Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  Lola herself was yonder on the stage, composed, seductive, arrogantly beautiful. She wore a faintly mocking smile for Madison, short and plump and bald, was perspiring heavily in his role of her gangster lover. He knew the lines well enough; but he could only stumble through them. She embraced him, as the scene demanded; but she laughed over his shoulder at the audience. She even winked, as though to share the jest with them. The third act could be no more than a hollow burlesque, with Hammond gone. The audience began to chuckle; and the actors were quick to respond, quick to strike this key which pleased their auditors. They burlesqued the lines more and more broadly. What had been stark and stirring tragedy became broad comedy and nothing more. When Lola at last was dragged away to the cell that waited for her, and there remained only a dozen lines of the act, the house was roaring with amusement.

  Lola went off stage; Madison, and the District Attorney, and an officer or two were left to speak the concluding lines.

  And then the comedy ended; for from somewhere behind the scenes there came a long, strangling cry, the hideous shriek of a human being in abject terror or pain.

  Feet pounded, behind the back drop; and the sound of excited voices penetrated through the painted canvas. The actors on the stage forgot their lines to listen. And Madison made some sign to the wings, rang the curtain down.

  The folk in the audience were on their feet, all attention now. Someone climbed on his seat the better to see. No one made any move to go. And Miss Moss asked Inspector Tope:

  “What has happened?”

  Inspector Tope said in a low tone: “I’ll find out. Wait here, please. All of you.”

  She nodded; and he hurried up the aisle. He came around the back of the house and down by the side aisle to that door behind the boxes through which Hammond must have escaped. An usher stopped him; but Tope said calmly:

  “Police Inspector Tope! Show me the way.”

  “Come on,” the usher agreed. “They’ve telephoned for the police.”

  He opened the small door, and the Inspector passed through . . .

  He came back to rejoin the others as quickly as possible, and his eyes were intent and sombre now. But he had no need to bear the news to them; for as he approached down the aisle, Madison stepped through the curtains to say another word. The packed house listened breathlessly.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced. “The police request me to explain to you that there has been an—accident in one of the dressing rooms. It is suggested that you all remain for the present where you are. It will not be long. I thank you.”

  A man shouted: “You mean we can’t get out?”

  But Madison, with only a gesture for reply, turned and disappeared. Then Tope, who had paused in the aisle while Madison was speaking, came to his seat again, and Miss Moss looked up at him.

  “An accident?” she asked incredulously.

  “A murder!” he replied.

  He saw that Clint and Clara were clinging to one another, white and still.

  5

  THE audience milled and murmured all about them; the aisles were filled; there was a clamor in the air, and shrill hysteria, and angry truculence, and someone in the rear of the house called in hoarse authority:

  “Get back there! No! You’ll have to wait a minute, please . . .”

  No accident, but murder! This was the word Inspector Tope brought from back stage; and he saw that beyond Miss Moss, Clint and Clara were rigid and pale, looking straight ahead. Then Clint whispered something to the girl; and he caught Tope’s eye upon them and tried to grin. And Miss Moss smoothed down her dress precisely, and adjusted her hat upon her head, and tugged on her gloves.

  “Who was it?” she asked calmly. “Who was killed?” The Inspector shook his head. “Some man who came to see Miss Cyr,” he explained. “I did not hear his name! They found his body in her dressing room.”

  She said composedly: “I expect it was his hat and overcoat which Mr. Hammond wore.” And she asked: “Would you mind going back there again, to find out exactly what it is that has happened?” She looked at him calmly. “I’m afraid,” she pointed out, “that Clint and Clara will be involved. They were back there during the second act. It may have been done then.”

  He could still be astonished at her strength and poise. He said honestly: “Yes.” And he rose, and he was suddenly at his ease. “I want to go,” he confessed. “I’m like a fire horse who hears the gong! Such matters were my business for so many years. Yes, I will go.”

  She predicted, as much to herself as to him: “They will start by accusing Hammond, since he ran away. But he had nothing to do with it, no part in it.”

  The Inspector asked: “Why? How can you know?”

  “If he had done it, he would stay.”

  “Then why did he run away?”

  “For some other reason,” she urged. “Some sudden panic! Flight is terror, not confession. He was afraid; so he must have known it had happened. That is why he ran away.” Inspector Tope wagged his head. “I see,” he assented. “That is so, of course.” And he said, almost smilingly: “You and I would have accomplished many things together, in my old days, Miss Moss. I could recognize facts, and cling to them. But you go behind facts; go deeper.” He chuckled. “Hagan should talk to you. You could help the man.”

  He stepped into the aisle: “Shall I come back here, or wait till tomorrow to see you again?”

  “Here,” she said. “We will stay till you come.”

  While they thus spoke together in low tones, isolated by the turmoil and the babble of the audience all about them, Clint and Clara had been obliviously whispering together. But when Tope rose now they looked up at him; and as he started to move away Clint asked sharply:

  “Where are you going?”

  But Tope left it to Miss Moss to answer. He threaded and elbowed his way up the aisle. The rear part of the house was crowded with people standing between the seats, and in the aisle; but from the front rows the spectators had withdrawn, as folk press back from a conflagration, as though they feared that from behind the silent curtain an explosive violence might emerge to their destruction. Tope made his way past them all; he followed the side aisle behind the boxes and opened the door to the stage.

  A policeman in uniform was on guard there; a tall, raw-boned traffic officer from the nearest corner, impressed for this emergency. His name was Jim Dunning, and Tope knew him of old. “Evening, Jim?” he said. “How’s the missus? And that boy of yours?”

  The officer grinned. “You, is it, Inspector? And they’re fine! Might have known you’d turn up here.”

  “I was in the house,” said Tope. And he asked: “Has Hagan come?”

  “He’s over there on the stage,” Dunning pointed out, so Tope looked around. The third act set had been struck; the great stage all was bare. One huge, naked bulb hanging from overhead shed a bald illumination on the scene. And Tope took time to appraise his surroundings with a judicial eye.

  The space:—it was too large to be called a room—in which he now stood, extended for the full width of the auditorium; and it was roughly rectangular, save that there were projections here and there. Overhead, high in the shadows, hung drops and flats that could be lowered as they were required. Other sections of scenery were leaned against the solid wall on his left, and beyond them he saw wide, high, double doors that must admit to the alleyway outside. On his right, the curtain took the place of wall; and he could hear, muffled by its folds, the hoarse murmur of the penned crowd outside. Diagonally across from where he stood there was a doorway that admitted to a hall and to steps that must lead down to the stage door. Iron stairs ascended on the left of these steps; there was a dressing room on the right; and two other dressing rooms were built out from the rear wall, their doorways facing the curtain, with a space between where the properties and furniture required for this play were just now heaped in an orderly disarray. Tope saw there the restaurant tables from the first act; the sections of wall which formed the ele
vator shaft in the second act; he marked the trap cut in the floor, which when raised by mechanical lifts in the basement would serve as the elevator itself . . . And many other things he saw.

  And many people, clustered in small groups here and there. Some were old friends; some he recognized as members of the cast; some he had never seen before. Inspector Hagan, who had succeeded Tope himself in charge of murder cases, stood exactly under the bulb in the middle of the stage, his glance darting to and fro. He was talking with Madison, the fat little stage manager; and Kay Ransom stood almost between them, looking up first at one and then at the other, with quick, birdlike movements, as they spoke. Mat Hews was near them, likewise listening; and with him in a little group, Max Urbin who played the heavy role opposite Hammond in the play, and two or three of the lesser characters.

  There were other men about. Some were manifestly stage hands or the like. A group of two or three men stood yonder in the doorway to the hall. Besides Dunning, the traffic officer, there were other policemen here. One of them leaned against the wall beside the starred door of the nearer dressing room. This was Lola’s, Tope understood, where the body had been found. He wondered who occupied the dressing room beyond, diagonally opposite where he stood. Its door was open, and he caught a glimpse of a man inside. The man was hanging a pair of trousers on a hook, and Tope guessed that it was Hammond’s room. The little man was no doubt Hammond’s valet; and he remembered that the valet, according to Kay Ransom, was hopelessly in love with Lola Cyr’s maid, and smiled to himself at the thought.

  Lola herself was not in sight, nor was her maid. Tope looked for them in vain.

  Inspector Tope had caught Hagan’s eye when he came in; and Hagan nodded to him then. But the man was still engaged with Madison, and there were things Tope wished to know. So he spoke to Dunning, here at his side, indicating the guarded door of the nearer dressing room.

  “That where it happened?” he asked.

  “In there,” Dunning agreed. “Her dressing room. This Lola Cyr!”

  “Where is she?”

  “She threw a fit,” said Dunning cheerfully. “Passed out cold!”

  “I heard her scream!” Tope assented. “We heard that, out front.”

  “They’ve got her in Miss Ransom’s dressing room,” Dunning explained. “Her maid’s taking care of her. She’s all shot!”

  Tope nodded; and then he caught Inspector Hagan’s eye again, and left Dunning and walked that way.

  “Hello, Tope,” Hagan said. “How are you? Haven’t seen you for weeks. Might have known you’d be around . . .”

  There was friendliness in his tones, but also a faint and jealous resentment too. Since he had succeeded Tope in charge of homicide, he was always conscious of the silent comparison between his work and that of his predecessor which went on in the minds of his superiors. Inspector Tope was one of those outstanding figures who now and then emerge from the multitude; a hard man to follow without suffering by contrast. Yet Hagan respected Tope, and Tope liked the younger man.

  “You’re on the job quick, Inspector,” he commented.

  “How did you hear about it?” Hagan asked.

  “I was in the house,” Tope explained. Madison stood by, his eyes turning from one of them to the other as they talked. The man’s bald head was streaming; and the makeup he had worn when he took Hammond’s part was streaked and smeared across his cheeks.

  “How did it look from the front?” Hagan asked; and Tope said carefully:

  “Near the end of the second act, I saw a man come out through the door behind the boxes, and go through the emergency exit into the alley, near our seats. I thought it was Hammond, had a hunch then that something was wrong. Then when the woman screamed, just before the last curtain, the audience got as nervous as though they’d smelled smoke. I was with some people, and I left them and came back to find out what had happened.” He asked: “What have you got so far?”

  Hagan looked around. They were encircled by listeners; but at Hagan’s scowls these folk drew back; and the Inspector spoke in lowered tones.

  “This man came to call on Lola Cyr,” he said. “He’d been around several times lately. Never gave a name at the door. She’d leave word he was expected. He came in tonight, and went to her dressing room, after the first act. The door man let him in.” He hesitated, looked around for the stage manager. “Where’s that door man, Madison?” he asked harshly.

  Madison made a gesture, turned hurriedly away.

  “I haven’t looked him over yet, except to see that he was shot at close range,” Hagan explained. “Doc Gero is due here any time; thought I’d wait for him.”

  “You don’t know who he was?” Tope asked; and Hagan shook his head. Then Madison returned with someone; he said huskily:

  “Here’s Peterson! He was on the door.”

  Peterson was an old man, slight, gray, with a thin gray beard. He spoke in a curt, harsh tone; the tone of one used to administering rebuffs, revelling in a certain authority over folk more important than himself. And Hagan questioned him crisply:

  “You on the door?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the job tonight?”

  “Since half-past six.”

  “All the time?”

  “Yes. Only a minute or two now and then, to go downstairs, or carry a note or something.”

  “How many times did you leave the door?”

  “I could count up, but I kept an eye on the door all the time. Nobody come in I didn’t see.”

  “Sure?” Hagan challenged; and Peterson said angrily: “That’s my job, being sure.”

  Hagan said: “Don’t get funny! It’s my job to ask questions. You answer them. All right, you see this man when he came in?”

  “Sure. Miss Cyr told me he was coming; said send him in. He’d been here before.”

  “Know his name?”

  “No.”

  “When did he came?”

  “Middle of the first intermission.”

  “You bring him in?”

  “He knew the way,” Peterson explained. “I told him to go ahead.”

  “See where he went?”

  “Didn’t look to see.”

  Hagan nodded. “Anybody else come back tonight?”

  “Sure. There’s always some.”

  The Inspector looked at Madison. “You run a pink tea back here?” he asked in a sardonic tone.

  “We try to keep visitors down to a minimum,” the stage manager protested. “But you can’t keep ’em all out. There’d be an argument, all the time.”

  And Hagan turned back to the doorman again: “Many of them tonight?”

  “The Jervis girl, and a young fellow. Her brother, I guess,” said Peterson.

  “What Jervis girl?” Hagan asked. He looked at Madison again; and before Tope could speak, Madison explained: “Clara Jervis. She was out in California while we were rehearsing. She and young Hews, our juvenile, were in school together in Pasadena. Her brother’s name is Clint. The two of them have come back stage to see Mat and Miss Ransom, half a dozen times.”

  “She an actress?” Hagan asked; and Madison said, with a faint smile:

  “She thinks so! Wants to be!”

  Tope had stood silently by; but it seemed time now to speak. He coughed faintly, and he said: “I know them, Hagan. In fact, I was with them tonight.” He hesitated, then made a sign with his head and moved aside, and Hagan followed him. When they were out of hearing, Tope explained:

  “You know them, too. Know who they are. This Clarence Peace that Dave Howell has been after for the last two months—he was trustee of their money, the Jervis Trust, estate of Dana Jervis. Howell came to me about it, and he and I went up to the Trust offices today. There was a woman in charge there named Moss, Miss Moss; sort of a secretary. She and the young ones and I had dinner tonight with this Mat Hews and Kay Ransom. Then we came to the show.” And before Hagan could speak, he added: “And—this may figure in what’s happened here tonight. Howell f
ound out today where Peace was hiding out; but before he could get there, Peace made a getaway.”

  But Hagan made an impatient gesture. “That’s Howell’s affair, not mine,” he said, and he asked: “Did you come back stage with these kids tonight?”

  Tope shook his head. “Miss Moss and I stayed out front,” he explained. “The children came back after the first act, and stayed through the second act. Then they joined us again, told us about Hammond being gone.”

  “I’ll want to talk to them,” Hagan commented. “They might know something.”

  “They might,” Tope agreed. He hesitated, half-minded to insist again that between this killing and that matter of the embezzlement from the estate some connection might lie. But this was no more than a guess on his part; and Hagan was as well entitled to guess as he. So he held his tongue on this point; added only:

  “They’re waiting out in front for me.”

  Hagan considered, and he nodded to Madison, who stood a little to one side. Madison drew near; and Hagan asked: “Anyone else back stage tonight except these three, this dead man and the two kids?”

  “Only those of us had business here,” Madison replied. “At least, that’s what Peterson says.”

  “Could anyone else have come back without being seen?” Hagan insisted. “How about that door over there?” He pointed to the way by which Tope had come.

  “It was bolted,” Madison explained.

  “Hammond skipped that way! Inspector Tope saw him go.”

  “He could have slipped the bolt,” the stage manager explained; and Tope added:

  “And the killing was done by that time, Hagan. It must have been done while the guns were going on the stage, and Hammond was on himself then, so he didn’t do it.”

  “Then why did he take it on the run?” Hagan protested.

  “I think he knew it had happened,” said Tope.

  Hagan considered, speaking half to himself: “Guess there’s no use to hold that audience any longer. But Tope, will you ask your friends to wait? Madison, you can tell the rest of them to go.”