Make Out with Murder (7 page)

There was more to it than all that, though. She was damned attractive and damned well knew it, and she knew how to play off this attractiveness and, oh, hell, there’s only one way to say it. She was very good at getting people horny.

She ordered mussels and a glass of white wine and another martini. I didn’t want anything to eat, which surprised her but didn’t seem to annoy her. She made a lot of small talk during her meal, and when I would start to turn the conversation around to Melanie she managed to sidetrack it. After this happened a few times I stopped thinking that she was more shook up then she was showing and Got The Message.

What I remembered, actually, was one time when I was taken out to lunch by Joe Elder, who is my editor. We went to a place around the corner from his office where they have a working antique telephone on each table. The food is better than you’d expect. The only thing wrong with Mr. Elder is that he can actually drink a Daiquiri without making a face. God knows how. But all through lunch I kept trying to talk about an idea I had for a book, and he kept changing the subject, and later they brought the coffee and he started talking about the book, and it was the same way now with Caitlin Vandiver. She had decided that we were having a business lunch and she knew that meant not saying a word about business until we were done with the lunch.

She finished her mussels about the same time I ran out of Irish to sip at. When the coffee came she settled herself in her chair and came in right on cue.

“You were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said.

Which was my cue, so I picked it up. “I was the one who discovered the body,” I said.

“Oh, dear. That must have been awful for you.”

It had been, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I told her I was concerned professionally, which brought that tension into her expression, which I later realized was because she thought I might be working up to some sort of blackmail pitch. But I went on to say that I worked for Leo Haig. “The prominent detective,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

Sure, lady. “I have to tell you this in confidence. We have grounds to believe that Melanie was murdered.”

“But I thought it was an overdose of heroin.”

“It was.” The autopsy had confirmed this. “That doesn’t mean she gave it to herself.”

“I see.” She thought for a minute. Then she said, “Oh.”

“I’m afraid so. It puts things in sort of a different light. Jessica’s suicide and Robin’s accident—”

“Might not be a suicide and an accident. Well, Robin’s certainly was, although I suppose someone could have tampered with Ferdie’s car. Do those things happen? I know they do in books, but my God, if I were going to kill someone I would take my trusty little gun and shoot him in the back of the head.” She was silent for a moment, and I wondered who she was killing in fantasy. (Whom, I mean.) Then she said, “I never thought Jessica was the type to commit suicide. She was always a tougher and bitchier broad than I am, and that’s going some. And she was a dyke, too.”

I had sort of assumed this, but I still didn’t have a reply worked out.

“Of course she might have grown out of that,” Caitlin went on. “I did, you know. Although I never embraced lesbianism as wholeheartedly as Jessica did. I never stopped liking men, you see.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Do you want to know something interesting? When I was a girl, oh, way back before Noah built his ark, I always had a special preference for older men.”

“Er.”

“But now that I’ve slithered onto the dark side of thirty, I find I’ve done an about-face. I have a thing for young men these days.”

“Uh.”

“I’ve noticed, Chip, that some young men have a thing for older women.”

I don’t have a thing for older women, but I certainly haven’t got anything against them. Actually, I don’t suppose chronological age means very much. There are women of thirty-six who are too old. There are other women the same age who are not. Caitlin was in the second category, and I was becoming more aware of this every minute.

Her perfume may have had something to do with this. Her leg, which had somehow moved against mine under the table, may also have had something to do with it.

“Well,” I said. “About Melanie—”

“Were you sleeping with her, Chip?”

Everybody wanted to know if I was sleeping with Melanie. First those cops, now Caitlin. I said, “We hadn’t known each other very long.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t take very long.”

“Er. The thing is, you know, that someone killed Melanie. And if someone also killed Jessica, and if it’s the same someone—”

“Then Kim and I might be on somebody’s Christmas list.”

“Uh-huh. Something like that.”

She lit a cigarette. She had been lighting cigarettes all along, but I don’t think it’s absolutely essential to call it to your attention every time somebody lights a cigarette. This time, though, she made a production number out of it, winding up taking a big drag and sighing out a cloud of smoke.

She said, “You know, Chip, I do have a little trouble taking this seriously.”

“There may not be anything to it.”

“But there also
may
be something to it, is that what you mean? Assuming there is, what do I do about it? Put myself in a convent? Hire around-the-clock bodyguards? Quickly marry the president so I qualify for Secret Service protection?”

“The most important thing is to find Melanie’s killer.”

“‘Catch him before he kills more?’ That makes a certain amount of sense.” She studied me for a moment. “The man you work for,” she said.

“Leo Haig.”

“He’s really good?”

“He’s brilliant.”

“Hmmm. And what do you do for him exactly? You’re a little young to be a detective, aren’t you?”

“I’m his assistant. That doesn’t mean my job is taking out the garbage.” Actually, I do take the garbage out of the fish tanks some of the time. “I work with him on cases.”

“So you’d be working on this, too.”

“That’s right. I do the leg work.” I regretted saying that because she sort of winked and did some leg work of her own.

“I’ll just bet you do, Chip.”

“Uh.”

“I’d like to see you devote all your energies to my case,” she said. As I guess you’ve noticed, she tended to say things with double meanings. “I’d like you working hard on my behalf. You don’t have a client, do you? You’re just investigating because of your friendship for my sister?”

We had a client but he didn’t want his name mentioned, so I didn’t mention it. I agreed that we were involved in this out of friendship for Melanie. Which was true—I would have been working every bit as hard without Addison Shivers as a client.

She opened her bag and found a checkbook. She wrote for a minute, tore out a check, folded it in half and slipped it to me. “That’s an advance,” she said.

I took the check.

“An advance,” she repeated. “Actually this is no day to be making advances, is it?”

“Uh.”

“It’s about that time, isn’t it? I have to pick up my darling husband at his club. On the way home I can hear how good it is to work up a sweat. That depends how you work it up, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“Do you? I suspect you do. I have that feeling about you, Chip. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other in the course of your investigation of the case.”

“I’m sure we will, Mrs. Vandiver.”

“Caitlin.”

“Caitlin,” I agreed.

“It’s a difficult name to remember, isn’t it?”

“No, but—”

“Some of my best friends call me Cat. Just plain Cat. You know, as in pussy.”

The waiter brought the check. She put money on the table and we left. I was really in no condition to walk, to tell you the truth, and I think she noticed this, and I think she was pleased.

On the street she offered me her cheek as she had offered it to her husband, but when I went to kiss her, she turned her head quickly and my mouth landed on hers. She did something very nice with her tongue, then drew quickly away, an amused light in her eyes.

“Oh, we’ll get along,” she said.

I felt like springing for a cab, so of course there weren’t any around. I took the subway. It was hot and crowded and smelly and I wound up pressed up against a home-bound secretary. I was in the wrong condition to be pressed up against anyone and the secretary noticed it. She gave me the look people give when they find a cockroach in their oatmeal.

When I got off the train I finally looked at Caitlin’s check. It was for five hundred dollars and it was made out to me rather than to Haig. She’d spelled my first name Chipp, which explained why she hadn’t asked me what my real name was. She was probably used to people with first names like that.

Actually, it would simplify my life in a lot of ways if I spelled it with two p’s. I should have thought of that years ago.

Haig didn’t see anything wrong with accepting retainers from both Addison Shivers and Caitlin Vandiver. “Our work will be in both their interests,” he said. “I see no likely conflict. And there’s certainly precedent for it. Nero Wolfe frequently represents more than one person in the same matter, and does so without either party being aware of his association with the other. In the case that was reported under the title
Too Many Clients
, for example—”

I had just read
Too Many Clients
a month or so ago, but there was no point in telling him that. You might as well try telling Billy Graham you read the Bible once, for all the good it would do you.

Six

I was upstairs until six-thirty, helping Haig with the fish. He had a strain of sailfin mollies he was trying to fix. The object was to develop the dorsal fin to the greatest possible size through selective breeding and inbreeding and by giving the young the best possible nutritional start on life. One of the molly mothers had dropped young earlier in the day and we had to net her and remove her from the breeding tank. Mollies are less likely to eat their young than most livebearers, but every once in a while you get a female who hasn’t read the book, and she can polish off an entire generation in a couple of hungry hours.

We gave the babies a heavy feeding of live brine shrimp. Haig buys enormous quantities of frozen brine shrimp for general use, but hatches his own for feeding young fishes. He tends to be a fanatic about things like this, and while he fed live brine shrimp to a few dozen tanks of young fish, I hosed out one of the tubs and prepared a brine mixture and sprinkled the little dry eggs on it.

Then we went downstairs and Wong announced that dinner was ready, and it was a Szechuan shrimp dish with scallions and those little black peppers that it is a terrible idea to bite into. Wong’s shrimps had very little in common with the ones I had been feeding to our fish. He’s a fairly sensational cook, and never seems to make the same thing twice.

I stayed around long enough to win a few games of chess. Then I went downstairs and said polite things to Consuela and Carmelita and Maria and some other girls whose names I didn’t know, and let Juana the Madame pinch my cheek, which I wish she would stop doing, and then I started walking downtown.

The Cornelia Street Theater was located in a basement. You can probably guess what street it was on. There was a banner outside at street level announcing that they were doing
Uncle Vanya
, by Chekhov.

Maybe you know what the play is about. If not, I’m not going to be much help to you. I paid two dollars for a ticket and sat fairly close to the stage. (Actually, there were only about fifty seats in the house, so it wouldn’t have been possible to sit very far from the stage.) Maybe thirty of the fifty seats were empty. I sat and watched the play without paying any attention to it. I don’t know whether it was good or not. I just couldn’t concentrate. I would drift off into thought chains and just let my mind wander all over the place, and once in a while Kim Trelawney would appear on stage and I would take some time out to look at her, but she didn’t have many lines and never hung around long, and as soon as she went off I went off myself.

I guess the show must go on, although with this show I couldn’t quite see it. I mean, anybody could have played Kim’s part that night, for all she had to do up there. And it wasn’t as though an audience of thousands would have killed themselves if they didn’t see
Uncle Vanya
that night. The way she had acted at the funeral, obviously taking it all hard, I hadn’t really expected her to show up for the play.

There were two intermissions, and each of them drained a little of the audience away, so by the time the final curtain went down there were only about a dozen of us there to applaud, and not all of us did it very enthusiastically. The cast tried to take two bows, but by the time the curtain came up a second time everybody had already stopped applauding and people were on their way out of the theater. It was sort of sad.

I managed to get backstage and meet Kim. She blinked a little while I introduced myself, and when I said I was a friend of Melanie’s, she nodded in recognition. “I saw you at the funeral,” she said.

“I’d like to talk to you, if I could.”

“About Melanie?”

“Sort of.”

“I’ll meet you out front,” she said. “Just give me a few minutes.”

She took about four of them, and came out wearing jeans and a peasant blouse and carrying a canvas shoulder bag in red, white and blue. She suggested we have coffee at O’John’s, a little place on the corner of West 4th.

“Gordie’s going to meet me there in a few minutes,” she said. “He doesn’t like me walking home alone.”

We got a window table and ordered two cups of coffee. “Gordie’s a little overprotective,” she said. “Sometimes it bothers me. But sometimes I like it.”

“Was Gordie the fellow you were with this afternoon?”

“Yes.” She smiled suddenly, and instantly reminded me very much of Melanie, the way her entire face was so immediately transformed by her smile. “I haven’t known him very long,” she said, “and I don’t really know him very well. In certain ways, that is. He’s very different from the type of boy I usually go out with.”