“The order of the murders,” he said. “Robin, Jessica, Melanie, Caitlin. I was shocked when I learned that Caitlin was dead. Doubly shocked, because I thought you would save her for last. You were trying so hard to throw suspicion upon Gregory Vandiver. Inventing some nonsense about financial insolvency, some prattle about his having invested large sums in rare coins and being forced to liquidate them. One would have thought you would wait until Kim was safely dead before disposing of him. He, surely, would have done so before killing his wife, had he the financial motive you suggested.
“But that becomes clear when one devotes some thought to it. You did not merely want to murder your half-sisters. You wanted to have sexual relations with them as well.
“First Robin. You married her in order to have sex with her. Then Jessica. You went at least three times to her place of employment in the week preceding her death.
“You signed Gregory Vandiver’s name to the membership application, having already planned to use him as a scapegoat should there be need for one. Through this contact with Jessica, you were able to arrange to see her privately at her apartment. You did so, sir, and you pitched her out of her window.”
“You can’t prove that,” Bell said.
“But I can. Miss Sugar no doubt recognizes you. If not, her colleagues very possibly will. In any event, I have here three pieces of paper confirming the dates of your visit. They identify you as Gregory Vandiver, sir, but they are in your handwriting.”
Which is how I had tipped to the whole thing. I remembered where I had seen that precise penmanship. It was on a 2 x 2 coin envelope.
“You had an affair with Caitlin. I have had it established that this was not terribly difficult for one to achieve. I knew at an early date that you were probably in touch with her. I learned that when Mr. Harrison reported on his conversation with you Saturday.”
I said, “How?”
Haig glared at me.
“I’m serious. How did you know that?”
“Because you’ve learned to report conversations verbatim. I spoke to Mr. Bell over the telephone to prepare him for your visit. I identified you as my associate, Mr. Harrison. I did not mention your first name. Nor did you mention it when introducing yourself. Mr. Bell asked if it was all right for him to call you Chip. The only person likely to have told him your name was Caitlin, yet he gave the impression that everything you were saying to him was coming as a great surprise. This made me instantly suspicious of Mr. Bell, a suspicion I never had cause to relinquish.”
“I was not having an affair with Caitlin,” Bell said stiffly. “As a matter of fact, she did ask my advice after Harrison talked to her. She had second thoughts about hiring him, and wanted my opinion.”
“Indeed.”
“I never had sexual relations with her. Or with Jessica. Perhaps it’s true that I visited her at that massage parlor. If I signed Gregory’s name, it was on a whim. I only visited her to have a half hour of her time, so that we could talk about Robin. It was a way of bringing Robin back to life for me.”
Haig closed his eyes. He opened them and sighed and sat down behind his desk again. “I won’t comment on that,” he said. “Nor shall I attempt to determine what sexual act you performed with Melanie Trelawney. I suspect it might have been you who put the thought in her mind that her two sisters had been killed. Or you might have become aware of her suspicions by virtue of her having called you to inquire if there was any possibility that Robin’s death was not wholly accidental. At any rate, it should have posed no problem for you to gain access to her apartment. Once there, you could have had little difficulty in rendering her unconscious. She was completely nude when Mr. Harrison discovered the body. It has not been my observation that people habitually disrobe before injecting themselves with heroin.”
“Happens some of the time,” Gregorio said.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You wouldn’t get suspicious either way,” Seidenwall said.
Haig nodded. “So you would not have disrobed her to make her the more obvious victim of death from a drug overdose. I’m sure you did something with her. I do not care to know what it was, nor do I care to know whether it took place before or after you injected a fatal overdose of the drug into her bloodstream.”
I don’t care to know that either, to tell you the truth.
“You can’t prove any of this,” Bell said. Not for the first time.
Haig stared at him. He was on his feet again. “I can prove almost all of it,” he said. “Once the facts are known and established, the proof is rarely hard to come by. Had you taken your time, you might have managed to bring it off. You did come very close at that. You killed four out of five. Had sex with four of your sisters, killed four of your sisters.
“And you were very patient at the onset. You waited to kill Philip Flanner, waited to marry his widow, waited to kill her. But then you got a taste of it and you liked it, didn’t you? You loved it.”
Bell didn’t say anything. The muscle was really having a workout in his temple, and he didn’t look his usual happy self.
“You incestuous murdering bastard,” Haig said. “You never did what you wanted to do. You never killed your father and you never slept with your mother, and you used your sisters as surrogates for both, one after another. But you’ll never get the last one, Bell, you’ll never put a hand on her!”
The son of a bitch moved fast. He had the knife out of his pocket and the blade open before I could even blink.
A fat lot of good it did him. He wasn’t even out of his chair before Seidenwall had an arm wrapped around his throat and Luther Polk’s long-barreled automatic was jabbed into the side of his head.
They took turns advising him of his rights. He went limp, but that didn’t make Seidenwall let go of his throat or Polk stop jabbing him in the head with the gun barrel.
On the way out, his hands cuffed behind his back, he turned and smiled at me. It was a smile I will never forget as long as I live. I can close my eyes and see it now. I wish I couldn’t.
“You know,” he said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with having you beaten up. I hope you can believe that.”
Nineteen
After the three cops had escorted Ferdinand Bell out of there, I figured everybody would start talking at once. I guess nobody wanted to make the first move. They all just sat there staring at each other.
Finally Addison Shivers said, “The vagaries and inconsistencies of human nature. How many persons did that man kill?”
“I know of nine,” Haig said. “The four sisters; Philip Flanner; Maria Tijerina; Elmer Seaton, the sailor; Seamus Fogarty; Gregory Vandiver. Nine. There may have been others, but I doubt it.”
“And yet the one crime he was anxious to deny was the administration of a beating to young Chip.”
“Indeed,” Haig said. “He was not responsible for it, as it happens.”
Kim said, to me, “You never told me you were beaten up.”
I agreed that I never did.
“If he didn’t do it, then who did?”
I got to my feet. It was doomed to be anticlimactic, but it was my part of the show. “That’s easy to answer,” I said. “Gordie McLeod set me up. Didn’t you, old buddy?”
Everybody stared at him. He didn’t return the favor. He stared at his hands, mostly. Kim got up and drew away from him as if he was a leper. Which, come to think of it, he more or less was.
I said, “Well?”
He stood up. “I made a mistake,” he said.
I just looked at him.
“Well, I’ll tell you, man. All I could see is you’re nosin’ around my girl. And then I find out you’ve got some people down to the docks askin’ questions about me. What do I need with people askin’ questions, and I don’t know about any murders, and I figure maybe you’re doin’ a number, and if you’re doin’ a number I figure maybe I can cool things out is all. I told ’em to take it easy with you.”
The look on Kim’s face was worth the p
rice of admission.
“So I made a mistake,” he went on. “You know, the way I feel about Kim and all, and so I got carried away. I never had your advantages, I never went to college, never joined a fraternity, I’m just your ordinary guy, works hard all his life and tries to make a go of it.”
“You were also born stupid. Don’t forget that.”
“Well, I never said I was the brightest guy in the world. Just your average Joe.” He gave his shoulders a shrug. He had a lot of shoulders and they moved impressively. “Look,” he said, “I’m the kind of guy gives credit where credit’s due. I had you wrong. You’re okay. I made a mistake.” He extended a paw like an overtrained retriever. “No hard feelings, huh?”
“None at all,” I said, and I extended my hand and moved toward him, and for some odd reason or other my hand kept going right on past his hand, fingers bunched and rigid, and the fingers jabbed him almost exactly three inches north of his navel, assuming he was born once and had one, and that’s where the solar plexus is supposed to be, and that’s where his was, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like a charm.
He doubled up and turned sort of orange, and he started folding inward like a dying accordion, and I interlaced my fingers and cupped the back of his head with both hands and helped him fold up, and at the same time I raised my right knee as high as it would go, and it couldn’t go all the way up because it met his face coming down.
You wouldn’t believe the sound it made.
After Wong sponged the blood off him, we put him in a chair, and I stood in front of him trying not to look at his nose. It was a pleasure not to look at it.
“No hard feelings,” I said, “but I’ve had a yen to do that since I first saw you. It was the sort of yen that kept getting stronger until there was just no restraining myself. Do you understand what I’m saying, or should I use smaller words?”
He tried to glare at me.
“Here’s the point,” I said. “I have a feeling I’m going to get that yen over and over. It’s not the sort of thing you do once and get bored with. So it would probably be a good idea if you arranged your life so that you and I were not in the same place at the same time, because kicking the shit out of you could get to be a habit with me.
“I’ll tell you something else. You don’t give a shit about Kim, beyond the fact that she’s easy to look at and worth a couple of million dollars. She’s far too good for you, and even you must be bright enough to realize that. She would have written you off a long time ago, but she was afraid of you. I think she can see that you’re nothing much to be afraid of. You’re not going to see Kim any more.”
He tried a little harder to glare at me.
“You didn’t beat me up to keep me away from Kim. You had your buddies work me over to keep me off your back, because you’ve got a nice little hustle going and you figured I might turn it up. I did. We got a call just before you got here today. It was from—never mind who it was from. You take days off from the docks now and then.
“You have one talent on God’s earth: you can start a car without the key, and that’s what you’ve been doing for a living. I could tell you just where you drive them, and just how much you get for them, but you already know. Or maybe you write the address on your shirt cuff so you won’t forget it.”
“Who told you?”
“Mr. Haig has some very good friends. Mr. Haig’s friend asked that his name not be mentioned so I’m not going to mention it. Mr. Haig’s friend asked if he could take care of this for us. He said a good friend of his has a paving contract up in Rockland County. He wanted to know if we wanted him to arrange to tuck you under a section of four-lane divided highway.”
His face got very white. Except for around the nose, where it was still doing a little low-grade bleeding.
“We told him you weren’t worth the trouble. If you start being worth the trouble, meaning if you turn up on Kim’s doorstep again, Mr. Haig will call him and say he changed his mind. A lot of this man’s friends are in the highway construction business. I guess it’s profitable.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
“I’m not finished. I’m also supposed to tell you that the auto theft people don’t want to work with you any more. And that you may have a certain amount of trouble getting picked in the dock shape-up. People may tend to overlook you. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Mr. Haig’s friend didn’t want his name mentioned, but there was another name he told me to mention to you.”
I did so, and I never thought four syllables could have such an effect. He did everything but die on the spot.
I said, “I think you should go away now.”
He went away.
So did the rest of them, ultimately. They had questions, most of them, and Haig answered them. He got into a long psychoanalytical rap with Andrea Sugar, who turned out to be very knowledgeable on Jungian psychology.
Madam Juana took him aside and told him something, and kissed his cheek, and Haig went beet-red. He had never done this before in my presence. I can’t swear to what she said to him, but I can make a guess based on my instincts and my experience, because before his blush had a chance to fade she came over to me and gave me a kiss on the cheek and whispered in my ear, and what she whispered was, “You a wonnerful boy and you get the bom who kill my Maria, and anytime you wanna girl you come down and I give you best inna house, no charge, anytime you wanna fock.”
Eventually Kim was the only one left. I took her upstairs and showed her the fish. She was very interested. She was also still a little nervous, so I waved at Haig and took her back to her apartment.
“I never thought you were violent, Chip. I thought of you as, you know, gentle and sensitive and aware.”
Like the actor who turned out to be a faggot, I thought.
“And Gordie is so big and strong—”
“Well, Wong Fat showed me how to do a few things. I’m basically a very non-violent person. The only time I ever had to hit anybody was when I was a deputy sheriff in South Carolina.”
“A what?”
“It was an honorary position, basically. What it came down to was that I was a bouncer in a, well, in a whorehouse, if you want to know. Sometimes guys would get drunk and pull knives, and I would have to hit ’em upside the head with this club they gave me.”
“Upside the head?”
“The local expression.”
“You really didn’t go to college, did you?”
“I told you. I had to drop out of high school. My parents were sort of high-class con men, although I didn’t know it at the time, and they got caught, and they killed themselves, and Upper Valley threw me out a few months before graduation. They were all heart.”
She looked at me with those wide eyes. “You’ve really lived,” she said.
“Well, I tend to keep moving.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before, Chip.”
So that’s about it. Ferdinand Bell is wearing a strait-jacket, and will spend what’s left of his life in a cell with spongy walls. This infuriates Haig, who would like to see the return of public hanging. We still haven’t spawned the African gouramis, but John LiCastro finally got the results he wanted, and has a whole twenty-nine-gallon tank full of baby discus fish. Haig went over to see them the other day and says they’re doing fine, and that you would have thought LiCastro had fathered them himself, the way he was carrying on.
Gordie McLeod hasn’t been heard from. He never turned up to take his stuff out of Kim’s apartment, and a couple of days ago I got all his things together and tucked them neatly into the incinerator. Kim said that wasn’t very nice, and I said it was too bad.
I ran into Andrea Sugar at the funeral for the Vandivers. She volunteered to teach Kim the art of massage. I sort of sidestepped that one. It was probably just a nice gesture on her part, but she may have had an ulterior motive. I have nothing against lesbians, but I wouldn’t want my girl to marry one.
What else? Addison Shivers calle
d the other day. He sent a check around, and Haig returned it, and the old gentleman was displeased.
“I have not earned it, sir,” Haig told him. “You hired me to look out for the interests of the late Cyrus Trelawney. I exerted myself enough to justify retaining the advances I received from yourself and Mrs. Vandiver, but I cannot say that I did much for Cyrus Trelawney, certainly not enough to warrant my accepting additional payment.”
They talked some more, and an hour later the check arrived again. A messenger brought it and he tried to deliver it downstairs, which confused the girls. No one had ever tried to pay by check before. This particular check was for five thousand dollars, and it was no longer payment for work performed. Instead it was an advance against work to be performed. Because Haig had been rehired to look out for the interests of Cyrus Trelawney. Specifically, he’s going to prove that Ferdinand Bell’s mother was nutty as a Mars bar, and the killer wasn’t Trelawney’s son in the first place.
Which means I’ll be making a trip to Lyons Falls before very long. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, if you want to know. The heat wave just broke and New York is not a bad place to be.
Haig has been driving me crazy lately. He keeps handing me furniture catalogues and asking me to pick out the kind of bed I like best. He won’t give up, he’s as single-minded as Cato on the subject of Carthage. So far I’ve been stubborn and have gone on paying the rent on my furnished room.
Which is probably silly. I’ve been spending most of my nights on Bethune Street lately, anyway.
A New Afterword by the Author
Chip Harrison is several things.
Firstly, he’s the narrator and protagonist of four novels: No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper.
Secondly, he’s the credited author of those books, or was in their first appearance; more recently they’ve been republished in various editions under my name, Lawrence Block.