Donald Westlake - Two Much!

Now I permitted myself a slightly doubtful scoff. “Are you saying murder? Don’t be silly.”

“They were shot,” she said. “I swear to God. You can call the police at Brookhaven, if you don’t believe me.”

“Shot? Liz, you mean for real? With a gun ?”

“Whoever did it,” she said, “tried to make it look like an accident. He burned the house down. But it was too suspicious and they did an autopsy right away and found the bullets.”

“But — but who did it?”

“They don’t know,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was the matter with the Suffolk County police? They couldn’t find a goddam pistol within fifty feet of a major crime? Was all my cleverness to go for naught simply because the police were too inept to do their job properly?

Find the gun! Goddam it, Suffolk County police, I know you can’t find stolen bicycles and stolen sailboats, but for Christ’s sake even you people should be able to find a gun! It’s right out in front of the house, covered with Volpinex’s fingerprints!

Had a child found it? Had a child taken it away, for magpie reasons of its own?

Liz had been saying something more. I said, “What? I’m sorry, Liz. I guess the impact is just hitting me.” And I jumped up impulsively from the desk, staring in agony toward my dusty window. “Bart!” I cried. “Bart dead!”

“Betty gets billing, too,” Liz said.

I blinked at her. “You’ve had longer to get used to this,” I said. “Longer to think about it.”

“It never gets much funnier,” she said.

“But Bart,” I said, gesturing vaguely, hopelessly. “He’d come back from the coast, we’d had such—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Liz said. “Save it for the graveside. You and Bart got along about as well as Betty and I did.”

“I wasn’t suing him!”

“You would have, if there’d been any money in it. You liked Bart all right, and I liked Betty all right, and I feel just as lousy as you do, but we’re still alive, Art, and we’ve got things to do.”

“Undertakers,” I said vaguely, “arrangements...”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

What now? I said, “What else, then?”

“I need an alibi, Art,” she said.

I gazed at her, dumbstruck, I mean truly dumbstruck. Possibilities raced through my mind like cockroaches when the kitchen light turns on. I said, “Did you —?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said. “If I was going to get rid of Betty, I’d be smarter than that .”

I might have considered that an insult, but more important considerations had the floor. I said, “Then why do you need an alibi?”

“We had the lawsuit going,” she said. “There was bad blood between us, and a lot of people knew it. I don’t want this thing pinned on me, Art.”

“Neither do I,” I said. And I was telling the truth. I wanted it pinned on Volpinex, where it belonged; and where it would answer all the awkward questions.

Liz said, “We were married last Wednesday. We’ve been inseparable ever since, right up till this morning. We’ve been in your apartment, so we wouldn’t even have my servants around us.”

“My apartment?”

“You know I’d show you my appreciation,” she said. “I’m a generous girl, you know that.”

Pop. Another complete movement dropped into my head. “You sure are generous,” I told her. “You have no idea how generous you are.”

Mistrust spread over her irascible features. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How badly do you need this alibi? I mean, why not produce Joe Rock? He’s the guy you were really with, isn’t he?”

“He can’t help,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He’s evading a couple of Federal warrants. Drug sales, possession, things like that.”

“So it’s me or nobody.”

“What’s your offer, Art?”

“No offer,” I told her. “We’re at the level of take-it-orleave-it.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind a women’s prison,” she said.

“Lesbianism would make you fat,” I told her, and buzzed Gloria. “Bring your pad in, will you?”

Liz wasn’t liking any of this. “Just tell it to me,” she said. “Let me say yes or no.”

“Let me have my fun,” I said, and when Gloria came in I dictated to her a new agreement between Liz and me that eliminated the entire former agreement from beginning to end. “The greater understanding, confidence, and trust of one another created since our marriage” was given as the principal reason for the change. From now on, this agreement said, our marriage would be ruled exclusively by our wedding vows, the laws of Connecticut, and the customs and mores of the social groupings amid whom we would make our communal life. Insofar as property was concerned, the community property statutes of the state of California would apply.

Liz sat stony-faced through all this, and Gloria speed-wrote it all with her usual aplomb. At the finish I said, “Date it yesterday, prepare it for both our signatures, and do it in four copies.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, deadpan, and left the office.

Liz crossed her legs the other way. “And what,” she said, “makes you think I’d sign anything like that?”

“A real marriage, sweetheart,” I said. “Wouldn’t you really like that, after all?”

“No.”

“Then it just comes down to preferences,” I said. “Which would you rather have for the rest of your life? The State Penitentiary for Women, or marriage to me?”

“That’s not an easy decision.”

“Take your time,” I said. We could both hear the clickety-clack from the outer office. “Gloria only types about thirty words a minutes,” I said.

Boy was she mad when they found the gun!

That happened about three in the afternoon. By then we’d both been interviewed by rumple-suited Suffolk County plainclothes detectives, who sat uncomfortably in the living room of the Kerner apartment in Manhattan and treated us with the awkward polysyllabic deference natural to cops confronted by power and/or money. We had also started the funeral arrangements, and I had started the details of a cover-up beside which Watergate was at the level of who-left-the-top-off-the-grape-jelly?

The funeral arrangements were themselves part of the cover-up, since I insisted on the simplest possible form. Liz felt the same way for arrogant reasons of her own — she hated the hoi polloi gawping at the edges of her life — and so what was decided on was cremation and urnment in the Kerner mausoleum up near Tarrytown, all to be done as soon as the coroner and other authorities were done with the remains, and the entire operation to be unaccompanied by services, wakes, or even announcements of any kind. No prayers, no get-togethers, nothing. The bare minimum. Burn ’em up, brush the ashes into the urn, clap on the cork, shove it onto the shelf, and the less said the better.

The next step of the cover-up, for me, involved cooling out an incredible number of people who knew different potentially incriminating parts of what had been going on. Gloria. Ralph. Candy. Joe Gold. My sister Doris. The list went on and on, and not everybody could be given exactly the same story. Doris, for instance, knew damn well I didn’t have a twin brother, but it was just possible I could convince Ralph that the twin brother had existed.

Oh, boy.

I started my cover-up campaign with Gloria. When she finished typing up the agreement I’d dictated, she brought it in and waited while Liz read it. Then Liz stalled a bit by asking directions to the ladies room, and while she was gone I said, “Gloria, I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”