Die Laughing Read online

  “Genes?”

  “All right,” Rose said. “Call it genes. Call it whatever you want to. Roy Baker wouldn’t steal and he wouldn’t kill. I— oh, I know what you’re going to say. I can’t prove it. Call it anything you want to. Call it a woman’s intuition.”

  “No,” Shapiro said; “even I stop at some things, dear. You’re a good character witness. Qualified beyond most.” He smiled at her. “In most things, come to that,” Nathan Shapiro said.

  He waited a moment for her to smile back at him. After a moment she did smile.

  “It’s as much your job as arresting people,” Rose said. “As much your job to see that the wrong people aren’t arrested. Isn’t it?”

  “It’s not my case. Precinct thinks they’ve got it sewed up. Two men from the squad are sitting in, and by the time they get on the squad they’re good men.” He paused and his long face lengthened. “With exceptions,” he said.

  “You,” Rose Shapiro told her husband, “are impossible.”

  This seemed to please him. She’s a very reassuring woman, Shapiro thought. She’s discerning about many things. She will never admit, even to herself, that she is not discerning about me.

  “Come out of it,” Rose said. “Remember, I told you once you are very like your father. Look at your father, Nate.”

  A portrait of Rabbi Shapiro was above the fireplace. It was not a particularly good portrait. It was a portrait of a man with a long face and brooding dark eyes. It’s just, Nathan Shapiro thought, that I look a little like him. He was a wise and gentle man and because I look a little like him it throws her off. I’m a cop who is handy with a gun.

  “All right,” Shapiro said, “in the morning I’ll talk to Bill Weigand. I’ll tell him my wife knows this kid didn’t kill anybody and that precinct’s wrong and the assistant district attorney who’s sitting in doesn’t know which end is up. All right?”

  “Very much all right,” Rose said. “Turn on the symphony, Nathan.”

  He turned on the radio, but he didn’t really listen to Beethoven. He somewhat preferred Brahms, as a matter of fact. But even from Brahms, he realized, his mind would have wandered. A kid in shock could run out and look for a cop, instead of using the telephone. It is difficult to tell what a frightened kid will do.

  Shapiro sat at his desk and read reports. They did not add much to what Tony Cook had told him on the telephone. Patrolman Williams (J. K.) had been “proceeding” through Point Street and had seen a boy run out of the house at No. 278. The boy had run toward the east, which would have taken him to Seventh Avenue. (Where, to be sure, he might have found a traffic cop.) He had stopped when hailed; had gone willingly enough back into the house with Patrolman Williams—gone up wide stairs to the second floor and led the way into two rear rooms, with a bath between them, which stretched the sixty-foot width of the house. They had found the body of Jennifer Singleton, face up, on a soft rug which had once been pale yellow and which wasn’t any longer. Williams had used the telephone—a white telephone on a small table with a glass top.

  Williams had seen no disorder in the room when he first went into it; he had seen only a dead woman who had been beautiful—a woman with a wide, unlined forehead and very large blue eyes set far apart and with light brown hair which seemed to shine. She had been a little woman. When she died she had been wearing a blue silk suit, the jacket open over a white blouse. The wound, which Williams thought had been made with a knife, was just under her left breast. The body was still warm. When an assistant medical examiner made his guess some forty-five minutes later, it was that Jennifer Singleton had been dead not much more than an hour.

  At the Charles Street station house the boy had told his story. During several hours of questioning, he had stuck to his story. A man from the Homicide Bureau of the District Attorney’s office had sat in on the questioning; Detectives Stevens and Altgelt from Homicide South had joined precinct detectives.

  The boy said he had gone upstairs to thank Mrs. Singleton for his graduation present and knocked at a partly closed door and the door had opened far enough for him to see her lying on the floor. He had thought at first that she had fallen; only when, calling her name, he had turned her on her back had he seen the deep, still bleeding wound in her chest. He had not used the telephone because he had read about fingerprints and knew better than to touch anything.

  He had been pretty sure she was dead. Because there was so much blood. Yes, blood was still coming out of the wound, but not very fast.

  No, he did not know that she had been in the habit of tossing money, loose, into a drawer of her dressing table so that Maria Gomez, the maid, and Mrs. Florinda James, the cook, could take out what they needed for incidental expenses connected with the operation of the house. There was no money in the drawer when the police looked into it.

  The money in his pocket was his own. He had worked fourteen hours that week—four hours on Tuesday and again on Thursday; six hours that Sunday. Tuesday he had cleaned out the basement; Thursday and Sunday he had worked in the garden. She paid him two dollars and a half an hour.

  His wages, then, came to thirty-five dollars. Most of the rest was a present of a hundred dollars. The wages had been in one envelope, left on the kitchen table where it usually was on Sundays, and the present in another envelope, with the words “Graduation Gift” written on it. He had put both envelopes in the kitchen trash can after he had taken the money out of them. Because the trash can was full, and because he knew that Mrs. James was off on Sunday afternoons, he had emptied it in the incinerator. He usually did that on Sundays.

  Yes, he knew—anyway he supposed—that Maria Gomez was off that afternoon too.

  He hadn’t, until he went upstairs and called and knocked on the door, known whether Mrs. Singleton was home or not. If she wasn’t, he had meant to write “Thank you for the wonderful present” on a sheet of paper from her desk.

  He had never owned a switchblade knife in his life—or borrowed one from any of the other kids. Yes, he knew that some of the kids had switchblades. Actually, he didn’t own any kind of a knife. Sure he knew where the kitchen knives were kept.

  He hadn’t killed anybody. Mrs. Singleton was a lovely lady. A wonderful lady.

  He hadn’t seen Patrolman Williams when he ran out of the house. He didn’t have eyes in the back of his head. If he had seen the patrolman he would have told him what had happened. He was running to find a policeman, not to get away from one. Almost always there was a traffic policeman at Seventh Avenue and Greenwich.

  They had got in touch with the boy’s father, who was Ralph Baker and was in his two-room apartment on the fourth floor of a tenement house in Morton Street. They had got other clothes for the boy from his father. The clothes Roy had been wearing to work in Mrs. Singleton’s garden were by then evidence, not clothing to be worn.

  There was blood on the white skivvy shirt. There was also blood on the denim trousers. Blood spurts when the aorta is sliced open.

  He had been booked as a material witness. The man from the D.A.’s Homicide Bureau had authorized a homicide charge, but there was no hurry about that.

  The boy had been told he could make a telephone call and that he was entitled to have a lawyer if he wanted one. He had been crying then. He had said he didn’t know any lawyer to call. He had been offered food and shaken his head, still crying. He had been locked up.

  Probably by now, Nathan Shapiro thought when he had finished with the reports, he’s been arraigned in felony court and bound over for the grand jury. And a hundred to one he’ll be indicted, charge felony murder. And a hundred to one, again, they won’t let him cop a plea. What it comes to, they’ve got him cold. Rose has identified herself with a nogood kid.

  He buzzed the cubbyhole office of Captain William Weigand, commanding, Homicide South. Bill Weigand said, “Right, Nate. Come along.” Nathan Shapiro went along, feeling even more than usually dismal about everything. He sat down opposite Weigand’s desk and said, “This Singleton
kill, Captain.”

  “A hell of a thing,” Bill Weigand said. “One hell of a thing, Nate. She was one of the great ones. Must have been—oh, somewhere in her middle fifties. Maybe older than that. And she could make you think her thirty years younger. And some snot-nose kid, trying to steal a hundred bucks or so—”

  He spread his hands hopelessly. He said, “What the hell’s the matter with these kids, Nate?”

  “I’ve been reading the reports,” Shapiro said. “Looks bad for the kid.”

  “It’s wrapped up,” Weigand said. But then he looked intently at Nathan Shapiro for some seconds and said, “It’s not your baby, Nate. Not ours, really. You know what some of the precinct squads call us, Nate. The brain boys. No need for the brain boys this time.”

  “Way it looks,” Shapiro said.

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “So—time heavy on your hands, Nate? Now you’ve wrapped up the Mathewson kill?”

  “This boy,” Shapiro said, “goes to the school my wife’s assistant principal of. Clayton High. On Greenwich.”

  “I know that,” Weigand told him. “How is Rose, by the way?”

  “That’s the point, Bill,” Nathan Shapiro said. “She’s upset. About this kid she’s upset. You see, she thinks he’s a fine boy. Not a boy who would kill anybody.”

  Bill Weigand looked briefly at the ceiling. Then he looked at Nate Shapiro.

  “She knows him pretty well?” Weigand said. “There are—God knows—hundreds of kids at Clayton.”

  “She says he stands out,” Shapiro said. “Seems he does, in a way. Member of the student council and that sort of thing. One of his teachers thinks he’s a brilliant kid.”

  “Nate,” Weigand said, “the precinct boys think they’ve got him cold. The assistant district attorney thinks they’ve got him cold. Steven and Altgelt sat in for a while last night and they think it’s pinned on him and pinned tight. Right?”

  “The way it reads,” Shapiro said.

  “And Rose thinks different,” Weigand said.

  “She thinks different, Bill. And she knows a lot about kids. She’s known one hell of a lot of kids. All kinds. She’s good with kids, Bill.”

  “So,” Weigand said, “you want to play Rose’s hunch, Nate? Look. I know her. She’s quite a person, this Rose of yours. All right, she knows about kids. But—” He stopped and again consulted the ceiling, this time for more than a minute. Then he said, “She’s sold you this hunch of hers, Nate?”

  “Enough to make me wonder.”

  “Long time ago,” Weigand said, “I learned not to look gift hunches in the teeth. Get on with your wondering, Nate. If something hot breaks I’ll probably have to call you off it. You want somebody with you?”

  “Tony Cook’s a useful sort of guy.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “You and Cook go wondering for a couple of days.”

  III

  Start with the hunch that it wasn’t as simple as it looked; start with a hunch which wasn’t even his own. Which meant start at the end, which had been the end of a middle-aged woman named Jennifer Singleton who had been a celebrated actress. Start at the end and work back to the beginning. Which meant, among other things, working back through Jennifer Singleton’s life to find out if there was somebody who, because of something which had happened in her life, wanted her dead.

  He’d grope and grope, Shapiro thought, leaving Weigands’s office for the squad room, beckoning Anthony Cook from his desk, and the chances were a hundred to one nothing would come of it. It is, Shapiro thought, a kind of groping for which I am singularly ill equipped. Johnny Stein, now—Johnny probably knows his way among people who live in the theater. Only they’ve transferred Johnny to Homicide North.

  “You know anything about this Mrs. Singleton?” Shapiro asked Tony Cook and Cook looked at him with some surprise and said, “Who doesn’t, Nate?”

  Nathan Shapiro said that he didn’t; said that sure he had heard her name; had seen advertisements in which her name was in larger type than the name of the play she was in and in type many times larger than that of the man or woman who had written the play.

  “I don’t know,” Cook said, “they say she was great. I saw her in a couple of plays—one about five years ago and last week in the one she’s in now; was in. I guess maybe she was great.” He paused. “This thing she’s in now,” Tony Cook said. “Was in. Rachel made a pitch about seeing it. Rachel Farmer.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I know the Rachel you mean, Tony. How is this Rachel of yours?”

  “Not mine,” Tony said. “Not yet. Anyhow, not the way you mean. She’s fine. So we went to this play. Called Always Good-bye, the play is. About a woman who—”

  “All right, Tony,” Shapiro said. “You saw the play. Mrs. Singleton had an important part in it, I gather?”

  “Put it this way,” Tony Cook said. “She was it. This woman, you see, has a lot of men crazy about her and—” “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Tell me another time, Tony. You thought she was good? Very good?”

  “O.K.,” Tony said. “She was a knockout. Says on the reports she was in her fifties somewhere. Maybe almost sixty. Hell, she looked being maybe thirty. And damn good-looking. And she had a voice like nobody’s I’ve ever heard and when she laughed—she had a sort of low laugh like—hell, I don’t know. Like water running over stones in a brook. Know what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” Shapiro said. “I guess maybe.”

  “So you wanted to laugh too,” Cook said. “Even when there wasn’t anything specially funny. Another thing, Nate. When she was on-stage it was like there wasn’t anybody else on it. I mean, they were all right. Most of the time, anyway. It wasn’t as if she wanted them to disappear or anything like that. It was just that—oh, when she came on, everything kind of lighted up. Know what I mean?”

  “I guess so, Tony.”

  “So,” Cook said, “what’s the pitch, Lieutenant? This kid killed her when he was looking for what was worth grabbing and she walked in on him.”

  “Way it looks,” Nathan Shapiro said, sadly and thinking that it sure as hell did. “Seems, though, the captain isn’t entirely satisfied. You know the way he is, Tony. Doesn’t want to take any chances we’re wrong.”

  Which was true enough, at least in general.

  “So,” Shapiro said, “he wants us to look around. Just to be sure there aren’t any loose ends anywhere. So suppose you see what you can dig up about the lady, Tony. If she’s as well known as she seems to have been, she’d be in Who’s Who, maybe.”

  “There’s something called Who’s Who in the Theatre,” Cook said. “Anyway, I think there is.”

  “Maybe,” Shapiro said, “you can find somebody who knew her pretty well and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Cook said. “Slip came through a little while ago. Seems some man showed up around six-thirty last night, while the boys were still there. Seems he had a dinner date with Mrs. Singleton. Wait a minute.”

  They had walked as they talked, and were in a corridor outside the squad room. Cook went back and Shapiro waited. Cook came back. “Man named Lester Agee,” Cook said, and spelled the last name out. “Report says, ‘Agee expressed shock at news of Mrs. Singleton’s death.’ Wait a minute.”

  Shapiro waited.

  “Seems to me,” Cook said, “I’ve seen that name somewhere. Out-of-the-way name, sort of.”

  He tapped the side of his head with finger tips, as if his memory was a stopped clock which needed starting up.

  “Got it,” Cook said. “He’s the guy wrote this play she was in. Could be he’ll know about her.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “And probably she had an agent. Understand actors and people like that do have them.”

  “Flesh peddlers,” Cook said. “That’s what they call them. O.K., Lieutenant. I’ll dig around. Catch up with you where?” “I’ll be downtown,” Shapiro said. “Lunch down there some place.”

  “Rachel and I—” Cook said, and stopped. “Sometimes when I’
m down that way, Nate, I go to a little Italian joint. Just a joint, but it’s O.K.”

  He named the little joint and gave Shapiro its address.

  “When we can make it,” Shapiro said. “Unless something comes up.”

  “You’ll be?”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “I’ll probably go back to school, Tony.”

  Shapiro took a downtown Seventh Avenue local and got off at the Sheridan Square station and climbed stairs into bewilderment. From Sheridan Square, which is not a square, streets seemed to go off in all directions. He should, he thought, have brought Tony Cook along as a guide. Tony’s girl lived down here somewhere—Tony’s thin dark girl who so often posed naked for painters that she didn’t, half the time, seem to know whether she had any clothes on or not. Or, for that matter, care.

  There was a traffic policeman in the middle of the maze of streets which converged at, and crossed, Seventh Avenue. When the lights were in his favor—Nathan Shapiro crosses only with the green—he got to the traffic cop. The cop told him that the Clayton High School was on Greenwich, which Shapiro already knew, and where Greenwich was, which Shapiro hadn’t known. Point Street was another matter. The traffic cop had to think that one out.

  When he had, he said that Point Street wasn’t really a street. Point Street was a block of a street which was called Van Allen, and why the hell it was called Point Street for that single block the cop sure as hell didn’t know, Lieutenant. The best way to get to that block, he guessed, was to—

  Shapiro listened carefully, learned by rote. He went, he hoped, as directed. He got lost only briefly—came to Van Allen and walked west through it, looking at street signs. (The most prominent signs said “One Way,” but Shapiro was used to that. Most of the streets in Manhattan are named “One Way,” now and then with no other visible designation.) On one side of an intersection, Shapiro was walking west through Van Allen Street. On the other side he walked through Point Street.