If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about the trip to the cemetery or the burial. I rode out in a car full of old ladies talking about convertible debentures. There was a machine at the graveside to lower the casket, untouched by human hands, and off in the distance a couple of old men stood leaning on their shovels. They reminded me of the vultures in cartoons about people lost in the desert.
Anyway, the same limousines drove everybody back from Long Island and deposited us in front of the mortuary, and I managed to walk over to Caitlin Vandiver and her husband. I introduced myself and asked if I could talk with her about Melanie.
I got a smile from her and a blank look from him, and I also got the impression that she smiled a lot and he looked blank a lot. “So you were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said. “Well, I don’t know that I can tell you very much about her. I don’t even know what you would want to hear. We were never terribly close, you know. I’m several years older than she was.”
She paused there, as if waiting for me to express doubt. She didn’t look old by any means. I’m a terrible judge of age, but I probably would have guessed her at thirty and I knew she was six years older than that.
“There are a couple of things,” I said. “I think it would be worthwhile for us to talk.”
Her smile froze up a little, and at the same time her eyes showed a little more than the polite interest they had held earlier. “I see,” she said.
I don’t know what she saw.
“Well,” she said, the smile in full force again, “actually I could use some company. I hate to eat alone and funerals always make me ravenous. Is that shameful, do you think?”
I mumbled some dumb thing or other. Caitlin turned to her husband and put her cheek out for a kiss. He picked up his cue and kissed her.
“Greg always plays squash on Fridays,” she said. “Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night, you understand.” The two of them said pleasant things to one another and Vandiver strode athletically down the street, arms swinging at his sides. I decided that he probably jogged every morning.
“He jogs every morning before breakfast,” Caitlin said. It unsettles me when people do this. I feel as though I must have a window in the middle of my forehead. “He’s keeping himself in marvelous physical condition.”
“That’s very good,” I said.
“Oh, it’s simply great. I wonder what he thinks he’s saving himself for. I haven’t had a really decent orgasm with him since the first time I saw him in his jogging suit. Romance tiptoed out the window. Shall we eat? I know a charming little French place near here. Never crowded, quite intimate, and they make a decent martini; and if I don’t have one soon — fellow me lad — I shall positively die.”
And, after we had walked about a block, she said, “I pick the wrong words sometimes, damn it. I shouldn’t have said that about positively dying. Too many people are doing it lately. Robin, Jessica, now Melanie. It’s scary, isn’t it?”
She took my hand as she said this and gave it a squeeze. I gave a squeeze back, and I think she smiled when I did.
We went to restaurant on 48th Street. It was empty, except for a couple of serious drinkers at the bar and a couple at a side table trying to stretch out lunch so that it reached all the way to quitting time. We walked through to the garden in the rear and took a table.
“Tanqueray martini, straight up, bone dry, twist,” she told the waiter. It sounded as though she’d had practice with the line. To me she said, “Do you drink? I know so many people your age don’t these days.”
I’d been trying to decide between a Coke and a beer, but that did it. “Double Irish whiskey,” I said. “With water back.”
Her eyebrows went up, but just a little. She told me I was to call her Caitlin. I was not certain that I was going to do this, and supposed I would sidestep the issue by not calling her anything at all. She seemed to think Harrison was my first name and wanted to know what my last name was, and I told her, and she got a little rattled and said that Harrison Harrison was unusual, to say the least, and ultimately we got that straightened out. She didn’t ask me what Chip was short for, which was one strong point in her favor.
There were other points in her favor. Maybe her husband jogged every morning before breakfast because he was trying to catch up with her. The money she spent on her clothes and her hair didn’t hurt, but it didn’t account for her figure or the general youthfulness of her appearance. She was tall for a woman, and quite slender, and her breasts were not especially easy to ignore.
There was more to it than all that, though. She was damned attractive and damned well knew it, and she knew how to play off this attractiveness and, oh, hell, there’s only one way to say it. She was very good at getting people horny.
She ordered mussels and a glass of white wine and another martini. I didn’t want anything to eat, which surprised her but didn’t seem to annoy her. She made a lot of small talk during her meal, and when I would start to turn the conversation around to Melanie she managed to sidetrack it. After this happened a few times I stopped thinking that she was more shook up then she was showing and Got The Message.
What I remembered, actually, was one time when I was taken out to lunch by Joe Elder, who is my editor. We went to a place around the corner from his office where they have a working antique telephone on each table. The food is better than you’d expect. The only thing wrong with Mr. Elder is that he can actually drink a Daiquiri without making a face. God knows how. But all through lunch I kept trying to talk about an idea I had for a book, and he kept changing the subject, and later they brought the coffee and he started talking about the book, and it was the same way now with Caitlin Vandiver. She had decided that we were having a business lunch and she knew that meant not saying a word about business until we were done with the lunch.
She finished her mussels about the same time I ran out of Irish to sip at. When the coffee came she settled herself in her chair and came in right on cue.
“You were a friend of Melanie’s,” she said.
Which was my cue, so I picked it up. “I was the one who discovered the body,” I said.
“Oh, dear. That must have been awful for you.”
It had been, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I told her I was concerned professionally, which brought that tension into her expression, which I later realized was because she thought I might be working up to some sort of blackmail pitch. But I went on to say that I worked for Leo Haig. “The prominent detective,” I said.
“Oh, yes.”
Sure, lady. “I have to tell you this in confidence. We have grounds to believe that Melanie was murdered.”
“But I thought it was an overdose of heroin.”
“It was.” The autopsy had confirmed this. “That doesn’t mean she gave it to herself.”
“I see.” She thought for a minute. Then she said, “Oh.”
“I’m afraid so. It puts things in sort of a different light. Jessica’s suicide and Robin’s accident—”
“Might not be a suicide and an accident. Well, Robin’s certainly was, although I suppose someone could have tampered with Ferdie’s car. Do those things happen? I know they do in books, but my God, if I were going to kill someone I would take my trusty little gun and shoot him in the back of the head.” She was silent for a moment, and I wondered who she was killing in fantasy. (Whom, I mean.) Then she said, “I never thought Jessica was the type to commit suicide. She was always a tougher and bitchier broad than I am, and that’s going some. And she was a dyke, too.”