Two Much!

52

The last time I’d been in the Minck apartment was my wedding night. It looked much different now; somehow, Ralph had managed in two days to create a setting that looked as though he’d been abandoned for three months. Dirty dishes all over the living room, ashtrays piled high with horrible butts, a stink of mildew and dirt and decay in every room, and a bathroom I won’t attempt to describe.

The children, it turned out, were temporarily with some handy cousin in Queens. Candy was somewhere out in the great wild world, having left no forwarding address, and Ralph was sitting around in the kind of undershirt men haven’t worn since the draft started in 1940. “She’s gone for good,” he said.

“Did she say so? Did she, well, leave a note, a letter, anything like that?”

“Yes. She’s gone for good.”

“Yes what? She left a letter?”

“Yes.”

Oh, God. Not the famous letter I’d read at dinner the other night “Where is it, Ralph?”

“She’s gone for good, Art.”

“Yes, but where’s the letter? Her letter, Ralph, the letter she left you.”

“It’s over...” He gestured toward the planet earth.

I finally found it on the kitchen table, formerly crumpled but later resmoothed, smeared with stains of butter, coffee, tomato juice, liquor of some sort, and what might have been tears. Reading it, I found that it was and yet it was not the same letter Candy had shown me the other night. That is, it was the same letter except for me; “your dearest friend and mine, Art Dodge,” as I had been previously billed, was no longer a character in this version of the epic. The appropriate paragraphs had been rewritten, quite neatly, as follows:

I went back to the living room, carrying the letter. It was sticky, rather like my apartment après-Feeney. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, Ralph,” I said cheerily, and plopped into the cleanest chair I could find.

“She’s gone for good,” he said.

“I just don’t believe it,” I said. “Ralph, I look at this letter, and what I see is a cry from a woman’s heart”

He gazed at me, blearily. “A what?”

“A cry for help, Ralph.”

“She’s gone for good, Art.”

“She loves you, Ralph, she says so right here. And she wants you to understand her, care about her, love her in the romantic way you did when it was just the two of you. No kids, no legal papers being drafted on the dining room table, none of this extra stuff. Romance, that’s what she wants, Ralph, and she wants it from you.”

“From somebody else,” he said, and growled a little. “If I could find the guy, Art—”

“He doesn’t matter, Ralph. He probably doesn’t even exist, she just put that in there to make you jealous. Like my twin brother.”

“I’ll find him some day, and—” He blinked, slowly, twice. “Like what?”

“My twin brother.”

“What twin brother?”

Good. I had his attention. I probably wouldn’t have it for long, so I plunged right ahead. “It’s a con, Ralph,” I said. “Somebody’s setting me up for something, but I don’t know what I was hoping you’d be able to help me, but I can see you’ve got troubles of your own.”

He was bewildered, naturally. “Well, what happened? What’s the matter?”

“That girl I was engaged to,” I said. “Elizabeth Kerner, you looked her up for me.”

“The heiress,” he said.

“I went ahead and married her, Ralph. Just a week ago today.”

Joy for me commingled with pity for himself, and he began to cry. “Congratulations,” he blubbered. “May you be as happy as I used to be.”

“Listen, Ralph,” I said. “A week ago I married her, and the night before last somebody murdered her twin sister.”

I had his attention again. The waterworks dried up and he said, “Murdered? Are you sure?” Sniffing, he wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve.

“Bang bang,” I said. “With a gun. Out at Point O’ Woods. Then the killer burned the house down, trying to cover his tracks.”

“Good God!” He’d forgotten Candy completely by now.

“But here’s the crazy part,” I said. “There was another body with her, and the general opinion is that it was my twin brother.”

“What? You don’t have a twin brother.”

“There are documents,” I said, “to prove that my bride’s twin sister was married last month to somebody who called himself Robert Dodge and who claimed to be my twin brother. And now that guy is dead.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“It gets crazier,” I promised him. “Because the killer turned out to be that lawyer, Volpinex. Fingerprints on the gun, and he’s disappeared, and there just isn’t any question.”

He sat back, wiping snot from his cheek with his other sleeve. “None of it makes sense, Art,” he said.

“I’m afraid of it,” I told him. “I don’t know what’s going on, Ralph, but I figure I’m the patsy if I’m not damn careful. So I haven’t said anything to anybody. I haven’t even denied the twin brother.”

He frowned at me. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t know what it means. Listen, there’s a lot of money in that Kerner family, and somebody’s after it. You know me, Ralph, I’ve done some pretty cute conniving in my day, I’m not sure I could stand a really tough police investigation. I mean, things that were perfectly innocent at the time could be made to look pretty incriminating right now.”

“The truth is usually best, Art,” he said doubtfully.

“I know that, Ralph. But this is all so weird, I’m afraid to make any move at all. If I just sit tight, maybe I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“Don’t sign any false statements,” he told me.

“Ralph, I wouldn’t sign a birthday card right now.” (Or write one either, apparently.)

He nodded, thinking it over. “That’s probably best,” he said. “You aren’t a witness or anything, are you?”

“I was in Manhattan with my bride while it was going on. I’m just an in-law. Or a relative, if you want to believe the twin brother story.”

“Then you’re probably right,” he said. “Sit tight, and wait to see what happens next.”

“And if something does happen, Ralph, can I come to you?”

“You know that, Art. How can you even ask? Aren’t we friends?”

“I was just thinking... under the circumstances...” And he began to dissolve again. “Ralph,” I said, leaning forward to pat his knee, to console him. “She’ll be back, Ralph.”

“She’s gone for good, Art.”

“Ralph, I’ll look for her.”

He gazed at me in bleary hope. “You will?”

“I’ll talk to her, if I can. I’ll do anything I can to help, Ralph.”

“Art, if you could— Art, I just—”

“We’ll help each other,” I suggested. “I’ll help you with Candy, and you’ll help me with this crazy twin brother thing.”

And we fell into one another’s arms.