Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  A: “Well, I’m not sure I get the idea what you want here, but let’s give it a try and see what happens.”

  Q: “Fine. Now, the hero of this film is being blackmailed in the early part of the picture. But then he gets rid of the evidence against himself, but the blackmailer keeps coming around anyway. He’s bigger than the hero, he threatens to beat him up and so on, he even moves into the hero’s apartment, he still wants his blackmail money even though the evidence is gone. The hero doesn’t want to go to the police, because he’s afraid they’ll get too interested in him and start looking around and maybe find some other evidence. So that’s the situation, as far as this young filmmaker has taken it. The blackmailer is in the hero’s apartment, the hero is trying to decide what to do next. Now, if this was one of your pictures, how would you handle it from there?”

  A: “Well, that depends on your story.”

  Q: “Well, I think he wants the hero to win in the end.”

  A: “Okay. Fine.”

  Q: “The question is, where would you yourself take it from there?”

  A: “Well, what’s the script say?”

  Q: “That doesn’t matter. That’s still open.”

  A: “Open? You have to know what happens next.”

  Q: “Well, that’s up to you. What would you have happen next?”

  A: “I’d follow the script.”

  Q: “Well, they’re doing this as they go along.”

  A: “They’re crazy. You can’t do anything without a script.”

  Q: “Well…They’re working this from an auteur assumption, that it’s up to the director to color and shape the material and so on.”

  A: “Yeah, that’s fine, but you got to have the material to start with. You got to have the story. You got to have the script.”

  Q: “Well…I thought the director was the dominant influence in film.”

  A: “Well, shit, sure the director’s the dominant influence in film. But you still gotta have a script.”

  Well, that wasn’t any help. What was I supposed to do, go ask three or four screenwriters for suggestions? Is the director the auteur or what the hell is he?

  I did keep trying along in this vein for a few more questions, but they didn’t get me anywhere. So far as I could see, Big John Brant’s career had come down to this; he was the fellow who told the cameraman to point the camera at the people who were talking. And to think how high in the pantheon I’d always placed this man.

  The script. Only a hack cares about the goddam script. What I needed was to talk to a real director; Hitchcock, or John Ford, or John Huston, or Howard Hawks. What happens next? that was my question. Sam Fuller would have an answer to that. Roger Corman, even.

  Well, it was all hopeless. The interview with Brant meandered along, being of no use personally and damn little professionally, until Miss Fireperson came in a little after twelve with a pointed reminder: “Don’t forget your luncheon appointment, J.T.” So I also wouldn’t be getting lunch. I gathered up my paraphernalia, shook hands, smiled, said some lies, listened to just one more scatological anecdote, and took my departure.

  * * *

  As far as the hotel bar, where I swallowed another of Kit’s Valiums with bourbon and water, ate a handful of peanuts for lunch, and gradually came to a decision. I could no longer spend my life wandering through a snowstorm from one reluctant haven to the next. I had to reclaim my own home. I had to get Edgarson out, and me in, and I had to do it now.

  I had one more bourbon to confirm this decision and to warm me for the trek uptown, and then I left the hotel and turned toward home. Since I lived less than ten blocks from here—up four and over five, approximately—and since traffic was utterly snarled by the snow, there was no point trying to find a cab, so I walked. I was dressed warmly enough, except for my shoes, and I simply kept stumping through the slush, irritable but determined.

  There’s something both lazy and inexorable about a major snowstorm. No wind, no real storm at all, just billions and billions of wet white smudges floating down like Chinese armies, and after a while there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it should ever stop. Maybe that low gray-black sky contains unlimited quantities of these wet white smudges, maybe they’ll just keep drifting down like this forever. Maybe human life developed on the wrong planet.

  Along the way, I bought a chainlock at a hardware store on Third Avenue. I couldn’t help remembering Bart Ailburg, whose door had been armed with a lock like this but who had been murdered anyway. However, no true parallel applied. Ailburg had been murdered by a loved one, which in my case was not the issue.

  At the house, I spent ten minutes searching out Romeo, the super, and finally found him drinking wine in the tenants’ storeroom in the basement. He wasn’t drunk, I was happy to see, but he was surly. “I doan wuk Sahdy,” he told me, trying to hide the brown paper bag with its cargo of Hombre or Ripple.

  “You don’t work ever,” I informed him. “But you’ll come upstairs with me now or I’ll call Goldbender and tell him I found you drunk in the basement and lighting matches.”

  Surliness turned to a kind of clogged outrage. “I ayn drunk!” Then he comprehended the rest of my sentence and was, for just an instant, completely baffled. Innocence bewildered him, he didn’t know at first what to do with it. But he soon enough recovered, crying out, “Motches? I doan got no motches! I doan hob no stinkin’ motches!”

  “And,” I went on, wanting to be certain he understood the threat I was making, “I’ll tell Goldbender that I intend to call the police about a super being drunk and lighting matches in the basement.”

  Maddened by this maligning of his virtue, Romeo waved his arms in the air, slopping wine on himself and on the stored possessions of the tenants as he cried, “I doan hob no motches!”

  “Goldbender is going to think about his insurance,” I pointed out, “and—”

  “I doan hob no motches!”

  “And,” I insisted, “he is going to fire you. Particularly,” I added, “when he smells you.”

  Romeo became aware of the spillage and began fretfully to pat himself with his free hand. “You makin me nervis,” he said, and he sounded as though soon he might cry.

  “Come along, Romeo,” I said. “Put your lunch down over there and come along.”

  “This ay muh lunch.” He frowned from the bag to me, and returned to an earlier worry. “An I doan hob no motches.”

  “Come, Romeo.” I turned away, not looking back till I reached the stairs, when I saw that Romeo, however much he might be bewildered and mistreated, was also sensible. He was coming along.

  As we plodded up the several flights of stairs together, me squoshing in my cold wet shoes, Romeo said, “Wha jew wan, anyway?”

  “Just come along,” I told him.

  What I wanted from Romeo was his presence. We would enter, Edgarson would approach me, Edgarson would see the witness, Edgarson would depart. The details would work themselves out, but at the finish Edgarson would definitely depart.

  Except that he wasn’t there. Gingerly I let myself into the apartment, Romeo snuffling in my wake, and nothing moved in the semi-darkness of the living room. I switched on lights, I looked quickly in bedroom and kitchen and bath, and the apartment was empty. Edgarson had vacated on his own.

  Romeo had remained by the door, shoulders hunched against injustice, and when I emerged from the kitchen he said, “O.K. Here I am. Wha jew wan?”

  “That’s fine, Romeo,” I told him. “Thank you very much, I won’t be needing you any more.”

  Then, of course, he didn’t want to leave. At first he’d been bewildered and surly when I’d brought him up here, and now he was bewildered and surly when I released him. There’s no pleasing some people.

  But he did finally go, and I immediately brought out my hammer and screwdriver from the storage cabinet under the bathroom sink and proceeded to mount the chainlock. It was in two parts; a metal plate from which dangled a six-inch chain with a metal ball on
the end of it, and a longer metal plate with a long slot. The plate-with-chain I screwed into place on the doorframe at about chest height, then stretched the length of chain out horizontally and marked on the door how far the ball would reach. Next I fixed the longer plate onto the door in the right position, slipped the ball in the wide space in the slot, and experimentally opened the door. When I did so the chain tightened, because the ball was stuck in the narrower part of the slot, and the door wouldn’t open more than four inches.

  There. Let Edgarson play with his keys now, it would take more than a key to come through that door. He could open it wide enough to reach his arm in, but that was all.

  Safe at last, I turned my attention back to the apartment. Surely Edgarson would have done something to commemorate his visit. Excrement on the floor? Mousetraps in the bed? Something destructive, or nasty, or both?

  But I’d misjudged him. The man had beaten me up Thursday night, and yet when he’d had a full day and night to himself in my apartment he’d done nothing to it at all. He seemed to have no pattern, no consistency in his behavior, and if that was deliberately planned to increase my nervousness it was very successful. If I’d found all my dishes broken or all the furniture knocked over in the living room I would have been more angry but less tense, because I would have known what I was up against and what he was likely to do next. This way, it was impossible to guess where or when Edgarson would once more pop up, or what his manner would be when he did make his next appearance.

  This time, he had contented himself with going through my personal papers and with leaving me a short but complete note, typewritten and sitting on my answering machine:

  You have until noon Monday.

  * * *

  The phone woke me at nine-thirty Sunday morning and it was Staples, sounding slightly irritated through his normal cheeriness. “Do you feel brilliant this morning, Carey?”

  “What? What?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “No, but you might. What time is it?”

  “Nine twenty-seven. Up late last night?”

  Yes, as a matter of fact. I’d stayed up till nearly three, distracting myself from thoughts of Edgarson by trying to make a sensible interview out of Brant’s twaddle. But I was awake now, so I sat straighter in the bed and said, “That’s okay, I ought to get up anyway. What’s happening?”

  “Another little problem.”

  “Problem? You mean a murder?”

  “Well, that’s the question. I say it’s a clear-cut case of suicide, but Al Bray keeps saying it feels funny. He doesn’t have a bit of evidence, it just feels funny.”

  So that was why Staples was annoyed. It wasn’t so much that Bray disagreed with him, which surely must have happened more than once in the course of their partnership, as that Bray was disagreeing on Staples’ grounds. It was Staples who was supposed to have feelings and be intuitive, while Bray was assigned the role of the methodical plodder. To have the plodder suddenly intuit all over the place could be unsettling.

  I said, “You mean you think it’s suicide and he thinks it’s murder?”

  “He doesn’t know what he thinks,” Staples said. “It just doesn’t feel right. So he asked me to call you.”

  “He asked? Al Bray?”

  “We made a deal. If you agree with me it was suicide, Al won’t make any more fuss and we’ll put in our report and that’s the end of it.”

  “What if I think it’s murder?”

  He chuckled; a bit challengingly, I thought. “Then you’ll have to prove it,” he said.

  * * *

  They sent a car for me, with a uniformed policeman as chauffeur. I hadn’t been happy about leaving the apartment untended, since the chainlock only works when there’s someone inside to attach it, but then I remembered a stunt from several hundred spy movies. I took a paper match, bent it double, and wedged it between door and frame just below the bottom hinge. It protruded just enough to be seen, if you knew where to look, and if anyone opened my apartment door the match would fall. It wouldn’t keep Edgarson out, but it would warn me in time if he’d returned. If the match was on the floor when I came back I’d know Edgarson was once again in residence, and off I’d go for Romeo.

  Outside, the policeman was standing beside his unmarked black Plymouth, his breath steaming in the cold air. The snow had stopped but the sky was still gray and heavy with low clouds, and the temperature was dropping.

  Our destination was Central Park West near 89th Street, and on the way the cop filled me in on the situation. At eight-twenty this morning, a tenant of the building in question had come out to walk his dog, and found the crushed body of a woman lying face up on the sidewalk. The tenant returned immediately to the building and informed the doorman, who called the police. The doorman also obtained a blanket and went out to cover the body, at which point he realized the victim was someone he knew, a tenant who had occupied one of the penthouse duplexes atop the building. Apparently she had fallen or jumped or been pushed from the terrace up there.

  A patrol car responded to the first call, but no one went up to the dead woman’s apartment until the precinct detectives arrived, and then it took considerable banging and doorbell-ringing to rouse the woman’s husband, who had been asleep and had not been aware of his wife’s absence from the apartment. According to the husband, his wife had been despondent and depressed recently and had spoken of suicide.

  The couple’s name was Templeton, George and Margo, and they were both in their early fifties. He was a millionaire in the real estate business in the city, with ownership of office buildings and Broadway theaters among his holdings, and she was a one-time actress who had given up her career twenty-five years ago to marry him. They had two sons, both now grown and living away from New York. They had been to a party last night where both had become very drunk and where George Templeton freely admitted they had quarreled publicly over whether or not he had ruined her life twenty-five years ago by marrying her. They had returned home, continuing the argument in their chauffeur-driven limousine and in their bedroom, until Templeton had either gone to sleep or passed out from drink. And he had known nothing more until the pounding of the police at his door had awakened him.

  The Templetons kept a staff of three servants, but only one of these—the maid—lived in the apartment, and she invariably spent her Saturday nights and Sundays with her family in New Hyde Park.

  As to the time of death, the Weather Bureau said the snow had stopped at just about eight o’clock this morning. The body had been found at eight-twenty, and both the tenant who’d found it and the doorman who’d covered it swore there was no snow on top of the body. After eight o’clock, then, and before eight-twenty.

  I was primed with all of this by the time we reached the building, and I was happy to see the body was no longer on the sidewalk. Clean and neat, that’s the way I like my murders.

  My chauffeur-cop accompanied me into the building and up in the elevator. Going up I reviewed what he’d told me, and decided Al Bray was probably right. It not only sounded like murder, it sounded like my murder, plus a terrace. I mean the murder I’d committed. Argumentative women don’t commit suicide, they don’t want to give the opposition the satisfaction. What most likely happened was that George Templeton, tired and drunk and getting older by the second, had finally popped Margo a good one to shut her up and she’d done herself a fatal injury in hitting the floor. Not wanting the scandal or the trouble of a manslaughter trial, George had chucked her over the terrace, pretended to be asleep, and then told the police his wife had been suicidal lately.

  I felt ambivalent about exposing old George; in a way, we were members of the same fraternity.

  * * *

  It was a two-story apartment, with a spiral staircase.

  The elevator let me off directly into the living room, on the apartment’s lower floor, where Staples and Bray were sitting together on green velvet sofas, having a stiff-necked discussion. It ended when t
hey saw me, and they both got up and came over. Staples looking a bit cocky and defiant, Bray awkward but determined.

  It was Bray who did the talking, after we’d exchanged ritual hellos. “I feel a little funny about this situation, Mr. Thorpe,” he said. “It goes against the grain with me. But there’s something wrong here, I know there is, and I just can’t put my finger on it. You’ve come up with a couple of off-the-wall solutions the last week, so maybe you can do something this time.”

  Staples added, “Even if it’s just to put those feelings of Al’s to rest.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I admitted. “You people are trained, I’m not. I’ve just had beginner’s luck.”

  “Maybe you’ve still got it,” Bray said. “Come along.”

  We went up the spiral staircase in single file, Bray and then me and then Staples, who said, “Templeton isn’t here right now. His doctor’s in this building and he’s down there, under sedation. If you need to talk with him, we can work something out.”

  At the head of the stairs was the master bedroom, large and ornately furnished, with French doors leading to the terrace. Windows flanking the French doors featured hanging plants, with frost-blackened leaves.

  Staples now took over, saying, “No one’s gone out on the terrace yet. It’s exactly the way we found it. Come take a look.”

  I went with him. He opened the French doors and I stood in the doorway as he pointed out the obvious, saying, “You’ll notice there’s footprints in the fresh snow. But there’s only one set of them, and they lead straight out to the railing, and they don’t come back.”

  I nodded. “So I see.”

  “We took the shoes off the body,” he went on, “and compared them with the nearest prints, and those prints were definitely made by those shoes.”

  “Ah.”

  I stood frowning at the terrace. The recent windless snow, the current bitter cold, had combined to create an almost perfect tableau for us, as though it were a model made out of papier maché. Two lawn chairs were folded away to one side of the terrace, which was otherwise unfurnished. The layer of snow on the floor was two to three inches thick, and in it the footprints showed clearly. There was no other disturbance of the snow of any kind out there. Beyond the snow-topped wrought iron railing was Central Park, far below, shrouded in grayish white.