Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) Read Free

of course, but I
thought probably I ought to keep an eye on you.”
    “You followed me.”
    “That’s just what I did,” he agreed.
“And I noticed another peculiar thing. You must have let half a dozen
empty cabs go by, but then when you got to Sheridan Square you were suddenly in a real frantic rush to
hail a cab and jump in and holler out your address.”
    He paused, with a bright alert smiling look,
as though offering me a chance to compliment him on his powers of observation.
I refrained.
    He went on. “Well, it seemed to me you
didn’t want anybody tracing you from Mrs. Penney’s apartment, and I thought that a little peculiar. So I followed you uptown here, and waited to see which
lights went on, and got your name from the doorbell. You really ought to ask who’s there before you let anybody in, you know, just as a
by-the-by.”
    “The intercom’s broken.”
    “Then you ought to get it fixed. Believe
me, it’s my business and I know, you can’t have too
much security.”
    “I’ve talked to the super and the
landlord both. Wait a minute! What are we talking about?”
    “You’re right,” he said, “I got
myself off the subject. I’m a bug on safety, I take all kinds of precautions
for myself and I’m all the time pushing safety on everybody else. Let me see,
now. After I got your name from the doorbell I went back downtown and let
myself into Mrs, Penney’s apartment.”
    That surprised me. “You had a key?”
    “Well,” he said, with another of his
little smiles, “I have a whole lot of keys. Generally there’s one for the
job.”
    “You broke in, in other words.”
    “Well, sir, Mr. Thorpe,” he said,
“I don’t think you ought to start using harsh words, you know. There’s two
of us could do that.”
    “All right, all right.
Get to the point.”
    “Well, you know what I found in the
apartment.”
    “This envelope,” I said, waggling
the fist in which I had it imprisoned.
    “Yes,” he said, “and a body on
top of it. From the marks on the coffee table and the floor, it looked to me as
though there’d been some sort of fracas. You struck her—there’s a bit of a gray
spot on the side of the jaw, she was dead before it could swell up any—and she
hit her head on the coffee table going down.”
    “It was an accident,” I said.
    He did a judicious pose, pursing out his lips
and stroking the line of his jaw; Sidney Greenstreet. “That’s a
possibility,” he said. “On the other hand, you did run away, and you
did try to cover your presence in the apartment, and if you’ll look at this
picture here you’ll see you do just look guilty as all hell.”
    From inside his coat he had taken a
photograph, which he now leaned forward to extend toward me. I took it, with
the hand not crushing the envelope, and looked at a grainy but recognizable
black-and-white picture of myself emerging from Laura’s apartment building. By
God, I did look guilty as all hell, with my mouth open and eyes staring and
head half-twisted to look over my shoulder. I also looked very bulky, as though
I’d just stolen all the silver. Mostly I reminded me of Peter Loire in M. “I see,” I said.
    “Infra red,” he told me. He seemed
very pleased with himself. “The negative’s in my desk at the office.”
    I looked up from my own staring eyes into his
calmly humorous ones. “What now? What are you going to do?”
    “Well, sir,” he said, “I think
of that as being up to you.”
    And suddenly we were in a situation I
recognized from the movies. “Blackmail,” I said.
    He looked a bit offended. “Well,
now,” he said, “there you go with the harsh words again. I just
thought you might be interested in buying the negative, that’s all.”
    “And your
silence?”
    “I wouldn’t want to get a man in trouble,
if I could avoid it.” He shifted his bulk on the sofa. “Now, I’m
supposed to turn in my report by twelve noon, and it seems to me I could handle it one
of two ways. Either I could say