by Jerry eBooks
But we didn’t touch Larry till the ambulance arrived, along with a police car and the squad from homicide.
It was me who’d called homicide; because I’d felt the end of a sharp instrument protruding a couple of inches from Larry’s back.
The ambulance surgeons turned him over on the cot, hunting for the wound. It was high up, close to the spine. A slim rounded needle of steel that had been thrust between his ribs, going deep.
“It’s an ice pick,” the ambulance surgeon said, holding it aloft in rubber gloved hands. “Without a handle. This man’s been stabbed.”
Lieutenant Ballantyne, of the homicide squad, was in charge now. He’d been in charge from the instant the intern made that statement, and he now turned around to all of us, including Doc Miller and Phil Thorndike. He chewed his cigar, eying us thoughtfully.
“Who is he?”
“Contestant in the show,” Doc Miller said.
“A charge of mine,” I added. “Just out of prison two months ago. Entered this show to make enough money to go straight. Planned to win the grand prize. A thousand dollars to the winning couple. Kis name is Larry Gilroy.”
The lieutenant turned his eyes on me. “You here when it happened, Jack?”
“In the audience. He died during the show.”
“Who stabbed him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see anybody stab him.”
“You mean he died right out there on the floor with a couple of hundred people looking on?”
“Sixteen hundred and thirty-five spectators,” the master of ceremonies advised accurately.
“And nobody saw him get stabbed?”
“You can canvass the audience,” I told him. “The cops closed the doors. But so far nobody volunteers any information.”
“This is screwy,” said the lieutenant. “Sixteen hundred people watching a dance show, and one of the performers dies right out there in front of them, but nobody really sees the performer killed. Did the lights go out?”
“They were on all the time,” Phil Thorndike said. “We didn’t know a thing about it till the girl Larry was dancing with held up her hand and screamed. Her hand was wet with blood. She was his partner.”
My voice sounded rather odd in my own ears. “A girl by the name of Loretta Ward.” I was trying to make the statement seem impersonal.
“Now we’re getting places,” Ballantyne said. “Who was his partner?”
I heard my own voice saying softly: “A girl by the name of Loretta Ward. A nice kid.”
“But she was dancing with him when it happened?”
“Yes—” My voice came from far away.
And Ballantyne snapped his fingers. “Then that’s the little lady I want to talk to. Right now.”
The dance marathon didn’t stop with the death of Larry Gilroy, who’d been stabbed, any more than it had stopped last week when a contestant died of “natural causes.” Even with a police investigation under the same roof the show went on.
And there were a couple of reasons for that.
In the first place, the management didn’t want to disappoint current, or future, customers. For that reason alone, the show had to go on.
And the police agreed to it because they had over sixteen hundred people under one roof, holding them for questioning, and the best way to keep them out of the hair of the investigating officers was to give them a show to look at.
That next sixty minutes saw lots of excitement in the Paradise Ballroom—more than the management ever counted on. The police had entrances and exits under guard. They took the names and addresses of all patrons, double-checked identifications. They fired questions rapidly: “Where were you when Larry Gilroy fell? Did you see anybody stab him?”
As soon as they answered questions fully, the patrons were free to leave. But none of them wished to leave. They had circus seats, at forty cents per head, to a murder investigation, and they all preferred to stay and watch the progress of that investigation.
So the show went on, but this time with only eight couples and a single remaining in it. It went on without Loretta Ward, who’d fainted at the sight of her partner’s death and who was now the primary witness for the police.
They’d taken Loretta into a back room of the ladies’ rest quarters—hysterical, unable to speak. The combination of physical exhaustion from the long forty-three-day grind, and the abrupt, inexplicable murder of her dance partner—who’d died in her very arms—had been enough to put any young woman, no matter how strong, in a serious emotional state.
I paced up and down the corridor while they held Loretta in that back room. I paced from the closed doors of the quarters for men and women, down through the darkness to the dance-floor entrance, then back again. I could hear the orchestra playing fast swing music inside, and the voice of the master of ceremonies booming from the speaker system.
“A great show, folks. We’ve had a little unfortunate trouble here, but it’s still a great show, and our contestants still carry on! Couple No. 13 is out of the contest, but we still have eight couples and a single—”
A man had been killed—murdered. It was “a little unfortunate trouble.” I’d have called that understatement. But the master of ceremonies was doing a good job. He was soothing the crowd as near down to normal as could be expected under such hysterical circumstances.
Hearing that, pacing up and down the dim corridor, I kept wondering how Larry Gilroy could die in front of all those spectators, with nobody, not even himself, an actual witness to the stabbing.
The cops, of course, had Loretta on the grill. They suspected her. And why not? She’d been dancing with him at the very moment of his death.
But, for myself, I wrote off Loretta. She was too swell a kid to be guilty of anything like that. I knew her character and her background much more intimately than Lieutenant Bailantyne. I knew she wouldn’t hurt a fly; let alone stab a man she planned to marry, with an ice pick, in the back.
Wondering about it, pacing the corridor, I passed right by the big refrigerator a dozen times before I paid any attention to it. Then I stopped my pacing while it held me with a new fascination.
This refrigerator was kept in the corridor because there was no room for it any place else in the rest quarters. It held two hundred pounds of ice, which the nurses chipped off at rest periods to fill rubber ice bags that were applied to swollen feet of weary contestants. I’d seen this refrigerator a hundred times without giving it more than a glance.
But now I had a new interest in it.
I opened the heavy door, lit a match to peer inside. Heaps of ice in there, some of it broken. A couple of ice picks—that the nurses used—lying atop the ice. But one of the picks had no pick. It was only a wooden handle, the blade of it gone.
And I knew then where it had gone—into the back, between the ribs, deep into the body of Larry Gilroy.
I went swiftly along the corridor and knocked on a door. Lieutenant Bailantyne stuck his head out, saying gruffly, around his cigar: “Yeah, Jack?”
“How you getting along with Loretta?”
“Not well. She won’t talk. Maybe she don’t know anything, but she ought to—she was dancing with the guy.”
“But maybe she didn’t see any more than the rest of the spectators. You trace the murder weapon yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “It’s an ice pick. No handle.”
“I can tell you where the handle is, lieutenant. In the refrigerator down at the end of this hall.”
He looked at me owlishly, rolling the cigar in solemn lips. “Yeah?”
“It might be a good idea to test it for fingerprints,” I suggested. “You’re damn right it might!” And he pushed past me.
Loretta was on a cot in a room across the corridor from the one in which Larry Gilroy lay dead. She was small, blond as straw, and still wore the trim green skirt, the green wool sweater, which had been her costume for the contest. The number 13 was woven into her sweater, along with an advert
isement for the Stevens No-Wear Shoe Co. The sweater, of course, along with her complete ensemble, had been donated to her by courtesy of Stevens No-Wear Shoes.
She lay face down with her pale cheek flat to the pillow and eyes half closed. Her body shook as if with chill, and her lips formed whimpering sounds not pleasant to hear. The night nurse and Doc Miller were wrapping her in freshly warmed blankets.
Miller said to her in a soothing voice: “Here’s a friend to see you, Miss Ward.”
“I won’t see anybody!”
“But this is an old friend of yours. Jack McGregor.”
That made her open her eyes and look up at me like a hurt child. “Hello, Jack.” The way she said it made me feel I might be her last friend in the world.
The night nurse gave a nod to Miller, the two of them leaving the room, closing the door behind them with a soft click, and leaving me alone with Loretta for the first time in ten years.
I felt awkward again, like that time way back at the high-school dance. I drew a chair close to the cot, straddled it, and tried to be the friend she needed.
I asked: “Anything I can do, Loretta?”
Her blond head moved just a trifle against the pillow. “Nothing, Jack. He’s dead, and I don’t want to talk about it. These police keep yelling questions at me.”
“They only want to find out about Larry. You should help them. They have to know.”
She grimaced and hid her face in the pillow.
“Do you understand the circumstances, Loretta?”
“Yes—” That came, almost smothered, from under the pillow. “He was killed. That’s what they tell me. But I don’t know anything about it. He just seemed kind of . . . tired. Then I looked at my hands. Blood on them. Larry’s. From his back. Then his body went limp in my arms. That’s absolutely all I know.”
I thought carefully before I made the next statement. I tried not to word it bluntly. “They think you might know more about it, Loretta. Lieutenant Ballantyne thinks—well, that you might’ve had something to do with it.”
“I don’t care what they think.”
“But they might arrest you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You were in love with Larry?” I asked.
“I was going to marry him. Yes.”
An idea crossed my mind. She hadn’t been in love with him at all. Girls like Loretta—kind, big-hearted, with an inborn desire to mother the wayward. It occurred to me she’d only planned to marry Larry in order to reform him.
Maybe I felt a little better after that. Felt a little more cheerful, though there was still nothing in the general set-up to feel cheerful about.
“The least you can do for him new,” I said, “is help us find out who did it to him. You can tell us things.”
She looked up then, from the pillow, cheeks streaked with tears, marked by mascara from her lashes. “What is it you want to know?”
“Everything, anything. You must have some ideas. Larry had enemies, or one enemy. He must’ve said something.”
“Not a thing, Jack. He never said—” Then her eyes brightened with a new thought. “Why, yes! He did say something. About the holdup. Did you know there was a holdup at the box office last night?”
I did know it. In fact, I’d been in the ballroom at the very time it happened.
It was just before midnight. Doc Miller, in the late hours, always removed his white medical coat, the stethoscope, and doubled in brass as ticket seller, relieving Joe Fanta, who worked in the box office during an earlier shift.
I remembered very well how it happened—the contestants on the dance floor going through rumba sprints while the orchestra played wildly, the master of ceremonies shouted encouragement from the platform, and the crowd stamped and applauded for somebody to fall of exhaustion.
While it was going like that, we heard a pistol shot from the outer foyer, and then all the lights in the place went out. In the sudden darkness, women of the audience shrieked in fear. But Phil Thorndike, up on the platform, kept yelling through his loud-speakers: “Keep your seats, folks! Nothing to get worried about! Just a little trouble with the electricity, no doubt. Everything fixed in a moment. In the meantime, we’ll all sing! The orchestra will render ‘God Bless America!’ Come on, boys! Let there be music!”
So the orchestra played to quiet the nerves of the audience, like “God Save the King” on a sinking British ship, and Thorndike kept yelling encouragement until the lights came on again.
It took only minutes, maybe three or four minutes, and the entire audience looked sheepish in the new light—sheepish because they’d been worried over the dark.
But something had happened during that period of darkness. Doc Miller, as was his custom at midnight, had locked the box office in the outer foyer in order to take the night’s cash profits back to the safe in the manager’s office.
The way doc told it to the cops, “somebody fired a shot, and slugged him over the head as he was locking the cage. He caught sight of two tough guys who looked like gangsters, but he didn’t see enough of them to be able to describe them very well. They hit him again, over the head, snatched the box of money from him, and pulled the master switch on the house lights. Then they kicked him in the jaw so hard he passed out.
He now had cuts and bruises to show for the robbery, and the guys who’d slugged and kicked him had departed for places unknown, in the darkness, taking away with them about twelve hundred dollars in currency, and two hundred in change from the cash drawers in the ticket cage.
Remembering all that, I said to Loretta: “What about the holdup last night? What about it?”
“Well, Larry mentioned it to me this morning, while we were dancing and having breakfast served on the floor by the nurses. He whispered to me that he knew something about it.”
“You think he—”
I didn’t know quite how to finish framing the question, but she understood the rest of it without my continuing.
“Larry had a part in it? That’s silly. Jack. How could he have any part in it? He stayed in my arms, dancing, all the time while the lights were out. We bumped into other couples dancing in the dark. We all stuck to the show, waiting for the lights to come back on. So Larry had no chance to do anything. Not any more than the master of ceremonies, or the orchestra boys. We all kept working, even in the dark. None of us stopped for a second. So we can’t say Larry—”
“No,” I agreed, “I guess he didn’t. But what did he have to say about it? I mean, this morning.”
“Well, he just said he had an idea about it; that he got the idea when he tripped in the dark last night. I told him he ought to speak to the police, but he said they’d probably only take him out of the contest to question him. He said the best thing to do was keep his mouth shut and stick till the finish. He said to me: ‘We’re gonna win that prize at the finish, honey. Now we’re a cinch to win it. Don’t worry, we’ll win!’ He seemed to be very determined that we’d win.”
“But somebody stopped him,” I said.
She sat up on the cot, the warm blanket wrapped close about her. She hugged it close and shivered. “Jack, you don’t think . . . you don’t really think that I . . . that I’d do anything like that to Larry?”
“No,” I assured her, “I certainly don’t.”
“But how could anybody get close enough to stab him? While he was dancing in my arms? I’d see them.”
“That’s what the police think,” I told her. “But I’ve got another idea on the subject. I don’t think Larry was stabbed while dancing with you. I think he was stabbed during the rest period.”
“That’s silly, Jack. If he’d been stabbed before, then how would he be able to get back out on the dance fleer?”
“It’s not so silly,” I said. “He didn’t know he was stabbed.”
III.
My mind had gone back to a couple of recent police cases, one in San Francisco, one in Kansas City. In the West Coast case, two women of eighty had a love quarrel
over a man of ninety. One of the old gals, during the hair-pulling, was stabbed with an old-fashioned hat pin, stabbed deep through the ribs with it. But she didn’t feel pain, didn’t even know she’d been stabbed until several hours later, when dying of internal hemorrhage.
In the Kansas City case, a sex fiend prowled the streets during the night, attacking young girls. The night the police got him he’d been struggling with a girl in a dark alley. Her screams brought a patrolman: She didn’t seem to be hurt, refused to be taken to the emergency hospital. She stood up to go home; then abruptly dropped dead, and police surgeons found a darning needle buried deep in her back.
Thinking of that now, leaving Loretta Ward on the cot in the back room of the dancers’ rest quarters, I stepped out into the corridor that led to the main floor of the ballroom.
Half a dozen uniformed cops and city detectives, stood around the refrigerator with flashlights while one of them, with a satchel, dusted powder again and again over the pickless handle of the ice pick.
“No soap,” he said at last. “Clean as a whistle.”
“That proves it,” said Lieutenant Ballantyne. “These picks are used all the time by the nurses. To fill ice bags. Fingerprints on all the rest—except this one handle. Reason for that is the killer wiped it clean. This is the handle from the pick that did the trick.”
“You got something?” I intruded.
“Plenty. That Larry Gilroy wasn’t necessarily stabbed out there on the dance floor. Maybe back here in the corridor. Somebody slapped him on the back with a hand that had a pick in it. The handle was loose. It came away. Gilroy didn’t even know he’d been stabbed. It could happen.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said.
“The other angle,” the lieutenant went on, “is that it has to be somebody connected with the show. Somebody who could walk into the dark corridor and give Gilroy a friendly slap on the back. They tell me none of the audience is ever allowed back here. So it had to be somebody in the show.”