The Old Die Young Read online

  “You remember seeing Miss Farmer and me on your way out?”

  “Not all that clearly. Remembered, pretty vaguely, when I was up here. And began to get a hunch about what was the matter with me. And tried to get my regular doctor, and discovered he was on vacation. He’d arranged for a stand-in, but I couldn’t get hold of him, either, so I asked the desk to send somebody. They sent Dr. Knight. After he more or less confirmed what I’d guessed, I remembered, half remembered, seeing you. Sort of in a blur. And I—well, I thought maybe I’d better report what had happened. Not that it had anything to do with what happened to poor Clive Branson.”

  The coffee came. A pot of it, and a fresh cup. And cream and sugar. Askew thanked and tipped the waiter, who said, “Thank you, sir,” and took the used cup and empty pot away. Askew served himself coffee and said, “Sure you won’t join me?”

  Tony remained sure he wouldn’t have coffee. He said, “Speaking of Branson, you were at this surprise birthday party Mr. Simon gave for him, I understand?”

  “Sure. Everybody connected with the play. Except the stage hands, anyway. Doesn’t come under their contract. Damn near everything else does, you know. Have to get a special ruling if we want an actor to—hell, move a chair on the set. But they don’t have to be invited to staff parties.” He drank from his cup. It was a little as if he were biting the cup. He said, “It was a nice, easygoing party. Until old Clive started emptying ashtrays, anyway. Half asleep on his feet, the old boy seemed to be.”

  “Before that, Mr. Askew. Anything out of the way? Anything you noticed?”

  “I don’t know what you’re after, I’m afraid. Oh! Did I see somebody put poison in Branson’s glass? So somebody killed the old boy?”

  “We don’t know yet. It’s possible. Somebody who knew Branson was more than normally susceptible to sleeping medicine. To all the barbiturates. Did you happen to know that, Mr. Askew?”

  “No, I didn’t happen to know that, Mr. Cook. Or anything else about Branson, except that he was supposed to be one hell of an actor, and that Simon wanted him for Summer Solstice. If he could get him. Which, I gather, was chancy up to the last go-round. With him and Abel. He came high, I gather.”

  “Any idea how high, Mr. Askew?”

  “Not my department, Cook. My royalty is on the gross. At a guess, could have been several thousand a week. Maybe ten, for all I know. So, stick the customers. Which is O.K. with me, naturally. Long as they come, that is. Twenty a throw for the orchestra seats. Man! Does that shove up the gross! Which is where I come in. Did come in, anyway. With Branson out of the cast, God knows.”

  He brooded for some seconds over his coffee.

  “If you’re thinking somebody’s been trying to shut me up, Cook, shut me up with atropine, it’s out. Nothing to be shut up about. Because I didn’t see anybody put sleeping medicine in Branson’s drink. Or anything else out of the way. At this damn party or any other time.”

  Tony said, “All right, Mr. Askew. I’ll turn in a report.” He left the playwright’s sixth-floor, two-room suite and went down to the lobby and to a telephone booth.

  10

  He dialed the number of the Hotel Algonquin. When he was answered, from a few feet away, he said, “Mr. Price, please. Mr. Kenneth Price.” He heard the repeated buzz which indicated a telephone bell was ringing in Price’s rooms. Ringing and not being answered. Then he was told that Mr. Price did not seem to be in his suite.

  He dialed Homicide South and reported an apparent effort to poison Bret Askew, playwright. And reported that Askew seemed little the worse for the attempt, which might, he thought, be in some manner related to the more successful effort to do away with Clive Branson, actor. He was told that Lieutenant Shapiro had signed out and had also signed Cook out. He was asked if he needed somebody to lend a hand. Tony didn’t. He would try to get in touch with Shapiro and fill him in. He dialed a familiar Brooklyn number, and the telephone rang in the apartment of Rose and Nathan Shapiro, and rang unanswered. It was a night of elusive people. He looked up Abel, Martha, in the directory. Two listings—“Abel Martha Associates. Abel Martha res.” He tried the latter. After four rings, it was answered—“Mrs. Abel’s apartment”—via, clearly, an answering service. No, Tony did not wish to leave a number.

  He looked up another number and dialed again. John Knight, M.D., would almost certainly not be in his office, which apparently was more or less across Forty-fourth Street from the Hotel Algonquin.

  But he was. The answer was abrupt, in a low, somewhat grating voice, the voice of a man who did not much want to be disturbed. “Knight speaking.”

  “Dr. Knight?”

  “John Knight, M.D.”

  “This is the police, Doctor. Detective Cook.”

  “All right. And so what?”

  “You treated a man this evening in the Algonquin. A Mr. Askew. Mr. Bret Askew. Right?”

  “I wouldn’t say treated. Looked in on. Pretty much confirmed his own diagnosis. Seemed to know a good deal about it. Said he had researched for a play a while back. Had all the symptoms down pat, anyway.”

  “Symptoms of, Doctor?”

  “Poisoning by one of the alkaloids, belladonna group. Probably atropine sulfate, he thought.”

  “And he was right?”

  “The symptoms were right. Blurred vision, dilation of the pupils, dry throat and some fuddled speech. Conformed to poisoning by atropine. All I had to go on. I’d have to take him to a hospital for tests to be sure. He wouldn’t go. Didn’t want his stomach pumped out, I suppose. Can’t blame him, can you? Anyway, he was coming out of it. I told him to drink a lot of coffee, figured he’d be all right in a few hours. Wait a minute! You mean he isn’t? That he’s—well, died of it?”

  “No, Doctor. Nothing like that. Seemed to be coming along all right. Only he’s filed a report. Thinks somebody tried to poison him. Dropped this alkaloid in his drink. In the Algonquin lounge.”

  “What he told me, too.”

  “And, Doctor, something you’re required to report. Have you?”

  “Not yet. Planned to in the morning. O.K.? Or—You say you’re a detective. So, it’s already been reported, huh? By this man Askew himself, you say. So?”

  “You’d better report it anyway, Doctor. As, perhaps, attempted murder.”

  “All right. In the morning. But a pretty feeble attempt, Cook. You did say your name is Cook? A mild overdose of a drug used to curb excessive secretions. For peptic ulcer, sometimes. Or an irritated colon. Had to look the stuff up myself when I got back here. Never prescribed it myself, that I remember.”

  “But it is prescribed?”

  “Yes. Some internists use it. It will also dry up a runny cold. Pretty drastic treatment for that, though.”

  “Since you’ve just looked it up, Doctor—on the assumption that it was atropine sulfate—what would be the usual dosage?”

  “Four tenths of a milligram. Repeated after four hours. A fraction, small fraction, of the presumed fatal dose.”

  “Any idea how much Askew was given? Or, of course, took?”

  “Not more than twice the therapeutic dose. At a guess. I told you he wouldn’t go for a thorough test. And I couldn’t drag him, could I? And I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to die of it.”

  “Could be his doctor prescribed it for him and he just took too much?”

  “Could be, I suppose. But he denied ever having a prescription for it. Yes, I thought of the possibility, and asked him.”

  “Yes, Doctor. Any chance he could—well, have faked the symptoms?”

  “Try dilating your own pupils sometime, Cook. No, he’d had the stuff, all right. Perhaps not atropine. Could be one of the others in the belladonna group. Never know, will we? And, all right, I’ll file a report in the morning. Pretty sketchy report it will be, though.”

  Tony said it would be a good idea to file a report, if just to keep the record straight. “Thank you, Doctor.” He hung up. He tried once more to get Lieutenant Shapiro in Brooklyn
and again had no success.

  Poison in the drinks of two men. Overdoses, actually, of reasonably standard medications. One fatal because of the special susceptibility of the victim; the other merely an annoyance. A play, and a light comedy at that, the link between the two men. And the lieutenant away somewhere. At a movie? Damn! Perhaps Kenneth Price had returned, would be available to tell of his brief drinking session with Askew and, of course, to deny he had sprinkled atropine sulfate into Askew’s glass. Probably to deny he had ever heard of atropine sulfate.

  Tony had run out of dimes and used one of the house telephones. If Price was in his suite, he was not answering his telephone.

  Outside the hotel, Tony succumbed to the temptation of a just-vacated taxi. It would have been more sensible to go downtown by subway. Tony was not feeling very sensible.

  The taxi driver had never heard of Gay Street. He seemed barely to have heard of Greenwich Village. He said, “Oh, Greenwich.” Tony paid him off at Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street and walked the rest of the way, to save time.

  There was a streak of light under the door of Rachel’s second-floor apartment, as Tony had hoped there would be. She answered quickly to his ring. She even had clothes on.

  “There’s nothing like having a dinner date with a policeman,” she said. “Is that man who stared at us dead?”

  “No. Very alive and kicking. Name of Askew. Man who wrote Summer Solstice.” He let go of her and told her, briefly, about Askew’s uncomfortable experience.

  “First the actor, then the playwright,” Rachel said. “Somebody’s certainly got it in for that play. All right, Tony love, I’ll take it off. All right, you can help if you want to.”

  It was some time later, and in the bed of his own apartment, that Tony Cook wakened. Momentarily, he was surprised to be in his own bed, alone. Then he remembered. Rachel and Tony are rather often in bed together, but seldom for sleeping. They quickly become too conscious of each other for sleep. So, what had wakened him at—he looked—four thirty in the morning? Something that kept tumbling around in his mind. After a few seconds it came to him. Something Rachel had said just before he helped her off with the dress.

  “Somebody’s got it in for the play.” Which was certainly nothing to wake up about. A slight but witty comedy, it was said to be. A little reminiscent of Noel Coward. Nothing anybody would have it in for. Unless—

  Tony’s father had been an ardent playgoer, although usually in the balcony. And once, Tony had heard him say that somebody “could sue the ass off her, only the somebody’s dead.” Tony had known his father was talking about a play and had asked for more.

  He had got it. It was a play written by a woman and very obviously about her late husband, whose name she still bore. It had been, by general agreement, a very witty play and an entirely merciless one. The husband, who had been well known—chiefly for the amount of money he owned—had been ridiculed as a man of barely credible stupidity, a sluggish bore, inept in all things, including lovemaking. “She really took the skin off him. He would have rolled over in his grave, except he’d been cremated.”

  Partly the wit, and to a degree the malice, had made the play a success. One of the reviewers had written that he loathed it and that it probably would run forever. It hadn’t, but it had run well and been, briefly, mentioned in connection with the Pulitzer Prize, which it had not received.

  Tony could not remember the title of the play or the name of its author. But a good many people, including relatives of the obvious prototype, might well have had a grudge against it. And tried to do it in?

  Unlikely, of course. Unlikely as hell. Still, it went to show you could certainly have a grudge against a play—and against its author. Try to stop it by temporarily incapacitating its leading actor? Not, probably, intending the incapacity to be permanent? And then to punish the author, not intending to kill him?

  It hardly held water. It did not justify being waked up at four thirty in the morning. Still—had there been a prototype for a character in Askew’s play? Some actual person who felt that the play “really took the skin off him”? Farfetched, of course. But possible? Worth looking into? Something to query Askew about, conceivably.

  Clearly not at four thirty in the morning, but it took Tony Cook fifteen minutes to get back to sleep.

  11

  Cleo is usually happy about mornings and greets them with pleased noises. This happens at seven o’clock, give or take a few minutes, and the time of advent does not vary with the time of year or the intensity of the light. For Cleo, morning is seven o’clock.

  After her preliminary greetings, probably intended to reassure morning it is welcome, Cleo hurries to a chair by the apartment’s east living-room window. On it, she repeats her greeting, more emphatically than before. Then it is time to let out her charges, who have been shut up for the night. Letting them out is the first order of morning business. Then she will take the longer of her charges for his morning walk. That can be protracted as befits the weather. Breakfast will surely follow. Indeed, it never fails.

  This morning started out like any other, with sounds of welcome, with the dash to the window chair. But instead of gleeful yelps, Cleo made a sound which was almost a whimper. She repeated this several times before she went to the door they were shut behind to let them out, to let them share her disappointment and chagrin, for which they are, after all, responsible. She lets them out by scratching at their door and barking at it. Only this time it was more whimper than bark. Cleo does not like to walk in the rain.

  Nathan Shapiro doesn’t either, but there is no alternative. Dogs have to be walked.

  Cats are another and simpler matter. Early in their married life, they had learned that the chance of their having children was one in—“Well, about one in five thousand,” Dr. Horowitz had told Nathan. “Probably the mumps you had when you were twenty. Too bad—but just be thankful that mumps in men doesn’t affect potency.” Being duly thankful, they had tried a cat, a sleek and friendly Siamese, and Rose had turned out to be, rather violently, allergic to cats. So they had had to find a new home for Chin, with a family who didn’t sneeze and wheeze because of her presence. Dogs were chancy, too; people who are sensitive to cat dander often react adversely to dogs also—even to ponies, for that matter—but Rose got along all right with dogs, and Cleo was their third scottie. Their first dog had been a dachshund, who had been most amiable despite his Germanic association. But the Shapiros, while by no means orthodox, had felt that a Germanic dog was inappropriate in the Hitler era, and had switched to Scotch terriers. Cleo is the third of that breed to live with, and be taken for walks by, Rose and Nathan Shapiro.

  From Cleo’s mournful response this morning, Nathan had inferred an adverse change in the weather even before he looked toward the window and got up rather hurriedly to close it. The almost-summer weather had indeed broken. It needn’t have been quite so emphatic about it, Nathan thought. The rain was slashing down in sheets. It was by no means a warm rain. Nathan Shapiro, who shares Cleo’s distaste for walking in the rain, sighed as he went into the bathroom. The window was open there, too. The rain was pouring in.

  Rose said from her bed, “Raining, isn’t it?”

  Nathan said it was raining. Hard.

  Rose said, “Damn.” Then she said, “Anyway, I’m glad it’s morning.” Nathan walks Cleo in the mornings. Rose has the afternoon shift.

  Cleo scratched at the bedroom door. She was not very vigorous at it. It was rather as if she hoped not to be heard.

  Nathan opened the door. He said, “Good morning, Cleo.” Cleo answered on a subdued note. She put paws up against a pajama leg and looked up, sorrowfully, at Nathan’s face. “Yes,” Nathan said, “I know it is. No doing of mine, dog.”

  Cleo whined a rejection of this obvious untruth.

  “Go get it,” Nathan told the little bitch.

  Cleo never has to be told to get her lead and bring it to be snapped to her collar. Except on rainy mornings. She did go and get
it. She dropped it at some distance from her long one, teaching him not to make it rain.

  Shapiro went back to the bedroom and dressed. Rose went into the bathroom. She was out of it by the time her husband had finished with his necktie.

  “Don’t let her stall you, dear,” Rose said. “And do take an umbrella.” Cleo often protracts her morning walks.

  “She won’t today,” Nathan said. “Not in this.” He didn’t say anything about taking an umbrella. He detests umbrellas. He finished dressing. He put on a raincoat and a hat, which is reserved for rainy days. He put folded sheets of yesterday’s New York Chronicle in the pocket of the raincoat. A local law requires New York City dog owners to clean up after their pets. Police Lieutenant Shapiro is, of course, a lawman. On better days, Cleo pulls Nathan out the apartment door. Today, he had, gently, to pull her. She did not seriously resist. She was resigned, if not enthusiastic. At the rain-swept curb, she did not dilly-dally.

  They were back in the apartment in ten minutes, and in eleven Nathan was drinking the coffee Rose had ready for him. She let him drink half the cup while she fed Cleo, whose spirits were improving. Then Rose came in carrying her own cup and sat beside him on the sofa facing the fireplace, for which they would soon have to buy wood. Rabbi Shapiro, Nathan’s father, smiled down at them from the portrait above the mantel. He had been a smiling man as well as a learned one.

  “Tony Cook called,” Rose told her husband. “Would like you to call him back before you go in.”

  Nathan finished his coffee and stood up.

  “Not until you’ve had your egg,” Rose told him. For Nathan Shapiro, breakfast is something one drinks from a coffee cup. He waited for his soft-boiled egg. He even ate it. Then he looked at his watch. Almost a quarter of eight. Cook would be in transit between Gay Street and the headquarters of Homicide, Manhattan South. Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, short of a miracle, would not check in by eight o’clock. His tardiness would offend no one.