Make Out with Murder by Lawrence Block

would have been too stoned to get it all together. “Hey, man, like we got to go see them plant old Melanie.” “No, baby, that was last week.” “Far out!”
    I recognized Caitlin and Kim with no trouble. I would have figured out who they were anyway since they were seated in the front pew, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. They didn’t exactly look alike, and they didn’t look like Melanie exactly, but all of them looked like old Cyrus Trelawney. Except on them it looked becoming. They had what I guess we can call the Trelawney nose, strong and assertive, and the deep-set eyes. Caitlin was blond and fair-skinned, a tall woman, expensively dressed. The man beside her wore a tweed suit that didn’t have leather elbow patches yet. His nose and lips were thin and his expression was pained. I didn’t have much trouble figuring out that he was Gregory Vandiver. Of the Sands Point Vandivers.
    Kim was very short and slender, also fair-skinned, but with hair as dark as Melanie’s. She seemed to be crying a lot, which set her apart from the rest of the company. Crying or not, I could see what the theater critic meant; she would have been an ornament to any stage. The guy next to her, on the other hand, had no decorative effect whatsoever. He kept reaching over and patting her hand. He looked familiar, and I finally figured out where I had seen him before. He played the title role in King Kong.
    Kim was wearing a simple black dress, and she managed simultaneously to look good in it and to give the impression that she didn’t generally wear dresses. The ape was wearing a suit for the first time in his life.
    There was a handful of other people I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t identify. I guessed that the plump, boyish man in the gray sharkskin suit might be Ferdinand Bell, Robin’s husband. If there was a professional numismatist in the room, he was likely to be it. And a girl off to one side was probably Andrea Sugar, if Andrea Sugar was there at all, because nobody else around could possibly have been a recreational therapist at something called Indulgence. The rest of the crowd was mostly old, and you sensed somehow that they were there because they liked funerals better than daytime television. I understand there are a lot of people like that. Every couple of days they trot down to the local mortuary to see who’s playing.
    The casket was open. I guess they do this so that the more skeptical mourners can assure themselves that the person they’re mourning is genuinely dead. And so that the undertaker can show off his cosmetic skill.
    I wasn’t going to look. But then I decided that was silly, and I went up and looked, and it wasn’t Melanie at all. There was rouge on her cheeks and lipstick on her mouth and eyebrow pencil on her eyebrows and some tasteless shit had cut her pretty hair and styled it, if you could call it that. Melanie never wore makeup in her life. This wasn’t Melanie. This was a reject from the waxworks.
    I really felt like hitting somebody.
    Haig had told me to approach one of the sisters after the funeral. It was up to me which one I chose. “The older girl is probably better equipped to make a decision,” he said, “while the younger one would probably be more receptive to overtures from someone your age. Use your judgment.”
    I used my judgment, and decided Kim might well be more receptive to overtures from someone my age, especially in view of the fact that I was more receptive to the idea of making them to her than to Caitlin. But I used a little more of my judgment and came to the conclusion that I would rather talk to Kim without that Neanderthal of hers hulking nearby. The idea of trying to Broach A Serious Subject to her while she was intermittently dissolving in tears also left something to be desired. So it was Caitlin by default.
    If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about the trip to the cemetery or the burial. I rode out in a car full of old ladies