Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Fourteen

I’m going to leave it at that. Haig doesn’t think I ought to. He wants me to handle it like Dick Francis and describe the beating they gave me, a blow at a time. With the proper discipline, he maintains, I can run the scene to ten or twelve pages instead of getting it over and done with in seven words. The thing is, I don’t want to spend that much time remembering it. They kicked the shit out of me, very coldly and systematically, doing everything to assure me that there was nothing personal in what they were doing. Then they walked off in different directions, and I crawled into my rooming house and upstairs and got into bed.

Everything was worse in the morning. Things really ached. I dragged myself over to Haig’s office and he took one look at me and threw a fit. What infuriated him the most was that I hadn’t called him immediately so that he could have had his doctor look at me. I said I was pretty sure nothing was broken. He called his doctor, who made a housecall, which I felt was completely unnecessary. I think he came over for an excuse to look at the fish. But while he was there he also looked at me and pronounced me physically fit. I had a lot of bruises, and they were going to look increasingly ugly for the next week to ten days, but I had no broken bones and there was no evidence of internal injuries.

“You should have stayed here last night,” Haig said.

I suppose he couldn’t resist saying that. I didn’t bother replying to it.

I had things to do, but they started with Kim and I couldn’t see her until after noon when the hulk would either go to the docks or pretend to. I called Andrea Sugar, but failed to reach her. So I helped Haig with the fish until Wong brought us some lunch. I can’t remember what it was, only that it had slivers of almonds in it and it was delicious. Afterward Haig picked up the phone and called Addison Shiver’s office. The old lawyer was in conference, but would return his call.

When Haig hung up I got through to Kim. “Gordie left a few minutes ago,” she said. “Chip, maybe you shouldn’t come over here. Gordie scares me a little.”

He scared me more than a little, but I kept this fact to myself. “There was another murder attempt yesterday,” I told her. “I’m on my way over.”

This peeved Haig. “Mr. Shivers will be calling me shortly,” he said. “You ought to be here when he does.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to him yourself.”

He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach. “I do,” he said. “But you should be present. I have a strong feeling that he is going to provide me with the solution to the case.”

“Just like that?”

“Let us say he is going to give me evidence to support the conclusion I have drawn already.”

“Conclusion?”

“On the basis of evidence already available to us.”

“Evidence?”

“You’re beginning to sound like an echo, Chip. Try to curb that tendency.”

“I’ll do my best. What evidence do we have already available to us? We have to find where Gordie spent yesterday afternoon and where he’s been getting his money; we have to find out when Gregory Vandiver left his office and how deep a financial hole he’s in, we have to—”

He waved a small hand at me. The right one, probably.

“Superficial,” he said.

“But we don’t know anything. Unless you’ve found out something and haven’t told me.”

“You have all the information I have.”

“Do you want to tell me what I missed?”

“That would be premature,” he said. He was disgustingly pleased with himself. “If you’ll wait for Mr. Shivers’ call—”

I decided he was grandstanding and I also decided I had better things to do than sit around waiting for the phone to ring. I sprung for a cab and rode down to Kim’s place on Bethune Street. When she opened the door, the first thing I did was give her hell for not making sure it was me before unlocking the door.

“Then I’m in real danger,” she said.

“You’d have to call it that. I was out on Long Island yesterday. To see Caitlin. Somebody wired a bomb to her car.”

“Oh, God! She’s not—”

“She’s all right. But her chauffeur isn’t. He was killed. It’s pretty unmistakable, Kim. Somebody wants to kill every last one of you.”

I got her to sit down and made her a cup of coffee. I sat on the couch next to her and patted her hand a lot and tried to be reassuring, which was tough because I had started off trying to scare her silly. I went on patting her hand, though, because I was beginning to enjoy it.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Her eyes were wide with fear and innocence, and she was just so damned beautiful I wanted to kiss her. Instead I said, “Look, there are a lot of possibilities. One possibility is that you’re not in any real danger at all. For the time being.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Depending on who the killer is.”

She thought that over, and then her face tightened. “You mean if I’m the one. I suppose you have to suspect everyone—”

“That’s not what I meant at all, for Pete’s sake. Look, I have to ask you this. Where was Gordie yesterday afternoon?”

“He was at work.”

“The hell he was. Mr. Haig knows somebody who can ask questions on the docks and get the right answers. Gordie didn’t show up for the shape-up yesterday. He didn’t work at all.”

She looked at me.

“He told you he worked from noon to eight?”

“Yes. Where was he if he wasn’t at work?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out. It also seems he’s been losing big sums of money betting on slow horses. He’s been losing more than he’s been earning and I’d like to know where he’s been getting his money. Have you been giving him any?” I took her hand. “I know it’s an embarrassing question, but I have to ask it.”

“I don’t mind. Because I’ve never given him anything. He’s even tried to pay a share of the rent, but I haven’t let him. He always takes the check when we go out together. He always seems to have plenty of money. A longshoreman can make a decent living and I thought—” She stopped suddenly.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m a slow study today, aren’t I? You think he’s been murdering my sisters.”

“I think it’s possible, yes. It’s not the only possibility, but it’s reasonably strong.”

“It’s so hard to believe.”

“Could he have killed Melanie? That was Wednesday, sometime during the afternoon.”

“He was working then. At least he told me so.”

“And yesterday he had plenty of time to get out to Long Island and back. We’ll have to find out if he has an alibi for Jessica’s murder. I don’t think he tracked Robin upstate and sabotaged her car. That sounds a little tricky. I think her death was accidental after all, but maybe it gave him the idea for the whole thing.”

“How do you mean?”

“He must have figured that you would benefit financially by Robin’s death. You don’t, the money all goes to her husband, but he wouldn’t necessarily know that. So he could have decided that if he killed off Jessica and Melanie and Caitlin you would have that much more money for him to marry.”

She nodded with understanding. “So that’s why I’m safe for the time being.”

“Until you marry him and make out a will in his favor. That’s if he’s the killer. There are other possibilities.”

“Who else do you suspect?”

“I don’t want to mention any names yet. I wouldn’t have said I suspected Gordie if there had been any other way to ask the questions I had to ask.”

She went to make herself another cup of coffee and asked me if I wanted one. I said I wouldn’t mind a beer. She brought one and poured it into a glass for me. She didn’t crumple the can when it was empty.

“I don’t know how I’m going to behave in front of him,” she said thoughtfully. “Just being aware that he might be a murderer is going to make it difficult for me.”

“You can’t let him know that you suspect. He wouldn’t want to murder you ahead of schedule, but if it’s a choice of doing that or being caught for the murders he’s already committed—”

“It’s going to be hard not to let anything show.”

“Well, you’ll get a chance to find out how good an actress you are.”

“I will, won’t I?” She set her coffee cup down and folded her hands on her knee. “I could believe that he might become violent. He’s that type of person, there’s a real potential for violence there. But I can’t see him doing it in a calculated manner, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s bothered me from the start.”

“Well, I’ll be very careful.”

“You’d better. That means two things, you know. Being careful not to let Gordie know you suspect him, and being careful not to be alone with anybody else. Don’t open your door when you’re here alone.”

“For strangers, you mean.”

“Or for people you know.”

“God,” she said. “You mean I have to suspect everybody, is that it?”

“Just about.”

“It’s been hard enough living with Gordie lately. And now to have this on my mind—”

I said, “Look, it’s not my place to say this, but I’ll say it anyway. I agree it’s hard to imagine Gordie involved in such a complicated series of murders. It’s also hard to imagine him involved with you. I mean, I really can’t figure out what you see in a baboon like him.”

She picked up her coffee cup and looked into it for a long time. Then without raising her eyes she said, “Oh, I don’t know exactly. I haven’t had much experience with I men. Before I met Gordie I fell in love with one of the boys in my acting class. He was a completely different type I from Gordie. Very gentle and sensitive.”

“I have a feeling I know how this ends.”

“Of course. He turned out to be gay, which was something I probably should have recognized in the first place. The signs were all there. And it wasn’t as though he did anything to encourage me to fall in love with him. He thought I knew what he was and just wanted to be friends.” She looked up. “I took all of this terribly hard. And I decided that my next man was going to be as heterosexual as possible. Gordie was such a change, he had all this macho strength, and at the time I thought it was what I wanted.”

“I gather you’ve changed your mind since.”

“I know I couldn’t marry him. Or even live with him much longer. Last night after your phone call I was furious with him. He had no right to act that way. I wanted to tell him to leave.”

“What stopped you?”

“I think maybe I’m a little afraid of him. That he would take a punch at me or something.” She managed a lopsided grin. “I’m a lot more afraid of him now than I was last night. After what you told me.”

“Well, don’t act any differently for the time being.”

“I’ll try not to. I can be a pretty good little actress when I have to.”

“And an ornament to the stage. I think we’ll crack the case in the next couple of days. And when all this is over—”

I left the sentence unfinished. I also left Kim’s apartment after a few minutes because otherwise I might have found myself talking about what would happen when all this was over. I couldn’t keep from having thoughts on the subject, but it was pretty silly to voice them at that stage. Premature, Haig would have called it.

I tried Andrea again. “I feel like a secret agent,” she said. “I hoff zee documents.”

“That’s the worst Peter Lorre impression I ever heard, but it’s good news. Can I come over?”

She gave me the address.