“Gillette,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “I believe we’ve spoken to everyone now.”
“Have we? Very good.” He rose from the chair and stretched his long limbs. “Is Mr. Frohman anywhere about?”
“Right here, Gillette,” the producer called from the first row of seats. “I must say this appears to have been a colossal waste of time. I don’t see how we can avoid going to the police now.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree,” I said. “We are no closer to resolving the matter than we were this morning.” I glanced at Gillette, who was staring blankly into the footlights. “Gillette? Are you listening?”
“I think we may be able to keep the authorities out of the matter,” he answered. “Frohman? Might I trouble you to assemble the company?”
“Whatever for?” I asked. “You’ve already spoken to — Say! You don’t mean to say that you know who stole Miss Fenton’s brooch?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But then why should you — ?”
He turned and held a finger to his lips. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the final act.”
The actor would say nothing more as the members of the cast and crew appeared from their various places and arrayed themselves in the first two rows of seats. Gillette, standing at the lip of the stage, looked over them with an expression of keen interest. “My friends,” he said after a moment, “you have all been very patient during this unpleasantness. I appreciate your indulgence. I’m sure that Sherlock Holmes would have gotten to the bottom of the matter in just a few moments, but as I am not Sherlock Holmes, it has taken me rather longer.”
“Mr. Gillette!” cried Miss Fenton. “Do you mean to say you’ve found my brooch?”
“No, dear lady,” he said, “I haven’t. But I trust that it will be back in your possession shortly.”
“Gillette,” said Frohman, “this is all very irregular. Where is the stone? Who is the thief?”
“The identity of the thief has been apparent from the beginning,” Gillette said placidly. “What I did not understand was the motivation.”
“But that’s nonsense!” cried Arthur Creeson. “The sapphire is extraordinarily valuable! What other motivation could there be?”
“I can think of several,” Gillette answered, “and our ‘nefarious blackguard,’ to borrow a colorful phrase, might have succumbed to any one of them.”
“You’re talking in circles, Gillette,” said Frohman. “If you’ve known the identity of the thief from the first, why didn’t you just say so?”
“I was anxious to resolve the matter quietly,” the actor answered. “Now, sadly, that is no longer possible.” Gillette stretched his long arms. Moving upstage, he took up his pipe and slowly filled the bowl with tobacco from a ragged Persian slipper. “It was my hope,” he said, “that the villain would come to regret these actions — the rash decision of an instant — and make amends. If the sapphire had simply been replaced on Miss Fenton’s dressing table, I should have put the incident behind and carried on as though I had never discerned the guilty party’s identity. Now, distasteful as it may be, the villain must be unmasked, and I must lose a member of my company on the eve of our London opening. Regrettable, but it can’t be helped.”
The members of the company shifted uneasily in their seats. “It’s one of us, then?” asked Mr. Allerford.
“Of course. That much should have been obvious to all of you.” He struck a match and ran it over the bowl of his pipe, lingering rather longer than necessary over the process. “The tragedy of the matter is that none of this would have happened if Miss Fenton had not stepped from her dressing room and left the stone unattended.”
The actress’s hands flew to her throat. “But I told you, I had spilled a pot of facial powder.”
“Precisely so. Gervaise Graham’s Satinette. A very distinctive shade. And so the catalyst of the crime now becomes the instrument of its solution.”
“How do you mean, Gillette?” I asked.
Gillette moved off to stand before the fireplace — or rather the canvas and wood strutting that had been arranged to resemble a fireplace. The actor spent a moment contemplating the plaster coals that rested upon a balsa grating. “Detective work,” he intoned, “is founded upon the observation of trifles. When Miss Fenton overturned that facial powder, she set in motion a chain of events that yielded a clue — a clue as transparent as that of a weaver’s tooth or a compositor’s thumb — and one that made it patently obvious who took the missing stone.”
“Gillette!” cried Mr. Frohman. “No more theatrics! Who took Miss Fenton’s sapphire?”
“The thief is here among us,” he declared, his voice rising to a vibrant timbre. “And the traces of Satinette facial powder are clearly visible upon — Wait! Stop him!”
All at once, the theater erupted into pandemonium as young Henry Quinn, who had been watching from his accustomed place in the wings, suddenly darted forward and raced toward the rear exit.
“Stop him!” Gillette called to a pair of burly stagehands. “Hendricks! O’Donnell! Don’t let him pass!”
The fleeing boy veered away from the stagehands, upsetting a flimsy side table in his flight, and made headlong for the forward edge of the stage. Gathering speed, he attempted to vault over the orchestra pit, and would very likely have cleared the chasm but for the fact that his ill-fitting trousers suddenly slipped to his ankles, entangling his legs and causing him to land in an awkward heap at the base of the pit.
“He’s out cold, Mr. Gillette,” came a voice from the pit. “Nasty bruise on his head.”
“Very good, Hendricks. If you would be so good as to carry him into the lobby, we shall decide what to do with him later.”
Miss Fenton pressed a linen handkerchief to her face as the unconscious figure was carried past. “I don’t understand, Mr. Gillette. Henry took my sapphire? He’s just a boy! I can’t believe he would do such a thing!”
“Strange to say, I believe Quinn’s intentions were relatively benign,” said Gillette. “He presumed, when he came across the stone on your dressing table, that it was nothing more than a piece of costume jewelry. It was only later, after the alarm had been raised, that he realized its value. At that point, he became frightened and could not think of a means to return it without confessing his guilt.”
“But what would a boy do with such a valuable stone?” Frohman asked.
“I have no idea,” said Gillette. “Indeed, I do not believe that he had any interest whatsoever in the sapphire.”
“No interest?” I said. “What other reason could he have had for taking it?”
“For the pin.”
“What?”
Gillette gave a rueful smile. “You are all wearing costumes that are several sizes too large. Our rehearsals have been slowed for want of sewing pins to hold up the men’s trousers and pin back the ladies’ frocks. I myself dispatched Quinn to find a fastener for Mr. Lyndal.”
“The essence of theater,” I said, shaking my head with wonder.
“Pardon me, Lyndal?”
“As you were saying earlier. An actor must consider even the smallest object from every possible angle. We all assumed that the brooch had been taken for its valuable stone. Only you would have thought to consider it from the back as well as the front.” I paused. “Well done, Gillette.”
The actor gave a slight bow as the company burst into spontaneous applause. “That is most kind,” he said, “but now, ladies and gentlemen, if there are no further distractions, I should like to continue with our rehearsal. Act one, scene four, I believe. . .”
~ * ~
It was several hours later when I knocked at the door to Gillette’s dressing room. He bade me enter and made me welcome with a glass of excellent port. We settled ourselves on a pair of makeup stools and sat for a few moments in a companionable silence.
“I understand that Miss Fenton has elected not to pursue the matter of Quinn’s theft with the authorities,” I
said after a time.
“I thought not,” Gillette said. “I doubt if her gentleman friend would appreciate seeing the matter aired in the press. However, we will not be able to keep young Quinn with the company. He has been dismissed. Frohman has been in touch with another young man I once considered for the role. Charles Chapman.”
“Chaplin, I believe.”
“That’s it. I’m sure he’ll pick it up soon enough.”
“No doubt.”
I took a sip of port. “Gillette,” I said, “there is something about the affair that troubles me.”
He smiled and reached for a pipe. “I thought there might be,” he said.
“You claimed to have spotted Quinn’s guilt by the traces of face powder on his costume.”
“Indeed.”
I lifted my arm. “There are traces of Miss Fenton’s powder here on my sleeve as well. No doubt I acquired them when I was searching for the missing stone in the dressing area — after the theft had been discovered.”
“No doubt,” said Gillette.
“The others undoubtedly picked up traces of powder as well.”
“That is likely.”
“So Quinn himself might well have acquired his telltale dusting of powder after the theft had occurred, in which case it would not have been incriminating at all.”
Gillette regarded me with keen amusement. “Perhaps I noticed the powder on Quinn’s sleeve before we searched the dressing area,” he offered.
“Did you?”
He sighed. “No.”
“Then you were bluffing? That fine speech about the observation of trifles was nothing more than vain posturing?”
“It lured a confession out of Quinn, my friend, so it was not entirely in vain.”
“But you had no idea who the guilty party was! Not until the moment he lost his nerve and ran!”
Gillette leaned back and sent a series of billowy smoke rings toward the ceiling. “That is so,” he admitted, “but then, as I have been at some pains to remind you, I am not Sherlock Holmes.”
<
~ * ~
HANNAH TINTI
Home Sweet Home
FROM Epoch
Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. She had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. When she graduated from high school she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside cover of her yearbook, which she perused longingly several times over the summer and brought with her to the University of Massachusetts, where it sat, unopened, alongside her thesaurus and abridged collegiate dictionary until she met Clyde, received her M.R.S. degree, and packed her things to move into their two-bedroom ranch house on Bridge Street.
Before she put the meat in the oven that afternoon, Pat had made herself a cup of tea and turned on the television. Channel 38 was showing Rebel Without a Cause, and as the light slowly began to rise through the screen of their old Zenith she saw James Dean on the steps of the planetarium, clutching at the mismatched socks of a dead Sal Mineo and crying. She put down her tea, slid her warm fingertips inside the V-neck of her dress, and held her left breast. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her nipple hard and erect against the palm of her hand. It was like seeing an old lover, like remembering a piece of herself that no longer existed. She watched the credits roll and glanced outside to see her husband mowing the lawn. He had a worried expression on his face and his socks pulled up to his knees.
That evening before dinner, as she arranged the butter and margarine side by side on the table — one yellow airy and light, the other yellow hard and dark like the yolk of an egg — she wondered how she could have forgotten the way James Dean’s eyebrows curved. Isn’t memory a strange thing, she thought. I could forget all of this, how everything feels, what all of these things mean to me. She was suddenly seized with the desire to grab the sticks of butter and margarine in her hands and squeeze them until her fingers went right through, to somehow imprint their textures and colors on her brain like a stamp, to make them something that she would never lose. And then she heard the bell.
When she opened the door Pat noticed that it was still daylight. The sky was blue and bright and clear and she had a fleeting, guilty thought that she should not have spent so much time indoors. After that she crumpled backwards into the hall as the bullet from a .38-caliber Saturday Night Special pierced her chest, exited below her shoulder blade, and jammed into the wood of the stairs, where it would later be dug out with a penknife by Lieutenant Sales and dropped gingerly into a transparent plastic Baggie.
Pat’s husband Clyde was found in the kitchen by the back door, a knife in his hand (first considered a defense against his attacker and later determined as the carver of the roast). He had been shot twice — once in the stomach and once in the head — and then covered with cereal, the boxes lined up on the counter beside him and the crispy golden contents of Captain Crunch, Corn Flakes, and Special K emptied out over what remained of his face.
Nothing had been stolen.
It was a warm spring evening, full of summer promises. Pat and Clyde’s bodies lay silent and still while the orange sunset crossed the floors of their house and the streetlights clicked on. As darkness came, and the skunks waddled through the backyard and the raccoons crawled down from the trees, they were still there, holding their places, suspended in a moment of quiet blue before the sun came up and a new day started and life went on without them.
It was Clyde’s mother who called the police. She dialed her son’s number every Sunday morning from Rhode Island. These phone calls always somehow perfectly coincided with whenever Pal and Clyde had just settled down to breakfast, or whenever they were on the verge of making love.
Thar she blows, Clyde would say, and take his hot coffee with him over to where the phone hung on the wall, or slide out of bed with an apologetic glance at his wife. The coffee and Pat would inevitably cool, and in this way his mother would ruin every Sunday. It had been years now since they frolicked in the morning, but once, when they were first married and Pat was preparing breakfast, she had heard the phone, walked over to where her husband was reading the paper, dropped to her knees, pulled open his robe, and taken him in her mouth. Let it ring, she thought, and he had let it ring. Fifteen minutes later the police were on their front porch with smiles as Clyde, red-faced, bathrobe bulging, answered their questions at the door.
In most areas of her life Clyde’s mother was a very nice person. She behaved in such a kind and decorous manner that people would often remark, having met her, What a lovely woman. But with Clyde she lost her head. She was suspicious, accusing, and tyrannical. Her husband had died suddenly a few years back, and once she got through her grief her son became her man. She pushed this sense of responsibility through him like fishhooks, plucking on the line, reeling him back in when she felt her hold slipping, so that the points became embedded in his flesh so deep that it would kill him to take them out.
She dialed the police after trying her son thirty-two times, and because the lieutenant on duty was a soft touch, his own mother having recently passed, a cruiser was dispatched to Pat and Clyde’s on Bridge Street, and because one of the policemen was looking to buy in the neighborhood, the officers decided to check out the back of the house after they got no answer, and because there was cereal blowing around in the yard the men got suspicious, and because it was a windy day and because the hinges had recently been oiled and because the door had been left unlocked and swung open and because one of them had seen a dead body before, a suicide up in Hanover, and knew blood and brain and bits of skull when he saw them, he made the call back to t
he station, because his partner was quietly vomiting in the rosebushes, and said, We’ve got trouble.
~ * ~
Earlier that morning, as Little Mike Findleman delivered Pat and Clyde’s Sunday Globe, the comics straining around the sections like wrapping on an inappropriate gift, he noticed that the welcome mat was gone. It had been ordered out of an expensive catalog and said, Home Sweet Home. Every day when Little Mike rode up on his bicycle and delivered the paper, he looked at the mat and thought of his own home. It was not sweet.
Little Mike’s father had recently returned from a minimum-security prison, where he had spent the past three years doing time for embezzlement. With her husband back in the house, Little Mike’s mother, a charismatic redhead, was now on antidepressants, and had cooked spaghetti for dinner twenty-eight days in a row. To top it off, Little Mike had not made the cut to junior league baseball, as his friends Norman and Greg Kessler had, and the shame he felt when he checked the list posted outside the gym and later as he told the twins, who squinted into the sun and shrugged their shoulders together as if they were brushing him off their lives like a bug, struck him deeply and confirmed his suspicions of his own lack of greatness. Little Mike enjoyed getting off of his bicycle and kicking Pat and Clyde’s welcome mat as he dropped off their paper just after dawn, leaving it askew and glancing back at it as he walked down the front porch steps. It made him feel less alone.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 Page 35