Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Picked her up there and took her places. After she threw young Gage out. Now and then she’d have people in for drinks and I’d be one of them. Sometimes I’d have people here for drinks and she’d come. And we’d go to parties together. Mostly on Sundays, of course. When she wasn’t working.”

  “I’ve got to ask a lot of things,” Shapiro said. “Matters of routine. Things for the record. Do you have a key to her house, Mr. Agee? Or, did you ever have?”

  “Did I let myself in yesterday? Wait in her upstairs living room—what she called her ‘quarter’—and kill her when she came in? That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it?”

  “Whether you had a key to the house,” Shapiro said. He let weariness sound in his voice.

  “No. I didn’t. Oh, when we were married. Sure. And when she said she’d found the man she really loved—meaning this twerp Gage—and went off to Reno, I gave her back the key. Played it as a scene, she did, and I played along. She played most things as scenes. Which didn’t mean that, to her, the things weren’t real. It was her idiom to play her life in scenes.”

  “You didn’t have a key to her house. When you went there to see her you rang the doorbell and somebody let you in?”

  “Like anybody else. Sure.”

  “Happen to know whether Gage had a key to the house?” Agee said he didn’t. He said that, at a guess, Jenny would have played a scene with Gage when she threw him out. The “give-me-back-my-doorkey” scene. He said that that was only a guess. He said, “It’s easy enough to have a key copied, Lieutenant.”

  “By anyone,” Shapiro said. “When did she throw Gage out, as you put it?”

  “Last fall.”

  “And had been married to him how long?"

  “Couple of years. Six months or so after our divorce became final she married the twerp.”

  “You called him ‘young’ Gage,” Shapiro said. “A good deal younger than she was?”

  “Put it one way,” Agee said, “nobody was younger than Jenny. But the way you mean it, a hell of a lot younger. She was—oh, damn near sixty. Probably you’ve looked that up.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “And Gage?”

  “In his thirties somewhere,” Agee said. “I never asked him. At a guess, in his thirties. And, before you nibble at it, I’m pretty close to ten years younger than she was. And Kurt Morton is about my age. And what does that get you?”

  “Nothing, probably.”

  “That she robbed cradles? Went after younger men? That—” He broke off suddenly. Then he said, “This kid you’ve got. Good-looking kid?”

  “I’d call him that.”

  “No,” Agee said. “You’re getting her all wrong. She wasn’t like that. Oh, she noticed when a man was good-looking. What woman doesn’t? As men notice good-looking women. But what you’re implying—you’re getting her all wrong. Applying the wrong standards. All right, policemen’s standards.”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “I’m a policeman. We run into all sorts. And try to sort them out. I’m not implying anything about Mrs. Singleton. Just trying to find out about her.”

  “This kid you’ve got. Does he imply anything? Boast about anything? Because if he does, he’s a damn liar.”

  “He doesn’t,” Shapiro said. “I gave him a chance to. Not, of course, that it would have been a chance he’d have wanted to take.”

  “All right,” Agee said. “We circle around it, don’t we? Did this kid rape her? Or try to? There’d be ways of knowing if he had, wouldn’t there? I mean—”

  Then he closed his eyes as he had before and, as before, rhythmically pounded the padded arm of his chair. Again, Shapiro waited. After a time, Agee rested his arm on the chair arm and opened his eyes.

  “They did an autopsy? Cut—” His heavy face worked and for a moment he did not go on. He swallowed, as if he tried to swallow words. Or thoughts. “Cut her up,” he said.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “It’s always done. To make certain of the cause of death. Among other things. No, Mr. Agee. She hadn’t been raped. Just stabbed. Once. She must, they say, have lost consciousness almost immediately. Have died within a minute or two.”

  “Something,” Agee said. “Not much, but something. Not—not hurt before he killed her? Or, somebody killed her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see her. Her—her body? Go and stare at her?”

  “No. Oh, others did. Had to. And took pictures. Had to do that, too.”

  “You, yourself, never saw her.”

  “Only her picture,” Shapiro said. “She was beautiful.”

  “Then,” Agee said, “you never heard her laugh. Never heard her laugh.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “She had a special kind of laughter?”

  “I can’t describe it,” Agee said. “Nobody could ever describe it. Reviewers, people like that, tried for years to find words to—oh, to describe magic. Nobody ever did. They said things like ‘low’ and ‘rippling’ and ‘infectious.’ Said all the usual things. And, of course, that it was ‘unique.’ A handy word to say nothing with. Do you read poetry, Lieutenant?”

  “Sometimes,” Shapiro said. “Not much.”

  “Some poetry,” Agee said, “does odd things to people. To some people. Almost physical things. There’s a kind of stirring all through you when you read some poetry. A kind of exaltation. A feeling of utter rightness. That—hell, I can’t find the words for it. That never happened to you?”

  “With music sometimes. Not with words.”

  “Jenny’s laughter did that—something like that—to people. Sang in them. Made them, when they heard it, different people—gayer people. For the moment. While she laughed. But I told you, didn’t I, that there’s no way to describe her laughing. Her speaking voice too. But it was when she laughed—”

  He stopped talking and closed his eyes again for a moment. “All right,” he said then, “this doesn’t get you anywhere, does it?”

  “Anything which will tell us about her,” Shapiro said. “I don’t know what gets us anywhere. We feel our way. Ask the questions we have to ask. Get the facts, or what we’re told are the facts. Find out, as well as we can, who people are. And, of course, where they were.”

  “So,” Agee said, “you’re getting to that. I was here. Working. And alone in the apartment. And Mimms was out, probably at a movie. He usually is Sunday afternoon.”

  “Mimms?” It sounded improbable.

  “The man who takes care of me,” Agee said. “The man who let you in.”

  “Sunday,” Shapiro said. “You work on Sundays, Mr. Agee?”

  Lester Agee looked entirely surprised. He looked at Nathan Shapiro as if Shapiro had asked an incredible question. When he spoke, he spoke slowly, as if he doubted whether Shapiro was familiar with English.

  “I,” Agee said, “am a professional writer. I write for a living. Sunday is like any other day. Sunday and the Fourth of July and Christmas. When I’m onto something, or am trying to get onto something. Do policemen take Sundays off, Lieutenant? Convenient for criminals, that would be.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “Sunday is like any other day, Mr. Agee. Speaking of writing. Do you know a man named Pierson? Clarke Pierson. He says he knows you. Or, anyway, has met you.”

  “Pierson?” Agee said. “Can’t say I do.” He narrowed his eyes and, after a moment, shook his head. “Can’t say I do,” he said. “Who’s he?”

  “A man who thinks highly of the kid we’ve got in jail,” Shapiro said. “Thinks he’s a brilliant kid. And that the kid is, if he gets out of this, going to be a writer.”

  “God help him,” Agee said. “The kid, I mean. Pierson?”

  “He teaches something called ‘creative writing’ at the high school young Baker goes to,” Shapiro said. “And wrote a play once that you—”

  “That Pierson,” Agee said. “Kind of a wispy little guy?”

  “He could be called that.”

  “Wrote a wispy little play a few years ago,” Age
e said. “Played what amounted to a one-night stand, as I remember it. Yes, he was around for a while and I guess I ran into him. So that’s what he’s doing now. ‘Creative writing,’ for the love of God. And this kid wants to be a writer?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then there’s a kid,” Agee said, “who’s really in trouble.”

  VII

  Talking to the other kids at Clayton High School hadn’t, Detective Anthony Cook decided after a couple of hours of trying it, got him much of anywhere. For one thing, and perhaps the chief thing, the kids didn’t want to talk to cops. For the most part, the kids were evasive with cops; didn’t, obviously, want to get mixed up with cops, even to the extent of telling a cop what they knew about another kid.

  He stopped kids at random in the school’s wide corridors as they went from class to class. There were hundreds of kids; his sampling was, of necessity, hit-and-miss. “Yeah,” a kid said, “think I know him. All-right guy, far’s I know.” Which didn’t help particularly. “Stuck up,” a girl said. “Thinks he’s God’s gift to something. Because he’s attractive, maybe.” “Yeah,” a tall Negro boy said, “I know him, man. He’s a square, man.”

  “Just seen him around,” another boy said. “Way I get it, he didn’t join in much. Know what I mean?”

  “Join in what?” Cook asked that one.

  “Things,” the boy said. “Like making a pitch about the lousy mess you guys have got us into.”

  Cook didn’t get this one, and said so. Did the boy mean the police had got them into a lousy mess?

  “Like everybody else,” the boy said. “Worse, maybe. Because it’s guys like you push us around when we got rights.”

  That didn’t make it much clearer to Cook. He made a guess. “Antiwar demonstrations?” was his guess.

  The boy said, “Sure. Part of it. Show people where our generation stands. On a lot of things, mister. Take me. Soon as I’m old enough to get a draft card, I’m going to burn it. So you want to arrest me?”

  That one was one of the more articulate. A good many, among those who said anything, used words which, apparently, had a special meaning. It was, to Cook, as if they spoke in code.

  One he stopped in the corridor—a boy with slanting, Oriental eyes—used English with greater care. “I know him to say hello to,” this boy said. “I’m in an English class with him. He is a very earnest student, sir. A conformist, if you understand me. What is sometimes called a square."

  When he had a chance to make a choice among the kids he asked about Roy Baker, Cook chose males and, after an hour or so of getting nothing much, those who looked, to the experienced eyes of a policeman, like tough kids. They were among the least talkative. But when they talked at all, they seemed to know less than the others about Roy Baker. They might, of course, be covering for him. But it was not clear what, if anything, they were covering—except, of course, themselves. Had Roy been a member of a gang? “Don’t know what you’re talking about, man. No gangs in this school I know of.”

  Cook found a girl—a pretty girl—who was in Mr. Pierson’s creative writing class with Roy Baker. “We write things,” she explained. “Mr. Pierson reads some of them aloud for group criticism. Stories and things like that.”

  “Any of Roy’s?”

  “A couple, anyway. Pretty grim things, both of them were. Like there was no hope in anything. Only Mr. Pierson seemed to think they were good.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Like my father says, there’re enough sordid things without having to read about them.”

  “Sordid? Roy’s stories were sordid?”

  “About people without any money, living in slums,” the girl said.

  “He’s a good-looking boy,” Cook said. “How did most of the girls feel about him?”

  “All right, I guess. Not me, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “At general impressions,” Cook said.

  “Right after school,” the girl said, “Roy was always rushing off somewhere. Too busy to stand around and talk, the way most of us do. Or go somewhere for a Coke. Like he had a job to do or something.”

  That did recur—Roy Baker had not mixed much with the other students. If he had made friends, the boys and girls Cook could persuade to talk had not been among them. Cook was left the impression from his random sampling that Roy Baker had merely gone, almost anonymously, to Clayton High School; that he had not really been a part of it. And that proved nothing about Roy Baker. The kid had had part-time jobs to do for the money in them. Probably it was as simple as that. He had had little time to be a kid among other kids at Clayton High School. Which, of course, he might have resented.

  “Like there was no hope in anything,” the girl had said of stories by Roy Baker a teacher had read aloud to the class. Stories “about people without any money, living in slums.”

  Cook looked at his watch. It was a little after five. He walked down Sixth Avenue to Morton Street. On one side of the block he walked through were solid houses in a row. On the other side were old-law tenements, with fire escapes zigzagging up them. In the entrance hall of the one of the tenements which had the right street address slips of paper in slots listed names. After the name “Ralph Baker” on one of the slips there was further direction. “4R” was printed after Baker’s name. “Four rear,” Cook decided, and climbed a narrow staircase which leaned uncertainly against the wall.

  A square of paper—yellowed paper—was thumbtacked to one of the doors on the fourth floor. It had “Baker” printed on it. Cook knocked on the door. When there was no answer he knocked again. There was still no answer, but he heard below him the creaking of stairs as somebody walked up them. Whoever it was walked to the third floor and along the hallway and came on up.

  Cook looked down at a tall, light-haired man who had his suit coat slung over his shoulder. A few steps from the landing the man stopped and looked up at Cook. He said, “Looking for somebody, mister?”

  There was an unshaded light bulb glowing dimly in an outlet set into the ceiling of the fourth-floor hallway. It dripped light on the top of the man’s head and made shadows of cheekbones down his face.

  “For Ralph Baker,” Cook said. “Happen to be you?”

  “Sure as hell does,” the man said. “And if you’re the one after the rent again—”

  “No,” Cook said. “Just like a word with you, Mr. Baker. About your son. I’m a police detective.”

  “You’ve got the kid wrong,” Baker said. “He’s a good kid. Whatcha want me to tell you about him?”

  He came on up and Cook stepped aside to let him reach the door. He stopped in front of it.

  “Think I’m gonna help you frame my own kid?” Baker said.

  “Nothing like that,” Cook told him. “And nobody’s trying to frame your son, Mr. Baker.”

  “Hell,” Baker said, “I know cops. Got a warrant, or something?”

  “No warrant,” Cook said. “Just trying to find out what we can about the kid. What they call background. Thing we always have to do, cases like this.”

  Baker fished a key out of his pocket and opened the door. He went through it and left it open and Cook went through it after him.

  He went into a small room with a narrow, and unmade, bed against one wall and a table with two chairs drawn up to it in the middle of the room. There was a hard-looking upholstered chair against the wall opposite the bed. At the rear of the room there was an open door and beyond it another room. The back room had a window in it. The window was unexpectedly clean. Through it, Cook could look across an open space and at another tenement.

  Baker, without saying anything, went into the back room and to his right, turning out of sight. Cook waited, standing with his back to the entrance door. He heard a refrigerator door opened and then a drawer opened and a clunking sound. Baker came back into the front room with a punctured can of beer. He sat on the unmade bed and tilted his head back to pour beer into his mouth.

  There was something vaguel
y familiar about this tall man, who probably was in his forties and certainly needed a shave. He looked, Cook thought, a little as his son might look in twenty-five years or so. Perhaps that, Cook thought, is the reason I feel I’ve seen this man before. It’s because he looks like the mug shot of the kid.

  When Baker raised his head to drink his beer Cook saw a thin scar under his chin. Then Cook remembered.

  “Been about ten years, hasn’t it?” Cook said. “Maybe eleven.”

  Baker merely looked at him over the beer can. Then he shook his head. He said, “What’s been ten years, mister?” “Since you went after a man in a saloon uptown,” Cook said. “Only they called it a cocktail lounge.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about. What you think you’re talking about.”

  “Help you remember,” Cook said and pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat on it, straddling. “I was one of the cops who broke it up. In uniform then. In a patrol car with a sergeant, and we got the signal. Fight in a bar on West—West what street, Baker?”

  “Nope,” Baker said. “Like the kids say, I don’t dig you.” “Sixty-fourth,” Cook said. “Maybe Sixty-fifth. Pretty well over toward the river. From what we got, you walked in, all hostile, and there was this man sitting in a booth with a woman. You yanked him out and knocked him down. That’s the way we got it. Just like that. And he hit you a couple of times and you knocked him down again. And this broad who’d been with him started yelling and—maybe I oughtn’t to call her a broad, Baker. Seeing she was your wife. Name of—what was her name, Baker? Long time ago, it was.”

  “Somebody else you’re thinking of,” Ralph Baker said and tilted the can up to his lips again. “Somebody looked like me, maybe.”

  “Somebody,” Cook said, “with a scar like that one you’ve got. Somebody used a knife on you once, didn’t they? And, from where he got you, you were pretty lucky to stay alive.”

  “When I was a kid,” Baker said. “Window glass. Some kid heaved a rock and I was sitting inside. Only time anybody pulled a knife on me was when Jim—” And with that he stopped and put his can down hard on a table by the bed. The can made an empty clang when he put it down.