Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  “Never love any man, my child, unless you know his means. Wealthy men love as ardently as poor ones, and they’re so much more entertaining!”

  “Advice to the lovelorn?” Clint chuckled, and Kay nodded.

  “She’s always giving advice, yes. I told her I was beginning to be that way about you, Clint darling! She warned me off. Told me you were probably on an allowance, hadn’t a cent except what you spend.”

  “Right,” Clint agreed. “I’m poor as a church mouse, Kay. If I endowed you with all my wordly goods, you couldn’t buy half a dozen pairs of stockings. Not that I’m offering, you know!”

  She made an amused grimace. “Don’t be so cautious!” she derided. “Just because there are witnesses! You don’t talk that way when we’re alone!”

  Clint flushed almost angrily; and Kay laughed, Tope thought too gaily. He had a sudden impression that there was a hard calculation in the girl. He looked at Clara wondering whether she liked Kay, and he saw that she and Mat were holding hands under the table, oblivious to everything but each other.

  Then Clint said in a dry tone: “Now you’re bragging, Kay!”

  And Tope, because he liked to try experiments, remarked to Miss Moss:

  “Miss Cyr must have inside information about the Jervis affairs!”

  There was a sudden silence, and they all looked at him, and Kay cried: “Why? Whatever do you mean?”

  Miss Moss said calmly: “The trustee of the estate has run away with some securities that didn’t belong to him, Miss Ransom. Clara and Clint aren’t as well off as they were!” Tope, watching her, thought she was glad of the chance to make this statement, as though she were willing to make sure that neither Mat nor Kay had any mercenary ground for the affection in which they appeared to hold Clint and Clara. There was a moment’s silence and then Kay cried in shrill amusement:

  “Paupers? Clint darling, that’s splendid! You must go on the stage! I’ll make Madison let them murder you with Mat every night, or something. I always said I’d never marry a loafer! But turn workingman, my dear, and see . . .”

  They laughed at her, and the Inspector, content with his experiment, asked curiously:

  “Is it true Miss Cyr is bald, has no hair?”

  Mat looked at Kay to reply. “I don’t know,” Kay confessed. “And I’m dying to know, too. I’ve never seen her without that turban thing she wears. I’ve heard that she hasn’t a hair on her head. It must be ghastly! Can you imagine it? Just a shiny, white skull and that beautiful face of hers on the front of it.”

  And she added: “But she gets men, somehow! Hammond hangs around her all the time; and there’s a new one back stage to see her almost every night!”

  Mat said abruptly: “Kay, we’ve got to run!” Inspector Tope saw that the young man was ill at ease. He signalled the waiter, signed the check. “I’ve left tickets at the box office, Clara,” he explained. “You folks sit here and finish your coffee. You’ve lots of time.”

  “We’ll come back and see you after the first act,” Clara promised. But Mat negatived that proposal.

  “No, don’t,” he said positively. “Madison’s shutting down on visitors. We’ll meet you here for supper, if you like.”

  Clara laughed. “All right,” she agreed. “But I’m not afraid of Madison!” And Kay protested that it was not yet time to go; but Mat insisted, led her at last away. The Inspector, watching them in the corridor outside the grill, saw that he spoke sharply to the girl, chiding her for something or other. It was Tope’s ancient habit when he saw a thing he did not understand, to wonder, to seek to discover reasons why.

  He had more and more, during the half hour that they sat over their coffee, the troubled sense that something did impend; that these young folk here, and Miss Moss who loved them, were in danger. Once he thought there were eyes upon him; and he looked all around, covertly, half-expecting to see someone here who might be Peace. But there was no individual in the room who could fit the embezzler’s description.

  He talked with Miss Moss for a while, about indifferent matters; and Clint smoked a cigarette, and Clara was quiet and at ease. Then it was time for them to go. They walked the short distance to the theatre. The streets were bright and noisy with traffic, the sidewalks crowded. Clint got their tickets at the box office while they waited in the narrow lobby; then they took their places in the file of laughing folk who were pressing toward the door.

  Inspector Tope had an astonishing reluctance to go in. When he had passed the ticket taker, for no reason in the world he looked back and all around, scanning every countenance with quick and wary eyes. He had the animal’s sense that this was a trap; that death was lurking here.

  This play which they were tonight to witness attracted an audience distinctive and unique; it imposed upon the individuals of that audience, from the moment they entered the doors of the theatre, a new character. Suspense may be the essential element of drama; but there was here no suspense at all. The story of the play had been told and re-told, by word of mouth and by the press, till it was known in advance to every individual in the stalls. They came, not out of curiosity, but from a furtive appetite for violence; they came as the Roman throngs came to the Coliseum, to see bloody battle and stark death. They came in order that their spines might be made to congeal; and though they might have but just arisen from some festive dinner table, their voices, once they were within the theatre, were likely to hush to whispers. Laughter was smothered; each man watched his neighbor with an instinctive feeling that there might be a flat automatic pistol in the side pocket of the dinner jacket which the other wore.

  After they were in their seats, the Inspector, in the brief interval before the curtain rose, took note of his surroundings, just as the driver of an automobile, approaching another car, instinctively observes the width of the road, the depth of the ditch, the possibility of turning off the highway to safety if any emergency should suddenly arise. He had once been in a theatre when smoke curled up from the orchestra pit and the thrill of panic ran across the house, and he was always since then faintly uneasy in a press of people.

  But this could not account for his uneasiness tonight. He thought his feeling might arise from the tension obvious all around him; from the lowered voices, the nervous laughter, the whispering tones. Miss Moss said quietly:

  “A strange audience. They whisper like conspirators.” He nodded, and he had a new respect for her acuteness because she felt this too. “They know what’s coming,” he explained. “Every woman in the house is wondering whether she will scream, or faint, when the shooting starts!”

  “Why are they here?” she wondered. “I came because I like to be with the children, when they want me. But why have these others come?”

  “To find out what it’s like to see a man killed,” said Tope gravely; and after a moment she smiled and confessed:

  “I think I’m curious, about myself. To see what I will do.” Then the curtain slid upward with a whispering hiss; and a murmur swept across the audience as it settled into silence, and Clara beyond Miss Moss pressed closer to the older woman and Tope heard her laughing entreaty: ‘

  “Hold my hand, darling! Please!”

  The Inspector was during what followed more attentive to the audience than to the play. By suggestion, by clever stagecraft, by a dozen indirections the players cast across the house a sinister spell. When there was a laugh in the lines, the laugh was hurried, as though those who laughed were impatient to hear what was to come. Or the laughter was too loud and long, as though in sheer relief to tight and jangling nerves.

  The first act was clear and precise in its every implication; when the curtain fell, the groundwork had been laid for that which was to come.

  The curtain fell, and the lights gleamed bright and pitiless, and folk hurried up the aisle to snatch a cigarette during the intermission. Clint and Clara rose too, and Tope and Miss Moss got up to let them pass.

  “We’re going back to see Mat,” Clara explained.

&
nbsp; But Miss Moss objected: “He asked you not to!”

  The girl laughed: “Oh, Madison’s a grouch; but he’s not as bad as he pretends. Why don’t you two come? You’ve never been behind the scenes. Do!”

  Miss Moss hesitated, and she looked at Inspector Tope. He had an uncertain desire to stay near these young people; he had an absurd sense that danger threatened them. “Shall we?” he asked.

  “I think not,” she decided at last. “We’ll wait here.” She asked Clara: “Do you really think you’d better go?”

  Clara gaily protested: “Of course! But we’ll be back. ’Bye.” And she and her brother hurried up the aisle. Tope turned to watch them. There was a door communicating with the stage, behind the boxes to the left; and he thought Clint and Clara might go that way. But they went out through the lobby, to the stage door, he supposed.

  When they were gone, he sat silent for a while, remembering that when Peace disappeared it was in this theatre. And Tope wondered about this; and he thought it might be well to talk to Walter Hammond by and by, seek to get from him some small circumstance which Howell might have overlooked. Tope was not particularly anxious to locate Peace unless Miss Moss wished that this should be done; yet any enigma always vexed and goaded him till it was solved.

  Then Miss Moss asked him some question about the play, and he answered her; and the folk who had gone out to smoke came drifting down the aisles; and suddenly the house was dark, the curtain rose again.

  Clint and Clara had not returned. Miss Moss whispered: “Where are they?”

  He looked behind them, toward the lobby. “Perhaps delayed,” he suggested. “They will have to come around from the stage door; it needs a minute or two.”

  But they did not appear; and he and Miss Moss gave only half their attention to the stage where now the play went on.

  The scene of this second act was an automobile salesroom. Mat Hews and Kay were there, just returned from lunch, laughing together. Two other salesmen, lay figures of no importance in the play, dressed the set. There was an elevator at one side; a freight elevator for lifting cars from the basement, or to the floor above. After her scene with Mat, Kay stepped into the elevator and Mat pulled at the cable and started the car slowly upward. He watched her out of sight, called: “All right?” And at her assent, he pulled the cable again and the heavy elevator came slowly down to its place at the level of the stage once more.

  Tope noticed that the elevator shaft appeared to be walled with brick; and he wondered whether the bricks were real. He had heard that for greater verisimilitude, the machine guns were loaded with paper wads which spattered against these walls. Then he forgot his conjectures, for Lola Cyr was on, with Max Urbin! The house now was taut and still. The moment was approaching.

  Mat spoke with them, pointing out the excellences of the car which had caught Lola’s eye. She must try the driver’s seat; Urbin must see the engines under the gleaming hood. The other two salesmen in the background watched smilingly.

  And then four silent men came in the door. Four men, of whom three wore overcoats. Their hands were in their pockets; and there was something awkwardly bulky beneath the overcoat each wore.

  The fourth man was Hammond. He spoke to Urbin.

  The ensuing colloquy was brief. One of the men in overcoats approached the salesmen. Something slender and metallic protruded from the front of his coat; and they backed into the elevator. A moment later Mat Hews was there with them! Hammond and Urbin speaking; a dry triumph in Hammond’s tones, truculence in those of the other man. Truculence, yet terror too.

  Then Urbin, his hands in the air, backed into the elevator. He and Mat and the other two were no longer visible to the audience. Hammond spoke, and Urbin replied. His voice could be heard, even though he could not be seen. The three overcoated men stood side by side, facing the elevator. Lola was powdering her nose, her attention all focussed on the mirror in her hands. Tope remembered Kay’s boast that she had devised this business.

  The machine guns clattered, a fierce and deadly rattle like that of a monstrous serpent. The din continued till it seemed endless. Across the audience ran a twitching convulsion of horror; smothered cries; movements as though of pain. Miss Moss pressed her hand to her mouth.

  Lola yonder was still powdering her nose!

  Then there was silence, and the three men were gone, and Hammond came swift to Lola’s side. Together they turned as though upon a signal; they pressed against the wall, their hands high, their backs toward the door.

  And someone peered doubtfully in at the door, and a little crowd, forming and dissolving, came into existence there. Then a man in a blue coat pressed through; and somewhere above the stage, Kay screamed. She cried Mat’s name. The elevator, with its grim freight invisible to the audience, began to rise out of sight. The officer shouted something and ran to stop it. Before he could do so, it was gone, and Kay’s cries came ringing, piercing, full of grief and terror.

  Hammond and Lola yonder had abandoned their posture of helplessness; they came toward the policeman, and Hammond said quickly:

  “Three men, officer. Machine guns. This lady and I were looking at a car when they came in . . .”

  So the swift action ran. Other policemen arrived, and Hammond suggested that the lady, his companion, was near collapse. He proposed that he send her home in a taxicab, and was permitted to do so. He and Lola went off stage . . .

  It was a little later—a minute, three minutes, he could not be sure—that Tope was conscious of someone moving in the aisle on his left, behind the boxes. He turned and saw a man open the emergency exit and go quietly out. An usher hurried down the aisle, too late to intercept him; and Tope half rose from his seat, then sat down again.

  But his senses were preternaturally alert from this moment on.

  Clint and Clara, he remembered, had not yet returned from back stage; and he had an overpowering anxiety to know where they were. But Miss Moss was all attentive to the play, and he would not leave her here alone. He thought her unconscious that anything was amiss till she said to him suddenly:

  “Inspector, something’s wrong! See, they’re mixed in their lines, making up speeches as they go along.”

  He had forgotten the play. He watched, and listened for a moment; said then abruptly:

  “Hammond is supposed to be on the stage in this scene. He isn’t there!”

  “Why not?” she wondered.

  He hesitated. “Taken ill, perhaps,” he suggested guardedly. For he knew now that it was Hammond who had slipped out through the emergency exit a moment ago.

  The act ended; the curtain somehow came down upon a botched and stumbling climax, and Miss Moss said uneasily: “I wish the children would come!”

  Tope rose. “Shall we step outside?” he suggested. “Meet them, or find them?”

  She asked acutely: “What is it? You are disturbed?”

  “Not at all,” he assured her.

  She said: “Nonsense! What is the matter? Tell me. I am not a child!”

  He hesitated, surrendered then. “Hammond went out a while ago,” he confessed. “Through that door there!” He pointed. “I saw him go. I don’t know why . . .”

  Then Clint and Clara came swiftly down the aisle, their eyes shining. They tumbled into their seats, and—both talking at once—told their news.

  “More excitement!” Clara whispered. “Hammond is gone! He just vanished! Madison will have to take his part in the third act. They’re wild, back there. Nobody knows anything! Running around in circles. Hammond was supposed to be on for the end of the second act. They had to ad lib all over the place. H-sh!”

  Someone had just stepped in front of the curtain to speak to the audience. A small, fat man with a bald head.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said apologetically. “I regret to say that Mr. Hammond is suddenly indisposed. You may have remarked some confusion in the latter part of the preceding act. He was unable to go on. I must attempt to play his part in the third act.” He sm
iled. “I’m afraid I can’t equal Mr. Hammond’s performance. As you observe, I do not look the part of a ruthless gangster. I beg you will let your imaginations help me as much as possible.” He heard their good-humored laughter, smiled again. “Thank you,” he said, and disappeared.

  “That’s Madison,” Clara whispered. “And Hammond isn’t sick! He’s just gone! His valet said he went in to Lola’s dressing room with her, but nobody saw him come out at all.”

  Tope asked quietly: “His hat and coat?” The man who went out through the emergency exit a while before wore a hat pulled low, a coat about his ears.

  “They’re in his dressing room,” Clint explained.

  “But why should he disappear?” Miss Moss asked. “Without any explanation?” She looked at the Inspector, hesitated, seemed about to speak; and he nodded, and she said then: “Inspector Tope saw him go out of the exit there, a while ago.”

  “You did?” Clara exclaimed. And Clint cried:

  “Sure it was him?”

  “He had a hat and coat on!” Tope confessed. “But—yes, I was sure!”

  They sat in an astonished silence for a moment; and then Miss Moss spoke. She asked quietly:

  “Did Miss Cyr have a caller between the acts?”

  Tope moved like a man touched by an electric needle. His quick, searching mind had been groping toward this same question; hers was ahead of him. He looked at Miss Moss with a deep respect. And at the same time he realized that Clara and Clint were silent; that their eyes had met as though in startled consultation. He saw Clara faintly shake her head; but Clint said, with a slow reluctance:

  “Yes, she had a caller!”

  Tope said soberly: “Hammond wore an overcoat too big for him. The hat too.”

  And Miss Moss asked Clint: “Was this man larger than Mr. Hammond?”

  But Clara whispered: “Hush, there’s the curtain!”

  Tope was glad for the interval that followed; for the chance to think his own thoughts while those about him were attentive to the action on the stage. It was an old habit with the man not to seek to find out too much, too rapidly; he preferred to digest first those things already known. Yet one question waited to be asked. Where was Miss Cyr’s caller now; and had he missed his overcoat and hat?