Preach No More

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Mmmm.”

  It was fine to stretch out the length of the tub in hot water and, as it cooled, turn the hot on again with the toes. He had lain in hot water for fifteen minutes when the telephone rang. Rose said, “Lie still. I’ll get it,” through the bathroom door, and he could hear her footsteps as she crossed the room. He turned more hot water on with his toes.

  She opened the door and went into the bathroom and looked at him stretching the length of the tub.

  “Tony Cook,” she said. “He said neither of them rearranged her clothes. And is there something else you want him to do before he knocks off for the day?”

  “They both agree?”

  “That’s what Tony said.”

  “Tell him to call it a day.”

  “Which is what you’re going to call it,” Rose Shapiro said. “And when you’re through soaking just put a robe on, and tonight you’re going to have a real drink. Medicinal.”

  “But at lunch I had a—”

  “Nathan.”

  “Yes, dear. A real drink.”

  When he went back into the living room, with a robe belted over pajamas, she had bottles and glasses and ice on a coffee table between sofa and fire. She had not mixed her own martini. She had put ice in her cocktail glass to chill it. His real drink was to be Scotch. She looked up at him and looked at him carefully and said, “Much better, darling. You look like somebody in the movies. I don’t remember who.”

  “Clark Gable, probably,” Nathan told her. “A very morose Clark Gable without a mustache. Made up to play the melancholy Dane.”

  “In a dressing gown,” she said, and put ice in her mixing glass and in his stubby glass. She poured Scotch on the ice in his glass, even after he had said, “Whoa!” She mixed her martini and spilled the ice from her glass back into the ice container and measured gin and vermouth into the mixer and stirred and poured in her glass and twisted a sliver of lemon peel over it and rubbed the peel around the edge of the glass. She said, “There,” and he stretched his legs out toward the electric coils in the fireplace, although he wasn’t cold any longer. Come to think of it, he wasn’t tired any longer, and he no longer expected to sneeze at any moment.

  For some minutes they sat so and sipped their drinks. Scotch didn’t taste as good to Nathan as his usual sweet wine. But it was warming. And his stomach had not protested—well, not actively protested—his drink before lunch. Those people up at the hotel are driving me to drink, Nathan thought, but he thought it without resentment.

  “If you smother somebody with a pillow,” Nathan said, “the person being smothered struggles. Fights.”

  “I would, certainly,” Rose said. “I’d take it hard. ‘Shrieking to the south and clutching at the north.’”

  “Yes,” he said. “And if you had clothes on they’d be—oh, heaped on you. Skirt up around your waist, because you’d kick to stay alive. Your legs every which way.”

  “Yes, Nathan. I’d think so. The girl who was with Prentis?”

  “We think was with Prentis. Just before he was killed. Yes. Her clothes were very smooth. Very—seemly. If that’s the word I want.”

  “It’s a good word. An old word but a good word. I take it you mean—oh, decently covered.”

  “As if she were laid out,” Nathan said. “Her dress smoothed down over her knees.”

  “Hands crossed on her chest?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that far. Straight down by her sides. She was that way when she was found, Rose. The men who found her are sure of that. What Tony called to tell me.”

  She nodded her head. She sipped from her glass.

  “I don’t understand these people,” he said. “I think one of them killed Prentis and the girl. I can’t prove it, and I don’t know why. But I think somebody smothered the girl and smoothed her clothing down so that she would be, as you put it, decently covered. Who would do a thing like that, Rose?”

  “I don’t know. A man? Or a woman?”

  “It could have been either. Which do you think would be more likely?”

  She shook her head and sipped from her glass. Then she put her glass down and turned to Nathan and shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s—well, it’s hard to imagine anybody who would—oh, go to that trouble. Any murderer. Of course, some women are hipped on modesty. Decency. Whatever you may call it. Not so many nowadays. But some, I guess. Only—”

  She looked down at her glass, which was almost empty. She emptied it. She looked at his glass, which was still almost full. She raised eyebrows at him and lifted her shoulders. “All right,” Nathan said. “I will in a minute. Only?”

  “I’m thinking,” Rose said, and put fresh ice in the shaker and measured a little gin and much less vermouth onto it, stirred and stirred and poured. This time she did not squeeze a sliver of lemon peel because she had brought only one from the kitchen, planning on her usual single drink. She did not immediately drink from her partly filled glass.

  “Women don’t really care about other women being—exposed. Naked, if it comes to that. Naked women aren’t anything special to other women. Heterosexual women, I mean. I don’t know much about the other kind. Of course—oh, I suppose there are some women who hate human bodies. Think them sinful. The woman you have in mind, Nathan? Because you have some woman in mind, haven’t you?”

  “As a possible,” he said. “Oh, perhaps two. Mrs. Prentis is one of them. She—told me a strange thing today. Without being asked to.”

  He told her about Hope Prentis’s self-imposed chastity.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Rose said. “It’s fanaticism.”

  “Yes.”

  “The poor man,” Rose said. “Or—was he that way too?”

  “I doubt it. He—a man gave him pictures of pretty girls. Who might guide him, accompany him, in his investigations of the city’s vice. ‘Guide’ is the word that was used.”

  Rose Shapiro said, “My God!” and half emptied her half-filled glass. She said, “Are there really people like that? Like this Mrs. Prentis, I mean.”

  Nathan said, “Apparently,” and drank from his own glass. He looked at it and drank again.

  “Some kind of religious masochism? Or—didn’t she care? Just frigid?”

  “I don’t know,” Nathan said. “You think a woman is the more likely? About the clothes, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I—well, I don’t think either is very likely. A woman—it doesn’t seem to me that a woman would care very much. About how another woman—a dead woman—looked. I said that, didn’t I? But about a woman like this Mrs. Prentis—” She raised her shoulders and let them drop again.

  “A prudish man,” she said then. “An—oh, an insanely prudish man. A fanatic about it. Is there a man like that, Nathan?”

  “Yes,” Nathan said, “there’s a man who maybe’s like that.”

  He set down his glass and went to the telephone.

  He got the lieutenant on the four-to-midnight shift at Homicide South.

  “Well,” the lieutenant said, “Spencer’s good with a camera. I don’t know he looks much like the type goes around snapping people in restaurants. Or that the Wexley is the sort of place where that sort of thing’s done much. But O.K. if you say so, Nate. He’ll be dressed like a priest, you say?”

  “If he’s there at all. He may very well not be. It’s just a chance.”

  “O.K.,” Lieutenant O’Reilly said. “We’ll have a shot at it, Nate. Spencer’ll use a minicamera, but chances are, of course, he’ll tumble to it.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said and his voice was sad almost to the point of hopelessness. “Chances are he will, Frank. I’d like the prints in the morning.”

  “Sure. If he gets the shots.”

  “If he gets the shots. And—there are boys down at Headquarters who can do a nice job of touching up.”

  “Yes, Nate. Thanks for telling me.”

  “Just getting straight in my own head, Frank. If he’s wearing a cl
erical collar—backside to front—have them draw a necktie in. Or however they do it. Not on all the prints. On two or three, maybe.”

  “Four-in-hand? Or bow?”

  “Four-in-hand. Dark, at a guess.”

  “You want them to change his clothes? Give him, maybe, a nice snappy sports jacket?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “He’s not a lily needs gilding, Frank. Decent black suit. He’s a very decent man.”

  Francis X. O’Reilly said, “Spencer’s on his way,” and Nathan Shapiro went back to the sofa in front of the electric fire. He finished his drink and looked at the empty glass.

  “You’ve opted for somebody,” Rose said. “A priest, I take it.”

  “Ordained minister,” Shapiro said. “He wouldn’t call it priest. Papish, he’d call that, probably. Opted on the chance only, Rose. Because I haven’t the faintest idea why he’d do it. Way it looks, he only stands to lose. No motive.”

  “You’ve told me,” Rose said, “that it isn’t necessary to prove a motive.”

  “Technically,” Nathan said. “But juries like to know why. Come to that, so do detectives.” He regarded his empty glass. Rose pulled it nearer and put ice cubes in it. He said, “I don’t think I’d—”

  “Medicinal,” Rose said. “To ward off colds.”

  But this time she poured much less Scotch on the ice.

  They had dinner. They sat in front of the fire and played records. A Brahms record and an Ella Fitzgerald record. A Beethoven and an Ethel Merman. “Share and share alike,” Rose said, as he put the records on the changer. It was during the Beethoven that Nathan began to yawn.

  “Go to bed,” Rose said. “You’re tired and sleepy. I’ll clean things up and be along.”

  Nathan Shapiro said, “All right,” in a sleepy voice and went into the bedroom. When she had rinsed dishes and put them in the washer she too went into the bedroom, and Nathan was in bed. Only, he was in her bed.

  “You’re supposed to be sleepy,” she told him. “Very tired and sleepy.”

  “Not all that sleepy,” Nathan said. “Of course, if I’m getting a cold—”

  “Share and share alike,” Rose Shapiro said, and slid out of clothes.

  “Hello?”

  “Police. Matter of routine. Can you account for your movements last night?”

  “Home and in bed by ten. Asleep in ten minutes. Didn’t stir all night.”

  “Doesn’t jibe with what we hear. We hear you went to a movie. Eighth Street Playhouse.”

  “You’ve heard wrong, mister.”

  “It’s supposed to be a good movie. Tomorrow, maybe. We can have dinner early somewhere and—”

  “No, Tony. I’m getting a lamb stew from Bob the Butcher. We’ll eat it here.”

  “Six-thirty?”

  “Make it—oh, all right. Six-thirty. But this time we really go to the movie.”

  “Of course,” Tony Cook said. “What else would we think of doing?”

  “The movie,” Rachel Farmer said. She spoke very firmly. But of course he was blocks away.

  12

  The photographs were pretty good, considering. For shots taken with what O’Reilly had called a “minicamera,” they had blown up well. One showed the small, thin man sitting at a table in a restaurant—the coffee shop of the Hotel Wexley, but that didn’t show. A second showed him, still at the table, from another angle. A third showed him walking out of the restaurant, toward the camera, and it was the best and most useful. If any of them was going to be useful.

  There were two copies of each print. In one of each the Reverend John Wesley Higgs was wearing a clerical collar. It still looked too large for him; he seemed to peer out of it, as if he were peering over a wall. In the other prints he was wearing a plain white collar and a necktie. These retouched photographs were convincing enough if you didn’t look at them too closely. Higgs was just a man in a dark suit, wearing a collar and a dark four-in-hand tie.

  Shapiro put the photographs which showed the Reverend Mr. Higgs having dinner in the top drawer of his desk. He put the two versions of Higgs walking toward the camera, and apparently unaware of it, face down on top of his desk.

  Shapiro read Tony Cook’s report. There wasn’t much doubt that Farmington had got kickbacks from the singers he had hired to hymn the praise of God. But there was a great deal of doubt whether it could be proved. They could, Tony thought, get plenty of the men and women to say they had paid. But he had found none who could testify it was pay if you want the job. And all had put their money envelopes in a box marked with the name of the Mission of Redemption, Inc. and had been told they were making voluntary contributions to a sacred cause. And suppose Farmington had taken the envelopes out of the box and put them in a briefcase? You don’t leave money lying around loose.

  It would be difficult to prove that Farmington had kept the money. Probably it would be impossible. And it was not, at least directly, within the province of Homicide South.

  It was a little after nine when Shapiro got to writing his own report—the report, he thought, he should have written yesterday. Not that there was anything especially urgent in it. Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Prentis had not, for eight of their ten years of marriage, had sexual intercourse because, if there is no expectation of children, intercourse is a sin. Mrs. Prentis had spent five or six days in a rather bleak retreat near North White Plains. (Detective Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro had got his feet wet. But he had not caught cold. Yet, anyway.)

  It was taking a time to round them up, Shapiro thought, at a quarter of ten. But he had supposed it would. They would have had to be waked up, as well as rounded up. The big-eyed bus boy would be frightened again. Nobody would be happy.

  It was a little after ten when Tony Cook came to say they were all on hand—Manuel Perez with the large frightened eyes; André Brideaux, Emile Schmidt and Granzo (who probably would be indignant) and the doorman, who was named Rex Prince. And whom they had missed the first time around because they had not known the Village Brawl ran to a doorman. And had not thought to ask. Which proves, if it needs proving, that I’m not much good at the job and that the department is stupid not to know it.

  “Bring them in one at a time,” Shapiro told Tony Cook. “Start with the kid, because he’s scared of the fuzz. We may as well let him get it over with.”

  Manuel Perez was wearing a black leather jacket and, below tight slacks, black shoes with straps on them. He looked scared; there was fear in his large dark eyes. As soon as Tony Cook brought him into the room, walking behind him and towering over him, Manuel said, “Sir. I didn’t do bad thing, sir.” And then he went into Spanish, talking very rapidly and excitedly. Shapiro didn’t understand the hurried Spanish.

  “All right, son,” Nathan Shapiro said. “Nobody thinks you did anything bad. Just maybe that you can help us. Come over here, son.”

  It was only a few steps in the small office from door to desk. Manuel Perez took them hesitantly. After the first he turned back to look at the door, but Tony Cook was standing in front of it. The boy went on, as if into a trap. “It’s all right, son,” Shapiro said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Look at this.”

  Shapiro put one of the photographs where Manuel could look down at it. It was one of the Reverend Higgs wearing a clerical collar. Shapiro said, “Ever see him anywhere, son?”

  “He’s a priest,” Manuel said. “Isn’t he a priest, sir?”

  “Dressed like one, anyway,” Shapiro said. “Ever see him, Manuel?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so. I go to mass, sir. Every Sunday I go to mass.”

  “That’s fine,” Shapiro said. “You don’t know this man?”

  “No, sir.”

  “This one?” Shapiro said, and showed him the photograph which had been worked over so that Higgs appeared dressed in a dark business suit, with a dark necktie.

  Manuel Perez looked at it. He looked longer than he had at the other. Then he looked at Shapiro. He said, “But it’s the same man as the other, sir? Isn
’t it, sir? Only not a priest.”

  “You’ve got good eyes, son,” Shapiro told him. “You ever see this man dressed this way?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. Only maybe I did but don’t remember. I try to remember, sir. Not the priest, sir. Maybe this one, but I don’t know. In the restaurant there are lots of people, sir, and I run run run. Would he have be—I mean been—in the restaurant?”

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “We’re trying to find out, son. You never saw him there, Manuel? Dressed as a priest or not?”

  “Priests don’t come there, sir. I never saw a priest there.”

  “All right, son,” Shapiro said. “Want to see he gets a ride back home, Tony?”

  “Sure,” Tony Cook said, “I’ll see—”

  “Please, sirs,” Manuel said. “Please. Not in a police car. Not down where I live. They’d think I—I don’t know, sirs. It would be bad for me. They’d think I—” He did not finish, at least in English. But he spoke rapidly, excitedly, in Spanish.

  “All right,” Shapiro said. “They’d think you’d sold out to the fuzz. Something like that. Go home any way you like, Manuel. See that he gets out all right, Tony. And ask Mr. Schmidt to come in.”

  Manuel Perez did not run across the office to the door. But he moved very rapidly to the door, and Tony Cook opened it for him and went out after him. Probably, Shapiro thought, the kid had expected to be beaten up. We’re the enemy, Shapiro thought. It’s too damn bad, but that’s the way it is.

  Emile Schmidt looked just as German as ever in a tweed jacket and gray slacks and a very wide necktie. He was not at all afraid. He looked at both photographs and shook his head. He said, “Not that I remember, Lieutenant. Would it have been at the restaurant?”

  “It might have been,” Shapiro said.

  “Priests don’t come there,” Emile said. “They like quieter places. I worked over at Charles for a while a couple of years back. Priests used to come in there sometimes. But that was before they dolled the place up. I don’t know about now.”

  “But this man. You don’t remember ever seeing him?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”