“James Brady,” Cook said. “That was the man you beat up that night. Comes back to me now. And the woman—your wife, I mean—was named Myra. And Brady says it was you who pulled the knife. After you used your fists. When he got up and came at you the second time. That’s when he says you pulled a knife on him.”
“He always was a lying bastard,” Baker said. “A bastard son of a bitch. I never owned a knife. He pulled it and I took it away from him. Like I told the judge. And like two-three guys who saw what happened told the judge. And the judge went along. Or didn’t you know that?”
“Suspended sentence,” Cook said. “On an assault charge. Not aggravated, because the judge didn’t have enough evidence to show him whose knife it was. And whosever it was, you hadn’t used it. It keeps coming back to me, Baker.”
“Got nothing to do with anything about the kid,” Baker said. “So, ten years ago, I roughed up a bastard my wife was two-timing me with. He had it coming, and maybe that’s what the judge thought. I was a hell of a lot younger then and I got mad easy.”
“What ever became of Myra?” Cook asked him, and Baker said, “How the hell do I know? Went off and shacked up with Brady, like she’d been doing all along. And who she shacked up with after that I don’t know, and don’t give a damn.”
“Roy thinks his mother is dead,” Cook said. “Myra was his mother?”
“Sure she was his mother. He tell you she was dead?”
“Not me,” Cook said. “Lieutenant I work with.”
“Could be,” Baker said, “that’s the way he wants to think it was. Instead of that she was a no-good bitch.”
“You and he have lived together since his mother took off?”
“He was a little kid then,” Baker said. “For a while my mother took care of him. About twelve he was when she died. Since then the kid and I’ve been together.”
“Here?”
“Other places too. Here for three-four years.”
“What do you work at, Baker?”
Baker stood up and walked again into the rear room. From that room he called, “Want a beer?”
Cook said he didn’t want a beer, and Baker came back with another punctured can and sat where he had sat before. He drank. He said, “What’s it got to do with the kid what I do for a living?”
“Nothing, probably,” Cook said. “Any secret about it?”
“Clerk in a grocery store up the street,” Baker said. “No law against that, is there?”
“No,” Cook said. “Why’d there be a law against that?”
“What I said,” Baker said, and swallowed beer.
“Worked there long?”
“Six months, maybe.”
“Before that?”
“Other places. A while I was a janitor—what they call a superintendent. Gave the kid and me a place to live, that did. So what the hell has this got to do with the kid?”
The question was evidently reasonable. Cook wished an answer were.
“Just trying to get Roy’s background,” Cook said. “Sort of thing we have to try to fill in.”
“Done what I could for the kid after she walked out on us,” Baker said. “Kept him in school, since he was so goddamn set on it. On what I’ve been making, that wasn’t easy, mister.”
“He helped keep himself in school,” Cook said. “Finding jobs. Like this one he had with Mrs. Singleton. You ever run into Mrs. Singleton, Baker?”
“Why the hell should I? You think she came into this place I work and picked up her own groceries? This cook of hers did that.”
“Oh,” Cook said, “she did trade at this place you work? So of course you knew who she was when Roy went to work there.”
“Listen,” Baker said, “everybody in this part of the Village knew about her. Knew who she was.”
“When the cook bought things at the store,” Cook said. “She carry them home? Or did somebody deliver them?”
“If she ordered a lot of stuff,” Baker said, “it got sent over.”
“You ever deliver things to her? Yourself, I mean.”
“Couple of boys do that,” Baker said. “Mostly, anyway.”
“You never did yourself?”
“Maybe a couple of times. When one of the kids was off. Wasn’t supposed to be my job, but sometimes we get jammed up.”
“When you did deliver to her house, you ever see Mrs. Singleton? Because, with your boy working there, you’d naturally be interested in the place he was working and the kind of woman he was working for.”
“Listen,” Baker said. “Couple of times I delivered to her, they let me in through the basement and I carried whatever it was to the back yard and then up to the kitchen. How’d I meet Mrs. Singleton? I used the back door. Like I was told.”
“Sure,” Cook said. “It figures. By the way, Mrs. Singleton charge things at the store?”
“Paid cash the times I delivered,” Baker said. “This cook would tell me to wait and she’d go somewhere—upstairs, I guess—and come back with the money. One time, I remember, she came back with a fifty-dollar bill and asked me could I change it. I sure as hell couldn’t.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“You didn’t get paid?”
“Sure I got paid. The cook got her handbag and paid me out of that.”
“Say anything?”
“To herself, way I remember it. Sort of grumbling. About ‘she’ ought to know better than to leave fifties in that drawer of hers. Something like that.”
“Drawer of hers?”
“Listen, mister,” Baker said. “Maybe I didn’t go to school much, but I can read. In the paper, it said the police theory was my kid was taking money out of a drawer she kept it in and she walked in on him and so he stabbed her. Which is one damned lie.”
“No,” Cook said. “Just the way it looks, Baker. Maybe it wasn’t the way it looks. What we’re trying to find out.”
“Like hell you are. My kid comes handy, so you pin it on my kid.”
There was no use telling him the Homicide Squad didn’t work that way. Cook told him anyway. He got the short, four-letter answer he expected.
“Roy ever mention to you that Mrs. Singleton kept household money in a drawer in her room?”
“No.”
“You ever tell him about this time the cook came back with a fifty you couldn’t change?”
“Not that I remember offhand. Maybe I did; maybe I didn’t.”
“Sometimes,” Cook said, “when a kid has a more or less regular job in a house, like Roy had at Mrs. Singleton’s house, they give him a key. So that he can get in and work when there’s nobody home. A kid they trust.”
Baker wouldn’t know about that.
“Whether Roy had a key or not?”
“Never said anything about having a key.”
“You’d think he would, sort of,” Cook said. “Be pleased they trusted him that much.”
“Didn’t.”
“You and the kid got along all right? Talked things over?” “Sure. Except when he’s here, and’s got his chores done, he mostly goes into the other room and studies. And sometimes I go out for a beer.”
“Sure,” Cook said. “Yesterday afternoon—round five maybe—were you out for a beer, Baker? Maybe at a bar where some of the guys know you?”
“You trying to lay it on me? First the kid and then me? That the way it is?”
“No. Just asking questions. No reason you shouldn’t be having a beer with some guys you know. In a cool bar somewhere. Must have been hot here yesterday.”
“Yesterday,” Baker said, “I went to a ball game. And the Mets lost.”
“Yes,” Cook said. “I know they lost. Roy helps you keep this place cleaned up. That’s what you meant by chores?”
“Sure he does. He’s a good kid. Sort of old-maidish about keeping the place cleaned up. Takes after his mother, could be. She was a bitch most ways, but she kept house.”
“She have a job when you and she were livi
ng together?”
“Yeah. She was a waitress. Way she met this Brady son of a bitch. And maybe others I didn’t find out about. So what’s that got to do with your trying to frame the kid?”
He did not wait for an answer. He got up from the bed the kid hadn’t been around to make that morning and went into the other room for another beer.
Cook didn’t wait for him to come back. Cook had, he decided, got the picture, for what it was worth. Cook went down tilting stairs and got a subway uptown.
An emotional man, Nathan Shapiro thought of Lester Agee. He went down in the elevator from Agee’s big apartment and walked a gritty sidewalk in afternoon heat with the sun in his face. Emotional and shaken up by what had happened, Agee was. Odd he hadn’t, when he had gone to the house of the woman he was in love with and been told she had been murdered, done more than merely walk away. Only perhaps it wasn’t really odd. There would have been nothing he could do to alter tragic finality. It had been rational merely to walk away. Walk away in shock, perhaps, rather than in reason.
Agee was a man hard hit, Shapiro thought. Or, of course, a good actor. In the theater, Agee was. Had he ever acted in it? He had written with actors in mind; must, Shapiro supposed, have known enough about acting—about what was possible and what was not—to write with actors in mind. Something I don’t know anything about, Shapiro thought. A whole kind of life I don’t know anything about. I’m no good at understanding people like Agee or, come to that, like Jennifer Singleton. I’m groping around in a world I don’t know anything about. Like always.
He walked toward a bus stop. Near it, he found a sidewalk telephone booth and, again, dialed Joseph Gage’s number. Again, Gage didn’t answer. Shapiro waited for a bus and finally was trundled slowly across town. He went the rest of the way to West Twentieth Street by subway, which was quicker, if somewhat harder to breathe in.
Write a summary, in official terms, of a day’s wasted time. Check with Cook when Cook came back from talking with teachers and with kids at Clayton High School. See whether Cook informants in a world about which, apparently, Cook knew something had told him that Lester Agee, at present a playwright, had ever been an actor. Tell Bill Weigand that he’d found nothing which especially reinforced a borrowed hunch; that it still looked like being the kid. Call it a day and go home to Brooklyn and to Rose and tell her that it still looked like being the kid. She wouldn’t like that.
No reason that Gage should be home merely because the police wanted to talk to him. Be interesting, of course, to find out whether Gage knew that, after divorcing him, Jennifer Singleton had planned to remarry Agee. Be interesting, also, to find out if he still had a key to the “mansion” on Point Street. And where he had been the afternoon before. If the motive for murder wasn’t merely that a kid had been walked in on while he was stealing a hundred dollars or so, it might conceivably be that Gage didn’t want to lose God knew how much more, as he might if a divorce went through. Be interesting to know details of Jennifer Single- ton’s will. Precinct was working on that, of course. It was still precinct’s case. Only, precinct figured it was a solved case. Precinct might reasonably be perfunctory about side issues.
Too late in the day now to catch Mrs. Singleton’s lawyer at his office. Assuming anybody had bothered to find out—
Shapiro shuffled reports on his desk. Nobody had come up with bail money for Roy Baker. The Medical Examiner’s autopsy showed that Jennifer Singleton had been white, female and well nourished. She had been in good health until a knife had severed the aorta near her heart. Mrs. Singleton’s lawyers, who had been duly notified of what radio and television and newspapers had already told them, were Barclay, Stapleton and Wolfe. They had offices in East Thirty-ninth Street.
Shapiro looked up a telephone number and dialed it, although it was almost six o’clock in the afternoon. He got, as he had supposed he would, an answering service, which said, sweetly, that it was Barclay, Stapleton and Wolfe and that if any associate of the firm called in he would be told that Lieutenant—what was that again?—Lieutenant Shapiro of the New York Police had called.
It was taking Tony Cook longer than Shapiro had supposed it would. The afternoon session at Clayton High School must have been over long ago, and the pupils and their teachers long since scattered beyond the reach of inquiry. Possibly Cook had come on something and was chasing it down. Wait, obviously, until Cook came in, or called in. Have another go at Joseph Gage, although that probably was not much more than a way of twiddling thumbs to occupy time. He dialed Gage’s number, which was becoming a familiar one. He waited half a dozen rings for an answer he didn’t get. He dialed a number far more familiar. The voice which answered brightened the late fragment of a wasted day.
“Looks,” Nathan Shapiro told Rose, “as if I’ll be late.”
“The way it always looks, darling,” Rose said. “Next time I’ll marry a nine-to-fiver. About the boy?”
“Nothing to prove anything one way or another,” Shapiro told his wife. “We’re talking to people.”
“He’s a good boy,” Rose said. “Come home when you can, dear. There’s pastrami.”
Cook came into the squad room. He looked hot and a little tired. He pulled a chair up to Shapiro’s desk.
“Nothing at the school that gets us anywhere,” Cook said. “Or that I can see gets us anywhere. There are a hell of a lot of kids there. Our kid doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on the other kids.”
“Not on the girls?” Shapiro asked him. “Good-looking kid like he is?”
If Roy Baker had made an impression on the girls, Cook said, he himself hadn’t asked the right girls. “Take a week to really get anywhere,” Cook said. “A week and a half a dozen of us. And the kids are cop-shy. The ones I talked to—”
Cook told, briefly, of his interviews with students and teachers at Clayton High School.
“After school,” Shapiro said, “he seems to have worked. For Mrs. Singleton. Maybe at other jobs. Limit his social life.”
“Seems to have,” Cook said. “After the kids, and most of the teachers, left for the day, I went around to see the kid’s father. He—”
Cook told Shapiro about the kid’s father.
“Well,” Shapiro said. “Might account for the kid’s ways. Reaction against a father who hadn’t got much of anywhere. Including very far in school. He said that?”
“Yes.”
“And who beat up a man his wife was two-timing him with. And who maybe pulled a knife.”
“He says not,” Cook said. “We couldn’t find anybody— except this guy Brady—who’d say Baker pulled a knife. And nobody got cut.”
“Roy would have been seven or eight,” Shapiro said. “Old enough to know that his mother cleared out. That she didn’t die. But he said she was dead. Covering up, at a guess. Hurt and covering up the hurt. Baker says he didn’t know his son had a key to the Singleton house. But did know that there was money loose in a drawer somewhere. Money the cook could get to pay for groceries.”
Repeating things is a way of fixing them in the mind. It is Nathan Shapiro’s belief that a lot of things slip out of his mind unless he pins them there.
“He could have known about the key,” Cook said. “Could have got hold of it and had it copied. Could have found out from the kid that the servants, and Mrs. Singleton herself, were likely to be out on Sunday afternoons.”
“And,” Shapiro said, “got his own kid in a jam. In a way framed his own kid. Sort of man who would, you think, Tony?”
“I don’t know I’d put it past him,” Cook said. “Lots of people go out to see the Mets get walloped. No way of telling whether our friend Baker was one of them. Or was somewhere else.”
Shapiro nodded. He was shuffling, reading, copies of the reports turned in, through channels, by members of the precinct squad who had found people, and asked questions of people, the night before. According to Florinda James, cook, Mrs. Singleton put money in the drawer every Saturday. There was no fix
ed amount put in but it was not ever an especially large amount. “What she had loose in her purse,” Mrs. James had told the detective. It was usually, but not always, in small bills. How much was likely to be in the drawer at any given time? Maybe a hundred dollars. Maybe not more than fifty.
“Baker could have thought there was a lot more,” Cook said. “Of course, so could the kid.”
“You can get into the house through the basement,” Shapiro said. “Go upstairs into the kitchen. Or go out and up two or three steps into the garden. Baker wouldn’t have had to go through the garden and be seen by his son. Looks as if somebody is going to have to ask around at hardware stores which make keys, doesn’t it, Tony?”
“Give the precinct boys something to do,” Tony Cook said. “They—”
The telephone rang on Shapiro’s desk and Shapiro spoke his name into it. He listened. He said, “She there now, Lieutenant?”
Cook could hear the answer. It was, “Yeah. With her father.”
“We’ll sit in,” Shapiro said, and put the receiver back and stood up.
“Girl showed up at Charles Street,” he told Cook. “Says she was with Roy yesterday afternoon. At the Singleton house. In the garden. And—that she went with him when he went up to thank Mrs. Singleton. And that Mrs. Singleton was dead when they got there.”
Cook said he’d be damned.
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “You and me, Tony. Let’s get along.”
VIII
Shapiro identified himself to the desk sergeant at Charles Street. He said, “This girl who says she was with young Baker yesterday?”
The girl was in the squad room with Lieutenant Mulligan. And, the sergeant said, with her father. And the squad room was that way.
In the squad room, Mulligan was sitting at a desk in a corner. A man in a blue suit was sitting at one end of the desk, with a window behind him and a notebook on the desk in front of him. On wooden chairs, facing Mulligan across the desk, were a gray-haired man with very square shoulders and a girl with long blond hair—soft hair which rippled to her shoulders. Mulligan said, “’Lo,” with no marked enthusiasm to Shapiro and Tony Cook. Then he said, “Get yourselves chairs if you want to.”
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