Make Out with Murder (5 page)

My rooming house is a compromise. Haig wants me to live in the carriage house. There’s an extra room on the lower floor that’s at least as spacious as the one I pay twenty dollars a week for, two blocks to the south. It’s furnished nicely and it’s reassuringly devoid of cockroaches, which are fairly abundant in my place on 18th Street. He keeps trying to move me in there and I keep resisting.

“The thing is,” I told him finally, “I’m sort of, uh, interested in girls. I mean, sometimes something comes along that looks like the foundation of a meaningful relationship, uh, and, uh—”

Haig’s spine stiffened, which doesn’t happen often. “Your friends would always be welcome in my house,” he said.

“It’s not that, exactly.”

“Your relations with women are your own business. It’s been my observation that the great detectives are inclined to be celibate. Not through inadequacy, but because they have passed through the stage of sexual activity before developing their highest powers. Wolfe, of course, fathered a daughter before embracing misogyny wholeheartedly. Holmes was devoted to The Woman but lived alone. Perry Mason never so much as took hold of Delia Street’s hand. Poirot always had an eye for a pretty figure, but no more than his eye was ever engaged. Their assistants, however, were apt to go to the opposite extreme. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but I would have no objection to your leading an active sexual life. You could bring women here, Chip. They could attend the breakfast table with no embarrassment.”

But of course the embarrassment would come long before they got to the breakfast table. Because you cannot make an initial pitch to a girl and lead her up an alleyway and into what is unmistakably a Puerto Rican whorehouse without creating an atmosphere which is not precisely perfect. So I keep my room on 18th Street, and consistently fail to lure girls to it anyway, and Haig and I maintain this running argument.

I drank two beers at Dominick’s and hung around there until the late news came and went. There was nothing about Melanie, which wasn’t all that surprising. If every drug overdose made the eleven o’clock news, they wouldn’t have time for wars or assassinations. I threw darts at Dominick’s dart board without distinguishing myself. I thought a lot about Melanie, and I remembered what she’d been like alive and how she had looked in death, and all of a sudden I was very damned glad I was working for Leo Haig, because we were going to get the son of a bitch who killed her and nail his hide to the wall.

Four

In the morning the man next door had a coughing fit, and I woke up before the alarm clock went off. I picked up a
Times
on the way over to Haig’s house. In the courtyard, Carmelita was hanging out underwear on a clothesline running between two ailanthus trees. I have a lot of respect for those trees; anything that can come up out of a crack in a New York sidewalk deserves a lot of credit.

“You up early,” she said.

“So are you.”

“I am not go to bed yet. Busy night.”

“Business is good, huh?”

“All time sailors. Want to fock like crazy. Drink and fock, drink and fock.”

“Well,” I said.

“Margarita, she so sore. Fockin’ sailors. Mos’ tricks, all they want is the blow job. Get the other from their wife. Fockin’ sailors, they get blow job alla time on the boat, alla they wanna do is fock. So everybody gets sore.”

“Oh,” I said.

I went upstairs and into the office. Haig was busy playing with his fish tanks. I opened the paper and found the article about Melanie and started reading it. Wong came in on tiptoe with a couple of cups of strong coffee. He and I smiled at each other and he went away. Haig went on feeding the fish and I went on reading. A couple of paragraphs from the bottom I must have voiced a thought without realizing it, because Haig turned to face me and said, “Why?”

“Huh?”

“You said you’ll be a son of a bitch. I was wondering why.”

“I knew she had some income,” I said. “But I never thought it amounted to that much. I mean, she never even offered to pay for her own brown rice, for Pete’s sake.”

“Make sense, Chip.”

I blinked at him. “I was right about her age,” I said. “She turned twenty-one in May and came into the principal of her inheritance. According to the
Times
her share came to a little over two million dollars.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“But then why did she live like that? Suppose she didn’t want to touch the principal, what would the interest be on two million dollars?”

“Well over a hundred thousand dollars a year.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

“So you’ve said.”

“I used to buy subway tokens for her. She could have gone home in a limousine. It’s unreal.”

He seated himself on his side of the desk and held out his hand for the paper. I gave it to him and he read the article through several times, pausing to stroke his beard between paragraphs. Now and then he made a sort of clicking sound with his tongue or teeth. I don’t know how he makes that sound exactly or just what it’s supposed to indicate. When he had read most of the print off the page he set the paper down and closed his eyes for a moment.

Then he said, “You have your notebook? Good. There are several things you have to do. The funeral is at two tomorrow afternoon. Had you planned to go?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it. Of course I’ll go.”

“I think you should, for reasons in addition to your feelings for Miss Trelawney. In the meantime, there are places you should go and people you might profitably meet.”

He talked for a while, and I wrote things down in my notebook.

I got to the library at 42nd and Fifth a little before the lunch crowd took over the steps. I went through the
New York Times
Index for the past three years and made a lot of notes, then headed over to the microfilm room and filled out a request slip. A girl with Dick Tracy’s chin brought me little boxes of film and showed me how to use the viewer.

At first it was slow going because I tended to get sidetracked. I would be scanning my way through back issues and happen to hit an article that looked interesting, so I would stop and read it. After this happened a couple of times I realized what was going on and kept my mind on what I was there for.

Cyrus Trelawney had died three years ago. A combination of heart trouble, cirrhosis of the liver and general cussedness had taken him out five days after his eighty-first birthday. He was a widower at the time, and he left five daughters. The eldest, Caitlin, was then thirty-three. The others were Robin (twenty-seven), Jessica (twenty-one), Melanie (eighteen) and Kim (fifteen). It seemed to me that there ought to have been a thirty-year-old between Caitlin and Robin, just to preserve the symmetry. Maybe he’d had financial reverses around that time.

Although he didn’t seem to have had many financial reverses generally. The
Times
obit must have been an easy one to write, because Trelawney seems to have been a properly crusty old pirate. He had come to the States from Cornwall at the age of sixteen with a couple of silver shillings in his shoe, and I guess he was better at finding A Job With A Future than I’ll ever be, because in the next sixty-five years he parlayed those shillings into almost eleven million dollars, after taxes. He did most of this in ways that I’m not equipped to understand, financial transactions and mergers and takeovers and all those words you find in the business pages of the newspaper.

Trelawney used to claim he was descended from Cornish pirates, and the
Times
writer sort of implied that no one had any reason to doubt his claim on the basis of his performance in the world of finance. He was past forty before he married, and shortly thereafter he sat about producing daughters at three-year intervals, except for the one gap of six years. He was twenty years older than his wife and he outlived her by eight years.

I got a lot of information from the obituary notice and more information from various social page articles and the stories about the deaths of Robin and Jessica, but there’s no particular point in saying just what I learned where. I had to report it that way to Leo Haig, but I’ll just sketch in the general facts here.

Caitlin, the firstborn, was thirty-six now. She had been married at sixteen, but old Cyrus had it annulled. She was married again six years later, divorced two years after that, married again the following year and divorced again within a year. Now she was married for the fourth time—unless there had been a divorce since then that hadn’t made the papers. A couple of months before her father’s death, she’d exchanged gold bands with Gregory Depew Vandiver, of the Sands Point Vandivers, whoever the hell they are. The wedding announcement told all the schools he had attended and all the clubs he belonged to and described him as connected with a Wall Street firm with half a dozen very Protestant names in its title. After a honeymoon in Gstaad,
The Times
said, the Vandivers would make their home on the North Shore of Long Island.

Robin had been married twice. When she was twenty-three she married Phillip Flanner, a man twice her age who had been her psych professor at Sarah Lawrence. Two years after the wedding, Flanner fell in front of a subway train. If your wife’s that rich, what are you doing in the subway? Robin remarried three years after that. Her second husband was Ferdinand Bell. (I kept writing this down as Ferdinand Bull, by the way.) The article described Bell as a professional numismatist, which is what a coin dealer becomes when he marries an heiress.

Robin’s auto wreck—Haig said not to call it an accident—took place in Cobleskill, New York, in January. She and her husband were returning from a three-day convention of the Empire State Numismatic Association held in Utica. There was a patch of ice on the road and Bell lost control of the car. He was wearing his seat belt and sustained superficial injuries. Robin was in back taking a nap and was not wearing a seatbelt. She broke her neck, among quite a few other things, and died instantly.

Jessica went out the window three months after Robin’s death. The window she went out of was in the penthouse of the Correggio, one of the more desirable high-rise apartment buildings in the Village. She had lived in the penthouse with a girl named Andrea Sugar, who had been working at the time of the fall at Indulgence, which was described as an East Side massage parlor and recreation center. Jessica also worked at Indulgence as a recreational therapist, but had taken the afternoon off.

Jessica had never been married, and by reading between the lines I developed a fair idea why.

Melanie you know about.

I couldn’t learn very much about Kim. She had been only fifteen when her father died and was only eighteen now. I could tell you what high school she attended but I don’t think you’d care any more than I did. The items I turned up through the
Times Index
were not much help by the time I found them on microfilm. They just mentioned her as “also appearing” in a variety of off-off-Broadway shows. The shows in which she also appeared got uniformly rotten reviews. In one review, a brief pan of something called
America, You Suck!
the critic wrote: “Young Kim Trelawney constitutes the one bright spot in this otherwise unmitigated disaster. Although not called upon to act, Miss Trelawney is unquestionably an ornament to the stage.”

By the time I left the library I had sore eyes from the viewer and a sore right hand from scribbling in my notebook. I also had the name of the lawyer who had handled Cyrus Trelawney’s affairs. I called him from a phone booth and learned that he was out to lunch, which reminded me that I ought to be out to lunch myself. I went to the Alamo and had a plate of chili with beans. They charge an extra fifteen cents for any dish without beans. Don’t ask me why.

The pay phone at the Alamo was out of order. So were the first two booths I tried, and before I found a third one I decided not to call him anyway. It wasn’t likely he’d be desperately anxious to see me, and it’s always easier to get rid of a pest over the phone than in person.

His name was Addison Shivers, and if I was making this up I wouldn’t dream of fastening a name like that onto him, because it didn’t fit him at all. I expected someone tall and cadaverous and permanently constipated. I can’t tell you anything about the state of his bowels, actually, but he was nothing like what I had anticipated. To begin with, it wasn’t hard to get to see him at all.

His office was on Chambers Street, near City Hall. I took the subway there and found the building and was elevated to the sixth floor, where a frosted glass window said
Addison Shivers / Attorney-at-Law
. Then there were half a dozen other names in much smaller print underneath. I don’t happen to remember a single one of them.

I told the witch at the desk that my name was Harrison and I worked for Leo Haig. (If you give that the right inflection, people think they’ve heard of Haig even though they haven’t.) I said I wanted to see Mr. Shivers. She went through a door and came back to ask what my visit was in reference to.

“Melanie Trelawney,” I said. She relayed this and came back with the news that Mr. Shivers would see me. She seemed even more surprised than I was.

His office was very simple, very sparsely furnished. I guess you have to be richer than God to have the confidence to get away with that. All the furniture was oak, and you could tell right away that he hadn’t bought it in an antique shop; he had bought it brand-new and kept it for fifty years. The only decorative things were a couple of sailing prints in inexpensive frames and some brass fixtures from ships. I think one of them was what is called a sextant, but I honestly don’t know enough about that sort of thing to tell you what the rest of them were. Or even to swear that the one was a sextant, for that matter.

He looked old enough to be Cyrus Trelawney’s father. He had a little white hair left around the rim of his head. His face was sort of red, and his nose was more than sort of red. He was well padded, although you couldn’t call him fat. The strongest impression I got from him was one of genuine benevolence. He just plain looked like a nice man. Sometimes you can’t tell, but then again, sometimes you can.