Lenz was pottering around, opening the door of the wardrobe, gazing inside, closing the door and turning to the mirror above the dressing-table. He looked like a magician on the verge of producing a bowl of goldfish from behind his left ear.
Eventually he paused in front of me, holding up the panel of glass between us. “Mr. Duluth, I want, with your assistance, to make a little experiment. I am going to ask you to leave this room and to enter it again when I call. I want you to think of yourself as an actor coming back to his dressing-room after rehearsal—an actor who has imperfect vision and who has reason to fear mirrors.” From his pocket he produced his horn-rimmed spectacles. “I am a trifle far sighted, Mr. Duluth. If you wear my spectacles, it should help with the illusion.”
I took the spectacles, completely docile.
“One thing more, Mr. Duluth.” Lenz crossed to the dressing-table, picked up a stick of red grease paint and drew with it two bold lines across the new glass. “I want you to imagine this mirror to be cracked, as it was last night. With that assumption in mind, I want you to act exactly as you would imagine this hypothetical individual to act.” He paused, adding gravely, “And, please do not be alarmed at anything you may see.”
A slight gesture of the hand dismissed me out into the passage. I shut the door. Eddie Troth was still loitering around. Feeling distinctly foolish, I put on Lenz’s spectacles which instantly blurred my vision into a weird, uncomfortable kaleidoscope. I waited until I heard Lenz’s voice from the dressing-room call: “Mr. Duluth.”
That was my cue. I groped toward the door and pushed it open.
The first thing I noticed was that Dr. Lenz had disappeared. That drab, musty room seemed empty. I paused on the threshold, trying to throw myself into the role Lenz had asked me to play. An actor coming back from rehearsal—his first instinctive movement would be toward the dressing-table. I went to the dressing-table. In front of me, swimming out of focus, was the new mirror scrawled with Lenz’s grease-paint which was intended to give the impression of cracks. As I peered, my own reflection peered back at me, grotesquely distorted like the reflection in the side of a convex silver coffee pot. It was worse than what I used to see in the glass in my hang-over days.
Once again I tried to assume a superstitious actor’s reaction. He would have recoiled from the broken mirror and turned to the other one in the wardrobe. I crossed to the wardrobe and gazed through Lenz’s spectacles into the full-length mirror inset in its door.
I had, of course, expected to see my own reflection again, cock-eyed as it had been before. But, instead of the familiar face of Peter Duluth staring back at me, I saw something quite different—another face which couldn’t possibly have been mine, a strange, inhuman face, something out of an attack of D.T.s, peering bale-fully from unblinking gray eyes.
For a second I was right off my guard. I felt as if the whole world had gone nuts. At the best of times a disembodied face on the wrong side of a mirror is not an attractive thing to meet up with.
I tugged off the spectacles and the spell was broken.
I saw aronce that the closet door with its insert mirror was open, pushed back flat against the side wall, and that I was looking not into a mirror but straight at Dr. Lenz who was standing inside the wardrobe, holding the panel of plain glass in front of him. His hands, keeping the glass in place, were concealed behind the woodwork of the door frame. The illusion of a mirror was most convincing.
It was a trick, of course, which could have worked only on someone with bad eyesight or someone in a thoroughly nervous state of mind—but under those circumstances it would have worked like hell.
Lenz was stepping out of the closet now. He propped the pane of glass against the wall.
“A childish ruse, Duluth, but I think it would have had a profoundly alarming effect upon Heir Wessler with his poor eyesight and his fear of mirrors.”
“Wessler!” I had more or less guessed he’d been working around to that. “Then you think Theo had the right
idea, that it was meant for Wessler and Comstock barged into it by mistake?”
Dr. Lenz nodded. “As Miss Ffoulkes pointed out, no one could possibly have guessed that Mr. Comstock would come into this room. It is far more likely that Herr Wessler was the intended victim.” He added sternly: “But while Miss Ffoulkes seems to consider it some harmless, practical joke, devised by Miss Rue, I am compelled to believe that last night’s disturbance was caused by someone with a very strong, malicious desire to demoralize Herr Wessler.”
That sounded bad.
He continued: “My reasoning, of course, is purely hypothetical but it fits with all the facts in our possession. I would like to explain to you what I believe to have happened here last night.”
I didn’t want to hear. I had an overwhelmingly ostrich impulse to bury my head in the nearest sand and pretend that everything was daisy. But there was nothing I could do.
“I believe, Mr. Duluth, that last night while the rehearsal was in progress on stage, someone came into this room with Mr. Troth’s sheet of glass. That person broke the mirror above the dressing-table. I can suggest a reason for his doing that. By breaking the mirror, he would not only have created the atmosphere of superstition and fear he required, he would also have insured the fact that Herr Wessler would turn to the wardrobe and be confronted by the false mirror and the pre-arranged tableau just as you did. This individual then stepped into the wardrobe and employed the sheet of glass in the manner I have indicated. We must assume also that he distorted or disguised his face in some manner so that the manufactured reflection would seem macabre, supernatural.” He gave a dry smile. “I also endeavoured to contort my face when I was recreating the illusion for you, Mr. Duluth.”
“You did a swell job,” I said bleakly.
Lenz acknowledged this compliment with a slight bow. “But last night it would have been far easier to create a ghostly illusion. You tell me Herr Wessler’s black cloak was hanging in this wardrobe. With that draped around him, this individual could have made it appear as if his face were detached from a body, floating, as it were, in a void.” He turned to the dressing-table and picked up the fragment of glass he had selected from the pile in the passage. “I want you to look at this, Mr. Duluth. Do you notice anything unusual about it—”
I looked. Smudged over one corner of the fragment was a sort of grayish substance that looked like clay.
“Wessler’s modeling clay!” I said with an unexpected flash of insight.
“Exactly! How effective to have used the modeling clay to build up an alarming mask; how reasonable that a particle of it should adhere to the glass.” Dr. Lenz stroked his beard. “That, Mr. Duluth, is what I imagine to have been the set-up in this dressing-room last night It does not go against the evidence.”
It didn’t. “But it would have been damn risky,” I objected. “All Wessler had to do was to investigate and the person would be caught.”
“Certainly there would have been considerable risk, Mr. Duluth. But the fact itself implies that this individual must have been clever enough to realize that a face in the glass was the one thing Herr Wessler would never investigate. One glimpse would have been enough to have sent him hurrying in terror from the room, leaving the way open for escape.”
He paused. “Of course, when Mr. Comstock blundered into the trap, everything must have been thrown out of gear. I think we can visualize the actual sequence of events. Mr. Comstock, his mind full of memories of the girl Lillian Reed, came to this dressing-room, presumably from an impulse to visit once more the scene of her suicide. Miss Ffoulkes’ account of what she saw upstairs had been a great shock to him. He was in an abnormally keyed-up condition. He moved to the dressing-table, and was confronted with the cracked mirror. That in itself would have come as a shock to any superstitious actor. Assume that he threw out a hand for support …” He broke off, adding: “Herr Wessler probably left the figurine of Miss Rue on the dressing-table, didn’t he?”
I sa
w then. “You mean Comstock might have grabbed the statuette by the neck?”
‘That would seem to explain the condition of the little figure,” agreed Lenz placidly. “Imagine Mr. Comstock staring at the thing in his hand, the figure of a woman, her head lolling to one side. That would have added to the cumulative effect of horror. Then, just as you did, he turned to the mirror in the wardrobe. He saw the tableau which had been staged for Wessler.” He shrugged. “The face, distorted by the clay, would have seemed to him the face of someone long dead. Naturally he would have connected it with Lillian Reed.”
This hypothesis, coming from anyone but Lenz, might have seemed fantastic. But Lenz contrived to make it sound as practical and foolproof as an algebraic equation.
“Let us, for a moment, Mr. Duluth, return to the individual in the closet. The wrong person had fallen into his trap. It was a most embarrassing situation. He must have started to move from the closet with the intention of revealing himself and possibly of explaining the whole affair away as some innocent prank.”
I whistled. “So that was why Comstock said it came out at him—out of the mirror. He thought he was seeing the ghost of Lillian Reed actually stepping through the glass.”
“That is my belief.” Lenz had all the answers. “Overcome with the panic which was precipitating his fatal heart attack Mr. Comstock dropped the statuette at the foot of the wardrobe and dashed from the room. It is easy to guess what followed. Fearing Mr. Comstock would insist on an immediate investigation, the individual in the closet must have run from the room and attempted to replace the sheet of glass in the passage, inadvertently dropping and smashing it. As it happened, we were all so concerned with Mr. Comstock’s collapse that, although we heard the tinkle of breaking glass, we did not follow it up and he was able to make his escape.”
By now Lenz seemed to have everything matter-of-factly buttoned up. Then I remembered something. “But how about Lillian Reed’s first appearance? What the hell was it Theo Ffoulkes saw upstairs?”
Lenz smiled. “As a man of the theater, Mr. Duluth, you know surely that a dramatic performance often requires a rehearsal.”
“You think Theo broke in on a rehearsal?”
“It is possible, Mr. Duluth. It is also possible that it was a prologue, a curtain-raiser, as it were, to put you all into the right frame of mind with regard to the Lillian Reed legend. For I am sure that the person responsible for this disturbance was familiar with that story and consciously exploited it. Does that not seem to be the only reasonable explanation of what occurred?”
It did. I said so and asked dismally: “But who on earth could want to pull a trick like that on Wessler? Do you suppose it’s your provocative dose, Mr. Kramer?”
“It may have been Mr. Kramer. It may have been anyone, including those members of your own company who were not on stage at the time. From Miss Ffoulkes’s description it would seem that a woman, at least, was involved.” Dr. Lenz looked with extreme concentration at his own thumbnail. “Were any of the ladies in the cast wearing a light tan fur last night?”
I made a rather jittery mental check-up—Theo, tweeds, no fur; Mirabelle, a chocolate-colored mink; Iris, Persian lamb.
“None of them,” I said.
“In that case, we shall have to consider the possibility of an outsider, a woman whom we do not know, who managed to slip past the doorman.”
As he stopped speaking the wardrobe door flapped shut with a dull click. It seemed the only sound in that whole dreary theater. My nerves, which had been all set to act up for some time, started off down the straight.
I said hopelessly: “Well, what do we do? Hand everything over to the police and call it a day?”
“Come, come, Mr. Duluth, there is no need to take so defeatist an attitude.” Dr. Lenz’s voice was light but it was a lightness I knew of old—the everything’s-going-to-be-all-right tone which he used on the more refractory patients at his sanitorium. “After all, however unfortunate the circumstances, we have proved, have we not, that Mr. Comstock’s death was the result of an accident. No malice was intended toward him per se. There is no real case for the police—as yet.”
Once again, Dr. Lenz had qualified one of his professionally encouraging remarks with a very ominous— as yet.
“There are no entrances to this theater at the moment except through the stage door?”
“Not that I know of—not unless somebody has keys.”
“In that case—” Dr. Lenz was very positive—“I suggest that you question the doorman to discover whether any unknown person could have come in through the stage door last night. Especially you should stress—”
“I know,” I said gloomily. “A woman with a light tan fur.”
For a few minutes we stood there in that stuffy dressing-room, staring at each other in silence. Then the door was thrown open and the lanky figure of Eddie Troth crossed the threshold.
“Finished with that pane of glass?” asked my stage-manager cheerfully. He looked at me and then at Lenz. “What the hell’s been going on here?”
I glanced at Lenz. He shook his head.
“Oh, nothing, Eddie,” I said. “Dr. Lenz has just been teaching me a conjuring trick. It’d be a riot on a party. It’s all done with mirrors.”
CHAPTER TEN
HAVING given his amazing reconstruction of last night’s alarums and excursions, Lenz seemed to feel his responsibilities at an end. He produced his watch, claimed an immediate engagement with one of the other Four First Beards of Psychiatry and left me alone in the dressing-room with several thousand apprehensions and Eddie Troth.
But Eddie was a swell person for elbowing out apprehensions. He started talking about his traps as if rats were the only things in the world that mattered. He said he had bought the cage variety because the doorman, exhibiting unsuspected personality, had threatened to report him to the S.P.C.A. if he used the breaknecks or poison which might damage the Siamese cat.
“Don’t like the cage trap so well,” concluded Eddie, talking with the assurance of an expert, “but I didn’t want to get in wrong with the doorman and I’m having swell results. They’ve only been set a couple of hours but I’ve caught a lot of those babies already.”
He started to blush and shuffle like a nervous kid and finally plucked up courage to ask whether I wouldn’t like to see the rats he’d caught. There was something engaging about a grown man being excited over rat catching. Although it was almost rehearsal time and I had my vital session with the doorman ahead of me. I said I’d go with him—just out of a general impulse of chumminess.
We went downstairs, turned left at Mac’s alcove and pushed through a shabby pair of double doors which led beneath stage. I had never been there before. If possible, the Dagonet was even less pleasant below stage than it was anywhere else. There was a century-old smell of greasepaint and grime. The only light, seeping from grilles at street level, cast grudging illumination on ancient packing cases, left by long-forgotten productions, moldering bits of scenery and all the other flotsam of the theater. Eddie’s newly installed wind machine loomed in a corner. Every now and then it gave a sort of faint groan as if someone were dying in unspeakable agony.
With conscious pride, Eddie led me around that limbo of lost plays, pointing out trap after trap, most of which were suitably tenanted with a rat. It was really remarkable that he had caught so many so quickly.
Presumably, after a few months in the Dagonet, even the vermin got to feeling suicidal.
I asked if he wasn’t going to drown them right away but he said no, caught rats were like ducks, they acted as decoys.
“I’ll have six in each trap by tomorrow.”
“Maybe they’ll escape,” I suggested.
Eddie was shocked at such ignorance. He gave me a long technical lecture on how it was impossible for rats to escape from traps.
I took his word for it.
He grinned. “Sure, Mr. Duluth, I’m going to save you the expense of fumigation.”
> It was rather touching, having him so determined to save Peter Duluth, Inc. that particular outlay.
Once we were out of the cellar, I left Eddie and started down the passage to the doorman’s room. People were arriving for rehearsal. Theo passed me with Wessler. She seemed tickled pink and called out something about Lenz’s codeine helping her cough. Then Mirabelle and Gerald erupted together through the stage door. Mirabelle looked white and angry. She didn’t acknowledge my greeting and I heard her mutter to Gerald:
“You can’t do that to me and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you.”
I wondered vaguely what new trouble was brewing.
When I entered the doorman’s room, Mac was brooding over his scrap-book. The Siamese cat saw me first and turned on me two distinctly derisive blue eyes.
I did my best to ignore the feline gaze. But with one of those ill-timed feline impulses she leaped at me and clawed her way to my shoulder where she settled down to a steady session of purring.
That made Mac conscious of my presence. He looked up, his toothlessness showing in a senile smile. He said: “She’s a fine girl, she is. Mr. Troth wanted to put arsenic down but I wasn’t having any arsenic around where Lillian could get it. No, sir.”
“Lillian?” I echoed. To me it seemed a little late in the day to protect the long-departed Lillian Reed from arsenical poisoning. Then I saw the doorman’s admiring gaze was fixed on my shoulder. “My god,” I said hollowly, “you mean you’re calling the cat Lillian?” “Why not?” asked Mac concisely.
It was a question with no obvious answer. I hastily changed the subject and, following Lenz’s instructions, asked the doorman whether any outsiders could have gotten into the Dagonet last night.
Puzzle for Players Page 9