Chip Harrison: Make Out With Murder

Caitlin, the firstborn, was thirty-six now. She had been married at sixteen, but old Cyrus had it annulled. She was married again six years later, divorced two years after that, married again the following year and divorced again within a year. Now she was married for the fourth time — unless there had been a divorce since then that hadn’t made the papers. A couple of months before her father’s death, she’d exchanged gold bands with Gregory Depew Vandiver, of the Sands Point Vandivers, whoever the hell they are. The wedding announcement told all the schools he had attended and all the clubs he belonged to and described him as connected with a Wall Street firm with half a dozen very Protestant names in its title. After a honeymoon in Gstaad, The Times said, the Vandivers would make their home on the North Shore of Long Island.

Robin had been married twice. When she was twenty-three she married Phillip Flanner, a man twice her age who had been her psych professor at Sarah Lawrence. Two years after the wedding, Flanner fell in front of a subway train. If your wife’s that rich, what are you doing in the subway? Robin remarried three years after that. Her second husband was Ferdinand Bell. (I kept writing this down as Ferdinand Bull, by the way.) The article described Bell as a professional numismatist, which is what a coin dealer becomes when he marries an heiress.

Robin’s auto wreck — Haig said not to call it an accident — took place in Cobleskill, New York, in January. She and her husband were returning from a three-day convention of the Empire State Numismatic Association held in Utica. There was a patch of ice on the road and Bell lost control of the car. He was wearing his seat belt and sustained superficial injuries. Robin was in back taking a nap and was not wearing a seatbelt. She broke her neck, among quite a few other things, and died instantly.

Jessica went out the window three months after Robin’s death. The window she went out of was in the penthouse of the Correggio, one of the more desirable high-rise apartment buildings in the Village. She had lived in the penthouse with a girl named Andrea Sugar, who had been working at the time of the fall at Indulgence, which was described as an East Side massage parlor and recreation center. Jessica also worked at Indulgence as a recreational therapist, but had taken the afternoon off.

Jessica had never been married, and by reading between the lines I developed a fair idea why.

Melanie you know about.

I couldn’t learn very much about Kim. She had been only fifteen when her father died and was only eighteen now. I could tell you what high school she attended but I don’t think you’d care any more than I did. The items I turned up through the Times Index were not much help by the time I found them on microfilm. They just mentioned her as “also appearing” in a variety of off-off-Broadway shows. The shows in which she also appeared got uniformly rotten reviews. In one review, a brief pan of something called America, You Suck! the critic wrote: “Young Kim Trelawney constitutes the one bright spot in this otherwise unmitigated disaster. Although not called upon to act, Miss Trelawney is unquestionably an ornament to the stage.”

By the time I left the library I had sore eyes from the viewer and a sore right hand from scribbling in my notebook. I also had the name of the lawyer who had handled Cyrus Trelawney’s affairs. I called him from a phone booth and learned that he was out to lunch, which reminded me that I ought to be out to lunch myself. I went to the Alamo and had a plate of chili with beans. They charge an extra fifteen cents for any dish without beans. Don’t ask me why.

The pay phone at the Alamo was out of order. So were the first two booths I tried, and before I found a third one I decided not to call him anyway. It wasn’t likely he’d be desperately anxious to see me, and it’s always easier to get rid of a pest over the phone than in person.

His name was Addison Shivers, and if I was making this up I wouldn’t dream of fastening a name like that onto him, because it didn’t fit him at all. I expected someone tall and cadaverous and permanently constipated. I can’t tell you anything about the state of his bowels, actually, but he was nothing like what I had anticipated. To begin with, it wasn’t hard to get to see him at all.

His office was on Chambers Street, near City Hall. I took the subway there and found the building and was elevated to the sixth floor, where a frosted glass window said Addison Shivers / Attorney-at-Law . Then there were half a dozen other names in much smaller print underneath. I don’t happen to remember a single one of them.

I told the witch at the desk that my name was Harrison and I worked for Leo Haig. (If you give that the right inflection, people think they’ve heard of Haig even though they haven’t.) I said I wanted to see Mr. Shivers. She went through a door and came back to ask what my visit was in reference to.

“Melanie Trelawney,” I said. She relayed this and came back with the news that Mr. Shivers would see me. She seemed even more surprised than I was.

His office was very simple, very sparsely furnished. I guess you have to be richer than God to have the confidence to get away with that. All the furniture was oak, and you could tell right away that he hadn’t bought it in an antique shop; he had bought it brand-new and kept it for fifty years. The only decorative things were a couple of sailing prints in inexpensive frames and some brass fixtures from ships. I think one of them was what is called a sextant, but I honestly don’t know enough about that sort of thing to tell you what the rest of them were. Or even to swear that the one was a sextant, for that matter.

He looked old enough to be Cyrus Trelawney’s father. He had a little white hair left around the rim of his head. His face was sort of red, and his nose was more than sort of red. He was well padded, although you couldn’t call him fat. The strongest impression I got from him was one of genuine benevolence. He just plain looked like a nice man. Sometimes you can’t tell, but then again, sometimes you can.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand,” he said. His voice was dry but gentle. “I read about Melanie, of course. When that sort of thing happens I merely wish they could hold off until I either die or become senile. I’ve given up asking that tragedy be averted entirely. I merely wish to be spared the knowledge of it.” He looked off into space for a moment, then returned his eyes to mine. “I didn’t see Melanie often after her father’s death. But I always liked her. She was a good person.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Your name is Harrison, I believe. And you work for a man named Haig, but I don’t believe I know him.”

“Leo Haig,” I said. “The detective.”

“No, I don’t know him. I don’t know any detectives, I don’t believe. Any living detectives. What’s your connection with Melanie Trelawney?”

I’d had a whole approach planned, but it didn’t seem to fit the person Addison Shivers turned out to be. “It’s not much of a connection,” I said. “I knew her for the past month; she was my friend.”

“And?”

“She was murdered,” I said. “Leo Haig and I are trying to find out who killed her.”

This, let me tell you, was not part of the original game plan. Haig had emphasized that there was no need to pass on our suspicions and convictions to anyone else for the time being. But he had also always told me about instinct guided by experience, or intuition guided by experience, or intelligence guided by experience, and that’s what I was using.

Mr. Shivers sat there and listened while I told him all the reasons why Leo Haig and I knew Melanie had been murdered. He knew how to listen, and his eyes showed that he was following what he was hearing. He heard me all the way through and then asked a few questions, such as why I had not mentioned any of this to the police, and when I answered his questions he nodded and sat forward in his chair and folded his hands on the top of his old oak desk.