“Listen, Joe,” I said.
“What—more? Can’t you join a commune?”
“Joe, I got a serious problem.”
“I’ve said that for years, Art”
“There’s been a murder, Joe. No fooling, no gags, no kidding around, an honest-to-God murder.”
“In the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn’s ad-lib writer,” he said, “include me out.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Include us both out. But here’s the thing, Joe. What I’ve been pulling here this summer is a twin scam. You know?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You must have had some idea, from that conversation.”
“Art, in cases of homicide I make it a rule not to hear conversations.”
“That’s wonderful, Joe. Except I think I’m maybe being set up for something. Maybe to take the fall.”
“Art? You wouldn’t be trying to pull one on me, would you?”
Of course I would, but that isn’t what I said. I said, “Joe, I’m too scared to pull anything on anybody. You’ve got to listen to me.”
“Maybe. Start talking.”
“I met twin sisters. So I became twin brothers, so I could screw them both. A simple innocent game, right?”
“It bears your signature like Andy Warhol’s on a junkyard fence,” he said.
“So then,” I said, “it turns out these two are rich. But rich. And they’re suing each other for millions and millions of dollars. And last night, Joe, while I was with one sister here in New York, the other sister was getting murdered out on Fire Island.”
“On the level?”
“Absolutely. I swear on my mother’s IUD. But here comes the cute part. Joe, there was a guy out there with her. Killed with her.”
“Yeah?”
“My twin brother, Joe.”
“What? What shit is this?”
“Exactly the question I ask myself, Joe.”
“Somebody’s up to something,” he said.
“I had the same feeling myself. Am I being set up for something? I’m scared, Joe, and no fooling. If I get out of this, I may well be cured for life.”
“Amen,” he said.
“Joe,” I said, “the only safe thing I can see for me is that my scam did not exist. If the cops want me to have a twin brother, fine. I neither confirm nor deny. But if the twin con comes to light, what happens to me?”
“Art,” he said, “are you asking me to lie under oath in a murder case?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I am asking you to stay out of it entirely. If some cop calls you long distance and asks you did Bart Dodge stay with you for a few days you can say yes, because later on you could say you thought he said Art Dodge, and maybe you got the dates wrong, and what’s the problem anyway? You’re out there, you’re safe, you’re out of it.”
“You’re damn right I’m out of it.”
“All I’m asking, Joe,” I said, “is that you don’t volunteer. I’ve got to cover the twin con, I’ve just got to.”
“I begin to think,” he said, “that this may turn out to be a wonderful lesson for you.”
“You bet. Joe, can I count on you?”
“Art,” he said, “you and I have been pals for years. You’ve always been able to count on me, and you’ll be able to go on counting on me right up to the point where it becomes inconvenient.”
“But you won’t blow the twin con.”
“I won’t volunteer.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Joe,” I said, and went back to the Kerner apartment, where Liz met me with fire in her eyes, saying, “Give me that agreement I won’t go along with it, I want to tear it up.”
“You what? Listen, I gave you that alibi, I helped—”
“You can just forget that alibi, buster,” she said, “and the agreement, too.”
“Forget it? Why?”
“Because,” she said, “that asshole Ernie Volpinex did it, what do you think of that?” She stood in front of me, arms akimbo, fists against sides, jaw jutting out. “They found a gun where he tried to hide it, his fingerprints are all over it, it was a goddam crime of passion! Ernie’s run away, nobody can find him, he’s guilty as sin, I don’t need any alibi, and I won’t stand for that goddam-goddam-goddam-agreement!” She shook both fists in my face. “Stop that laughing, you goddam hyena! Stop it right now!”
I DIDN’T THINK YOU’D COME to work today,” Gloria said when I walked in.
“Ah, well,” I said. “Life must go on.”
“People have called from the Daily News, from ABC, and from Channel 11. They want an interview about your brother.”
“No interviews,” I said. What a thought: me on television, discussing the murder of my twin brother. That would finish me, wouldn’t it?
“I told them you wouldn’t be in today. I suppose they’ll try you at home.”
Meaning the nest fouled by Feeney, to which I was unlikely to be returning for quite some time. “Good luck to them,” I said. “And if anybody else calls, friend or foe, I’m still not in. Period of mourning, unlikely to return to the office before next week.”
“Right.” She gave me a conspiratorial look. “Anything else from the Kerner woman?”
“I still don’t know what she’s up to,” I said. “The only thing to do is just wait and see.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to a lawyer,” she suggested.
“I intend to. Get me Ralph Minck, you have his office number there.”
“Right. Oh, your sister called.”
“Doris? Call her back, I’ll talk to her before Ralph.”
I went to the inner office and sat down at a desk that somehow seemed less mine. I had altered into someone different in the last two days, and the cons and concerns of yesteryear no longer vibrated as they once had. The murder cover-up was all that counted now; it exhausted all my energies just to tread water in this mighty ocean.
But once I’d pulled it off, if I did, would I then be able to come back to my innocent former self, full of silliness and smut? In some absurdist way it seemed that in killing Volpinex I was becoming Volpinex. Where was my comedy? Where was my caustic center?
“A Birthday,” I muttered aloud, “a Birthday, a Birthday.” If I could still do them, if I could still come up with a greeting on demand, then there was nothing to worry about.
Buzz. “Your sister.”
“Right.” Click. “Doris?”
“Art, what on earth is going on?”
“About what?”
“The newspaper said your twin brother Robert was murdered.”
“My what?”
“Art, you don’t have a twin brother.”
“I know that. What—Oh! That thing out on Long Islandl”
“Fire Island. It said—Wait, I’ll get the paper.”
“I know what it said, I noticed that coincidence myself.”
“Coincidence?”
“Doris,” I said, “how many brothers do you have?”
“Barely one,” she said. “You promise and promise and promise to call Duane, and you never do it.”
“I’ve been busy, Doris, getting ready for Thanksgiving.”
“But that isn’t the point. The point is, what is this— Here, I’ve got the paper. Twin brother Arthur Dodge, Manhattan greeting card publisher.’ What are they talking about?”
“A different Arthur Dodge, obviously,” I said. “We don’t exactly have an obscure name, you know.”
“But a greeting card publisher?”
“Doris, do you know how many little outfits like mine there are, just in New York? And maybe he doesn’t have his own outfit at all, maybe he’s an executive with Hallmark or Gibson or one of that crowd. I mean, I can see reporters getting mixed up and calling me instead of this other guy, and believe me they’ve been calling all day, but Doris you know I don’t have any twin brother.”
“It’s just a coincidence?” She sounded no more than half-convinced.
“Listen, Doris,
” I said. “I’m looking in the Manhattan phone book right now, right here. Do you know how many A. Dodges there are, just the initial? And this is just Manhattan, this doesn’t count people living in Queens and Brooklyn and—”
“It was just such a surprise,” she said. “The same name and everything.”
“There are eight million people in this city,” I said. “Some of them have the same names.”
“At first,” she said, “I thought maybe it was you that was killed.”
“What would I be doing in a rich people’s place like that?” I said, and oddly enough that was the convincer. The fact was, although I had insisted on being upwardly mobile, she had remained steadfastly rooted in a social level where old tires are placed on the front lawn as planters. So she laughed over the idea of my hobnobbing with rich people, and so did I, and then we had a little chat about the subject of coincidence in general, with some drab examples from her own life and times, and finally she got off the phone and I buzzed Gloria to get me Ralph.
Waiting, trying to think of a new birthday message, I went through the accumulation of mail, trying to get back some of my former joie de milieu by repeating once-pleasant activities, but even wastebasketing final notices didn’t give me a charge any more.
And what was this? A large thick manila envelope, very like the one Volpinex had carried, the one filled with death weapons aimed at Bart. This new envelope was on my desk face down, with no identification showing, and my hands hesitated over it while the hairs on the back of my neck did little clenching things, as though holding tiny ice cubes. It looked exactly like the Volpinex envelope, which I remembered burning in the sink in Point O’ Woods, watching the yellow flames hula over the photostats.
So this was a different envelope, that’s all; why was I hesitant? I have never been a believer in ghosts or the occult or any of that mumbo jumbo. I don’t even believe Mary was a virgin. So this was a different envelope, and my reluctance to touch it was the result of nervous tension, nothing more.
Exactly. When I did turn it over, a bit more emphatically than necessary, the other side showed me my name and address typed in the middle, a gallery of canceled stamps (Eisenhower with beards and moustaches) on the upper right, and the information “L. Margolies, 37 E. 10, NY 10003” on the upper left.
Comedy: The Coward’s Response to Aggression.
Ah. Knowing more these days about aggression and the coward’s range of responses to it, I opened the envelope with the expectation of a good rousing argument to come, but was interrupted by Gloria buzzing to tell me that Ralph was home sick. “Drat,” I said. “Call him at home, then. But if a woman answers, hang up.”
“Right.”
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.”
THE 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 plop
ped 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.
Two Much! Page 20
