Make Out with Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

no signs of struggle?”
    “None that I could see. Uh, in Melanie’s apartment, you might say there were always signs of struggle. I mean, she wasn’t the world’s most fanatical housekeeper.”
    “But nothing out of the ordinary? And no sign of another person’s presence?”
    “No. Except the phone off the hook, of course. I hung up myself after I called the police.”
    “And neglected to mention to the police that it had been I off the hook when you arrived?”
    “I felt they would wonder why I happened to notice it.”
    He nodded. “And they’d resent you for it. It’s infinitely simpler for them to process this as an accidental overdose than as a murder, and a loose end like a telephone off the hook would only impress them as a complication. They’d file the case the same way, but they would be annoyed with you for bringing up irrelevancies and inconsistencies. They would have been happiest if you could have told them Melanie had been planning on trying heroin. It’s as well you didn’t, but that’s how any bureaucratic mind works.”
    He spun around in his swivel chair and gazed into the fishtank at eye level. The entire room, and it is a large one, is paneled in English oak and lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. Most of the shelf space is devoted to books, the overwhelming majority of them detective stories, but fish tanks are spotted here and there on the shelves. There are a dozen of them. They are all what Haig calls recreational aquariums, as opposed to the breeding tanks and |rearing tanks on the top floor. Actually, to tell you the truth, they’re what Haig calls recreational aquaria. I call them aquariums because I’m not entirely literate yet. This particular tank was very restful to look at. It was a fifteen-gallon tank, which means it was one foot deep by one foot wide by two feet long, and its sole occupants were eleven Rasbora heteramorpha. I have a feeling that you either know what they are or you don’t, and a description won’t help much, but Haig wants me to make an | effort on matters like this. Rasboras are fish about an inch long, a delicate rose pink with a blackish wedge on their sides. They’re pretty, and they swim in schools, and in this particular tank they swam in and around a dwarf amazon sword plant and a piece of crystalline quartz. The tank was top-lighted, and if you watched the fish for a while you got a happy feeling.
    At least I did. Haig watched the fish for a while and stroked his beard a lot and turned around in the swivel chair with a thoughtful expression on his face.
    “How old was Melanie?”
    “I don’t know. A little older than me. I guess about twenty-one.”
    “And Jessica?”
    “Older, but I don’t know by how much. Wait a minute. Melanie was the second youngest. And Robin was older than she was, so one of the girls still alive is younger than Melanie.”
    “Were any of them married?”
    “Yes, but I don’t know which ones. Obviously Melanie wasn’t married.” And never would be, I thought, and something vaguely resembling a lump formed in my throat, but I swallowed and it went away.
    Haig said, “Hmmmmmm.” He turned and looked at the rasboras some more. I watched him do this for a while and saw that it was going to be an extensive thing, so I got up and went over to the wall and looked at some fish myself. A pair of African gouramis, two very beautiful fish, rendered in shades of chocolate. I’m not putting down the Latin name, because there’s no agreement on it yet; the species was just discovered a couple years ago and ha never been bred in captivity, a state of affairs which Leo Haig regards as a personal challenge. I stared into the tank and decided that I had never seen two living creatures display less interest in each other. We will breed the damned things sooner or later, but we were not going to accomplish it that particular evening.
    Nor were we going to accomplish much else. Haig swung around and said as much. “