I’ll tell you something. Sometimes when two people meet each other, the best thing that can happen is that they go directly to the nearest bed. Other times the best thing can happen is that they take their time and really get to know each other first. Either way is cool. The problem comes when the two people perceive the situation differently.
Not that she was precisely driving me up a wall. There were times when it felt that way, I’ll admit, but basically it was a question of Melanie’s feeling it was very necessary for us to take our time, while I felt that all the time we had to take was whatever time it took to get out of our clothes. Since Melanie always wore jeans and a tie-dyed top and sandals, and nothing under any of those three articles of clothing but her own sweet self, and since I was sufficiently motivated to take off my shirt without unbuttoning it, this process would not have taken much time.
It probably wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound. I mean, I’m not Stanley Stud who has to have a woman every night or his thing will turn green. I want a woman every night, but I’ve learned to live with failure. We were getting to know each other, Melanie and I, and we were getting to I know each other slightly in a physical way, and eventually things were going to work out. Until then I wasn’t sleeping very well, but I had decided I could put up with that.
I sat at the counter and stirred my coffee, trying to convince myself that I wanted to drink it. Every few seconds I would glance out through the window to see if the man in the brown suit was finished and ready to lead me off to still more exciting places. Every once in a while someone with the same general orientation as Brown Suit would give me a sidelong glance. Which made me think defensively again of Melanie.
One thing had been bothering me lately. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Melanie might be a little bit out of touch with reality.
For maybe the past ten days she had been behaving strangely. She would laugh suddenly at nothing at all, and then a few minutes later she would start crying and not say what it was about. And then a couple of days earlier she explained what it was. She was convinced she was going to die.
“Two of my sisters are already gone,” she said. “First Robin was killed in a car accident. Then Jessica threw herself out the window. There’s just three of us left, Caitlin and Kim and me, and then we’ll all be gone.”
“In seventy years, maybe. But not like tomorrow, Melanie.”
“Maybe tomorrow, Chip.”
“I think maybe you do drugs a little too much.”
“It’s not drugs. Anyway, I’m straight now.”
“Then I don’t get it.”
Her eyes, which range from blue to green and back again, were a very vivid blue now. “I am going to be killed,” she said. “I can sense it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Robin and Jessica were killed—”
“Well, Jessica killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Did she?”
“Jesus, Melanie, that’s what you just said, isn’t it? You said she threw herself out a window.”
“Maybe she did. Maybe she... she was pushed.”
“Oh, wow!”
She lowered her head, closed her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know anything, Chip. All I know is the feelings I’ve had lately. That all of the Trelawney girls are going to die and that I’m going to be next. Maybe Robin’s accident really was an accident. Maybe Jessica did kill herself. She wasn’t terribly stable, she had a weird life style. And maybe Robin’s accident really was an accident. I know it must have been. But — I’m afraid, Chip.”
I saw her a couple of times after that, and she was never that hysterical again. She did mention the subject, though. She tried to be cool about it.
“Well, like it’s a good thing you’re working for a private detective, Chip. That way you can investigate the case when I’m murdered.”
I would tell her to cut the shit, that she was not going to be murdered, and she would say she was just making a joke out of it. Except it was only partly a joke.
I guess that coffee shop wasn’t the best place to pick for a stake-out. Not just because the coffee was rotten, but because the clientele was largely gay.
Which is all right as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get uncomfortable in homosexual company. I have a couple of gay friends, as far as that goes. But the thing is this: if you sit in a place like that, just killing time over a cup of coffee, and if you’re young and tallish and thinnish, which is to say the general physical type which is likely to hang out in such a place for a particular purpose, well, people come to an obvious conclusion.
It was getting a little heavy, so I paid for my coffee and I went out to wait outside. I guess that turned out to be worse. I wasn’t outside for five minutes before a heavy-set man with a slim attaché case and a neatly trimmed white moustache asked me if he could buy me a drink.
I took my wallet out and flipped it open briefly. “Police,” I said. “Surveillance,” I said. “Scram,” I said.
“Oh, dear,” the man said.
“Just go away,” I said.
“I didn’t actually do anything,” the man said. “Just an offer of a drink, all in good faith—”
“Jesus, go away,” I said.
“I’m not under arrest?”
Across the street, the man in the brown suit emerged from the hotel. He still had his package of magazines with him. I told the idiot with the moustache that he was not under arrest, but that he would be if he didn’t pissed off.
“You’re not Vice Squad?”
“Narcotics,” I said, trying to get past him.
“But you should be on the Vice Squad,” he insisted. “You’d fool anyone.”
I’ve decided since that he must have intended this as a compliment. At the time I couldn’t pay that much attention to what he was saying because Brown Suit was on his way into a subway kiosk and I had to hurry if I didn’t want to lose him. It occurred to me that perhaps I did want to lose him, but I wanted to get away from the creep with the moustache in any case, so I charged down to the subway entrance and caught sight of the man in brown just as I dropped my own token into the turnstile. Actually, it was his turn to follow me for the next little bit, because he had to buy a token. I always have a pocket full of them.
Leo Haig believes his right-hand man should be prepared for any contingency.
I bought a paper to give myself something to hide behind and to kill time so that he could let me know which train we were going to ride. It turned out to be the downtown A train and we rode it to Washington Square. Then we went up and around and caught the E train as far as Long Island City. This puzzled me a little because he could have caught that same E train at 42nd Street and saved going out of the way a couple of miles, but I figured maybe he changed his mind and had some particular last-minute reason to go out to Queens.
At Long Island City he got out of the train just as the doors were closing, and if I hadn’t been standing right next to the door at the time I would have gone on riding to Flushing or someplace weird like that. But I got out, and I immediately began walking off in the opposite direction from him. After I had gone about twenty yards I turned and looked over my shoulder and there he was. I started to turn again, but he was making motions with his hands.
I just stood there. I didn’t really know what else to do.
“Look,” he said. “This is beginning to get on my nerves.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been following me all afternoon, son. Would you like to tell me why?”