“Tell me about it later,” she said, and zipped into the bathroom with every indication of urgency.
Well, that’s the way it is in the morning, particularly if you’ve been putting away many gallons of champagne or other liquid the night before. In fact, come to think of it …
Down the hall from the bedrooms, toward the living room, was another lavatory for the convenience of guests. I found it very convenient, streaking down the hall in nothing but my skin, relieving myself, then washing up in the guests’ sink and drying with the guests’ tiny towels. Why do guests get such tiny towels?
I had made the initial run without meeting any of the servant population of this apartment, but on the return trip I emerged from the guests’ john to find Nikki prancing by with a watering can in her hand. Surveying my nethers with pleased surprise, she said, “Ooo la la!” I hadn’t known they really said things like that.
I looked at her, saw her roguish eyes and her twitching tail, and firmly ordered myself away. Not even counting the physical demands to which I’d already been put this morning, there was the increasingly desperate need to reduce my presences here to one before either of the sisters caught wise. “Later,” I said, and trotted off down the hall.
At the end, Betty’s door was on the left and Liz’s was on the right. Betty’s was just slightly ajar; looking through the crack, I saw that she was not only awake, she was sitting on the edge of the bed. And from the concentrated way she was staring toward the closed bathroom door, I knew what she was waiting for.
God almighty, was there no end to this? I’d been awake less than half an hour, and already I’d been through an exhaustingly full day. I ran on into Liz’s room, took two deep breaths, and Liz came out of the bathroom. “Not dressed?” she said.
“I thought I’d shower.” Quickly kissing her surprised face, I waved gaily, said “Hasta la vista,” and scampered off.
I couldn’t lock the lavatory door behind me, but I could certainly lock the tub room door, and did so. The far side door I daren’t lock from Betty’s side, since she might notice, so I had to leave it closed but vulnerable. In the meantime, I’d switched on the shower, and to the merry splash of water I went back to Betty, who jumped up from the bed the instant I appeared, ignored my “Why, darling, you’re still awake,” and zoomed into the john.
And now at last I had a minute by myself to collect my wits and try to work out an answer to this mess. I couldn’t very well keep playing bathroom games all day long. Somehow or other I had to get Art out of this apartment Putting it simply, Art had to make an exit while Bart stayed here. Putting it even more simply, I had to be in two places at the same time.
My current situation was that Bart was naked here in Betty’s bedroom while Art was naked over there in the shower. Therefore, my first order of business was to get Art out of the shower. Then I had to put Bart somewhere out of sight for a while until I could get some clothing on Art Then Art could start to depart but would dart back to where Bart was hidden apart so he could hop a cart back to his sweetheart Smart?
I was still chewing on that one when Betty returned from the bathroom and looked at me in surprise. “Aren’t you going to get dressed?”
“Fart,” I said.
“What?”
Then I leaped to my feet. “A shower,” I said loudly. Everything was happening twice. “I’m going to take a shower.”
I started to run by her toward the john when she said, “Liz is in there now.”
My heart bounced off the floor. “In where?”
“Taking a shower.”
Liz was in there? If Liz was in there, she had to know the truth, or anyway be damn close to it. Two thousand a month: a mental image of bills with little wings flying out a window. Husband to Betty, unbound by extra contracts; a mental image of a huge lumber mill with wings flying away over a mountain. I said, “Are you sure?”
“I heard the water running.”
“Oh,” I said. Oh, the water running, mat was all right, In fact, I almost said something about that being Art in there, not Liz, when I realized there was no way for me to know such a thing.
But now what? If we were all going to wait here for Art to finish his shower, we were all going to get very very dirty.
“Here,” Betty said. She was extending something toward me.
“What? What?”
“Don’t you want your glasses?”
“Oh!” Another goddamn detail. I took the glasses and put them on and then I really did squint. Lenses and glasses make the best combination since ice cream and pickles. “Maybe,” I said, trying to look at her like a man who could see and who didn’t have any other problems either, “maybe he’s out of, I mean, maybe she’s out of there by now. I’ll go, uh, I’ll go check.” And I scampered away to the bathroom, cracking my naked hip against the doorjamb on the way by. Oh, my poor eyes.
Close the lavatory door. Open the tub room door, enter a room which was by now full of steam. My glasses immediately fogged. Wrenching them off, I turned off the water, hurried back to Betty, put the damn foggy glasses back on, peered over them at her, gave her the falsest cheerful smile I’ve ever worn, and said, “All clear now. See you in a few minutes.”
As I started to shut the door again, she called, “Do you have enough towels?”
“Plenty. Plenty.”
“If you don’t there’s some in the cabinet under the—”
“Plenty plenty plenty.”
Shut lavatory door, but leave unlocked. Into still-steamy tub room, close door, lock it. Remove glasses, place on counter opposite tub, turn shower on again, cross room, slam nose into other door.
Ouch. Damn, I forgot it was locked. Unlocking it, I slid it open, saw that Liz’s lavatory was unoccupied, stepped in, slid the door shut, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out to see Liz, dressed, patting her hair at a mirror on the wall. “You must have been very dirty,” she commented.
I closed the lavatory door. “Now that I’m your property,” I said, “I’ll have to take very good care of myself.”
She gave my reflection in her mirror a sour look, then turned to offer a repeat performance to the original. “I wonder what I would have done,” she said, “if you’d refused to sign.”
“You would have loved me more,” I suggested, “but you wouldn’t be marrying me.” I knew it was true when I said it, and I felt a small twinge, but nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I’d decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.
Liz was frowning at me, thinking it over. “That’s right,” she said. Then, turning away, she said, “You want some breakfast?”
I was hurriedly gathering up my clothing, still scattered here and there on the floor, and throwing it onto my body. “No, I’d better got out of here,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to run into Bart.”
“You want me to drop you any place?”
I hopped around on one foot, pulling on a sock. “Don’t bother. I’ll take a cab downtown.”
“Where will you be today?”
“That’s hard to say.” I could only find one shoe; then the other turned out to be under the bed. “I’ll call you tonight,” I said.
“Be sure to get that blood test”
“I’ll call my doctor as soon as I get to the office.” Shirt on and tucked in, I went toward her to kiss her good-bye. But she turned away, studying her hair in that damn mirror again. Standing behind her, looking at her reflected face, I said, “Does this mood go away?”
“Well find out, won’t we?” she said.
“Right. Well, don’t bother to see me out, I can find my own way.”
She didn’t say anything. She was brooding at herself in the mirror when I left the bedroom.
Betty’s door was now entirely closed. Down the hall I went, feeling very nervous, and ducked into the guest bathroom again without seeing anybody. Closing the door, I sat on the toilet and leaned my ear close to the keyhole, so I’d hear whe
n Liz walked by.
It took a while, and once again I had leisure to think. I visualized Liz entering the lavatory, hearing the shower running, going in there and finding the room empty, turning off the water, and then meeting Betty in the middle. “Where’s Bart?” “Who?”
I’m too greedy. I shouldn’t have signed, I should have kept to my original plan and made Art disappear. Look what was happening this morning, and this was only the beginning.
And we were rapidly reaching the point where exposure would mean a lot more than a simple loss of income. We were moving into Felony land now: bigamy, fraud, God knows what else. I could even wind up in jail at the end of this; both of us, Art and Bart, serving concurrent sentences.
Sounds in the hall, somebody going by. Once they were past me, I opened the door a crack and peeked out, and if was Liz moving away down the corridor. Looking at her, I found myself wishing it was Betty I could give up, and not entirely because of the two grand a month.
Oh, well, stick with the possible. Once she was out of sight, I nipped out of the guest’s John and sprinted back down the hall toward the bedrooms again. And all I needed now was for Betty’s door to open, for Betty to come out and find me running along here, for Betty to begin asking.…
It didn’t happen. Into Liz’s room, across it, into the lavatory, through it into the steamier-than-ever tub room. There were large storage drawers under the counter, some of them empty. Yanking my clothing off, I jammed it all into an empty drawer, added my contact lenses wrapped in toilet paper from Liz’s John, and stepped into the shower spray just long enough to get wet Then I turned the water off, got a big soft golden bath towel from a shelf, put my glasses on, and returned to Betty, who was standing in front of a mirror on the wall, dressed, patting her hair. Turning a sweet smile toward me, she said, jokingly, “You must have been very dirty.”
“Now that I’m yours,” I said, “I’ll have to take very good care of myself.” Twice, everything twice.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “For some reason, I’m starved.”
WHAT A DAY. I TOLD Betty I wanted to go to the apartment I allegedly shared with Art, because I wanted to get the rest of my things from there. She offered, naturally, to go with me, but I managed to talk her out of it. Once out of the apartment, I headed for Dr. Osbertson, the quack who fails to cure my flu every winter, and received my second blood test in less than a week. From there I went to my apartment; the freak who was subletting was away, but had left traces of himself behind. Apparently his hobby was blowing up pizzas. Picking my way through the swamp, I packed a lot of junk that could be Bart’s, and toted it all away to the office, where the usual turmoil and trouble from my other life awaited me. I let it keep on waiting while I called Ralph out at Fair Harbor, but unfortunately got Candy instead. “Ralph Minck, please,” I said, but she recognized my voice, made a few formerly unprintable suggestions, and hung up on me. And through it all I kept thinking, I have to get rid of Bart, just for a little while; I have to get him out of town, I have to make him go away, go away, go away.
When I was a kid, the Saturday afternoon movie would occasionally show a treasure-hunting underwater diver caught in the clutches of an octopus. Fighting and struggling, bubbles rising up, seabed roiling, octopus arms waving all over the place. For the first time, I understood exactly what that diver was going through.
Over the next hour I dealt with the mail, the telephone messages, crap from illustrators, threats from the printer, filthy language from the landlord. “I’m getting out of this, prick,” I told the landlord, while my mental image-screen showed dollar bills with little wings flying in the window. And through it all I was thinking, Bart away.
I tried to be smarter than that. I tried to reason with myself, convince myself of the insanity of even planning to marry Liz. Stay with the old plan, take the lumber mills and run, don’t be so greedy, don’t be so stupid, don’t be so crazy. I told me, I really did, I can’t claim I didn’t warn me, but none of it did any good. In my brain, or whatever that is behind my eyes, I was already committed, I was thinking only, Get rid of Bart.
The only distraction was a pair of phone messages from Linda Ann Margolies. Regretfully I dropped them into the wastebasket; I had liked that girl, but one more complication would finish me forever. Or should I just return her call, talk for a minute, see if she knew any new jokes?
No. I phoned Ralph again instead, and this time I got him. “Listen, Ralph,” I said, “could you do a little job of research for me? On the QT.”
“Sure. Trouble at the firm?”
“No trouble. In fact, and this’ll probably surprise you as much as it does me, I’m thinking of getting married.”
“No kidding! Well, you old son of a gun. Anybody I know?”
“You never met her,” I said. “She’s got a place at Point O’ Woods.”
“Rich, huh? Trust you.”
That was something nobody was likely to do. I said, “She’s the one I’d like you to look up. Also her lawyer.”
“Her lawyer? You aren’t pulling something funny, are you?”
“Of course not I’ll tell you the situation, Ralph. I’m in love with this girl, and she’s in love with me, but her lawyer’s out to get her for himself, because she’s rich. Anyway, that’s what I think.”
“That’s unethical,” Ralph said. He sounded shocked.
“Exactly what I told him to his face,” I said. Then, speaking to Ralph in what I took to be his own language, I said, “He brazened it out But I just don’t trust him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Ernest Volpinex.”
“What firm is he with?”
“I have no idea. No, wait I think I have his card. Unless I threw it away.” I made a fast search on my desk, but it wasn’t there. “Sony, I don’t have it any more.”
“That’s all right. I can look him up.”
“Fine.”
“What do you want to know, exactly?”
“Well,” I said, “he told my fiancée she had to get married this year or she’d have a great big tax bite next April. She’s an orphan, see, her parents both died last New Year’s Eve.”
“Before or after midnight?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, what’s her name?”
“Elizabeth Kerner. What I want to know is her financial position. How much did she inherit, does she really have that tax problem, what her general situation is. And about Volpinex, I want to know what kind of bird he is. I think he’s a crook, and I’d like to know his reputation in his field, and any scandal or anything like that in his past.”
“You want to turn your girl friend away from him, is that it? Move her to a different lawyer.”
“I’d like to move her to you, Ralph, if you’d like a client.”
“How much is this alleged tax bite?”
I knew why he’d asked that question. He wanted to know how rich she was, so he’d know how much he wanted her as a client. So I told him the simple truth: “Three million dollars.”
“Ah,” he said, calmly but promptly. “I’ll look into it right away for you, Art. I’ll find out everything I can.”
“Thanks, Ralph, I appreciate it”
“Anything for a friend”
“You’re true blue, Ralph.”
“It’s nothing. And congratulations on the coming nuptials.”
“Thanks, Ralph. This time it’s the real thing.”
We chatted a bit more, and then we both hung up. I sat there a moment, quiet, my hand resting on the phone. I have to get rid of Bart.
THE TELEGRAM ARRIVED at nine that night. Good old Joe; it’s a blessing to have friends you can rely on, particularly when they live in California and you need a telegram from California.
Betty and I were having dinner for two on the terrace, bathing in the warm August air and watching the lights of taxicabs on the Park Drive. Liz was out somewhere, foul-tempered and door-slamming
, and Art hadn’t been heard from all day.
“Now what?” I said, and extended the yellow form across the coffee and peach melba toward Betty. Nikki had brought it out to us, wiggling her rump, and now stood beside the table, giving me her lewd looks and awaiting further orders.
Betty took the telegram, frowning past it at me. “What is it? that’s all, Nikki.”
Nikki turned like a Buckingham Palace guard, but more interestingly, and pranced back indoors. She moved like someone with good pelvic muscles. I said, “It’s a telegram. Trouble of some kind.”
Betty cautiously lowered her eyes to the words on the yellow paper, reading them by candlelight. I knew what they said. Not only had I just read it myself; earlier today I’d written it. And what it said was:
BART
CALL’ME TONIGHT OR TOMORROW. SERIOUS SITUATION.
JOE GOLD
“Who’s Joe Gold?”
“An old friend of mine in Los Angeles. Makes a living writing record liner notes.”
“You know the strangest people,” she said, and handed the telegram back to me. “What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I better call.”
“Do you still have business affairs out there?”
“No. I told you, I sold my interest in the car wash before I came back East”
“Then what could it be?”
“I just can’t think of anything. I ought to call.”
“I suppose so,” she said doubtfully. She frowned in mistrust at the telegram in my hand, a legitimate telegram legitimately sent from Los Angeles by a man legitimately named Joe Gold. “I suppose so,” she repeated, then picked up the summons bell on the middle of the table and shook it.
Nikki responded immediately to the tinkle—an eavesdropper, apparently, among her other qualities. “Yes, madame? I should clear now?”
“The telephone for Mr. Dodge.”
“Yes, madame.”
While she was gone, Betty said, “Why would he send a telegram here?”
“He must have called the office, and Art gave him this address.”
“Then why wouldn’t he call here?”
Two Much! Page 10
