Make Out with Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

idea what it was about. Seidenwall wanted to plant some drugs so they would have an excuse to arrest me. Gregorio talked him out of it, not out of fondness for me, but because he felt I wasn’t worth the trouble.
    “I’ll tell you, Harrison,” he said on his way out. “You’re the only thing in this that doesn’t make sense. Everything else is pretty open and shut. But you don’t figure.”
    “Why?”
    “You swear it’s not a business thing with the girl. That she’s a friend. And then you tell us you’ve known her for a month and you weren’t balling her.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    “You a faggot?”
    “No.”
    “Everybody knows those hippie chicks go like rabbits. It’s what you call common knowledge. But you knew her for a month without getting in her pants. It don’t add up.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Number two. You go to her apartment and find her dead with a needle in her arm.” The needle was not in her arm, but I let it pass. “And what do you do? You call the cops.”
    “Isn’t that what a person is supposed to do?”
    “Of course it’s what a person is supposed to do. Nobody in this fucking city does what he’s supposed to do. Nobody wants to get involved. Nobody wants to call himself to the attention of the police, especially in a drug-related homicide, especially when the person in question is a hippie punk that probably uses drugs himself.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Yeah, you don’t. And you’re not a hippie punk either, are you? You’re some kind of a cop.”
    “I work—”
    “Yeah, I know. You work for this Haig, who’s some kind of private cop that I never heard of. You’re his assistant. What do you assist him with?”
    “Cases.”
    “Uh-huh. I’ll tell you one thing, Harrison. I hope this Haig character looks more like a cop than you do. Because you just don’t fit the image of a cop, Harrison. Private or otherwise, you’re not my idea of a cop.”
    I pictured Leo Haig and tried to decide which of the two of us looked more like a cop. I gave up thinking about it because it made me feel like giggling and I didn’t want to giggle. I had the feeling that one giggle from me was all Seidenwall would need.
    I wasn’t sleeping with Melanie, I had done my civic duty and called the police, and I didn’t look like any kind of a cop. Those were the three things about me that made Gregorio and Seidenwall suspicious. I couldn’t quite follow their reasoning on this, but then again I didn’t have to.
    Suspicious or not, they walked out my door and down the stairs without even telling me not to leave town. So: their suspicion was evidently just on general principles, coupled with instinctive dislike.
    I suppose they would have given me a much worse time if they’d had the brains to realize Melanie had been: murdered.

Three
    “It was definitely murder,” I said. “First of all, Melanie would never give herself a shot of heroin. She told me she tried heroin once, she snorted it, and it made her nauseous without giving her any kind of a high at all.”
    “She might try it a second time.”
    “She might, but there were too many other things she liked better. And if she did try it again, it wouldn’t be with a needle. She’s terrified of needles. Some nurse had to give her an injection once and botched it, kept stabbing around trying to find the vein, and she still has nightmares about it. Still had nightmares about it. Oh, shit.”
    “Settle yourself, Chip.”
    I nodded across the desk at him. It’s what they call a partners’ desk, with drawers and stuff on both sides so two people can use it. I was on my side of the desk. I was very flattered to have a whole side of a desk to myself, but I really didn’t have much of anything to keep in the drawers.
    Haig took a pipe out of a little wooden rack on his side of the desk. This was during his pipe period. He had trouble keeping them lit, and they kept burning his mouth. He was convinced that he would sooner or later break