that right? What could you say? How
is an anonymous letter going to—”

The phone rang. I glanced over at it, annoyed,
and then finished my sentence as I crossed the room to answer it. “—be
more persuasive than I am? I know them now, they’re my friends. Hello?”

Staples: “Fred again, Carey. Listen, this
is taking a while, I’m definitely going to be late.”

Glowering at Edgarson, I said, “I’m sorry
to hear that, Fred.”

“Patricia’s on her way, though. And I’ll
get there just as soon as I can.”

“We won’t start without you,” I
promised.

“You know,” he said, “it’s
amazing how many people don’t really come from New York.”

“Is that right?”

“Tell you all about it when I see
you.”

“Right. So long.”

I hung up, and Edgarson said, “Let’s see,
now, would that be Fred Staples? Detective Sergeant, Homicide
South?”

“Excuse me a minute,” I said, and
went into the bathroom, where I swallowed a Valium with Alka Seltzer. Then I
stood for a long minute looking at my reflection in the mirror.

I knew what I had to do. What choice was
there?

I got the hammer from the storage cabinet
under the sink, and then I eased open the door just far enough to see him out
there. He was on his feet, strolling comfortably around, at home and at ease.
He stopped at the bookcases, he browsed, he selected
an issue of
Third World Cinema
and leafed through it. Would he stop at the
two-page spread of stills from the porno movie?

He would. Clutching the hammer, I slipped out
of the bathroom and across the carpeted living room floor. Remembering how
readily he had taken that knife from me, wincingly aware of what he might do if
he saw me coming at him with a hammer in my hand, I found myself torn between
the needs of speed and silence, and I did a sort of frantic tip-toe plunge
across the room, lifting the hammer high over my head.

*

I was zipping Edgarson into the Valpack when
the doorbell rang.

I looked up. The digital clock on my desk read
3:02; Staples, or possibly his wife.

I finished zipping, then ran into the
bathroom, turned off the water, dried the hammer, put it away. As I was coming
out of the bathroom the doorbell rang again. To stall any longer would be
suspicious, so I buzzed my visitor in and then dragged the Valpack into the
bedroom, where with great difficulty I managed to hang it in the closet.

Trotting back to the living room, I scooped
into a desk drawer the former contents of Edgarson’s pockets, and then just had
time to double-check that the bloodstain on the floor was completely cleaned
up. Then there came the knock at the hall door, and I opened it to admit
Patricia Staples, bundled up like Anna Karenina. “Mrs. Staples. Come
in.”

She came in, and we transferred a series of
hats, coats, scarves and gloves from her person to the hall closet, during
which I told her of her husband’s most recent phone call and she agreed that
yes, Fred had told her he might be late, but she was used to that. It was hard
to keep to a schedule if you were a policeman’s wife.

While agreeing with all that, I took a few
seconds to frown at my breached chainlock. It looked no different from before,
it appeared not to have been damaged in any way, and yet Edgarson had come
through it as though it were made of grass. How had he done it?

“What a nice place you have here,”
Mrs. Staples was saying, moving on into the living room.

So we had a few minutes of chit-chat of the
normal type, ending with her deciding to have a bourbon and water if that’s
what I was having. It was.

I went off to the kitchenette to mix the
drinks, and she made me very nervous by roaming around the living room, looking
at this and that. Was there anything left to be noticed?

I brought the drinks out as quickly as
possible, and she smiled at me and said, “You know, bachelors aren’t
supposed to be good housekeepers, but you keep this place just spick and
span.”

“Well,” I said, “I just shove
everything out of sight.”

I induced her to sit on the sofa, and sat down
beside her. She raised her glass. “Cheers.”

I agreed, and we drank, and I said, “Of
course, I’m not really a bachelor.”

She raised mildly interested eyebrows.
“You’re married?”

“Separated. My
wife is in Boston, getting a divorce.”

“How sad.”
She leaned toward me slightly. “Do you have children?”

“Two. A boy and a
girl.”

“Do you get to see them?”

What a thought. “Sometimes,” I said.
“Not as much as I’d like, of course.”

“Of course.”
She sipped at her drink, ruminating. “Divorce is such a terrible
thing.”

I could do this conversation from across the
street: “And yet, sometimes it’s the only answer.”

She sighed, and sipped, and sighed again, and
said, “Did you read that article in last month’s
Readers Digest
?”

“‘New Hope For Dead
People’?”

Big blue eyes blinked slowly.
“What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Which article
did you mean?”

“The one by the
Monsignor about divorce.”

“No, I missed that one.”

“He felt it was a very serious
step.”

“I feel that way, too.”

“Particularly for the
children.”

Enough about the damn
children. I said, “Well, the grownups feel it too, of course.”

“Oh, of course.”
She paused, thinking her goldfish thoughts, sipping away at her bourbon,
looking as beautiful and as intelligent as a sunset. Gazing away across the
room, she said, “Fred can’t have children.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Not on a Sergeant’s salary.”

“Oh,” I said.

Another sigh, another sip.
“It’s difficult to bring a child into the world these days.”

“Sometimes it’s difficult not to.”

Those eyes beamed at me again. “Beg
pardon?”

“Nothing. I was
just agreeing with you,” I explained, and the sound of the telephone saved
me.

It was Fred: “Listen, Carey, I’m terribly
sorry, but I’m just not going to get there at all. Al Bray and I are up to our
asses in this thing, it looks as though it might be the break we were looking
for.”

My back was to Patricia. I closed my eyes and
said, “The anonymous letter?”

“It just might do it. Wish us luck.”

“Oh, I do.”

“The problem is,
we aren’t going to be able to get away, not for hours.”

I looked at Patricia Staples, sitting on my
couch. I would have to go on talking with her, and there would be no search
parties to rescue me. “That’s a shame,” I said.

“Well anyway, Patricia’s there, isn’t
she?”

“Right here,” I said brightly.

“And the whole point was for her to see
the picture. Would you mind? I mean, as long as she’s there.”

“You’re sure you wouldn’t like me to
wait?”

“We’ll be hours, Carey. Thanks for the
thought, but you and Patricia go ahead, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“Could I talk to her?”

“Of course.”

I turned the phone over to Patricia, and noted
that both glasses seemed to be empty. While husband and wife spoke together, I
carried the glasses into the kitchen, built new drinks, and fretted over
Edgarson’s anonymous damn letter. Was he coming from beyond the grave—or the
Valpack—to even the score? Had he revealed more than he’d realized in that
first anonymous letter?

And yet, it seemed unlikely Fred Staples would
have talked to me the way he had if the trail were leading in my direction. Or
that he would cheerfully leave me alone with his wife.

Encouraged by those thoughts, I carried the
drinks back to the living room to discover that Patricia was off the phone now
and looking at my movie posters. She accepted the new drink with thanks, downed
some of it, and said, “Well, I guess we’re supposed to go ahead and see
the movie.”

“Right,” I said, and while I got out
the print and threaded the first reel into the projector I said, “I want
you to know I feel proud that Fred trusts me alone with you.”

“Oh, it’s me he trusts,” she said
carelessly. “He thinks if you made a pass at me I’d push you away.”

Was there something ambivalent in that remark?
I frowned at her, but her expression was as blank as ever. I went back to threading
the film. (I would have had everything set up ahead of time, except for
Edgarson dropping in.) With the film ready, I placed the projector, turned the
sofa at right angles to the wall, and switched on my telephone machine so we
wouldn’t be disturbed. “There we are,” I said. “All set. If
you’ll just sit where you were…”

She did. I switched off the lights and on the
projector, waited to be sure the focus and frame were right, and then sat down
next to her.
Gaslight
began.

The first time Ingrid Bergman became
frightened, Patricia clutched my hand. She held it tight, while all the time
gazing at the screen, and the second time Ingrid Bergman became frightened
Patricia drew my hand into her lap and held it there with both of hers.

What a warm lap. The backs of my knuckles were
being pressed downward into the cleft, and heat radiated up like rose petals
from that crotch. On-screen, Joseph Cotten suspected something was wrong, but
smooth Charles Boyer had command of the situation. And the third time Ingrid
Bergman became frightened Patricia did some complex rubbing movement involving
hands and body and knuckles, and at that point enough was enough. So I reached
across with my free hand, and drew her face to mine, and drank deeply the
nectar of her lips.

She did not struggle. Nor, on the other hand,
did she particularly enter into the proceedings, though both her hands did
continue to press my hand deeply into her lap. Generally I would say that she
took this kiss the way she had taken the conversation that had preceded it;
with mild polite interest.

All kisses must end, and at the finish of this
one Patricia drew back her face just far enough so we could see one another’s
eyes in the flickering reflected light from the screen. Solemnly we looked at
one another. Solemnly she said, “We shouldn’t.”