Death on the Aisle

by Frances

  “All right,” Kirk said. “Where the hell is she? Who the hell does she think she is? Helen Hayes? Katharine Cornell? Somebody we should stand around all night waiting for?”

  Nobody seemed to have an answer to this series of questions. Then Jimmy Sand appeared, carrying the blue-bound script. It adhered to him, Pam North decided, watching.

  “O.K., Humpty,” Sand said. “I guess she’s on her way. Nobody answers.”

  “On her way!” Kirk repeated. He spoke bitterly. “On her way where? She was ‘on her way’ when you called half an hour ago. She’s been on her way all night. Who the hell does she think she is?”

  Kirk stopped and glared at everybody.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. Take it from Martin’s entrance—no, take it from the start of the scene. We’ll twiddle our thumbs for her. Take it from the start.”

  “Oh,” Pam said to herself. “Not again!”

  I know it word for word, Pam thought. I could play all the parts. I could say it in my sleep. I’ve never been so bored.

  It was strange, Pam thought, to be bored in the middle of a murder and in the middle of a play. It wasn’t being the way she thought it would be. I thought temperament, Pam thought, and everybody tense and excited, because it’s a rehearsal and a murder both together. She looked at Jerry, who was staring at the stage without expression and obviously thinking about several other things. Business, Pam thought, and he just sits there. I wonder where Bill is? She looked around for Dorian and remembered that, ten or fifteen minutes before, Dorian had stood up and wandered off, dreamily, and Pam hadn’t asked where because she thought she knew. But Dorian hadn’t come back.

  “And I’ll bet,” Pam said to herself, “she’s found Bill and is right in the middle of things, and here I am and nothing happening!”

  She started to stand up and Jerry looked at her abstractedly.

  “Drink of water,” Pam said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Perhaps, she thought, Jerry will come with me, and we’ll find out what’s happening. But Jerry merely nodded and went back to thinking, with the look of a man who is thinking about business. Pam sighed and looked at the stage. They were going through the second scene of the first act for the fourth time, and forgetting lines and Jimmy Sand was prompting in a tired voice. Humpty Kirk seemed to have subsided somewhere.

  “Probably in a coma,” Pam said to herself. “I should think he would.”

  Pam walked up the aisle, thinking she would find something going on, but there was nothing. There was a drone from the stage and empty seats and no sign of anybody chasing murderers. Pam crossed back of partitions between the orchestra seats and the lobby doors and started down the aisle at the extreme right with the desultory movements of a person who may decide to sit down at any moment. But before she was halfway down her steps quickened. Pam North had an idea.

  “I’ll see what it looks like back there,” she said. “And where they really go when they go out the doors.” She said it to herself, but with almost audible determination. If they didn’t want her to go back-stage, they could always say so, if they didn’t see her, and nobody had said she mustn’t. She passed back of the curtains which cut off the stage boxes and stumbled on a short flight of steps. She said “ouch” under her breath and “this must be it” under her mind. There was a door at the top of the short flight of steps and it opened toward her. Pam North stepped through, cautiously.

  Caution was required. At her right was something infinitely complicated, and having to do with electricity. There were switches and buttons and, just as Pam feared, wires. She shrank to the other side, brushing against tall wooden frames over which canvas was stretched tightly. On the back of one of the frames was stenciled: “Teddy Must Run.” Pam could just make it out in light, which, starting bravely from unshaded bulbs, lost itself amid looming obstacles.

  “‘Teddy Must Run,’” Pam repeated to herself. “Oh—I remember that. But it was years ago. This must be part of its scenery, just left around.”

  Something brushed against her face and she jumped. In a moment she would have screamed, but in a moment she discovered that she had brushed the dangling end of a piece of rope. She looked up, and the rope disappeared in darkness. She could look a long way up, and there was a steel framework, with ropes dangling from it.

  “The grid,” Pam said to herself, proud to have remembered. She edged forward and the space widened. It was bounded now, on her right, by a rough brick wall and, on her left, by a canvas structure which she recognized, almost at once, as the other side of Martin Bingham’s apartment in the East Sixties. It was stenciled, too—“Two in the Bush.” Through it she could hear voices. A voice said: “—to keep this one small place free from—”

  “All the noisy bitterness of the world.” Pam finished to herself. It was still the second scene of the first act. Pam hoped it wasn’t really as dull as it had now begun, to her, to sound.

  She went on, and then, beyond another pile of canvas frames, stacked against the brick wall, a man was sitting in a kitchen chair, leaning back against the bricks. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at Mrs. North without interest. Pam smiled at him and he nodded absently. Then Pam remembered who he was, or almost who he was. He was one of the stage hands, or perhaps the electrician, who had sat in the semicircle when Bill was identifying people. He didn’t seem to mind her being back-stage and she went on until the brick wall was in front of her, as well as at the right. She turned to her left, and realized that now she was directly behind the set—yes, here were the other sides of the two doors, which led out of Mr. Bingham’s apartment. On this side of the doors there was a little platform, built up and reached by stairs—Pam wondered a moment, and then remembered that the doors, from the other, visible, side of the wall opened off a platform of similar height. Of course—the actors couldn’t be caught climbing as they came in the doors. They had to have something on the other side to start from. It was interesting, Pam decided, to find out about these things. And now along the back there should be windows—the other side of windows. She came to the windows curtained and, after the first two, angling away, so as to cut off a corner of the room. It was funny, Pam was thinking, how small the set really was, seen thus unprotected in its essential wood and canvas, and how much more of the stage they could have used if they had wanted to—all this wasted space between the walls of the set and the real, brick wall of the theatre—and it was funny—Then Pam interrupted herself, because she heard voices. She had wondered where everybody was, and where all the actors went when they went off the stage, and now here were at least two of them, just around the corner of the set—around the blunted corner made by the windows. Pam hesitated, wondering if they would mind her being there, and then started to go on to meet them, because she was really not doing any harm. Then she stopped, because Humphrey Kirk, who ought to have been out front, was back here instead, and talking earnestly.

  “They haven’t yet, but they will,” Humphrey Kirk said. “You can trust them for that, Berta. It would be too easy if they didn’t. Oh, darling—why!”

  It didn’t sound as Humphrey Kirk usually sounded. The “darling” was not its usual casual substitute for “hey, you!” And Kirk’s voice was different; it had an odd, urgent note; it was—Then Pam identified the note, or thought she did, because she had heard something like it in another voice, often. It was the voice of a man who was worried through a deep fondness; who was brought up against, and baffled by, some alarming vagary in one deeply loved. Only this was not a little vagary—not one of those half-assumed, although still essentially real, variations from the understandable which both the man and the woman, without ostensible admission of the fact, enjoyed. This was about something which was, to Kirk, extremely real. Nor was there any doubt how he felt about Alberta James.

  Now, she realized, Pam ought to cough, or fall noisily over something, or, more simply, walk on around the corner and interrupt. If people were to lurk, the people should be paid policem
en and—But Pam did not go on around the corner, because now Alberta was speaking.

  “But Humpty,” she said. “I had to. Just that once. You know I did. I couldn’t just let it drop—not with everything unsettled. And—”

  “You didn’t want to let it drop. You didn’t plan to, not really.” There was bitterness, and unhappiness, in Kirk’s voice now. There was a little pause and then the girl spoke slowly.

  “I can’t make you believe me, Humpty,” she said. “That’s the way it was—there was never anything, really, and what there was was over. Oh yes—that’s clearer now than it was a while ago. Even than it was yesterday. I—he confused me, Humpty. For a while I didn’t—It was all—complicated. But you know it was complicated. I couldn’t just—stop. It was all—tangled up.”

  “That’s the trouble.” Kirk’s voice was quick, this time, as the voice of a man who sees his point and drives toward it. “You were tangled up. That’s why the rest of it was tangled—you weren’t clear, sure in your own mind.” He paused. “Or in your own feelings,” he added. “God knows I’ve tried not to think that.”

  “You didn’t have to, Humpty.” Alberta’s voice was low. “Oh, Humpty—dear—you didn’t have to. Not ever.… What do you think I am?”

  “You know what I think you are, darling,” Humpty said. “Oh—forget what I said about your feelings. It wasn’t that you felt confused. You thought confused. You wouldn’t take the simple way. You had to go on with it—‘working things out,’ as you said.” He stopped, suddenly and then went on. “Well,” he said, and now his words had an inflection of almost hopeless finality. “We’ve worked it out, all right. Among us.”

  The girl didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Oh, Humpty!” Her voice seemed to be coming through tears.

  This is awful, Pam thought to herself. I oughtn’t to be doing this. There were other sounds—a slight movement, a low murmur. Pam could almost see them, holding each other desperately against danger. I hate myself for this, Pam thought. I’ll always hate myself for this. And I’ll never tell; if they are both murderers, I’ll never tell.

  Humphrey Kirk’s voice was quieter when he spoke again. He said he was a fool.

  “But I always knew, really,” he said. “I was—well, jealous. Stupidly jealous. But I always knew. You know that?”

  The answer was very low, its burden more evident in tone than in words. She had known.

  “Now,” Kirk said, in still another voice. He was, Pam thought, pushing back that unstable forelock of his. “Now—we’ve got to get things clear. You say you just dropped it.”

  “I must have,” she said. “That’s the only way. And somebody—must have found it. Or perhaps he found it after I went out. That would explain it.”

  Damn, Pam thought. Found what? It was annoying to have the guilt of eavesdropping, and such illusive gain. Found what?

  “But Humpty,” the girl said. “We can’t just explain it—think up something it could have been. We have to know! We’re not safe unless we know! We’re tangled up in it.”

  Humphrey Kirk sighed.

  “If you’d only dropped it long ago, darling,” he said. “You could have gone to some other man. There are plenty of other men just as good as Bolton—as Bolton was. Or if, instead of that, you had quit seeing him the other way. As your aunt said.”

  “Her aunt?” thought Pam North, who was no longer even pretending to herself not to listen avidly. “What’s her aunt got to do with this? And what is it?”

  Pam listened and tried to think it out at the same time. Alberta had lost something and somebody had found it. She had made Humphrey Kirk jealous, but probably needlessly jealous with, presumably, Dr. Bolton, and she “could have gone to another man,” which was an odd thing for Humphrey Kirk to tell her. Unless by “man” he meant “doctor,” Pam nodded to herself. Alberta could have gone to another doctor; therefore, she was seeing Bolton professionally. But Kirk would not have been jealous if she had been seeing Bolton only professionally. And Alberta’s aunt, like Kirk himself, had been opposed to her dual relationship with Bolton.

  “There wasn’t any ‘other way,’” the girl said, “not for a long time.”

  Again there was a moment during which neither spoke. When Kirk did speak, then, there was a note in his voice which made Pam feel that something had been settled between them.

  “There’s always F. Lawrence,” Kirk said. His tone was speculative. Alberta said, “Why?” and Kirk made dim, hesitant noises. Finally he said it wasn’t clear.

  “Except for the obvious hookup,” he said. “And I’ll admit that’s remote. But it would give the police a trail—something else to bay on. And that would give us time.”

  “What good’s time?” Alberta asked. There was, it seemed to Pam, an odd note in her voice. Apparently the note seemed odd, also, to Humphrey Kirk. He asked Alberta, in a voice suddenly sharpened, what she meant. Her answer was silence, and Pam wished she could see them; the girl was, she thought, looking at Humpty in a certain way. But what way is it? Pam thought. What is she saying with her eyes and the line of her mouth? Whatever she was saying, it was clear to Kirk.

  “Darling!” Kirk said. There was urgency and a kind of command in his voice. “Don’t think that! You mustn’t think that!”

  Damn! Pam thought to herself. What mustn’t she think? Alberta mustn’t think—Pam tried to fill out the sentence. “You mustn’t think—I did it.” Could that be it? Or—“I think you did it!” Or—but it slipped through Pam’s mind. Were they talking, really, about somebody else entirely; somebody else of whose innocence Alberta had doubt; somebody close to her who, to Alberta dreadfully, might have killed Carney Bolton?

  It was, Pam decided, entirely unsatisfactory. She added up. Humpty Kirk and the girl with reddish brown hair were in love, and it was not an easy and comfortable love; it was love shot with jealousy and doubt. She had lost something and somebody had found it and “it” was connected with the murder of Bolton. Kirk wanted time for something and Alberta felt that time was of no use to them. Alberta had been a patient of Bolton; Alberta had an aunt who had disapproved of Bolton. Alberta was thinking something she mustn’t think and—

  “Well,” a low, musical voice said behind Pam North. “Are you waiting for something—Mrs. North?”

  Mrs. North jumped and said, “Oh!” She looked, she was convinced, as guilty as she felt—as guilty as she was. Mary Fowler looked at her quietly and seemed a little amused. But the amusement was not friendly.

  “Oh,” Mrs. North said again. “I was just exploring.”

  I wish, she thought, that that sounded more convincing. If she’s been there for any time at all she knows I’m not exploring; I’m just standing still. And now I’ll have to walk on with her and pretend to be looking at things, and we’ll simply fall over those two and everybody will know I was listening. Oh, damn!

  Mary Fowler’s words, when she spoke, then, seemed to take Pam North’s statement as full and satisfying information. Miss Fowler said, “Of course.” But Pam would have preferred, she decided, another tone.

  “It must be interesting to you,” Miss Fowler said. “Back-stage and everything. It always interests people who aren’t professionals. It’s—I’ll never forget how exciting it was for me, a long time ago, when I was only a girl and stage-struck.”

  She smiled at Mrs. North.

  “Only,” she said, “one almost needs a guide the first time, don’t you think? If you had asked me—or anyone—we’d have been glad—”

  It was hard to tell what Mary Fowler was thinking; whether the note in her voice was irony. Or more than irony. But she must, Pam decided, pretend that she was believed.

  “I know,” Pam said. “It was foolish of me. Only everybody was busy.”

  She spoke without lowering her voice, so that nobody who might now, in turn, be overhearing would think she had anything to hide. She felt Mary Fowler’s unexpectedly strong fingers on her arm.

  “We’ll go on arou
nd, my dear,” Miss Fowler said. “Be careful you don’t stumble over something.”

  Pam tried not to look at Miss Fowler suspiciously. Stumble over something? Was that irony?

  They went on around the corner blunted by the windows and—and there was nobody there! Or, more exactly, there were several people there, Alberta James among them. And Humphrey Kirk was not among them. There was a short bench just under the farthest window and it was about right as to distance and direction, Pam thought, to have been the refuge of the girl and Humpty Kirk when they were talking. But now nobody was in it. Alberta was standing farther on, with John Hubbard and another man whom Mrs. North had not seen before, and they were talking.

  “Oh,” Miss Fowler said from beside Mrs. North. “I thought Humpty was here. Have any of you seen him?”

  “He was here,” Alberta James said. “Five minutes or so ago. I don’t know where he is now.”

  She spoke casually, as if it didn’t matter at all to her where Humpty Kirk had got to. She didn’t look guilty of anything, Pam North decided. But, of course, she was an actress. And Mary Fowler didn’t look as if she had any secret knowledge which concerned Alberta and Humpty and, unfavorably, Pamela North. But Miss Fowler had, Pam remembered, once been an actress herself. Pam looked at Miss Fowler’s rather heavy face, marred by the startling eyes, and wondered about that. She must, Pam thought, have played very special parts.

  Pam decided to be somewhere else. She smiled vaguely and said something about the deep anxiety which might, by now, be presumed to be consuming Mr. North; she asked directions and was given them. Hubbard gallantly guided her through apertures to another door and told her to watch the stairs. Through the door and down the stairs she was back in the auditorium.

  They were still on the same scene. Just as Mrs. North found a seat, Alberta James came on stage and spoke the lines of Sally Bingham. Humphrey Kirk was coiled in a seat in the third row with the air of one who has never left it. Jerry North was slumped in the same seat he had previously occupied and still, Pam decided, looking at him across half the auditorium and in a very bad light, thinking of business. Then Weigand and Mullins came down the right-center aisle from somewhere in the darkness to the rear and Weigand spoke.