Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Page 7

  The gilded cage enclosing this contented canary was a seventh-floor co-op apartment in a grim red-brick building in Corona, Queens, not far enough from the Long Island Expressway. One saw it out there, churning away in the blighted darkness beyond the living room windows like a diorama of life on the planet Jupiter. The apartment itself was warm and yellow and bright, with furniture that must have looked just as flimsy and just as tacky in the various Long Island showrooms from which it had been purchased. A great rectangular green-and-yellow painting of a meadow glade in spring, the grandmother of all jigsaw puzzles, dangled over the sofa like an eavesdropper, while Staples and I sat daringly beneath it, drinking Corona Hills Scotch with club soda and chatting about great murder mysteries of fact and fancy.

  Patricia, meantime, bustled about. Queen of her domain, a housewife so utterly satisfied with her lot as to make all the efforts of Women's Lib seem like an exercise in counting grains of sand, Patricia Staples spent that entire evening, it seemed to me, with a white apron over her pale blue dress, carrying a casserole to the table between two heat-mittened hands. This, by God, was what the boys of Guadalcanal Diary had been fighting for.

  Well of course it wasn't quite that bad. It doesn't take that long to carry a casserole, nor to cook one, but even when Patricia Staples was sitting in the uneasy chair on her husband's left hand her mind and heart appeared to be still in the kitchen.

  As to her being a fan of mine, I saw early on that she was a fan of no one and nothing but her husband. She gave eager agreement to everything he said, whether sensible or foolish, and he gave her the blind compliment of assuming that all her parrot responses were the product of an independent but wonderfully sympatico mind.

  Staples apparently preferred not to talk shop in his wife's presence, so when we all sat down to dinner-chicken, rice, tomatoes, celery and much much more, all in the same Corning ovenproof bowl—the talk turned to movies, and I'm afraid I found it impossible not to become a pompous bore. But they did keep demanding it; Patricia invariably agreed with Fred, who invariably agreed with me, who had no one to agree with but myself. It would take a far more Calvinist personality than mine to resist such an opportunity for pontification. I spoke in long compound sentences, like an early draft of one of my own articles, and in fact I quoted from my previous works several times. Patricia didn't mind, since she wasn't particularly aware of my existence anyway, but Fred for all his eagerness did begin to glaze after a while.

  Dinner, like all good things, came to an end, and while Patricia retired again to her kitchen to "tidy up" (a phrase they both used, both of them) Staples and I seated ourselves once more beneath the leaning painting, this time with Corona Hill VSOP Olde Brandy, and after the few obligatory propaganda remarks from Staples about how good it must be for a bachelor to eat a real meal for a change we went back to shoptalk, the subject being murder. This time, though, it was murder closer to home: "You haven't asked," Staples pointed out, "about the Wicker case."

  "That's right," I agreed. "I haven't."

  He took that to mean I wanted to know, so he told me. It was one of those convoluted stories of betrayal, disguise, coincidence and overly-complicated scheming that mystery stories always end with, and though I nodded a lot while Staples reeled it off I didn't retain a word of it, except the fact that Jack March's real name turned out to be Andrew Thomas Cauldenfield. (Ever since Lee Harvey Oswald, murderers have had prominent middle names, just as tall farm youths used to have prominent adam's apples.)

  Patricia joined us soon after that, and the talk switched back to movies, and that was when Gaslight came up. Staples announced it to be one of his all-time favorite pictures, "but Patricia's never seen it."

  "I have a print," I said. And I found myself extending an invitation: "Would you like to come see it?"

  Staples stared at me. "A print? You mean you own that movie, you have it right there in your apartment?"

  "I have copies of more than twenty films," I told him, "and access to almost anything else I'd like to see. The studios loan prints to people in the field."

  Staples viewed me with something like awe, and even Patricia seemed impressed. Staples said, "By golly, if I had that I don't think I'd ever leave the house."

  "It's like anything else," I told him. "You get used to it after a while."

  We then discussed the best time for them to come see Gaslight and decided on Sunday afternoon at three. Staples would be working earlier that day, but Patricia could take the subway to Manhattan, meet her husband for lunch, and then the two would come over to my place for the screening.

  Soon after that it was time to leave. Staples suggested he drive me back to Manhattan, and though I insisted Td be perfectly content in the subway he wouldn't take no for an answer. So I thanked Patricia for a delicious dinner, shook her cool hand, and her husband and I rode the elevator down to the basement garage where he kept his car.

  The ride back was full of conversation, by which I mean that Staples kept up a cheerful flow of talk to which I added occasional appropriate punctuation. It was becoming clear that in Staples' eyes I was a celebrity, and he was delighted to have collected me. My own feelings were too complicated for me to think about, so I simply floated on the surface of my mind, letting it all happen.

  At my door, Staples pulled to a stop and shook my hand, saying, "It was really nice to have you out, Carey. Really nice."

  "I appreciated it, Fred. And that's a wonderful girl you have there."

  "Don't I know it," he said, with a big grin.

  "See you Sunday, Fred," I said, and opened the car door.

  "Right you are. Goodnight, Carey."

  "Goodnight, Fred."

  I stepped out onto the street, closed the door after me, and the Ford growled away, its exhaust thick and white in the cold air. I crossed the sidewalk, went up the stoop reaching for my keys, and a dark figure came out of a corner of the vestibule to hit me very hard in the stomach. I doubled over in pain and shock, trying not to lose my balance and fall backwards down the steps, and he hit me again, this time in the side, just above the waist.

  It was brief, but horrible, and I suspect very professional. Grabbing a handful of my coat, he pulled and tugged and crowded me into the darkness of the vestibule and then punched and kicked and kneed me half a dozen times in quick succession, as I sagged down the wall. All of the blows were to my body, and all seemed placed with some kind of anatomical precision, and all were very painful.

  Then it was over and he was gone, without my ever seeing his face or hearing his voice; though of course I knew at once who it was. I sat on the floor of the vestibule, having trouble breathing, and a while later I found the keys I'd dropped and let myself into the building and up several thousand stairs to the apartment, where Edgarson's voice on my answering machine said, "We're calling about your debt, Mr. Thorpe. We look forward to early payment."

  * * *

  Two hours in a hot tub helped somewhat, and so did both Valium and bourbon, but when I dragged myself out of bed Friday morning I was as stiff and sore as though Edgarson had just finished kicking me that very second.

  I was supposed to go to a noon screening at MGM, but I found myself reluctant to leave the apartment. Also to answer the phone; so I turned on the answering machine with the monitor button pushed, enabling me to hear my callers as they were leaving their messages. That way, I could speak to anyone I chose, and avoid the rest. Meaning Edgarson.

  Even such painful clouds as this one have silver linings. After another long soak in the tub, followed by more pills, I decided to table the problem of Edgarson for a while, and actually managed to get some work done on my next projected piece for Third World Cinema, with the tentative title, "John Cassavetes: The Apotheosis Of The Inarticulate." Though Edgarson didn't call, several other people did, but I wasn't in the mood for any of them and I ignored their messages and went on with my work.

  Then, just as I had written, "On-set improvisation sounds so good in theory that it'
s a shame it sounds so bad in practice," the phone rang again, and after my recorded announcement ("Hi. Carey Thorpe's answering machine here. Please leave your name and a phone number where I can reach you, and I'll be back to you first chance I get.") Staples' voice said, "Fred here, Carey. I was hoping to catch you at home. We've got another—"

  A policeman; exactly what I needed. Not waiting to listen to any more, I picked up the phone, switched off the machine, and said, "Here I am. I'm here."

  Staples, headed off in mid-message, floundered briefly before saying, "Hello? Carey?"

  "I was working," I told him, "so I left the machine on."

  "Oh, I won't bother you, then, I just—"

  "No, no, that's fine, I'm ready to take a break. What's happening?"

  "Well, we've got another one," he said. "Feel brilliant today?"

  "Another murder?"

  "Another tricky murder. Regular murders we get all the time. Want to come along?"

  With Staples I would be safe from Edgarson. "Absolutely," I said.

  * * *

  This time, happily, the body had been removed. In fact, Staples and I had the small apartment on West 76th Street entirely to ourselves.

  The victim was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, an advertising copywriter named Bart Ailburg. His one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brownstone half a block from Central Park featured a pleasant large living room with windows overlooking back gardens featuring plane trees.

  Much could be gathered about Ailburg from his home. The excessive masculinity of his imitation lion-skin bed throw and all those hoofs and horns scattered about as paperweights, ashtrays, lamps and general decoration, combined with the sloppy pile of male physique magazines under the bed, suggested rather strongly a homosexual tendency. The travel posters on the walls, the two shelves of travel reference books handy to his desk, and the small souvenirs grouped on the mantle over the nonfunctional fireplace indicated that his job was connected with travel advertising. And the three locks on his front door, taken with the fact that he had two medicine chests in the bathroom, both crammed with prescription bottles and all kinds of patent medicines, suggested a timid hypochondriac, a cautious unassertive sort of man.

  Staples reconstructed the crime for me. This living room was rectangular, with sofa, TV and so on at the end near the kitchen and with the desk and bookcase at the end by the windows. The desk was centered in front of the windows, and Ailburg had been sitting at it, facing the room, working. Doing a travel ad, in fact, writing out a draft in pencil on a lined yellow legal pad; his writing was spidery, neat, rather small. The killer had picked up a bone-handled letter opener from the desk and had stabbed Ailburg six times in the neck and back. Ailburg, bleeding a terrific amount, had fallen forward onto the desk and had shortly afterward died, leaving most of the desk drenched in blood except for the legal pad, which had been under him.

  Judging from stains on the bathroom floor, the killer had become smeared with blood and had next taken a bath. Since it had been necessary for him to take a bath rather than merely wash at the sink, it was a reasonable presumption that he had been naked when he'd done the killing.

  The apartment had not been ransacked, nothing appeared to have been stolen.

  The ad Ailburg had been working on had been due this morning, for a deadline later today. When Ailburg, invariably a prompt and reliable worker, had failed to show up and also failed to answer his phone, one of the partners in the ad agency sent a messenger, who persuaded the building's superintendent to enter the apartment. They discovered first that only the door's regular lock was fastened, leaving both the chainlock and the police lock undone, and then they discovered Ailburg himself.

  The report had reached Staples and Bray shortly after ten this morning. All of the normal things had been done, neighbors questioned, movements checked, and nothing interesting had turned up. Ailburg, a man of regular habits, had apparently come home directly from the office yesterday, had spent a quiet evening at home, and had then been murdered sometime between midnight and three in the morning.

  "Al Bray," Staples finished, "is ready to put it down to one of your fag murders. Rough trade. You know, where a fellow goes cruising in Central Park and comes back with some tough young stud who bumps him off."

  "No," I said. "Not this time."

  Staples grinned at me. "That's what I say, too."

  "In the first place," I said, "Ailburg might have gone cruising, but he wouldn't come back with anybody tough. That wasn't his style."

  "Well, you cant say that for sure," Staples said. "When you get into people's sex lives, it's hard to make predictions."

  "Ailburg had a deadline this morning," I said. "If he was such a conscientious type, he might go out looking for a friend after he got the work done, but not before."

  "There I agree with you," Staples said. "That was my point exactly with Al."

  "Also," I said, "a cautious man wouldn't let a stranger behind him with a sharp letter opener."

  "No, he wouldn't. But the killer was probably naked, don't forget that."

  "A lover," I said. "But someone Ailburg knew, not some pick-up. You don't go get yourself a brand new sex partner and then sit down calmly to do some work while this new body prances around naked."

  Staples said, "That's right. The feeling I had in this room was that it was somebody Ailburg was comfortable with, somebody he didn't have to play host to."

  I said, "I don't see the problem. It was one of Ailburg's boy friends. How many did he have?"

  Staples held up a well-thumbed black address book. "There are over sixty men's names in here," he said. "Homosexuals still tend to be pretty secretive about who their lovers are. We've got no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It would be a long, hard, dull job to check out every one of these guys, and we could still never come up with the right one."

  "Ah," I said. "That's why Bray's content to think it's a pick-up killing."

  "Sure," Staples said. "If the job's tough, we have to do it, but if it's impossible we can forget it."

  Walking around the room, I said, "I suppose you've looked for letters, anything that could give you specific names of boy friends."

  "Nothing," Staples said.

  Td been avoiding the desk, which was still smeared with caked brown blood. The rough outline of Ailburg's torso and arms was clear in the center, with the pencil and the legal pad. Going over at last to that part of the room, I saw that both windows were securely locked, that there was no fire escape here, and that we were too high for anyone to have climbed in from the back. Finally I turned my reluctant attention to the desk.

  Other than the bloodstains, it was neat, the work space of a methodical man. A small Olympia portable typewriter was pushed to one side, near the beige telephone. And on the legal pad was written:

  "St. Martin! Carefree days, exotic nights! The peace of the beaches, the thrill of the casinos! And only a mile and a half away, the charming capital city of Antigua."

  "A very rough draft, apparently," I said. "There weren't any other worksheets around?"

  Staples shook his head. "From the looks of things, he'd just started to work when he was killed."

  I said, "Which was sometime between midnight and three in the morning. That wasn't in character for the man, not to start work until so late at night on something that was supposed to be turned in the next morning."

  "That bothered me, too," Staples said. "But I'm not sure what it means."

  "An argument," I suggested. "The killer came here probably in the early evening, and they had one of those droning dragged-out arguments that lovers get into."

  "Most lovers," Staples said, with a big smile, suggesting that he and his Patricia should be exempted.

  "Certainly," I said. "Anyway, Ailburg had this work to do, so finally he just told his boy friend, ‘I’m going to work’ and he sat down here and started writing. And not doing very well, either, probably because he was still troubled about the fight. I me
an, 'The peace of the beaches,' that's a terrible line."

  "It does sound funny," Staples said.

  "Now, the boy friend," I went on, "got really mad when Ailburg started to ignore him. The fight wasn't settled, and there Ailburg was at his desk, writing away just as though nothing had happened. So the boy friend came over, in a rage, and let him have it."

  "Fine." Staples waved the address book again. "Which one?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  We spent another five minutes looking at the place, but there was nothing left to see. Staples, who'd been expecting me to come up with another of my little magic turns, watched me with fading hope, but I knew I wasn't going to repeat my success. Finally I said, "I guess the Wicker case was just beginner's luck."

  "I knew this was a tough one," Staples said, with a game smile, "that's why I called you."

  "Sorry I couldn't—" Then I stopped, and frowned over at the desk.

  Staples was saying, "Oh, come on, Carey, if I can't do my job there's no reason you should— What's up?"

  "There's something wrong," I said. "Just a minute."

  I went back to the desk, Staples following me, and frowned again at that bit of copywriting. "That isn't right," I said.

  "What isn't right?"

  "I've been to the Caribbean, and Antigua isn't that close to St. Martin. Not at all. Wait, hold on."

  Sitting at Ailburg's desk, forgetting for the moment any squeamishness I might have felt, I looked through his reference books for an atlas. Finding one, I turned to a map of the Caribbean and said, "See? Here's St. Martin, and here's Antigua way down here."

  Staples touched the map with a blunt finger. "What's that little island there? The one by St. Martin."

  When he removed his finger, I bent to read the lettering: "Anguilla."