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

suspicion deep within his eyes? Remembering the
movie lore that policemen don’t drink with people they intend to arrest—wasn’t
that from Beat The Devil ?—I said, “Care for a
drink? A beer? Some wine?”
    “No, thanks,” he
said, still smiling. “Too early in the day for
me.”
    Hell and damnation. Hoping only that he would
turn out to be another blackmailer, I closed the door and offered him a chair.
Taking it, he said, “First off, I might as well tell you you’re off the
hook. Not that you were ever on it, at least not very much.”
    I looked at him, not sure I understood. “Off the hook?”
    “Your innocence has been
established,” he said.
    I sat down in the director’s chair.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
    “The funny thing is,” he told me,
“it was through that fella that Laura Penney told you about. The one she
said was following her.”
    “It was?”
    “We got in touch with the husband last
night. Mr. Penney. And darn if he didn’t have private detectives watching his
wife. He’d just put them on the case a few days ago.”
    “They don’t seem to have helped
much.”
    “They were supposed to collect evidence
for a divorce or something.” Shaking his head, he said, “I can’t
understand anybody like that, can you? Sneaking around, putting detectives to
watch their wife. Maybe it’s because my own marriage is so good, but I just
can’t comprehend a man who’d do a thing like that.”
    Nodding, I said, “I know, it doesn’t seem
right. But if you look in the Yellow Pages, there’s a
lot of agencies specializing in that sort of thing. They must get their
customers somewhere.”
    “I suppose so.” This insight into a
darker corner of human nature had
robbed Staples almost entirely of his sunny smile, but now he rallied, saying,
“But in this case it did us some good.”
    “You found the killer?”
    “Not yet, but we’ve narrowed things down.
We got in touch with the detective agency this morning, and they gave us their
dossier. We have photographs of just about everybody Mrs. Penney saw in the
last few days. We even have a picture of you. Want to see it?”
    Peter Lorre in M. “I’d be
fascinated.”
    He took from his jacket pocket a white
envelope with a red rubber band around it. First he transferred the rubber band
to his wrist, then he opened the envelope and took out a little bunch of
photographs; small ones, about two-and-a-half by four-and-a-half. He selected
one of these, chuckled at it, and handed it over.
    Not Peter Lorre in M . Rock Hudson and Doris
Day in Pillow Talk . That was me there, seeing Laura chastely to her door, and
this photograph did not suggest that I would next go upstairs with her and
commit murder.
    “Nice picture,” Staples suggested.
    I sighed. “The last time Laura was alive.
May I keep this?”
    “Well, sure,” he said. “We
don’t need it, because you aren’t the killer.”
    “This picture tells you that?”
    “No, the fellow who took the picture told
us. He was on watch outside the apartment building until one in the morning,
and he’s willing to swear you never went back into the place during that
time.”
    Why wouldn’t he swear to it? Never went back
in; that was the simple truth. (And how it must have galled
Edgarson that he couldn’t put my head in the noose.)
    Could I still make a little trouble for him? I
said, “Then the private detective must have
seen the killer.”
    “If he did,” Staples said, “he
didn’t recognize him. Or it’s possible the killer was already in the apartment,
waiting for Mrs. Penney, and he used another way out of the building. Say
through the side exit from the basement. Which would suggest
premeditation.”
    “From Sergeant Bray’s description,”
I said, “it didn’t sound like premeditation. It sounded more like a fight,
an angry flare-up or something.”
    Staples nodded. “Everything points to a
sudden argument with a friend. That’s why I’d like you to take a look