The Old Die Young

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

“Absolutely. People applauded after his reading. Not the sort who applaud unless they mean it. And Clive’s—Clive was an actor. They like applause, you know.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Put anybody on top of the world, I’d think. By the way, Mr. Branson was one of your clients. Does that mean you negotiated his contract for this play? With Mr. Simon, I suppose?”

  “Of course. Run of the play. And—well, a very good contract. Mr. Simon was very anxious to get him, naturally. And, of course, so was Bret.”

  Bret? Oh, yes—Bret Askew, who had written Summer Solstice.

  “Do you mind telling us what Mr. Branson’s salary was, Mrs. Abel?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant, I think I do. Unless it’s very important to your—investigation. Let’s just say substantial and leave it there, shall we? Or, of course, you can ask Mr. Simon. Maybe he’ll tell you, if it’s important.”

  Shapiro nodded. “And will Mr. Price get the same salary, whatever it was? And the same run-of-the-play contract?”

  “God, no, Clive was a star. A famous one. Just his name brought them flocking in. Dear Ken is just a rising young actor. He does want run of the play, as you probably gathered, and I’ll try and get him that. But not Clive’s salary. Not by—well, thousands. Depends on what the critics say. If they decide to come tomorrow night. If Simon decides to reopen tomorrow night. He’s probably deciding about that now, at the rehearsal, you know. That’s what they called it for.”

  “Where will they be having this rehearsal, Mrs. Abel?”

  “At the theater, of course. But they won’t want outsiders.” Shapiro said he saw.

  5

  The pretty young receptionist was at her desk when they went out through the outer office of Martha Abel Associates. She was on the telephone. She looked up and smiled a conventional smile. It was midafternoon by then; too early for results of the autopsy on the late Clive Branson. Still—

  There were two telephone booths on the lobby floor of the modest office building. Shapiro used one of them.

  Dr. Nelson was available at the offices of the Medical Examiner, New York County. Yes, the post mortem examination of the cadaver of Branson, Clive, was under way. No results to be released at the moment. But did Lieutenant Shapiro want a guess? He did.

  “Could be natural causes,” Nelson said. “Like I told you when we picked it up. Cardiac arrest. Or could be—this is just a guess, Lieutenant—overdose of one of the barbiturates. Along with alcohol. Alcohol in the blood; all right. We’ve got that far. Bad combination, alcohol and barbiturates. Both depressive, you know.”

  “High alcohol content in the blood, Doctor?”

  “Not especially. He wasn’t drunk. He’d been drinking.”

  “We’ve been told,” Shapiro said, “that Branson never took sleeping pills. That he told his dresser that he overreacted to them. What would he have meant by that, would you say?”

  “Probably that they knocked him out sooner than they do most people. Or kept him out longer. Hypersensitive, could be. Or, one chance in hundreds, that they stimulated instead of putting to sleep. Does happen with a few—very few. But it does happen. Makes one person in—oh, a few hundreds, climb walls instead of quietly passing out for a few hours. Eight, maybe. Maybe only six or so. Depends on the dosage, of course. Usual therapeutic dose for Nembutal, for instance, is a hundred mgs. Some people do fine with fifty.”

  “Yes. And the lethal dose, Doctor?”

  “Varies a lot. As little as a gram has been fatal. People have recovered after several times that. Depends on a lot of things. Weight, age, general physical condition. Lot of things.”

  “Including special sensitivity?”

  “Certainly. And whether there’s alcohol in the bloodstream, as I just told you. Listen, Shapiro, we haven’t finished with this one. A couple of hours to go. And when we’ve got something, it’ll go through channels. O.K.?”

  “Of course, Doctor. We—just want to get going. If there’s someplace to go.”

  “Well,” Dr. Nelson said, “you can call it a suspicious death. Good enough?”

  Shapiro said, “Yes, Doctor,” and hung up.

  “This Summer Solstice’s playing at the Rolf Simon Theater,” Tony Cook told him when he came out of the booth. “Forty-sixth, east of Broadway. Easy enough walk from here.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Strike you that Mrs. Abel and this actor, Price, sound pretty chummy, Tony?”

  “Because of the ‘darlings’ and ‘sweethearts’? Maybe. But theater people do talk that way quite a lot. Rachel’s sort of picking it up since she got those TV jobs.”

  Rachel Farmer, by profession a model for painters and photographers, had recently got bit parts in several TV series episodes—parts which required tall girls. She is almost as tall as Tony Cook, a fact which they often verify.

  Shapiro said, “Mmm,” and by unspoken agreement they started walking toward the Rolf Simon Theater. When they had gone a few blocks, Shapiro said, “Probably just that, I suppose. Still, she’s a handsome woman, Tony. And not married. Not working at it, anyway. And they did seem rather chummy.”

  “And Branson’s death is a break for Price. Only they’re both her clients, Nate. And Branson was a star, with a star’s salary. Of which La Abel got her cut. A lot bigger cut than she’ll get from Price’s. I don’t mean a bigger percent; bigger total.”

  “I know what you mean,” Shapiro said, and they waited for a green light to cross where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet.

  The Rolf Simon Theater was on the south side of Forty-sixth, in the middle of the block. The sign read:

  CLIVE BRANSON

  IN

  Summer Solstice

  a new comedy

  by BRET ASKEW

  “Branson” was in much larger lettering than “Askew” or, for that matter, than the title of the play. It was also outlined in light bulbs, which Askew was not. The theater lobby was brightly lighted. Half a dozen people stood in line in front of the box-office counter. And there was a sign which read, in letters of still-damp paint:

  No Performance Tonight

  Refund requests by mail from Rolf Simon Productions

  The center door to the auditorium was closed. It was not locked, as they found while the man in the box office yelled, “Hey!” at them. They paid no attention to the “Hey.”

  The stage was lighted harshly from above. Three men made up the audience. On stage, Ken Price, facing a very pretty young woman in a green pantsuit, said, “The minute you were born, darling, the days began to get longer. With me, it was the other way around.”

  The man on the aisle got up from his seat and walked toward the stage and said, “Not like that, for God’s sake, Price. The way Clive read it. This is comedy, man. Comedy.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” Price said. “I know it’s comedy, Mr. Kirby. I’m trying to read it that way. But is that line supposed to roll them in the aisles?”

  “Not the way you’re reading it,” a slim young man said from his orchestra seat. “And here in the fifth row I can just hear you.”

  “Sorry,” Price said, and read the line again, more loudly and with more vivacity.

  “More like it,” the man named Kirby said. “A little more like it. So, Miss Collins? Taking a little nap or something?”

  “Longer days,” the pretty young woman said. “Oh, ever so much longer.” But, to Shapiro, there seemed to be almost a sob underlying her voice. Shapiro and Cook sat down in the back row.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Kirby said. “All right, take five and we’ll go on with the funeral. Act Two again from the top.” He sat again in his aisle seat, next to a heavy-set man with gray hair.

  Tony Cook had found a program and was looking at it. “Comedy in three acts by Bret Askew,” he read from it, keeping his voice low. “Directed by Robert Kirby.”

  But his voice had not been low enough. The heavy-set man turned in his seat and looked at them. His broad face was as heavy-set as his body. He stood up and Kirby got out of his seat
to let him pass. The man was also tall; coming up the aisle he was formidable. When he was three or four rows away, he spoke. His voice, too, was heavy.

  “All right, you two,” he said. “What’re you doing here? And how the hell did you get in?”

  “We’re policemen, Mr. Simon,” Shapiro said, taking a chance on the identity of the producer. “And nobody tried to stop us. We can just wait until you’ve finished.”

  “You’ve got names, I suppose,” Simon said, conceding by absence of contradiction that Shapiro had been right about his own. “And wait for what, man?”

  Shapiro gave him names. “To talk about Mr. Branson’s death,” he added. “His very sudden death. We’re from Homicide, Mr. Simon.”

  “So what the—” Rolf Simon said, and stopped. He turned and spoke down the aisle. “All right, Kirby,” he said, his voice loud in the almost empty room. “Get on with it. Have the new boy read … you, Peter. You’ll have to be up on it by tomorrow, if you want the part.”

  A somewhat wraithlike young man spoke from the stage, on which he had been relatively invisible. He said, “O.K., Mr. Simon. I’ll be up on it by tomorrow.”

  Simon made, loudly, the sound usually described as “Hmph.” Then he said, “All right, you two, we may as well go upstairs.”

  The “you two” was clearly for Shapiro and Tony Cook. They followed Simon out into the lobby.

  Now there were eight men and women in front of the box office. The man inside looked at Rolf Simon and raised his eyebrows. Simon merely shook his head.

  Beyond the box office, Simon stopped in front of a narrow door. He used a key to open it. It opened on an elevator, almost as narrow as the door. There was just room for the three of them in it—and that, primarily, because Nathan Shapiro, although a tall man, is a thin one. The elevator went up, for what seemed to Shapiro rather a long time. When it stopped, it was at an office with a young woman in it. She was typing when Simon led them into the office. The young woman looked up with the expression suitable for an expectant secretary.

  “Okay, sweetheart, you can take a break,” Simon said. “Matter of fact, you can call it a day.”

  “But Mr. Simon—” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” Simon said.

  She got up and went out through a door at the rear of the office. With the door open, Shapiro could see what looked to be a large living room.

  “Yes,” Simon said. “Rolf Simon Productions and living quarters.” The secretary called Sweetheart closed the door after her.

  “Trouble with actors,” Simon said, “they get to thinking they’re people. Louses things up.”

  Shapiro could think of no answer to that, and so attempted none.

  “Sit down somewhere,” Simon said and went himself to a big desk and sat behind it. “Look at that damn girl. All mushed up. Damn near puddling, wasn’t she?”

  Shapiro said, “Sorry, Mr. Simon.”

  “Just saw her, if you were looking,” Simon said. “Heard her, too. Damn near crying, wasn’t she? Poor little wench had a crush on him. Don’t call it a crush nowadays, I suppose. A thing for him. God knows what they do call it. Anyway, she’s all broken up. Have to snap out of it by tomorrow night. Probably will, I guess. Nice little actress. She got decent notices, anyway.”

  It seemed to Shapiro that Rolf Simon put a slight emphasis on the word “she.” Perhaps, he thought, the emphasis was not intentional.

  “You’re talking about Miss Collins—I think that’s her name, isn’t it? And her having this crush, or whatever they call it, on Mr. Branson?”

  “What else, Shapiro? Not that it was doing her any good, I’ll say that for Branson. Did realize she was years too young for him. Like in the play. Well, almost like in the play, let’s say. Jesus, how’d I let Askew talk me into this? Ought to know better at my age, wouldn’t you say?”

  Shapiro decided he had no answer for that one either.

  “And Branson wasn’t interested in Miss Collins, Mr. Simon?”

  “Said he wasn’t, anyway; didn’t play around much, far’s I know. Not lately, anyhow. Men get past it, Shapiro. Some do, anyway. As you’ll learn one of these days.”

  Shapiro supposed so. He nodded his head in acceptance of the nondurability of the human male.

  “Sure,” Simon said, “some hold out longer than others. But Clive Branson was—well, sort of a quiet guy. As actors go. A sweet guy, you could say. Everybody liked him. And here you two are saying somebody killed him. What the hell, Lieutenant?”

  “We don’t say that, Mr. Simon. Only that it’s possible. What we call a suspicious death; what the medical examiner calls it. No doctor around. So, no death certificate.”

  “He was all right last night,” Simon said. “Far’s I could tell, anyway. Did that Hamlet bit O.K. Fond of doing that, old Clive was. Sort of—well, sort of a set piece, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I understand you arranged this party, Mr. Simon. To celebrate Mr. Branson’s birthday. That was yesterday? His birthday, I mean.”

  “Nearest Sunday to it, anyway. Day we’re not on, you know. Night off. Years ago, it was against the law to have performances on Sunday. Isn’t anymore, but it’s still a day off. For my shows, anyway. Got set in my ways, you could call it.”

  Shapiro nodded again. At a guess, Rolf Simon had had plenty of time to get set in his ways. Somewhere around seventy years, the guess would be. Which brought the question up again.

  “Do you know how old Mr. Branson was, Mr. Simon?”

  “Older than he—no, Lieutenant, I don’t know how old Branson was. Been around quite a while, I do know. In Who’s Who it figures out—”

  “I know,” Shapiro said. “Figures out to be forty-two, but they’d take his word for that, wouldn’t they?”

  “Far’s I know. All right, maybe he was a couple of years older. Didn’t show it—not to me, anyway. As I said, he was going great guns last night. Some of these damn squirts ought to have seen him then.” He stopped speaking rather abruptly and stared at Shapiro. His stare, like everything else about him, was heavy.

  “What squirts, Mr. Simon?”

  “All right—these damn reviewers. Call themselves critics. Different breed of cats fifty years ago. Called themselves critics then, too, but some of them were. Nathan. Joe Krutch. Some of the others. Nowadays—” He did not add to that. His inflection made more unnecessary.

  “The reviewers didn’t give Summer Solstice good—writeups, Mr. Simon?”

  “Reviews. Notices,” Simon said. “Oh, the Chronicle liked the play well enough. Compared it to S. N. Behrman and Noel Coward. Takes us back a few years, doesn’t it? But it was an all-right notice, and the Chronicle’s the one that counts. And the Sentinel wasn’t bad, except it messes around with the word ‘veteran.’ ‘Far too veteran for the forty-year-old husband.’ Or some such, for God’s sake.”

  “Referring to Mr. Branson?”

  “Who else? Made him sound doddering, ‘miscast by about ten years.’”

  “That Branson was too old for the part?”

  “I suppose so. Character’s supposed to be forty. Wife’s twenty. What the play’s all about. You can have a look at the show tomorrow night, Lieutenant. If we get the kinks out by then. Leave you a couple of tickets at the box office. For you, too, Cook, if that’s your name.”

  Tony Cook admitted that was his name.

  “House seats if it comes to that,” Simon said. “Sold out solid until after Christmas, but this may put a dent in it. Hard to tell about that. You know what a summer solstice is, Lieutenant?”

  Shapiro did know. “The date the day is at its longest,” he said. “Most daylight compared to darkness. June twenty-first most years.”

  “Yeah. And winter solstice the other way around—December twenty-first or -second. The way Askew’s rigged it, the girl—this Mrs. Derwent—was born on December twenty-first, and her husband on June twenty-first. Only he was born twenty years before she was. Twenty years and a half, actually.
O.K., it’s a gimmick, but it works out, all right. Light comedy; sort of thing we don’t get too much of nowadays. The boy can write, I’ll give him that. Hell, even these damn reviewers give him that. But it was Branson who brought them in. Made the advance sale. Star-of-stage-and-screen sort of thing. For all he was a nice guy.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “for all you knew a healthy one?”

  “He never said he wasn’t. And didn’t look as if he wasn’t. But I hadn’t been seeing him lately. Back in Hollywood, he did tell me once he was having some trouble sleeping, but who doesn’t? I told him I wasn’t sleeping too damn well, either, except I was taking pills for it. And he said something about envying me, whatever he meant by that.”

  Shapiro said he saw. He said, “Mr. Branson had a run-of-the-play contract, I gather. Mind telling me what salary you were paying him, Mr. Simon?”

  “Yes, I do mind. Gets out and people will think I was a damn fool. Think I’m a soft touch. I was paying him plenty. And, yes, run of the play. That he held out for, and I can’t say I blame him.”

  Shapiro stood up. “So,” he said. “I guess we can let Mr. Simon get back to his rehearsal, don’t you, Cook?”

  By which Tony Cook knew it was his turn. And, for a moment, he was puzzled by what his turn should come to. Then he made a stab at it.

  “When did this party last night break up, Mr. Simon?” Cook asked.

  “Hell,” Simon said, “I didn’t keep a stopwatch on it. A little after one, at a guess. Clive began emptying ashtrays. Had a little gadget to put butts in, and began emptying trays into it. Not the sort of thing I’d ever seen him do on the West Coast, but what the hell? His house, after all.”

  “Probably thought the party was about over,” Tony Cook said.

  “Or ought to be,” Simon agreed. “So—I figured he was bored, or maybe sleepy. Can’t say I was myself; ready to make a night of it, actually. So were the others, I thought. Kirby and Bret Askew, anyway. Arlene and Mrs. Abel had split already. The Abel dame suggested that. Business about being a working girl. Having to be at the office first thing in the morning. Lot of crap, of course. Actors’ agents open their offices around eleven, which is about the time actors begin to wake up. Anyway, that’s what she said. And Arlene decided to go along with her. And Ken Price took off about a quarter of an hour later, which didn’t surprise me a hell of a lot.”