Die Laughing by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

Author:RICHARD LOCKRIDGE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

XI

Nathan Shapiro went down the staircase indicated to him and came to a long room with a bar across one end. There were cushioned benches along one wall leading from the bar, and a table with a round of cheese on it; there were chairs backing toward the rear of the room, where there was a pool table which two men were using. A man sat in one of several tall chairs set along the side of that part of the room and watched the players.

There were four men standing at the bar with glasses in their hands. They were talking; they paid no attention to the tall, sad-faced man who came—a little tentatively, since he did not belong there—into the barroom of The Players Club. Shapiro said, “Mr. Morton?” not raising his voice because, however preoccupied, a man will hear his own name.

The man who turned and looked at him and then said “Yes?” was a trim man and several inches under six feet. He wore a blue jacket with an insignia of some sort on the left breast. He had black hair, recently and carefully cut. He had wide cheekbones and, below them, his face went down in clean planes to the bones of a cleanly outlined jaw. For a moment, Shapiro thought he had seen him somewhere before. He could not remember where, or of whom the man reminded him. Then he thought, “Gage,” and, simultaneously, that he was wrong. This man did not look in the least like Gage. Except—Shapiro groped in his mind as Kurt Morton moved across the room to join him. He came up with the thought that both Kurt Morton and Joseph Gage had actor’s faces. Which wasn’t much to come up with. They both had decisive faces.

Morton, in the few steps he took toward Shapiro, moved lightly, like a young man. But he could not be really young, if he was the right Morton. His hair was very black and his wide-set eyes were black too.

He said, “Looking for me, Mr.—?”

“Shapiro,” Shapiro told him. “Police lieutenant.”

Morton said, “Oh,” and his decisive voice went a little less decisive. He said, “You the man who called up a while back? Wanted to see me?”

“I called,” Shapiro said.

Morton said, “Oh,” again, in the diminished tone he had used before. He said, “Thought it might be somebody else. One producer keeps hounding me. I keep telling him I’m not interested in the part. However. What can I do for you, Lieutenant? About poor dear Jenny? Haven’t seen her for a long time, Lieutenant. However.”

He went toward the chairs at a round table and motioned, and Shapiro went after him. Morton still carried his drink. He sat down in one of the chairs and motioned toward another and said, “Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?”

Shapiro shook his head.

“You investigating poor dear Jenny’s taking off?” Morton asked him. There was a slight British intonation in his voice. “Thought you people had your man for that, Lieutenant. One of these hippy kids, I thought it was.

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