Make Out with Murder (9 page)

What happened was this: someone threw a pipe bomb into the second floor front of our building. That was the broken glass, the sound of the bomb going through the window, which had not been open at the time. Then the bomb went off, shaking the whole house and, more to the point, giving Maria Tijerino and Able-Bodied Seaman Elmer J. Seaton a greater thrill than they could possibly have anticipated.

Shit. I don’t want to be cute about this because it was not at all nice. Maria and the sailor were in bed in the front room at the time and the damned bomb blew them to hell and gone. I went in there and looked, God knows why, and then I went into the john and threw up. I mean, I could make a few dozen jokes along the lines of If-you-gotta-go-etc. But the hell with it. I saw it, and it was ugly.

The explosion didn’t hurt anybody but Maria and the sailor. It put some cracks in the plaster throughout the house without doing any real structural damage.

It also made some of our fish tanks leak.

Haig and Wong Fat and I missed a lot of the action because we were running around trying to make sure the fish were all right. That probably sounds very callous, but you have to realize that there was nothing we could possibly do for Maria or the sailor. And a leaking fish tank is something that requires attention. If a fish tank absolutely cracks to hell and gone, you can just go to church and light candles for the fish, but we didn’t have any that got cracked. The thing is, shock waves will interfere with the structural soundness of an aquarium, which is basically a metal frame with a slate bottom and four glass sides, and quite a few of ours sprung slow leaks, and that meant we had to transfer the fish to sound tanks and empty the leakers before they leaked all over the place. Eventually we would have to repair all the leakers, a process which involves coating all the edges with rubber cement and cursing a lot when the tank leaks anyway.

So while we were scurrying around examining tanks on the third and fourth floor, I gather half the police in Manhattan were stumbling around on the first two floors. There were a couple of ambulances out front and a Fire Department rescue vehicle. There were beat patrolmen and Bomb Squad detectives and God knows who else, and, because it was established that Maria and her sailor were dead, which could not have been too difficult to establish, there were two cops from Homicide.

Yeah.

I suppose you already figured out that it would be the same two cops, Gregorio and Seidenwall. You must have.

Because you’re reading this, and if I were reading it I would certainly expect to keep encountering the same two cops. (I gather this never happens in real life, but just the other day I read a mystery by Justin Scott called
Many Happy Returns
and the lead character kept cracking up oil trucks, of all things, and each time he turned a truck over the same two humorous cops turned up to glare at him. It didn’t seem to matter what part of the city he was in, he always ran into the same goddam cops.)

The thing is, you’re reading this in a book, so you know it’s Gregorio and Seidenwall again. I wasn’t reading it, I was living gamely through it, and they were the last thing I expected.

But there they were.

“… check on the possibility of …” Gregorio said. I don’t know how the sentence had started or how he was planning to end it. He had evidently begun it in the hallway, undeterred by the lack of anyone to hear it, and he didn’t end it, because he caught sight of me. “I’ll be a ring-tailed son of a bitch,” he said.

“Er,” I said.

“You again,” he said.

You again, I thought.

“I don’t like this at all,” he said. “A hippie girl OD’s in a toilet on the Lower East Side and you’re the one who discovers the body. A sailor and a spic hooker fuck themselves into an explosion and you’re living upstairs. You know something, Harrison? I’m not crazy about any of this.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“I never believed in coincidence,” Gregorio said. “It makes me nervous. I hate to be nervous. I got a stomach that when I get nervous my stomach gets nervous, and I can live without a nervous stomach. I can live better and longer without a nervous stomach.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“I don’t like the sense of things fitting together like this,”

Gregorio said. “How long have you lived in New York, Harrison?”

“A couple of years,” I said. “Off and on.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“Off and on,” Gregorio said. “A couple of years off and on.”

“We oughta take him in.”

“A couple of years you were here, and a lot of years I was here, and all that time I never heard of you, Harrison. I never knew you existed. Now I see you twice in two days.”

“Three days,” I said.

“Shut up,” Gregorio said.

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

Leo Haig said, “Sir!”

And everybody else shut up.

He said, “Sir. You are on my property without my invitation or enthusiastic approval. You have come, as well I can appreciate, to investigate a bombing. You wish to ascertain whether or not the bombing is impinging in any way upon myself and my associates. It is not. We are not involved. The building has been bombed. Living in a building which is sooner or later bombed is evidently a natural consequence of living in the city of New York. It is perhaps an even more natural consequence of living above a house of ill repute. I am not happy about this, sir, as no doubt neither are you. I am distressed, especially as this bombing causes me considerable inconvenience. I am increasingly displeased at your attitude toward my associate, and, by extension, toward myself.”

Gregorio and Seidenwall looked down. Leo Haig looked up. Hard. Gregorio and Seidenwall looked away.

Haig said, “Sir. I assume you have no warrant. I further assume your contingency privileges obviate the necessity for a warrant to intrude upon my property. But, sir, I now ask you to leave. You cannot seriously entertain the notion that I or my associate did in fact bomb our own building.

“We are not witlings. Each of us can vouch for the other’s presence at the time of the bombing, as can my associate Mr. Wong Fat.” Wong was at that moment cowering under his bed saying the rosary. “You can, sir, as your estimable colleague suggests, take Mr. Harrison into custody. It would be an unutterably stupid act. You could, on the other hand, quit these premises. It appears to me that these are your alternatives. You have only to choose.”

I never heard the like. Neither, I guess, did Gregorio. They scooted.

I always wanted to call someone a witling,” Haig said later. “Wolfe does it all the time. I always wanted to do that.”

“You did it very well,” I said.

“I have my uncle to thank for that,” Leo Haig said. “I have my uncle to thank for many things, but one fact sums it all up. But for him, I would have gone through life without ever being able to call a policeman a witling.”

We had a beer on the strength of that.

Eight

I spent the night in Haig’s house. It was late by the time we were done with the fish, even later before we finished talking about the bombing. We agreed that it was possible someone had bombed the whorehouse on purpose, and we also agreed that we didn’t believe it had happened that way. That bomb had gone through the wrong window. It had been meant for us, and whoever threw it had his signals crossed.

Which was one of the reasons I spent the night on the couch. Somebody was trying to kill us, and I really didn’t want to give him any encouragement.

“You ought to move in here,” Haig said over breakfast. “It would expedite matters.”

“Not if I have to spend any time on that couch.”

“It was uncomfortable?”

“It was horrible,” I said. “I kept waking up and wanting to stretch out on the floor, but moving was too painful.”

“Of course you’d have a proper bed,” Haig said stiffly. “And a proper room of your own, and the implicit right to entertain friends of your own choosing. In addition—”

He paraded the usual arguments. I paid a little attention to them and a lot of attention to breakfast. Corned beef hash, fried eggs, and the world’s best coffee. I don’t always like coffee all that much, but Wong Fat makes the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s a Louisiana blend with chicory in it and he uses this special porcelain drip pot and it really makes a difference.

After breakfast Haig gave me a list of things to do regarding the fish. While I was upstairs attending to them he was on the phone in his office. I finished up and was sitting on my side of the partners’ desk at a quarter after eleven. Haig was reading one of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. I forget which one. He said, “Formidable,” once or twice. I spent ten minutes watching him read. Then he closed the book and leaned back in his chair and played with his beard. After a few minutes of that he look one of his pipes apart. He put it back together again and started to take it apart a second time, but stopped himself.

“Chip,” he said.

I tried to look bright-eyed.

“I’ve made some calls. I spoke with Mr. Shivers and Mrs. Vandiver. Also with several other lawyers. Also with Mr. Boll and a man named LiCastro. Also—no matter. There are several courses of inquiry you might pursue today. You have your notebook?”

I had my notebook.

Indulgence was on the second floor of a renovated brownstone on 53rd Street, between Lexington and Third. The shop on the first floor sold gourmet cookware. I walked up a flight of stairs and paused for a moment in front of a Chinese red door with a brass nameplate on it. There was a bell, and another brass plate instructed me to ring it before opening the door. I followed orders.

The man behind the reception desk was small and precise and black. He had his hair in a tight Afro and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. His suit was black mohair and he was wearing a red paisley vest with it. His tie was a narrow black knit.

It was air-conditioned in there, but I couldn’t imagine how he could have come to work through all that heat in those clothes. And he looked as though he had never perspired in his life.

He asked if he could help me. I said that I wanted to see a girl named Andrea Sugar.

“Of course,” he said, and smiled briefly. “Miss Sugar is one of our recreational therapists. Do you require a massage?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Very good. Are you a member?”

I wasn’t, but it turned out that I could purchase a trial membership for ten dollars. This would entitle me to the services of a recreational therapist for thirty minutes. I handed over ten of Leo Haig’s dollars and he filled out a little membership card for me. When he asked me my name I said “Norman Conquest.” Don’t ask me why.

“Miss Sugar is engaged at the moment,” he said, after my ten dollar bill had disappeared. “She’ll be available in approximately ten minutes. Or you may put yourself in the hands of one of our other therapists. Here are photographs of several of them.”

He gave me a little leatherette photo album and I looked through it. There were a dozen photographs of recreational therapists, all of them naked and smiling. In the interests of therapy, I guess. I said I would prefer to wait for Miss Sugar and he nodded me to a couch and went back to his book. It was a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky, if you care.

I sat around for ten minutes during which the phone rang twice. The desk man answered, but didn’t say much. I leafed through
Sports Illustrated
and read something very boring about sailboat racing. He went into another room and came back to report that Miss Sugar was waiting for me in the third cubicle on the right. I walked down a short hallway and into a room a little larger than a throw rug. The walls were painted the same Chinese red as the door.

The floor was cork tile. The only piece of furniture in the room was a massage table with a fresh white sheet on it.

Andrea Sugar was standing beside the table. She wasn’t the girl I had seen at the funeral. She was wearing a white nurse’s smock. (I think that’s the right word for it.) She was tall, almost my height, and she looked a little like pictures of Susan Sontag. She said hello and wasn’t it hot out and other convention things, and I said hello and agreed that it was hot out there, all right, and she suggested I take off all my clothes and get on the table.

“I’m not really here for a massage,” I said.

“You’re not supposed to say that, honey.”

“But the thing is—”

“You’re here for a massage, sweetie. Your back hurts and you want a nice massage, you just paid ten dollars and for that you’ll get a very nice massage, and if something else should happen to develop, that’s between you and me, but I’m a recreational therapist and you’re a young man who needs a massage, and that’s how the rulebook reads, Okay?”

The thing is, I did sort of need a massage. My back still had kinks in it from Leo Haig’s corrugated couch. I just felt a little weird about taking all my clothes off in front of a stranger. I don’t think I have any particular hangups in that direction, actually, but the whole scene was somehow unreal. Anyway, I took off my clothes and hung them over a wooden thing designed for the purpose and got up on the table and onto my stomach.

“Now,” she said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

I guess the question didn’t need an answer, because she was already beginning to work on my back. She really knew how to give a back rub. Her hands were very strong j and she had a nice sense of touch and knew what muscles to concentrate on. When she got to the small of my back I could feel all the pain of a bad night’s sleep being sucked out of the base of my spine, like poison out of a snakebite.

“It’s about Jessica Trelawney,” I said.

The hands stopped abruptly. “Christ Almighty,” she said softly. “Who
are
you?”

“Chip Harrison,” I said. “I work for Leo Haig, the detective.”

“You’re not a cop.”

“No. Haig is a private investigator. I was also a friend of Melanie Trelawney’s.”

“She OD’d the other day.”

“That’s right.”

By now she had gone back to the massage. Her hands moved here and there as we talked, and when they strayed below the belt they began to have an effect that was interesting. I felt an urge to wriggle my toes a little.