Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “It does,” she said up the stairs, “say ‘New York Police Department.’ And there’s a number on it. I guess maybe he’s a policeman.”

  “All right,” the man said. “Bring him up.”

  Elizabeth said, “Come on,” and started up the stairs and Cook went on after her. He went after her through an open door and into a room on the street side which was the width of the narrow house. Sunlight came through windows which reached from floor to ceiling. Shafts of sunlight lay on a polished floor. In the middle of the big room there was a man in a wheel chair. He was, Cook thought, very old. He had a round pink face and his white hair shone. A very clean white blanket covered his legs.

  He wheeled the chair nearer Cook and looked up at him. He said, “Let me see your badge, officer,” and reached a hand out. He had small, clean hands. He took the badge and looked at it and said, “Seems to be in order. My name’s Whitehall, by the way. What’s yours, son?”

  “Cook, attached to the homicide squad.”

  “Even in their houses people aren’t safe any more,” Whitehall said in the voice which seemed so much deeper than the man. He was a small man. “When I was young people were safe in their houses. How old do you think I am, Cook?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Cook said.

  “Eighty-three,” Whitehall said. “Old enough to be Liz’s great-grandfather. Only I’m not. Had a stroke two years ago and likely to have another, whatever Doc Reynolds says. What do you want me to tell you, young Cook?”

  “From here,” Cook said, “you have a good view of Mrs. Singleton’s house. Just whether you saw anything Sunday afternoon, Mr. Whitehall. Or—” he looked around the room. There was a low, wide bed in a corner. “Perhaps,” Cook said, “you were resting? At—oh, around four-thirty, say?”

  “Paralyzed,” Whitehall said. “Not senile. Not much time to waste sleeping, if that’s what you mean. Sit and watch the world go by. Not that much of it does in Point Street. Few years ago I’d watch it go by in Paris. In London. All over. Not always like this, young man. Lots to remember.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Cook said, looking down at the very clean old man who, immobilized, seemed somehow frisky; who sounded cheerful with little reason for cheer. Momentarily, and with something like guilt, Tony Cook felt the strength and flexibility in his own long legs.

  “About Sunday afternoon?” Cook said. “You were looking out your window?”

  “After they’d brought me lunch,” Whitehall said. “Yes. And I saw this kid run out of the house. Away from the cop on the beat. But cop yelled at him and the kid turned around and came back. Nice-looking kid. Seen him before once or twice. Going into Jenny’s house through the basement.”

  “Jenny’s?”

  “What everybody called her. Oh, I’d met her a few times. Been over there once or twice when I was still getting around. Damned handsome woman, Jennifer Singleton was. Damned good actress.”

  “Yes,” Cook said. “About when you were sitting by the window, Mr. Whitehall?”

  “General Whitehall, come down to it,” Whitehall said. “Retired a hell of a long time ago. Before you were born, could be. From about three o’clock, I suppose. Until perhaps six. At six they let me have a drink. And if I’ve been a good boy, a cigar. No cigarettes. Bad for my lungs. I say what the hell difference does it make and nurse says, ‘Now, General, we don’t want to worry Doctor, do we?’ Nothing I’d rather do, come down to it. As for Sunday, part of the time I was reading, you know. Ever read The Guns of August, Cook?”

  “No,” Cook said. “I never have, General.”

  “Probably seems as far away to you as the Trojan War,” Whitehall said. “Good book. If Von Kluck hadn’t turned east. But he did, didn’t he?”

  Cook was inclined to say, “If you say so, General.” Instead he said, “Look up from your book from time to time?”

  “Conscious of movement outside,” General Whitehall said. “Corners of your eyes, call it. I’ve got good eyes still, young Cook. They’ve left me that. What am I supposed to have seen? Outside the Singleton house. You can’t see into it. Look.”

  Cook did as he was told, through one of the tall windows. The equally tall and more numerous windows of the Singleton house were opaquely curtained. He turned back. Whitehall noiselessly, quickly, wheeled himself to the window and sat beside Cook.

  “Not supposed to see,” Cook said. “Anything you did see. A girl says she went into the house during the afternoon. Through the basement door. The boy may have let her in.”

  “No,” Whitehall said. “I didn’t see any girl. Which doesn’t prove there wasn’t one, does it? Pretty girl?”

  “Yes,” Cook said. “They say she’s pretty. See anybody go into the house that way, General? A man, perhaps?”

  “The boy,” Whitehall said. “But that was a lot earlier. Middle of the day some time. Weekdays service people go in that way. Grocery boys and cleaner’s boys and the like. Not much on Sundays. The boy was the only one I saw go in through the basement.”

  “Through the front door?”

  “Go in or come out?”

  “Either one, General.”

  “No. Except Mrs. Singleton herself, of course.”

  “When was that, General?”

  Cook asked the question very gently, as if he might, speaking otherwise, frighten away an answer.

  “Around four-thirty, at a guess. A little before, if Nurse Frittle was on time. Hell of a name for a nurse, isn’t it? For anybody, come to that.”

  “On time?”

  “Blood pressure every two hours. Not that they don’t know what I’m going to die of. Due at four-thirty. Jenny came home about then. A few minutes before, if Frittle was on the dot. Usually is, you know.”

  “Mrs. Singleton, General?”

  “Came in a cab,” General Whitehall said. “Sixteen-thirty or about then.”

  “Alone? And went into the house?”

  “Came alone, I’m pretty sure. But maybe the man came with her. Or maybe he’d just been waiting for her. I’ve a feeling that was it. Could be I’d seen him. Got a glimpse of him standing around in front of the house. Before the cab pulled up. Or, maybe, walking back and forth in front of it. Nothing I could swear to, Cook. But he did join her, if he wasn’t in the cab with her.”

  “Yes?” Cook said, still in the gentle tone. If you reach out too quickly, too eagerly, you may frighten. Not that this sprightly old man seemed likely to frighten easily. “This man joined her?”

  “The cab pulled up to the curb on her side,” Whitehall said. “Had her money ready, at a guess. Women don’t mostly. Didn’t in my day. Had to scrummage around through these bags they carry. She was quick, as if she’d had her money out for a block or two. Got out and the cab pulled away and there this man was. Held out his hand to her and said something.”

  “She take his hand? As if he were a friend, I mean?”

  “I think she did.”

  “Did they just stand there? As if they were a couple of acquaintances met by chance?”

  “That I can’t tell you,” General Whitehall said. “Because then Frittle came in with this gadget of hers and said, ‘Shall we turn ourselves around, General? For our light, you know.’ Talk the damnedest way, don’t they? So I turned my baby carriage around so the light would fall on her pressure gadget and she took my pressure.”

  “And?”

  “I said, ‘Do I win my cigar, Nurse?’ Because it’s always a secret between them and God or somebody. If it’s higher than usual, I don’t get the cigar. Got a match, Cook? Or a lighter?”

  Cook got a lighter out of his pocket. And General Whitehall got a cigar out from under the white blanket. “Want to close the door for me, Cook?” Whitehall said. “She snoops.”

  Cook walked across the big room and closed the door. The girl named Elizabeth was on the stair landing outside, looking in. He closed the door on her, rather expecting her to block it with a foot. She did not. He went back to the scrubbed little old man an
d lighted his cigar. Whitehall drew on it gratefully. It smelled to Cook like a good cigar.

  “This man,” Cook said. “What did he look like?”

  Whitehall blew fragrant smoke into the air and regarded it as it eddied there. But then he shook his head.

  “Not very big,” Whitehall said. “Of course, I was looking down on him, which can distort things like that. Had on a dark suit, I think. Oh, yes, he wore a hat. Pulled down over his forehead, I think. I can’t give you much to go on, Cook.”

  Then he looked at Cook keenly through his bright blue eyes—his strangely youthful blue eyes.

  “Thought it was this boy did it,” Whitehall said. “Sounded like that on TV and the radio. In the Times even. Not that the Times said so. Well, Cook?”

  “It may have been,” Cook said. “We look a lot of places, General. It’s possible this man may have gone into the house with her?”

  “I suppose so. Possible, I mean. When Frittle finished and said, ‘We’ll see about the cigar, won’t we, General?’ and got the hell out, I wheeled around and looked out the window. No sign of Jenny. Or the man. She’d have had time to go into the house. He’d have had time to walk out of sight. Or go in with her.”

  “Dark suit,” Cook said. “Hat. Dark hat, too?”

  “Yes. All I can tell you about it.”

  “Not very big, you said. Any idea how tall, General?”

  “No. As I said, I was looking down on him.”

  “Taller than Mrs. Singleton herself?”

  “Yes. But she was not at all tall, Cook. Off-stage, I mean. On-stage—well, she was as tall as she wanted to be. They can do that, Cook. Add cubits to their stature. They say Edwin Booth did that. But he was before even my time, young Cook. As not much is any more. I—”

  The door opened abruptly and a nurse, with the cap of her profession on the back of her head, came abruptly through it. From just inside the door she said, “General. We’re cheating!” She looked at Cook and frowned at him. She looked, Cook thought, as if her name might well be Frittle.

  “It is time,” Nurse Frittle said, “for General Whitehall to have his rest. Whoever you are.”

  XI

  Nathan Shapiro went down the staircase indicated to him and came to a long room with a bar across one end. There were cushioned benches along one wall leading from the bar, and a table with a round of cheese on it; there were chairs backing toward the rear of the room, where there was a pool table which two men were using. A man sat in one of several tall chairs set along the side of that part of the room and watched the players.

  There were four men standing at the bar with glasses in their hands. They were talking; they paid no attention to the tall, sad-faced man who came—a little tentatively, since he did not belong there—into the barroom of The Players Club. Shapiro said, “Mr. Morton?” not raising his voice because, however preoccupied, a man will hear his own name.

  The man who turned and looked at him and then said “Yes?” was a trim man and several inches under six feet. He wore a blue jacket with an insignia of some sort on the left breast. He had black hair, recently and carefully cut. He had wide cheekbones and, below them, his face went down in clean planes to the bones of a cleanly outlined jaw. For a moment, Shapiro thought he had seen him somewhere before. He could not remember where, or of whom the man reminded him. Then he thought, “Gage,” and, simultaneously, that he was wrong. This man did not look in the least like Gage. Except—Shapiro groped in his mind as Kurt Morton moved across the room to join him. He came up with the thought that both Kurt Morton and Joseph Gage had actor’s faces. Which wasn’t much to come up with. They both had decisive faces.

  Morton, in the few steps he took toward Shapiro, moved lightly, like a young man. But he could not be really young, if he was the right Morton. His hair was very black and his wide-set eyes were black too.

  He said, “Looking for me, Mr.—?”

  “Shapiro,” Shapiro told him. “Police lieutenant.”

  Morton said, “Oh,” and his decisive voice went a little less decisive. He said, “You the man who called up a while back? Wanted to see me?”

  “I called,” Shapiro said.

  Morton said, “Oh,” again, in the diminished tone he had used before. He said, “Thought it might be somebody else. One producer keeps hounding me. I keep telling him I’m not interested in the part. However. What can I do for you, Lieutenant? About poor dear Jenny? Haven’t seen her for a long time, Lieutenant. However.”

  He went toward the chairs at a round table and motioned, and Shapiro went after him. Morton still carried his drink. He sat down in one of the chairs and motioned toward another and said, “Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?”

  Shapiro shook his head.

  “You investigating poor dear Jenny’s taking off?” Morton asked him. There was a slight British intonation in his voice. “Thought you people had your man for that, Lieutenant. One of these hippy kids, I thought it was.”

  “We have to go through a good deal of routine,” Shapiro said. “You hadn’t seen your former wife for some time, you say?”

  “Oh,” Morton said, “in this play she was doing. Flimsy bit, for my money. Agee’s tapering off. May as well face it. But you didn’t mean that, did you? Hadn’t seen her, as her if you take me, for damn near a year. At a guess. Not exactly palsy, we haven’t been. Since we split up. Make any difference, since this hippy kid killed her?”

  “Cases like this,” Shapiro said, “we find out all we can about everybody. A lot of it, as you say, doesn’t make any difference. Some years ago you and Mrs. Singleton separated. Probably don’t know much about her life recently.”

  “What everybody knows,” Morton said. He finished his drink and put the empty glass down and said, across the room, “I’m running dry, Joe.”

  The bartender said, “Right along, Mr. Morton.”

  “Married Agee,” Kurt Morton said. “Then this twerp Gage. Still trying to be a juvenile, Gage-boy is. The lady got around, Lieutenant. That you have to say for Jenny. They say a lot of things, but that you’ve got to say.”

  “What things, Mr. Morton?”

  “From the way some of them talk,” Morton said, “you’d think she was Bernhardt and Duse and Hayes all rolled into one. With a bit of Cornell and maybe Bankhead worked in. Queen of the American stage. Actually heard her called that.”

  “She wasn’t all these—er—things?”

  “Oh,” Morton said, “part of the time she was good. When we were playing together she was sometimes pretty damn good. Not good comedy timing. I had to watch that. Play around it. Set the timing for her. But she could laugh herself out of almost anything. That I’ll give her.”

  The bartender brought Morton’s new drink to the table. It wasn’t, Shapiro thought, Morton’s second drink of the day, which was still an immature day. Or, possibly, his third.

  “You and Mrs. Singleton were a very famous team for some time, I understand,” Shapiro said. “I don’t know much about the theater, but I’ve heard that.”

  “You’re damned right we were,” Morton said. “Until—all right, until she got jealous.”

  Shapiro repeated the word.

  “Oh,” Morton said. “Professionally. Because there wasn’t any hiding it. So, I’m a conceited so-and-so. But for years I carried her and she knew it and when she figured she had it made she got so she didn’t like it.”

  “She seems to have done well enough after you and she split up,” Shapiro said. “In a good many plays, from what I hear. Starred in a good many. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Momentum,” Morton said. “I taught her a lot. Gave her a push, you might say. And she kept rolling along. Happens that way, sometimes. No telling what audiences will go for. And she did have that laugh. I don’t deny her that. And quite a few tricks, some of which we worked out together for her. And she had the looks. I don’t deny her that, either.”

  “But,” Shapiro said, “that she was a great actress. You do deny her that, Mr.
Morton. Anyway, it sounds as if you did.”

  “No evil of the dead,” Morton said. “That’s what they say, isn’t it? So—sure, Lieutenant, she was a great actress. And a lovely woman who didn’t look half her age. And the soul of generosity.” He drank deeply. “When there was something in it for her,” he said. Then he said, “Wash that last out, Lieutenant. Don’t want to give you ideas.”

  “After you and she quit acting together,” Shapiro said, “you kept on acting, I understand. Except, recently, not so often, somebody told me.”

  “When something comes along that I fall for,” Morton said. “Can afford to pick and choose, you know. Not take anything that somebody wants me for. Lot of trashy stuff around now. Things I wouldn’t touch. Not like Jenny. Anything she could do that gurgle in was good enough for Jenny.”

  “Gurgle?”

  “All right, gurgling laughter.”

  “Recently,” Shapiro said, “I understand you haven’t found many plays you thought were worth appearing in? Many that, as you say, you fell for?”

  “Not for a season or two,” Morton said. “Have to keep my standards up, if you know what I mean.”

  “But when you and Mrs. Singleton were acting together—famous together, way I understand it—you appeared in a good many plays. More good plays available in those days?”

  “We were a team,” Morton said. “Writers tailored plays for us. Plays with two good leads. Those days, you got the Mortons to sign and you pretty much had it made. If you wrote plays, or produced them. Mostly Les Agee wrote our plays. Pretty good he was, in those days.”

  Morton drank from his glass.

  “You getting anywhere with all this?” he asked Shapiro. “Ancient history, I’d think. I suppose you know your business, but I’d think we were getting rather far afield.”

  “Just background,” Shapiro told him. “Hard to tell sometimes what may turn out to be pertinent. Just trying to get the picture, Mr. Morton. From different angles, call it. For example, what you say about Mrs. Singleton as an actress is a bit different from what other people have told us.”