Make Out with Murder (6 page)

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand,” he said. His voice was dry but gentle. “I read about Melanie, of course. When that sort of thing happens I merely wish they could hold off until I either die or become senile. I’ve given up asking that tragedy be averted entirely. I merely wish to be spared the knowledge of it.” He looked off into space for a moment, then returned his eyes to mine. “I didn’t see Melanie often after her father’s death. But I always liked her. She was a good person.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Your name is Harrison, I believe. And you work for a man named Haig, but I don’t believe I know him.”

“Leo Haig,” I said. “The detective.”

“No, I don’t know him. I don’t know any detectives, I don’t believe. Any living detectives. What’s your connection with Melanie Trelawney?”

I’d had a whole approach planned, but it didn’t seem to fit the person Addison Shivers turned out to be. “It’s not much of a connection,” I said. “I knew her for the past month; she was my friend.”

“And?”

“She was murdered,” I said. “Leo Haig and I are trying to find out who killed her.”

This, let me tell you, was not part of the original game plan. Haig had emphasized that there was no need to pass on our suspicions and convictions to anyone else for the time being. But he had also always told me about instinct guided by experience, or intuition guided by experience, or intelligence guided by experience, and that’s what I was using.

Mr. Shivers sat there and listened while I told him all the reasons why Leo Haig and I knew Melanie had been murdered. He knew how to listen, and his eyes showed that he was following what he was hearing. He heard me all the way through and then asked a few questions, such as why I had not mentioned any of this to the police, and when I answered his questions he nodded and sat forward in his chair and folded his hands on the top of his old oak desk.

After a moment he said, “You’ll want information, of course. About the will, about the disposition of funds. I can tell you all that.” He got a remote look in his eyes again. “Poor Cyrus,” he said. “He was my client for fifty years, you know. Needless to say he employed a great many other attorneys, but I was his lawyer in all personal matters. And he was my friend for as long as he was my client. He was a very great man, you know.”

“He must have been.”

“A great man. I’m not sure that he was a
good
man, mind you. Goodness and greatness rarely keep house together. But I can say that he was a good friend. And now three of his daughters are dead. And his only son.”

“His son?”

“Cyrus, Junior. He was the second born, he died in infancy. Cyrus never ceased to mourn him, especially when it became evident that he would not be fathering any more children. He wanted the name continued, you see. He was resigned to the fact that it would not be, ultimately, and felt it would be sufficient that his seed would endure through his daughters.” He cleared his throat. “And now three of his daughters are dead in less than a year.”

Cyrus, Jr. That explained the six-year gap between Caitlin and Robin.

“I respect your logic concerning Melanie’s death,” he said. “I agree that she must almost certainly have been murdered. You realize, of course, that this does not call for the conclusion that Robin and Jessica were murdered as well.”

“I know.”

“Though one cannot deny the possibility. Or the danger to the two remaining Trelawney girls.”

I nodded.

“What do you and Mr. Haig intend to do?”

“Try to warn Mrs. Vandiver and Kim. And try to figure out who killed Melanie and how to prove it.”

“You ought to have a client,” he said. He opened his desk drawer and took out a large checkbook, the kind with three checks on a page. He wrote out a check, noted it on the stub, and handed it across the desk to me. It was made out to Leo Haig and the amount was a thousand dollars.

“I don’t know what your rates are,” he said. Neither, to tell you the truth, did I. “This will serve as a retainer. Note that I am engaging you to look out for the interests of Cyrus Trelawney, deceased. That leaves you a considerable degree of leeway.”

“I think I understand.”

He had one of his junior clerks find various papers about the Trelawney estate. He went over them with me and explained the parts I couldn’t understand, and I filled the rest of my notebook. He poured himself a large brandy in the course of this, and asked me if I wanted anything myself. I told him I didn’t.

When I had everything he could give me, he excused himself again for not getting to his feet. He leaned across the desk and we shook hands.

I asked if I would be seeing him the following day at Melanie’s funeral.

“No, I don’t go to funerals any more,” he said. “If I did, I shouldn’t have time for anything else.”

Five

I had never been to a funeral before. When my parents committed suicide, I was away at school. I suppose the funeral took place before I could have gotten to it, but I have to admit I never even thought about it. I just packed a bag and started hitchhiking.

If Melanie’s funeral was typical, I’m surprised the custom hasn’t died out. I mean, I can sort of understand the way the Irish do it. Everybody stays drunk for three or four days. That makes a certain amount of sense. But here we were all gathered in this stark, modernistic, non-denominational cesspool on Lexington and 54th in the middle of the afternoon, listening to a man who had never met her say dumb things about a dead girl. One of the worst parts was that the jerk was sort of glossing over the fact that Melanie was either a junkie or a suicide, or both. He didn’t come right out and say anything about casting first stones, but you could see it was running through his mind. I wanted to jump up and tell the world Melanie was murdered. I managed to control myself.

I wouldn’t have been telling the world, anyway. Just a tiny portion of it. There were none of Melanie’s friends there except me. Her relationships with the people in her neighborhood had been deliberately casual, and even if some of them had decided to come to the funeral, they would have been too stoned to get it all together.
“Hey, man, like we got to go see them plant old Melanie.” “No, baby, that was last week.” “Far out!”

I recognized Caitlin and Kim with no trouble. I would have figured out who they were anyway since they were seated in the front pew, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. They didn’t exactly look alike, and they didn’t look like Melanie exactly, but all of them looked like old Cyrus Trelawney. Except on them it looked becoming. They had what I guess we can call the Trelawney nose, strong and assertive, and the deep-set eyes. Caitlin was blond and fair-skinned, a tall woman, expensively dressed. The man beside her wore a tweed suit that didn’t have leather elbow patches yet. His nose and lips were thin and his expression was pained. I didn’t have much trouble figuring out that he was Gregory Vandiver. Of the Sands Point Vandivers.

Kim was very short and slender, also fair-skinned, but with hair as dark as Melanie’s. She seemed to be crying a lot, which set her apart from the rest of the company. Crying or not, I could see what the theater critic meant; she would have been an ornament to any stage. The guy next to her, on the other hand, had no decorative effect whatsoever. He kept reaching over and patting her hand. He looked familiar, and I finally figured out where I had seen him before. He played the title role in
King Kong.

Kim was wearing a simple black dress, and she managed simultaneously to look good in it and to give the impression that she didn’t generally wear dresses. The ape was wearing a suit for the first time in his life.

There was a handful of other people I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t identify. I guessed that the plump, boyish man in the gray sharkskin suit might be Ferdinand Bell, Robin’s husband. If there was a professional numismatist in the room, he was likely to be it. And a girl off to one side was probably Andrea Sugar, if Andrea Sugar was there at all, because nobody else around could possibly have been a recreational therapist at something called Indulgence. The rest of the crowd was mostly old, and you sensed somehow that they were there because they liked funerals better than daytime television. I understand there are a lot of people like that. Every couple of days they trot down to the local mortuary to see who’s playing.

The casket was open. I guess they do this so that the more skeptical mourners can assure themselves that the person they’re mourning is genuinely dead. And so that the undertaker can show off his cosmetic skill.

I wasn’t going to look. But then I decided that was silly, and I went up and looked, and it wasn’t Melanie at all. There was rouge on her cheeks and lipstick on her mouth and eyebrow pencil on her eyebrows and some tasteless shit had cut her pretty hair and styled it, if you could call it that. Melanie never wore makeup in her life. This wasn’t Melanie. This was a reject from the waxworks.

I really felt like hitting somebody.

Haig had told me to approach one of the sisters after the funeral. It was up to me which one I chose. “The older girl is probably better equipped to make a decision,” he said, “while the younger one would probably be more receptive to overtures from someone your age. Use your judgment.”

I used my judgment, and decided Kim might well be more receptive to overtures from someone my age, especially in view of the fact that I was more receptive to the idea of making them to her than to Caitlin. But I used a little more of my judgment and came to the conclusion that I would rather talk to Kim without that Neanderthal of hers hulking nearby. The idea of trying to Broach A Serious Subject to her while she was intermittently dissolving in tears also left something to be desired. So it was Caitlin by default.

If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about the trip to the cemetery or the burial. I rode out in a car full of old ladies talking about convertible debentures. There was a machine at the graveside to lower the casket, untouched by human hands, and off in the distance a couple of old men stood leaning on their shovels. They reminded me of the vultures in cartoons about people lost in the desert.

Anyway, the same limousines drove everybody back from Long Island and deposited us in front of the mortuary, and I managed to walk over to Caitlin Vandiver and her husband. I introduced myself and asked if I could talk with her about Melanie.

I got a smile from her and a blank look from him, and I also got the impression that she smiled a lot and he looked blank a lot. “So you were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said. “Well, I don’t know that I can tell you very much about her. I don’t even know what you would want to hear. We were never terribly close, you know. I’m several years older than she was.”

She paused there, as if waiting for me to express doubt. She didn’t look old by any means. I’m a terrible judge of age, but I probably would have guessed her at thirty and I knew she was six years older than that.

“There are a couple of things,” I said. “I think it would be worthwhile for us to talk.”

Her smile froze up a little, and at the same time her eyes showed a little more than the polite interest they had held earlier. “I see,” she said.

I don’t know what she saw.

“Well,” she said, the smile in full force again, “actually I could use some company. I hate to eat alone and funerals always make me ravenous. Is that shameful, do you think?”

I mumbled some dumb thing or other. Caitlin turned to her husband and put her cheek out for a kiss. He picked up his cue and kissed her.

“Greg always plays squash on Fridays,” she said. “Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night, you understand.” The two of them said pleasant things to one another and Vandiver strode athletically down the street, arms swinging at his sides. I decided that he probably jogged every morning.

“He jogs every morning before breakfast,” Caitlin said. It unsettles me when people do this. I feel as though I must have a window in the middle of my forehead. “He’s keeping himself in marvelous physical condition.”

“That’s very good,” I said.

“Oh, it’s simply great. I wonder what he thinks he’s saving himself for. I haven’t had a really decent orgasm with him since the first time I saw him in his jogging suit. Romance tiptoed out the window. Shall we eat? I know a charming little French place near here. Never crowded, quite intimate, and they make a decent martini; and if I don’t have one soon—fellow me lad—I shall positively
die.”

And, after we had walked about a block, she said, “I pick the wrong words sometimes, damn it. I shouldn’t have said that about positively dying. Too many people are doing it lately. Robin, Jessica, now Melanie. It’s scary, isn’t it?”

She took my hand as she said this and gave it a squeeze. I gave a squeeze back, and I think she smiled when I did.

We went to restaurant on 48th Street. It was empty, except for a couple of serious drinkers at the bar and a couple at a side table trying to stretch out lunch so that it reached all the way to quitting time. We walked through to the garden in the rear and took a table.

“Tanqueray martini, straight up, bone dry, twist,” she told the waiter. It sounded as though she’d had practice with the line. To me she said, “Do you drink? I know so many people your age don’t these days.”

I’d been trying to decide between a Coke and a beer, but that did it. “Double Irish whiskey,” I said. “With water back.”

Her eyebrows went up, but just a little. She told me I was to call her Caitlin. I was not certain that I was going to do this, and supposed I would sidestep the issue by not calling her anything at all. She seemed to think Harrison was my first name and wanted to know what my last name was, and I told her, and she got a little rattled and said that Harrison Harrison was unusual, to say the least, and ultimately we got that straightened out. She didn’t ask me what Chip was short for, which was one strong point in her favor.

There were other points in her favor. Maybe her husband jogged every morning before breakfast because he was trying to catch up with her. The money she spent on her clothes and her hair didn’t hurt, but it didn’t account for her figure or the general youthfulness of her appearance. She was tall for a woman, and quite slender, and her breasts were not especially easy to ignore.