Make Out with Murder by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

where a frosted glass window said Addison Shivers / Attorney-at-Law . Then there were half a dozen other names in much smaller print underneath. I don’t happen to remember a single one of them.
    I told the witch at the desk that my name was Harrison and I worked for Leo Haig. (If you give that the right inflection, people think they’ve heard of Haig even though they haven’t.) I said I wanted to see Mr. Shivers. She went through a door and came back to ask what my visit was in reference to.
    “Melanie Trelawney,” I said. She relayed this and came back with the news that Mr. Shivers would see me. She seemed even more surprised than I was.
    His office was very simple, very sparsely furnished. I guess you have to be richer than God to have the confidence to get away with that. All the furniture was oak, and you could tell right away that he hadn’t bought it in an antique shop; he had bought it brand-new and kept it for fifty years. The only decorative things were a couple of sailing prints in inexpensive frames and some brass fixtures from ships. I think one of them was what is called a sextant, but I honestly don’t know enough about that sort of thing to tell you what the rest of them were. Or even to swear that the one was a sextant, for that matter.
    He looked old enough to be Cyrus Trelawney’s father. He had a little white hair left around the rim of his head. His face was sort of red, and his nose was more than sort of red. He was well padded, although you couldn’t call him fat. The strongest impression I got from him was one of genuine benevolence. He just plain looked like a nice man. Sometimes you can’t tell, but then again, sometimes you can.
    “You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand,” he said. His voice was dry but gentle. “I read about Melanie, of course. When that sort of thing happens I merely wish they could hold off until I either die or become senile. I’ve given up asking that tragedy be averted entirely. I merely wish to be spared the knowledge of it.” He looked off into space for a moment, then returned his eyes to mine. “I didn’t see Melanie often after her father’s death. But I always liked her. She was a good person.”
    “Yes, she was.”
    “Your name is Harrison, I believe. And you work for a man named Haig, but I don’t believe I know him.”
    “Leo Haig,” I said. “The detective.”
    “No, I don’t know him. I don’t know any detectives, I don’t believe. Any living detectives. What’s your connection with Melanie Trelawney?”
    I’d had a whole approach planned, but it didn’t seem to fit the person Addison Shivers turned out to be. “It’s not much of a connection,” I said. “I knew her for the past month; she was my friend.”
    “And?”
    “She was murdered,” I said. “Leo Haig and I are trying to find out who killed her.”
    This, let me tell you, was not part of the original game plan. Haig had emphasized that there was no need to pass on our suspicions and convictions to anyone else for the time being. But he had also always told me about instinct guided by experience, or intuition guided by experience, or intelligence guided by experience, and that’s what I was using.
    Mr. Shivers sat there and listened while I told him all the reasons why Leo Haig and I knew Melanie had been murdered. He knew how to listen, and his eyes showed that he was following what he was hearing. He heard me all the way through and then asked a few questions, such as why I had not mentioned any of this to the police, and when I answered his questions he nodded and sat forward in his chair and folded his hands on the top of his old oak desk.
    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