Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Three

“It was definitely murder,” I said. “First of all, Melanie would never give herself a shot of heroin. She told me she tried heroin once, she snorted it, and it made her nauseous without giving her any kind of a high at all.”

“She might try it a second time.”

“She might, but there were too many other things she liked better. And if she did try it again, it wouldn’t be with a needle. She’s terrified of needles. Some nurse had to give her an injection once and botched it, kept stabbing around trying to find the vein, and she still has nightmares about it. Still had nightmares about it. Oh, shit.”

“Settle yourself, Chip.”

I nodded across the desk at him. It’s what they call a partners’ desk, with drawers and stuff on both sides so two people can use it. I was on my side of the desk. I was very flattered to have a whole side of a desk to myself, but I really didn’t have much of anything to keep in the drawers.

Haig took a pipe out of a little wooden rack on his side of the desk. This was during his pipe period. He had trouble keeping them lit, and they kept burning his mouth. He was convinced that he would sooner or later break a pipe in, and sooner or later find a mild enough tobacco, but in the meantime he was doing his best. He thought pipe-smoking might be good for the image. He took the pipe apart and cleaned it while I settled myself. He never did get around to smoking it that night.

I said, “Another thing. Melanie was extremely careful about that air mattress. You had to take your shoes off before you sat on it, and she would make me check to see if I had anything sharp in my pockets. She was very nervous, about puncturing the thing.”

Haig nodded. “The syringe.”

“Right. Even assuming she decides to take heroin, and even assuming she’s going to shoot it, the last place in that apartment she’d pick to use a hypodermic needle is the air mattress.”

“You didn’t point this out to the police.”

“No. I didn’t point out anything to them, like telling them how she was afraid she was going to die.”

“Perfectly within your rights.” He touched his beard, stroked it with love and affection. “A citizen is under no compulsion to volunteer unrequested information to the police. He is merely obliged to answer their questions honestly and completely, and make no false statements.”

“Well, I fell down there.”

“The lock.”

“Right. They asked how I got in and I told them the lock was wrecked a couple of weeks ago in a burglary and she hadn’t got around to replacing it yet.”

“And of course you didn’t tell them you had been there once before.”

“No. I, uh, more or less gave them the impression I spent the past four hours with you.”

“I think that was wise,” he said. “They should have noticed the syringe and the air mattress. That should have been as obvious as a third nostril.” He closed his eyes for a moment and his hand worked on his beard. “You should have told me of Miss Trelawney’s fear of death.”

“What could you have done?”

“Probably nothing. Hmmm. There were five girls altogether, I understand. Five Misses Trelawney.”

“That’s right. And now three of them are dead.”

“And two alive. Are the survivors living here in New York?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about them.”

“Hmmmm. Perhaps you know more than you think. Melanie must have talked about them.”

“Actually, she didn’t talk too much about anything. She wasn’t very verbal.”

He nodded approvingly. “I’ve never felt loquacity is a mark of excellence in a woman. Nevertheless, she no doubt mentioned something about the girls who died. Their names, if nothing else.”

“Robin and Jessica.”

“One died in an auto wreck and the other fell from a window?”

“Yes. Let me think. Jessica went out the window and Robin died in the car accident.”

He pursed his lips. At least he did something weird with his lips, and I have never quite known what it is that you do when you purse your lips, but this was probably it. “Let’s not call it an accident, Chip,” he said. “Let’s merely call it a wreck, just as we’ll say that Jessica fell from a window, not that she threw herself out.”

“You think they were both murdered?”

“I think we ought to take it as a postulate for the time being. And we have to assume that whoever had a motive for murdering three of five sisters is not going to discontinue his activities before he has done for the remaining two into the bargain. Which of the sisters was the first to die?”

I had to think. “Robin first, then Jessica. I don’t know about the timing, though. All of this happened before I met Melanie. I have the impression that Jessica died two or three months ago, but I really don’t know how long before then Robin died.”

He closed his eyes. “That’s very interesting,” he said.

“What is?”

“First an auto wreck,” he said. “Then a fall, then an overdose of heroin. Assuming that an autopsy reveals that was indeed the cause of death. Which would seem a logical assumption at this stage of things. There were no signs of struggle?”

“None that I could see. Uh, in Melanie’s apartment, you might say there were always signs of struggle. I mean, she wasn’t the world’s most fanatical housekeeper.”

“But nothing out of the ordinary? And no sign of another person’s presence?”

“No. Except the phone off the hook, of course. I hung up myself after I called the police.”

“And neglected to mention to the police that it had been I off the hook when you arrived?”

“I felt they would wonder why I happened to notice it.”

He nodded. “And they’d resent you for it. It’s infinitely simpler for them to process this as an accidental overdose than as a murder, and a loose end like a telephone off the hook would only impress them as a complication. They’d file the case the same way, but they would be annoyed with you for bringing up irrelevancies and inconsistencies. They would have been happiest if you could have told them Melanie had been planning on trying heroin. It’s as well you didn’t, but that’s how any bureaucratic mind works.”

He spun around in his swivel chair and gazed into the fishtank at eye level. The entire room, and it is a large one, is paneled in English oak and lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. Most of the shelf space is devoted to books, the overwhelming majority of them detective stories, but fish tanks are spotted here and there on the shelves. There are a dozen of them. They are all what Haig calls recreational aquariums, as opposed to the breeding tanks and |rearing tanks on the top floor. Actually, to tell you the truth, they’re what Haig calls recreational aquaria. I call them aquariums because I’m not entirely literate yet. This particular tank was very restful to look at. It was a fifteen-gallon tank, which means it was one foot deep by one foot wide by two feet long, and its sole occupants were eleven Rasbora heteramorpha. I have a feeling that you either know what they are or you don’t, and a description won’t help much, but Haig wants me to make an | effort on matters like this. Rasboras are fish about an inch long, a delicate rose pink with a blackish wedge on their sides. They’re pretty, and they swim in schools, and in this particular tank they swam in and around a dwarf amazon sword plant and a piece of crystalline quartz. The tank was top-lighted, and if you watched the fish for a while you got a happy feeling.

At least I did. Haig watched the fish for a while and stroked his beard a lot and turned around in the swivel chair with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“How old was Melanie?”

“I don’t know. A little older than me. I guess about twenty-one.”

“And Jessica?”

“Older, but I don’t know by how much. Wait a minute. Melanie was the second youngest. And Robin was older than she was, so one of the girls still alive is younger than Melanie.”

“Were any of them married?”

“Yes, but I don’t know which ones. Obviously Melanie wasn’t married.” And never would be, I thought, and something vaguely resembling a lump formed in my throat, but I swallowed and it went away.

Haig said, “Hmmmmmm.” He turned and looked at the rasboras some more. I watched him do this for a while and saw that it was going to be an extensive thing, so I got up and went over to the wall and looked at some fish myself. A pair of African gouramis, two very beautiful fish, rendered in shades of chocolate. I’m not putting down the Latin name, because there’s no agreement on it yet; the species was just discovered a couple years ago and ha never been bred in captivity, a state of affairs which Leo Haig regards as a personal challenge. I stared into the tank and decided that I had never seen two living creatures display less interest in each other. We will breed the damned things sooner or later, but we were not going to accomplish it that particular evening.

Nor were we going to accomplish much else. Haig swung around and said as much. “Sitzfleisch,” was how he put it. “We have to let the newspapers do some of our work for us, and then you can go to the public library and do some of the rest. At the moment the library is closed and the newspaper has not yet materialized, so we exercise our sitting flesh. Get the chessboard.”

I got the chessboard. I didn’t much want to get the chessboard, but I could see no way out of it. Leo Haig was about as effective at chess as he was at smoking a pipe. Whenever there was nothing to do he was apt to want to play. I’m not very good myself. When I worked in the whorehouse in South Carolina, most of my job consisted of playing chess with Geraldine. She almost always beat me, and I in turn almost always beat Leo Haig.

We played three quick games, and they went as they usually did. I exchanged a knight for a rook in the first game and wore him down, and in the second I put a strong queen-side attack together and more or less lucked into a mating combination. In the last game he left his queen en prise, and when I pointed it out to him he tipped his king over and resigned gracefully.

“I’ve a feeling,” he said, “that I shall never be a satisfactory chess player.”

I didn’t want to argue and knew better than to agree. “I don’t think the character tag of being a hopeless chess player will endear me to the reading public,” he continued.

I still didn’t say anything.

“We shall pursue this a bit further,” he went on. “But I think we must ultimately find another sport. In your spare moments, Chip, you might compile a list of sedentary sports requiring a certain degree of mental dexterity.”

We had coffee together, and then he went upstairs to discuss chess openings with the upstairs fish. I wandered into the front room and played a quick game of backgammon with Wong. He said, “Ah, so,” a lot, which I think is why Haig hired him, and he beat the hell out of me. Then I went downstairs and around the corner for a beer.

Leo Haig’s house is on West 20th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, which puts it just two blocks away from my rooming house. (Which is why I selected the rooming house in the first place; before I went to work for Haig I was living on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University.) I promised I would tell you about Haig’s house, and I guess now is as good a time as any.

The address is 311½ West 20th, and the Vi is because, it does not front on the street. There’s a house out in front, and there’s an alley next to it, and if you buzz the buzzer a door opens and you can walk down the alley to the house in back, which is half Leo Haig’s and half a whorehouse. It started off life as a carriage house. Many years ago, rich people lived in the house on the street and had the one in back for their horses and servants. The horses lived on the bottom and the servants on top. Now the horses have been replaced by Puerto Rican prostitutes and the servants have been replaced by Leo Haig and Wong Fat.

My rooming house is a compromise. Haig wants me to live in the carriage house. There’s an extra room on the lower floor that’s at least as spacious as the one I pay twenty dollars a week for, two blocks to the south. It’s furnished nicely and it’s reassuringly devoid of cockroaches, which are fairly abundant in my place on 18th Street. He keeps trying to move me in there and I keep resisting.

“The thing is,” I told him finally, “I’m sort of, uh, interested in girls. I mean, sometimes something comes along that looks like the foundation of a meaningful relationship, uh, and, uh—”

Haig’s spine stiffened, which doesn’t happen often. “Your friends would always be welcome in my house,” he said.

“It’s not that, exactly.”

“Your relations with women are your own business. It’s been my observation that the great detectives are inclined to be celibate. Not through inadequacy, but because they have passed through the stage of sexual activity before developing their highest powers. Wolfe, of course, fathered a daughter before embracing misogyny wholeheartedly. Holmes was devoted to The Woman but lived alone. Perry Mason never so much as took hold of Delia Street’s hand. Poirot always had an eye for a pretty figure, but no more than his eye was ever engaged. Their assistants, however, were apt to go to the opposite extreme. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but I would have no objection to your leading an active sexual life. You could bring women here, Chip. They could attend the breakfast table with no embarrassment.”

But of course the embarrassment would come long before they got to the breakfast table. Because you cannot make an initial pitch to a girl and lead her up an alleyway and into what is unmistakably a Puerto Rican whorehouse without creating an atmosphere which is not precisely perfect. So I keep my room on 18th Street, and consistently fail to lure girls to it anyway, and Haig and I maintain this running argument.

I drank two beers at Dominick’s and hung around there until the late news came and went. There was nothing about Melanie, which wasn’t all that surprising. If every drug overdose made the eleven o’clock news, they wouldn’t have time for wars or assassinations. I threw darts at Dominick’s dart board without distinguishing myself. I thought a lot about Melanie, and I remembered what she’d been like alive and how she had looked in death, and all of a sudden I was very damned glad I was working for Leo Haig, because we were going to get the son of a bitch who killed her and nail his hide to the wall.