Death on the Aisle Read online

  “Yeh,” Mullins said. “Where was the ashes? Where was the butt he was smoking, because the only one was the broken one on the floor. Or if that was the cigarette, what made him break it?”

  Weigand’s fingers drummed again.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that the cigarette had nothing to do with it in the first place; that it was just Dr. Bolton smoking. But suppose the murderer wanted to fix 1:18, when Hubbard saw the cigarette glow, as the time of the murder, because at that time he had an alibi—was on stage, perhaps. Suppose Hubbard had already, not realizing it, spoken about the cigarette to the murderer. What’s to prevent our man from taking the ash-cup Bolton had been using, and which may have been full of cigarette ends, and throwing it away—and replacing it with an unused cup? Then he could take a couple of drags off a cigarette anywhere, drop it on the floor near Bolton, and leave us to work out the 1:18 time.”

  Mullins looked thoughtful. After a time he said, “Yeh.”

  “In that event,” Weigand said, “Bolton was killed after 1:18. But—” He broke off.

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. “Don’t ball it up any more. It’s screwy enough now.”

  Weigand shook his head, and drummed the desk.

  “Or,” he said, “it could be this way—the murderer did go and smoke a cigarette in a seat near Bolton’s and did intend to establish 1:18 as the time of the murder. He did that because, at 1:18, he wasn’t in the theatre. I mean, of course, he wasn’t suppose to be in the theatre.”

  Mullins scratched his head and then looked in his notebook.

  “Penfield Smith, Mary Fowler, this Christopher baby—they weren’t supposed to be in the theatre.”

  “And,” Weigand said, “add Mr. Ahlberg. He came in, when we were re-playing it for times, at 1:21. Three minutes after Bolton, in a manner of speaking, left it. But perhaps all our times are a little off. The second run-through lasted almost precisely as long as the first, but that doesn’t mean that every exit and every entrance coincided with the same exit and entrances in the first. Maybe, for example, they didn’t have any argument at all during the first few minutes of the original run-through, but had one of about the same length toward the end. Get it?”

  “Jeez, Loot,” Mullins said. “Let’s forget the whole business, huh? Let’s just figure that somebody bumped Bolton off any old time, huh? This sort of thing will get us nuts.”

  Weigand shook his head. He said they couldn’t just forget any part of the business. So Mullins would work out a chart showing the times it might be possible for each suspect to commit the murder; the times, that was, when each person was apparently for a long or short period off the stage, if one of the actors, or out of sight if not one of the actors. Mullins sighed. Weigand relented a little.

  “You can do it later,” he said. “Tonight, after we’re done here. Because just now, I think we’ll see some people about a murder.”

  He stepped to the door and spoke to Stein. He closed the door and came back to the desk.

  “We’re going to start with Mr. Kirk,” he said. “I think Mr. Kirk ought to have some things to tell us.”

  VI

  TUESDAY—5:37 P.M. TO 6:15 P.M.

  Humphrey Kirk sat and extended himself in the chair Weigand indicated and pushed back the lock of red hair. It fell down again. Weigand let the fingers of his left hand play for a moment on the polished surface of the desk. Then he told Kirk he wouldn’t keep him long.

  “Now,” he added, thoughtfully. He let the qualifying word hang in the air for a moment and went on. “I have a way of going about these things,” he said. “Sometimes it works. Just as, I suppose, you have a way of going about directing a play. Perhaps, as a matter of fact, there’s a certain similarity in the methods.”

  Kirk, Weigand thought, would be interested in shop talk. Kirk looked as if he were. He looked interested and inquiring.

  “I’ve found,” Weigand told him, “that there’s no use in trying to learn everything at once, to get all the answers the first time over. As a matter of fact, I usually don’t know all the questions the first time over. New points keep creeping in. I suppose a play develops in pretty much the same way?”

  “Well,” Kirk said, “it’s the other way around, of course. Analysis as against synthesis. But I see what you mean.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Obviously,” he said. “And in my job it works out this way—I don’t expect a witness to give me all he has the first time I talk to him. If he did, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with what he told me—I wouldn’t have an outline to fit it into. Just as you don’t expect an actor to give you all he has the first time he reads the line. You have to get a picture in your own mind before you know what you require of your actor. Right?”

  Kirk nodded.

  “Only of course,” he said, “I have the script to start with. And you haven’t.”

  Weigand felt Mullins looking at him wonderingly, and pretended he didn’t.

  “No,” he said. “We have to write the script as we go along. We see what happens first, and fit it into a story. It’s like coming into the middle of a movie—or, for that matter, like coming in on ‘Two in the Bush’ during a run-through of the second act. The first thing we wonder about is the relations of the people—who’s fond of whom, where the hates and irritations lie. That sort of thing. Right?”

  Kirk nodded. He said Weigand’s job, looked at in that way, seemed like an interesting one. Weigand nodded and drummed gently on the table. “Now, Mr. Kirk,” he said, “I have a strong feeling that you didn’t like Dr. Carney Bolton. I don’t say it was any more than that. If you want to tell me anything, I’ll listen.”

  Kirk pushed back the red lock and held his hand to his forehead. He stared at Weigand. Weigand could see him hesitating.

  “All right,” Kirk said. “I didn’t.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Tell me about him,” he directed.

  “Obviously,” Kirk said, “he was a very able man. From all I hear he was a good doctor; anyway he had some celebrated patients. He spent a lot of time on Broadway. He went to most of the openings, always with a different girl—or almost always. He had fingers in lots of pies, and money in lots of shows. He went to the Stork and places like that. He knew a lot of people.”

  “And,” Weigand said, “you didn’t like him. Why?”

  “I don’t like people like that, particularly,” Kirk said. “That was all.”

  “Now, Mr. Kirk,” Weigand said. “Don’t make things hard for us.”

  “No,” Kirk said, “that really was all, at bottom. He’d been a nuisance during rehearsals; he decided to give this one his personal attention and he was full of notions. He got in everybody’s hair. But as far as that’s concerned, almost everybody got in almost everybody’s hair. He irritated me more than—well, say Smitty for example, but chiefly because I don’t like people like Bolton and do like people like Smitty. Also, of course, Smitty made more sense. But there wasn’t anything else.”

  Weigand said he saw.

  “Why was Bolton particularly interested in this show, do you suppose?” he asked.

  “Because—” Kirk started, leaning forward. Then he changed his mind and settled back, adjusting the meandering lock. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Presumably the play just interested him more than usual.”

  “Or,” Weigand said, “perhaps somebody in the cast interested him more than usual.”

  Kirk said he wouldn’t know. He said it with a careful lack of interest.

  “Wouldn’t Miss James be rather Bolton’s type?” Weigand asked, suddenly. Kirk sat up.

  “My God, no!” he said. “She’s anything but his type. She wouldn’t—” He broke off. Weigand waited a moment.

  “Wouldn’t she, Mr. Kirk?” he said. “Dr. Bolton was—helpful to a good many young actresses, wasn’t he?”

  “Look,” Kirk said, “I tell you she wasn’t the type. She never looked at Bolton.”

  “She had lun
ch with him today,” Weigand said, without expression. Kirk looked amused.

  “Got you there, Lieutenant,” he said. “She had lunch with me.”

  “In that case,” Weigand told him, “she’s a liar. And for no reason. She says she had lunch—coffee, anyway—with Bolton at an Automat. Maybe you were along?”

  “Skip it,” Kirk said. “You’re on the wrong track.”

  It was, Weigand admitted, quite possible. He said there was one other question on the same track.

  “You’re pretty fond of Miss James yourself, aren’t you, Kirk?” he said.

  Kirk wanted to know whether that was any of Weigand’s damn business.

  “Frankly,” Weigand told him, “I don’t know. If Bolton were playing around with Miss James and you were pretty fond of her—well, finish it yourself, Kirk. I don’t know that I’d want any girl I was fond of playing around with Bolton.”

  Kirk was still uninterested, but his voice was hard. He said that Weigand could skip that, too. Weigand was cheerful about it. It was, he said, something Kirk could keep in mind—until next time. Meanwhile, they’d try another track. Kirk knew this theatre—how to get in and out of it, that sort of thing. He would save Weigand’s nosing about, at the moment, by telling him about that. Kirk nodded and told.

  You could, he said, get into the theatre through the front doors, as the audience did. Normally when the theatre was dark, even when rehearsals were going on, those doors were locked, however. You could get in through the stage door.

  “And the fire exit doors?” Weigand asked. “I suppose you can’t?”

  You couldn’t, Kirk told him. They all, in accordance with the law, opened outward. And on the outer surfaces there were neither knobs nor handles. And when fully closed, they locked automatically, as far as entrance was concerned. Weigand nodded. So there were two possible entrances, but the front entrance was almost certainly locked. Right?

  That was right.

  “Now,” Weigand said, “to get from the stage to the auditorium, how do you go about it?”

  There were doors at the ends of the right and left aisles, behind the boxes, Kirk told him. There were the temporary steps he had seen over the footlights. And you could go through the basement. Weigand looked interested.

  At the right—stage right—of the stage were the dressing rooms, Kirk told him. They opened off a corridor, into which the passage from the stage door led. From this door, there was also an entrance to the basement area under the orchestra seats—a wide, mostly empty expanse of concrete, broken by concrete pillars. Off this area there were entrances to the boiler room, where the cooling apparatus for use during the summer also was. Or you could, if you wanted to, find a door which would lead you under the stage. You could, if you knew which way to go, also find a door which led you into the downstairs lounge and from there you could, of course, go up carpeted stairs to the main floor of the theatre.

  Weigand nodded and said, “Thanks.”

  “Did you touch Bolton’s body when you found it?” he asked.

  “I don’t—” Kirk said—“yes, I remember. I touched his—the shoulder. It was when he sort of toppled away, across the arm of the seat, that I realized he was dead. Then I yelled!”

  Weigand supposed Kirk had merely touched clothing, not skin. So he wouldn’t know anything about body temperature. Kirk said, with a slight shudder, that he wouldn’t. Weigand said, “Right!”

  “By the way,” he said, “did the rehearsal we just saw go pretty much as the earlier one did, up to the time you found the body?”

  Kirk shrugged.

  “Pretty much,” he said. “New points kept coming up—little things, such as we take up in conferences before each session; some came up on the second run-through that didn’t on the first. But we covered much the same ground.”

  “I suppose,” Weigand said, “you always have little disagreements—among the actors, I mean?”

  Kirk said Oh God yes.

  “But,” he said, “this show is tame to some I’ve directed. These people are little ladies and gents.”

  “Is it a good play?” Weigand said. Kirk stared at him.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a great play. The last act needs a little fixing, maybe, and I’m not sure about the first scene and I want to speed up the second-act curtain, but it’s a swell play. First-rate Smitty.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Penfield Smith,” Weigand said, “how did he get along with Bolton?”

  Kirk grinned at him, suddenly.

  “He told you, didn’t he?” he said. “Smitty couldn’t bear him. His butting in was driving Smitty nuts. And when Smitty goes nuts—” Kirk looked at the ceiling and smiled reminiscently and shook his head. “Boy!” he said. “When Smitty goes nuts!”

  “Was that all there was to it?” Weigand asked. His tone was carefully without expression. He was, he decided suddenly, “throwing the line away.” Kirk continued to regard the ceiling.

  “No,” he said. “They didn’t get along from way back. There was something—” He stopped suddenly and looked at Weigand. “Very nice going, Lieutenant,” he said. “You caught me napping. But what the hell—a hundred people can tell you about it. Or you can read about it in Variety, if you want to go through the files. It was this way—”

  The way it was was that Bolton had done Smith a dirty trick some ten years earlier, before Smith had got going; when he was still trying to get going. So far as Kirk could remember it was on the occasion of Bolton’s only appearance as an independent producer. Normally he was an “angel,” backing recognized producers. But this time he appeared in his own right as the prospective producer of an early play by Penfield Smith. He went so far as to buy the play. And then—well, did Weigand know how the Dramatists’ Guild contract worked? Weigand shook his head.

  “It requires advance payments,” Kirk told him. “You can buy a play by paying a hundred dollars down, and a hundred a month for a few months. Then you have to pay a hundred and fifty a month. And as long as you make the option payments the play is yours. Up to a year.”

  “So?” Weigand said.

  So Bolton went into it, presumably, on the up and up, really meaning to produce the play. But he wanted changes made that Smith wouldn’t agree to and they quarreled. And then—

  “Well,” Kirk said, “Bolton just hung on to the play. He told Smith he was going to. He sent his option checks on the last possible days of grace each month and laughed at Smith and wanted to know what Smith was going to do about it. Smith couldn’t get his play back, you see. There was another producer interested, and he tried to buy Bolton off and Bolton just laughed. He held on to the play for the full year, which ran well into the spring. And by that time the other producer was tied up with another play and there was Smitty—stuck. He got around fifteen hundred for his play, and that was all he ever got, because it had some topical value and was no good the next year. And Smitty needed money bad in those days—needed it damned bad. He’d just got married and all that sort of thing; married, in fact, on the strength of “selling” the play to Bolton. And then they started a baby and there were complications—not Bolton’s fault, of course, although he just laughed when he heard about it. And somebody else might have put the play on and had a flop and Smitty wouldn’t have got even his fifteen hundred. However—”

  “Mr. Smith didn’t like it,” Weigand finished for him. Kirk agreed that Mr. Smith hadn’t.

  “He was sore as a pup when he found out that Bolton had money in this one,” Kirk said. “He thought Maxie was on his own when he signed the contract. He tried to withdraw the play, but he couldn’t.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “By the way,” he said, “did Mrs. Smith get all right?”

  Kirk shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “Mrs. Smith never did get all right. Mrs. Smith up and died.” He pushed back the lock of hair and regarded Weigand.

  “So I don’t think Carney Bolton was so much of a guy, do you, Lieutenant?” he said.


  Weigand said he didn’t seem to have been so much of a guy.

  “There are a lot more nice stories about him,” Kirk said. “You’ll run across them, probably. So you see why I wasn’t keen about—” He stopped, abruptly.

  “About what, Kirk?” Weigand asked him.

  Kirk shook his head.

  “No soap, Lieutenant,” he said. “Just make it read: ‘About Carney Bolton.’”

  “All right,” Weigand said. “I’ll make it read that way. For now. By the way, do you happen to remember where you were when Hubbard saw the cigarette—you remember where that comes in the act, don’t you?”

  Kirk nodded and then shook his head, spreading out his hands, helplessly.

  “Sitting somewhere out front, probably,” he said. “But I honestly don’t know, Lieutenant. I was all over the place. That’s the way I work.”

  Weigand nodded and thought that was all, for the moment. He could go back and join the others. And would he, in passing, ask Mr. Smith to come back. Kirk, standing, looked down at Weigand.

  “He’ll love me for telling you this, Lieutenant,” he said. “I just drifted into it. Or did you push me in?”

  Weigand shook his head and smiled faintly and did not answer. He watched Kirk go, looking after him speculatively.

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. “That guy’s that way about this James girl.”

  “Yes, Mr. Winchell,” Weigand said, staring at the door as it closed behind Kirk.

  “And listen, Loot, this guy Bolton was making a play for her and Kirk didn’t like it. Don’t you figure it that way?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Weigand said. “That is just the way I figure it.” Then he said, “Come in,” to the person who was knocking on the door. Penfield Smith came in. He removed his glasses from his nose and a handkerchief from his pocket. He peered at Weigand and polished his glasses. He peered at Mullins and put his glasses on and looked at Mullins. He sat down where Weigand indicated and took off his glasses and continued to polish them. He was still polishing them when he spoke.

  “I suppose by now, Lieutenant,” he said, “you know why I didn’t like Dr. Bolton—why I heartily approved his demise?”