Death on the Aisle

by Frances

  Bill said, “Right.”

  “Only,” he said, “don’t you have to find a little dressmaker and a little milliner first? I thought that was a rule.”

  Dorian didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked at Bill through eyes which always seemed to him to have a glint of green in them, and which now looked darker than they usually did. That might, he thought, be the lighting in the upstairs room at “21.” For a moment they looked at each other, slowly, with a kind of care.

  “We are right, aren’t we, Bill?” Dorian said. Her voice was grave; the question was a real question.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “For a long time, now. Didn’t you know?”

  She smiled a little then, quickly.

  “Whose fault was it that it was such a long time?” she wanted to know.

  “Well,” he said, “for a good while, yours. All that stuff about marrying a cop. And then, I’ll grant you—”

  “Then,” she said, “it was you being a cop, and too busy. What with men in cement. And men without teeth in condemned houses. And such charming incidents.”

  Bill would, he realized, have risen to that not so long ago; have answered, worried and anxious, and tried to make her see that something had to be done about men who killed other men and, for reasons which rather slowly became apparent, pulled out all their teeth; about men who encased their fellows in cement, and lowered them into rivers. Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Bureau had often argued such matters with Dorian Hunt since that first day, which came so quickly after their first meeting, when they had realized that they were going to have to explain themselves rather fully to each other.

  The fact that Weigand was Lieut. Weigand of the police, and that it was his primary duty to pursue, had been the one thing most difficult to explain to Dorian. At first she had said only “why?” and then, which was even more difficult, “why you?” It had taken time to explain that last, and a good many words, and in the end, Weigand suspected, it was not really the words that had done it. Never, he somewhat suspected, had Dorian come to approve his occupation, because she felt strongly, and with a personal bias, on the subject of hunters. His profession had become, in the end, merely a somewhat unfortunate attribute of William Weigand, and Dorian had decided to overlook it. After that, she seemed quite light-hearted about it, and even interested in pursuit as an exercise in logic. But Weigand did not suppose that she had changed essentially on the matter, and, since he was logical and wanted everything thrashed out fully, this sometimes puzzled him. He looked at her now and decided it was not an important puzzlement.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m off today, if nothing breaks. So why not today? Why not”—he looked at his watch—“three o’clock at some small, and convenient, clergyman’s? The Little Church?”

  “No,” Dorian said, firmly. “Not the Little Church. Just some little preacher’s, where nobody’s ever gone before—a new little minister’s, without any tradition.”

  “Right!” Weigand said, and raised eyebrows at a waiter. He looked at the check, managed not to wince, and laid bills on the tray. The waiter pulled out the table and they wriggled forth and Weigand held Dorian’s fitted, furless gray coat. It looked military, he thought, and said “Damn” under his breath. Dorian’s eyebrows went up.

  “Things,” he said. “Your coat looks like part of a uniform.”

  Her eyes darkened again and she waited until he came beside her. Then she took his arm, suddenly, almost angrily. It was not like Dorian, who seldom took arms.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to hurry, Bill. We’ve got to hurry—so fast! They’re taking all our time away, Bill.”

  Urgency went with them down the stairs. Bill was abrupt, hurried, as he collected hat and coat. He was quick and casual with the doorman who opened the door of his car—parked prominently and conveniently, as became the car of a police lieutenant. Inside the car his fingers moved automatically, hurriedly. The radio switch clicked in response to one familiar gesture; the fingers of the other hand twisted the key in the ignition lock. The motor took hold and the radio said, harshly, indifferently:

  “—call your office.”

  “Bill—” Dorian said. Unconsciously he held up his hand, quieting her as he listened.

  “Car 8 call your office,” the radio said. “That is all.”

  It was enough.

  “Damn!” Weigand said, not under his breath. “Damn it to hell!”

  “Oh—Bill!” Dorian said. “Again?”

  The motor died as Weigand cut the switch.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said. He didn’t believe it. It was one of those things—when the car radio spoke metallically; when the telephone demanded angrily in the middle of the night; when a police messenger appeared suddenly at his desk, it was always one of those things. A man with his teeth out. A man in cement. One of those things. People, Weigand thought angrily, picked the damnedest times to murder.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” he repeated. “I’m supposed to be off today. But I’ll have to see.”

  “Of course,” Dorian said, in a small voice. “You’ll have to see. Oh, Bill—why don’t you sell ribbons?”

  “Nobody buys ribbons any more,” he said, opening the door. “Didn’t you know about ribbon clerks, Dor? Technological unemployment—dreadful thing.”

  He was out, and leaned back in.

  “We’ll hope,” he said. “You wait and hope.”

  But it was no use hoping. Weigand turned away from the telephone in “21” knowing that. It was murder again, and Bill cursed it. But there was excitement, still, in a new case starting, and excitement ran under his disappointment. And then, half pleased and half perturbed, he contemplated the message he had just received, relayed, as to instructions, from Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley and, as to information, from Detective Sergeant Aloysius Clarence Mullins.

  The instructions were simple. There was a man dead in a seat in the West 45th Street Theatre, which was against regulations. Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Weigand to investigate and report. The information, added with a touch of amusement in the voice by the patrolman on telephone duty, amplified by one sentence, quoting Mullins:

  “Tell the Loot the Norths is here.”

  To that, Weigand had said, simply, “My God!”

  He repeated the gist of it to Dorian. It wasn’t nothing; it was a case.

  “And,” he said, “Jerry and Pam seem to be in it.”

  “Again?” said Dorian.

  “I know,” Weigand said, “it’s peculiar. And what do we do with you?”

  “We don’t get married?” Dorian said. “There isn’t going to be any little preacher?”

  “I know,” Weigand said. “But there’s a man dead. We’ll fix that, and then the little preacher.” He looked at Dorian. “Damn,” he said, “it’s a note, Dor.”

  Dorian admitted, a little drily, that it was inconvenient. She said she had had her afternoon all planned.

  “This is leaving me at loose ends,” she explained. “You should never leave a fiancée at loose ends, Bill. Didn’t you know? So I think I’ll just go along.”

  “But—” Weigand began, getting into the car.

  “If the Norths can, I can,” Dorian said, making movements of not getting out.

  “But—” said Weigand, starting the motor.

  “Of course,” Dorian said, “our other plan was better. But you would be a detective, and whither thou goest—”

  “That,” Weigand said, “was said by one woman to another woman. Which nobody seems to remember.”

  He turned on the siren, and cars scattered like alarmed chickens before a hawk’s dive. Cars stopped at Fifth Avenue by the lights surged ahead in answer to commanding whistles and a traffic patrolman’s strangely indignant gestures. Weigand’s Buick, wailing, turned south on Fifth, and civilian cars hugged the curb obediently.

  Dorian grabbed the door handle as the car swerved off Fifth into Forty-fifth and sent more traffic scatteri
ng. She gasped as the Buick swerved left and right again to avoid a grinding truck. She shouted something, and Bill leaned toward her.

  “—stay dead—” he heard, and said, “What?”

  “He’ll stay dead,” Dorian shouted. “You don’t have to—”

  “Custom,” Weigand shouted back. “Cops always do. Regulations.”

  They were beyond Broadway when Weigand flicked the siren off and put the brakes on. For a moment the change in sound was one rather of pitch than volume, as the tires shrieked on the pavement. Then the Buick nosed in beside a police radio car which was one of a covey of radio cars. The Homicide Squad car was against the curb in front of a theatre entrance. The marquee of the theatre had a title spelled out in light bulbs, with a word preceding it. The bulbs spelled out:

  “Coming: TWO IN THE BUSH.”

  There was a crowd, held back by patrolmen, so that the sidewalk immediately in front of the theatre was clear except for three lean men with cards in the bands of their hats. They saw the Lieutenant and started for him. Weigand waved at them.

  They advanced with modified eagerness, and Weigand shook his head.

  “Later,” he said. “I don’t know myself.”

  Dorian held on to Bill and the reporters looked at her curiously. They pushed through glass doors and patrolmen inside displayed interest. Weigand said “Homicide” and one of them jerked a directing thumb.

  The lobby was long, and Dorian’s heels clicked on tile. There were more doors and another lobby, and her heels dug into carpet, scarred with cigarette burns. Then they were in the theatre. The seats were empty under dim lights. Ahead and down, it was lighter and men and women were clustered, some on the flatly lighted stage, others in the rows of seats nearest the orchestra pit. At the head of each of the four aisles a uniformed patrolman stood, waiting and detached. Weigand started left and the patrolman there stiffened when he saw Dorian, and waved them the other way. They went down the right-center aisle and Weigand looked across the house. There was a little knot of men in the left-center aisle, toward the rear of the house, and as he looked a light flared, blindingly, and went out.

  “Over there,” Dorian said, pointing.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Later.”

  They came into the reflected light from the stage, and Pam North, trim in a yellow dress which had the look of a uniform about the shoulders, stood up from a seat on the aisle.

  “Bill!” she called. “Here we are!”

  “Hello, Pam,” Weigand said, and Pam said, in a tone of pleased surprise: “Dorian!” Then she went on:

  “Bill,” she said, “he says it’s me! Did you ever?”

  Weigand was conscious of a slight loss of contact with reality.

  “Who says what’s you, Pam?” he said, slowly and carefully. Then he said: “Just a minute, Mullins.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “The Norths is here.”

  “He says if it hadn’t been that I came he would still be alive,” Pam said. “I don’t think he means it, but he sounds as if he did. You tell him, Bill.”

  Bill looked inquiringly at Mr. North, who was still sitting in the seat next that from which his wife had risen. Mr. North was running the fingers of his right hand through his hair.

  “Hello, Jerry,” Weigand said.

  “Probably,” Mr. North said, “it is nothing. Of course it is nothing, really.” He looked up at Weigand. “But,” he said, “you can’t help wondering, can you? Wherever we go. I can’t even sit up with a sick author.”

  “Jerry,” Bill said. “For God’s sake, don’t you!”

  Gerald North stood up and smiled at Dorian and said he was sorry.

  “Penfield Smith,” he said. “He’s the author here. We publish him. He said it was driving him nuts, and would I sit in one afternoon just to see who was crazy. And Pam said she had never seen a rehearsal and wanted to come, and it seemed all right.” He paused, and looked around the gloomily lighted auditorium. “At the time,” he added darkly. Pam said: “Jerry!” and he reached out and touched her shoulder, gently.

  “All right, Pam,” he said. “It’s just a coincidence.”

  He still, Weigand thought, seemed rather haunted by it. And so, a little way under the surface, did Pam North. Her eyes were wide and alarmed, Weigand thought. He could sympathize.

  “I know,” Pam said, uncannily astep with his thoughts. “Typhoid Mary—Homicide Pam.” She stopped and looked at him: “Bill, you don’t think—”

  Weigand shook his head, and told her to forget it. He said, “All right, Mullins,” and Mullins said, “O.K., Loot, back here.” Weigand left the Norths and Dorian together and sidled between seats to the other aisle. He walked back up it and a man in white who was bending over a dark huddle in a seat on the right of the aisle stood up.

  “Dead,” he said. “Stabbed in the back of the neck. Punctured the spinal cord, apparently.”

  He was a young man, and looked pale.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked suddenly.

  “No,” Weigand said. “Do you?”

  “Sure,” the ambulance surgeon said. “I heard him lecture once. Carney Bolton—the Carney Bolton.” He looked down at the huddle. “Sinus man,” he said. “About the best.” He looked at Weigand, waiting for comment. It came in a soft whistle.

  “Well,” Weigand said. “So this is Dr. Carney Bolton! So it caught up with him, finally.” The ambulance surgeon looked as if he knew what Weigand meant, and nodded. “Right,” Weigand said.

  “Nothing for me,” the ambulance surgeon said. “He hasn’t been dead long; an hour or two. But that’s the M.E.’s guess.”

  “Right,” Weigand said, and waved him on his way. The detective watched a moment as the young man in white went up the aisle, nodded to the patrolman at its head, went out through the lobby doors.

  “Well,” Weigand said, to nobody in particular. “Dr. Carney Bolton. Let’s have a light here, one of you.”

  Dr. Carney Bolton had been a long, thin man and was now a long, thin corpse. The body had folded up in the seat, the head fallen forward and to the left, so that it partially rested on the arm of the orchestra chair which was farthest from the aisle. A plain, wooden handle stuck out of the back of the neck: a handle of unpainted wood. If you wanted to straighten Dr. Bolton up and look at his face the handle would, Weigand thought wryly, be very convenient. The Medical Examiner’s man, when he came, would no doubt find it convenient. Now it was hard to see much of what had been Dr. Carney Bolton. Weigand lowered the seat in front and knelt on it and stared at Dr. Bolton without touching anything.

  He had been around fifty-five, Weigand guessed—a man almost starkly thin and almost arrestingly tall, with thinning blond hair which did not show the gray that must be there. His face was long and narrow and the staring eyes—staring now at the floor and the back of the seat in front—were set close together. The lips, partly open, were unexpectedly soft, and sensual in the long face, above the long chin.

  “He looks,” Pam North said from behind Weigand, “as if he had been somebody. If you didn’t know, you asked, like Chesterton.”

  “Look,” said Weigand, twisting toward her, “you are supposed to be down with Jerry and Dorian, Pam. Not—this.” He gestured toward the corpse, and curiosity overcame him. “What about Chesterton?” he asked.

  “I know,” Pam said. “It’s awful, but I had to see. And Mullins said it wasn’t very awful. He said that when he went down the street if people didn’t know who he was they asked. Because he was so funny looking, he meant. And this man, because he would look as if he were somebody you ought to know. Was he?”

  Weigand sorted out the pronouns, deduced which “he” applied to Chesterton and, belatedly, nodded.

  “He was Dr. Carney Bolton,” he said. “You know?”

  Mrs. North said, “Oh!”, and looked at the body with renewed interest.

  “Always in the papers,” she said. “Lots of women; lots of fingers in lots of pies. At all the first n
ights. Yes.”

  That, Weigand told her, was Bolton. Backer of plays and beguiler of women; physician to the theatrical profession at its most solvent; dabbler in motion-picture enterprises. A man who got around and was a good name in gossip columns; a man who frequently had been sued, with one hope or another, by women, and had always seemed to enjoy it. And now—

  “Now somebody’s stuck an ice-pick in his neck,” Mrs. North pointed out. “Not even a very good ice-pick. Just the dime kind, or maybe just given out by ice-men.”

  Weigand looked at her and then at the wooden handle in the back of Bolton’s neck. Obviously, when you looked at it with that in mind, it was the handle of an ice-pick, and a very cheap ice-pick.

  “It’s funny how seldom you see an ice-pick nowadays,” Mrs. North said conversationally. “They’ve gone out. Only we have them in the country just like that.”

  Weigand nodded. Somebody, he said, had been bright. Mrs. North made an inquiring sound, and said it seemed very ordinary, somehow. Not ingenious. Weigand nodded in approval and said that that was, of course, precisely it.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Nothing complicated to misfire. No special weapon to be traced. Not even a handle which will take fingerprints. Just an ordinary ice-pick from the nearest hardware store: cost, ten cents; traceability, zero. Next to a club on a dark night, the perfect weapon.”

  Mrs. North said “Um-m-m!” and shivered. She said she didn’t like them this way, so much.

  “It’s too real,” she said. “Too close. I think I’ll make Jerry get an electric one in the country.”

  Weigand’s mind hesitated almost imperceptibly at the jump. He was, it was gratifying to realize, improving rapidly. He could recall the time when that would have left him flatfooted. He recalled his mind and slid to the floor; he dismissed the flashlight with a gesture and it went out. And where the hell, he asked, was the man from the M.E.’s office? A couple of detectives made low, agreeing sounds.

  “Got your pictures?” Weigand wanted to know. The police photographer wanted another shot or two. Weigand said “Right,” and that they could get on with the printing, not moving it more than they had to. He pushed Pam North gently in front of him, and went down toward the stage, his eyes flickering over the people on it and in the seats in front. He wriggled through the seats to Mullins and smiled fleetingly at Dorian, and shook his head ruefully. The headshake reported that this one was going to take time and doing; it relegated into the uncertain future the little preacher. Dorian looked resignation at him. Weigand shook his head sadly and went to business. He said, raising his voice for the first time, “Mullins.”