Make Out with Murder Read Free Page A

got this sudden flash and didn’t like it at all. So I did something I’ve wanted to do for years. I think it’s something everybody secretly wants to do.
    I kicked the door in.
    You’d be surprised how easy that is. Or maybe you wouldn’t when you stop to think that some of the most decrepit drug addicts in the world do it a couple of times a day. I hauled back and kicked with my heel, hitting the door right on the lock. On the third try the door flew open and the forty-dollar lock went flying, and I lost my balance and sat down without having planned to. I suppose a few tenants heard me do all these things, but they evidently knew better than to get involved.
    The apartment was a rabbit warren, a big living room and a long hallway that kept leading to other rooms, some of them containing Salvation Army reject furniture, some of them papered with posters of Che and stuff like that. Actually I think Melanie paid as much rent for the place as I paid for a room in a decent neighborhood. She said she liked having plenty of space. Personally, considering the condition of the rooms, I would think that a person would pay more for less space. One room in that building would have been bad enough. Five rooms was ridiculous.
    The telephone was in the living room. It was off the hook. I worked my way through the apartment, calling out her name, picking up more and more negative vibrations and getting less and less happy about the whole thing. I found her in the back room. She was spread out stark naked on her air mattress, which is just how I had always hoped to find her.
    But she was also absolutely dead, and that was not what I had had in mind at all.

Two
    She wasn’t the first corpse I had ever seen. One summer I picked apples for a while in upstate New York, a job which consisted largely of falling off ladders. The other pickers would go out drinking when they were done, and sometimes I would tag along. There was usually at least one fight an evening. Sometimes somebody would pull a knife, and one time when this happened it wound up that one guy, a wiry man with a harelip, caught a knifeblade in his heart and died. I saw him when they carried him out.
    The first book I wrote, I covered my experiences apple-picking, but never put that part in. God knows why.
    So she wasn’t the first corpse I ever looked at, but she might as well have been. I kept thinking how horrible it was that she looked so beautiful, even in death. Her pale white skin had a blue tint to it, especially in her face. Her eyes were wide open and I could swear they were staring at me.
    I knew she was dead. No living eyes ever looked like that. But I had to reach down and touch her. I put one hand on her shoulder. She’d been dead long enough to grow cool, however long that takes. I don’t know much about things like that. I’d never had to.
    I almost didn’t see the hypodermic needle. She was on her back, legs stretched out in front of her, one arm at her side, the other placed so that her hand was on her little bowl of a stomach. That hand almost covered the hypodermic needle. After I saw it, I picked up her other arm and found a needle mark. Just one, and it looked fresh.
    I put her arm back the way I had found it. I went to the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at her some more. I must have stood there staring at her for five minutes. Then I paced around the whole apartment for another five minutes and came back and stared at her some more.
    This wasn’t shock. I was in shock, of course, but I was being very methodical about this. I wanted to notice everything and I wanted to make sure I remembered whatever I noticed.
    I left her apartment, closed the door, walked down the stairs and out. I walked all the way over to First Avenue before I caught a cab. The cab dropped me at 14th Street and Seventh. I walked quickly from there to my rooming house on 18th Street, a few doors west of Eighth.
    When I was in my own room on the third floor, the