Write Murder Down

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “You’d come up here to New York because you’d been told your sister was depressed. You couldn’t get in touch with her by telephone. Did you make any other effort to find her?”

  “Went down to this apartment of hers around lunchtime. Rang the doorbell and she didn’t answer. But, hell, that had happened before. Sometimes she just didn’t want to be bothered.” Lacey leaned back in the chaise. “Back home she used to shut herself in her room sometimes. I’d hear her typewriter going, mostly. Not always. But I’d knock on the door and she wouldn’t answer.”

  “So you gave up trying to see her Thursday? You weren’t afraid she’d—well, do something to herself? Being depressed, as you’d been told she was?”

  “I told you she didn’t seem all that down to me. Just—well, pretty much the way she usually was when she was working. Just not there, sort of.”

  “Did she ever mention—any of the times you saw her—that she was thinking of leaving Mr. Karn? Going to another publisher?”

  Lacey sat up straight. “What’re you talking about?” I’ve never seen him look surprised before, Shapiro thought.

  “There was a rumor that she was thinking—”

  Or seen him laugh, Shapiro thought. Lacey was laughing. “That’s a mighty silly rumor,” he said. “Though to tell you the truth, I never did know what she was thinking. But Mr. Karn has the book. He’s reading it right now. Hell, I’ve signed an agreement—but that’s none of your business, Shapiro.”

  “You signed an—” Shapiro said and stopped in midsentence. What stopped him was the opening of a french door onto the terrace of the house. The heavy-muscled man in a white jacket came through the door. He was carrying a tray, and the tray seemed somehow incongruous in his big hands.

  He stopped on the terrace and looked at the three by the pool. He said, “Mr. Karn thought—” and stopped. Then he said, “I didn’t know you had company, Mr. Lacey. Mr. Karn thought maybe you’d like something to eat, seeing he’s still tied up.”

  Lacey looked at Nathan Shapiro and then at Tony Cook. He said, “I guess—” and let it hang.

  “By all means bring Mr. Lacey his lunch,” Shapiro said. “We’d like a word with Mr. Karn anyway.”

  Stokes came across the grass carrying the tray. He put the tray, which held sandwiches and what Shapiro took to be another mint julep, down on the table beside Lacey’s chaise. He said, “There you are, Mr. Lacey.”

  “Mr. Karn,” Shapiro said. He said it in a flat voice.

  “Nope,” Stokes said. “Mr. Karn’s busy. He don’t want to see nobody. Weren’t you here yesterday, mister?”

  “Yes, Stokes,” Shapiro said, his tone suddenly mild. “I was here yesterday. And we’re back today. And we want to see Mr. Karn.”

  He stood up. Tony Cook stood up, too. And Tony said, “Well, if it isn’t my old friend Slugger Phipps. You haven’t changed much, Phipps. Only I didn’t expect to run into you as a waiter.”

  “You got something wrong, mister,” Stokes said. “Never heard of nobody called Phipps.”

  “Assault with a deadly weapon, Phipps,” Tony said. “Got away with simple assault because your mouthpiece argued your fists weren’t deadly weapons. The man you beat up didn’t agree, particularly. Hadn’t come through with protection money. That was it, wasn’t it, Phipps?”

  “You’re nuts, mister. My name’s Stokes. Five years now I’ve worked for Mr. Karn.”

  “Since you got out,” Cook said. “Mr. Karn know about that?” He turned to Shapiro, but kept his eyes on Stokes. “Seven years ago,” he said to Shapiro. “I was in uniform. Cruise car up in the Bronx. My partner and I picked Phipps here up while he was beating hell out of a bookie who’d tried to hold out on the organization. Of course, the bookie happened to be a bit of a rat. But—sort of a little guy.” He turned back to Stokes. “I’m not a little guy, Phipps,” Tony Cook said. “The lieutenant and I want to see Mr. Karn.”

  “You’re still nuts,” Stokes said. “Whoever you are, you’re nuts.”

  But it occurred to Nathan Shapiro that the man in the white jacket, which bulged so over his heavy muscles, spoke with considerably less conviction.

  “That’s right, Stokes,” Shapiro said. “Detective Cook and I’ve come out from the city to see Mr. Karn. Suppose you tell him that.”

  There was a long moment when the three standing men looked at each other. John Henry Lacey remained on the chaise. He sipped from his new drink. It was, evidently, a situation in which Lacey had no intention of becoming involved. It was, however, a situation which did not seem greatly to surprise him.

  Stokes broke first. He said, “Well, I guess I can go see.”

  He went off across the grass toward the terrace. Shapiro and Cook went after him. He went into the house and they went with him into the house. He went along a corridor and knocked at a closed door. There was at first no response. Then there was a scraping sound, as of a chair pushed along a wooden floor. There was the sound of feet on the wooden floor, and they sounded like stamping feet. The door opened and Oscar Karn glared at them. His beard appeared to bristle.

  “I told you I didn’t—” Karn said, and spoke loudly. But he did not finish that. He looked up at Shapiro. He said, in a slightly different voice, “What do you want now, Lieutenant? I helped you all I could yesterday.”

  “Perhaps not all you can,” Shapiro said, and took a step toward the man in the doorway.

  “No, Phipps,” Tony Cook said behind Shapiro. “I wouldn’t try anything. Way I told you, I’m not a little guy.”

  Shapiro did not look back to see what, if anything, Phipps-Stokes had been about to try. He went on toward Karn, and Karn stepped back into the room. Shapiro went into it after him, and Cook went along and shut the door behind them.

  Karn’s “office” was not a large room. It had a large desk in it, and papers were piled neatly on the desk. They were in two piles, the one which had been in front of Oscar Karn smaller than the other.

  Karn went and sat at the desk. He said, “I’m working on Miss Lacey’s manuscript, Lieutenant. But I’ll help any way I can. I only hope—well, that it won’t take too long.”

  “No, Mr. Karn,” Shapiro said. “It shouldn’t take too long. Is the book all you hoped it would be? Worth—say worth all the trouble you’ve gone to to get it?”

  “Trouble?” Karn said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Lieutenant. What do you mean by trouble? Yes, it’s a very good book. A very fine book, actually.”

  “A book that will sell as well as you hoped? As well as Snake Country sold?”

  “I think so. In fact, I’m pretty—what are you getting at, Lieutenant?”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “I’m a homicide man, Mr. Karn. I’m getting at murder.”

  “I know you think Jo-An was murdered,” Karn said. There was dismissal, almost contempt, in his voice. “And that you can’t find the murderer, if there was one. Anyway, I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Yes, Mr. Karn,” Shapiro said. “We think Miss Lacey was murdered. But you’re wrong in thinking we can’t find the murderer. Because, you see, right now we’re—”

  They had their backs to the door of Karn’s office. Both Shapiro and Cook whirled when the door banged open behind them. Shapiro’s right hand started to move toward his shoulder holster, but the movement stopped.

  Stokes’s hands were just as big and powerful as ever. His left hand hung at his side. His right hand didn’t. His right hand had an automatic pistol in it and the pistol was pointing. It moved, slowly, from Shapiro to Cook. Neither of them made a move toward his own gun after Shapiro’s first aborted move.

  “That’s right,” Stokes said. “Just be good boys. These gentlemen bothering you, Mr. Karn?”

  Karn didn’t answer directly. But he stood up behind his desk and began to move along it toward a french door which opened on the terrace. He reached it and, still facing into the room, reached behind him and raised the lever which dogged the door closed. He pushed back agai
nst the door and it swung open. Only then did he answer Stokes.

  “I’m afraid they’ve got some absurd notion,” he said. “Yes, Stokes, you could call it a bothersome notion. So—”

  “Just stay where you are, boys,” Stokes said and started to sidle toward Karn. He had to sidle around the desk and, for a moment, his back was to Tony Cook. The moment was long enough.

  Tony kicked hard, and the toe of his heavy shoe caught Stokes behind the right knee. Stokes staggered but did not fall. Tony reached out toward him, but Stokes escaped the reaching hands and turned on Tony with the automatic up and less than a foot from Tony’s chest. “You son of—” Stokes said, and Nathan Shapiro’s gun cracked, the sound enormous in the small room. The automatic flew out of Stokes’s hand. There was blood on the gun when it clattered on the floor.

  Stokes crouched, groping for the gun. Tony’s fist crashed into his jaw, and Stokes reeled back and against the desk. He stood against it for a second and then, slowly, slid down against it to the floor.

  Shapiro whirled. Karn wasn’t in front of the french door. He was running across the terrace. He had pushed the door closed behind him, and Shapiro had to wrench it open. He went through it, his revolver ready, and Karn was running on the grass beside the house and toward the front of it and the police car standing there.

  Shapiro yelled “Stop!” and Karn didn’t stop. He was almost at the corner of the house when Shapiro brought his gun up and began slow pressure on the trigger.

  There was the loud crack of a revolver, but it didn’t come from the gun in Shapiro’s hand. Karn staggered and fell to the grass. He slid along on the grass and seemed to be clutching at it.

  John Henry Lacey III came around the corner of the house. He had a revolver in his right hand, pointed at Karn. He walked toward Karn and looked down at him, and then let the revolver sag so that it wasn’t pointing at anything except the ground.

  Shapiro went toward the two.

  “Got him in the left foot,” Lacey said. “Thought you wouldn’t want him damaged too much.” There was no appreciable trace of the South in his speech.

  Karn rolled over and sat, swaying, on the grass, which had a streak of blood on it. He stared down at his feet. Then he looked up at Lacey.

  “Double-crossing son of a bitch,” he said, and his voice was high and shaking. He tried to reach down toward his shattered foot and didn’t make it and rolled over on the grass and lay on his side, looking up at Lacey. “Son of a—” he said, but the rest of the words wouldn’t come. They were lost in a wordless cry.

  “Shouldn’t say a thing like that, Mr. Karn,” Lacey said, and the Southern intonation, which seemed to come and go in his speech, was there again. “Bad thing to call a man down where I come from. And I’m not. I’m not a murderer, either. Down our way we don’t hold with killing ladies.”

  Stokes came out from the office onto the terrace. He held his right hand in his left, and blood dripped from the hands. Tony Cook was behind Stokes. His revolver was jammed against Stokes’s back.

  “Looks like we’ll need an ambulance, Lieutenant,” Tony Cook said. He looked down at the man lying on the lawn. “Two of them, maybe?”

  “Oh,” Nathan Shapiro said, “I think we can get them both in one, Tony. After we patch them up a little. The stuff’s in the car.”

  15

  Rachel Farmer opened her apartment door quickly when Tony rang the doorbell at a few minutes after six on Tuesday evening. She was fully dressed, to Tony’s mild surprise. The first thing she said was, “I thought it was the other one. The brother. For the money.”

  It had been in the newspapers all day; it had been on television the night before. The Times had given it a two-column front-page head Tuesday morning. (The lead story, right-hand column, had still to do with the common market.) The News had really splashed it. The Post, an afternoon paper which hits the street in the morning, had the arraignment, which was what was left and was not really a second-day story. It also had all the News had had and most of what had appeared in the Times. It didn’t have so much about Oscar Karn’s long and admired career as a publisher, but the Times book reporter had written that and had known his stuff.

  Tony Cook removed his jacket and his shoulder holster with the gun in it. He said, “So did I, up pretty near to the end. But Nate didn’t. Didn’t like the idea of a brother killing a sister. Knows it happens but doesn’t like it. And didn’t think this Lacey was the type, anyway.”

  “The type to carry a gun, though,” Rachel said, while Tony put drinks on the table in front of the sofa.

  “Neither of us had figured on that,” Tony said, and sat beside her. “Came as a nice surprise. Surprise to Karn and that thug of his, too. Only, not so nice a surprise to them.”

  He drank from his glass of bourbon on the rocks. Rachel sipped from her small glass of Tio Pepe. She has beautiful hands, Tony thought. He looked further. And beautiful legs, he added.

  “Lacey said that down home everybody has a gun,” Tony said. “I told him in New York it’s against the law to have a handgun without a permit. He said that was a pretty crazy law.”

  “Bound over for the grand jury,” Rachel said. “I read that much. Just so he could get to publish this book of Miss Lacey’s? It doesn’t seem very reasonable.”

  “Murder never is,” Tony said. “Sometimes it seems reasonable to people. Did you read the Times this morning?”

  “I don’t read the Times much,” Rachel told him. “It’s too long.”

  “A piece about Karn,” Tony said. “I mean, in addition to the news story. Kind of a profile. You didn’t read that?”

  She hadn’t read that.

  “Karn’s been a publisher for a long time,” Tony said. “Very big at it. Published a lot of stuff by people who’re famous now. Famous or dead, of course. Discovered a lot of them. Made Karn, Incorporated, famous too. Only, the last few years, the corporation—Karn was the corporation apparently—began to dwindle down. Authors went to other publishers. Or just, as I said, died. Jo-An Lacey’s big hit put Karn back on his feet for a while. Several years ago, that was. But he was left, toward the end, with nothing much to merge with.”

  She shook her head.

  “He was planning to merge with another publisher,” Tony said. “What it amounted to, probably, was that another publisher was going to buy him out. Only, he didn’t have much to sell. Unless he could come up with another big hit. Like another Lacey best seller. And then, Miss Lacey said she was walking out on him. That she’d been to see an agent who would get her a much better contract.”

  “Couldn’t Karn have just given her a better contract himself?”

  “He might have offered,” Tony said. “Probably did. Only—well, if you found out you’d been played for such a sucker, would you want to accept any kind of offer from the guy who’d played you? I wouldn’t. We figure the better break she got from a new publisher, the madder she’d probably have been at Karn.”

  “So he got mad back and killed her?”

  “Mad in a cold, careful sort of way,” Tony said. “He had to get the book, don’t forget. Planned it very carefully, we figure. We figure he knew he’d have to kill her as soon as she told him she’d seen Morton—the agent I mentioned. He’d know he was going to lose her. But he could expect a certain amount of time before another publisher made an offer, and the more nearly the book was finished, the better. So he played it cooL Not knowing he was in for a hell of a surprise.”

  “Which was?” said Rachel.

  “The book was accepted in a week—Morton said that was unheard-of, or something. So then Karn had to kill Jo-An in a hurry. He’ll deny everything, of course. And he’s already hired one hell of a good lawyer.”

  “So maybe he’ll get off?”

  “Nate doesn’t think so. The District Attorney’s office doesn’t think so. The jury’ll have the last thought, of course. There’s more. You want to hear what more there is?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “After a
nother sherry, though.”

  Tony poured her another sherry from the chilled bottle. He freshened his own drink.

  The way they figured it, Tony told her, Karn planned Jo-An’s death to be thought a suicide. He wrote Lacey saying Jo-An was very depressed and that Lacey had better come up and see what he thought. He even made Lacey a hotel reservation. Planned the depression to explain suicide.

  “And if we didn’t buy suicide,” Tony said, “Lacey would be on hand to be suspected. Since, after all, he was the obvious one who profited. He gets her money, and it’s probably quite a lot of money. We’re still checking that out. But we couldn’t suspect him if he was nicely tucked away in Alabama. So—get him up here. He struck a snag there too, though—Lacey wasn’t up here, as far as he knew, when he killed her. The reservation had been made for Friday, the twenty-third, and Jo-An was killed the night of the twenty-first. We can only guess why he didn’t wait until the weekend. Jo-An’s agreement with Morton was to take him the finished book and sign the contract Monday. That would have been yesterday.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Oh—we have two or three. Jo-An got this acceptance from Materson, the publisher, that same day, and from what Morton said about the contract, the terms were like nothing she’d ever seen before. She must have spilled the whole thing to Karn, and it’s possible she got herself so worked up she told him she was going to march right to Morton and sign the contract the very next day. Not wait until Monday. Or she may have said she’d already signed the contract but was going to deliver the manuscript Or—oh, some such thing made him decide he’d better not wait.

  “So then he could only hope that we’d buy suicide. And, if we did buy suicide, get Lacey to sign this agreement.”

  “You leave things out,” Rachel said. “What agreement? There wasn’t anything in the papers about an agreement.”

  “Well,” Tony said, “we don’t have to tell the newspapers everything. Agreement between Karn and Lacey. Lacey as executor of his half sister’s will. ‘In consideration of five thousand dollars, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, Lacey, as party of the first part and executor of the will of Jo-An Lacey, deceased—’”