Death on the Aisle (14 page)

Yes, Patrolman Callahan knew about what time it was; he made a point of knowing about what time everything was. “I gotta sense of time, Lieutenant,” he said. Weigand said that was fine. And what time, about, was it that the woman had tried to get into the theatre?

“I'd make it about 1:20, a minute or so either way,” Patrolman Callahan reported. “It couldn't have been much earlier, because it was 1:15 when I rode down from Broadway and it took me a few minutes to break up the jam. Some guy thought it would be bright to double park.”

Weigand said “right” and waved the patrolman on his way. But when Callahan reached the door there was another question for him.

“By the way,” he said, “could you see into the lobby? Did you see anybody?”

Callahan shook his head. Not from where he was sitting, he couldn't. But he supposed the woman had seen old man Evans in there puttering around, and that it was Evans who had refused to let her in.

“He's a funny old guy,” Callahan said. “He'd think it was fun to let her knock. By the way, I hear he got hurt?”

Weigand told him, briefly, about Evans. Callahan nodded.

“Somebody pushed him, all right,” Callahan said, with conviction. “He's got a lot of people around here sore on him. I know half a dozen kids who'd be glad to give him a shove, only they'd rather do it off the Empire State.” Callahan paused. “Not that he ain't all right when you get to know him,” he said. “He just don't like kids.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Thanks, Callahan.”

Weigand and Mullins continued with the routine. They looked for discrepancies in stories, for people seen at wrong times.

And there was a point at which Weigand's drumming fingers were quiet for a moment on the desk, and then picked up their beat at a slightly faster tempo. Weigand stared at the wall for a moment and then said:

“Well, that's interesting.”

Mullins involuntarily looked at the wall and then, hurriedly, back at Weigand, who hadn't noticed. Mullins waited, hoping for clarification, but Weigand merely stared a moment longer at the wall.

“Something, Loot?” Mullins said. Weigand abandoned the wall and looked at Mullins instead. After a moment he apparently saw Mullins and after a moment longer he nodded slowly.

“Something that doesn't match,” he said. “You heard it, Sergeant. Only—” He stopped and stared at Mullins again.

“You know, Mullins,” he said. “Things aren't neat. Why didn't Evans have a watch to break and stop when he fell downstairs? Everybody who is going to fall downstairs and knock himself out ought to have a watch. For the police force to go by.”

Mullins thought this over and grinned at Weigand.

“Maybe he had to hock it, Loot,” Mullins said. “You can't be too hard on a guy.” Then Mullins, remembering with a pang that there was thought to be engaged in, sobered. “Is there something screwy in the stories, Loot?” he asked, hopefully. “Something that don't fit?”

Mullins waited hopefully. But after a moment the Lieutenant shook his head, as Mullins had been afraid he would.

“We've got to keep you in training, Sergeant,” Weigand told him. “Think it over, Mullins.”

Mullins obediently, but without much hope, wrinkled his forehead and made a start.

Weigand watched him a moment, smiling slightly. Then he interrupted.

“And,” he said, “here's something else for you, Sergeant.

Weigand opened an envelope and spilled its contents on the desk. Its contents was burned paper matches. Mullins stared at them and then at Weigand.

“Stein,” Weigand said. “I've had him collecting them. Borrowing here, borrowing there. Giving himself nicotine poisoning, probably. And remembering where each match came from, and not throwing the match away after he used it.” Weigand spread the matches out on the desk top.

“Looking,” he said, “for this baby.”

The baby was wider than the other matches; wide enough to carry printing down its face. “The Pipe and Bottle,” the printing said. Looking at it, Mullins began to nod.

“The bottle-shaped one,” he said. “Like you found on the floor behind the stiff.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Stein got it on his fourth cigarette. The one he lighted with a match he borrowed from Mr. Humphrey Kirk.”

“Well,” Mullins said. “Think of that.”

They finished the second scene of the first act for the third time and Humpty Kirk uncoiled himself from a seat near the center of the fourth row.

“All right,” Kirk said. “Where the hell is she? Who the hell does she think she is? Helen Hayes? Katharine Cornell? Somebody we should stand around all night waiting for?”

Nobody seemed to have an answer to this series of questions. Then Jimmy Sand appeared, carrying the blue-bound script. It adhered to him, Pam North decided, watching.

“O.K., Humpty,” Sand said. “I guess she's on her way. Nobody answers.”

“On her way!” Kirk repeated. He spoke bitterly. “On her way where? She was ‘on her way' when you called half an hour ago. She's been on her way all night. Who the hell does she think she is?”

Kirk stopped and glared at everybody.

“All right,” he said. “All
right
. Take it from Martin's entrance—no, take it from the start of the scene. We'll twiddle our thumbs for her. Take it from the start.”

“Oh,” Pam said to herself. “Not
again!
”

I know it word for word, Pam thought. I could play all the parts. I could say it in my sleep. I've never been so bored.

It was strange, Pam thought, to be bored in the middle of a murder
and
in the middle of a play. It wasn't being the way she thought it would be. I thought temperament, Pam thought, and everybody tense and excited, because it's a rehearsal
and
a murder both together. She looked at Jerry, who was staring at the stage without expression and obviously thinking about several other things. Business, Pam thought, and he just sits there. I wonder where Bill is? She looked around for Dorian and remembered that, ten or fifteen minutes before, Dorian had stood up and wandered off, dreamily, and Pam hadn't asked where because she thought she knew. But Dorian hadn't come back.

“And I'll bet,” Pam said to herself, “she's found Bill and is right in the middle of things, and here I am and nothing happening!”

She started to stand up and Jerry looked at her abstractedly.

“Drink of water,” Pam said. “I'll be right back.”

Perhaps, she thought, Jerry will come with me, and we'll find out what's happening. But Jerry merely nodded and went back to thinking, with the look of a man who is thinking about business. Pam sighed and looked at the stage. They were going through the second scene of the first act for the fourth time, and forgetting lines and Jimmy Sand was prompting in a tired voice. Humpty Kirk seemed to have subsided somewhere.

“Probably in a coma,” Pam said to herself. “I should think he would.”

Pam walked up the aisle, thinking she would find something going on, but there was nothing. There was a drone from the stage and empty seats and no sign of anybody chasing murderers. Pam crossed back of partitions between the orchestra seats and the lobby doors and started down the aisle at the extreme right with the desultory movements of a person who may decide to sit down at any moment. But before she was halfway down her steps quickened. Pam North had an idea.

“I'll see what it looks like back there,” she said. “And where they really go when they go out the doors.” She said it to herself, but with almost audible determination. If they didn't want her to go back-stage, they could always say so, if they didn't see her, and nobody had said she mustn't. She passed back of the curtains which cut off the stage boxes and stumbled on a short flight of steps. She said “ouch” under her breath and “this must be it” under her mind. There was a door at the top of the short flight of steps and it opened toward her. Pam North stepped through, cautiously.

Caution was required. At her right was something infinitely complicated, and having to do with electricity. There were switches and buttons and, just as Pam feared, wires. She shrank to the other side, brushing against tall wooden frames over which canvas was stretched tightly. On the back of one of the frames was stenciled: “Teddy Must Run.” Pam could just make it out in light, which, starting bravely from unshaded bulbs, lost itself amid looming obstacles.

“‘Teddy Must Run,'” Pam repeated to herself. “Oh—I remember that. But it was years ago. This must be part of its scenery, just left around.”

Something brushed against her face and she jumped. In a moment she would have screamed, but in a moment she discovered that she had brushed the dangling end of a piece of rope. She looked up, and the rope disappeared in darkness. She could look a long way up, and there was a steel framework, with ropes dangling from it.

“The grid,” Pam said to herself, proud to have remembered. She edged forward and the space widened. It was bounded now, on her right, by a rough brick wall and, on her left, by a canvas structure which she recognized, almost at once, as the other side of Martin Bingham's apartment in the East Sixties. It was stenciled, too—“Two in the Bush.” Through it she could hear voices. A voice said: “—
to keep this one small place free from
—”

“
All the noisy bitterness
of the world
.” Pam finished to herself. It was still the second scene of the first act. Pam hoped it wasn't really as dull as it had now begun, to her, to sound.

She went on, and then, beyond another pile of canvas frames, stacked against the brick wall, a man was sitting in a kitchen chair, leaning back against the bricks. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at Mrs. North without interest. Pam smiled at him and he nodded absently. Then Pam remembered who he was, or almost who he was. He was one of the stage hands, or perhaps the electrician, who had sat in the semicircle when Bill was identifying people. He didn't seem to mind her being back-stage and she went on until the brick wall was in front of her, as well as at the right. She turned to her left, and realized that now she was directly behind the set—yes, here were the other sides of the two doors, which led out of Mr. Bingham's apartment. On this side of the doors there was a little platform, built up and reached by stairs—Pam wondered a moment, and then remembered that the doors, from the other, visible, side of the wall opened off a platform of similar height. Of course—the actors couldn't be caught climbing as they came in the doors. They had to have something on the other side to start from. It was interesting, Pam decided, to find out about these things. And now along the back there should be windows—the other side of windows. She came to the windows curtained and, after the first two, angling away, so as to cut off a corner of the room. It was funny, Pam was thinking, how small the set really was, seen thus unprotected in its essential wood and canvas, and how much more of the stage they could have used if they had wanted to—all this wasted space between the walls of the set and the real, brick wall of the theatre—and it was funny—Then Pam interrupted herself, because she heard voices. She had wondered where everybody was, and where all the actors went when they went off the stage, and now here were at least two of them, just around the corner of the set—around the blunted corner made by the windows. Pam hesitated, wondering if they would mind her being there, and then started to go on to meet them, because she was really not doing any harm. Then she stopped, because Humphrey Kirk, who ought to have been out front, was back here instead, and talking earnestly.

“They haven't yet, but they will,” Humphrey Kirk said. “You can trust them for that, Berta. It would be too easy if they didn't. Oh, darling—
why!
”

It didn't sound as Humphrey Kirk usually sounded. The “darling” was not its usual casual substitute for “hey, you!” And Kirk's voice was different; it had an odd, urgent note; it was—Then Pam identified the note, or thought she did, because she had heard something like it in another voice, often. It was the voice of a man who was worried through a deep fondness; who was brought up against, and baffled by, some alarming vagary in one deeply loved. Only this was not a little vagary—not one of those half-assumed, although still essentially real, variations from the understandable which both the man and the woman, without ostensible admission of the fact, enjoyed. This was about something which was, to Kirk, extremely real. Nor was there any doubt how he felt about Alberta James.

Now, she realized, Pam ought to cough, or fall noisily over something, or, more simply, walk on around the corner and interrupt. If people were to lurk, the people should be paid policemen and—But Pam did not go on around the corner, because now Alberta was speaking.

“But Humpty,” she said. “I had to. Just that once. You know I did. I couldn't just let it drop—not with everything unsettled. And—”

“You didn't want to let it drop. You didn't plan to, not really.” There was bitterness, and unhappiness, in Kirk's voice now. There was a little pause and then the girl spoke slowly.

“I can't make you believe me, Humpty,” she said. “That's the way it was—there was never anything, really, and what there was was over. Oh yes—that's clearer now than it was a while ago. Even than it was yesterday. I—he confused me, Humpty. For a while I didn't—It was all—complicated. But you know it was complicated. I couldn't just—
stop
. It was all—tangled up.”

“That's the trouble.” Kirk's voice was quick, this time, as the voice of a man who sees his point and drives toward it. “
You
were tangled up. That's why the rest of it was tangled—
you
weren't clear, sure in your own mind.” He paused. “Or in your own feelings,” he added. “God knows I've tried not to think that.”