It was soft, husky, like the voice of someone who didn’t have any breath in his lungs. I didn’t recognize it. But I did recognize the desperate, agonized emotion behind it.
It was asking urgently: “Who is that? Is—is that you, Dr. Lenz?”
Then Lenz’s serene voice. “Yes.”
“Thank God!” There was a little strangled sob. “You’ve got to come—come at once. I can’t bear it—not any longer. Dr. Lenz, you’ve got to come— It’s—it’s killing me.”
It was horrible, the stark, tortured quality of that voice. My fingers gripped tightly on the receiver.
Lenz was saying: “I’ll come at once. But who is it? Who are you?”
There was a long pause from the other end of the wire. Then that husky, unrecognizable voice again. It whispered,
“This is Mirabelle Rue….”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AFTER THAT there was silence, followed by the soft click of a receiver being slipped back on the stand. I jumped out of bed and started to dash around the room, grabbing clothes. In a second Lenz’s solemn face appeared around the door.
“There …”
“I know,” I said. “I heard.”
He disappeared. Within a few minutes I had thrown on a shirt, a pair of pants, shoes and an overcoat. I ran out into the hall. Dr. Lenz had beaten me to it. Fully dressed down to the large pearl pin in his tie, he was waiting patiently by the door.
The elevator shot us downstairs and we leaped into a taxi. As it rushed us toward Mirabelle’s hotel, Dr. Lenz’s gray eyes stared imperviously at nothing. Once he took out his ponderous gold watch, checked the time at a quarter to four and put the thing back in his vest pocket. He didn’t say anything.
Which was the most sensible thing to do, of course. What was there to say?
But there was plenty to worry about. I thought of Mira-belle as she’d been that day in my office, broken, gnawed by some fear she refused to share with me; Mirabelle at the rehearsal, acting on her nerves, with Roland Gates always at the back of her mind; Kramer pouring her a glass of brandy. That brandy …
I was jittery as hell as we paid off the taxi and hurried into the expensive foyer of Mirabelle’s hotel. I knew the number of her suite. Without waiting to call on the house telephone, I bundled Lenz into the elevator and hustled him out at the penthouse floor. I ran down the passage to Mirabelle’s door and knocked.
There was no sound from within. I knocked again— more loudly. For minutes, it seemed, I waited there, conscious of nothing but the absolute silence inside the apartment and the uncertain feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I started banging on the door with my fists.
A dog barked inside. Then a second—then a third. The whole floor resounded with that sudden bedlam of barking. I could hear the pad of running paws and a wild scuffling against the door. There was no sign from Mirabelle.
Lenz joined me. He said calmly: ‘Try the bell.”
I had been too het-up to notice the buzzer. I pressed my thumb against it, setting the dogs off into an orgy of yelps. The buzzer was still shrilling when quick footsteps sounded from within. A voice called:
“Dmitri, Rupert, Zenda—go on back to the bedroom. Naughty dogs.”
The commotion subsided. After a few seconds, the door was opened.
Mirabelle was there. I had prepared myself for almost everything except this. She was exactly the same as ever, breath-taking with her chestnut hair pushed back from her forehead and a sort of floating, pale green negligee. She stared at us for an instant blankly; then she held out both her hands, smiling that dazzling smile which had carried so many plays through the summer into their second season.
“Dr. Lenz, Peter—darlings! How divine to see you! But why in the middle of the night and why all the ringing and banging?”
“Mirabelle,” I asked hoarsely, “are you all right?”
“All right?” Her forehead puckered. “Of course I’m all right. Why …?” Her gaze slid over my unconventional assortment of clothes. “Angel, you’ve lost your neck-tie and your socks. You’ve been in a brawl. Are you hurt? Is he hurt, Dr. Lenz?”
Lenz didn’t say anything, which made the situation that much more confused.
“We … I…” I began, not quite sure whether to be angry or relieved.
“Never mind, darling.” Mirabelle slipped her arm through mine and drew me into the hall. “Just so long as you’re all right now. That’s all that matters.”
Before I had time to speak, I was whisked into the living-room and stretched out on a couch. Mirabelle, restless as curtains in the wind, was dashing in and out of the room, bringing cigarettes and glasses of water and keeping up a constant, cooing monologue. Finally she perched herself on the arm of the couch and stroked my hair.
“Now, darling, tell me all about it”
I glanced despairingly at Lenz who had seated himself on a small wooden chair.
He folded large hands across his breast. “There seems to have been a misunderstanding, Miss Rue. We merely came here, the two of us, in answer to a telephone call.”
Mirabelle picked up a cigarette, put it to her lips, lit a match, blew the match out and put the cigarette back on the table.
“What telephone call?” she said.
It seemed extremely difficult to believe that Mirabelle could have sent out a despairing S.O.S. and forgotten it again in less than half an hour. Clutching onto the few vestiges of my composure, I explained the situation.
Mirabelle’s eyes narrowed. “But how remarkable, darling. How very remakable.”
“You mean,” said Lenz, “that it was not you who telephoned to me?”
“But, angel, why should I have telephoned to you? I think you’re marvelous and I’ve always adored your beard, but—well, I’ve been fast asleep ever since I got back from the theater.”
“That is strange.” Lenz stroked the extreme tip of his imperial. “I have a keen ear for voices, Miss Rue. I would have been willing to swear on oath that it was you who spoke over the telephone.”
Mirabelle went through her business with the cigarette all over again, building up to a climax where she floated across the room in chartreuse clouds and unearthed a silver lighter from beneath a large French doll. She came back to the couch and I noticed her fingers move slowly to her cheek as if she still felt the slap Wessler had given her earlier that night
“A practical joke, darlings,” she said at last. “An absurd, tiresome practical joke. I’m miserable you were
dragged out in the middle of the night. But what can we do?”
Mirabelle seemed to have hit the nail firmly on the head. What could we do?
At that moment, an inner door was pushed open to reveal the borzoi and two gigantic great danes. They glared at Lenz and me and moved to Mirabelle. All three of them licked her hand ceremoniously and, with much thumping of tail, arranged themselves in a geometric pattern on the carpet at her feet.
In the face of so much canine disapproval, there seemed nothing for it but to leave ignominiously. We did.
Mirabelle came with us to the door and kissed us both with absent minded affection and a delicate whiff of cyclamen. I glanced back at her standing by the door, twisting the ears of the two great danes while the borzoi sat gazing up at her with aristocratic melancholy. Mirabelle and her dogs—nothing could have been more peaceful.
“Well, what do you make of that?” I said as Lenz and I went down together in the elevator. “If Mirabelle didn’t call, who the hell did? And why?”
Lenz’s fingers were playing over his watch chain. With cryptic irrelevance, he asked: “What is your telephone number, Mr. Duluth?”
“Lipscombe 3-1916.”
“And Miss Rue’s calls, I presume, are put through the hotel switchboard?”
I told him I believed so. When we reached the deserted foyer, he moved to the night-operator’s hide-out and pushed his head through the grille. “Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me the exact time at wh
ich Miss Rue made a telephone call tonight to Lipscombe 3-1916. I am her doctor; it is necessary for me to know.”
I stared. The operator blinked and patted blonde hair. It was probably against all hotel regulations for her to answer leading questions like that, but no operator in the world could have stood up against Dr. Lenz.
“The call from Miss Rue to the Lipscombe number went out about three-thirty,” she said brightly.
“Thank you,” said Lenz.
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” offered the operator.
Dr. Lenz was still at the grille. He produced a piece of paper and a large silver pencil and was scribbling absorbedly. When he had covered the page, he folded it, demanded an envelope from the operator, sealed it and wrote Mirabelle’s name on the outside. He pushed the letter and a dollar bill through the grille.
“Perhaps you would see that Miss Rue gets this first thing in the morning.”
As he moved away toward the swing-door, I said weakly: “Then it was Mirabelle who called?”
“It was, Mr. Duluth.”
“And—and she tried to pretend she hadnt. How in the name of heaven did you figure that out?”
“As I told Miss Rue, I have a keen ear for voices. I knew it could have been no one else on the phone.”
“But she must be crazy. What’s it all about? What’s happening? What did you write her that letter for?”
Dr. Lenz’s face was pale. I had never before seen him look so worried. “I wrote to Miss Rue to warn her that it is not always wise to be too brave.”
I had no idea what he meant. He did not enlighten me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I RETREATED to my bed that night in a very neurotic condition. Mirabelle’s screwy behavior alone had been enough to shorten my already much-abbreviated life; but that Lenz, who was supposed to be on my side, should start being mysterious seemed altogether more than a harmless youngish producer-director should be expected to bear.
At breakfast the doctor added to my anxiety by announcing his intention of returning to the sanitorium. The psychiatric or what-ever-they-were problems of Wessler’s half-brother, Wolfgang von Brandt, seemed suddenly to have taken on major importance in his mind. He made no reference to the happenings of the night before and volunteered no explanations. He merely packed his nightshirt and tooth brush, enveloped my hand in his great palm and said:
“If I felt I could be of any immediate use I would stay. But I cannot feel that way at the present time.”
He went, leaving me none the wiser and considerably more uneasy.
As soon as he had gone, I hurried downstairs to Iris’s room on the fifth floor. I found her in her made-over studio couch bed with a sort of metal fish-net over her hair.
“Hello.” She pushed herself up against the pillows and patted the fish-net. “Don’t look so disapproving, darling. I won’t wear it when we’re married.”
“Are you telling me?” I said.
Then I poured out to her the incredible history of Mirabelle’s telephone call. I knew I should have been the strong man shielding the weak, defenseless little woman, but with Iris and me things seemed to work in reverse.
“And there’s something else,” I concluded, twisting the pink fold of pajama which had somehow gotten between my fingers. “Something else I’ve got to tell you about Mirabelle. I haven’t dared mention it to Lenz. I was scared he’d shut me up again. But I—I think things are still going on at the Dagonet; I think someone’s trying to poison Mirabelle’s brandy.”
Iris extracted her pajamas from my convulsive grip and smoothed out the creases. She looked very calm and self-possessed, exactly the way I wanted her to look.
“Tell me about Mirabelle’s brandy being poisoned,” she said.
I told her about how I’d backslid and drunk some of Mirabelle’s drink and sent the glass to be analyzed. Her eyes went very dark.
“That,” she said, “and then Mirabelle’s telephone call later last night.”
“Exactly. But what in God’s name do we do?”
Iris got out of her studio couch, retrieved two pink slippers from the window sill and moved to the telephone. She held it out to me.
“Call your friend,” she said, “and see if he’s done the analysis. We can’t do anything until we know one way or the other.”
That made sense, of course. Feeling very nervous, I took the receiver and dialed. My friend had done the analysis—only too well. I listened to what he said. I put the receiver back on the stand.
Iris’s “Well?” was electric.
“He’s done the analysis,” I said. “Ill tell you just what he said. He said that glass contained a considerable amount of some alkaloid of the morphine group. He said there wasn’t enough poison to kill anyone outright but that, taken over a period of time, it might be very dangerous.”
‘Talk English, Peter. What poison was it? Did he say?”
“He did,” I said. “He couldn’t be sure. Not yet. But he’s almost certain it was…”
“What, Peter?”
“Codeine,” I said.
We stared at each other in arid silence.
Iris said very softly: “And Theo lost her codeine last night. Peter, it is all starting again. First Wessler, and now Mirabelle. What—what are we going to do?”
“Give up,” I said. “Give up and have done with it. Call Clarke.”
“Tell him someone’s trying to poison Mirabelle just now when we’ve managed to hold back about Comstock and Kramer?”
“Hell, we can’t go on like this indefinitely. We can’t endanger Mirabelle’s life—just to keep our show open.”
“Nonsense, Peter. We’ve got to. The play’s as important for Mirabelle as it is for us. And what good could the police do? They couldn’t go around tasting everything she drank before she drank it. They can’t do anything we couldn’t do ourselves. Someone’s trying to poison Mirabelle slowly. We can prevent that ourselves, Peter. We’ve got to.”
“Then—at least, we must tell Mirabelle.”
“Tell Mirabelle?” Iris thrust her chin out determinedly. “Peter, you can’t tell your star ten days before opening that someone’s trying to poison her. Think what it would do to her performance! Think—oh, damn everything. This play was going to do so much for us; it’s our life, Peter. We’re both tied up with it so tightly now that we sink if it sinks.” She gripped my arms. “Troubled Waters is going to open, Peter. Even if we all get murdered, it’s got to open.”
She was gazing straight at me, her lips half parted. It was just like Iris to have that extra crazy ounce of courage that I lacked. “We’ll take care of Mirabelle ourselves, Peter. We’ll find some way.”
Suddenly there was a lot of soft pajama in my arms. “Do you know,” I said, “you’re probably the most beautiful woman I ever saw?”
Iris said: “This is one hell of a time to start realizing that.”
But she took the fish-net off. I was still kissing her when a sharp knock sounded on the door. Iris broke away. She tried to act startled, but she hadn’t reached the point where she could fool me with a performance. Too casually she lit a cigarette, smoothed back her hair and said: “Come in.”
The door opened and Gerald Gwynne was there. He moved quickly toward Iris. Then he saw me and his dark young face went sullen.
“Hello,” said Iris. “Do you want me or Peter?”
From the way she said that I knew she had been expecting him and was giving him the high sign. That came as a real sock beneath the belt, because it implied so much that had never been said. I took a careful look at Gerald. It seemed suddenly important that he was ten years younger than I was and plenty handsomer. I found myself wishing like hell that I’d let him go to Hollywood after all.
He was still watching Iris. He said: “Matter of fact, I came to see Peter. Thought he’d probably be down here.”
I didn’t tell him I knew he was lying. I let it ride that way. “What do you want to see me about?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Finally he muttered: “It’s about Wessler. I think it’s pretty damn unpardonable what he did to Mirabelle last night. I’ve come to tell you that you ought to do something about controlling Wessler, if you want the show to get anywhere.”
“Since when have you become so interested in the show’s success?” I asked. “Only a couple of days ago you were trying to walk out on us.”
He flushed: “Why bring that up? It’s over, forgotten. I just demand an even break for Mirabelle. She hates Wessler’s guts; it’s tough enough for her as it is having to play with him. You ought to see, at least, that he doesn’t beat her up at rehearsals.”
“Thanks for the swell advice.” I was suddenly fighting mad. “What do you expect me to do? Fire Wessler and take on Roland Gates? That would be dandy for Mirabelle, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t be a fool. I…”
“Cut that out,” I said. “Mirabelle got you into Troubled Waters because she went down on her bended knees to me to have you hired. You’re doing a good job but if it’s going to your head and if you start thinking you’re a goddamn little prima donna, you can quit. Take up your Hollywood contract and get out.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “No need to shoot your mouth off. If you feel that way—okay. Sorry I brought it up. I was only asking. Forget it.”
He swung away toward the door. It was bad for my business to let him go that way. But I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Gerald had reached the door and was turning the handle when Iris said: “Don’t go, Gerald. Not yet.”
He turned immediately, moving back to her, his eyes changing their mood. “What is it, Iris?”
She was looking at me cautiously. I couldn’t get her drift. It was as if, by coming into the room, Gerald had made it so that Iris was someone quite different, someone I didn’t know.
She said: “Gerald, you’re fond of Mirabelle, aren’t you?”
Puzzle for Players Page 18