Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  Okay, kid, I know all about that line. “Right,” I said, and rolled her off onto the floor.

  * * *

  “I love your pubic hair,” I said.

  She gazed down at herself. “It is nice, isn’t it? All furry and soft. But boy, in the summertime I just have to shave and shave and shave. Because of the bathing suits.”

  “You must look fantastic in a bikini.”

  She smiled at me. I was learning that she loved compliments above all other things. “You’ll have to see me sometime.”

  “I intend to.”

  We were in the bedroom now. The first reel of Gaslight had been running itself out as we’d finished our first encounter, so I’d quickly shut down the projector and hustled this incredible woman in here onto the bed, where we could vary our approaches without danger of skinning our elbows or knees.

  It was the first time I’d ever made love to a woman in a bedroom with a murder victim hanging in the closet, particularly a victim of my own, and I must say it made absolutely no difference at all. I was neither turned off nor were my responses heightened. Possibly I’m abnormal.

  My reaction, however, was completely normal when Patricia got off the bed and crossed the room to open the closet door. “Ummm,” I said. “Ummm, unnn, ungg.”

  “Do you have a robe? Oh, here it is. Terrycloth, I love terrycloth, it feels so nice against my skin.”

  Beyond her the pole sagged from the weight of the Valpack. She closed the door, slipped into my robe, gave me a smile and a bye-bye finger waggle, and went off to the bathroom.

  Christ. Since the Valium supply was temporarily cut off, I padded barefoot out to the living room, switched on the smallest dimmest light, found my glass, and made myself a fresh bourbon on the rocks. When I carried it back to the bedroom Patricia was there, getting dressed. “It’s terribly late,” she told me.

  “Don’t worry about it. Want a drink?”

  “No, I’d better go on home. Fred worries.”

  Fred was entitled, though I didn’t say so. “Listen,” I said. “You just saw Gaslight, remember?”

  “Of course,” she said, and gave me a surprisingly lewd smile.

  “I mean you have to be able to talk about the movie,” I pointed out, and while she dressed and did her face and fussed with her hair and generally cared for herself like a conscientious gardener I gave her the plot and principal incidents of Gaslight. By then she was ready to leave, so still naked I walked her to the door. “Now, remember,” I said, helping her to bundle into her coats and hats and gloves and scarves, “Charles Boyer was doing it, and the jewels were the decoration in the dress.”

  She nodded. “The jewels were in the dress.”

  “See you soon,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sparkly-eyed, and kissed my nose, and left. I watched her down the first flight of stairs, then shut the door, turned, and stepped smack on a thumbtack.

  “Ow!” I said, naturally, and hopped around on one foot till I got the thumbtack out. Then I limped around on one and a half feet, cursing, until it occurred to me to wonder where that damn thumbtack had come from. Surely not from my desk, way over at the other end of the room.

  I turned on more lights, bewildered, and at first I found nothing at all. Then, also on the floor, I came across a smallish rubber band. Where had these things come from?

  Edgarson. The chainlock.

  Yes. When I closely studied the chainlock, there was a tiny puncture in the wood of the door just past the metal plate with the slot. Now I saw what Edgarson had done. He had looped the rubber band around the chain, then with the thumbtack had fastened both ends of the rubber band to the door. With the door open, the rubber band was stretched out across the metal plate with the slot in it. When Edgarson closed the door, the rubber band naturally contracted, pulling the chain with it, sliding the ball through the slot to the wide opening. When he thumped the door, the ball fell out.

  Another illusion shattered.

  SEVEN

  The Riddle of the Other Woman

  The phone had rung three times while Patricia was here, so I listened to my messages while going through the drawerful of Edgarson’s possessions, the things formerly in his pockets.

  Only two messages; one caller had hung up without saying anything. The first of the verbal callers was Jack Freelander, umming and stuttering his way through another request to pick my brains for his damn porno article that Esquire would never publish anyway, and the other was Kit: “Hi, baby. I’m feeling a lot better all at once. I was mean yesterday, wasn’t I? Drove you out into the storm. Come on back, and I’ll make it up to you.”

  Any other time, honey, but just at the moment I am (a) rather drained of my vital fluids, and (b) occupied with an unexpected guest who just keeps hanging around.

  Edgarson’s effects: One wallet, containing thirty-seven dollars, four credit cards, a Tobin-Global laminated ID card with his photograph on it, a New York driver’s license, about twenty assorted business cards, a few crumpled old newspaper clippings that made no sense to me, and several pieces of paper scribbled over with notes to himself; phone numbers and the like. Three key rings, loaded with keys. A claim check for a parking garage over on First Avenue. A Boy Scout knife, with enough doohickeys and thingamabobs to dismantle a tank. A plastic pouch with a little pocket screwdriver set. A circuit tester. Various envelopes containing official-looking documents concerning bail-bond jumpers and repossessable automobiles. A small address book—I wasn’t in it. A half-used checkbook, with all the stubs blank. A little metal box containing thumbtacks, paper clips, rubber bands, washers and so on. A small roll of black electric tape. A tattered paperback copy of One Of Our Agents Is Missing by E. Howard Hunt. A dollar and thirty-seven cents in change.

  I pocketed the wallet and claim check and change, stuffed the key rings and knife and screwdriver set and circuit tester and little metal box and roll of electric tape back into the drawer, and shredded the envelopes, checkbook and address book into the wastebasket, on top of the paperback. Then I bundled into my overcoat and left the apartment.

  It was now shortly after eight in the evening, and the neighborhood was full of cars from Queens, which is the normal weekend cross we have to bear in this part of the city. The air was very cold, the sky was still leaden and low, and while the main avenues had been cleared of snow the side streets were still rather clogged.

  I found the parking garage on First Avenue, and Edgarson’s claim check got me the same dirty blue Plymouth Fury he’d been following me around in. I paid the tab out of Edgarson’s wallet, tipped the boy an Edgarson quarter, and drove on back to my place, where I parked next to Staples’ favorite fire hydrant.

  Lugging that Valpack down the stairs was the hardest and least appetizing part of the whole job. Thump, thump, thump all the way down. I couldn’t lift the thing, so I also had to drag it through the snow on the sidewalk and then heave and push and cram it up over the rear bumper and into the trunk. Finally it arranged itself in there, and I slammed the lid and drove out to Kennedy Airport, where a TWA skycap said, “You can’t park here, sir.”

  “I just want to leave my luggage. It’s too heavy for me to carry.”

  He gave me a superior smile, but when I opened the trunk and he tried to lift the Valpack by the handle his expression suggested he’d just found a hernia. “My my,” he said. “That is heavy.”

  Should I do a joke about there being a body in it? No, I should not.

  The skycap struggled the Valpack onto his cart and said, “Do you have your ticket, sir?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And where will you be going?”

  Feeling a cool climate was best under the circumstances, I said, “Seattle.”

  “Fine, sir. You’ll find your bag at the ticket counter.” I thanked him, gave him one of Edgarson’s dollars, and he wheeled Edgarson away.

  Driving out to the long-term parking lot, I considered leaving it at that, but time and confusion were my alli
es here, so I took the inter-airport bus back to TWA, and used one of Edgarson’s credit cards to buy him a nonstop round-trip ticket to Seattle, first class. My Valpack was tagged, two clerks wrestled it onto the conveyor belt, and Edgarson rolled away on the start of his journey westward. My clerk compared the quickly scrawled signature I’d just perpetrated with Edgarson’s quickly scrawled signature on the credit card, was satisfied, gave me the card and the ticket, and wished me a pleasant journey. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I love Seattle this time of year.”

  For only fifteen more of Edgarson’s dollars, a taxi took me to my general neighborhood in Manhattan. I had emptied his wallet en route, keeping the money and stuffing the cards and papers into my overcoat pockets, and in the course of a six-block stroll I distributed the wallet and its former contents into twenty-five or thirty trash receptacles. Then I returned home, to find that more people had been in conversation with my answering machine.

  Two of them; the Staples family. Patricia’s message was first, and was both brief and evocative. What an astonishing way for that woman to talk. When Fred’s voice came on immediately after I felt a certain brief discomfort, which was not at all eased by what he had to say:

  “More developments in the Laura Penney case, Carey. I think maybe you could be a big help after all. Call me at the office.” And he gave his number.

  I phoned Patricia first, and we said warm things back and forth, about how much we had enjoyed and how much we would enjoy and so on, and then she said she’d be in Manhattan tomorrow afternoon and would I be home between two and three? Oddly enough, I would.

  Next, I said, “Sweetheart, I hate to mention this, but Fred does come here sometimes. I’d hate to have him accidentally recognize any voices on my answering machine, if you follow me.”

  “You mean you don’t want me to tell you those things any more?”

  “Don’t talk to some cold machine,” I explained. “Talk to my warm ear.”

  So she did, at some length and in some detail concerning the morrow, and when at last I managed to end the conversation I was feeling a bit humid. I went and washed my face in cold water before phoning her husband.

  The guttural New York voice that answered told me Staples wasn’t there, but when I identified myself he gave me a number where Fred could be reached. I jotted it down, hung up, and realized I had just written Kit’s phone number.

  Could that be right? Confused notions of swapping, keys-on-the-floor, Fred And Patricia And Carey And Kit, mingled in my mind with the more realistic thought that Staples was at work right now on Laura’s murder, and this work of his had apparently brought him to an interview with my girl.

  Which meant I had a choice. I could phone Staples to find out precisely what was going on, or I could use that ticket to Seattle. (Replacing it first, since the original was now in a dozen pieces in as many trash baskets.) So far, though, Seattle was still the alternate; I dialed Kit’s number.

  And Kit answered. She sounded, I thought, a little tense. I said, “It’s me, honey. I got two messages to call.”

  “Oh, hello, Carey.” Enunciated with clarity but no warmth; announcing me to Staples, of course.

  Pretending I hadn’t a care in the world, I said, “Feeling better, eh?”

  “Yes. I guess it was one of those twenty-four hour bugs.”

  “When I get a twenty-four hour bug, it stays a week.”

  “Could I call you back, Carey? I’m a little tied up right now.”

  “With Fred Staples,” I said. “That was my other message, he wants to talk to me.”

  “Oh? I didn’t—Hold on.”

  I held on, and the next voice I heard belonged to Fred Staples. I listened hard for nuances in that voice, changes in his attitude toward me, but he was the same ebullient Fred as ever: “Hey, there, Carey, how you doing?”

  “Just fine,” I said.

  “You never told me you had such a terrific girlfriend.”

  I answered in appropriate mode: “Keeping her for myself, Fred.”

  He chuckled, then said, “You going to be around the rest of the evening?”

  “Sure.” Some long-winded explanation of my absence from the apartment trembled on my lips, but I forced it down. The guilty man flees, as they say, where no man pursueth. Also, there’s the fella that protests too much.

  “I’d like to drop over,” Staples was saying. “In half an hour or so, okay?”

  “Coffee or bourbon?” (No drink with potential arrestee.)

  “Mmmm…Better make it coffee”

  Taking comfort from that hesitation, I said, “I’ll have it waiting.” But I missed the first time, when I tried to cradle the phone.

  * * *

  If you’re going to commit a murder—and in the first place, I don’t recommend it—one thing you should definitely not do afterward is have sex with the investigating officer’s wife. It merely makes for a lot of extraneous complication.

  In fact, generally speaking, it seems to me that all police officers’ wives are better left alone. In the first place, their husbands walk around all the time with guns. And in the second place, there are so many other things a cop can do to you if he’s annoyed; he carries as much power in his badge as in his pistol. So all in all I would suggest that policemen’s wives, like nuns, should be left to Mexican bandits.

  There’s nothing like ignoring your own advice. But I hadn’t after all intended all that with Patricia Staples; it had just, well, happened.

  Whatever my intentions, though, well-armed police officer Fred Staples was about to walk into the scene of (a) Edgarson’s launching, and (b) his own cuckolding. No matter how much Valium or how much bourbon I put away, I remained convinced that something, some small tiny forgotten thing, from at least one of those misadventures would attract Fred’s bright eye. Though I ran the vacuum cleaner, though I made the bed, though I went over the apartment half a dozen times, I still didn’t feel secure when the doorbell rang nearly an hour later. I wasn’t ready, but I let him in.

  Al Bray wasn’t along, which I took as another hopeful sign. He came up the stairs, we smiled at one another, and said hello and shook one another’s hands, and then he came on in without apparently noticing anything about anything. I poured coffee for both of us, he sat on the sofa where Patricia lately had lain, and I settled tensely into the director’s chair.

  “I called Patricia before I came over,” he told me. “She said she had a terrific time.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “It was my pleasure.”

  “She asked me to tell you she really loved Gaslight.”

  In my own recent conversation with Patricia, the word ‘gaslight’ had become a kind of double entendre private joke. Was she deciding to play a dangerous game? Hoping she wasn’t, I made some sort of conventional response and then said, “But you’ve got to tell me why you went to see Kit. I’m burning with curiosity.”

  He said, “Well, she did know Mrs. Penney, of course.”

  “Not all that well.”

  Was he being evasive? He said, “When a case doesn’t break right away, you tend to reach out farther and farther, hoping to pick up one end of the string.”

  “Kit’s only relationship with Laura was through me,” I pointed out.

  “That’s right. And you’re from Boston.”

  Good God; was he suspecting me? Carefully I said, “I don’t think I follow.”

  “Here’s the anonymous letter.” He extended it toward me.

  A sheet of ordinary white paper, with a typewritten message and no signature:

  Laura Penney died in New York while her husband was in Chicago. He doesn’t know anything about it. Look the other way. Think about the Boston connection. If A got too close to B, what would C do?

  I cleared my throat. “That’s the least intelligible letter I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said, noticing that that bastard Edgarson had even managed to use my own first initial in the right place. “C,” indeed.

  Taking the l
etter back, putting it away inside his jacket, Staples said, “You and Kit Markowitz have been going together for five or six months, haven’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’ve been keeping it quiet, because you’ve got this divorce underway with your wife.”

  “Right again.”

  “That’s why you’d go out with other women sometimes, Laura Penney and different other women.”

  “Sure.” I shrugged, being casual if it killed me. “Kit knows all about that. The idea was, if I went out with a number of different women it would make less trouble in dealing with my ex-wife. But if I seemed to be heavily involved with just one girl, then Shirley might start to act like a woman scorned, if you know what I mean.”

  “Shirley. That’s your wife.”

  “Right.”

  Nodding, thinking things over, Staples said, “The other day, you told me you missed Laura Penney more than you’d thought you would. She was closer to you than you realized.”

  “Yes?”

  Staples leaned forward, his face much more serious than usual. “Women understand emotions a lot more quickly than men. I’ve noticed it time and again.”

  “You’re probably right. But I don’t know where you’re heading.”

  “Kit Markowitz understood more than you did about your feelings for Laura Penney.”

  “She did?”

  “What if,” he said, and he was watching my face as though he expected to see words form on it, “what if Kit thought you were even closer with Laura Penney than you were?”

  “I don’t know. What if she did?”

  But he had another hypothetical question to ask: “What if I told you she went through her date book for the last four months, and she’d seen you less than one-quarter of those days?”

  “Well, we both work, we both have lives of our own.”

  “But she did that with the date book before I ever talked with her,” Staples said. “She was thinking about it, you see what I mean?”