Make Out with Murder by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

told all the schools he had attended and all the clubs he belonged to and described him as connected with a Wall Street firm with half a dozen very Protestant names in its title. After a honeymoon in Gstaad, The Times said, the Vandivers would make their home on the North Shore of Long Island.
    Robin had been married twice. When she was twenty-three she married Phillip Flanner, a man twice her age who had been her psych professor at Sarah Lawrence. Two years after the wedding, Flanner fell in front of a subway train. If your wife’s that rich, what are you doing in the subway? Robin remarried three years after that. Her second husband was Ferdinand Bell. (I kept writing this down as Ferdinand Bull, by the way.) The article described Bell as a professional numismatist, which is what a coin dealer becomes when he marries an heiress.
    Robin’s auto wreck—Haig said not to call it an accident—took place in Cobleskill, New York, in January. She and her husband were returning from a three-day convention of the Empire State Numismatic Association held in Utica. There was a patch of ice on the road and Bell lost control of the car. He was wearing his seat belt and sustained superficial injuries. Robin was in back taking a nap and was not wearing a seatbelt. She broke her neck, among quite a few other things, and died instantly.
    Jessica went out the window three months after Robin’s death. The window she went out of was in the penthouse of the Correggio, one of the more desirable high-rise apartment buildings in the Village. She had lived in the penthouse with a girl named Andrea Sugar, who had been working at the time of the fall at Indulgence, which was described as an East Side massage parlor and recreation center. Jessica also worked at Indulgence as a recreational therapist, but had taken the afternoon off.
    Jessica had never been married, and by reading between the lines I developed a fair idea why.
    Melanie you know about.
    I couldn’t learn very much about Kim. She had been only fifteen when her father died and was only eighteen now. I could tell you what high school she attended but I don’t think you’d care any more than I did. The items I turned up through the Times Index were not much help by the time I found them on microfilm. They just mentioned her as “also appearing” in a variety of off-off-Broadway shows. The shows in which she also appeared got uniformly rotten reviews. In one review, a brief pan of something called America, You Suck! the critic wrote: “Young Kim Trelawney constitutes the one bright spot in this otherwise unmitigated disaster. Although not called upon to act, Miss Trelawney is unquestionably an ornament to the stage.”
    By the time I left the library I had sore eyes from the viewer and a sore right hand from scribbling in my notebook. I also had the name of the lawyer who had handled Cyrus Trelawney’s affairs. I called him from a phone booth and learned that he was out to lunch, which reminded me that I ought to be out to lunch myself. I went to the Alamo and had a plate of chili with beans. They charge an extra fifteen cents for any dish without beans. Don’t ask me why.
    The pay phone at the Alamo was out of order. So were the first two booths I tried, and before I found a third one I decided not to call him anyway. It wasn’t likely he’d be desperately anxious to see me, and it’s always easier to get rid of a pest over the phone than in person.
    His name was Addison Shivers, and if I was making this up I wouldn’t dream of fastening a name like that onto him, because it didn’t fit him at all. I expected someone tall and cadaverous and permanently constipated. I can’t tell you anything about the state of his bowels, actually, but he was nothing like what I had anticipated. To begin with, it wasn’t hard to get to see him at all.
    His office was on Chambers Street, near City Hall. I took the subway there and found the building and was elevated to the sixth floor,