“We can’t, but I can,” said Piper. “I’ve got something to ask you. Do you keep a gun in the theater?”
Max Durkin denied that the Diana Burlesque had ever needed such a protection.
“Well,” said Piper, “Anybody else in the theater pack a rod?”
Max Durkin shook his head. “As far as I know, nobody in the place ever owned a gun.” But Miss Withers’s noticed that his eyes blinked twice before he spoke. There were few better signs that a man was lying.
“Excuse me,” she cut in, “but from what I hear, Mr. Durkin was somewhere in the opposite aisle when the shot was fired from the box. You didn’t hear anyone pass you in the darkness?”
“I was practically in the front of the house,” cut in Durkin. “When I heard the shot I ran back. I thought—I thought somebody had shot the girl on the stage.”
“Did you?” smiled Miss Withers in her usual sweetly sarcastic tone.
The inspector, who had turned his back for a moment, held out his hand. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Durkin.”
Instead of a friendly grasp, the manager felt his wrist caught and held. A wet swab of cotton was pressed swiftly against his index finger. “What the hell—”
Piper smiled. “It’s all right. I just made sure that you hadn’t fired the shot yourself. A solution of sulphuric acid and waxed diphenylamine crystals brings out the nitrate flecks—if there are any. You don’t happen to have a pair of gloves here, do you?”
Durkin shook his head. “Search the place if you want to.”
“We did,” Piper told him. “Well, we’re right back where we started. You can go now.”
* * *
—
Max Durkin departed, and the inspector turned to Miss Withers. “Well, that’s that—” But he was all alone.
He caught sight of the resolute figure of the school teacher going up the aisle, and hurried after her. “Wait a moment—what do you know that I don’t?”
“Nothing—yet,” she snapped. “Suppose we have a look at the box from which the shot was fired.”
Together they climbed the stairs, and Miss Withers turned up her nose at the untidy condition of the box. “Sherlock Holmes would have told you the middle name of the killer just from one flash at those cigarette butts,” said Piper. “And ten to one they mean nothing more than that the boys up above in the gallery use this as a target. Come on, let’s get backstage. I haven’t had a talk with the cootch dancer yet, and you’d better come along as a chaperone.”
They descended to the aisle and walked forward through the little door which led past the switchboard. “Hm,” observed Miss Withers. “If anybody from among the performers did the murder they’d have had to walk right past the electrician.”
The inspector nodded. “But it’s no help, unfortunately. Because he admits that, being soft on this Vere de Vere dame, he was watching her strip-number from the wings instead of being at his board.”
“And that’s why he was so long in putting on the house lights?”
The inspector shook his head. “He claims that somebody screwed up his switchboard by dropping a piece of tin behind it and shorting the wires. It took him time to get his flashlight and lift it out.”
Miss Withers digested this as they walked through the weary crowd of show girls—in temporary guard of two delighted detectives—and down to the basement dressing rooms.
There was a cop on duty outside the door. “She’s still under,” he informed them. “Must have been a terrible shock to her.”
“Yeah?” Piper pushed open the door. The dressing room was small and stuffy, holding little more than a stool, a bench, a mirror, and a coat rack. The voluptuous figure of Janey Vere de Vere lay stretched out on the bench, which had been padded with her coat. Beside her sat the ministering figure of Murphy, the comic, still attired in his nightshirt costume, over which he had thrown a topcoat. He held a glass which was half full of something which looked like water and smelled like juniper juice.
“You’re the guy who caught her when she fainted on the stage?”
The comic nodded. “Ran out from the wings. Y’see, we’re engaged to get married, and I got a right here.”
“Yeah? Well, did she say anything as she fainted? Did she cry out?”
Murphy shook his head. “Nothing…”
“Except what?” prompted Miss Withers, on a hunch.
“Except she said something, sort of mumbling, about— ‘My husband!’ ” He put down the glass. “But that don’t mean anything, because she’s been divorced for years.”
Piper leaned over the prone figure. “Out cold, eh? Well, she certainly can’t help us any…”
“Neither can Mr. Murphy, right now,” suggested Miss Withers. The inspector took the hint. “Outside,” he ordered. The comedian went out.
“It’s more than an hour since the shot was fired,” Miss Withers pointed out. “It’s a long faint that lasts an hour.”
Piper snapped his fingers. “Right! Say, that’s one of the reasons we knew Ruth Snyder was lying. She claimed to have stayed in a faint all night. You think—”
“She’s either dead, or—” Miss Withers took up the glass of gin, and suffered a few drops to trickle down the arched nostril of the girl on the bench.
Janey Vere de Vere was not dead. She sat up, coughing and gasping wildly. “What—where am I?”
“You’re in a bad spot—unless you tell us plenty,” said Piper gruffly. “What do you know about this?”
Janey Vere de Vere blinked. “About—about the shooting? I only know that I used to be married to him. I mean Davey. I still am, I guess, because they tell me those correspondence Mexican divorces aren’t legal. But I hadn’t seen him for four years until I saw him with that black hole in his forehead—I mean, not seen him really—”
Miss Withers gave her the gin. “Steady, young woman,” she advised.
“I’ll talk,” the girl hurried on. “I’ll tell you everything. I walked out on Davey, and I wrote him that I had a divorce. Then I found that it was a phony, and the lawyer took my money and didn’t even register the papers in Mexico City. So I wrote Davey, and he was sore. He came to New York and all last week he sat every night in a box and just stared at me—I was afraid of him, and I got a gun that I’d had for years, and kept it in my dressing room. Tonight while I was out to dinner it was stolen—”
“This the gun?” Piper showed her the .32. She nodded, without being able to speak. “Got a permit?” She pointed toward her handbag.
“You usually go to dinner while the moving picture is being run?” inquired Miss Withers. Janey Vere de Vere nodded.
“Who do you think might have known that you kept a gun here?” She shook her head. “The lock on my dressing room door is broken. I told Durkin about it tonight, when I told him the gun was gone. But he didn’t—”
Miss Withers and the inspector exchanged a glance.
“Well, we’ve got to be getting on with it,” said Piper. “You better stick around, young woman. Don’t leave town. By the way, you haven’t any idea of any enemies your late husband had—anybody who might have wanted to see him bumped off?”
“Nobody in the world,” said Janey Vere de Vere. But she looked intently at the buttons of the inspector’s vest when she said it, and Miss Withers made another mental note.
* * *
—
They went out of there. Piper called his myrmidons. “As soon as you finish searching the audience and get the house cleared out, go backstage and give everybody the nitrate test—on both hands. We ought to get a positive reaction or two.”
To Miss Withers: “Funny about the old-fashioned black-powder cartridges in that gat. They haven’t been on sale since smokeless powder caught on. Looks like the girl had been sitting on that gun for years and years.”
“She didn’t sit on it q
uite long enough,” Miss Withers told him. There were sounds of violent trouble behind them, and both ran across the stage. An ape-like figure in overalls, with long swinging arms, collided suddenly with the inspector, and both went down.
“Got you!” cried Piper. He rose with a hammer-lock on Roscoe, the stage electrician. Miss Withers looked surprised.
The man ceased to struggle, and stared at his forefinger. It was rimmed with black. He gasped and muttered.
Detectives surrounded them, and someone slapped handcuffs on Roscoe. “A positive, the first crack out of the box,” somebody said. “Here’s the rat that fired the gun. He hit McMann over the head with a slug…”
“I tell you I went to a shootin’ gallary during the dinner hour tonight!” Roscoe was insisting. “I only shot at the brass ducks—”
Nobody listened to him. The detectives had torn from his pocket the “blackjack” with which he had sent into unconsciousness the sergeant who daubed diphenylamine on his finger. It happened to be a neo-Maxim silencer.
“Well, for the love of—” Inspector Oscar Piper straightened his tie. “There’s our case, boys. Roscoe what’s-his-name—sweet on the cootch dancer—bumped off her husband when he got the idea that she might go back to the guy. He’d probably hopped—but he was smart enough to have a silencer handy in case things didn’t work out right for popping the guy otherwise. Take him away.”
He turned to Miss Withers. “As easy as that!” he said. But the look on her face sobered his joy.
“Suppose,” she said softly, “suppose that Roscoe is telling the truth?” Suppose he spent his dinner hour at the shooting gallery across the street? Where’s your case?”
“Suppose the moon is made of Camembert?” retorted Piper. All the same he turned to his men. “Go on, give the nitrate test to the rest of the performers. Just in case somebody asks. But it’s the ape, all right.”
He saw that she frowned. “Well, why else should he have a silencer? They don’t carry them for pocket luck-pieces, you know.”
“I know,” said Hildegarde Withers.
“He was going to use the silencer, and then he got a better idea. He’d shoot Jones from the box, with the house lights off, and then get back to his board and give himself a swell alibi, see?”
“I see,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I see, said the blind man, I see clearly. By the way, Oscar, where’s the stage door?”
They discovered that the Diana, like many theaters on crowded and alley-less Manhattan Island, had no regular stage door. The performers left and entered the place through the side aisle down to the front of the house.
A few minutes later Sergeant Twist reported that the performers had a clean bill of health as far as the nitrate test was concerned. None of them had fired a gun within forty-eight hours. “We even tested the dame who’s downstairs in the dressing room,” Twist reported.
“See? I told you so,” said Inspector Piper. Miss Withers nodded.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. She hurried downstairs and knocked on Janey Vere de Vere’s dressing room. The girl was smoking a cigarette, having dressed for the street. “I just thought,” said Miss Withers. “Wasn’t it in an act—a dancing act—at the Palace that I saw you?”
Janey Vere de Vere confessed that she had never risen in vaudeville to the heights of the Palace. “More likely the Hippodrome,” she said.
“It must have been two other fellows,” Miss Withers agreed, and took her departure. She came out on the stage fired with a new energy. “Shall we leave, Oscar?”
“See you out front,” he said. “I’ve got to have a word with the manager if I can find him. I want some more information about this electrician.”
But it was Miss Withers who found Max Durkin. He was sitting in his office, which opened off the foyer, glaring morosely at his smouldering cigar.
“Bad for business, this sort of thing,” he told her.
“I’ve got just one question,” she told him. “About the gun. You’re sure that you never saw it before, and that you never knew of anyone in the theater owning one—or losing one?”
“Positive!” said Max Durkin. “And if anybody says anything different they’re lying.”
“Thank you so much,” said Hildegarde Withers, and left. Durkin stared at his empty ash-tray, and then at the floor.
“Hey!” he began, but the school teacher was gone. Max Durkin shook his head. “That woman is either nuts, or else—”
Then the inspector arrived to tell him that his presence would be required at headquarters next morning. Durkin agreed with a willing smile. “But I still don’t see why poor old Roscoe would run wild—”
“You can’t fool the nitrate test,” Piper told him. Then he was gone.
Janey Vere de Vere came up the aisle beside Murphy, in the center of a crowd of relieved and still excited girls. She saw Durkin in the office door.
“Wait outside, will you?” she asked the comic. He protested, and finally drew away a little. The red-haired girl, looking a little bulky and big in her street clothes, crossed to where Durkin waited.
“How about dinner and a bottle of gin?” he asked, grinning.
“Max! After all that’s happened—”
“It’s over, and you’re well out of it,” he said. “Never mind Murphy. You’ve got eight more weeks of the Wheel to eat with him, but you’re only here till Sunday.”
“Yes,” said Janey Vere de Vere. “But—” She wore one glove, and dug in the pocket of her modish sport coat for the other. “Say! I’ve dropped a glove somewhere…”
Durkin stared at her. “It’s probably the old dame who hunts with John Law,” he said lightly. “She just hooked one of my cigars—a lighted one. I figure her for a souvenir-hunter. Did she get any fillings out of your teeth?”
But Janey Vere de Vere wasn’t listening. “See you tomorrow, Max,” she told him, and hurried out. Max Durkin lit another cigar, and then he too left the darkened theater to its guardian cops. He had no appetite for his usual late supper that night, for an idea had just begun to occur to him…an idea which spoiled the taste of his cigar.
* * *
—
Miss Hildegarde Withers rode northward in a taxi which she shared with the inspector. “A pleasant and illuminating evening,” she said, as they drew up to her door. It was barely eleven o’clock.
“If you’re not too tired, Oscar,” she continued, “I wish you’d do something for me. You have your travelling laboratory kit at home, have you not?” She handed him a parcel wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. “Suppose you give this your famous nitrate test, and let me know how it comes out?”
“What? Why, of course, but—”
Miss Withers slammed the door and went up the stairs. “If that doesn’t put a bee in his bonnet nothing will,” she said to herself. Lighting the lamp above her study table, she proceeded to arrange upon it a surprisingly incongruous exhibit consisting of half a dozen cigar butts.
For a long time she stared at them. They ought to make sense, but they didn’t. At the extreme right she placed the fresh green-brown cigar, its tip barely burned away, which she had stolen from Max Durkin’s ashtray.
The relics which had been left in the littered theater box she one by one discarded. Only one of them showed any trace of dampness where it had been chewed by the smoker. Surprisingly enough this one—like Durkin’s—had been cut, rather than bitten off, and it was rolled of the same green brown tobacco as the first.
Yet there was little more than a quarter of the cigar remaining—instead of ash on its end there were only shreds of blackened and acrid smelling tobacco.
“In the best tradition of sleuthdom,” she told herself. “Sherlock Holmes could spot a Trichinopoly miles away, and he published a monograph on heaven knows how many kinds of cigar ash. Now I wonder what Holmes would deduce from this?”
The night was a hot one, and Miss Withers mopped her face. Through the open window little black gnats came to buzz around her lamp. Though a fly swatter and an insect-gun stood nearby on the sideboard, the lean and worried school teacher pored over her booty and let the gnats buzz.
“I wonder why Oscar hasn’t let me know how he came out with his nitrate test?” she finally asked herself.
It was at that moment that her bell rang—three long impatient rings.
Miss Hildegarde Withers lived at that time in an old-fashioned brown stone on West Seventy-Fourth Street, remodelled from one of the mansions of the eighties. She hurried to the door and pressed the buzzer which unlatched the downstairs door. There were hurried steps on the stair—and she nodded to herself. The Inspector had come instead of phoning.
“He’s found it!” she cried…
* * *
—
When Oscar Piper arrived, shortly before one o’clock, at Miss Withers’s apartment he peered eagerly from the taxi window. Yes, her light was on and he could bring her the news without being inopportune. He hurried into the lobby, pressed the bell beneath her name, and finding the door ajar, ran up the stairs.
He knocked excitedly on the door. “It’s me, Hildegarde!”
There was a long pause, and he knocked again. Miss Hildegarde Withers, her long Bostonian face unusually grave, swung open the door. He displayed “exhibit A,” and then stopped short as he entered the room and saw that a handsome red-haired girl was sitting in a chair near the window.
“Miss Vere de Vere—” he began.
“Nobody else,” she said evenly. “I believe you have my glove.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 73