Two Much! (27 page)

I meant the wife in Maine, that Volpinex
had
murdered her, and that he really had intended to murder me on the terrace last Friday, two insights that had exploded belatedly into my consciousness the instant I saw him in that half-lit hall, rounding the turn at the head of the stairs and walking toward me. That was what I'd meant, but I doubt there was any way he could have understood me from what I'd said. When a man begins a conversation by shouting, “You did it you really did and you were going to do it to me,” it is not unfair to say of mat man that he is speaking gibberish.

Volpinex, in any event, treated my outburst the way a sensible man treats gibberish: he ignored it. He said, “I'm not interested in you, Dodge. I'm looking for Elisabeth.”

“Which one? She's not here. I mean she's in the bathroom!” Meaning I didn't want him to think I was alone in the house.

He paused, glanced at the open bathroom door immediately to his left, and gave me a one-raised-eyebrow stare. “Is that something comical? Another joke?”

“You won't get away with it,” I warned him, which was absurd. He was between me and the stairs, nobody knew he was here, he was an expert in karate: he would get away with it.

“Your sense of humor continues to elude me,” he said. He had come forward to the bedroom doorway, just close enough to be sure I was alone in this room. “I fail to understand what you're saying,” he said, and now I saw he was holding a large manila envelope in his left hand. What was in it? Some murder device? Visions of silken twine slithered through my head. Or a slender case of surgical knives, as in
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

I said, “They'll suspect you. I left a letter with my lawyer to be opened in case of my death.”

His frown of incomprehension continued a few seconds longer, and then all at once he smiled, broadly and insultingly. For a humorless man he had quite a collection of smiles on tap, none of them pleasant. “So you think I'm here to kill you,” he said.

“You wanted to Friday, on the terrace.”

“Did I?” The smile curled around his face like smoke, and I noticed he didn't bother with a denial.

“That's why I left a letter with my lawyer,” I told him.

He shook his head, impatient with me. “You did not,” he said. “Don't be tedious.”

“You think so?” Raging to cover my fright, I shook my fist at him and yelled, “Just murder me and see what happens!”

He stood there and looked at me, and we both listened to what I'd just said. It hadn't come out exactly right, had it? Hurrying right along, I said, “You didn't come here to see Betty, that's just a story.”

“Oh, but I did.”

“Why? You're not her lawyer.”

“And you're not your brother,” he said.

“What?”

“You have no twin brother,” he told me, and the glint in his eye was triumph.

Oh oh.

Brazen it through. You can't prove a negative, this is a bluff, brazen it through, don't slip for a second, don't show him a thing. “Of course I have a twin brother,” I said. “You've met him yourself, his name is Arthur.”

“No,” he said. “
Your
name is Arthur. There never was a Robert or Bart Dodge, no twin brother at all.” He jiggled that manila envelope toward me. “I have the hospital records here, showing that yours was a single birth. I have school records, tax records. I have you cold, Dodge. I told you not to get into a game that was too fast for you, but you wouldn't listen. And I believe your next step is going to be the state penitentiary.”

“Wait a minute, now,” I said. “Hold on. What do you mean—penitentiary?”

“Your two marriages,” he said. “The first you entered under a false name and with falsified papers. The second was fraudulent because you lied on your application about your current marital status.”

“The Kerner family wouldn't want a scandal like that.”

He laughed; oh, he was enjoying himself. “They'd like nothing better,” he said. “If the girls tried to hush it up, the rest of the family wouldn't let them. And they'll both, of course, use it in their civil suits against one another. Oh, you'll be famous, Dodge.”

“That's not one of my goals,” I said.

“The time for choice is over,” he told me. Turning away, he said, “I'll wait for Betty downstairs.”

“Wait. Wait a minute.” This was even worse than being murdered. Something like true terror was crawling around on the floor of my stomach. With two quick steps forward, I grasped his arm, saying, “Wait, let's talk this over.”

He looked at my hand on his arm. “Take your hand away,” he said.

I didn't. I said, “Look, you're smart, you're better off in partnership with me, the two of—”

He moved. First something horrible happened to my left wrist, and then I went sailing backward to crash on the floor and slide along it until my shoulders and head crashed into the night table. The lamp fell over, but stayed lit, and the drawer popped open, dropping itself and a scatter of playing cards, hairpins, and assorted garbage over my face and chest. I batted my way upward through it to a sitting position on the floor, and looked up to see Volpinex leering down at me like something on a cathedral cornice. “I enjoyed that,” he said. “I'd enjoy doing it again.” He kicked me encouragingly on the ankle. “Get up, Dodge.”

“No,” I said. My left wrist stung abominably. I splayed my right hand out behind me, for support, and my fingers bumped into something hard and unyielding.

He kicked me in the same spot, more determinedly. “I said get up.”

My fingers closed on Daddy's gun, on the floor now amid the wreckage of the night table drawer, and I swung it around at arm's length. “God
damn
you!” I shouted, and I shot that grinning gargoyle right in his drain spout.

T
HEN, OF COURSE, I WAS
really
terrified.

“No no no no no!” I shouted, but there weren't enough no's in the world to overpower that simple yes. But I hadn't meant it. I'd never meant to kill anybody. Not even to hurt anybody.

Maybe he wasn't dead. The gun still in my hand, as though glued there, I crawled over on hands and knees to where he was lying crumpled against the wall next to the door, and I peeked at his face to see if maybe his eyes were open.

Oh, dear. I swallowed a sudden hint of dinner and looked very quickly away again. You don't have a face like that if you're alive. That wasn't something you could take to a fix-it shop, oh, no, that was something broken for good.

Broken for good.

I have known terror before in my life, such as when I'm in the closet and the suspicious husband is tramping around in the bedroom and the wife is making shrill suggestions that they go out to a movie, and I know what such terror feels like. It feels hot and electric and red, full of buzzing and tiny explosions. That was the terror I'd felt most recently when I had my hand on Volpinex's arm and tried to talk him into making some sort of deal, and until now that was the only kind of terror I'd ever known.

But now I'd met the real thing, the terror below that one, the terror that makes that one seem like a simple case of hypertension. And I'll tell you what real terror is like. It's a wet green swamp with no bottom, and the filthy water coming into your nostrils. It's a small and slimy toad inside your body, eating your bowels and your stomach, leaving a bile-smeared hollow inside you from your brittle ribs to your exposed genitals. It's not being able to reverse time for even one second, for one tiny miserable second, to undo the unthinkable. It's Volpinex with a face like a First World War atrocity case and no more life in him than a sausage.

I don't know how long I stayed there, sunk back on my haunches as I refused to look any more at Volpinex, continuing to hold the gun because it hadn't yet occurred to me to put it down, but I was finally getting shakily to my feet—with no idea at all what I would do next, how I would get out of this, what the moves were that followed this one—when all at once Betty was standing in the bedroom doorway, staring open-mouthed at me, at the gun, at Volpinex. And then shrieking.

“Betty,” I said, “listen to me.” But even I couldn't hear my voice in the midst of those shrieks of hers.

And for what happened next I blame the motion picture industry of America. I had ceased to function as a thinking, planning intelligence, I had become a character in a specific sequence.

Three characters: two male, one female. One of the males is dead, shot by the other. The female arrives, sees, screams, turns, runs away. We've all seen mis sequence, in how many movies? And she runs toward the staircase, she always runs toward the staircase. And the man with the gun lifts it and fires. That's what he does, every time.

Every time.

W
HEN I AWOKE, THEY
were still there.

It was not callousness that had permitted me to go into a deep and dreamless sleep right after committing the first two murders of my life. At first I'd been so terrified I couldn't think at all, and if I'd stayed awake I really believe I would have gone off the deep end. But my brain, more equal to the emergency than I was, simply called for a crash dive, and out I went like a stage hypnotist's shill.

And when I awoke, they were still there: Volpinex by the bedroom door, Betty out in the hall by the head of the stairs. It was after two in the morning and my mind was clear. I came to consciousness all at once, remembering everything and knowing exactly what I should do in order to get out from under.

I started small, with that damned manila envelope full of un-twinning. It was the easiest to get rid of, and gave me confidence for the tougher part to follow. I burned it in the bathroom sink, watching the yellow flames flare up from the photostats, watching it burn down to anonymous ash. I ran water, smeared it around, dried my hands on a towel. Now for the other two pieces of evidence.

It was hard getting them downstairs. Dead bodies don't feel like-living bodies, and the differences kept making my stomach churn. Over and over I had to pause in my labors, stagger to the nearest open window, and pant the fresh air for a while. Then back to it, tugging and toting and dragging those two awkward misshapen creatures down the stairs and back to the kitchen. And now I know why corpses are called stiffs.

Flammables, flammables—I opened cabinet after cabinet. Charcoal starter, floor cleaner, various burnable liquids. Good good good. On went the oven and the four gas burners. I sprinkled my flammables over the remains, and from them in a line through the house and up the stairs and here and there at the scenes of the crimes. Then I carefully put all the cans and bottles back where I'd found them, stored just so.

Now the gun. Bring it downstairs, wipe it off with this dish towel here, then force Volpinex's reluctant fingers around it, grasping it tight. Good. Now remove the gun from his grip, careful not to touch it with my bare hand, holding the barrel wrapped in the dish towel.

Lights out, throughout the house. The smell of escaping bottled gas was now rather strong in the kitchen, less so toward the front door. Out on the porch I went, carrying the gun in the dish towel. I trotted down the slate walk, paused, then pitched the gun underhand into a thick clump of bushes on the far side of the concrete public walk. Then back to the house I jogged, to toss the dish towel inside, light the trail of flammable liquid, and watch the flame skitter like a kitten across the wooden living room floor toward its unborn big brother in the kitchen.

I was at the beach, but had not yet reached the Point O' Woods border fence, when I heard the explosion.