Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  They got themselves chairs and found space for them around the desk, Shapiro where he could see the girl who had, from Mulligan’s grumpy attitude, thrown a monkey wrench into the machinery. She was a very pretty girl and looked to be sixteen or so. She had blue eyes, and above them her forehead, very white, rose straight to the soft hair. It was the kind of forehead which makes some women look innocent as long as they live, almost as if they always remained, in essence, babies.

  The man beside her had a long rigid face, and it was set sternly. He looked sternly at Shapiro and Cook as they pulled chairs up, making a narrow circle about the desk.

  “My daughter,” the man said, “has told you what she insisted on telling. I see no reason why she should be required to tell it again.” He looked even more sternly at Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro.

  “Mr. Raymond Franklin,” Mulligan said. “And his daughter Ellen. This is Lieutenant Shapiro. And—” He looked at Cook and shrugged heavy shoulders. Cook gave his name. Mulligan repeated it after him. “Detective Anthony Cook.” Franklin looked unrelentingly at Shapiro and at Cook. He did not say anything to either of them. But the girl said, “Please, Father. I want to tell them whatever they want to know. Because Roy is my friend and they’re making a dreadful mistake. A perfectly dreadful mistake.”

  The girl’s voice was light and very young. When she said “dreadful mistake” tears came into her eyes and she blinked at them. She had long eyelashes, darker than her hair. Her face was soft with youth, as her voice was soft. But her cheekbones were evident under the softness and the delicate bones of her jaw gave definition to the young face.

  “Says she was with the Baker kid yesterday,” Mulligan said. He had a heavy, grating voice. “Watching him garden. And—go ahead and tell them, Miss Franklin. What you told me.”

  “Roy and I are friends,” the girl said. “And he knows how I am about flowers.”

  “About flowers?” Shapiro said.

  “I love them,” the girl said. “Simply love them. And where we live there aren’t any, of course.”

  “Lower Fifth,” Mulligan said, and gave an address. The address would put the Franklins very close to the Square. Close to the square the apartment houses on the east side of the avenue are new and large—and, Shapiro thought, expensive.

  “You go to Clayton High?” Shapiro asked the girl.

  “It’s her mother’s idea,” Franklin said. “Some nonsense about her meeting all kinds of boys and girls her age. My wife is very democratic.”

  He spoke with what sounded like forced forbearance. His voice was gritty, like his face.

  “Met Roy there?” Shapiro said and then, while the girl nodded her head so that the heavy blond hair swayed around it, “About yesterday, Miss Franklin?”

  “It wasn’t the only time,” the girl said. “Roy told me about Mrs. Singleton’s garden and how pretty it was and I asked him if he’d take me with him sometime. He didn’t see why not, and so when the tulips were first out he let me go with him. That was a Sunday too. He said he didn’t think Mrs. Singleton would mind and that anyway she probably wouldn’t be there, because she mostly wasn’t on Sundays. We went in through the basement, but that was all right, and the tulips were lovely. Just lovely. Yellow and white and some of them striped red and white.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “What he said were annuals,” the girl said. “I don’t know the names of them. Sometime I’m going to have a garden of my own and grow all—”

  “We plan to buy a place in the country,” Franklin said. “The city is becoming almost—” he paused for a moment— “intolerable,” he said. “Not in the least the way it was when I was young.”

  It is difficult to keep people on the subject. It is a difficulty to which policemen become accustomed.

  “Yesterday?” Shapiro said, with sad patience. “About yesterday, Miss Franklin?”

  Pinned to it, the girl was succinct.

  She had not gone with Roy Baker. “Because I had to go to this luncheon with Mother.” But she had gone about four o’clock, and had rung the basement bell and Roy had come and let her in and they had gone to the garden and she had sat on a bench and looked at flowers and watched Roy work among them. “Oh,” she said, “and we talked.”

  She didn’t know how long she had watched the tall boy working in the garden. “Cultivating, they call it.” She thought it might have been about an hour. Then Roy said, “That does it, Ellie.” (“He calls me Ellie. Because we’re friends.”) He had also said that, after he picked up his money, he would walk her home.

  “We went into the kitchen,” the girl said. “And there were two envelopes on the table and money in both of them.”

  “That was in the papers,” Mulligan said. “What Baker claimed. You read about this in the papers, Miss Franklin? What the kid says about money in envelopes?”

  “I saw them,” Ellen Franklin said. “Just like I say. Daddy, why don’t they believe me?”

  Franklin didn’t say anything.

  “You tell anybody about this, Miss Franklin?” Mulligan asked her. “Your father? Your mother?”

  “I guess not. Father—he doesn’t like me to what he calls get mixed up in things. Do you, Daddy?”

  “No,” Franklin said. “I do not, Ellen.”

  “So I didn’t tell anybody,” the girl said. “Because I didn’t know they were going to say these dreadful things about Roy.”

  “Two envelopes,” Shapiro said. “He opened them?”

  “One of them had something written on it,” the girl said. “When he opened that one he said, ‘Gee, she’s wonderful.’ Something like that, anyway. And then that he’d go up and leave her a note or something to thank her.”

  “Which also was in the papers,” Mulligan said, to nobody in particular. “What he said.”

  “He suggest you go up with him?” Shapiro asked the girl. He had not. But, “I’d read about the house and I thought it would be all right if I went with him and saw it myself. And he said he guessed it would be all right. It’s a beautiful house. So-so big and everything.”

  “It is a beautiful house,” Shapiro said. “You went upstairs with him?”

  Suddenly, then, the girl leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. She began to shake her head, and her slender body shook.

  Her father put a hand on one of the shaking shoulders.

  “I can’t talk about it,” the girl said. “It was so dreadful. I-”

  Her voice was choked.

  “Ellen,” her father said, “it was what you insisted you had to do. Had a duty to do. A responsibility. Your mother and I accepted that. However unpleasant it might turn out to be.”

  He looked at Mulligan and then at Shapiro. “However unpleasant,” he said, his voice scratching.

  “You went upstairs with Roy,” Shapiro said. “Tell me about the stairs, Ellen.”

  “I don’t know what you mean about the stairs,” Ellen said. “Just—stairs. Wide stairs. I mean the stairway was wide.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “You went up the stairs with him. Then?”

  She pressed her fingers to her forehead. Her body moved with the deepness of the breath she drew in. When she spoke, she spoke very rapidly.

  “He said,” Ellen Franklin told them, “he’d call first, because she might have got home. He said, ‘Mrs. Singleton?’ and then said it again, a little louder. And then he knocked at the door and when he knocked it opened. And there she—she—” Again she moved her head from side to side, apparently in rejection. “She was lying on the floor,” Ellen said. “And there was—I guess it was blood on—on the rug and—”

  She stopped again. They waited this time.

  “Roy ran in,” Ellen said. “I stayed there at the door. He got down on his knees beside her and then he said, ‘Ellie, she’s hurt. Dead, maybe. Anyway, it’s awful.’ And then he started to turn—to turn her over on her back and then he said, speaking very loud, ‘Go home, Ellie. You mustn’t get mixed up in this. Go h
ome!’”

  “And?” Shapiro said.

  “I felt all sick,” the girl said. “I just went down the stairs —and—and back into the kitchen, I guess. And out through the basement. I kept feeling I was going to be sick. All the way home I felt that way.” She lifted her head, then. “When I got home I was,” she said. “Dreadfully, dreadfully sick. It was all so—so awful. The way she looked and—the blood and everything. And—”

  She stopped speaking and, again, covered her face with her hands.

  “We’re having the kid brought over,” Mulligan said. “See what he says about all this. On account of it’s sort of funny he didn’t say anything about Miss Franklin here being with him.”

  The girl looked up and looked at Mulligan.

  “He wanted to keep me out of it,” she said. “That’s why he told me to go home. So that I wouldn’t—” She ended that with a shake of her head. “Maybe,” she said, “he’ll say I wasn’t there at all. That I’m making it up.”

  “He’s that kind of boy?” Shapiro asked her. “A boy who would keep you out of it even if it was bad for him?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. He’s a wond—”

  They waited for her to finish the obvious word. She did not.

  “While you were in the garden with him,” Shapiro said, “did he go into the house at any time?”

  “No,” she said. “Not ever. Not ever once.”

  Franklin stood up, then. He was a long, lean man with thin, square shoulders.

  He said, “That’s all you want of her, isn’t it?” and spoke to Mulligan. “She’s a child. She’s had about all she—”

  He stopped because Mulligan was moving his heavy head from side to side.

  “No,” Mulligan said, ‘like to have her repeat this with the boy here.”

  “You’ll—force her to stay?”

  Mulligan looked at Shapiro.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “If you mean physically, no, Mr. Franklin. If you want to take her home now, you can. No charge against her. We can bring the boy over to your apartment, if you’d rather have it that way. Because we do have to see what he says to this. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Franklin sat down again. They waited. They did not have long to wait. While they waited, Ellen Franklin put her folded arms on Mulligan’s desk and put her head down on them.

  A patrolman brought Roy Baker into the squad room. Baker wore a white shirt, open at the throat. He wore a blue denim jacket which fitted lumpily over his shoulders, which he held back resolutely. A little too resolutely, Shapiro thought. He was bracing himself. And he looked very young; as young as the girl who did not, at first, lift her head.

  “Baker,” the patrolman said, making the obvious clear to everybody.

  The girl lifted her head then and turned in her chair and looked up at the tall boy. She said, “Hello, Roy,” and her voice was uncertain.

  The boy said, “Hello, Ellie.”

  “I’ve told them, Roy,” Ellen Franklin said, and she began to hurry her words. “I’ve told them everything about it. I—”

  Roy Baker stood erect and looked down at her and they all—all except the police stenographer in the blue suit—looked up at him. They saw his eyebrows go up and his head move, almost jumpily, from side to side.

  “Told them what?” Roy said. “Everything about what?”

  His voice had been warm, had had brightness in it, when he said hello to the girl. Now it was distant, without inflection.

  “About yesterday,” the girl said, and again spoke rapidly. “About my being in the garden with you and going upstairs with you and that after I got there at four o’clock—only it was earlier than that, really—you didn’t go into the house at all and—”

  “Ellie,” the boy said in the same detached voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean Mrs. Singleton’s garden?”

  “No, Roy,” the girl said. “You mustn’t any more. Because, I’ve told them, Roy. Just the way it happened.”

  They kept on looking up at the tall boy. He shook his head again. He said, “I don’t get it, baby. I sure don’t get it. What would you be doing in the garden? I don’t get it.” He shook his head again.

  “You don’t want to get me mixed up in anything so—so awful,” Ellen said. “That’s why you say that. But, don’t you see, I am what you call mixed up in it. And if you didn’t go into the house from before four—maybe it was around three-thirty really—until we both went in and found her, you couldn’t have—have done anything to her.”

  “Ellie,” the boy said, “you’re a crazy kid. Just crazy, baby.”

  With that, the warmth came back into his young voice. He moved a step forward and, Shapiro thought, started to reach out toward her. His shoulders moved under the lumpy jacket. But then he stopped. He looked around at the men who looked at him. He ended by looking at Raymond Franklin. He said, “You’re her father, sir?”

  Franklin said, “Yes,” his voice scratching the word out.

  “Whyn’t you take Ellie home, sir?” the boy said. “She’s—she’s just a kid.” He looked at Ellen then and he said, “I love you. But you’re just a kid.”

  As he said that, color surged up under the gardener’s tan of his face.

  The girl looked up at him and color surged in her face, as it had in his.

  “You never said that before,” she said. “Never before.”

  She started to get up from her chair. As she turned it from the desk the chair grated on the floor. She was half up, facing the boy—most evidently on her way to the boy—when her father reached to her shoulder and pressed her back onto the chair. He said, “You’ve done enough already, Ellen.”

  She looked up at Shapiro. She sat tensely on the wooden chair, but did not try again to stand. Her father’s hand stayed on her shoulder, pressing down on it.

  “Don’t you see, sir,” the girl said to Shapiro, “he’s still just trying to keep me from being mixed up in—in something so ugly. Whatever happens to him. Because—you just heard what he said?”

  “Yes, Ellen,” Shapiro said. “I heard what he said.”

  “Then it’s because—because of that—that he’s—that he doesn’t care what happens to him as long as I—”

  Shapiro’s long face did not change. He did not shake his head. But the girl stopped speaking and merely looked up at him. There was, he thought, anxiety in her face—anxiety and a kind of eagerness.

  “Do you feel the same way about him?” Shapiro asked her.

  It was surprise in her face this time.

  “Why, of course,” Ellen Franklin said. “Of course. For months and months.”

  Roy again started to reach out toward the girl, but Franklin stood up.

  “Leave her alone, boy,” Franklin said, and his voice scratched again. “Just leave her alone.”

  He pulled his daughter up from the chair and he looked around at Mulligan, at Shapiro and at Cook.

  “I,” Franklin said, “am taking my daughter home. Whatever any of you say.”

  Mulligan looked at Shapiro and raised heavy eyebrows.

  “Yes, I think so,” Shapiro said. “For now, anyway.”

  “Roy,” the girl said. “Roy! You mustn’t—” Her light young voice went up. It strained at the words. But her father had pushed her across the room, by then, and to the door and had reached around her and pushed the door open. He kicked the door closed after them.

  “Well, Roy?” Shapiro said.

  “She’s my girl,” Roy said. “I want her to be my girl. But she’s all crazy mixed up.”

  “She wasn’t in the garden with you yesterday?”

  “No. She’s just trying—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “it may be that way. Did you ever take her into the Singleton garden when you were working there? To show her the flowers?”

  “Once,” Roy said. “Maybe two-three weeks ago. So she could see the tulips.”

  “Ask Mrs. Singleton if it would be all right?”

&nb
sp; “Yes. I asked her. And she said, ‘Flowers are meant to be looked at, boy.’ So I knew it would be all right.”

  “You want anything else from Baker?” Mulligan said across the desk.

  “Not right now,” Shapiro said.

  Mulligan got up and from behind his desk and took the tall, blond boy by the arm and across the room to the door. He opened the door and said, into the corridor, “O.K. Take him back.” Mulligan came back and sat down at the desk again.

  “Lying for him,” he said. “These kids nowadays. Crazy. Can’t believe anything they say.”

  “Maybe it’s that way,” Shapiro said. “Only, you’d think he’d have jumped at it, wouldn’t you? Said, sure she was there. Because if it’s the way she said it was, he couldn’t have killed Mrs. Singleton, could he? Because the M.E.’s man says she was killed not earlier than around four-thirty and they don’t slip up much.”

  “Only the kid didn’t,” Mulligan said. “Because, maybe, he figured we weren’t believing her anyhow and thought it would make him look good if he didn’t back her up. See what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, and stood up. “Rejection of offered sacrifice. Because if it came to court and she stuck to this, and it could be proved a lie, she’d be in for a perjury charge. Could have been that. You’ll check the girl out? Find out where she was yesterday? Because if she thought she could get away with this story of hers, she wouldn’t have been home, would she? Because she’s a bright kid, Lieutenant.”

  “Oh,” Mulligan said, “yes, I guess we’ve got to. Though, for my money, this doesn’t change anything.” He looked at the ceiling, apparently for further words. “What they call romantic,” Mulligan said. “Romantic gesture. That’s what they call it.”

  The familiar words came uncertainly from Lieutenant Mulligan’s heavy lips.

  “All the same, I’m not buying the girl’s story,” Cook said, as they walked away from the station house, and toward the nearest subway station. “You buying it, Nate?”

  “Apparently he had taken her there before,” Shapiro said. “I don’t think into the house. The staircase is quite a job, Tony. Would have made an impression, particularly on a pretty and, like Mulligan says, romantic girl. Didn’t on her.”