The pursed look remained on his face, but he got his ass out of my chair. “In your childhood,” he said, looking down across the desk at me, “you should have heeded your elders’ advice, when they warned you against judging others by yourself. I assure you, I will do everything in my rather considerable power to rescue those young ladies from you and your brother.”
Straight out of a Victorian novel, but didn’t he know he was lying? His parents must have kept him locked away in a dusty attic throughout his childhood (and who could blame them), where he had bided his time with the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
But melodrama is contagious. Leaping up, driven to my feet by the force of the scene I was playing, and just for that moment meaning every ridiculous word I said, I said, “Speaking for my brother, Mr. Volpinex, and believe me I think I know my brother’s heart, I’m telling you right now that all grasping attorneys and other vultures hovering over the Kerner inheritance had better watch their step pret-ty carefully, because Liz and Betty, in their hour of need and travail, have found their heroes at last! And good day to you, sir!”
WHEN CHARLIE HILLERman came bulging in, after the slithering departure of Volpinex, I was hurriedly but calmly writing a check. “Okay Art,” Charlie announced, coming over to lean over my desk and show me his biceps, “I figured it out you’re always in town on Wednesday, and I’m here to tell—”
“Here you are, Charlie.”
He took the check, and glared at it. “If you think you can fob me off with another partial pay—” He stopped, dead, and stared at the check.
“Not at all, Charlie,” I said. “That’s payment in full.”
He sank into the chair lately defiled by Volpinex. “Holy God,” he said. “Who do I kill?”
“Just the reverse,” I said.
He frowned at me, his natural suspicion returning. Snapping the check with his finger, he said, “Is this any good?”
“Of course it is. Charlie, you remember telling me about the time you did the dollar-bill card for F&A?”
“Sure. ‘If you want to sleep here, George, you’ll need ten of those.’ What about it?”
“You did such a good job the Treasury people came around,” I reminded him. “F&A couldn’t distribute.”
He nodded, sulky at the memory. “And I never got paid.”
“That’s what you get for dealing for a schlock outfit, Charlie. Stick with me and you’ll be okay.”
“Huh,” he said.
“The point is,” I said, “I’ve got a Birthday you’re perfect for.”
His natural truculence was creased by a pleat of curiosity. “What is it?”
“I understand when you were born—three wise men left town.”
“Not bad,” he said.
“It’s encouragement like that keeps me going, Charlie.”
“What’s the picture?”
“The card is a photostat of a birth certificate.”
He frowned, not seeing it; in truth, it wasn’t a very good idea. “Yeah?” he said.
From the bottom left drawer of my desk I took the photostat of my birth certificate I’d sent for when I got my passport; you never know when you might want to leave the country. Extending it across the desk, I said, “We’ll use mine. That way, there won’t be any lawsuits.”
“Yeah?” He took the photostat and studied it, not charmed. “What do you need me for?”
“Well, I don’t want it exactly mine, do I? You’ve got gray inks for the background, white inks for the lettering, you can make a couple minor changes. So it’s sort of Everyman.”
His stubby finger poked the stat. “John Doe in here?”
“No, that’s too cute. We can leave my last name, it’s common enough, something you find around the garage. Change the first name, let’s see, something with six letters, hmmmmmmm.…”
“Joseph?”
“Joseph Dodge.” I pondered that. “Joe Dodge. Wasn’t there somebody famous named Joe Dodge?”
“Was there?” Charlie in thought looked like a Bassett hound.
“How about …” I said, “how about Robert? That ought to fit.”
“Okay.”
“And listen,” I said. “Change the birth time. You know, let’s not give anything away to these astrology freaks.”
He frowned massively at me. “What?”
“Just do it, Charlie,” I said. “Think of it as a personal quirk.”
He shrugged. “If you say so. Any particular date?”
“Oh, leave the date,” I said airily. “No sense changing everything. Just make the birth time, oh, I don’t know, say twelve minutes later. And then the rest you can leave just the way it is.”
“So there’s just the two changes, right? Arthur to Robert, and five seventeen to five twenty-nine.”
“Right. When do you suppose you could have it?”
“When do you suppose I could get paid for it?”
“On delivery.”
If he frowned any deeper his head would crack open like a coconut. “You been robbin’ liquor stores?”
“I’m trying to maintain faith with my artists. When could you have it?”
“This afternoon. How much do I get for it?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Wrong. Forty.”
“For an hour’s work? Even hookers don’t get that much.”
“Thirty,” he said.
“I’m on a tight budget, Charlie,” I said. “If I have to go above twenty-five I won’t be able to pay you right away. I mean, if you’re willing to wait—”
“I’ll take the twenty-five,” he said.
BUZZ.
“Hah?”
“Linda Ann Margolies is here.”
For just a second I was a complete blank. Linda what? Then my eye drifted past my desk clock, and I saw it was five after one, and it all came back to me: the Columbia gem, the master’s thesis on comedy. “Right,” I said, stuffing the rest of my pastrami-on-rye into a desk drawer, and hung up. I swigged down my coffee, underhanded the cup into the wastebasket, patted my mouth with the paper napkin, pocketed the napkin, got to my feet, and smiled a welcome as Gloria ushered in Linda Ann Margolies.
And when I saw her, I multiplied the smile by two.
Ah, yes, there are moments when I understand cannibalism. Food imagery kept filling my head as I looked at this lush morsel: home-baked pastry, crepes suzette, ripe peaches. If she were any shorter it would be too much, overblown, fit for a gourmand rather than a gourmet, but she was just tall enough to cool the effect slightly and thereby become perfect. Sex without loss of status, how lovely. “Come in, Miss Margolies,” I said, and ignored the jaundiced lip-curl of Gloria in the background.
Gloria left us, I gestured the student into the Volpinex-Hillerman Memorial Chair, and she said, “I do thank you for your time, Mr. Dodge. I know you’re a busy man.”
“Up with the sun and on the run,” I said, dropping back into my own chair.
She flashed a quick surprised smile. “Oh, yes! That’s the one from the prune advertisement.”
I was flabbergasted. “How in God’s name did you know that?”
“Just part of my thesis,” she said. Modest dimples parenthesized her modest smile. “I know them all.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“I’d love to hear a new one,” she said.
Frowning, I said, “Barbasol shaving cream. Woman in an evening gown holding a giant mock-up of the product.”
But she was already nodding and grinning. “Is your can too small? Try mine for size.”
“Wall Street Journal,” I challenged her.
“I upped my income five percent last year. Up yours.”
“Woman’s clothing store, um, uh, Peck and Peck.”
“There is a kind of woman,” this calm marvel said, “who would like to have a chauffeur six times a day.”
“Right,” I said. “So I’m here to interview you about comedy, is that it?”
She laughed: modest, polite, friendly. “I’ve been doing my homework.”
“I can see that. You sure you’re in the right place, lady?”
“Don’t downgrade yourself,” she told me. “Folksy Cards is at the top of its field.”
“The motto around this joint,” I said, “is Don’t Shit A Shitter. I know what field I’m in. Sex and violence tied to festive occasions.”
Pencil and steno pad appeared from her knapsack-size purse. “The interview has started.”
“Humor is like a fountain,” I said.
“That’s life. Are you a native New Yorker?”
I frowned at her. “What’s that got to do with comedy?”
“There are theories about the humorist as the outsider,” she said. “We can make it work both ways. If you were born and raised in New York City, you must feel isolated from the rest of the country: ergo, comedy. If you came from Kansas or somewhere, you feel isolated and rootless here in New York: ergo, comedy. I just want to know whether you go under Column A or Column B.”
“I go with the West Lake Duck.”
“Foreign or domestic?”
She was hard to shake. Shrugging, I said, “I grew up all over. You’ve heard the term Army brat?”
“Father a career man?”
“Right”
“Officer or enlisted man?”
“Another theory?”
“Of course.”
“Enlisted man,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, and wrote something down.
I glowered at her. “What do you mean, of course?”
“Those tied in to the power structure,” she told me, “don’t need comedy. That’s the theory, anyway. Parents alive or dead?”
“Ask me questions about comedy.”
She gave me a sharp, and then a very soft look. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. “It’s easy to get lost in words, and lose the faces. All right, we’ll talk—”
“My father’s dead,” I said. “Coronary in a rowboat in Vermont, fishing, two years after he finished his thirty and retired. Mother hasn’t been heard from since fifty-nine, when she ran off with the Danish xylophonist from the NCO Club dance band at Vogelweh, Germany, taking Dad’s fifty-four Volkswagen but leaving behind her silver pumps.”
Miss Margolies studied me for a long silent moment of uncertainty, and then said, “Was all that on the level?”
“You’ve just learned something else about comedy,” I told her. “It causes paranoia.”
She was too cool to be surprised. She nodded, her mouth smiling while the frown line remained between her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about comedy. What is comedy, really?”
“Making people laugh.”
“Below that,” she said “What is comedy really all about?”
“Acceptance,” I said. “The comic makes them laugh, so they don’t kill him.”
When she frowned, she looked like a daughter in a television commercial, learning about deodorants. “I know about that, too,” she said. “But there has to be something underneath it, something specific that makes this person or that person choose comedy instead of some other defense. So what is it?”
She was repeating herself, and boredom produces irritation. Taking a deep breath, I said, “Because the comic is a killer himself, that’s why. The comic is the last civilized man to feel the killer inside himself. We’re omnivores, little girl, and that means we’ll eat anything that stands still, we’ll eat anything that doesn’t have flashing lights. ‘Comedy instead of some other defense,’ you said, and that’s right. Comedy is surprise. I make you laugh, that means I surprise you, that means you’ll keep your distance, you won’t attack. Laugh meters should record in mega-deaths, because that’s what comedy is all about; I kill you for practice to keep you from killing me for real.”
She nodded, watching her pencil skate across the surface of the steno pad. Smiling to herself she said, “Well, it works.”
I frowned at her. “What works?”
Ignoring the question, she looked up at me again and said, “You’re saying the comic is a killer among killers, and he uses comedy both to hide his deadliness for social reasons and to show his deadliness as protection. And of course in your greeting cards the sharpened teeth show very clearly in the smile, don’t they?”
I said, “What works?”
She gave me a mock simper, the crowing of the smartass. “Ask the same question three times,” she said, “and the third time you’ll get the truth.”
“Very cute,” I said. But I hadn’t agreed to this interview to be annoyed.
Her smarmy grin went on and on. “The last civilized man to feel the killer alive inside himself,” she read, from her no-doubt perfect fucking shorthand. “Is that you?”
I walked around the desk, and her smile said she knew I would. I put her on the floor, and her smile said she’d known about that one, too. I played boy-girl upon her there, and twice I had the pleasure of seeing her look surprised.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON ON the beach at Point O’ Woods—not exactly the Riviera. Older duffers sat around in shirts and pants and hats, discussing debentures, while their wives nattered under beach umbrellas. A few younger women paddled here and there in the shallow water, but there wasn’t a bikini among them. Mostly they wore one-piece suits with little skirts, and some of them even had on white rubber bathing caps. There isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t look as though she has fat thighs if she’s wearing a white bathing cap and a yellow one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, so there wasn’t much to look at except the beach and the ocean and the cloudless sky and the pretty houses. But Bart didn’t care; now that he was alive, he was having a great time.
Alive. Charlie Hillerman had showed up Wednesday afternoon with a doctored photostat that looked almost good enough in the original to pass for the real thing. A Xerox of it was perfect, absolutely perfect. And in the meantime I’d mailed off two dollars to Kings County with a request for another copy of my own certificate, so now Art and Bart would both be able to prove their existences.
And what if Bart actually married Betty? The possibilities were intriguing. Art might simply disappear, for instance, leaving his debts behind him. Or I might accept a settlement for a quiet annulment after I’d revealed the truth. Or Bart might be the one to disappear (killed by me), leaving Art to inherit. I could kill him with Daddy’s gun.
Which had been a strange moment. Every once in a while in the turbulent life of man it becomes necessary to lubricate the ways, and on one such occasion in Daddy’s bed I’d reached for the night table drawer, on the dim chance there might be some K-Y jelly in there. Pawing away left-handed, while the rest of me was occupied elsewhere, I suddenly became aware that I was clutching a gun. ‘Yike,” I said, and lifted the thing out to stare at it A revolver, shortbarreled, grayish-black metal, surprisingly heavy. “Good God,” I said.
Betty, naturally, screamed; anyone would who found herself in bed with a naked man clutching a gun. The scream startled me, my hand flew open, and the gun dropped out of sight into the drawer again. I slammed the drawer, and would have stammered out something about the true object of my search except that Betty cried, “Be careful with mat! It’s loaded!”
“Loaded! Good Christ, what for?”
“We don’t know how to empty it,” she said, and looked at me hopefully. “Do you?”
“That’s the first gun I ever touched in my life,” I said.
“It was Daddy’s,” she said.
So much for Daddy’s sex life. And, for a while, so much for mine. But within a few minutes we both got back into the spirit of the enterprise again, and succeeded quite well after all without the help of the petrochemical industry. And I gave not another thought to the gun in the drawer. Of course, it didn’t occur to me then that anybody was ever going to use it.
However. Apart from that one bad moment with the arsenal, Bart’s life that week at Point O’ Woods wa
s as sweet as an Armenian dessert. Romp romp romp with Betty in and around Father’s bed, late dinners out under the stars, and rest periods here on the beach. What could be better? Even Betty’s insistence on wearing a one-piece yellow bathing suit with a little skirt couldn’t dampen my spirit. Nothing could.
“Here comes Liz,” Betty said.
“Mm?” She hadn’t been around all week. Lifting my head from the sand—it was weighted down by both glasses and clip-on sunglasses—I looked off to the southwest, and here from the general direction of Dunewood came Liz. In a bikini, by God, a gleaming white one; suddenly I could hardly wait to be Art again.
But who was that with her? Squinting, I saw it really was Volpinex, the creature from the mummy case, slithering across the sand like an oil spill. His beach apparel was everything he’d worn in the office, minus the suitcoat and tie, and plus large dark sunglasses that made him look like a Greek millionaire’s hatchet man.
Betty and I got to our feet, and Liz smirking as though at some private joke, made the introductions. I have not met this man before. “Glad to know you,” I said.
He gave me a cold dry hand to shake (which I immediately gave back), and said, “I suppose your brother told you about me.”
Surprise and shock suddenly lit my features. “Ohl You’re the man who thinks I’m a fortune hunter.”
His smile turned sour; he hadn’t expected so direct a response in front of the ladies. His mistake had been in thinking I was another smart aleck like Art. Nevertheless, he was game, saying, “Not a fortune hunter.” With a nod toward Betty, who was blinking in delayed comprehension at the both of us, he said, “A fortune finder, I would say.”
“Ernest!” Betty cried, in outrage and astonishment, while Liz chuckled her dirty chuckle and said, “Ernie, you do have a knack.”
“And a responsibility,” he told her, his smile oozing around the words.
“Ernest,” Betty said, “are you accusing Bart of, of …”
“Not accusing,” Volpinex assured her. Lifting one finger, as though making a point he particularly wanted the jury to think about, he said, “I consider it a possibility only. But given my role in your affairs, it’s a possibility I most certainly must take seriously.”
Two Much! Page 6
