Two Much! (8 page)

“My hosts?” What in hell was he after?

“Ralph Minck,” he said. “Attorney, employed by a large firm downtown. Specialist in stock issue flotation and presentations to the SEC.”

And recently promoted to a level where he could bring his paper work home. I said, “I don't quite follow what you're doing, Mr.…”

“Volpinex. I believe I gave you my card.”

“Yes, you did. Now what do you want
me
to give
you
?”

“Quite simply,” he said, “your assurance that neither your brother nor yourself is a fortune hunter.”

I leaned forward over the desk, my forearms on my scattered mail. “Mr. Volpinex,” I said, “you should go to bed earlier. Watching all those thirties movies on the ‘Late Late Show,' letting them seep into your brain at three and four in the morning, it just isn't good for you.”

“Thank you for your concern,” he said, “but my own concern is exclusively with—”

“Another point,” I said, raising one forearm to point a finger upward. A phone bill, sticking to my damp skin, came up with me, midway between wrist and elbow. I made a sound, shook it loose, and said, “Another point. What if
I'd
been watching the same movies, night after night? Then I would be brainwashed into believing that, guilty or innocent, my
only
possible reaction to such a charge was to punch you in the mouth. Luckily, my sleeping habits have been healthier than that.”

“Very lucky,” he commented dryly. “I'm a karate expert.”

I gazed at him, utterly depressed. “Are you really?”

“Also kung fu. However, to return to the point, my own concern is exclusively with the Misses Eliz/sabeth Kerner. They are—”

“Excuse me, would you say that again?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The name part.”

“You mean, the Misses Eliz/sabeth Kerner?”

“That's it. Thank you.” I gave him a courtly gesture. “Proceed.”

“Yes. Thank you. The young ladies in question are, as you well know, only recently orphaned. Their emotional condition is still unsettled. Were they alone and unprotected, who knows what advantage might be taken of them. Fortunately, however, they are not alone and unprotected.”

“They have me,” I said. “And my brother, of course.”

“Please don't misunderstand, Mr. Dodge,” he said, “but you and your brother are hardly on a social or, may I say, economic level with the Kerners.”

“I thought this was a classless society.”

“Did you really?” He frowned at me, trying to understand that, then shrugged and shook his head. “Setting that to one side,” he said, with another gesture at my little office, “there is still the economic consideration.”

“Of course there is. And I am, as you can see, a legitimate businessman, with a thriving company.”

“Thriving? Your company might support one brother reasonably well, but two brothers would starve on it.”

I couldn't have said it better myself. Nor would I have. I said, “My brother only recently entered the firm. In the fall we plan a major expansion.”

“Bravo, Mr. Dodge. With two of you hawking your wares door to door I'm sure you'll do very well.”

There was just something about his style. Here he was, a cockroach in a three-piece suit, telling me
I
was lower class. Not only that, he was a skinny swarthy thirty-year-old, and he talked as pompously as a fat fifty gray-haired WASP banker. Did he really think he
was
a Grahame or a Frazier?

Then I got it. A sudden conviction entered my brain, and I pointed at the slimy bastard. “You're after them yourself!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“One of them, I mean.” I used my pointing hand to snap my fingers, as an aid to thought. “Which one? Liz?”

His pinched-lemon face closed up even more. “I had suspected even before we met,” he said, “that you were the sort to misunderstand professional ethics and automatically think the worst of your fellow man. Your insinuation is beneath—”

“We know each other, Jack,” I told him. “We're sisters under the skin and you know it. I'm not—”

The door opened and Gloria came in, with two Excedrin and a cup of water. An invaluable woman. As I took my medicine she said, “Charlie Hillerman's outside.”

“Tell him I went to Alaska to take some Christmas card photographs. Reindeer fucking, that kind of thing.” Then my eye passed over my other unwelcome visitor, I suddenly remembered an odd incident from Charlie Hillerman's past, and I said, “No, wait. Tell him I'll be with him in just a minute.”

“And give him a heart attack? Commit your own murders.”

She left, and I went back to Volpinex. Now that I understood him, he didn't worry me any more. “You didn't come here,” I said, “to find out if I'm a fortune hunter. Or my brother, him, too, if he was. You came here to find out if we're competition. And let me tell you something right now: we are. Both of us.”

The pursed look remained on his face, but he got his ass out of my chair. “In your childhood,” he said, looking down across the desk at me, “you should have heeded your elders' advice, when they warned you against judging others by yourself. I assure you, I will do everything in my rather considerable power to rescue those young ladies from you
and
your brother.”

Straight out of a Victorian novel, but didn't he know he was lying? His parents must have kept him locked away in a dusty attic throughout his childhood (and who could blame them), where he had bided his time with the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mrs. Humphry Ward.

But melodrama is contagious. Leaping up, driven to my feet by the force of the scene I was playing, and just for that moment meaning every ridiculous word I said, I said, “Speaking for my brother, Mr. Volpinex, and believe me I think I know my brother's heart, I'm telling you right now that all grasping attorneys and other vultures hovering over the Kerner inheritance had better watch their step pret-ty carefully, because Liz and Betty, in their hour of need and travail, have found their heroes at last! And good day to you, sir!”

W
HEN
C
HARLIE
H
ILLER
man came bulging in, after the slithering departure of Volpinex, I was hurriedly but calmly writing a check. “Okay Art,” Charlie announced, coming over to lean over my desk and show me his biceps, “I figured it out you're always in town on Wednesday, and I'm here to tell—”

“Here you are, Charlie.”

He took the check, and glared at it. “If you think you can fob me off with another partial pay—” He stopped, dead, and stared at the check.

“Not at all, Charlie,” I said. “That's payment in full.”

He sank into the chair lately defiled by Volpinex. “Holy God,” he said. “Who do I kill?”

“Just the reverse,” I said.

He frowned at me, his natural suspicion returning. Snapping the check with his finger, he said, “Is this any good?”

“Of course it is. Charlie, you remember telling me about the time you did the dollar-bill card for F&A?”

“Sure. ‘If you want to sleep here, George, you'll need ten of those.' What about it?”

“You did such a good job the Treasury people came around,” I reminded him. “F&A couldn't distribute.”

He nodded, sulky at the memory. “And I never got paid.”

“That's what you get for dealing for a schlock outfit, Charlie. Stick with me and you'll be okay.”

“Huh,” he said.

“The point is,” I said, “I've got a Birthday you're perfect for.”

His natural truculence was creased by a pleat of curiosity. “What is it?”

“I understand when you were born—three wise men left town.”

“Not bad,” he said.

“It's encouragement like that keeps me going, Charlie.”

“What's the picture?”

“The card is a photostat of a birth certificate.”

He frowned, not seeing it; in truth, it wasn't a very good idea. “Yeah?” he said.

From the bottom left drawer of my desk I took the photostat of my birth certificate I'd sent for when I got my passport; you never know when you might want to leave the country. Extending it across the desk, I said, “We'll use mine. That way, there won't be any lawsuits.”

“Yeah?” He took the photostat and studied it, not charmed. “What do you need me for?”

“Well, I don't want it
exactly
mine, do I? You've got gray inks for the background, white inks for the lettering, you can make a couple minor changes. So it's sort of Everyman.”

His stubby finger poked the stat. “John Doe in here?”

“No, that's too cute. We can leave my last name, it's common enough, something you find around the garage. Change the first name, let's see, something with six letters, hmmmmmmm.…”

“Joseph?”

“Joseph Dodge.” I pondered that. “Joe Dodge. Wasn't there somebody famous named Joe Dodge?”

“Was there?” Charlie in thought looked like a Bassett hound.

“How about …” I said, “how about Robert? That ought to fit.”

“Okay.”

“And listen,” I said. “Change the birth time. You know, let's not give anything away to these astrology freaks.”

He frowned massively at me. “What?”

“Just do it, Charlie,” I said. “Think of it as a personal quirk.”

He shrugged. “If you say so. Any particular date?”

“Oh, leave the date,” I said airily. “No sense changing everything. Just make the birth time, oh, I don't know, say twelve minutes later. And then the rest you can leave just the way it is.”

“So there's just the two changes, right? Arthur to Robert, and five seventeen to five twenty-nine.”

“Right. When do you suppose you could have it?”

“When do you suppose I could get paid for it?”

“On delivery.”

If he frowned any deeper his head would crack open like a coconut. “You been robbin' liquor stores?”

“I'm trying to maintain faith with my artists. When could you have it?”

“This afternoon. How much do I get for it?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Wrong. Forty.”

“For an hour's work? Even hookers don't get that much.”

“Thirty,” he said.

“I'm on a tight budget, Charlie,” I said. “If I have to go above twenty-five I won't be able to pay you right away. I mean, if you're willing to wait—”

“I'll take the twenty-five,” he said.

B
UZZ
.

“Hah?”

“Linda Ann Margolies is here.”

For just a second I was a complete blank. Linda what? Then my eye drifted past my desk clock, and I saw it was five after one, and it all came back to me: the Columbia gem, the master's thesis on comedy. “Right,” I said, stuffing the rest of my pastrami-on-rye into a desk drawer, and hung up. I swigged down my coffee, underhanded the cup into the wastebasket, patted my mouth with the paper napkin, pocketed the napkin, got to my feet, and smiled a welcome as Gloria ushered in Linda Ann Margolies.

And when I saw her, I multiplied the smile by two.

Ah, yes, there are moments when I understand cannibalism. Food imagery kept filling my head as I looked at this lush morsel: home-baked pastry, crepes suzette, ripe peaches. If she were any shorter it would be too much, overblown, fit for a gourmand rather than a gourmet, but she was just tall enough to cool the effect slightly and thereby become perfect. Sex without loss of status, how lovely. “Come in, Miss Margolies,” I said, and ignored the jaundiced lip-curl of Gloria in the background.

Gloria left us, I gestured the student into the Volpinex-Hillerman Memorial Chair, and she said, “I do thank you for your time, Mr. Dodge. I know you're a busy man.”

“Up with the sun and on the run,” I said, dropping back into my own chair.