Die Laughing

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “So?”

  “Make the rounds,” Gage said. “My agent makes the rounds. Try out and try out. And maybe get a contract and rehearse for weeks and we have previews for two weeks and it opens on Tuesday and closing notices go up Saturday

  night. Like I said, it’s a mug’s game. Don’t know why I ever got into it. Why any of us does. Unless it’s just the itch.”

  “It doesn’t,” Shapiro said, “sound very steady work. You’ve been doing all right yourself, Mr. Gage?”

  “Getting by,” Gage said. “Scraping bottom some times, but not starving. Keeping up my Equity dues. And—” Somewhere a telephone rang. Gage got up and moved lithely across the room. He said, “Hello?” and, “Yes, he is,” and then, across the room, “Call for you, Lieutenant. Somebody must have known you’d be here.”

  “Seems like it,” Shapiro said, and crossed the room to the telephone and said, “Yes, Captain?” He listened and said, “Can’t say I’m surprised,” and listened again and looked at his wrist watch while he listened. He said, “O.K., Bill. Maybe half an hour?”

  When he went back, he did not again sit down in the low chair.

  “About all, for now,” Shapiro said. “Glad you got in touch with us, Mr. Gage. I guess—”

  He stopped.

  “One other thing,” he said. “This kid—Roy Baker—he says you interviewed him when he went to see Mrs. Singleton about the job. What did you think of him?”

  “Seemed O.K.,” Gage said. “Nice-looking kid. Jenny didn’t mind nice-looking kids around.”

  “She was the one decided he’d do?”

  “Yes. After all, it was her house. And her garden. But I thought the kid was all right. I’m not claiming I didn’t. Looks now as if I was wrong as hell, doesn’t it?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Shapiro told him and said, “Maybe we’ll want to talk to you again, Mr. Gage.”

  Gage slid up from his chair. He said he’d be around.

  Shapiro was lucky in getting a taxi, which surprised him. It was a little less than half an hour after Bill Weigand, commanding, Homicide South, telephoned that Shapiro pushed a doorbell high up in an apartment house a block or so from the East River. Weigand opened the door and said, “Sorry about it, Nate. But it is yours. Right?”

  From a deep chair in front of windows which overlooked the river, Dorian Weigand uncoiled, with a cat’s fluid grace, and came up the room, a hand reached out. She said, “Hi, Nathan.” He said, “Evening, Mrs. Weigand. “Dorian,” Dorian Weigand said. “Dorian,” Nathan Shapiro said after her.

  “Bill never takes time off,” Dorian said. “Or lets other people. If you ever get home, tell your Rose we’re sorry.” Shapiro said, “Sure,” looking down into her green eyes as she coiled herself back into the deep chair. Her eyes always amazed him.

  “Sherry?” Weigand said. “Right?”

  “I don’t—” Nathan said. “All right. Very small sherry.”

  He sat and looked at lights on the river until Weigand put a small glass of sherry on a table beside him. The glass was small but seemed to soar from its base.

  “The D.A.’s office more than me,” Weigand said and put his own glass, which did not contain sherry, on another table and sat in a chair by it. “About this girl who says she was with young Baker. Girl named Ellen Franklin. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Point is,” Weigand said, “do we believe her? What the D.A.’s office wants to know. Before court tomorrow. Or, do we believe the kid when he says she wasn’t there?”

  “Mulligan didn’t waste any time,” Shapiro said. “Getting through the D.A.’s office, I mean.”

  “Homicide Bureau,” Weigand said. “Man named Simmons.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I know Bernie Simmons. And?” “You sat in,” Weigand said. “Heard the girl. And heard the boy deny it. Which one do we believe, Nate? Because, Simmons says, it may make a difference. Because—”

  Because the District Attorney’s office, which in New York County is most scrupulous, had passed the information on to a man named Dunlap, court-appointed defense counsel. And Dunlap was going to court the next day, before the judge who had fixed bail at fifty thousand dollars, and ask the release of Roy Baker, held as a material witness. On the grounds of newly discovered evidence.

  “Taking the girl to tell her story?”

  “Actually,” Weigand said, “taking Mulligan. To whom she went first. The point is, are we sure enough to tell the D.A.’s man to fight it? Or, fight reduction in bail, which is probably about all Dunlap hopes for? Mulligan, apparently, doesn’t believe the girl’s story and says you don’t. Right?”

  “I think,” Shapiro said, “that she’s been in the Singleton garden. Not necessarily yesterday or at the times she says. Which, incidentally, was four o’clock on the first time she told it and three-thirty later. I don’t think she was inside the house. Above the basement. I don’t think she went up with Baker and was there when he found the body. But I can’t prove she wasn’t. A jury might well believe her.”

  “Telling a lie for the boy’s sake?” That was Weigand.

  “For love’s sake,” Dorian said.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I think she was—that it was what Mulligan brought himself to call a romantic gesture. But a jury might think the boy’s denial she was there was the romantic gesture.”

  “We’re a long way from a jury,” Weigand said. “Why do you believe she wasn’t in the house, Nate?”

  “Because there’s a pretty special staircase from the entrance hall to the second floor,” Shapiro said. “What they used to call, I guess, a grand staircase. I’ve got no imagination. You know that. But I could damn near see elegant ladies in—oh, dresses with long trains or hoop skirts or whatever—coming down it. The girl loves flowers. Is maybe a romantic kid. Staircase didn’t make any impression on her. Oh, that it was wide. Because, I think, she never saw it.”

  “Amounts to a hunch,” Weigand said. “You don’t believe the girl’s story because of a staircase.”

  “I suppose it comes to that,” Shapiro said. “Nothing to stick our necks out about. This lawyer Dunlap. Leak it to the papers?”

  “Probably has already,” Weigand said. “And—they’ll jump at it, Nate. Young love sort of thing. Also, the girl’s father is pretty well known. Patent lawyer. What they’ll call a ‘famed patent lawyer.’ Daughter of famed patent lawyer alibis suspect in slaying of celebrated actress. Right?”

  “Much too long for any headline I ever saw,” Dorian said, speaking from the depth of the chair she curled in. “Also, can they call the boy a ‘suspect’? Because, as I get it, he’s merely a material witness.”

  Weigand raised his glass in her direction. He turned back to Shapiro.

  “Have you and Cook found anybody who looks better?” he asked the sad-faced man. Shapiro shook his head. He took a sip from his glass of sherry. It was a little tart for his taste and he wondered what his stomach would make of it. His stomach is often petulant.

  “We know the boy was there,” Shapiro said. “That when he was picked up he had more money on him than we’d expect. And that there was no money in the drawer she kept it in. His explanation of that sounds a little spur-of-the- moment. He says he didn’t see the cop on the beat and wasn’t running away from him. But he was running. Nobody can blame precinct. He looks like a client. On the other hand—”

  He paused. Weigand waited a moment. Then he said, “On the other hand, Rose as a character witness? Or, more than that, Nate?”

  “There’s a man named Agee,” Shapiro said. “Says he was going to remarry Mrs. Singleton. There’s a man named Gage who’s married to her now—was until last night—who says he and the lady were going to go on with the marriage they had and that if Agee thought different he thought wrong. Agee seems to me a man who might get emotional if, say, he got his hopes up and somebody knocked them down.”

  “Emotional enough to use a knife?”

  “Bill,” Nathan Shapiro sai
d and turned in his chair to face Weigand more directly, “I’m no good at guessing things like that. Specially about people like Agee. I don’t know what makes people like that tick. They’re beyond me. You ought to know that.”

  “And,” Weigand said, gravely, “you have no imagination and are good only with a gun. I know about that.”

  “And,” Dorian said, still a little absently, “when you get among people who’re involved in the arts, you are all at sea. And helplessly drown in the sea.”*

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “sometimes I get lucky. Which—misleads people.”

  “Sure,” Weigand said. “Everybody knows about your luck, Nate. Emotional enough to use a knife? In your worthless opinion”

  “He acted as if he had been very much in love with Mrs. Singleton,” Shapiro said. “On the other hand, he had been an actor once, according to Gage. He may have been acting.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. All right, I don’t think he was acting. And, he was there—showed up at the house, I mean—an hour or two after she was killed. Identified himself. Appeared to be badly shaken up. It could be that he staged that. Could be he was there a couple of hours earlier. Could be he had a key, though he says he hadn’t.”

  “Reasonable doubt? As far as the kid’s concerned?”

  “Could be made to sound like that, I guess. And there’re a couple of others. Gage probably will get some, anyway, of her money. Of which there seems to be a lot. Gage was off by himself in a boat. Fishing. Didn’t know anything about his wife’s death until he went around to the theater this evening. He gave his key to the house back to her when they separated. Decided to take a vacation from each other, way he puts it. Maybe he did. And maybe he had the key copied before he did.”

  “And he profits. A hell of a lot more than the kid would from what he found in the lady’s cash drawer.”

  “Yes. I did think of that. All right, another reasonable doubt, if you want to put it that way.”

  “He needs money?”

  “Gave me a pitch about how precarious an actor’s life is. Doesn’t live as if he were broke.”

  “They’ll close the show with the star dead,” Weigand said. “Open it again with someone else?”

  “Haven’t decided, as I get it,” Shapiro said. “General feeling seems to be they won’t.”

  “Leaving Gage out of a job,” Weigand said.

  “And Mr. Agee out of royalties,” Dorian said. “How does Mr. Agee live, Nate? He’s had a lot of successes.”

  “Like he’d had a lot of successes,” Shapiro said. “Big apartment in a high-rise. Big rent or big investment if he bought it. Won’t be pinched, I think, if royalties from Always Good-bye dry up. He was giving Mrs. Singleton a cut on his royalties, incidentally.”

  “Why?” Weigand asked him. Shapiro told them why.

  “Generous,” Weigand said. “Two, now, beside the boy. Any more up your sleeve?”

  “Cook’s, actually,” Shapiro said. “Went around to see the boy’s father. Ralph Baker, the father is. In a jam—saloon brawl over Baker’s wife—years ago. Cook recognized him. Grocery clerk. Sometimes delivery boy.”

  He told them the Test about Ralph Baker.

  “Knew there was money lying around in the house,” Bill Weigand said. “Guess it, anyway. May have guessed there was a lot more than there seems to have been. Could have got hold of the kid’s key and had it copied.”

  “Knowing suspicion would be likely to fall on his son?” That was Dorian. “That kind of man, Mr. Cook think?”

  “How can anybody tell?” Shapiro said. “All right, Cook wasn’t much impressed by him. Type we run into pretty often, according to Cook. Who’s run into a lot of them.” “Three reasonable doubts,” Weigand said. “Any more in sight, Nate?”

  “I don’t know that it’s reasonable,” Shapiro said. “Another man we ought to talk to, maybe. Another husband. Apparently she walked out on him and—”

  “Kurt Morton,” Dorian said. “They were a famous husband-and-wife team. I haven’t heard anything about him for years. He’s still alive then, Nathan?”

  “Seems to be,” Shapiro said. “Sort of dropped out, from what they say. May think he was pushed out. By her. Could be he’s brooded over it.”

  “A long brood,” Dorian said. “A brood of years. Not really very reasonable, is it?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “Just a man to talk to. Because murder itself isn’t reasonable and you can’t tell.”

  “Husbands,” Dorian said. “And wives too, of course. Always the first in line, aren’t they? The police always take such a dim view of marriage, it seems to me.”

  “From dim experience,” Bill Weigand told his wife. “You’ll see this Morton, Nate?”

  “If we’re going on with it,” Shapiro said. “You said a couple of days. Because Rose had this hunch.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “An infectious hunch, isn’t it, Nate? From her to you and you to me.”

  Shapiro looked sadly at his glass and sipped from it.

  “Well,” he said, “there are loose ends worth pulling at.” “Yes,” Weigand said. “Very clear at first. You and Cook have fogged it up a little.”

  “I know,” Nate Shapiro said and sighed. “What I’m best at.”

  “You do think the girl’s lying?”

  “The way it feels to me. For what that’s worth.”

  “Oh,” Bill Weigand said, “nothing, obviously. All the same—”

  He got up and walked the length of the long living room to a telephone and spun its dial. He was answered quickly and said, “Bernie?” He spoke loudly enough for the two to hear him down the room. Clearly he got “Yes” for an answer.

  “We’re not sure enough for a big pitch on it, Bernie,” Bill Weigand said. “Nate Shapiro has stirred up several reasonable doubts.”

  He listened for a moment.

  “Right,” Bill said. “He’s very good, Bernie. Token resistance, maybe? Leading to a suitable compromise. Right? Because Nate thinks the girl probably is lying for the kid. And—”

  Apparently he was interrupted. He listened for a moment, said, “I’ll ask him,” and covered the receiver with a hand and spoke down the room, his voice raised.

  “Bernie,” he said, “says, ‘Because she thinks he’s guilty?’ You think that, Nate?”

  Nathan Shapiro is, he feels, always being asked for opinions he knows are worthless.

  “How do I know?” he said.

  “You don’t,” Weigand said, still muting the receiver. “So guess, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro hesitated.

  “At a guess,” he said, “that doesn’t follow. Could be, she only thinks he’s in trouble and needs to be helped.” He paused for a moment. Then he said, “She’s a child, Bill. I don’t know anything about children.”

  “Right,” Weigand said and took his covering hand from the receiver and spoke into it.

  “Nate doesn’t think the girl believes the boy is guilty,” Weigand said. “Thinks she’s an impulsive, romantic child.” He listened for a moment. He said, “Oh, I know it doesn’t prove anything. Isn’t evidence of anything. You asked how sure we are. So, we’re not sure. You’ll have to take it from there, Bernie.”

  * When last working on a case which involved “people in the arts,” as recounted in Murder for Art’s Sake, Shapiro solved, not drowned. Dorian Weigand helped him.

  X

  Criminal Court Judge Francis O’Brien would see counsel in chambers. He added, “You too, Lieutenant,” and got up from the bench and went through a doorway behind it. Assistant District Attorney Henry MacKenzie and Clarence Dunlap, counselor at law, and police Lieutenant Patrick Mulligan went around the bench and through the door after him. Judge O’Brien was at his desk when they caught up. He had just lighted a cigarette. One of the trying aspects of being a presiding judge is that one cannot smoke on the bench.

  “Application for the discharge of one Roy Baker,” Judge O’Brien said. “Held in bail as
a material witness in the fatal stabbing of one Jennifer Singleton. All right, Clare. Make your pitch.”

  “The kid couldn’t have done the killing,” Dunlap said. “His girl friend was with him all the time. Was with him when he found the body.”

  “She says,” Lieutenant Mulligan said, with heavy skepticism in his voice. “That’s all it comes to. What the kid who’s been looking at too many soap operas says. And he says she wasn’t.”

  To this Judge O’Brien said “Hmmm.” Then he said, “The District Attorney’s office opposes, Mac? And, are you going before the grand jury?”

  “Even,” MacKenzie said, “if the girl is telling the truth, Baker’s still a material witness. As for trying for an indictment, I don’t know. Word hasn’t come down. You know how the chief is about that sort of thing, judge.”

  “Very well,” Judge O’Brien said. “Very well indeed, Mac. Also, I rather wondered why you didn’t charge homicide in the first place. Assuming that the material witness thing is a gimmick. It is, isn’t it?”

  “At first,” MacKenzie said, “it looked open and shut. We decided it wasn’t yet, anyway.”

  “Because,” Mulligan said, “the brain boys moved in and—all right, Mr. MacKenzie—the D.A.’s office came sort of unstuck.”

  “Not entirely,” Judge O’Brien said. “Considering the amount of bond they asked for. And got. You really expect to get him discharged, Clare? Or will a reduction in bond satisfy you?”

  “The material witness bit is a gimmick,” Dunlap said. “We all know that. Not enough to make a homicide charge stick. So, just put the kid in storage while they dig up more. Yes, I’m applying for his discharge. Without bail.”

  The judge crushed his cigarette out and lighted another. He did not hurry with either action. Then he said, “Hmmm.” Then he said, “You oppose that, Mac.”