Make Out with Murder (2 page)

“Then I don’t get it.”

Her eyes, which range from blue to green and back again, were a very vivid blue now. “I am going to be killed,” she said. “I can sense it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Robin and Jessica were killed—”

“Well, Jessica killed herself, didn’t she?”

“Did she?”

“Jesus, Melanie, that’s what you just said, isn’t it? You said she threw herself out a window.”

“Maybe she did. Maybe she … she was pushed.”

“Oh, wow!”

She lowered her head, closed her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know anything, Chip. All I know is the feelings I’ve had lately. That all of the Trelawney girls are going to die and that I’m going to be next. Maybe Robin’s accident really was an accident. Maybe Jessica did kill herself. She wasn’t terribly stable, she had a weird life style. And maybe Robin’s accident really was an accident. I know it must have been. But—I’m
afraid
, Chip.”

I saw her a couple of times after that, and she was never that hysterical again. She did mention the subject, though. She tried to be cool about it.

“Well, like it’s a good thing you’re working for a private detective, Chip. That way you can investigate the case when I’m murdered.”

I would tell her to cut the shit, that she was not going to be murdered, and she would say she was just making a joke out of it. Except it was only partly a joke.

I guess that coffee shop wasn’t the best place to pick for a stake-out. Not just because the coffee was rotten, but because the clientele was largely gay.

Which is all right as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get uncomfortable in homosexual company. I have a couple of gay friends, as far as that goes. But the thing is this: if you sit in a place like that, just killing time over a cup of coffee, and if you’re young and tallish and thinnish, which is to say the general physical type which is likely to hang out in such a place for a particular purpose, well, people come to an obvious conclusion.

It was getting a little heavy, so I paid for my coffee and I went out to wait outside. I guess that turned out to be worse. I wasn’t outside for five minutes before a heavy-set man with a slim attaché case and a neatly trimmed white moustache asked me if he could buy me a drink.

I took my wallet out and flipped it open briefly. “Police,” I said. “Surveillance,” I said. “Scram,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” the man said.

“Just go away,” I said.

“I didn’t actually do anything,” the man said. “Just an offer of a drink, all in good faith—”

“Jesus, go away,” I said.

“I’m not under arrest?”

Across the street, the man in the brown suit emerged from the hotel. He still had his package of magazines with him. I told the idiot with the moustache that he was not under arrest, but that he would be if he didn’t pissed off.

“You’re not Vice Squad?”

“Narcotics,” I said, trying to get past him.

“But you should be on the Vice Squad,” he insisted. “You’d fool anyone.”

I’ve decided since that he must have intended this as a compliment. At the time I couldn’t pay that much attention to what he was saying because Brown Suit was on his way into a subway kiosk and I had to hurry if I didn’t want to lose him. It occurred to me that perhaps I did want to lose him, but I wanted to get away from the creep with the moustache in any case, so I charged down to the subway entrance and caught sight of the man in brown just as I dropped my own token into the turnstile. Actually, it was his turn to follow me for the next little bit, because he had to buy a token. I always have a pocket full of them.

Leo Haig believes his right-hand man should be prepared for any contingency.

I bought a paper to give myself something to hide behind and to kill time so that he could let me know which train we were going to ride. It turned out to be the downtown A train and we rode it to Washington Square. Then we went up and around and caught the E train as far as Long Island City. This puzzled me a little because he could have caught that same E train at 42nd Street and saved going out of the way a couple of miles, but I figured maybe he changed his mind and had some particular last-minute reason to go out to Queens.

At Long Island City he got out of the train just as the doors were closing, and if I hadn’t been standing right next to the door at the time I would have gone on riding to Flushing or someplace weird like that. But I got out, and I immediately began walking off in the opposite direction from him. After I had gone about twenty yards I turned and looked over my shoulder and there he was. I started to turn again, but he was making motions with his hands.

I just stood there. I didn’t really know what else to do.

“Look,” he said. “This is beginning to get on my nerves.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been following me all afternoon, son. Would you like to tell me why?”

Leo Haig always tells me to use my instinct, guided by my experience. He stole this bit of advice from Nero Wolfe. My problem is, I haven’t had too much experience and my instincts aren’t always that razor-sharp.

But what I said was, “I have to say something to you.”

“Well, you could have said it back on Ninth Avenue, son. You didn’t have to wait until we both rode back and forth underneath Manhattan Island.”

“The thing is, I don’t know if you’re the right man.”

“What right man?”

“The married man who’s been running around with my sister, and if you are—”

Well, he damned well wasn’t, and that was a load off both our minds. He laughed a lot, and he did everything but explain to me precisely why he was extremely unlikely to be running around with anybody’s sister, or to be married, and we went our separate ways to our mutual relief. I got another E train heading back in the direction I’d come from and he went somewhere else.

At least he hadn’t made me until I’d tailed him to Ninth Avenue. I suppose that was something.

There’s probably a good way to connect from the E train to something that goes somewhere near the Lower East Side, but I’m still not brilliant about the subway system and the maps they have there are impossible to; figure out, especially when the train is (a) moving and (b) crowded, which this one certainly was. So I rode down to Washington Square again, feeling a little foolish about the whole thing, and then I got out and walked cross town. I called Melanie a couple of times en route, but the line was busy.

Melanie’s place was on Fifth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D. I could never figure out why. I mean, I could figure out why the building was there. It had no choice. Buildings tend to stay where you put them, and nobody would have allowed this building in a decent, neighborhood anyway. But Melanie did have a choice. She wasn’t wildly rich, and I don’t suppose she could have stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, but she could have had a better apartment in a safer neighborhood with the income she got from her father’s estate. Instead she lived on one of the most squalid and unsafe blocks in the city.

“You know,” I’d told her a day or two ago, “if you really insist on having this irrational fear of being murdered, you ought to move out of this rathole. Because when you live here, being murdered isn’t an irrational fear. It’s a damned rational one.”

“I feel secure here,” she said.

“The streets are wall-to-wall junkies and perverts,” I said. “The muggers have their own assigned territories so they don’t mug each other by mistake. What makes you feel secure?”

“It’s a settled neighborhood, Chip.”

I walked through it now. It was at its very worst in the afternoon because the light was bright enough to see how grungy it was. It was also bright in the morning, but there was no one around. Starting a little after noon, the rats would begin to peep out of their holes.

I got to her building. They still hadn’t replaced the front door. No one knew who had taken it, or why. I walked up four very steep flights of stairs and knocked on her door.

There was no answer.

I knocked a couple more times, called her name a lot, and then tried the door. It was locked, and that worried me.

See, Melanie would only lock her door when she was home. I know most people do it the other way around, or else lock it all the time, but she had a theory on the subject. If a junkie burglar knew she wasn’t home, and found the door locked, he would simply kick it in. This would mean she would have to pay for a new lock. If, however, she left it unlocked, he would come in, discover there was nothing around to take, and finally settle for ripping off her radio. Since the radio had cost fifteen dollars and the big cylinder lock had cost forty, it was clear where the priorities lay.

I knocked again, a lot louder. She would not be asleep at this hour. And her telephone had been busy just a few minutes ago. Of course telephones in New York are capable of being busy just for the hell of it, but—

I got this sudden flash and didn’t like it at all. So I did something I’ve wanted to do for years. I think it’s something everybody secretly wants to do.

I kicked the door in.

You’d be surprised how easy that is. Or maybe you wouldn’t when you stop to think that some of the most decrepit drug addicts in the world do it a couple of times a day. I hauled back and kicked with my heel, hitting the door right on the lock. On the third try the door flew open and the forty-dollar lock went flying, and I lost my balance and sat down without having planned to. I suppose a few tenants heard me do all these things, but they evidently knew better than to get involved.

The apartment was a rabbit warren, a big living room and a long hallway that kept leading to other rooms, some of them containing Salvation Army reject furniture, some of them papered with posters of Che and stuff like that. Actually I think Melanie paid as much rent for the place as I paid for a room in a decent neighborhood. She said she liked having plenty of space. Personally, considering the condition of the rooms, I would think that a person would pay more for less space. One room in that building would have been bad enough. Five rooms was ridiculous.

The telephone was in the living room. It was off the hook. I worked my way through the apartment, calling out her name, picking up more and more negative vibrations and getting less and less happy about the whole thing. I found her in the back room. She was spread out stark naked on her air mattress, which is just how I had always hoped to find her.

But she was also absolutely dead, and that was not what I had had in mind at all.

Two

She wasn’t the first corpse I had ever seen. One summer I picked apples for a while in upstate New York, a job which consisted largely of falling off ladders. The other pickers would go out drinking when they were done, and sometimes I would tag along. There was usually at least one fight an evening. Sometimes somebody would pull a knife, and one time when this happened it wound up that one guy, a wiry man with a harelip, caught a knifeblade in his heart and died. I saw him when they carried him out.

The first book I wrote, I covered my experiences apple-picking, but never put that part in. God knows why.

So she wasn’t the first corpse I ever looked at, but she might as well have been. I kept thinking how horrible it was that she looked so beautiful, even in death. Her pale white skin had a blue tint to it, especially in her face. Her eyes were wide open and I could swear they were staring at me.

I knew she was dead. No living eyes ever looked like that. But I had to reach down and touch her. I put one hand on her shoulder. She’d been dead long enough to grow cool, however long that takes. I don’t know much about things like that. I’d never had to.

I almost didn’t see the hypodermic needle. She was on her back, legs stretched out in front of her, one arm at her side, the other placed so that her hand was on her little bowl of a stomach. That hand almost covered the hypodermic needle. After I saw it, I picked up her other arm and found a needle mark. Just one, and it looked fresh.

I put her arm back the way I had found it. I went to the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at her some more. I must have stood there staring at her for five minutes. Then I paced around the whole apartment for another five minutes and came back and stared at her some more.

This wasn’t shock. I was in shock, of course, but I was being very methodical about this. I wanted to notice everything and I wanted to make sure I remembered whatever I noticed.

I left her apartment, closed the door, walked down the stairs and out. I walked all the way over to First Avenue before I caught a cab. The cab dropped me at 14th Street and Seventh. I walked quickly from there to my rooming house on 18th Street, a few doors west of Eighth.

When I was in my own room on the third floor, the first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was to go into the bathroom and remove the towel bar from the wall. It’s a hollow stainless steel bar, and there was a little plastic vial in it that contained several dollars’ worth of reasonably good grass. I poured the grass in the toilet and flushed, rinsed out the vial, and tossed it out the window. Then I went through the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t find anything to worry about except for a few codeine pills that my doctor had prescribed for a sinus headache. I thought about it and decided to hell with them, and I flushed them away, too. That left nothing but aspirin and Dristan, and I didn’t think the cops would hassle me much for either of those. I put the towel bar back and washed my hands.

I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like the way I was dressed. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of slacks that didn’t need pressing too badly. I traded in my loafers for my black dress shoes.

Then I went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall. I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number I know best.

Haig answered the telephone himself for a change. We talked for a few minutes. Mostly I talked and he listened, and then he made a couple of suggestions, and I hung up the phone and went off to discover the body.

I guess I’ll have to tell you something about Leo Haig.