Write Murder Down

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  And now, because, a while back, a very tall and deceptively lean girl walked into a studio and tried to steal a picture a dead painter had done, evenings aren’t the way they used to be. Now they’re either special or empty. This was an empty one. It’s a hell of a note, Tony thought. It’s really one hell of a note.

  I could call her, Tony thought. Maybe today didn’t turn out to be as rough as she thought it would be. Maybe I could, anyway, take her to dinner. She’s still got to eat, even if she’s tired out. I could give her a ring. That wouldn’t do any harm.

  He reached out a hand toward the telephone. But then he drew the hand back. She’d say no, and when she said no she meant it. If she were home at all, she’d probably be taking a shower. He could see her under the shower, with water running down her body. She wasn’t lean at all, really, when you got a good look at her. A lot of people did get a good look, of course. Too damn—

  Tony grabbed his mind and turned it around. I’m going a little nuts, he thought. It’s her way of making a living and that’s her business. I don’t own the girl. Ownership doesn’t come into it and never will, because we don’t want it that way. I’ll just—

  He got up and made himself another drink. I’ll finish this one, he thought, and get dressed and go out and have dinner some place. Maybe I’ll go to André’s and see if this man named Lorenzo has remembered anything more about a beard. Anyway, I’ll get some of that damned good lasagna.

  It was getting cooler in the room. Tony turned on the television set. Cronkite was already on. Tony hadn’t realized it was that late. No more hell seemed to be breaking loose than usual. The administration was up to some new trick or other and CBS didn’t seem to think much of it. Come to that, Tony Cook didn’t either, for what difference that made. Somebody ought to send somebody a telegram about it.

  Tony finished his drink and cut the television off and dressed to go out to dinner. He put on one of the striped shirts he had begun to wear because Rachel liked striped shirts on him. He put his gun on, and slacks and a summer jacket cut so that the gun didn’t show unless you were looking for it. He thought, Charles is nearer than André’s, but it costs more. And anyway, it’s not a place to go alone. And Rachel and I were there last night. Maybe tomorrow night we’ll go uptown.

  He opened the apartment door and made sure it was locked behind him—locked with the special lock he’d had put on. Of course, the lock wouldn’t outlast a real pro, but it would delay him some, which was about all you could expect.

  While he was making sure the door was fast, he heard foot-falls on the stairs above him. They were heavy, a man’s steps. He looked up the stairs; Laurence Shepley was coming down them. Halfway down the flight to the third floor, Shepley said, “Hi, neighbor.” He sounded, Tony thought, like a man who had had a couple of drinks. Tony said, “Evening, Mr. Shepley,” and thought that he probably sounded like a man who had had a couple of drinks.

  Shepley said, “‘Constabulary duty to be done,’ Mr. Cook?”

  “Even policemen have to eat,” Cook told him, and Shepley came on down the stairs.

  “Yes,” Shepley said. “People have to eat. Whatever happens. People get killed and still people have to eat. Or, anyway, try to.” He stopped beside Tony Cook on the landing. “You going to Charles? Where you were last night with that tall girl?”

  “No,” Tony said. “Not tonight. A place on down a ways. Place called André’s. Italian food. You ever been there, Mr. Shepley?”

  “No. Good place?”

  “I like it. Want to come along and see if you do?”

  “Keeping me under your eye, Detective Cook?”

  He said it pleasantly, as if it were a joke.

  “Nothing like that,” Tony said. “Why would I?”

  “Because I knew a young woman named Jo-An Lacey,” Shepley said. “And because she’s dead. Are you meeting somebody at this restaurant? That lieutenant you were teamed up with today?”

  “Nobody,” Tony said. “Come along, if you like. Only probably you’ve got a date.”

  “No. I haven’t got a date. Not—well, not a night for dates.” He shook his head. “Keep thinking of Jo-An,” he said. “Seems—well, it seems such a goddamn waste, somehow. Yes, I’ll come along to this Italian place.”

  They went on down the stairs. They walked east and south for half a dozen blocks. André’s Restaurant was in the basement of a narrow, four-story building. They went down the stairs into it, Tony going first. A black-haired man in a dark suit met them inside and said, “Gentlemen? Two?” Then he said, “Oh, good evening, Mr. Cook. Table in the garden, maybe?”

  He looked at the man with the red beard. There was nothing in his face to suggest he had ever seen him before. Nothing, anyway, that Tony Cook could see. Tony said that a table in the garden would be fine. He looked at Shepley and said, “O.K. with you?”

  “Wherever you say. You know the place.”

  It was moderately cool in the garden beyond the bar and the inside tables, few of which were occupied. In the center of the garden there was a small fountain, but it was only a trickle of a fountain. The table they were taken to was beside precisely trimmed green bushes. “A cocktail before dinner, gentlemen?”

  Tony said, “Bourbon on the rocks, please.” Shepley said, “Very dry martini. Up.” The waiter said, “Gentlemen,” and went away.

  Shepley had said almost nothing as they walked down from West Twelfth Street. Tony had been thinking about Rachel and warning himself not to get possessive about her. He was still surprised, and chagrined, at the sudden spurt of almost anger in his mind when he thought of the many men who had a good look at her as she practiced her profession.

  “She was a damn sweet kid,” Shepley said. “And a hell of a good writer. Her brother called me up this afternoon. And came around to—”

  The waiter said, “Gentlemen,” and put drinks on the table in front of them. He said, “Would you care to order now, gentlemen?”

  “Later,” Tony said. The waiter said, “Whenever you’re ready, gentlemen,” and went away. Tony looked across the table at the red-bearded Laurence Shepley, and when he spoke he spoke very slowly.

  “Her brother?” Tony Cook said. “Called you and then came to see you? You. Why you, Mr. Shepley?”

  “Said he was her brother,” Shepley said. “Said he’d gone to her apartment and rung the bell and got no answer. Said she had written him something about having seen me a few times. And that he didn’t know anybody in town and thought I might know where she was. All right, that’s what he said.”

  “Just because she’d mentioned you in a letter?”

  “What he said.”

  “What did you tell him, Shepley?”

  “What could I tell him? That she was dead. I tried—well, tried to make it easy. But there’s no making it easy, is there?”

  “How she came to die? Did you tell him that?”

  “Not at first. At first I said there’d been an accident. But-well, he apparently didn’t buy that. Asked if he could come around and see me and I said yes, he could.”

  “You didn’t tell him to get in touch with us? With the police?”

  “Not on the telephone. When he came around, yes, I did. And that the police seemed to think—well, that somebody had killed her. You want to hear all of it, Cook?”

  Shepley drank from his glass. Tony had left his untouched. Now he raised it and drank from it. Then he said, “Yes. I want to hear all of it.”

  “He had a suitcase with him. Lugged it all the way upstairs. He said, ‘What’s happened to Sis?’ I said that she had been found dead in her apartment. That the police had taken over. That he had better get in touch with the police, because that was all I knew about it.”

  “He’d gone to the Gay Street apartment? Knew she was living there as a Miss Jones?”

  “Yes. I suppose she’d written him. He was—he was all broken up. Kept saying, ‘It can’t be Sis. Can’t be Jo-An.’ That sort of thing. I gave him a drink, but it d
idn’t seem to help much.”

  “You’re sure he was her brother?”

  “How could I be? He said he was her brother. He said, ‘I’m John Henry Lacey, Jo-An’s brother.’ That was when he first telephoned me. He said, ‘Do you know where she might be, Mr. Shepley? Because something she wrote me made me think she might be in trouble. Need help.’ He talked—well, the way she talked, only more so. Very Southern accent. And damn if he didn’t look like Old South when he showed up. Tall, rather thin, blond hair. And blond chin whiskers. You know? The goatee kind of thing.”

  Shepley absently stroked his own trimmed beard.

  “He looked,” Shepley said, “as if he’d been brought up on mint juleps. As if he ought to be called ‘Colonel.’”

  Tony gave that the moderate smile it warranted. He said, “When you told him to go to the police did he say he would?”

  “Said something about its being an idea. He didn’t commit himself.”

  “You didn’t tell him where to go? To what station house, I mean?”

  “I don’t know myself.”

  Tony said that Charles Street would be the best place, but he said it absently. He finished his drink and pushed his chair back. “When the waiter comes back,” Tony said, “will you order another round for me? I won’t be long.”

  He went out of the garden and into the restaurant. The headwaiter was doubling as bartender. Tony went to the bar. He said, “The man I came in with, Larry. You ever see him before? The one with the beard?”

  Lorenzo shrugged his shoulders, very thoroughly. He said, “Everybody’s asking about beards. What’s about beards?”

  “Everybody?”

  “Well, Pieronelli. From the precinct squad. You know Charley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wanted to know if this girl who got killed ever came in here. I told him—”

  “I know what you told him, Larry. Any chance this man who came in with me is the man who came in with her? The man with the beard?”

  Lorenzo shrugged again.

  “Look,” he said, “I told Charley all I knew was the man had a beard. Lots of men have beards.”

  “A beard like this man with me has? Or, maybe, a chin beard? You know. What they call a goatee. Used to, anyway.”

  “Because like a goat,” Lorenzo said. “Tm sorry, Mr. Cook. Just a beard. Could be it was a little beard like a goat’s. Could be it was like this man’s you came in with. Like I told Charley, it was just a beard.”

  Tony went to a telephone booth. Nobody who said he was John Henry Lacey had showed up at Charles Street. He dialed again. Nobody who said he was John Henry Lacey, brother of Jo-An Lacey, had showed up at Homicide, Manhattan South. Tony thought for a moment or two. Probably Nathan Shapiro would be in the middle of dinner. What was it Shepley had said part of? Of course. “‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’” Tony dialed a Brooklyn number. A woman answered him.

  “Rose,” Tony Cook said, “I’m sorry as hell. This is Tony. Nate handy?”

  Rose said, “A minute, Tony,” and it was less than a minute.

  Tony told Nathan Shapiro about the man who said he was the brother of Jo-An Lacey.

  Shapiro said, “Mmmm.” He said, “Why go to Shepley?”

  “Apparently the girl had mentioned Shepley in a letter or something. What he told Shepley. What Shepley says he told him.”

  Shapiro said “Mmmm” again.

  Tony said, “Yeah.”

  “You say he has a beard?”

  “What Shepley says. A little one.”

  “He’d just got into town? From what he told Shepley?”

  “He had a suitcase with him. Lugged it up to Shepley’s apartment. From what Shepley says. Went around to his sister’s apartment and didn’t find her. I didn’t get very far with Shepley. I thought I ought to check in.”

  “Didn’t show up at precinct,” Shapiro said. “Or at our squad room. Headquarters, maybe?”

  Tony said he hadn’t checked on that yet.

  “Might as well,” Shapiro said. “Incidentally, Miss Lacey’s manuscript seems to have shown up. Karn thinks he’s got a right to publish it. Or says that’s what he thinks. That the estate will have the right to sign a contract. This brother could be the estate, couldn’t he?”

  “Mobile doesn’t know, offhand anyway, of any other Laceys kicking around.”

  “Keep after Shepley. See if this brother said he’d just got in. You’re supposed to be off tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  The word “supposed” was the key word—a key which was going to lock Tony Cook in on the job. Tony said, “Yes. That’s the schedule.”

  “So was I,” Shapiro said. There was a sigh in his voice. Of course, there usually was. “I’ll see you in the morning,” Shapiro said.

  “Sure,” Tony said.

  Shapiro sighed again.

  “This man Karn,” he said. “This publisher of hers. He’s got a beard too, Tony.”

  Tony said, “Oh.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “In the morning, then. You might check headquarters. Place out-of-towners would go, probably. Where are you now, Tony?”

  Tony told Nathan Shapiro where he was. He told Shapiro that Jo-An Lacey probably had been at the same restaurant once or twice. And that she had been there with a man who wore a beard. And that the man who ran André’s couldn’t identify Shepley, “who’s here with me,” as the man with the beard.

  “Identifications are wobbly things at best,” Nathan told him, needlessly. “Unless this brother shows up, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “If he does?”

  “I’ll see you tonight,” Nathan Shapiro said, and hung up.

  Tony called headquarters. It took longer. There was no record that a man calling himself John Henry Lacey the Third had been around to inquire about his sister.

  Tony’s bourbon was on the garden table when he got back to it. Shepley had half finished another martini. Shepley said, “I’m getting ahead of you.”

  Tony started to catch up, but he didn’t hurry about it.

  “I was talking to the lieutenant,” Tony said. “He wanted me to ask you whether this man who said he was Lacey told you how long he’d been in town.”

  “I don’t remem—wait a minute. He said something about just having got off the train. I’m pretty sure he said train. And he did have this suitcase with him. Way he handled it, I thought it was heavy. Wondered why he hadn’t left it downstairs.”

  “The wicked city,” Tony said. “Afraid somebody would steal it. Come to that, somebody might have. He said train, as you remember it?”

  “Yes. Surprised me a little. Probably why I remember it. I didn’t know they were still running trains.”

  “A few, I guess. You going to have another?”

  “Probably,” Shepley said. “It’s been—well, sort of a bad day. Maybe I was fonder of Jo-An than I realized.”

  Tony finished his drink and ordered lasagna. Shepley ordered another drink and then said, “O.K., I’ll try the lasagna too.”

  Shepley didn’t eat all of his lasagna. He pushed his plate away and said he thought he’d have a brandy, and would Tony join him? Tony Cook said he thought he wouldn’t; said he had to go uptown and make a telephone call. He drank espresso and, for a moment or two, watched Shepley sip cognac. Then he stood up.

  “That’s right,” Shepley said. “Thanks for putting me onto this place, Cook. I may stick around a while.”

  Tony left Shepley sticking around. Tony got a cab and went up to West Twentieth Street.

  It was a little after eight by his watch. In Mobile, Alabama, it would be—would be what? An hour earlier, at a guess. Lieutenant Buncombe, Mobile police force, might conceivably be on duty.

  Buncombe was. In answer to Tony’s question, he said he didn’t know, but he could guess. Old man Sturdevant, probably. He handled most of the old-timers because he was an old-timer himself. Leslie Sturdevant, that would be. But he wouldn’t be at his office; not at this hour of a Fr
iday night. His club, could be. Sold his plantation after his wife died and the children moved away. All right, suh, he’d get the number if Mistuh Cook was sure he wanted it.

  “The old man won’t like it,” Buncombe said. “He’s a crusty old so-and-so. Being pretty well along, as you might say.”

  But here it was, and Tony wrote it down. He hung up and dialed the number. He was costing the New York Police Department money in telephone tolls. The call went south and west across the country, with clicking sounds and irrelevant voices. Finally, a voice said, “The Plantation Club, suh.”

  “Is Mr. Sturdevant—Mr. Leslie Sturdevant—in the club?”

  “I believe so, suh. But he probably is at dinner.”

  Tony said he would like to speak to Mr. Sturdevant. He added that he was calling from New York. He told the Plantation Club who was calling. The Plantation Club did not seem unduly impressed.

  “I shall see if Mr. Sturdevant is in the club, suh. And whether he will wish to speak to you.”

  Tony waited. He waited for some minutes. Then he heard, “This is Leslie Sturdevant.” The voice was high; it was an old voice.

  “This is Detective Anthony Cook, New York Police, sir. Sorry if I’ve interrupted your dinner.”

  There was no answer to this.

  “We thought you might be able to help us, sir.”

  “In what connection?”

  “I’ve been told you may be the legal representative of Miss Jo-An Lacey, Mr. Sturdevant. Miss Lacey is—”

  “Miss Lacey is dead,” Sturdevant said. “It was in the newspapers. According to the account, Miss Lacey committed suicide. Most surprising. Most shocking.”

  “We’ve reason to think it wasn’t suicide, sir. Did you represent her?”