Tony got to East Twenty-first Street before Nathan Shapiro. Gay Street is closer to the Police Academy building than Brooklyn. Tony was lucky in finding a cab on Sixth Avenue, and traffic, at a few minutes after seven, wasn’t too heavy. Nevertheless, he had time to wonder, as he occasionally did, whether he had been wise in his choice of occupations. The nine-to-fivers had some solidity in their lives. When they were through for the day, they were through for the day. Telephone calls didn’t jangle in on them. They had, among other things, time to eat dinner.
Rachel had said that it was perfectly all right and that she was a little bushed anyway and that she would scramble herself some eggs and study her part. “All four lines of it,” she had added. And, all right, it was a damn nuisance. She was getting used to it, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
On the other hand, Tony thought as he paid off the driver, I tried a nine-to-five job when I was a kid, before I decided to go on the cops, and it bored me stiff. I’m not cut out to be a company man. All the same, damn it to hell. Now and then, when he’s on the eight-to-four, a man ought to have a chance to plan his evenings.
He resisted the inclination to walk a block and grab a sandwich. Nate had said as soon as he could make it. He went up to the second floor.
The man waiting beside his desk in the squad room was small. He wore a black mustache which was obviously too large for his face. He was smoking a cigar. He had also been eating it. It didn’t, to Tony, smell like a good cigar.
Tony said, “Mr. Arnez?” and sat down at his desk. Manuel Arnez, fleet taxicab driver, according to what Nate had said, blew smoke at him. It was really a noxious cigar. Arnez said, “Yeah,” and managed to say it with a heavy accent. “I been off duty for two hours and I ain’t had no dinner.”
“Neither have I,” Tony said. “But this shouldn’t take long. You recognized this woman from a picture you were shown, way I get it. A woman you picked up at—”
“Listen, Captain,” Arnez said. “I ain’t swearing to nothing. All I told this guy she sorta looked like. Far’s I’m gonna go.”
“O.K.,” Tony said. “We aren’t asking you to swear to anything. You were cruising up Madison Avenue this morning and this woman flagged you down. All right, maybe this woman. Somebody who looked like the picture.” He took the picture he had got from Leon Perkins—the picture which had been so many times copied and so widely circulated—out of the drawer of his desk. “This picture.”
Manuel Arnez looked at the picture. He ate some more cigar. He said, “Yeah. That’s the picture. But I ain’t swearing to nothing. Got a match, Captain?”
Tony gave him a folder of matches and watched him light the stub of the cigar. (A cigar toward which Tony was beginning to feel a rather intense animosity.) Arnez blew smoke at Tony.
“You think this picture may be one of the woman you picked up this morning, Mr. Arnez? On Madison a couple of blocks below Forty-second?”
“Could be. Maybe. Like I said—”
“I know what you said. You’re not swearing to anything. About what time was this?”
Arnez took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it—a trip-record sheet from a cabdriver’s clipboard, Tony realized.
“Twenty after nine, says here,” Arnez said, refolded the sheet, and put it back in his pocket.
“Picked her up at nine-twenty,” Tony said. “A woman in a long-sleeved gray dress. No hat. Carrying a black handbag. That right?”
Arnez took the cigar stub out of his mouth and looked at it.
“Look,” Arnez said, “I know you guys. Pushing people around. People who ain’t done nothing.”
“All right,” Tony said. “We’re pigs. But I’m not pushing you around. Make this easy, Mr. Arnez, and we’ll both have some dinner. You picked up a woman who maybe was the woman we’re asking about on Madison Avenue about nine-twenty this morning. Where did you let her out?”
“Fifty-seventh and Park. Far side of Park, she wanted. Had to wait for the light. And then she came up with a ten-spot. Hell, I’d just gone on duty. What did she expect, huh?”
“You couldn’t change it?”
“Took all the singles I had. So suppose the next one comes up with another ten-spot?”
“Things are tough all over,” Tony said. “Did your next fare come up with a ten-spot, Mr. Arnez?”
“No, he didn’t. And you know what he tipped? A lousy two bits. This lady was more like it. Half a dollar. Usually, it’s the other way around, if you know what I mean.”
Tony did. It is a confirmed belief of taxi drivers that women are worse tippers than men.
“The way I get it,” Tony said and stopped because Nathan Shapiro came into the squad room. He looked at Tony Cook and Manuel Arnez and nodded his head and went on toward his office. Tony told Arnez to wait a minute and followed Shapiro. In his office, Nathan looked like a man who had been deprived of his dinner. But, of course, he usually looks as if he had been deprived of something.
Yes, the taxi driver had said Fifty-seventh Street. Didn’t Akins live on Fifty-seventh Street? And yes, Mrs. Perkins had probably been his passenger. Tony went back to the squad room and told Arnez that that would be all, and that they would get in touch with him if they needed to and that they appreciated his cooperation. Arnez said, “Yeah?” with an inflection of complete disbelief, and put the soggy remnants of his cigar in the tray on Tony’s desk and went away.
The cigar was loathsome. It had, however, gone out. Tony picked up the ashtray, holding it at arm’s length, and dumped it in the trash container most distant from his desk. He went into Shapiro’s office.
They agreed that Fifty-seventh Street might well be a coincidence. From the far side of Park, Mrs. Sue—probably for Susan, but they didn’t know—Perkins might have walked anywhere on Fifty-seventh. Or, for that matter, to any place up or down Park. Or, conceivably, on to the East River and jumped in. But sleeping coincidences are not like sleeping dogs. They got a squad car and drove uptown.
The address Captain Fremont and Detective Latham had got from Leslie Akins, as a matter of routine, was that of a tall and evidently new apartment house on the south side of Fifty-seventh. It had a uniformed doorman. A doctor had his plaque by the entrance. Inside, in the cool lobby, there was a counter with a uniformed man behind it and a switchboard behind him. He had been sitting on a stool. He stood up and looked at them and said, “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
Shapiro said, “Mr. Leslie Akins?”
“I’ll see,” the man said. At least, Nathan thought, he didn’t say he would ascertain. “Whom shall I say is calling?”
Nathan told him who he should say would like to see Mr. Leslie Akins. The man looked at them and raised his eyebrows. Neither Shapiro nor Cook said anything, and the man plugged into the switchboard. He waited less than a minute and said, “Mr. Akins, sir?” and that a Lieutenant Shapiro and a Detective Cook would like to see him. He listened for a moment and turned back.
“Mr. Akins is just going out,” he said. “He asked whether tomorrow won’t do. At the office, he says.”
“Tell him we’d like to see him this evening,” Nathan said. “And that we won’t keep him long.”
The man told Akins. All right, they were to go right up. To Penthouse A. That elevator.
“Lot of security,” Tony said in the elevator. “And we seem to be getting penthouse clientele this time around.”
Nathan said that, the way things were nowadays, security made sense. He added that they also had basement clients this time around.
Although Tony had pressed the button marked “Penthouse,” the elevator stopped at the twenty-first floor. They walked up a flight of stairs and found two polished wooden doors. Tony pressed the bell in the jamb of the door with “A” on it. The door opened almost at once, and it was Leslie Akins who opened it. He was as erect and substantial at home as he had been in his office. He said, “Just caught me, gentlemen. Mrs. Bradley and I were about to go out to dinner. But come in, gentlemen.”
They went into a large room, the far wall of which was largely glass. Tony thought that he was, this time around, running into a good many people who lived in glass houses.
Sylvia Towne Bradley was sitting by a coffee table. There was a sherry glass in front of her. She looked younger than she had when Tony had last seen her in her, or her husband’s, glass penthouse. She had, he thought, gone to more trouble with her makeup. She wore a dark blue summer suit and high-heeled shoes of the same color. She was elegant this evening, Tony thought. She still looked as if she belonged in the country.
“A couple of detectives, Syl,” Akins said.
She looked at them. She nodded her head slightly. She said, “I’ve met Detective Cook.” Her intonation did not indicate that it had been a pleasure.
“Shapiro,” Nathan told her. Her expression did not really alter. Perhaps it set a little.
Akins suggested that they sit down. They did. He went to a chair near the coffee table and picked up his glass. The liquid in his was darker than the liquid in Sylvia Bradley’s. Akins was still drinking dry manhattans, Tony thought.
Akins did not offer drinks. He said, “Yes, gentlemen?”
“We’re still trying to get in touch with your secretary, Mr. Akins,” Nathan said. “Not having any luck, I’m afraid. Can’t find anybody who’s seen her since she left the office this morning because she wasn’t feeling well.”
“She was going home,” Akins said. “You’re sure she didn’t? You try that husband of hers?”
“Late this afternoon,” Tony said. “An hour and a half ago, about, she hadn’t got home. Her husband’s getting worried about her. Says he isn’t, but I think he is.”
Akins shook his head slowly. Sylvia Bradley got up, unhurriedly, and picked up her glass, which was almost empty, and carried it to the glass side of the room. There was a terrace beyond. She was, Tony thought, signaling both her complete lack of interest in the whereabouts of Akins’s secretary and her readiness to go out to dinner.
“You seem particularly anxious to get in touch with Sue, Lieutenant,” Akins said. “Mind telling me why? Surely you don’t think she—” He did not finish.
Shapiro gave him several seconds to continue. When he did not take advantage of them, Shapiro said, “She’s conceivably a witness, Mr. Akins. In connection with our investigation of Mr. Bradley’s death. We don’t like witnesses to simply disappear.”
He looked at Mrs. Bradley when he mentioned her husband’s name. There was nothing to indicate she had heard the name. Or the word “death.” She had withdrawn. It was almost as if she had left the room.
“You still haven’t explained why you’ve come here,” Akins said. “I gathered from what you told the man downstairs that it was a matter of some urgency. Mrs. Bradley and I have been discussing the future of the agency. Now that she’s a part of it. As I said, we were about to go out to dinner.”
Nathan said, “Part of it?” He looked across the room at Sylvia Towne Bradley. She was still taking no part in anything; was not concerned with any of it. She continued to look out at Manhattan. She did finish what remained in her glass.
“Of course,” Akins said. “Syl inherits Frank’s share, naturally. His partnership. We’ve been—well, planning the immediate future of the firm.”
“It will go on as before, Mr. Akins? With Mrs. Bradley as your partner instead of her husband?”
“Not quite like that,” Akins said. “Mrs. Bradley hasn’t had any experience in advertising, have you, Syl?” She did not answer. Again it was as if she had not heard. “We’ll have to find somebody to take old Frank’s place, and that won’t be easy. Somebody who’s heading up his own agency now, maybe. But he’d probably want to merge. Somebody who’s working for another agency—hell, a man as good as we need would want the earth. Of course, he might bring an account with him. Unless his contract ties him up. Frankly, it’s a bit of a problem, Lieutenant. But, not yours, is it? Probably boring you with this inside-the-office stuff.”
“No,” Shapiro said. “I’m not bored, Mr. Akins.”
“Nothing to do with poor Frank’s death,” Akins said. “Not that I can see, anyway.”
“Probably not,” Shapiro agreed. “Of course, it isn’t always easy to tell what may be involved with what. But you’re probably right.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, Lieutenant. Why did you come here this evening? In, I take it, the course of your search for Mrs. Perkins?”
“Because we have reason to believe Mrs. Perkins took a cab uptown this morning,” Shapiro told him. “From in front of your office building to Fifty-seventh and Park. About half a block from here.”
“And you wondered whether she had come here. To my apartment. Whether I’m—what, Lieutenant? Hiding her?”
“Earlier today,” Shapiro said, “we gathered you didn’t know until you got to your office that Mrs. Perkins was—taking the day off. Because she wasn’t feeling well. Her husband assumed—says he assumed, anyway—that she had gone, as he says, ‘to walk things off.’ Was that what you assumed, Mr. Akins?”
For the first time, Sylvia Bradley seemed to be interested in what was being said. She turned toward them. There was still no expression in her deeply tanned, faintly sun-marred, face. Akins lifted his glass. He emptied it in one long swallow. He put the glass down.
“I did know Sue sometimes took long walks when things worried her,” Akins said. “This morning I didn’t think about it one way or the other, that I rem—” He stopped in the middle of the word. He lifted his glass again, but found it empty. He got a pack of Kents out of his jacket pocket and shook a cigarette out of it and lighted the cigarette. He lighted the filter end, and it flared. He crushed the fire out in a tray. He did not light a new cigarette.
Nathan Shapiro merely waited.
“All right,” Akins said. “Maybe I wasn’t entirely sincere with you this morning, Shapiro.”
Nathan assumed he meant “truthful”; that he was talking in a still unfamiliar language. Nathan waited. When Akins seemed to have difficulty in choosing further words, Nathan said, “Go on, Mr. Akins. Mrs. Perkins did come here?”
Slowly, Leslie Akins nodded his head.
“She was very upset,” Akins said. “I’ve never seen her so upset before. About—about nothing, really. I—well, I just wanted to help her, you see. Give her a chance to pull herself together. Before—well, before you started badgering her with more questions. I could tell from the way she sounded on the phone that she needed a chance to—call it get organized. So I told her to come on up.”
“You telephoned her this morning? At the office? Before you went down there yourself? Was that the way it was?”
“No. Why would I have called her? She called me. I was just having coffee. About—oh, a quarter after nine, at a guess. I usually get to the office about ten, you see. And stay until God knows when. Left earlier than usual this afternoon. Syl—Mrs. Bradley, that is—and I had arranged to meet here at six. To talk things over.”
People wander. Sometimes, but by no means always, to avoid coming to a point. A point which might prick.
“Mrs. Perkins telephoned you about a quarter after nine,” Shapiro said. “You were having coffee. Were you alone, Mr. Akins?”
“Kumi was in the kitchen. Unless he’d already gone. He was off today—”
“Kumi?”
“Man who takes care of the place. Takes care of me, I suppose you could say. Japanese. Long, tangled-up name. Starts with Kumi, so I call him that.”
“Does he live in, Mr. Akins?”
“Well, yes and no. Tenth floor, it’s mostly servants’ rooms. Go with the apartments. The room numbers match the apartment numbers. Kumi stays in one of those. One that goes with this apartment.”
“He’d be there now?”
“I doubt it. Doubt if he’d be back. He’s usually off on Thursday, but he wanted to make it today. Didn’t ask him why. One day’s as good as another, far’s I’m concerned. What’s the point of all this, Lieutenant? Thought you were interested in Sue Perkins, not my domestic arrangements.”
“Sorry,” Shapiro said. “Guess I got sidetracked. I do sometimes.” He was aware that Tony Cook was looking at him. He did not look at Tony Cook. “Mrs. Perkins called you,” he said. “Seemed upset, you thought. Go ahead, Mr. Akins. She wanted to see you, I take it?”
“Something she wanted to take up with me, was the way she put it. Something she wanted to talk about here, instead of waiting until I got in to the office. Didn’t make sense. She—well, I thought she sounded gaga, if you know what I mean. Never knew her to be like that in all the years she’s worked for me. All right, it worried me. We’ve—well, we’ve worked together for a lot of years, you see. Grown sort of fond of the old girl. So I told her to come on up. That I’d wait for her. Frankly, well, I was afraid she was going to quit her job. As if things at the office weren’t already bad enough, what with Frank—”
He let it hang there. Sylvia Bradley walked away from the glass side of the big room and sat in a chair a little nearer to the three men. She did not say anything. She merely looked at them. It was rather as if she had just entered the room.
“Was that actually why she wanted to see you, Mr. Akins?” Shapiro asked. “To resign her job?”
“Nothing like that. Nothing at all like that. The damnedest thing. Listen to this, Syl. She wanted me to take that husband of hers in as a partner. Make him creative executive. Take over Frank’s job. She kept saying, ‘It’s only right. It’s the only fair thing.’ She kept saying things like that over and over. And crying. Half the time she wasn’t even coherent. It was—it was a hell of a thing, Lieutenant. She—well, she seemed just to have fallen apart. Jesus!”
“What did you tell her, Mr. Akins? Not, I suppose, that you’d do what she wanted?”
“Hell, no. Mostly I told her to try to calm down. Maybe, that I couldn’t decide a thing like that without talking to Mrs. Bradley. Letting her down easy, I suppose you’d call it. She was almost hysterical, I’m afraid. Kept saying we owed him that. After what we’d ‘done to him,’ was the way she put it.”
“Speaking of her husband,” Shapiro said. “What did she mean by that?”
“Oh, he used to work at the agency. Copywriter. Did for years, actually. He and Sue met at the office. After Frank joined me, we had to let him go.”
“Was that your idea or Mr. Bradley’s, Mr. Akins? You say Mr. Perkins had been working for the agency for years. Before Mr. Bradley joined it?”
“Oh, all right. It was Frank’s idea. Perkins always seemed like a good man to me. But—well, you don’t quarrel with a new partner about a minor matter of personnel, you know. Anyway, from what I hear, Perkins is doing all right. Freelancing, I understand. So, why Sue’d got all steamed up about it, I don’t know.”
“You yourself were satisfied with Mr. Perkins’s work, Mr. Akins? It was Mr. Bradley who—”
“Frank couldn’t stand the sight of him,” Sylvia Bradley said. “It was like Frank. He had phobias, I suppose you’d say. If we’re not going out to dinner, Leslie, I’d like another sherry.”
Akins got a chilled bottle out of a cooler at one end of the room. It was Tio Pepe, Tony noted. He hoped Rachel’s scrambled eggs had turned out all right and that she was getting the rest she needed. He hated the thought of her being bushed.
Akins poured chilled sherry into Sylvia Bradley’s glass. He looked reflectively at his own empty glass. Then he carried his cocktail glass and the Tio Pepe bottle back to the bar. He put the bottle in the refrigerator and took another bottle out of it. He dropped ice cubes into a squat glass and poured from the second bottle. Tony Cook could not see the bottle he poured from, but assumed it was Jack Daniel’s. He did not add dry vermouth. He carried the refilled glass back and sat down with it.
He did not offer drinks to Shapiro and Tony Cook. Cook lighted a cigarette.
“Couldn’t stand the sight of him, Mrs. Bradley?” Shapiro said.
“Ugly,” she said. “Freakish. He couldn’t bear to be around that kind. Had a phobia about it. Always baffled me. Never could understand that about him. Some of my best friends are freakish.”
Shapiro recognized the paraphrase. He suspected he was supposed to.
“After Mrs. Perkins had made this request of you,” Shapiro said. “This, you say, almost hysterical request, what happened, Mr. Akins? She left? Didn’t say where she was going?”
“No. Oh, I offered to take her back downtown. To the office. Said we’d talk it over when—well, when she was calmer. And when I’d had a chance to think it over. All right, I was trying to let her down easy. Temporizing, I suppose you’d call it. She just sat on that sofa over there and cried. And moaned. Now and then—well, it was almost screaming. When I talked to her she didn’t seem to hear me. I couldn’t seem to get through to her at all. Never went through anything like it, Lieutenant. And this was Sue Perkins! Solid as a rock, she’d been for years. Relied on her, I always had. And now that! I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
He shook his head, underlining his bewilderment.
“Not like her at all,” Akins said. “No control at all. It was as if she were in shock of some sort.”
Shapiro had met Mrs. Sue Perkins only once, and then briefly. She had seemed like a very controlled woman. And a very decisive one. There are times, of course, when even the most decisive, the most poised, lose control.
He watched Leslie Akins shake a bewildered head once more and lift his glass and drink from it. For some seconds, then, he held the glass in front of him and looked at it, as if, in it, he might read an explanation of the inexplicable. When he finally put the glass down on the table, it was with a perceptible clink.
He looked at Nathan Shapiro then. He said, “It was the damnedest thing, Lieutenant. Hard to believe it really happened. And I had an appointment at eleven with a client. New client at that. Might turn out to be an important account.”
He shook his head again.
“I can see that it made a difficult situation,” Shapiro said. “How did you get out of it, Mr. Akins? Since, you say, she wouldn’t listen to you?”
“Just sat there crying and shaking her head,” Akins said. “No condition to go anywhere, seemed to me. Do anything.”
“So?”
“I made some coffee for her,” Akins said. “Thought maybe it would help her pull herself together. Instant coffee. Kumi has a gadget I don’t know how to work. Brought her a cup and asked her if she wanted cream and sugar. Trying to act as if nothing had happened, you know. Said, ‘Just drink this, Sue.’ Trying to get through to her.”
“Did you?”
“I guess so. Sort of, anyway. She did drink the coffee—with cream, as I remember. And I said I had this client coming to the office at eleven and that she knew that. She’d set it up, of course. And that it was important. Then I said something like, Why didn’t she just stay here until she was feeling better? Just stay here and rest. And make herself some more coffee, if she wanted it. That she knew where the kitchen was.”
“She did? Know where the kitchen is, I mean?”
“Oh, yes. She’d come up here a few times in the evening. To finish up work we hadn’t had time to at the office. Three or four times that happened, at a guess. Once or twice she made us both coffee when we’d finished. Before I phoned down for a cab and sent her home.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “This morning she agreed to stay here until she felt more up to things?”
“Yes. Oh, she still didn’t say much of anything. Maybe, ‘All right.’ And nodded her head. She was still sobbing. Sort of—gulping, if you know what I mean. I hated to leave her like that, but what more could I do? Come to that, I thought she might quiet down better alone, if you see what I mean, Lieutenant.”
Shapiro said he saw. And that, then, Akins had left Mrs. Perkins finishing her coffee and gone down to the office? And about what time had that been?
It had been ten or a little after. “You got to my office about the same time I did, Lieutenant. I had a quick look at my mail and then talked to you. Took up most of the time before my appointment, way I remember it.”
“And when you came back here this evening, Mrs. Perkins had gone, I take it?”
“Of course. I don’t suppose she stayed here long. Must have steadied down, I’d think. Anyway, she washed her cup and put the cream pitcher back in the refrigerator. So I guess she was all right.”
“Probably she was,” Shapiro said. “And you’ve no idea where she might have gone from here, Mr. Akins?”
“None whatever. Not to the office, I know. And you say she didn’t go home.”
“No,” Shapiro said. “She didn’t go home, Mr. Akins. We’re sorry to have kept you both from dinner.”