Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  Which was an insight into Kit I could have lived without. I said, “Maybe she feels neglected.”

  “I think she does.”

  “She never let me know about it.”

  “Well, she’s an independent woman, isn’t she? She wouldn’t, uh, what’s that saying? Wear her heart on her sleeve.”

  “I suppose she wouldn’t.”

  Back he went to his hypothetical questions: “But what if she looked around,” he said, “to see what you were doing that three-quarters of the time you weren’t with her? Wouldn’t she see that you were spending a lot of time with Laura Penney?”

  “Oh, not that much.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Al Bray went through Laura Penney’s calendar again this afternoon, and she saw a lot of you, Carey. A lot of you. Over a four-month period, you had dates with Kit Markowitz forty-three times and with Laura Penney forty-five times. That’s two more.”

  I coughed, and cleared my throat, and said, “What’s all this building up to, Fred?”

  He said, “Maybe we’ve been making a mistake all this time, Carey. We’ve been concentrating on men friends, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Now what in hell was he talking about? “I’m just not following you, Fred.”

  So he explained: “Laura Penney died when she hit her head on the glass coffee table in her living room. It was the fall that killed her, and it didn’t necessarily have to be a very strong punch that knocked her down. A little struggle, she loses her balance, it could happen just like that.”

  “Meaning what? Come on, Fred, for God’s sake what are you driving at?”

  “A woman could have done it,” he said.

  He suspected Kit! Kit!

  I stared at him. Relief washed through me like sunrise, and I barely restrained myself from laughing in his face.

  He said, “Think about it. Here’s a woman thinks Laura Penney is taking her man away. She goes over to have it out. They argue, they fight, Laura falls and is killed. The other woman is frightened, she’s going to run away, but then she looks around and finds male clothing in the bedroom. Either she thinks the clothing belongs to her boyfriend, or she decides to confuse the issue. In either case, she takes the clothing away with her. Or there’s Al Bray’s theory that she just leaves and then the boyfriend shows up, finds the body, and clears his stuff out himself. But in any case, the woman did the killing.”

  I said, “You mean Kit? Kit wouldn’t kill anybody, that’s just ridiculous.”

  “Not on purpose, maybe. But an accident, in the middle of a fight? She has a pretty good temper, doesn’t she?”

  “She isn’t violent, for God’s sake.”

  “Nevertheless,” Staples insisted, “of all the Boston connections, that’s the one that shows the most promise.”

  “But there isn’t any Boston connection,” I told him. “Kit’s a New Yorker.”

  “The Boston connection is you.” Pulling out the anonymous letter again, he said, “Listen to this, if we put your names in here instead of these letters, making Laura Penney ‘A’ and you ‘B’ and Kit Markowitz ‘C.’ Then it reads, ‘If Laura Penney got too close to Carey Thorpe, what would Kit Markowitz do?’”

  “Call me up and yell at me,” I said. “That’s what she’d do.”

  “Did she call you up and tell you about her date book?”

  “No. So what?”

  “So she’s maybe a little more secretive than you think.” Satisfied with himself, he leaned back on the sofa, putting the letter away again as he said, “Tomorrow we’ll get hold of that private detective who was watching Mrs. Penney’s building, and we’ll run Kit Markowitz through a lineup and see if he recognizes her.”

  Oh, you will, eh? And good luck to you, too. Aloud I said, “I just don’t believe any of it.”

  “We’ll see.” Staples nodded, and sipped at his coffee. “We were making too quick an assumption,” he told me. “Assuming it had to be a man.” He patted the pocket containing Edgarson’s troublemaking letter. “This tip may have put us on the right track after all.”

  “Not if it makes you believe Kit Markowitz killed anybody,” I said. “Is that really what you’ve been working on all day?”

  “We started with half a dozen possibilities, but pretty soon they narrowed down to her. For one thing, she doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “Why? Where does she say she was?”

  “At home, alone. No witnesses.”

  “Didn’t anybody call her? Didn’t she talk to anybody on the phone?”

  “She tried calling you, she says,” Staples told me, “but she got your answering machine and she didn’t leave any message.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She told me that the next day. I was home, but I was screening a film.”

  Staples finished his coffee, then said, “I’ll tell you something else, Carey. You’re an absolutely brilliant natural detective, the most fantastic I’ve ever seen. You’ve got a real knack for it. But you can’t get anywhere with this case, and do you know why?”

  I did know, as a matter of fact, but it would be interesting to hear what he thought so I said, “No. Why?”

  “You’re too close to it. You’re emotionally involved.”

  “You may be right,” I said.

  * * *

  I phoned Kit and she said, “Is he gone?”

  “Staples? Just left.”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said, and hung up, and arrived fifteen minutes later, looking angry and determined. Taking off her coat, she said, “He thinks I did it.”

  “Slow down,” I advised her. “You want a drink?”

  “I will not slow down.” She hung up her coat and marched into the living room. “That damn fool thinks I killed Laura Penney. Over you!” And she turned to glare at me as though it were my fault. (Well, I suppose it was, at that.)

  “Absurd on the face of it,” I said.

  “There’s only one thing to do.”

  I didn’t like her glower. “And what would that be?” I asked.

  “We have to find the killer ourselves.”

  “What?”

  “That idiot Staples is out there right now,” she said, waving an arm at the window and the cold dark snowy world beyond it, which as it happened did not at this moment contain Staples, who had gone home for dinner with his Patricia, “and all he’s trying to do is find evidence to convict me.”

  “Which he’ll never find.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” she said. “I have no alibi.”

  “Millions could say the same.”

  “He could build up a case against me.”

  “Staples? I don’t see how. You didn’t do it, so where’s his proof?”

  “Circumstantial evidence,” she said, in the manner in which people in Victorian novels used to say “madness in the family.”

  “What circumstantial evidence?”

  “How do I know?” She was pacing around my room, waving her arms. “Remember The Wrong Man?”

  “The Hitchcock film, with Henry Fonda?”

  “He was convicted of murder, and he didn’t do it.”

  “That was a mistaken identification.”

  “How about Call Northside 777? Jimmy Stewart as the reporter. And both of those movies were based on real-life cases.”

  “You need a drink,” I decided, because I needed a drink, and headed for the kitchenette.

  She followed me, still waving her arms. “And while he’s spending all his time trying to railroad me, who’s looking for the real killer? Nobody! And he’ll get away.”

  Amen. I said, “Kit, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. This is just another one of Staples’ brainstorms, he gets one a day, like rain in Mexico City. The other day he thought Laura was having an affair with her father, and the father killed her.”

  “Well, now he’s convinced that I killed her. And it’s up to us to prove him wrong.”

  I made the drinks while she raved on, and carried
them back to the living room. Kit wasn’t prepared to sit, but I was, and when she paused briefly to deal with her drink I said, “Life doesn’t work like the movies, Kit. The innocent person getting off the hook by finding the real killer, that doesn’t happen.”

  “Well, it’s going to happen this time.” She stood in front of me, straddle-legged with determination. “And you’re going to help.”

  “How? There isn’t even anything to do.”

  “Of course there is. For one thing, we’ll go to the funeral.”

  “Funeral?”

  “Laura’s funeral, tomorrow morning at ten.”

  Laura’s funeral. She’d been dead almost a week by now, and I’d taken it for granted she’d already been dispatched to her final resting place, but probably the coroner had delayed things. In any event, I certainly didn’t want to go to the funeral. “What on earth do you want to go there for?”

  “We’ll see who shows up.” She plopped down beside me on the sofa, eager and intent. “And you’ve been talking with Staples, you know what’s been done in the investigation so far. Have they definitely eliminated anybody? I mean, besides you.”

  “Well, they were hot on the idea of the secret lover for a while,” I said. “And they narrowed that down to five.”

  “Five? Terrific! Just a minute, let me get pen and paper.” And up she jumped.

  Gloomily I watched her cross the room to rummage through my desk. This was ridiculous, but what could I do about it?

  Back she came, bristling with pen and paper. “I’ll stay here tonight, all right?”

  “Wonderful,” I said, with less than my usual enthusiasm.

  “Then we can go to the funeral together in the morning.” She readied the pen. “Now, who are these five?”

  EIGHT

  The Secret of the Locked Room

  Oddly enough, all five were at the funeral. And so were Kit and I, and so was Staples.

  It was quite a large turnout, in fact, mostly with faces I was used to seeing at cocktail parties. Laura’s father was in the front row with a heavy-faced black-haired gent I took to be the husband from Chicago. There appeared to be no other family members in attendance.

  This funeral was taking place in some Croatian or Ukrainian chapel on East 9th Street. The style of the place was early Frankenstein, and so were the huddled old charladies intermixed with the mourners, mumbling to themselves like so many Madame Khrushchevs in a bad mood. These people had been ethnic since before the word was popular.

  And Laura, it turned out, had been one of them. She had introduced her father to me once as “Frank Ward,” but now I learned another seven or eight Eastern syllables had been lurking behind that Anglo brevity all the time. And what about that husband, the alleged Penney? Did those flat cheekbones look WASP? They did not.

  Poor Laura. Born in upstate New York, she’d spent her life as a full-fledged American, only to depart as an immigrant. Remembering her bigotry—I don’t think there were any groups she cared for—I knew this ceremony would only upset her. It was just as well she wasn’t here to see it.

  Kit kept whispering and murmuring to me throughout the service, but I paid little attention, since all she was doing was adding to the original list of five suspects. Taking a leaf from Staples’ book, she was casting a critical eye on the women in attendance and finding most of them suspicious. She’d bought a steno pad on the way down, and did a lot of cramped note-taking, as though she’d be writing up this affair for the old home town paper.

  The box containing the remains was prominent in the center aisle, on a wheeled bier draped in purple and black. Gazing at it, I did regret my touch of bad temper.

  After the ceremony, a dozen cars would follow the hearse out to the graveyard in Queens, but Kit’s detective ardor, I’m happy to say, didn’t extend that far. Nor did Staples’; seeing him move away from the line of mourners shuffling out to the cars, I went over to him and said, “Anything new?”

  “Not with me. How about you?”

  “Well, you got Kit mad.”

  He seemed amused. “I did?”

  “She’s decided to find the killer herself, and show you up.”

  “Fine. But if Edgarson says he saw her last Tuesday night, it’ll be all over.”

  Edgarson? Was I supposed to know that name? Playing it safe, I repeated it with a question mark, and Staples explained he was the detective, etc. “Oh,” I said. “Is that all set up?”

  “Not yet. He’s supposed to call me next time he checks in with his office.”

  Don’t hold your breath. I said, “Let me know when you switch to a new theory, okay? Kit’s about to drive me crazy.”

  Grinning, he said, “Why don’t you come up with something? If you can’t show that somebody else is guilty, at least prove to my satisfaction that your girl is innocent.”

  “I’ll work on it,” I promised.

  “Come along with me,” he suggested. “If we spend one concentrated day on this case maybe we can crack it.”

  “Sorry. I’ve already promised Kit I’d play Mr. and Mrs. North.” I gestured to where she was standing in a corner of the chapel, arms folded as she glowered in our direction.

  “Later on, then. Around two?”

  At two, Patricia would be dropping by for more Gaslight. “I don’t think so, Fred. I’ll be with Kit most of the day.”

  “Well, I wish you luck.”

  “I believe I’m going to need it.” I left Staples and rejoined Kit, who wanted to know everything that had been said. “Let’s go back to the States first,” I suggested, “and have a cup of coffee.”

  Which we did, in a Second Avenue health food restaurant full of heroin addicts. Kit went through her expanded list of suspects and I managed to contract it again slightly by removing three of the women who I knew happened to be a part of the alibis of various former male suspects. Another of the female suspects I eliminated by simply laughing the idea to scorn, but that still left two women and five men on the list. Six men, since she insisted on adding Jay English, the famous homosexual. Seven men; Jay’s boyfriend Dave Poumon was swept ashore on the next tide.

  “Nine suspects,” I said. “What are you going to do with all those people?”

  “Throw a party,” she said. “We’ll get them all drinking and relaxed, and ask some penetrating questions.”

  “God help us,” I said. “And when will this overdone scene take place?”

  “Today’s Monday. Why not Friday? Everybody spends their weekends in town this time of year.”

  “Friday’s a long way off,” I pointed out. “I thought you were feeling a certain urgency about all this.”

  “Oh, we have lots to do before the party.” She had this all thoroughly planned, I could see that much. “We’ll want to know which penetrating questions to ask,” she explained.

  “Ah, of course.”

  She ruminated over her list. “I’ll make some phone calls this afternoon. I can ask Betty about Claire.” She made a note, then another, saying, “And Lucy Fishman used to go with Jack Henderson, so I’ll find out about him from her.” She frowned at her list, made another note, made a question mark, underlined something, and switched her frown to me. “You can start with Staples,” she said.

  “I can?”

  “There was something about an anonymous letter. See if you can get a look at it.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised.

  She tapped her list with the pencil point. “There’s a possibility he already checked out Jay English and Dave. Could you find out?”

  “Clever questioning might turn the trick,” I said.

  “Also Claire and Ellen. See if he has anything on them.”

  “Will do.”

  “Could you get to him this afternoon?”

  An unexpected mobile of deceit suspended itself delicately in my brain. “I think maybe I could,” I said.

  “Then come down to my place for dinner and we’ll compare notes.”

  “Lovely idea.”
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  “Around seven?”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Between two and three, when Staples thought I was with Kit and Kit thought I was with Staples, I was with Patricia, enjoying Gaslight. At twenty past three, alone and refreshed and energetic from the shower, I popped a Valium and phoned Staples at his office, but he wasn’t there. I left a message and worked on the Cassavetes article until four-thirty, when Staples called. “I thought you were with Miss Markowitz.”

  “We laid our plans,” I said, “but then she went off to do some girl-talk type sleuthing of her own.”

  “Would you like to do some boy-type sleuthing? We’ve got another one.”

  “New York must be on the verge of depopulation.”

  “This one’s imported. From Visaria.”

  “From what?”

  “Visaria.” He spelled it, which didn’t help.

  “Is that a country?”

  “I don’t know if they’ve got a country,” he said, “but they’ve got a mission at the UN, and the head of it just got himself killed. You feel ready for a locked room mystery?”

  * * *

  Staples had sent a car for me again, which delivered me to a small remodeled brick town house on 46th Street between First and Second Avenues. This entire neighborhood was full of United Nations missions and foreign embassies, each nation putting on as much show as it could afford. At East Side prices, the smaller countries couldn’t afford much, and this narrow four-story architectural nonentity was about par for a modest mission like that from Visaria.

  If I’d hoped for some insight into the style and culture of Visaria from the interior of the mission I was doomed to disappointment. The building, probably in advanced disrepair when Visaria bought it, had apparently been purchased as a Handyman’s Special and furnished out of Sears, Roebuck. The floors, which felt spongy and unreliable underfoot, had all been covered with cheap solid-color wall-to-wall carpeting. Dropped ceilings, those fiberboard rectangles in a white metal grid, screened off the no-doubt-hideous original ceilings with clean new hideousness, and the original walls were covered with paletone panelings in simulated wood grain. Light was provided by fluorescent panels in the dropped ceilings. It was like being in a real estate office in a shopping center, with furnishing to match; imitation-wood formica desks, imitation-leather vinyl sofas, and real metal square wastebaskets.