Two Much!

49

Gloria buzzed me at ten-fifteen.

“Yes?”

“Liz Kerner calling.”

“Right.” Click. “Morning, sweetheart. Have a nice wedding night?”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard? What, are they announcing your orgasms on the six o’clock news?”

“Then you don’t know anything about it,” she said. “The police didn’t call?”

“Police? What for?”

“Don’t go away,” she said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” And she hung up.

Twenty minutes. Good. It had been very very hard this morning to pretend I was still the same old Art Dodge and that nothing had gone sour in my little merry-go-round world. Starting twenty minutes from now, I’d be able to relax into the shock that continued to be my primary true feeling.

Last night I’d traveled for an hour across Fire Island until, at the end of a rundown dock in Robbins Rest, I’d found a motorboat with an unconscious seminaked couple lying in the bottom of it, sleeping it off in fond embrace. The key was in the ignition, and it was simplicity itself to get behind the wheel, start the engine, and steer toward Bay Shore. About halfway across, the male started to wake up, but I clonked him with the fire extinguisher and that was that. The girl never moved.

I didn’t tie up to the dock at Bay Shore, but gave the boat a push and permitted it to drift away. Then I walked through town till I found an all-night diner, where I called a cab to take me to an address in Babylon, the next town toward New York. (There was no way to claim Bart’s new Thunderbird, which was a pity.) Behaving as though I were half-smashed, I told the driver to let me off at the corner so I could sneak into the house without waking up the li’l woman. He grinned at me and blew cigar smoke around and wished me luck, pal. I thanked him, feeling I needed it.

Another walk in Babylon to another all-night diner, where I called a cab from a different company and traveled this time to Mineola, playing the same sort of role. From Mineola, another company’s cab took me to Queens, and in Queens I picked up a regular New York City cab to bring me to my office in Manhattan, which I staggered into at twenty after six this morning. Directly into the sleeping bag I went, where I dozed fitfully, full of bad dreams, until Gloria arrived at nine. Since which time I’d been taking a lot of coffee and Excedrin, and assuring Gloria my condition was the result of several nights on the floor in that sleeping bag.

But another and much better excuse for my condition was on the way. Twenty minutes she’d said, but she made it in fifteen, brushing past Gloria just like last time and saying to me, “We have to talk in private.”

“We have to talk about your manners,” I told her. “Okay, Gloria, it’s all right.”

“If you say so,” she said, and closed the door gently behind her.

Liz dropped heavily into the second chair. She looked even worse than I felt: strain lines, fatigue, nervousness. “I’ve never known how to break news gently,” she said.

“Don’t tell me you want a divorce.” Art Dodge was a role I’d played successfully for years; I might have muddied the part recently with my loan-out interpretations of twin brother Bart, but the original characterization was still there, full-fleshed and ready to go. And never had I needed it as much as I did right now.

“Lay off the jokes,” she said. “You’ll just want to bite your tongue in a minute.”

I frowned at her. “Come off it, Liz,” I said. “Nothing’s that serious, not in your world. What’s up?”

“Betty and Bart are dead,” she said. Just like that.

“Ha ha,” I said, and then I brought myself up short and stared at her. We kept our eyes solemnly on one another and neither of us said a single solitary word while I silently counted, very slowly, to one hundred forty-three.

At which number, she looked away from me, shrugging, and said irritably, “I shouldn’t have to tell you this. The police should notify you, right?”

“Police? What was it, an accident? A car?”

She looked at me again. “Somebody killed them,” she said. “On purpose.”

Now I permitted myself a slightly doubtful scoff. “Are you saying murder? Don’t be silly.”

“They were shot,” she said. “I swear to God. You can call the police at Brookhaven, if you don’t believe me.”

“Shot? Liz, you mean for real? With a gun?”

“Whoever did it,” she said, “tried to make it look like an accident. He burned the house down. But it was too suspicious and they did an autopsy right away and found the bullets.”

“But — but who did it?”

“They don’t know,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was the matter with the Suffolk County police? They couldn’t find a goddam pistol within fifty feet of a major crime? Was all my cleverness to go for naught simply because the police were too inept to do their job properly?

Find the gun! Goddam it, Suffolk County police, I know you can’t find stolen bicycles and stolen sailboats, but for Christ’s sake even you people should be able to find a gun! It’s right out in front of the house, covered with Volpinex’s fingerprints!

Had a child found it? Had a child taken it away, for magpie reasons of its own?

Liz had been saying something more. I said, “What? I’m sorry, Liz. I guess the impact is just hitting me.” And I jumped up impulsively from the desk, staring in agony toward my dusty window. “Bart!” I cried. “Bart dead!”

“Betty gets billing, too,” Liz said.

I blinked at her. “You’ve had longer to get used to this,” I said. “Longer to think about it.”

“It never gets much funnier,” she said.

“But Bart,” I said, gesturing vaguely, hopelessly. “He’d come back from the coast, we’d had such—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Liz said. “Save it for the graveside. You and Bart got along about as well as Betty and I did.”

“I wasn’t suing him!”

“You would have, if there’d been any money in it. You liked Bart all right, and I liked Betty all right, and I feel just as lousy as you do, but we’re still alive, Art, and we’ve got things to do.”

“Undertakers,” I said vaguely, “arrangements...”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

What now? I said, “What else, then?”

“I need an alibi, Art,” she said.

I gazed at her, dumbstruck, I mean truly dumbstruck. Possibilities raced through my mind like cockroaches when the kitchen light turns on. I said, “Did you—?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said. “If I was going to get rid of Betty, I’d be smarter than that.”

I might have considered that an insult, but more important considerations had the floor. I said, “Then why do you need an alibi?”

“We had the lawsuit going,” she said. “There was bad blood between us, and a lot of people knew it. I don’t want this thing pinned on me, Art.”

“Neither do I,” I said. And I was telling the truth. I wanted it pinned on Volpinex, where it belonged; and where it would answer all the awkward questions.

Liz said, “We were married last Wednesday. We’ve been inseparable ever since, right up till this morning. We’ve been in your apartment, so we wouldn’t even have my servants around us.”

“My apartment?”

“You know I’d show you my appreciation,” she said. “I’m a generous girl, you know that.”

Pop. Another complete movement dropped into my head. “You sure are generous,” I told her. “You have no idea how generous you are.”

Mistrust spread over her irascible features. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How badly do you need this alibi? I mean, why not produce Joe Rock? He’s the guy you were really with, isn’t he?”

“He can’t help,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He’s evading a couple of Federal warrants. Drug sales, possession, things like that.”

“So it’s me or nobody.”

“What’s your offer, Art?”

“No offer,” I told her. “We’re at the level of take-it-orleave-it.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind a women’s prison,” she said.

“Lesbianism would make you fat,” I told her, and buzzed Gloria. “Bring your pad in, will you?”

Liz wasn’t liking any of this. “Just tell it to me,” she said. “Let me say yes or no.”

“Let me have my fun,” I said, and when Gloria came in I dictated to her a new agreement between Liz and me that eliminated the entire former agreement from beginning to end. “The greater understanding, confidence, and trust of one another created since our marriage” was given as the principal reason for the change. From now on, this agreement said, our marriage would be ruled exclusively by our wedding vows, the laws of Connecticut, and the customs and mores of the social groupings amid whom we would make our communal life. Insofar as property was concerned, the community property statutes of the state of California would apply.

Liz sat stony-faced through all this, and Gloria speed-wrote it all with her usual aplomb. At the finish I said, “Date it yesterday, prepare it for both our signatures, and do it in four copies.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, deadpan, and left the office.

Liz crossed her legs the other way. “And what,” she said, “makes you think I’d sign anything like that?”

“A real marriage, sweetheart,” I said. “Wouldn’t you really like that, after all?”

“No.”

“Then it just comes down to preferences,” I said. “Which would you rather have for the rest of your life? The State Penitentiary for Women, or marriage to me?”

“That’s not an easy decision.”

“Take your time,” I said. We could both hear the clickety-clack from the outer office. “Gloria only types about thirty words a minutes,” I said.