Cap went and looked at the hooks where the wraps hung, and then asked Sam, “Did you pass anybody, going toward that corner?”
“Just Mr. Gatski,” Sam said, and he told about bumping into Joe, and Joe’s “Excuse me.”
Cap said, “Uh-huh,” and looked at the sound mixer. He was the only one that hadn’t confessed to being alone in the dark somewhere. Cap asked, “What’s your name?”
“Battinger,” the mixer answered.
Cap repeated, “Battinger?” He thought it over, still was thinking when Lanny Hoard spoke.
“Wasn’t Clem Batting’s real name Battinger?” he asked.
Then I remembered. When Marie divorced Jack to marry Clem, the newspaper colyumists had dug up Clem’s real name.
“Clem’s my brother,” the mixer said.
Marie looked at him quickly, with a scared expression, as if that were a secret she hadn’t meant to tell. But Joan, the hairdresser, spoke up again at once. “Mr. Battinger was ahead of me on the way to the door when the shot was fired. I could see him. I’d just left Lanny.”
While Cap was thinking this over, the cop he’d sent off stage came back and whispered to him, and he nodded and looked at Lanny, then back at the mixer.
“So Clem’s your brother,” he said. “But the girl claims she saw you heading toward the door when the shot was fired. If you didn’t do it, it’s a good thing you’ve got an alibi.”
He didn’t seem satisfied, however. When the cop came back still without the gun, Cap searched us all, regardless. He got the three women to help him search each other, even, but there wasn’t any gun. All this took time. It was three o’clock and we were getting nowhere fast, when suddenly Rose spoke up.
“You’re running in a circle,” she accused, and Cap said:
“Yeh? You could do better?”
Rose blushed easy, but she stuck to it. And everybody listened. Everybody around a studio knows about script girls and what kind of eyes and ears they’ve got.
“You know already it’s one of us,” she said, “and you yourself limit it to one out of six.”
“That’s right,” Cap agreed.
“Of those six, let’s start with Otto, then,” Rose said. “He’s got a picture of Miss Fleming in his pocket. But regardless of that, he’s just plain drunk.”
“Not drunk,” the gaffer denied.
“He’ll not tell us what he was doing at the minute,” she admitted, “but that’s explainable. He was drinking on the set and didn’t want to lose his job.”
Cap argues, “We can’t find any bottle.”
“I saw Otto hide a bottle once before,” Rose said. She walked back along the wall, where a battery of lights stood ready to work on the rose trellis set in the morning. She looked into the barrel of each light and finally called Cap. “He spilled it, you see,” she pointed out as Cap lifted an empty bottle from the light. “Didn’t put the cork back in. There’s the liquor, running down inside the light.”
“My bottle,” Otto grunted, and Cap asked:
“What does it prove?”
“Why, that he was drinking when the shot occurred,” Rose said. “The sound scared him, and he dropped the stopper. There it is, on the floor. It was too dark to find it, so he did the next best thing. Put the bottle away open.”
Cap admitted, “It’s possible. That would put the gaffer at the opposite corner of the stage from the murderer, in spite of the picture in his pocket.”
“That leaves five,” Rose said. “As for Battinger, he has Joan’s alibi.” She looked at the sound mixer, and he tried to smile. “That’s enough, isn’t it? In spite of his being the brother of Marie’s former husband?”
Cap didn’t like to count the mixer out, but at last he said, “For the time being, okay. That leaves—”
“Joan herself,” Rose said, “which is ridiculous. And Mr. Gatski, and Sam Masterford, and Lanny Hoard.”
Lanny cried, “You’re crazy, Rose. You’ve got to show a motive.”
“Yes, when writing a melodrama,” she answered, without looking at him. “But this isn’t a script. It’s facts. The sort of things I’m used to, day in and day out.”
Lanny started to storm, and Cap told him to shut up.
“Lanny either talked himself into a hole or out of it a bit ago,” Rose said. “He claimed he had the receiver off the hook, with the operator listening for the sound of a nickel hitting the bell, when the shot was fired.”
Cap smiled. “Smart girl,” he said. “I thought of that, too. Hoard told the truth. My man checked with the operator. She heard the shot, and Hoard saying, ‘What the hell!’ ”
“That leaves two,” Rose went on, holding up two fingers, “Mr. Gatski and Sam Masterford.”
Joe Gatski began to holler all over again and nothing could stop him this time. He said he’d get the girl’s job, and he talked about his lawyers, and walked up and down, banging his heels on the floor. At last Cap got him quiet, telling him what this girl said wasn’t important. But Joe went on giving her filthy looks just the same.
She said, “Sam was putting on his rubbers, over by that wall. The murderer—” she hesitated, as if she didn’t like the taste of the word on her tongue, then in spite of herself she repeated it—“the murderer was standing somewhere near the end of that unfinished library set there, and Sam was in behind it. And Mr. Gatski was back near the rose trellis set you see over there.”
“Why, that’s right,” Gatski yelled. “I couldn’t shoot around corners!”
“How do you know where Gatski was?” Cap asked.
“My ears told me,” Rose said. “Haven’t you heard him walk? He runs the same way, hitting the floor first with his heels. I think he’ll drive me crazy sometimes on a set. To get to the place from which the shot was fired, and back again, in that short time, he’d have had to run. But he didn’t run. I was listening.”
Sam Masterford looked sort of astonished.
“So you put me behind the eight ball in your calculations?” he asked.
Rose answered, “No. Behind the pistol. You shot Jack.”
Sam didn’t say a word. Not a word. Just blinked his gray eyes behind his glasses and looked at Marie. She got up to her feet, slowly, and if a woman ever had suffering in her face, she did at that moment.
“So it was you, Sam,” she whispered. “Sam, I understand now. All this talk about you loving me!”
Gatski grumbled, “It’s screwy, perfectly screwy! Sam Masterford wouldn’t shoot a—”
“Mr. Masterford saw the same thing I did,” Rose went on, speaking to Lanny Hoard. “The reason Jack blew up on his last line was that there wasn’t any line. They were just falling in love all over again.” Marie sobbed out loud, but Rose couldn’t stop. “It wasn’t acting at all,” she explained. “Someone called the scene a natural. It was. Sam recognized it. He tried to change it. Didn’t like it, and didn’t even want to shoot it. He put it off as long as he could. But Marie kept right on looking at Jack the same way.”
Still Sam didn’t say a word.
“He has his rubbers on,” Rose added. “Remember, he called attention to them, said he had a hard time getting them on. You can’t hear a man run in rubbers.”
Lanny broke in, half-defending Sam. “You didn’t find any gun on him!”
“That’s right,” Cap agreed, “we haven’t found any gun.”
Rose looked toward the library set, with its bookshelves half-full. She said, “Did you look back of the books?”
The two cops began to tear down the books. There the gun was, on the top shelf.
Rose said, “Sam and I worked on a quickie together, six or eight years back. One of the first sound-effect jobs. He ran in a scene then of a fellow hiding a gun in the bookshelves of a library. I’ve always remembered it.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and sweat bega
n running again off his long, thin nose. “I see. That’s where the idea came from,” and then he asked the only question in his own defense. “Why didn’t Gatski put it there? Or Hoard?”
“They weren’t near enough,” Rose answered, “and besides, they couldn’t reach that high shelf, Sam.”
“They could throw it up,” he sort of argued.
“Not without me hearing it,” she reminded him.
Cap turned to her. “Thanks, miss,” he started to say, but Joe Gatski had pulled out his watch by this time, and he interrupted:
“Four o’clock!” he exclaimed. “And we haven’t called the city police!” He started for the phone, but turned around quickly. “Remember, holding you here was none of my doing. I’m paying no overtime after eleven o’clock. Charge it up to Masterford.”
Sam just shrugged, and didn’t say anything. He never was much of a hand to talk. He didn’t even take the stand at the trial. Claimed he didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t of course, but the public couldn’t believe that. Never will. Somebody’s hiding something, they think, but the reason for that is, they’ve never been on a set on a cleanup night. Anything can happen to anybody the last hours of any production. Like I said before, somebody ought to write a piece about it.
DETECTIVE: ANN SHELLEY
THE GILDED PUPIL
Ethel Lina White
ALTHOUGH SHE BEGAN WRITING stories, essays, and poems as a child, the Welsh-born Ethel Lina White (1876–1944) did not publish her first novel, The Wish-Bone (1927), until she was past her fiftieth birthday. Her first three books were general fiction, after which she wrote more than a dozen mystery novels, beginning with Put Out the Light (1931).
Though White was one of England’s most popular mystery writers during the 1930s and early 1940s, her books are seldom read today, her reputation resting mainly on the motion pictures, inspired by her extremely suspenseful novels, that are in constant rerun on classic movie channels.
The Spiral Staircase, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Dorothy McGuire and Ethel Barrymore, was released in 1946; it was based on White’s 1933 novel Some Must Watch. It was remade in 1975 with Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Plummer, and again as a made-for-television movie in 2000 with Nicollette Sheridan and Judd Nelson.
Even more successful was The Lady Vanishes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, and Paul Lukas. Released in 1938, it was inspired by White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins. It, too, has been remade twice, once in 1979, starring Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd, and Angela Lansbury, and again as a made-for-television movie in 2013 with Tuppence Middleton, Keeley Hawes, and Julian Rhind-Tutt. Her Heart in Her Throat (1942; the British title was Midnight House) was filmed as The Unseen (1945), starring Joel McCrea, Gail Russell, and Herbert Marshall.
“The Gilded Pupil” was first published in Detective Stories of To-day, edited by Raymond Postgate (London, Faber & Faber, 1940).
The Gilded Pupil
ETHEL LINA WHITE
THE ESSENTIAL PART of this tale is that Ann Shelley was an Oxford M.A.
Unfortunately, so many other young women had the same idea of going to College and getting a Degree, that she found it difficult to harness her qualifications with a job. Therefore she considered herself lucky when she was engaged as resident governess to Stella Williams, aged fifteen—the only child of a millionaire manufacturer.
It was not until her final interview with Stella’s mother, in a sunroom which was a smother of luxury, that she understood the exact nature of her duties. Lady Williams—a beautiful porcelain person, with the brains of a butterfly—looked at her with appealing violet eyes.
“It’s so difficult to explain, Miss Shelley. Of course, my husband considers education comes first, but what I want is someone to exercise a moral influence on Stella. She—she’s not normal.”
“Thymus gland?” hinted Ann.
“Oh, far worse. She won’t wash.”
Ann thought of the times she had been sent upstairs to remove a water-mark, because she had overslept, or wanted to finish a thriller; and she began to laugh.
“That’s normal, at her age,” she explained. “Schoolgirls often scamp washing.”
Lady Williams looked sceptical, but relieved.
“The trouble began,” she said, “when she was too old for a nurse. Nannie used to wash and dress her, like a baby. But she refuses to let her maid do anything but impersonal things, like clothes. It’s her idea of independence. She’s terribly clever and Socialistic. She’ll try to catch you out.”
“That sounds stimulating,” smiled Ann.
All the same, she was not impressed pleasantly by her new pupil. Stella was unattractive, aggressive, and superior. Her sole recommendation to Ann’s favour was her intelligence, which was far above the average.
* * *
—
On her first Saturday half-holiday, Ann walked out to the grounds of Arlington Manor—the residence of the Earl of Blankshire—to visit her old governess, Miss West. It was a May day of exciting weather, with concealed lighting bursting through a white windy sky. She thrilled with a sense of liberation, when she turned to the road through the woods, where the opening beeches were an emerald filigree against the blue shadows of the undergrowth.
Miss West’s cottage suggested a fairy-tale, with its thatched roof and diamond-paned windows. It stood in a clearing, and was surrounded by a small garden, then purple with clumps of irises.
Ann’s knock was answered by the maid, Maggie—a strapping country girl. She showed the visitor into the bed-sitting-room, where her mistress, who was crippled with rheumatism, was sitting up in bed.
Miss West was an old woman, for she had also been governess to Ann’s mother. Her mouth and chin had assumed the nutcracker of age, so that she looked rather like an old witch, with her black blazing eyes and snowy hair.
Her dominant quality was her vitality. Ann could still feel it playing on her, like a battery, as they exchanged greetings.
“I love your little house,” she remarked later, when Maggie had brought in tea. “But it’s very lonely. Are you ever nervous?”
“Nervous of what?” asked Miss West. “There’s nothing here to steal, and no money. Everyone knows that the Earl is my banker.”
This was her way of explaining that she was a penniless pensioner of the Earl, whom she had taught, in his nursery days.
“Every morning, someone comes down from the Manor, with the day’s supplies,” she said. “At night, a responsible person visits me for my orders and complaints….Oh, you needn’t look down your nose. The Earl is in my debt. He is prolonging my life at a trifling expense to himself; but I saved his life, when he was a child, at the risk of my own.”
Her deep voice throbbed as she added, “I still feel there is nothing so precious as Life.”
Later, in that small bewitched room, Ann was to remember her words.
“Life’s big things appeal most to me,” she confessed. “Oxford was wonderful—every minute of it. And I’m just living for my marriage with Kenneth. I told you I was engaged. He’s a doctor on a ship, and we’ll have to wait. In between, I’m just marking time.”
“You have the important job of moulding character,” Miss West reminded her. “How does your gilded pupil progress?”
“She’s a gilded pill.” Ann grimaced. “A gilded pupill.”
“Is Oxford responsible for your idea of humour?” asked Miss West, who had a grudge against a University education.
“No, it’s the result of living in a millionaire’s family. Please, may I come to see you, every Saturday afternoon? You make me feel re-charged.”
Although Miss West had acted like a mental tonic, Ann was conscious of a period of stagnation, when she walked back through the wood. She taught, in order to live, and went to see an old woman, as recre
ation. Life was dull.
It might not have appeared so flat, had she known that she was marked down already for a leading part in a sinister drama, and that she had been followed all the way to the cottage.
* * *
—
For the next few weeks life continued to be monotonous for Ann, but it grew exciting for Stella, as, gradually, she felt the pull of her governess’s attraction. Ann had a charming appearance and definite personality. She made no attempt to rouse her pupil’s personal pride by shock-tactics, but relied on the contrast between her own manicured hands and the girl’s neglected nails.
Presently she was able to report progress to the young ship’s doctor.
“My three years at Oxford have not been wasted,” she wrote. “The Gilded Pupill has begun to wash.”
In her turn she became fonder of Stella, especially when she discovered that the girl’s aggressive manner was a screen for an inferiority-complex.
“I always feel people hate me,” she confided to her governess one day. “I’m ashamed of having a millionaire father. He didn’t make his money. Others make it for him. He ought to pay them a real spending-income, and, automatically, increase the demand, and create fresh employment.”
Ann found these Socialistic debates rather a trial of tact, but she enjoyed the hours of study. Stella was a genuine student, and always read up her subject beforehand, so that lessons took somewhat the form of discussions and explanations. Ann was spared the drudgery of correcting French exercises and problems in Algebra.
But her gain was someone else’s loss. She had no idea how seriously she was restricting the activities of another character in the Plot.
Doris—the schoolroom maid—searched daily amid the fragments in the wastepaper-basket for something which she had been ordered to procure. And she searched in vain.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 117