Two Much!

50

Boy was she mad when they found the gun!

That happened about three in the afternoon. By then we’d both been interviewed by rumple-suited Suffolk County plainclothes detectives, who sat uncomfortably in the living room of the Kerner apartment in Manhattan and treated us with the awkward polysyllabic deference natural to cops confronted by power and/or money. We had also started the funeral arrangements, and I had started the details of a cover-up beside which Watergate was at the level of who-left-the-top-off-the-grape-jelly?

The funeral arrangements were themselves part of the cover-up, since I insisted on the simplest possible form. Liz felt the same way for arrogant reasons of her own — she hated the hoi polloi gawping at the edges of her life — and so what was decided on was cremation and urnment in the Kerner mausoleum up near Tarrytown, all to be done as soon as the coroner and other authorities were done with the remains, and the entire operation to be unaccompanied by services, wakes, or even announcements of any kind. No prayers, no get-togethers, nothing. The bare minimum. Burn ’em up, brush the ashes into the urn, clap on the cork, shove it onto the shelf, and the less said the better.

The next step of the cover-up, for me, involved cooling out an incredible number of people who knew different potentially incriminating parts of what had been going on. Gloria. Ralph. Candy. Joe Gold. My sister Doris. The list went on and on, and not everybody could be given exactly the same story. Doris, for instance, knew damn well I didn’t have a twin brother, but it was just possible I could convince Ralph that the twin brother had existed.

Oh, boy.

I started my cover-up campaign with Gloria. When she finished typing up the agreement I’d dictated, she brought it in and waited while Liz read it. Then Liz stalled a bit by asking directions to the ladies room, and while she was gone I said, “Gloria, I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”

“What makes this day,” she said, “different from any other day?”

“No, seriously,” I said. “You know that twin brother thing I was pulling?”

“I know you were doing something,” she said “God knows what.”

“It was harmless,” I assured her. “Just a sex game, you know how I am.”

She allowed as how she knew how I was.

“I’ll tell you something,” I said. “That woman there, that bride of mine, she just came in to tell me her sister was murdered last night out on Fire Island.”

Appropriate shock from Gloria, followed by appropriate doubt. “Is it for real?”

“Apparently so,” I said. “The snapper is, a guy was found dead with her, and Liz says the guy was my twin brother.”

“Your—?”

“I know,” I said. “That isn’t possible, is it?”

“Not any way I know of.”

“Now,” I said, “Liz wants me to give her an alibi. She wants me to swear she was with me last night, and the truth is she wasn’t.”

Lowering her voice, Gloria said, “Do you think she...”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But that’s why I had you type up that agreement. Normally, she wouldn’t sign a paper like that for anything. If she signs it now, she’s up to something. I just want you to know, Gloria, in case something bad comes out of this later on.”

She gave me a troubled look; part of the reason she stuck with this weird job is that she actually did like me. “You’re in over your head, Art,” she said.

“Truer words were never spoken,” I said, meaning it, “but I don’t see any way to get out of it. I’ve got to follow through to the end and hope for the best.”

“I suppose so.”

“If anybody comes around and asks you anything,” I said, “anything at all, you don’t know a thing.”

“Right.”

“Not even whether I have a twin brother or not.”

“I’m a complete dummy,” she promised me.

“Maybe I can still beat Liz at her own game,” I said bravely. Then we both heard the outer door close. “She’s coming back,” I whispered. “Let’s see if shell actually sign that agreement.”

Joe Gold I dealt with later that afternoon, following the visit from the Long Island police. The gun still hadn’t been found, but the cops showed no real inclination as yet to consider either Liz or me prime suspects. We’d alibied one another, we’d expressed shock and horror, we’d told what we could of our late siblings’ recent activities and associates, and then we’d been left, with apologies, to our mourning.

Immediately upon the departure of the fuzz I said to Liz, “Give me some of your stuff. Undies, lipsticks, crap I can spread around my apartment.”

“Good thinking,” she said, and quickly assembled a paper bag of closet sweepings, with which I rushed to my own place, a residence which no longer resembled the site of a Turkish massacre, but was still not quite so clean as a truckstop diner on a Saturday night Oh, well, Feeney had undoubtedly done his best. Spraying Liz’s detritus hither and yon, I made my way to the phone, which seemed to have had honey poured on it, and phoned Joe out there in sunny L. A.

“Listen, Joe,” I said.

“What — more? Can’t you join a commune?”

“Joe, I got a serious problem.”

“I’ve said that for years, Art”

“There’s been a murder, Joe. No fooling, no gags, no kidding around, an honest-to-God murder.”

“In the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn’s ad-lib writer,” he said, “include me out.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Include us both out. But here’s the thing, Joe. What I’ve been pulling here this summer is a twin scam. You know?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“You must have had some idea, from that conversation.”

“Art, in cases of homicide I make it a rule not to hear conversations.”

“That’s wonderful, Joe. Except I think I’m maybe being set up for something. Maybe to take the fall.”

“Art? You wouldn’t be trying to pull one on me, would you?”

Of course I would, but that isn’t what I said. I said, “Joe, I’m too scared to pull anything on anybody. You’ve got to listen to me.”

“Maybe. Start talking.”

“I met twin sisters. So I became twin brothers, so I could screw them both. A simple innocent game, right?”

“It bears your signature like Andy Warhol’s on a junkyard fence,” he said.

“So then,” I said, “it turns out these two are rich. But rich. And they’re suing each other for millions and millions of dollars. And last night, Joe, while I was with one sister here in New York, the other sister was getting murdered out on Fire Island.”

“On the level?”

“Absolutely. I swear on my mother’s IUD. But here comes the cute part. Joe, there was a guy out there with her. Killed with her.”

“Yeah?”

“My twin brother, Joe.”

“What? What shit is this?”

“Exactly the question I ask myself, Joe.”

“Somebody’s up to something,” he said.

“I had the same feeling myself. Am I being set up for something? I’m scared, Joe, and no fooling. If I get out of this, I may well be cured for life.”

“Amen,” he said.

“Joe,” I said, “the only safe thing I can see for me is that my scam did not exist. If the cops want me to have a twin brother, fine. I neither confirm nor deny. But if the twin con comes to light, what happens to me?”

“Art,” he said, “are you asking me to lie under oath in a murder case?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I am asking you to stay out of it entirely. If some cop calls you long distance and asks you did Bart Dodge stay with you for a few days you can say yes, because later on you could say you thought he said Art Dodge, and maybe you got the dates wrong, and what’s the problem anyway? You’re out there, you’re safe, you’re out of it.”

“You’re damn right I’m out of it.”

“All I’m asking, Joe,” I said, “is that you don’t volunteer. I’ve got to cover the twin con, I’ve just got to.”

“I begin to think,” he said, “that this may turn out to be a wonderful lesson for you.”

“You bet. Joe, can I count on you?”

“Art,” he said, “you and I have been pals for years. You’ve always been able to count on me, and you’ll be able to go on counting on me right up to the point where it becomes inconvenient.”

“But you won’t blow the twin con.”

“I won’t volunteer.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Joe,” I said, and went back to the Kerner apartment, where Liz met me with fire in her eyes, saying, “Give me that agreement I won’t go along with it, I want to tear it up.”

“You what? Listen, I gave you that alibi, I helped—”

“You can just forget that alibi, buster,” she said, “and the agreement, too.”

“Forget it? Why?”

“Because,” she said, “that asshole Ernie Volpinex did it, what do you think of that?” She stood in front of me, arms akimbo, fists against sides, jaw jutting out. “They found a gun where he tried to hide it, his fingerprints are all over it, it was a goddam crime of passion! Ernie’s run away, nobody can find him, he’s guilty as sin, I don’t need any alibi, and I won’t stand for that goddam-goddam-goddam-agreement!” She shook both fists in my face. “Stop that laughing, you goddam hyena! Stop it right now!”