by Frances
Pam still did not speak, but only stared out of the window nearest her.
“Tired, Pam?” Bill asked.
She shook her head and after a pause said she wasn’t tired.
“But I’m afraid I’m worried, Bill,” she said. “Because I don’t want it to be the way it is. The way I think it is.”
And also, Pam thought, because I ought to tell him what I heard, back there behind the set and … She compromised with her conscience.
“One thing, Bill,” she said. “Ask Alberta James whether she has ever worked in a dress shop. Sometimes actresses do when they’re out of engagements. Because maybe …” She let it hang there, and turned toward Bill Weigand to find him looking at her and smiling, without much enjoyment.
“Oh, yes, Pam,” he said. “I’ll ask her that, all right. And also Miss Fowler.” He paused, reflecting. “And of course,” he added, “there’s always Mr. Christopher. Mr. Christopher likes nice things.”
Neither spoke again until Mullins pulled in in front of the theatre.
“Although,” Weigand said then, “we may be barking up the wrong tree, Pam. Maybe she did it herself.”
“The wrong clothes tree?” Pam said. “Or is it clothes horse? But why should she? It wouldn’t have been in character.”
Weigand’s shoulders answered. They went on through the lobby.
XII
TUESDAY—11:35 P.M. TO WEDNESDAY, 12:15 A.M.
“All right,” Weigand said, curtly, to Humphrey Kirk. “Get everybody on stage.”
Kirk looked puzzled and worried, but Weigand’s face did not encourage enquiry.
“Everybody on stage,” Kirk called. “The Lieutenant wants to say something.”
When he had them there, Weigand spent more than a minute staring at them; letting his gaze go over them slowly, without friendliness.
“All right,” he said, finally. “One of you killed Ellen Grady. For the benefit of the others, killed her by drowning her in her bathtub some time after seven o’clock this evening. The same one of you killed Bolton and tried to kill Evans by pushing him down the stairs from the lounge to the basement. Anybody want to say anything?”
Nobody did. Weigand waited.
“Right,” he said. “And once more, to all but one of you—anybody who knows anything he hasn’t told is in danger. Ellen Grady knew something. She’s dead. Evans almost found out something. For the benefit of everybody, he didn’t. He doesn’t know who pushed him.… But he is in the hospital, and it’s only luck he isn’t in the morgue.” He paused again. “One of you doesn’t care who he kills,” he added. “I’m warning the rest.”
He waited, looking at them coldly. They were uneasy now, finally, there on the lighted stage with the shadows behind them; with the shadows of the now unlighted auditorium dark behind the thin crescent of light which lay across only the nearest seats. They looked at Weigand and then away from him; they looked quickly at one another and then away. Those standing or sitting nearest the shadows, nearest the doors and windows and the fireplace which opened into the set, edged forward into the light.
“I’ll have men around,” Weigand told them. “They’ll do what they can. But maybe it won’t be enough. If one of you knows something, it won’t be enough for him. I can’t promise it will be.” He pushed again. “Stay here until I tell you you can go,” he directed. “That’s all.”
“Shall we go on rehearsing?” Kirk asked. Weigand stared at him.
“I don’t care what you do,” he said. “So long as nobody leaves the theatre. But I want Miss James.”
Kirk seemed about to say something. Weigand waited for him, making the wait obvious. Kirk finally shrugged and turned away.
“Miss James,” Weigand said, raising his voice. “I want to talk to you now. Detective Stein will show you where.”
The girl looked very small beside the detective as they went up the aisle, out of the crescent of light into the darkness. Weigand watched them go. He’d let her wait a bit, he decided. He summoned Mullins with a gesture and started toward the door upstage left. Kirk watched him.
“If you want—” Kirk began. Weigand stopped him.
“I don’t want anything,” Weigand said. “I want to look around.”
Weigand led Mullins behind the set, along the passage made by the canvas wall of illusion and the brick wall of real estate. They rounded the corner by the windows, and came out into a relatively open area. Here was waste space, full of oddments—nondescript chairs, a bench along one wall; a wall of canvas masking a door opening off the set. Ahead of them was the beginning of a corridor, and Weigand headed for it. It was short and ran to a flight of stairs leading down to the stage door. Just beyond its opening onto the stage area, another corridor branched from it to the right and off this corridor a flight of iron stairs rose.
“Dressing rooms up there,” Mullins said. He pointed up the stairs. “And back there.” He waved along the branching corridor.
“Right,” Weigand said. “Where’s the door to the basement?” He found it before Mullins could answer, and said “Right” again, this time to himself. As they faced the stage door, the door to the basement area was on their left. It was only a few feet in from the stage door itself. Weigand opened the basement door and stared down into the shadows. There were stairs leading down from this door also, he discovered. He said, “Um-mmm.” Then he turned, walked back, opened the door which led into the set, stumbled over the two-by-four which made an awkward threshold and came out on the stage. Everybody stared at him. He paid no attention. He went to the windows which cut off the corner of the room and stared out of them. Then, to Mullins, whom he had left behind, he called suddenly:
“Move around a bit, Sergeant.”
There were the rather heavy sounds of Mullins moving around a bit.
“Right,” Weigand said. He paid no attention to the people who were staring at him, went back through the door in the set, and collected Mullins from the corridor.
“Could they of?” Mullins asked.
“Yes,” Weigand said, “they could of.”
“Have,” Mullins said.
“Have is right,” Weigand said. “Come on.”
He led Mullins around a corner, found the door leading to the orchestra, and went along the side aisle, up the slight slope, to the rear of the auditorium. Then he paused and looked back.
“Either way would have worked,” he said. “Only why take a chance?”
“Yeh,” Mullins said. “Under or over. Maybe because it was quicker?”
Weigand said it could be. Only there seemed to be no reason why anybody should cut it that close.
“Of course,” he added, “there may have been reasons.”
He led on up the stairs to the mezzanine and opened the door into the office. The lights there were momentarily blinding, although they were bright only by contrast to the shadows elsewhere. Stein, who had been sitting beside the desk, stood up as Weigand and Mullins came in. Weigand nodded and jerked his head toward the door.
“Hang around where they can see you,” he directed. “Maybe somebody will want to spill something.”
He walked around the desk and sat down behind it. Mullins pulled a chair up so he could rest his notebook on a corner of the desk. Then they both looked across at Alberta James, sitting on a straight chair facing them. She looked very slight and her soft hair framed her face disarmingly. But she was pale and her hands clutched each other in her lap. Weigand’s voice when he spoke was level and impersonal.
“I have a good many things to ask you, Miss James,” he said. “You don’t have to answer. If you had nothing to do with these murders, you’ll be wise to answer. If you had something to do with them, I’d advise you not to talk. Whatever you say, Sergeant Mullins will take down, and after it is transcribed, I’ll ask you to initial each page and sign the last page. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” the girl said. Her voice was very low.
“As an alternative to this,” Weigand s
aid, “I can take you to the station house, and have one of the assistant district attorneys question you with me. You’ll be allowed to telephone a lawyer, if you want one. We may let him in, if we have to. But we don’t have to without an order, or unless we charge you with something. Is all this clear?”
“Very clear,” the girl said. “I haven’t done anything. I’ll answer any questions you like.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “I’m telling you all this, Miss James, because there are several circumstances you’ll have to explain. We know a good deal more now than we did earlier.”
“I haven’t done anything,” the girl repeated. Her head was back and she was facing the detectives and her eyes were afraid.
“Right,” Weigand said. “I hope you haven’t. Now—you heard me say that Ellen Grady has been killed?”
She nodded.
“Very well,” Weigand said. “You went there this evening; went to see Miss Grady. Why?”
“What makes you—” she began. Then she stopped. “All right,” she said. “I went to see her. For a very foolish, trivial reason.”
“Which was?”
“She is—she was—the lead. So she could decide, with the help of Miss Fowler, what she wanted to wear in the different acts. And she could object if I wore something which she thought clashed with her clothes or—made them less effective. I wanted to wear a blue dress in the first act, accented with orange. I didn’t know whether that would be all right with her. I didn’t get a chance to ask her today and so—well, it was on my mind and I thought ‘Why not go around now and ask her?’ So I did.”
She spoke with little hesitation, as if she had formed the explanation in her mind while she waited. As, Weigand decided, she unquestionably had. Which, he qualified to himself, proved nothing—whether it was true or false, she would have known the explanation would be needed, and would have formulated it in her mind.
“Right,” Weigand said. “You saw Miss Grady?”
“Yes, for a moment. She said it would be all right.”
“I see,” Weigand said. “Now—tell me about it. Was she alone? How long did you stay?”
“She was alone,” the girl said. “I only stayed a minute or so. She said she was getting ready to take a bath. She was in a negligee, as a matter of fact, and the tub was running. I only stayed a minute.”
“Where?” Weigand said. “I mean, did you stay in the living room? Or go into the bedroom? Did she let you in herself?”
“I rang the bell,” the girl said. “She opened the door a little and saw who it was and said to come on in. She said: ‘You may as well come in, too. Everybody does.’”
“Did she seem angry, upset?”
“No.” The girl thought. “She seemed—oh, sort of resigned and—amused. As if there had been a string of little things. But not irritated.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “Then you went in?”
Ellen Grady had, the girl said, opened the door and then walked on through the living room to the bedroom. Alberta had closed the door behind her and followed. Ellen had sat down in the chair and offered her a cigarette and Alberta had sat on the bed and taken up the matter of the first-act dresses. Ellen had been pleasant about it, and agreed at once to Alberta’s choice. Then Alberta, seeing that Ellen wanted to go on with her bath—“she kept sort of looking toward the bathroom,” Alberta explained—had crushed out her cigarette and—
“I said I hoped I hadn’t bothered her, but that I’d wanted to get it settled,” Alberta said. “Miss Fowler wanted to know, and so did I. She said it was all right, and she was sorry to hurry me away, but that somebody was coming and she wanted to get her bath in first. So I just went.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “And she?”
As Alberta went on into the living room on her way to the door, she said, Ellen had already started to take off the negligee and was walking toward the bathroom.
“She waved at me,” Alberta said. “Sort of—oh, ‘good-bye-be-seeing-you’ and—oh, I almost forgot.”
“Yes?” Weigand said.
“Just as I was going out she called after me,” Alberta told him. “She said to snap the door so it wouldn’t lock. It usually locked when you closed it, I suppose.”
“And you did?”
She had. She had supposed, naturally, that the other person Ellen Grady was expecting had been told to come on in and that Ellen wanted the door left so that she could come on in.
“She?” Weigand repeated. “Did she say it was a woman?”
“She just said ‘somebody,’” Alberta told him. “But I naturally supposed it was a woman, since she was—well, she certainly didn’t act as if she were expecting a man. Unless—” She stopped.
“Unless?” Weigand repeated. The girl looked at him, and half smiled.
“Do I have to fill it in, Lieutenant?” she said.
Weigand shook his head. What, he wanted to know, had Miss James done then.
Then, she said, she had gone on across town by taxi to the Algonquin, where she was meeting Mr. Kirk for dinner. She met Mr. Kirk, they had dinner, she came to the theatre. Weigand said he saw.
“Was Mr. Kirk there when you got there?” he asked, casually.
“No,” she said. “He was late as it hap—oh!”
“How late?” Weigand asked.
“Only a few minutes,” she said. “Hardly any time. I waited in the bar, where we were going to meet. Then, in just a minute or two, he came along.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “We can always check on just how long you waited, if it seems important. Now—how did it happen that Dr. Bolton had in his hand, when he died, a piece of material which belonged to you, Miss James? A piece of orange silk you were showing Miss Fowler, as a sample of what you wanted for the accents on your blue dress?”
There was no sound from the girl for a moment, but her eyes seemed to grow wider. Weigand watched her hands; saw them twisting together in her lap. Then she said: “Oh—I—” and stopped.
“Well, Miss James?” Weigand said.
She seemed to stiffen to meet the moment. She swallowed and when she first spoke her voice was uncertain. Then it, too, steadied.
“Humpty said you’d find out,” she said. “And that you’d suspect—all sorts of things. And not believe that I really lost it. It was—I was afraid to explain. But—”
“But?” Weigand repeated, when she did not go on.
“I simply don’t know,” she said. “I must have lost it some place. And somebody must have picked it up. Perhaps Dr. Bolton himself. I don’t know why it was in his hand when you found him—”
“Simply because, Miss James, it was in his hand when he was killed,” Weigand told her.
She nodded, and said she supposed so.
“And I still don’t know,” she said. “I had it this morning and showed it to Aun—to Miss Fowler. Then this afternoon it was gone when I wanted to try it with the blue and—” She was hurrying, now—hurrying away from a slip of the tongue. But Weigand stopped her.
“To Aun—” he repeated, echoing her syllable. “Your aunt, you were about to say, weren’t you, Miss James. And then you said, ‘Miss Fowler’ instead. And—is Miss Fowler your aunt, Miss James?”
Slowly, unwillingly, she nodded.
“Everybody knows that,” she said. “It isn’t any secret except—”
“Except,” Weigand said, “from the police. Why from the police, Miss James?”
He was surprised, a little, when the girl smiled, and seemed to relax.
“You know,” she said, “I haven’t the least idea. She wanted it that way—said we’d better not mention it, because it would merely be another confusion that had nothing to do with the murder. As of course it didn’t. But she seemed to feel—oh, the more complicated the relationships of all of us, the more you would have to spend going down blind alleys. Like her and Mr. Tilford—everybody knows that, too.”
“Except,” Weigand told her, without inflection, “the police. What ab
out your aunt, Miss Fowler, and Mr. Tilford?”
“Only,” the girl said, “that they used to be married—oh, years ago.”
“Well,” Mullins said, “I’ll be damned.”
Weigand looked at him and Mullins said, “Sorry, Loot, but jeez!”
“What other ‘relationships’ are you people keeping from the police?” Weigand wanted to know. “Keeping from us just to make it simple for us?”
The girl shook her head, the long reddish brown hair swaying. Nothing, she told him. Nothing that mattered. “Except,” Weigand said, “your ‘relationship’—whatever it was—with Bolton.”
It was a stab. Watching her closely, he could not tell whether it had reached a mark. Perhaps her eyes widened a little again; perhaps her newly won relaxation faltered a little. But it was hard to tell.
“Relationship?” she repeated. “There wasn’t any—”
And then, with no warning, the door opened violently and Humphrey Kirk stood violently in the doorway. He spoke, loudly:
“You can’t—” Humphrey Kirk said, and stopped. Weigand stared at him, and was suddenly rather amused. Because it was almost ludicrously evident that the scene which confronted Mr. Humphrey Kirk was by no means the scene he had expected. The hero had leaped furiously from his horse and found the maiden having tea with the dragon. The hero was left at a disadvantage.
“Well, Mr. Kirk,” Weigand said, in a voice which was incongruously low and quiet. “What can’t I, Mr. Kirk? If you mean I can’t ask Miss James questions, you’re quite wrong. And if you mean I can’t have you thrown out of this office, or if necessary out of this theatre, you’re wrong again.”
He stared at Kirk, who stared back. Kirk looked, Weigand decided, slightly embarrassed.
“What did you think we were doing with her, Mr. Kirk?” Weigand asked, his tone very dry. “Shining a light in her eyes? Or beating her up?”
“Well—” Kirk said.
“You read too much, Mr. Kirk,” Weigand told him. “Such men get foolish ideas. Sergeant Mullins and I are merely asking Miss James some questions. She understands that she doesn’t have to answer. So far she has preferred to answer. Isn’t that right, Miss James?”