“We try here at the school,” Pierson said, “to help kids who want part-time jobs—after-school jobs. Saturday and Sunday jobs. We hear of somebody who wants a kid we tell a kid about it, if there’s one on the list seems suitable.” “It’s generally known you have this list of kids looking for jobs?”
“I suppose so,” Pierson said. “I don’t know much about it. Or whether Roy was recommended by us to Mrs. Singleton. Miss Cudahay might know. She’s on the front desk.”
Shapiro thanked him and said he’d been a help, which Shapiro did not think particularly true. Clarke Pierson wisped his way out of the office.
IV
Walking Greenwich Village streets again in search of the restaurant—the joint—Tony Cook had named to him, Nathan Shapiro did not really get lost. He merely, as he realized later, went considerably out of his way. He walked through Eighth Street, among oddly dressed young people of assorted colors and most of them noticeably hairy. One could tell the males from the females for the most part. The boys had hair on their faces, as well as down the backs of their necks.
At Fifth he walked south and through the Square. Beyond it he found the street he was looking for and, after passing it once, the restaurant. It was down three steps from street level and, inside, it smelled of garlic. Tony Cook was at a corner table in the rear of the narrow room, talking up to a man in a white apron—a very fresh white apron. Tony Cook had a cocktail glass in front of him. He raised it in greeting to Nathan Shapiro, who went gloomily down the room, sympathizing in advance with his stomach, which was going to be displeased. It often is.
The man in the white apron beamed at him. Introduced—he was Nicholas Gazzi—he shook hands heartily and said, “Can I get you something from the bar, Lieutenant?”
“Sherry,” Shapiro said, and sat down. Nick Gazzi looked somewhat doubtful. “Only domestic, Lieutenant,” Nick said. “A nice glass of chianti, maybe? Or a martini, yes?”
“Domestic sherry’ll be all right,” Shapiro said.
“Be on the sweet side, probably,” Tony Cook said. “They make pretty good martinis, Lieutenant.”
“Sherry,” Shapiro said. “I don’t mind if it’s sweet.”
Nick Gazzi shrugged resigned shoulders and went up the room to a small bar near the door. There were two men sitting at the bar and, at a corner table from which, looking up, they could see the legs of people walking outside, two women, one in a severe suit and the other in a flowered dress.
“Busier at night,” Cook said. “Even got a man plays the piano. You don’t look very happy about the morning, Nate.”
“Lieutenant” was reserved for more formal moments.
“Not especially,” Shapiro said and “Thank you,” to Nick Gazzi for a wineglass of dark brown fluid. Shapiro tasted it. It was sweet, all right. Gazzi said, “Please,” which didn’t seem to mean anything, and went out through swinging doors at the rear of the dining room.
“Mrs. Singleton’s house is quite something,” Shapiro said. “The boy took good care of her garden. The boy could, as he says, have seen her body from the door of her bedroom, if it opened when he knocked on it. At the school, everybody spoke well of the kid and nobody believed he would kill anybody.”
“Come to that,” Cook said, “nobody ever does. Most of the time, anyway.”
“The kid,” Shapiro said, “got his job with Mrs. Singleton through a kind of employment office the school runs for kids who want part-time jobs. A man named Gage called up for Mrs. Singleton. They sent three boys over and she turned down the first two and took Roy Baker on. Last October, that was. To clean up her garden for the winter. She kept him on through the winter, doing odd jobs—there’d be plenty in a house as big as hers. Apparently he was a good worker.”
“Also,” Cook said, “from what they say he’s a good-looking kid. I’ve an idea she liked good-looking kids around.”
Shapiro merely raised his eyebrows.
“You said Gage,” Tony Cook said. “The man who called up for her?”
“Yes.”
“He’s her husband,” Cook said. “Or widower. They were separated. Not divorced. Not yet, anyway. He’s a good-looking kid, from his picture.”
“Kid?”
“Maybe thirty,” Cook said. “Kid by comparison. He’s got a small part in this play she was in, Always Good-bye. Which is a hell of a hit, Nate. Has been since it opened last October. They were going to close it down during July and open up again in August. To give Mrs. Singleton—the others too, of course, but it was her idea—a vacation. They’re pretty much sold out through next October. In a tizzy, Temple is.”
“Temple?”
“The producer. Charles Temple. Very snappy guy, at the moment. Snapped at me. General idea seems to be if the police force was any good it wouldn’t let people get killed. And producers of hit plays be inconvenienced by having to refund a hell of a lot of money.”
“It will come to that, Tony?”
“What I gathered,” Tony Cook said. “They don’t say flat out but probably Always Good-bye is a dead duck without the lady. Because, like I said before, Nate, she was the play. She was this woman who—”
“Yes, Tony,” Shapiro said. “You told me. Sounds as if you’ve had a busy morning.”
“Sort of,” Cook said, trying to remember if he had told Shapiro the story of the play. He couldn’t remember that he had. He reached under his chair and came up with a large brown envelope. He opened it and took a glossy photograph out of it and laid it in front of Nathan Shapiro.
It was a photograph, artfully lighted, of a beautiful woman—a woman with wide-set eyes and high cheekbones. Her head had been a little raised for the photographer. The lines of jaw and chin were immaculately clean. There was a kind of sparkle, as well as beauty, in the pictured face.
“Our subject,” Cook said, and watched Shapiro look at the photograph, lift it so that better light fell on it.
“Taken some time ago?” Shapiro said, and put the photograph down on the table and continued to look at it.
“Taken,” Cook said, “just before the play opened. The play she was in, Nate. Taken last September, from what they say. What her publicity agent says. And, Nate, the way it figures she was damn near sixty. Fifty-eight anyway. If she told the truth in her Who’s Who biog. Born 1910, it says. And—here’s one for the book—born Jane Grumper. Want to eat or hear the rest of it?”
Tony Cook looked reflectively at his empty glass. He looked at Nathan Shapiro’s, which was nearly empty.
“I’m not especially hungry,” Shapiro said.
Cook was facing the little bar. He held up two fingers at the man behind it, who was not Nick Gazzi. The man said, “Right with you, Captain.”
“Just a way he has of speaking,” Cook said. “Knows I’m not a captain.”
“Sure,” Shapiro said. “Born Grumper. And?”
Born in September, 1910, daughter of Herman and Mary Grumper, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Educated, according to her biography in Who’s Who, in Milwaukee public schools. Attended the University of Wisconsin. For, Temple had told Cook, a year. Then she had come to New York and, for another year, studied acting at a dramatic school.
“She’d been in high-school plays, this Temple says,” Cook told Shapiro, who sipped his sweet sherry and listened. “Been good in them. Was in one at the university, too. So—”
“She’d gone a fall and a winter to the dramatic school; that summer she had got a part in a play which was trying out at a theater in the country. A producer saw it in the summer theater and liked it and put it on on Broadway.
“Wasn’t much of a play, according to Temple,” Cook said. “About a theatrical boarding house or something like that. Six girls in the cast, and Jane Grumper one of them. Only she wasn’t calling herself Jane Grumper then. Jennifer Grenville, on account of Grumper—”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “I realize names make a difference, Tony.”
The play had got tepid notices, according to Temple. But Jennifer Grenville hadn’
t. Of the half-dozen girls in the play—all pretty girls, according to Temple; all of them able to act a little—the reviewers had seemed to see only Jennifer. Temple had seen the play. He had told Cook, “This girl shone out of it. Even then, when she was just a kid, she had whatever it is some of them have. As if”—he had paused there, Cook told Nathan Shapiro—“as if there was a spotlight built into her. A light she carried with her.”
“She got raves,” Cook said. “A bit part, Temple called hers, and they raved about her.”
The little play had run only a couple of months. Nobody remembered it after it had closed. But nobody ever forgot Jennifer Grenville. And Jennifer Grenville never went back to dramatic school. She went into another play, not in a bit part, and then, when that play’s run ended, she married a man named Philip Singleton.
“Who,” Cook said, “had one hell of a lot of money. And a family estate on Long Island somewhere and, for all I know, a couple of yachts. And Jennifer, while it lasted, gave up being an actress and spent her time being Mrs. Philip Singleton.”
It had lasted a little over a year before Singleton, who was not as young as he liked to think himself, had a heart attack in the middle of a squash game and died of it.
“He left her one hell of a lot of money,” Cook said. “A million, maybe. Maybe more. She could have spent the rest of her life twiddling her yachts.”
She had not. Within a year after her husband’s death, she had gone back to acting. She had kept the name of Singleton and grown famous under that name. She had had other names to sign checks with.
Three years after Singleton’s death she had married an actor named Kurt Morton and that marriage had lasted for ten years and they had become famous as a team.
“Like the Lunts,” Cook said. “Maybe more like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Seems to have been romantic as hell. Stories about their devoted marriage all over the place. Which, according to Temple, was great box-office. Starred together in four or five plays. And three of them were written by this guy Agee. The guy who was going to have taken her to dinner last night. The man who wrote this thing she was in until yesterday—this Always Good-bye, in which she played this woman who—”
“Yes, Tony,” Shapiro said. “You told me. What happened to Morton?”
“The great romance went phfft,” Cook said. “Surprised the hell out of everybody, Temple says. They’d been in a play together—a play Agee wrote for them—and Temple says they were great in it. He says there was amazing interplay between them always, whatever he means by that. And that he’d never seen it more—felt it more—than in that last play of theirs. The play ran two years and closed and they took the curtain bow together, like always, only this time they didn’t just hold hands and bow. They held onto each other, Temple says.”
“This man Temple seems to know a lot about her,” Shapiro said and finished his sherry and waited, uneasily, to see what his stomach would make of it. It did not, immediately, comment.
“He was their producer by then,” Cook said. “Was looking for another play for them for the next season. Only, she went to Reno. All very amicable, apparently. And six months after the divorce she married Agee. That lasted—”
“One thing at a time,” Shapiro said. “What happened to Morton?”
“Never made it back, Temple says. Oh, had parts in other plays. But quit being a star. In some ways, according to Temple, he was a better actor than she was. Better at comedy, anyway. But she was the one who had what Temple calls the ‘effulgence.’ Whatever he means by that. He was dimmed out without her, according to—”
“Yes, Tony,” Shapiro said. “I’ve got your man Temple straight. Very useful man to have dug up. This Kurt Morton still around?”
“Seems to be,” Tony Cook said. “Spends most of his time at a club called The Players. Hasn’t had a part for several years.”
“Older than Mrs. Singleton?”
“No. Maybe five years younger. So’s Agee, come to that. And as for young Gage—”
“The gentlemen care to order?” Nicholas Gazzi said, above them. “The lasagna I made myself.” He put a thumb and a finger together and tossed them, together, into the air.
“Suits me,” Cook said. “Damn good here, Nate.”
“I wonder,” Nathan Shapiro said, “if I could have a chicken sandwich?”
“Chicken cacciatori,” Gazzi said. “Wonderful.” His thumb and finger performed again. “Spaghetti with meat sauce, maybe?”
“Just a chicken sandwich,” Shapiro said.
Gazzi looked down at him with reproach, and shook his head in sorrow and surprise. But he said, “As you wish, sir,” his tone formal. He went off shaking his head mournfully.
“He—Morton, I mean—seems to be the one who lost by the divorce,” Shapiro said. “Her decision, you gather?”
“Seems to have been.”
“Happen to know if they stayed friends? Or if he resented her going on without him? Going a long way, apparently.”
That Tony Cook didn’t know.
“All right,” Shapiro said. “She married Agee. The man who was going to take her to dinner last night. How did that work out?”
“All right for maybe five years,” Cook said. “Then she went to Reno again. But six months or so later she was back in another play of his. Made another big hit in it, Temple says. As big as she was having in Always Good-bye, which is about—”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Apparently their professional association went along all right. You say he’s younger than she was?”
“Maybe ten years younger, according to—”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Who’s young Gage, Tony?”
“The one she was still married to,” Cook said. “Sort of, anyway. Compared to her, he’s a kid. Maybe in his middle thirties, Temple says. Has a part in Always Good-bye. Not a big part.”
“‘Sort of’ married to her?”
“Well, he’s got an apartment of his own in the Murray Hill area. Lived in this house of hers with her for about a year. Then moved into this apartment.”
“Still married,” Shapiro said. “Not working at it?”
“Sort of thing happens sometimes,” Tony Cook said and, “Smells good as always, Nick,” in response to an oval casserole of pasta. It smelled good to Shapiro, too. The chicken sandwich didn’t smell much of anything except, faintly and inexplicably, of garlic. “Still married,” Shapiro said. “Still gets his legal share of whatever she left, doesn’t he? From the looks of this house of hers, that could be quite a bit.”
Tony Cook said what sounded a little like “gug.” It is difficult to achieve clarity with a mouth full of lasagna. He swallowed. “Singleton left her a lot,” he said. “She’s been making a lot for years. And there’s this, Nate. Temple doesn’t know for sure, because apparently it was a private arrangement between her and Agee. But he thinks she was getting a cut of Agee’s royalties. Which on a hit like Always Good-bye could add up.”
It was conceivable, Nathan Shapiro thought, as he ate his sandwich and envied Anthony Cook his stomach, that there was quite a bit of addition to be undertaken. Not that it wasn’t still, probably, the way it looked. It looked like being the kid, as it had from the start. Shapiro decided he might as well have a look at the kid.
V
The kid was still locked up in the Charles Street station house. And sure Lieutenant Shapiro could see him. There was a lack of enthusiasm in the voice and manner of the officer commanding the precinct detective squad.
“If you’ve got the time to waste,” Lieutenant Mulligan told Lieutenant Shapiro. And then he said, “What’s going on here anyway? We’ve got him cold.”
“Sounds that way,” Nathan Shapiro said.
“Last night,” Mulligan said, “the assistant D.A. gave the go-ahead on a homicide charge, and why not, for God’s sake? But this morning he calls back and says they’re not ready yet and are going to make it material witness. Says that’s the way it came to him from the deputy chief of the
Homicide Bureau, who’s a man named Simmons.”
Shapiro said he didn’t know anything about that.
“On account of,” Mulligan said, “the way we get it it was your boss Weigand, who talked Simmons into holding off for a couple of days anyway. For all we’ve got Baker cold.”
Shapiro didn’t know anything about that, either.
“So that’s the way it is for now,” Mulligan said. “Arraigned as a material witness. I will say for the judge he set bail high enough. Fifty grand, which shows how the judge felt about it, wouldn’t you say?”
“Ought to keep Baker,” Shapiro said. “The kid got a lawyer?”
“Court-appointed, sure. Made noises about the amount of the bail but the judge didn’t hear them. Look, how come Weigand’s so interested in an open-and-shut case? Two of your boys sat in last night. They went along with the rest of us.”
“The captain,” Shapiro said, “wants us to take another look is all.”
“Maybe,” Mulligan said, “because she wasn’t just anybody but this famous actress and it’s a hell of a big story. The Daily News is off its rocker about it. So’s the Times, sort of. And the TV boys and everybody. So Weigand wants Homicide to horn in.”
“No,” Shapiro said. “Weigand doesn’t work like that, Lieutenant. Can I see the kid?”
“I said sure, didn’t I?” Mulligan said. “With the recorder on.”
In some New York City station houses, everything asked and answered in the interrogation room is tape-recorded. Some policemen prefer earlier customs, which allowed more freedom.
“Any way you want it,” Shapiro said, and was told, “In there,” and went into a small room furnished with a wooden table and wooden chairs and inadequately air-conditioned. He waited for some minutes and a uniformed man opened the door and said “Here he is, Lieutenant.” A tall blond boy came into the small room, and the patrolman locked the door behind him.
Roy Baker stood straight just inside the door. He wore his blond hair long. He wore clean, tight denim trousers and a blue polo shirt. He had a wide forehead, and his blue eyes were set far apart. He was a very good-looking boy, in spite of the long hair, Nathan Shapiro thought. And he thought also that Roy Baker had been crying.
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