Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Did your husband approve of your putting up bail for young Baker?”

  “Actually, I didn’t bother him about it. Just wrote a check and had it certified, because they said they wanted that, and had Stella—she’s my secretary—run down with it. And they’ve let the boy go, haven’t they?”

  “Yes, They’ve let the boy go. You do believe your daughter was with him Sunday afternoon? And, went upstairs with him and that Mrs. Singleton was dead, or dying, by the time they found her?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Franklin said. “Of course I do. Ellen doesn’t tell untruths, Lieutenant. You think I don’t know my own daughter?”

  There was, Shapiro decided, no point in going into that with this firm woman. There had, probably, been little point in coming to see her at all. She was loyal to her daughter’s loyalty; loyal to the extent of five thousand dollars. That was all there was to it. And, at a guess, five thousand wasn’t much of anything to the Franklins. So—

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” Shapiro said. “Taken up your time this way. We just have to—”

  He didn’t finish, because a maid in a blue uniform came in, carrying a telephone which was not attached to anything.

  “There’s a call for Lieutenant Shapiro, ma’am,” the maid said. “Shall I plug it in?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Franklin said. “It doesn’t work if you don’t plug it in, Lucile,” and then, to Shapiro, “Somebody knew you’d be here?”

  “Pretty much a rule,” Shapiro said. “They always want to know.” He took the telephone from the maid after she had plugged it and said his name into it. He listened and said, “O.K., I’ll get along up there.” He listened again. “Oh, yes,” he said. “We’ll have to, of course. It could have been that way. Get Cook on it.”

  He put the telephone down on a table. Mrs. Franklin was looking at him, firmly and with her eyebrows arched.

  “A man we’re interested in has met with an accident,” Shapiro said.

  Tony Cook went uptown by subway and walked some blocks west and climbed two flights of stairs and let himself into his small apartment, which was as closely hot as he had expected it to be. He opened what windows it had and thought, as he usually thought, that it was time he moved downtown. This West Bronx place had been all right when he was assigned to a precinct squad nearby. It was one hell of a long way from West Twentieth Street and Homicide South. It was, of course, even farther from an apartment in Gay Street and the girl who lived in it.

  Tony Cook shaved, although he had shaved that morning. He showered. He put on slacks and a summer jacket and looked at himself. Too gay, the jacket? Too much a jacket for the country? He changed to a light gray summer suit. The suit jacket buttoned more smoothly over the handgun in its shoulder holster.

  It was almost five-thirty by then, and he wasn’t due for an hour. She had got used to his being punctual but had, a few months ago, implied, without flatly saying, that punctuality could be carried too far. “Mister,” Rachel Farmer had said, “You ought to give a girl time to dress.” She had said that with her apartment door opened just enough so that she could look out around it. She had unhooked the safety chain, but by the time he got in she was across the room, walking away from him with that long stride of hers. She hadn’t, certainly, had time to dress.

  When he first met Rachel Farmer she hadn’t, apparently, cared whether she had clothes on or not or even, Tony had sometimes thought, known whether she had or hadn’t. She had been in sweater and slacks when he first saw her and was in the process of stealing a drawing, which she insisted was of herself, from the studio of a painter who had just been murdered. She had been very tall and thin in sweater and slacks and had moved, Tony thought then, rather like a man.

  When he next saw her she was, unconcernedly, not wearing anything at all and Tony had noticed, sharply, that she was not in the least like a man. And when, off duty, he had first gone around to take her out to dinner, she had been wearing a sleek white dress with a red belt around her slim waist and white shoes with heels which made her even taller than she really was. She had, that evening, been quite a surprise to Tony Cook.

  She still was, Tony thought, sipping a short drink with his feet up and waiting until it was time to go downtown again. She kept on being. She still now and then called him “mister,” but she called “mister” anybody the term suited, or almost suited. Its suitability, among the Village people she knew and he was getting to know, was rather often a tossup.

  He looked at his watch often while he killed time and a small drink. Not too punctual, he told himself. But not too late, either. Sometimes you had to wait a while for a downtown express.

  At around six he went down the two flights to the hot street and walked toward the subway station. As he closed the street door he heard a telephone ringing behind him, but he decided it wasn’t his. She wouldn’t be calling up to break their date. She didn’t break their dates.

  At Fourteenth Street he changed to a local and had to wait several minutes for it. He walked with long strides the few blocks from the West Fourth Street station to Gay Street, and he was on the dot. He waited a few moments for the dot to pass before he pressed a doorbell. Not that he would fool her any. She knew he was eager. He sometimes thought she knew almost everything there was to know about him. The lock release chattered at him and he went up a flight of stairs. Her door was opening when he reached the top of the flight.

  She wasn’t wearing the white dress this time. She was wearing a pale green dress. She had, he thought, recently had her black hair done. She said, “Hullo, mister.” He didn’t kiss her because she had, obviously, just put lipstick on and, anyway, they didn’t kiss much except when it wasn’t casual. He did put an arm around her and hold her close against him for a moment and then patted her tenderly on the fanny. She was wearing a panty girdle which she didn’t need. She’d certainly changed a lot since he first met her and thought maybe she had killed a man.

  She had ice out where it usually was and his bourbon and a little pitcher of water and a glass for bourbon and water. He knew his way, and took it, to the refrigerator, where she kept La Ina and the glass chilling for it, and he poured for them both while she sat on a sofa with her knees together but, because it was a year for short skirts, pleasantly visible. He sat beside her and they touched glasses.

  “I,” Rachel Farmer said, “am being immortalized. Don’t you think that’s nice, Tony?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “With clothes on, for once,” Rachel said. “Some, anyway. And sitting down, if you’ll believe it. By Rafe Lorenson. The ‘Rafe’ is for ‘Raphael,’ or he thinks it is. It’s a portrait and I’ll be immortal. A hundred years from now they’ll be debating who his model was. Which will make the immortality a little wispy, won’t it? So I told him I’d take the cash and let the credit go, if it was all the same.”

  Rachel Farmer was a model. She posed for painters and photographers. Her nonchalance about nakedness was a professional, acquired characteristic.

  But for Tony she dressed most carefully, even to the point of a panty girdle to which stockings could be hitched. Which was gratifying, in a puzzling sort of way. It made her sometimes nakedness for him a special thing—a selected gift. She said, now, “Are you listening, mister? Because you look as if you weren’t. Or don’t you like the dress?”

  “Very much,” he said. “You are going to be immortalized by a painter named Rafe. And he lets you pose sitting down.”

  “With clothes on, even,” she said. “Head and shoulders. Well, mostly shoulders, come down to it. Actually, somewhat more. And what have you been doing, Tony? By the way, your gun’s showing. Usually you remember to take it off.”

  Tony Cook stood up and took his jacket off and his gun off. When they went out to dinner he would, of course, have to put it back on again. It was the light gun he could wear, legally, when he was off duty.

  “It was a cruel thing about Jennifer Singleton,” Rachel said. “A mad thing. For a few do
llars.” She sipped her drink and looked at nothing. “Years ago. When I was young,” Rachel Farmer said, “I saw her for the first time. I’ve forgotten what she was in. Somehow the plays she was in never seemed to matter much. I decided I’d be an actress, like her. Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an actress, Tony?”

  “No,” Tony said.

  “Of course,” Rachel said, “I’ve wanted to be a lot of things, really. One thing one day and another thing another. When I was young, of course.”

  “You’re young,” Tony said.

  “Not in the same way,” she said. “After I saw her the first time I used to walk by that house of hers, even when I was really going another way, or should have been. I thought, she’ll come out sometime and see me and say, ‘You ought to be on the stage, young woman.’ Or, perhaps, ‘My dear.’ It was when I was seventeen or eighteen. And already I was too tall, of course. I didn’t know it yet. On the stage, women can’t be as tall as men, you know. And most men aren’t taller than I am.”

  “You want to measure, lady?”

  “Not fair,” Rachel said. “I’ve got heels on.”

  “We could, of course—”

  He was told to drink his drink and then, gently, laughed at. He shrugged an inquiry.

  “Your eyes, Tony. I’ve learned about your eyes. Drink your drink and we’ll have another and go out to dinner. I don’t say we won’t see who’s the taller, darling. Later. Are you working—you and Mr. Shapiro—on the Singleton thing? Or is it, as it sounds in the newspapers, all solved?”

  It had looked like being, he told her. Now they weren’t so sure.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, “she ever did come out when you were walking by her house?”

  “Never.”

  “You never did meet her? I mean—the Village is a neighborhood, in its special sort of way. More than most places in Manhattan. She lived only a few blocks from here. And, there are circles down here.”

  “Concentric,” Rachel said. “Perhaps overlapping is what I mean, not concentric.”

  “People interested in the same things,” Cook said. “In—I suppose it’s called the arts.”

  “Not by me, mister. Not ever by me.”

  “You know what I mean, Rachel. Maybe I use the wrong words. After all, I’m a cop, think like a cop, I guess.”

  “Being a cop’s all right,” Rachel said. “Did you ever want to be something else? A doctor? Or—I don’t know. A professor. The president of something? The way I wanted to be an actress?”

  “I tried to get into Annapolis once,” Cook said. “Or, I guess, just thought of trying. Nothing came of it. And once I wanted to be a cowboy. When I was about twelve, probably. Being a cop’s all right.”

  “I just said that,” Rachel said. “Yes, I do know people around here. All sorts of people. People who want to go on the stage. And one or two who are on it. And two men who want to write plays. And a woman who’s been writing a novel for years and years. One of the things I wanted to be years ago, when I was young, was a poet. Because it doesn’t matter how tall poets are. It’s how tall their words are.”

  He held his glass out and, after a moment during which she merely looked at him, she held hers to click with his.

  “Circles touching circles,” he said. “Within circles. Jennifer Singleton in any of them?”

  “She was much older than the people I know,” Rachel said. “I don’t think—” she stopped at that and looked at her almost empty sherry glass as if a thought might be dissolved in it.

  “One of the boys who’re trying to write plays,” she said, “told me once he knew Mrs. Singleton. We were talking about the theater, which is all he ever talks about. He—I’m trying to remember, although I don’t see that it matters. Oh, yes—that he’d met her some place and sent her a play of his to read. Because he thought there was a character in it she might be interested in creating. That was the word he used.”

  “Did she read it?”

  “He said she did. And that she was very sweet and encouraging about it. But—I remember now—that the part he had thought of for her should be played by an older woman. Which, he said, made him wonder if she’d really read the script. Because the character he’d had in mind for her was about forty-five. And she, Tony?”

  “Late fifties,” he said. “Almost sixty. And not looking it by years. I didn’t know people who wrote plays sent them to actors. I’d have thought they’d send them to producers.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This one says he did. And it seems to me I’ve heard about people sending scripts to movie stars. It’s not anything I know about. I stand up, usually in cold places with nothing on, and people paint pictures of me. Of what they see when they look at me, anyway. Remember the one Briskie did of me with two heads?”

  “Yes,” Cook said and looked at her carefully. “One head,” he said, “is better than two.” He looked at her empty glass and at his own. “And two drinks than one,” he said. He arranged that.

  They talked after that about things of no consequence except to them. For their second drink he sat beside her on the sofa. He looked down at her feet. “I don’t,” he said, “see how women stand up on such high heels. I’d think they’d teeter. But you don’t.”

  She turned and looked at him and smiled at him.

  “All this about being tall,” Tony said. “Too tall to be an actress because men have to be—”

  She patted his knee. Then she stood up.

  “Tony,” Rachel said, “I think we’d better go to dinner.”

  He stood, too. He said, “Charles?”

  “Nick’s, I’d rather,” she said. “Because I feel like pasta. Do you feel like pasta?”

  He said that pasta would be fine.

  “At Nick’s,” Rachel said, “lasagna and things like that just have to be dished up.”

  Tony Cook put his gun on and they went down the stairs to Gay Street. As he was closing the outside door after them a telephone, muted, rang somewhere in the house.

  “It could be mine,” Rachel said. “But it would stop before we could get back, wouldn’t it?”

  They walked away through crooked Gay Street.

  Nick Gazzi’s restaurant was not crowded, and Nick, beaming at them—Nick approved of them—served lasagna quickly and each had a glass of chianti and, afterward, espresso. And they went back early to the apartment in Gay Street and sat side by side on the sofa and sipped very small glasses of cognac. And when the cognac was finished, Rachel pushed her left shoe off with the toes of her right foot and then the right shoe with her left.

  “Now,” she said, “you can be taller than she is. Wasn’t that once an advertising slogan or something?”

  Tony Cook did not answer that. He stood and pulled the tall girl to her stocking feet and held her against him. He was, by a very little, the taller.

  “It still isn’t fair,” Rachel said. “There are heels on your shoes too.”

  “Above all,” Tony said, “we must be fair.”

  They went together into the bedroom.

  Lying side by side on the bed they were both long people. They lined naked feet up to a chalk line they made believe was there, and she reached an arm up over her own head, the forearm straight. Her fingers touched his head an inch or two above his right ear.

  “I guess so,” Rachel said. “Maybe two inches taller. If you’d just lie still I could—”

  He did not lie still.

  “Be more exact,” Rachel Farmer said. “But I guess it really doesn’t—”

  She did not finish that.

  They were lying quietly again when the telephone rang. It seemed to them both to ring very loudly. It was on her side of the wide bed, and she reached out a long bare arm and lifted the receiver. She said, “Yes?” very softly. She listened for a moment and covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said, in a whisper this time, “Are you here?” to Tony Cook.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  She did not speak this time but formed
a name with lip movements. He nodded his head.

  “Yes, he is,” Rachel said and then raised her voice and called, “Tony?” as if he were some distance away. He waited seconds and then reached across her and took the handset she held toward him. He said, “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Been trying to get you all evening,” Shapiro said. His voice rasped sadly. “Your apartment, Miss Farmer’s. That Charles Restaurant you two go to. Where were you?”

  There seemed to be no point in being too specific about that. “We didn’t go to Charles tonight,” Cook said.

  He listened, then. He said, “I’ll check it out, Nate,” and reached the telephone back to Rachel, who put it in its cradle. Cook swung long legs out of the bed. She put a light on so he could find his clothes.

  “Man named Agee,” Tony said, stepping into shorts. “Fell in his apartment and banged his head on an andiron in the fireplace. Only maybe it wasn’t that way. Maybe the andiron or something hit him. Any idea what I did with my shoes?"

  “Probably under the bed,” Rachel said. “But your gun’s in the living room, I’m almost sure. It was the first thing you took off when we came back.”

  She turned on her side and watched him put on shirt and trousers.

  “Lipstick came off on you,” Rachel said. “They claim it’s indelible, but it always does, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re beautiful,” Tony Cook said, and took the tissue she handed him and rubbed his lips with it.

  He leaned down and kissed her, not on her lips because his now were clean of lipstick. He put his gun on and his jacket over it and went down a flight of stairs and, with long strides, through the Village streets to ask a boy where he had been when a man got hit on the back of the head, probably with a poker.

  The man couldn’t tell what he had been hit with. It was, according to the hospital, touch and go whether he’d ever tell anything again about anything.

  XIII

  Nathan Shapiro was not as late as he so often found himself to be. Two men from the precinct squad were there when he got to Lester Agee’s apartment, and Arnold Mimms, Mr. Agee’s man, had only told his story once. He told it again to Shapiro. He had a small, dry voice. He was a small, dry man. He had found Agee lying unconscious on the floor, his head against the uptilted end of a firedog in the empty fireplace. This had been at a little before five in the afternoon. He had come into the living room to get the ice container to take it to the kitchen to fill it. He did that every evening about that time. He had not expected Mr. Agee to be in the room.