“What about?”
“This choir you’ve been singing in,” Tony said. “Shouldn’t take but a few minutes. Just a routine matter, Miss Holmes.”
“It’s awfully early,” the voice said and, unexpectedly, it sounded like a voice. Apartment-to-entry telephones are cranky, with ways of their own—moody things. “I’m not dressed. But—oh, all right. Except I’m supposed to be uptown by ten-thirty.”
Tony started to say that she’d have plenty of time to make it, but the latch clattered at him and he pushed his way in and climbed three flights of stairs and rang a doorbell. It was some seconds before he heard heels click behind the door. The door opened to the extent of a safety chain.
She was a small girl and looked very young. She had blonde hair and she was dressed, swaddled, in a quilted robe. But she had had time to put a face on. Probably, Tony thought, while he was climbing three flights of stairs. She looked up at him and said, “How do I know you’re a detective? A girl’s got to be careful.”
“Should be, Miss Holmes,” Tony said, and took his badge out of his pocket and held it out so that she could see it. She looked at it with care. If Janet Rushton had been half as cautious—
“I guess it’s all right,” Stacey Holmes said. “A girl down this way let somebody in and he killed her. A girl I knew. Sort of knew, anyway. It’s—well, I guess it’s made everybody jumpy.”
“Reason to be jumpy,” Tony said. “More people ought to be.” He put his badge back in his pocket and she unhooked the chain, and he went into the apartment. It was one large room, with windows on the street side. Just inside the door a closet jutted into the room, and it had slatted doors, closed. Kitchen facilities, Tony thought. Or what perhaps was called a kitchenette. On the other side there was another walled area bulging into the room. The door to this was solid. Bathroom. A narrow passage between them into the big room. The room was long and there were bright pictures on the walls, and the daybed had been made up. And sun came in through the tall windows at the room’s end.
Stacey Holmes walked ahead of him into the room. The quilted robe bundled around her. But underneath it, Tony thought, she probably was slender and neatly put together. And she was a blonde. Would have made a suitable guide for the Reverend Jonathan Prentis? He had preferred blondes, if they could take Farmington’s word for it. If they could take Farmington’s word for anything.
The girl sat on the made-up day bed. But then she bounced off it and said, “I was just going to have coffee. You want some coffee?”
“I guess not,” Tony said, but then, “Coffee would be fine, Miss Holmes.”
He went to one of the tall windows and looked down into Twelfth Street. Nothing much was going on in Twelfth Street, except that the harsh wind was blowing loose papers through it. The wind had knocked over an empty trash can, and it rolled a little way with the wind and brought up against another trash can and stopped.
The girl brought a tray with two filled cups from the kitchen closet and put it down on a table. She said, “There isn’t any cream. Cream is fattening.”
“I don’t take cream,” Tony said, and sat where he could reach the cup and tasted the coffee. Instant, but pretty good instant. He said, “You make good coffee, Miss Holmes,” and she said, “Out of a jar, but it’s easier. What do you want to ask me, mister—what did you say your name was?”
Tony told her again what his name was. He said, “This girl who got killed. The girl you sort of knew. Janet Rushton?”
“Yes,” Stacey said. “That’s the one. She was—we were—in this choir. The Voice’s—oh!”
“Yes,” Tony said. “He got killed too.”
She said, “Oh,” again. She said, “I don’t know anything about it. About either of them. Why would I?”
“No reason,” Tony told her. “We don’t think you do. We’re just—oh, just poking around, the way we have to. You were in the choir with Miss Rushton. Knew her. We’re trying to find out everything we can about her.”
“Not all that well I didn’t know her,” the girl said. She got a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket of the quilted robe and looked at it and shook her head at it and then said, “Got a match?” Tony snapped his lighter for her and held it across the small table. He got a cigarette out of his own pocket and lighted it.
“Just to say hello to,” Stacey said and sipped from her cup. “There were an awful lot of us. She was in a show for a while. Had a number. But I didn’t really know her. She was blonde, like me, and she wore green a lot. She had one green dress that must have cost her—wow! Square neckline and a yellow stripe going across from one shoulder, diagonally, you know, and—”
“Yes,” Tony said. “I’m sure she dressed well. She had an attractive apartment. But you didn’t know her at all well, you say.”
“Like I said,” Stacey Holmes said, “there were a lot of us. Boys and girls. And when we put on those robe things you couldn’t tell us apart. Not really.”
“Did you know Mr. Prentis? Aside from who he was, I mean.”
“He was pretty tremendous,” the girl said. “That voice of his. Gave you the shivers, sort of. No. He didn’t pay any attention to the girls in the choir. Mr. Farmington did that. Only not much, really. If you could carry a tune. That was about all he cared about.”
“Any of the other girls know Mr. Prentis? To speak to, I mean? Miss Rushton, for example?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Stacey said. “Really I wouldn’t. It was just a job. We lined up and marched out and sang hymns, and after it was over, we came home. It was—oh, just a way to pick up some change, if you know what I mean. There aren’t all that many jobs going around. Reason I’ve got to be uptown at ten-thirty, my agent thinks maybe he’s got something lined up for me. Anyway, somebody’s casting. Supposed to open next September, but who knows?”
“For singing in the choir,” Tony said. “Fifty dollars a performance? That right?”
“It’s what they sent the agents,” she said. “At least, far’s I know we all got the same. Fifty I got. Less Joe’s cut. Joe Westclock, that is. He’s Talent, Incorporated.”
“Ten per cent, that would have been? His cut?”
“Yes,” Stacey Holmes said. “Only then there was the tithing. Only it wasn’t, really. Not the way it worked out, because it was off the top.”
Tony Cook shook his head. He finished his coffee and shook his head again and said he didn’t get it.
“Well,” the girl said, “it was new to me. Called that, anyway. A tenth, it means, he said. It’s a religious term, I guess. Anyway, it was, the way he put it, to help carry on the work. Work of—what was the word he used? Redemp-something. Oh, I remember. Redemption.”
“You—each of you—were supposed to pay back a tenth of what you got?” Tony said. “As a contribution to the—the mission? That would be—let’s see—four dollars for each time you sang?”
“Five dollars,” Stacey Holmes said. “You didn’t listen. I said it was off the top. Fifty dollars was the top.”
“You all did this—tithing?”
“Sure. It was part of getting the job. Joe said that was the way it was set up. The way it always was. He said it was the way Mr. Farmington wanted it because, he guessed, Mr. Farmington was a very religious man and thought everybody ought to contribute. Only Joe said, ‘To the Second Coming, I gather.’ He makes jokes like that. But he said we had to take it or leave it, and forty dollars is—well, it only took a couple of hours, you know. And it was three times a week. And you could take other jobs the other nights. If you could get them.”
Tony put his cigarette out. But almost at once, looking across the table at the bundled-up girl, he lighted another.
“They’re bad for you,” the girl said. “Do things to your voice. My teacher keeps telling me that, and I’m down to five a day. Most days, anyway.”
“Probably your teacher’s right,” Tony said. “This five dollars. This tithe. The agency take it out of your check?”
“No, it wasn’t that way.
When we showed up to be checked in—Mr. Farmington did that himself—we got little envelopes. With ‘The Mission of Redemption, Inc.’ printed on them. And we were supposed to put a five-dollar bill in them—or five ones, of course, but I usually put a five because sometimes taxi drivers can’t change fives and they mostly won’t at change booths.” She stopped, with the finality of one who has made everything clear.
“After you put the money in the envelopes,” Tony said, “you—what did you do with the envelopes?”
“Wrote our names on them and put them in the box,” Stacey said. “It just said ‘Contributions’ on the box. It was on the table next to the one Mr. Farmington sat at when he checked us in.”
“And?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘and,’” the girl said. “We put those robes on and lined up the way we were supposed to. I don’t know what you mean by ‘and.’”
“The box marked ‘Contributions,’” Tony said. “Somebody took it away? One of the—ushers, or whatever they called them.”
“I guess so,” the girl said. “No, wait a minute. I was late once—not really late, but everybody was lining up. Maybe I was the last. I remember now. Mr. Farmington had a briefcase sort of thing under his table and when I’d checked in and put my envelope in the box, he started to take the envelopes out of the box and put them in this briefcase. Because they would be safer there, I guess. Because you don’t just let money lie around loose, do you?”
Mr. Ralph Farmington didn’t, Tony thought. But all he said was, “It isn’t a good idea to let money lie around loose.”
The girl pulled back the quilted sleeve of her robe and looked at the watch on her wrist. She said, “It’s pretty near ten and I’ve got to dress and be uptown by—”
“Yes,” Tony said, and looked at his own watch. “You will have to hurry, Miss Holmes. I’m sorry I kept you so long.”
But, again on the sidewalk, walking toward the next on his list, Tony Cook wasn’t really sorry. He did hope the girl would make it and that she’d get a job in the show which, perhaps, was going to open in September. He wished the small blonde girl well. She had been a help.
By noon, when he had made his last call—a call in Gay Street—Tony had something to take back to the headquarters of Homicide South. He had the names and addresses of six girl singers and two men who had paid kickbacks for their jobs in the choir of Mission of Redemption, Inc. Oh, all right, what looked like being kickbacks. Call the payments tithes if you want to.
Since he was in Gay Street and it was lunchtime, he pushed a button under a name in the entry hall of a small apartment house. The bell rang on the second floor and he could hear it ringing. But it wasn’t answered.
Well, he hadn’t really expected it would be. He went, by subway, up to Twentieth Street.
10
Shapiro got to West Twentieth Street at a little after nine that Friday morning and, briefly, shuffled papers. The full post-mortem report on Janet Rushton was in. It added nothing to the preliminary report, except that she had not been pregnant. She had not been raped. Her fingerprints had been checked out. A few years previously she had been licensed as a cabaret performer, at a time when all employees of restaurants with entertainment had been fingerprinted. So, she was Janet Rushton. She had been born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which is not too far from Little Rock. Which was somewhat interesting, but neither suggested nor proved anything. She had been the oldest of three daughters of Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. L. Rushton. Her parents were living and had been notified.
Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Prentis had been married ten years before in Springfield, Missouri. Neither had been previously married. Her age had been given as “over twenty-one.”
Bits and pieces.
Captain William Weigand was in his office. Asked by Weigand, Nathan Shapiro said that, so far as he could see, things weren’t coming at all. He said that the people involved were, as usual, people he was incapable of understanding. He said, “Look, Bill, it’s nothing to grin at.” He said, “Usually it doesn’t make any difference and we both know it. But this is the sort of thing a Christian would be better at. Maybe a Christian—a Protestant Christian anyway—would be able to sort these people out.” He said that, probably, the Reverend Prentis had been playing around with a girl in the choir—the girl who was dead now. He said that, probably, a man named Farmington had given Prentis a lead on girls. He said that Tony Cook had got the notion that Farmington was taking kickbacks from the men and women he hired, locally, for the choir and that Tony was now checking it out. He said, “Oh, all right, I’m the wrong man for it, but all right.” He said he was going back up to the hotel and talk some more to the people who made up the mission.
“Money?” Weigand said. “There’ve been stories about Prentis’s setup. That a lot of people have contributed a lot of money.”
“Money is the root of all evil,” Shapiro said. He shook his head sadly. “Probably from the Bible,” he said.
“It is,” Bill Weigand told him. “Oh, it’s ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ But it’s from the New Testament, Nate, I think.”
Nathan Shapiro, his gloomiest expectations justified, got a car from the pool and went uptown to the Hotel Wexley. He found Ralph Farmington talking into the telephone in the living room of the suite he shared with the Reverend John Wesley Higgs. He was talking in a hushed voice. As Shapiro went in he said, “O.K., Joe. You can put it that way. Looks like I am or will be. So if anything—”
Farmington did not finish the sentence, Shapiro thought because he had come into the room. Farmington put the receiver back in its cradle, very gently. He gestured toward the door of Higgs’s room. He got up from the desk and came around it and edged Shapiro toward the door.
“Trying to get some sleep, Higgs is,” Farmington said, in what was not quite a whisper. “Didn’t get in until after three, he and Pruitt didn’t.”
“All right,” Shapiro said. “It’s Mrs. Prentis I’d like to see now. If she’s up to it. Happen to know whether she is?”
Farmington said he didn’t. He said Mrs. Mathews had pretty much taken over as far as Mrs. Prentis was concerned. Asked, he said that, yes, Henry Pruitt was staying at the hotel with the rest of them; that he had moved into the room Prentis had occupied and that this captain whatever-his-name-was had said it was all right.
“Perfectly all right,” Shapiro told him. “We’ve picked up anything in the room we thought might help.”
Maloney was a good cop, and Shapiro could be sure that had been done. And reasonably sure nothing of value had come of it—nothing, say, like a letter from somebody threatening to kill the Reverend Mr. Prentis. Shapiro went along the corridor to the suite occupied by Mrs. Florence Mathews and her assistants.
Mrs. Mathews was wearing a black dress. She was signing checks and sliding them across the desk to a middle-aged woman, also in a black dress, who was putting them in envelopes. When Shapiro went into the office room of the suite, Mrs. Mathews looked up and said, “Well?” and sounded angry about it. Then she said, “I haven’t any time to waste this morning. There are a hundred things—”
“I’m sure there are,” Shapiro said. “It’s Mrs. Prentis I’d like to see for a few minutes. Mr. Farmington said to speak to you about it.”
“Have you no respect? No consideration for one so recently bereaved?”
“A great deal,” Shapiro said. “Also, I’m a policeman. Investigating a murder. Is she still under sedation? If the doctor says she can’t be talked to—well, I’ll have to wait till she can. Otherwise—”
“The doctor hasn’t been in to see her this morning. There isn’t anything she can tell you. You—you just want to persecute her. She’s a gentle Christian woman who has suffered a great loss. She should be spared—”
“Mrs. Mathews,” Shapiro said, and talked like a policeman, “I have no intention of persecuting Mrs. Prentis. But I have every intention of seeing her. Now, if she’s up to it. You’ve probably seen her this morn
ing, haven’t you?”
“Of course. She is afflicted. It is no more than my duty. I persuaded her to let me order a little breakfast sent up. She must keep up her strength.”
“Of course,” Shapiro said. “Very wise of you, Mrs. Mathews. She’s up and dressed, I take it? The sedation’s worn off?”
“Well—”
“So,” he said, “I’ll try to be as brief as I can. As considerate.”
He turned back toward the door. Mrs. Mathews started to get up from the desk.
“No,” Shapiro said. “You needn’t come with me. I’m not going to persecute Mrs. Prentis.”
Mrs. Mathews continued to get up from the desk. She shook her head and started to walk around the desk.
“No,” Shapiro said. He made it a very final “No.” He went out of the room and closed the door after him. He went the length of the corridor and knocked at a door. A voice—rather a small and distant voice—said, “Who is it?” and Shapiro told Mrs. Jonathan Prentis who it was. There was a pause of some seconds, and then she said, “The door isn’t locked.”
It was a corner room, with windows on two sides. There was a waiter’s cart in the middle of it and used dishes on the cart. Mrs. Prentis had had eggs for breakfast, and had eaten them. Also bacon. She was keeping up her strength.
She sat in a chair by one of the windows and had a book open on her lap. The Bible, Shapiro saw when he had partly crossed the room. A Bible in limp-leather binding. The hands on the Bible were shapely but, for a woman’s, rather large. She was blonde and, Shapiro thought, on the whole good-looking—all of her large and shapely. And younger than he had expected her to be. She wore a black dress. He did not think she had been crying, and she seemed quite composed.
She said, “I told the young woman yesterday all I have to tell.” She said, “It is nothing. Was nothing. Only someone very evil could have harmed my husband. They say he was in an evil place when it happened. He had gone to seek out evil. To strive against it. He was a man of God.”
“There are one or two things you may be able—”
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