Donald Westlake - Two Much!

“Kainair reseedonce.”

“Hi, Nikki, this is Bart.” I shouted a bit, like someone calling long distance. “Is Betty there?”

“Hold on one moment, pleeze.”

So I held on one moment, massaging my sore ribs. Get even with Volpinex, I have to get even with Volpinex.

“Hello? Bart?”

“Hi there, sweetheart!” I shouted. “Well, I’m here!”

“Oh, I’m happy you called,” she said. “That was nice of you.”

“Yep,” I said. “The flight was easy, Joe met me at the airport, and here I am.”

“Did you see that girl yet?”

“Heck, no,” I said. “I just got here. Joe has the doctor’s phone number, so I’ll call him next and see what I’m supposed to do.”

“What’s the weather there?”

“Hot,” I said, telling her what this morning’s Times had told me, with its national weather map. “Hotter than New York. I bet it’s a hundred.”

“Really? That must be awful.”

“Well, it’s air-conditioned where I am, and Joe’s car is air-conditioned, so it isn’t too bad. Boy, it’s funny, you know? It’s only noon here.”

“You’re probably suffering jet lag,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“You know,” she said, “Art’s really mad about you going away.”

My, how news can travel fast. I said, “Art is? What for?”

“He told Liz he was going to throw you out of the business because you came to help but then you didn’t do anything, and now you’ve run out on him.”

“Well, that dirty rat,” I said, with honest outrage. “He told me himself I should take a few days off, while he was doing that auditing business.”

“All I know is what Liz told me.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll get back there in a day or two, and straighten things out with that brother of mine.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be involved in that business of his anyway,” she said. “Wouldn’t it make more sense if you were my business manager, with a salary and everything?”

“You mean, live on you?” I sounded really boy scout when I said that.

“Of course not. I have a business manager now, so you’d just take his place.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that might be all right. Though I don’t like the idea of getting somebody else fired for no reason at all.”

“Well, he could still be my lawyer, but you’d be my business manager, that’s all.”

“Lawyer? You mean Volpinex?”

“Oh, no, he’s not my lawyer. I have somebody of my own.”

Which was good news. I said, “But your man is lawyer and business manager both?”

“It’s always been more convenient that way.”

“Well, I think it would probably be better management to have two different people for those two different jobs.”

“There, you see? You’re already talking like my business manager.”

I laughed boyishly. “I guess I am,” I said.

When we came in from the beach, around six o’clock, I said to Liz, “Well, what do you want to do tonight?”

“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’ve got a date.”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Anybody I know?”

“Ernie Volpinex,” she said, and headed for the stairs.

I frowned after her. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is that on the level?”

She turned on the second step and looked at me. “Have I ever lied to you?” Then she started up again.

“Hold on, there,” I said, and followed as far as the foot of the stairs. When she turned to look down at me without curiosity, I said, “We’re supposed to be engaged, aren’t we?”

“Clause seven,” she said. The sexual non exclusivity clause.

“So you’re going out with Volpinex.”

“That’s right”

“I see,” I said, controlling my sudden anger, and stepped a pace back from the stairs.

Her lip curled a bit. “I’m sure you do,” she said, and went on up to the second floor.

So. I detected Volpinex’s fine Mediterranean hand in that, goading Liz to test my obedience to the contract. The bastard was going to be an ongoing pain in the ass, was he? Or in the side.

Had he told Liz yet how he’d squashed me? She’d noticed my bruises last night and I’d just muttered something about an accident, but Volpinex would go into more detail than that. I take badly to humiliation, and that was the weapon he was turning against me.

What could I do to him? Wandering out to the kitchen, making myself a drink, I tried to think of some way to get back at him, make him lay off.

“I could kill him,” I muttered aloud, surprising myself as much for the thought as for voicing it out loud in an empty room.

Kill him? No, that was merely one of those extravagant thoughts we all have sometimes. But what else was there? Carrying my drink out to the back deck and the late afternoon sun, I sat in a sling chair and brooded over the problem of Attorney Volpinex. I sipped at my drink and sopped up the last of the sun and after a while I snoozed.

When I awoke it was twilight, and the mosquitoes were growing interested. I went inside to a dark house and switched on some lights. Liz had gone, without saying anything, and Betty was having dinner with family friends. I had the house to myself.

So I got sloshed, which I very rarely do, and watched bad comedy on the living room television set until I passed out. I awoke around eleven with a splitting headache and an urgent desire to become sober; an hour later I was on my fifth cup of coffee and was watching The Lady killers when Betty came in, looking cute but dated in her white frock. “Hi, there,” she said. “All alone?”

“Liz had a conference with her lawyer.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, and sat on the other end of the sofa, half-turned toward me, her face and knees all giving me sympathetic study. “I know she’s my sister,” she said, “but I must admit she can be a trial sometimes.”

“And a judgment others.” On screen, Herbert Lom dispatched Cecil Parker on the cottage roof with Parker’s own cane. Trundle trundle trundle down the tile.

Betty continued to study my profile. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “You know, quiet and serious.”

Quiet and serious. I frowned at the television screen, unable to think of an answer to that, and suddenly realized I was being quiet and serious.

“It’s strange about twins, isn’t it?” she said.

I turned away from Alex Guinness’s manic smile. “What’s strange?”

“They’re so alike, and yet they’re so different.”

Ah hah — profundity. It had been a while since I’d been Art in Betty’s presence, and with my other problems to think about it was hard to reach for the right responses. Bart, of course, would simply have agreed with her yin-yang statement by adding a platitude of his own, but what would Art say?

Wonderful. I’d forgotten how to make believe I was Art.

In the meantime, Betty had filled my silence with more words of her own. “Like Liz and me,” she said. “I know we look alike, but inside we’re so different it’s hard to believe sometimes that we’re even related.”

“I’ll go along with that,” I said. Discreet mayhem continued on the television screen.

“I bet it’s the same with you and Bart,” she said, and when I glanced at her again there was some sort of tiny glint in her eye. And was that the ghost of a playful smile manifesting itself around her lips?

And what have we here? My curiosity piqued and my interest aroused, I said, “You think we’re that different?”

“Well, I don’t really know, do I?” Now it was her turn to look at the television screen, and the expression of innocence glued to her face was about as realistic as a Dacron wig.