Write Murder Down Page 12

  Nathan went along. There were not many people on the street. Here and there was a woman wearing a hat, and sometimes a man with her dressed up for Sunday. Catholics returning from Mass, Nathan supposed, considering the hats the women were wearing. One of the women said, “Good morning, Mr. Shapiro,” and he said, “Oh, good morning, Mrs. O’Hara,” and thought there was abstraction in his voice. He said, “It’s a fine morning,” to make up for the abstraction and went down a flight of stairs to a subway platform. There was only one other man on the platform, and he was drunk. It was ten minutes before a train came along, and Nathan saw that the drunk got on it without falling between the cars. Which ended his responsibility for an early-morning drunk.

  It was beginning to grow hazy in Manhattan as Shapiro walked from the subway station to the station house. It was going to be warmer than it had been the day before. It was going to be muggier.

  He climbed the stairs to Homicide, Manhattan South. Tony Cook was already there, sitting at his desk. Phillips Morton was sitting beside the desk. Morton had one hand covering the left side of his jaw. Holding a hand against a bruised jaw doesn’t help the jaw any, but one always thinks it may.

  “Morning, Tony,” Nathan said. “Good morning, Mr. Morton. Had a spot of trouble, I hear.”

  “You’re damned right,” Morton said and took his hand away from his jaw. The jaw was swelling, and there was an adhesive bandage on it.

  Shapiro said they had better go along to his office, and they went along to his office. Shapiro sat at his desk and Tony and Phillips Morton sat on the other two chairs.

  “Mr. Morton just got here,” Tony said. “Called the precinct when he came to and then, thinking it was a hell of a funny coincidence, called in here. And Lenny Johnson, who was catching, suggested he call me.”

  “And you called me,” Shapiro said. “All right, Mr. Morton, you’ve probably been over it, but you’ll want to go over it again. What happened?”

  “Sometimes I go to my office early Sundays,” Morton said. “Catch up on things. And read manuscripts. Telephone doesn’t keep ringing the way it does at the apartment. Writers—some of them—want agents to do the damnedest things. Buy flowers for their girls’ birthdays. You wouldn’t believe it, Lieutenant.”

  “This morning?” Shapiro said.

  Morton had got to his office about eight o’clock. He had signed in in the lobby, as was the regulation—recently the regulation. “There’s a company doing Government work on one of the floors. And there’s some sort of an Egyptian agency on another.” He had unlocked his office door. Yes, so far as he could tell, the door was locked. Anyway, he had used his key.

  “And this guy—a big guy—came charging out of the inside office and slugged me.”

  “With a weapon?”

  “With his fist, far’s I could tell. Anyway, he knocked me out. I was out—oh, maybe ten-fifteen minutes. I was still groggy when I looked at my watch.”

  “Did you get a good look at this man who hit you, Mr. Morton?”

  “I suppose so. Sure, I must have. Only—well, he came out of nowhere. A big man. In a dark suit, I think. But—it was all so damn sudden. And unexpected. Here I go to my own office, where it’ll be quiet, to read a manuscript and somebody busts out of my office and slugs me. It was all—it was all too sudden, I guess. Too sudden to take in until it was—well, until it was over.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Things are, sometimes. Was there money in your office, Mr. Morton? A safe or anything like that?”

  “No. Checks made out to me as agent for writers. No money. Oh, I had about a hundred dollars in my wallet. I’ve still got it.”

  “You called the police when you came to,” Shapiro said. “Who came?”

  “Two men in uniform. Very quickly. Then two men not in uniform, who asked a lot of questions.”

  “Safe and Loft Squad,” Tony said. “I checked. They figure the lock was picked. By a pro. Seven people had signed into the building. All legitimate. But there’s only one man on duty in the lobby. Automatic elevators, of course. It wouldn’t have been too hard.”

  “Apparently it wasn’t,” Shapiro said. “They didn’t take your wallet, Mr. Morton. There wasn’t any cash in your office. Not money, evidently. What was this man after?”

  “File folders,” Morton said. “From the temporary files; the permanent files are in locked cases. The folders, Lieutenant, from L through S. Letters from writers. Mostly about shaking money out of publishers. That sort of thing. Letters telling me that So and So gets a seventy-thirty break on subsidiaries and why doesn’t he? Stuff that I’ll get around to answering.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “your correspondence with Jo-An Lacey? Say, a letter telling you she wanted you as her agent?”

  “No. Just the contract she was going to sign tomorrow when she brought in the rest of the manuscript. Which hasn’t any value since nobody’s signed it. The publishers hadn’t. She hadn’t. Oh, and a letter—one of those confirming-our-telephone-conversation sort of things. Not specifying the conversation, as I remember. That was all. She’d just come to me. I told you that. Had been going to come to me.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Did you tell anybody you had this contract ready and that she hadn’t signed it?”

  “No. I don’t shoot my mouth off about people in my stable, Lieutenant.”

  “But she may have told somebody.”

  “Sure.”

  “And somebody may have assumed she had already signed this contract?”

  Morton supposed it was possible. He had no way of knowing.

  “Neither have we,” Shapiro said. “Yes, Tony?”

  Tony Cook had not said anything. He had not moved. It must, Tony thought, have been something in his face, although he had not been conscious that Shapiro had been looking at him.

  “When Miss Lacey said she was bringing around the manuscript of this new book,” Tony said, “you gathered it was a finished manuscript? Or did she say it would be?”

  “She said something like she was pretty sure she’d have it all wrapped up by Monday. Some writers keep diddling around with things they’ve written. Don’t like to let go of them.”

  “Was she one of those?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Morton said.

  “When she gave you the carbons of these first few chapters of ‘Lonely Waters,’” Tony said, “did she give you an outline of the rest of it? Something to show the publishers?”

  “No. It was my understanding that she had completed a first draft, but was making some changes. Finishing, mainly, would mean revising the rest of the book in line with earlier changes. And polishing, of course.”

  “Did you ever hear of some other writer’s finishing a book when the original writer died before it was finished?”

  “It’s happened,” Morton said. “Mostly when there are two people collaborating on a book, of course. The one who doesn’t die finishes it. But sometimes a publisher who gets hold of a not-quite-finished book he’s hot for may get another writer to finish it It’s never happened to any of my people, but I’ve heard of it. Nothing wrong with it, is there?”

  “I wouldn’t see anything,” Nathan Shapiro said. “The publisher would explain, I suppose?”

  “Sure,” Morton said. “I’d think so. As I said, I’ve no firsthand experience with that sort of thing.”

  “L through S,” Shapiro said. “Laurence Shepley a client of yours, Mr. Morton? I gather he recommended you to Miss Lacey.”

  “Yes,” Morton said. “Larry’s a client of mine. I’ve sold some pieces of his. A couple of them expanded into books.”

  “The books,” Tony said. “Did the Karn people publish them?”

  “Yes. Come to think of it, yes.”

  “Were they successful books, Mr. Morton?”

  Morton started to rub his bruised jaw. He thought better of it. He said, “Ouch!” Then he said, “Moderately. What I mean is, they paid their way. Just about. Production costs keep on going up. At a guess
, Oss Karn didn’t lose on them. Didn’t make much, either.”

  “And Shepley himself?”

  Morton said, “Huh?” He said, “Sorry. My jaw hurts.”

  “We won’t keep you much longer,” Shapiro said. “What Detective Cook is wondering, did Mr. Shepley make much from these books?”

  “He didn’t get rich from them,” Morton said. “Thing is, he’s not getting rich from much of anything nowadays. Did better when there was a fiction market. Short fiction, I mean. Between us, he’s just about getting by.”

  “Which cuts your commissions, of course.”

  “Sure.”

  Again, Nathan Shapiro said, “Yes, Tony?” although Tony Cook hadn’t said anything.

  “If, say, Karn wanted somebody to finish Miss Lacey’s book,” Tony said. “We don’t know it needed finishing, of course. Suppose it did. Would you think he might ask Shepley to do it?”

  Morton shrugged his shoulders. He winced slightly. It hurts to shrug shoulders under a badly bruised jaw.

  “Well,” he said, “Larry used to write fiction. Not long stuff. Not novel-lengths. But he’s a pro. Come to think of it, he was originally from down South somewhere. As Miss Lacey was. But hell, I’m pretty sure Jo-An had finished the book. And she was going to bring the manuscript in to me tomorrow.”

  “Apparently,” Shapiro said, “she sent it in to Karn instead. At least, he says it showed up at his office. In the mail.”

  “All of it, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “He hadn’t seen it himself when I talked to him. Anyway, he said he hadn’t. We’ll have a look at it tomorrow. Meanwhile—assume it was not finished. Assume Shepley had been asked to finish it. Would such an arrangement have been cleared through you, Mr. Morton?” Shapiro shook his head sadly. “I don’t understand how these things are handled, you see.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Morton said. “If he thought I could get him a better deal, Larry’d probably have come to me. If he was satisfied, no reason he should. I haven’t an over-all contract with him. Not with any of my people. I told you that, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Just an agency clause in book contracts. Shepley hadn’t taken it up with you? If, of course, there was anything to take up?”

  “No.”

  “So there wouldn’t be anything in his file folder relating to that? Any correspondence of any kind?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there was much of anything in Larry’s folder. Wait a minute. As I remember, a magazine contract for something of his. My copy of it. The check had come through and I’d sent mine to him. It would have gone into the permanent files any time. Any time I’m not between secretaries. Only most of the time I am between secretaries, damn it. Kids come in and louse things up for a couple of weeks and quit. Or I fire them. Kids who want to be writers and think working for an agent is a way in, the poor innocents.”

  “By the way,” Tony said, “do you know a man named Parks, Mr. Morton? Francis Parks? He’s a poet, as I understand it. Karn has brought out a book or two of his.”

  “Of him,” Morton said. “They say he’s an all-right poet. Not one of my people. I don’t handle poets. I’ve got enough trouble without poets. I don’t know who’s published Parks. In book form, that is. He’s had a few things in The New Yorker. Nothing I could make anything out of, but I’m a Yeats type, myself. Why’d you ask about Parks, Mr. Cook?”

  “Just somebody I ran into at a party the other night,” Tony said. “Knows Shepley slightly. Has seen him around in the Village with a girl who could have been Miss Lacey. But we already knew Shepley was seeing Miss Lacey. Seems Shepley’s given occasional lectures at N.Y.U. About magazine article writing, according to Mr. Parks. Make arrangements for that sort of thing through you, Mr. Morton?”

  “No. Not my line of country. Lecture agent, possibly. Direct contact, more likely. I didn’t know he’d been giving lectures. But—I guess anything that would make him a buck. An honest buck. Larry’s an honest guy.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Shapiro said. “You can’t tell us anything more about this man who attacked you, Mr. Morton?”

  “I told you I can’t,” Morton said. “Just—oh, just a sudden movement. Then I came to on the floor.”

  “I see,” Shapiro said. “It happens that way a lot of times. Just a sudden movement and—was this sudden movement wearing a beard, Mr. Morton?”

  “I keep on telling you I—” Morton said, and then stopped and looked hard across Shapiro’s desk. “If you’re thinking of Larry Shepley, forget it,” Morton said. “Larry’s a friend of mine.”

  “All right,” Nathan Shapiro said. “We can’t really forget anybody, but all right. I gather your face got cut when this man hit you. Badly?”

  Morton put a hand up to his damaged jaw. He touched the adhesive bandage.

  “Just a nick,” Morton said. “Bled a little. Isn’t bleeding now. Just a nick. He had hard knuckles, I suppose.”

  “Or was wearing a ring,” Shapiro said. “Left side of your jaw. Hit you with his right hand? Or don’t you remember?”

  “As far as I know,” Morton said, “he could have hit me with a baseball bat.”

  “Go home and put an ice bag on it,” Shapiro said. “If we need to—and probably we will need to—we’ll get in touch.”

  They let Phillips Morton find his own way out.

  “It’s all very confusing,” Shapiro said. “All of this is confusing. If Miss Lacey hadn’t signed this contract and the publishers hadn’t, why steal it? Who were the publishers, by the way? My memory’s going.”

  “Materson and Brothers,” Tony said. “So’s mine.”

  “For one thing,” Shapiro said, “there are too many publishers mixed up in this. Along with too many beards.”

  “If somebody didn’t know it wasn’t signed,” Tony said.

  “Anybody could have looked,” Nathan Shapiro said. “Of course, they didn’t know Morton was going to barge in. Speaking of barging in, how did the party you and Miss Farmer went to go?”

  Tony told him how the party had gone, which was not precisely as they had hoped it would go. When Tony had finished, Nathan Shapiro nodded his head sadly. “Of course,” he said, “this man Carson’s not a disinterested party. Works for this Jefferson Press. Represents them, anyway. To their advantage to play down the value of Karn, Incorporated. We’ll have to ask around. Any idea who we might ask?”

  Tony didn’t have.

  “Anyway,” Shapiro said, “it’s Sunday and it’s summer. There’ll be nobody around to ask. Except—I think we’d better go and talk with Mr. Shepley, don’t you?”

  “It’s Sunday for him too,” Tony said. “It’s summer for him too. He’s probably got a telephone. I could give him a ring.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “We’ll just drop in, I think.”

  They went in an unmarked police car down to West Twelfth Street. Tony pressed the button over the slip with “Laurence Shepley” typed on it. They waited for the door release to click. It did not. Tony put his thumb hard on the button and kept it there for some seconds. Nothing came of that, either. “Well,” Tony said, “I live here too.” He got his key out. They climbed a flight of stairs. “Where I live,” Tony said, indicating a door. They climbed on. “Where he lives,” Tony said, stopping in front of a door on the fourth floor.

  “When he’s home,” Shapiro said, and knocked on the door. He knocked hard on the door, and at first nothing came of it. Then there was a muffled voice from beyond the door. The words were not clear, but there seemed to be anger in the voice. The voice sounded like that of a man swearing. More or less involuntarily, Nathan Shapiro and Anthony Cook moved to opposite sides of the door. Trained policemen have involuntary reactions. This sometimes keeps them alive.

  When Laurence Shepley yanked the door open, he looked angry, but not threatening. He had nothing to threaten with. He was wearing a terry-cloth robe which was a little too short for him and his red be
ard was ruffled. He glared at them. He said, “Now what the hell?”

  “Just a question or two, Mr. Shepley,” Shapiro said. “Can we come in?”

  “You sure as hell can’t,” Shepley said. “Unless you’ve got a warrant or something. Damn it all, it’s Sunday, and it’s the crack of dawn.”

  “It’s almost noon,” Shapiro said. “No, we haven’t got a warrant of any kind, Mr. Shepley.”

  “Dawn cracks late on Sunday,” Shepley said. “What do you want? If it’s about Jo-An Lacey, I’ve told you all there is to tell. I knew her casually. Took her to dinner a couple of times.”

  He said the last sentence in a loud voice, like one who wants to be overheard.

  “Anyway,” Shepley said, “I’ve got a friend with me. You waked us both up. And he—”

  “Who is it, Larry?”

  It was not a man inside the apartment who wanted to know who had roused them at this ungodly hour of a Sunday. Nathan hadn’t supposed it would be.

  “Damn it to hell,” Shepley said, raising his voice again. “A couple of cops. Want to ask me questions.”

  “Dear Larry,” the woman—a young woman from her voice—said. “I hope you have the answers, dear.”

  Shepley came out and closed the door after him. He said, “All right. It any of your business?”

  “None,” Shapiro said. “Suppose you get dressed, Mr. Shepley, and come down to Mr. Cook’s apartment. That way we won’t have to go on disturbing your friend.”

  Shepley continued to glare. He did start to smooth his beard down with both hands.

  “No compulsion,” Shapiro said. “Just as—well, call it a favor. And cooperation with the police. We won’t keep you long.”

  Shepley said “Damn it to hell,” again. But the violence had somehow leaked out of his voice. He said, “Oh, all right. I’ll come down.”

  He went back into his apartment and closed the door after him. He did not slam the door.

  They waited in Tony’s apartment with the door to the stairs open. “Anyway,” Tony said, “we won’t have to wait for him to shave.” It was five minutes or so before they heard feet coming down the stairs. Shepley had put his shoes on. And Tony had boiling water almost finished dripping through the coffee in the Chemex.