Free Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) by Donald E. Westlake Page A

with my coffee, waiting for
the Valium to take hold.
    Staples tried to reassure me: “We run
into a lot of nuts like that, Mr. Thorpe. They get an idea in their heads, and
they don’t want to be distracted by facts.”
    I said, “What if you hadn’t already
cleared me, what would you be thinking now?”
    He chuckled. “I’d be a lot more
interested in talking with that particular nut, to tell the truth.” Then
he said, “Forget about it, Mr. Thorpe, it’s a closed incident. Let’s look
at those photos.”
    So we did. Six pictures of Laura, with as many
men, all of whom I knew to one extent or another. Going through them one at a
time, I gave Staples a name and capsule biography for each, and resisted the
temptation to plant suspicion in his mind about any specific one of these prime
suspects.
    That was a question I hadn’t as yet resolved
in my own mind. If I hadn’t killed Laura—and the official line was that I had
not—then someone else must have done it. Would it be better
to provide that someone else, or could we content ourselves with a simple
unsolved murder? There are hundreds of unsolved murders every year, why
shouldn’t Laura Penney’s be among them? For the moment, at least, that seemed
the better way, so I made none of the leading remarks that occurred to me
concerning each of these escorts, but simply provided Staples with basic
uncolored information: name, occupation, relationship with the deceased.
    And one of them turned out to be that same Jay
English whose name Staples had heard Kit mention on my answering machine, in
the sentence, “I still say Jay English did it.” He remembered that
comment, of course, and asked several questions, with me assuring him the whole
thing had been a joke, if not in very good taste, considering the unequivocal
homosexuality of its subject. Joke or not, Staples made sure to get the
roommate’s name spelled right: David Poumon.
    One of the other photos was of Laura with her
father, a straight-backed well-preserved old gent I’d met once several months
ago, when he was in town from upstate. If Staples was so interested in unusual
sexual relationships, how about intimating something incestuous there to keep
his busy mind occupied? No; once again I restrained myself and moved on to the
next, which happened to be the same stammering Jack Freelander who’d just left,
um, a message on my machine.
    After I’d done all the pictures once, with
Staples making notes in his small pad and giving each suspect his own page, he
led me back through all six again, asking leading questions, poking here and
there in search of motive, and damn if he didn’t suggest father-daughter incest
himself. He led up to it gradually, with questions about whether Laura saw her
father seldom or often, what she had to say about him, and so on, and finally
he asked the question straight out: “Do you think there was anything going
on there?”
    “Going on?”
    “Well, you say he’s a widower, and she’s
separated from her husband.”
    I was astounded, not at the concept but that
Staples should voice it. Apparently he specialized in thinking the unthinkable.
I said, “He’s her father! You don’t think—I mean, what do you
think?”
    He shrugged, his
expression as open and cheerful as ever. “I think people have love lives,”
he told me. “One way or the other, they make that connection. Now, here’s
a woman, she’s thirty-two years old, she’s been married, she’s separated from
her husband, all she has is these casual non-sexual dates with a number of
different men. She doesn’t seem to have anybody that’s really important to
her.”
    “That’s possible,” I said.
“There are people who prefer to be alone.”
    “Not many. And not
Laura Penney. It doesn’t feel right, Mr. Thorpe. She had a lover, I’m
sure of it.” Gesturing at the photos on the table next to me, he said,
“In among all those men in her life was the man in her life. But he was
kept hidden.