Enough Rope Read online

  He picked up the glass, set it down again, the whiskey untouched. “Do you see? I’m an old man and a fool. I like things to come out right—neat and clean and sugary, wrapped with a bow, and a smile for the ending. No police, no trials, no public washing of soiled underwear. I think we are close enough now. I think we have enough of it.” He picked up his glass once more and this time drained it. “Get the chessboard.”

  I got the board. We played, and he won, and my mind spent more of its time with other pawns than the ones we played with now. The image grew on me. I saw them all, Rachel Avery, Dean Avery, Thurman Goodin, carved of wood and all of a shade, either black or white; weighted with lead, and bottomed with a circlet of felt, green felt, and moved around by our hands upon a mirthless board.

  “You’re afraid of this,” he said once. “Why?”

  “Meddling, perhaps. Playing the divinity. I don’t know, Mr. Bane. Something that feels wrong, that’s all.”

  “Paddy from the peat bog, you’ve not lost your sense of the miraculous, have you? Wee folk, and gold at the rainbow’s end, and things that go bump in the night, and man a stranger and afraid in someone else’s world. Don’t move there, Tim, your queen’s en prise, you’ll lose her.”

  We played three games. Then he straightened up abruptly and said, “I don’t have the voice to mimic, I’ve barely any voice at all, and your brogue’s too thick for it. Go up to the third floor, would you, and in the room all the way back, there’s a closet with an infernal machine on its shelf—a tape recorder. I bought it with the idea that it might make writing simpler. Didn’t work at all; I had to see the words in front of me to make them real. I couldn’t sit like a fool talking at a machine. But I had fun with the thing. Get it for me, Tim, please.”

  It was where he’d said, in a box carpeted with dust. I brought it to him, and we went into the kitchen. There was a telephone there. First he tested the recorder, explaining that the tape was old and might not work properly. He turned it on and said, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Then he winked at me and said, “Just like a typewriter; it’s easiest to resort to formula when you want to say something meaningless, Tim. Most people have trouble talking when they have nothing to say. Though it rarely stops them, does it? Let’s see how this sounds.”

  He played it back and asked me if the voice sounded like his own. I assured him it did. “No one ever hears his own voice when he speaks,” he said. “I didn’t realize I sounded that old. Odd.”

  He sent me for bourbon. He drank a bit, then had me get him the phone book. He looked up a number, read it to himself a time or two, then turned his attention again to the recorder.

  “We ought to plug it into the telephone,” he said.

  “What for, sir?”

  “You’ll see. If you connect them lawfully, they beep every fifteen seconds, so that the other party knows what you’re about, which hardly seems sensible. Know anything about these gadgets?”

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  He finished the glass of whiskey. “Now what if I just hold the little microphone to the phone like this? Between my ear and the phone, hmm? Some distortion? Oh, won’t matter, won’t matter at all.”

  He dialed a number. The conversation, as much as I heard of it, went something like this:

  “Hello, Mr. Taylor? No, wait a moment, let me see. Is this four-two-one-five? Oh, good. The Avery residence? Is Mrs. Avery in? I don’t . . . Who’m I talking with, please? . . . Good. When do you expect your wife, Mr. Avery? . . . Oh, my! . . . Yes, I see, I see. Why, I’m terribly sorry to hear that, surely . . . Tragic. Well, I hate to bother you with this, Mr. Avery. Really, it’s nothing . . . Well, I’m Paul Wellings of Wellings and Doyle Travel Agency . . . Yes, that’s right, but I wish . . . Certainly. Your wife wanted us to book a trip to Puerto Rico for the two of you and . . . Oh? A surprise, probably . . . Yes, of course, I’ll cancel everything. This is frightful. Yes, and I’m sorry for disturbing you at this—”

  There was a little more, but not very much. He rang off, a bitter smile on his pale face, his eyes quite a bit brighter now than usual. “A touch of macabre poetry,” he said. “Let him think she was planning to run off with Goodin. He’s a cold one, though. So calm, and making me go on and on, however awkward it all was. And now it’s all ready on the tape. But how can I manage this way?”

  He picked up a phone and called another number. “Jay? This is Cam. Say, I know it’s late, but is your tape recorder handy? Well, I’d wanted to do some dictation and mine’s burned out a connection or something. Oh, just some work I’m doing. No, I haven’t mentioned it, I know. It’s something different. If anything ever comes of it, then I’ll have something to tell you. But is it all right if I send Tim around for your infernal machine? Good, and you’re a prince, Jay.”

  So he sent me to pick up a second recorder from Jason Falk. When I brought it to him, he positioned the two machines side by side on the table and nodded. “I hate deception,” he said, “yet it seems to have its place in the scheme of things. I’ll need half an hour or so alone, Tim. I hate to chase you away, but I have to play with these toys of mine.”

  I didn’t mind. I was glad to be away from him for a few moments, for he was upsetting me more than I wanted to admit. There was something bad in the air that night, and more than my Irish soul was telling me so. Joseph Cameron Bane was playing God. He was manipulating people, toying with them. Writing them, and with no books to put them in.

  It was too cold for walking. I got into the car and drove around the streets of the town, then out of the town and off on a winding road that went up into the hills beyond the town’s edge. The snow was deep but no fresh snow was falling, and the moon was close to full and the sky cluttered with stars. I stopped the car and got out of it and took a long look back at the town below, his town. I thought it would be good right now to be a drinking man and warm myself from a bottle and walk in the night and pause now and then to gaze at the town below.

  “You were gone long,” he said.

  “I got lost. It took time to find my way back.”

  “Tim, this still bothers you, doesn’t it? Of course it does. Listen to me. I am going to put some people into motion, that is all. I am going to let some men talk to one another, and I am going to write their lines for them. Do you understand? Their opening lines. They wouldn’t do it themselves. They wouldn’t start it. I’ll start it, and then they’ll help it play itself out.”

  He was right, of course. Avery could not be allowed to get away with murder, nor should the dead woman’s sins be placed on public display for all to stare at. “Now listen to this,” he said, bright-eyed again. “I’m proud of myself, frankly.”

  He dialed a number, then poised his index finger above one of the buttons on the recorder. He was huddled over the table so that the telephone mouthpiece was just a few inches from the recorder’s speaker. The phone was answered, and he pressed a button and I heard Dean Avery’s voice. “Goodin?”

  A pause. Then, “This is Dean Avery. I know all about it, Goodin. You and my wife. You and Rachel. I know all about it. And now she’s dead. An accident. Think about it, Goodin. You’ll have to think about it.”

  He replaced the receiver.

  “How did you . . .”

  He looked at my gaping mouth and laughed aloud at me. “Just careful editing,” he said. “Playing from one machine to the next, back and forth, a word here, a phrase there, all interwoven and put together. Even the inflection can be changed by raising or lowering the volume as you bounce from one machine to the other. Isn’t it startling? I told you I have fun with this machine. I never got anything written on it, but I had a good time fooling around with it.”

  “All those phrases—you even had his name.”

  “It was good of you to call. And the tail syllable of some other word, happen, I think. The two cropped out and spliced together and tossed back and forth until they fit well e
nough. I was busy while you were gone, Tim. It wasn’t simple to get it all right.”

  “Now what happens?”

  “Goodin calls Avery.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, Tim! I’ll call Goodin and tell him how my car’s broken down, or that he’s won a football pool, or something inane, and do the same thing with his voice. And call Avery for him, and accuse him of the murder. That’s all. They’ll take it from there. I expect Avery will crack. If I get enough words to play with, I can have Goodin outline the whole murder, how it happened, everything.”

  His fingers drummed the table top. “Avery might kill himself,” he said. “The killers always do in that woman’s stories about the little Belgian detective. They excuse themselves and blow their brains out in a gentlemanly manner. There might be a confrontation between the two. I’m not sure.”

  “Will it wait until morning?”

  “I thought I’d call Goodin now.”

  He was plainly exhausted. It was too late for him to be awake, but the excitement kept him from feeling the fatigue. I hated playing nursemaid. I let him drink too much every day, let him die as he wished, but it was not good for him to wear himself out this way.

  “Goodin will be shaken by the call,” I told him. “You’ll probably have trouble getting him to talk. He may have closed the station for the night.”

  “I’ll call and find out,” he said.

  He called, the recorder at the ready, and the phone rang and went unanswered. He wanted to wait up and try again, but I made him give it up and wait until the next day. I put him to bed and went downstairs and straightened up the kitchen. There was a half inch of whiskey in a bottle, and I poured it into a glass and drank it, a thing I rarely do. It warmed me and I’d needed warming. I went upstairs and to bed, and still had trouble sleeping.

  There were dreams, and bad ones, dreams that woke me and sat me upright with a shapeless wisp of horror falling off like smoke. I slept badly and woke early. I was downstairs while he slept. While I ate toast and drank tea, Mrs. Dettweiler worried aloud about him. “You’ve got him all worked up,” she said. “He shouldn’t get like that. A sick man like him, he should rest, he should be calm.”

  “He wants the excitement. And it’s not my doing.”

  “As sick as he is . . .”

  “He’s dying, and has a right to do it his own way.”

  “Some way to talk!”

  “It’s his way.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  The radio was playing, tuned to a station in Harmony Falls. Our town had one FM station but the radio did not get FM. Mrs. Dettweiler always played a radio unless Mr. Bane was in the room, in which case he generally told her to turn it off. When she was upstairs in her own room, the television was always on, unless she was praying or sleeping. I listened to it now and thought that he might have used it for his taping and editing and splicing. If you wished to disguise your voice, you might do it that way. If Dean Avery had never heard Thurman Goodin’s voice, or not well enough to recognize it, you could work it well enough that way. With all those words and phrases at your disposal . . .

  Halfway through the newscast they read an item from our town, read just a brief news story, and I spilled my tea all over the kitchen table. The cup fell to the floor and broke in half.

  “Why, for goodness . . .”

  I turned off the radio, thought better, and reached to pull its plug. He never turned it on, hated it, but it might occur to him to tape from it, and I didn’t want that. Not yet.

  “Keep that thing off,” I said. “Don’t let him hear it, and don’t tell him anything. If he tries to play the radio, say it’s not working.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Just do as you’re told!” I said. She went white and nodded mutely, and I hurried out of the house and drove into town. On the way I noticed that I held the steering wheel so tightly my fingers had gone numb. I couldn’t help it. I’d have taken a drink then if there’d been one about. I’d have drunk kerosene, or perfume—anything at all.

  I went to the drugstore and to the barbershop, and heard the same story in both places, and walked around a bit to relax, the last with little success. I left the car where I’d parked it and walked back to his house and breathed cold air and gritted my teeth against more than the cold. I did not even realize until much later that it was fairly stupid to leave the car. It seemed quite natural at the time.

  He was up by the time I reached the house, wearing robe and slippers, seated at the table with telephone and tape recorder. “Where’d you go?” he wanted to know. “I can’t reach Thurman Goodin. Nobody answers his phone.”

  “Nobody will.”

  “I’ve half a mind to try him at home.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “No? Why not?” And then, for the first time, he saw my face. His own paled. “Heavens, Tim, what’s the matter?”

  All the way back, through snow and cold air, I’d looked for a way to tell him—a proper way. There was none. Halfway home I’d thought that perhaps Providence might let him die before I had to tell him, but that could only have happened in one of his novels, not in this world.

  So I said, “Dean Avery’s dead. It happened last night; he’s dead.”

  “Great God in heaven!” His face was white, his eyes horribly wide. “How? Suicide?”

  “No.”

  “How?” he asked insistently.

  “It was meant to look like suicide. Thurman Goodin killed him. Broke into his house in the middle of the night. He was going to knock him out and poke his head in the oven and put the gas on. He knocked him cold all right, but Avery came to on the way to the oven. There was a row and Thurman Goodin beat him over the head with some tool he’d brought along. I believe it was a tire iron. Beat his brains in, but all the noise woke a few of the neighbors and they grabbed Goodin on his way out the door. Two of them caught him and managed to hold him until the police came, and of course he told them everything.”

  I expected Bane to interrupt, but he waited without a word. I said, “Rachel Avery wanted him to run away with her. She couldn’t stand staying with her husband, she wanted to go to some big city, try the sweet life. He told the police he tried to stop seeing her. She threatened him, that she would tell her husband, that she would tell his wife. So he went to her one afternoon and knocked her unconscious, took off her clothes, and put her in the bathtub. She was still alive then. He dropped the radio into the tub to give her a shock, then unplugged it and checked to see if she was dead. She wasn’t so he held her head under water until she drowned, and then he plugged the radio into the socket again and left.

  “And last night he found out that Avery knew about it, about the murder and the affair and all. So of course he had to kill Avery. He thought he might get away with it if he made it look like suicide, that Avery was depressed over his wife’s death and went on to take his own life. I don’t think it would have washed. I don’t know much about it, but aren’t the police more apt to examine a suicide rather carefully? They might see the marks on the head. Perhaps not. I don’t really know. They’ve put Goodin in jail in Harmony Falls, and with two bloody murders like that, he’s sure to hang.” And then, because I felt even worse about it all than I’d known, “So it all comes out even, after all, the way you wanted it, the loose ends tied up in a bow.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “I’m sorry.” And I was, as soon as I’d said the words.

  I don’t think he heard me. “I am a bad writer and a bad man,” he said, and not to me at all, and perhaps not even to himself but to whatever he talked to when the need came. “I thought I created them, I thought I knew them, I thought they all belonged to me.”

  So I went upstairs and packed my bags and walked all the way to the station. It was a bad time to leave him and a heartless way to do it, but staying would have been worse, even impossible. He was dying, and I couldn’t have changed that, nor made the going much easier for hi
m. I walked to the station and took the first train out and ended up here in Los Angeles, working for another foolish little man who likes to hire foreigners, doing the same sort of nothing I’d done in New York, but doing it at least in a warmer climate.

  Last month I read he’d died. I thought I might cry but didn’t. A week ago I reread one of his books, Lips That Could Kiss. I discovered that I did not like it at all, and then I did cry. For Rachel Avery, for Joseph Cameron Bane. For me.

  You Could Call It Blackmail

  He was in the garden when the phone rang. It rang several times before he remembered that Marjorie had taken Lisa to her piano lesson. He walked unhurriedly back to the house, expecting the caller to hang up before he reached the telephone, but it was still ringing when he got to it.

  “David? This is Ellie.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Why?”

  “Your voice. Is something wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine. No, everything’s not fine.”

  “Ellie?”

  “I’d like to see you. Could we meet for lunch?”

  “Yes, of course. Just let me think. Today is what? Monday. I’m supposed to come into the city the day after tomorrow to have lunch with someone at Simon and Schuster. I hope I remember her name before I see her. I’m sure I could get out of it.”

  “No, don’t do that. It doesn’t have to be lunch. If we could meet for a drink?”

  “Sure. Not that it would be any problem to cancel lunch. Let me think. There’s an Italian place called the Grand Ticino on Thompson off Bleecker. It’s always quiet during the day. I must be the only person who goes there, and I don’t get there more than once or twice a year.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  He spelled it. “Two o’clock Wednesday? I’ll call what’s-her-name and move lunch back to noon.”

  “Two is fine. I hope you remember her name.”

  “Penny Tobias. I just did.”

  The luncheon with Penny Tobias did not go well. Its unstated purpose was clear to both parties in advance; Simon & Schuster was interested in enticing David Barr away from his present publishers, while he in turn was not entirely averse to being enticed. Things would have gone well enough if he hadn’t had Ellie Kilberg on his mind. But ever since her call he had been writing any number of mental drafts of the conversation they would have, and he couldn’t stop doing this while Penelope Tobias stuffed fettuccine into herself and rattled on about the glories of the S & S spring list. He wasn’t genuinely unpleasant, but he was certainly inattentive and was positive it showed.