Death on the Aisle

by Frances

  “Why, it’s a gun!” Pam said. She said it with incredulity in her voice, and only then, hearing her voice, realized that she had been hearing it for several moments. She could hear her voice saying, in that strangely fixed instant, “if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have known.”

  I’m beginning to do it without realizing it, Pam thought to herself. I must really stop doing that.

  And then, with thoughts jumbling through the incredulity which filled her, Pam realized two things. It looked desperately as if she might stop doing a great many things, besides talking to herself. “Like breathing,” Pam thought, her mind aghast. “And beating.” But what she said was about none of these things.

  “So that’s why it got darker,” she said. “You turned the light out in the office?”

  “Of course,” the husky voice said. “When I realized.”

  And now, finally, Pamela North, turning slowly from the staircase which led to safety at the command of a prodding gun which pressed just under her left shoulder-blade, realized fully what was so incredible in this moment, so that even as she turned she could hardly believe in what was happening. The voice in the shadows behind her was the wrong voice!

  “Don’t scream, Mrs. North!” the voice behind commanded, as the speaker sensed—perhaps because some convulsive movement was conveyed through the weapon which pressed hard into Pam North’s back—a new tension in the slight figure which obediently turned back into the shadows. “I don’t want to do it—here. They’d come too soon.”

  The voice was reasonable and measured, explaining quite logically. Explaining, Pam thought, why I’m not to be killed here and now, and have it done with. It is strange that everything is so clear. But that’s because it is happening to somebody else, really. It can’t be happening to me.

  “I shan’t scream,” she said. “I—I almost laughed. Because, you see, you were quite wrong—until a minute ago you were quite wrong. That’s because I was wrong, you see.”

  Pam felt that she, in turn, must be completely logical and clear.

  “I never suspected you at all,” she said. “I wasn’t any danger to you. I thought …”

  Pam let it trail off. What was the good of it? She waited to hear the voice again, but for a moment, as she walked, the gun commanding, through the shadows of the mezzanine, moving across the theatre from the stairs, there was only silence. When she heard the voice again there was a note in it, hard to understand. It was as if the speaker were fighting down doubts.

  “You knew, Mrs. North,” the voice said. “What will it get you to lie? Because, anyway, you know now, don’t you?”

  Mrs. North, in the darkness, slowly nodded her head.

  “So,” the voice said, “it really doesn’t make any difference, does it? You see that, don’t you? Even if I was wrong before, you know now!” There was a pause.

  “Ellen Grady knew,” the voice said, “when she saw me. So I had to—I was sorry about that. I’m sorry about this, Mrs. North.”

  “I told you no one,” Lieutenant Weigand said. His voice was angry. “Somebody’s going to pound pavements for this!”

  Detective Niccoli wilted perceptibly.

  “Well?” Weigand said. “Where did you see her last? Where was she going?”

  Detective Niccoli, in a small voice for so large a detective, told Weigand.

  “And what could I do?” he asked, heartened by the sound of his own voice.

  He could, Weigand told him, have gone to the door with her. He could have parked there and waited. If he didn’t know there were two stairways leading up from the downstairs lounge, he should have asked somebody who did. Instead of waiting trustingly at the head of one flight while Mary Fowler went up the other.

  “If we don’t find her, you go back to uniform,” Weigand told the diminished detective. “If there’s another killing, you go out of the department if it’s the last thing I do.” He glared at the detective. “Don’t stand there gaping,” he ordered. “I want her—alive.”

  Detective Niccoli moved off, uncertainly.

  “Kirk!” Weigand shouted. He was walking down an aisle toward the stage, having left Niccoli behind him. “Kirk!”

  Kirk’s voice came from the shadows of the auditorium.

  “Yes?” he said. “What’s happened?”

  Weigand told him, curtly. Miss Fowler, disregarding his order that nobody was to wander off, his warning that safety lay only in numbers, had outwitted her guardian and disappeared. Kirk came up behind Weigand, brushing back the forelock.

  “For God’s sake,” he said. “Is there going to be another? Do you think—?”

  “I want to find Mary Fowler,” Weigand told him. “That’s all, for now. I want the theatre lighted up. She may still be in it—or—”

  “Or her body may,” Kirk finished for him. “Is that what you think, Lieutenant? Because I—”

  “Think later,” Weigand said. “Get the lights on. Can you do that? Or find somebody who can?”

  Kirk nodded.

  “I’ll find the electrician,” he said. “It’ll save time.”

  Kirk moved rapidly. But he saved very little time. The electrician was absent; shouts did not bring him. In the end, it was Kirk himself who pulled at switches a little gingerly, and pulled finally at enough of them to flood the theatre with light. Then the electrician appeared, from a comfortable smoke in the alley outside. He disapproved of Kirk’s action with a frown; inspected the switches and, apparently to his surprise, found them undamaged. He shook his head gloomily and pushed irritably at a switch already closed.

  Weigand, as the lights came up, scattered his men.

  “Find her,” he ordered. “If she’s in the theatre, find her!”

  The detectives scattered—back-stage, below stage, in the dressing-rooms. One climbed unhappily up ladders to the dim regions of the loft above the stage, and moved gingerly along catwalks. In the basement, where the light was always dim, flashlights stabbed it. In the lounge downstairs, sofas were hauled from against walls; in the orchestra, lights darted among the ranked seats. It was, Humphrey Kirk thought as he watched, as he saw detectives, working up, climb the stairs to the mezzanine, odd how, from the places they looked, one could tell that they expected to find a body.

  They don’t, Kirk thought, look first in the places a living woman might be. They look behind things, and under things. They are looking for death.

  And perhaps, Kirk thought, although he doubted it, they are right. Another death might well be on the cards, unless somebody moved rapidly. And, thinking of Berta, his heart spun over.

  I’ve got to find Berta, he thought. I’ve got to get her out of this—before—before. He did not finish the thought even to himself, because his mind shrank away from the logic that would finish it. If what he thought true was true, things were bad for Berta—any way you took it, things were bad for her. And if—But then a new thought came to the mind of Humpty Kirk. Murder might turn senseless, hysterical. If it did—if death moved wantonly as, if he were right, it might move—then Berta might be in its path. Nobody was safe when death became wanton.

  Kirk whirled and faced the stage, scanning it anxiously for the girl. He did not see her for a moment, and he started to call loudly—for her, for Weigand, for help from somewhere. Then, as he realized his mood and overcame it, she spoke beside him. She had come down the aisle behind; now she stood at his side, her fingers on his arm. Her voice was very low, strained, tight.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Humpty,” she said. “You’ve got to come with me. I need you. I can’t do it alone.”

  He looked at her steadily for a moment, and then she nodded slowly, with a kind of finality.

  “We’ve got to do it, Humpty,” she said. “We’ve got to do it ourselves. How can we get out?”

  Humpty knew the answer to that one, with the detectives scattered through the theatre; with only uniformed men guarding the doors. He guided the girl, holding her arm and talking as if they were confer
ring over something in the play, until they were near a fire exit—never locked from within. They stood there for a moment, still talking as if idly, while Humpty Kirk pressed down on the bar which held the door’s catch. It was down, without sound, and the door gave to his inquiring pressure.

  “Now!” Humpty said. She moved instantly to his pressure. No one, Humpty thought in the alley outside, had seen them go. Now if they could make his car without being seen! It was a good thing the alley was so dark, the street on which it gave emptied so by night. The car was against the curb and they walked toward it boldly, once they were in the light.

  Mrs. North hesitated when they came to the car, and for a moment the sense of unreality gave way to a coldness which seemed to start around her heart. If I get in the car it will be too late, she thought. We’ll leave everybody behind. Then, desperately, she tried to call with her mind. “Jerry!” her mind called. “Jerry! Help me!” The weapon, unobtrusively against her side now, pressed as if the person who held it had heard her cry. The pistol pressed with a kind of warning.

  “Get in, Mrs. North,” the voice said. “Under the wheel. I want you to drive.”

  Mrs. North’s mind fought to stay, but her body entered the car. That’s how it is, Mrs. North thought, it’s your body makes you. I always wondered about that, and why people went for “a ride” to be killed when they just made it easier for the murderers, and could refuse and die where they were, but it’s their bodies makes them. The body doesn’t ever give up. It grabs for minutes. And—

  “Start the car, Mrs. North,” the voice said. “I’ll tell you where to go.”

  Mrs. North started the car.

  “I’m going to take you home with me, Mrs. North,” the voice said. It was level and quite reasonable. “Because I don’t want them to find you too soon, and I can’t waste too much time finding a place where they wouldn’t find you. And because they will never expect me to take you there, even if they do suspect.”

  It amazed, and somehow heartened, Mrs. North to find that she could answer.

  “But they will,” she said. “And when they do, they’ll know. But now they all think as I do—I mean as I did. They don’t think it’s you.”

  The voice was silent. Then it said: “Turn right, here.” They turned uptown. “Go faster,” the voice said. “But don’t try to attract attention, or have a traffic man stop us. I want to see if there’s anybody behind.”

  Mrs. North drove north, not too fast. The city was strange and empty at this hour. People on the sidewalks seemed detached and distant. Only the traffic lights, switching now to red, seemed methodical with the method of daytime. But now, guarding an almost empty street, they seemed to mock themselves. Mrs. North brought the car to a stop, waiting for the light to change. She mustn’t drive through it, because there might be a policeman in the shadows somewhere, and he might try to give them a ticket. And then the revolver would smash death into her side.

  I must wait quietly for the light, Mrs. North thought, so that after a while I can die where it will be convenient. And then, mercifully, the sense of unreality came back. Something will happen, Mrs. North said. Jerry will come or—

  “If you let me go now,” Mrs. North said, “and I didn’t go back, but hid somewhere until you got away—”

  The sound beside her was almost a laugh.

  “Why should you do that?” the voice said. “Whatever you promised, what difference would it make? You’d be a fool not to tell them.”

  It would be foolish to deny that, Mrs. North thought.

  “Turn right again,” the voice said. Mrs. North swung right, through a crosstown street. There were taxis parking halfway along the block, and one driver leaned into a window of another’s cab, talking. If I could run into that cab, Mrs. North thought, and scream, then there wouldn’t be time—

  “No, Mrs. North,” the voice said, uncannily. “Don’t try it.”

  I must have swerved the car a little, Mrs. North thought. I must have given it away. She drove on. The lights were green at Broadway, where glaring lights illuminated emptiness and more idly waiting taxicabs. Mrs. North drove across.

  “And now,” the voice said, as if it were taking up a casual conversation, “if I did it now, I’d have to use the gun, which would be noisy. The other way was better—the first way. There was no noise at all, only it stuck a little. Then I hit it with my hand and it went in, with a smooth feeling. I got a doctor to show me where, you know. I told him a friend of mine, a writer, wanted to know. It is easy to fool people. It was easy to fool me, once.”

  And now the cold feeling came back, creeping over the sense of unreality. Because in the cold, conversational note of the voice there was madness, and only madness. But it was a madness calculated and cunning, and with a kind of horrible reason under it.

  “After I kill you,” the voice said, “I’ll hide your body somewhere and nobody will find it for a long time. And then I’ll go away.” There was a pause. “I think the knife in the kitchen table drawer will be sharp enough.”

  It might have sounded absurd, had the voice been different. But to Mrs. North, driving across Sixth Avenue with the lights—and with the hard point pressing her side—it was only, and now finally and horrifyingly, real. Because now, in her mind, Mrs. North could see the knife, lying in the kitchen drawer, with a fork beside it and some spoons and—yes, a spatula. There would be a spatula in a kitchen drawer. It was not a long knife, as Mrs. North saw it, but it had a shining blade. You would use it to pare potatoes with, probably.

  Mr. Tilford was glad to be away from the theatre. He was tired and it had been a long day, but now it was almost over. Thinking back over it, as he was inclined to when a day was finished, he decided that he had made no mistakes, although some of the things he had done he would have preferred not to do, if he could have chosen freely. However—

  “You turn right, here,” Mr. Tilford said, leaning a little forward as he spoke.

  It was a long time before they missed Pamela North. One by one the detectives came back, worried and apologetic, from the search for Mary Fowler. And then, while the last was explaining, Weigand suddenly broke in.

  “Where’s Kirk?” he demanded. “And the girl?”

  And that started things again, but after a moment Weigand shrugged his shoulders.

  “All right,” he said. “It was always on the cards some of them would get away if they wanted to—I banked that they wouldn’t. Now—let them all go.” He looked at Detective Stein, who was staring at him, surprised.

  “It’s over here, anyway,” he said. “Perhaps they’re safer scattered out. Tell them we’ll see them—tomorrow. Tell them they can get some sleep.”

  Stein told them—those of them there were. There were not as many, he thought, running tired eyes over them, as there had been.

  “All right,” Weigand said to Mullins. “It’s a day. Tell the Norths—”

  And it was only then, when Mr. North and Dorian joined Weigand and Mullins, that they discovered there was no Mrs. North. They were not worried for a moment, and called to her, their voices reverberating through the empty spaces of the theatre. And then, when she did not come, and when Dorian had looked in places she might be, and the comfortable belief that she was surely somewhere around was whittled away to nothing—then the color left Mr. North’s face, and he called once more, his voice high and excited: “Pam! Pam—where are you?!”

  Then Bill Weigand took Jerry North’s shoulder, and said, “All right, Jerry. We’ll find her.” But Weigand’s voice was tight and anxious, and when he met Dorian’s frightened eyes his own went blank for an instant to hide an answer he did not want them to give.

  “She’ll be all right, Jerry,” he said. He wished he believed it.

  XVI

  WEDNESDAY—1:35 A.M. to 2:05 A.M.

  It had been, Mary Fowler thought, an exhausting day; far more exhausting than she had thought it would be when she awakened that morning. It had not been a physically exhausting day, exa
ctly; bodily she was less tired than often after a day at the theatre, with the inevitable demands on her patience, the endless adjustments which her relationships with the actresses she dressed made necessary, with the necessity always to meet the so often divergent demands of actors, directors, stage designers. But she had had, listening to the questions of the detectives, answering and listening to others answer, always a great many things to keep ordered in her mind. It was a strain, admittedly, and she was tired from it. But so far as she could remember, she had kept everything straight.

  There would never be another day like it, she thought, remembering everything. First Carney, and then poor Ellen, and Evans. She had not expected that; the discovery of Evans in the closet downstairs still amazed her. Poor Evans, she thought—that had been so needless. Because, if you could believe the detectives, Evans had not seen enough to make him dangerous to anyone. She hoped he would be all right and smiled inwardly to think that she must still have a hidden fondness for little Evans, although in the old days he had been more annoying than anything else.

  Well, she thought, it’s been a long day, but it’s almost over now. I’ll be glad to rest.

  “You turn right here,” Mary Fowler said, leaning a little forward as she spoke.

  If it were only over! Alberta James thought, sitting in the car, with the fingers of her left hand clenched. If it were only over! If only those last dreadful moments were over like all the rest—dead like Carney and poor Ellen. I don’t want to do it, she thought desperately. I don’t want it to be this way; oh, I never dreamed it would be this way. But it had to be this way. Humpty was right; it was something they had to do, something she, because of everything, had to do. Because if the lieutenant didn’t know now, at any moment he might know.

  He finds out things, Alberta James thought—sooner or later he finds out things. Please God, she thought, give me time—just a little time, God … only long enough … make him not know yet, God. She awakened to her surroundings as the car slowed.

  “You turn right here,” she said.

  “She was in the office,” Jerry North said, his voice dull, lifeless. “She was behind me and I told her to come. She said, ‘Coming, Jerry,’ or something like that, and I thought she was right behind me. And then—oh, I thought she was with one of you … with you, Dor.”