Free Make Out with Murder by Lawrence Block Page B

and winding up dead, you see it every night on television. I mean, let’s face it, Kim’s the only one in the goddamned family that has anything much on the ball. The older one, Caitlin, she just a nymphomaniac and a lush. Old man Trelawney must have been pretty sharp to make the score he made, I’ll give him that, but he wasn’t too good at having kids. Kim’s okay but the other four were a batch of sickies.”
    “They had problems,” Kim said. “Don’t talk about them like that.”
    “Look, everybody has problems, kid, but those nuts—”
    Kim’s eyes flared. “I loved Melanie,” she said. “And I love Caitlin. I loved all my sisters, and I don’t want to hear you talk like that about them!”
    She stormed out of the room. Gordie’s face darkened briefly, then relaxed. “Women,” he said. “I’ll tell you something, they’re all of them a little nuts. They don’t have thoughts the way men do. They have feelings. You got to know how to handle them.”
    After they were married, I knew how he would handle her. He would beat her up whenever he felt she needed it.
    “Look,” he said, “I want you to stay out of Kim’s life. You get me?”
    “Huh?”
    “I know you got to work your angle like everybody else. You already got a client, you don’t need to hang around Kim. I don’t want her getting upset.”
    “I didn’t know that I did anything to upset her.”
    “Seeing you upsets me. And when I get upset Kim gets upset, and I don’t want that. You got an angle to work and I can respect that, but I don’t want you getting in my way.”
    “I really want it to be him,” I told Haig. “I want it to be him and I want them to bring back capital punishment. Someone has to throw the switch. I volunteer.”
    “Surely the fact he’s living with Kim has nothing to do with your motivation.”
    “You mean am I interested myself? I don’t honestly know. She reminds me of Melanie, and I can’t make up my mind whether that turns me on or off. The thing is I like her, and I can’t see her spending a lifetime with a clown like him. Hell, I can’t see her spending a social evening with him.”
    “But he seems an unlikely suspect.”
    “I know. I can see him committing murder. I don’t think he’d draw the line at something like that. But he wouldn’t be so clever in choosing different murder methods. He’d probably just hit each of them over the head.”
    “I gather he’s not enormously intelligent,” Haig said dryly.
    “He’s about as dumb as you can get and still function.”
    “Is he crafty, though?”
    I thought about that. I said, “Yes, I think he is. Animal cunning, that kind of thing.”
    “He assumed you were ‘working an angle.’ I submit he so assumed because he’s working an angle of his own.”
    I nodded. “He was more or less telling me to stay off his turf. And he knows about the money. In fact he seems to know a lot about all the sisters. He hasn’t been with Kim that long, and they weren’t that close.”
    “That struck me,” Haig said. His fingers went to his beard and his eyelids dropped shut. “He knows about the Trelawney money. He wants to marry Kim, to the point where she apparently feels pressured. She hasn’t come into the principal of her inheritance yet, of course. And won’t for three years.” He remained silent for a few minutes. I knew his mind was working, but I had no idea what it was working on. Mine was just sort of treading water.
    I got up and went over to watch the African gouramis. There were three half-grown guppies still swimming around. While I watched, the female gourami swam over to one of the guppies but didn’t bother devouring it. I guess she wasn’t hungry at the moment.
    Haig raises several strains of fancy guppies. The species is a fascinating one, and the males of Lebistes reticulata are as individual as thumbprints. When they’re about half-grown, you can tell (if you’re Leo Haig) which ones are going to amount to something.