Death on the Aisle (23 page)

“Maybe,” Dorian said, “Bolton criticized his set. And Mr. Christopher got in a pet and stuck him.”

Weigand shook his head at her.

“Christopher out,” he said. “Mary Fowler. In too late. Motive: obvious—if Bolton had died fourteen years ago. But he died today. And fourteen years is a long time to nurture hate, as we felt in regard to Tilford. Evans …” Weigand broke off.

“Which reminds me,” he said. “See what Stein found out, Mullins … about Evans and Mary Fowler.”

“Evans,” Mrs. North pointed out, while Mullins went out the door, “was unconscious, or at least in a hospital bed, when Miss Grady was killed.”

Weigand was nodding when Mullins came back. Mullins came back hurriedly.

“He was just coming to tell us,” he said. “At the hospital, they won't let him talk to Evans. And the Fowler dame—she ain't here! She's just—gone! Ain't that the helluva note?”

XV

W
EDNESDAY
—1:15 A.M. TO 1:35 A.M.

It seemed to Pamela North, watching them, that the others were disturbed unreasonably by the news that Mullins had brought them. It was natural, of course, that Bill should be disturbed and annoyed that a suspect, because Pam could see that Bill might regard Mary Fowler as a suspect, should have sifted out of a place from which nobody was supposed to sift. It reflected on the efficiency of his men, and hence on his own efficiency. But he could not, Pam thought, really feel as perturbed about it as his voice sounded; as angry with the men of his detail as his words—rather unexpected words from Bill Weigand—sounded. Mrs. North shook her head, wonderingly.

Dorian might be expected, as things were, to feel what Bill felt. But that hardly explained why she should rise quickly when Mullins indignantly spluttered his message and look at Weigand from widened eyes and say, “No, Bill! Don't let it be that way—!” with quite that odd note in her voice. Dorian didn't, Pam realized, understand it even yet, because it was evident that she thought Mary Fowler was in danger—or, at any rate, that somebody was in danger.

“But now nobody is,” Pam told herself, watching Mullins and Weigand, with Dorian after them, leave the lighted little office and disappear in the shadows of the mezzanine lounge, where chairs and sofas were dim, deeper darknesses in the gray dark. “Because there's nobody left who could be.”

Jerry had started after the others, but now he stopped and Pam realized that she had been speaking aloud.

“Could be what, Pam?” Mr. North said, hurriedly. But he gave her no time to answer. “Come on, Pam,” he said. “Something's happening.”

“All right, Jerry,” Pam said. “I'll come. Only it's happened, really—all of it. Except the very last of it.”

Jerry, who should have known better, took promise for performance. He went out and was in the darkness when he called back, still hurriedly. “Come
on
, Pam!”

Pam said, “Yes, dear,” and now she did follow him. But she did not hurry, because she did not think that anything important was going to happen.

“It's only that she knows,” Pam said. “And doesn't want—” Pam realized that she was talking aloud to herself again, and broke off, because she believed, without much conviction, that she should not talk aloud to herself. At least, she thought, following this new tack because it somehow made her feel that what must inevitably happen, and what she did not want to have happen, was being delayed if she did not think about it—at least, people don't like other people to talk to themselves, and it worries Jerry. Although he ought to know I'm not crazy.

“Or at least,” Pam said to herself, “no more than most people. Anyway, I don't think so. And just
because
you talk to yourself doesn't prove anything, although what you
said
to yourself might.”

This sounded perfectly clear in Pam North's mind, although, with a little smile to herself, she realized that it mightn't to some people. Except Jerry, of course. To Jerry it would be almost as clear as it was to her, only he would want, probably, to “clean it up.” That was what actors wanted to do to lines which were not flatly coherent, Pam had discovered. “Clean them up” and “put another beat in” or take a beat out. Such suggestions from the actors had been enraging Mr. Smith all day and he kept saying: “But that's the way she” (or “he” if it were a he)—“
would
say it! That's
character!
”

Pamela, slowly following Jerry and the others, who now apparently had gone down the stairs from the mezzanine to the main floor, where she could hear raised voices, willfully let her mind wander.

It's all right to talk to yourself if what you say is interesting, Pam thought. And often, although probably I shouldn't think it, I'd rather talk to myself than to other people. Because other people go all around Robin Hood's barn, and cross every “i.”

“Dot,” Pam said to herself correctingly. “And cross every ‘t.' And the trouble with that is it's so slow.”

She was out in the shadows of the mezzanine, now, walking toward the stairs, and moving slowly because she hoped it would be over when she got there—because surely, now, Bill must know!—and because it was too dark to hurry. It seemed darker, indeed, than it had a moment before and, without putting her mind on it, Pam wondered indifferently why it should become darker.

“Because it's night already,” Pam thought. “It must be terribly late, really.”

It was too late, Pam thought, the word leading to the thought, and her mind going back remorselessly, to what she wanted to keep it away from. It is too late for the murderer, she thought.

“And, to be perfectly honest,” Pam said to herself, “I'm on her side, although it was a dreadful thing to do. Because it wasn't to make things easier for herself, or not only that. And anyway, if it had to be somebody, it had better have been Dr. Bolton than almost anybody else.”

Mrs. North was almost at the head of the mezzanine staircase, now. She could see the shadowy shapes of the balustrades going down, and the light below.

“It was Ellen, really,” Pam said to herself. “That was dreadful, and that was the mistake. Because if it hadn't been for that I wouldn't have known. That made it—”

“
Don't go any further, Mrs. North
,” the voice behind her said. “This is as far as you're going.”

And at the same moment, Pamela North felt something small and hard against her back—something like—

“Why, it's a gun!” Pam said. She said it with incredulity in her voice, and only then, hearing her voice, realized that she had been hearing it for several moments. She could hear her voice saying, in that strangely fixed instant, “if it hadn't been for that I wouldn't have known.”

I'm beginning to do it without realizing it, Pam thought to herself. I must really stop doing that.

And then, with thoughts jumbling through the incredulity which filled her, Pam realized two things. It looked desperately as if she might stop doing a great many things, besides talking to herself. “Like breathing,” Pam thought, her mind aghast. “And beating.” But what she said was about none of these things.

“So that's why it got darker,” she said. “You turned the light out in the office?”

“Of course,” the husky voice said. “When I realized.”

And now, finally, Pamela North, turning slowly from the staircase which led to safety at the command of a prodding gun which pressed just under her left shoulder-blade, realized fully what was so incredible in this moment, so that even as she turned she could hardly believe in what was happening.
The voice in the shadows behind her was the wrong voice!

“Don't scream, Mrs. North!” the voice behind commanded, as the speaker sensed—perhaps because some convulsive movement was conveyed through the weapon which pressed hard into Pam North's back—a new tension in the slight figure which obediently turned back into the shadows. “I don't want to do it—here. They'd come too soon.”

The voice was reasonable and measured, explaining quite logically. Explaining, Pam thought, why I'm not to be killed here and now, and have it done with. It is strange that everything is so clear. But that's because it is happening to somebody else, really. It can't be happening to me.

“I shan't scream,” she said. “I—I almost laughed. Because, you see, you were quite wrong—until a minute ago you were quite wrong. That's because
I
was wrong, you see.”

Pam felt that she, in turn, must be completely logical and clear.

“I never suspected you at all,” she said. “I wasn't any danger to you. I thought …”

Pam let it trail off. What was the good of it? She waited to hear the voice again, but for a moment, as she walked, the gun commanding, through the shadows of the mezzanine, moving across the theatre from the stairs, there was only silence. When she heard the voice again there was a note in it, hard to understand. It was as if the speaker were fighting down doubts.

“You knew, Mrs. North,” the voice said. “What will it get you to lie? Because, anyway,
you know now, don't you
?”

Mrs. North, in the darkness, slowly nodded her head.

“So,” the voice said, “it really doesn't make any difference, does it? You see that, don't you? Even if I was wrong before,
you know now!
” There was a pause.

“Ellen Grady knew,” the voice said, “when she saw me. So I had to—I was sorry about that. I'm sorry about this, Mrs. North.”

“I told you no one,” Lieutenant Weigand said. His voice was angry. “Somebody's going to pound pavements for this!”

Detective Niccoli wilted perceptibly.

“Well?” Weigand said. “Where did you see her last? Where was she going?”

Detective Niccoli, in a small voice for so large a detective, told Weigand.

“And what could I do?” he asked, heartened by the sound of his own voice.

He could, Weigand told him, have gone to the door with her. He could have parked there and waited. If he didn't know there were two stairways leading up from the downstairs lounge, he should have asked somebody who did. Instead of waiting trustingly at the head of one flight while Mary Fowler went up the other.

“If we don't find her, you go back to uniform,” Weigand told the diminished detective. “If there's another killing, you go out of the department if it's the last thing I do.” He glared at the detective. “Don't stand there gaping,” he ordered. “I want her—alive.”

Detective Niccoli moved off, uncertainly.

“Kirk!” Weigand shouted. He was walking down an aisle toward the stage, having left Niccoli behind him. “
Kirk!
”

Kirk's voice came from the shadows of the auditorium.

“Yes?” he said. “What's happened?”

Weigand told him, curtly. Miss Fowler, disregarding his order that nobody was to wander off, his warning that safety lay only in numbers, had outwitted her guardian and disappeared. Kirk came up behind Weigand, brushing back the forelock.

“For God's sake,” he said. “Is there going to be another? Do you think—?”

“I want to find Mary Fowler,” Weigand told him. “That's all, for now. I want the theatre lighted up. She may still be in it—or—”

“Or her body may,” Kirk finished for him. “Is that what you think, Lieutenant? Because I—”

“Think later,” Weigand said. “Get the lights on. Can you do that? Or find somebody who can?”

Kirk nodded.

“I'll find the electrician,” he said. “It'll save time.”

Kirk moved rapidly. But he saved very little time. The electrician was absent; shouts did not bring him. In the end, it was Kirk himself who pulled at switches a little gingerly, and pulled finally at enough of them to flood the theatre with light. Then the electrician appeared, from a comfortable smoke in the alley outside. He disapproved of Kirk's action with a frown; inspected the switches and, apparently to his surprise, found them undamaged. He shook his head gloomily and pushed irritably at a switch already closed.

Weigand, as the lights came up, scattered his men.

“Find her,” he ordered. “If she's in the theatre, find her!”

The detectives scattered—back-stage, below stage, in the dressing-rooms. One climbed unhappily up ladders to the dim regions of the loft above the stage, and moved gingerly along catwalks. In the basement, where the light was always dim, flashlights stabbed it. In the lounge downstairs, sofas were hauled from against walls; in the orchestra, lights darted among the ranked seats. It was, Humphrey Kirk thought as he watched, as he saw detectives, working up, climb the stairs to the mezzanine, odd how, from the places they looked, one could tell that they expected to find a body.

They don't, Kirk thought, look first in the places a living woman might be. They look behind things, and under things. They are looking for death.

And perhaps, Kirk thought, although he doubted it, they are right. Another death might well be on the cards, unless somebody moved rapidly. And, thinking of Berta, his heart spun over.

I've got to find Berta, he thought. I've got to get her out of this—before—before. He did not finish the thought even to himself, because his mind shrank away from the logic that would finish it. If what he thought true was true, things were bad for Berta—any way you took it, things were bad for her. And if—But then a new thought came to the mind of Humpty Kirk. Murder might turn senseless, hysterical. If it did—if death moved wantonly as, if he were right, it might move—then Berta might be in its path. Nobody was safe when death became wanton.

Kirk whirled and faced the stage, scanning it anxiously for the girl. He did not see her for a moment, and he started to call loudly—for her, for Weigand, for help from somewhere. Then, as he realized his mood and overcame it, she spoke beside him. She had come down the aisle behind; now she stood at his side, her fingers on his arm. Her voice was very low, strained, tight.