Die Laughing Page 18

Cook looked again at Nathan Shapiro. Again, Cook didn’t say anything.

  “A break for us, maybe that is,” Shapiro said. “We have to count on breaks a good deal, Mr. Pierson. Old men look out windows and see things nobody can count on their seeing. It’ll help, maybe.”

  “You say yourself it may have been just acquaintances meeting by accident,” Pierson said. He had his pipe going well. The smoke was acrid. Probably, Nathan Shapiro thought, the little man can’t afford very good tobacco.

  “That’s right,” Shapiro said. “Probably get us nowhere even if we find the man. We’re asking around the neighborhood, all the same. Ask all sorts of questions which don’t get us anywhere. Turn up little odds and ends which don’t add to anything. For example—tell him what this friend of yours told you last night, Tony. About playwrights sometimes sending—”

  “I don’t—” Cook said and then, quickly, nodded his head and said, “Oh. That. Sending playscripts to actors. That what you mean, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “One of the odds and ends. Bits of information—irrelevant information, probably—we pick up as we go along.”

  “Seems,” Cook said, “people who write plays sometimes send copies of them to actors and actresses they think might be interested in working in them. In the plays, I mean. Who might, the playwright hopes, take the plays to producers and say, ‘This is one I want to act in,’ or something like that. Man this friend of mine knows did send a script to Mrs. Singleton, he says. And that she read it, but didn’t see anything in it for her.”

  “You know the theater, Mr. Pierson,” Shapiro said. “That sort of thing happen very often, do you know?”

  “I’ve heard it happens,” Pierson said. “People do send plays to stars, I guess.”

  “Seems a bit risky to me,” Shapiro said. “Of course, in my job, you can get to take a dim view of people.”

  Pierson drew on his pipe, which gurgled, and exhaled smoke. He said he didn’t get what Shapiro was driving at.

  “Not at anything, probably,” Shapiro said. “Playscripts. I suppose they’re copyrighted?”

  “Not usually,” Pierson said. “You mean somebody—some actor, say—might read a play and have it copied or something?”

  “I just wondered,” Shapiro said. “Whole business is new to me. Or—just steal the basic idea, perhaps. What you call the situation. Like the situation in this play of Agee’s you say he twisted out of shape. What I mean about its being risky, Mr. Pierson.”

  “Can’t say I ever heard of anything like that happening,” Pierson said.

  “Probably I’ve just got a suspicious mind,” Shapiro said. “I’m supposed to have, of course. Well—we’ve taken up a lot of your time, Mr. Pierson. Sorry about your wife. She’s in a pretty bad way?”

  “Pretty bad,” Pierson said. “If I could send her to a big clinic. Like Mayo’s. Sort of thing costs a lot of money. Not the kind of money a schoolteacher has.”

  “My wife,” Shapiro said, “tells me you’ve got a couple of children, Mr. Pierson. They here in the apartment?”

  “No,” Pierson said. “Jane’s not up to—to taking care of them just now. They’re with her mother.”

  Shapiro said, “Well,” again. This time he stood up. He looked down at Clarke Pierson, who started to get up out of his own chair.

  “One thing I’m sort of puzzled about,” Shapiro said. “Couple of times you’ve spoken about Agee’s being hit on the back of the head. He was. But—how did you know it, Mr. Pierson?”

  “Heard it on the radio,” Pierson said. He put his pipe down in the ashtray.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “I don’t think so. Because we haven’t given out any details like that, Mr. Pierson. Just that Mr. Agee fell in his apartment and badly hurt himself. That’s all that’s been on the radio, Mr. Pierson.”

  “I suppose I just guessed it then,” Pierson said. “Most likely place to hit a man if you’re going to use a poker.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Say a man is sitting in a chair and you’re behind him with a poker. The chair has a low back, maybe, and his head comes up above it. Pretty vulnerable position the man is in, isn’t it?”

  Pierson looked up at Shapiro. He looked up with widening eyes.

  “Did you send a play to Mrs. Singleton, Mr. Pierson? For her to read because you thought she could act the leading role? Because—wait a minute. The situation, as you tell it, could be a little like her own life, couldn’t it? When she left the stage and married Singleton and tried to adjust to living the kind of life rich people do on Long Island estates? Or did then. You sent her a play, Mr. Pierson?”

  “No,” Pierson said. “I didn’t send her a play.”

  “Settles that,” Shapiro said. “You first saw her in this play of Agee’s last week. This play you say he twisted out of the shape it should have been in. You hadn’t seen it before.”

  “No.”

  “I think,” Shapiro said, “that it was quite a shock when you did see it, Mr. Pierson. What was its title when you sent it to her to read? Not, I suppose, Always Good-bye. Something more—”

  “The Shallow—” Pierson said, and heard his own voice and seemed to panic as Shapiro had thought he might.

  Pierson came up out of the chair, his right hand in his trousers pocket.

  The hand came out with something in it, and a blade leaped out of the handle of a switchblade knife.

  Shapiro’s own right hand shot under his jacket for his gun, but he didn’t need it. Tony Cook was quicker than either of them, and he didn’t reach for his gun. He slashed his hand down, holding it edgewise, on the small man’s wrist, and the knife flew out of the smaller hand. He grabbed Pierson and held him in hard hands.

  Shapiro snapped the blade back into the knife, not bothering about fingerprints because they wouldn’t come into it. But he was careful not to touch the blade.

  It is hard to clean a knife of blood—to clean it so a police laboratory cannot find traces even after many hours, and from the traces identify a type. It is even harder to be sure you have got a knife clean than it is to be sure about a poker.

  XV

  Anthony Cook was tired. He had been up most of the night before and slept a few hours and gone on duty again, working on odds and ends. But, late in the afternoon as he walked down Sixth Avenue from Fourteenth Street, he did not walk like a tired man. He walked like a man who was going somewhere and wanted to get where he was going.

  He saw the kids at Ninth Street. They were on the east side of Sixth and waiting for the light to change so they could cross it They were nice-looking kids. Roy Baker was a lot taller than the girl and had a long arm around her waist, and she had her arm as far around the big boy as it would go. When he got down to Eighth Street and was waiting for a light himself, Tony Cook looked back. The kids were walking, still holding on to each other, down toward Eighth. Ellen was still looking up at Roy and they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to where they were going. But people veered around them. People who walk Village streets, if they are considerate people, get used to giving right of way to engrossed young couples.

  Maybe she’ll persuade him to get his hair cut, Tony Cook thought, and himself veered away. He veered off Sixth Avenue toward Gay Street. The nearer he got to Gay Street the nearer he came to forgetting that he was tired.

  She had on a white dress, this time. As nearly as Tony could remember it was the same white dress she had worn when he had first seen her in a dress. She held the apartment door open and for a moment looked at him from eyes nearly level with his own.

  “You look tired, mister,” Rachel Farmer said. “I’ve got everything ready, and you just sit down.”

  He did as he was told, and it was she who went to the kitchen and got her sherry and the chilled glass for it out of the refrigerator. It was she who put ice into his glass and poured bourbon on it and said, “You can take your gun off now. It shows.” He took his gun off. It was pleasant to do as he was told.

  “The
poor little man talked,” Rachel said. “At least the Times says he did. Or that you and Lieutenant Shapiro allege he did.”

  “The lieutenant,” Tony said. “And Captain Weigand. And Assistant District Attorney Bernard Simmons. They allege. I just sit in. He sure as hell talked. Nobody could stop his talking. Not that anybody tried very hard. Oh, he was told he didn’t have to talk. And advised that he should have a lawyer present if he did want to talk. And he just went on talking and it went on tape. Until damn near four o’clock this morning it went on tape.”

  He sighed, remembering again that he was tired. He was told to drink his drink and did as he was told. He was told he didn’t look comfortable there and to come over here, and he went and sat on the sofa beside the girl who was almost as tall as he was.

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” Rachel said. “I’ve got things we can eat when we want to eat. What did you mean on the telephone when you said I’d helped?”

  “Told me something I hadn’t known,” Tony said. “Didn’t mean anything to me, but I happened to pass it on to the lieutenant and he got a hunch. And tried it out on Pierson and Pierson panicked. I hadn’t expected him to, but I guess Nate had. Says he was as surprised as I was because he never knows what people are like, but that’s something he always says. He did press a little, the lieutenant did. Surprised me once or twice. Told Pierson the lab boys had found blood and hair on the poker. They hadn’t yet. Or, anyway, hadn’t sent through a report on it. And he told Pierson that General Whitehall would be able to identify the man Mrs. Singleton was talking to, which Whitehall can’t do. Could have been it was that, as much as anything, made Pierson panic. That and the realization he’d slipped up himself by knowing more about where Agee was hit than he could have known. And—”

  “I wish,” Rachel said, “you’d begin at the beginning. Or, for that matter, begin anywhere. What did I tell you that helped?”

  “That playwrights sometimes send scripts to actors,” Tony said. “I hadn’t known that. Shapiro hadn’t known that. Gave him his hunch about Pierson.”

  “Pierson did that? Sent a script to—oh, to Jennifer Singleton? If that was in the Times it was in the jump and mostly I don’t jump.”

  Pierson had said he had; he had said it over and over once he had begun to talk uncontrollably. To explain himself over and over as if being understood was more important than admitting to murder. That he had sent the script of a play called The Shallow Pool to Jennifer Singleton, because it was, to a degree, about her and that she and Lester Agee had stolen it—had turned it into a worthless charade called Always Good-bye.

  “He says he went to Mrs. Singleton to get what was due him,” Cook told the girl beside him. “Didn’t have any idea of killing her. Just happened to have the switchblade—which he says he took away from one of the boys at the school—in his pocket. That he hadn’t meant to use it, though now he guesses he must have.”

  “He doesn’t sound very sane,” Rachel said.

  “In Bellevue under observation now,” Tony told her. “They’re trying to find out. And his wife’s at St. Vincent’s. She’s got this blood cancer—leukemia—and’s going to die of it. There’s nothing much anybody can do about it. Which Pierson couldn’t get himself to admit. He kept thinking that if he could only get the money he thought he had coming to him he could do something for her.”

  “I’m sorry for him,” Rachel said. “I hope they find out at the hospital he’s too nuts to be responsible.”

  “He killed a woman,” Cook said. “Tried to kill a man.”

  “Because they’d stolen from him,” Rachel said. “They had?”

  It was not as clear as that, Tony Cook told her. Pierson had written a play called The Shallow Pool. They had found a carbon of the manuscript in his apartment. It was being checked with the script of Always Good-bye. That was being done at the District Attorney’s office, and the man on it was still cagey. But he had found “certain similarities,” for what that was worth. They had only Pierson’s own word for it that he had sent the script to Mrs. Singleton—and that she had kept it almost three months and then sent it back, saying it wasn’t for her.

  “Agee did tell the lieutenant that the idea for Always Good-bye was partly Mrs. Singleton’s,” Cook said. “It could be—Nate thinks it could be—that she wasn’t really conscious where her idea came from and that it may have come from Pierson’s play without her actually knowing it. And that Agee himself may not have known anything about Pierson’s play.”

  Agee would be asked about that when, and if, he could be asked about anything. “They think now he’ll make it. He’s still in a coma, and nobody knows what he’ll remember when he comes out of it.”

  Pierson had not thought the use of the situation from his play was subconscious on Jennifer Singleton’s part. He had thought it theft. He had telephoned her on Friday, the day after he had first seen Always Good-bye. He had asked if he could see her Sunday afternoon, said he wanted to ask her something about the play she was in. She had said he might come Sunday; that she expected to be home around four. She had been later than that and Pierson, after ringing the bell and getting no answer, had waited for her in front of the house.

  “Remember,” Cook told the girl, “this is what Pierson tells us is the way it was.”

  “I’ll remember,” Rachel said, and her lips crinkled. “You’re not in court testifying, Tony. You’re with a girl friend. Finish your drink, mister.”

  Tony raised his glass and sipped from it and looked over it at the girl. She raised her own glass. She had fine, long hands, Tony thought. They distracted him.

  “He went in with her,” Rachel said. “And he accused her of stealing his play. And what? Wanted to be paid for it?”

  It had come to that, Tony Cook supposed. It had not, apparently, been as simple as that. “It was what they’d done to it,” Pierson had said, and said many times during the long hours during which, with few questions necessary or asked, he had talked on and on. “That was the main thing. They’d made it into trash. She and Agee.”

  But he had asked for money. That he did not deny.

  Jennifer Singleton had at first denied she knew what he was talking about; had said that she didn’t remember anything about a play he had sent her. Oh, he had sent her one. She could not remember whether she actually had read it. Certainly she had not stolen it, or from it.

  “She called me a crazy little man,” Clarke Pierson told the listening policeman and the man from the District Attorney’s office. His voice went up to shrillness as he said that. “And she laughed at me. Laughed at me!”

  He had said he wanted money—half, anyway, of what she and Agee had made out of the play. “I ought to have had it all,” Pierson told his listeners. “I was being fair, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I being fair?”

  Nobody answered that.

  He had told Jennifer Singleton that his wife was sick and that he needed money to have her taken care of. Jennifer had told him that that was an old, old story. But she had said she would give him something and that he could call it charity. She had said, five hundred dollars if he would promise not to tell this crazy story of his around. Not that anybody would believe it—anybody who counted. She had said it was a matter of the nuisance value and looked at him and laughed again at him and said, “You are a nuisance, little man. A piddling little nuisance. I’d thought you might be, so after you called me up I wrote Les about you.”

  “If she did say that,” Rachel said, “it sounds as if she knew what he was going to charge her with. Her and Agee. Doesn’t it? If she wrote Mr. Agee before she’d seen Pierson?”

  “It’s only the way he says it was,” Cook said. “Maybe he’s lying. Maybe—oh, I don’t know. Maybe he just thinks it was that way. He got pretty hysterical toward the end. Most of the time, actually, he was—call it wild. Panic wild.”

  Pierson had told Jennifer Singleton that ten times five hundred wouldn’t be half enough. “I told her I needed thousands, not hundreds,” he
told those who listened to him in a small, hot and smoky room in the West Twentieth Street precinct house. He had told her he had it coming to him. She had laughed again. She had said, “Sue us, little man. Sue Les and me. Let everybody in on the laugh, little man.”

  But she had got up then and gone from the upstairs living room, to which she had taken him, toward her bedroom. She had told him she was going to get her checkbook and give him his “tip.”

  “She called it a tip,” Pierson had said. “A tip!”

  He had followed her into the bedroom and it must—he thought it must-have been then he got his knife out. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I’m sure I didn’t mean to hurt her. Just—just to scare that laughing out of her.”

  He had found her in the bedroom, not taking a checkbook out of a dressing table drawer but lifting the telephone by her bed. She had laughed again before she saw the knife and had said, “You’re out the five hundred, little man. I’m calling the police and—”

  Then she had seen the knife in his hand and seen the blade leap out of it. She had run, but there was not room to run in. She had got around the big bed and he had grabbed her from behind and—

  “It’s all mixed up now,” he had told them. “The way things are in a nightmare. I guess I reached around and stuck the knife into her. I was holding her with an arm around her neck. I think that was the way it was. And—and she just sort of slipped out of my arm. It seems as if that was the way it was.”

  “Do you,” Rachel said, “you and the others, think it was really that way? That he really—oh, didn’t know what he was doing? What? Temporary insanity? Is that what they call it?”

  “He brought a knife with him,” Tony said. “He killed her with the knife. Lawyers and psychiatrists can argue about the rest of it.”

  “And Agee? He went to Agee for money, too? But without the knife?”

  “If he had the knife he didn’t use it,” Cook said. “To have another try at getting money, yes, he says so. But—if Mrs. Singleton had written Agee saying that a little man named Pierson was bothering her, and then turned up dead, Agee would sure as hell have put the two things together.”