Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim for the Work of Donald E. Westlake!

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  A Travesty

  One: The Adventure of the Missing R

  Two: The Affair of the Hidden Lover

  Three: The Wicker Case

  Four: The Problem of the Copywriter’s Island

  Five: The Footprints in the Snow

  Six: The Chainlock Mystery

  Seven: The Riddle of the Other Woman

  Eight: The Secret of the Locked Room

  Nine: The Death of the Party

  Ten: Memoirs of a Master Detective

  Ordo

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Acclaim for the Work of DONALD E. WESTLAKE!

  “Dark and delicious.”

  —New York Times

  “Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

  —Booklist

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Brilliant.”

  —GQ

  “A wonderful read.”

  —Playboy

  “Marvelous.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Tantalizing.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A brilliant invention.”

  —New York Review of Books

  “A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Westlake is one of the best.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

  BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE:

  361

  BROTHERS KEEPERS

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED

  THE CUTIE

  FOREVER AND A DEATH

  HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER

  LEMONS NEVER LIE (writing as Richard Stark)

  MEMORY

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

  YOU WILL ENJOY:

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SINNER MAN by Lawrence Block

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

  SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

  THE LAST STAND by Mickey Spillane

  UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH by Charles Willeford

  A BLOODY BUSINESS by Dylan Struzan

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY

  by Joyce Carol Oates

  BLOOD SUGAR by Daniel Kraus

  Double

  FEATURE

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-143)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2020

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 1977 by Donald E. Westlake

  Originally published as Enough

  Cover painting copyright © 2020 by Paul Mann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78565-720-7

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-721-4

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  For Aram Avakian, fondly, this two-reeler.

  Editor’s Note

  Donald Westlake originally published this book under the somewhat cryptic title Enough, and opened it with a quote from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: “Enough: too much.” This did not make the title less cryptic. If you picked the book up when it was new, it’s possible you might have known that just two years earlier Westlake had published another book punningly titled Two Much. But did that explain this new title? It did not.

  This book, which contains two original novellas (two of Westlake’s very best), is a favorite of mine, and when we launched on our project of bringing the best of Don’s undeservedly forgotten work back into print (“The difference between in print and out of print,” Don once emailed me, “is precisely the difference between life and death”), I was determined to include this book.

  But what to do about that title? Oh, we could have left it alone. But detached from its moment in time and its proximity to Two Much, it really didn’t make any sense. So I huddled with Abby Westlake and we brainstormed several dozen possible new titles, focusing on the fact that the two novellas in this book both are intertwined with the world of film. Finally, I stumbled upon the title that stuck. “Of course, Double Feature,” Abby wrote. “It even sounds like a Don Westlake title.”

  I hope it does. And I hope Don wouldn’t object to this modest tinkering. I take some comfort from his having tolerated such things with good grace and good humor while he was alive. Remind me to tell you the story of the turnip someday.

  Charles Ardai

  New York City, 2020

  A TRAVESTY

  If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think

  little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and

  sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

  THOMAS DE QUINCEY

  “MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS”

  ONE

  The Adventure of the Missing R

  Well, she was dead, and there was no use crying over spilt milk. I released her wrist—no pulse—and looked around the room, while fragments of imaginary conversations unreeled in my mind:

  “And you say you hit her?”

  “Well, not that hard. She slipped on the floor, that’s all, and smacked her head on the coffee table.”

  “As a result of you hitting her.”

  “As a result of her polishing the goddam floor all the goddam time.”

  Laura’s clean jagged style had, as a matter of fact, killed her more than anything else. What kind of bachelor girl apartment was this, with its hulking glass coffee table and chrome lamps and white vinyl chairs and bare black floor? Where were the pillows, the furs, the drapes and hangings, the softnesses? Sterile cold hardness everywhere; it might as well be an art gallery.

  “But you did hit her, is that right?”

  “But it was an accident!”

  If it were an accident, it might just as well have happened when I was somewhere else. I wasn’t here at all, officer, I was, uhh… Screening a film. Yes, at home by myself. Yes, I do that all the time, it’s part of my job.

  I got to my feet, studying the room. If I weren�
��t here, what would be different?

  Well, that glass, for one. It wouldn’t be standing on the murderous coffee table with Jack Daniels in it and my fingerprints all over it.

  Fingerprints. Well, there’d be fingerprints everywhere in this highly polished apartment, wouldn’t there?

  “Yes, officer?”

  “Do you know a Miss Laura Penney?”

  “Yes, I do, casually.” Casually: “Is something wrong?”

  “Have you been to her apartment?”

  “A few times, I suppose, picking her up for a screening.”

  Fine. I took the glass to the small kitchen, washed it, put it away, and headed for the bathroom to study the medicine chest. Razor, shaving cream, toothbrush; nothing that would lead anybody to—

  Wait a minute. That little medicine bottle with the drugstore label, isn’t that—?

  It is. My Valium, with my name typed on the prescription label: “Carey Thorpe, 1 as required for stress.” So I took one—if this wasn’t a situation of stress there is no such thing—and pocketed the bottle.

  Nothing else in here, so onward quickly to the bedroom. Clothing, yes. A couple of shirts, a tie, my Emperor Nero cufflinks, some shorts, my other blue sweater—

  Socks? Black, one size fits all, they could belong on anybody’s feet, so leave them. This is becoming a pretty hefty package as it is.

  Anything else? Bed-table drawers, with their anonymous drugstore items. Nothing under the bed, not even dust. Fin.

  Back to the living room, with my armload of dry cleaning, and Laura spread lifelike on the glossy floor, a scene from almost any John Carroll-Vera Hruba Ralston flick. This side of her looked perfectly fine.

  Into my coat. Into my topcoat, distributing shirts and shorts and ties into various pockets, wrapping the sweater around my waist under all the coats. Thank God it was February, and perfectly normal to look lumpy and bulky.

  Gloves on, and one final look around. Oh, God, the letter from Warner Brothers, announcing the re-release of some hoary chestnut. My name was on it, and a date making it clear the thing couldn’t have arrived earlier than today. I snatched it up and headed for the apartment door.

  And what was the movie again, the one they were reissuing? I gave the letter a quick scan: A Slight Case of Murder.

  Oh, really. Stopping, I gazed heavenward; or at least ceilingward. “Come on, God,” I said. “That’s beneath you.” And I got out of there.

  * * *

  Until the night Laura Penney did herself in most of the violence I’d known had been secondhand. Carey Thorpe is the name, and if that rings no bells you aren’t a truly serious student of the cinema. I’ll admit it’s easy to miss my general film reviewing, in publications such as Third World Cinema and The Kips Bay Voice, but my first book, Author and Auteur: Dynamism And Domination In Film, was an alternate selection of Book Find Club in the summer of 1972, and last year my second book, The Mob at the Movies: Down from Rico to Puzo, got universal raves.

  Born in Boston in 1942, I came to consciousness concurrently with television. Being a spindly youth, I spent most of my childhood in front of the box, watching whatever the program directors thought fit to show me. Old movies were the mainstay of local programming then, so by 1960 when I went off to college (Penn State; anything to get away from home and family) I knew more about movies than Sam Goldwyn and less than him about anything else.

  College, of course, was full of other spindly youths just like me. Perhaps our predecessors in the dorms had discussed sex and beer and goldfish-swallowing, but we discussed Hitchcock and Fuller and Greta Garbo (why did she agree to make Two-Faced Woman?). In my sophomore year my film reviews were appearing in the college paper, in my junior year my first general piece—“Billy Wilder: The Smile In The Skull”—was accepted by Montage Quarterly (twenty-five dollars and two contributors’ copies, both ripped by the mailman), and when I got my degree in American Lit I moved directly to New York City, typewriter in hand, where I’ve been ever since.

  Fortunately, my maternal grandmother passed away just before I passed out of college, leaving me a trust fund with an income of about fifteen thousand a year. Unfortunately, the old bitch mistrusted me as much as she liked me, and tied up the fund so thoroughly with banks and lawyers that I can’t ever get at the principal. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) Nevertheless, the fifteen G a year has been a reasonably comfortable base, and over the last several years my writing has brought in about as much again, so I’ve lived moderately well.

  On the other hand, I’d prefer to live very well, and I’d been hoping to make a killing (excuse that) with From Italy With Love. It had seemed to me America was ready for a big glossy photo-filled coffee-table book on Italian Neo-Realism of the postwar era, but so far I haven’t been able to get together with a publisher. I’ll admit seven hundred stills from Shoe Shine, Bicycle Thief, Open City and Paisan might get a little depressing, but what about all those sexy women in their tattered dresses? Sometimes I don’t understand the publishing industry.

  I met my wife-to-be, nee Shirley Francesconi, about a year after I moved to New York, at a press screening. She was two years older than I and living with a drugs-politics-8mm freak, so we knew each other only socially for a year or so, and if I’d had any sense I’d have left it that way. But then her freak got busted on possession and went away for an extended rest, so we dated a while and then we lived together and then we got married and then we found out we hated each other.

  The only reason we stuck it seven years instead of seven days is because my family thought Shirley was terrific. In fact, when the split finally did come last year it wasn’t to her own folks over in Queens that Shirley went home, it was to mine up in Boston. She’s been there ever since, moving slowly in the direction of divorce and annoying me about money.

  The money problem is unfortunately complicated by the fact that she left while I was still high on From Italy With Love. I’d raved a lot about the vast sums that book would bring in, and Shirley wants some of it. My family is well off—my father’s an insurance company executive, he’s had his five square meals every day of his life—and they’re encouraging her to squeeze me. How’s that for a super family?

  Then there’s the kids. It’s perfectly true I’m no good as a father, but I never claimed I’d be any good. If Shirley’d just gone ahead and taken the goddam pill like she was supposed to there wouldn’t be any kids, but oh, no, the pill gave her migraine. Migraine! The pill maybe gave her migraine, but the diaphragm gave her a daughter named Rita and the foam gave her a son called John, and whose fault is that? Let my parents go on supporting them if they want, who I want to support is me.

  So that’s where we stand; or where we stood until Laura took that header. I’m no monk, I like female companionship, but for all I know Shirley has private detectives on me—she’ll do anything to strengthen her position for that inevitable day in court—so I impressed on both my girls the necessity for maintaining tight security. We didn’t live together, we didn’t obviously date a lot, and of course I’d explained to each of them that I’d occasionally have to take other women to screenings or press parties. (The two girls also didn’t know about one another. Laura and Kit were nodding acquaintances, with no reason ever to confide in each other, so I was about as safe as anybody ever is in this vale of tears. It was even possible to take one of my girls to a premiere attended by the other, with no suspicions raised.)

  Well, all that had now come to an end. Laura, who’d at first come on as the most rabidly independent of Women’s Lib types, had been complaining more and more about our secret life, comparing herself to Back Street and other absurdities, wanting to know why I didn’t just get the divorce over and done with (why hurry a finish that could only be costly and difficult for me?) and even threatening once or twice to blow the whistle herself with Shirley. Of course she didn’t really mean it, but it was upsetting to hear her talk that way, and in fact it was a repetition of the same threat that had caused me to lose my te
mper tonight and pop her one, etc.

  “You say Miss Penney threatened to tell your wife about this affair?”

  Mm. I was right to get clear of this, as quickly and quietly as I could. So out of the apartment I went, smearing the doorknobs with my gloved hand, checking the street before leaving the building, and walking all the way over to Sheridan Square before hailing a cab to take me home.

  Where I found several messages waiting on my telephone answering machine. After divesting myself of my coats and excess wardrobe I made a drink and sat at the desk to listen.

  The first was a nice female voice with a British accent: “Mr. Gautier’s office calling Mr. Thorpe, in re screening on the twentieth. Could you possibly make it at four instead of two?”

  I’d rather. And since I was unexpectedly dateless for that screening, perhaps the owner of the nice British accent would like to join me. Reaching for pencil and paper, I made a note to call back, while listening to the second message, from Sogeza “Tim” Kinywa, editor of Third World Cinema: “Sogeza here, Carey. Have you got a title yet on the Eisenstein piece?”

  No, I didn’t. I was about to make another note when the third message started: “Oh, you’ve left already. I wanted to remind you to bring the Molly Haskell book, but never mind.”

  Well. A strange sensation that, hearing a voice from beyond the grave. I erased the tape, finished my drink, and went to bed.

  * * *

  My street door intercom doesn’t work. I’ve talked to the super about it, but he only speaks some fungoid variant of Spanish understood exclusively on a six-mile stretch of the southern coast of Puerto Rico. I’ve also talked to the landlord, an old man with a nose like a tumor, and his response was the same as to anything his tenants say to him; a twenty-five minute diatribe on economics, expounding a theory so arcane, so foolish, so contradictory and so absurd that I’m surprised the government has never tried it. Or maybe they have.

  In any event, when the bell rang at nine-thirty the morning after Laura’s accident I couldn’t find out who it was before letting them in, but who could it be other than the police? Wouldn’t they automatically question all of Laura’s friends, everybody in her address book? Bracing myself, I left my half-eaten omelet and buzzed them in.