Make Out with Murder (8 page)

“How?”

“Well, you know. He’s not educated; he dropped out of high school and went right to work on the docks. Sometimes I have the feeling that we don’t really have very much to talk about. And his ideas about women, I mean they’re very old-fashioned. He believes a woman’s place is in the home and everything, and he doesn’t really think very much of my being an actress. He’s proud when I get a part and stuff like that, but he thinks it’s just something for me to amuse myself with until we get married and start making babies.”

“And you don’t feel that way?”

She gnawed the tip of her index finger. “I don’t know exactly
how
I feel, Chip. From the time I was a little girl I wanted to be an actress. It was what I always wanted. After one semester of college I knew I had to get away from classrooms and spend all my time around theaters. But it’s so hard. You can’t imagine.”

“I guess it’s very hard to get started.”

“It’s almost impossible. You saw how many people we had in the theater tonight. Maybe thirty.”

“If that.”

“I know. It was closer to twenty, and most of them were friends who didn’t pay for their tickets. And the actors didn’t get paid anything, we’re all working for free in the hope that somebody important will see us on stage and have something else for us, and—”

She told me a lot more about what was wrong with trying to act for a living. And then she said, “Sometimes I think I should just forget the whole thing and marry Gordie. That’s what he wants me to do. It’s a temptation, you know. Just give it all up and have babies and enjoy life. Except I worry that I would wake up some day years from now and wonder what I had done with my life. It’s very confusing.”

She looked straight into my eyes during this last speech and I felt as though I could see clear through to the back of her head. I found it easy to understand why Gordie was overprotective. There was something about Kim that made you want to put your arms around her and tell her everything was going to be all right. Even if it wasn’t.

I was just about to reach across the table and take her hand when something changed on her face. She raised her eyes over my shoulder, then waved a hand. I turned, and of course it was good old Gordie.

He pulled a chair up and sat down. He did not seem overjoyed to see me there. (Which made it mutual, actually.) Kim introduced us, and I found out that he had a last name, McLeod. Then he found out that I was a friend of Melanie’s and some of the suspicion left his face. Not all of it, but some.

“You see the play?” I admitted that I had. “Saw it myself a couple of times. Rather catch a movie myself. All these people just talking back and forth. What did you think of Kim?”

“I thought she was very good,” I said.

“Yeah, only good thing about the play, far as I’m concerned. She’s very talented.”

I said she certainly was, or something equally significant.

“But I don’t like the people she has to hang around with. It’s a well-known fact they’re all fairies in that business. A well-known fact. Still in all, as a way for her to pass the time until she settles herself down—”

He went off on a speech that Gloria Steinem would not have enjoyed. I have to admit that I didn’t follow it too closely. It was already becoming clear to me that Gordie McLeod and I were never going to become best buddies. I was noting Kim’s reactions to what he was saying and trying to figure out just what it was about this ape that attracted her. I had no trouble figuring out what it was about her that appealed to him.

“Well,” he said, “it’s gettin’ to be about that time. Nice meetin’ you, guy.”

“There was something I wanted to discuss with Kim,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“About Melanie,” Kim said.

He settled back in his chair. “Well, sure,” he said.

“It’s a little public here,” I said. “Could we go somewhere more private?”

“What for?”

“So that we could talk in private.”

“What’s this all about, anyway?”

I wasn’t making much headway. Kim came to the rescue and suggested we all go back to the apartment. She didn’t say
her
apartment or
their
apartment, just
the
apartment. He didn’t seem wild about the idea, but we went anyway. He insisted on paying for my coffee. I have to admit I didn’t put up a fight.

The apartment, which did turn out to be their apartment, was on Bethune Street a few doors west of Hudson, which made it about equidistant from Kim’s theater and the Hudson docks where Gordie did something muscular. It was on the second floor of a good old four-story building. There were three high-ceilinged rooms and a little balcony with a view of nothing spectacular.

There was a good feeling to the apartment, and it was hard to believe Kim had rented it less than a year ago. There were some nice Oriental rugs, a couple of floor-to- ceiling bookshelves, and furniture that was both attractive and comfortable. It was not hard to guess which of the two of them had done the decorating.

Gordie got himself a beer and asked me as an afterthought if I wanted one. I didn’t disappoint him by accepting. He sprawled on the couch, took a gurgling swig of beer, and put his feet up. “Let’s have it,” he said.

I started my pitch. That I worked for Leo-Haig-the- Famous-Detective. That Haig and I had uncovered evidence that indicated a strong possibility that Melanie had been murdered. That there were grounds for speculation that Jessica, and perhaps Robin as well, had been similarly done in. That a client who I was not at liberty to name had hired Haig to nail the killer. That it was important to recognize that Caitlin and Kim might be in a certain amount of danger.

And so on.

I didn’t get to deliver this entire rap all at once because Gordie kept interrupting. He seemed to find it extremely difficult to follow a simple English sentence and even more difficult to put together one of his own, and he kept turning the conversation onto weird tangents. Earlier, I had found it disturbing that a girl like Kim was thinking about marrying an idiot like Gordie. Now I found it disturbing that she was living with him. What in hell did they talk about?

When I had been able to get it all out, and when Kim had a chance to ask a few questions of her own, Gordie took a last long drink of beer, crumpled the can impressively in one hand, and tossed it unsuccessfully at the wastebasket. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said.

I was sure he would.

“What I think, I think it’s a load of crap.”

“I see,” I lied.

“You know what your trouble is, Harrison? You’re one of these college boys. You read all these books and listened to all these egghead professors and it scrambled your brains.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Me, I’m an ordinary Joe, you know what I mean? An ordinary man, your average human being. What I mean, I didn’t have your advantages. I never even finished high school. I did my learning on the streets.”

“So?”

“So I don’t look for a complicated answer when there’s a simple one staring me in the face. The whole trouble with this country is too many guys like you who went to Harvard and they couldn’t recognize crap if they stepped in it.”

“I didn’t go to Harvard.”

“Manner of speaking. Where’d you go? Yale? Princeton?”

“I didn’t go to college. I didn’t finish high school; I got thrown out in my last year.”

“What are you trying to hand me?”

“Nothing in particular, I just—”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I got no use for college boys, I’ll tell you that straight out, but one thing I got less use for is a college boy pretends he’s not a college boy. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

Enough. “The point is,” I said, “that if Kim is in any danger—”

“Kim’s not in no danger. And if she is, that’s what I’m here for. What are you saying, you’re gonna protect her? I mean, I can’t see you protecting a pigeon from a cat. No offense, but you get my meaning.”

I got his meaning.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll be protecting Kim no matter what. This city’s a fuckin’ jungle; nothing but junkies and spades and fairies and weirdos. But all this murder shit, you’re making a mountain out of a mole’s hill. Robin, she’s in a car and it cracks up. That sound like a murder? How many people go out like that every weekend?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then there’s Jessica. She’s a dyke and a whore and they’re all crazy, so maybe she wasn’t getting it regular enough or who knows why, but she goes out the window. Happens all the time. Then there’s Melanie, who’s some kind of a crazy hippie with drugs and shit and who knows what, and junkies are all the time shoving needles in their arm and winding up dead, you see it every night on television. I mean, let’s face it, Kim’s the only one in the goddamned family that has anything much on the ball. The older one, Caitlin, she just a nymphomaniac and a lush. Old man Trelawney must have been pretty sharp to make the score he made, I’ll give him that, but he wasn’t too good at having kids. Kim’s okay but the other four were a batch of sickies.”

“They had problems,” Kim said. “Don’t talk about them like that.”

“Look, everybody has problems, kid, but those nuts—”

Kim’s eyes flared. “I
loved
Melanie,” she said. “And I love Caitlin. I loved all my sisters, and I don’t want to hear you
talk
like that about them!”

She stormed out of the room. Gordie’s face darkened briefly, then relaxed. “Women,” he said. “I’ll tell you something, they’re all of them a little nuts. They don’t have thoughts the way men do. They have feelings. You got to know how to handle them.”

After they were married, I knew how he would handle her. He would beat her up whenever he felt she needed it.

“Look,” he said, “I want you to stay out of Kim’s life. You get me?”

“Huh?”

“I know you got to work your angle like everybody else. You already got a client, you don’t need to hang around Kim. I don’t want her getting upset.”

“I didn’t know that I did anything to upset her.”

“Seeing you upsets me. And when I get upset Kim gets upset, and I don’t want that. You got an angle to work and I can respect that, but I don’t want you getting in my way.”

“I really want it to be him,” I told Haig. “I want it to be him and I want them to bring back capital punishment. Someone has to throw the switch. I volunteer.”

“Surely the fact he’s living with Kim has nothing to do with your motivation.”

“You mean am I interested myself? I don’t honestly know. She reminds me of Melanie, and I can’t make up my mind whether that turns me on or off. The thing is I
like
her, and I can’t see her spending a lifetime with a clown like him. Hell, I can’t see her spending a social evening with him.”

“But he seems an unlikely suspect.”

“I know. I can see him committing murder. I don’t think he’d draw the line at something like that. But he wouldn’t be so clever in choosing different murder methods. He’d probably just hit each of them over the head.”

“I gather he’s not enormously intelligent,” Haig said dryly.

“He’s about as dumb as you can get and still function.”

“Is he crafty, though?”

I thought about that. I said, “Yes, I think he is. Animal cunning, that kind of thing.”

“He assumed you were ‘working an angle.’ I submit he so assumed because he’s working an angle of his own.”

I nodded. “He was more or less telling me to stay off his turf. And he knows about the money. In fact he seems to know a lot about all the sisters. He hasn’t been with Kim that long, and they weren’t that close.”

“That struck me,” Haig said. His fingers went to his beard and his eyelids dropped shut. “He knows about the Trelawney money. He wants to marry Kim, to the point where she apparently feels pressured. She hasn’t come into the principal of her inheritance yet, of course. And won’t for three years.” He remained silent for a few minutes. I knew his mind was working, but I had no idea what it was working on. Mine was just sort of treading water.

I got up and went over to watch the African gouramis. There were three half-grown guppies still swimming around. While I watched, the female gourami swam over to one of the guppies but didn’t bother devouring it. I guess she wasn’t hungry at the moment.

Haig raises several strains of fancy guppies. The species is a fascinating one, and the males of
Lebistes reticulata
are as individual as thumbprints. When they’re about half-grown, you can tell (if you’re Leo Haig) which ones are going to amount to something. Those you keep.

The others serve as food for other fish. Haig is fond of remarking that the best food for fish is fish, and some of ours require a certain proportion of five food in their diet. We have a pair of leaf fish, for example, who go through a dozen young guppies apiece every day. It used to bother me, the whole idea of purposely raising fish so that you can feed them to other fish, but that’s the way Nature does it in the ocean. I used to know a guy who had a pet king snake and used to buy mice and feed them to it. That would bother me a lot more, I think.

“Chip.” I turned. “There is a motive lurking here. I keep getting teasing glimpses of it but I don’t have enough hard information to see it. We need to know more about wills and such. Tomorrow—”

But he didn’t get to finish the sentence, because just then we heard glass shatter somewhere in the front of the house. We looked at each other, and I started to say something, and then the bomb went off and the whole house shook.

I stood there for a minute. Waiting for the next explosion, probably, but there wasn’t one. I went into the front room and saw a crack in one of the front windows.

Then the girls downstairs started shrieking.

Seven

It was a pipe bomb consisting of a length of pipe filled with various goodies, but I’m not going to go into detail. I mean, who knows what lunatic out there might get inspired and follow my directions and bomb a whorehouse on his own? Haig says that Alfred Hitchcock once had a scene in which an assassin used a gun built into a camera, and then a few months after the picture was released someone assassinated somebody just that way, in Portugal I think, and Hitchcock felt very ginchy about it. I can understand that.