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  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “We have to go on what people say. At the start, anyway. No idea what kind of an estate she left, I suppose? And wouldn’t—”

  The telephone on his desk interrupted him. He said, “Shapiro.” He listened. He said, “O.K. Suppose you stick around for an hour or so and see if he stays there.” He hung up.

  “Lacey’s checked in at the Algonquin,” Shapiro said. “And wouldn’t tell you if he did have.”

  “No,” Tony said. “Oh, that I can call him Monday at his office. I got hold of him at his club. Crusty about that.”

  “She had upwards of ten thousand in a checking account,” Shapiro said. “I took a look at her checkbook in her room at the Algonquin. Which reminds me—”

  He dialed. He got the acting captain in charge of the precinct squad at the West Fifty-fourth Street station. The precinct man had finished with Room 912 at the Algonquin. They had sealed it up after removing Miss Lacey’s possessions and depositing them with the property clerk. Savings-account bankbooks? “Hold it, Nate. Got a list here.”

  Nathan held it.

  “Yeah. Five of them. All in Mobile, Alabama. Total deposits of—hold it a minute.”

  Nathan held it.

  “Eighty thousand seven hundred and twenty-three dollars and ninety-three—no, make that ninety-six—cents.”

  “Joint accounts, Captain? With her brother, say?”

  “Just Jo-An Lacey. What the list says, anyway. Property clerk has the books now. Along with her clothes and what not.”

  Nathan Shapiro said, “Thanks, Captain,” and hung up. He told Tony Cook what he had been told.

  “Of course there may—” Shapiro said, and again the telephone interrupted him. He gave his name and listened. He said, “Did you get the number?” He said, “Good,” and wrote down a number. He matched the license number with one in his mind. He said, “All right. Check in,” and hung up.

  “A black Cadillac showed up at the Algonquin,” he told Tony Cook. “Chauffeur got out and went in. Came back in a couple of minutes with Lacey the Third. Drove away with him. Looks as if Lacey’s going to have the weekend in the country.”

  Tony Cook waited.

  “Because,” Nathan said, “the car was Oscar Karn’s. Thoughtful man, Karn. Offers a sympathetic hand to hold onto, probably.”

  “Or else,” Tony said.

  “As you say,” Nathan said. “Mmmm.”

  “Comes to better than ninety grand,” Tony said. “In ready cash. It must pay to write novels.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Shapiro said. “She had a smash hit. With maybe another one coming up.”

  “And maybe,” Tony said, “a safe-deposit box full of securities. In Mobile.”

  “Ninety thousand will do for a start,” Nathan Shapiro said. “Oh, we’ll check up through channels. Banks are stuffy about things like that, but we’ll check up. These parties you’ve been to with Rachel. Down in the Village?”

  “One or two of them. One uptown. Park Avenue.”

  “Painters, writers, composers? That sort of people? Rachel seems to get around. Editors, maybe?”

  “They didn’t wear labels,” Tony said. “Yes, she knows a good many people. Gets invited around a good deal. Used to, anyway. Recently—” He broke it off there.

  Nathan Shapiro merely nodded his head. Then he said, “She’s intelligent as well as decorative, from what I’ve seen of her. Does she do any of these things herself? Paint? Write? That sort of thing?”

  “Once she told me she ‘dabbles,’” Tony said. “Didn’t say at what. And I’ve never pressed her. What she wants to tell me she tells me. You getting at something, Nate?”

  “Not about you and Rachel. Your business and hers. You’re seeing her tomorrow night, Tony? Going to one of these parties, maybe?”

  “I’d planned to take her to dinner. But, from what you said, I gather I’ll be working. Day off or not.”

  “According to the schedule,” Shapiro said, “it’s your day off. We can stick to schedule. Pretty much, anyway. Just taking her to dinner? No party?”

  “No party, Nate. Just—well, just—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Maybe she was invited to a party, you think? Tomorrow being a Saturday. And turned it down because she had a date with you? A party to which you could, as you put it, tag along? With your ears open?”

  “Not that I know of. Of course, she wouldn’t make a—”

  He stopped. Nathan Shapiro finished for him. “Make a point of having turned down a party to have dinner with you,” he said. “I’m sure of that. From what little Rose and I have seen of Miss Farmer. There’ll be a good deal of talk about Miss Lacey when people—people in her line of work especially—get together. She’s been identified as Jo-An Lacey, you know. It’s been on radio and television. The News is already on the street with it. The Times will be. There’ll be a lot of talk about it, I’d think.”

  Tony said, “Well.” He said it slowly. He said, “These people will be friends of hers, Nate. Acquaintances, anyway. You’d—I mean I’d—be—well, asking her to be my cover.”

  “She’s a friend of yours too, Tony. I’m not suggesting you wear a disguise or anything like that. You’ll be Detective Anthony Cook. I suppose you were at these other parties?”

  “Sure. Only—”

  “You’ll just be keeping your ears open,” Shapiro said. “For talk about the Karn outfit. About this Laurence Shepley. Who maybe knows some of the same people. Has he been at any of these parties you’ve been to?”

  “No. Of course, people come in and out. Rachel and I—well, we usually’ve left early. She’d never seen Shepley until last night. When he was at the Charles bar. But, sure, he’d probably bump into other writers. Go, maybe, to the same parties.”

  Shapiro looked at his watch.

  “It’s not quite ten,” he said. “Miss Farmer will still be awake?”

  Tony didn’t know. He said she’d expected to have a hard day. He said maybe she’d already have gone to sleep.

  “I doubt whether she’d much mind your waking her up,” Shapiro said. “Use the booth outside, huh?”

  Tony sighed. His sigh wasn’t up to any of Nathan Shapiro’s, but it was a good enough sigh.

  Rachel answered on the second ring. She did not sound particularly as if she had been wakened. She did say, “What on earth, Tony?”

  He told her what on earth. She said, “Why on earth?” and Tony told her why. She said, “It sounds a little like spying, doesn’t it?” and Tony said she could call it that and say no and that they’d have dinner together as they’d planned and that that would be, on the whole, a hell of a lot more fun.

  “The Pierces are having a few people in for drinks,” Rachel said. “They asked me to drop by if I was free and I said maybe, the way one does. From five-thirty on, Angela said. Angela Pierce and Tommy Pierce. You’ve met them. He’s with one of the book publishers, as it happens.”

  “Little blonde with blue eyes? Good figure and doesn’t mind showing it?”

  “You remember the wrong Pierce,” Rachel said. “It would be better if you remembered a tall, sort of gangly man with a neat black mustache. Which would be Tommy. But all right. Five-thirty will mean more like six-thirty, you know. And they’re only a few blocks away.”

  “Six,” Tony said. “When I’ll be around, I mean.”

  “All right, Tony.”

  “Was it a hard day?”

  “Enough to make my feet hurt. Good night, Tony.”

  “I’m very fond of your feet, Rachel.”

  “Good night, Anthony.”

  Tony went back to Nathan Shapiro’s office. Shapiro was just hanging up the telephone.

  “The State Police are keeping an eye on Karn’s place,” Shapiro said. “Just to see that Lacey gets there all right. No reason he shouldn’t that I can see. Well?”

  “All right,” Tony said. “She’s been asked to drop in for cocktails with some people called Pierce. They’re having a few people in.
She’s not particularly enthusiastic, but—all right. And this man Pierce—seems I’ve met him but I don’t remember much about him—seems he works for a book publisher.”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “sometimes we’ve got to get the breaks. Maybe this is one of the times.”

  He did not speak as if he expected it to be one of the times.

  9

  Tonight she was wearing a white sleeveless dress with a wide yellow belt. She even had it on when she opened the door for Tony Cook at six o’clock—at, actually, a few minutes before six. He put his arms around her, and for a moment he thought she resisted. Then she didn’t. She said, “Oh, all right. But your gun bangs into me. Do you have to wear it tonight?”

  “The regulations require,” Tony said and looked at her and got the odd, indefinable impression that his required gun was, for that evening, a symbol. He said, “All right, to hell with the regulations. I could get busted, but—all right.”

  “Nobody will frisk you,” Rachel told him, and then smiled her wide smile. “Sometimes,” Rachel Farmer said, “I think I like you.”

  Tony took off the shoulder holster and the gun in it. He felt lighter without it and, in a fashion, bereft.

  “They live on Thompson Street,” Rachel said. “Down below the Square. You know those houses? A row on Thompson and a row on Sullivan, with a common garden between them for the whole block. The people who own the houses own the garden. They’ve even got statues in it They’ve got private guards, of course. It’s—oh, a kind of community. But all the houses are old houses.”

  They walked down to Waverly Place and cut across Washington Square to Thompson Street. It took them about ten minutes. A uniformed man from a private protection agency was walking toward them along Thompson when they got to it.

  “They own the whole house,” Rachel said. “There are apartments in some of the houses, but mostly they’re just houses. Here we are.”

  She led the way up scrubbed white steps between polished brass handrails. Neither of them needed the help of the handrails. Tony pressed a button, and chimes sounded softly from within the Pierce house—a three-story house of white-painted brick.

  Thomas Pierce was a tall, somewhat gangly man with a neat black mustache. Tony still remembered him only vaguely. He looked at Tony as if he did not remember him at all, but he beamed at Rachel. He said, “Good girl. Angie said you were afraid you couldn’t make it.”

  “Things changed a little,” Rachel said. “You remember Tony Cook, Tommy?”

  “Sure,” Tommy Pierce said, with great conviction in his voice. Tony suspected the conviction did not really belong there. Pierce grasped his hand firmly. He said, “Swell you could come along, Cook.” Tony said it was good of them to let him barge in. They went in.

  The long, not-wide room they went into had windows at the far end—ceiling-to-floor windows. There was a garden beyond them. There were half a dozen people in the room. They were clustered in a rough circle around a big coffee table. All of them had drinks.

  “Probably know everybody,” Pierce said, and the three men in the room stood up. “Angie,” Pierce said, “Rache made it after all. And brought a friend with her to even things.”

  A slim blond woman, with a dress which clung to an admirable body, stood up. She said, “Rache, darling,” and came across the room with both hands held out. Rachel Farmer took both the extended hands. She said, “This is Tony Cook, Angie. I think you and Tommy met him once at the Petersons’.”

  “Of course,” Angela Pierce said. There was as much conviction in her voice as there had been in her husband’s, but Tony thought it was more firmly based. “Wonderful of you to bring him, darling. Sherry, Rache? And you, Tony?”

  First names were leaped on, snatched up, Tony Cook thought. He said, “Bourbon, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Pierce.”

  Angela Pierce said, “Tommy?” and Thomas Pierce went down the room to a table under the windows. There were bottles on the table and glasses and a large ice bucket. Pierce began to rattle ice into a glass; to pour from a bottle.

  “You all know Rache,” Angela Pierce said. It appeared to Tony that everybody did. “And this is Tony Cook.” They murmured pleasantly at Tony. They were all young or youngish, Tony thought. Only one of the men had aggressively long hair. He didn’t know any of—

  He stopped that thought in the middle of it. He did know one of the men, one of the politely standing men. For the moment he could not remember the man’s name. The man, who was of medium height and a little older than the others—old enough for thick gray hair—came toward Tony with his hand out. Tony took the offered hand.

  “Hi, Mr. Cook,” the gray-haired man said. “Still on the force?”

  “Yes,” Tony said, and remembered the man’s name and where they had met. The man’s name was Alvin Carson, and they had met with Tony sitting in a witness chair and Carson walking up and down in front of him and turning from time to time toward a jury.

  “Yes, Mr. Carson,” Tony said. “I’m still a policeman. You gave me rather a going-over a few years back.”

  Carson had been the lawyer defending a man charged with murdering his mistress. Tony had been a detective (3rd gr.) then. He had been a witness for the People of the State of New York. Carson had given him the memorable going-over on cross-examination. Carson had also got his client off with a manslaughter conviction, which was less than the District Attorney, New York County, had expected.

  “Just doing my job,” Carson said, and let go of Tony’s hand, which he had been clutching firmly. “The way you were doing yours, Mr. Cook. So you’re still at it.”

  “Yes,” Tony said. “Still at it, Mr. Carson. But—off duty at the moment.”

  He realized that all the others in the room, except Rachel, were looking at him. So far as he could tell, they were looking at him without animosity. A good many people, even among the law-abiding, look at policemen with uneasiness, even animus.

  “Enter the law,” Pierce said, coming down the room with a wineglass in one hand and a squat glass with ice tinkling in it in the other. The wine in Rachel’s glass was, Tony noticed, almost as dark in color as the bourbon in his. Well, they were Rachel’s friends, even if they did call her “Rache” and offer her sweet sherry.

  Tony took the glass held out to him and said, “Thanks,” and was told to find a place to sit down. He found a place to sit down. It was next to Angela Pierce. Carson pulled up a chair and gestured toward the one he had vacated. Rachel sat in it. She was on the other side of the round table from Tony. She sipped from her glass and put it down on the table. She did not look at Tony, although he was looking at her. She smiled at Angela Pierce. To Tommy Pierce she said, “Perfect, Tommy.” If Tony had not known her well, he would have thought she meant it. I shouldn’t have dragged her into this, Tony thought. We should have gone uptown some place and had dinner by ourselves.

  “We were all talking about poor Miss Lacey,” Angela Pierce said. “Such an awful thing to happen. Jo-An Lacey, Tony.”

  “Yes,” Tony said. “It was an awful thing, Mrs. Pierce. Did you know Miss Lacey?”

  “Met her once,” Angela Pierce said. “Some big brawl or other. Pen, Tommy?”

  Tony could feel his face going blank. It seemed an odd time to be asking for a pen. Pierce, who was circulating with a mixer of martinis, grinned at him. “She means P.E.N., Tony,” Pierce said. “Poets, essayists and novelists. Comes out to the right initials. No, it wasn’t, Angie. A party for her Oss Karn gave when Snake Country came out. Several years ago. You’re right, though. It was really a brawl. One of those do’s where you meet everybody four times. And the guest of honor maybe once. Hazards of the trade, from where I sit.”

  He poured martini into a glass held out for him.

  Tony said, “Trade, Mr. Pierce?”

  Pierce put the mixing glass down on the table, where it would be within reach of those who needed it. He came around the table and pulled a chair up near, but a little behind, Tony Cook’s.

>   “Publishing,” he said. “Publishing books, writing books. Agents. Trade. Racket. Sometimes even part of an art. Not often, but sometimes. I’m in it at one end. Jo-An Lacey was in it at another. She was—all right, she was one of the people who make it more than a business. Or racket or whatever. She was one in—oh, in a thousand. Maybe in ten thousand. Did she kill herself, Cook? First they said she did. Cut her wrists and died in a bath. Old Roman custom. But then the police seemed to get in on it as if there were more to it than just suicide. And why the hell should she kill herself? She was going places. As a matter of fact, she had got places.”

  Thomas Pierce had, Tony realized, a carrying voice. It was carrying to everybody in the room.

  “The police are in on it,” Tony said. “It—all right. It doesn’t seem as open-and-shut as it did at first. But that’s in the morning papers by now. No secret about it. You’re in the publishing business, Rachel tells me.”

  “He’s senior editor at the Jefferson Press,” Angela said.

  “Head of the Trade Books Department, actually,” Pierce said. “You’re a detective, Tony. You’re working on the case?”

  “I’m assigned to Homicide,” Tony said. “We’re all working on the case. Sure.”

  “And you can give us the lowdown?”

  “There isn’t any lowdown yet,” Tony said. “All right, we think Miss Lacey was murdered. There are just bits and pieces.”

  It wasn’t going as Nate had planned it. Partly, of course, because Alvin Carson had, in a sense, put the finger on him.

  “From what’s going around,” Pierce said, “she was finishing a new book. I don’t know why I put it that way. Oss certainly hasn’t been making any secret of it.”

  “Oss?”

  He could guess. There was no special reason for making it clear that he could guess.

  “Oscar Karn,” Pierce said. “Oscar Karn, Inc.” He pronounced it “ink.”

  “That’s what we understand,” Tony said.

  It wasn’t going to be a matter, a simple matter, of picking up gossip. He might as well nudge it. In any event, they had “all been talking about poor Miss Lacey.”