After a moment he said, “You’ll want information, of course. About the will, about the disposition of funds. I can tell you all that.” He got a remote look in his eyes again. “Poor Cyrus,” he said. “He was my client for fifty years, you know. Needless to say he employed a great many other attorneys, but I was his lawyer in all personal matters. And he was my friend for as long as he was my client. He was a very great man, you know.”
“He must have been.”
“A great man. I’m not sure that he was a good man, mind you. Goodness and greatness rarely keep house together. But I can say that he was a good friend. And now three of his daughters are dead. And his only son.”
“His son?”
“Cyrus, Junior. He was the second born, he died in infancy. Cyrus never ceased to mourn him, especially when it became evident that he would not be fathering any more children. He wanted the name continued, you see. He was resigned to the fact that it would not be, ultimately, and felt it would be sufficient that his seed would endure through his daughters.” He cleared his throat. “And now three of his daughters are dead in less than a year.”
Cyrus, Jr. That explained the six-year gap between Caitlin and Robin.
“I respect your logic concerning Melanie’s death,” he said. “I agree that she must almost certainly have been murdered. You realize, of course, that this does not call for the conclusion that Robin and Jessica were murdered as well.”
“I know.”
“Though one cannot deny the possibility. Or the danger to the two remaining Trelawney girls.”
I nodded.
“What do you and Mr. Haig intend to do?”
“Try to warn Mrs. Vandiver and Kim. And try to figure out who killed Melanie and how to prove it.”
“You ought to have a client,” he said. He opened his desk drawer and took out a large checkbook, the kind with three checks on a page. He wrote out a check, noted it on the stub, and handed it across the desk to me. It was made out to Leo Haig and the amount was a thousand dollars.
“I don’t know what your rates are,” he said. Neither, to tell you the truth, did I. “This will serve as a retainer. Note that I am engaging you to look out for the interests of Cyrus Trelawney, deceased. That leaves you a considerable degree of leeway.”
“I think I understand.”
He had one of his junior clerks find various papers about the Trelawney estate. He went over them with me and explained the parts I couldn’t understand, and I filled the rest of my notebook. He poured himself a large brandy in the course of this, and asked me if I wanted anything myself. I told him I didn’t.
When I had everything he could give me, he excused himself again for not getting to his feet. He leaned across the desk and we shook hands.
I asked if I would be seeing him the following day at Melanie’s funeral.
“No, I don’t go to funerals any more,” he said. “If I did, I shouldn’t have time for anything else.”
Five
I had never been to a funeral before. When my parents committed suicide, I was away at school. I suppose the funeral took place before I could have gotten to it, but I have to admit I never even thought about it. I just packed a bag and started hitchhiking.
If Melanie’s funeral was typical, I’m surprised the custom hasn’t died out. I mean, I can sort of understand the way the Irish do it. Everybody stays drunk for three or four days. That makes a certain amount of sense. But here we were all gathered in this stark, modernistic, non-denominational cesspool on Lexington and 54th in the middle of the afternoon, listening to a man who had never met her say dumb things about a dead girl. One of the worst parts was that the jerk was sort of glossing over the fact that Melanie was either a junkie or a suicide, or both. He didn’t come right out and say anything about casting first stones, but you could see it was running through his mind. I wanted to jump up and tell the world Melanie was murdered. I managed to control myself.
I wouldn’t have been telling the world, anyway. Just a tiny portion of it. There were none of Melanie’s friends there except me. Her relationships with the people in her neighborhood had been deliberately casual, and even if some of them had decided to come to the funeral, they would have been too stoned to get it all together. “Hey, man, like we got to go see them plant old Melanie.” “No, baby, that was last week.” “Far out!”
I recognized Caitlin and Kim with no trouble. I would have figured out who they were anyway since they were seated in the front pew, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. They didn’t exactly look alike, and they didn’t look like Melanie exactly, but all of them looked like old Cyrus Trelawney. Except on them it looked becoming. They had what I guess we can call the Trelawney nose, strong and assertive, and the deep-set eyes. Caitlin was blond and fair-skinned, a tall woman, expensively dressed. The man beside her wore a tweed suit that didn’t have leather elbow patches yet. His nose and lips were thin and his expression was pained. I didn’t have much trouble figuring out that he was Gregory Vandiver. Of the Sands Point Vandivers.
Kim was very short and slender, also fair-skinned, but with hair as dark as Melanie’s. She seemed to be crying a lot, which set her apart from the rest of the company. Crying or not, I could see what the theater critic meant; she would have been an ornament to any stage. The guy next to her, on the other hand, had no decorative effect whatsoever. He kept reaching over and patting her hand. He looked familiar, and I finally figured out where I had seen him before. He played the title role in King Kong.
Kim was wearing a simple black dress, and she managed simultaneously to look good in it and to give the impression that she didn’t generally wear dresses. The ape was wearing a suit for the first time in his life.
There was a handful of other people I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t identify. I guessed that the plump, boyish man in the gray sharkskin suit might be Ferdinand Bell, Robin’s husband. If there was a professional numismatist in the room, he was likely to be it. And a girl off to one side was probably Andrea Sugar, if Andrea Sugar was there at all, because nobody else around could possibly have been a recreational therapist at something called Indulgence. The rest of the crowd was mostly old, and you sensed somehow that they were there because they liked funerals better than daytime television. I understand there are a lot of people like that. Every couple of days they trot down to the local mortuary to see who’s playing.
The casket was open. I guess they do this so that the more skeptical mourners can assure themselves that the person they’re mourning is genuinely dead. And so that the undertaker can show off his cosmetic skill.
I wasn’t going to look. But then I decided that was silly, and I went up and looked, and it wasn’t Melanie at all. There was rouge on her cheeks and lipstick on her mouth and eyebrow pencil on her eyebrows and some tasteless shit had cut her pretty hair and styled it, if you could call it that. Melanie never wore makeup in her life. This wasn’t Melanie. This was a reject from the waxworks.
I really felt like hitting somebody.
Haig had told me to approach one of the sisters after the funeral. It was up to me which one I chose. “The older girl is probably better equipped to make a decision,” he said, “while the younger one would probably be more receptive to overtures from someone your age. Use your judgment.”
I used my judgment, and decided Kim might well be more receptive to overtures from someone my age, especially in view of the fact that I was more receptive to the idea of making them to her than to Caitlin. But I used a little more of my judgment and came to the conclusion that I would rather talk to Kim without that Neanderthal of hers hulking nearby. The idea of trying to Broach A Serious Subject to her while she was intermittently dissolving in tears also left something to be desired. So it was Caitlin by default.