by Jerry eBooks
THE MUSIC STOPS.
THE pound of drums was well-muffled in the backstage corridor, ill-lit and redolent of grease-paint and body sweat. Ted Storme had flattened himself against a plyboard petition, shielded by the half-column that jogged out of it.
He had heard the chorus girls rush out and had slipped in here, but Sam Slats had come into the passage with Susan’s Gram and had gone into her dressing room with her. They were talking now, just the other side of this thin wall. Storme could hear them almost as well as though he were inside.
“I’m through,” Jennie Wrenn was saying, her voice husky with fatigue. “I haven’t got it any more, Sam.”
“Through?” the roly-poly little clown snorted. “Through, she says she is and her just after rolling the town’s toughest audience in the aisles.”
“With what? With a line of burlycue hokum makes me feel dirty all over. Urrgh. If I wasn’t at my wit’s ends how to buy groceries for Vi and Susan I’d have slapped the script in Tom Goslin’s mug.”
“Shucks, Jen, the Goose has got to give the customers what they want. Say, I didn’t have time at that rush rehearsal to ask you how that red-headed daughter of yours is.”
“Bad, Sam.” A sigh quivered through the plyboard. “That pump of hers . . . I’ve had her all over—Boston, the Mayos at Rochester, every place I heard there was some doc knew something about tinkering with busted tickers.”
“And no soap, eh?”
“Not even suds. Worst of it’s the way we’ve dragged little Susan around . . . Is that lassie a sweatheart, Sam!” Warmth came into the dreary tones. “I . . . If anything ever happened to her, I’d cut my throat.”
“Yeah. I guess you would. Say, all that running around and doctoring must have cost you plenty. So that’s where the sock you retired on went to.”
“That’s where it went to, old-timer. Didn’t take long. Five years. And now if you don’t get out of here and give me a chance to rest, you’ll find yourself doing a single on the two a.m. show. Go on now. Take a powder.”
Ted Storme squeezed hard against the wall as the door just beyond the jog opened and shut again. Sam Slats’ footfalls plodded away down the hall and another dressing room door creaked open. Storme started out, pulled back behind the column again, his throat drying.
The last man he wanted to see had come into the corridor, down there at the other end. Feet Dorgan.
He glanced back toward the entrance and decided he couldn’t make it unobserved. The fat man’s heels clicked on bare wood as he neared. Storme held his breath, his body taut. Dorgan was just the other side of the pillar when he stopped coming on. Jennie Wrenn’s door rattled open, was shut again.
“You!”The woman’s voice inside the room was startled. “Get out of here!”
“I’m disappointed, Jennie,” Feet Dorgan purred. “I expected a warmer greeting after all these years.”
“Warm? Hot’s the word for what I ought to give you! A red-hot poker for choice.” Despite the bravado of the words, Storme detected a quaver of something like fear. “Are you getting out, or do I have to call Tom Goslin to throw you out?”
“Go ahead and call him. See if he’ll throw out his angel.”
“His what?”
Dorgan chuckled. “The Goose is just fronting for me. I own ninety per cent of the Biarritz.”
“You own—” Heavy breathing came very distinctly through the thin plyboard. “So that’s how—”
“Art Rand got you booked into here. Five hundred for the week, with options. You snapped it up, figuring you could grab a quick stake and drop out of sight again before I got track of you. Where you made your mistake, Jennie, was using the old name.”
“I had to use it. It’s the only thing I’ve got left to sell. But I—”
“Didn’t give Art your home address, told him you’d come to the office to check on whether he’d found a job for you. You thought you could keep covered that way.”
“I’m still covered. If you think you can make me tell you where Viola is.”
“I know I can. And you do, too, old gal. You haven’t forgotten why they call me Feet Dorgan.”
A sharp inhalation.
“No, I haven’t.” The sound of it told Storme it was said through stiff, suddenly white lips. “How could I forget when every time Vi’s heart acts up it reminds me how it got that way?”
“You shouldn’t have let her go to the morgue.” Dorgan chided. “The police would have accepted your identification.”
“Ben Castle was her husband. I had no right to keep her away.” Jennie Wrenn checked herself. “But that’s water under the bridge five years ago. Suppose you do locate Vi, what then? You’ll be no nearer finding out where Ben cached them numbers racket collections he gypped you out of.”
“I won’t be, eh?” The fat man’s tone was still sauve. “We got it out of Ben, just before the cops hopped us and I had to put lead into him, that he’d told her where he hid it. She knows where that seventy-five thousand is, and she’s going to tell me.”
“Not in a million years she won’t.”
“So you think.”
“So I know, Dorgan. Listen. Last week we didn’t have a cent left in the house and I darn near went on my knees to Vi, begging her to get a little of that money, just enough to keep us from starving. She wouldn’t. She said—get this, Feet Dorgan!—she said eating food with the money that cost Ben his life would be like eating a piece of Ben himself. Someway that swag, wherever it is, has come to mean Ben to her. Do you think she’s going to turn Ben over to you? Do you think you can make her! Viola Castle’s got the best protection against your cute little tricks anyone could have, a heart that’ll conk out the minute you start on her. You didn’t think of that, did you?”
Ted Storme relaxed, the cords in his neck aching as though they had been taut for hours.
“Maybe,” Dorgan was saying slowly, “I didn’t. Or maybe I remembered something you seem to have forgotten.” He paused, and the suspense was agonizing. “Such as that your daughter Viola has a daughter of her own.”
Silence again in that dressing room, for ten pounding heartbeats in which the blare of the band from the stage outside was something obscene.
Then, “No!” Susan’s Gram moaned. “No! Not even you can be that low.”
“Can’t I?” Storme heard as he stepped around the pillar, closed fingers on a chipped doorknob and started to turn it with slow, infinite precaution against any sound that might warn the man who was saying, “For seventy-five grand I can be. Stop! Get back, you old—”
A gunshot’s flat pound cut off the sudden, startled shout. Inside the room a heavy body thudded to the floor. A single saxophone brassily declared, “That’s All-ll,” and the muffled music stopped.
People started to applaud as the show ended on the saxophone’s brazen, “That’s All-ll.” Mimi clinked her glass against Bert Judson’s. “Here’s to crime,” she giggled.
“Drink ’er down, Bert ol’ top.”
“Mudinyereye,” Bert mumbled, and emptied his glass, but Mimi once more managed to spill hers into the silver ice bucket between them without his noticing.
The handclaps gave way to a rapping of little wooden hammers on tabletops, a clatter of silverware on plates. Judson’s hand fumbled for the bottle, didn’t quite make it, and dropped to his side. The music started to play again and the applause to die down. Bert Judson looked blearily at Mimi, slumped over on the table, and cushioned his head on his arm.
Her throat got so tight she could hardly breathe. The bee-girls were on the stage again, dancing an encore, but all Mimi saw was eyeball-white glittering between Bert’s almost closed lids. She put her hands on the table-edge to push up.
“Where’s Dorgan?” a languid voice asked. Ashton Lee goggled down at her through his thick glasses.
Mimi’s mouth opened but she couldn’t make words come. The bald little man had on a dark-blue top-coat and his pallid fingers writhed on the brim of a Homburg hat that matched it in color. His
look went to Bert, came back to her.
“Where’s Dorgan?” he asked again.
“He—he went backstage.”
Lee’s fingers stopped writhing, but the way they crumpled the hat’s brim was worse.
“How long ago?”
“Right after you left.”
“Norma go with him?”
“No. She went to the—”
Before Mimi could say where the lawyer was on his way toward the door at the end of the stage, Mimi got to her feet, plucked up her wrap and started the other way, toward the front door.
She wanted to run, but she couldn’t. Her legs felt as if she were wading through water up to her waist but she got to the mezzanine stairs somehow; somehow climbed them. She kept going, however, through the lobby, through the revolving door, down the wide entrance stairs. She stopped short at their foot, terror flaring into her eyes as she spied the traffic cop she had sent into the parking lot to save Ted Storme talking to the slim, blackhaired killer Jock Haddon had told her was Gull Foster.
The cop saw her. Pointed to her. Gull nodded and started coming across the gutter.
CHAPTER V.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON.
STEPPING into the grimy dressing room, Ted Storme’s brain registered the fat body sprawled on the uncarpeted floor. But not Jennie Wrenn. Dorgan, a splotch of crimson marring the silken white of his hair above the stare of his sightless eyes. The actress, her huge, pink-spangled bulk backgrounded by the black rectangle of an open window was straightening up from a feral crouch, and her hand held a pearl-handled revolver. A woman’s weapon, but still deadly at this close range.
“Hold it,” Storme said quietly as he pulled the door shut. “I’m on your side. I know you had good reason to kill him.”
“Reason to kill him?” she repeated dully, apparently too dazed to be startled or afraid. “But I didn’t. I didn’t have anything to kill him with.”
“What’s that in your hand? A powder-puff?”
She looked down at it, a sort of horror coming into her face.
“I . . . It came in through the window.” Her features were ghastly under their mask of make-up. “I—” She stared up again at Storme, pupils dilating. “I started for him and he yelled, ‘Stop!’ and there was a crack and this flew in through the window.” Her brows knitted. “Some—someone must have shot him from outside.”
“And threw the gun in here to fix you in a kill-frame.” Storme said, and moved swiftly across the room. “Which you’ve made perfect by putting your prints on it.” He reached the window, leaned out. “State you’re in I’d lay a hundred to one you’re not lying, but I’m the only one who’d believe you.” He looked out on the casino’s dark back yard. The kitchen, a one-story addition, loomed blackly to the left. “Your only chance to beat the frame is to find the real killer and you haven’t a whisper of a—”
The rattle of the door knob, behind him, cut him off. Storme vaulted over the sill, lighted catlike and twisted, peered in over the sill in time to see the door shut again behind a shiny-pated little man in a dark-blue topcoat, eyes monstrous behind thick, round lenses.
“Lee!” Jennie Wrenn breathed, her back to the window. “Ashton Lee!”
Light glittered on Lee’s glasses as he looked at the gun in her hand, looked at Feet Dorgan’s body. A flicker of obscure satisfaction passed across his pallid countenance.
“I advise you to plead self-defence, my friend,” he said. “Dorgan attacked you, you shot him to save your honor. We should not find it difficult to convince a jury.”
“We?”
“My testimony as to what I saw and heard as I entered can either substantiate that story—or send you to the chair.” Teeth showed in a bland—and sinister—smile. “I’m sure your daughter will not compel me to the latter regrettable alternative by refusing to tell me where she hid the money Ben Castle stole from—” Running feet thudded in the corridor. “Quick!” Lee snapped. “Tell me where she is.”
“I’ll burn in perdition first!”
“You’ll burn, Jennie, but not in—” Knuckle raps cut him short, and someone called urgently, “On stage, Jennie Wrenn! They’re yowling for you and Slats!”
“No!” the lawyer screamed shrilly. “Don’t shoot me too! I didn’t—”
The door burst open, let into the room a heavy-set, shirt-sleeved man.
“What the devil?” he barked, and gagged as he spied the corpse but kept on going, plucked the gun from the woman’s hand. Then he wheeled to Lee.
“She was going to shoot me, Tom! the lawyer was jabbering. “She shot Dorgan and she was going to shoot me!”
“Shut up, you yellow pup.” Tom Goslin looked disgusted. “You’re hide’s safe now.” He turned back to the woman. “Gosh, Jennie! If you had to do it, why’d you have to do it in here?”
“I didn’t, Tom! I—”
“Save it, old gal. Save it for the cops. It breaks my heart to have to turn you in, but what can I do? Okay, shyster. You got the nerve to stay in here and keep an eye on her while I go phone the Law?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Ashton Lee gave a good imitation of a man just reprieved from death and still shaken. “As long as you’ve got her gun.”
Goslin went out. Lee smiled.
“You should have accepted my offer while you had the chance, Jennie Wrenn,” he said.
Storme saw the old woman’s hand squash on the window sill behind her.
“You’ll have to tell the police where you’ve been living with your daughter,” Lee said, “and they’ll tell me, and so I’ll have my chance for a little talk with her.”
“Maybe.” she was still undefeated. “And maybe Viola won’t be there when you get there. Maybe somebody will beat you to her and take her where you can’t find her.”
Ted Storme knew that this was meant for him. His countenance was gaunter than ever, his mouth more bitter when he reached the cream-colored roadster in the parking lot and slid in under the steering wheel. Susan sat up.
“Where’s Gram?” she asked.
“She can’t come just now, honey.”
“But you promised. You promised you’d bring her to me.”
“I did, and I’ll keep that promise.” His tone had all the solemnity of a vow. “But Gram’s act’s onstage.” The motor purred to life under the long hood and the car was moving. “Whatever happens, the show must go on.”
“Yes,” the child sighed. “Yes, I know. The show must go on.”
The roadster nosed out of the lot but paused briefly at the cut curb to let a black and red taxi roll past toward the main entrance to the Biarritz. The taxi blocked Gull Foster off from Mimi, stopped right in front of her and she grabbed at its door handle, wrestled it open.
“Help me!” she sobbed to the man inside. “Please help—”
Her throat locked. He was the big gunsel she had seen taking Ted Storme out of the casino to kill him.
Foster came around the back of the cab.
“Gotcha, you little stool pigeon,” he snarled.
Strong fingers grabbed Mimi’s wrist, pulled her into the taxi and a leg shot out of the door, planted a big foot on Foster’s face. He flew backward but Mimi didn’t see where he landed because the door slammed shut.
“Get after that yaller car afore we lose it and you’re out a sawbuck!” the Texan yelled.
The cab leaped into fast motion, skidded around in a U-turn that piled Mimi in the far corner of the seat.
“If that doddlebug don’t quit gettin’ in my hair,” she heard, “he’s liable to get hurt. What was he pesterin’ yuh about?”
Mimi’s heart bumped her ribs. It came to her that the cop had only just told Foster about her and that this one don’t know why he was after her.
“Oh,” she said, straightening up. “He made a pass at me and I didn’t like it, and he didn’t like that.”
And then her breath caught again. The roadster they were trailing was rounding a curve in the highway ahead. Light from a car coming
this way lit up the face of the man who was driving it, and she saw who he was.
Ted Storme!
The roadster straightened out of the curve.
“Gram’s in trouble,” Susan said with conviction.
Storme’s nostrils pinched. “What makes you think that?”
“Your sayin’, ‘The show must go on.’ That’s what good troupers always say when they’re in despr’it trouble. You can tell me about it, Ted. Gram always tells me when there’s trouble. She says facing it is half the job of licking it.”
She had courage, this chestnut-curled tot. “All right, honey. I’ll tell you. The people you’ve been hiding from have found your grandmother.”
There was darkness now on either side of the broad concrete highway, a darkness in which the wind from the roadster’s speed roused a rustle of unseen shrubbery. Susan’s whisper was no louder than that rustle.
“What are they going to do to Gram?”
“She’ll be all right till I can figure out how to help her. How to clear her from the murder-frame! “I promised I’d bring her back to you and I always keep a promise, but I’m sure she wants me to take care of your mother first.”
“Gram would. That’s the way she is.”
“So I thought.”
This road was a main artery down the Island’s North Shore. Far ahead lights made a glow over the clover-leaf intersections where the routes to the various bridges to the city sorted out.
“Gram didn’t have time to tell me where you live, Susan,” Storme said, “and I’ve got to know it now because I’ve got to know which road to take.”
Storme’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The orange blink of a “silent policeman” flitted past. A closed hot-dog stand was a black mass drifting by in the night.
“We live on East Ninety-third Street,” Susan said. “Near the old brewery by the river.”
There was a lift in Ted Storme’s voice as he observed, “That means over the Triboro Bridge and down the East River Drive.”
The world in which he moved might hate him but he had won the trust of this cleareyed child. He was too elated to notice the red and black taxi that followed him, far behind.