Chip Harrison: Make Out With Murder

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—”