Donald Westlake - Two Much!

“No interviews,” I said. What a thought: me on television, discussing the murder of my twin brother. That would finish me, wouldn’t it?

“I told them you wouldn’t be in today. I suppose they’ll try you at home.”

Meaning the nest fouled by Feeney, to which I was unlikely to be returning for quite some time. “Good luck to them,” I said. “And if anybody else calls, friend or foe, I’m still not in. Period of mourning, unlikely to return to the office before next week.”

“Right.” She gave me a conspiratorial look. “Anything else from the Kerner woman?”

“I still don’t know what she’s up to,” I said. “The only thing to do is just wait and see.”

“Maybe you ought to talk to a lawyer,” she suggested.

“I intend to. Get me Ralph Minck, you have his office number there.”

“Right. Oh, your sister called.”

“Doris? Call her back, I’ll talk to her before Ralph.”

I went to the inner office and sat down at a desk that somehow seemed less mine. I had altered into someone different in the last two days, and the cons and concerns of yesteryear no longer vibrated as they once had. The murder cover-up was all that counted now; it exhausted all my energies just to tread water in this mighty ocean.

But once I’d pulled it off, if I did, would I then be able to come back to my innocent former self, full of silliness and smut? In some absurdist way it seemed that in killing Volpinex I was becoming Volpinex. Where was my comedy? Where was my caustic center?

“A Birthday,” I muttered aloud, “a Birthday, a Birthday.” If I could still do them, if I could still come up with a greeting on demand, then there was nothing to worry about.

Buzz. “Your sister.”

“Right.” Click. “Doris?”

“Art, what on earth is going on?”

“About what?”

“The newspaper said your twin brother Robert was murdered .”

“My what?”

“Art, you don’t have a twin brother.”

“I know that. What— Oh! That thing out on Long Island.”

“Fire Island. It said— Wait, I’ll get the paper.”

“I know what it said, I noticed that coincidence myself.”

“Coincidence?”

“Doris,” I said, “how many brothers do you have?”

“Barely one,” she said. “You promise and promise and promise to call Duane, and you never do it.”

“I’ve been busy, Doris, getting ready for Thanksgiving.”

“But that isn’t the point . The point is, what is this— Here, I’ve got the paper. Twin brother Arthur Dodge, Manhattan greeting card publisher.’ What are they talking about?”

“A different Arthur Dodge, obviously,” I said. “We don’t exactly have an obscure name, you know.”

“But a greeting card publisher?”

“Doris, do you know how many little outfits like mine there are, just in New York? And maybe he doesn’t have his own outfit at all, maybe he’s an executive with Hallmark or Gibson or one of that crowd. I mean, I can see reporters getting mixed up and calling me instead of this other guy, and believe me they’ve been calling all day, but Doris you know I don’t have any twin brother.”

“It’s just a coincidence?” She sounded no more than half-convinced.

“Listen, Doris,” I said. “I’m looking in the Manhattan phone book right now, right here. Do you know how many A. Dodges there are, just the initial? And this is just Manhattan, this doesn’t count people living in Queens and Brooklyn and—”

“It was just such a surprise,” she said. “The same name and everything.”

“There are eight million people in this city,” I said. “Some of them have the same names.”

“At first,” she said, “I thought maybe it was you that was killed.”

“What would I be doing in a rich people’s place like that?” I said, and oddly enough that was the convincer. The fact was, although I had insisted on being upwardly mobile, she had remained steadfastly rooted in a social level where old tires are placed on the front lawn as planters. So she laughed over the idea of my hobnobbing with rich people, and so did I, and then we had a little chat about the subject of coincidence in general, with some drab examples from her own life and times, and finally she got off the phone and I buzzed Gloria to get me Ralph.

Waiting, trying to think of a new birthday message, I went through the accumulation of mail, trying to get back some of my former joie de milieu by repeating once-pleasant activities, but even wastebasketing final notices didn’t give me a charge any more.

And what was this? A large thick manila envelope, very like the one Volpinex had carried, the one filled with death weapons aimed at Bart. This new envelope was on my desk face down, with no identification showing, and my hands hesitated over it while the hairs on the back of my neck did little clenching things, as though holding tiny ice cubes. It looked exactly like the Volpinex envelope, which I remembered burning in the sink in Point O’ Woods, watching the yellow flames hula over the photostats.

So this was a different envelope, that’s all; why was I hesitant? I have never been a believer in ghosts or the occult or any of that mumbo jumbo. I don’t even believe Mary was a virgin. So this was a different envelope, and my reluctance to touch it was the result of nervous tension, nothing more.

Exactly. When I did turn it over, a bit more emphatically than necessary, the other side showed me my name and address typed in the middle, a gallery of canceled stamps (Eisenhower with beards and moustaches) on the upper right, and the information “L. Margolies, 37 E. 10, NY 10003” on the upper left.

Comedy: The Coward’s Response to Aggression.

Ah. Knowing more these days about aggression and the coward’s range of responses to it, I opened the envelope with the expectation of a good rousing argument to come, but was interrupted by Gloria buzzing to tell me that Ralph was home sick. “Drat,” I said. “Call him at home, then. But if a woman answers, hang up.”

“Right.”

I reached into the envelope again, and a Birthday came to me. At once I wrote it down: “Your birthday stone — is hanging around my neck.”

What? I frowned at what I had written, like a coughing romantic composer looking at blood in his handkerchief. What the hell was this ? “Your birthday stone — is hanging around my neck.” Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even sensible. It didn’t mean anything. What did it mean?

I muttered aloud, “I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it, it’s all gone.” I stared at my former product on the walls, and none of it was funny. None of it was funny. Here and there shreds of meaning clung to the sentences, like meat to a well-gnawed bone, but they weren’t funny .

“I’m becoming Volpinex.” I’m afraid I also said that one aloud, and God knows what else I would have announced if Gloria hadn’t buzzed me again at that moment. I depressed the switch. “Hah?”

“Got him.”

“Who?”

“Ralph Minck. Remember?”

“Oh.” I averted my eyes from the birthday non-greeting I’d just written. “Right,” I said. Ralph: time to cool him out with twins. Rolling myself into one, I pushed the button and said, “Hello, Ralph?”

“Hello,” he said, in a voice so faint and tremulous I could barely hear him. He didn’t sound sick, he sounded suicidal.

I said, “Ralph? What’s happening?”

“I’m afraid I can’t talk to anybody right now.” Dignity tottered among garbage cans in his voice.

“Wait, wait! Don’t hang up. It’s me, Ralph, your best friend Art. What’s the problem, boy?”