Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Five

I had never been to a funeral before. When my parents committed suicide, I was away at school. I suppose the funeral took place before I could have gotten to it, but I have to admit I never even thought about it. I just packed a bag and started hitchhiking.

If Melanie’s funeral was typical, I’m surprised the custom hasn’t died out. I mean, I can sort of understand the way the Irish do it. Everybody stays drunk for three or four days. That makes a certain amount of sense. But here we were all gathered in this stark, modernistic, non-denominational cesspool on Lexington and 54th in the middle of the afternoon, listening to a man who had never met her say dumb things about a dead girl. One of the worst parts was that the jerk was sort of glossing over the fact that Melanie was either a junkie or a suicide, or both. He didn’t come right out and say anything about casting first stones, but you could see it was running through his mind. I wanted to jump up and tell the world Melanie was murdered. I managed to control myself.

I wouldn’t have been telling the world, anyway. Just a tiny portion of it. There were none of Melanie’s friends there except me. Her relationships with the people in her neighborhood had been deliberately casual, and even if some of them had decided to come to the funeral, they would have been too stoned to get it all together. “Hey, man, like we got to go see them plant old Melanie.” “No, baby, that was last week.” “Far out!”

I recognized Caitlin and Kim with no trouble. I would have figured out who they were anyway since they were seated in the front pew, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. They didn’t exactly look alike, and they didn’t look like Melanie exactly, but all of them looked like old Cyrus Trelawney. Except on them it looked becoming. They had what I guess we can call the Trelawney nose, strong and assertive, and the deep-set eyes. Caitlin was blond and fair-skinned, a tall woman, expensively dressed. The man beside her wore a tweed suit that didn’t have leather elbow patches yet. His nose and lips were thin and his expression was pained. I didn’t have much trouble figuring out that he was Gregory Vandiver. Of the Sands Point Vandivers.

Kim was very short and slender, also fair-skinned, but with hair as dark as Melanie’s. She seemed to be crying a lot, which set her apart from the rest of the company. Crying or not, I could see what the theater critic meant; she would have been an ornament to any stage. The guy next to her, on the other hand, had no decorative effect whatsoever. He kept reaching over and patting her hand. He looked familiar, and I finally figured out where I had seen him before. He played the title role in King Kong.

Kim was wearing a simple black dress, and she managed simultaneously to look good in it and to give the impression that she didn’t generally wear dresses. The ape was wearing a suit for the first time in his life.

There was a handful of other people I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t identify. I guessed that the plump, boyish man in the gray sharkskin suit might be Ferdinand Bell, Robin’s husband. If there was a professional numismatist in the room, he was likely to be it. And a girl off to one side was probably Andrea Sugar, if Andrea Sugar was there at all, because nobody else around could possibly have been a recreational therapist at something called Indulgence. The rest of the crowd was mostly old, and you sensed somehow that they were there because they liked funerals better than daytime television. I understand there are a lot of people like that. Every couple of days they trot down to the local mortuary to see who’s playing.

The casket was open. I guess they do this so that the more skeptical mourners can assure themselves that the person they’re mourning is genuinely dead. And so that the undertaker can show off his cosmetic skill.

I wasn’t going to look. But then I decided that was silly, and I went up and looked, and it wasn’t Melanie at all. There was rouge on her cheeks and lipstick on her mouth and eyebrow pencil on her eyebrows and some tasteless shit had cut her pretty hair and styled it, if you could call it that. Melanie never wore makeup in her life. This wasn’t Melanie. This was a reject from the waxworks.

I really felt like hitting somebody.

Haig had told me to approach one of the sisters after the funeral. It was up to me which one I chose. “The older girl is probably better equipped to make a decision,” he said, “while the younger one would probably be more receptive to overtures from someone your age. Use your judgment.”

I used my judgment, and decided Kim might well be more receptive to overtures from someone my age, especially in view of the fact that I was more receptive to the idea of making them to her than to Caitlin. But I used a little more of my judgment and came to the conclusion that I would rather talk to Kim without that Neanderthal of hers hulking nearby. The idea of trying to Broach A Serious Subject to her while she was intermittently dissolving in tears also left something to be desired. So it was Caitlin by default.

If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about the trip to the cemetery or the burial. I rode out in a car full of old ladies talking about convertible debentures. There was a machine at the graveside to lower the casket, untouched by human hands, and off in the distance a couple of old men stood leaning on their shovels. They reminded me of the vultures in cartoons about people lost in the desert.

Anyway, the same limousines drove everybody back from Long Island and deposited us in front of the mortuary, and I managed to walk over to Caitlin Vandiver and her husband. I introduced myself and asked if I could talk with her about Melanie.

I got a smile from her and a blank look from him, and I also got the impression that she smiled a lot and he looked blank a lot. “So you were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said. “Well, I don’t know that I can tell you very much about her. I don’t even know what you would want to hear. We were never terribly close, you know. I’m several years older than she was.”

She paused there, as if waiting for me to express doubt. She didn’t look old by any means. I’m a terrible judge of age, but I probably would have guessed her at thirty and I knew she was six years older than that.

“There are a couple of things,” I said. “I think it would be worthwhile for us to talk.”

Her smile froze up a little, and at the same time her eyes showed a little more than the polite interest they had held earlier. “I see,” she said.

I don’t know what she saw.

“Well,” she said, the smile in full force again, “actually I could use some company. I hate to eat alone and funerals always make me ravenous. Is that shameful, do you think?”

I mumbled some dumb thing or other. Caitlin turned to her husband and put her cheek out for a kiss. He picked up his cue and kissed her.

“Greg always plays squash on Fridays,” she said. “Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night, you understand.” The two of them said pleasant things to one another and Vandiver strode athletically down the street, arms swinging at his sides. I decided that he probably jogged every morning.

“He jogs every morning before breakfast,” Caitlin said. It unsettles me when people do this. I feel as though I must have a window in the middle of my forehead. “He’s keeping himself in marvelous physical condition.”

“That’s very good,” I said.

“Oh, it’s simply great. I wonder what he thinks he’s saving himself for. I haven’t had a really decent orgasm with him since the first time I saw him in his jogging suit. Romance tiptoed out the window. Shall we eat? I know a charming little French place near here. Never crowded, quite intimate, and they make a decent martini; and if I don’t have one soon — fellow me lad — I shall positively die.”

And, after we had walked about a block, she said, “I pick the wrong words sometimes, damn it. I shouldn’t have said that about positively dying. Too many people are doing it lately. Robin, Jessica, now Melanie. It’s scary, isn’t it?”

She took my hand as she said this and gave it a squeeze. I gave a squeeze back, and I think she smiled when I did.

We went to restaurant on 48th Street. It was empty, except for a couple of serious drinkers at the bar and a couple at a side table trying to stretch out lunch so that it reached all the way to quitting time. We walked through to the garden in the rear and took a table.

“Tanqueray martini, straight up, bone dry, twist,” she told the waiter. It sounded as though she’d had practice with the line. To me she said, “Do you drink? I know so many people your age don’t these days.”

I’d been trying to decide between a Coke and a beer, but that did it. “Double Irish whiskey,” I said. “With water back.”

Her eyebrows went up, but just a little. She told me I was to call her Caitlin. I was not certain that I was going to do this, and supposed I would sidestep the issue by not calling her anything at all. She seemed to think Harrison was my first name and wanted to know what my last name was, and I told her, and she got a little rattled and said that Harrison Harrison was unusual, to say the least, and ultimately we got that straightened out. She didn’t ask me what Chip was short for, which was one strong point in her favor.

There were other points in her favor. Maybe her husband jogged every morning before breakfast because he was trying to catch up with her. The money she spent on her clothes and her hair didn’t hurt, but it didn’t account for her figure or the general youthfulness of her appearance. She was tall for a woman, and quite slender, and her breasts were not especially easy to ignore.

There was more to it than all that, though. She was damned attractive and damned well knew it, and she knew how to play off this attractiveness and, oh, hell, there’s only one way to say it. She was very good at getting people horny.

She ordered mussels and a glass of white wine and another martini. I didn’t want anything to eat, which surprised her but didn’t seem to annoy her. She made a lot of small talk during her meal, and when I would start to turn the conversation around to Melanie she managed to sidetrack it. After this happened a few times I stopped thinking that she was more shook up then she was showing and Got The Message.

What I remembered, actually, was one time when I was taken out to lunch by Joe Elder, who is my editor. We went to a place around the corner from his office where they have a working antique telephone on each table. The food is better than you’d expect. The only thing wrong with Mr. Elder is that he can actually drink a Daiquiri without making a face. God knows how. But all through lunch I kept trying to talk about an idea I had for a book, and he kept changing the subject, and later they brought the coffee and he started talking about the book, and it was the same way now with Caitlin Vandiver. She had decided that we were having a business lunch and she knew that meant not saying a word about business until we were done with the lunch.

She finished her mussels about the same time I ran out of Irish to sip at. When the coffee came she settled herself in her chair and came in right on cue.

“You were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said.

Which was my cue, so I picked it up. “I was the one who discovered the body,” I said.

“Oh, dear. That must have been awful for you.”

It had been, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I told her I was concerned professionally, which brought that tension into her expression, which I later realized was because she thought I might be working up to some sort of blackmail pitch. But I went on to say that I worked for Leo Haig. “The prominent detective,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

Sure, lady. “I have to tell you this in confidence. We have grounds to believe that Melanie was murdered.”

“But I thought it was an overdose of heroin.”

“It was.” The autopsy had confirmed this. “That doesn’t mean she gave it to herself.”

“I see.” She thought for a minute. Then she said, “Oh.”

“I’m afraid so. It puts things in sort of a different light. Jessica’s suicide and Robin’s accident—”

“Might not be a suicide and an accident. Well, Robin’s certainly was, although I suppose someone could have tampered with Ferdie’s car. Do those things happen? I know they do in books, but my God, if I were going to kill someone I would take my trusty little gun and shoot him in the back of the head.” She was silent for a moment, and I wondered who she was killing in fantasy. (Whom, I mean.) Then she said, “I never thought Jessica was the type to commit suicide. She was always a tougher and bitchier broad than I am, and that’s going some. And she was a dyke, too.”

I had sort of assumed this, but I still didn’t have a reply worked out.

“Of course she might have grown out of that,” Caitlin went on. “I did, you know. Although I never embraced lesbianism as wholeheartedly as Jessica did. I never stopped liking men, you see.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Do you want to know something interesting? When I was a girl, oh, way back before Noah built his ark, I always had a special preference for older men.”

“Er.”

“But now that I’ve slithered onto the dark side of thirty, I find I’ve done an about-face. I have a thing for young men these days.”

“Uh.”

“I’ve noticed, Chip, that some young men have a thing for older women.”

I don’t have a thing for older women, but I certainly haven’t got anything against them. Actually, I don’t suppose chronological age means very much. There are women of thirty-six who are too old. There are other women the same age who are not. Caitlin was in the second category, and I was becoming more aware of this every minute.

Her perfume may have had something to do with this. Her leg, which had somehow moved against mine under the table, may also have had something to do with it.

“Well,” I said. “About Melanie—”

“Were you sleeping with her, Chip?”

Everybody wanted to know if I was sleeping with Melanie. First those cops, now Caitlin. I said, “We hadn’t known each other very long.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t take very long.”

“Er. The thing is, you know, that someone killed Melanie. And if someone also killed Jessica, and if it’s the same someone—”

“Then Kim and I might be on somebody’s Christmas list.”

“Uh-huh. Something like that.”

She lit a cigarette. She had been lighting cigarettes all along, but I don’t think it’s absolutely essential to call it to your attention every time somebody lights a cigarette. This time, though, she made a production number out of it, winding up taking a big drag and sighing out a cloud of smoke.

She said, “You know, Chip, I do have a little trouble taking this seriously.”

“There may not be anything to it.”

“But there also may be something to it, is that what you mean? Assuming there is, what do I do about it? Put myself in a convent? Hire around-the-clock bodyguards? Quickly marry the president so I qualify for Secret Service protection?”

“The most important thing is to find Melanie’s killer.”

“‘Catch him before he kills more?’ That makes a certain amount of sense.” She studied me for a moment. “The man you work for,” she said.

“Leo Haig.”

“He’s really good?”

“He’s brilliant.”

“Hmmm. And what do you do for him exactly? You’re a little young to be a detective, aren’t you?”

“I’m his assistant. That doesn’t mean my job is taking out the garbage.” Actually, I do take the garbage out of the fish tanks some of the time. “I work with him on cases.”

“So you’d be working on this, too.”

“That’s right. I do the leg work.” I regretted saying that because she sort of winked and did some leg work of her own.

“I’ll just bet you do, Chip.”

“Uh.”

“I’d like to see you devote all your energies to my case,” she said. As I guess you’ve noticed, she tended to say things with double meanings. “I’d like you working hard on my behalf. You don’t have a client, do you? You’re just investigating because of your friendship for my sister?”

We had a client but he didn’t want his name mentioned, so I didn’t mention it. I agreed that we were involved in this out of friendship for Melanie. Which was true — I would have been working every bit as hard without Addison Shivers as a client.

She opened her bag and found a checkbook. She wrote for a minute, tore out a check, folded it in half and slipped it to me. “That’s an advance,” she said.

I took the check.

“An advance,” she repeated. “Actually this is no day to be making advances, is it?”

“Uh.”

“It’s about that time, isn’t it? I have to pick up my darling husband at his club. On the way home I can hear how good it is to work up a sweat. That depends how you work it up, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“Do you? I suspect you do. I have that feeling about you, Chip. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other in the course of your investigation of the case.”

“I’m sure we will, Mrs. Vandiver.”

“Caitlin.”

“Caitlin,” I agreed.

“It’s a difficult name to remember, isn’t it?”

“No, but—”

“Some of my best friends call me Cat. Just plain Cat. You know, as in pussy.”

The waiter brought the check. She put money on the table and we left. I was really in no condition to walk, to tell you the truth, and I think she noticed this, and I think she was pleased.

On the street she offered me her cheek as she had offered it to her husband, but when I went to kiss her, she turned her head quickly and my mouth landed on hers. She did something very nice with her tongue, then drew quickly away, an amused light in her eyes.

“Oh, we’ll get along,” she said.

I felt like springing for a cab, so of course there weren’t any around. I took the subway. It was hot and crowded and smelly and I wound up pressed up against a home-bound secretary. I was in the wrong condition to be pressed up against anyone and the secretary noticed it. She gave me the look people give when they find a cockroach in their oatmeal.

When I got off the train I finally looked at Caitlin’s check. It was for five hundred dollars and it was made out to me rather than to Haig. She’d spelled my first name Chipp, which explained why she hadn’t asked me what my real name was. She was probably used to people with first names like that.

Actually, it would simplify my life in a lot of ways if I spelled it with two p’s. I should have thought of that years ago.

Haig didn’t see anything wrong with accepting retainers from both Addison Shivers and Caitlin Vandiver. “Our work will be in both their interests,” he said. “I see no likely conflict. And there’s certainly precedent for it. Nero Wolfe frequently represents more than one person in the same matter, and does so without either party being aware of his association with the other. In the case that was reported under the title Too Many Clients, for example—”

I had just read Too Many Clients a month or so ago, but there was no point in telling him that. You might as well try telling Billy Graham you read the Bible once, for all the good it would do you.