The Corpse Steps Out

by Craig Rice

  “Maybe they’d understand too,” he said.

  “Well damn it,” she said, “I’d always remember it. Even with things as they are. I’ve never done a show badly in my life.”

  “That’s just pride,” he told her.

  “All right, damn it, it’s just pride.”

  She rose wearily and paced the little control room while Oscar shooed the musicians and audition cast into the studio, located Schultz and the sound man, and began explaining a last-minute change in the script to Bob Bruce, who didn’t look as though he understood it. Schultz put a bag of almonds on the desk and sat down by the control board. Finally St. John arrived, limping ever so slightly.

  “Why aren’t you with your client?” Nelle asked irritably, picking up her script.

  “He wants to listen to this alone,” St. John said, “and besides, I don’t entirely trust you. I want to be here where I can keep an eye on you.” He looked at her coldly. “Too bad you haven’t a trained voice. You might be able to come within a few feet of hitting that obbligato.”

  Nelle started to speak, closed her mouth grimly, reached up with a sudden motion, grabbed St. John’s long thin nose between her fingers, and pulled it until he forgot his dignity and yelped. Then she walked stiffly into the studio.

  It was, Jake thought, the only happy moment of the day.

  St. John retired to a chair in the corner. No one dared look at him.

  “All set,” Schultz called into the communicating microphone. He look at his signals and saw that the client’s room was ready.

  They were not all set. The sound man was missing again.

  Someone located him. Oscar looked over the studio and saw that everyone was present.

  “Everybody ready?” he called.

  “No,” Lou Silver said.

  The tuba player had the hiccups.

  At last Schultz gave the signal, Bob Bruce gave another signal, there was a long sweeping chord on the harp, and Nelle’s voice came floating into the control room.

  Exactly three minutes later, Schultz jumped, gave another signal that silenced everyone in the studio, and grabbed the communicating microphone.

  “Start over. I forgot to pipe you into the client’s room.”

  Oscar’s groan came through the loud-speaker like a blast from a river boat. St. John said crossly, “Why don’t you know your business, Schultz?’”

  Schultz jumped up. “All right, damn you, you can get another operator.” He started for the door.

  Jake grabbed his arm. “Sit down, Schultz. For the love of God, let’s get this over with.”

  Schultz hesitated, grumbled, sat down, made motions with plugs and switches. The signals were made again. The long sweep of the harp strings was repeated. Once more Nelle’s voice filled the control room.

  The audition was finally under way.

  Jake thought he had never seen Nelle quite so pale. And no wonder. A lovely spot to be in, he reflected, simply lovely. With the fierce pride of the artist, to do a deliberately bad job would be a thing she’d remember forever. To do a good job would be to cut her own throat.

  He listened anxiously till she approached the obbligato passage in her first song. She came to it, her voice picked it up and carried the notes superbly, perfectly, triumphantly. That was the moment when the rest of the cast caught her spirit, and the show began to move.

  As the last notes of the closing theme died away, Jake decided that the audition had been as close to perfect as any show Nelle had ever done.

  Malone had certainly better find Goldman now!

  He walked into the studio, Helene at his side, and saw that Nelle knew how good a job she had done. She was very white, and her eyes were tired. He took her arm firmly.

  “Jake—”

  “Yes, I know. Nelle, we’ve got to stall somehow. Helene, you go phone Nelle’s apartment, tell the butler to phone here in about ten minutes with the news that Tootz has had a stroke. We’ll have to rush Nelle to his bedside.”

  “But at six o’clock,” Nelle began, “at six o’clock, when the option expires—”

  “At six o’clock, you’ll be shut in a room with Tootz, and a white-clad nurse and a bearded doctor are going to tell St. John that no one can go in under any circumstances.”

  “Jake, I love you,” Helene said.

  They walked out of the studio together. St. John met them at the door, his pale face smiling.

  “I knew your good judgment would assert itself, Nelle. Now come along and talk things over with Givvus. You too, Justus.”

  “Sure,” Jake said lightly, “why not?”

  He told Helene to wait for them in the reception room, squeezed Nelle’s hand reassuringly, and followed St. John down the hall.

  The agency man paused at the door to the client’s room. “No funny business, now.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nelle said wearily. “I know when I’m licked.”

  They opened the door and stepped inside. Mr. Givvus sat, his back to them, before the loud-speaker. He did not rise, nor even stir, when they came in.

  “Mr. Givvus,” St. John began.

  Still the man did not move.

  Jake walked over to him. Mr. Givvus was slumped a little in his chair. Just behind his right ear was a small, very neat bullethole.

  The audition had been wasted on the late Mr. Givvus.

  Chapter 14

  With a quick, instinctive motion, Jake kicked the door shut, and laid one hand over Nelle’s mouth before she could scream.

  “But he’s dead!” St. John said in a curiously flat voice.

  “That’s not original,” Jake said grimly, “but God knows it’s true.” He took his hand away from Nelle’s mouth and pushed her into a chair.

  “But,” St. John said, “he was alive when I left him here before the audition.”

  Jake nodded. “Obviously. Unless you shot him yourself.”

  St. John looked at him wildly. “Why would I shoot him? He was my client! I was auditioning for him.”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. Suddenly he looked at the loud-speaker. “St. John, was the loud-speaker turned on when you left him?”

  “No. I showed him how to turn it on, and told him when we’d be ready to go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s turned off now. So either whoever shot him turned it off—heaven knows why—or else it was never turned on, which seems more likely to me. And in that case, the murder took place before the audition.”

  “You mean,” Nelle said, and stopped. “You mean we went through all that awful rehearsal and everything, and the audition, and then nobody even heard it? You mean the loud-speaker was turned on and the audition came in here, and he was dead all the time?”

  “I do,” Jake said, “and shut up.” He paused for thought.

  “If he was shot before the audition, that means practically anybody might have done it. We were all milling around before the audition.” He looked closely at Nelle. There was no sign of emotion on her white face.

  “But who would?” St. John demanded. “No one here even knew him.”

  “It was a mistake,” Nelle said. “It must have been a mistake.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  “Or whoever shot him isn’t in the radio business,” she said.

  “Nelle, what are you talking about?”

  “Jake, no one in radio would shoot a prospective sponsor. He must have been mistaken for someone else.”

  Jake looked closely at the late Mr. Givvus. He had been a small, spare man, with thinning gray hair, and tight, ungenerous lips.

  “Look here,” Jake said, “we can’t stand around here wondering who shot him. We’ve got to do something.”

  “Do what?” St. John said in a dazed voice.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here. Think of the hell that would pop if he were found here in the client’s room. Everything connected with this unholy mess would come out, including your own shady part in it, St. John. Radio couldn’t stand the scandal, neither co
uld you, and especially, neither could Nelle.” He was thinking fast. If Nelle had shot him—and who else would have wanted to—the body had to be gotten away as quickly as possible.

  “But what can we do?” Nelle demanded wildly.

  “Thank God there’s no blood on the chair to clean up. He didn’t bleed much and it’s all on his coat. St. John, you’re in this party whether you like it or not. Get”—he thought for a moment—“get Schultz, Oscar, and Miss Brand. Bring them here. Make it quick, and keep your mouth shut.”

  “What do you intend to do?” St. John asked, his hand on the door.

  Jake said grimly, “I’m going to take Mr. Givvus for a ride.”

  As the door swung shut, he turned to Nelle.

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about whether Malone gets to Brule or not.”

  “Oh Jake,” Nelle said, “the poor little guy. Who shot him?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “If you didn’t, maybe it was the same guy who shot Paul March, and maybe not. Or maybe Essie shot him thinking he was St. John.”

  St. John returned. Schultz, Oscar, and Helene were with him. He had explained the situation on the way.

  Jake locked the door. “St. John, how many people knew about this audition?”

  “Outside of ourselves and the cast—the head of the sales department here. No one else.”

  “Good. Somehow, we’ve got to get this guy out of here.”

  Schultz cleared his throat. “It can be done. There’s a back elevator.”

  “How about the elevator operator?”

  “Leave him to me,” Schultz said.

  “St. John, how did Givvus get here? Car, taxi, what?”

  “He told me he walked over from his hotel.”

  “That helps. You run along and start spreading the information that your client didn’t show up for the audition. I’ll meet you here later in the reception room. Helene, get your car around to the rear entrance near the back elevator—Schultz will tell you just where. And Nelle, you and Oscar get out in the reception room and start the biggest, noisiest row you can manage. You ought to be able to draw a good crowd. The rest, Schultz, is up to you.”

  They left to carry out instructions. A few minutes later Schultz returned, carrying one of the smocks worn by the studio musicians and a bottle of whisky. He poured some of the whisky on the smock, put the smock on Mr. Givvus, pulled a beret over his head so that it concealed the bullethole. Mr. Givvus’ straw hat bothered him a moment; finally, he stuck it on his own head.

  He peered into the corridor. From the reception room they could hear Nelle and Oscar Jepps calling each other names in stentorian tones.

  “No one around. Let’s go.”

  They held the dead man upright by draping his arms over their shoulders, and carried him to the waiting freight elevator. The operator sniffed the whisky-laden air disapprovingly.

  “Someday one of these horn-tooters is going to get the ax for showing up corned,” he observed. “You should of took his smock off, Schultz.”

  “No time,” Schultz said. “Hadda get him out of there before somebody seen him. I’ll take the smock off down in the car.”

  The operator grinned. “That sound man, Krause, is going nuts,” he said.

  “It’s his first baby,” Schultz said.

  “That ain’t it,” the elevator man said, “some ape stole his revolver-shot sound effect out of the studio. It’s his own invention and he’s fit to be tied. He wants to call the police.”

  “Why the hell would anybody steal a sound effect?” Jake asked.

  The elevator man shook his head. “Search me. Probably a gag. Last stop, all out.”

  They dragged Mr. Givvus to the alley entrance where Helene was waiting with the car. There Schultz took off the smock and beret, and put Mr. Givvus’ straw hat over the bullethole. They sat him up in the back seat, propped up with cushions.

  “Good luck,” Schultz said, and waved at them.

  “Where to?” Helene asked, driving down the alley.

  Jake didn’t answer.

  “Well,” she said after a few blocks, “only last night I asked you where you’d hide a corpse if you had to hide a corpse.”

  “Shut up,” Jake said, “I’m trying to think.”

  “And you said you’d never been faced with that problem, and you’d think about it. Well, I hope you’ve been thinking.”

  “Drive toward Lincoln Park,” Jake said.

  The sun had set, and twilight was slowly settling over the city. As they reached the park, the light was shadowy, dim, almost hazy. Jake directed her to a little-frequented drive, and finally told her to stop near a clump of bushes.

  There was a park bench on the other side of the bushes, facing the lake. Jake looked around, made certain that no one was in sight, carried the late Mr. Givvus to the park bench, and sat him upright. As a parting touch, he found a folded newspaper in the car, and spread it in the late Mr. Givvus’ lap. Then he climbed back in the car.

  “Drive on,” he said. “You see, when you have a corpse to dispose of, you simply—”

  “This time you shut up. Where to?”

  “Back to the studio,” he told her. “I’m going to try to bluff those letters out of St. John.”

  The reception room was quiet, nearly empty when they arrived. A page boy sat at the desk, absorbed in a copy of Amazing Stories. Nelle and John St. John were sitting on one of the davenports in stony silence, as far apart as possible.

  Jake smiled at them pleasantly. “Don’t ask me,” he said amiably. “You’ll read all about it in the newspapers. Now St. John, let’s have the letters that belong to Nelle.”

  “I think I’ll keep them,” St. John said coldly.

  Jake had expected that. “You wouldn’t like to have me tell the police about your client being shot when and where he was, and about your being the last person to see him alive, would you?”

  St. John’s lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “And you wouldn’t like to have me tell the police how you disposed of the body, would you? I believe it’s a criminal offense. And if you did go to the police, I would have to turn the letters over to them as part of the evidence, and of course the newspapers—” He let it go at that.

  “Well,” Jake said after a pause, “I thought there was no harm in trying.”

  St. John said, “In view of what has happened, Miss Brown’s contract will probably be re-signed with Goldman as expected, so she has nothing to worry about. The letters are in a good, safe place. I think I’ll keep them, just in case.”

  “A general agreement of silence seems to be the most sensible idea,” Jake said.

  St. John nodded.

  “Just the same,” Nelle said, crossly, “you might tell us how you got the letters in the first place.”

  “I got them from Paul March,” St: John said.

  “Obviously,” Jake said, nastily. “What we’d like to know is what you did with his body.”

  “Body?” St. John repeated blankly. Then he gave a polite little laugh. “Oh yes. That’s very funny.”

  Jake made one sudden and cataclysmic motion. A loud sound shattered the pleasant twilight quietude of the reception room.

  “Oh boy!” said Nelle Brown exultantly. “Oh boy! Right on the button!”

  Chapter 15

  A page boy came running and helped St. John to his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said. “It was one of those irresistible impulses.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Justus,” said the page boy soothingly. “Those things will happen now and then.”

  John St. John glared at them over a handkerchief.

  “I’m not going to forget this, Jake Justus!”

  “Not for a while, you’re not,” Jake agreed happily, looking at the reddening handkerchief, and the damage done on St. John’s slender and aristocratic nose.

  “I always say,” Helene observed, watching St. John’s stiff back disappear through the door, “there’s nothing like a goo
d old-fashioned brawl to clear the atmosphere.”

  Jake flicked imaginary soil from his hands. “Now that’s over, we’ll have dinner.”

  “How can you!” Nelle said weakly. “How can you eat or talk or do anything normal, after—after a day like this!”

  “We men of iron,” Jake said in his best lecture-platform voice, “become accustomed to the trivial frictions of life.”

  Even this didn’t get so much as a snort out of Nelle and Helene.

  They had dinner, doing their best to keep up a conversation. It was not wholly successful.

  “I wonder if they’ve found him yet,” Helene said over the coffee.

  “Found who?”

  “The—I mean, Mr. Givvus.”

  Nelle shuddered. “It was awful. I mean, walking in there and finding somebody murdered.”

  “You ought to be getting used to it,” Jake said. “This is the second time it’s happened.”

  “Jake!”

  “We’ll take her home,” Helene said, “my home, I mean. Then she can feel as bad as she wants to.”

  Jake paid the check and they walked out to the car.

  “We’ll take her home,” Jake said, “but there’s no sense to her feeling bad. Naturally murder is bound to be a little upsetting, but you can get used to anything. And these murders all seem to be doing Nelle a lot of good.”

  They stopped at the drugstore to replenish the liquor supply, then drove to the Erie Street building.

  Halfway up the stairs, Nelle stopped. “Jake. Not that apartment.”

  “Yes,” Jake said, taking her arm. “That apartment. And quit shivering. It doesn’t look anything the same.”

  Helene stopped suddenly. “Oh Lord. I forgot.”

  “What did you forget?” Jake asked. “I’ve got the bottle.”

  “I forgot that—I mean, I forgot it was the same apartment that—”

  “Shut up,” Jake said, “both of you.”

  “Oh Jake,” Helene said, “can’t you sympathize with her?”

  “I can,” Jake said, “but I’m damned if I think it would be good for her. Go on, open the door.” He slipped an arm around Nelle’s waist as they walked into the room.

  She looked around a little timorously. “It doesn’t look the same. Everything’s gone. Everything of his, I mean.” She began to cry.