Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Seven

It was a pipe bomb consisting of a length of pipe filled with various goodies, but I’m not going to go into detail. I mean, who knows what lunatic out there might get inspired and follow my directions and bomb a whorehouse on his own? Haig says that Alfred Hitchcock once had a scene in which an assassin used a gun built into a camera, and then a few months after the picture was released someone assassinated somebody just that way, in Portugal I think, and Hitchcock felt very ginchy about it. I can understand that.

What happened was this: someone threw a pipe bomb into the second floor front of our building. That was the broken glass, the sound of the bomb going through the window, which had not been open at the time. Then the bomb went off, shaking the whole house and, more to the point, giving Maria Tijerino and Able-Bodied Seaman Elmer J. Seaton a greater thrill than they could possibly have anticipated.

Shit. I don’t want to be cute about this because it was not at all nice. Maria and the sailor were in bed in the front room at the time and the damned bomb blew them to hell and gone. I went in there and looked, God knows why, and then I went into the john and threw up. I mean, I could make a few dozen jokes along the lines of If-you-gotta-go-etc. But the hell with it. I saw it, and it was ugly.

The explosion didn’t hurt anybody but Maria and the sailor. It put some cracks in the plaster throughout the house without doing any real structural damage.

It also made some of our fish tanks leak.

Haig and Wong Fat and I missed a lot of the action because we were running around trying to make sure the fish were all right. That probably sounds very callous, but you have to realize that there was nothing we could possibly do for Maria or the sailor. And a leaking fish tank is something that requires attention. If a fish tank absolutely cracks to hell and gone, you can just go to church and light candles for the fish, but we didn’t have any that got cracked. The thing is, shock waves will interfere with the structural soundness of an aquarium, which is basically a metal frame with a slate bottom and four glass sides, and quite a few of ours sprung slow leaks, and that meant we had to transfer the fish to sound tanks and empty the leakers before they leaked all over the place. Eventually we would have to repair all the leakers, a process which involves coating all the edges with rubber cement and cursing a lot when the tank leaks anyway.

So while we were scurrying around examining tanks on the third and fourth floor, I gather half the police in Manhattan were stumbling around on the first two floors. There were a couple of ambulances out front and a Fire Department rescue vehicle. There were beat patrolmen and Bomb Squad detectives and God knows who else, and, because it was established that Maria and her sailor were dead, which could not have been too difficult to establish, there were two cops from Homicide.

Yeah.

I suppose you already figured out that it would be the same two cops, Gregorio and Seidenwall. You must have.

Because you’re reading this, and if I were reading it I would certainly expect to keep encountering the same two cops. (I gather this never happens in real life, but just the other day I read a mystery by Justin Scott called Many Happy Returns and the lead character kept cracking up oil trucks, of all things, and each time he turned a truck over the same two humorous cops turned up to glare at him. It didn’t seem to matter what part of the city he was in, he always ran into the same goddam cops.)

The thing is, you’re reading this in a book, so you know it’s Gregorio and Seidenwall again. I wasn’t reading it, I was living gamely through it, and they were the last thing I expected.

But there they were.

“... check on the possibility of...” Gregorio said. I don’t know how the sentence had started or how he was planning to end it. He had evidently begun it in the hallway, undeterred by the lack of anyone to hear it, and he didn’t end it, because he caught sight of me. “I’ll be a ring-tailed son of a bitch,” he said.

“Er,” I said.

“You again,” he said.

You again, I thought.

“I don’t like this at all,” he said. “A hippie girl OD’s in a toilet on the Lower East Side and you’re the one who discovers the body. A sailor and a spic hooker fuck themselves into an explosion and you’re living upstairs. You know something, Harrison? I’m not crazy about any of this.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“I never believed in coincidence,” Gregorio said. “It makes me nervous. I hate to be nervous. I got a stomach that when I get nervous my stomach gets nervous, and I can live without a nervous stomach. I can live better and longer without a nervous stomach.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“I don’t like the sense of things fitting together like this,”

Gregorio said. “How long have you lived in New York, Harrison?”

“A couple of years,” I said. “Off and on.”

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

“Off and on,” Gregorio said. “A couple of years off and on.”

“We oughta take him in.”

“A couple of years you were here, and a lot of years I was here, and all that time I never heard of you, Harrison. I never knew you existed. Now I see you twice in two days.”

“Three days,” I said.

“Shut up,” Gregorio said.

“We oughta take him in,” Seidenwall said.

Leo Haig said, “Sir!”

And everybody else shut up.

He said, “Sir. You are on my property without my invitation or enthusiastic approval. You have come, as well I can appreciate, to investigate a bombing. You wish to ascertain whether or not the bombing is impinging in any way upon myself and my associates. It is not. We are not involved. The building has been bombed. Living in a building which is sooner or later bombed is evidently a natural consequence of living in the city of New York. It is perhaps an even more natural consequence of living above a house of ill repute. I am not happy about this, sir, as no doubt neither are you. I am distressed, especially as this bombing causes me considerable inconvenience. I am increasingly displeased at your attitude toward my associate, and, by extension, toward myself.”

Gregorio and Seidenwall looked down. Leo Haig looked up. Hard. Gregorio and Seidenwall looked away.

Haig said, “Sir. I assume you have no warrant. I further assume your contingency privileges obviate the necessity for a warrant to intrude upon my property. But, sir, I now ask you to leave. You cannot seriously entertain the notion that I or my associate did in fact bomb our own building.

“We are not witlings. Each of us can vouch for the other’s presence at the time of the bombing, as can my associate Mr. Wong Fat.” Wong was at that moment cowering under his bed saying the rosary. “You can, sir, as your estimable colleague suggests, take Mr. Harrison into custody. It would be an unutterably stupid act. You could, on the other hand, quit these premises. It appears to me that these are your alternatives. You have only to choose.”

I never heard the like. Neither, I guess, did Gregorio. They scooted.

I always wanted to call someone a witling,” Haig said later. “Wolfe does it all the time. I always wanted to do that.”

“You did it very well,” I said.

“I have my uncle to thank for that,” Leo Haig said. “I have my uncle to thank for many things, but one fact sums it all up. But for him, I would have gone through life without ever being able to call a policeman a witling.”

We had a beer on the strength of that.