Make Out with Murder

by Lawrence Block

  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.”

  “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 ba
bies 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 yo
u 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.”