Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02

by Enough (v1. 1)

  But how? What should I say to him? Tell him that Patricia loves him, that we'd had one brief crazy mistake and—?

  No. That expressionless rockbound face told me one thing for sure; I should not mention Patricia's name. Somehow I had to get him to stop doing this thing without ever saying out loud his reason for doing it.

  What, then? Friendship? No; it wasn't long enough or deep enough. Danger to himself? There wasn't any, to begin with, and in any event I was sure he didn't care.

  Professionalism. Pride of accomplishment, that was my only chance. Leaning closer to him, speaking softly enough so Bray wouldn't be able to hear, I said, "You don't want to do this, Fred. If you do this, the real killer will get away."

  Nothing. No response.

  "You don't want that to happen, Fred. Think of poor Laura Penney, think of Kit. If you do this, their deaths will go unpunished."

  Nothing.

  "Fred," I said, becoming more desperate, "don't you care who killed Laura and Kit? Don't you care?"

  He looked at me, at last. He studied me for five seconds with his very cold eyes, and then he said, "No." And faced front.

  I couldn't believe it. "But that's your job," I said. "That's your vocation. Doesn't it matter to you?"

  Apparently he was finished expressing himself. He sat silent, facing front.

  I kept trying for another twenty blocks, talking at him every time the radio blare cut Al Bray out of earshot, appealing to Staples' moral sense, his ethics, his pride in a job well done, and I might as well have been talking to an Easter Island statue. The only time he spoke or moved or did anything at all was when I skirted the subject of Patricia, just hinting slightly at the reason for all this, and when I did that he said, while still facing front, "Better be careful. You could get yourself shot trying to escape."

  He meant it, too.

  After that I subsided, casting about in my mind for some other way off this hook, and gradually I became very annoyed. I had done everything right, everything. I had committed three murders and covered myself brilliantly and gotten away with all three of them clean, and now this overly-possessive husband, this damned jealous-Framed for a murder I committed! It isn't fair, it just isn't fair.

  "Well, I'll tell you one thing," I said at last, driven by exasperation. "The wrong one of us is a detective, that's for sure. The only way you can make an arrest is to frame somebody. Who's going to solve your crimes for you after I'm gone?"

  He didn't respond to that either, so I gave him some more: "You can't do anything right, do you know that? No wonder—" But, no; I did not want to be shot trying to escape. So I started again: "You couldn't even get George Templeton."

  He frowned at that, and turned finally to give me a puzzled look. "Templeton?"

  "The fellow whose wife went off the terrace in the snow."

  "I remember him. What about him?

  "I only took your side because I thought you were my friend," I told him. "But Al Bray was right, Templeton killed his wife."

  Staples squinted, apparently trying to read on my face whether I was lying or not. "You're just saying that," he decided. "Because you're sore."

  "Am I? I'll tell you the two things that prove it. The frostbitten plants in the window, and the fact that the only disturbances in the snow on the terrace were the footprints."

  "Explain," he said.

  "Templeton hit her and she died," I explained. "Hours before he threw her out. He kept the terrace doors open and the body nearby to delay rigor mortis, so she'd look as though she died later than she did. He put on her shoes and walked out to the end of the terrace, being very careful not to touch anything, and then walked backwards off the terrace in the same footprints. And then put the shoes back on the body."

  "That's just a theory," Staples said. "There isn't any proof."

  "Not now, not any more. The only way you'll get Templeton is to frame him. But that morning there was proof, only you were too dumb to see it."

  He was stung, but controlling himself. "What proof?"

  "Drunk or sober," I told him, "there was no way for Mrs. Templeton to leave that terrace without disturbing the snow on top of the railing. And it was untouched."

  "Well, I'll be damned," he said.

  "She never went off that terrace," I told him. "Templeton carried her downstairs and threw her out the living room window."

  "You're right." He shook his head and looked at me in obvious admiration, and actually smiled at me. "I'm going to miss you, Carey," he said.

  Which was when it finally became real for me. The chill air of prison touched the nape of my neck, and I crouched more miserably inside my coat. Staples meant what he said; he would miss me. He liked me, he was pleased to think of himself as my friend, despite everything. But he would also frame me for Laura Penney's murder, frame me solid and convincing, and nothing on earth would stop him.

  I couldn't talk any more. I turned away, staring out the side window at the rain, looking at my future. How different it would be from my past. All my cleverness, buried inside a stone.

  Staples was still marveling over my final deduction. "You really are something, Carey," he told the back of my head. "In a lot of ways I don't care for you very much, but you sure are one hell of a detective."

  ORDO

  ONE

  My name is Ordo Tupikos, and I was born in North Flat, Wyoming on November gth, 1936. My father was part Greek and part Swede and part American Indian, while my mother was half Irish and half Italian. Both had been born in this country, so I am one hundred per cent American.

  My father, whose first name was Samos, joined the United States Navy on February 17th, 1942, and he was drowned in the Coral Sea on May 15th, 1943. At that time we were living in West Bowl, Oklahoma, my mother and my two sisters and my brother and I, and on October 12th of that year my mother married a man named

  Eustace St. Claude, who claimed to be half Spanish and half French but who later turned out to be half Negro and half Mexican and passing for white. After the divorce, my mother moved the family to San Itari, California. She never remarried, but she did maintain a long-term relationship with an air conditioner repairman named Smith, whose background I don't know.

  On July 12th, 1955, I followed my father's footsteps by joining the United States Navy. I was married for the first time in San Diego, California on March 11th, 1958, when I was twenty-one, to a girl named Estelle Anlic, whose background was German and Welsh and Polish. She put on the wedding license that she was nineteen, having told me the same, but when her mother found us in September of the same year it turned out she was only sixteen. Her mother arranged the annulment, and it looked as though I might be in some trouble, but the Navy transferred me to a ship and that was the end of that.

  By the time I left the Navy, on June 17, 1959, my mother and my half brother, Jacques St. Claude, had moved from California to Deep Mine, Pennsylvania, following the air conditioner repairman named Smith, who had moved back east at his father's death in order to take over the family hardware store. Neither Smith nor Jacques was happy to have me around, and I'd by then lost touch with my two sisters and my brother, so in September of that year I moved to Old Coral, Florida, where I worked as a carpenter (non-union) and where, on January 7th, i960, I married my second wife, Sally Fowler, who was older than me and employed as a waitress in a diner on the highway toward Fort Lauderdale.

  Sally, however, was not happy tied to one man, and so we were divorced on April 12th, i960, just three months after the marriage. I did some drinking and trouble-making around that time, and lost my job, and a Night Court judge suggested I might be better off if I rejoined the Navy, which I did on November 4th, i960, five days before my twenty-fourth birthday.

  From then on, my life settled down. I became a career man in the Navy, got into no more marriages, and except for my annual Christmas letter from my mother in Pennsylvania I had no more dealings with the past. Until October 7th, 1974, when an event occurred that knocked me right over. />
  * * *

  I was assigned at that time to a Naval Repair Station near New London, Connecticut, and my rank was Seaman First Class. It was good weather for October in that latitude, sunny, clean air, not very cold, and some of us took our afternoon break out on the main dock. Norm and Stan and Pat and I were sitting in one group, on some stacks of two by fours, Norm and Stan talking football and Pat reading one of his magazines and me looking out over Long Island Sound. Then Pat looked up from his magazine and said, "Hey, Orry."

  I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes were half-blinded from looking at the sun reflected off the water. I said, "What?"

  "You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne."

  Dawn Devayne was a movie star. I'd seen a couple of her movies, and once or twice I saw her talking on television. I said, "Sure."

  He gave me a dirty grin and said, "You shouldn't of let that go, boy."

  With Pat, you play along with the joke and then go do something else, because otherwise he won't give you any peace. So I grinned back at him and said, "I guess I shouldn't," and then I turned to look some more at the water.

  But this time he didn't quit. Instead, he raised his voice and he said, "Goddamit, Orry, it's right here in this goddam magazine."

  I faced him again. I said, "Come on, Pat."

  By now, Norm and Stan were listening too, and Norm said, "What's in the magazine, Pat?"

  Pat said, "That Orry was married to Dawn Devayne."

  Norm and Stan both grinned, and Stan said, "Oh, that."

  "Goddamit!" Pat jumped to his feet and stormed over and shoved the magazine in Stan's face. "You look at that!" he shouted. "You just look at that!"

  I saw Stan look, and start to frown, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Had they set this up ahead of time? But not Stan; Norm sometimes went along with Pat's gags, but Stan always brushed them away like mosquitoes. And now Stan frowned at the magazine, and he said, "Son of a bitch."

  "Now, look," I said, "a joke's a joke."

  But nobody was acting like it was a joke. Norm was looking over Stan's shoulder, and he too was frowning. And Stan, shaking his head, looked at me and said, "Why try to hide it, for Christ's sake? Brother, if Yd been married to Dawn Devayne, I'd tell the world about it."

  "But I wasn't," I said. "I swear to God, I never was."

  Norm said, "How many guys you know named Ordo Tupikos?"

  "It's a mistake," I said. "It's got to be a mistake.'

  Norm seemed to be reading aloud from the magazine. He said, "Married in San Diego, California, in 1958, to a sailor named Ordo Tu—"

  "Wait a minute," I said. "I was married then to, uh, Estelle-"

  "Anlic," Pat said, and nodded his head at me. "Estelle Anlic, right?"

  I stared at him. I said, "How'd you know that name?"

  "Because that's Dawn Devayne, dummy! That's her real name!" Pat grabbed the magazine out of Norm's hands and rushed over to jab it at me. "Is that you, or isn't it?"

  There was a small black-and-white photo on the page, surrounded by printing. I hadn't seen that picture in years.

  It was Estelle and me, on our wedding day, a picture taken outside City Hall by a street photographer. There I was in my whites—you don't wear winter blues in San Diego—and there was Estelle. She was wearing her big shapeless black sweater and that tight tight gray skirt down to below her knees that I liked in those days. We were both squinting in the sunlight, and Estelle's short dark hair was in little curls all around her head.

  "That's not Dawn Devayne," I said. "Dawn Devayne has blonde hair."

  Pat said something scornful about people dyeing ther hair, but I didn't listen. I'd seen the words under the picture and I was reading them. They said: "Dawn and her first husband, Navy man Ordo Tupikos. Mama had the marriage annulled six months later."

  Norm and Stan had both come over with Pat, and now Stan looked at me and said, "You didn't even know it."

  "I never saw her again." I made a kind of movement with the magazine, and I said, '"When her mother took her away. The Navy put me on a ship, I never saw her after that."

  Norm said, "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch."

  Pat laughed, slapping himself on the hip. He said:

  "You're married to a movie star!"

  I got to my feet and went between them and walked away along the dock toward the repair sheds. The guys shouted after me, wanting to know where I was going, and Pat yelled, "That's my magazine!"

  "I'll bring it back," I said. "I want to borrow it." I don't know if they heard.

  I went to the Admin Building and into the head and closed myself in a stall and sat on the toilet and started in to read about Dawn Devayne.

  * * *

  The magazine was called True Man, and the picture on the cover was a foreign sports car with a girl lying on the hood. Down the left side of the cover was lettering that read:

  WILL THE ENERGY CRISIS KILL LE MANS?

  DAWN DEVAYNE: THE WORLD'S NEXT SEX GODDESS

  WHAT SLOPE? CONFESSIONS OF A GIRL SKI BUM

  Inside the magazine, the article was titled, Is Dawn Devayne The World's New Sex Queen? by Abbie Lancaster. And under the title in smaller letters was another question, with an answer:

  "Where did all the bombshells go? Dawn Devayne is ready to burst on the scene."

  Then the article didn't start out to be about Dawn Devayne at all, but about all the movie stars that had ever been considered big sex symbols, like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield. Then it said there hadn't been any major sex star for a long time, which was probably because of Women's Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes. "You don't need a fantasy bed-warmer," the article said, "if you've got a real-life bed-warmer of your own."

  Then the article said there were a bunch of movie stars who were all set to take the crown as the next sex queen if the job ever opened up again. It mentioned Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret and Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie. But then it said Dawn Devayne was the likeliest of them all to make it, because she had that wonderful indescribable quality of being all things to all men.

  Then there was a biography. It said Dawn Devayne was born Estelle Anlic in Big Meadow, Nebraska on May 19th, 1942, and her father died in the Korean conflict in 1955, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1956 because her mother had joined a religious cult that was based in Los Angeles. It said her mother was a bus driver in that period, and Dawn Devayne grew up without supervision and hung around with boys a lot. It didn't exactly say she was the neighborhood lay, but it almost said it.

  Then it came to me. It said Dawn Devayne ran away from home a lot of times in her teens, and one time when she was sixteen she ran away to San Diego and married me until her mother took her home again and turned her over to the juvenile authorities, who put her in a kind of reformatory for wayward girls. It called me a "stock figure." What it said was:

  "... a sailor named Ordo Tupikos, a stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star's childhood."

  I didn't much care for that, but what I was mostly interested in was where Estelle Anlic became Dawn Devayne, so I kept reading. The article said that after the reformatory Estelle got a job as a carhop in a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles, and it was there she got her first crack at movie stardom, when an associate producer with Farber International Pictures met her and got her a small role in a B-movie called Tramp Killer. She played a prostitute who was murdered. That was in i960, when she was eighteen. There was a black-and-white still photo from that movie, showing her cowering back from a man with a meat cleaver, and she still looked like Estelle Anlic then, except her hair was dyed platinum blonde. Her stage name for that movie was Honey White.

  Then nothing more happened in the movies for a while, and Estelle went to San Francisco and was a cashier in a movie theater. The article quoted her as saying, "When 'Tramp Killer' came through, I sold tickets to myself." She had other jobs too for the next three years, and
then when she was twenty-one, in 1963, a man named Les Moore, who was the director of Tramp Killer, met her at a party in San Francisco and remembered her and told her to come back to Los Angeles and he would give her a big part in the movie he was just starting to work on.

  (The article then had a paragraph in parentheses that said Les Moore had become a very important new director in the three years since Tramp Killer, which had only been his second feature, and that the movie he wanted Dawn Devayne to come back to Los Angeles for was Bubbletop, the first of the zany comedies that had made Les Moore the Preston Sturges of the sixties.)

  So Dawn Devayne—or Estelle, because her name wasn't Dawn Devayne yet and she'd quit calling herself Honey White—went back to Los Angeles and Les Moore introduced her to a star-making agent named Byron Cart-wright, who signed her to exclusive representation and who changed her name to Dawn Devayne. And Bubble-top went on to become a smash hit and Dawn Devayne got rave notices, and she'd been a movie star ever since, with fifteen movies in the last eleven years, and her price for one movie now was seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. The article said she was one of the very few stars who had never had a box-office flop.

  About her private life, the article said she was "between marriages." I thought that would mean she was engaged to somebody, but so far as I could see from the rest of the article she wasn't. So I guess that's just a phrase they use for people like movie stars when they aren't married.

  Anyway, the marriages she was between were numbers four and five. After me in 1958, her next marriage was in 1963, to a movie star named Rick Tandem. Then in 1964 there was a fight in a nightclub where a producer named Josh Weinstein knocked Rick Tandem down and Rick Tandem later sued for divorce and said John Weinstein had come between him and Dawn Devayne. The article didn't quite say that Rick Tandem was in reality queer, but it got the point across.