Anyway, I didn’t argue with her. Monks had wheeled the car onto Park Avenue at Seventy-second. Traffic was fairly light for nearly twelve in the afternoon. I sailed my cigarette out of the window. The cool wind whipped at my face, tried to slap my hat off.
June Wexler looked funny. She was looking at me in a way I wasn’t sure of.
“No,” she said. “You don’t look like Humphrey Bogart. And you don’t look like Dick Powell either.”
“Oh, for Christ sake!” Monks roared. “What did you say the address was, Miss?”
That shut her up. She gave him the number again. I looked out my side of the car. I felt red-faced for no good reason.
Pretty soon, we hissed to a halt in front of one of the fancier joints on Park. It wasn’t too much of a show horse on the outside but I could guess what the layout inside would be like. This must be only the winter quarters for the Wexler family so they could be in the center of the teeming metropolis. After all, June had to have her Broadway plays, movies, cocktail parties, and gay, giddy social fling. And April, I could just see her, attending everything that was long-hair: the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, concerts, Greenwich Village. Yeah, I could see her all right. Probably had never discovered lipstick or the hair comb.
It was Monks’ show. So I let him lead the way and tagged along behind. June didn’t stop to ring the bell or try the heavy ornamental knocker that must have been the latest thing in Charles Dickens’ day. She let us in with a key. When the outside door closed behind us, the silence of the house was right out of Walter B. Cooke’s.
The furniture wasn’t much less like a funeral parlor either. Nothing personal. Just deep-colored staple furnishings that suggested wealth but didn’t scream of comfort. Tautly upholstered chairs and stiff, purple-hued tables. The full-length hall mirror was about the only thing that remotely implied that there might be human beings strolling about.
As we padded down the hall corridor, June wrinkled her pretty nose at me. “All April’s idea. Isn’t it a scream?”
That was it exactly. I felt like screaming. Just as a release. Or maybe to get an echo. I shot a glance at Monks.
His puss was a picture of what it must be at Sunday mass.
We finally were parked in what obviously was the living room. June motioned us to a lounge and slipped out of her fur stole. I made a tilted-glass gesture with my right hand. She grinned and indicated an end table in the far corner of the room. Then she went for her sister.
Monks still had his hat on, his police-line-up eyes roving over the room suspiciously. I could see he didn’t approve. But this room was a damn sight better than what I had seen already. It was a room with some liquor in it. That was an improvement in any man’s house.
The chrome of the decanter twinkled as I poured.
“None for me, Ed,” Monks said.
“Oh, Mike. Just one. You can’t get drunk on this. It’s only scotch.”
“All the same,” he said.
I didn’t argue with him. I doubled my shot, sat down, and stretched my legs. My hat made an antler of the stuffed moose over the fireplace with one toss.
“What do you think, Mike?”
“About what?”
“The Wexler kid-June.”
“She needs a spanking over someone’s knee. And you’re not the man for the job, Ed. A good-looking ape like you, it would only turn her head.”
“Skip the bouquets. Do you think she was leveling with her second story?”
He got human again. He sighed, sat down, and took his hat off. He twirled it between his fingers.
“That one, yeah. She’s an imaginative kid, guess she’s always had her own way. But nobody dreams up stuff like that. She might have distorted the truth a little, like kids do. But the basic facts must have been there. And she did look damned scared about those attempts on her life. They don’t sound like no accidents to me.”
I swilled some scotch.
“I’ll go along with that. But a dame using a .45, that doesn’t jibe with any of my info on the subject of what weapons a woman will use to put another one out of the way. Knife, yes, poison, yes, .45, yes, if it’s unpremeditated and that’s the only weapon handy. But to cram one into a woman’s purse and go pussyfooting down some hall a few miles the other side of town, that I can’t buy. And you can’t either if I know you.”
He scowled and I could see it had been bothering him too. He was about to come back with something else when there was a sound from the doorway.
I had got a jolt when I had turned Anton over on my office floor. I got another one. Only a much nicer kind. Something I had never expected at this stage of the game.
June had come back with her sister April. They were standing in the hallway, poised and waiting the way people are just before handshakes all around.
Sure, they looked exactly alike. Sure, they were both prime examples of how life can duplicate itself. Sure, they were as twinny as they can come. But that wasn’t the jolt.
The jolt was April Wexler.
She was something. She was everything. She was a woman that June Wexler could never be in a million light-years. She was a face you see on an art calendar that you sometimes wish would come to life but never does. She was Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. She was the road that you follow all your life, the road you never want to come to an end.
Maybe I’m nuts. They were twins, they did look exactly alike. But for my money, blow hot or blow cold, come hell or come atom bomb, I could never get June Wexler mixed up with April Wexler.
They were as different as night and day.
FOUR
June Wexler was making smiling introductions and I’m sure I nodded hello or something. Monks got right down to business but I hardly heard his preliminaries. I was trying to find out what it was that set April so far apart from June when they both looked as alike as two niblets of corn. Coloring the same, both brunette in the striking classification, same height and size but…
The eyes, I thought. That’s it, the eyes. June’s were bright and merry but otherwise her baby blues were dead ashes. April’s eyes were smolderingly intelligent. She looked like she had something cooking upstairs. She gave me the immediate impression she would always look like that.
I came down to earth in time to hear April Wexler just tailing off in reply to a question of Monks’.
“—really no explanation for it. Who would want to shoot poor Anton?”
The voice was different, too. It was somewhere between the tingle of fresh blood in your body and deep, slow-burning embers. I had the urge to know her in a hurry.
“They shot Lincoln, Miss Wexler,” I said. “And a lot of other nice guys in the war. No matter how cockeyed the logic is, Anton got his because of a reason.” I wondered if Monks was going to pull out all the stops and nail her with what her sister suspected of her. Or would little June tell all? It was hard to say. Little Miss White Lies was being nice and ladylike again. And calmly serene.
April Wexler leveled her womanly blues in my direction.
“That’s rather speciously put, Mr. Noon. Even if I do confess I see your point. Is there something else I haven’t heard? If there is something else, it certainly concerns us since Anton was our chauffeur.”
“Call him Ed, April,” June said mischievously.
“I’m sure he prefers Mr. Noon, darling.” April looked at her as she said it. As casually as it was put, the first traces of the man-hater that June had tagged her, poked out from beneath her smooth exterior.
Monks grunted tiredly. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get on with this. Call him Ed, but please let me call the shots.”
“As you like, Lieutenant.” Damn, she was cool.
I could see he respected her poise because he wasn’t going to even attempt a bluff or a bulldoze.
“Miss Wexler, I take it you and your sister live here alone?”
“That is correct.”
“No servants?”
“None.”
“Except, of course, Anton?”
“Anton, yes, because June and I do go around quite a bit. June parties a lot and I take in the exhibits, the Met. Shopping. All that sort of thing.”
Score one for Ed Noon. But I had been wrong about the comb. Her hair was a natural. Worn straight but amazingly neat and controlled.
“What about Anton?” From anyone else but Monks, it would have been a snide remark. But he was anyone else to April Wexler. A faint blush reddened her cheeks.
“What do you mean by that remark?”
Now that he had blundered past the No Admittance sign, Monks wasn’t going to backtrack.
“Where did he stay—or didn’t he?”
“He did not.” Color did worlds for her. “He had a furnished room in the Seventies. He reported every morning except Wednesday at nine sharp. He left every evening promptly at seven, unless he was needed to drive the car someplace. He made ninety-five dollars a week. And he never earned a penny more. Or less. And that is all.”
“Now, Miss Wex—”
“It strikes me, Lieutenant, that you have extended your line of inquiry. What precisely are you trying to prove?”
“Miss Wexler,” Monks rallied. “It’s rather an odd setup. Two rich women and only a chauffeur.”
June snorted through her nose and April pinned her with a cold stare. But when she turned to Monks again, she was smiling tightly.
“Of course, Lieutenant, he would be handy in any emergency. If you wondered if he served in a bodyguard capacity, the answer is yes.”
Monks sighed with obvious relief. I couldn’t help so I helped myself to some more scotch. Mike was no match for her. They kicked it back and forth with some more questions and answers. I guess he knew it, too, because the next thing I heard was my name.
“—isn’t that right, Ed?” Monks was asking me about something.
“Oh, absolutely,” I said solemnly. I guess I sounded pretty bored.
April Wexler looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“This situation certainly doesn’t call for levity.”
“What situation?” I started to feel mean because the sound of her voice was trying to make me stand in the corner. As if she were a schoolteacher who had just caught me throwing a piece of paper across the room. I couldn’t take that from her, because I knew she was barely twenty-one. Even if she had the equipment, mental and physical, of a much older dame.
“Hadn’t you better get hold of yourself, Mr. Noon?” Her frown was really supposed to make me feel small.
I’m perverse when I get that kind of treatment. I can’t help it.
“Have you ever tried that, Miss Wexler? It’s pretty tough to do.”
“I hope you don’t as a rule go on like this.”
“I go Pogo, Miss Wexler. And on and on and on. It depends on my mood.”
“Really!” It shot out of her before she could stop it.
“Oh, beans,” I said disgustedly. “Mike, when are you going to give her the bad news?”
“What bad news?” The way she whirled on Monks was savage. He nearly jumped a foot. He tried to shake me off.
“Ed, we’ll hold that tack for a while I think—”
“For what? Till you have another corpse on your hands? No dice, Mike. Be yourself. These kids are worth a couple of million bucks in about three days. Unfortunately, it’ll be too late then.”
June Wexler started to ease out of her chair toward the door. “Excuse me, I have to go the little girl’s room—”
“Stay right where you are, June Wexler, until I hear what these gentlemen have to say.” April could have hit her with a rock and she would have stopped just as fast.
“Okay, Ed,” Monks sighed, knowing women were more in my line. For a good cop, he doesn’t like to grill a lady. I’ve seen a prostitute make him act like a gentleman down at the station. “Tell her. And tell her quick.”
“Let’s have it, Mr. Noon,” April Wexler said with an I’ve-put-up-with-this-nonsense-long-enough sound in her voice.
“Okay. I’ll give it to you without the violins.” I put my glass down hard on the end table. I let her have it straight. Right through June’s fables, up to her dramatic tea-reading of the three murder attempts and the bombshell of the two million to be shared on Our Twenty-first Birthday. June squirmed all the way through it and April looked at her and never stopped looking. They were a mirror right then, standing before each other. But the reflection that was being given back was never more different.
“That’s it, Miss Wexler,” I finished off. “If June had come to the lieutenant here with all that muck Before Anton, he might have passed it off as kid stuff. But this is After Anton. And Anton is dead. Very dead. And it doesn’t seem like kid stuff any more. And I’m not being funny. Not this minute.”
April turned her back on her sister, her eyes slowly boring into mine. My pulse fluttered a little. It couldn’t have been the scotch. It was too weak.
“No,” she said in a completely altered voice. “That does make it different, doesn’t it? Very different indeed.”
“April, I didn’t mean—I was so frightened and confused—” Fresh tears had sprung to June’s eyes. But they were genuine this time.
“Don’t say anything to me, June. Not just now. I want to think.” She folded her arms and went over to the fireplace. I seemed to notice her costume for the first time. Cashmere sweater, nicely clinging past a slim waist level, running into a pair of gorgeously tailored slacks. She was as deceptively slender as a beautifully proportioned thoroughbred that has muscles. And all in the right places.
Monks caught my eye and winked. He must have thought the confession was coming up. The one with the handkerchief thrown in. Somehow I didn’t think so. I’m a sucker for first impressions. And my first impression was that I wasn’t a sucker for thinking well of April Wexler.
“Well, Miss Wexler?” It was Monks giving her the go-ahead signal.
“Well what, Lieutenant?”
I was on her side. “He means a well is a hole and you’re in one. Unless you can come back with some denials or some charges of your own.”
“Yeah, how about that?” Monks glowered at June as if he’d had the idea all the time. I could see April had made an impression on him too. Sure, it figured. June had two million reasons to get rid of her sister, too. It was some screwy setup.
“Now, wait a minute, you two,” June bounced indignantly up from her chair. “I brought you here, remember? I told you all about it, that gun was aimed at me you said. And I can’t see why you insist on going at it this—”
If you go to the movies, you can’t help knowing something about timing. It’s as important to a picture as taxes are to the war effort. Whole scenes hinge on the importance of the actor moving properly, of reaching a certain point, just as the phone rings or his girl comes around the corner.
What happened was something like that. And a Hollywood director would have screamed with glee.
Because just as June leaped to her feet and crossed over to us, the telephone rang, Monks shouted a warning, and the heavy crystal chandelier that hung from the center of the room snapped its moorings and came hurtling down.
And April screamed.
Because June was right beneath it.
FIVE
Reflex is a funny thing. Some people have it, some don’t. And it’s almost a crime when they hand out medals or pats on the back for it. Because nine times out of ten, you couldn’t do otherwise if you tried. It’s like blinking when someone makes a pass at your face with his hand.
I say that because reflex saved June Wexler’s life. Her life or a pretty bad headache. The chandelier housed at least twenty-one bulbs and was solid crystal clear through.
Monks’ roar had set me off. My reflexes anyway. I was still cuddling my glass of scotch. I’d settled back on the cushions with it as though I was going to stay a while. So I was relaxing after my long speech when the chain on which the chandelier hung grated its warning. That and
Monks’ fog horn were enough for whatever particular stimuli my set of muscles needed.
My free left hand was clutching the corner of one of those thick fluffy pillows provided for the comfort of Wexler guests or any lounge lizards who happened to stumble in. I made it uncomfortable for June Wexler but I saved her life with it.
I sailed it at her with all the gathered force I could muster from a sitting position. I put all my rising weight behind it. I’ll take a bouquet for my pitching arm but brains had nothing to do with it. It was reflex. Pure and simple.
The pillow caught her right in the lower torso. It made her bend like an accordion, sent her sprawling like the first pin to go from the set of ten at the other end of a bowling alley. Her tiny scream was a muffled “Oh!” of sound and air.
The next sound was a hell of a lot louder. The very expensive chandelier was a very inexpensive mass of broken glass in the center of the living-room floor. A sliver of flying glass quivered from the lounge like a shiny dart.
Monks was upset enough to forget there were ladies present. He cursed. Cursed in a manner and style that would have gotten him an on-the-spot membership in the Truckmen’s Union. The look he gave April Wexler when he finished was pure murder. It would have shriveled flowers.
I helped June to her feet. Her chin was trembling like an adagio dancer and her blue eyes were pools of disbelief. I gave her the rest of my drink.
There was a pretty awful silence for a few minutes. I suddenly remembered a telephone ringing, realized it had been ringing all this time, but now had gone cemetery-silent. Whoever had rung up had got tired of waiting.
“Easy, Michael,” I said to Monks.
He glared at me. “Easy? You’re crazy, Ed. This poor kid was almost killed right under our noses. That would have been some laugh down at Headquarters. Only I’m not laughing.”
“Neither am I. Ed, if it hadn’t been for you—” June said.
“Yes.” April Wexler’s voice was astoundingly cool as it interrupted. “Mr. Noon, you saved my sister’s life. I don’t know how to thank you.”
The Spitting Image Page 3