Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Outright discharge, yes,” MacKenzie said. “A reasonable reduction in bail—well, we might go along.”

  “The kid’s father is a grocery clerk,” Dunlap said. “There’s no money. There’s no security a bondsman would look at.”

  “If I fixed bond at, say, five thousand?” the judge said.

  “A hundred to one,” Dunlap said, “the kid stays in storage. Five thousand, fifty thousand. What’s the difference? And he’s a nice kid, Frank. I mean Your Honor. Locked up with a bunch of guys who aren’t nice at all. When there’s nothing on him except, for God’s sake, he happened to be there. And—”

  “Save it for the jury, Clare,” Judge O’Brien said. “Would you oppose reduction to five thousand, Mac?”

  “We’d go along on that,” MacKenzie said.

  “As a matter of public relations?” O’Brien said. “Or because the girl’s story knocks the bottom out of your case? Considering who her father is? Or just because you agree with Clare here that five thousand or fifty thousand come to pretty much the same thing for the boy?”

  “You’ll have to ask the chief that,” MacKenzie said. “Or Bernie Simmons.”

  “You just came along to say the words?”

  “The office of the District Attorney, New York County, does not oppose a reasonable reduction in the bond fixed for Roy Baker, held as a material witness,” MacKenzie said. “It does oppose outright discharge of Baker.” He paused for a moment. Then he said, “Your Honor.”

  “Very well,” Judge O’Brien said. He pressed a button on his desk and, very quickly, the court clerk knocked and, told to come in, came in and said, “Your Honor?”

  “Order for reduction of bond in re Roy Baker, held as a material witness,” O’Brien said. “Draw it up for me to sign. The reduction is from the fifty thousand now set to five thousand.”

  “Thanks for nothing, Frank,” Clarence Dunlap said.

  But it did not turn out to be for nothing. At eleven o’clock that morning, Mrs. Raymond Franklin posted bail of five thousand dollars, by certified check, with the court clerk. By eleven-thirty, Roy Baker walked out of the House of Detention for Men. He went home and changed and still was in time, at Clayton High School, for his afternoon class in creative writing.

  Shapiro checked in late at Homicide South. He had been out late the night before. One of the advantages of a lieutenant’s rank is, within reason, leeway. That morning he felt no urgency. He was vaguely disappointed that he did not, but he was not surprised. A man, detective or other man, feels urgency when he is going somewhere and knows where he is going. Nathan Shapiro was not and did not.

  Routine suggested Kurt Morton, second husband of Jennifer Singleton. A man, possibly, with a grudge. But with, as Dorian Weigand had pointed out, a very aging grudge. Morton, Shapiro thought gloomily, would turn out to be a dead-end street. If he could find the street.

  There was a catch in that. The Manhattan directory listed some columns of Mortons but only one of them had “Kurt” as a first name. And that Kurt Morton had an address in Harlem and was listed as “Morton, Kurt, b” which was not encouraging. Shapiro dialed the number anyway and got “Yeah?” for an answer. Mr. Morton? He got, “You’re late, man. Dead two years.” It didn’t matter, after that, but Shapiro has curiosity, which is essential in his profession. The nature of the late Mr. Morton’s business? “What is this, anyhow?”

  “Just wondered,” Shapiro said. “Looking for another Morton, probably.”

  “Guess you are, man. We’re men’s furnishings here. Want to buy some shirts, maybe?”

  There are many trivial annoyances in the trade Shapiro follows; many small and scratchy details.

  There was no Kurt Morton at all in the Brooklyn directory, although there were three who were merely “Morton, K.” The Bronx and Queens directories got him no further, unless he—or Cook—were to check out all the “Morton, K’s.” There must be a quicker way to find this dead-end street. Then it came to Shapiro. Around something called The Players a good deal, a man named Temple had told Cook. A club of some sort, apparently. Shapiro looked it up and found a listing for “Players, The” on Gramercy Park, South. He dialed the number.

  Mr. Kurt Morton was a member of The Players. More, he was staying at The Players. Whether he was at the moment in the club—

  “Rather important I get in touch with him,” Shapiro said.

  Mr. Morton’s room could be tried. It was tried. Mr. Morton did not appear to be in it. If it was really important—a part perhaps?—Mr. Morton almost always lunched at the club. A message could be left for Mr. Morton at the bar. Or—

  “Wait a minute. I’ll step out and have a look.”

  Shapiro waited a little less than a minute.

  “Just came down,” the man at The Players said. “Should I ask him to come to the telephone?”

  “Will he be there long, would you think?”

  “Well,” the man at The Players said, “I shouldn’t wonder, Mr.—?”

  Shapiro did not supply a name.

  “An hour or so at a guess,” the man said. “Mr. Morton is, I believe, at liberty just now. Er, between engagements. If it’s about a part I’m sure he’d be glad—”

  “I may catch him there,” Shapiro said, and said, “Thanks,” and hung up. The man at the club was surprisingly forthcoming. Possibly Morton, who was “between engagements,” had asked him to be.

  Nathan Shapiro was half up from his desk to start a crosstown walk to Gramercy Park when Bill Weigand came out of his office, looked around the squad room and said, “Oh, Nate. Come in a minute. Right?”

  Shapiro went in.

  “Young Baker’s bond’s been reduced,” Weigand told him in the small office. “From fifty grand to five. And, it’s been posted, Nate. Want to guess who posted it?”

  “I’m no good at guessing,” Shapiro said.

  “Mrs. Franklin. Mrs. Raymond Franklin. The mother of the girl you don’t believe, Nate. Because Ellen begged her to? Because Ellen thinks he’s a cat who’s out of sight?”

  “A—” Shapiro said and then, “Oh. It could be, Bill.”

  “Or,” Weigand said, “because she believes her daughter, without being begged to? And, maybe, thinks we’re being too tough on a boy her baby is crazy about? A guy who’s groovy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Interesting, sort of, it should be Mrs. Franklin who came up with the bond money. Not her husband.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “But Franklin was, I think, against his daughter’s telling this story of hers at all. And, doesn’t approve of the girl’s going to public school and mixing around with all sorts of kids.”

  “‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes’?”

  “At a guess. It was the mother, according to Franklin, who insisted on Ellen’s going to Clayton High. I gathered Franklin didn’t approve. Just went along.”

  “Five thousand,” Weigand said, “is a good deal to stake on a kid you don’t know anything about.”

  “Maybe it isn’t a good deal to her,” Shapiro said. “But I don’t see that it ties in to anything, do you?”

  “No,” Weigand said. “Not even a loose end. But we might—”

  “Oh, yes,” Shapiro said. “I’ll ask her why she’s decided to be a fairy godmother. After I see a man about a part.”

  Weigand raised eyebrows. Shapiro told him about Kurt Morton and his own impression—which probably was mistaken—that Morton had feelers rather anxiously out for a job. “Because,” Shapiro said, “not that I know anything about clubs, but this guy at The Players—manager or whatever—was very outgoing about Morton’s being between engagements.”

  "So?”

  “So nothing, probably. Only, if he’s been out of work for a long time, and badly needs to get a part, it might make him—well, broody. Broody over better days and, could be, bitter about the woman who ended them.”

  “A hunch, Nate?”

  “Just curiosity,” Nate Shapiro said. “Like we’ve all go
t, Bill. Like the book says we’re supposed to have.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Go satisfy it, Nate.”

  Heat had settled on New York and the air was heavy. The air caught in the throat and in the lungs. There had been a breeze at the start of the day, but the breeze had given it up.

  Nathan Shapiro walked across town in the heat to see a man who might bear a grudge.

  A detective does a lot of walking, shoe soles rasping on cement. He climbs stairs and rings doorbells and asks questions and most of the answers to his questions get him nowhere. Tony Cook had started early at doorbell ringing and so had Detective (2nd gr.) Lawrence Simpson, also of Homicide, Manhattan South. And so, cooperating, had Detectives Holmes and Watson, of the precinct squad. Holmes and Watson often worked as a team. Somebody had once thought it appropriate.

  They shared the houses in Hunter Street, which ran a block north of the part of Van Allen Street which is called Point Street. Rear apartments on Hunter Street, in that block, have windows from which anyone with enough interest, and time on his hands, can look across back yards at what goes on in rear apartments in Point Street.

  The building on Hunter Street which was directly opposite the Singleton house reached up ten stories into, that day, murky air. On each floor there were two rear apartments. Holmes and Watson rang twenty doorbells. Eight of them were not answered.

  People are, reasonably enough, suspicious of men who come around asking questions. People, reasonably enough, want to see badges. It all takes time. It is generally a waste of it.

  “We weren’t home Sunday. Weekends in the summer we mostly go to the country. It’s lovely in the country this time of year. Up in Putnam County we have a little place—just a cabin, really—and Tom gets to play tennis and—”

  That was a blond young woman in shorts and halter, answering Ralph Watson, who was in a somewhat wrinkled gray suit, and who said, “Yes’m. Must be nice in the country. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “It hasn’t been any bother, really,” the blond young woman said. “I’m just sorry we can’t help. It was such a dreadful thing to happen. And right over there, too.”

  She went to a window and looked out of it; looked down at a fenced place where flowers grew. “And to think,” she said, “all the time we’ve lived here we didn’t know the house over there was Mrs. Singleton’s!”

  “Think we’ve got nothing to do but watch our neighbors?” a man on the seventh floor asked Detective Arthur Holmes. “Anyway, we were at a movie Sunday afternoon. Had a late lunch and went to a movie. Didn’t get back until around six.”

  “Why, yes,” a rather sagging woman on the sixth floor told Detective Holmes. “I often look down at Mrs. Singleton’s garden. It’s so nice to see things kept up for a change. It’s so nice to see flowers in the city.”

  “Sunday afternoon?”

  “When was Sunday?”

  Holmes told her when Sunday had been. She said, “Of course. Wasn’t it a dreadful thing? About poor Mrs. Singleton, I mean?”

  Holmes agreed it was a dreadful thing. Had she seen, Sunday afternoon, a young man working in the garden? And had she, perhaps, seen him go into the house at any time and come out of it again? About—oh, say about four-thirty? And had she seen anybody else with him in the garden? A girl, maybe?

  “Sunday?” she said. “Oh, Sunday—of course. My bridge club was meeting here. Eight of us, you know. From about three—except that Mrs. Bridges was late and that held us up, because it’s duplicate, actually—until it must have been after six. And of course, because I was the hostess, I had to do the tea and things. You know how it is.”

  “Play poker myself,” Holmes said, more or less involuntarily. “But sure, I see how it was. No time to be looking out windows.”

  Holmes and Watson met on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house. They compared blanks. The residents of the Hunter Arms had been inattentive to activities of their neighbors on Sunday afternoon, when they had been home that Sunday afternoon.

  “One guy on the tenth floor,” Holmes said, “I wouldn’t put past using binoculars. But he says he was at the ball game Sunday.”

  They separated; went to the buildings on either side which adjoined the Hunter Arms and also had rear windows. Neither of them expected much to come of it.

  Tony Cook and Larry Simpson rang doorbells of houses which adjoined the landmark mansion which had been Jennifer Singleton’s. A maid in a black uniform answered the doorbell Cook rang. The family had gone to the country for the summer. Yes, she had been there Sunday afternoon. Watching TV. And if she hadn’t been, did they think she’d have been spying on the neighbors?

  “Hear anything from the house next door?”

  “I told you, I had the TV turned on. Like what?”

  “A woman crying out,” Cook said. “A woman screaming?”

  “From next door,” she said, “we don’t never hear anything. I’ll say that for these old houses. The walls are thick.”

  The middle-aged couple who lived in the house on the other side of the Singleton house had been in it Sunday. And they had sat for a while on their balcony, which, at an angle, overlooked Jennifer Singleton’s garden. But that had been when they were having drinks before lunch. “We do on Sundays. It’s rather a special thing for Kenneth and me.”

  From about one until a little after two they had been on their balcony. Yes, they had seen a young man working in the garden next door. A young man with blond hair? An all-right-looking boy, really. Was he the one? He looked—oh, so nice and clean. So different from a lot of the kids one saw around. Was he really the one who did it?

  “We’re trying to find out,” Simpson told her. “There wasn’t a girl with him while you were on the balcony?”

  “No. Just the boy.”

  “And later. Did you and your husband happen to look out later?”

  They had not. After drinks and lunch they had taken naps. “We usually do on Sundays. Unless we go out, of course. Or have friends in.”

  They had heard nothing? At, say, around five? Nothing from the house next door?

  “It was warm,” Mrs. Kenneth Lambert said. “We had closed the windows and turned the air conditioning on. And, anyway, our bedrooms are on the street side.”

  A lot of steps to take on gritty cement in increasing heat. A lot of doorbells to ring. As, dividing the job, they went from house to house on the south side of Point Street, moving away from the Singleton house, the chance of turning up anything grew fainter. They needed a miracle—needed, for example, someone who had been walking home late on a Sunday afternoon and had seen somebody go into the Singleton house at around four or four-thirty, through front door or basement door. Seen somebody who could be described. Seen a girl going to the basement door, and a boy meeting her there and letting her in. Seen a man or a woman using a key to open that door, or the front door. Nobody was passing miracles for policemen.

  They met again in mid-block, where two narrow houses faced the house in which Jennifer Singleton had died. Numbers 277 and 279, the houses were. Cook went up three scrubbed white steps at No. 277 and rang the doorbell.

  He did not need to wait long. A blue-eyed girl of about twelve opened the door. She had blond hair to her shoulders and she looked a little, Cook thought, like the Tenniel drawings of a girl named Alice. Of course, Alice did not wear shorts and a halter. The child looked up at Cook and shook her head and the blond hair swayed on her shoulders with the movement.

  “Grandfather says we don’t want any,” the girl said and started to close the door. Cook stopped it with a foot and said, “Any what?”

  “Any anything,” the girl said. “Brushes or books or anything. I want to close the door.”

  “No brushes,” Cook said. “No books. I’m a detective. I want to ask some questions.”

  “Nobody’s done anything,” the girl said. “Go away.”

  “Your mother?” Cook said. “Or father or—or anybody?”

  “They don’t li
ve here,” the child said, with impatience in her young voice. “They’re in South America. Almost all the time they’re in South America.”

  “Who does live here?” Cook asked her.

  “It’s my grandfather’s house,” the girl said. She tried again to push the door shut and again Cook’s foot stopped it.

  “You and your grandfather,” Cook said. “Who else, sister?”

  “You’re nosy,” the child said. “What do you mean you’re a detective?”

  “Just that,” Cook said. “And we’re paid to be nosy, young lady. You and your grandfather and—”

  “Grandfather’s nurse, of course. And there’s Amy. That’s all who live here when mother and father are in South America, as they mostly are. Annie comes in twice a week to help with the cleaning but she doesn’t count. Not really. Not that she isn’t nice. You don’t look like a detective to me. Not like the ones on television.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cook said. “I’d like to talk to—”

  A voice interrupted him. It was a strong, deep voice and came down from above.

  “Who’re you talking to, girl?” the man with the deep voice said.

  The girl turned away, and as she turned pulled the door open. Cook looked into an entrance hall with a flight of stairs rising at the end of it. The voice, he thought, had come down the stairs from probably, the floor above.

  “He says he’s a detective,” the girl said. “That’s what he says, grandpa.”

  “Tell him we don’t want—” the man with the deep voice said and then, “What do you mean a detective?”

  “That’s what—” the girl began and Cook stepped into the entrance hall and raised his voice. He said “Police detective, sir. About the murder across the street. Just part of the routine inquiry, sir. To see if anybody—any of the neighbors— saw or heard any—”

  “Elizabeth,” the man upstairs said, “bring him up here. No, wait. Tell him to show you his badge, if he’s a policeman.”

  “He says—” the child who was named Elizabeth, not Alice, told Cook. He had his badge out by then and held it toward her, cupped in his hand. She looked and took it out of his hand and turned it over and looked at the other side. Then she gave it back.