Make Out with Murder Read online

  “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.

  It was really something to see.

  “So LiCastro is crazy about tropical fish,” I said later. “I was wondering how on earth you would know somebody like him. His discus spawned, but a fungus got the eggs.”

  “That usually happens.”

  “He was tickled enough that he got them to spawn in the first place. He’s trying a new fungicide and he wants your opinion of it. He didn’t remember the name. He’s going to call you later.”

  “And he’ll make some inquiries about Gordon McLeod?”

  “That’s what he said. I had a very eerie feeling about that. I wanted to make sure he just made inquiries. I thought he might think I was asking for something more serious than inquiries. Like he might have thought I was being subtle and indicating you wanted McLeod killed if I didn’t spell things out.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure. Also I had the feeling that if you did want McLeod killed, and you said as much to LiCastro, then that would be the end of McLeod.”

  “That I do not doubt,” Haig said. “Continue.”

  I continued. “Jessica Trelawney drew a will a couple of weeks after Robin died. I have the date written down if it matters.”

  “It may.”

  “Her lawyer says that’s a common response to the death of someone close. He also says she left everything to a feminist group called Radicalesbians. I’m not making this up. He is sure the will is going to be challenged by attorneys for Caitlin Vandiver, and he told me off the record that he’s just as sure it won’t stand up. He more or less implied that he drew it in such a way as to make it easy to challenge. I’m pretty sure he’s not a big fan of Radicalesbians.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So no one stood to gain a penny by Jessica’s death, except for Radicalesbians, but that doesn’t prove anything because no one necessarily knew about her will. Before that she had never drawn a will, and if she had died intestate, everything would have been divided among the surviving sisters. Which is what would have happened to Robin’s money if she and Bell had died together in the car accident.”

  “Car wreck,” Haig said.

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “Precision is important. Language is a tool, its edge must be kept sharp.”

  “Indeed. Melanie did die intestate, which is a word I have now used twice in two minutes and can’t remember ever using before. I suppose it’s a part of keeping the edge of my tool sharp. So her money will be divided among Caitlin and Kim, and—”

  “Between.”

  “Huh?”

  “One divides among three persons and between two. I don’t like to keep correcting you, Chip.”

  “I can tell you don’t. I found out who Caitlin’s lawyer is, but couldn’t reach him.”

  “He wouldn’t divulge information about her will anyway.”

  “He probably will, because it’s Addison Shivers, but I couldn’t get to see him. Anyway, I figured he would tell us or not tell us over the phone. I would guess that her money is scheduled to go to her husband, but you can’t be sure, can you? I mean, she changes husbands pretty quickly, and if she’s not morbid she might not want to have to change her will that frequently. The problem is that I keep going out after information and I keep getting it and it doesn’t seem to get me anywhere.”

  “Sooner or later everything will fit into place.”

  “By that time everyone could be dead.”

  “In the long run everyone always is, Chip.” He began filling a pipe, tamping down each pinch of tobacco very carefully. “We have to make haste slowly,” he went on, while making haste slowly with the pipe. “We are making progress. We are in the possession of data we previously lacked. That is progress.”

  “I suppose.”

  “There are cases that lend themselves to Sherlockian methodology. Cases which are solved by the substance in a man’s trouser turnups. Cases which hinge on a dog’s silence in the night or the chemical analysis of coffee grounds.” He closed his eyes and put the deliberately filled pipe back in the pipe rack. His hand went to his beard and he leaned back in his chair. “This, I think, is another sort of case entirely. There is someone somewhere with a logical reason to kill the five daughters of Cyrus Trelawney. He had a reason to sabotage Ferdinand Bell’s car, a reason to pitch Jessica Trelawney out a window, a reason to inject Melanie Trelawney with a fatal overdose of heroin. If we determine the reason, we will have determined the killer.”

  He sat forward suddenly, and his eyes opened like those dolls that go sleepy-bye when you lay them down on their backs. “Do you know something, Chip? I think there’s an element of Ross MacDonald in this. I can’t avoid the feeling that the underlying motive is buried somewhere deep in the past. As though it all has its roots forty years ago, in Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “A figure of speech. So often Lew Archer uncovers something that started forty years ago in Canada, you know.” He spun around in his chair and gazed at the rasboras. They didn’t seem at all self-conscious. While he let them provide inspiration, I took out my nail file and cleaned out the dirt from under my fingernails. I only tell you this so you won’t think I was just sitting there doing nothing.

  He turned around again, eventually, and folded his hands on his round belly. He looked elfin but determined. “I shall call Addison Shivers,” he said. “I have some questions to ask him.”

  He reached for the telephone, and it rang. So he picked it up, naturally enough. It doesn’t seem to surprise him much when things like this happen. In fact he made it look as though he had been waiting for it to ring.

  He talked briefly, mostly saying things like “Yes,” and “Indeed.” Then he hung up and raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Our client,” he said.

  “Mr. Shivers?”

  “Mrs. Vandiver. She’s at her house on Long Island. She wants to see you immediately. She says it’s rather urgent.”

  Eleven

  You get to Sands Point by taking the Long Island Rail Road to the Port Washington stop. I understand that there are people who do this every day. What I don’t understand is why.

  I got on the train at Penn Station, and got off it at Port Washington. I stood there on the platform for a minute, and a very tall and very thin man came up to me. “You would be Mr. Harrison,” he said.

  “I would,” I said. “I mean, uh, I am. Yes.”

  “I am Seamus,” he said. “I’ve br
ought the car.”

  The car was a Mercedes, about the size of Chicago. I started to get in the front next to Seamus, but stopped when he gave me a very disappointed glance. I closed the door and got in back instead. He seemed happier about this.

  There was a partition between the front and rear seats, which kept Seamus and me from having to make small talk to each other. I sat back and looked out the window at one expensive home after another. Finally, we turned onto what I thought was a side road but turned out to be the Vandiver driveway. It wandered through a stand of old trees and finally led to a house.

  The house gave you an idea of what God could have done if he’d had the money. That’s not my line; I read it somewhere, but I can’t think of a way to improve on it. There were these Grecian columns in front which you would think no house could live up to, and then the house went on to overpower the columns, and it was all about as impressive as anything I’ve ever seen. Caitlin and Melanie had each inherited the same amount of money, and Caitlin lived here, while Melanie had lived in Cockroach Heaven, and it wasn’t hard to feel that Caitlin had a better appreciation of creature comfort.

  She was waiting for me in a room carpeted in white shag and decorated in what I think they call French provincial, The furniture did not come from the Salvation Army, There were oil paintings on the walls, including one that I recognized as a portrait of Cyrus Trelawney.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “It’s been such a bore of a day. Your drink is Irish whiskey, if I remember j correctly. Straight, with a soda chaser?”

  It was the last thing I wanted, but I evidently had an image to maintain. She made the drinks, fixing herself a massive Martini, and her eyes sparkled as we touched our glasses together. “To crime,” she said.

  I took a sip and avoided coughing. I’m sure it was excellent whiskey, but at that point it tasted a lot like shellac.

  “I hope you didn’t mind my sending Seamus for you,” she said. “He’s not really a chauffeur. He’s more of a general houseman. I usually prefer to do my own driving, actually, but I hate waiting for anything. Especially trains, and the Long Island is hardly ever in on time. Did you have a dreadful ride?”