Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Eighteen

Of course everybody stared at the son of a bitch. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were on Leo Haig and he was as cool as a gherkin. His forehead looked a little pinker, but that may have been my imagination. I couldn’t really tell you.

“This is quite fascinating,” Bell said. “I asked around when I heard you were investigating Melanie’s death. I was told that you were quite insane. I wondered what this elaborate charade would lead to.”

“I would prefer that it lead to the gas chamber, sir. I fear it will lead only to permanent incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane.”

“Fascinating.”

“Indeed. I shouldn’t attempt to leave if I were you, Mr. Bell. There are police officers seated on either side of you. They would take umbrage.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Bell said. His cheeks puffed out as he grinned. “Why, if this were a movie I’d pay to see it. It’s far more thrilling in real life.”

Haig closed his eyes. Without opening them he said, “I have no way of knowing whether or not Cyrus Trelawney was your father. You do not resemble him, nor do I perceive any resemblance between yourself and his legitimate offspring. Very strong men tend to be proponent, which is to say that their genes are dominant. Much the same is true of fishes, you might be interested to know. I would guess that you resemble your mother. I suspect you inherited your madness from her.”

A muscle worked in Bell’s temple. He didn’t say anything.

“I don’t doubt that she told you Trelawney was your father. I don’t doubt that you believe it, that you grew up hearing little from her than that a rich man had fathered you. It certainly made an impression upon you. You grew up loving and hating this man you had never met. You were obsessed by the idea that he had sired you. Had he acknowledged you, you would have been rich. Money became an obsession.

“One learns much about a man from his hobbies. You collect money, Mr. Bell. Not in an attempt to amass wealth, but as a way of playing with the symbols of wealth. Little pieces of stamped metal moving from hand to hand at exorbitant prices. Pfui!”

“Numismatics is a science.”

“Anything may be taken for a science when enough of its devotees attempt to codify their madness. There is a young man in this city, I understand, who spends his spare time, of which I trust he has an abundance, analyzing the garbage of persons understandably more prominent than himself. For the time being he is acknowledged to be a lunatic. If, heaven forefend, his pastime amasses a following, garbage analysis will be esteemed a science. Learned books will be published on the subject. Fools will write them. Greater fools will purchase and read them. Pfui!”

“You know nothing about numismatics,” Bell said.

Haig grunted. “I could dispute that. I shall not take the trouble. I am not concerned with numismatics, sir. I am concerned with murder.”

“And you’re calling me a murderer.”

“I have done so already.” He stroked his beard briefly.

“I’ve no idea just when you planned to become a murderer. At your mother’s knee, I would suppose. You came to New York. You established yourself in your profession. You kept tabs on your father. And, because of your infirmity of purpose, you bided your time.

“Because you could not kill this man, nor could you think of relinquishing the dream of killing him. You waited until time achieved what you could not: the death of Cyrus Trelawney.”

“And then I married Robin.”

“Then you married Robin Trelawney,” Haig agreed with him.

“And then I crashed up the car and killed her, I suppose. The only person I ever loved and I crashed up my car on the chance that I would live through the wreck and she would not.”

“No, sir. No in every respect. But I’ll back up a bit. Before you married Robin, indeed before Cyrus Trelawney died, you had all of your plan worked out. The first step called for you to murder Philip Flanner.”

“Now I know you’re insane,” Bell said.

“You told Mr. Harrison that you were a friend of Flanner’s, that he was a fellow numismatist. He was not. You did become a friend of his, but not until after he and Robin were married. You ingratiated yourself with him because he had recently taken her as a wife.”

“He fell in front of a subway car.”

“You threw him in front of a subway car.”

“You couldn’t prove that in a million years.”

“I haven’t the slightest need to prove it. You are a very curious man, Mr. Bell. You took your time ingratiating yourself with Robin. You waited until her father was at last in his grave before you persuaded her to marry you. Then you waited a couple of years before you killed her. You must have thought about the murder method for all of that time and more.”

“I loved Robin.”

“No, sir. You have never loved anyone, except insofar as you loved Cyrus Trelawney. I leave that to the psychiatrists, who will have ample opportunity to inquire. You drove with Robin to a coin convention. At some time in the course of the ride back, you broke her neck. That would not have been terribly difficult to manage. Then you put her in the back of the car and found a place where an icy road surface could explain an accident. You then effected that accident, sir, which no doubt took a certain amount of insane courage on your part.”

“No one will believe this.”

“I suspect everyone in the room already believes it, sir. But they will not have to, nor will anyone else.” Haig turned around and looked at the rasboras. I was astonished, and I was used to him, so you can imagine what it did to everybody else. But I’ll be damned if anyone said a word. I was wondering how long he was going to milk it, when he turned around again and got to his feet.

“The order of the murders,” he said. “Robin, Jessica, Melanie, Caitlin. I was shocked when I learned that Caitlin was dead. Doubly shocked, because I thought you would save her for last. You were trying so hard to throw suspicion upon Gregory Vandiver. Inventing some nonsense about financial insolvency, some prattle about his having invested large sums in rare coins and being forced to liquidate them. One would have thought you would wait until Kim was safely dead before disposing of him. He, surely, would have done so before killing his wife, had he the financial motive you suggested.

“But that becomes clear when one devotes some thought to it. You did not merely want to murder your half-sisters. You wanted to have sexual relations with them as well.

“First Robin. You married her in order to have sex with her. Then Jessica. You went at least three times to her place of employment in the week preceding her death.

“You signed Gregory Vandiver’s name to the membership application, having already planned to use him as a scapegoat should there be need for one. Through this contact with Jessica, you were able to arrange to see her privately at her apartment. You did so, sir, and you pitched her out of her window.”

“You can’t prove that,” Bell said.

“But I can. Miss Sugar no doubt recognizes you. If not, her colleagues very possibly will. In any event, I have here three pieces of paper confirming the dates of your visit. They identify you as Gregory Vandiver, sir, but they are in your handwriting.”

Which is how I had tipped to the whole thing. I remembered where I had seen that precise penmanship. It was on a 2 x 2 coin envelope.

“You had an affair with Caitlin. I have had it established that this was not terribly difficult for one to achieve. I knew at an early date that you were probably in touch with her. I learned that when Mr. Harrison reported on his conversation with you Saturday.”

I said, “How?”

Haig glared at me.

“I’m serious. How did you know that?”

“Because you’ve learned to report conversations verbatim. I spoke to Mr. Bell over the telephone to prepare him for your visit. I identified you as my associate, Mr. Harrison. I did not mention your first name. Nor did you mention it when introducing yourself. Mr. Bell asked if it was all right for him to call you Chip. The only person likely to have told him your name was Caitlin, yet he gave the impression that everything you were saying to him was coming as a great surprise. This made me instantly suspicious of Mr. Bell, a suspicion I never had cause to relinquish.”

“I was not having an affair with Caitlin,” Bell said stiffly. “As a matter of fact, she did ask my advice after Harrison talked to her. She had second thoughts about hiring him, and wanted my opinion.”

“Indeed.”

“I never had sexual relations with her. Or with Jessica. Perhaps it’s true that I visited her at that massage parlor. If I signed Gregory’s name, it was on a whim. I only visited her to have a half hour of her time, so that we could talk about Robin. It was a way of bringing Robin back to life for me.”

Haig closed his eyes. He opened them and sighed and sat down behind his desk again. “I won’t comment on that,” he said. “Nor shall I attempt to determine what sexual act you performed with Melanie Trelawney. I suspect it might have been you who put the thought in her mind that her two sisters had been killed. Or you might have become aware of her suspicions by virtue of her having called you to inquire if there was any possibility that Robin’s death was not wholly accidental. At any rate, it should have posed no problem for you to gain access to her apartment. Once there, you could have had little difficulty in rendering her unconscious. She was completely nude when Mr. Harrison discovered the body. It has not been my observation that people habitually disrobe before injecting themselves with heroin.”

“Happens some of the time,” Gregorio said.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You wouldn’t get suspicious either way,” Seidenwall said.

Haig nodded. “So you would not have disrobed her to make her the more obvious victim of death from a drug overdose. I’m sure you did something with her. I do not care to know what it was, nor do I care to know whether it took place before or after you injected a fatal overdose of the drug into her bloodstream.”

I don’t care to know that either, to tell you the truth.

“You can’t prove any of this,” Bell said. Not for the first time.

Haig stared at him. He was on his feet again. “I can prove almost all of it,” he said. “Once the facts are known and established, the proof is rarely hard to come by. Had you taken your time, you might have managed to bring it off. You did come very close at that. You killed four out of five. Had sex with four of your sisters, killed four of your sisters.

“And you were very patient at the onset. You waited to kill Philip Flanner, waited to marry his widow, waited to kill her. But then you got a taste of it and you liked it, didn’t you? You loved it.”

Bell didn’t say anything. The muscle was really having a workout in his temple, and he didn’t look his usual happy self.

“You incestuous murdering bastard,” Haig said. “You never did what you wanted to do. You never killed your father and you never slept with your mother, and you used your sisters as surrogates for both, one after another. But you’ll never get the last one, Bell, you’ll never put a hand on her!”

The son of a bitch moved fast. He had the knife out of his pocket and the blade open before I could even blink.

A fat lot of good it did him. He wasn’t even out of his chair before Seidenwall had an arm wrapped around his throat and Luther Polk’s long-barreled automatic was jabbed into the side of his head.

They took turns advising him of his rights. He went limp, but that didn’t make Seidenwall let go of his throat or Polk stop jabbing him in the head with the gun barrel.

On the way out, his hands cuffed behind his back, he turned and smiled at me. It was a smile I will never forget as long as I live. I can close my eyes and see it now. I wish I couldn’t.

“You know,” he said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with having you beaten up. I hope you can believe that.”