Death Takes a Bow (4 page)

There were more people around Sproul now. The physician and Dr. Dupont were still there, and Mrs. Williams was sitting in a chair, looking as if she were near to fainting. And there were several new men and a new woman on the stage. These were, it could be assumed, other officers of the club, sharing Dr. Dupont's perturbation loyally. And in the auditorium the members of the audience were, for the most part, standing up, and moving toward aisles. Without asking anybody, Mr. North went to the lectern and struck it with the little wooden gavel Mrs. Williams had used when first the audience was invited to come to order. There was a pause in the movement of the audience.

“Mr. Sproul is dead,” Mr. North said, astonished instantly at his own bluntness. “He died here on the platform and it will be necessary to call the police.” He waited. They were listening, now.

“I don't know any more about such things than any of you,” he went on, not altogether truthfully. “But I imagine that the police would like everybody to remain here until—until they've looked into things. You'll have to decide for yourselves, of course. But I think you should have in mind that that would be what the police would want. Dr. Dupont is going to call the police now, and they should be here almost at once.”

Mr. North paused and regarded the audience, which regarded him. There was no telling what the audience would do; probably it would merely go home, except for its more curious members. And it was not, certainly, his responsibility. He had, he was pleased to think, put it up to Dr. Dupont.

It was evident that Dr. Dupont also thought so. He looked at Jerry North without affection.

“High-handed,” he said. Mr. North was surprised and oddly pleased. It was an apt way of putting it. He smiled at Dr. Dupont.

“Somebody,” he pointed out, “has to do something, Doctor. I thought you wanted me to get him out of here.”

Dr. Dupont made a noise. It was partly a snort and partly a sound which might be spelled “grumpph!” It was pleasingly old school; it sounded like the Union Club on the subject of the man in the White House.

“Well,” Mr. North said, “are you going to call the police, Dr. Dupont?”

“He doesn't need to,” Pam North said. She was standing just below the platform, where it met the auditorium. “We did it. Or Dorian did, really. Because of Bill. I thought she was the one, really, because he's her husband. After all.”

Everybody looked at Mrs. North, who was pleasing to look at. She wore a red woolen dress and a black felt hat with a red feather, and she was carrying a black fur jacket affectionately in her left arm. She held her right hand up to Jerry.

“Pull, darling,” she suggested. She smiled at him. “You were very good, Jerry, really and you needn't have worried at all. Only it was sort of wasted, wasn't it?”

Jerry reached down a hand. Pam rose to the low stage. Dr. Dupont stared at her, with a slight air of unbelief.

“The speech, Doctor,” Pam explained. “Jerry's, I mean. Because of Mr. Sproul.” She looked at Mr. Sproul. “He doesn't look awful, does he?” she said. “You can't believe it, really—It's not as if he were hanged.”

“Pam,” Jerry said. “Quit it. You're—”

“Jittering,” Pam said. “Of course. I keep thinking—”

“Don't,” Jerry told her. But he thought, too, of a man they had both seen slowly turning at the end of a rope and the nerves tightened in the back of his neck. He shook himself and tried to shake off the thought.

“Dorian called the police?” he asked, bringing them back to the concrete. “Just now—oh—”

Dorian was coming down the center aisle. She didn't look like the wife of a policeman. And she looked puzzled.

“They're coming,” she said, when she saw Jerry North looking at her. “Only—they already knew. Bill had left to come up. Somebody had telephoned before. Somebody with a funny voice, Mullins said. Mullins was rounding up the squad. A high voice and rather strange English. The—the voice reported that Mr. Sproul had been murdered.”

She was at the platform now. She did not offer to climb up.

“Has he?” she asked. “Been murdered?”

She looked intently at Jerry North and the others on the stage.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Dupont answered. He looked with determination at those around him, and then at the restive, puzzled audience. “A sensational rumor,” he announced. Everybody stared at him. He stared them down, or tried to stare them down—first those on the stage, then those in the audience.

“Mr. Sproul is merely unwell,” he said, in his high, cracking voice. “Dr. Klingman will bear me out.”

He gazed at Dr. Klingman; his gaze held command. Dr. Klingman's face held a slight smile.

“Unwell?” he repeated. “Really, Dr. Dupont—that is a matter for a metaphysician. On our—plane—on our plane, he is dead. Quite possibly he has been murdered.” He looked with a barely more perceptible smile at the tall president of the Today's Topics Club. “I am sorry,” he said. Again his voice held a note of raillery. “It is an annoying fact.”

Dr. Dupont looked disappointed in Dr. Klingman. He shook his head sharply, admonishingly.

“Natural causes,” he commanded. “If he is—
very
unwell, it is obviously from natural causes.”

Pam and Jerry stood side by side and looked at Dr. Dupont. Everybody looked at Dr. Dupont. Then, from the audience, there was an unexpected sound. Somebody had laughed, nervously. Pam saw that Dr. Dupont's tall, spare figure was shaking. His hand, half raised in what might have been a gesture of command to somebody, shook perceptibly. Pam spoke, and her voice was unexpectedly quiet and steady.

“Doctor,” she said. “Sit down, please. This has been a shock. You must—catch him!”

Others had seen it almost as quickly. Dr. Klingman, who was nearest, caught the tottering, tall old man and eased him gently down to the floor of the stage. Dr. Dupont's eyes closed and almost immediately reopened. They looked up at Dr. Klingman.

“The club,” Dr. Dupont said. “What will they say about the club?” Now there was something pathetic about the dictatorial old man. But Pam North stared at him, and then at Jerry.

“He takes it very hard, doesn't he?” she said. “Harder than you'd expect. He was—he was almost hysterical, wasn't he? Before he started to faint. Isn't that odd?”

It was odd, Jerry North thought. But it was oddness of a kind hard to identify. It might be that Dr. Dupont was merely an odd man, and then it was meaningless. For them, and, when he came, for Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Division. But it might be, as easily, that Dr. Dupont was himself not particularly an odd man, but a normally quite predictable man who suddenly found himself in odd circumstances. The circumstances were odd, certainly. But did they have for Dr. Dupont an additional, personal, oddity? That would be one for Lieutenant Weigand.

Pam and Jerry North were standing near the front of the stage, and stage left. Dr. Dupont, now sitting up gingerly in the supporting arm of Dr. Klingman, was between them and the chair in which Victor Leeds Sproul still sat, as if lolling there. Beyond Sproul and those clustered around him, looking diagonally upstage, was the door through which Jerry North and Mrs. Williams and Mr. Sproul had entered hardly half an hour before. Mr. North, wondering about the oddity of Dr. Dupont, looked at the door abstractedly. His gaze was so abstracted that it was several minutes before he saw that the door was opening. It opened inward, toward the speakers' room beyond. Mr. North was at first vaguely puzzled by an incongruity before he realized that the lights which had been burning in the speakers' room were no longer burning—that the door was opening inward on shadows, with a darker, human shadow in the doorway. The shadow kept back, so that the lights from the border above the stage fell on it only slightly. It was a dark, small shadow. It seemed to be a little, dark man; a little, dark, surreptitious man, staring out of an unlighted room at the scene of a murder. And then the shadow disappeared and, slowly, the area of darkness on which the door had opened grew narrower. The little dark man had seen whatever it was he wanted to see, and was withdrawing as inconspicuously as he had appeared.

That, Mr. North thought, was measurably odder than the behavior of Dr. Dupont. That needed looking into. Mr. North, forgetting the several occasions on which he had looked into odd matters and lived—once by a fairly narrow margin—to wish he hadn't, moved without announcement toward the door. He felt, strangely, that he was moving invisibly across the lighted stage, so evidently was the attention of everyone fastened on Sproul and the group around him. Even Pam seemed not to notice that he had left his place beside her.

The door closed fully, but without sound, just a moment before Mr. North reached it. Mr. North pushed it back cautiously, standing on the stage and letting it swing away from him. He could look into and across the room, and see the door on the far side which led to the corridor beyond. That door was closing, biting away a sector of light which had, only a moment since, entered the darkened speakers' room from the lighted hall outside. The little dark man was going away from there.

If Mr. North was to see the little dark man and inquire about his interest in the taking off of Mr. Sproul, it was evident to Mr. North that he would have to hurry. He stepped quickly into the gloom of the little speakers' room and started across it toward the other door; he took two steps and the second brought his shin sharply against the edge of a chair. Mr. North gave tongue, leaned slightly forward to move the chair, and felt a sudden, crushing weight descend on his left shoulder. Falling with it, Mr. North knew that he had not run into anything this time. Something had run into him.

His shoulder was numb, but as—half from the impact, half defensively—he let himself drop to the speakers' room carpet, Mr. North was thankful. Because the blow had been aimed at his head, and only the chance that he had leaned a little forward and to one side after his encounter with the chair had saved him. It was better, Mr. North decided, lying for an instant motionless, to have a numb shoulder than a numb head. Of course, the second might come.

Mr. North was twisting himself up, hands out protectingly, demanding that his eyes accustom themselves to the faint light, when the door leading to the corridor opened again. It had been a blind before, Mr. North supposed. Perhaps it was a blind this time—an invitation to Mr. North to rise hopefully and undertake pursuit, and make himself a better target than he made crouched between a chair and what was evidently a desk. Mr. North waited an instant.

Apparently it was not a blind this time. A small man went through the door. He was a clear, black shadow this time, moving with speed and moving quietly. He was a little, dark man, all right. He was also a man who did not want to tell Mr. North, or presumably anyone, why he had been peering out of a dark room at the scene of sudden death. At the scene, Mr. North was now more than ever convinced, of a sudden murder. A peculiar enough murder, when you came to think of it; one which could hardly have been accomplished more publicly. If this was the murderer, now departing through the door as Mr. North worried his way up between desk and chair and prepared to follow—if this was the murderer, he had developed a new, and apparently uncharacteristic, desire for privacy.

Mr. North was up and the numbness was going out of his shoulder. It had not, he thought, been as hard a blow as it felt to be. Even if it had landed where it was unquestionably aimed, he might have escaped with a bad headache. The little dark man lacked thoroughness—or perhaps did not wish to be thorough. Possibly, Mr. North thought, opening the door which the little dark man had closed behind him, his assailant limited himself to one murder an evening. Or possibly merely to one an hour.

Mr. North came to the corridor. It was bright and empty. At one end it ran to a flight of stairs leading downward; at the other it ran to what was evidently another corner at right angles to it. There was nothing to indicate which way the little dark man had gone. But the turn to the right, leading to the intersecting corridor, led evidently to more immediate concealment. The stairs were broad and led downward in full sight to the floor below—and there was no sound of anyone hurrying down them.

Mr. North turned right and began to run, trying to run lightly. A few strides brought him to the crossing corridor. He looked quickly to right and left. Toward the right, the transverse corridor led straight, evidently to the other side of the building. It must, Mr. North decided, run behind the stage of the auditorium; probably it gave, part way down, some means of access to the backstage area. But the little dark man had had his look backstage. Presumably, now, he merely wanted to get away. If so, the shorter stretch to the left would look more promising. Mr. North, hoping—or hoping he hoped—that he was right, took the turn to the left.

He reached the end of the corridor branch and heard something. The corridor ended in a flight of stairs, narrow and metal-edged. The stairs mounted at right angles to the corridor, to the right. Somebody was running up them.

Mr. North reached the lowest step in time to see movement at the uppermost. The little dark man had come this way; the little dark man was, not quite so silently as before, going this way. Mr. North went after him, reaching the top of the flight rather winded. He reached another corridor. The place was a labyrinth. And this corridor was lined with office doors and it came over Mr. North, gloomily, that the little dark man might be in refuge behind any of them, assuming he found any of them unlocked. Mr. North tried the nearest; it was unlocked. It led into a kind of class room, planned evidently for small discussion groups. There was a little platform at one end, and on either side of the platform was a door. And the little dark man, if he had chosen this particular room, might now be behind either of the doors. But he might equally well be in any of the other rooms along the corridor. And as Mr. North searched any one room—this one, for example—the little dark man had only, if he chose, to return to the corridor and go back down the stairs. Only by the sheerest fluke of luck, Mr. North realized, would he now be able to catch the little dark man and make inquiries of him. Mr. North felt his shoulder. Mr. North did not feel lucky.