Death on the Aisle (7 page)

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 shook 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.

“Yes,” Weigand said. “I get the picture. And this was just after you came on-stage?”

Hubbard nodded.

He started back to his seat and turned. “You're sure it was the
right
aisle?” he said. Hubbard nodded. “Which one?” Weigand insisted. Hubbard pointed. Weigand said, “Oh, of course.
Your
right,” and went back to his seat. “Right” and “Left” might be confusing in the theatre, he realized. Stage right was to the audience's left; Hubbard's “right aisle” was the aisle on the left as you entered the theatre. The aisle on which Dr. Carney Bolton had been sitting.

Hubbard waited a moment longer and Kirk said:

“All right, children. Take it from there.”

They picked it up. John Hubbard and Alberta James were, it appeared, Wade and Sally Bingham; it was their father Ellen Grady, as Joyce Barber, was planning to marry. They were, it became evident, opposed to this—it was a duel between them and Joyce Barber; a duel very deft and biting.

“This is where it starts rolling,” Kirk said, still crouched in the aisle. Weigand looked across at Penfield Smith. He could see little of Smith's face, but what he could see had an expression of almost exalted approval. Kirk followed Weigand's glance.

“He likes it,” Kirk said. “He knows when he's good.”

The scene between Joyce Barber, Francis Carter and the Bingham children lasted about five minutes. Then Alberta James went offstage, Hubbard crossing to the door with her, an arm around her shoulders. A little later, F. Lawrence Tilford came on, rather pompously as it seemed to Weigand, in the character of Martin Bingham. Still later, Carter and then Wade Bingham exited, leaving only Bingham and Joyce Barber on the stage. Weigand listened to the smooth, flickering dialogue with half a mind and kept the rest on other things. Mullins, using a tiny flashlight, was taking notes—there was always, a slight vibration when Mullins took notes, and heavy, anxious breathing. Weigand watched for others who ought to be coming in.

A dark figure sidled slowly through a row of seats from the extreme left—“
my
left” Weigand thought—aisle and took a seat a little off the left-center aisle. That would be—yes, that was Mary Fowler.

“Time her,” Weigand whispered over his shoulder to Mullins. “That's Miss Fowler.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said.

A much slimmer figure came through the same aisle and sat beside Miss Fowler and their heads went together. Faintly, Weigand caught the swing of hair—that would be Alberta James. The two got up and went back through the row to the aisle. They disappeared behind the boxes.