Spy and the Thief (21 page)

“Is he in New York now?”

She nodded. “He’s lining up a director and cast for a new off-Broadway play. This is the time of year for casting.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Nick said, “since I know his father.”

She gave him another quick inspection. “Actually, there’s a little party at a friend’s apartment tonight. I’m pretty sure Bill Fane will be there. Would you like to come?”

“I certainly would!”

She scribbled an address on a piece of notepaper. “It’s an apartment just off Washington Square on Fourth Street. Come any time after nine.”

“You’re sure it’s all right?”

“Of course. These Village parties just sort of grow. Just say you’re a friend of mine. You are, aren’t you?”

Nick returned her smile. “I sure am.”

That evening, shortly after eight o’clock, Nick mingled with the theater crowds and walked down to the 41st Street Playhouse. He didn’t know exactly what he expected to find—perhaps a theater full of phantoms watching a phantom production. But there was no one outside, and all the doors were locked. The only light came from the box office in the lobby where the white-haired man was no doubt totaling up the day’s sales of tickets to
Wicked,
a show that had closed two months earlier.

It was nearly nine thirty when Nick Velvet arrived at the party, guided toward the end of his journey by the oddly unreal strains of a medieval ballad being played on a recorder. The apartment was large and crowded. It was almost devoid of furnishings, although a few psychedelic posters covered one wall and a bad modernistic painting hung on another. Nick suspected that the artist was probably one of the guests.

But just then he was more interested in the young man with the neatly trimmed beard who was playing the recorder. It was the same youth he’d seen at the theater that afternoon.

“Isn’t he good?” Norma Cantell said, coming up behind him.

“Hello! I didn’t see you.” The room already held about two dozen guests, and more were arriving. “He can certainly capture a medieval sound on that thing. Who is he?”

She motioned to the bearded youth, who stopped playing long enough to be introduced. “Nick Velvet, John Milton.”

“Not the poet?” Nick asked, because in this group it seemed the thing to say.

“Not the poet,” the young man agreed with a smile. He’d obviously heard the gag many times before.

Nick was about to say something else, but Norma Cantell tugged at his sleeve. “There’s Bill Fane now, if you want to meet him.”

The man she led him to was obviously the center of attention, and he was dressed to fit the part. He was tall and handsome, with a little scar running along one cheek from some forgotten boyhood misadventure. Roscoe Fane had said his son was 28, but he might have passed for five years younger than that. There was something dynamic about him, something that pulled people—especially the young people—to him like a magnet. Something like the charisma that politicians and evangelists sought.

“Nick Velvet?” he replied to the girl’s introduction. “I don’t remember my father ever mentioning your name.”

“Do you see much of him these days?” Nick asked, avoiding the implied question.

“Talk to him almost every day, just to see how he’s feeling. He has a telephone hookup on his yacht.”

Nick lit a cigarette. “Last time I saw him he was most interested in your show. The first one—
Wicked.”

“That’s because he owns the theater it was in.”

“On Forty-first Street? Is it still running there?”

Bill Fane shook his head. Already he seemed bored by the conversation and his eyes were scanning the room for recent arrivals. “No, we closed it in June.”

“Someone said they were still selling tickets up there.”

Fane’s expression didn’t change. “For
Wicked?
That’s impossible. They have a new play coming into the theater next month—that’s what they must be selling. Why would anyone buy tickets for a show that’s closed?”

“I don’t know,” Nick admitted, but already the producer was mumbling an apology and moving away.

Nick picked up a drink at the improvised bar and wandered over to sit with John Milton. He waited until the young man had finished another selection on the recorder and then said, “You’re quite good at that.”

“It sounds better with a group,” Milton said.

“Do you still have those tickets you bought for
Wicked?”

“What tickets were those?”

“I ran into you this afternoon, leaving the Forty-first Street Playhouse. Don’t you remember?”

“You must be mistaken,” the bearded youth answered evenly. “I was getting tickets for
Legman in Love.
It opens next month.”

“I see.” Nick stared at his cigarette. “I’d heard from a couple of people that you can still get tickets for
Wicked.
Two dollars each.”

Milton seemed ready to stick to his denial, but the atmosphere was friendly. “I guess the word’s getting around,” he said. He reached into a pocket for his wallet and produced two purple tickets—orchestra seats M101 and M103 for Friday night’s performance. They’d been overprinted in red to show the new lower prices. “Don’t know if I’ll be able to go, though,” he said with a smile.

“I passed the theater tonight. There was no performance going on.”

Milton was suspicious again. He pocketed the tickets and said, “Then I won’t miss anything if I don’t get there.” He picked up a glass of water and sipped it.

Nick sighed and moved away. He was getting nowhere with these people. They were all crazy—or else he was.

He went back to Norma Cantell. “Is Bill Fane still here?” he asked, unable to spot the producer in the growing crush.

“No. He left with some girl. He always does.”

“Tell me something—honestly,” Nick asked.

“If I can.”

“Are you people supporting Fane in some way? Buying tickets to his non-existent show?”

“Of course not! What gave you that idea?”

Nick sighed and glanced over at John Milton. “Does he only drink water?”

“That’s all. Just water.”

Some space had been cleared and a few couples were dancing. The music was coming now from a stereo record player at the far end of the room, filling the place with the amplified throb of electric guitars.

“The man at the box office,” Nick said. “Do you know him?”

She seemed surprised by his question. “I think his name is Thorne. He’s a retired actor or something.”

Nick had one more idea. “Is Bill Fane—or this Thorne—blackmailing you all, forcing you to make payments?”

“Don’t be silly! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He had to admit it
was
silly. Blackmail payments of two dollars at a time! But there had to be some explanation. “What goes on in that theater, Norma?”

“Get lost!” she said suddenly. “You’re starting to bore me.” He watched her move through the guests and disappear into the kitchen to help the slim little girl who was apparently their hostess.

Nick stayed for another ten minutes without striking up any useful conversations. As he was leaving he saw John Milton still at a table alone. The bearded young man was staring at the two purple tickets to
Wicked.
As Nick went out the door he saw the youth shrug indifferently and drop the tickets into his half-empty water glass.

Nick Velvet was a thief and not a detective. He’d wasted too much time already, puzzling over the activities at the theater, and he decided the following day that his assignment must be carried out without further delay. He was being paid $20,000 to steal the tickets, not to discover the reason for their continued sale.

That night he was back at the theater, first checking the front doors to make certain they were locked, then moving down the side alley to check the stage door. After a complete circuit of the theater he was convinced it was tightly locked—though a light still burned in the box office.

It was not yet midnight, but on 41st Street there was little after-theater traffic. He waited until some strollers passed from the Billy Rose Theatre in the next block, then went back down the alley to the stage door. Nick carried a small but impressive tool kit beneath his shirt. It took him only a few moments to open the common cylinder lock and enter the backstage area. He used a hooded flashlight to guide himself around coils of rope and discarded flats of scenery until he reached the auditorium portion of the building.

In the front a single light bulb still burned in the box office. If the white-haired Mr. Thorne was still there, he had to be lured away. Nick disliked violence, and he hoped to jump the man and tie him up without injury. He took a little rubber ball from his pocket and sent it bouncing along the carpeted floor at the back of the orchestra, but the noise was too muffled. Nick tossed a penny against the wall, but still no one came out of the box office.

He remembered that once in Paris he’d lured a watchman with a faked phone call. Often theaters had pay telephones in their lounges. It took him only a minute to locate a phone booth and dial the number of the theater box office. Almost immediately he heard the phone begin to ring. He let it ring eight times before he broke the connection, satisfied at last that he was alone in the theater.

The box-office door stood half open and he pushed it the rest of the way, his eyes on the hundreds of little pigeonholes where the tickets were kept.

But the familiar purple ones were gone. Only the pink tickets for
Legman in Love
were visible.

He was all the way into the narrow confines of the cluttered box office before his foot hit a yielding softness on the floor. Nick looked down and saw the crumpled body of the white-haired Mr. Thorne. He’d been shot through the heart at close range.

Nick bent to examine the ancient Army Colt revolver half hidden by the body. There was little doubt it was the murder weapon. Its front sight was still tangled in the dead man’s powder-burned jacket, A key ring was still in place on his belt.

Nick stood up, breathing hard. Someone had killed Thorne and beaten Nick to the tickets. It might be coincidence, or it might be a carefully laid plot to frame him for the murder.

He glanced around the cubicle, noting an open drawer beneath the grillework ticket window. The drawer was empty. He checked the cabinets to make certain the
Wicked
tickets were indeed gone, then returned to the darkened auditorium. He tried the six sets of outside doors leading into the lobby, but all were locked. From somewhere in the distance a siren began to grow louder. It might have been headed anywhere, but Nick couldn’t wait to find out.

He left as he had come, through the stage door and into the alley.

The next morning, while threatening black clouds rolled along the horizon, Nick Velvet went back to Roscoe Fane’s yacht. The bald-headed man was sitting as Nick had last seen him, facing the morning sun even though the dark clouds obscured it.

Nick drew up a canvas deck chair and sat down opposite the man. “I came back to report,” he said quietly.

“You have the tickets?”

“No.”

Roscoe Fane’s eyes widened. “You mean you failed? I hired you because you have the reputation of never failing.”

A distant flash of lightning streaked the horizon, then died as the thunder rolled over them. “I failed in a sense,” Nick admitted. “I failed to realize I was being set up for a frame.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the whole story of the tickets was a phony from the very beginning. They had no worth, there was nothing happening in that empty theater. And certainly tickets sold from the box office of a defunct show would attract too much attention. You just hired those people to buy them, and old Thorne to sell them, knowing my curiosity would be aroused. Then, last night when I broke into the theater, you arranged to get there first and murder Thorne.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Oh, I’m sure you have a motive. He was an old actor, and you own that theater. I suppose there was something between you way back in the past. You did some careful planning to make me the fall guy, but you made one slip.”

“And what was that, Mr. Velvet?”

“The theater was, for all practical purposes, a giant locked room. I checked every door before I entered, and all of them were locked. I went in by the stage door and later I checked the lobby doors from the inside. They were all locked too. Admitting that old Thorne could have opened a door for someone he knew, then how did the killer leave? Don’t you see? He had to lock the theater behind him! It had to be locked when I reached it, so there’d be evidence of my break-in. The killer had to be someone
with a key to the theater!
You, as the owner, were the only person who not only had such a key but also knew what my plans were.”

Roscoe Fane sighed and spoke to one of the crew. “The storm is moving closer. We’d better get inside.” But he continued to sit in the deck chair, and after a moment he turned back to Nick. “Your reasoning, is idiotic, Mr. Velvet. I never even knew Thorne was dead until you told me just now.”

“You deny killing him?”

“Of course I deny it! Why would I go through this elaborate scheme just to frame you for a crime? And as for your locked-room theater, I can see you’ve spent very little time around them. A theater is one of the few buildings in the world which could never be a completely locked area. The murderer could easily escape from it without a key.”

“What do you mean?” Nick asked, feeling a chill on his spine.

“My friend, anybody on earth can walk out of a locked theater without a key and still leave it locked behind him. He simply walks out of an Exit door. Every theater has them, and the fire laws require that they never be locked to someone inside the theater.”

Nick Velvet sat staring at the bald man. He was speechless, baffled.

The crew member had reappeared now, pushing a wheel chair. “If you need any further evidence of my innocence,” Roscoe Fane said, “I have been crippled for the past two years. It is almost impossible for me to walk, or to do much of anything besides sit in the sun and worry.”

The man helped him into the wheel chair just as the first large drops of rain hit the deck. “Get out of here now, Velvet!” he growled. “And don’t come back unless you bring those tickets!”