Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Mr. Agee has a regular schedule,” Mimms told Shapiro and the two precinct men. “I serve him lunch at one. Then he goes to his office upstairs and works until, usually, about four-thirty. Then he showers and changes for the evening. I make sure that the things he may need are ready here when he has dressed.”

  “Here” was the big living room of the big duplex apartment—the room with a wall of glass at one end and, far below it, the East River. Mimms wore a white jacket and black trousers and stood thinly erect as he told his story.

  He had come in through a door at the rear of the living room and had gone to the bar and picked up the ice container. There had been some ice still in it, but not enough.

  Also it had begun to melt. “Mr. Agee does not like slushy ice.”

  He had turned away from the bar, carrying the ice bucket, and only by chance had looked up the long room.

  He had seen his employer’s feet, sticking out from behind that chair. He pointed to the chair, which was one of those beside the fireplace.

  “It was most peculiar,” Mimms said. “I was quite concerned.”

  He had called his employer’s name and got no answer. He had hurried up the room, saying, “Mr. Agee, sir. Mr. Agee.”

  He had found Agee lying on his back, his head against the firedog. His hair was matted with blood and there was blood on the end of the firedog.

  “He was breathing very strangely,” Mimms said. “He was unconscious. So I called Dr. Rolfe. Then I lifted his head enough to put a pillow under it. The doctor came almost at once. His office is downstairs.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to call the police, Mr. Mimms?” Shapiro asked him.

  “I assumed he had fallen and hit his head,” Mimms said. “I did not think it a matter for the police.”

  Dr. Rolfe, after a brief examination, had used the telephone—used it to call an ambulance, to arrange for a hospital room and, last, to call the police emergency number. They had not had to wait long. The doctor had ridden with Lester Agee in the ambulance.

  “The doctor seem to agree with you that it was an accident? That Mr. Agee had fallen and struck his head on the firedog?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “But he did call the police.” Shapiro turned to one of the precinct men. He said, “Anybody get in touch with this doctor?”

  “At the hospital, his office says. Got a man there. Only he’s still in the emergency ward with Agee. Seems, from what we can get at the hospital, that Agee’s pretty bad.”

  Shapiro nodded. He turned back to Mimms. He said, “Mr. Agee have dizzy spells that you know of? Anything like that?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “Does he drink much? Enough to make him unsteady on his feet?”

  “I’ve never seen him unsteady, Lieutenant. He is a most moderate man.”

  “Did he have any visitors this afternoon?”

  About that Mimms could not be certain. He had himself gone out after three and been gone for perhaps an hour. There had been “certain errands.” He had gone into the apartment through the service door and back to his own quarters, which were beyond the kitchen.

  “Down at the desk,” one of the precinct men said, “they say nobody got announced to Agee. But that if somebody knew the apartment number they could just get into an elevator and go up, although they were supposed to stop at the desk first.”

  After Mimms had completed his errands and returned to the apartment he had not heard anything to make him think his employer had a guest. He had heard no voices. But he would not, from his own quarters beyond the kitchen, have been likely to hear anything from the living room or from Agee’s office on the floor above. Sometimes, if Mr. Agee happened to leave his office door open, Mimms could hear his employer’s typewriter. He did not remember hearing it that day. If, after he got back, somebody had rung the doorbell, Mimms would have heard it ring and would have gone to the door. The doorbell had not rung. Yes, Mr. Agee had known that Mimms had errands to do. Yes, if Mr. Agee had been expecting someone he would, of course, have let his visitor in.

  “The door?” Shapiro said to one of the precinct men.

  “No sign of anything. Not forced.”

  Shapiro walked over and looked at the fire tools beside the clean and empty fireplace. A poker, fire tongs and a hearth brush, all with brass tops and sturdy iron shafts. They looked clean enough. Shapiro did not touch them.

  “Lab boys on the way,” one of the precinct detectives said. “But the way it looks to me, he just fell and banged his head.”

  “The way it looks,” Shapiro said, sadly. “Didn’t seem to be the wobbly kind, but it could have been that way.”

  But it remained a coincidence and Nathan Shapiro does not like coincidences. His dislike, of course, does not prevent them from happening. Still—

  “Elevator men?” Shapiro asked. “Any of them remember taking a stranger up to the twenty-second floor this afternoon?”

  “Haven’t got around to that, Lieutenant,” the precinct man he spoke to said. “After all, we just got here when you showed up. Far as we’ve got, he just fell down and banged his head.”

  “Far as I’ve got too,” Shapiro said. And, he thought, it was as far as he was going to get here. Talk to a doctor who had called the police because a man had fallen in the living room of his apartment. Shapiro rode down on a plummeting elevator, waited briefly for his stomach to rejoin him, and asked at the desk. Dr. Rolfe’s office? That way. Shapiro went that way and found a door in a corridor with “E. J. Rolfe, M.D. By appointment” lettered on it. Shapiro pressed a button and heard a bell ring. He waited and pressed the button again, not hoping for anything to come of it. But a click came from it in the door’s lock and a turned knob came of it and a tall, gray-haired man in a sober gray suit opened the door and said, “Yes?”

  Shapiro said, “Dr. Rolfe?” and the tall man nodded his head.

  “Police officer,” Shapiro said and gave the rest of it. “About Mr. Agee.”

  He was told to come in and went into a waiting room with deep chairs in it and an air conditioner humming. Dr. Rolfe sat in one of the chairs and motioned toward another and said, “So, Lieutenant?”

  “You called the police,” Shapiro said. “About what apparently was a simple accident. Why, Doctor?”

  “Les Agee’s a friend of mine,” Dr. Rolfe said. He had a low, soothing voice. “As well as a patient. Mrs. Singleton gets stabbed to death. Her former husband falls and bashes his head. I thought the police might be interested.”

  “You thought perhaps he didn’t fall? And hit his head on this andiron thing?”

  “He certainly hit his head on something,” Rolfe said. “Or got hit with something. The edge of the firedog. Or, say, a poker. The wound could have been made either way.”

  “It’s bad,” Shapiro said, not as a question.

  Dr. Rolfe answered it as one. He said, “Damn bad, Lieutenant. Depressed fractures are always bad.”

  “He’ll make it?”

  Rolfe moved broad shoulders in a shrug.

  “It’s touch and go,” he said. “He’s got a good constitution. He’ll need it.”

  “He’s still unconscious?”

  “Yes. And probably will be for a long time. If not for all time. Brain damage. We don’t know how much. Pete Collins will have to go in to find out. Pete’s a damn good surgeon. He’ll need to be, I’m afraid.”

  “If Agee comes through, will he remember what happened?”

  Rolfe shrugged again and opened his hands as his shoulders moved.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps not. I’d be inclined to think that he won’t. There’ll be a gap, probably. Short gap. Long gap. Depends on what Pete finds and what he can do about what he finds. It’ll be days, could be it’ll be weeks, before we know.” He paused and looked over Shapiro’s head. “Could be,” he said, “it’ll be months.”

  Shapiro stood up and the doctor looked up at him.

  “Les Agee,” Rolfe said, “
played tennis, Lieutenant. Pretty good at it. Had played for years.”

  Shapiro waited.

  “Point is,” Rolfe said, “tennis players learn to fall. I mean, to catch themselves. On their hands, usually. I wouldn’t have expected Les to land on the back of his head. In fact, I wouldn’t have expected him to fall at all. Ever see him, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “He looked fit. Moved well.”

  “Gave him a checkup two-three weeks ago,” Rolfe said. “Very good shape then. Now, God knows, he’ll need to be.”

  “You’ve no idea when we can talk to him?”

  “I told you. Days. Weeks. Perhaps months. And perhaps never.”

  Nathan Shapiro went back by bus and subway to West Twentieth Street. They had not been able to get in touch with Detective Anthony Cook. No answer at his apartment. No answer at his girl’s apartment. Not at Charles Restaurant, where he sometimes took this girl of his. In short, no Tony Cook.

  But, a report from Cook on Shapiro’s desk and in it one thing that might be salient. A thing about a retired general named Whitehall, who sat sometimes by his window across the street from the house Jennifer Singleton had died in. And who, on Sunday afternoon, had seen her on the sidewalk in front of her house talking with a man. Who had been turned in his wheel chair while she still was talking to a man who might have come with her in a taxi or might have been waiting for her outside her house. And who might, for all General Whitehall (Ret.) knew, have gone into her house with her. A small man in a dark suit, wearing a dark hat on a hot June afternoon.

  Shapiro looked up the telephone number of Farmer, Rachel, who lived in Gay Street, and dialed the number and got no answer. He wrote his own report, after calling Brooklyn and telling Rose that, again, he might be late—and after being told, in a tone of resignation, that he was late already. Then, once again, he dialed an Algonquin number and a telephone rang in Gay Street. This time he was answered quickly by the girl and, a little less quickly, by Tony Cook, who apparently had been in another room. And Tony Cook would check it out. And when he had, sure he would come in.

  Nathan Shapiro’s stomach, which so often protested about so many things, usually in a rather nasty tone of voice, reminded him that he had not eaten for too many hours. Shapiro walked a few blocks to a restaurant, hoping that his stomach would be pleased with him. He had pot roast and mashed potatoes and ignored the carrots which came along. His stomach took the dimmest possible view of carrots.

  Cook was not at the office when Shapiro got back to it. Shapiro sat at his desk and brooded. He wasn’t getting anywhere. That much was evident, as it so often was. Probably, however agile he had appeared to be, Lester Agee had merely fallen and banged his head on iron. Got a foot stuck in an overdeep carpet—a carpet which had seemed to cling to Nathan Shapiro’s own feet. Admit coincidence, whether you like it or not. And admit that, in all likelihood, precinct had been right in the first place—right about a tall, blond boy named Roy Baker.

  A small man in a dark suit who had met Jennifer Singleton in front of her house, or who might have met her somewhere else and ridden to the house with her in a cab, probably had nothing to do with anything. A neighbor out for an afternoon stroll in warm sunshine meeting another neighbor and stopping briefly for a chat and then strolling on his way. It probably came to no more than that.

  Shapiro ran through his mind the men he had talked to, the possibles he had told Bill Weigand and Dorian about, and measured them.

  Lester Agee, presumably now on a hospital operating table —in all respects a big man. No angle of observation could foreshorten him to a small one. Joseph Gage. A tall man; as tall at least as Agee. And not, Shapiro thought, a man likely to be wearing a dark suit and a dark hat on a warm Sunday afternoon in June. Roy Baker. A tall boy, who would almost certainly not be wearing any hat at all and who had not, when captured, been wearing a dark suit. Kurt Morton, on the other hand—Morton was not tall; looked down on from a second floor window across a street he might well be thought of as a small man. And Morton probably bore a grudge.

  The small man had been a strolling neighbor, his meeting with Jennifer Singleton during the last hour of her life a meeting by chance. A hundred to one that was the way it was. And if it came to making odds, a hundred to one precinct had been right about Roy Baker. A hundred to one, Nathan Shapiro thought, I’m merely mucking it up. As usual.

  If Lester Agee had been hit on the head, which was not at all certain, it could be because Agee had seen more Sunday afternoon than he had admitted seeing. Got through the house to the garden, using a key he quite probably had, however he denied it, and found—found what? Found nobody at all, at an hour when Roy Baker was supposed to be there working? And—been seen by Baker from the window above, perhaps while Baker was going through Mrs. Singleton’s bedroom looking for what he could steal? If Baker thought he had himself been seen he would have had reason—as violent men’s reasons go—for silencing Lester Agee. Except, of course, that Agee had said nothing about going through the house to the garden or seeing anybody in the room above. No evident reason he shouldn’t say he had if he had. But the kid wouldn’t know that. Killers try not to take chances.

  A fruitless spinning of theories, Shapiro decided of his thought process—a spinning of them and a tearing of them apart. And where the hell is Tony Cook?

  Cook answered that by coming into Shapiro’s small, hot office. He came in shaking his head.

  “Kid was alone in the apartment when I got there,” Cook said, and sat down across the desk from Nathan Shapiro. “Said he’d been alone there since he got home from school about four o’clock this afternoon. Said he’d been writing a story about a man who was unjustly suspected of murder. I said, ‘How’s about having a look at this story of yours, son?’ and he said it hadn’t worked out and he’d turn it up. He wanted to know why we wanted to know where he’d been and were we trying to pin something else on him, man.”

  “You tell him why, Tony?”

  “Only that a man who knew Mrs. Singleton had had what was maybe an accident and maybe wasn’t. It’s been on the radio. All very no-comment. Interesting and regrettable coincidence. With, sure, space between the lines for anybody who wants to read between them. And that Lester Agee, famed playwright, is in critical condition.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “He is, Tony. And his doctor doesn’t think he’s the kind to fall on the back of his head. And the lab’s got a poker and a pair of fire tongs and hearth brush with thick shaft to play with. The boy can’t prove he was in the apartment alone?”

  “Doesn’t try to.”

  “His father?”

  “Working late. Store’s open evenings and it’s his turn to work evenings. I checked that out. True enough, and he’s there now. Supposed to come on at five and work until midnight, only this afternoon he was maybe half an hour late.”

  “Left before the kid got home? And showed up late for work?”

  “Way the kid tells it there was nobody in the apartment when he got home from school. Could be his old man was having a few beers somewhere and watching a ball game on TV. Could be, I suppose, he was uptown slugging Agee.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “The way it mostly is, Tony. Nothing to get hold of. This General Whitehall. Reliable old man?”

  “Yes,” Tony Cook said. “Lively old geezer, in spite of the wheel chair. Saw what he says he saw, I’m pretty certain.”

  “Which,” Shapiro said, “wasn’t enough. Your girl friend—Miss Farmer. Did she happen to know Mrs. Singleton? I suppose you asked her, since they both live—or did live—in the same general neighborhood.”

  “Rachel didn’t know her,” Tony said. “Knew her house. Used to walk past it thinking maybe Mrs. Singleton would come out and—anyway, Mrs. Singleton didn’t come out. Rachel does know people who knew Mrs. Singleton, or say they did. All a lot younger than Mrs. Singleton was. Young playwrights and girls who want to be actresses and people like that. Nearest any of them came to knowing th
e lady was that one kid wrote a play and sent it to her because there was a part in it he thought might interest her.”

  “Did it?”

  “From what he told Rachel it didn’t. She sent it—the play—back to him, saying she was sorry. Saying nice things about the play, apparently, but that the character he had in mind for her should be played by an older woman. Which made him wonder if she’d really read the play because the character he’d had in mind for her was actually a lot younger than she was. And—”

  “Yes, Tony,” Nate Shapiro said. “Have a good evening?”

  “Yes, Nate,” Tony Cook said. “The evening was all right. Sorry I was out of touch. But—”

  “It’s all right,” Shapiro said. “You were off duty. And— time we both were for the night. You’re going home? Or— back to—”

  “Home, Lieutenant. Just home. I walked one hell of a lot today and my feet hurt.”

  “It’s a walking job,” Nate said, and he and Cook walked together to the subway. The trains they took went in opposite directions.

  A subway train is a bad place to think in; a thudding noisy place with discarded newspapers rustling on the floor. The rustling newspapers seemed a tickle in Nathan Shapiro’s tired mind.

  It was only when, in Brooklyn, he climbed gritty, cement steps from the track level that Shapiro realized it was not rustling newspapers which made a tickle in his mind.

  XIV

  It was pleasantly cool in the apartment, with the air conditioner on. Cleo stood on hind legs and pawed welcome against Nathan Shapiro’s trousers, and he reached down and scratched her behind her most available ear. Rose put down a book and came across the living room to Nathan. She was wearing a white summer robe and her short black hair looked as if she had just washed it under the shower. She stood in front of her husband and looked up at him. She put her arms around him and, for a moment, held him close. Then she pushed him away a little and said, “You wear a most uncomfortable gun, Nathan. And you’re tired, aren’t you? And did you remember to have something to eat?”