by Paul Ernst
“There is no rear way except out through the main room and then back through the kitchen. Might as well take her out the front entrance.”
The doctor shrugged again and went along, and I looked at the dead girl, Rose Rosslyn, lying so neatly in the center of the room, on her back as if asleep, and then they took her out. I shook my head. “Young to die. Pretty to die.”
“Tell that to whoever shot her,” said Ryan.
The door opened and a detective came in. “One of the cancan girls,” he said to Ryan. “Spoke to Rose. Could be the last who did.”
Ryan started toward the door and I went, too, but in the corridor I turned tentatively toward the supper room. Ryan lightly touched my arm to steer me the other way. His way. He said, “Keppert is a big name, and that girl you were with has got it. I wish she didn’t. I wish she was Ellen Smith, or Mankiewitz… If you stick around with me for a while you can testify later to the Senator that everything was on the up and up. Besides, you might help—you have a good name with the boys. Besides again the Duysberg diamond case may be mixed up in this somewhere.”
And besides yet again, I thought, this way I would have no more tête-à-têtes with Ellen. I said, “Sure, honored,” and went with Ryan, across the corridor to the bigger general dressing room.
The girls had changed from their dance costumes and looked like any other half-dozen females save that they were a little larger and prettier. One, a big brunette, had been crying, and it was to this one that Ryan’s man steered Ryan.
“Edna Mailer,” the man said. And to the girl, “Tell him.”
“I was just saying I’d talked to Rose a little while before she—before—” The girl faltered.
Ryan offered her a cigarette and held a match for her. Disarming. You could see why he was a lieutenant at thirty.
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s not much to tell. I went next door just before Larry Mansfield’s number to ask Rose if she had some make-up cream she could spare. We both like the same kind. I knocked on her door and she said come in, and she gave me the cream, and I thanked her. That was all.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t know. A couple of minutes before Larry’s number.”
“He goes on at about ten-fifteen,” another girl spoke up.
So at ten-ten, give or take a couple of minutes, Rose Rosslyn had been alive. And about a half-hour later she’d been dead. The focus of attention, like the hot light of the sun converging through a magnifying glass, would be on the time from ten-ten to about ten-forty-five, the period taken up by Mansfield and the Misses Club 50.
“Did Rose seem all right to you?” asked Ryan. “Not jumpy or afraid?”
“She didn’t seem afraid or jumpy, but she did seem to have something on her mind. Like she was thinking of something a long way from half a jar of make-up cream.” Edna hesitated.
“Yes?” said Ryan.
“I’m just guessing.”
“Guess ahead.”
“Well, she seemed kind of mad.”
“At being bothered?”
“No, no. Not mad at me. I don’t know what at. But you’ve seen people get terribly sore at something and then try not to show it. That’s the way Rose looked.”
Edna had no more to offer, and none of the other girls had left the dressing room before their number—each could testify for the others on that—and none had heard anything suspicious. Ryan’s man had searched the room and their dressing cases for the murder gun, or anything else he might turn up, and had found nothing. We went out to the corridor, down and across to the last of the three dressing rooms on the right-hand side.
Ryan knocked and the door was opened by the girl in the white evening dress who had caused the police to be called in the first place.
“I’d like another word with you, Miss Lang,” Ryan said. “Go over what you were telling me before, about finding Rose Rosslyn, will you?”
Miss Lang was smoking a cigarette, and a heap of crumpled long butts in a tray showed that she had been smoking a lot before we called.
“You went to Rose Rosslyn’s room just as the cancan number was ending. Right?” said Ryan. I had never heard less bluster in a man’s voice. And I had never seen a man I would less care to lie to.
“Yes,” replied Miss Lang. “That would be at about twenty of eleven. They should have started earlier, but Larry Mansfield, in the number before, hogged some extra time.”
Golden Throat, they love you, I thought. At least this girl in white loves you.
“Why did you go to her room?”
“It’s as I said before.” The girl shrugged. “Rose and I had a date later with a couple of friends of hers. At least we’d had one. But not once, from the time we’d come in till the time I went to knock at her door, had Rose said anything to me about it. Or even seen me. I went to see if it was still on.”
“And then?”
“I knocked, and there wasn’t any answer. I was sure Rose was in her room because she was due on next. That novelty, taps-ballet, she does.… I opened the door and I—she—”
“You closed the door again when you went away?”
“I think so—Yes. I closed the door. I went to find Mr. Checckia, and he was in near the bar. I told him about Rose, and we went to the street and he got a policeman.”
“That’s all, Miss Lang?”
“That’s all I can remember,” the girl said, stabbing out the current cigarette butt.
“You were in here from the time you came to the Fifty at…”
“…about a quarter of ten.”
“… at about a quarter of ten, till the time you went to Rose’s room?”
The girl nodded. She looked sallow now, against the white evening dress. She lit another cigarette.
“You didn’t leave your room at all?”
“Not at all. I had some sewing to do—there’s a lot of mending to be done at a joint like this with no seamstress—and also it takes a while to get ready for my act.”
“When you opened the door and saw what had happened, did you also see a gun? Near Rose?”
“I didn’t wait to see anything else but Rose. I just ran out of there.”
“I’ll look around your room, if you don’t mind. Someone might have hidden a gun in here.”
Miss Lang looked as if about to stage a protest, but she didn’t. She watched Ryan’s deft searching, meanwhile dragging deeply at the cigarette.
He found nothing of interest to anyone, in the dresser, the wardrobe, or her overnight case. Meanwhile, Miss Lang seemed to have said all she had to say. Ryan thanked her and we went up the hall. I got a glimpse of the bull fiddle player’s elbow through an inch crack between the edge of the corridor curtain and the right-hand doorjamb. We stopped at the door next to Rose’s, between Rose’s and the supper room.
“Mansfield’s room,” said Ryan, knocking.
The door was opened by Golden Throat and we went in. Room just like Rose’s, with a professional’s bright-lighted dresser, a second-hand wardrobe, and a couple of chairs.
Mansfield (he had a crust taking unto himself a name of that theatrical size) looked older close up than he had in the spotlight. Thirty-five, maybe. Near the end of his string as engaging juvenile singer, and where did he go from here? There is a lot of this in the entertainment world—achievement of a moderate success in a field with a definite age limit to it, then increasing wonder and worry as to what you may do next when that has petered out. I felt a little sorry for Golden Throat, a little less inclined to be flippant about him, and more than a little glad that I was in a line not demanding good looks or charm.
He seemed very, very shocked by Rose Rosslyn’s death, and very, very anxious to co-operate. “I can’t realize it,” he said. “She was such a nice person.” He blew his nose with a fetching show of masculine emotion. “I’ve known her for years. Her and her brother.”
“Brother?” Ryan repeated.
“A twin, in age if not in lo
oks. From a theatrical family just as I am. They were a dance team till last year when her brother died. Since then she has carried on alone.”
“Any enemies around here?” asked Ryan. “Anybody who would want her dead?”
“Not that I know of. Everybody seemed to like her.”
Ryan nodded. “You went on at about a quarter after ten?”
“Yes.”
“You came back here during the cancan number? You stayed in your room?”
Mansfield shook his sleek head. “I came back to the corridor for a second—it’s a better exit when you actually leave the stage. Then I went up front again to see a friend.”
“You stayed there through the dancing number?”
“Yes. I had a drink with my friend—she’d come in with me, as a matter of fact, and later I was going to see her home.”
“You were at the table when Miss Lang ran out of the corridor hunting for Checckia?”
“Yes.”
“But you were back here, this side of the curtain, ‘for a second.’ Did you hear Rose call out? Or hear a shot?”
“No. If I had, I’d have gone to her room to see what was wrong. No, I didn’t hear a thing.”
“If you were out,” said Ryan smoothly, “someone might have sneaked in here to hide something.”
“Hide—something?” The singer didn’t like that idea at all. He didn’t seem to smoke as Miss Lang did; he was a gum chewer instead. A wad of it came down from where he’d kept it parked in his cheek, and his jaws began working frantically.
“Yes. So if you don’t mind I’ll look around.”
Again I watched Ryan give a room a once-over-lightly. Till he got to Mansfield’s suitcase, in the bottom of the wardrobe. He went through this so thoroughly that a fly speck must have been revealed had one been there. Again he came up with nothing, while the singer watched and anxiously chewed his cud.
“How long are we going to be held here, do you suppose?” Mansfield asked. He was not outraged about it, he was extremely meek, but I thought I caught an urgency within his tone. The “friend” he’d been with at the table? Some older, moneyed women, maybe—the ice cake he planned to leap to next from the failing support of show business? Possibly.
“Not any longer than I can help,” Ryan replied. And we went out to the corridor. There, he said, “Funny.”
“Hilarious,” I agreed. “But what, specifically?”
“Suitcases,” Ryan mused. “Overnight bags. Dressing cases. They all seem to have one. Carrying stuff from apartment to the Fifty, or to laundry or the cleaners, I suppose.”
“So?”
“I don’t remember seeing any suitcase in Rose’s room.”
I blinked. I didn’t either, now that I thought of it. And I should have thought of it, and I should have noticed.
Ryan opened the door marked, Manager, Mr. Checckia, without knocking; Checckia was still out front if he had obeyed Ryan’s orders. He had obeyed. The office was empty. We stepped in and Ryan closed the door, and at once something was odd. Then I placed it. No noise. Checckia had had his office soundproofed, even to the door, against the racket of orchestra and customers.
The room was not much larger than the individual dressing rooms but was, of course, much better furnished. There was deep, silent carpeting on the floor, a walnut desk and leather chairs, walnut paneling, and a big, lightly built but strong steel safe in the corner. All but the safe seemed fairly new, and all was expensive.
The safe door was open a couple of inches and traces of powder showed here and there where prints had been taken.
“That gun, and the bullet, have to be somewhere around,” Ryan said. “I don’t think anyone had time or opportunity to get them out of the building.”
They weren’t in here. Ryan went through desk and safe and felt around the cushions of the chairs.
“It begins to look important,” I said. “It begins to look as if someone was stupid enough, or crowded enough, to use his own gun on Rose.” I did not add, “Or her own gun.” I was pretty sure I didn’t have to; what with the type of small-caliber gun used, I thought that notion would already be lushly nurtured in the homicide man’s mind.
Ryan just nodded, face expressive as a handless clock’s. “Find the gun, get some answers. And we’ll find it.”
The man he had detailed to take the customers’ names and addresses at the supper-room door on their way out, came into the office.
“All gone but four,” he said. “Four people the bull fiddle player said he saw go into the hall, back here. If you trust the bull fiddle player,” he added.
Ryan didn’t smile; he didn’t have to. Of course he didn’t trust the bull fiddle player. Or Dodge Duffy, or Checckia, or Miss Lang, or the Misses Club 50. Or me. But he could not hold a hundred miscellaneous citizens here all night, and the musician seemed as handy and gamble-worthy a screen as was available at the time.
“Who are the four?” he asked.
The man gave him a piece of paper, and Ryan glanced at it. Then he glanced at me.
“Looks more than ever as if you had an interest in this,” he observed. “In a strictly professional way, of course.”
I smiled brightly back at him. Oh, of course!
3
RYAN chose to talk to his unlucky four in Rose Rosslyn’s dressing room. This was not quite as gruesome as it sounds, for Rose, of course, was gone, and there had been a bit of work with a wet rag over the spot where her head had lain. But it was still indirectly gruesome because there was this damp spot in the center of the bare wood floor.
“Herblock Bohr,” said Ryan from the list, and his man nodded and went out to get him.
Herblock Bohr. I’d had him pointed out to me, and was also familiar with his thumbnail picture in the newspapers. He wrote a column, “Bohring Along Broadway,” which had a certain local popularity but had never caught up to syndication and real fortune, possibly because it was a shade more snide than it needed to be. Part of his job was to spend a lot of time in New York night spots, and it was not unnatural that he should also frequently go backstage. But his luck had been out tonight when he went back through the Club 50’s curtained corridor doorway at the wrong time.
Bohr appeared in the doorway and proved not quite the man his column pictures proclaimed him to be. Happens sometimes. He hadn’t the jaw his photographs indicated, nor the normal hairline, nor the slimness. He was forty, pudgy, putty-colored, with a forehead rising up like the fortress side of Gibraltar. He didn’t seem alarmed, I’ll say that for him. Just annoyed.
Ryan watched obliquely, but alert as a cat, while Bohr came in—and I got the reason for interviewing the suspects in this particular room. The damp spot on the floor. It was obvious that Ryan counted the reaction of his interviewees to it as almost more important than anything he might make them say.
Presumably no standard customer at the 50 knew which dressing room was Rose’s; there was no name on her door, no name on any door save Checckia’s. Presumably they did not know just where she had been killed back here.
If one entered and regarded that damp spot with a startled eye, it could mean previous information and could be important.
Neither Bohr’s eyes nor any muscle of his face moved. He came straight in. “Hello, Ryan,” he said, with the clear intimation in his voice that he, as a citizen, was in a sense Ryan’s employer, and leave us not forget that salient fact.
Ryan’s eyelids flickered but his voice was even enough.
“Hello, Bohr. I didn’t know the Fifty was part of your regular beat.”
“They’re all part of my regular beat,” said Bohr. “And I have to bat out my column before much more time has passed,” he added importantly.
“I know.” Ryan seemed to have a temper packed in dry ice. “That’s why I called you first.” He looked at some notes taken in a dime-store book he drew from his pocket. What they were, heaven knows. Maybe genuine notes, maybe a grocery list written by his wife. “You came back here, from the bi
g room, during Mansfield’s number.”
“That’s right,” said Bohr.
“About ten-twenty.”
“I wouldn’t know. It was shortly after Mansfield started singing.”
“Why did you come back? Who did you come to see?”
“Gar Checckia,” he said, which was the first time I’d known the manager’s first name.
Ryan waited, polite and implacable.
“Gar phoned me earlier this evening,” Bohr said. “He told me he might have a story for me. I tried to get an idea of what it was, but he wouldn’t say over the phone. So I came here, checked my hat, and went back to see him in his office.”
“And?”
“He said he didn’t have the story yet, but ought to later. He hinted that it concerned a night-club entertainer and a dame. He wouldn’t say any more except to stick around, as the principals weren’t here yet. I went back to the supper room and ordered a brandy and sat down to wait.”
“You believed Checckia, then. About having a story.”
“Yes.” Bohr didn’t say it with entire certainty, but his waiting, of course, indicated that he had believed the manager at least to some extent. “I’ve gotten several leads from Gar. One was just before the Swadeneir divorce.”
I remembered that. Geraldine Swadeneir, wealthy in her own right, married to Timothy Swadeneir of the Wheat Exchange. Forty-one, and suddenly an infatuated patsy for a race-track driver of twenty-six. The disclosures had raised quite a cloud of musk.
“You came back here at about ten-fifteen,” Ryan said patiently. “You saw Checckia. Was his door closed?”
“No. He only closes it, I believe, when he sees someone important or when he’s working. To keep the place quiet. The door was open and I went in, and Gar was at his desk, feet up. He waved to me and said Hi, and he was sorry he hadn’t a story for me yet but to stick around. I went back out and up the hall to the supper room.”
“That was all that happened?”
“That was all.”
“You heard nothing while you were back here?”
“You mean, I presume, like a shot, or a girl calling for help. No, I didn’t.”