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

lawyer in all personal matters. And he was my friend for as long as he was my client. He was a very great man, you know.”
    “He must have been.”
    “A great man. I’m not sure that he was a good man, mind you. Goodness and greatness rarely keep house together. But I can say that he was a good friend. And now three of his daughters are dead. And his only son.”
    “His son?”
    “Cyrus, Junior. He was the second born, he died in infancy. Cyrus never ceased to mourn him, especially when it became evident that he would not be fathering any more children. He wanted the name continued, you see. He was resigned to the fact that it would not be, ultimately, and felt it would be sufficient that his seed would endure through his daughters.” He cleared his throat. “And now three of his daughters are dead in less than a year.”
    Cyrus, Jr. That explained the six-year gap between Caitlin and Robin.
    “I respect your logic concerning Melanie’s death,” he said. “I agree that she must almost certainly have been murdered. You realize, of course, that this does not call for the conclusion that Robin and Jessica were murdered as well.”
    “I know.”
    “Though one cannot deny the possibility. Or the danger to the two remaining Trelawney girls.”
    I nodded.
    “What do you and Mr. Haig intend to do?”
    “Try to warn Mrs. Vandiver and Kim. And try to figure out who killed Melanie and how to prove it.”
    “You ought to have a client,” he said. He opened his desk drawer and took out a large checkbook, the kind with three checks on a page. He wrote out a check, noted it on the stub, and handed it across the desk to me. It was made out to Leo Haig and the amount was a thousand dollars.
    “I don’t know what your rates are,” he said. Neither, to tell you the truth, did I. “This will serve as a retainer. Note that I am engaging you to look out for the interests of Cyrus Trelawney, deceased. That leaves you a considerable degree of leeway.”
    “I think I understand.”
    He had one of his junior clerks find various papers about the Trelawney estate. He went over them with me and explained the parts I couldn’t understand, and I filled the rest of my notebook. He poured himself a large brandy in the course of this, and asked me if I wanted anything myself. I told him I didn’t.
    When I had everything he could give me, he excused himself again for not getting to his feet. He leaned across the desk and we shook hands.
    I asked if I would be seeing him the following day at Melanie’s funeral.
    “No, I don’t go to funerals any more,” he said. “If I did, I shouldn’t have time for anything else.”

Five
    I had never been to a funeral before. When my parents committed suicide, I was away at school. I suppose the funeral took place before I could have gotten to it, but I have to admit I never even thought about it. I just packed a bag and started hitchhiking.
    If Melanie’s funeral was typical, I’m surprised the custom hasn’t died out. I mean, I can sort of understand the way the Irish do it. Everybody stays drunk for three or four days. That makes a certain amount of sense. But here we were all gathered in this stark, modernistic, non-denominational cesspool on Lexington and 54th in the middle of the afternoon, listening to a man who had never met her say dumb things about a dead girl. One of the worst parts was that the jerk was sort of glossing over the fact that Melanie was either a junkie or a suicide, or both. He didn’t come right out and say anything about casting first stones, but you could see it was running through his mind. I wanted to jump up and tell the world Melanie was murdered. I managed to control myself.
    I wouldn’t have been telling the world, anyway. Just a tiny portion of it. There were none of Melanie’s friends there except me. Her relationships with the people in her neighborhood had been deliberately casual, and even if some of them had decided to come to the funeral, they