Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Sit down, Baker,” Shapiro said.

  “You’re another one of them,” the boy said, and still stood erect near the door. “I’ve been telling it over and over the way it was.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I’m another one of them, son. And I guess we do go over things a good many times. And now I want you to go over it again. They tell you who I am?”

  “A lieutenant from the Homicide Squad,” Roy Baker said. “They didn’t give me any name.”

  “Shapiro. You may as well sit down, son.”

  The tall, handsome boy pulled a chair near the door, so that it was some distance from the chair Nathan Shapiro sat on. The boy sat facing Shapiro. There was no doubt he had been crying. As Shapiro sat and looked at him, the boy’s face twitched. But he sat very erect in the straight chair.

  “All right, son,” Shapiro said. “You worked in this garden of hers yesterday. Until about when, Roy?”

  “Until about five, like I told them.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I know you’ve been over it all. At about five you’d finished? Or was that your quitting time?”

  “Both, man.”

  “What were you doing?”

  Roy Baker said he didn’t get it. Then he said he was working.

  “Doing what?”

  “Weeding. Cultivating. Watering. The things you do in a garden. You know.”

  Shapiro didn’t know, actually. But he nodded his understanding. He said, “Then?”

  Then the boy had gone in the back door of the house and found two envelopes, one containing his wages and the other marked “Graduation Gift.” He told the rest as he had told it before, speaking without emphasis, using words which, Shapiro realized, had become too familiar for emphasis.

  “You didn’t use the telephone to call the police,” Shapiro said, when the familiar story had been told. “Why was that, Roy?”

  “I’ve read about things like that,” the boy said. “You’re not supposed to touch anything. On account of fingerprints.”

  “You knew there wasn’t anybody else in the house?”

  “Sure. Like it mostly was Sunday afternoons. Maria and Mrs. James are both off Sunday afternoons.”

  “But you thought Mrs. Singleton might be there. Since you went up, you say, to thank her for the present.”

  Roy Baker had thought she might be. Mostly she wasn’t Sunday afternoons, but sometimes she got home maybe around four.

  “She was a good person to work for, Roy?”

  “She was all right.”

  “Friendly to you?”

  “Sure. All right, man, she was a swell person to work for. She was a swell person, I guess.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “apparently a very attractive woman. Did she ever—call it make passes at you, son? Or, say, let you feel you could make passes at her?”

  Roy Baker moved as if he were about to stand up. But he did not stand up. He said, “You’re crazy, man. She was old. Maybe she was forty. Old enough to be my mother.”

  There was no use telling the boy that Jennifer Singleton had been old enough to be his grandmother. For a boy of eighteen, old age may well begin at forty. After that time blurs, grows foggy gray. There was no use telling the boy that sexual interest is not ended by a stop watch marking years. If the boy didn’t already know it. There was no use telling the boy that he was a damned good-looking boy to any woman’s eyes. That he probably already knew.

  “You think I’m a queer or something?” Roy Baker said, unexpectedly.

  A good many things people say are unexpected to Nathan Shapiro, who is the first to admit he doesn’t understand people very well.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me, son. I expect you get along all right with girls. They fall for you, don’t they, Roy?”

  “I get along all right. What’s that got to do with anything, man?”

  “Nothing, probably,” Shapiro said. “You know the layout of the house, Roy? Since you’ve been working there for—how long was it, son?”

  “Since last September,” Roy Baker said. “Sure I know the layout. In the winter I helped out inside. Brought in wood for the fireplaces and helped the cleaning woman with heavy things.”

  “Did they give you a key to the house? Since, on Sunday afternoons, you’d have to have some way to get in if the cook and the maid—and Mrs. Singleton, of course—were all out.”

  “Yeah. After I’d been there a few times, the cook gave me a key to the basement door.”

  “Ever need to use it, Roy?”

  “Couple of times, maybe. I’d ring the bell and wait for somebody to let me in. Couple of times nobody came and I used the key.”

  “Had you been in Mrs. Singleton’s bedroom—bedroom suite I guess you’d call it—before yesterday?”

  “Sure. Sometimes.”

  “When Mrs. Singleton was there?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes. Mostly when I was helping the cleaning woman, she went out. Said, ‘I’ll get out from underfoot,’ and things like that.”

  “Never alone in the room with her? With Mrs. Singleton, I mean. In the bedroom, I mean.”

  “Man, you’re crazy.”

  “Well?”

  “Could be. Once or twice. Once she spilled something on the rug. Cold cream or something, and it was Sunday and she called down—I was spading up the garden—and had me go up and take the rug downstairs and clean it.”

  “That time,” Shapiro said, “how was she dressed, son?” “A robe or something, I guess. I just rolled the rug up and took it down to the basement.”

  “Was the rug pretty messed up, Roy? Have trouble getting it cleaned?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “When you went up to get the rug,” Shapiro said, “she’d been doing her face, I suppose. Spilled the cold cream or whatever it was while she was doing her face. Have cold cream, or whatever they use, all over it?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Look, son,” Shapiro said, and let his voice harden, “this was a beautiful woman. You’re not a queer. Men look at beautiful women. This time, whenever it was, you looked at her. Had she put what they call a ‘new face’ on?”

  Roy hesitated. Perhaps, Shapiro thought, I’ve put ideas into his head. Perhaps I haven’t needed to.

  “She looked all right,” Roy Baker said. “Way I remember it. For an older woman. What I keep telling you, she was old enough to be my mother.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “you do keep telling me that, son. By the way, they tell me you live with your father. Your own mother?”

  “She’s dead, man. When I was a kid she died.”

  “Sorry,” Shapiro said. “Tough not having a mother. You been in trouble before, Roy?”

  “Not until now.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “they tell me you claim you’ve never owned a switchblade.”

  “That’s the truth, man.”

  “Ever belong to a gang, Roy?”

  “Not the way you mean it. If you mean it bad, and I guess you do. Couple of years ago I went around with some fellows, way everybody does.”

  “You don’t go around, as you put it, with the same fellows any more?”

  “No. A lot of them quit school. Anyway—”

  He paused. Shapiro waited. Then he said, “Anyway what, son?”

  “Some of them wanted to rough up some other guys. I didn’t have anything against the other guys. So I said they could count me out.”

  “They did? Without getting tough about it?”

  “Look, man,” Roy Baker said. “I can take care of myself.”

  Shapiro said he was sure of it. He said, “Mrs. Singleton bring friends out to look at her garden, when you were working in it?”

  “A few times, maybe.”

  “Introduce you to any of them?”

  “Why would she, man? Oh, couple of weeks ago—a Sunday afternoon, I guess—she brought three or four people out and said, ‘Hello, Roy,’ and then, when somebody said she’d never see
n tulips like those, Mrs. Singleton said, ‘It’s all Roy’s doing, Ruth. He makes things grow.’ But that wasn’t being introduced. Anyway, all you do with tulips is put the bulbs in the ground and weed around the shoots when they come up.”

  “That so?” Shapiro said. “You didn’t know any of the people she brought out to look at the garden.”

  “Mr. Gage,” Roy said. “He was the one called up the school and said he had a job for a boy who would work at it. When they told me to go over to the house, Mr. Gage was the one I talked to first—Mrs. Singleton too, but mostly Mr.

  Gage.”

  “What kind of a man is this Mr. Gage, Roy? You do know he was her husband, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Only he wasn’t around much. What do you mean, what kind of a man?”

  “Just that. You liked him?”

  “Didn’t think about it. Just about getting the job. He did ask a lot of questions, sort of as if he thought I was trying to keep things back. I didn’t have anything to keep back, but that was the way it felt.”

  “But he hired you?”

  “Not really. Mrs. Singleton did that herself. Said something like, ‘Quit badgering the boy, Joe. And quit being so superior. He’ll do.’”

  “What does this man Gage look like, Roy?”

  “He’s good-looking. Dark hair—pretty near black. And taller than I am. Kind of face you remember, sort of. They say he’s an actor.”

  “Younger than Mrs. Singleton was, would you say?”

  “Maybe. Not all that young, but it’s hard to tell about older people. Maybe in his thirties.”

  “This woman she called Ruth,” Shapiro said. “Use her last name?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody else she called by a first name?”

  “Don’t remember anybody—yes. There was a man she called ‘Les.’ Big man with gray hair, only not much of it.”

  “Seemed friendly with him?”

  “They all seemed friendly.”

  “Two men,” Shapiro said. “One of them Mr. Gage and the other this man she called ‘Les.’ And a woman she called ‘Ruth.’ That was all came to look at the garden this time you remember?”

  “There was another woman came out a little later. After the others, I mean. She had a drink in her hand. They called her ‘Joanie,’ way I remember it. But I’d got back to work by then.”

  “That time, or any other time,” Shapiro said, “was there a man around they called ‘Kurt’?”

  Not that Roy Baker could remember.

  “She often had people in on Sunday afternoons?”

  “Pretty often, I guess.”

  “Big parties?”

  The boy didn’t remember any big parties. Except on New Year’s Eve, and he’d helped clean up the next day. Mostly, as far as he knew, people would come in Sunday afternoons, but maybe only four or five people.

  How did he know that?

  Mostly, the small cocktail parties had been in the sitting room of her suite upstairs. He’d be working and now and then would stand up, on account of a man had to stretch, and look up and see people in the sitting room of Mrs. Singleton’s suite. In the spring, before the air conditioning was turned on, the windows would be open and he would hear voices. And sometimes people would go out on the balcony and look down at the garden.

  “According to what you told them last night,” Shapiro said, “you never owned a switchblade knife.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Some of the boys at school do?”

  “Maybe. Some of the tough ones, maybe.”

  “At the house,” Shapiro said, “you knew where the kitchen knives were kept?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you didn’t know that Mrs. Singleton had a drawer—in her desk, I think it was—she put money in for the maid and cook to use for incidental expenses? Things that came up about the house when Mrs. Singleton herself wasn’t in it?”

  “No. And I know what you’re getting at, man. Like I told the others, I didn’t know she left money lying around. The money I had on me when this cop grabbed me was my wages and the present she gave me and maybe four-five dollars I had when I went there to work.”

  The boy stood up suddenly. He moved extremely well and quickly. He walked over and looked down at Nathan Shapiro and his face was working.

  “You all think I’m lying,” the boy said, and his voice went up. “I can’t help what you think, man. The way it was is the way I said it was. When I went in she was lying on the rug and bleeding and I—”

  “Yes, Roy,” Shapiro said. “You’ve told us.”

  “Thing is,” the boy said, “none of you listen. All you care about you’ve got somebody to pin it on. Easy like. Somebody like me with no money to hire a fancy lawyer. The way it always is with the cops.”

  He tightened his hands into fists and shook them in the air. Then, as suddenly as he had stood up, he sat down in a chair by the wooden table and put his arms on it, and his head down on his arms. And he began to cry.

  There was still as much child as man in the boy, Shapiro thought.

  “No,” he said, “it isn’t always that way with the cops, son.”

  He went over to the door of the small room and knocked on it and a patrolman opened it.

  “I’ve finished with Baker,” Shapiro said.

  “Just going to tell you the van’s here, Lieutenant,” the patrolman said. “To pick up Baker.”

  The van of the Department of Correction would take Roy Baker to the House of Detention for Men. Until somebody posted fifty thousand bond money for him. Which would, Nathan Shapiro thought, be a hell of a long time.

  He turned and Baker was standing up. His eyes were red and he dabbed at them with the back of his hands. He didn’t look at Shapiro when he walked across the room and out the door. He went down the corridor with the patrolman, not looking at anybody.

  “Find out everything you can about the kid.” That was what Anthony Cook was supposed to do. From his classmates at Clayton High School; from his teachers there—from everybody who, during the almost four years he had gone to the school, had had contact with Roy Baker. When he started, Cook realized it wasn’t going to be easy. After a couple of hours of trying to get answers he had proved it wasn’t.

  There were too many kids in Clayton High School. There were too many in most of the classes for any one kid to stand out. “Baker?” the teachers said. “There are a good many boys named Baker at the school, Mr. Cook. Would he be a small dark-haired boy? No, the dark one is named Frank, I think. You said Roy?”

  “Roy,” Cook said, time after time. “A tall blond boy. The one who’s now in a little trouble.”

  A good many of the teachers he talked to didn’t know anything about a boy named Roy Baker being in trouble. A few did, and the gym teacher was one of them. He considered Roy Baker an upstanding young man and a good basketball player, for all he was only six feet tall. He didn’t know anything against the kid. Good team spirit the kid had.

  “Not been in any trouble you know of?” Cook asked him.

  Not that the instructor of physical education had ever heard about. Good athlete. Good enough distance runner and an all-right tennis player. Only trouble was, like with a lot of them, he didn’t have time to train properly. Worked after school instead of working out after school, if Cook knew what he meant. Didn’t give himself a fair chance.

  “Some of the kids probably are members of gangs,” Cook said. “Know if young Baker was?”

  The gym instructor said he didn’t. But then he hesitated. He said, “Seems as if, couple of years ago—” and stopped, evidently to consider. After he had he said, “Ever been in trouble with you people?”

  “Not that the records show,” Cook told him.

  “There are some tough guys here,” the gym instructor said. “All schools have them. Kids without the team spirit. Learn to spot them in my job.”

  Cook was sure of it.

  “Couple of years ago,” the gym instructor said. “Seem
s to me I remember the Cook boy was friendly with a few guys who didn’t have the team spirit. Not what I’d call the team spirit.”

  “Gangs?”

  “We’ve got them, I guess. Usually, the kid gangs are mostly dropouts. Some of the boys young Baker seemed to know best have dropped out the last couple of years. Hang around street corners, if you know what I mean. Have fights with other gangs. About territory and that sort of thing. And girls. There are always girls.”

  Cook told him he had something there. He said, “Recently—last year, say—you think Baker hasn’t been seeing so much of these tough kids? What they call delinquent kids?”

  “Way I feel about it,” the gym instructor said. “But they come through here in droves. Few I get to know a little. Ones on the basketball squad. Track team. Whether, say, they can shoot baskets. And whether they’ve got the right team spirit. Tell you what, Mr. Cook, whyn’t you talk to the staff psychologist?”

  Cook said it was a good idea, and acted on it, finding the psychologist with the assistance of Mrs. Rose Shapiro, who said, “Is the boy all right, Mr. Cook?”

  “Held as a material witness,” Cook told her. “Bail set pretty high. Too high for him to make, which I guess was the idea, Mrs. Shapiro.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Rose Shapiro said. “You won’t find out he wasn’t, Mr. Cook. Is that what you—and my husband, I suppose—are trying to do?”

  “Just what kind of a kid he is,” Cook said. “This psychologist? Think he’d know?”

  “She,” Rose told him. “Helen Phipps. Dr. Helen Phipps. Doctorate in psychology. You can try.”

  Dr. Helen Phipps was a small woman with gray hair in a bun at the back of her head. She wore bifocals. She was rather what Cook had supposed she would be. She couldn’t place a boy named Roy Baker.

  “Which means,” she said, “that he hasn’t had problems—or been a problem, of course—which would bring him to my attention. However—”

  However, there were records. An assistant brought them. Dr. Phipps looked at them. She said, “Hmmm.”

  “I.Q. one hundred and forty,” she said. “Some indication of resentful attitude the first year he was here. According to Dr. Williams, who was an assistant in this department then. Been transferred since. Hmmm. Normal attitude toward sex. Application fair to good. Means to his school work, Mr. Cook. As reported by his teachers. Considered outstanding in English courses by those who have had him in classes. Only fair in mathematics. About all we’ve got here. As I said, we get the problem ones. The disruptive ones.”