“What’s this all about, anyway?”
I wasn’t making much headway. Kim came to the rescue and suggested we all go back to the apartment. She didn’t say her apartment or their apartment, just the apartment. He didn’t seem wild about the idea, but we went anyway. He insisted on paying for my coffee. I have to admit I didn’t put up a fight.
The apartment, which did turn out to be their apartment, was on Bethune Street a few doors west of Hudson, which made it about equidistant from Kim’s theater and the Hudson docks where Gordie did something muscular. It was on the second floor of a good old four-story building. There were three high-ceilinged rooms and a little balcony with a view of nothing spectacular.
There was a good feeling to the apartment, and it was hard to believe Kim had rented it less than a year ago. There were some nice Oriental rugs, a couple of floor-to- ceiling bookshelves, and furniture that was both attractive and comfortable. It was not hard to guess which of the two of them had done the decorating.
Gordie got himself a beer and asked me as an afterthought if I wanted one. I didn’t disappoint him by accepting. He sprawled on the couch, took a gurgling swig of beer, and put his feet up. “Let’s have it,” he said.
I started my pitch. That I worked for Leo-Haig-the- Famous-Detective. That Haig and I had uncovered evidence that indicated a strong possibility that Melanie had been murdered. That there were grounds for speculation that Jessica, and perhaps Robin as well, had been similarly done in. That a client who I was not at liberty to name had hired Haig to nail the killer. That it was important to recognize that Caitlin and Kim might be in a certain amount of danger.
And so on.
I didn’t get to deliver this entire rap all at once because Gordie kept interrupting. He seemed to find it extremely difficult to follow a simple English sentence and even more difficult to put together one of his own, and he kept turning the conversation onto weird tangents. Earlier, I had found it disturbing that a girl like Kim was thinking about marrying an idiot like Gordie. Now I found it disturbing that she was living with him. What in hell did they talk about?
When I had been able to get it all out, and when Kim had a chance to ask a few questions of her own, Gordie took a last long drink of beer, crumpled the can impressively in one hand, and tossed it unsuccessfully at the wastebasket. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said.
I was sure he would.
“What I think, I think it’s a load of crap.”
“I see,” I lied.
“You know what your trouble is, Harrison? You’re one of these college boys. You read all these books and listened to all these egghead professors and it scrambled your brains.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Me, I’m an ordinary Joe, you know what I mean? An ordinary man, your average human being. What I mean, I didn’t have your advantages. I never even finished high school. I did my learning on the streets.”
“So?”
“So I don’t look for a complicated answer when there’s a simple one staring me in the face. The whole trouble with this country is too many guys like you who went to Harvard and they couldn’t recognize crap if they stepped in it.”
“I didn’t go to Harvard.”
“Manner of speaking. Where’d you go? Yale? Princeton?”
“I didn’t go to college. I didn’t finish high school; I got thrown out in my last year.”
“What are you trying to hand me?”
“Nothing in particular, I just—”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I got no use for college boys, I’ll tell you that straight out, but one thing I got less use for is a college boy pretends he’s not a college boy. Who do you think you’re kidding?”
Enough. “The point is,” I said, “that if Kim is in any danger—”
“Kim’s not in no danger. And if she is, that’s what I’m here for. What are you saying, you’re gonna protect her? I mean, I can’t see you protecting a pigeon from a cat. No offense, but you get my meaning.”
I got his meaning.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll be protecting Kim no matter what. This city’s a fuckin’ jungle; nothing but junkies and spades and fairies and weirdos. But all this murder shit, you’re making a mountain out of a mole’s hill. Robin, she’s in a car and it cracks up. That sound like a murder? How many people go out like that every weekend?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then there’s Jessica. She’s a dyke and a whore and they’re all crazy, so maybe she wasn’t getting it regular enough or who knows why, but she goes out the window. Happens all the time. Then there’s Melanie, who’s some kind of a crazy hippie with drugs and shit and who knows what, and junkies are all the time shoving needles in their arm 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.”