Two Much!

by Donald E. Westlake

  All around us the sun shone down on the worthy Episcopalians. I said, “I think you right, Mr. uh.…”

  “Volpinex,” he repeated, rolling the word like a fetishist with a mouthful of leather.

  “Well, Mr. Volpinex,” I said, in my straightforward way, “I can’t say I like your insinuations. I agree with your responsibility, but not your manner.”

  “That’s right,” Betty said. She looped an arm through mine and glared our defiance at the nasty man.

  “I certainly don’t intend,” he said, with an ironic bow toward me, “to insult any honest gentleman present.”

  “My life is an open book,” I told him. “I’ve lived the last seven years in California, and came here this spring because my brother wanted help in expanding his business. We may not be rich, but we are honest and hard-working. I invite you to study my past history as deeply as you want, and you will find nothing, I guarantee it”

  “I must say I hope you’re right,” he said, trying for sarcasm but failing to hide his discomfort. He had come after me as though I were Art, and instead had found himself face to face with Horatio Alger. I’d give him Victoriana, and what exactly would he do about it?

  Withdraw. “Well, it’s been nice chatting with you,” he said.

  “You’re going to feel terrible, Ernest,” Betty said, “when you find out how wrong you’ve been.”

  Volpinex glanced sourly at our linked arms. “Yes,” he said. “I know what a loyal heart you have, Betty. But do remember that I am loyal, too.”

  I said, “And I’m sure Betty appreciates you for that”

  He gave me a quickly calculating look. He knew I was too good to be true, but was it possible I was true anyway? The question still in his eyes, he turned away. “Well, Liz,” he said, with an unsuccessful attempt to take her hand, “we really ought to be going.”

  “I can hardly wait,” she told him, “to see you with the other brother.” Then she turned her mocking smile on me, saying, “You really are an Eagle Scout, aren’t you?”

  Betty said, “Now, Liz, don’t you start.”

  “I meant it in sincerest admiration,” Liz assured her and to Volpinex she said, “Come along, Ernie, you know it gives you a rash to be in the presence of goodness.”

  Volpinex showed us all something that might have been a grin, and followed Liz away in the direction of the Kerner house.

  Betty said, “Now do you see why I want our engagement to be a secret? The world is full of suspicious minds.”

  “He’s only doing what he thinks is his duty.” Bart, I was surprised to see, was magnanimous in victory.

  She hugged my arm, giving my knuckles a graze of warm crotch. “Won’t they be surprised,” she said, “when we turn up married?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I believe they will”

  SUNDAY MORNING BETTY said, “Bart, I think I’ll go into town with you.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  She gave me a conspiratorial smirk. “We’ll leave Liz alone here with Art.”

  “Sneaky of us,” I said.

  Liz had returned this morning, probably in anticipation of Art’s arrival. Could she actually have spent last night—not to mention Wednesday and Thursday and Friday nights—coupled with that creep Volpinex? Had the woman no standards at all? There was no telling from looking at her, of course. Briefly I considered probing more deeply while in my Art persona, but quickly abandoned that idea. Art, after all, had not seen Liz and the ferret together. Also, Liz was far too sharp for me to get cute with.

  Anyway, I now had a much more serious problem to deal with. Betty was coming to town with me? How could Art spend the next three days with Liz if Bart was stuck in Manhattan with Betty? For the first time I found myself wishing I actually were twins.

  All right. Every problem can be dealt with, if we but try. I managed to get away from Betty briefly, and phoned the Minck household. Let Ralph answer, I prayed, and let it not be Candy.

  Well, it was neither. It was a snot-nosed brat. “Child,” I said. “I wish you to take down a phone number, and if you take it down wrong I shall come to your house tonight with a hatchet and chop off your feet.”

  “I’ll get it right,” the child said defensively. “I always do.”

  Slowly I read off the number from the phone in front of me, then demanded the child read it back. Only when it was read back to me with no numbers transposed or misinterpreted did I move on. “I wish you, child,” I said, “to go to your father at once, tell him it’s important, and tell him to call this number and ask for Bart. B. A. R. T. Got it?”

  The child, upon reading it back, turned out to have it.

  “Good, child,” I said. “Your father must call this number within half an hour. Not your mother—your father. Got that?”

  The child said yes. We both hung up. I went off to the kitchen and prepared myself a drink containing alcohol. Then there was nothing to do but rejoin Betty on the front porch and wait.

  Twenty minutes. I was becoming fidgety, I was having trouble concentrating on Betty’s heartwarming tales of college days at dear old Bennington. I was on the verge of losing my sweet disposition. What the hell was I doing all this for anyway? The card racket wasn’t major money, but it was keeping me housed and fed. Screw the world’s third largest supplier of wood and wood products and the several other firms and the television station in Indiana. Let the money go, let Volpinex have both sisters and whatever else he wanted; why should I strain myself when the whole scam was certain to fall apart sooner or later anyway?

  Phone. Ting-aling-aling; what a cheerful sound.

  Through which Betty kept talking, paying no attention. “Dear,” I said. “Wasn’t that the phone?”

  “Hm?”

  Ting-aling-aling. “The telephone,” I said. “I think it’s ringing.”

  She’d been halfway through a story as fascinating as the road from Cairo to Aqaba and the interruption made her irritable. “Now, who could that be?”

  “Someone who wants to talk to you,” I suggested, and for the third time the phone went ting-aling-aling.

  “Oh, well.” At last she got off her ass and went inside and I heard her say, “Hello?” Yes, yes, yes. “Just a minute.” Ahhhh. “Ba-art?”

  “Mmm?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “Really?” Already on my feet, I strolled into the house and crossed the living room toward the phone she was extending in my direction. “Who is it?”

  “I’ll ask,’ she said, and dipped her head toward the receiver.”

  Christ. “Never mind, it’s okay.” I took the phone away from her and said, “Hello?”

  Ralph’s voice. “Art? Is that you?”

  “Oh, Art!” I said. And I mouthed silently at Betty. It’s Art. She nodded hugely, understanding.

  “The darn kids got it wrong again,” Ralph was saying. “They thought you said Bart.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” I said.

  “Well, at least they got the phone number right.”

  “Well, sure,” I said.

  “You think so? You’d be surprised how those kids can louse up a message.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “Art? Is there something wrong?”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said. Betty was mouthing What is it? I gestured at her to wait.

  Ralph was saying, “What? No, I didn’t mean there was anything wrong with me, I meant was there—Uh, is everything okay there?”

  I said, “You sure I can’t help?”

  “I’m fine, Art,” he said. “Listen, you’re all confused.”

  “Well, okay,” I said, sounding doubtful.

  “You wanted me to call you, right?”

  “Then I’ll give you a ring tomorrow,” I said.

  “Oh, I get it. There’s somebody there right now, and you can’t talk.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You and your girls,” he said, with a little chuckle of envy. “O
kay, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Any time at all,” I said.

  “So long.”

  Would he ever get off the goddamn phone? “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well, uh …” For the love of Christ, Ralph! “So long, then.” And he finally hung the hell up.

  “The thing is, Art,” I told the dead phone, “when I came back East it was to be helpful.” I waited; the phone said buzzzz. “Well, sure, kid, I realize that” Buzzzzzz. “Fine. Then I’ll see you Wednesday.” Buzzzzzz. “So long.”

  I hung up, and Betty said, “What was that all about?”

  “That was Art,” I said.

  “Well, I know that. What did he want?”

  “He can’t come out this week. There’s some tax problem, auditing the company books, something like that. I really don’t know enough about that side of the business yet, so Art has to handle it himself.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “Liz will be disappointed.”

  “So’s Art,” I said, and I meant it. “But he says I should just stay out here all this week. There wouldn’t be room for me in the apartment with him there.”

  “Well, we’ll stay in my place,” she said.

  Another complication? “What place?”

  “In Manhattan.”

  “Gee,” I said, “I do hate to waste these summer days. It’s so much nicer out here.”

  She gave me a coquettish look. “But we have a special reason to go to the city,” she said. “Don’t you know what it is?”

  I didn’t, and I hate uncertainty. Life is tricky enough as it is. “Some special reason to be in New York?”

  “Do you know who I’m going to be by Wednesday?”

  “Who you’re going to be?”

  “I’m going to be Mrs. Bart Dodge,” she informed me, then abruptly flung her arms about me and kissed me on the ear and neck. “Isn’t that going to be wonderful?”

  “Fabulous,” I said, which was the simple truth.

  She released me, and I saw there were stars in her eyes. “Do you think your brother could be our best man?”

  “Gee, what a great idea,” I said. “Of course, he might be too busy this week, but I’ll sure ask him.”

  ART WAS THERE IN SPIRIT. Like the tremulous virgins in Victorian novels, I went through my wedding in a daze. Betty ran the whole thing; all I had to do was sit back and let it happen.

  And wonder, from time to time, just what the hell was going on. What did Betty want with me anyway? I knew why I was marrying her, but why was she so hell-bent on marrying me?

  And I mean determined. From the moment of our arrival in Manhattan Sunday afternoon, when she browbeat the Kerner family doctor into backdating our blood tests to Friday, until the moment of our legalization in a judge’s chambers in Weehawken, New Jersey, on Tuesday evening, Betty drove forward like a piranha fish through a cow, undeflected by cartilage or bone. Was Bart really that lovable?

  Well, what other explanation was there? I’d been too busy with my double life to pay much attention, but apparently I’d bowled the girl over right from the beginning with my plodding semidistracted amiability. I’d never realized such depths of passive charm resided within me. Nor was it likely to be generally as provocative as Betty found it. Hers had to be a very special taste: if I was in truth the most exciting bachelor she’d ever met, the moneyed class in this country is in serious trouble.

  In any event, Betty set to with a will and got us married. “You just relax, sweetheart,” she said, giving me a quick kiss and a brisk shove into a handy easy chair, “and I’ll take care of all the details. And if there’s anything you want, just ask Nikki or Blondell or Carlos.”

  “Yes, dear,” I said.

  Nikki or Blondell or Carlos. The Kerner family home in Manhattan, an eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in the sixties, with windows and terrace overlooking the park from a safe seven stories up, was exactly my idea of the life of the rich, starting with the three servants just mentioned. We’d been roughing it at Point O’ Woods, doing our own cooking, dressing ourselves, all of that lower class raggle-taggle. A local girl from Bay Shore, a stout blonde teen-ager who seemed to be molded out of wet white bread and who occasionally answered to the name Francine, ferried over twice a week to do the laundry and sweep the floors, but my God even dental technicians have cleaning ladies.

  Well, the apartment in New York was more like it. The rooms were spacious and expensively furnished, and the things hanging on the walls were, I discovered with my fingernail, paintings and not prints. There were three phone lines, reflecting the former occupancy of Kerner pére and his far-flung business interests, and there were four bathrooms, reflecting his tendency to produce daughters. And while the three servants lived in, they were hardly underfoot; they had quarters of their own, beyond the kitchen. Nikki, and Blondell, and Carlos.

  The last-named, Carlos, was the chauffeur who’d had the piano key inserted in his shoulder during the New Year’s tragedy. A short and stocky forty-year-old with a flat sullen Indian face and an accent like a briar patch, he went out of his way to assure all and sundry that he was Mess-kin and not Poor Ree-kin. When not driving, which was most of the time—his trip out to Bay Shore to pick up Betty and me from the ferry Sunday afternoon had apparently been his first excursion in the family’s new Lincoln in several weeks—Carlos was vaguely a handyman, terrace gardener, sometime butler, frequent bartender, and general layabout. We viewed one another from the outset with mutual distrust.

  Blondell, a great round black mammy of the sort I’d thought had been made illegal by the Supreme Court decision of 1954, was the cook, of course. She was also not an American citizen, which perhaps explained her continuing existence in a form that had to be rated a debit to her race. Hailing from an obscure Caribbean island named Anguilla, she carried a British passport, but the language she spoke could hardly have been less English. Her accent, even more impenetrable than that of Carlos, was like wayward breezes: soft and unpredictable. Since as Bart I wore glasses, and Blondell loved intellectuals above all things, she and I got along from the beginning.

  Nikki’s accent was French. She was the maid, her manner was saucy, and her presence made me revise slightly my opinion of the late Albert J. Kerner. She had Candy’s boniness, and some of Candy’s foxlike facial features, but softened in her case by a more honest lewdness. Her uniform skirts were short, and she seemed to find an incredible number of work tasks that required her to bend over in front of me, showing me what she would have called her derrière. I called it an ass, and I wanted to bite it, but of course with the wedding so close that was impossible. Perhaps Art, in a few days? …

  Well. That was for the speculative future; in the speculator’s present I was about to become a gushing groom. The waiting period in New York State was too long, so on Tuesday Carlos drove us to Jersey City where we took out our license, and where Charlie Hillerman’s birth certificate passed with flying colors. Then some sexual extravagances in the backseat of the Lincoln during a run out to Far Hills for dinner with an old college chum of Betty’s plus the chum’s new husband; these were the only people in on our little secret.

  I must say I liked their house. This was the foxhunting section of New Jersey, where Jackie Kennedy used to hang out, and the house did the neighborhood proud. A great sprawling stone creature four stories high, it stood amid a park of imported trees, dotted with tennis court and arbor and swimming pool. The stables were out back. Inside, there were warm wood tones and expensive antiques and the comfortable aura of money gouged from generations of peasantry.

  The owners, Betty’s chums, were named Dede and David. Dede was a cool ash blonde such as American men are supposed to go crazy for but which I have always suspected would be an inept lay, and David looked like one of those junior Washington lawyers who get sent out for coffee. He was in fact an attorney with the family firm in Philadelphia, and this house—Windy Knob they called it, which made my teeth jar—was also a family fi
xture, having been most recently occupied by an aunt who was now declining on the Côte d’Azur.

  Having seen Betty mostly in sexual encounters recently, I’d forgotten just what a crashing bore she could be in company. The modulated voice, the standardized conversation, the social smile. How proud her etiquette teacher would have been.

  Not that Dede and David helped. They’d gone to the same etiquette school, and with no trouble at all the three of them recreated that Point O’ Woods party at which Betty had first entered my life. David talked with me about the stock market, Young Republicans, sailing, and men’s shoes, and by God if Bart didn’t join right in. Art would have behaved badly here, of course, either with smartass remarks or by falling asleep, but Bart was of a more placid nature. Men’s shoes: I’d never known they could be that interesting.

  Dinner was early, since our wedding was scheduled for nine. In a two-car caravan, Dede and David following in their V-12 Jaguar, we roared northeast to Weehawken, Where we cooled our heels for twenty minutes in Judge Reagensniffer’s quarters while Hizzoner finished dealing with his evening’s quota of traffic offenders and wife beaters. David spoke to me about imported automobiles.

  At last the judge entered. A sharp-faced skinny geezer with thinning white hair on his bony pate, he probably wasn’t a day over eighty-five, and had the brisk spryness that comes from years and years of uninterrupted bad temper. He looked at us, sitting around on his sagging brown leather furniture, and snapped, “What do you people want?”

  “I’m Elisabeth Kerner,” Betty told him, her smooth surface unmarred by his cantankerousness. “We have an appointment here to be married.”

  “Ah!” His sour face creased in a bony if fatherly smirk; he’d known for a long time how to behave with the gentry. “Of course, Miss Kerner,” he said. His little eyes surveyed us all “And this would be?”

  “My fiancé, Robert Dodge. And these are our witnesses.”

  Introductions were made. The judge offered to shake my hand, and I found myself gripping something that seemed to be made of coat hanger wire and sausage casings. Then the forms were gone through, Betty pulling envelopes from her purse, the judge sitting at his massive old wooden desk, people signing things right and left.