Back in the living room Staples was reading my movie posters, but his mind was still on the message, because he said, “Would you run it just once more? I’m sorry, I know it upsets you, but I want to record it.”
Turned out he had a cassette recorder in his overcoat pocket. Damn it to hell. I considered accidentally erasing the message but I was afraid I’d trigger Staples’ suspicions, so we played the thing one last time while his little machine turned a beady ear on my little machine, and then at last I could erase the bastard and sit down with my coffee, waiting for the Valium to take hold.
Staples tried to reassure me: “We run into a lot of nuts like that, Mr. Thorpe. They get an idea in their heads, and they don’t want to be distracted by facts.”
I said, “What if you hadn’t already cleared me, what would you be thinking now?”
He chuckled. “I’d be a lot more interested in talking with that particular nut, to tell the truth.” Then he said, “Forget about it, Mr. Thorpe, it’s a closed incident. Let’s look at those photos.”
So we did. Six pictures of Laura, with as many men, all of whom I knew to one extent or another. Going through them one at a time, I gave Staples a name and capsule biography for each, and resisted the temptation to plant suspicion in his mind about any specific one of these prime suspects.
That was a question I hadn’t as yet resolved in my own mind. If I hadn’t killed Laura—and the official line was that I had not—then someone else must have done it. Would it be better to provide that someone else, or could we content ourselves with a simple unsolved murder? There are hundreds of unsolved murders every year, why shouldn’t Laura Penney’s be among them? For the moment, at least, that seemed the better way, so I made none of the leading remarks that occurred to me concerning each of these escorts, but simply provided Staples with basic uncolored information: name, occupation, relationship with the deceased.
And one of them turned out to be that same Jay English whose name Staples had heard Kit mention on my answering machine, in the sentence, “I still say Jay English did it.” He remembered that comment, of course, and asked several questions, with me assuring him the whole thing had been a joke, if not in very good taste, considering the unequivocal homosexuality of its subject. Joke or not, Staples made sure to get the roommate’s name spelled right: David Poumon.
One of the other photos was of Laura with her father, a straight-backed well-preserved old gent I’d met once several months ago, when he was in town from upstate. If Staples was so interested in unusual sexual relationships, how about intimating something incestuous there to keep his busy mind occupied? No; once again I restrained myself and moved on to the next, which happened to be the same stammering Jack Freelander who’d just left, um, a message on my machine.
After I’d done all the pictures once, with Staples making notes in his small pad and giving each subject his own page, he led me back through all six again, asking leading questions, poking here and there in search of motive, and damn if he didn’t suggest father-daughter incest himself. He led up to it gradually, with questions about whether Laura saw her father seldom or often, what she had to say about him, and so on, and finally he asked the question straight out: “Do you think there was anything going on there?”
“Going on?”
“Well, you say he’s a widower, and she’s separated from her husband.”
I was astounded, not at the concept but that Staples should voice it. Apparently he specialized in thinking the unthinkable. I said, “He’s her father! You don’t think—I mean, what do you think?”
He shrugged, his expression as open and cheerful as ever. “I think people have love lives,” he told me. “One way or the other, they make that connection. Now, here’s a woman, she’s thirty-two years old, she’s been married, she’s separated from her husband, all she has is these casual non-sexual dates with a number of different men. She doesn’t seem to have anybody that’s really important to her.”
“That’s possible,” I said. “There are people who prefer to be alone.”
“Not many. And not Laura Penney. It doesn’t feel right, Mr. Thorpe. She had a lover, I’m sure of it.” Gesturing at the photos on the table next to me, he said, “In among all those men in her life was the man in her life. But he was kept hidden. Why?”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “A lover wouldn’t be kept hidden unless there was a reason for it.”
“Right.” He checked off the possibilities on his fingers. “He’s married. He’s homosexual and doesn’t want to make a complete break with the homosexual world. He’s her father.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I,” Staples assured me. “But at this stage of the game, I keep an open mind.”
I was beginning to feel a bit wary of that open mind of Staples’. If he was so eager to think the unthinkable, why wouldn’t it occur to him to play with the thought that my guaranteed innocence might in itself be an indication of guilt? I was, after all, the Least Likely Suspect. And as with all Least Likely Suspects, I was in reality the Murderer.
Staples and I talked for half an hour more, with him drawing another three or four names from me of men who knew Laura but whose pictures had not been snapped by the private detectives. Finally he seemed satisfied that he’d squeezed me dry, and he made ready to leave, saying, “I do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Thorpe. And the coup you pulled in the Wicker killing this afternoon was really beautiful. You made my day.”
“It’d be interesting to find out the rest of that story.”
“Oh, I’m sure Al Bray’s got the whole thing by now.” Then, seeming to be struck by a sudden thought, he said, “Say. That girlfriend of yours is tied up tonight, isn’t she?”
Meaning Kit, who had said so on the machine. “Yes, I guess she is.”
“Why not have dinner with us? Patricia and me. She’d love to meet you, she’s as big a fan as I am. And I’ll have the story from Al by then, I can tell it to you at dinner.”
“Oh, I don’t think I should—”
“Listen, you’re not imposing.” He was very eager, very determined. “And Patricia’s a wonderful cook. I tell you what, I’ll call her from here, you’ll see there’s no problem. Okay?”
I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I wanted to be near Staples as much as possible, I wanted to know what he was thinking so I could steer him away from dangerous shallows. On the other hand, his presence made me nervous. As to the grubby details of Jack March and his fatal grudge against Jim Wicker, they interested me not at all.
But Staples was waiting for an answer, all eagerness and bounce. “All right,” I said. “If it’s all right with your wife.”
“Patricia’s gonna flip,” he assured me. “Okay if I use your phone?”
“Go right ahead.”
He did, and though he kept his voice too low for me to hear the exact words—I had politely removed myself to the far end of the room—the syrupy note in everything he said suggested he couldn’t have been a husband more than fifteen minutes. True love birds, icky-wickies together. But it was too late now to back out.
Cradling the phone at last, Staples turned his beaming smile toward me and said, “It’s all set, Mr. Thorpe. I’ll pick you up around seven-thirty, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “But if I’m going to eat at your table, I think you’d better call me Carey.”
“Terrific.” He stuck out his hand, saying, “And I’m Fred.”
The hunter and the quarry shook hands.
* * *
It was like being stuck in one of the sweeter Disney cartoons, one of the early ones where the sentimentality really cloys. Great pink clouds of love floated everywhere, and tiny bluebirds seemed to flutter just beyond my peripheral vision.
Patricia Staples wasn’t at all difficult to look at, but God have mercy if she wasn’t a penance to listen to. Of medium height and weight, with silky blonde hair and clear innocent blue eyes, pert lips and straight nose, she look
ed like something on a corn flakes box or on the cover of a 1943 issue of Liberty magazine, and in the course of dinner alone she called her husband “sweetness” and “honey” and “sugar” often enough to produce terminal diabetes. (Even though he did send nearly half of them back.)
Staples had told me that he and his Patricia had been married almost three years, yet they looked and sounded and acted like the most simpering of honeymooners. Staples later claimed this aspect was the result of their decision not to have children, apparently allowing them to be infantile without competition, but I prefer to believe that Staples was attracted to her lavish wholesomeness because of its contrast with the seamier side of his own work.
The gilded cage enclosing this contented canary was a seventh-floor co-op apartment in a grim red-brick building in Corona, Queens, not far enough from the Long Island Expressway. One saw it out there, churning away in the blighted darkness beyond the living room windows like a diorama of life on the planet Jupiter. The apartment itself was warm and yellow and bright, with furniture that must have looked just as flimsy and just as tacky in the various Long Island showrooms from which it had been purchased. A great rectangular green-and-yellow painting of a meadow glade in spring, the grandmother of all jigsaw puzzles, dangled over the sofa like an eavesdropper, while Staples and I sat daringly beneath it, drinking Corona Hills Scotch with club soda and chatting about great murder mysteries of fact and fancy.
Patricia, meantime, bustled about. Queen of her domain, a housewife so utterly satisfied with her lot as to make all the efforts of Women’s Lib seem like an exercise in counting grains of sand, Patricia Staples spent that entire evening, it seemed to me, with a white apron over her pale blue dress, carrying a casserole to the table between two heat-mittened hands. This, by God, was what the boys of Guadalcanal Diary had been fighting for.
Well of course it wasn’t quite that bad. It doesn’t take that long to carry a casserole, nor to cook one, but even when Patricia Staples was sitting in the uneasy chair on her husband’s left hand her mind and heart appeared to be still in the kitchen.
As to her being a fan of mine, I saw early on that she was a fan of no one and nothing but her husband. She gave eager agreement to everything he said, whether sensible or foolish, and he gave her the blind compliment of assuming that all her parrot responses were the product of an independent but wonderfully sympatico mind.
Staples apparently preferred not to talk shop in his wife’s presence, so when we all sat down to dinner—chicken, rice, tomatoes, celery and much much more, all in the same Corning ovenproof bowl—the talk turned to movies, and I’m afraid I found it impossible not to become a pompous bore. But they did keep demanding it; Patricia invariably agreed with Fred, who invariably agreed with me, who had no one to agree with but myself. It would take a far more Calvinist personality than mine to resist such an opportunity for pontification. I spoke in long compound sentences, like an early draft of one of my own articles, and in fact I quoted from my previous works several times. Patricia didn’t mind, since she wasn’t particularly aware of my existence anyway, but Fred for all his eagerness did begin to glaze after a while.
Dinner, like all good things, came to an end, and while Patricia retired again to her kitchen to “tidy up” (a phrase they both used, both of them) Staples and I seated ourselves once more beneath the leaning painting, this time with Corona Hill VSOP Olde Brandy, and after the few obligatory propaganda remarks from Staples about how good it must be for a bachelor to eat a real meal for a change we went back to shoptalk, the subject being murder. This time, though, it was murder closer to home: “You haven’t asked,” Staples pointed out, “about the Wicker case.”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “I haven’t.”
He took that to mean I wanted to know, so he told me. It was one of those convoluted stories of betrayal, disguise, coincidence and overly complicated scheming that mystery stories always end with, and though I nodded a lot while Staples reeled it off I didn’t retain a word of it, except the fact that Jack March’s real name turned out to be Andrew Thomas Cauldenfield. (Ever since Lee Harvey Oswald, murderers have had prominent middle names, just as tall farm youths used to have prominent adam’s apples.)
Patricia joined us soon after that, and the talk switched back to movies, and that was when Gaslight came up. Staples announced it to be one of his all-time favorite pictures, “but Patricia’s never seen it.”
“I have a print,” I said. And I found myself extending an invitation: “Would you like to come see it?”
Staples stared at me. “A print? You mean you own that movie, you have it right there in your apartment?”
“I have copies of more than twenty films,” I told him, “and access to almost anything else I’d like to see. The studios loan prints to people in the field.”
Staples viewed me with something like awe, and even Patricia seemed impressed. Staples said, “By golly, if I had that I don’t think I’d ever leave the house.”
“It’s like anything else,” I told him. “You get used to it after a while.”
We then discussed the best time for them to come see Gaslight and decided on Sunday afternoon at three. Staples would be working earlier that day, but Patricia could take the subway to Manhattan, meet her husband for lunch, and then the two would come over to my place for the screening.
Soon after that it was time to leave. Staples suggested he drive me back to Manhattan, and though I insisted I’d be perfectly content in the subway he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So I thanked Patricia for a delicious dinner, shook her cool hand, and her husband and I rode the elevator down to the basement garage where he kept his car.
The ride back was full of conversation, by which I mean that Staples kept up a cheerful flow of talk to which I added occasional appropriate punctuation. It was becoming clear that in Staples’ eyes I was a celebrity, and he was delighted to have collected me. My own feelings were too complicated for me to think about, so I simply floated on the surface of my mind, letting it all happen. At my door, Staples pulled to a stop and shook my hand, saying, “It was really nice to have you out, Carey. Really nice.”
“I appreciated it, Fred. And that’s a wonderful girl you have there.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said, with a big grin.
“See you Sunday, Fred,” I said, and opened the car door.
“Right you are. Goodnight, Carey.”
“Goodnight, Fred.”
I stepped out onto the street, closed the door after me, and the Ford growled away, its exhaust thick and white in the cold air. I crossed the sidewalk, went up the stoop reaching for my keys, and a dark figure came out of a corner of the vestibule to hit me very hard in the stomach. I doubled over in pain and shock, trying not to lose my balance and fall backwards down the steps, and he hit me again, this time in the side, just above the waist.
It was brief, but horrible, and I suspect very professional. Grabbing a handful of my coat, he pulled and tugged and crowded me into the darkness of the vestibule and then punched and kicked and kneed me half a dozen times in quick succession, as I sagged down the wall. All of the blows were to my body, and all seemed placed with some kind of anatomical precision, and all were very painful.
Then it was over and he was gone, without my ever seeing his face or hearing his voice; though of course I knew at once who it was. I sat on the floor of the vestibule, having trouble breathing, and a while later I found the keys I’d dropped and let myself into the building and up several thousand stairs to the apartment, where Edgarson’s voice on my answering machine said, “We’re calling about your debt, Mr. Thorpe. We look forward to early payment.”
Two hours in a hot tub helped somewhat, and so did both Valium and bourbon, but when I dragged myself out of bed Friday morning I was as stiff and sore as though Edgarson had just finished kicking me that very second.
I was supposed to go to a noon screening at MGM, but I found myself reluctant to leave the apartment. Also
to answer the phone; so I turned on the answering machine with the monitor button pushed, enabling me to hear my callers as they were leaving their messages. That way, I could speak to anyone I chose, and avoid the rest. Meaning Edgarson.
Even such painful clouds as this one have silver linings. After another long soak in the tub, followed by more pills, I decided to table the problem of Edgarson for a while, and actually managed to get some work done on my next projected piece for Third World Cinema, with the tentative title, “John Cassavetes: The Apotheosis Of The Inarticulate.” Though Edgarson didn’t call, several other people did, but I wasn’t in the mood for any of them and I ignored their messages and went on with my work.
Then, just as I had written, “On-set improvisation sounds so good in theory that it’s a shame it sounds so bad in practice,” the phone rang again, and after my recorded announcement (“Hi. Carey Thorpe’s answering machine here. Please leave your name and a phone number where I can reach you, and I’ll be back to you first chance I get.”) Staples’ voice said, “Fred here, Carey. I was hoping to catch you at home. We’ve got another—”
A policeman; exactly what I needed. Not waiting to listen to any more, I picked up the phone, switched off the machine, and said, “Here I am. I’m here.”
Staples, headed off in mid-message, floundered briefly before saying, “Hello? Carey?”
“I was working,” I told him, “so I left the machine on.”
“Oh, I won’t bother you, then, I just—”
“No, no, that’s fine, I’m ready to take a break. What’s happening?”
“Well, we’ve got another one,” he said. “Feel brilliant today?”
“Another murder?”
“Another tricky murder. Regular murders we get all the time. Want to come along?”
With Staples I would be safe from Edgarson. “Absolutely,” I said.
* * *
This time, happily, the body had been removed. In fact, Staples and I had the small apartment on West 76th Street entirely to ourselves.
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