“No offer,” I told her. “We’re at the level of take-it-orleave-it.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind a women’s prison,” she said.
“Lesbianism would make you fat,” I told her, and buzzed Gloria. “Bring your pad in, will you?”
Liz wasn’t liking any of this. “Just tell it to me,” she said. “Let me say yes or no.”
“Let me have my fun,” I said, and when Gloria came in I dictated to her a new agreement between Liz and me that eliminated the entire former agreement from beginning to end. “The greater understanding, confidence, and trust of one another created since our marriage” was given as the principal reason for the change. From now on, this agreement said, our marriage would be ruled exclusively by our wedding vows, the laws of Connecticut, and the customs and mores of the social groupings amid whom we would make our communal life. Insofar as property was concerned, the community property statutes of the state of California would apply.
Liz sat stony-faced through all this, and Gloria speed-wrote it all with her usual aplomb. At the finish I said, “Date it yesterday, prepare it for both our signatures, and do it in four copies.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, deadpan, and left the office.
Liz crossed her legs the other way. “And what,” she said, “makes you think I’d sign anything like that?”
“A real marriage, sweetheart,” I said. “Wouldn’t you really like that, after all?”
“No.”
“Then it just comes down to preferences,” I said. “Which would you rather have for the rest of your life? The State Penitentiary for Women, or marriage to me?”
“That’s not an easy decision.”
“Take your time,” I said. We could both hear the clickety-clack from the outer office. “Gloria only types about thirty words a minutes,” I said.
50
Boy was she mad when they found the gun!
That happened about three in the afternoon. By then we’d both been interviewed by rumple-suited Suffolk County plainclothes detectives, who sat uncomfortably in the living room of the Kerner apartment in Manhattan and treated us with the awkward polysyllabic deference natural to cops confronted by power and/or money. We had also started the funeral arrangements, and I had started the details of a cover-up beside which Watergate was at the level of who-left-the-top-off-the-grape-jelly?
The funeral arrangements were themselves part of the cover-up, since I insisted on the simplest possible form. Liz felt the same way for arrogant reasons of her own — she hated the hoi polloi gawping at the edges of her life — and so what was decided on was cremation and urnment in the Kerner mausoleum up near Tarrytown, all to be done as soon as the coroner and other authorities were done with the remains, and the entire operation to be unaccompanied by services, wakes, or even announcements of any kind. No prayers, no get-togethers, nothing. The bare minimum. Burn ’em up, brush the ashes into the urn, clap on the cork, shove it onto the shelf, and the less said the better.
The next step of the cover-up, for me, involved cooling out an incredible number of people who knew different potentially incriminating parts of what had been going on. Gloria. Ralph. Candy. Joe Gold. My sister Doris. The list went on and on, and not everybody could be given exactly the same story. Doris, for instance, knew damn well I didn’t have a twin brother, but it was just possible I could convince Ralph that the twin brother had existed.
Oh, boy.
I started my cover-up campaign with Gloria. When she finished typing up the agreement I’d dictated, she brought it in and waited while Liz read it. Then Liz stalled a bit by asking directions to the ladies room, and while she was gone I said, “Gloria, I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”
“What makes this day,” she said, “different from any other day?”
“No, seriously,” I said. “You know that twin brother thing I was pulling?”
“I know you were doing something,” she said “God knows what.”
“It was harmless,” I assured her. “Just a sex game, you know how I am.”
She allowed as how she knew how I was.
“I’ll tell you something,” I said. “That woman there, that bride of mine, she just came in to tell me her sister was murdered last night out on Fire Island.”
Appropriate shock from Gloria, followed by appropriate doubt. “Is it for real?”
“Apparently so,” I said. “The snapper is, a guy was found dead with her, and Liz says the guy was my twin brother.”
“Your—?”
“I know,” I said. “That isn’t possible, is it?”
“Not any way I know of.”
“Now,” I said, “Liz wants me to give her an alibi. She wants me to swear she was with me last night, and the truth is she wasn’t.”
Lowering her voice, Gloria said, “Do you think she...”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But that’s why I had you type up that agreement. Normally, she wouldn’t sign a paper like that for anything. If she signs it now, she’s up to something. I just want you to know, Gloria, in case something bad comes out of this later on.”
She gave me a troubled look; part of the reason she stuck with this weird job is that she actually did like me. “You’re in over your head, Art,” she said.
“Truer words were never spoken,” I said, meaning it, “but I don’t see any way to get out of it. I’ve got to follow through to the end and hope for the best.”
“I suppose so.”
“If anybody comes around and asks you anything,” I said, “anything at all, you don’t know a thing.”
“Right.”
“Not even whether I have a twin brother or not.”
“I’m a complete dummy,” she promised me.
“Maybe I can still beat Liz at her own game,” I said bravely. Then we both heard the outer door close. “She’s coming back,” I whispered. “Let’s see if shell actually sign that agreement.”
Joe Gold I dealt with later that afternoon, following the visit from the Long Island police. The gun still hadn’t been found, but the cops showed no real inclination as yet to consider either Liz or me prime suspects. We’d alibied one another, we’d expressed shock and horror, we’d told what we could of our late siblings’ recent activities and associates, and then we’d been left, with apologies, to our mourning.
Immediately upon the departure of the fuzz I said to Liz, “Give me some of your stuff. Undies, lipsticks, crap I can spread around my apartment.”
“Good thinking,” she said, and quickly assembled a paper bag of closet sweepings, with which I rushed to my own place, a residence which no longer resembled the site of a Turkish massacre, but was still not quite so clean as a truckstop diner on a Saturday night Oh, well, Feeney had undoubtedly done his best. Spraying Liz’s detritus hither and yon, I made my way to the phone, which seemed to have had honey poured on it, and phoned Joe out there in sunny L. A.
“Listen, Joe,” I said.
“What — more? Can’t you join a commune?”
“Joe, I got a serious problem.”
“I’ve said that for years, Art”
“There’s been a murder, Joe. No fooling, no gags, no kidding around, an honest-to-God murder.”
“In the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn’s ad-lib writer,” he said, “include me out.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Include us both out. But here’s the thing, Joe. What I’ve been pulling here this summer is a twin scam. You know?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You must have had some idea, from that conversation.”
“Art, in cases of homicide I make it a rule not to hear conversations.”
“That’s wonderful, Joe. Except I think I’m maybe being set up for something. Maybe to take the fall.”