The Old Die Young

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “By the way,” Shapiro said, “do you happen to remember what Mr. Branson was drinking?”

  “I sure do. Scotch and a little water and no ice. Very strong on the no-ice bit, he was.”

  Shapiro said he saw. “Did you happen to notice whether he left his drink on a table when he moved around the room?”

  “So somebody could put poison in it? Is that what this is all about? Seeing he’s dead? Yes, I guess he did—I couldn’t swear to it, though.”

  He wasn’t being asked to swear to anything. Merely to give his best recollection. He had given it. So. Did he happen to remember about what time Branson started emptying ashtrays? If, as he gathered, Branson had indeed done that, bringing the party to an end.

  Sam did remember that Branson had begun to empty ashtrays. He and this butler guy. Sam had thought it rather odd. It had been only a little after midnight.

  “We’d have done it,” Sam Scanlon said, “Otto and I. Like always. Part of the job. Leave everything cleaned up. Ashtrays empty, glasses washed. Well, rinsed out, anyway. Right, Mr. Owen?”

  “Essential part of the service,” Owen said. “Leave everything shipshape.”

  “Apparently Mr. Branson didn’t want to wait,” Shapiro said. “Maybe he—oh, just got sleepy. Wanted to call it a night. A little after midnight, as you remember it, Mr. Scanlon?”

  Sam thought so. Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes past.

  “And Lord was helping him?”

  Sam said, “The Lord?”

  “Not ‘the.’ Edgar Lord—the dresser. The one you think of as the butler.”

  “Oh, him. Yes, he was lending a hand. Had been doing that all evening. Seeing that Mr. Branson got everything he wanted, mostly. But helping me keep an eye on glasses, too.”

  Tony supposed that, except for Branson, the others had ice in their drinks? Sure, except the ones who were drinking champagne. So, Branson’s glass would be easy to identify, if Branson left it on a table while he circulated? Sam supposed so. “Was that the way somebody did it?” Sam asked again. “Put poison in his drink?”

  “It could have been,” Shapiro told him. And added he supposed Sam hadn’t seen anyone doing that? Opening a twist of paper, say, and spilling something out of it into Mr. Branson’s glass? Sam sure as hell had not. About what time would it have been?

  “A little before midnight, probably.”

  No. They had been busy then. “People were getting thirsty, you know. Looked like the party was really getting going. Figured it would be good for a couple more hours, anyway. O.K. with Otto and me. We get paid by the hour. Right, Mr. Owen?”

  Owen agreed that Sam and Otto got paid by the hour, as did the Greenwich Catering Service.

  And Lord was still around at midnight, or a little before?

  “He sure was. Passing around drinks. Until his boss started on the ashtrays. Like I said, then he started to help the boss.”

  Had Branson seemed all right when he started to clean things up? Not, say, half asleep?

  Sam hadn’t noticed anything one way or the other about Branson—only what he was doing. Sam himself had started carrying used glasses out to the kitchen and rinsing them off.

  14

  They got a cab on Sixth Avenue and rode to the offices of Homicide, Manhattan South. The desk sergeant on the ground floor had envelopes for each of them. Delivered by messenger. Each envelope contained two tickets to that evening’s performance of Summer Solstice at the Rolf Simon Theater. The tickets, all in the orchestra, were marked $20. Tony could remember when orchestra seats cost four-forty, except for big musicals—those cost five-fifty. Nathan could remember when a seat for a nonmusical went for three dollars and thirty cents—as mentioned by Rolf Simon.

  They climbed stairs to Homicide South and checked in. It lacked only half an hour of four o’clock, which was the time for them to check out. Technically, of course. Tony started for his squad-room desk, but Nathan said, “Come along,” and they went into his small office. There was a desk, with desk chair, in the office, and an unwelcoming visitor’s chair. They sat down and lighted cigarettes, and Nathan said, “So?”

  “Lord lied to us,” Tony said. “Why?”

  “To wipe himself out of the whole business,” Shapiro said. “He wasn’t even around when it happened. He didn’t put sleeping medicine in his employer’s glass and has no way of knowing who did. Because he had gone to bed.”

  “Yes,” Tony said. “He had retired, as he probably would put it. How quickly would the barbiturate have acted, do you think?”

  Shapiro shrugged wide, thin shoulders. Half an hour or so, he supposed. But that would be for someone with a normal reaction, and would depend on the barbiturate used; some worked faster than others. Would depend too on the amount ingested. Only Branson didn’t have the normal reaction. Sleeping pills hit him harder, and it might be they would also hit him quicker. Perhaps Dr. Nelson could help—when he finished with his cadaver.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “But not so quick that he didn’t start redding up.” He paused. “Word my mother used to use,” he added.

  “I’ve heard it,” Shapiro said. He frowned. “Some kind of blind instinct? Drugged? Clean up, get to bed. Makes you wonder.” His shrug was almost a shiver. Oh, well, they could always ask Dr. Nelson.

  A telephone call to the Medical Examiner’s office proved that wrong. Dr. Nelson was working on a cadaver and was not to be disturbed. “Would anyone else do, Lieutenant?”

  Shapiro thought not. It would be guesswork, anyway, and the exact times were not, at the moment, so crucially important.

  “Who gains?” he said. “Who stands to profit? And, of course, who loses from Branson’s death?”

  Tony was quick to answer. “This Price guy; he gets the leading role that Branson had. Prestige, and a jump in salary. And Miss Barnes, for fifty thousand. And a couple of other ex-wives, only they weren’t at the party. And Lord, who was.”

  “For longer than he said, apparently. At the party, not in his room, when somebody put a barbiturate in Branson’s drink.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “At the time we guess somebody did. I wonder why he lied, don’t you, Tony? Being upstairs, of course he couldn’t have done anything. Or seen somebody do something.”

  “Yeah. In high school I had a math teacher who used to put equations on the blackboard and then say to the class, ‘What conclusion would a wooden Indian draw?’ He thought we were all wooden Indians.”

  Nathan said, “Yes, Tony, I get your point.”

  “Simon? He gets out of a contract he’d been trying to buy up. Ten thousand a week, for God’s sake. Hell, that figures out at more than a thousand a show, counting matinees.”

  “Yes, Tony. As a wooden Indian would notice, Simon does save money. Quite a lot of it, it would seem. But with a risk to his advance sale, wouldn’t you say? Could be, people will be wanting their money back, couldn’t it? We’ll know better after tonight, if Simon gets the critics back, I suppose. We—”

  The telephone rang, the interoffice telephone. Shapiro answered it. He said, “Yes, Cap—Inspector, Tony and I each got a pair…. Well, say we’re treading water…. Why, yes, we’d like that a lot…. Six thirty, then…. And mine to Mrs. Weigand. Be seeing you, Inspector.

  “He got tickets too,” Shapiro told Tony Cook. “Anyway, his wife did. As Dorian Hunt. So she can do sketches for the Chronicle, Bill says. And they want Rose and me at their place for an early dinner. To celebrate, he says. His making deputy inspector, I guess.”

  He looked at his watch and found it was well after four. The afternoon had dissolved around them. With what accomplished? Not much. Water treading was all, probably.

  The four-to-midnight shift was on. Shapiro and Cook signed out. Nathan went home to Brooklyn, to tell Rose they were going to the Weigands’ for dinner and then to the theater. Tony went to Gay Street. Rachel came out of the shower at the sound of his moving around in her apartment. Yes, she’d be happy to go to the theater for the reopening
of Summer Solstice. Yes, Hugo’s would be fine for dinner. And yes, she’d remember to put clothes on. Ready in, say, half an hour? No, they’d better wait until they were dressed for the quick one.

  The Shapiros’ seats were on the aisle, fifth row, in the center section of the orchestra of the Rolf Simon Theater. They were in them by seven fifty-five, in anticipation of the eight-o’clock curtain. And the orchestra was barely half full. The Weigands were in the third row, center, not on the aisle, and Dorian had a sketch pad in her lap. At seven fifty-eight, Nathan stood up and Rose shifted sideways in her seat to let Tony and Rachel Farmer in to the third and fourth seats in the row.

  “House seats,” Tony said to Rose, beside him. “Did us proud, didn’t he?”

  “Mr. Simon?” Rose said. “Yes, he did. And Nathan is now an acting captain. Altogether, a proud evening.” Then Nathan and Tony stood up again, and Rachel and Rose twisted sideways, to let four people, one of them an outstandingly bulky woman, go by to seats near the center of the row. The men sat down and had to get up almost at once to let another couple through. Their seats were beyond those of the previous two couples, and it was a tight squeeze for them to get past the bulky woman.

  “That ought to do it from our side,” Nathan said to Rose.

  It didn’t. There were still two more couples to go at eight-oh-five. The curtain was still down. “We could have finished our coffee,” Rachel told Tony. “I said they’d be late.”

  The orchestra was almost full by eight ten. But two aisle seats in the fourth row, in front of the Shapiros and Tony and Rachel, were still empty.

  “Critics’ seats, probably,” Rachel said to Tony, keeping her voice low. “Mr. Simon will be—” she left it there.

  An usher came down the aisle followed by a tall man in a dark suit. He was alone. He accepted the ticket stub from the usher and sat in the seat on the aisle.

  “The man from the Chronicle,” Rachel said. “He said, ‘The rest of the cast was barely adequate,’ about the little number I was in a couple of weeks ago. The one you didn’t see, Tony, because it closed so fast. I was pretty much the rest of the cast. I and—”

  The house lights went down. Slowly, the curtain went up.

  The set was, as the program had promised, The terrace room of the Derwent house in East Hampton, Long Island. Kenneth Price was alone on the stage. He wore a white dinner jacket. He lighted a cigarette and almost at once, and impatiently, crushed it out in a tray. He crossed the stage to a bar and lifted the lid of an ice bucket on it and, apparently satisfied that there was ice available, slapped the lid back on. Then he said, “Damn!” and crossed toward a door, stage left. But when he had taken only a few steps, that door opened and Arlene Collins came through it into the terrace room of the Derwent house in East Hampton, Long Island. She wore a white, off-the-shoulders dinner dress and she was lovely—poised and lovely. She said, “Happy birthday, darling.”

  Price said, “At last. I was about to give you up.”

  She said, “Were you really, darling?”

  He crossed to her and put his hands gently on her shoulders. He looked down at her for several seconds. Then he said, “No, child, I guess not. I guess I never will. I’m afraid you’re stuck—”

  She did not let him finish. She shook her head with resolution. She put both of her hands on his, and they stood so for a moment. Then she said, “It’s only seven fifteen, and we said sevenish. And we do know the Fosters, don’t we? Fifteen minutes, at the least. More likely—” She shrugged slightly, her hands still on his.

  “Yes,” Kenneth Price said to Arlene Collins, except that he was no longer Kenneth Price, nor she Arlene Collins, “time for one of our own.”

  He released her and went to the bar. “A very little one,” she said. “A soupçon, whatever that may be.” He poured, very little liquid into one glass and more into another. He carried both glasses to a sofa, stage right, and they sat close together and clicked glasses.

  “Happy birthday, dear,” Mrs. Louis Derwent said to her husband.

  They were doing it well, Nathan thought. Not that he was any judge, of course. He looked at Rose, and she gave him a quick nod.

  A young man in a black dinner jacket appeared on the terrace beyond the room. He was separated from the room by sliding glass doors. “Ronald, and by himself,” Derwent said, and went to the doors and slid one of them open. The young man, Ronald Foster by the program, came into the room. He said, “Hi. I bring apologies from sainted parents. Dad got held up at the office. Just got home. And will you two meet them in about half an hour at the Carousel, instead of their coming here first? And happy solstice to you both.”

  The actor playing Ronald Foster—Peter somebody, wasn’t he?—seemed younger than Nathan remembered him from rehearsals. Now he was about Arlene Collins’s age, which was evidently the early twenties. And Kenneth Price, as Derwent, looked slightly older than Nathan had thought him. Of course. Grayed hair at the temples.

  Derwent returned to his seat on the sofa but not, this time, as close to his wife as he had sat before. Ronald Foster sat in a chair in front of them, a glass-topped table separating them. Seated so, they formed a triangle. Which, Nathan realized, had been the director’s intention.

  “Happy solstice and happy birthday,” Ronald said. “I am right, aren’t I?” He paused an instant, and added “sir” to his sentence. A most polite and formal young man, paying light deference to a senior. And with a tinge of Harvard in his speech. Or, perhaps, stage Oxford. Ronald was not, Nathan assumed, a character of whom the audience was supposed to grow greatly fond. Price, after playing Ronald when Clive Branson had the lead, must find the switch in roles rather gratifying.

  “Quite right, Ron,” Louis Derwent said to Ronald Foster. “Summer and I began together. When the sun had passed its zenith. Beware the twenty-first of June.”

  “Not beware, darling. Celebrate.” That was from Mrs. Derwent—Carol, from the program. She lifted her glass in a salute. The Derwents clicked glasses. Ronald Foster held his out across the table, and Carol Derwent held hers out toward his. The glasses did not really touch.

  The three talked, then, about a racehorse, which it appeared the Derwents owned, and about politics, but at first only briefly. The conversation was light, agile, now and then witty. The wit was most often Louis Derwent’s, although Carol had some shimmering lines. Laughter began to ripple through the audience.

  Information about the Derwents seeped out of the dialogue. The summer solstice, which that day was, was also Louis Derwent’s birthday. “Forty-two years ago today,” Derwent said. “In the late afternoon, they tell me. The baby who came for cocktails.”

  “Twenty years before me,” Carol said to that. “But you waited for me, didn’t you, dear?”

  “Twenty years and six months,” Derwent said. “December twenty-first to the summer solstice. We try to make things come out even, Ron. Not that they always do, of course.”

  He turned as the door through which Carol had come on stage opened again. This time Helen Barnes came into the set. She, too, wore a dinner dress. Hers was of pale yellow, long-sleeved and close-fitting. The result was admirable. The two men stood up when she came into the room. She said, “I thought your father and mother, Ron—”

  “So did I, Mrs. Ashley,” young Foster said. “So did they. Only, as usual, Dad got held up, so we’re meeting at the restaurant.”

  “Parents!” Mrs. Ashley said. “So unreliable. So trying, really.”

  To that, Carol Derwent said, “Mother!”

  Her husband added, “Come off it, Mary. The usual?”

  She said, “Please, son,” and Derwent went to the bar and emptied crushed ice from a glass which had waited with the ice chilling it. He poured a pale liquid into the glass.

  “Perhaps we ought to go,” Carol said. “You did say about half an hour, Ronald.”

  “Parents can wait,” Ronald Foster assured her. “Be good for them, actually.”

  They sat down again, Mary A
shley on the sofa next to her son-in-law, Ronald Foster where he had sat before. The four sipped from their glasses and again talked. And again, to Nathan’s ears, the dialogue shimmered. And the laughter from the audience grew more frequent. Some of it was drawn by Ronald’s needling Louis about his racehorse, and by Louis’s wittily insulting answers. The skillful building of the horse into a plot issue was interrupted at a high point of suspense by Carol. As she spoke and stood up, the others stood too. With Louis delivering one last shot at Ronald, the four of them went out to the terrace and turned away out of sight. The curtain came down and the house lights went up, slowly. End of Act One.

  The audience stirred. Sections of it moved up aisles toward cigarettes in the lobby. Act one had been, Nathan thought, quick and light and pleasant. He decided he needed a cigarette. Rose decided she didn’t. Tony and Rachel were talking with animation. Nathan Shapiro went up the aisle alone.

  At first the man standing behind the central section of seats seemed only vaguely familiar. He was tall and thin and wore a dark-blue suit. He wore a white shirt with, surprisingly, a stiff white collar. He wore a black string tie.

  “Evening, Mr. Lord,” Nathan said. “Enjoying the show?”

  “Just dropped in for a glimpse, Lieutenant,” Edgar Lord, dresser to the late Clive Branson, assured Shapiro. “They do know me here, of course. Passed me in for a few minutes, Brian did. He’s one of the doormen.”