Write Murder Down

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “It was meant to look like suicide,” Tony said, “but we don’t think it was—that is, Nate and I don’t think it was. She—well, she was in the bathtub with her wrists cut.”

  Rachel said, “Oh!” again and put her right hand up to her lips. She shook her head again, her hand still pressing against her lips. She took the hand down and said, “I’m sorry, Tony. She was—she was just a shadow in the light.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Tony said. “We’re—oh, as usual, just trying to put the pieces together. Are you about finished here? Because if you are—”

  “She’s not,” Ivan Mackenowitz said, his voice gruffer than ever. “Won’t be for an hour, Mr. Anthony Cook. An hour and a half if you keep on asking her damn-fool questions.”

  “He’s like that, Tony,” Rachel said. “Most of them are like that.”

  She slipped the robe off and went back to stand on the little platform. She stood, so far as Tony could tell, exactly as she had stood before.

  “The head,” Mackenowitz said. “Damn it, Miss Farmer, the head.”

  She moved her head a little. Tony said, “Tomorrow, then?” and, without moving her head, which was turned a little away from him, Rachel said, “Of course, Tony.”

  4

  People kept coming into the lobby of the Hotel Algonquin and kept going out of it. Most of those who went out went through the entrance to the restaurant. Some went into the Rose Room, which was also a restaurant with an illuminated sign, “Cocktails.” A few went out into Forty-fourth Street, but more came in from it. Laurence Shepley drank bourbon; Nathan Shapiro sipped from his glass of sherry. Sour it was, he thought; almost bitter sour. Why not call it that instead of calling it “dry”?

  “When you took Miss Lacey home from dinner,” Shapiro said, “did you ever take her to Gay Street, Mr. Shepley? Or did you ever call for her there? Visit her there?”

  “I don’t know where this Gay Street is,” Shepley said. “She lives—lived, I guess—here at the Algonquin.” He finished his drink and started to stand up. He said, “I’m going to have lunch. You want to come along?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “And I’d appreciate it if you gave me a few more minutes before you have your lunch. There ought to be pictures of her coming along pretty soon. I’d like you to have a look at them.”

  “Taken after she was dead? This Miss Jones you think was Jo-An was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t much want to look at pictures of dead people.”

  “Nobody does much, Mr. Shepley. Some of us have to. Meanwhile—you say she dressed well. You did say that, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did. Yeah, she dressed well.”

  “There weren’t any of her clothes in the Gay Street place,” Shapiro said. “Oh, a white dress and things to go with it.”

  “I don’t know,” Shepley said. “I think she wore a white dress once or twice.”

  “If Miss Lacey and Miss Jones are—were—the same person, her clothes will be up in her room, probably,” Shapiro said. “I’d like you to go up with me and have a look at them.”

  “Proving what? We know Jo-An lived here.”

  Proving, Nathan Shapiro thought, I want to see how you react to things. “Probably nothing,” Shapiro said. “We may come across somebody downtown who saw Miss Jones wearing the same clothes. Going into her apartment. Gives us a tie-in, if you see what I mean.”

  “A pretty, fuzzy one,” Shepley said. “Look, am I under arrest or something?”

  “Not at all. Go have your lunch if you want to. Or, cooperate with the police. Either way you want it.”

  “Without prejudice?”

  “Well—no official prejudice, Mr. Shepley. I’d like your help is all.”

  “O.K. All right, O.K. Damn it all, man, I saw her in them. Her clothes, I mean. Now they—well, they’ll just be hanging there, limp. Anyhow, they’ll make a fuss about letting us in the room.”

  “Not too much of a fuss,” Shapiro said. He stood up. Shepley, who had interrupted his own movement to stand, looked up at him.

  “All right,” Shepley said, in a low, slow voice, “I wasn’t sleeping with Jo-An. Or planning to, come to that. But—well, she was a damn nice kid.”

  “Kid? According to the autopsy report, the dead woman was in her late twenties or early thirties.”

  “Jo-An was a kid all the same. A—a bright, expectant kid. She was going to have lunch with me today. She liked it here. She—it was a change from Alabama for her. One hell of a change. She’d read about the Algonquin, I guess. About Frank Adams and Dorothy Parker and Woollcott and the rest. Long time ago, that was. Before my time. Before her time. All right, let’s go look at her clothes.”

  He stood up. He walked to the hotel desk, leading Shapiro.

  The desk clerk did make something of a fuss. The assistant manager, summoned from his office behind the desk, looked at Shapiro’s badge and said it was irregular, wasn’t it? but he guessed so and he’d have a bellman go up with them. Outside the door of Room Nine-twelve, the bellman said, “Something happened to the lady? On account of, I used to get cabs for her sometimes. And brought her gear up when she first arrived. She was a pleasant lady, talked sort of Southern. Something’s happened to her?”

  “We can’t be sure yet,” Shapiro said, and the bellman used a key and let them into Room Nine-twelve. It was a moderately large room with twin beds—with two easy chairs and a long chest which had a mirror over it and a glass top. There was a small, straight chair in front of the low chest. There were cosmetics in bottles and boxes on the top of the chest. Somebody had been living in this room. It wasn’t like the apartment in Gay Street, in which it was hard to believe anybody had ever lived.

  Shapiro opened the closet door and dresses and a light coat and a long negligee were on hangers in it. He said, “Have a look, will you, Mr. Shepley?” and Shepley went to the closet and began to slide dresses along on the rod, looking at each. Shapiro went into the bathroom. There were two toothbrushes in slots of the receptacle for the bathroom glass. In the medicine cabinet there was a tube of toothpaste and a hairbrush and a bottle of Maalox. There were no bottles containing sleeping pills.

  Shapiro went back into the bedroom. Shepley was still looking at the clothes in the closet. He had taken two dresses out of it and laid them on one of the beds.

  Shapiro put a handkerchief over his fingers and opened a small drawer in the desk section of the chest. The drawer contained stationery marked “Hotel Algonquin.” He looked in the drawer under the first one, still with the handkerchief shielding his fingers. He found a flat checkbook of a national bank in Mobile, Alabama. The checks in it were printed, “Jo-An Lacey.”

  She had filled in her slips carefully, in a small, clear hand. She had tallied them. Her balance in the Mobile bank was, to Nathan Shapiro, rather surprisingly large. Rose and Nathan Shapiro keep whatever spare cash they have, which is never a great deal, mostly in a savings bank.

  Shepley came out of the closet and pointed to the two dresses he had spread out on the bed.

  “Those two I’m pretty sure of,” he said. “Pretty sure I’ve seen her wearing them, I mean.”

  Both the dresses were summer afternoon dresses. One of them was a print of yellow and black. The other was a long-sleeved white dress with a low V in the back.

  “There’s another one I’m not quite sure about,” Shepley said. He brought a gray dress of what Shapiro thought was fight-weight wool out of the closet. It was a dress with a dark gray top and a skirt slashed with deep red and the same dark gray. It was a little longer than the other two when Shepley laid it out on the bed beside them. Shapiro memorized the three dresses and said, “All right, Mr. Shepley. Sorry to have held up your lunch.”

  They went down together, with the bellman, to the street level. Tony Cook was at the hotel desk, talking to the room clerk. Shapiro went up to him and Cook said, “I’ve got the—oh, hello, Mr. Shepley.”

  Shepley had started t
oward the restaurant, but he turned back. He looked at Tony, at first blankly. Then he said, “Hi, neighbor.” He looked from Tony Cook to Nathan Shapiro. “You two seem to know each other,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re a cop too, neighbor?”

  “Cook,” Tony said. “Yes, I’m a cop too. I’ve got some pictures, Lieutenant.”

  He took pictures out of a manila envelope. The top one showed a young woman lying in a bathtub, with long hair floating on grimy water. Tony took out another picture, this one only of head and shoulders. It was a picture of the same young woman. Death was spread out on both pictures.

  “Have a look at this, will you, Mr. Shepley?” Shapiro said and held out the picture which showed only head and shoulders.

  Laurence Shepley looked at the photograph. He said, “Jesus,” in a slow voice—a voice with shock in it. Then he said, “Do they always look like that, Lieutenant?”

  “Pretty much,” Shapiro said. “Is it Miss Lacey?”

  “Yes,” Shepley said. “It’s Jo-An. And-this Miss Jones?”

  It was Tony Cook who said “Yes” to that. Shapiro looked at the man with the red beard for a moment. Then he said, “You can go have your lunch now, Mr. Shepley.”

  Shepley didn’t say anything. He walked away, but not toward the restaurant entrance. He walked along by the partition toward the door and Forty-fourth Street.

  “I want Room Nine-twelve kept locked until some men get here,” Shapiro told the desk clerk. “Nobody goes into it. You understand that, Mr. Arthur?”

  “I’ll get the man—”

  “Just keep the room locked up,” Shapiro said. “Don’t let anybody into it. That’s a police order.”

  The desk clerk said, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro said, “Come on, Tony,” and then, “No. Wait a minute.”

  He went to a row of telephone booths and pulled a Manhattan directory out of the rack. Phillips Morton, Inc., had an office at 529 Fifth Avenue, which would be convenient. Shapiro went into one of the booths and dialed the number he wanted. Precinct would be notified; the lab squad and the fingerprint men would go over Room 912 at the Hotel Algonquin.

  Tony Cook and Nathan Shapiro walked east on Forty-fourth Street. They were two tall men, one in slacks and sports jacket, the other in a tired gray suit. Although it was warming up, they both kept their jackets buttoned to cover the guns under them.

  “Shepley is a writer,” Shapiro said. “Says he is, at any rate. And a friend of Miss Lacey’s, who also was a writer. A much better-known one, Shepley says. A famous one, he says. Not a particularly close friend of Miss Lacey’s, Shepley says he wasn’t. Bought her a few drinks. A dinner or two. Says he’s never been in Gay Street.”

  “He lives in the Village,” Cook said. “Same building I live in. An easy walk from it to Gay Street. And, he was at the bar at Charles Restaurant last night while Rachel and I were there. Waiting for somebody to join him, it could have been.”

  “He was waiting back there,” Shapiro said, “at the hotel. For Miss Lacey to join him for lunch. He seems to bob up a bit, doesn’t he, Tony?”

  Tony Cook agreed that Shepley seemed to bob up quite a bit.

  “And,” he said, “the woman who worked for Miss Lacey when she was Miss Jones in Gay Street also works for Shepley. Cleans his apartment once a week. This Mrs. Jenkinson. Probably just a coincidence. Like your running into Shepley at the Algonquin. Where Miss Lacey was staying.”

  “Where she was living,” Shapiro said. “The Gay Street place and the false name—just a hideaway or a front or something. Yes, it’s still here.”

  It was the unmarked police car. Tony held his hand out for the key.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “We won’t need it just yet.”

  He told Cook where they were going and why they wouldn’t need a car to get there. They waited for lights to cross Fifth Avenue.

  “Did you find Miss Farmer?” Shapiro asked.

  Cook told about finding Rachel, and that Rachel had never got a good look at the woman at the typewriter. “Which doesn’t matter now, of course,” he said. “We know what she looked like.” He said that it was when he was walking toward the studio where she was posing that he had seen Mrs. Jenkinson climbing the steps to the house he lived in.

  “The pix went downtown?” Shapiro said, as the lights changed and they crossed Fifth Avenue. Cook said that the pictures had gone downtown for the precinct men to show around. They found 529 Fifth Avenue, which was a tall building. “Morton, Phillips, Authors’ Representative” had office 1012. They went up to the tenth floor and along a corridor. PHILLIPS MORTON, INC., AUTHOBS’ REPRESENTATIVE was on the ground glass of a door. They opened the door into a small office with a young woman sitting at a typewriter. She was filing her nails.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Morton,” Shapiro told her.

  “I’m afraid he’s gone to lunch,” the girl said, and kept on filing her nails. Then she looked up at Nathan Shapiro. She looked, Shapiro thought, with skepticism. Probably, Nathan thought, because he didn’t look like an author. I look, Shapiro thought, like a slightly seedy character approaching middle age. She looked at Tony Cook with, Shapiro realized, considerably more animation. “I’m sorry he’s out,” she told Tony Cook. “He probably won’t be back until around three. If he comes back at all, that is.”

  But then the door from the corridor opened and a man of middle height and medium roundness came in. He had a towel on his right hand. The girl said, “Oh, Mr. Morton, I thought you’d gone. These gentlemen—”

  “Washing my hands,” Phillips Morton said. He had a brisk voice. He was, Nathan Shapiro thought, probably in his middle thirties. “Afraid I’ve got to be getting along, though. You gentlemen wanted to see me? Haven’t got much time. Going to lunch with an editor. So?”

  Shapiro said who he was and who Tony Cook was. Morton said, “Why me? I haven’t run over anybody or anything.”

  “About Miss Lacey,” Shapiro said. “Miss Jo-An Lacey. A client of yours, we’ve been told.”

  “Just moved into my stable,” Morton said. “Coming in Monday to sign a contract.”

  “No,” Shapiro said, “I’m afraid she isn’t, Mr. Morton. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  Morton’s round, reddened face seemed to freeze. He said, “God damn it to hell.” He shook his head. He said, “God damn it to hell.” Then he said, “Wouldn’t you know?” He said, “Come on in,” and led the way to a door across the little room. He put his hand on the doorknob and turned back. He said, “Get the Algonquin, will you, honey? Have them page Bracken. Have them tell him I’m held up and’ll be there as soon as I can and to start his drinking.”

  The girl said, “Yes, Mr. Morton.”

  Morton said, “Come on,” and opened the door and went through it. Shapiro and Cook went after him into a somewhat larger room with a desk backed to a window. Morton went to the chair behind the desk and motioned toward two other chairs. He said to Shapiro, “You’re a police lieutenant?”

  “Yes. Homicide.”

  “Don’t tell me Miss Lacey’s been killed?”

  “I just did,” Shapiro said. “And we want to know what you knew about her. And about a man named Laurence Shepley.”

  “Damn little about her,” Morton said. “Except what everybody knows. Big hit with Snake Country. Big movie sale. And boy, did she get gypped. Shep—hell, I’ve known Shep for years. Handled him for years. Nothing flashy. Steady producer. Was until the magazines started to fold, anyway. What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you can tell us. You said—what was it?—that she’d just moved into your stable.”

  “Got her on my list,” Morton said. “If you’d rather have it that way. And damn glad to have her there.” He paused and shook his head. He said, “Jesus!” Then he said, “Old Shep gave her my name. Thoughtful of him. Realized, I guess from something she told him, she needed somebody.” He looked intently at Shapiro. “A hell of a writer,” he said. “But, without somebody like me—an a
gent who knows his way around—a sheep for the shearing.”

  “Mr. Shepley suggested she come to you,” Shapiro said. “She did. When was that, Mr. Morton?”

  It had been, Morton told them, about two weeks ago. He riffled back in a desk calendar and said, “Monday, June twelfth.” She had called him up and said that Shepley had suggested she get in touch with him. “As soon as she told me her name, I said to come right around. Because—well, she’s the kind of writer agents dream about. You’re sure she’s dead?”

  Shapiro said he was afraid so. He said, “Go ahead, Mr. Morton.”

  Jo-An Lacey had come right around. She had brought part of a manuscript. “Four chapters. Carbon, but partly corrected.” She had also brought a copy of her old contract with a publisher. She said she had been told she could do better.

  “I looked over her contract and said, ‘My God, lady!’ Something like that, anyway.”

  She had left the four chapters of the manuscript with him. She had also left her contract.

  “You and she signed some sort of an agreement? Appointing you as her representative?”

  “Not the way it’s done,” Morton said. “Not by me, anyway. Oral agreement. Sure, in the contract there’s an agency clause. The book contract, I mean. The one she was going to sign this afternoon. Damn good contract. Straight fifteen to twenty thousand. Seventeen and a half from there on. Sixty per cent of the paperback and the rest of the subsidiaries. No grab at the movie rights or first serial or foreign rights. Materson was tickled pink to get her. Ten thousand advance and I could have got a lot more, but she didn’t want a lot more.”

  “You took this part of her book to—to whom, Mr. Morton?”

  “Materson and Brothers. They’re old line—solid old line. One of the best in the business. And they’re not about to merge with anybody, far’s I know.”

  He had taken the first four chapters of a book which had, as a working title, “Lonely Waters.” He had read them that same night and had submitted them to Materson the next day. They had read the material in a week. “Which must be pretty close to a record.” They had accepted the novel. “Without even an outline of the rest of it. That’s how sure they were.” Materson & Brothers had accepted what he had demanded in the contract. “Not a whimper out of them. That’s how anxious they were to get her.” He had got the contract for her signature on Wednesday the twenty-first and called her. She had been going to come in next Monday and sign it. God damn it to hell. “If only I’d made her come right away.”