I had sort of assumed this, but I still didn’t have a reply worked out.
“Of course she might have grown out of that,” Caitlin went on. “I did, you know. Although I never embraced lesbianism as wholeheartedly as Jessica did. I never stopped liking men, you see.”
“Uh,” I said.
“Do you want to know something interesting? When I was a girl, oh, way back before Noah built his ark, I always had a special preference for older men.”
“Er.”
“But now that I’ve slithered onto the dark side of thirty, I find I’ve done an about-face. I have a thing for young men these days.”
“Uh.”
“I’ve noticed, Chip, that some young men have a thing for older women.”
I don’t have a thing for older women, but I certainly haven’t got anything against them. Actually, I don’t suppose chronological age means very much. There are women of thirty-six who are too old. There are other women the same age who are not. Caitlin was in the second category, and I was becoming more aware of this every minute.
Her perfume may have had something to do with this. Her leg, which had somehow moved against mine under the table, may also have had something to do with it.
“Well,” I said. “About Melanie—”
“Were you sleeping with her, Chip?”
Everybody wanted to know if I was sleeping with Melanie. First those cops, now Caitlin. I said, “We hadn’t known each other very long.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t take very long.”
“Er. The thing is, you know, that someone killed Melanie. And if someone also killed Jessica, and if it’s the same someone—”
“Then Kim and I might be on somebody’s Christmas list.”
“Uh-huh. Something like that.”
She lit a cigarette. She had been lighting cigarettes all along, but I don’t think it’s absolutely essential to call it to your attention every time somebody lights a cigarette. This time, though, she made a production number out of it, winding up taking a big drag and sighing out a cloud of smoke.
She said, “You know, Chip, I do have a little trouble taking this seriously.”
“There may not be anything to it.”
“But there also may be something to it, is that what you mean? Assuming there is, what do I do about it? Put myself in a convent? Hire around-the-clock bodyguards? Quickly marry the president so I qualify for Secret Service protection?”
“The most important thing is to find Melanie’s killer.”
“‘Catch him before he kills more?’ That makes a certain amount of sense.” She studied me for a moment. “The man you work for,” she said.
“Leo Haig.”
“He’s really good?”
“He’s brilliant.”
“Hmmm. And what do you do for him exactly? You’re a little young to be a detective, aren’t you?”
“I’m his assistant. That doesn’t mean my job is taking out the garbage.” Actually, I do take the garbage out of the fish tanks some of the time. “I work with him on cases.”
“So you’d be working on this, too.”
“That’s right. I do the leg work.” I regretted saying that because she sort of winked and did some leg work of her own.
“I’ll just bet you do, Chip.”
“Uh.”
“I’d like to see you devote all your energies to my case,” she said. As I guess you’ve noticed, she tended to say things with double meanings. “I’d like you working hard on my behalf. You don’t have a client, do you? You’re just investigating because of your friendship for my sister?”
We had a client but he didn’t want his name mentioned, so I didn’t mention it. I agreed that we were involved in this out of friendship for Melanie. Which was true — I would have been working every bit as hard without Addison Shivers as a client.
She opened her bag and found a checkbook. She wrote for a minute, tore out a check, folded it in half and slipped it to me. “That’s an advance,” she said.
I took the check.
“An advance,” she repeated. “Actually this is no day to be making advances, is it?”
“Uh.”
“It’s about that time, isn’t it? I have to pick up my darling husband at his club. On the way home I can hear how good it is to work up a sweat. That depends how you work it up, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“Do you? I suspect you do. I have that feeling about you, Chip. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other in the course of your investigation of the case.”
“I’m sure we will, Mrs. Vandiver.”
“Caitlin.”
“Caitlin,” I agreed.
“It’s a difficult name to remember, isn’t it?”
“No, but—”
“Some of my best friends call me Cat. Just plain Cat. You know, as in pussy.”
The waiter brought the check. She put money on the table and we left. I was really in no condition to walk, to tell you the truth, and I think she noticed this, and I think she was pleased.
On the street she offered me her cheek as she had offered it to her husband, but when I went to kiss her, she turned her head quickly and my mouth landed on hers. She did something very nice with her tongue, then drew quickly away, an amused light in her eyes.
“Oh, we’ll get along,” she said.
I felt like springing for a cab, so of course there weren’t any around. I took the subway. It was hot and crowded and smelly and I wound up pressed up against a home-bound secretary. I was in the wrong condition to be pressed up against anyone and the secretary noticed it. She gave me the look people give when they find a cockroach in their oatmeal.
When I got off the train I finally looked at Caitlin’s check. It was for five hundred dollars and it was made out to me rather than to Haig. She’d spelled my first name Chipp, which explained why she hadn’t asked me what my real name was. She was probably used to people with first names like that.
Actually, it would simplify my life in a lot of ways if I spelled it with two p’s. I should have thought of that years ago.
Haig didn’t see anything wrong with accepting retainers from both Addison Shivers and Caitlin Vandiver. “Our work will be in both their interests,” he said. “I see no likely conflict. And there’s certainly precedent for it. Nero Wolfe frequently represents more than one person in the same matter, and does so without either party being aware of his association with the other. In the case that was reported under the title Too Many Clients, for example—”
I had just read Too Many Clients a month or so ago, but there was no point in telling him that. You might as well try telling Billy Graham you read the Bible once, for all the good it would do you.
Six
I was upstairs until six-thirty, helping Haig with the fish. He had a strain of sailfin mollies he was trying to fix. The object was to develop the dorsal fin to the greatest possible size through selective breeding and inbreeding and by giving the young the best possible nutritional start on life. One of the molly mothers had dropped young earlier in the day and we had to net her and remove her from the breeding tank. Mollies are less likely to eat their young than most livebearers, but every once in a while you get a female who hasn’t read the book, and she can polish off an entire generation in a couple of hungry hours.
We gave the babies a heavy feeding of live brine shrimp. Haig buys enormous quantities of frozen brine shrimp for general use, but hatches his own for feeding young fishes. He tends to be a fanatic about things like this, and while he fed live brine shrimp to a few dozen tanks of young fish, I hosed out one of the tubs and prepared a brine mixture and sprinkled the little dry eggs on it.