Make Out with Murder Read Free Page B

first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was to go into the bathroom and remove the towel bar from the wall. It’s a hollow stainless steel bar, and there was a little plastic vial in it that contained several dollars’ worth of reasonably good grass. I poured the grass in the toilet and flushed, rinsed out the vial, and tossed it out the window. Then I went through the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t find anything to worry about except for a few codeine pills that my doctor had prescribed for a sinus headache. I thought about it and decided to hell with them, and I flushed them away, too. That left nothing but aspirin and Dristan, and I didn’t think the cops would hassle me much for either of those. I put the towel bar back and washed my hands.
    I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like the way I was dressed. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of slacks that didn’t need pressing too badly. I traded in my loafers for my black dress shoes.
    Then I went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall. I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number I know best.
    Haig answered the telephone himself for a change. We talked for a few minutes. Mostly I talked and he listened, and then he made a couple of suggestions, and I hung up the phone and went off to discover the body.
    I guess I’ll have to tell you something about Leo Haig.
    The place to start, I suppose, is how I happen to be working for him. I had been looking for a job for a while, and things had not been going particularly well. I got work from time to time, washing dishes or bussing tables or delivering messages and parcels, but none of these positions amounted to what you might call A Job With A Future, which is what I have always been seeking, though in a sort of inept way.
    My problem, really, was that I wasn’t qualified for anything too dynamic. My education stopped a couple of months before graduation from Upper Valley Preparatory Academy, which is to say that I haven’t even got a high school diploma, for Pete’s sake. And my previous work experience—well, when you tell a prospective employer that you have been an assistant to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, a termite salesman, a fruit picker, and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in South Carolina, well, what usually happens is his eyes glaze and he points at the door a lot.
    (I don’t want to go into all this ancient history now, really, but if you’re interested you could read about it. My first two books, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again , pretty well cover the territory. I don’t know that they’re much good, but you could read them for background information or something. Assuming you care.)
    Anyway, I was living in New York and doing the hand-to-mouth number and reading the want ads in The Times , and there were loads of opportunities to earn $40 a week if you had a doctorate in chemical engineering or something like that, but not much if you didn’t. Then I ran into an ad that went something like this:
RESOURCEFUL YOUTH wanted to assist detective. Low pay, long hours, hard work, demanding employer. Journalistic experience will be given special consideration. Familiarity with tropical fish helpful but not absolutely necessary. An excellent opportunity for one man in a million. …
    I didn’t know if I was one man in a million, but it was certainly one advertisement in a million, and nothing could have kept me from answering it. I called the number listed in the ad and answered a few questions over the phone. He gave me an address and I went to it, and at first I thought the whole thing was someone’s idea of a joke, because the building was obviously a whorehouse. But it turned out that only the lower two floors were a whorehouse. The upper two floors were the offices and living quarters of Leo Haig.
    He wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but whatever it might have been, he wasn’t it. He’s about five-two and very round. It’s not