Ten Plus One

13

David Arthur Cohen was a sour little man who made his living being funny.

He operated out of a one-room office on the fourteenth floor of a building on Jefferson, and it was in this office that he greeted the detectives sourly, offered them chairs sourly, and then said, “It’s about these killings, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, Mr. Cohen,” Meyer said.

Cohen nodded. He was a thin man with a pained and suffering look in his brown eyes. He was almost as bald as Meyer, and the two men, sitting on opposite sides of the desk, with Carella standing between them at one end of the desk, looked like a pair of billiard balls waiting for a careful shooter to decide how he would bank them.

“It dawned on me when Mulligan was murdered,” Cohen said. “I’d recognized the other names before then, but when Mulligan got killed, the whole thing suddenly fell into place. I realized he was after all of us.”

“You realized this when Mulligan was killed, huh?” Meyer said.

“That’s right.”

“Mulligan was killed on May second, Mr. Cohen. This is May eighth.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s almost a full week, Mr. Cohen.”

“I know that.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“What for?”

“To tell us what you suspected.”

“I’m a busy man.”

“We understand that,” Carella said. “But surely you’re not too busy to bother trying to save your own life, are you?”

“Nobody’s going to shoot me,” Cohen said.

“No. You have a guarantee of that?”

“Did you guys come up here to argue? I’m too busy to argue.”

“Why didn’t you call us, Mr. Cohen?”

“I told you. I’m busy.”

“What do you do, Mr. Cohen? What makes you so busy?”

“I’m a gag writer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I write gags.”

“For what? For whom?”

“For cartoonists.”

“Comic strips?”

“No, no, single-box stuff. Like you see in the magazines. I write captions for them.”

“Let me get this straight, Mr. Cohen,” Carella said. “You work with a cartoonist who…”

“I work with a lot of cartoonists.”

“All right, you work with a lot of cartoonists who send you drawings to which you write captions? Is that it?”

“No. I send them the caption, and they make the drawing.”

“From the caption?”

“From a lot more than the caption.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Do you see these filing cabinets?” Cohen asked, waving his arm toward the wall behind him. “They’re full of cartoon ideas. I write up the gag, and then I send a batch of them to any one of the cartoonists on my list. They read the gags. If they like four, or five, or even one, they’ll hold it and draw up a rough sketch to show the humor editor of the magazine or newspaper. If the editor okays it, the cartoonist draws up a finish, gets his check, and sends me my cut.”

“How much is your cut?”

“I get ten percent of the purchase price.” Cohen looked at the detectives, saw that they were still puzzled, and said, “Here, let me show you.” He turned in his swivel chair, opened one of the files at random, and pulled out a thick sheaf of small white slips measuring about three by five. “There’s a gag typed on each one of these slips,” Cohen said. “See? That’s the number in the right-hand corner—each gag has a different number—and my name on the bottom of the slip.” He spread several of the slips on the desktop. Meyer and Carella leaned over the desk and read the nearest one.

“That’s what you send the cartoonist?” Carella asked.

“Yeah,” Cohen said. “Here’s a good one. Look at this one.”

Carella looked.

“That’s pretty funny,” Meyer said.

Cohen nodded sourly. “Here’s the one right after it. This is called snowballing. You write one gag, and another one along similar lines suggests itself, and you write that one. Here, look at it.”

“I don’t get it,” Meyer said.

“Well, you either get them or you don’t,” Cohen answered, shrugging. “Here’s one of my favorites.”

“Is this what you do all day long?” Carella asked.

“All day long,” Cohen said.

“How many of these do you write every day?”

“It depends on how it’s going,” Cohen answered. “Sometimes I can turn out twenty or thirty a day. Other times I’ll just sit at the typewriter, and nothing’ll come to mind at all. It runs in cycles.”

“Do all cartoonists use gag writers?”

“Not all of them. But a great many. I send to about a dozen of them regularly. I’ve got…oh…maybe two hundred gags at market right this minute. I mean, gags they’ve held and drawn up to show around. I make a pretty good living at it.”

“I’d go out of my mind,” Meyer said.

“Well, it’s not bad, really it isn’t,” Cohen said.

“Do you enjoy doing it?” Carella asked.

For a moment the three men had forgotten why they were in that office. They were in that office to discuss six murders, but for the moment Cohen was a professional explaining his craft, and Meyer and Carella were two quite different professionals who were fascinated by the details of another man’s work.

“Sometimes it gets a little dull,” Cohen said. “When the ideas aren’t coming. But I usually enjoy it, yes.”

“Do your jokes make you laugh?” Carella asked.

“Hardly ever.”

“Then how do you know whether they’re funny or not?”

“I don’t. I just write them and hope somebody else’ll think they’re funny.” He shrugged. “I guess they must be, because I sell an awful lot of them. To the best magazines, too.”

“I never met a gag writer before,” Meyer said, cocking his head to one side appreciatively.

“I never met a detective before,” Cohen said, and suddenly the visit came back into focus, suddenly there were two detectives in a small office with a man who was linked to six homicides. In deference to the pleasant tangent, there were perhaps thirty seconds of silence. Then Meyer said, “Can you tell us anything about that play in 1940, Mr. Cohen?”

“There isn’t much to tell,” Cohen said. “I went into it for kicks. I was a liberal-arts major, and I hadn’t yet made up my mind what I wanted to do, so I was experimenting. I fooled around with the drama group for about a year, I guess.”

“Acting?”

“Acting, yes, and I also wrote some skits for a revue we did.”

“When was that?”

“After The Long Voyage Home; 1941, I think.”

“What about the people who were in the O’Neill play? What do you remember about them?”

“Gee, that was a long time ago,” Cohen said.

“Was there anything out of line? An incident of some kind? A fight? Even a heated argument?”

“Not that I can recall. It seemed like a pretty smooth production. I think everyone got along pretty well.”

“There were three girls in the play,” Carella said. “Was there any trouble with them?”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Two guys falling for the same girl, anything like that?”

“No, nothing,” Cohen said.

“Then nothing out of the ordinary happened?”

“I can’t remember anything. It was just a routine college show. We all got along pretty well.” Cohen hesitated. “Even had a party after the show.”

“Anything out of line happen at the party?”

“No.”

“Who was there?”

“The cast, and the crew, and Professor Richardson, the faculty adviser. He left early.”

“How late did you stay?”

“Until it was over.”

“And when was that?”

“Oh, I don’t remember. Early in the morning sometime.”

“Who else was there when it broke up?”

“Five or six of us.” Cohen shrugged. “Six, I guess.”

“Who were the six?”

“Three guys and three girls.”

“Who were the girls?”

“The three who were in the show. Helen Struthers, and the other two.”

“And the guys?”

“Tony Forrest, Randy Norden, and me.”

“Any trouble?”

“No. Look, we were kids. We were all in separate rooms, necking.”

“And then what, Mr. Cohen?”

“Then we all went home.”

“All right, what’d you do after you got out of college? Were you in the service?”

“Yes.”

“What branch?”

“The Army. The infantry.”

“What was your rank?”

“I was a corporal.”

“And your job?”

Cohen hesitated. “I…” He shrugged. “I told you. I was in the infantry.”

“What’d you do in the infantry?”

“I was a sniper,” Cohen said.

The room went silent.

“I know how that sounds.”

“How does it sound, Mr. Cohen?”

“Well, I’m not exactly an idiot, and I know the man who’s been doing these killings is a…a sniper.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I haven’t seen a rifle since I was discharged in 1946,” Cohen said. “I never want to see another rifle as long as I live.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t like killing people from ambush.”

“But you were an expert marksman, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you shoot at all now?”

“I told you…”

“Hunting, I mean. For sport.”

“No.”

“Do you own a rifle, Mr. Cohen?”

“No.”

“A pistol?”

“No.”

“Any kind of a weapon?”

“No.”

“Have you ever used a telescopic sight?”

“Yes, in the Army.” Cohen paused. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said. “Nowadays, when I talk about killing somebody, I mean I’ve written a gag that’ll knock him dead.”

“And that’s all you mean?”

“That’s all.”

“Mr. Cohen,” Meyer said, “where do you live?”

“Uptown. Near the Coliseum.”

“We’d like to take a look at your apartment, Mr. Cohen, if that’s all right with you.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“We’ll be forced to swear out a search warrant.”

Cohen reached into his pocket and threw a ring of keys on the desk. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. “The key with the round head opens the vestibule door. The brass key opens the apartment door.”

“The address?”

“127 North Garrod.”

“And the apartment number?”

“4-C.”

“We’ll give you a receipt for the keys, Mr. Cohen,” Carella said.

“Will you be out of there by six?” Cohen asked. “I’ve got a date.”

“I imagine so. We appreciate your cooperation.”

“I just have one question,” Cohen said. “If this guy is out to get us, how do I know I’m not next?”

“Would you like police protection?” Carella asked. “We can provide it, if you like.”

“What kind of protection?”

“A patrolman.”

Cohen considered this for a moment. Then he said, “Forget it. There’s no protection against a sniper. I used to be one.”

In the street outside, Carella asked, “What do you think?”

“I think he’s clean,” Meyer said.

“Why?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve been watching television, and going to the movies, and reading books, and I discovered something about homicide.”

“What’s that?”

“If there’s a Jew, or an Italian, or a Negro, or a Puerto Rican, or a guy with any foreign-sounding name, he’s never the one who did it.”

“Why not?”

“It ain’t permitted, that’s why. The killer has to be a hunnerd-percent white American Protestant. I’ll bet you ten bucks we don’t find anything bigger than a slingshot in Cohen’s apartment.”