Just how reliable was Betty? If I was going to be faithful Bart, what about her?
There was a dime in my pocket.
She must have fallen asleep again; it was six rings before she answered, and then her voice sounded blowsy with unconsciousness. I said, “Hi, there, honey. Guess who this is?”
“Hello?”
“You know who it is, Betty.”
“Art? Is that you?”
My heart was pounding; it surprised me. “That’s right,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“Where are you? What time is it?”
“Early. I’m in Ocean Beach, I’m staying with friends. I could be there in half an hour.”
“Oh, no!” She sounded truly shocked.
“No? Why not, honey?”
“Well... Bart’s here.”
“I don’t believe it. Put him on.”
“He — he just went for a walk. On the beach.”
“Come on, Betty, don’t leave me hanging here like this.”
“He’ll be back pretty soon,” she said, and suddenly she was pitching her voice lower, as though afraid she’d be overheard. “He really will.”
“Then you come out.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well, your brother... He’s staying here with me.”
“You can still go out for a while. He’s taking a walk, isn’t he?”
“Oh, Art, this isn’t right.”
I didn’t have to go on with it. I’ve had this conversation often enough with other women, I know when the argument is won and there’s nothing left but the extra verbiage to help the woman feel she was overpowered; but there was a certain satisfaction in running the ritual right through to the end. “Of course it’s right,” I told her. “Anything that feels good is right, you know that.”
“Art, you’re terrible, you really are.”
“I’ll meet you at the beach end of the fence.”
“I might not be there, Art.”
“I’ll wait for you,” I said, and hung up, and left the phone booth, and went for a walk on the beach.
46
I was lying again on father’s bed, hands behind my head as I brooded at the ceiling, when I heard her come in. The door opened and closed, she moved about down there, and then there was silence. Sitting up, I called, “I’m up here,” and heard her start up the stairs.
I hadn’t been surprised to find her gone when I’d come back here, but I had been disappointed, and I’d spent the last hour and a half in a state of general depression. But why? Did I love her, for Christ’s sake? Did I love either of those wretched sisters? In perfect truth I did not, but what I was learning — and this was quite a bit worse — was that I needed someone, someone, anyone, to love me.
(I don’t count Candy. The architect’s plans for my remodeling were already completed in her head, that was how much she loved me.)
But I still didn’t know what to do about anything, and now Betty was back. Sitting up on the bed as I heard her footsteps approaching, I turned toward the door and saw Volpinex just reaching the head of the stairs.
I scrambled off the bed, pointing at him. “You did it!” I shouted. “You really did! And you were going to do it to me!”
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.”