The Old Die Young

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Filing it for probate this afternoon,” Fisk said. “Read it, if you want to. Or I’ll give you the gist.” Fisk did not wait to be answered. “Fifty thousand each to his three surviving ex-wives,” Fisk said. “He had four, you know. One, an English one, died a few years back. Cynthia Desmond—sounds like a stage name, doesn’t it?—Carol Franklin, Helen Barnes, Felicia Leonard. She was the one who died. Residue to Edgar Lord, ‘for long service.’”

  “That’s all of it, Mr. Fisk?”

  “Yes. Oh, ‘In memory of happy days’ in each bequest to an ex.”

  “Any idea what Lord will get? After the hundred and fifty is paid?”

  “No. I was Branson’s lawyer, not his business manager. Chap named Parnell handled his financial affairs. I gather he had plenty. If the contract he had with Rolf Simon was at all typical, he damn well must have had. Ten thousand a week for run of the play. And a lot from the movies. Percentage of the gross on the last two. One of them went over big, I happen to know. The last one—well, not so great, they tell me.”

  “Of the four wives—all divorced, I take it—where does Helen Barnes fit in? In the—er, sequence?”

  “Next to last. The Franklin girl was the last. And the youngest. Working in Hollywood now. Yes, they all got divorces. All by mutual consent. With the best of feelings on both sides. Oh, we had to rig the Barker one. In New York, that was. In the old days. When it had to be adultery, you know.”

  “Miss Barnes is in the play Branson was starring in,” Shapiro said.

  Fisk knew that. He also knew Helen Barnes. “Nice woman—younger than Branson, probably. Early forties would be my guess. Doesn’t look even that. Makeup woman must have to age her some for the mother role.”

  “You’ve seen the play, Mr. Fisk?”

  “Just read the reviews. Heard one on TV. Not so kind to Branson, that one was. Or, too damn kind, if you get what I mean. Too old for the part, although it grieves me to say so. Damning with faint praise, to use the cliché. Look, Lieutenant, don’t get any ideas about Helen Barnes just because of the fifty thousand. She’s a damn nice person. Any wild ideas, I mean.”

  “I try not to get wild ideas, Mr. Fisk. But I will have to have a word with Miss Barnes, won’t I? Does she know about this bequest?”

  “Not from me. Of course, Branson may have told her. Chances are he did.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, and stood up. He thanked the attorney for his help.

  Fisk hoped he had helped. He said that old Clive was one hell of a nice guy, and that he wished Shapiro all the luck in the world in finding whoever had knocked him off. If, in fact, somebody had.

  Shapiro walked through Bryant Park on his way to the Rolf Simon Theater. The rain had let up, but it was a chilly late morning. People sitting on the Bryant Park benches wrapped coats and raincoats around them.

  So Helen Barnes was a damn nice person. To Morton Fisk, at any rate. To Rolf Simon, too. But murderers can be nice persons, to friends if not to victims. It seemed probable to Shapiro that Miss Barnes had known she was fifty thousand dollars richer because of Branson’s death. It seemed certain that as his wife, she had known of his intolerance to barbiturates.

  There was a flat-bottom truck parked in front of the Rolf Simon Theater, and a patrolman was guiding traffic around it. Several men were easing down from the marquee and loading onto the truck a large, ungainly structure. It was the sign reading CLIVE BRANSON IN from which, an hour or so before, two men had been removing light bulbs. What was left, complete with bulbs that were lighted, was Summer Solstice, a new comedy by BRET ASKEW. So. Shapiro waited until CLIVE BRANSON was safely stowed and went into the theater lobby. There was no one in the lobby. The box-office window was lowered. There was a sign on the ledge in front of the window: TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE SOLD OUT. One of the doors into the auditorium was unlocked. Nathan went in.

  Robert Kirby, the director, was in the fourth-row, center-aisle seat. Bret Askew was in the seat beside him. In the darkened auditorium, Shapiro could not see the heavy figure of Rolf Simon. He stood for a minute and looked down toward the lighted stage. Then he saw Simon. He was in a seat well back and on a side aisle.

  There were two women on the stage, both watching two men leaving the set’s living room for the set’s terrace—a terrace bright with sunlight. One of the men was Kenneth Price; the other, slighter and younger, was the newly selected man in what, clearly, was the play’s triangle. Both were dressed for tennis and carried rackets.

  The women watching them were Arlene Collins, playing the twenty-year-old wife, and Helen Barnes, playing her mother. “And may the best man—” Helen Barnes said, and the director spoke from his seat. “Hit the irony a little harder, Barnes,” he said. Helen Barnes, who looked just barely old enough for a mother’s role, repeated her line. It sounded much the same to Nathan, but Kirby said, “That’s it, darling. You know damn well who’s going to win. So does the audience.” And then, his voice a little more raised, “O.K., we’ll break for lunch. Make it—oh, about one thirty. Right?”

  Price came back into the forestage. He said, “You’ll have us all hoarse for tonight, Bob. Nobody’ll be able to hear any of us—beyond the first row, anyway.”

  “A couple of hours will do it,” Kirby said. “The second-act curtain still needs a little smoothing.” He got up and came up the aisle.

  Askew came behind him. “My God, you again,” Askew said.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “But not long this time, Mr. Askew. Just want a word or two with Miss Barnes.”

  “She’ll be in her dressing room, probably,” Kirby said. “Room Three. One flight up. You can go across the stage if you want to.”

  Shapiro went down the aisle and climbed the fragile steps and crossed the impromptu bridge to the stage. He left it by way of the lighted terrace. It wasn’t as real as it had looked from the orchestra. The vista of green land beyond it turned out to be painted on canvas. Shapiro turned to his right. After a few yards the terrace ended. A wall stopped him, and he turned right again and walked beside canvas nailed to wooden framework. LR WALL, L was lettered on one panel of the structure. Of course—the flat which, on the other side, was a wall of the living room of the Derwent house on Long Island.

  He came to a flight of stairs. A man in work clothes was sitting on the bottom step. “Dressing room up there?” Shapiro asked.

  “Some of them, Mac. Want to visit somebody?”

  Shapiro told the man who he wanted to visit.

  “Yeah,” the man said. “Kid from the deli just took her lunch up.”

  He stood up and gestured Shapiro toward the stairs. Shapiro climbed them. At the top there was a corridor, with doors on either side of it. The door on his right had the numeral 3 painted on it. It was closed. Shapiro knocked. “Yes?” came in a female voice from the other side of the door.

  “Miss Barnes?”

  “Who else?”

  “Lieutenant Shapiro,” Nathan said. (Would the “Lieutenant” ever stop sticking in his throat?) “Could I see you for a couple of minutes?”

  “Oh,” he heard, “the policeman. Come on in, if you want to. I’m decent.”

  He went in. Helen Barnes was sitting at a dressing table, eating a sandwich and, apparently, drinking a Coke. Her back was to Shapiro. The room contained, in addition to the dressing table, a couch and an upholstered chair. Helen’s back was a young back, and slender. She turned to face Shapiro as he went in. Her face, too, was a young face. Styles change, Nathan thought; he could remember when the mother of a woman of twenty would be played by an actress apparently in her fifties and not making out very well.

  He told Helen Barnes again who he was.

  She said, “I know, Lieutenant. By now, everybody knows. Yes, I was at the party. No, I didn’t put poison in Clive’s drink. Also, I don’t know who did.” She drank her Coke. She said, “He was a really nice man.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “an ex-husband of yours, Miss Barnes.”

  “Of course,” she
said. “Everybody knows that. Ex as of four years ago next month. All very friendly, it was.”

  “And you had been married how long, Miss Barnes? It is Miss, I take it?”

  “Or M.S., pronounced ‘Miz.’ Which is the way they pronounced ‘Mrs.’ where I grew up. In Missouri, that was—pronounced mizzooruh,’ by the way. Clive and I had been married about two years when we decided it wasn’t working out.”

  “Long enough,” Shapiro said, “to learn he couldn’t tolerate barbiturates.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant, oh, yes. Was that how it was done?” She frowned. “A sneaky way of going about it, seems to me. Yes, I knew Clive couldn’t take the stuff. And, yes, I can. And do, fifty mgs at bedtime for sleep. And another fifty half an hour later, if still awake. Which mostly I’m not. But I didn’t drop a capsule in Clive’s drink, and I didn’t see anybody else do it, either.” She took another sip from her Coke. “Of course,” she said, “you don’t have to believe me, do you?”

  Shapiro didn’t answer the question, if it was a question. Instead, he said, “Did you know Mr. Branson had left you money in his will, Miss Barnes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sweet of him. But he was sweet. And no, he didn’t mention any amount to me.”

  “A sizable sum,” Shapiro said. “At least to me. Fifty thousand each to you and the two other surviving former wives.”

  “Neither of whom was around to put sleeping medicine in Clive’s drink,” she said. “Leaving me on the limb. All by myself?”

  The last was a question. Shapiro answered it with a shake of his head.

  “Then,” Helen Barnes said, “I’ll have time to finish my sandwich. Bacon and tomato on toasted white, Lieutenant, and I’ve actually got a spare if you’d like it.”

  Shapiro thanked her and declined the offer. He found his way out of the Rolf Simon Theater and walked to the Algonquin.

  Tony Cook was already in the lobby, which was beginning to fill with pre-lunch drinkers. Tony had a table for two, with a glass on it. Bourbon on the rocks, Nathan assumed, knowing Tony’s noontime habits. Nathan sat down and rang the little bell. Tony raised inquiring eyebrows.

  “Helen Barnes—she plays the mother in Solstice—” Nathan told him, “used to be married to Branson. A few years back. Divorce very amiable, she says. Association in the play, likewise. He left her fifty thousand in his will. Left two other previous wives the same.”

  “And, being married to him, she’d be likely, be almost certain to know he couldn’t tolerate Nembutal, or whatever it was. And she was at the party.”

  He said the last with a rising inflection.

  “No,” Shapiro said, “I’m afraid not. Doesn’t seem the type—not to me, anyway. All very open about everything. Yes, she’d known about a bequest, and of course she knew Branson was oversensitive to barbiturates. And would I like a bacon and tomato sandwich? She had a spare. They’d taken a lunch break, and she was having hers in her dressing room. Very open and aboveboard, the lady seems to be.”

  It was unlike Nate to be so favorably impressed by personalities, to brush off suspicion so easily. Helen Barnes, whom Tony remembered only vaguely having seen on the Solstice stage, must be, off it, a very convincing woman.

  “How about you?” Nathan said, and then, to a waiter, “A sherry, please. Not too dry.” Not that the stipulation would get him much of anywhere. The Algonquin does not serve sweet sherry as a pre-lunch aperitif.

  “Dr. Jenkins is an eye man,” Tony said. “Ophthalmologist. Rather forthcoming, as doctors go. Price is subject to attacks of glaucoma, the painful type. Acute narrow-angle, he called it. Under treatment, and coming along quite well. What the eye drops are for, Jenkins says. Only thing he’s prescribed for Price. This other doctor, Perrine, is on vacation, it turns out. He’s an internist. May very well have prescribed a barbiturate for Price, Jenkins said. Nothing unusual about that.”

  “Did you prescribe atropine for Price, Doctor?” Tony had asked Jenkins. “Or any of the belladonna group of alkaloids?”

  Jenkins certainly had not. Highly contraindicated for people with Price’s type of glaucoma. Might well bring on an attack.

  Would Dr. Perrine be likely to have prescribed such medication?

  “He knows about Price’s glaucoma,” Jenkins said. “Told him myself. We physicians do exchange information about a patient we both have. To prevent just that sort of cross-up—prescribing a belladonna alkaloid in a case like Price’s.”

  And, Tony told Nathan, after the waiter had brought the sherry (which was dry), a belladonna alkaloid like atropine wasn’t, certainly wasn’t, something you could simply ask for at the corner drugstore. Not ask for and get.

  As for prescribing atropine, Tony was told that he was not distinguishing between giving it systemically and giving it topically. Which meant, it turned out, whether it was to be taken internally or used externally—like eye drops or ointment. For example, Dr. Jenkins said, he routinely prescribed drops containing atropine following cataract surgery. “But it’s quite a while since I’ve had anything to do with the gut,” he had added. “Keeping up with the eyes is all I have time for.”

  Had Dr. Jenkins any idea what one of the belladonna alkaloids would be prescribed for—um, systemically?

  Of course he did. Spastic or irritable colon. Perhaps acute enterocolitis. Perhaps peptic ulcer. Dosage small: fraction of an mg, probably several times a day.

  “Doesn’t get us much of anywhere,” Shapiro said, and took a sip of his sherry. Sour, as he had expected. Tony agreed that his talk with Dr. Jenkins hadn’t got them anywhere. If Price had had atropine to drop into Askew’s drink, he hadn’t got it from Jenkins. Or, presumably, from Dr. Perrine, who wouldn’t be back from vacation for another ten days. So?

  “Mr. Simon seems to have given this surprise party for Branson,” Shapiro said. “Provided the food and drink. And the service too, wouldn’t you think? A bartender and a waiter. Perhaps somebody to cook. Outside people, with outside points of view. Maybe one of them noticed something. Wonder who they were, don’t you, Tony? Oh, finish your drink.”

  Tony Cook did, in a gulp. He went across the lobby and into a phone booth. He stayed for several minutes.

  “Greenwich Catering Service,” he told Shapiro. “Simon’s secretary set it up. Says Mr. Simon uses them now and then. Finds them very reliable. And they’re in the phone book.”

  “Greenwich?” Shapiro said.

  “For Greenwich Avenue,” Tony told him. “In the Village. Shall we …?”

  They might as well have lunch first, now that they were there. Shapiro finished his sour sherry—“dry,” for God’s sake!—and they went into the restaurant. Nathan had broiled scrod; Tony, chicken potpie. Both were very good. They did not hurry over lunch. After they had finished, they walked to Sixth Avenue and took the Sixth Avenue subway downtown to the West Fourth Street station.

  The Greenwich Avenue address Tony had got from the Manhattan telephone directory was that of a four-story building with a restaurant on the ground floor. The Greenwich Catering Service was on the third. They climbed stairs to get to it. It was a not-very-large room with two people in it, one male and one female. They were both at desks, and the woman, youngish and reasonably attractive, was on the telephone. The man was writing something down on a memo pad. He looked up and said, “Yes?”

  Shapiro told him who they were and what they wanted. The man said, “Mr. Simon’s party Sunday night. That would be Sam and Otto, wouldn’t it, Ruth?”

  The woman said, “Six thirty then, Mrs. Bell, and white jacket.” She cradled the telephone and said, “Yes, Mr. Owen. Sam and Otto. Sam’s due to check in. Otto’s at the Smirnoffs’, you know. Do these …”

  “Policemen,” Shapiro said as she hesitated.

  “… want to see both of them?”

  One would do, Shapiro told her. For the moment, anyway.

  “Sam ought to call in about now,” Owen said. “See if we’ve got anything for him. He—” The phone rang on his des
k. He said, “Yes?” into it and then, “Oh, Sam. Couple of cops here want to see you. About the party Mr. Simon gave…. Yeah, for the actor…. Yeah, the dead one…. No, nobody thinks you did. Come along in, huh?”

  He hung up.

  “He’ll be right along,” he said. “Lives just around the corner, sort of. Says he didn’t bump anybody off. You heard what I told him. Hope I was right. Good bartender, Sam is. Anyway, we don’t get many squawks about him. And we’ve got a job for him tonight.”

  “He’ll be available,” Shapiro said. “Far’s I know, anyway. We’ll wait for him.”

  They did not have to wait long: a little less than ten minutes. Sam—Sam Scanlon, as it turned out—was a stocky man, probably in his fifties. He had an affable face, appropriate to a bartender.

  Yes, he and Otto had served Mr. Simon’s party at Mr. Branson’s house. It was Branson, wasn’t it? An actor, he understood. Never heard of him, himself. Otto had. Said he was a star in the movies. The party? Just a party. He made drinks, Scotch or bourbon and water, mostly. Poured champagne for those who wanted it. Yes, he and Otto had supplied the liquor. And the sandwiches and cheese things. Yes, sometimes the firm supplied the drinks and food, although usually the customer did. But this had been a surprise party, way he got it. This Mr. Branson hadn’t known people were coming. No way of knowing whether he’d have drinks and food—well, just lying around. Anyway, the party was on Mr. Simon, wasn’t it?

  He and Otto had showed up around nine thirty, as ordered. Mr. Branson’s man had let them in. Yes, he seemed to have expected them. Not all that much a surprise to him, way it looked. The man—butler? Well, he looked like a butler. Not that Sam had met many butlers. “People who have them don’t usually have us in, do they?—oh, dresser.” Anyway, the man had taken them to the kitchen of the house, and they’d got the ice cubes out and put the champagne on ice, and put on their jackets. White jackets, not tuxedos. As Mr. Owen had directed. Right, Mr. Owen?

  People had started coming around ten. Mr. Branson’s man had let them in. Oh, ten or eleven of them, he thought. All there by, say, ten thirty. All, way he got it, connected with a play Mr. Simon was putting on. That was Mr. Simon’s line, putting on plays. The guests at the party had moved around a good deal. It was a big room with plenty of places to sit. Yes, when they moved around they usually carried their drinks with them. Well, no, not always. Sometimes they left them on the tables they’d been sitting near. Yes, if people didn’t come back to their drinks, he’d pick them up, or Otto would, and they’d rinse the glasses off ready for fresh drinks as wanted. But more often than not, the people would come back to where they’d left their glasses and finish what was in them. Oh, yes, twice, he thought, people got their glasses mixed up. One time, he remembered, one of the women had picked up a glass from one of the tables and said, “But this is bourbon! Who stole my Scotch?” Like it was a joke.