Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “I acted with her,” Morton said. “Worked things out with her. And was married to her.”

  “Sure,” Shapiro said. “Speaking of the marriage, Mr. Morton. Which of you decided to end it?”

  “Any of your business?”

  “Probably not. You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to, Mr. Morton. I would rather like to know.”

  “Call it mutual,” Morton said. “Mutual agreement to disagree.”

  “Whatever you say,” Shapiro said. “She didn’t, say, fall in love with Agee and walk out on you?”

  “Nothing like that. Oh, she did marry Agee. Sure. On the rebound.”

  “And Agee went on writing plays for her,” Shapiro said. “The way you say he did for both of you as a team.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not plays with parts in them for you?”

  “Nothing I’d touch. I told you he’s gone off in recent years.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I know you told me that, Mr. Morton. And that you’re choosy about the plays you appear in. This producer you thought might have been the one telephoned you today. After you to appear in a play, you said. A play, you think, you might like to appear in?”

  “Haven’t read it,” Morton said. “He wants me to. So how do I know? And, what are you getting around to, anyway?”

  “Just trying to get the picture,” Shapiro said. “Were you in a play last season, Mr. Morton?”

  “No. Had plenty of offers, but as I told you—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “How about the season before last?”

  “Well, they decided not to bring that one in. Didn’t jell. And the director and Jamey managed to louse it up between them.”

  “Jamey?”

  “James Bouton. He had the lead. And upstaged everybody, like always.”

  “What kind of part did you have, Mr. Morton?”

  “Good part. One a real actor could get his teeth into. Not the biggest in the show. I don’t say that. But one I could feel my way into.”

  Shapiro said he saw, which was not entirely true. He said, “Since you and Mrs. Singleton—Mrs. Morton then, of course—split up, how many plays have you had parts in, Mr. Morton? Or would you rather I’d look it up?”

  Morton leaned forward across the table. He brushed his almost empty glass so that it teetered, but he caught it before it fell. He said, “I’ve had about enough of this. This prying into what’s none of your goddamn business.”

  “All right,” Shapiro said. “Does for an answer, doesn’t it? Something that is my business, Mr. Morton. Mind telling me where you were Sunday evening? Around five, say?”

  “So that’s it,” Morton said. “After all this beating about the bush.”

  “Part of it,” Shapiro said. “Always part of it. Well? Here?”

  “Where I wasn’t,” Morton said, “was at Jenny’s house killing her.”

  “Where you were?”

  “Had lunch here. Went up to my room afterward for a siesta. Get sleepy after lunch.”

  “In your room from about when to about when?”

  “Three-thirty. Maybe four. Until about six. Want to know what I did after that?”

  “Not particularly,” Shapiro said.

  “Open-house night,” Morton said. “Let the ladies in then. Dozens of people can tell you where Kurt Morton was then.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Shapiro said. “Don’t doubt it at all. You expect to stay here at the club for long, Mr. Morton?”

  “Any of your business?”

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “cases like this we like to know where people are likely to be.”

  He left it there and climbed the stairs out of the barroom. He had the feeling that Morton was staring at him as he went up the stairs, and that there would be dislike, even bitterness, in Morton’s black eyes.

  Morton was, Shapiro thought, as he walked in search of a sidewalk telephone booth, a bitter man. Conceivably, he was a man who had brooded over the collapse of a career which had once been shining. Brooded and blamed? Felt bitterness?

  That, as he walked away from Gramercy Park, seemed possible to Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro. But that it was enough did not seem very likely.

  Of course, Shapiro thought, as he shut the door of a telephone booth behind him, I don’t know anything about people like these. Don’t know what they are capable of. As usual, I’m the wrong man for the job.

  Mrs. Raymond Franklin was not at home. She was at a luncheon of the Village Preservation Association. She probably would be home early because it was her day to have the discussion group and the group’s time was three. About two-thirty, she’d be home, probably. Not later or much later. Yes, she would be told that Lieutenant—what was the name again?—Lieutenant Shapiro would like to talk to her for a few minutes. And that he would like her to call him back to fix a time when she might be free. At?

  Shapiro gave the number, and repeated it while she—unidentified, except that she had said “Mrs. Franklin’s residence” with a maid’s rising inflection—wrote the number down.

  Shapiro had a hot dog at a counter and a cup of tea to wash it down. He was finishing the tea and having a cigarette with it when something occurred to him. It was only a glimmer of a something. He found another telephone box and a Manhattan telephone directory and Temple Productions, with an address in the Forties. He spun another dial.

  Who wished to speak to Mr. Temple? Oh, police business. Probably Mr. Temple was out to lunch. If—what was the name again?—would wait a moment she would ring his office. Possibly his secretary—

  A man said, “Temple.” Then he said, “Same detective was here yesterday? Told him all I had to tell.”

  “No,” Shapiro said, “not Detective Cook, Mr. Temple,” and said who it was and said he would like a few minutes of Mr. Temple’s time.

  “Tomorrow,” Temple said. “I’m just going to lunch. And I’m tied up for the rest of the day. See you tomorrow about—”

  “Perhaps,” Shapiro said, “we can clear a small point up on the telephone. Not more than five minutes.”

  Temple said, “Shoot. And make it short.”

  “About an actor named Kurt Morton,” Shapiro said. “Used to be married to Mrs. Singleton. Acted together and—”

  “For God’s sake, man,” Temple said. “I know all that. Produced their plays. So what about Morton?”

  “Is he a good actor?”

  “Yes. Used to be damn good sometimes.”

  “He hasn’t acted much lately?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Hard to say precisely. People got to thinking of him as part of a team. No team, couldn’t visualize him alone. Not at his salary, anyway.”

  “You yourself, Mr. Temple?”

  Temple said he didn’t get it.

  “Haven’t had a—script, that’s the word, isn’t it—with a part in it for Mr. Morton? One you thought of producing. Perhaps even talked to him about?”

  It was, Temple said, funny he should ask that. Shapiro waited to be told why it was funny.

  “Les Agee’s working on a script now,” Temple said. “Rough at the moment. But I’ve got an option on it. I was thinking of putting it on with Jenny starred after Always Good-bye finished. Down the drain that is, now, of course. It’s got a part in it that’d be right for Kurt. If I decide to do it when Les gets through fiddling with it, and if I can get somebody who can do the Jennifer Singleton role, I may give him a shot at it.”

  “With an actress not Mrs. Singleton,” Shapiro said. “Not if she hadn’t been killed? I mean, not with Morton in it?”

  “Oh,” Temple said, “I thought of that. Would have had some publicity value. The ‘together again’ sort of bilge. Not that they’d have been a team again. Part I had in mind for Kurt isn’t a lead part. Don’t know, actually, whether he’d have taken it with Jenny starred, on his uppers as he probably is.”

  “You talked to him about it?”

  “No. Did talk to Jenny, poor darlin
g. Showed her part of Les’s rough. Wanted her part built up, of course. Like they all do.”

  “Did you mention the chance you might hire Morton for a part in this play?”

  “Sounded her out,” Temple said. “She nixed it. Good and hard she nixed it. Said I must be out of my ever-loving. Said didn’t I know Kurt was a has-been? Said if Kurt was going to be in the show I’d have to get me another girl.”

  “Which you weren’t going to do?”

  “To be in my business,” Temple said, “you’ve got to be a little crazy, Lieutenant. But you don’t have to be that crazy. You don’t trade a Jennifer Singleton for a Kurt Morton. Look—people I’m having lunch with are backers. Backers, man!”

  “Just one more thing,” Shapiro said. “Would Mr. Morton have known his former wife had, as you say, nixed him for this role?”

  “He might have, I suppose. Jenny, poor darling, was pretty steamed up. She may have talked about it. And things, God knows, get around in the profession.”

  “With Mrs. Singleton out of the picture, he might get this part if you put on the play Mr. Agee is working on?”

  “If I go on with it. Find somebody for Jenny’s role. Yes, I may give him a shot at it. And now, for God’s sake, I’ve—” “Yes, Mr. Temple. Thanks for your time.”

  Tony Cook called in. Lieutenant Shapiro was out somewhere. Cook went in and typed a report, with carbons, about his interview with General (Ret.) Whitehall. What had for a few minutes seemed important seemed to shrivel in typescript. Mrs. Jennifer Singleton had, half an hour or so before she was killed, met a small man as she got out of a taxi in front of her house. Had, perhaps, talked to him for a minute or two. No useful description of the man, except that he wasn’t big and wore a dark suit and a hat. A neighbor who was also an acquaintance, out for a stroll on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Hundred to one he had said good afternoon to an acquaintance and continued his stroll.

  Cook had lunch and went to Centre Street and talked a face to a man with a pencil. As he talked, by slow degrees, the moving pencil traced the face. “About so?” “Not quite so heavy.” That was of a jaw. “Like this?” “A bit higher, maybe.” That was of a left eyebrow. “Doesn’t show that much with his chin down.” That was about a scar. When no photograph is available, and the face Cook talked was not in the mug file, special members of the New York Police Department who have ready pencils put bits and pieces together and come up with faces. “He had a square sort of face,” one witness says. “His hair bushed out at the sides.” The trouble is, of course, that people usually don’t look much at other people—don’t really look.

  Tony Cook was a professional and one with a memory for faces. As he talked the face he wanted, he used a pencil of his own. “Something like this,” he said of an ear, and made lines which were something, if not much, like the lines of a human ear. The sketch artist, a sergeant, put an ear on the face which was slowly taking form. He said, “About like that?” “Pretty much,” Tony Cook said.

  It was done, finally. “Yes,” Tony Cook said, “that’s pretty much our baby.”

  Copies were made for distribution. Tony took one of them and went to work Sixth Avenue, which seemed the mostly likely street to work. Not that there weren’t, probably, thousands of places all over the city where keys were duplicated. Sixth Avenue would be handiest for a man who lived on Morton Street.

  It isn’t exciting to go from store to store and show a sketch of a man’s face and say, “Ever see this man around? Did he ever come in to have a key made? Copied?” Most of the things a policeman has to do aren’t particularly exciting, and nothing comes of most of them. For the most part, policemen just trudge along.

  (And once a good many policemen trudged from shop to shop, then too on Sixth Avenue, and showed storekeepers what was not even the sketch of a face—which was a chalk mark somebody had neglected to rub off a trunk which had a fresh body in it. And, four hours or so after the trunk, which had begun to leak blood, was left on an express company’s dock, they had the man who had bought a trunk from a shop on Sixth Avenue and put a body in it. Considerately, he had had the trunk delivered to a flat he had shared with the man he had decided would be better off dead.)

  Tony Cook trudged up the west side of Sixth Avenue and showed his sketch and asked his question. He got, “Sorry. Doesn’t ring any bell with me.” He got, “Man who cuts keys for us is off today.” He got, “Every day we get maybe a dozen people who want keys copied,” and then what was not quite a leer. “Girls want ’em for their boy friends. And the other way around. You know how it is.”

  Cook said he knew how it was and went on up the block and into another place with a sign, “Keys Made.” There was only one man in this store and Cook waited while he went, at the behest of a young woman in a very mini-skirt, to find something he thought he had somewhere. He came back, after a lapse of time, with a can of paint. “Gloss,” the young woman said. “Not what I want at all. I told you gloss wouldn’t do at all.”

  The man, after he had shrugged and sighed and returned the rejected can of paint to a rear room, looked at the sketch Cook showed him. He looked at it with greater care than the others had; he carried it to the front of the store where the light was better.

  He said, “I don’t know. Seems like I’ve seen him somewhere around. Don’t remember it was about a key. Seen him on the street around here, seems like. Or—hold it a minute.”

  Cook held it a minute.

  “Got it,” the man said. “Maybe I’ve got it anyway. Man looks like that, sort of, works in the Ace Market. Waits on trade. Now and then I pick up things there for the missus. Or go in with her to pinch avocados. Know what I mean?”

  “Pinch?” Cook said and then, “Oh, sure. Girl I know pinches them. This man works there, you think? Happen to know what his name is?”

  “Seems like they call him Ralph. All I know about him.”

  “But he hasn’t been in to have a key made?”

  “Not that I remember. Could be when Benny’s around. Happens Benny’s out making a delivery right now. But mostly I make the keys myself. Benny sometimes picks the wrong blanks. And they won’t fit in. Know what I mean?”

  Anyway, Tony Cook thought as he walked on toward Fourteenth Street, we came up with something, Sergeant Strothers and I. We came up with a face which looks something, anyway, like Ralph Baker’s face. There’s that.

  He crossed Sixth Avenue and worked down the other side. Nobody recognized the face he showed as that of a man who had had a Yale key copied within recent weeks. Perhaps somebody else would have better luck somewhere else. There were a good many copies of the sketch in a good many hands by now. And, of course, if Baker had had his son’s key to the Singleton house copied with intent to use it for burglary, he might have been smart enough to have the copy made where he wasn’t known.

  At around four in the afternoon, Cook knocked it off for the day and checked in, and out, at Homicide, Manhattan South. Shapiro was not there. Cook added to his report the unimportant fact that nobody on Sixth Avenue from West Fourth Street to Fourteenth Street could positively identify a sketch of Ralph Baker, father of a boy who had found a body. Who said he had found a body.

  XII

  Mrs. Raymond Franklin was, Shapiro thought, in her early forties. She was trim and quick and looked a good deal like her daughter. Of course she wanted to help. And she thought it wise, very wise, of the police not to be too easily satisfied. It was then almost five in the afternoon, because Mrs. Franklin had not got home until a few minutes before three and she’d had people coming in. Because if they ever do get around to tearing that awful thing down they ought to make a park there, not another apartment house, which probably would be just as out of character as the jail. And the library ought to have a park to go with it. And couldn’t she give Lieutenant Shapiro something? Because she was going to have a sherry herself.

  They were in a big living room by then and Shapiro was, as he usually was, trying to catch up. Mrs. Raymond Franklin
was unquestionably brisk. And decisive. Shapiro did, as he refused a drink, identify the jail which might be turn down as the House of Detention for Women and the library as the former Jefferson Market Court House. Rose had been very pleased when the courthouse had been turned into a library, after having been for years merely a contorted hulk. It was only a few blocks from Clayton High School and thus convenient for any students who might be interested in reading books.

  Why had Mrs. Franklin put up bail for Roy Baker?

  “Because he’s a nice clean boy and it’s all an awful mistake.”

  “You speak,” Shapiro said, “as if you know the boy, Mrs. Franklin. Do you?”

  “Not actually. But my daughter does. And she’s told me about him and she’s a—a perceptive child.”

  “Since he was held as a material witness? I mean had she talked about Roy before that? She seems to feel strongly about him.”

  “Well, no. Oh, I thought there was, recently, some special boy. But I don’t pry, Lieutenant. I want my daughter— both Ray and I want our daughter—to feel that we have confidence in her. And to feel that she can come to us, tell us things, only when she wants to. Because we trust her. And want her to know we trust her. Do you have any children, Lieutenant Shapiro?”

  “No.”

  “But you are married?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I’m married. To get back to—”

  “Lieutenant,” Mrs. Franklin said. “I know your name isn’t an uncommon one, of course. But by any chance is your wife the assistant principal at Clayton High?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “You put up the bond money for young Baker because your daughter—well, likes him? Just like that?”

  “I suppose it comes to that, really. But—he couldn’t have been the one who killed poor Mrs. Singleton. And so he shouldn’t be locked up. Kept locked up. Just because he’s a poor boy. Gangsters and people like that can always put up bail money, can’t they? And it isn’t fair, is it?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “I don’t suppose it’s fair. It’s just the way things are.”

  “They oughtn’t to be,” Mrs. Franklin said. She said it firmly; she was, Shapiro thought, a very firm woman.