Make Out with Murder (11 page)

I didn’t say anything for a minute or two. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and straightened up on his stool. He forced his smile back in place.

A wistful look came into his eyes. “There’s something I’ve always wondered about, Chip. May I call you that?”

“Sure.”

“Something I’ve always wondered about. That skid I took. I grew up in an area where winter was long and severe. I learned to drive on snow and ice, how to react to sudden skids. Not to fight the wheel, to turn with the skid, all of those actions that are contrary to instinct and must consequently be learned and reinforced. And on the day of the accident I reacted as I had been trained to react.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No, it did not. And I’ve wondered if there couldn’t have been a possibility of mechanical failure involved. I had the car looked at. It wasn’t damaged all that severely, and if Robin had been sitting beside me and wearing a belt—” His face darkened. He bit his lip and went on. “They found that the steering column was damaged. I had never thought before that it might have been tampered with. Now I find myself wanting to seize on the possibility to whitewash my own role in the affair. If the car had been sabotaged, if some fiend intentionally caused that accident—”

He got to his feet. “You must excuse me,” he said. “I have a nervous stomach. I’ll be a few moments. You might like to have a look at the coins in that case. There are some nice Colonials.”

I had a look at the Colonials. I couldn’t really tell you if they were nice or not. I also had a look at the books on his desk and in the glass-fronted bookcase. They all seemed to be about coins, which probably stood to reason. Some of them looked very old.

I was thumbing through a book called
The United States Trade Dollar
, by John Willem, when Bell came back. “An illuminating book,” he said over my shoulder. “The Trade dollar was coined purely to facilitate commerce in the Orient. The Chinese traders would put their personal chop marks on them to attest to their silver value. I’ve a few pieces in stock if you’d care for a look at the genuine article.”

He showed me three or four coins, returned them to their little brown envelopes and put them away. “My library is my most important asset,” he said. “There’s a motto in professional numismatics—Buy the book before the coin. The wisest sort of advice and all too few people follow it. Numismatics is a science, not just a matter of sorting change and filling holes in a Whitman folder. Take those Trade dollars. The whole history of the China trade is waiting to be read there.”

He went on like that for a while. I tend to look interested even when I’m not, which Haig tells me is an asset; people reveal more of themselves to people who appear interested. So I listened, and it really was pretty interesting, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to the man who killed Melanie and tried to bomb Leo Haig’s house.

I found an opportunity to get the conversation back on he rails and brought up the question of motive. “Suppose someone did sabotage your car. He couldn’t have been certain of killing just Robin. He would have had a shot at killing you, too.”

“That had occurred to me.”

“Well, anyone who’s busy killing off five sisters probably wouldn’t draw the line at including someone else here and there. Who benefited by Robin’s death?”

“Financially?” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s no secret, surely. Except for a few minor bequests, I inherited Robin’s entire estate.”

“But suppose you had both been killed in the accident.”

“Dear me. I hadn’t thought of that. I’d have to check that, but it seems to me that I recall a provision to cover my dying before Robin. It would also cover simultaneous death, I presume. It’s my recollection that the estate would be divided among her surviving sisters.”

“I see.”

“I’d have to check, but that would present no difficulty. My lawyer has a copy of Robin’s will. I could call him first thing Monday morning. Just let me make a note of that.”

He made a note of it, then looked up suddenly. “I say, Chip. You don’t think I ought to consider myself in danger now, do you?” He laughed nervously. “It’s hard to take | seriously, isn’t it? But if it
ought
to be taken seriously—”

“Do you have a will?”

“Yes, of course. I drew up a new will shortly after Robin’s death. A few thousand dollars to a couple of numismatic research foundations, some smaller charitable j bequests, and the balance to my sister in Lyons Falls.”

“And you inherited Robin’s estate free and clear?”

“Yes. Shortly after we were married we drew wills leaving everything to one another absolutely without encumbrance.” His eyes clouded. “I expected it would be my will which would be put to the test first. I was seventeen years Robin’s senior. She preferred older men, you know. Her first husband was as old as I am now when she married him. There’s a history of heart trouble in my family. I naturally expected to predecease Robin, and although I hadn’t all that much to leave her I wanted my affairs to be in order.”

I told him I didn’t think he was in any danger. No one could now expect to profit from his death. The news didn’t cheer him much. He was too caught up in thoughts of his dead wife.

I asked if he knew anything about Jessica’s will. “I barely knew Jessica,” he said. “The Trelawney sisters were not close, and Robin and I kept pretty much to ourselves. Most of our close friends were business associates of mine. Coin dealers are gregarious folk, you know. We hardly regard one another as competitors. Often we do more business buying from each other and selling to each other than we do with actual collectors. No, I don’t know anything about Jessica’s will. I did go to her funeral, just as I went to Melanie’s. I don’t honestly know why I attended either of them. I had little enough to say to anyone there. I suppose it was a way of preserving my ties to Robin.” He lowered his eyes. “We had so little time together.”

“How did you meet her? Was she interested in coins?”

“Oh, not at all. Although she did come to share some of my interest during our life together. She was growing interested in love money, those little pins and brooches made of three-cent pieces, a very popular jewelry form of the mid-nineteenth century. I would always pick up pieces for her when I saw them. No real value, of course, but she liked them.” He smiled at some private memory. “How did I meet her? I was a friend of her first husband, Phil Flanner. I suppose I fell in love with Robin while she was married to him, although I honestly didn’t realize it at the time. Phil died tragically; a stupid accident. I began seeing her not too long after the funeral. I was drawn to her and enjoyed her company, still not recognizing what I felt as love. Gradually we both came to realize that we were in love with one another. I wish we had realized this sooner, so that we might have been married sooner. We had so very little time.”

Ten

When I got back to the house on 20th Street, Haig was on the top floor playing with his fish, repairing the leakers with rubber cement. When I asked if he wanted me to help, he grunted. I stopped in the kitchen where Wong was hacking a steak into bite-sized pieces with a cleaver. I left without a word. When he’s chopping things he looks positively dangerous and I try to stay out of his way. I went downstairs and talked a little with some of the girls.

“Why they wanna blow up Maria?” Carmelita wanted to know. “She don’ never hurt nobody. One guy, he say she give him a clop, but Maria never give nobody no clop. He get his clop somewhere else. Maria tell him, you get your clop from your mother, she say.”

That was even more of a down than watching Haig swearing at his fish tanks, so I went over to Dominick’s and had a beer and watched the Mets find a new way to lose. Matlack had a one-run lead going into the bottom of the ninth, struck out the first man, hit the second man on the arm, and got the third man to hit a double-play ball to short.

That was his mistake. They had Garrett playing short and he made the play without the ball. The ball went to left field and the runners went to second and third, and some- body walked and Bobby Bonds hit a 2-2 pitch off the fence and Dominick turned the set off.

“Shit,” he said.

So I went back and read a couple chapters of an old Fredric Brown mystery until Haig came down, and then I gave him a full report. He made me go over everything a few hundred times. Then he closed his eyes and fiddled with his beard and put his head back and said “Indeed” fifteen times and “Curious” eighteen times. He wouldn’t tell me what was curious.

I spent most of the night walking around the Village looking for somebody to sleep with. It was hotter than hell and there wasn’t much air in the air. I didn’t have any luck. I have a feeling I wasn’t trying very hard. I had a couple of beers and a few cups of coffee and called Kim a couple of times, but no one answered.

I went back to my room and played a Dylan record over and over. I remember thinking that a little grass would be nice and regretting having flushed it to oblivion. It was a rotten night. I had run all over town and hadn’t accomplished anything much. I was sorry I hadn’t spent twenty of Haig’s dollars on a massage and realized I would have been just as sorry if I had.

I thought about going downstairs to give Kim one more call, and I decided the hell with it, and eventually I went to sleep.

Nothing much happened Sunday. I slept late and had breakfast around noon and walked over to Haig’s house because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I got there in time to watch Wong devastate him at backgammon. Wong beats hell out of me, but that was nothing compared to the way he routed Haig. It was pathetic to watch.

“There’s nothing for you to do,” he said.

Which would have been all right except that I felt like doing something. I hung around for a while and did some routine maintenance on the fish, although Sunday was supposed to be a free day for me. Just before dinner I called Andrea Sugar at home to find out if she had managed to get the records. She wasn’t in. I called her a couple of hours later and reached her and learned that she hadn’t had a chance to do anything yet.

I read a couple of books at Haig’s. After dinner I caught a movie. I don’t remember which one.

On the way home I stopped at a pay phone and called Kim. I was a little worried about her, if you want to know. I also just found myself thinking about her a lot. I asked her if she had thought of anything significant, or if anybody had been following her or anything. She had nothing to report.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’d like to go over things with you sometime. When Gordie’s working or something, if you follow me.”

“I think I follow you.”

“Because he’s not exactly crazy about me, and it’s hard to get anyplace with him around. I mean as far as a conversation is concerned.”

“He’s here right now. He’s in the other room. I don’t think I’ll tell him it’s you on the phone.”

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“He’ll be working tomorrow from noon to eight. I have a couple of classes during the afternoon, but the evening’s clear.”

“Don’t you have a performance?”

“Monday’s the dark night off-Broadway. Anyway, the play closed today.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it wasn’t very good. The critics hated it. Would you want to come over around six tomorrow?”

I said I would.

I went home and decided Gordie was the killer and that meant Kim was safe. He wouldn’t kill her now. First he would kill Caitlin, and possibly her husband as well, and then he would marry Kim, and then he would kill her.

Monday there were things for me to do and places for me to go, so of course it rained. Haig had made appointments for me all over the place. I had to see a couple of lawyers, one on Fifth Avenue and one near City Hall just a block from Addison Shivers. I decided to drop in on him and let him know how we were doing, but he was in conference with a client when I got there. I went out and had fish and chips for lunch and dropped in on him again, but this time he was out having lunch, so I said the hell with it and took the subway uptown as far as Canal Street, which is not all that far. I walked up Mulberry to the address Haig had given me.

It didn’t look like a place where I was going to feel tremendously welcome. It was the Palermo Social and Recreation Club, and there were a couple of old men playing bocce over to the right, and two other men sitting over a lackadaisical game of dominoes, and a fifth man watching the curl of lemon peel swim around in his cup of espresso. They all looked at me when I walked in. There was no discernible gleam of welcome in their eyes.

I went to the man sitting alone and asked him if he was John LiCastro. He asked who wanted to know, and I told him who I was and who I worked for and he smiled with the lower half of his face and pointed to a chair. I sat down and he told me I was privileged to work for a great man.

I agreed with him, but I wasn’t too sure of this at the moment, because it was beginning to seem to me that the great man was not accomplishing a whole hell of a lot. The great man had not left the house yet, which certainly gave him a lot in common with Nero Wolfe, but neither had the great man called any suspects together, or even established that there
were
any suspects, for Pete’s sake. The great man was spending a lot of time on his fish while I was keeping the New York Subway System out of the red, or trying to.

I didn’t say any of this to Mr. LiCastro. I had a pretty good feeling that it was extremely unintelligent to say anything to Mr. LiCastro that Mr. LiCastro didn’t want to hear. I told him what I had been instructed to tell him, and asked him what I had been instructed to ask him, and he took in my words with little darting affirmative movements of his head. At one point his eyes narrowed as he fixed on some private thought, and I realized that I was sitting across the table from a man who could kill a man at five o’clock and sit down to a huge dinner at five-thirty and not even worry about indigestion.

Then he ordered espresso for both of us and leaned back in his chair and asked some questions of his own, and there was a warm glow in his eyes and a look of complete relaxation on his face.