Death on the Aisle (16 page)

Bill Weigand smiled at her.

“Just for the ride, Pam?” he said. “It's all right with me. And doubtless very fine with Mullins. Only won't Jerry be jealous?”

“Bill!” Pam said. “You're ridiculous. Come on, Aloysius.”

“Listen, Mrs. North—” Mullins said. But he said it to Mrs. North's back, which was preceding him up the aisle. It was a back which moved jauntily, because Pam was pleased with herself. If I had stayed, she thought, I would have forgotten and told Bill about Alberta and Mr. Kirk, and I promised myself I wouldn't. And if I go now why—well, maybe something will come up so that it won't be worth telling. And then I won't have to worry.

“And anyway,” Pam added to herself as she and Mullins, with the red lights blinking officially on the car's prow and the siren demanding clearance up ahead, “anyway, it's a nice ride.” The siren screamed at a loitering truck; the police car lurched, caught itself and went around. Pam clutched the door handle. “Whee!” Pam said. “Ride 'em, Al!”

Mullins beamed at her with the near side of his face.

“Mostly the Loot won't—” he said. The siren drowned the rest of it.

Their course was across town, almost to the East River; then up for a dozen blocks. In ended when the car swerved into the curb in front of a small, sedate apartment house, from which the doorman hurried.

“You can't—” the doorman began, and saw the police shield on the car's nose. “What—?” the doorman said.

Mullins told him. Miss Ellen Grady's apartment, and no need to telephone Miss Grady. Because apparently she wasn't in. The doorman looked puzzled.

“I'm almost sure she is,” he said. “I'd have seen her go out. Is there something—?”

“That's what we're here to find out,” Mullins said. The doorman was looking wonderingly at Mrs. North's trim, non-authoritative figure. Mullins' manner became more official than ever and rolled over the doorman's implicit inquiry. At a repeated command the doorman, his expression slightly baffled, led them into the sedate lobby and took them up on the very modern, very subdued, elevator. He took them to the fourth floor and along a corridor and to a door marked “4-F.” The doorman pushed a button and a refined buzz answered him from within. But nothing else answered. He pressed the button again. Mullins brushed him aside and knocked harshly. The sound of his fist on the door panel was noisy and intrusive in the corridor. It filled Pam North, waiting behind the men, with an odd feeling of discomfort and alarm. Mullins tried the knob. Nothing happened, except that the doorman made a small, disturbed sound.

“She isn't in, sir,” he said. “She must have gone out without my noticing. If you would like to leave—”

“I'd like a passkey,” Mullins said. The weight of his official assurance bore down protest. The doorman looked unhappy, but reached for a ring of keys hooked to his belt.

“I don't know what—” he said. Mullins gestured impatiently. Pam felt sorry for the doorman, who could never finish a sentence, but not very sorry. She was feeling, obscurely, more afraid than sorry. Mullins took the keys and used the one the doorman had sifted from the rest. The door opened on a quiet apartment.

It was a small apartment, decorated by a decorator. “Furnished,” Pam decided. “The very best furnished.” The door opened onto a small living room, with a wooden mantel on one wall pretending to frame a fireplace. The pretense was only formal and not expected to deceive. Beyond, through a door, was another room. Pam followed Mullins into it. The doorman stood just inside the living room, trying to look as if he were still outside. Mullins stopped in the doorway to the next room and said, “Well!” Pam peered around him.

It was a bedroom, not so “furnished.” The bed was wide and low and spread with yellow silk and there was just room, near it, for a deep chair, also in yellow silk. There was a glass dressing table, too, with intricately shaped bottles almost filling it, and in front of it powder had spilled on a raspberry carpet. By the bed was a soft, thick white rug.

And over all these things there was a scattering of other objects. One slim, extravagantly heeled shoe lay on its side on the white rug; its mate stood impertinently on the dressing-table bench. Stockings festooned the deep chair and in the middle of the floor there was a satin girdle, tiny and unexpectedly forlorn. A brassière hung dejectedly over the edge of the bed. And halfway to one of the doors in the right wall of the room, a trail of silk and lace lay on the floor. Pam looked at the negligee, estimated its presumptive cost quickly and shook her head mentally. A couple of hundred dollars, she thought, lay trailing thus casually on the carpet, which could hardly be that clean. Mullins, staring in, said he would be damned.

“Somebody's searched the joint,” he said. “Jeez.”

Pam's laugh was tiny and subdued.

“Mr. Mullins!” she said. “She's just dressed to go out. And left what she didn't want.”

“Huh?” said Mullins. “Left the place like this?” His tone was disapproving, but Pam was not listening. There was, she thought, something wrong over that explanation. There was—her eyes went over the room. The shoe, that was it! The shoe on the dressing-table bench. Because if Ellen Grady had been going out, she would have sat on the bench the very last thing and if the shoe had been there then she would have brushed it off. But if she had been changing shoes
after
she had finished making up, then she would almost certainly have sat on the bench to change them and couldn't have put the shoe there because
she
was there.

“Wait,” Pam said, because now she knew what the room looked like. She started toward the doors in the right wall and then stopped suddenly. She turned to Mullins.

“You go,” she said. “Because it looks as if—as if she's gone to take a bath. And hadn't come out again!”

Mullins was across the room before she finished and had one of the doors open. And then he stood in this doorway and Pam could tell from his back that he had found something. He said “Jeez” again, but this time the tone was different. And, wishing she had never come—wishing that now she could make herself turn and run from the apartment—Pam followed him.

Ellen Grady had been a very beautiful woman. Lying small and naked in her bath, with hair floating around her face, she was still very beautiful. Mullins, looking down at her, swore slowly and with a strange sadness, because no man looking down thus on Ellen Grady, dead and defenseless and still singularly beautiful, could have been other than saddened at the waste. And even Pam, who had no reason to feel as a man would have felt, had another feeling beside her horror—a feeling that the bodies of the dead should not be so beautiful; should not, above anything else, look, in their slender whiteness, so dreadfully alive.

There was no mark on the body and the face was just above the water.

“No blood,” Mullins said. He tested the water with a finger and shook his head. “Just warm,” he said. “Anyway, she couldn't have been scalded.”

He turned, conscious of Pam North's presence.

“Jeez,” he said. “We'd better—I guess we'd better get the Loot.”

He looked back again at Ellen Grady's body, and said “Jeez” once more, and followed Pam North into the living room. Pam sat down very sudenly on the bed and watched and then put her head down to force back the circle of dark which seemed to be narrowing about her. She heard Mullins talking into the telephone.

“Well,” Detective Stein said, speaking into the wall telephone in the passage off the stage entrance of the West Forty-fifth Street Theatre, “he isn't here, Sergeant. He's at the hospital. Evans came out of it.” Stein listened. “I'll get him on the phone. And I'll send the gang.” He listened. “Jeez,” he said. “In the bathtub, huh? What? Well, I'll be damned.”

He hung up the receiver and turned to Detective King.

“Well,” Stein said, “they found the Grady dame, all right. In her bathtub. Dead as a beefsteak. The Sarge thinks maybe she was drowned.”

Lieutenant Weigand sat beside the hospital bed and listened to a small, wizened, angry man. Edward Evans had come out of it and, what was more, remembered a good deal about it. What he remembered made him very angry. At the moment his anger seemed rather more intense than a man could endure while remaining flat on his back. Weigand told him to take it easy.

“I gather,” Weigand said, “that you don't think you fell. You think somebody pushed you. Right. And before?”

“What the hell?” Evans said. “Me fall on those steps? After I've gone up and down them a thousand times, maybe? You're a fool, officer!”

Weigand's voice was gentle.

“No,” he said. “I think you were pushed. I just want to get it straight. Will you tell it once more, Mr. Evans?”

“Yah!” said Mr. Evans indignantly. “What's the matter? Can't you hear, or something?”

Weigand smiled at the angry little man and waited. After a moment, Evans almost smiled himself.

“I guess I'm sort of sore,” he said. “Here it is again—”

He couldn't, he said, be sure of times. He had been around when the members of the company started to come back after lunch. He remembered Kirk coming back; he remembered that, a minute or so before, Dr. Bolton had come in through the stage door and looked around as if he expected to see somebody and then gone back into the orchestra section. A few others had come in; Evans hadn't noticed particularly. He had left the back-stage and gone through the auditorium to the lobby. Not, it seemed, for any particular reason.

“I've got to keep an eye on things,” he explained. “I'm responsible. Nobody'll keep an eye on things if I don't.”

So he had gone to keep an eye on the lobby. He had picked up a cigarette butt or two from the sand-filled urns there and “had a look around.” Weigand could see him looking around—irascible and inquiring and very responsible. Evans had stayed in the lobby “a few minutes.” He thought he might have left it about 1:15. It might, however, be five minutes either way.

“Now,” Weigand said, “did you see anybody while you were there?”

“See anybody?” Evans repeated. “Why would I see anybody?”

Weigand hadn't, he said, any idea. He merely wondered. Was there anybody in the lobby? Or at the doors leading to the street?

“No,” Evans said. “I didn't see anybody.”

“Suppose,” Weigand said, “somebody had been trying to get into the lobby … from the street, I mean … and, finding the doors locked, had knocked. Would you have seen them? Or heard them?”

“Well,” Evans said, “that depends. If I was down near the doors, sure. If they knocked loud enough for me to hear, I'd have heard. But nobody did.”

“But,” Weigand said, “it's possible that you may have been some distance from the doors, with your back to them, and not have seen somebody who was trying to get in. Perhaps not even have heard them if they knocked? How is your hearing, by the way?”

That was, Weigand realized, a futile question. Evans bristled again.

“Nothing wrong with my hearing,” he said. “Nothing wrong with my eyes. Nobody tried to get in while I was there.”

Now he was certain, where before he had been doubtful. But the facts were not clarified. Evans' hearing might be less acute than he supposed; very probably, considering his indignation at the question, was less acute. With street noises to drown a tapping on the glass, he might have heard nothing when Mary Fowler tried to get in. Weigand was inclined to think that Evans had not seen her, whatever she thought. But she might merely have been wrong in thinking he saw her, and not wrong in saying he was there. The question stayed open.

“Right,” Weigand said. “You stayed a few minutes in the lobby. Then you went downstairs to the lounge. Right?”

“Sure,” Evans said. “Like I told you. I looked around there, and then went to the door leading down to the basement—only it ain't a basement, really. Not a real basement. Just a place under the orchestra and stage.”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “I've seen it. That's where we found you, remember. Now, tell me again what happened.”

“Well,” Evans said, “like I said, I opened the door. I hadn't switched on the lights, except there was a light in the men's lavatory and the doors were open, so it was sort of light. Enough to see your way around. I opened the door and started to step down and then I heard somebody. I started to turn around—”

He had just relinquished the doorknob and stood at the head of the stairs when he heard the sound; an indescribable sound of movement. He had started to turn and in a moment he would have seen who was behind him. But he never completed the turn. Something struck his shoulders heavily, hurling him off balance. He felt himself pitching foward and then—

“Well,” Evans said, “next thing I was here, in this bed.” He glared. “Somebody pushed me,” he said. “Somebody tried to kill me so I wouldn't see them. But they didn't. I'm tougher than that.”

The last was said with evident gratification, and some pride.

“Tougher than I look,' he added. “Where'd you say you found me?”

Weigand told him again about the little closet. Evans looked puzzled.

“I don't get it,” he said. “Why didn't they finish me off?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “Maybe they—he or she, whichever it was—thought you
were
dead, and just hauled you off to the closet so we wouldn't find the body. An inexperienced person might make that mistake. Or maybe, being sure you hadn't seen enough to identify anybody, the person who pushed you didn't care whether you were dead or not. If you had had a moment more to turn around, so you had really seen—well, then it might have been different. As long as you hadn't seen, and weren't given a chance to, you were no more dangerous alive than dead.”