Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Eight

I spent the night in Haig’s house. It was late by the time we were done with the fish, even later before we finished talking about the bombing. We agreed that it was possible someone had bombed the whorehouse on purpose, and we also agreed that we didn’t believe it had happened that way. That bomb had gone through the wrong window. It had been meant for us, and whoever threw it had his signals crossed.

Which was one of the reasons I spent the night on the couch. Somebody was trying to kill us, and I really didn’t want to give him any encouragement.

“You ought to move in here,” Haig said over breakfast. “It would expedite matters.”

“Not if I have to spend any time on that couch.”

“It was uncomfortable?”

“It was horrible,” I said. “I kept waking up and wanting to stretch out on the floor, but moving was too painful.”

“Of course you’d have a proper bed,” Haig said stiffly. “And a proper room of your own, and the implicit right to entertain friends of your own choosing. In addition—”

He paraded the usual arguments. I paid a little attention to them and a lot of attention to breakfast. Corned beef hash, fried eggs, and the world’s best coffee. I don’t always like coffee all that much, but Wong Fat makes the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s a Louisiana blend with chicory in it and he uses this special porcelain drip pot and it really makes a difference.

After breakfast Haig gave me a list of things to do regarding the fish. While I was upstairs attending to them he was on the phone in his office. I finished up and was sitting on my side of the partners’ desk at a quarter after eleven. Haig was reading one of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. I forget which one. He said, “Formidable,” once or twice. I spent ten minutes watching him read. Then he closed the book and leaned back in his chair and played with his beard. After a few minutes of that he look one of his pipes apart. He put it back together again and started to take it apart a second time, but stopped himself.

“Chip,” he said.

I tried to look bright-eyed.

“I’ve made some calls. I spoke with Mr. Shivers and Mrs. Vandiver. Also with several other lawyers. Also with Mr. Boll and a man named LiCastro. Also — no matter. There are several courses of inquiry you might pursue today. You have your notebook?”

I had my notebook.

Indulgence was on the second floor of a renovated brownstone on 53rd Street, between Lexington and Third. The shop on the first floor sold gourmet cookware. I walked up a flight of stairs and paused for a moment in front of a Chinese red door with a brass nameplate on it. There was a bell, and another brass plate instructed me to ring it before opening the door. I followed orders.

The man behind the reception desk was small and precise and black. He had his hair in a tight Afro and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. His suit was black mohair and he was wearing a red paisley vest with it. His tie was a narrow black knit.

It was air-conditioned in there, but I couldn’t imagine how he could have come to work through all that heat in those clothes. And he looked as though he had never perspired in his life.

He asked if he could help me. I said that I wanted to see a girl named Andrea Sugar.

“Of course,” he said, and smiled briefly. “Miss Sugar is one of our recreational therapists. Do you require a massage?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Very good. Are you a member?”

I wasn’t, but it turned out that I could purchase a trial membership for ten dollars. This would entitle me to the services of a recreational therapist for thirty minutes. I handed over ten of Leo Haig’s dollars and he filled out a little membership card for me. When he asked me my name I said “Norman Conquest.” Don’t ask me why.

“Miss Sugar is engaged at the moment,” he said, after my ten dollar bill had disappeared. “She’ll be available in approximately ten minutes. Or you may put yourself in the hands of one of our other therapists. Here are photographs of several of them.”

He gave me a little leatherette photo album and I looked through it. There were a dozen photographs of recreational therapists, all of them naked and smiling. In the interests of therapy, I guess. I said I would prefer to wait for Miss Sugar and he nodded me to a couch and went back to his book. It was a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky, if you care.

I sat around for ten minutes during which the phone rang twice. The desk man answered, but didn’t say much. I leafed through Sports Illustrated and read something very boring about sailboat racing. He went into another room and came back to report that Miss Sugar was waiting for me in the third cubicle on the right. I walked down a short hallway and into a room a little larger than a throw rug. The walls were painted the same Chinese red as the door.

The floor was cork tile. The only piece of furniture in the room was a massage table with a fresh white sheet on it.

Andrea Sugar was standing beside the table. She wasn’t the girl I had seen at the funeral. She was wearing a white nurse’s smock. (I think that’s the right word for it.) She was tall, almost my height, and she looked a little like pictures of Susan Sontag. She said hello and wasn’t it hot out and other convention things, and I said hello and agreed that it was hot out there, all right, and she suggested I take off all my clothes and get on the table.

“I’m not really here for a massage,” I said.

“You’re not supposed to say that, honey.”

“But the thing is—”

“You’re here for a massage, sweetie. Your back hurts and you want a nice massage, you just paid ten dollars and for that you’ll get a very nice massage, and if something else should happen to develop, that’s between you and me, but I’m a recreational therapist and you’re a young man who needs a massage, and that’s how the rulebook reads, Okay?”

The thing is, I did sort of need a massage. My back still had kinks in it from Leo Haig’s corrugated couch. I just felt a little weird about taking all my clothes off in front of a stranger. I don’t think I have any particular hangups in that direction, actually, but the whole scene was somehow unreal. Anyway, I took off my clothes and hung them over a wooden thing designed for the purpose and got up on the table and onto my stomach.

“Now,” she said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

I guess the question didn’t need an answer, because she was already beginning to work on my back. She really knew how to give a back rub. Her hands were very strong and she had a nice sense of touch and knew what muscles to concentrate on. When she got to the small of my back I could feel all the pain of a bad night’s sleep being sucked out of the base of my spine, like poison out of a snakebite.

“It’s about Jessica Trelawney,” I said.

The hands stopped abruptly. “Christ Almighty,” she said softly. “Who are you?”

“Chip Harrison,” I said. “I work for Leo Haig, the detective.”

“You’re not a cop.”

“No. Haig is a private investigator. I was also a friend of Melanie Trelawney’s.”

“She OD’d the other day.”

“That’s right.”

By now she had gone back to the massage. Her hands moved here and there as we talked, and when they strayed below the belt they began to have an effect that was interesting. I felt an urge to wriggle my toes a little.

“You really didn’t come for a massage.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean you should stop. I came to ask you some questions. If you want me to get dressed—”

“No, that’s no good. They look in from time to time and I should be doing what I’m supposed to be doing. You’re a friend of Melanie’s and you want to ask about Jess?”

“Yes.”

“I hope you’re trying to find out who murdered her. I just surprised you, didn’t I? I never bought that suicide story. Not for a minute. I’ve never known anyone less suicidal than Jess. She was one of the strongest women I’ve ever known. How does this feel?”

“Great.”

“You’ve got nice skin. And you’re clean. You wouldn’t believe some of the men who come in here. Have you ever had a massage before?”

“No.”

“What were we talking about? Jess. No, I never believed she killed herself and I always believed she was murdered. It was a waste of time telling the police this. I was very close to Jess. As a matter of fact we were lovers. I met her in a Women’s Lib group. Consciousness-raising. We responded to each other right away. She had made love with women before, but she had never had a real relationship. We lived together; I moved into her apartment. We bought each other silly little presents. Roll over.”

“Pardon?”

“You’re done on this side. Roll over onto your back.”

I did.

“I got her a job here,” she went on. “She didn’t have to work, of course. She was rich. But she wanted to work, she didn’t like the idea of living off her inheritance and not establishing herself as a person responsible for her own existence. She was extremely tough-minded, Chip.”

Her hands were working on my arms and shoulders and chest and stomach. She used a firm touch at first, but as she got further south she switched to a feathery stroking. My mind was not at all interested in sex, for a change, but my body was beginning to display a mind of its own.

I forced myself to talk about Melanie, and how Haig and I were convinced she had been murdered. I didn’t go into details and I didn’t mention the bombing the night before. I asked her if she had any ideas who might have wanted to kill Jessica.

“Some man,” she said.

“I meant specifically.”

She shook her head and ran her fingers over my thighs. “You meet strange people in this business,” she said. “Some very unreal men. The names they’ll call a woman when they get off. I don’t think they’re even conscious of it most of the time. It’s automatic, some deep built-in hatred of the entire female sex, and their own sexuality is all mixed up with a desire to dominate and hurt. I had a theory about Jess.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, it doesn’t point anywhere in particular. But I figured she had a client for a massage and he managed to get her home address. He went up there and fucked her and hurt her and then he killed her and threw her out the window. He could have beaten her up, you know. It wouldn’t have showed because the fall would have hidden any injuries.”

Haig and I had already discussed this. Anything less than a bullet hole would have been consistent with injuries suffered in that great a fall.

“But if Melanie was murdered, then probably it was the same person both times.”

“Right,” I said.

“Which makes my theory fall down. It’s not just a man who hates women. It’s a man with a particular hatred for women named Trelawney.”

“Right.”

“I can’t think who it could be.”

“Possibly someone who stands to gain by killing the five sisters.”

“Who stands to gain?”

“It’s hard to tell. The money wasn’t entailed, it passed over completely to the girls under Cyrus Trelawney’s will. Leo Haig is working on it.”

“I wish I could help.”

We chatted a little more, and then she drew her hands away and I thought the massage was over. I sort of hoped it was. I couldn’t take very much more of this.

She said, “It’s very warm in here, Chip. Would you mind if I removed my uniform?”

She had a fine body, long and lean and supple. Her breasts were very firm and her stomach perfectly flat. Her skin smelled spicy.

She put her hands right where I hoped she would put them. She pressed gently, then moved her fingers in that feathery stroke.

“There’s one muscle group I haven’t been able to relax,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s sort of embarrassing, if you want to know.”

“I’d be embarrassed if you didn’t react that way. Would you like me to do something about it?”

“I’d like that.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do.”

“Uh.”

She was not touching me now. “This isn’t part of the standard massage,” she explained. “You’ve had the standard treatment already.” I had had the treatment, all right. “If there’s anything else you would like, you have to tell me specifically what it is. And then you give me a present because you like me, and I do something very nice for you because I like you, and that’s how it’s done.”

“I see.”

“What would you like?”

“Uh. I don’t know what the choices are.”

“For a small present I could do something manual. For a large present I could do something oral.”

“I see.”

“You already know I have nice hands. I also have a very nice mouth.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I’ve received lots of compliments on it.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“So if you’d like to ask me to do something—”

“How much is a small present?”

“Ten dollars would be a small present. Twenty dollars would be a large present. A lot of people give me larger presents than that, but I sort of like you. You’re clean and you’re not an unpleasant person.”

I had about twenty-five dollars with me after paying my trial membership fee. But I was going to have to take cabs and be ready to spend money if the need arose. The twenty-dollar present was out of the question and the ten dollar present seemed like a lot of money for a very second-best experience. And I really didn’t like the idea of paying for sex. I could almost rationalize this on the grounds that it wouldn’t be sex, exactly. I mean, there was nothing really sexual about it, for Pete’s sake. It would just be a release from tension. Recreational therapy, you could call it.

What it comes to, really, is that if I had had a hundred dollars in my pocket I would probably have given twenty of them to Andrea. Since I had twenty-five, I told her I was afraid I would have to pass.

“That’s cool,” she said, slipping back into her uniform. “Maybe you’ll drop around again sometime.”

“Maybe I will.”

“And if there’s any way I can help you find out who killed Jess—”

“Maybe there is,” I said.

“How?”

“It might help if we knew the names of her customers for the week before she was killed. I don’t suppose there would be any connection, but something might turn up.”

She gave a low whistle. “That’s a tough one. There’s no record kept of what guy goes with what girl. They keep track of the number of massages everybody does because you get a percentage of that on top of the presents clients give you. And they keep the names from the membership forms, but you’d be surprised how many men are ashamed to give their right name.”

“Not all that surprised, actually.”

“I suppose I could find those records, though. For the week before Andrea died? I’ll have to be sneaky. You’re not supposed to have access to the records. I think they’re afraid some of the girls might try a little blackmail. But I’m good at schemes and I shouldn’t have much trouble getting around Rastus out there.”

My face must have showed something. She laughed. “No, I’m not a racist,” she said. “No more than the next bigot, anyway. That’s his name.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t think he was born with it. But it’s his name now and he likes to watch people when he introduces himself. Don’t forget your watch, Chip.”

The watch I almost forgot told me that it was ten minutes after two when I left Indulgence. I went around the corner and had a cheeseburger and some iced tea. Walking I was not a very pleasurable experience at the moment. Andrea Sugar had drained all the pain out of my backbone and rolled it up into a ball and stuffed it into my groin.

I’d given her Leo Haig’s number and told her to call as soon as she had the records of clients for the week in question. I couldn’t see how it would help, especially since anyone planning to kill Andrea would have likely used a name about as legitimate as old Norm Conquest himself, but it was something to do.

She had always been convinced that Jessica had been murdered. That was the sort of fact Leo Haig usually found interesting and suggestive, so I spent a dime telling him about it. By the time I left the restaurant I could almost walk without limping.

Almost.