Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Nineteen

After the three cops had escorted Ferdinand Bell out of there, I figured everybody would start talking at once. I guess nobody wanted to make the first move. They all just sat there staring at each other.

Finally Addison Shivers said, “The vagaries and inconsistencies of human nature. How many persons did that man kill?”

“I know of nine,” Haig said. “The four sisters; Philip Flanner; Maria Tijerina; Elmer Seaton, the sailor; Seamus Fogarty; Gregory Vandiver. Nine. There may have been others, but I doubt it.”

“And yet the one crime he was anxious to deny was the administration of a beating to young Chip.”

“Indeed,” Haig said. “He was not responsible for it, as it happens.”

Kim said, to me, “You never told me you were beaten up.”

I agreed that I never did.

“If he didn’t do it, then who did?”

I got to my feet. It was doomed to be anticlimactic, but it was my part of the show. “That’s easy to answer,” I said. “Gordie McLeod set me up. Didn’t you, old buddy?”

Everybody stared at him. He didn’t return the favor. He stared at his hands, mostly. Kim got up and drew away from him as if he was a leper. Which, come to think of it, he more or less was.

I said, “Well?”

He stood up. “I made a mistake,” he said.

I just looked at him.

“Well, I’ll tell you, man. All I could see is you’re nosin’ around my girl. And then I find out you’ve got some people down to the docks askin’ questions about me. What do I need with people askin’ questions, and I don’t know about any murders, and I figure maybe you’re doin’ a number, and if you’re doin’ a number I figure maybe I can cool things out is all. I told ’em to take it easy with you.”

The look on Kim’s face was worth the price of admission.

“So I made a mistake,” he went on. “You know, the way I feel about Kim and all, and so I got carried away. I never had your advantages, I never went to college, never joined a fraternity, I’m just your ordinary guy, works hard all his life and tries to make a go of it.”

“You were also born stupid. Don’t forget that.”

“Well, I never said I was the brightest guy in the world. Just your average Joe.” He gave his shoulders a shrug. He had a lot of shoulders and they moved impressively. “Look,” he said, “I’m the kind of guy gives credit where credit’s due. I had you wrong. You’re okay. I made a mistake.” He extended a paw like an overtrained retriever. “No hard feelings, huh?”

“None at all,” I said, and I extended my hand and moved toward him, and for some odd reason or other my hand kept going right on past his hand, fingers bunched and rigid, and the fingers jabbed him almost exactly three inches north of his navel, assuming he was born once and had one, and that’s where the solar plexus is supposed to be, and that’s where his was, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like a charm.

He doubled up and turned sort of orange, and he started folding inward like a dying accordion, and I interlaced my fingers and cupped the back of his head with both hands and helped him fold up, and at the same time I raised my right knee as high as it would go, and it couldn’t go all the way up because it met his face coming down.

You wouldn’t believe the sound it made.

After Wong sponged the blood off him, we put him in a chair, and I stood in front of him trying not to look at his nose. It was a pleasure not to look at it.

“No hard feelings,” I said, “but I’ve had a yen to do that since I first saw you. It was the sort of yen that kept getting stronger until there was just no restraining myself. Do you understand what I’m saying, or should I use smaller words?”

He tried to glare at me.

“Here’s the point,” I said. “I have a feeling I’m going to get that yen over and over. It’s not the sort of thing you do once and get bored with. So it would probably be a good idea if you arranged your life so that you and I were not in the same place at the same time, because kicking the shit out of you could get to be a habit with me.

“I’ll tell you something else. You don’t give a shit about Kim, beyond the fact that she’s easy to look at and worth a couple of million dollars. She’s far too good for you, and even you must be bright enough to realize that. She would have written you off a long time ago, but she was afraid of you. I think she can see that you’re nothing much to be afraid of. You’re not going to see Kim any more.”

He tried a little harder to glare at me.

“You didn’t beat me up to keep me away from Kim. You had your buddies work me over to keep me off your back, because you’ve got a nice little hustle going and you figured I might turn it up. I did. We got a call just before you got here today. It was from — never mind who it was from. You take days off from the docks now and then.

“You have one talent on God’s earth: you can start a car without the key, and that’s what you’ve been doing for a living. I could tell you just where you drive them, and just how much you get for them, but you already know. Or maybe you write the address on your shirt cuff so you won’t forget it.”

“Who told you?”

“Mr. Haig has some very good friends. Mr. Haig’s friend asked that his name not be mentioned so I’m not going to mention it. Mr. Haig’s friend asked if he could take care of this for us. He said a good friend of his has a paving contract up in Rockland County. He wanted to know if we wanted him to arrange to tuck you under a section of four-lane divided highway.”

His face got very white. Except for around the nose, where it was still doing a little low-grade bleeding.

“We told him you weren’t worth the trouble. If you start being worth the trouble, meaning if you turn up on Kim’s doorstep again, Mr. Haig will call him and say he changed his mind. A lot of this man’s friends are in the highway construction business. I guess it’s profitable.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“I’m not finished. I’m also supposed to tell you that the auto theft people don’t want to work with you any more. And that you may have a certain amount of trouble getting picked in the dock shape-up. People may tend to overlook you. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Mr. Haig’s friend didn’t want his name mentioned, but there was another name he told me to mention to you.”

I did so, and I never thought four syllables could have such an effect. He did everything but die on the spot.

I said, “I think you should go away now.”

He went away.

So did the rest of them, ultimately. They had questions, most of them, and Haig answered them. He got into a long psychoanalytical rap with Andrea Sugar, who turned out to be very knowledgeable on Jungian psychology.

Madam Juana took him aside and told him something, and kissed his cheek, and Haig went beet-red. He had never done this before in my presence. I can’t swear to what she said to him, but I can make a guess based on my instincts and my experience, because before his blush had a chance to fade she came over to me and gave me a kiss on the cheek and whispered in my ear, and what she whispered was, “You a wonnerful boy and you get the bom who kill my Maria, and anytime you wanna girl you come down and I give you best inna house, no charge, anytime you wanna fock.”

Eventually Kim was the only one left. I took her upstairs and showed her the fish. She was very interested. She was also still a little nervous, so I waved at Haig and took her back to her apartment.

“I never thought you were violent, Chip. I thought of you as, you know, gentle and sensitive and aware.”

Like the actor who turned out to be a faggot, I thought.

“And Gordie is so big and strong—”

“Well, Wong Fat showed me how to do a few things. I’m basically a very non-violent person. The only time I ever had to hit anybody was when I was a deputy sheriff in South Carolina.”

“A what?”

“It was an honorary position, basically. What it came down to was that I was a bouncer in a, well, in a whorehouse, if you want to know. Sometimes guys would get drunk and pull knives, and I would have to hit ’em upside the head with this club they gave me.”

“Upside the head?”

“The local expression.”

“You really didn’t go to college, did you?”

“I told you. I had to drop out of high school. My parents were sort of high-class con men, although I didn’t know it at the time, and they got caught, and they killed themselves, and Upper Valley threw me out a few months before graduation. They were all heart.”

She looked at me with those wide eyes. “You’ve really lived,” she said.

“Well, I tend to keep moving.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before, Chip.”

So that’s about it. Ferdinand Bell is wearing a strait-jacket, and will spend what’s left of his life in a cell with spongy walls. This infuriates Haig, who would like to see the return of public hanging. We still haven’t spawned the African gouramis, but John LiCastro finally got the results he wanted, and has a whole twenty-nine-gallon tank full of baby discus fish. Haig went over to see them the other day and says they’re doing fine, and that you would have thought LiCastro had fathered them himself, the way he was carrying on.

Gordie McLeod hasn’t been heard from. He never turned up to take his stuff out of Kim’s apartment, and a couple of days ago I got all his things together and tucked them neatly into the incinerator. Kim said that wasn’t very nice, and I said it was too bad.

I ran into Andrea Sugar at the funeral for the Vandivers. She volunteered to teach Kim the art of massage. I sort of sidestepped that one. It was probably just a nice gesture on her part, but she may have had an ulterior motive. I have nothing against lesbians, but I wouldn’t want my girl to marry one.

What else? Addison Shivers called the other day. He sent a check around, and Haig returned it, and the old gentleman was displeased.

“I have not earned it, sir,” Haig told him. “You hired me to look out for the interests of the late Cyrus Trelawney. I exerted myself enough to justify retaining the advances I received from yourself and Mrs. Vandiver, but I cannot say that I did much for Cyrus Trelawney, certainly not enough to warrant my accepting additional payment.”

They talked some more, and an hour later the check arrived again. A messenger brought it and he tried to deliver it downstairs, which confused the girls. No one had ever tried to pay by check before. This particular check was for five thousand dollars, and it was no longer payment for work performed. Instead it was an advance against work to be performed. Because Haig had been rehired to look out for the interests of Cyrus Trelawney. Specifically, he’s going to prove that Ferdinand Bell’s mother was nutty as a Mars bar, and the killer wasn’t Trelawney’s son in the first place.

Which means I’ll be making a trip to Lyons Falls before very long. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, if you want to know. The heat wave just broke and New York is not a bad place to be.

Haig has been driving me crazy lately. He keeps handing me furniture catalogues and asking me to pick out the kind of bed I like best. He won’t give up, he’s as single-minded as Cato on the subject of Carthage. So far I’ve been stubborn and have gone on paying the rent on my furnished room.

Which is probably silly. I’ve been spending most of my nights on Bethune Street lately, anyway.