Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Page 8

  "Anguilla, Antigua." Staples shrugged, saying, "He was upset from the argument, that's all, he just got mixed up."

  "Does that make sense?" I studied Ailburg's writing again, shaking my head. "No, it doesn't. This was his job, he knew what island was where. And look how he broke that sentence, starting a new line after the word 'charming.' It looks awkward."

  Staples said, "I don't see what you're driving at."

  I was sitting now where Ailburg had been, and I rested my forearms on a blood-free part of the desk. "Ailburg is sitting here," I said. "The boy friend comes around behind him, Ailburg sees him pick up the letter opener. He isn't sure what's happening, but he's afraid. And he quick starts a new line of copy, telling us who the boy friend is."

  Staples leaned over my shoulder to read aloud. " 'Capital city of Antigua.' You mean that's supposed to be a message?"

  "Let's see." Back to the atlas I went. "The capital city of Antigua is St. John. Is there anybody named St. John in that address book?"

  Staples, obviously unsure whether I was a genius or a lunatic, leafed through the address book, ran his finger down a column, and gave me a slow smile. "How about Jack St. Pierre?"

  "That's your man," I said. "It's up to you to prove it, but he's the guy to concentrate on."

  FIVE

  The Footprints in the Snow

  Staples drove me home, and on the way we discussed the murder that had first brought us together. All of Laura's male friends and acquaintances had been interviewed by now, several had been eliminated via unassailable alibis, and the active list had been reduced to five; not including, I was happy to see, Laura's father.

  But further reduction from five was proving difficult, if not impossible. No one of the suspects was more or less likely to be the elusive secret boy friend, none would admit to any but the most casual relationship with Laura, and unfortunately this victim had not left behind a clue to the boy friend's identity. (Using Ailburg as an example, Laura might have been found, for instance, clutching a publicity still of Cary Grant. Or Harry Carey. Or perhaps a tattered paperback copy of Herself Surprised. )

  In any event, the investigation was currently at a standstill. "But that doesn't mean we've given up," Staples assured me. "Whenever you ve got a good-looking career girl murdered, there's always a lot of media pressure to keep the case alive. Channel five won't even mention Bart Ailburg, but they still talk about Laura Penney on the news every night."

  "From my point of view, of course," I said, "I'm glad to hear that. That's one killer I really want found."

  "Well, I told you our five suspects," he said, and reeled off the names again. (There's no point my giving the list; the killer's name wasn't on it.) "If you could come up with another of your brilliant deductions," Staples told me, "we could really use it."

  "I'll do my best."

  Shortly thereafter he dropped me at my apartment, and went on to pick up Al Bray and go question Jack St. Pierre. It was still daylight, though rapidly growing dark with heavy clouds and the threat of impending snow, and no one was lurking for me in the vestibule. I let myself into the building, climbed the stairs, unlocked my apartment door, and entered to find Edgarson sitting in my leather director's chair, reading this afternoon's Post. "Well, there you are," he said, folded his paper, and got to his feet.

  I went down the steps three at a time, out the front door, and directly into a passing cab.

  * * *

  I spent the night at Kit's place on East 19th Street. We awoke late—it was Saturday, so Kit didn't have to work—and found that the promised snowstorm had indeed arrived, creating a cold slushy world of difficulty and discomfort. Fat white flakes were still drifting endlessly downward from a dirty gray sky, the radio weather forecast spoke of "gradual clearing"—by April, probably— and Kit had decided she had the flu.

  Which created an additional complication. Like most independent people, minor illness made Kit bad-tempered, and I soon realized she wanted me the hell out of there so she could snuffle in peace.

  But where would I go? Was Edgarson still in my apartment? I dialed my number, but only heard my own confident voice on the machine. I left me no message.

  Then I remembered Big John Brant, the movie director. He was in town, and I was supposed to phone him this morning about our interview. So I called the Sherry-Netherland, and soon had Brant on the line, sounding gruff but friendly. I identified myself, and reminded him of the interview, and he said, "Well, what about right now?"

  "That's fine," I said. "I'm downtown."

  "Then come uptown," he said, and chuckled, and broke the connection.

  I pocketed half a dozen of Kit's Valiums, my own supply being in captured territory. "Get well soon," I told Kit, and kissed her irritable cold cheek, and went out into the disgusting world.

  * * *

  Q: "In your film, Don't Eat The Yellow Snow, what is the symbolism of the repeated appearance of the small black dog in the background of so many of the shots?"

  A: "Oh, yeah, that damn dog. Well, I'll tell you, that's a funny story. That was Sassi's dog, you know. Wha'd

  she call that damn thing? Rudolph, that was it. Anyway, that was her third—no, second—her second feature with American Artists. She was shacked up with Kleinberg then, you know, so he'd give her anything she wanted. She wasn't even supposed to be in that picture, only Kate said she wouldn't work for Kleinberg for any amount of money, and Kleinberg left the script around in the bathroom or some damn place, and Sassi read it and said, I wanna do that picture. So we were stuck with her. And she had this shitty little dog, Rudolph, and that dog wasn't trained at all Run around, you couldn't control it, and finally I just said shit, I said, let the damn little thing stay in there, / don't give a rat's ass. Just so it doesn't get in the airplane sequence, that's all, and you know, it damn near did. Just about the end of the picture, the shitty little thing got itself run over by an Oregon state trooper. Sassi tried to get the fellow fired, but Kleinberg didn't run Oregon, so that was that."

  The interview was not going at all well. I suppose it was mostly my fault, since I was distracted by the problem of Edgarson, but Big John Brant wasn't helping very much. No matter what I asked him, from the broadest possible questions about thematic undercurrents to the narrowest points of technique, all I got back were these rambling reminiscences about nothing in particular. Sca-tology and gossip seemed to be his only subjects.

  And I'd spent sixty dollars on a cassette recorder to preserve this tripe. It wasn't until after I'd left Kit's place that I'd realized I was carrying none of my normal interviewing tools, so when I'd reached midtown I'd bought a pen and a pad and this cheap little recorder, and all I was recording so far was sex and shit.

  Nevertheless, it's my own conviction that a bad interview is never really the interviewee's fault. There are two participants in an interview, but only one of them is supposed to be professional. I've interviewed actors with an IQ of seven and managed to make them sound at least competent, if not brilliant. It was the Edgarson business that was clouding my mind, with the result that I was permitting Brant to maunder along with virtually no guidance at all.

  The setting also encouraged this feckless informality. Brant had a high-floor suite here at the Sherry-Netherland, with windows overlooking Central Park and the Plaza, where the still-falling snow made the world look like a Currier & Ives Christmas card that had inadvertently gone through the washing machine. A tall and slender and mind-crunchingly beautiful girl came into the room from time to time to add another couple of logs to the fire. Brant and I both sipped bourbon over ice as we sat before the crackling flames, and the contrast between this warm beautiful room and the cold snowy aspect of Central Park almost demanded a discursive droning conversational style, in which nothing could get accomplished.

  Brant, too, was a problem. An old man now, with liver spots on hands and forehead, with great knobby knuckles and wrists, with that old man's style of sitting as though he were a sack of rusty machine pa
rts, his best work was behind him and he no longer kept his brain tuned to the sharp clarity that had given the world such films as Meet The Gobs, All These Forgotten and Caper. He was garrulous and relaxed and perfectly content to bend a young stranger's ear for an hour or so while the snow fell outside and the beautiful girl performed her function of keeping his old body warm.

  But something had to be done, if any useful material at all were to come out of this meeting, so finally, after the memoir of the dog Rudolph, I decided my only choice, since Edgarson persisted in distracting me from my job, was bring him into the interview. Maybe he would help us get moving in a more useful direction.

  Q: "I'd like to ask you now a more or less specific question of technique, based on a film other than one of yours."

  A: "Somebody else's picture?"

  Q: "Yes. This is a work in progress being done by a young filmmaker here in New York. I've seen the completed portion, and I'd like to ask you how you would handle the problem this young filmmaker has set for himself."

  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 fife developed on the wrong planet.

  Along the way, I bought a chainlock at a hardware store on 3rd 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 youll 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 fighting 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, "Z doan hob no motches!"

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

  "Z 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 into 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.