Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  Well. Well, it looked as though I had an unexpected free evening. Wonder what Kit’s doing tonight?

  I had nearly finished dialing Kit’s number when it suddenly struck me that I had better keep that original date with Laura. It was noted on my calendar, why wouldn’t it also appear on hers? At seven-thirty tonight I’d better be in the lobby of Laura’s apartment building, ready for our date, ringing her doorbell.

  TWO

  The Affair of the Hidden Lover

  Somebody buzzed to let me in.

  Laura? Laura, I thought, and I wasn’t sure myself whether I was thinking of Laura Penney or of the 1944 Otto Preminger movie. Either way it was the dead girl come back to life, and a nasty shock. Gene Tierney moved in the shadowy recesses of my mind, and I felt uncomfortably like Dana Andrews as I pushed open the door and crossed the pocket lobby to the pocket elevator.

  When I emerged on the fourth floor a man wearing an open black overcoat and a dark gray suit was standing in Laura’s open doorway. A cop, obviously. He looked like Dana Andrews, so what did that make me? Clifton Webb?

  I know nothing, I reminded myself. I am here to pick up my dinner date, and I have no idea who this man is.

  I stopped, just into the vestibule, frowning and looking around as though thinking I might have gotten off at the wrong floor. In fact, I held the elevator, in case I should want to reboard.

  The policeman, a black-haired fortyish Dana Andrews with cold eyes and blue chin and dandruffy shoulders, said, “Can I help you?”

  My outer self remained bewildered. “I’m looking for Laura Penney.”

  “Would you be Mr. Thorpe?”

  So she had made a note. “Yes, I am,” I said, and released the elevator door, which grumbled shut behind me. “Is something wrong?” My hands hid themselves in my topcoat pockets.

  “Come in.”

  I crossed the threshold as he stood to one side, watching me. I tried not to look at the spot where I’d last seen her, but my eyes insisted, and it was with great relief that I saw nobody there. To cover my eyes’ indiscretion, I turned my head left and right, looking at everything in the room, continuing to fail to understand the situation. “Where is Laura?” I turned to the policeman, who was closing the door. “And who are you?”

  “Detective Sergeant Bray,” he said. “I’m a police officer. There’s been an accident.”

  “An accident? Laura?”

  “Did you know Mrs. Penney well?”

  “Did I know her? For God’s sake, man, what’s happened?”

  “I’m sorry to break it to you this way, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “but I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “Come along,” he said, taking my elbow. “Come sit down.”

  I permitted myself to be moved, as though too stunned to act from my own volition, and when he’d seated us, me on the sofa and himself to my right in the chrome-and-leather chair, I said, “An accident? What kind of accident?”

  “Frankly, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “there’s some question about that. When was the last time you saw Mrs. Penney?”

  “Yesterday. We had dinner together.”

  “You brought her home?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “At about what time?”

  “Possibly nine, nine-thirty, I don’t know exactly.”

  “And when did you leave?”

  “Oh, I didn’t stay,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t come up, I simply saw her to the door.”

  “You didn’t come up?” He sounded mildly surprised. “Wasn’t that unusual?”

  “Not at all. I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression about our relationship, we weren’t…lovers, or anything like that. I have a steady girlfriend, named Kit Markowitz.”

  “You and Mrs. Penney were just good friends,” he suggested.

  Was there irony in that remark? His manner seemed bland, unsuspicious; I took him at face value and said, “That’s right. But are you suggesting—” I paused, as though struck by a sudden disquieting thought. “Did somebody do something to her?”

  He frowned. “Such as what, Mr. Thorpe?”

  “I don’t know, I was just—I just remembered what she was saying last night.”

  “And what was that?”

  “It was all very vague,” I said. “She had the idea there was a man hanging around, following her. She pointed him out last night, standing on the sidewalk across the street.”

  “You saw this man?”

  “He was just a man,” I said. “He didn’t seem interested in Laura or me in particular. She had the idea her ex-husband had hired somebody to make trouble for her.”

  “Do you know Mr. Penney?”

  “No. I believe he’s in Chicago or somewhere.”

  He nodded. “Could you describe the man you saw last night?”

  “I only saw him for a minute. Across the street.”

  “As best you can.”

  “Well, I’d say he was in his mid-forties. Wearing a brown topcoat. He seemed heavyset, and I got the impression of a large nose. Sort of a W.C. Fields nose.” Bray nodded throughout my description, but wrote nothing down. “And you say Mrs. Penney seemed afraid of this man?”

  “Well, not afraid, exactly. Upset, I suppose. I offered to come upstairs with her if she was worried, but she said she wanted to phone her husband. I had the idea she wanted privacy for that.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Sergeant Bray, uh—Is it Sergeant Bray?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well—Could you tell me what happened?”

  “We’re not entirely sure as yet,” he told me. “Mrs. Penney fell in this room and struck her head. She might have been alone here, she might have slipped. On the other hand, it seems likely there was someone with her.”

  “Why?” I asked, and movement to my left made me turn my head.

  It was another one, in black pea jacket and brown slacks, coming into the room from deeper in the apartment and carrying what I recognized immediately as my socks. As I caught sight of him he said, “Al, I found these and—Oh, sorry.”

  “Come on in, Fred. This is Carey Thorpe.”

  Fred grinned in recognition. “Right. Dinner, seven-thirty.”

  “Mr. Thorpe,” Bray said, “my partner, Detective Sergeant Staples.”

  I got to my feet, unsure whether or not we were supposed to shake hands. “How do you do?”

  “Fair to middling.” This one was a bit younger than Bray and looked more easygoing. He said, “Would you be the movie reviewer?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “I read you all the time,” Staples told me. “In The Kips Bay Voice. My wife and I both, we think you’re terrific, we swear by you.”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  “If you say a movie’s good, we go. If you say it stinks, we stay away from it.”

  “I hardly know what to say,” I admitted, and it was the truth. Such extravagant praise had never come my way before.

  “Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby, we just don’t care.”

  Even praise can reach a surfeit, and I was happy to be rescued by Bray, who interrupted his partner by saying, “What have you got there, Fred?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He held them up like a dead rabbit. “Socks.”

  Bray seemed to find that significant. “Ah hah,” he said. “I thought so.”

  I said, “Excuse me, is that a clue?”

  Staples probably would have answered, but Bray asked me a question first: “Was Mrs. Penney involved with any man in particular, that you know of?”

  “A lover?” I shook my head, frowning with thought. “I don’t think so. She was usually available for an evening out, and I never heard her talk about any steady boyfriend.”

  “Well, there was one,” Staples said. “And he looks like our man, doesn’t he, Al?”

  “Could be.”

  I found myself watching these two as though they were characters in a movie I’d be writing u
p, noticing with approval the complementary types they offered. Bray was the slower and more methodical, while Staples was intuitive and emotional. Bray, in character, now said, “On the other hand, he could have come in afterward, found the body, and figured he ought to keep himself out of it.”

  “I still think it’s the boyfriend,” Staples said.

  “Except for the glass,” Bray told him. “If he lived here, wouldn’t he have known about that?”

  Something trembled in my stomach. Trying to sound no more than ordinarily curious, I said, “Glass?”

  This time Staples got to answer the question. “There was one glass in the living room here,” he said, “with a partly consumed drink in it. But in the kitchen cabinet was another glass that had been washed and put away. So the killer had a drink with her, and then after she was dead he washed his glass.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “How did you know all that? If he washed the glass, how did you find out?”

  “He put it in the cabinet right side up. Mrs. Penney stored her glasses upside down, so that one glass was put away by somebody else.”

  “By God,” I said, “real-life detectives are just like the movies.”

  Staples grinned like an Irish setter. “We get lucky sometimes.”

  “No, I can see it’s a special kind of talent,” I insisted, giving him a return overdose of praise while at the same time cursing myself for that stupidity about the glass. Of course she kept her damn glasses upside down, I knew that, but I must have been more rattled than I’d thought. The shelf is high, and the damn glasses look the same right side up or upside down.

  Bray said to his partner, “If the guy was living here, he’d know which way the glasses went.”

  “Not if he got rattled,” Staples said. “Besides, I don’t think he actually lived here, I think he just stayed overnight sometimes.”

  I said, “That’s the significance of the socks?”

  Staples grinned again; by golly, this was another chance to dazzle me with his sleuthing. “They’re more significant than that,” he said, and when he went on he addressed himself equally to his partner and to me. “These socks were the only male clothing in the bedroom. Now, the razor and stuff in the bathroom don’t mean much, they could even belong to the victim herself. But these socks mean a man, and one that stayed here often enough to keep some extra clothing around. And you see what else they mean?”

  I had to admit I didn’t, but Bray already knew. “He cleaned his stuff out,” he said.

  Staples pointed an approving finger at him. “Right! He left the socks because there’s no way to trace anybody from socks like these. But he took everything else because maybe they could be traced. Laundry marks, initials, whatever.” Turning his beaming face toward me, he said, “Now, you see what that means. That means guilty knowledge.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  Bray, the cautious one, said, “I agree with you, Fred, up to a point. There is a boyfriend and he did clear his stuff out after the victim was killed. But I still think there’s a good chance he came in after she was dead, realized he could be in a lot of trouble, and tried to cover his tracks.”

  “Maybe so,” Staples said. “Maybe there’s two guys out there in front of us, but I still think there’s only one.”

  “And there’s something else,” Bray told him. He then had me repeat my story about the mysterious man across the street, after which he said, “So he could be the killer, too.”

  I said, “Excuse me, I’m not trying to play detective with you, but she didn’t know who that man was, so she wouldn’t sit down and have a drink with him, would she?”

  Staples now did his finger-pointing in my direction, saying, “Very good, Mr. Thorpe, very good. Of course it’s possible, the guy could have come up and said he had a message from her husband or whatever, she asks him in for a drink and he kills her. That’s possible, but it isn’t very likely.”

  I said, “Or maybe the killer did the thing with the glass to throw you off, make you think it was somebody Laura knew socially.”

  This time Staples’ smile was condescending. “Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I hate to say this, but you’ve been seeing too many movies. In real life killers don’t get that cute. Visualize it for yourself; the guy gets in the apartment, kills Mrs. Penney, then he comes into the kitchen and turns over one glass so we’ll think he knows her socially. People just don’t act that way.”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  Bray said, “I guess that’s about all we’ll need you for at the moment, Mr. Thorpe. If we want to talk to you again, I suppose you’ll be around.”

  “Of course.” Smiling at them both I said, “I wasn’t planning on going out of town.”

  Staples smiled back, but Bray didn’t.

  * * *

  Home again, I swallowed a Valium with bourbon and sat down to listen to the messages on my answering machine. The first was from Shirley, in her harsh ex-wife’s voice with its recently acquired Boston accent: “There are some papers for you to sign, whether you like it or not. I’m sending them today, special delivery, and if we don’t get them back by Tuesday your father says I should hire a New York attorney. At your expense.”

  Lovely. Next came the voice of Tim Kinywa of Third World Cinema, also sounding petulant: “Sogeza here, Carey. Could you possibly give us a title on the Eisenstein piece? I need it before noon tomorrow if at all possible.” Damn; I’d forgotten about that. Here before me was the note I’d made, along with the note about the changed time for the screening. I underlined both, while listening to my next message. A secretary-type voice: “Mr. Thorpe, Mr. Brant will be in New York for a week, arriving Friday. If you’d care to arrange an appointment, would you phone the Sherry-Netherland sometime Saturday morning?”

  I would. For six months I’d been trying to set up an interview with Big John Brant, famous old-time director of such classics as Fury At Sundown, Tank Command, Fatal Lady and Smart Alex, and finally it was going to happen. Good.

  The last message was from Kit: “Hello, machine. Just wondered what your master was doing tonight. I’ll be in if he feels like calling.”

  Did I feel like calling? I considered the question while I dialed Tim’s number and listened to his recorded announcement: “Hello, caller, this is the number of Sogeza Kinywa and Third World Cinema. We aren’t answering the phone just now, but if you’ll leave your name and phone number on this tape we’ll get back to you very soon. Kwaheri, and peace.”

  Nobody talks to anybody any more. We just talk to each other’s machines. “Hello, Tim,” I said to the machine. “This is Carey, and the title is ‘The Influence of Eisenstein: Stairway To The Stars.’ I have an early screening tomorrow, but if there’s any problem you can reach me at home after one.”

  And now Kit. After the day I’d had I wasn’t sure I could handle the warm-human-being role tonight, but I ought to call her back anyway and see if anything developed. So I dialed, and damn if I didn’t get her machine: “Kit Markowitz here, on tape. I’m really sorry not to answer in person, but if you’ll leave a message right after the little beep, I’ll call you back just as soon as I can. Wait for it now, wait for it. Here it comes.”

  She’d changed her announcement; the previous one had been more standard. After the little beep I said, “Too cute, Kit. This is Carey, and I’m home for the evening.”

  After that, I settled down for a little work. A new New York-type magazine called The Loop had started in Chicago, and I’d promised them a piece called “Bogdanovich: The Kid Brother As Leader Of The Pack.” Linking Bogdanovich and Ryan O’Neal through the seminal figure of Lee Tracy was turning out to be more complicated than I’d anticipated.

  Kit phoned half an hour later to say, “I don’t think it’s too cute.”

  “It’s the ‘wait for it’ that gets me.”

  “But that’s the whole idea.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re too linear,” she said; one of her au courant but meaningless in
sults, the result of reading too many trade paperbacks. “You doing anything tonight?”

  I’d decided by now how to handle my news. “The fact is,” I said, “I’m mostly getting over a shock. You remember Laura Penney?”

  “The girl with the mouse-brown hair? The one you’ve been seeing so much of lately?”

  Ah. Maybe I hadn’t been covering my tracks quite so well as I’d thought. “Well, I won’t see much of her any more,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  “Good God!”

  “Killed, in fact.”

  “Oh, Jesus. One of those rape things?”

  “I don’t think so. It happened in her apartment. I was supposed to take her to dinner tonight, I went over th—”

  “You found her! Oh, my God!”

  “Not quite that bad. The police were there.”

  “Oh, baby, what an experience. Do they suspect you?”

  I was shocked—truly shocked—at the suggestion. “Why would they do that?”

  “I thought the police were supposed to suspect everybody.”

  “Oh. Then maybe they do suspect me, I don’t know. They didn’t act that way.”

  “You sound very jittery. Want me to come over?”

  Did I? The half-finished page in the typewriter grayed before my eyes. “I’d love it,” I said.

  * * *

  “I love your pubic hair,” I said.

  She came over to the bed, carrying the two drinks. “What kind of compliment is that?”

  “A sincere one.” I took my drink and made room for her beside me in the bed. Looking at the feature in question, I said, “It’s furry, but not too much. It has a friendly quality.”

  “I bet you say that to all your girls.”

  I did, as a matter of fact, so I remained silent while she arranged the covers over herself. On the TV facing the bed the fifty all-time greatest hits of some obsolescent teenage castrati were being peddled in an extremely hard sell. “As somebody once said about Marion Davies,” I said, nodding at the screen, “‘Forgotten, but not gone.’” It was nearly midnight, and if that Kallikak on the tube would ever stop yowling we would go on watching The Thin Man, a film I was enjoying this evening in a very new and different way. The day was ending far better than it had begun. Kit had come over around nine-thirty, we’d gone at once to bed, and then I’d been subjected to an hour’s conversation on the general subject What Happened To Laura Penney And Why? Kit, like Detective Staples, believed that Laura had a secret boyfriend and that he was the killer. I couldn’t tell her she was absolutely right, of course, but on the other hand I didn’t want to be suspiciously negative, so I maintained a thoughtful neutrality on the subject and let Kit do most of the talking.