“Weigand, Nate. This Lacey thing is heating up. The press is swarming all over Sully. So, Sully swarms all over me. So, consider yourself swarmed, Nate. The big bird pecks the littler bird.”
“It’s still a muddle, Bill,” Shapiro said. “I told you I was the wrong—”
“You always do,” Bill Weigand said. “Funny thing is, you never are. I’ll tell Sully you’re progressing. Right?”
“Sully” was Deputy Chief Inspector Dermit Sullivan, chief of detectives. The biggest bird in their part of the aviary.
“You’ll have to, I guess,” Shapiro said. “And he’ll tell the press—tell them what, Bill?”
“That an arrest is expected,” Bill Weigand said.
“You want me to come and fill you in?”
“If you like. It’s still your baby. No, I’ll talk to the inspector first. The less I know the better pitch I’ll make, probably. Right?”
Weigand did not wait to be told that that was right. He hung up. He’s a good guy to work for, Nathan thought. Too bad he keeps putting me on jobs I’m no good at.
The telephone rang. Shapiro picked it up and told it who he was.
“Cohen, Lieutenant. Sorry to have been so long. Subject did check out. Paid his bill and turned in his key. Bellhop took his suitcases out, and a big man in a black suit—chauffeur uniform but no cap—took the cases and put them in the trunk of a black Caddy. Held the door of the Caddy open and subject got in.”
“Subject being John Henry Lacey?” Shapiro said.
“Way he was described to me,” Cohen said. “Tall thin man in a seersucker suit. Right? Only he isn’t any more.”
Shapiro said “Mmmm?”
“At Saks he was buying shirts,” Cohen said. “You got that, sir? Paid cash and took them with him. I had to close in a bit, but I don’t think he noticed. Then he went back to the elevators and took an express up. I figured if I went along he might get the idea he’d seen me somewhere before. The express elevator goes nonstop up to the floor where they sell men’s clothing. So—well, I just waited around. Not much chance of losing him.”
“No,” Shapiro said. “Anyway, you didn’t.”
“Up there about half an hour,” Cohen said. “Came down with a suit box. No shirt package, but probably that was inside with whatever he’d bought upstairs. So he went out on the Fiftieth Street side and got a cab and I got a break and got one myself. He went back to the Algonquin and went up to his room, and I waited around. Another half hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. Then a bellhop went up and came down with two suitcases and this man Lacey. Only, I damn near didn’t recognize him.”
He paused, presumably to let it sink in. Shapiro felt a little as if he were on a lead. He also felt a little annoyed. He said, “Why was that, Detective Cohen?”
“Well,” Cohen said, “for one thing he’d shaved off that scraggly beard of his. Also, he wasn’t wearing the seersucker any more. Gray slacks and a sports jacket. Gray and yellow, the sports jacket was. Sort of—well, snazzy. Didn’t fit too well around the collar, but was all right. Wouldn’t leave it for alterations, the way I figured. If he did buy it at Saks and it was what was in the suit box.”
“It probably was,” Shapiro said. “Drove away in a Cadillac, you say. With a chauffeur driving.”
“Way it was, Lieutenant. Went off in style. Like—like a man who’s come into money. That jacket—well, if he did buy it at Saks it must have set him back a bit. Two hundred, maybe. Maybe more. Not that I run to clothes from Saks, but a friend of mine does. Damn good-looking jacket he had on.”
Shapiro thought he detected envy in Cohen’s voice. A detective’s salary doesn’t run to two-hundred-dollar sports jackets from Saks Fifth Avenue. Neither, of course, does the salary of a detective lieutenant, but Nathan Shapiro can always find more important things to worry about.
“I figured there was no point in trailing the Caddy in a cab,” Cohen said. “Anyway, it had an out-of-city license number. A WP number. Which could be White Plains, I thought.”
“You got the license number?”
“Sure.” He gave it to Shapiro. It was the license number Shapiro had expected it would be. Shapiro said, “Good job, Cohen,” and got “Thanks, Lieutenant. There’s one other—”
He hesitated. Shapiro waited.
“This chauffeur,” Cohen said. “The man who put Lacey’s cases in the Caddy. I had a feeling I’d seen him somewhere before. Only—well, the feeling was pretty damn vague, you know what I mean. Just that he was sort of familiar and that I ought to be able to place him somewhere. Only I’m not. Maybe it will come to me.”
“As a client, Cohen?”
“Could be. Doesn’t have to be. I’m sorry, sir.”
“No use trying to force it,” Shapiro said. “The name Stokes help you any?”
Cohen repeated the name. He repeated it a second time. Then he said, “I can’t say that it does, Lieutenant. Like I said, could be it’ll come back to me.”
With the telephone again in its cradle, Shapiro looked at it for several minutes. Then he used it to get Tony Cook at his desk in the squad room.
“I think,” Shapiro said to Cook, “we’re going to take a little ride into the country. Suppose you get a car set up.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Right away.”
“There’s no great hurry,” Shapiro said. “Half an hour will be about right. Give them a good head start, half an hour will.”
14
The police car, which was not marked as a police car, loitered north. On the Saw Mill River Parkway it carefully adhered to the posted speed limit, which for most of the way is fifty miles per hour. As a result, it was passed by almost every other car headed north. Volkswagens were the most frequent passers. They were also the ones which most often hooted contemptuously. Tony Cook, who was driving, now and then hooted back, but he obeyed instructions, which were to take it easy.
The head start had been adequate. The black Cadillac was parked in the turnaround in front of Oscar Karn’s big house. Passing it, Shapiro touched the hood. It was warm, not hot.
There was no sign of life around the Karn house. They walked toward the door, but, when still some feet from it, Shapiro stopped and turned. A clicking sound had come from the side of the house. After a few seconds there was another click.
“Somebody practicing his golf shots,” Tony Cook said, stopping alongside Shapiro. Shapiro said it sounded like that, and they turned and walked on smooth turf, rounding the end of the house. There was a swimming pool there, with chaises around it. A gray-and-yellow sports jacket was stretched neatly over the back of one of the chaises. A little table beside the chaise had a glass on it. Green foliage seemed to be growing out of the glass.
John Henry Lacey III was beyond the pool. He swung a golf club, and a white ball rose from the grass and arched thirty feet or so through the air and came to rest in the grass. Lacey put another ball down and pulled his golf club back but then lowered it without hitting the waiting ball and turned to face Shapiro and Tony Cook.
He looked very different without the straggly beard. He looked, Nathan thought, much more like the man in the photograph. He needed only the red setter to be the man in the photograph. He wore a white polo shirt, buttoned nearly to the throat, and gray slacks. He looked at them for a moment and then, still carrying his golf club, walked toward them. He went around the swimming pool, and as he walked nearer his eyebrows went up slightly. He had, Shapiro noticed, had a haircut since the night before. When he was a few feet away, he stopped and let the golf club dangle.
“Well,” Lacey said, “you two again.”
There was not nearly so much of the deep South in his speech, Shapiro thought.
“Yes,” Shapiro said, “it’s us again, Mr. Lacey.”
“If you want to see Karn,” Lacey said, “he’s not to be disturbed. Reading Sis’s book. Shut up in what he calls his office. Everybody’s supposed to go around on tiptoe. Only Mrs. Karn went off in her own car to play golf. Seems sh
e’s in a tournament.”
He went over to the chaise and took his jacket off the back of it and put the jacket on. It didn’t fit too well around the neck. Lacey pulled briefly at the lapels to tighten the collar and then sat down in the chaise. He lifted the glass from the table beside it, but put the glass down without drinking from it.
“Probably,” Lacey said, “I could arrange to get you gentlemen a drink. Showed Mr. Karn’s boy how to make a julep yesterday.” He sipped from the glass. “Almost showed him, anyway.”
It was warm in the sun, and it was a little after noon. The ice-filled glass looked attractively cooling. Tony looked at it and turned his eyes away.
“I guess not, Mr. Lacey,” Shapiro said. “One or two questions we’d like to ask you. Nothing you have to answer unless you want to.”
“About Sis’s death? I’ll answer anything I can, Lieutenant—Shapiro.”
He hesitated momentarily before he spoke Shapiro’s name. It was as if he found the name difficult.
“Whyn’t you sit down and ask your questions?”
Tony pulled up two director’s chairs and they sat in them, facing Lacey, who didn’t, now, look or speak so much like a caricature of the old Southern colonel. Before, he’d looked—Tony briefly searched his mind—before, he’d looked like somebody’s picture on the label of a whisky bottle. “Colonel Culpepper’s Rare Old Sourmash Bourbon.”
“When you went around to Mr. Shepley’s apartment the other day,” Shapiro said. “The day your sister’s body was found, he got the impression you’d just got to the city. Had gone down to your sister’s apartment from the railroad station. Expecting to find her alive.”
“That’s right,” Lacey said. “That’s the way—”
But then he stopped and looked for some seconds at Shapiro. Again he raised inquiring eyebrows.
“But it wasn’t that way, was it, Mr. Lacey?” Shapiro said. “And you don’t have to answer that question. You don’t have to answer any questions. You can get in touch with a lawyer if you want to.”
“Warning me?” Lacey said. “In accordance with the rulings of that damn court of yours?”
“Just telling you you don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to,” Shapiro said. “You didn’t just get into town that day, did you? Were in town a week before that. Stayed at a hotel called the Brentwood. Registered there as James Lawrence, not as Lacey.”
“All right,” Lacey said. “I did get to New York a week or so before Sis was killed, yes. And called myself Lawrence. Because—well, because I wanted to look around a little without advertising who I was. Because Sis was so well known and all.”
“You said you got a letter from Mr. Karn on Tuesday, June twentieth,” Shapiro said, “and that he had made a reservation for you at the Algonquin for the twenty-third. But in fact you were already in New York on the twentieth. How did you know about the reservation, Mr. Lacey?”
“Well, he did write me asking me to come up, I reckon a week sooner. And I thought I’d like to come up but, as I said, look around a little, so I told him—I telephoned him same day I got the letter—that I couldn’t come for a week, and then he said he’d make that reservation for me for the twenty-third. But I left the same day too—traveled overnight on the train and got here the sixteenth. So I got his letter the fifteenth. Stayed at the Brentwood, like you said.”
“Incidentally,” Shapiro said, “Jo-An was your half sister, wasn’t she? Not your full sister?”
“Sure,” Lacey said. “Everybody knows that. In our part of the country, anyway.”
Only up here in the North are ignorant natives uninformed about the Laceys. That seemed to be the implication. I’ll never understand these people, Nathan thought.
“Does it make any difference?” Lacey asked.
“I can’t see that it does,” Shapiro said. “Just trying to get things straight in my own mind, Mr. Lacey. You came to New York the sixteenth?”
“That’s right,” Lacey said. “Went up the street a few blocks and found this hotel, which looked pretty much all right. Looked clean, anyway, and as if it wouldn’t cost too much. Checked in. Decided, on the spur of the moment, that I might as well be James Lawrence. Knew a man named that once and the name just came into my head.”
“You thought using your own name would—would what? Interfere with this looking around you wanted to do?”
“Yes. You may not understand this, Lieutenant, but it’s hard for a Lacey to be—well, call it anonymous.”
Neither Cook nor Nathan Shapiro made a direct response to this. Cook looked away from Lacey, and out over the swimming pool. There was nothing to see there but gently rippling water.
“Looking around for what?” Shapiro said, after the pause.
“Well,” Lacey said, “I’d got this letter and it worried me about Sis. So I decided to come up here and see if there was really anything wrong.”
“What letter, Mr. Lacey? A letter from your sister?”
“She wrote me. Sure. Not the letter I mean. I mean the letter from Mr. Karn. Said he was worried about her state of mind. Thought I ought to know. He said he didn’t seem to be getting through to her. Said she seemed to be depressed. So I came up.”
“And?”
Lacey took a sip from his glass. He said, “I don’t get you.”
“What did you do about your sister, Mr. Lacey?”
“Went around to this apartment she’d rented to work in. Talked to her. Took her out to dinner. Thought I’d try to cheer her up.”
“Did you think she needed cheering up? That she was depressed, as Mr. Karn had written you he thought she was?”
Lacey said, “Well.” There was, Shapiro thought, some doubt in the word. He drank again from his tall glass with the mint sprouting out of it.
“When she was working it was—oh, hard to get through to her. It was sort of as if she wasn’t there, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t see she was much more that way than she usually was when she was doing this writing of hers. Abstracted. Sort of as if she was some place else. But that’s the way she usually was when she was what she called working.”
“But you didn’t feel she was any more that way than usual? Regardless of what Mr. Karn thought.”
“Just figured maybe he saw something I didn’t. After all, he’d known her a long time and pretty well. Maybe better than I did. He’s used to people like her. People who write books and that sort of thing.”
“You felt Mr. Karn knew your sister pretty well,” Shapiro said. “How well, Mr. Lacey?”
“You mean something by that?”
“Not necessarily. Your sister admired Mr. Karn. Was grateful to him? Because, from what he says, he pretty much discovered her as a writer.”
“She thought he was pretty wonderful, I guess. Said things that made me think she did. Surprised me sometimes by what she said about him. Not the—well, not the sort of man people like us are apt to know very well, if you see what I mean. From up north and all. Different tradition, I guess you’d call it. Anyway, she was pretty sold on him, I guess.”
“Stayed at the same hotel with him last April, as we understand it.”
Lacey put his glass down hard on the table. He swung his legs over the side of the chaise as if he were about to get up. His face flushed.
“When they were working together on her manuscript,” Shapiro said, without seeming aware of Lacey’s movements or the look in Lacey’s eyes.
Lacey didn’t say anything for some seconds. Then he said, “Thought you were getting the wrong idea about Sis. Getting some dirty idea about her. About her and Oscar Karn. She was a lady, Shapiro.”
The name seemed to come easier this time. But it also came more harshly.
“Mr. Lacey,” Shapiro said, and now his own voice was harder, “we’re not concerned about your late half sister’s morals. We’re concerned about who killed her. But incidentally, she wasn’t a virgin. The autopsy showed that.”
“Down where we come from,” Lac
ey said, “we don’t talk about our womenfolks being virgins. Or not being. You mean, they cut her up?”
“You can put it that way if you want to. There’s always a post-mortem examination in the case of violent deaths. Do you know whether your sister had men friends?”
“Sure she did. What girl doesn’t? She was just like any other pretty girl until this writing bug bit her. You trying to make out she was a tramp, Shapiro?”
“No. Now, you came to New York in response to Mr. Karn’s letter, apparently, and yet you didn’t want him to know you were coming so soon. Why was that, Mr. Lacey?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“So you agreed he would make you a reservation at the Algonquin for the twenty-third of this month? The day your sister’s body was found? That’s what you told us, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But you’d been in New York for some time before that. Staying at this other hotel.”
“What I’ve just been telling you.”
“Apparently,” Shapiro said, “your sister was killed the night of the twenty-first. Had you seen her that day? Last Wednesday, that would be.”
“No. You getting at something?”
“Trying to,” Shapiro said. “You didn’t see her last Wednesday?”
“I said I—wait a minute. I did call her up Wednesday. Along in the afternoon. Said I would take her out to supper. But she said she was tied up.”
“Say how? Or with whom?”
“No. Just, ‘I’m tied up. Call me tomorrow.’ And I did, but nobody answered. You say she was—”
He didn’t finish. Shapiro answered what he had not asked.
“Yes, Mr. Lacey,” Shapiro said. “She was dead when you called Thursday. Did you call in the morning?”
“Yes. Pretty early, I guess. But she didn’t answer.”
“You weren’t worried about her?”
“No reason to be I could see. I just supposed she’d gone out shopping or something. The way ladies do.”
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