Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Two

She wasn’t the first corpse I had ever seen. One summer I picked apples for a while in upstate New York, a job which consisted largely of falling off ladders. The other pickers would go out drinking when they were done, and sometimes I would tag along. There was usually at least one fight an evening. Sometimes somebody would pull a knife, and one time when this happened it wound up that one guy, a wiry man with a harelip, caught a knifeblade in his heart and died. I saw him when they carried him out.

The first book I wrote, I covered my experiences apple-picking, but never put that part in. God knows why.

So she wasn’t the first corpse I ever looked at, but she might as well have been. I kept thinking how horrible it was that she looked so beautiful, even in death. Her pale white skin had a blue tint to it, especially in her face. Her eyes were wide open and I could swear they were staring at me.

I knew she was dead. No living eyes ever looked like that. But I had to reach down and touch her. I put one hand on her shoulder. She’d been dead long enough to grow cool, however long that takes. I don’t know much about things like that. I’d never had to.

I almost didn’t see the hypodermic needle. She was on her back, legs stretched out in front of her, one arm at her side, the other placed so that her hand was on her little bowl of a stomach. That hand almost covered the hypodermic needle. After I saw it, I picked up her other arm and found a needle mark. Just one, and it looked fresh.

I put her arm back the way I had found it. I went to the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at her some more. I must have stood there staring at her for five minutes. Then I paced around the whole apartment for another five minutes and came back and stared at her some more.

This wasn’t shock. I was in shock, of course, but I was being very methodical about this. I wanted to notice everything and I wanted to make sure I remembered whatever I noticed.

I left her apartment, closed the door, walked down the stairs and out. I walked all the way over to First Avenue before I caught a cab. The cab dropped me at 14th Street and Seventh. I walked quickly from there to my rooming house on 18th Street, a few doors west of Eighth.

When I was in my own room on the third floor, the first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was to go into the bathroom and remove the towel bar from the wall. It’s a hollow stainless steel bar, and there was a little plastic vial in it that contained several dollars’ worth of reasonably good grass. I poured the grass in the toilet and flushed, rinsed out the vial, and tossed it out the window. Then I went through the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t find anything to worry about except for a few codeine pills that my doctor had prescribed for a sinus headache. I thought about it and decided to hell with them, and I flushed them away, too. That left nothing but aspirin and Dristan, and I didn’t think the cops would hassle me much for either of those. I put the towel bar back and washed my hands.

I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like the way I was dressed. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of slacks that didn’t need pressing too badly. I traded in my loafers for my black dress shoes.

Then I went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall. I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number I know best.

Haig answered the telephone himself for a change. We talked for a few minutes. Mostly I talked and he listened, and then he made a couple of suggestions, and I hung up the phone and went off to discover the body.

I guess I’ll have to tell you something about Leo Haig.

The place to start, I suppose, is how I happen to be working for him. I had been looking for a job for a while, and things had not been going particularly well. I got work from time to time, washing dishes or bussing tables or delivering messages and parcels, but none of these positions amounted to what you might call A Job With A Future, which is what I have always been seeking, though in a sort of inept way.

My problem, really, was that I wasn’t qualified for anything too dynamic. My education stopped a couple of months before graduation from Upper Valley Preparatory Academy, which is to say that I haven’t even got a high school diploma, for Pete’s sake. And my previous work experience — well, when you tell a prospective employer that you have been an assistant to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, a termite salesman, a fruit picker, and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in South Carolina, well, what usually happens is his eyes glaze and he points at the door a lot.

(I don’t want to go into all this ancient history now, really, but if you’re interested you could read about it. My first two books, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, pretty well cover the territory. I don’t know that they’re much good, but you could read them for background information or something. Assuming you care.)

Anyway, I was living in New York and doing the hand-to-mouth number and reading the want ads in The Times, and there were loads of opportunities to earn $40 a week if you had a doctorate in chemical engineering or something like that, but not much if you didn’t. Then I ran into an ad that went something like this:

I didn’t know if I was one man in a million, but it was certainly one advertisement in a million, and nothing could have kept me from answering it. I called the number listed in the ad and answered a few questions over the phone. He gave me an address and I went to it, and at first I thought the whole thing was someone’s idea of a joke, because the building was obviously a whorehouse. But it turned out that only the lower two floors were a whorehouse. The upper two floors were the offices and living quarters of Leo Haig.

He wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but whatever it might have been, he wasn’t it. He’s about five-two and very round. It’s not that he’s terribly heavy, just that the combination of his height and girth makes him look something like a basketball. He has a head of wiry black hair and a pointed goatee with a few gray hairs in it. That beard is very important to him. I’ve never seen it when it was not trimmed and groomed to perfection. He touches it a lot, smoothing and shaping it. He says it’s an aid to thought.

I spent three hours with him that first day, and at the end of the three hours I had a job. He spent the first hour pumping me, the second showing off his tropical fish, and the final hour talking about everything in the world, himself included. I went out of there with a lot more knowledge than I had brought with me, A Job With A Future, and a whole lot of uncertainty about the man I was working for. He was either a genius or a lunatic and I couldn’t make up my mind which.

I still haven’t got it all worked out. I mean, maybe the two are not mutually exclusive. Maybe he’s a genius and a lunatic.

The thing is, the main reason I got the job was that I had had two books published. You may wonder what this has to do with being the assistant of a private detective. It’s very simple, really. Leo Haig isn’t content with being the world’s greatest detective. He wants the world to know it.

“There are a handful of detectives whose names are household words,” he told me. “Sherlock Holmes. Nero Wolfe. Their brilliance alone would not have guaranteed them fame. It took the efforts of other men to bring their deeds to public attention. Holmes had his Watson. Wolfe has his Archie Goodwin. If a detective is to make the big time, a trustworthy associate with literary talent is as much a prerequisite as a personality quirk and an eccentric hobby.”

Here’s something I have to explain to you if you are going to understand Leo Haig at all.

He believes Nero Wolfe exists.

He really believes this. He believes Wolfe exists in the brownstone, with the orchids and Theodore and Fritz and all the rest of it, and Archie Goodwin assists him and writes up the cases and publishes them under the pen name of Rex Stout.

“The most telling piece of evidence, Chip. Consider that nom de plume, if you will. And of course it’s just that; no one was ever born with so contrived a name as Rex Stout. But let us examine it. Rex is the Latin for king, of course. As in Oedipus Rex. And Stout means, well, fat. Thus we have what? A fat king — and could one ask for a more perfect appellation to hang upon such an extraordinary example of corpulence and majesty as Nero Wolfe?”

Haig hasn’t always been a detective. Actually he’s only been a detective about a year longer than I’ve been an assistant detective. Until that time he lived in a two-room apartment in the Bronx and raised tropical fish to sell to local pet shops. This may strike you as a hard way to make a living. You’d be right. Most tropical fish are pretty inexpensive when you buy them from the pet shop, and even that price has to be three or four times what the shopkeeper pays for them, because he has to worry about a certain percentage of them dying before he can get them sold. Haig had developed a particularly good strain of velvet swordtails — the color was deeper than usual, or something — and he had a ready market for most of the other fish he raised as well, but he was not getting rich this way.

The way he got rich took relatively little effort on his part. His uncle died and left him $128,000.

As you can probably imagine, that made quite a difference in his life. Because all of a sudden he didn’t have to run around New York with plastic bags full of little fishes for sale. He could do what he had always dreamed of doing. He could become the World’s Greatest Detective.

Raising fish had been Leo Haig’s only way to make a living, but it had not been his only interest. He has what is probably the largest library of mystery and detective fiction in the world. I think he has just about everything ever written on the subject. The Nero Wolfe novels, from Fer-De-Lance to the latest one, are all in hard cover; after he received his inheritance he had them all rebound in hand-tooled leather. He’s been reading all of these things since he was a kid, and he remembers what he reads. I mean, he can tell you not only the plot, but the names of all the characters in some Ngaio Marsh mystery that he read fifteen years ago. It’s pretty impressive, let me tell you.

The house is pretty impressive, too, and he has emphasized that he wants me to write about the house, but I’ll wait until I come to the part about going there and then I’ll describe it for you. I’ll just say now that he picked it when he had collected his inheritance and started to set up shop as a detective. He moved in with his books and fish tanks, he managed to get a license as a private investigator, he listed himself in the Yellow Pages, and he sat back and waited for the world to discover him. The trouble is that he’s too rich and he’s not rich enough. If he had more money, like a couple of million, it wouldn’t matter if he ever worked or not. If he had less money, like nothing substantial in the checking account, it would mean that he’d have to take the few cases that come his way. But he’s got just enough money to let him maintain high standards. He won’t touch divorce work, for example. He won’t do any sort of snooping that requires electronic gear, which he regards as the handtools of the devil. And he won’t accept anything routine. What he wants, really, is to handle nothing but baffling murder cases that he can solve through the exercise of his incredible brain, with the faithful Chip Harrison doing the legwork and writing up everything afterwards.

I know his secret hope. Someday, if he makes enough of a name for himself, if he keeps his standards high, develops just the right sort of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, possibly someday Nero Wolfe will invite him over to the louse on 35th Street for dinner.

That’s really what he lives for.

I suppose my civic duty called on me to phone the police as soon as I discovered Melanie’s body. I’m glad I didn’t let my civic duty interfere with my instinct for self preservation, because it turned out that Detective Gregorio took my towel bar off the wall and checked it out to see if I had drugs stashed in it. That was just about the first place he looked. I’m never keeping anything incriminating in there again, believe me. Pick a place that you figure is the last place the police would think of looking, and that’s the first place they think of looking. It’s the damnedest thing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was, I went back to Melanie’s place, figuring it was possible that the police had already found her without my help, but they hadn’t. I had left a book on the floor so that it would be moved if anybody pushed the door more than a third of the way open, and it was still in its original position, so it seemed unlikely anybody had been in the apartment since I’d left it.

I went on inside, and I had an irrational hope that I had been somehow mistaken and Melanie would turn out to be alive after all, which is pretty stupid to write down and all, but impossible to avoid wishing at the time. Of course she was still there, and of course she was dead, and of course I felt sick all over again, but instead of throwing up any more I went into the living room and called 911. The person who picked up the phone put me on HOLD before I had a chance to say anything, which would have! been aggravating if I’d been bleeding to death or some; thing, but then a couple of seconds later a cop came on the line and I gave him the story. They were fast enough after that. It was 5:18 when I placed the call and the first two patrolmen arrived at 5:31. You would have thought it would take them almost that long to climb the stairs. They spent most of their time walking around and opening drawers and telling me not to touch anything. They were basically waiting for the detectives but they didn’t want to look as though they were waiting for the detectives, so they asked me a lot of boring questions and sneaked a lot of peeks at Melanie’s body. This seemed very disrespectful to me, but I didn’t think they would care to hear my feelings on the matter so I kept them to myself.

The detectives got there before very long and took over. There was Detective Gregorio, whom I mentioned before, and his partner Detective Seidenwall. Gregorio is tall and dark and handsome, and he has one of those twenty-dollar haircuts, and he didn’t like me much. Seidenwall is older, say fifty, and his name is easy to remember because he looks like the side of a wall, and he didn’t like me at all.

They both seemed to despise me, to tell you the truth.

The trouble started with my name. They said they wanted a full name, not a nickname, and I explained that Chip was my legal first name, and eventually I had to show identification to prove it. They wanted to know what I was doing in Melanie’s apartment and I said she was a friend and had invited me to stop in after work.

“Oh, you work, huh?” said Seidenwall.

“I work for Leo Haig. The detective.”

“You mean some kind of a private cop? You on some kind of a case?”

“No. Melanie was my friend.”

“Uh-huh. You a junkie too?”

“Of course not.”

“Roll up your sleeves, punk.”

This struck me as silly, since I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, but I rolled up what little sleeves I had. Gregorio got a little suspicious over a mosquito bite, but turned his attention to other things. He and Seidenwall asked me approximately seven million questions, many of them consisting of the same ones over again. How long had Melanie been a junkie? How long had I been sleeping with her? Had she died right away, or was it gradual?

This last question was a trap, of course. There were a lot of questions like this, designed to trick me into admitting I had been with her when she died. There were other trick questions, geared to establish that I had sold the heroin to her. They seemed to take it for granted that it was heroin, and she had died of an overdose of it.

The questions went on for a while. They probably would have asked me fewer questions if they hadn’t hated me on sight, and they would have gone on hassling me longer except they were bored with the whole thing. It was all pretty obvious to them. Melanie had overdosed herself with heroin and that was why she was dead. When I pointed out that she had never to my knowledge been a drug addict, had never used a needle, they nodded without much enthusiasm and said that made an OD that much more likely. She wouldn’t know about the proper dose, for one thing. And she would have had no time to build up a gradual tolerance to the drug. Finally, some people go into something called anaphylactic shock the first time they try certain substances. Penicillin, for some people. Or a bee sting, or heroin.

Anyway, she was dead, and as far as they were concerned it was an accidental drug-related homicide, and they got too many of them to be terribly interested in each; new one that came along. So they asked me all their questions and took a short statement from me, and then they asked me for permission to accompany me to my own residence and search the premises, and of course I could have refused because they didn’t have a warrant. But they already hated me enough for one day, I figured, and besides I had thrown away not only the illegal marijuana but the legal codeine tablets, so in a way I was almost glad they wanted to search my room. I mean, I’d have felt a little foolish if I had gone through all of that for nothing.

Gregorio and Seidenwall seemed unhappy when they didn’t find anything. They held a whispered conversation by the bathroom door, and I caught enough of it to get an idea what it was about. Seidenwall wanted to plant some drugs so they would have an excuse to arrest me. Gregorio talked him out of it, not out of fondness for me, but because he felt I wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I’ll tell you, Harrison,” he said on his way out. “You’re the only thing in this that doesn’t make sense. Everything else is pretty open and shut. But you don’t figure.”

“Why?”

“You swear it’s not a business thing with the girl. That she’s a friend. And then you tell us you’ve known her for a month and you weren’t balling her.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You a faggot?”

“No.”

“Everybody knows those hippie chicks go like rabbits. It’s what you call common knowledge. But you knew her for a month without getting in her pants. It don’t add up.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Number two. You go to her apartment and find her dead with a needle in her arm.” The needle was not in her arm, but I let it pass. “And what do you do? You call the cops.”

“Isn’t that what a person is supposed to do?”

“Of course it’s what a person is supposed to do. Nobody in this fucking city does what he’s supposed to do. Nobody wants to get involved. Nobody wants to call himself to the attention of the police, especially in a drug-related homicide, especially when the person in question is a hippie punk that probably uses drugs himself.”

“I don’t.”

“Yeah, you don’t. And you’re not a hippie punk either, are you? You’re some kind of a cop.”

“I work—”

“Yeah, I know. You work for this Haig, who’s some kind of private cop that I never heard of. You’re his assistant. What do you assist him with?”

“Cases.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll tell you one thing, Harrison. I hope this Haig character looks more like a cop than you do. Because you just don’t fit the image of a cop, Harrison. Private or otherwise, you’re not my idea of a cop.”

I pictured Leo Haig and tried to decide which of the two of us looked more like a cop. I gave up thinking about it because it made me feel like giggling and I didn’t want to giggle. I had the feeling that one giggle from me was all Seidenwall would need.

I wasn’t sleeping with Melanie, I had done my civic duty and called the police, and I didn’t look like any kind of a cop. Those were the three things about me that made Gregorio and Seidenwall suspicious. I couldn’t quite follow their reasoning on this, but then again I didn’t have to.

Suspicious or not, they walked out my door and down the stairs without even telling me not to leave town. So: their suspicion was evidently just on general principles, coupled with instinctive dislike.

I suppose they would have given me a much worse time if they’d had the brains to realize Melanie had been: murdered.