Дональд Уэстлейк - Enough [A Travesty (novel) and Ordo (novelette)]

The money problem is unfortunately complicated by the fact that she left while I was still high on From Italy With Love . I’d raved a lot about the vast sums that book would bring in, and Shirley wants some of it. My family is well off — my father’s an insurance company executive, he’s had his five square meals every day of his life — and they’re encouraging her to squeeze me. How’s that for a super family?

Then there’s the kids. It’s perfectly true I’m no good as a father, but I never claimed I’d be any good. If Shirley’d just gone ahead and taken the goddam pill like she was supposed to there wouldn’t be any kids, but oh, no, the pill gave her migraine. Migraine! The pill maybe gave her migraine, but the diaphragm gave her a daughter named Rita and the foam gave her a son called John, and whose fault is that? Let my parents go on supporting them if they want, who I want to support is me.

So that’s where we stand; or where we stood until Laura took that header. I’m no monk, I like female companionship, but for all I know Shirley has private detectives on me — she’ll do anything to strengthen her position for that inevitable day in court — so I impressed on both my girls the necessity for maintaining tight security. We didn’t live together, we didn’t obviously date a lot, and of course I’d explained to each of them that I’d occasionally have to take other women to screenings or press parties. (The two girls also didn’t know about one another. Laura and Kit were nodding acquaintances, with no reason ever to confide in each other, so I was about as safe as anybody ever is in this vale of tears. It was even possible to take one of my girls to a premiere attended by the other, with no suspicions raised.)

Well, all that had now come to an end. Laura, who’d at first come on as the most rabidly independent of Women’s Lib types, had been complaining more and more about our secret life, comparing herself to Back Street and other absurdities, wanting to know why I didn’t just get the divorce over and done with (why hurry a finish that could only be costly and difficult for me?) and even threatening once or twice to blow the whistle herself with Shirley. Of course she didn’t really mean it, but it was upsetting to hear her talk that way, and in fact it was a repetition of the same threat that had caused me to lose my temper tonight and pop her one, etc.

“You say Miss Penney threatened to tell your wife about this affair?”

Mm. I was right to get clear of this, as quickly and quietly as I could. So out of the apartment I went, smearing the doorknobs with my gloved hand, checking the street before leaving the building, and walking all the way over to Sheridan Square before hailing a cab to take me home.

Where I found several messages waiting on my telephone answering machine. After divesting myself of my coats and excess wardrobe I made a drink and sat at the desk to listen.

The first was a nice female voice with a British accent: “Mr. Gautier’s office calling Mr. Thorpe, in re screening on the twentieth. Could you possibly make it at four instead of two?”

I’d rather. And since I was unexpectedly dateless for that screening, perhaps the owner of the nice British accent would like to join me. Reaching for pencil and paper, I made a note to call back, while listening to the second message, from Sogeza “Tim” Kinywa, editor of Third World Cinema : “Sogeza here, Carey. Have you got a title yet on the Eisenstein piece?”

No, I didn’t. I was about to make another note when the third message started: “Oh, you’ve left already. I wanted to remind you to bring the Molly Haskell book, but never mind.”

Well. A strange sensation that, hearing a voice from beyond the grave. I erased the tape, finished my drink, and went to bed.

My street door intercom doesn’t work. I’ve talked to the super about it, but he only speaks some fungoid variant of Spanish understood exclusively on a six-mile stretch of the southern coast of Puerto Rico. I’ve also talked to the landlord, an old man with a nose like a tumor, and his response was the same as to anything his tenants say to him; a twenty-five minute diatribe on economics, expounding a theory so arcane, so foolish, so contradictory and so absurd that I’m surprised the government has never tried it. Or maybe they have.

In any event, when the bell rang at nine-thirty the morning after Laura’s accident I couldn’t find out who it was before letting them in, but who could it be other than the police? Wouldn’t they automatically question all of Laura’s friends, everybody in her address book? Bracing myself, I left my half-eaten omelet and buzzed them in.

Him in. When I opened the apartment door and listened, only one set of footsteps was trudging up the stairs. But didn’t cops always travel in pairs?

Apparently not. When he rounded the turn at the landing I saw a stranger, a chunky middle-aged man in brown topcoat and black hat, looking something like Martin Balsam in Psycho . And coming up the stairs toward me; so I should quick put on my Granny drag and run shrieking out to stab him.

In fact I should have, but of course I didn’t. Instead, I stood in my doorway looking open and honest and innocent and friendly, and when he reached the top of the stairs I said, in a we’re-here-to-help-you manner, “Yes?”

“Morning,” he said, and smiled. He was puffing a bit from the climb, and seemed in no hurry to get his words out. “Mr. Thorpe, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Can I help you?”

“Well, sir,” he said, “I think it’s the other way around. I think I can help you .”

Not a cop? What was he, some sort of salesman? I said, “What’s this about?”

“This,” he said. Taking a white envelope from inside his coat, he extended it toward me.

Frowning, I said, “What’s that supposed to be?”

“You left it behind.” He was still smiling, in a casual self-contained way. “Last night,” he added.

“Last night?” Unwillingly I took the thing from him and turned it over to see what was written on the other side. Return address: Warner Brothers, 666 Fifth Ave . Neatly centered, neatly typed, my own name and address.

The envelope! I’d remembered the damn letter, but not the envelope. Where had it been?

He answered my unasked question: “Under her.”

“Um,” I said.

“Why don’t we talk inside?” he suggested, still smiling, and walked into the apartment. I had to move aside or we would have bumped. Then I closed the door and followed him into the living room, where he stood nodding and smiling, looking at the movie posters, the one wall of exposed brick, the mirrored alcove that gives the apartment its illusion of space, the projector and screen set up at opposite ends of the room, the unfinished breakfast on the small table by the kitchenette. “Nice place,” he said. “Very nice.”

I moved reluctantly closer to him. He didn’t look like cops in the movies, but what else could he be? “Are you from the police?”

He gave me a quick amused glance. “Not exactly,” he said, and sat down on the sofa. “The fact of the matter is, I’m a private investigator.”

“A private detective?” Several thousand private eye films swirled through my head, most of them starring Dick Powell.

“I was on surveillance last night,” he told me, “outside that apartment.”

I didn’t feel like standing any more. Sinking into my leather director’s chair I said, “So she did put a tail on me.

His smile grew puzzled. “What say?”

“My wife.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to make trouble for an innocent party. No, sir, it didn’t have anything to do with you. It was Mrs. Penney’s husband put the agency on the job.”