Write Murder Down

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “No. But—well, after that last book of hers she was pretty famous, Lieutenant. It would have got around she was in town and—well, people would have bothered her. Interrupting people. Some of them can write damn near any place. In a boiler factory, for all I know. Some of them have to go into cells to work. Jo-An’s—Jo-An was—one of that kind. Interruptions threw her.” He drank from his glass. He shook his head. He said, “Damn,” and the word seemed to explode in his throat. He said, “Such a damned waste.”

  “You knew her pretty well, Mr. Karn?”

  “Know all my writers pretty well. Reason they come to me. One of the reasons. The other is that I put them over. The way I did her.”

  “I want to know anything you can tell me about her,” Shapiro said. “We can never tell what may help us. Things that wouldn’t seem to have any relevance—well, sometimes they do. You say she was famous after this last book? The last one that was published, I mean.”

  “Snake Country. Yes. It was—well, what some people call a bombshell. After it started we had to bring out a new printing every month. Damn near every month, anyway. And after the movie came out, paperback went into millions.”

  “Probably made her a lot of money,” Shapiro said.

  “Made everybody a lot of money,” Karn said. “This new one will too, from what I’ve seen of it.”

  “Which you say is only three or four chapters,” Shapiro said. “Do you know where the rest of it is, Mr. Karn? The rest of the manuscript? That she was going to bring in Monday, or sooner?”

  “In her hotel room,” Karn said. “Or in this apartment you speak of. It’s bound—”

  He stopped abruptly. He looked over his glass at Nathan Shapiro.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “It isn’t in either of those places, Mr. Karn. Perhaps she changed her mind? Sent it to your company by mail?”

  Karn’s dark eyes narrowed. He started to shake his head and stopped the movement. He said, “I suppose it could just—just sit there a minute, will you, Lieutenant? Make yourself a drink if you like.”

  He got up. He went across the big room and out of it. Shapiro just sat there. He did not make himself a drink. Karn was gone for almost ten minutes. He started to speak as he came into the room. He said, “Damned if she didn’t. Special delivery. It showed up at the office around two this afternoon. A hell of a big bundle of it, my secretary says.”

  He went to the table and picked his glass up and carried it back to the bar. He returned with it full.

  “She never did that before,” he said, after he had drunk from his glass. “A lot of them don’t trust the mails. Think their manuscripts are—oh, priceless. Carry them around in their hands like—oh, like babies. Or make sure their agents do.”

  “Miss Lacey didn’t have an agent?”

  “What makes you say that? Assume that?”

  “Why,” Shapiro said, “because she seems to have sent this new manuscript direct to you. To the company, that is. You just said, didn’t you, that some writers send in their books through their agents?”

  “She didn’t need an agent,” Karn said. “Not with me, she didn’t. Just be throwing away ten per cent of her money.”

  “Anyway,” Shapiro said, “now you’ve got this new book of hers. You’ll publish it, Mr. Karn?”

  “We sure as hell will.”

  “After you merge with—what is the other publishing house, Mr. Karn?”

  “Jefferson—what makes you think we’re going to merge with anybody, Lieutenant?”

  As he said that, Karn’s voice grated more harshly than before.

  “Just heard there was a rumor going around,” Shapiro said. “We pick up a lot of rumors. Your company isn’t going to merge with the Jefferson Press, then?”

  “That have anything to do with Jo-An Lacey?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, Mr. Karn. Thing is, we never know what things may have to do with one another. Not in my trade, anyway. About this merger?”

  “They made overtures. There’s nothing definite. And it’s supposed to be off the record, Shapiro.”

  “Things leak,” Shapiro said. “We find out all the time that things leak. Helps sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s get back to Miss Lacey. You’d known her for some time, Mr. Karn?”

  “About eight years. Since we published her first book. That was about eight years ago. Nice little job, but it didn’t go. Some publishers would have let her slide when it didn’t. Not Oscar Karn, Incorporated. Not the way I do business. Never has been. You come on somebody you think’s going to be good and you stick with them. Nurse them along, you might say. Sometimes nothing comes of it. Sometimes—well, once in a thousand times a Jo-An Lacey comes of it.”

  “She’s been with you for three books, somebody told me,” Shapiro said. “The last one Snake Country, which was—what did you call it?—oh, a bombshell.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mind telling me how she happened to come to you in the first place, Mr. Karn? Come to you to be published, I mean of course?”

  “She didn’t,” Karn said. “I went out and got her. Want to hear about that, Lieutenant? Can’t see that it will help you, but it’s no secret.”

  “We can’t tell what will help,” Shapiro said. “We just—well, sort of scratch around. To see what we can scratch up. Yes, Mr. Karn, I’d like to hear how Miss Lacey became a Karn author.”

  “Writer, she always called it. Thought the word ‘author’ was a stuffy word. They get odd notions, writers do. Wouldn’t be writers if they didn’t, I guess. Odd breed, writers are.”

  “I don’t know much about writers,” Shapiro said, in his sad voice. Any more, he thought, than I’ve known about painters and theater people and evangelists.

  “An odd bunch,” Karn said. “Well, about Jo-An—eight years ago, and she was just a kid then, I happened to come on a short story she’d had in some Southern magazine. One of these special little magazines. You know what I mean.”

  It was a statement, assuming knowledge Nathan Shapiro didn’t have. He didn’t think it worthwhile to say so.

  “Short piece,” Karn said. “Sort of thing you’d pass over without thinking about ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Only, I didn’t. I read it and then read it again and I thought, My God, here’s a woman can write. So I got her address from this magazine and wrote her. Asked her if she had ever thought of writing a novel and whether she already had a publisher. Well—”

  She had thought of writing a novel, Karn told Nathan Shapiro. In fact, she had one half written. No, she did not have a publisher. The story in the magazine was the first thing she’d ever had published. She’d just sent it in and it had been accepted and she had got paid twenty-five dollars.

  “They don’t pay anything, these little magazines,” Karn said. “And a lot of kids are so excited about having something in print they don’t care. Figure it makes them Writers with a capital W, if you know what I mean. So—”

  Karn had written Jo-An Lacey in nethermost Alabama and asked her to send him what she had finished of the novel. She had sent him about a hundred pages. “She couldn’t type worth a damn. The first twenty pages or so were single-spaced. Single-spaced, if you can believe.”

  Shapiro let appropriate disbelief show on his long sad face.

  “But I read it,” Karn said. “It was a kid’s try. First hundred pages and no story line. And some of the dialogue was pretty bad. Sort of thing kids do when they’ve read a lot and—well, not listened enough to the way people talk. But all the same, the girl could write. She needed an editor. They all do, you know. But she had what it takes. Had—all right, had a hell of a lot of what it takes. So I flew down to Mobile.”

  He had flown down, he told Shapiro, and taken the hundred typescript pages with him. He had done some editing before he took off and did more on the plane. He had rented a car and driven out to “this plantation place.”

  “Big house,” Karn said. “Tumbling down a good deal. Damn it, the place has even got a
ballroom. Picture that, will you? And a bunch of—well, you’d have to call them shacks—she told me had been slave quarters in her great-grandfather’s time. Carries you back, doesn’t it? And here was this pretty little kid living in this enormous old wreck with this brother of hers. And writing like an angel on a beat-up typewriter.”

  Karn paused and shook his head. Shapiro got a photograph out of his pocket. He said, “This is Miss Lacey, Mr. Karn?”

  Karn looked at the photograph of a dead face. He looked at it for a long time. Then he put fingers against his forehead and, after almost as long a time, said, “Yes, Lieutenant. That’s Jo-An. Taken after—after she was dead?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said.

  “She was so damned alive,” Karn said. “Life sort of sparkled in her face.”

  “I know,” Shapiro said. “They look different when they’re dead. You talked to her about her book?”

  Karn had talked to her about it; he had gone over it with her and made suggestions. “Mostly about the story line.” He had told her he would buy the book when she finished it. “Oh, I said if it held up.”

  It had been about six months, he thought, before he received the manuscript. It had held up. “All right, I knew it wasn’t going to be a world-beater. But I knew I wanted to grab her before somebody else did. So I sent along a contract.”

  The book, which had been called Something to Remember, had been published. It had got a “couple of all-right notices” and had sold a little over fifteen hundred copies. “Fifteen hundred and twenty-one,” Karn said. “Figures like that stick in your mind, somehow. And we lost a bit of money, of course.”

  Karn said he could have dropped Jo-An Lacey then; he said that most publishers would have dropped her. “We’re in the business to make money,” Karn said. “You don’t make money out of flops. But when you get the feel of a talent, a special talent in her case, you cut your losses and nurse it along. I do, anyway.”

  So he had encouraged the slight, pretty girl living in a mansion which was falling apart to write another novel. It had taken her two years to do it, but she sent it along, and Oscar Karn, Incorporated, had published it. It had done a little better than the first one, but not much better. “Something under three thousand. Not up to the break-even point for us, but what the hell? There’s more to publishing than making money, Lieutenant. For me, anyway. All right, I know people in the business who’d have dropped her. I didn’t. And what I got was Snake Country. And now this new one, which if it holds up—and I’m damned sure it will hold up—will be as good. Probably be better, with the reputation she’s got now.” He stopped and shook his head. “Had now, damn it,” he said, more or less to himself.

  “I suppose you have a contract with Miss Lacey,” Shapiro said. “Something that will—oh, authorize you to publish this new one? I don’t know much about how these things are arranged.”

  “Sure we have. You think we wouldn’t tie her up? Because we played along with her, and lost money at it, doesn’t mean we’re soft in the head, Lieutenant.”

  “I never thought you were, Mr. Karn,” Shapiro said. “The contract covers this new book, I take it?”

  “Yes. I told you we’re not soft—”

  “I know you did,” Shapiro said. “Somebody told me something about options. I’m not sure I understood about them. About a clause in an original contract which provides options on the next two books. Somebody said that was the usual practice.”

  “Who’s this somebody?”

  “I don’t know that I remember, Mr. Karn. Somebody in town I was asking about Miss Lacey. This new book will be the fourth you’ve published by Miss Lacey.”

  “Are you trying to get at something, Lieutenant?”

  “Just wondering. Trying to get things straightened out in my own mind. I mean, with Miss Lacey dead, she can’t sign a new contract, of course.”

  “Her estate can. Which will mean this brother of hers. As a matter of fact—”

  He broke off. Shapiro waited.

  “Nothing that would interest you, Lieutenant,” Karn said, after the pause had extended. “You can take it for granted we’ll publish ‘Lonely Waters.’”

  Shapiro said, “All right, Mr. Karn.” Then he added, “I take it that will be true whether you go in with this other firm or not? Merge with it?”

  “That’s still just talk. Lawyers’ talk. Nothing may come of it. Look, Lieutenant—”

  Shapiro said, “Yes?”

  “I want to do anything I can to help. But we have got people coming for cocktails. Too late to put them off. I’d like to, with this happening to Jo-An. But—”

  He looked down at his heavy golf shoes. He looked at his slacks, which had a grass stain on them.

  “Couple more questions,” Shapiro said. “Then I’ll get out of the way, Mr. Karn. I appreciate the time you’ve given me already.”

  Karn emptied his glass, with finality. But he said, “Go ahead, Lieutenant Shapiro.”

  “You met Miss Lacey for the first time when you flew down to Alabama,” Shapiro said. “You met her after that? I mean, got to know her?”

  “She brought the second book up herself,” Karn said. “I went over it with her. I was editing her myself. Also—well, she was here almost a week that time. I showed her around the city a little. She’d never been here before. Never been out of Alabama, probably. It’s quite a city for a kid to see, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Since she’s been here this time. With this new manuscript. You’ve seen something of her?”

  “Took her to lunch a few times. To dinner once, I think. Oh, I brought her out here once to meet Mrs. Karn. And to see how we live in the country up here.”

  “But you never knew—I mean she never told you—about having an apartment in Gay Street.”

  “No. I told you that. But there was nothing strange about that. She wanted a place to work, was all.”

  Shapiro stood up. He again thanked Mr. Karn for the time he had spared. Karn stood up, too.

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “one other thing. This time you took her to dinner, Mr. Karn? Was it down in Greenwich Village? They say there are some good restaurants down there.”

  “I took her to the Plaza,” Karn said. “It was—well, just a place she’d heard about.”

  Karn went across the living room with Shapiro and through the entrance hall. He stood in the open doorway while Shapiro walked to the police car. The Cadillac wasn’t there any more. Shapiro assumed it had been put in the garage.

  It took him less time to drive back to New York than it had taken him to drive to Mount Kisco. People were driving out of the city for weekends in the country. Not many were driving into it.

  He turned the car in at West Twentieth Street and, after finding that Anthony Cook had checked out at the end of his shift, took the subway home to Brooklyn.

  Nathan opened the door of the apartment and said, “Hi,” into it. Cleo, the Scottie bitch, made excited sounds, followed by a thump. She had been on a chair she wasn’t supposed to be on. Everything was in order. Cleo rushed to him and tried to climb his right leg and he scratched her behind the ears. Rose said “Hi” from the kitchen and came into the living room and stood in front of her husband and looked up into his face. A small line came between her dark eyebrows.

  Everything was in order.

  “You’re tired,” Rose Shapiro said.

  “No, dear,” Nathan said. “Just puzzled. This time it’s writers and publishers and something called an agent.”

  “Take your gun off and sit down,” Rose told him. “I’ll bring you something long and cold. Summer’s come, Nathan.”

  “Just a little—” Nathan Shapiro said, but Rose was already on her way to the kitchen. He took his gun off and put it on the shelf it lives on when it is not living on Shapiro. He sat down. Rose must have got home earlier than usual. She had turned the air conditioner on. He stretched out his legs and looked at his feet. Then he looked up at the portrait hanging over the firep
lace—the portrait of Rabbi Emmanuel Shapiro, his father. The dark eyes of the portrait held, Nathan thought, the sadness of Nathan’s own. Rabbi Shapiro had worn a beard.

  This Oscar Karn wears a beard, Shapiro thought. So does this writer named Shepley. There are too many beards around, to say nothing of too many writers.

  Rose brought two tall glasses in on a tray. There was ice in both of them. The liquid in one of them might have been water—water with bubbles in it. The other liquid was red. There were bubbles in it, too.

  Rose put the two glasses down on the long table in front of the sofa and picked up her gin and tonic. She held it toward Nathan’s glass and they clicked glasses together. They sipped from the glasses. Rose had diluted Nathan’s sweet wine with ice and soda, which proved that summer had come.

  “After all,” Rose Shapiro said, “writers are people too, Nathan. It’s this girl in the Village? It was on the radio, except on the radio it was suicide.”

  “No,” Nathan said. “I’m afraid it wasn’t, dear. And Bill Weigand should have put somebody else on it.”

  “Of course,” Rose said, consolation in her soft voice. There was, however, the trace of a smile on her gentle lips.

  7

  Because it wasn’t to be one of the good evenings, there wasn’t any hurry. Tony Cook walked home to Twelfth Street from Twentieth. The sun was still high and it was warming up. Tomorrow, he thought, will be muggy. Tomorrow we’ll all be choking on the air.

  He climbed the flight of stairs to his apartment and went into it and turned the window air conditioner on. He showered, ending with a jet of cold which made him jump. He shaved, although he had shaved that morning. And although he wasn’t doing anything this evening which would need a smoothly shaven face. He made himself a drink and sat, wearing only shorts, waiting for the room to cool and wondering what he would do with the evening.

  For a long time, Tony thought, there wasn’t any real problem about evenings. Off-duty evenings were—oh, hit or miss. Mostly, he thought, I’d hit on something. I’d call up a girl and take her to dinner and see what else, if anything, came of it. Or if the first girl was tied up, I’d call a second girl. Or, more often I suppose, I’d go to a movie. Or look at television. Or just sit around and read and go to bed early. Off-duty evenings were something which, in one way or another, could be counted on to take care of themselves. Sometimes I’d even bowl. Evenings used to be haphazard, but usually they turned out all right. Not special, mostly, but all right.