“It wasn’t too bad.”
“You were sweet to come. And your Mr. Haig does inspire confidence, doesn’t he? It put my mind at rest just to talk to him for a few minutes.”
“He’s quite a man,” I said.
She moved closer to me and put her hand on my arm. She was wearing the same perfume she had worn at the funeral. Her blouse was a black and white print and it was cut low in front. She was not wearing a bra.
“Let’s step outside,” she said. “Did it rain in the city? We had quite a storm out here this morning and it’s actually cooled things off a bit. It’s rather pleasant outside.”
We took our drinks and walked through some paths in back of the house to a little garden walled in by oaks and beeches. Caitlin sat down on the grass and kicked her shoes off. I stood there for a moment, then sat down next to her.
“I gather there was something you wanted to tell me,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Mr. Haig said you told him it was urgent.”
She nodded solemnly. “I said it was rather urgent that I see you.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Because I felt an urgent need to see you, Chip.” She finished her drink and set the glass down on the lawn. She sat back, her arms out behind her to support her weight, and her breasts strained against the black and white blouse. “I felt quite bored,” she said. “And quite lonely.”
“I see.”
“Do you? And of course I wanted a first-hand report on the case. Do you really think someone wants to murder me?”
“It looks that way.”
“But why?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” It occurred to me that this would be a good time to find out about her will. “Haig says motive is the big question. He wants to know who would benefit from your death.”
“Practically everyone, I imagine. I’m a very wicked woman, Chip.”
“Uh.”
“You have no idea just how wicked I can be. But of course, you’re talking about my will. It’s very straightforward, actually. Gregory and I made wills in each other’s favor at the time of our marriage. Whichever of us goes first, the other picks up all the marbles.”
“I see.”
“But I really don’t think Greg would murder me, do you? Or if he did, it wouldn’t be for money or anything so vulgar. He might kill me out of justifiable rage. I do behave rather badly, you know.” She ran her tongue over her lips. This is a very trite gesture, but she made it work anyway. “I suppose I could change my will and leave everything to Radicalesbians like my brilliant sister Jessica. Did you hear about that?”
“I just saw her lawyer today.”
“What a dimwitted dyke she was. Not that I have anything against lesbians myself. I think they limit themselves, that’s all. Like vegetarians.”
“Vegetarians?”
“Vegetables are nice, but so is meat.”
“Oh.”
“And girls are nice, but so are men.” She smiled softly. “I went through a gay period myself in my girlhood. I think I may have mentioned it to you the other day.”
“Uh, sort of.”
“I was in school at the time. There was this girl who was absolutely mad for me. She was a pretty thing, very small and dark, not like me physically at all. Her breasts just filled my hands. I liked that. She, on the other hand, was partial to large breasts. Do you like large breasts, Chip?”
“Uh, sure.”
“I thought you probably did. She told me one day what she wanted to do to me. She wanted to lick me here.” She indicated with her hand where the other girl had wanted to lick her. “So I let her. It was such heaven. She didn’t insist that I do anything in return, but do you know something, Chip? I discovered that I wanted to. I suppose it was curiosity at first, but I found I enjoyed it very much. Going down on her, that is.”
“Er.”
“I liked the taste. I’ll tell you something fascinating. At the time I only thought girls did it to each other. I didn’t imagine that a man would want to do it. But I’ve since learned that some men enjoy it very much. Have you ever done it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you enjoy doing it?”
“Yes.”
“I rather thought you might.” She opened the top buttons of her blouse. Her skin was creamy and flawless. “But to get back to what I was saying,” she said. “About lesbians and how limited they are. Now I adored eating my little friend, you understand, but then I went to bed with an older man and he taught me ever so many things, and while I still found girls amusing, I certainly wasn’t about to go without men for the rest of my life. Do you know what I particularly enjoyed?”
“What?”
“Fellatio.”
“Oh.”
“It’s such a technical term for such an intimate act, isn’t it?”
“I never thought about it.”
“You never thought about fellatio?”
“I never thought about the, uh, term, uh.”
“Such an intimate act,” she said. Her hand was on my thigh now. “I’m mad for penises. Isn’t that terrible of me? I like to feel them grow in my mouth. Oh, but yours has already grown, hasn’t it? Oh, lovely. Lovely.”
I took her by the shoulders and kissed her. Her mouth tasted of gin and tobacco and honey, and her perfume wrapped me up like a blanket. Her hand kept doing great things while we kissed.
She said, “This is a very private place, Chip. No one can see us here. We can take off all our clothes and roll around in the grass all we want.”
We took off all our clothes and rolled around in the grass a lot. Her body was delicious, taut and sleek and smooth, and if there was any age worn into it, I couldn’t tell you about it. We did a whole host of things I somehow don’t feel compelled to tell you about, and then she decided that she wanted to conclude with the thing she particularly enjoyed.
“I can taste myself on you,” she said. “I like that.”
Then she didn’t say anything any more, and neither did I, and it was a lot like going to heaven without the aggravation of dying first.
I’ll tell you something. It was pretty embarrassing to write that last scene. According to Haig, the less sexual detail in these books, the better. “Archie Goodwin very obviously leads an active sex life,” he says, “but he does no more than allude to it. He doesn’t throw it in your face, doesn’t drag you into various bedchambers with him.”
But Mr. Elder says times have changed, and that if we expect him to publish these books, there better be a lot of screwing in them. “You’ve got to arouse the reader,” he said. “The reports on the murders and what an interesting character Haig is, that’s all fine, but you’ve got to turn the reader on in this day and age. And of course you’ve got to do it in good taste.”
I don’t know if I turned you on, and I don’t know if it was in good taste or not. I have to admit I turned myself on just now, though. Just remembering how terrific it was.
A while later we were back in our clothes. We were also back in the room with the white shag carpet, and Caitlin was drinking another jumbo Martini. I had turned down the Irish whiskey in favor of a Dr. Pepper with a lot of ice.
“Oh, my,” she said. “That was quite wonderful, wasn’t it? I have a confession to make, Chip. I lured you out here for no other reason than to seduce you. Do you think you can possibly forgive me?”
I said I thought I probably could.
“You’re such a charming boy, you know. And terribly attractive, and I’ve been wanting to take you to bed ever since our lunch together.” She stretched like a waking cat. “And it’s so deadly dull out here. There’s Seamus, of course, but when one has sex with one’s servants one is limited to the more conventional approaches. It is considered terribly déclassé to perform fellatio upon the domestic help. Now if only I were Jewish, I could blow my chauffeur all I wanted.”
That’s a pun. Maybe you already knew that. I didn’t, and so I didn’t
laugh, which must have annoyed Caitlin a little. The idea is that Jews have a trumpet made out of a ram’s horn which they blow in synagogue on certain holy days, and it’s called a shofar.
We talked about various things, most of them at least slightly sexual, and I had another Dr. Pepper while she had another Martini, and then I remembered that I had an appointment to see Kim around six. I mentioned this and Caitlin glanced at her watch.
“Hell,” she said. “I’d planned on driving you back to the city myself.”
“I can take a train.”
“No, you wouldn’t want to do that. One trip on the Long Island is as much as should be required of anyone. I wanted to drive you, but Gregory’s due home soon and he likes me to be here when he arrives. I can’t imagine why. I’ll have Seamus drive you.”
“You really don’t have to bother.”
“It’s no bother,” she said. “I’ve no use for him around here at the moment.” She picked up the telephone and made a bell ring in another part of the house. When Seamus answered, she told him to bring the car around in a few minutes.
I kissed her a few times and told her not to worry about the murderer, which was silly in view of the fact that she could not have been worrying less about the murderer.
Then we went out and stood on the porch and watched Seamus drive the car almost fifteen feet before it exploded.
I was going to write that it was like nothing I had ever seen before, but of course I’d seen it a hundred times in a hundred movies. That’s just what it looked like. All of a sudden the car went up into the air and came down in pieces. Most of the pieces were metal, but some of them were Seamus, and they were raining down all over the lawn. One hunk of metal actually landed within a few yards of us, and we were standing half a football field away from the car when it blew up.
“Oh Christ,” Caitlin kept saying. “Oh Christ.”
I didn’t know what to do first. The police would have to be called, obviously, but the most immediate problem was Caitlin. She was shaking and all the color was gone from her face and she looked ready to pass out. I got her inside and tried to make her sit down, but her body went rigid.
“You have to fuck me,” she said.
I stared at her, but she was already getting out of her clothes. “I have to have it right now, right now. I have to, you have to do it for me, that could have been me in that car, somebody planted a bomb to kill me, somebody wants to murder me. It’s true, it’s really true. Christ, you have to fuck me, you just have to.”
I was positive I wouldn’t be able to. I mean, watching a car blow up isn’t normally my idea of a turn-on. But they say that a close escape from death makes you want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive in a sexual way, and it had crossed my mind that it could have been me in the car when it blew up, too, and I guess that made the difference. I got out of my clothes in a hurry, got down on the white shag rug with her, and we began screwing like minks, which is a vulgar way to put it, I guess, but that’s what we were doing.
I never heard the door open. I may have left it open, as far as that goes. I don’t think I would have heard an earthquake at that point. It was very basic and intense and without frills, and I don’t suppose much time elapsed from start to finish, but the finish was a good one and I lay there on top of her wondering if my heart would ever go back to beating at its usual rate, and a man’s voice said, “Caitlin, I believe I’m entitled to an explanation.”
“He has always had an instinct for disastrous timing,” she said in my ear. “Always.”
“Caitlin—”
“At least he refrained from speaking until we finished,” she went on. “Breeding tells, after all. That’s something.”
“I come home from work,” Gregory Vandiver said reasonably. “I return to my house at my usual hour. I find my car blown to bits all over my lawn; I find my manservant dead in the wreckage and I find my wife copulating with some strange young man on the middle of the drawing room floor. Now wait a minute. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Yes, I daresay I have. Don’t tell me, it’ll come to me in a minute.”
Twelve
Between the Sands Point police and the Long Island Rail Road, it was almost ten o’clock before I got back to the city. I did manage to call Kim before that, from the station in Port Washington, but it probably would have been better if I hadn’t called her at all. I didn’t manage to say three sentences to her before Gordie took the phone away from her.
“You take a lot of telling,” he said. “I don’t want you coming here, I don’t want you calling here, I don’t want you sticking your nose in where it ain’t wanted.” Then he told me to do something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had wanted to, which I didn’t in the first place, and then he slammed the phone down.
I walked from Penn Station to Haig’s house. I had given him a little of it earlier over the phone and now I gave him the whole thing in detail. (I left out the sex part, at least as far as going into details was concerned. I mean, I had to let him know that Gregory Vandiver walked in and found me screwing his wife. That was the kind of thing that might turn out to be pertinent. So I told him what I had done, you might say, without telling him how much I had enjoyed it.)
“The timing,” he said, “is very critical here.
“Right. The killer had about an hour and a half to plant the bomb. The car was all right when Seamus picked me up at the station.”
“Indeed.”
“She usually did her own driving. Anybody who knew her well would probably know that.”
“Do the police know that?”
“No. The police think that the killer did what he was trying to do. It seems that Seamus was involved with some faction of the I.R.A. The police had a sheet on him because he was suspected of playing a role in a gun-running operation. So they think Seamus was the intended victim, and they also think they have several leads.”
“I take it you and the Vandivers permitted them to continue thinking this.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure that was wise.”
“Neither am I, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was passed off as a friend of Mrs. Vandiver’s who happened to be visiting at the time. Her husband could have confirmed that we were friendly.”
“Indeed.”
“Gordie McLeod was back in the Village by eight-fifteen. Because I talked to him on the phone, and no, it wasn’t my idea. I wanted to talk to Kim, but he included himself in. Of course he didn’t have to stick around while a batch of Long Island public employees asked dumb questions and took pictures of everything, but I’m sure he was at work all day.”
“He was not.”
“Oh?”
“Mr. LiCastro called. The fungicide he wants to use will render the discus spawn infertile. I so informed him and gave him some suggestions. Gordon McLeod did not show up today for what I believe is called a shape-up. Mr. McLeod has been betting on quite a few horses lately. With little success.”
“That’s interesting.”
“It is. Nor is he in debt to his bookmaker. His losses, however, have of late exceeded his wages, and yet he has been consistently able to settle his debts promptly, and in cash.”
“He must be sponging off Kim.”
“Perhaps. It would be useful to determine this.”
I nodded. Haig put his feet up on the desk. He tries this every once in a while, but he’s always uncomfortable because his legs are too short and his abdomen too large. He gave it up after a few seconds.
He said, “I had a visitor during your absence. Mr. Ferdinand Bell.”
“What did he want?”
“To be helpful. A noble ambition, but I’m not sure he achieved its realization. He described the swerving of his automobile with an excess of detail. Listening to him, I very nearly felt that I was in it at the time. It was not a feeling I particularly enjoyed.”
“Did he have anything else to say?”
“He had some things to say about Miss Andre
a Sugar. He brought to my attention the possibility that a lesbian relationship might have existed between her and Jessica Trelawney.”
“No kidding.”
“He seemed shocked by this. I find his shock more interesting than the relationship itself, certainly. He also said that Mr. Vandiver is in serious financial difficulties.”
“You couldn’t prove it by the house.”
“So I gather. Mr. Vandiver has apparently suffered some financial reverses.”
“How would Bell know that?”
“I’m not sure he knew that he knew it. He was letting his mind wander in my presence, talking generally about the flightiness of the sisters Trelawney. Jessica’s homosexuality, Melanie’s hippie lifestyle, Kim’s hour upon the stage—”
“Kim seems pretty straight-ahead to me.”
“Your bias on the subject has already been noted. He also alluded to Caitlin’s liberated sexuality, which he cloaked with the euphemism of nymphomania.”
“I’m not positive it’s a euphemism.”
“Be that as it may. And that led him to Gregory Vandiver’s infirmity of purpose. Vandiver made some substantial investments in rare coins about a year ago. He consulted Bell, and purchased the pieces through Bell and on Bell’s recommendation. He specifically sought out items for long-term growth, the blue chips of the coin market. Barber proofs, Charlotte and Dahlonega gold, that sort of thing. Then a matter of months ago, Vandiver insisted that Bell unload everything and get him cash overnight. It seems Vandiver did realize a profit on his investment, if a tiny one, but that Bell would have advised him to hold indefinitely, and certainly to hold for several months, as an upturn could be expected in the market. But Vandiver insisted on selling immediately, even if he had to take a loss.”
“Meaning that he needed cash, I guess.”
“So it would seem. The money involved was considerable. I had to pry this from Bell, who evidendy believes that matters communicated to a professional numismatist come under the category of privileged information. Gregory Vandiver liquidated his numismatic holdings for a net sum of $110,000.”
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