“Her lawyer was named Sturdevant,” Tony said. “Leslie Sturdevant. An appointment with him?”
Shapiro shrugged. He jotted the date and the notation down on a pad of his own. He made it “LS 2” and wrote the characters more clearly, infinitely more clearly, than Jo-An Lacey had written them. He said, “We can give him a ring tomorrow and ask,” and flicked on. There was nothing else in March. In early April there was, “JH 2000.” If the initials were “JH”; if the figures were “2000.”
“John Henry for her brother,” Tony suggested. “Two thousand for his pocket?”
“Her checkbook will show,” Shapiro said. “When we get to her checkbook.”
He flipped on. The remaining days in April had been empty days for Jo-An Lacey. She had written no memos to herself. He came to Friday, the nineteenth of May. And he came to “Lv Uy,” or what appeared to be “Lv Uy.”
“Love Uriah Yancey?” Tony suggested.
Nathan gave that barely audible “Mmmm.” He continued to stare at the sheet in front of him. He said, “About when was she supposed to have come up, Tony?”
“A month or so ago,” Tony said. “Five or six weeks ago. Oh.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “It could be she meant ‘Leave for New York.’ If the ‘U’ was meant to be an ‘N.’ By train she probably would have got here the next day. Late the next day. We’ll have to check trains.”
There was no entry for Saturday, May twentieth, nor for Sunday, the twenty-first. On Monday there was “OK 7:30.” Except, of course, that the initials might as easily be “AH.”
“Oscar Karn at seven-thirty,” Shapiro said. “We’ll guess it that way. For dinner, probably. A welcome-to-New-York dinner. For her and her new book. He mentioned taking her to dinner. Said once or twice.” He flipped to Tuesday, the twenty-third of May. He came on “M, 2.”
The numeral was clear. The “M” might as easily have been “W.”
“M for Morton?” Tony said. “Only, he said she came to him only a couple of weeks ago.”
Shapiro said, “Mmmm,” which seemed to both of them as far as they were getting. But then he pushed the calendar pad toward Tony. He pointed to the letter “M.” Tony looked at the sheet and then at Nathan. He shook his head. He said, “Looks like an M to me, Nate.”
“An M with a line drawn under it,” Shapiro said. “Could be just a slip of the pencil, of course.”
“All of them look like slips of the pencil,” Tony said. “Of course, nobody writes by hand much any more. She—well, she rather carried it to extremes, didn’t she?” He looked down again at the sheet in front of them.
“It does look as if she had drawn a line under the ‘M,’” he said. “Intentionally, I mean. Should it mean something? Or just a kind of shorthand to herself?”
“I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “I’ve a feeling it ought to mean something but—it just keeps slipping away. Probably it did to her, I suppose.” He turned another page. There was a notation on the next page, that of Wednesday, the twenty-fourth of May. Again there were scrawled initials, and again they looked like “OK,” and again there could be no certainty. After the initials, there were three letters, in lower case. They appeared to be “1 ex.” There appeared to be a space between the “1” and the “ex.” (If it was a lower-case “1.” If the other letters were “ex.”) They both shook their heads. Shapiro turned back to the sheet which had the underlined “M” on it. They looked at each other, and they both shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. Shapiro flicked on to June.
June had been busier for Jo-An Lacey. There were more initials, with times penciled after them. Some of them were a little clearer than earlier initials had been. On June first, a Thursday, there was “OK, lun” and both the “OK” and the “lun” were clear enough. On that day, Oscar Karn had taken his promising young writer to lunch. They both felt an elation which had no basis in fact. They had found something comprehensible. On the other hand, they already knew that Karn had taken Jo-An to lunch. The date got them no further; it was not really an answer to anything.
Shapiro turned on. Sunday, June fourth. “LS 7 rd bd.”
And that, again, was easy enough—if the letters really were “L” and “S.” She had had a date with Laurence Shepley, and Laurence Shepley had a red beard.
“A girl I knew once did that sort of thing,” Tony said. “Wrote down things about people she met, so she could identify them if she met them again. She showed me one or two. One was a John something. The identifying thing—’Makes wife sick at stomach.’ Not especially helpful, I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Unless your friend always met John something and his wife together,” Shapiro said, and flipped through the rest of the week in June. He came on nothing until he reached Friday, the ninth. Then they read, “K’s for wkend,” and about that there wasn’t much doubt. There was also little enlightenment. Karn had said he and his wife had had Jo-An for a weekend at the house near Mount Kisco.
The initials “LS” appeared several times on the sheets for early June—appeared more often, Nathan Shapiro thought, than Laurence Shepley had indicated they would. But Shepley had not been specific. “OK” appeared once again. And on June 12 there was a name which was quite clear; which was printed for clarity. “Phillips Morton.” There was also “529 5th” and a telephone number. And one of her dates with Laurence Shepley had been the evening before. June 12 had been a Monday. And on the following day the writing again was clear enough: “Shwd PM con.” Again the meaning was, they agreed, clear enough.
There were no entries on the sheets for the rest of June.
Shapiro flicked back to the sheet which had the underlined “M” on it-the “M” followed by a “2.” (If it was a “2.”) It ought to mean something. He looked at Tony Cook and pointed a finger at the “M” with a line under it. Tony shook his head. “Not Morton,” he said. “She hadn’t met him then. Somebody we haven’t come across?”
Shapiro lifted his shoulders and let them subside again. He continued to look at the sheet he had turned to. Then he reached for the telephone and dialed. He waited some minutes for an answer.
Tony Cook didn’t ask him anything.
“My wife,” Nathan Shapiro said. “Probably out walking the dog. Her doctorate is in English literature. I don’t know whether that includes orthography, but could be it does.”
He tapped his fingers on the desk top. He looked at the watch on his wrist. He put Jo-An’s calendar pad in his pocket.
“I think,” Nathan said, “we may as well knock it off for today. For what remains of it. Maybe we’ll be fresher tomorrow. Maybe something will turn up tomorrow.”
There was very little hope in his voice. But Tony Cook has got used to that.
There was a cruising cab in Twenty-third Street. It had “Air Conditioned” on a window. Nathan Shapiro thought of the heat of the subway, of the infrequency of trains on a Sunday. He succumbed to temptation and flagged down the cab. He said to Tony, “Drop you?” Tony shook his head. Shapiro gave the cab driver the address.
“That’s Brooklyn,” the hacker said, his tone accusing. “I don’t go to Brooklyn, mister. Anyways, I’m due at the garage.”
Nathan Shapiro is usually gentle with cab drivers. He was not, this hot afternoon of a fruitless day—and a day which was supposed to have been an off-duty day—Shapiro felt no gentleness.
“No off-duty sign,” he told the cab driver. “And you’ll go where I say.”
“So,” the driver said. “A tough guy. Wants to make something out of it.”
Shapiro took his shield out of his pocket, and the hacker turned in his seat and looked at it. He said, “O.K. You’ve made something out of it,” and put the car in gear.
It was reasonably cool in the Brooklyn apartment, and Rose had got home from walking Cleo. She wore a sleeveless summer dress, and when Nathan went into the living room she was up and moving toward him. She had left a paperback turned down on a table near the window she had been sittin
g by. She looked up at him and looked for some seconds and then shook her head. She said, “Sit down and take off your gun. I’ll get us something cold.”
“It’s too—” Nathan said, and Rose, on her way to the kitchen, said over her shoulder, “It’s not too for anything, dear. Take your gun off.”
He took his gun off. He sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace. He took Jo-An’s calendar pad out of his pocket and opened it on his lap. Rose came back with two tall glasses with ice and liquid in them, and this time the liquid in both was the color of water. It bubbled in both glasses.
“Gin and tonic,” Rose said. “I think you need it, darling.”
She put the two glasses down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and sat beside Nathan. They clicked glasses and sipped from them. The gin and tonic was cold and pungent, and Nathan thought only briefly of his stomach. What he thought was, The hell with it. For this once, the hell with it. Rose said, “Whose calendar pad, Nathan?”
“The dead girl’s,” Nathan said. “Her handwriting’s terrible.”
“Her real writing isn’t,” Rose said. “I’ve been reading her. Her famous one. Mike had it in paperback.” She pointed toward the book on the table by the window. “She’s very good, dear. Now and then almost magically good. It’s—it’s almost a tragedy she was killed.”
“It’s almost a tragedy when anyone’s killed,” Nathan said, but she shook her head at him.
“Sad,” Rose said. “Distressing. Tragedy is for greatness. She—I think she almost had it, Nathan. Think she might have had it. Are you and Tony Cook getting anywhere?”
He closed sad eyes for a moment and shook his head.
“You will,” she told him.
He shook his head again. He took another sip of his drink. He flicked the calendar pad open to the entry of Tuesday, the twenty-third of May—to the “M” with a line under it and the numeral “2.” He held it toward Rose.
“She certainly scrawled,” Rose said. “We try to teach them not to, but nothing much comes of it. Of course, nowadays most of them just print. Script is a vanishing art.”
Rose is a schoolteacher by profession. She was, that year, the assistant principal of a high school in Greenwich Village.
“Is it supposed to mean something?” Rose asked, and pointed at the “M, 2.”
“We haven’t worked anything out,” Nathan said. “Just a letter and a figure. And a letter which might be an M and might as easily be a W.”
“Oh, no,” Rose said. “A W, of course. That’s why the line’s under it.”
He turned to look at her. He raised his eyebrows.
“Of course,” she said again. “In handwritten copy, you put a line under a W and over an M. For the printer. It’s the same with the U and the N. Because as many people write it’s hard to tell them apart. Proofreaders. Headline writers. People who have to make longhand corrections. A W, not an M, dear. Probably she made longhand corrections in typescript. That sort of thing. And got into the habit.”
He looked again at the three sheets of Jo-An Lacey’s memo pad. Dinner with (presumably) OK on Monday, the twenty-second of May. “W, 2” on the following day. And on the day after, “OK” again with “I ex” after it. He shook his head. He sipped from the tall glass. He looked at Rose and shook his head again.
“Somebody whose name begins with W,” Rose said. “An appointment at two o’clock in the afternoon? Is there somebody whose name begins with W on your list, dear?”
“No,” Nathan told her. “She may, of course, have known any number of people whose names began with W. We’ve no idea who she knew. Her publisher. A man named Laurence Shepley. Her brother, who’s showed up. She may have known a hundred people in New York. People named Williams and Wingate and, for all we know, Weinstein. She could have had an engagement with any of—”
He stopped. He looked thoughtfully at the portrait of his father over the mantelpiece. The dark eyes of the portrait, eyes so like his own, seemed to look back at him, in rather somber thought.
“Two o’clock in the afternoon,” Nathan said. “If that’s what the figure ‘2’ is for. Hardly two in the morning. Two in the afternoon is late for a luncheon date. Too early for a cocktail date. What would two people be doing at two in the afternoon?”
“Any number of things,” Rose said. “Going to a movie. Taking a walk. On Saturdays, when you’re working, I take naps. When I haven’t got things piled up at the office. It’s amazing how things—”
She stopped. She looked intently at her husband’s long, sad face.
“An office,” Nathan said. “Two in the afternoon would be a reasonable time to have an appointment at somebody’s office. At the office of somebody whose name begins with—”
He broke off. He looked, not at the portrait of his father but at his wife. There was, Rose thought, a difference in his eyes.
“A lawyer’s office?” Shapiro said. “To make out her will? As Karn had advised her to the night before?” He shook his head. “Which is only guessing,” he said. “Stabbing in the dark. Only—”
He flipped to the next page and held it out to Rose. “‘OK’ for Karn,” he said. “’L ex’ for what, Rose?”
She looked at “l ex.” She shook her head.
“An abbreviation for ‘literary executor,’” Nathan said. “It’s all still guessing, of course. Oscar Karn named that in the will she’d had drawn up the day before. By some lawyer Karn gave her the name of?”
Rose nodded her head.
“We’ve heard of two lawyers so far,” Nathan said. “One’s an old guy—apparently a crusty old guy—Tony talked to in Mobile. And didn’t get much out of. The other’s a man Tony ran into last night at a party with Rachel Farmer. A man named—” He stopped and shook his head for an instant. It came to him. “Carson,” he said. “Alvin Carson. He’s representing something called the Jefferson Press in negotiations about a merger of that and Oscar Karn, Incorporated. Negotiating, I suppose, with Karn’s lawyers. Damn Sundays.”
“Why, dear?”
“Because in summer nobody’s at home on them,” he said. “And offices are all closed. Still—”
He finished his drink. He got up and went to the shelf where the telephone directories were piled—directories for Manhattan and Brooklyn and the rest, including Westchester County. A detective has no idea where he may need to call.
Shapiro brought the Manhattan directory back to the sofa. Rose had taken both glasses back to the kitchen. Perhaps, if she brought them back filled, his would, this time, be filled with sweet wine and soda. Not that the gin and tonic seemed to be annoying his stomach.
“Carson.” A lot of Carsons. “Carson Fuller & Steinbeck attys.” Back up the column. “Carson Alvin atty”; and, in the next line, “Residence” in the East Seventies. Carson wouldn’t be there on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Carson would be somewhere playing golf. Or somewhere swimming. Or somewhere in the country sitting in a shady place. Still—
He went to the telephone and dialed. He waited for several rings. He got, “The Carson residence.” The voice was female, with an accent. He thought German.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Carson,” Shapiro said. “If he happens to be at home.”
“I don’t know,” the maid said. “If it’s about business, that would be his office.” The ‘would’ was a little like ‘voud.’ “I’ll go find out, though. Mister?”
“Shapiro. Nathan Shapiro. It’s Lieutenant Shapiro, tell Mr. Carson. And that I’ll only keep him a minute.”
“I see,” the maid said. “You vait.”
Shapiro waited. He waited for several minutes. Then he heard, “Carson, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”
The voice was level, entirely impartial.
“Perhaps give me a name,” Shapiro said. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday afternoon, but it might be important. In connection with an investigation we’re carrying on.”
“Into the death of Miss Jo-An Lacey,” Carson said. “I supposed that. Ra
n into this side-kick of yours at a party downtown. What name?”
“You’re representing the Jefferson Press in merger negotiations with the Karn company,” Shapiro said. “At least, that’s what I hear.”
“Right.”
“The name of your opposite number,” Shapiro said. “The lawyer representing the Karn interests.”
“Why? Not that there’s any secret about it. Littlejohn and Williams. Norm Littlejohn, primarily. Norman Littlejohn. Why?”
“I want to ask him a question which he probably won’t want to answer,” Shapiro said. “Nothing to do with the merger, Mr. Carson.”
“Norman Littlejohn,” Carson said again. “Lives up in Westchester some place. Or spends weekends there anyway. God knows why anybody’d want to.”
Prejudices draw people together. Shapiro felt kinship with Alvin Carson. Prospect Park provides adequate open space for Nathan Shapiro.
“Do you happen to know,” Shapiro said, “whether Mr. Littlejohn generally represents Mr. Karn? Or is he—his firm, I mean—only concerned with this proposed merger?”
“Far’s I know,” Carson said, “Littlejohn and Williams are general counsel for Karn. What’s it all about, Lieutenant? Miss Lacey, I suppose?”
“It may be,” Shapiro said. “I can’t go beyond that, Mr. Carson. Sorry to have interrupted your afternoon.”
“I was just watching a ball game,” Carson said, “and the Mets are getting clobbered. Anything else I can help you with?”
Shapiro said there wasn’t and thanked Carson again and hung up.
Rose came back with two tall glasses. The liquid was bubbly and much the color of water. She put the glasses down, and Shapiro looked at them and then at Rose.
“It was supposed,” she said, “to be your day off. We were supposed to go walking in the park.”
Nathan agreed that there was that. They clicked glasses, as they always did, and Nathan put his glass down and went to get the Westchester County directory. Not that Norman Littlejohn wouldn’t be out on a golf course. Or, if he was young enough, on a tennis court.
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