Die Laughing Page 6

  “Resentful attitude?”

  “Dr. Williams appears to have thought so.”

  “Sort of attitude which might get him involved with one of these teen-age gangs?”

  “It might,” she said. “It does, sometimes. They—strike out. Band together and strike out together. But there’s nothing on Baker’s record.”

  “His I.Q.? Is one hundred and forty good?”

  “Superior. Not genius rating, but superior. What’s he supposed to have done, Mr. Cook?”

  “He was,” Cook told her, “picked up running away from the scene of a crime. Of murder. Of the murder of Mrs. Jennifer Singleton, the actress.”

  “She was a wonderful actress,” Helen Phipps said. “I heard about what happened—about the tragic thing that happened. It is thought young Baker killed her?”

  “According to his story,” Cook told her, “he found her body. And he was running. He hasn’t been charged with homicide. But he’s held as a material witness.”

  “Meaning,” Dr. Phipps said, “that you think he killed her, but haven’t enough evidence to charge him. It comes to that, doesn’t it?”

  “Might,” Cook said. “Up to the D.A.’s office. I’m just finding out what I can about him.”

  And he wasn’t, he thought, finding out much that was solid. “Resentful” a couple of years ago. Possibly, at about that time, associated with tough kids. Most of whom had dropped out of school. Well, he’d have to try the kids themselves. Which wouldn’t be easy. Teen-agers tend to resent cops. They align themselves against cops. Or a lot of them do.

  Cook went to talk to kids.

  VI

  Detectives waste a lot of time. Nathan Shapiro felt that he was wasting his. Not, of course, that his time was of special value to anyone, including the Police Department of the City of New York. Wasting his on a hunch which wasn’t even his own hunch—a secondhand hunch, one could call it. He corrected that as he looked in a Manhattan telephone directory under the “G’s” for “Gage.” Not secondhand. Nothing between him and Rose was secondhand. Her belief in a tall blond boy named Roy Baker wasn’t secondhand either. She was seldom wrong about people. Oh, about me, Nathan Shapiro thought. Certainly about me. It is hard to understand, but about me she has a blind spot. Compares me to my father, which is ridiculous. However—

  “Gage, Joseph,” and a telephone number and an address in the Murray Hill area.

  Gage first, if he was to play this hunch, which wasn’t his hunch. Gage because he stood to profit from the death of Jennifer Singleton to the extent of one third of her estate. Unless, of course, she had, in her will or before she wrote a will, got around that. She could have paid him off with the stipulation that the payment was in lieu of dower rights. Ask Gage about that, and about other things.

  Only, Shapiro realized after listening for several minutes to a sound that meant a telephone was ringing in an apartment in the Murray Hill area, not ask him right now. Joseph Gage, widower, was not home or not answering his telephone. Conceivably, Joseph Gage, at four o’clock in the afternoon, was out drowning his sorrow. If, of course, he had sorrow which needed drowning. Something to find out about from Gage, when a tall, black-haired actor got home from wherever he was or decided to answer his telephone. Or, of course, his doorbell.

  Shapiro flipped the pages of the directory. “Agee, Lester.” Probably wouldn’t be listed, which would mean a minor wrangle with the New York Telephone Company. Sure enough, “Agee, Lester,” and an address in the far east Sixties. Shapiro dialed again and waited again. But this time he waited only briefly and a man said, “Mr. Agee’s residence.” He said it formally. He believed that Mr. Agee was in. And who wished to speak to Mr. Agee?

  “Police officer,” Shapiro said. “Mr. Agee’ll know what about.”

  His name? Shapiro gave his name and rank. The man said, “One moment, please,” and Shapiro said “Sure.” He waited rather more than a moment before he heard a different male voice and heard, “Agee.” Then Agee said, “About Jenny, I suppose? The damnedest damn thing. Some little squirt kills beauty. Kills—” It trailed off. “God damn it to hell,” Lester Agee said. “What do you want of me?”

  “To talk to you,” Shapiro said.

  “You’ve got the little squirt. The murdering little degenerate. What’s there to talk about?”

  Shapiro used words to him familiar—words about completing records; words about filling in backgrounds; words about the necessary routine; words about what “they” had told him to do. (The word “they” can cover a multitude of evasions.) He used words about having to go through the formalities.

  “You’ll be wasting your time,” Lester Agee said. “And my time.”

  “Probably. We waste a good deal of it, Mr. Agee. I’ll keep it as short as I can, but you’re one of the ones I’m supposed to see.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are one of those who was close to Mrs. Singleton. Can tell us about her.”

  “That she’s dead,” Agee said. “You don’t need me to tell you that. That she was a great actress and a great person and some lousy, thieving kid killed her.”

  “The way it looks,” Shapiro said. “In about twenty minutes, Mr. Agee?”

  Precinct provided, with no special enthusiasm, a cruise car and a patrolman to drive it. It took a little more than twenty minutes. The apartment house towered in the east Sixties. Shapiro identified himself; the clerk at the desk used his telephone. An elevator carried Shapiro twenty-two floors toward the sky and left him in a carpeted room with two doors opening from it. One door had “Service” lettered on it. The other had numerals, “2201.” When Shapiro pressed a button beside the numbered door, chimes sounded softly. Almost at once, a man in a dark suit opened the door. He looked at Nathan Shapiro carefully, and Shapiro realized that his own dark gray suit needed pressing.

  “You are Lieutenant Shapiro of the police,” the man in the narrow, almost black suit told Shapiro, who said he was.

  “Mr. Agee is expecting you,” the man told him. “If you will come this way?”

  Shapiro went that way behind the man in the narrow suit. He went down a corridor and into an enormous room, with one wall of glass. Beyond the glass, far down, was the East River. A tug was towing two barges up toward Hell Gate. There was a big empty fireplace in one side wall of the room.

  There were four deep green chairs at the end of the room where the wall was glass. In one of them a man was sitting, watching the laboring tugboat. The man in the narrow dark suit cleared his throat and said, “The police lieutenant, Mr. Agee.”

  The man’s chair was on a swivel, and the man swung it to face away from the glass. He was a big man; a heavy man with broad shoulders. A blue polo shirt stretched tight on his bulk, above gray slacks. His feet were bare in the room’s deep carpet. Shapiro waded down the room toward him.

  “All right,” Lester Agee said. “You’re here. Sit down.” He swiveled his chair so that it faced the one beside it. He flicked a big hand toward that chair and Shapiro went down the room, sinking into the carpet, and sat in the chair.

  “The way I get it,” Agee said, “you’re supposed to show me your badge. That’s the way I’ve seen it staged. And then there’s some gobbledygook about everything being taken down and used against me.”

  The big man’s voice rumbled. He had bushy gray eyebrows and gray hair, which was thick only on the sides of his head. “Gray hair and not much of it.” That was what a tall blond boy who had too much hair had said.

  Shapiro took his badge out of a pocket and held it out toward Lester Agee. Agee did not look at it. He looked at Nathan Shapiro and nodded his head.

  “More like it,” Agee rumbled. “This sort of thing, you’ve got to get the business right. The business is damn important. Remember one called Gaslight?”

  Nathan Shapiro for a moment looked at bright, contorted pictures on the walls of this enormous room. He was over his head again; the pictures reminded him of the last time when he was so obv
iously and deeply over his head. He said, looking back at the big man, “Gaslight, Mr. Agee?” “Name of it,” Agee said. “Years ago. Scotland Yard inspector or something. Wasn’t supposed to be somewhere and left and forgot to take his hat. Left it on a table. Audience damn near went nuts. Some performances, they say, people began to yell, ‘Hat. Hat!’ at the stage. One of the best bits of business anybody ever thought up.”

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “this was in a play.”

  “What the hell,” Agee said, “did you think it was in?” “You’d lost me,” Shapiro said. “I don’t know much about the theater, Mr. Agee.”

  “Television, probably,” Agee said. “Or movies. It’s people like you are letting the theater starve. You know that, Lieutenant?”

  “It costs a lot to go to the theater,” Shapiro said, wondering how far adrift a man could get. “Did this inspector go back and get his hat, Mr. Agee?”

  “Yes,” Agee said. “Just when the audience was ready to fall apart. Swell business. Swell timing. You didn’t come here to talk about the theater, did you?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “About Mrs. Singleton.”

  “Then,” Agee said, “get on with it, man. What about Jenny? Except that she was a beautiful person and a damned good actress. I don’t say great. No, I don’t say great. But most of the time it was hard to tell the difference. Except in comedy. I’ll give you that. But with that laugh of hers it didn’t matter if her comedy timing was a little off sometimes. And a no-count little rat kills her. Kills her, damn it. Kills Jenny.”

  Agee closed his eyes then and moved his heavy head from side to side and then, suddenly, he began to pound on the arm of his chair with his right hand. He pounded the padded arm in rhythm, as if to count in his mind. Shapiro sat and looked at him. Agee stopped beating the arm of the chair and sat quiet with his eyes still closed. Then, abruptly, he got out of the deep chair and walked across the room to a bar. Standing, he was an even bigger man, and a harder one. He walked with quick assurance.

  He made himself a drink and, holding it, turned to face Shapiro. He said, “O.K. Why don’t you get on with it?” He stood with his back to the bar and waited.

  “Yesterday evening,” Shapiro said, “you went to Mrs. Singleton’s house. Why?”

  “To take her to dinner.”

  “And?”

  “And found the street full of police cars,” Agee said, and took a long swallow from his glass. “And cops all around the place. And men in civilian clothes—I suppose they were cops too?—going in and out of the house. I started to go in and a patrolman stopped me and I asked what the hell gave and he told me. Told me Jenny’d been killed.”

  He put the glass down hard on the bar—hard enough, almost, to break it. It didn’t break.

  "Then?”

  “Somebody—a man in civilian clothes—asked me who I was and I told him and then—it’s a little dim. Jumbled up in my mind. Then, I guess, I just walked away and got a cab. I remember—think I remember—words going over and over in my mind. ‘She’s dead. Jenny’s dead. Jenny’s dead.’ Trying to take it in. What difference does it make? The way I felt, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “I don’t, right now, know what makes a difference. It hit you hard, her death? But obviously it hit you hard.”

  “Any of your business, Lieutenant?”

  “Anything I can find out about her is my business,” Shapiro said. “You had an engagement with her for last evening?”

  “I was taking her to dinner.”

  “You saw a good deal of her? In spite of being divorced from her? In spite of the fact that she was married to another man?”

  “I saw a good deal of her. This other man—that was over. Washed up. A twerp, Gage is. Sometimes she fell for twerps. Got over them. What’s it to you?”

  Again, Shapiro didn’t know.

  “Nothing to do with this young hoodlum killing her.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “If he did kill her.”

  “Then why the hell can’t you leave her alone? Leave me alone? You people’ve got this damned kid who killed her.”

  “We’ve got a kid,” Shapiro said. “Says he didn’t kill her. If he didn’t, somebody else did. So, we’ve got to look into all the chances.”

  Agee walked back to his chair. But now he leaned forward in it and looked at Shapiro.

  “Mean something special by that?” he said, and his voice rumbled the words. “Like, did I kill her? When she was the only thing in the whole damned world that mattered a damn? Is that what you’re working around to?”

  “Just working around,” Shapiro said. “The way they tell me to, Mr. Agee. You still loved her, Mr. Agee?”

  “We were going to get married again, as soon as she got rid of the Gage twerp.”

  “Divorce him? She’d started proceedings?”

  “Yes. Finally realized there was no point in going on the way they were going on. Married and not married.”

  “You have anything to do with her coming to this decision?”

  “It’s none of your damn—” Agee said, but Shapiro leaned forward in his own chair. He cut in on Agee’s rumbling words. He said, “Listen, Mr. Agee,” and, to his surprise, Agee let his sentence hang and said, “O.K. To what?”

  “You loved Mrs. Singleton, you say,” Shapiro said. “If the kid we’ve got didn’t kill her, you must want, as much as we want, to find out who did. So, it’s your business too, isn’t it? Did Gage know she was planning to divorce him? That you and she were going to remarry?”

  “She’d told him. She—she wasn’t the sort who did things under cover. Hid them. You didn’t know her.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “You did, apparently. Knew her very well.”

  “For a lot of years.”

  “And wrote a good many plays with her in mind? As a star in them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And for Kurt Morton to star in with her?”

  “What everybody knows,” Agee said.

  “She left Morton and married you. Then left you and married Gage. But you and she kept on seeing each other. Being friends. Again, did you persuade her to start divorce proceedings against Gage?”

  “We talked it over. But she went her own way about it. She always went her own way about things. You really think the kid didn’t kill her?”

  “It’s possible he didn’t.”

  “Then ask Joe Gage where he was last evening about—when about?”

  “Five,” Shapiro told him. “Why Gage?”

  “She had a lot of money,” Agee said. “Still married to her, Gage would get a wad of it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Probably. On the subject of money, Mr. Agee. Was she getting a share of your royalties from this play she was in? This last play of hers? And yours, of course?”

  “Now what the hell,” Agee said, “makes you think that?” “A man named Temple told the man I’m working with that that might be the setup.”

  “Temp,” Agee said, “is a nosy bastard. Always was. None of his business what I do with my own money, is it?”

  Shapiro said he shouldn’t think so.

  “And none of yours,” Agee said.

  “Probably not. Was Mrs. Singleton cut in on your royalties from the play?”

  “Yes. We’d arranged it that way. My idea, not hers.”

  “Not a usual arrangement, is it? I wouldn’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t either. Not with me it isn’t. Hadn’t been before.”

  “Your idea, you say. Mind telling me why? Without telling me it’s none of my business? Because, Mr. Agee, I’m not trying to do any pushing around.”

  “Just nibbling around,” Agee said. “Nibbling here and nibbling there. What it comes to, isn’t it?”

  Shapiro decided that question didn’t need an answer.

  “All right,” Agee said. “The idea for Always Good-bye was partly hers. She had a lot of ideas for plays for her to star in. Talked to me about them. Even wrote down scenes. No good at that.
Damn good at knowing what would be right for her. Have a part she’d be good in. Mostly, her ideas weren’t plays at all. Just roles for Jennifer Singleton.”

  “This one was different?”

  This one had been. She had had an idea in this one when she told it to Lester Agee. It wasn’t, Agee told Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, any idea that was going to shake the world. It was a situation, more than an idea—the situation a professional woman found herself in when she gave up her profession to marry a man who had never had one but was very rich. “How she adjusted, or tried to,” Agee said. “Obviously based on her own experience when she was married to Singleton. You know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve seen Always Good-bye?”

  “No, Mr. Agee. I told you I don’t go to the theater much.” “More or less what it’s about,” Agee said. “Oh, not the way she first worked it out. All serious as hell, the way she told it to me, a little bit at a time and sometimes a lot at a time. Full of implications. Surprised me, on the whole. Well as I knew her. Some of it didn’t sound like her.”

  “But your play was based—partly, anyway—on her ideas? Which was why you cut her in on the royalties?”

  “I used bits and pieces,” Agee said. “Turned it into comedy. Yes, I did cut her in. No formal arrangement—no collaborator’s contract, or anything like that. Just an understanding between friends.”

  “You say she’d had ideas for plays before. Told you about them. Did you ever cut her in before?”

  “I told you this was different. Her other ideas—hell, you couldn’t call them ideas. Just parts for her to star in. Nothing I could use, or did use.”

  “You saw a good deal of her, I gather,” Shapiro said. “At her house, usually?”