Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online

that’s the whole idea.”
    “I know.”
    “You’re too linear,” she said; one
of her au courant but meaningless insults, the result of reading too many trade
paperbacks. “You doing anything tonight?”
    I’d decided by now how to handle my news.
“The fact is,” I said, “I’m mostly getting over a shock. You
remember Laura Penney?”
    “The girl with the
mouse-brown hair? The one you’ve been seeing so much of lately?”
    Ah. Maybe I hadn’t been covering my tracks
quite so well as I’d thought. “Well, I won’t see
much of her any more,” I said. “She’s dead.”
    “Good God!”
    “Killed, in fact.”
    “Oh, Jesus. One of those rape things?”
    “I don’t think so. It happened in her
apartment. I was suppose to take her to dinner tonight, I went over th—”
    “You found her! Oh, my God! ”
    “Not quite that bad. The police were
there.”
    “Oh, baby, what an experience. Do they
suspect you?”
    I was shocked—truly shocked—at the suggestion.
“Why would they do that?”
    “I thought the police were supposed to
suspect everybody.”
    “Oh. Then maybe they do suspect me, I
don’t know. They didn’t act that way.”
    “You sound very jittery. Want me to come
over?”
    Did I? The half-finished page in the
typewriter grayed before my eyes. “I’d love it,” I said.
    *
    “I love your pubic hair,” I said.
    She came over to the bed, carrying the two
drinks. “What kind of compliment is that?”
    “A sincere one.”
I took my drink and made room for her beside me in the bed. Looking at the
feature in question, I said, “It’s furry, but not too much. It has a
friendly quality.”
    “I bet you say that to all your
girls.”
    I did, as a matter of fact, so I remained
silent while she arranged the covers over herself. On the TV facing the bed the
fifty all-time greatest hits of some obsolescent teenage castrati were being
peddled in an extremely hard sell. “As somebody once said about Marion
Davies,” I said, nodding at the screen, “‘Forgotten, but not gone.’”
    It was nearly midnight, and if that Kallikak on the tube would
ever stop yowling we would go on watching The Thin Man , a film I was enjoying
this evening in a very new and different way. The day was ending far better
than it had begun. Kit had come over around nine-thirty, we’d gone at once to
bed, and then I’d been subjected to an hour’s conversation on the general
subject What Happened To Laura Penney And Why? Kit,
like Detective Staples, believed that Laura had a secret boy friend and that he
was the killer. I couldn’t tell her she was absolutely right, of course, but on
the other hand I didn’t want to be suspiciously negative, so I maintained a thoughtful neutrality on the subject and let Kit do most
of the talking.
    A good girl, Kit, all in
all, about the best of my recent women. An acquisitions editor for a
reprint publisher, she was attractive, divorced, childless, bright, funny and self-supporting;
what more could a liberated male want?
    William Powell returned, with Asta. They put
Myrna Loy in a cab headed for Grant’s Tomb and went off hunting the murderer by
themselves. Kit said, “Could it be Jay English?”
    I looked at her. “Could what be Jay
English?”
    “The secret
lover.”
    “He’s a fag,” I pointed out.
    “Well, maybe he’s trying to go
straight.” She squinted at the TV, but it was Laura’s murder she was
trying to solve, not Julia Wolfe’s. “That’s why they kept it secret, because they weren’t sure it would work out.”
    “In the first place,” I said,
“Jay English doesn’t want to go straight. And in the second place, he’s
still living with that fellow whatsisname.”
    “Dave Something.”
    “That’s the one.”
    “Ah!” Sitting up straighter in the
bed, she said, “He’s the killer!”
    “Who?”
    “Dave. Because he found
out about Jay and Laura!”
    “You’re a madwoman,” I told her.
    “Then who do you think it is?”
    “I haven’t the