Death on the Aisle Read online

  He turned and went off down the aisle, calling, “Jimmy! Hey, Jimmy!” Weigand heard Jimmy say “Yeh, Humpty.” Weigand looked after him and turned to Pam North, who was looking after him, too.

  “He knows about the material,” Mrs. North said, suddenly. “The orange silk, I mean. It belonged to the pretty girl.”

  “Miss Grady?” Weigand said. Mrs. North was impatient with him.

  “She is beautiful,” Mrs. North explained. “It’s a great strain on her. And Mr. Kirk doesn’t care. The other girl—the James girl. She’s pretty. And Mr. Kirk does care. Therefore—the silk belonged to her.”

  Weigand said, “Um-m.” He was about to go on when one of the detectives who, now that the body was gone from its cramped place in the seat, had been examining the seat and carpet beneath it with devoted care, interrupted him. Did the Lieutenant want to have a look before they cleared things up and took them away?

  “What things?” Weigand said. Detective Stein pointed with a shaft of light from his electric torch. Weigand said “Um-m-m” again and bent closer.

  There were several things to see; following the guiding finger from the flashlight, Weigand checked them off:

  Wedged in between backs of two seats immediately in front of the seat in which Dr. Bolton had sat: a paper cup, crumpled at the bottom where it had been forced into the small gap. In the bottom, Weigand’s finger told him, a quarter of an inch of water. For a moment Weigand was puzzled; then it was obvious. The cup was intended as an ashtray—the water in the bottom to extinguish cigarettes. There were no cigarettes in it.

  On the floor, a little to the left of Bolton’s chair, a cigarette, broken in two in the middle as if the fingers which held it had suddenly twisted convulsively; as, Weigand thought, they very well may have. The cigarette had been lighted, but it had fallen before more than two or three drags had been taken, and then it had, lying on the carpet, gone out. Weigand took the light from Stein and bent lower, examining the cigarette carefully without touching it. It was marked at one end with a manufacturer’s insignia which Weigand recognized.

  “Virginia,” Weigand said. “Straight; so it went out.”

  “Right,” Stein said. It was not parody; it was emulation.

  On the carpet near the cigarette, two paper matches, both burned.

  Weigand said “Um-m-m” and withdrew. Stein pointed to the carpet behind the seat Bolton had occupied. Obediently, Weigand illuminated the carpet with the torch.

  There was another burned paper match there. It was, however, a special paper match, being shaped like a bottle. Weigand picked it up and regarded it with interest.

  “I think,” he told Stein, “that I’ll keep this one. It might come in handy.”

  IV

  TUESDAY—4 P.M. TO 4:58 P.M.

  Humphrey Kirk called Weigand from the stage.

  “Ready when you are, Lieutenant,” he called and Weigand, saying “Right” on the way, went up the stairs over the orchestra pit. Everybody looked at him.

  “To fix times and things like that, I’m going to have you run through the second act just as you did earlier this afternoon,” Weigand told them. “I don’t expect an exact duplication, of course, but you ought to be able to come pretty close—with the lines to help you and everything. I want those who were not on the stage, but were somewhere else in the theatre, to go where they were earlier. I’ll have one of my men go with each of you who was somewhere else. Is that clear?”

  Several people nodded. Kirk said he thought they all understood.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Now is there anybody who wasn’t in the theatre when the run-through started?”

  Mary Fowler waited a moment, evidently for someone else to speak, and then spoke herself. She said she wasn’t in the theatre when the run-through started.

  “I’d had to go to my place for some samples,” she said. “I was late getting back—not that that was unusual, I’ll admit. They’d already started when I got in. And first I tried to come in the front, and that delayed me more.”

  “Through the front of the theatre?” Weigand asked. Mary Fowler, her protruding eyes looking at him intensely, nodded. “How was that?” Weigand said.

  She had thought the front doors might be open, she told him. Sometimes they were, and since she didn’t need to go back-stage at once, it would have been easier to come through the front of the theatre. But the doors were locked and, although she saw Evans inside, he pretended not to hear her and—

  “Wait a minute,” Weigand told her. “Who’s Evans?”

  Kirk snapped his fingers.

  “I forgot about Evans,” he said. “He’s the custodian of the theatre—sort of a watchman who looks after things when it’s shut up. He’s always around somewhere; I forgot all about him. He’s not one of our crowd, really; he belongs to the bank.”

  “To the bank?” Weigand repeated.

  The Consolidated Bank, Kirk told him—the bank that owned the Forty-fifth Street Theatre and employed Evans as watchman. Weigand nodded.

  “Find this man Evans,” he called to Stein. Stein said “Right” from somewhere in the rear. Weigand turned back to Mary Fowler.

  “I’ll send a man with you,” he said. “About what time did you get here?”

  It was, Mary Fowler told him, about twenty minutes after one. Weigand looked at his watch and nodded. She was to do again for the detective who would be with her, what she had done before, pretending to herself that it was three hours earlier in the afternoon. And—

  “I got here late too,” Christopher broke in, sulkily. “Do you want me to go out and come back?”

  Weigand nodded.

  “One detective can go out with you and—is it Miss Fowler?”

  “Miss,” Mary Fowler told him.

  “One man can go with both of you,” Weigand said. “After Miss Fowler comes in, he can wait with you. Or did you come in before she did?”

  “After,” Christopher said shortly. “She was sitting out front when I came in and I stopped and spoke to her.”

  Weigand looked at Miss Fowler, who nodded. Weigand said, “Right.”

  “You were the only two who weren’t in the theatre when the run-through started?” he asked. Nobody said anything.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “You can start it then, Kirk.” The detective looked at his watch again. “Start it in three minutes. That will make it 4:12 instead of 1:12, and keep our times even.”

  Kirk nodded. Weigand went down the temporary steps to the orchestra and stopped. He said: “Hold it.”

  “Were the lights on out here?” he asked. “I assumed they weren’t.”

  “No,” Kirk said. “They weren’t. Want them out?”

  Weigand did. Kirk yelled “Fleming!” and when Fleming came waved at the auditorium. Fleming nodded, and went off stage. The house lights suddenly went out.

  It was more like a theatre now, Weigand thought, worming his way across the house to join the Norths, Dorian and Mullins on the other side. The light was where it should be; the stage was a box of light and the orchestra was a cavern of shadows. Back through gathering darkness, rows of empty seats curved starkly; at intervals along the sides dim red lights marked the locations of exits. It was more like a theatre and yet for the first time forbidding. As Weigand sat in the aisle seat the Norths and Dorian had left for him when they saw him coming, he felt an odd uneasiness. His back felt unprotected from the darkness beyond.

  “It breathes down the back of your neck,” Mrs. North whispered to him, suddenly. “The emptiness.”

  Weigand nodded to her. They were sitting well down, half a dozen rows from the stage, the stage light on their faces. The darkness seemed to begin immediately behind them.

  Across the aisle, in the section of seats to their right and two rows nearer the stage, Penfield Smith was sitting. He had wedged a paper cup between two seats in front of him and was smoking. Kirk came down the stairs on the other side of the house and dropped into a seat in the center section. The
stage emptied; then Jimmy Sand came onto it through the door at the left, carrying a straight chair and a script bound in blue paper. He sat down and twisted in his chair.

  “O.K., Humpty,” he said. “Want them on?”

  “Let it go,” Kirk said.

  Sand turned back and called, “All right, people.”

  Ellen Grady and Percy Driscoll came on together. Miss Grady went to a small sofa which stood a little distance from the footlights, and facing them, a little to Weigand’s left of the center of the stage. She sat on it, and continued a conversation with Driscoll, who walked across the stage to stand easily near the fireplace.

  “—and so they’re closing it out of town,” Miss Grady said. “And anyone could have told them that Florence couldn’t ever play it. A good many people did tell them.”

  “I know, darling,” Driscoll said. “Florence is a lovely person, but—”

  Paul Oliver came in hurriedly through the door near Driscoll, crossed the stage to a position near the window in the rear wall and said: “Sorry. Didn’t mean to hold you up.”

  “Of course not, darling,” Ellen Grady said, with a terrible sweetness. “You never mean—”

  “Curtain!” said Jimmy Sand, tersely. Miss Grady relaxed suddenly upon the sofa and became another person. Her voice lifted and took on inflections and she said:

  “Let’s try to look at it simply, Francis. Let’s try to look at it as if it were a simple thing and we were people who could. Now do you see what I mean, Humpty?”

  Miss Ellen Grady had suddenly, more or less in the middle of things, quit being Joyce Barber and become again Miss Grady, Weigand decided. She stared at Humphrey Kirk, shielding her eyes with her hand.

  “Where the hell are you, Humpty?” Miss Grady demanded. “Can you see what he’s doing?”

  “Now, darling—” Kirk said.

  “Up there catching flies, that’s what he’s doing,” Miss Grady said indignantly. “Every time I start a line he does a double take.”

  Oliver spoke with dark bitterness from the windows, out of which he had been, Weigand now realized, staring with rather aggressive interest.

  “I thought,” Oliver said, “that this was supposed to be comedy. I thought we decided there was a laugh there, when I break in on all this simplicity, and there isn’t any laugh if I don’t build for it.” Mr. Oliver was very resigned and weary about it all. “Heaven knows,” he said, “we need a laugh somewhere.”

  “Why don’t you stand on your head?” Miss Grady demanded, turning and glaring at him over the back of the sofa. “That’ll get a laugh. That’ll wow them.”

  Oliver looked at her with great tolerance.

  “This isn’t that kind of a play, darling,” he told her. “No cartwheels in this one.”

  Miss Grady turned toward Kirk and demanded indignantly whether she was supposed to take that.

  “From this over-grown juvenile,” she said, angrily. “From this mug-man, this—this fly-catcher?”

  “Children,” said Kirk, getting up and walking down to the rail of the orchestra pit. “Children!”

  Paul Oliver walked down-stage. Miss Grady leaned forward on the sofa and stared at Kirk.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver said. He sounded sincere, Weigand thought, wondering what to do about it all.

  “Did they do this before?” Weigand whispered to Pam. She nodded.

  “Almost exactly,” she said. “It’s as good as a play.” She paused and considered this. “Better than some,” she added, critically.

  “I’m merely trying to do what you said you wanted, Humpty,” Oliver said. “I’ll be glad to come down a little, except that it will make an awfully long cross when I go out. But perhaps Mr. Smith can put another beat in the line to get me off.”

  “Listen,” Mr. Smith said, standing up suddenly and knocking his paper cup of cigarette butts into the aisle. “That line stands! Absolutely and finally! Another beat and where’s the nuance? That’s what I want to know.”

  Mr. Smith sat down indignantly. Then he stood up again.

  “That’s final,” he said, and sat down.

  “Of course, Smitty,” Kirk promised him. “But it does give Paul a long cross.”

  Mr. Smith growled.

  “All right,” said Kirk, agreeably, “we’ll work it out some other way.” Kirk climbed to the stage and led Oliver back to the windows. Then, grasping him by the shoulders, he led him two paces down toward the footlights. “Try it from there. All right, darling, take it up.”

  “—feel things simply,” Ellen Grady said, instantly again Joyce Barber.

  She stopped and nobody said anything.

  “Darling please remember—yours, Perce,” Jimmy Sand said.

  “Sorry,” said Percy Driscoll, suddenly, as it seemed, awakening from an inner coma. “Darling—please remember that simple people wouldn’t be in this situation—that it’s a situation—”

  “Play it, please,” Kirk said. “You’re just saying it. How can we get the feeling of the thing if we don’t act it?”

  “Sorry,” said Driscoll. “I was just thinking—”

  “Listen, children,” Kirk said. “Don’t think. Just act. Just run through it.”

  “Sorry,” said Driscoll. He repeated the lines, assuming the character of Francis Carter. Ellen Grady answered him as Joyce Barber, and then Paul Oliver, now evidently somebody called Douglas Raimondi, broke in. Kirk returned to his seat.

  It was a play, now, Weigand realized. It was as if one mood had been turned off at the faucet and another turned on; it was confusing, but it was a play.

  “She’s going to marry Martin Bingham,” Pam North whispered. “But she’s been living with the other man—Carter—all this time and he doesn’t like it. And that other man, he’s the family jester. He just stands around and says things. Like Alexander Woollcott on the sofa.”

  “What?” said Weigand, in spite of himself.

  “Behrman,” Pam said, still in a whisper but a little impatiently. “Woollcott on a sofa. Of course you remember.”

  “Oh,” said Weigand. “That.”

  “Hush, Pam,” Jerry North said, from beyond her.

  “But Doug,” Ellen Grady said on the stage, “he couldn’t have been under the bed!”

  She had twisted on the sofa to look upstage toward Oliver, and, without moving, she raised her voice and called: “Humpty!” Kirk said, “Yes, darling.”

  “They can’t see my face,” Ellen Grady said. “And I’m damn near breaking my neck. It throws the line away.”

  “I know, darling,” Kirk said. “But it’s a back-hair line.”

  “All my lines are back-hair lines,” Miss Grady said, bitterly. “They always will be as long as you let him lurk up-stage every minute he’s on.” She paused. “Doing double and triple takes,” she added, with a voice of cold anger.

  “All right, darling,” Kirk said. “We’ll work on it tomorrow. I’ll think of something. Pick it up, Paul.”

  “It was the only place he wasn’t afraid,” Paul Oliver said, walking across the stage toward the door at his left. “See what I mean about the beat, Humpty? Am I supposed to run?”

  A growl started from the vicinity of Penfield Smith. Kirk intervened hastily.

  “I’ll work something out, Paul,” Kirk promised. “Maybe I can move you in and shorten the cross.”

  “Why not have him stand in front of me?” Ellen Grady inquired, sweetly. “Smack in front of me? Wouldn’t that be funny?”

  “Children!” said Kirk, gently. “Children! Pick it up from there.”

  “Bell,” said Jimmy Sand. “Brrrrrrr.”

  “Jimmy!” said Ellen Grady. “What a lovely bell.”

  John Hubbard came on. He met Paul Oliver going off and there were sounds of greeting and parting.

  “That’s it, children,” Kirk said. “Ad lib it there.”

  Mullins slipped into the seat behind Weigand and leaned toward him.

  “That guy Evans—” Mullins said. Weigand shoo
k his head, stopping it. “Never mind now,” he said. “Time them—when they come on and go off I mean. It will give us a framework, maybe.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said.

  They were getting on with it on the stage. Alberta James had come on. Ellen Grady moved upstage and turned to offer her left profile to the audience. She appeared to be staring absently through the windows. Kirk got up and moved a few seats toward the rear of the house, and then crossed through the row and came down to Weigand. He half knelt in the aisle beside the detective.

  “Do you always have as much trouble?” Weigand asked. “Did you earlier today?”

  “Trouble?” Kirk repeated, in apparently honest astonishment. “We’re not having any trouble. As smooth a run-through as I’ve ever seen.”

  Weigand said, “Oh.”

  “Then the time’s running about the way it did earlier?” he said.

  “I think so,” Kirk said. “Just about. It’s a little hard to gauge, but it won’t vary much. It never varies much. Yes, John?”

  Weigand looked up. John Hubbard had dropped out of his part and come down to the footlights.

  “I just remembered something,” Hubbard said. “There was a cigarette, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes?” said Weigand. “What do you mean?”

  “I was trying to think if things were the way they were earlier,” Hubbard explained. “After I came on, I mean—I thought it might help.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “And they weren’t? Something about a cigarette?”

  “Somebody was smoking a cigarette back there on the aisle,” Hubbard said. “The right aisle. I caught the glow as I came on and then—well, it was a little point of light, see?”

  Weigand got up and moved to the pit rail. He said, “Right.”

  “Just after I came on, I think,” Hubbard said, “it went out. That is, it didn’t exactly go out—it moved down, as if somebody had lowered a cigarette from his lips. Only, thinking about it, it went down faster than that. As if somebody had dropped it, only dropped it so that the lighted end always pointed this way.” Hubbard stopped and looked at Weigand earnestly. “Am I making it clear?” he said.