Death on the Aisle

by Frances

  She had her hand on the knob before she knew, finally, what that meant. She knew then that she had lost the toss before the voice behind her spoke again with satisfaction and hard irony in the tone.

  “So you came back, Mrs. North,” the voice said. “That was—considerate of you.”

  That ended it, Pam thought. Her hand was at her throat as, inside the room, she turned.

  Her voice was ragged, panting, but she stood as straight as she could.

  “All right,” Pam said. “Do it! Damn you—do it!”

  The revolver came up again and fell again. And this time, although at the last moment Pam twisted away from it, there was an explosion against her head, and blackness came up around her. It was curious that, in the blackness, a bell was ringing.

  It’s funny they should bury me standing up, Pam thought, almost before she thought: “Why, you do live after you die!” Because beyond question she was standing up. Although, she thought, maybe things don’t feel the same after you’re dead, and I’m really not standing up at all. And with mothballs, she thought disconnectedly, because the coffin certainly smelled of mothballs. It was very strange to smell mothballs after you were dead. Inappropriate, Pam thought, and moved her right hand. The fingers touched cloth rough to the feel. I thought always satin linings, Pam thought, and then it came over her that perhaps she was not dead at all.

  Because really, she thought, I seem to be standing up in a very narrow closet with an old coat with mothballs in it. And my head hurts.

  Then, without the formality of realizing she was alive, and had only been banged on the head and put in storage for reasons not yet clear, Pam began to listen to the voices. They were clear, and must be in the room just beyond the thin door of the closet. Pam knew all the voices. Two of them were women’s voices.

  “I had to see that you got the chance,” one of the voices said. “Because—oh, why did you? Why?”

  The other woman’s voice sounded tired and dead.

  “You know why,” it said. “You ought to know why—because of what he was going to do. What he did to me.”

  The other voice said “Oh!” It was the sound of someone hurt.

  “And so,” the other voice said, “you can’t give me away, can you? Nobody could do that, when somebody else killed for them. You can’t do that, you know.”

  “No,” the man’s voice said, sharply, coldly. “But I can. You forget that. You can’t lay it on her. Because I’m here.”

  There was a strange, new note in the tired voice—an ironic note. It was the note Pam had heard, and thought the last thing she would ever hear.

  “Are you, Humpty?” the voice said. “I wouldn’t be too sure that—”

  And then the voices stopped, except that one of them screamed, and there was a sound of movement and a chair fell before the revolver sounded. It roared in the room, and through the thin door of the closet in which Pamela North was locked. It roared twice, and then there was a sudden silence. In the silence Pam heard Humpty’s voice, low and desperate.

  “Berta!” Humpty was saying. “Berta! Darling—why did you—?”

  Then Pamela North began to pound on the door to be let out. Either she was making an unexpected amount of noise, she thought, or somebody else was pounding somewhere. And then she heard running feet and familiar voices and finally she managed to scream.

  “Jerry!” she screamed. “Jerry! Get me out of here!”

  Then the door opened and she fell out into Jerry’s arms and stared down at Humpty Kirk kneeling beside Berta James, and talking incoherently to her. To Pam he seemed to be saying over and over: “Why did you, Berta? Why did you?”

  It was a dreadful mistake, Pam saw, and wriggled in Jerry’s arms until she could see Bill Weigand, who was kneeling beside some one else a few feet away.

  “He’s wrong, Bill,” Pam said, anxiously. “We were all wrong! She didn’t, Bill—it wasn’t Berta at all. We were all wrong!”

  Bill looked around at her, and then stood up and looked down for a moment at the woman beside whom he had been kneeling. Then he looked at Pam, and he spoke gently.

  “Of course not, Pam,” he said. “Only—I never thought it was. The dress threw you off, Pam—but that fitted just as well. Mary Fowler was a dressmaker, Pam, in a way—didn’t you see that?”

  Pam looked down at Mary Fowler lying on the floor, and nodded.

  “But not soon enough,” Pam said. “I thought all along—but what does Mr. Kirk mean, then?”

  Kirk, still kneeling beside Berta James, and holding one of her hands in his, looked up.

  “She—when Mary tried to shoot me,” he said. “Berta jumped in between us.”

  He said it quietly, and looked at the girl whose long hair made a patch of color on the floor as if he would never stop looking at her. Then Pam heard Mullins through the open door which led into another room talking curtly into a telephone.

  “Ambulance,” Weigand explained. He knelt beside Berta James, who managed to smile at him. “Let me look,” he said. Gently, he tore the shattered silk which had covered one of the girl’s shoulders. There was blood under it, but Berta was trying to smile. Weigand smiled back at her.

  “Nothing a doctor can’t fix,” he promised her. She closed her eyes, but the smile loitered around her lips. Across her, Humphrey Kirk looked at Weigand, his eyes demanding an answer. Weigand nodded at him, and smiled faintly.

  “Right,” he said. “Nothing a doctor can’t fix.”

  Kirk looked beyond Weigand, and Weigand answered another question which was not spoken.

  “That’s over too,” he said. “She aimed well, that time. She’ll never have to explain it.”

  XVII

  WEDNESDAY—2:05 A.M. TO 2:45 A.M.

  “Somehow,” Pam North said, using the fingers of her free hand to feel the bandage across her temple, “somebody always gets banged up. I suppose it’s always a mistake to bump into a murderer.”

  They were back in the Norths’ apartment—Bill and Dorian, Pam and Jerry—and properly equipped with tall glasses. Mullins was taking statements from Alberta James at the hospital, or would be as soon as the doctors permitted, and from Humpty Kirk, who couldn’t somehow seem really to believe, in spite of everybody’s assurance, that the first bullet from Mary Fowler’s revolver had only grazed Berta’s shoulder. Jerry sat beside Pam and held on to her, and Dorian sat on the floor beside Bill’s chair, apparently where she could stop him if he tried to get away. But he seemed to have no intention of getting away.

  “And by the way,” Bill Weigand said, “why did you, Pam? Bump into the murderer, I mean? What started her after you?”

  Pam North hesitated and then looked at Jerry and said she was sorry.

  “You always tell me not to,” she said, “but I never remember. Talking out loud, Jerry.” She told them about it. “In a way,” she added, thoughtfully, “the joke was really on her, because up to then I thought the James girl.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “Because of the dress,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  Weigand shook his head.

  “Only that it was a woman,” he said. “I couldn’t see a man doing it. But Mary Fowler was always just as possible.”

  “Why did she?” Pam said. “It was an awful giveaway, even if it didn’t give away the right one. Because of course Ellen hadn’t hung it up, because she didn’t hang things up. And no man would have. Did she just go in and find Ellen’s dress on the floor and hang it up neatly and then go on and kill Ellen?”

  Pam sounded puzzled. Weigand said he doubted it.

  “I suppose it was after the murder,” he said, “and in a sense automatic. She was looking around the room, probably, to see if she had left anything which would be suspicious, and instinctively picked up the dress and hung it up. Because she, in her profession, must have had a special feeling for clothes—and because she may have been excited and not known what she was doing, or almost not known. As an orderly person may straighten things on a table, without realiz
ing what he is doing—while carrying on a conversation. But she came out of it before she hung up the negligee, I suppose.”

  Mrs. North shook her head at that.

  “Negligees are different,” she explained. “They’re supposed to sprawl. She wouldn’t feel the same.”

  Weigand said he wouldn’t know about that, but probably Mrs. North was right.

  “And,” he said, “it did point to Miss James, particularly since she had worked in a shop. But it wouldn’t have been the habit with her it was with her aunt, because she was so much younger—the habit wouldn’t have been fixed. And it already looked like being Mary Fowler, in any case.”

  Mr. North’s voice sounded as if he had been waiting a long time.

  “Why?” he said. “And how? Because she was supposed not to be in the theatre.”

  Weigand would, he said, start with the how, because that was simplest. He told them to remember how close the door which led to the basement was to the stage door. Mr. North and Dorian nodded, and after a moment Mrs. North nodded too.

  That, Weigand told them, made it simple. Miss Fowler came to the theatre a little late, when it was probable that all the others would already have returned from lunch and joined Kirk in the conference he habitually held on stage before each rehearsal. She went directly to the stage door and went in, not trying to hide herself. And then, if nobody was looking, she simply opened the door to the basement and went down the stairs. That was the first step. He saw Mrs. North shaking her head at him, and smiled.

  “I know,” he said. “Suppose somebody had been there. Well, in that case, she would simply have put the whole thing off, because one day was as good as another. She might have done it tomorrow—today, that is. She might have done it day before yesterday. She could do it any time the conditions were right—and that’s the reason she was habitually late to afternoon rehearsals. She’d been, we can suppose, waiting her chance for a couple of weeks.”

  About that they couldn’t, of course, tell, Weigand reminded them. She may, equally, have tried to kill Dr. Bolton only that day, and been lucky at the first cast. Because, he said, nobody had seen her. She had got unobserved from the stage door through the basement door. Then she went under the auditorium, up through the lounge, and to the rear of the orchestra seats. From there she could spot Bolton, and again if he were talking with somebody or too far down front, she could let him live another day. Because, so far, she had taken no risks, done nothing which she couldn’t easily explain; nothing which really needed explanation.

  “Remember,” Weigand said, “I’m guessing at some of this, some details may be wrong and we may never know. She made things hard to prove—the simplicity and the flexibility of her method helped her.” He paused, for a moment. “In a sense,” he said, “her method had the advantages, to the perpetrator, of a purely impromptu murder. It was a little, as far as timing went, as if she had merely waited until she happened to meet Bolton on a dark street and hit him with a club and walked away. Except that, obviously, she could be pretty sure in the theatre that the chance would come reasonably soon. But that kind of murder is always hard to break.”

  In any case, Bolton was sitting alone, and in the shadows. Then Mary Fowler committed herself. Any excuse to speak to him would do; apparently she pretended she wanted his opinion on the color of the material Berta James wanted in her dress. She showed the material to Bolton and, probably while he was holding it to get the light from the stage on it, stabbed him. She had to chance that he wouldn’t have time to cry out. And he didn’t have. He merely slumped.

  “Then,” Weigand continued, “she went back to the lounge, planning to go back through the basement. And there she ran into Evans—who had been her husband, incidentally, although it turns out not to be important. Now, of course, she was committed and had to try and smash whatever got in her way. She smashed Evans by pushing him down the stairs—in her hurry, and in the semi-darkness, she probably took him for dead. She got him out of sight, dragging him to the closet. Then she went on through the basement and up on the other side, and out through the stage door. This time she had to trust to luck that she wasn’t seen—and probably she thought her luck held. She didn’t, I think, know that Ellen Grady saw her and wondered about it—not then she didn’t.”

  Out in the stage-door alley, Weigand told them, Mary Fowler probably breathed a sigh of relief. She went on up the alley to the front of the theatre, and then to the front entrance. Once she was there, it didn’t matter whether she got in that way or not—so long as somebody saw her trying to get in. She could always make certain that she was noticed, even if it meant creating a minor disturbance. Fortunately for her, this wasn’t necessary; all she needed to do was to impress her presence on the memory of the mounted traffic man. She did that. Then, pretending to be annoyed, she went around to the stage door again, went in openly and sat down in one of the orchestra chairs.

  “And after that,” Weigand pointed out, “she made every effort to be in somebody’s company, or in plain sight, until the body was found. In that way, no matter when we finally decided Bolton had been killed, her time was accounted for—she either wasn’t in the theatre at all, or she was with somebody. That we were able to guess pretty accurately as to the time of the murder, and it appeared to be before she was around at all, helped her. But it wasn’t necessary.”

  And then, Weigand said, Ellen Grady threw her bombshell—Ellen had seen her! Why Ellen told her instead of the police they would never know. Perhaps she merely gave Mary a chance to explain before she went to the police; perhaps there had been some other, less innocent, plan in the back of her head. “Possibly,” Weigand suggested, “she may have thought she saw a chance to raise money to put into the show; perhaps she thought the money she would put up for Ahlberg would come from Mary Fowler. We’ll never know—but we know what she did get.”

  Weigand paused, because Pam was shaking her head doubtfully.

  “I don’t think Ellen knew the importance of what she’d seen,” Pam said. “Like me, I mean—not knowing what she knew. Because if she were going to blackmail a murderer she wouldn’t be taking a bath. Silly. I think that Mary Fowler just thought Ellen knew, the way she thought I knew. And Mary arranged to come around, maybe pretending it was something about costumes. And then she just killed Ellen, without asking her anything. I think that’s much more likely.”

  Weigand nodded and after a moment said perhaps it was. There was another pause.

  “Anyway, that’s what Mary Fowler did, or about what she did,” Weigand went on. “I don’t think, incidentally, that she had had any intention of running when we missed her, just before she heard Pam talking to herself. She didn’t think she had any reason to run. I think she had just come up here to the mezzanine to rest in a comfortable chair. We were all pretty tired—and she, being older, was probably more tired than the rest of us. She probably thought it was all finished business. And then she heard Pam telling herself she knew who had done it.”

  “Well,” Mr. North said, “wasn’t she safe?”

  Weigand shook his head.

  “I was pretty sure,” he said. “I was looking for proof. Because she couldn’t have seen Evans in the lobby, as she said she did. And I was looking for one lie, even an apparently senseless one.”

  “Why couldn’t she, Bill?” Dorian asked, looking up at him. “I know why really, of course. Because she had already pushed him. But you didn’t know when she pushed him, did you?”

  Weigand shook his head at her. It was simpler than that, he said. Once you assumed, as he had found no reason not to assume, that Max Ahlberg was telling the truth. It was, he said, a matter of times.

  “Ahlberg went through the lobby immediately before Miss Fowler started to knock,” he pointed out. “And then Evans wasn’t there. To get there, Evans would have had to come through from the theatre, and he would have had to pass Ahlberg to get where she said he was at the time we know she was there. It’s a long lobby, remember—and Evans accor
ding to his own version, had poked around the only time he was in the lobby. That was, of course, before he was pushed. To get down to the front of the lobby, starting after Ahlberg was out of the way, he would have had to run. I couldn’t see him running.”

  “But then why—?” Mrs. North began.

  “Because,” Weigand explained before she finished, “she wanted us to believe that he was alive just before she came in. Because she was afraid she had killed him. If he was up and around when she knocked at the lobby doors, and she was in sight afterward—as she was—she couldn’t have been the one who knocked him out. It jiggled things up, which was what she wanted.”

  Weigand stopped and took a long drink, and stared into his glass. Mr. North relinquished Pam long enough, but not without a warning glance, to fill it up again.

  “And so,” Weigand said, “that seems to be all.”

  Mr. North, who had just sat down again, put his own glass firmly on the coffee table in front of him.

  “That,” he said, “is not all. That’s only How. Where’s the Why?”

  Weigand looked faintly surprised, and as he took in the expressions on the faces of Pam and Dorian he looked a little more surprised. He said that he had thought, of course, that they had got that.

  “Specifically,” he said, “to keep Bolton from performing a sinus operation of Berta. Because that was what happened to Mary herself—or, perhaps it would be better to say, what she thought had happened … to make her eyes protrude.”

  Everybody stared at him. He nodded.

  “That,” he said, “was one of the first things I guessed. That Bolton had performed a sinus operation on Mary some time when they were living together and that the operation made her eyes hideous. Or, as I say, she thought that it did. I don’t know whether it did or not; probably nobody does, or ever will. Probably Bolton himself didn’t, although I suppose he denied it. But any doctor will tell you that such operations are ticklish things, that they sometimes have unexpected results. I asked Dr. Francis about it and he—well, he’s a doctor and he was talking about another doctor, so he hedged. But finally he said, yes, he had known of a case or two when the eyes had behaved oddly after an operation, although nobody knew whether the operation had actually caused their odd behavior. And then he said: ‘But if it were me, I wouldn’t let anybody poke around in there. I’d rather go to Florida.’ Coming from Francis, that was plenty.