Reilly turned to me.
“How did you know Bramble murdered Schweingurt? Why didn’t you think this Leiderkrantz fake did the job?” he asked.
I smiled wryly. “Only Bramble would have planted a sixty-five thousand dollar Dionysus to frame a murder motive. That meant that something even more valuable must be at stake – the original Athena.”
They had to lead Bramble by the arm when they took him away. He was completely dazed – he couldn’t comprehend how his perfectly planned plot could have backfired.
ORDO
Donald E. Westlake
My name is Ordo Tupikos, and I was born in North Flat, Wyoming on November 9th, 1936. My father was part Greek and part Swede and part American Indian, while my mother was half Irish and half Italian. Both had been born in this country, so I am one hundred per cent American.
My father, whose first name was Samos, joined the United States Navy on February 17th, 1942, and he was drowned in the Coral Sea on May 15th, 1943. At that time we were living in West Bowl, Oklahoma, my mother and my two sisters and my brother and I, and on October 12th of that year my mother married a man named Eustace St Claude, who claimed to be half Spanish and half French but who later turned out to be half Negro and half Mexican and passing for white. After the divorce, my mother moved the family to San Itari, California. She never remarried, but she did maintain a long-term relationship with an air conditioner repairman named Smith, whose background I don’t know.
On July 12th, 1955, I followed my father’s footsteps by joining the United States Navy. I was married for the first time in San Diego, California on March 11th, 1958, when I was twenty-one, to a girl named Estelle Anlic, whose background was German and Welsh and Polish. She put on the wedding license that she was nineteen, having told me the same, but when her mother found us in September of the same year it turned out she was only sixteen. Her mother arranged the annulment, and it looked as though I might be in some trouble, but the Navy transferred me to a ship and that was the end of that.
By the time I left the Navy, on June 17, 1959, my mother and my half-brother, Jacques St Claude, had moved from California to Deep Mine, Pennsylvania, following the air conditioner repairman named Smith, who had moved back east at his father’s death in order to take over the family hardware store. Neither Smith nor Jacques was happy to have me around, and I’d by then lost touch with my two sisters and my brother, so in September of that year I moved to Old Coral, Florida, where I worked as a carpenter (non-union) and where, on January 7th, 1960, I married my second wife, Sally Fowler, who was older than me and employed as a waitress in a diner on the highway toward Fort Lauderdale.
Sally, however, was not happy tied to one man, and so we were divorced on April 12th, 1960, just three months after the marriage. I did some drinking and trouble-making around that time, and lost my job, and a Night Court judge suggested I might be better off if I rejoined the Navy, which I did on November 4th, 1960, five days before my twenty-fourth birthday.
From then on, my life settled down. I became a career man in the Navy, got into no more marriages, and except for my annual Christmas letter from my mother in Pennsylvania I had no more dealings with the past. Until October 7th, 1974, when an event occurred that knocked me right over.
I was assigned at that time to a Naval Repair Station near New London, Connecticut, and my rank was Seaman First Class. It was good weather for October in that latitude, sunny, clean air, not very cold, and some of us took our afternoon break out on the main dock. Norm and Stan and Pat and I were sitting in one group, on some stacks of two-by-fours, Norm and Stan talking football and Pat reading one of his magazines and me looking out over Long Island Sound. Then Pat looked up from his magazine and said, “Hey, Orry.”
I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes were half blinded from looking at the sun reflected off the water. I said, “What?”
“You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne.”
Dawn Devayne was a movie star. I’d seen a couple of her movies, and once or twice I saw her talking on television. I said, “Sure.”
He gave me a dirty grin and said, “You shouldn’t of let that go, boy.”
With Pat, you play along with the joke and then go do something else, because otherwise he won’t give you any peace. So I grinned back at him and said, “I guess I shouldn’t,” and then I turned to look some more at the water.
But this time he didn’t quit. Instead, he raised his voice and he said, “Goddamit, Orry, it’s right here in this goddam magazine.”
I faced him again. I said, “Come on, Pat.”
By now, Norm and Stan were listening too, and Norm said, “What’s in the magazine, Pat?”
Pat said, “That Orry was married to Dawn Devayne.”
Norm and Stan both grinned, and Stan said, “Oh, that.”
“Goddamit!” Pat jumped to his feet and stormed over and shoved the magazine in Stan’s face. “You look at that!” he shouted. “You just look at that!”
I saw Stan look, and start to frown, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Had they set this up ahead of time? But not Stan; Norm sometimes went along with Pat’s gags, but Stan always brushed them away like mosquitoes. And now Stan frowned at the magazine, and he said, “Son of a bitch.”
“Now, look,” I said, “a joke’s a joke.”
But nobody was acting like it was a joke. Norm was looking over Stan’s shoulder, and he too was frowning. And Stan, shaking his head, looked at me and said, “Why try to hide it, for Christ’s sake? Brother, if I’d been married to Dawn Devayne, I’d tell the world about it.”
“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I swear to God, I never was.”
Norm said, “How many guys you know named Ordo Tupikos?”
“It’s a mistake,” I said. “It’s got to be a mistake.”
Norm seemed to be reading aloud from the magazine. He said, “Married in San Diego, California, in 1958, to a sailor named Ordo Tu—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was married then to, uh, Estelle—”
“Anlic,” Pat said, and nodded his head at me. “Estelle Anlic, right?”
I stared at him. I said, “How’d you know that name?”
“Because that’s Dawn Devayne, dummy! That’s her real name!” Pat grabbed the magazine out of Norm’s hands and rushed over to jab it at me. “Is that you, or isn’t it?”
There was a small black-and-white photo on the page, surrounded by printing. I hadn’t seen that picture in years.
It was Estelle and me, on our wedding day, a picture taken outside City Hall by a street photographer. There I was in my whites – you don’t wear winter blues in San Diego – and there was Estelle. She was wearing her big shapeless black sweater and that tight tight gray skirt down to below her knees that I liked in those days. We were both squinting in the sunlight, and Estelle’s short dark hair was in little curls all around her head.
“That’s not Dawn Devayne,” I said. “Dawn Devayne has blonde hair.”
Pat said something scornful about people dyeing their hair, but I didn’t listen. I’d seen the words under the picture and I was reading them. They said: “Dawn and her first husband, Navy man Ordo Tupikos. Mama had the marriage annulled six months later.”
Norm and Stan had both come over with Pat, and now Stan looked at me and said, “You didn’t even know it.”
“I never saw her again.” I made a kind of movement with the magazine, and I said, “‘When her mother took her away, the Navy put me on a ship, I never saw her after that.”