Death on the Aisle (6 page)

“Give me the times on the second-act run-through,” Kirk directed.

“Today?” Jimmy called. Then, when Kirk answered with a yell, Jimmy said, “Sure.” He crossed to a table near the footlights and stared down at it and turned papers.

“One-twelve to 1:58,” Jimmy called. “With four script pages to go. And it's running long, Humpty.”

“It won't,” Humpty said. “Wait till we get it set. Forty minutes flat.” He turned to Weigand and resumed his natural voice.

“I remember, now,” he said. “We didn't quite finish—had about four minutes to go, at a page a minute. I stopped them and came back to talk to Bolton; and found him dead.”

Weigand said, “So.”

“What about?” he said.

Kirk said there was a laugh where Bolton said there wasn't a laugh—just there, before the act wound up. Kirk had tried a new timing on it and wanted to see what Bolton thought now.

“Now,” Kirk said, thoughtfully, “I guess I'll just keep it in.”

They turned from murder easily, these people, Weigand thought. He had a feeling that Bolton's death was secondary to Kirk; that the long director, with the collapsing forelock, honestly felt murder irrelevant when compared to the timing of a laugh—that all the others, up there on the stage, thought “Two in the Bush” more important, at the moment, and their parts in it more important, than any number of men dead in aisle seats. He regarded Kirk a moment interestedly, and then recalled them both.

“Do
you
happen to know when Dr. Bolton came back from lunch?” Weigand said. Kirk pushed back the lock of red hair. It fell down again.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw him.” He paused. “At least,” he said, “I saw him start in through the stage door. I was up the street a little ways, and I saw his back. That was—oh, about one o'clock. I'd had a sandwich and come back—” He broke off and a surprised look came over his face. He stared at Weigand, and there seemed to be reproach in his stare.

“That's one for the book,” Kirk said. “I had an appointment and damned if I didn't forget it altogether. I was thinking about the last act and got an idea and came back to find Smitty and talk it over with him. I just put down my sandwich in the middle and came back, all full of it. And then I saw Bolton going in.”

“And did you see him inside?” Weigand wanted to know. Kirk thought and shook his head. He said that that didn't, however, prove anything. Bolton could have been almost any place in the theatre, and Kirk, who was looking for Smitty, wouldn't have seen him.

“And did you see Mr. Smith?” Weigand wanted to know. Kirk hadn't; Mr. Smith wasn't there. He came in after the run-through had started and Kirk by then was deep in the second act and didn't stop. And Bolton? Kirk shook his head. He supposed Bolton was in the theatre, but as for being sure—

“Look, Lieutenant,” Dr. Francis broke in. “Don't let me interrupt you. But I'm going. This one's dead and you can have it taken away. We'll do an autopsy tonight, just for the hell of it, but I can tell you now he was stabbed.” Weigand said he could have told Dr. Francis that. Francis nodded.

“Between the occiput and the atlas, or first vertebra,” Francis said. “Just below the foramen magnum, in other words. Very neatly, with a very sharp ice-pick—by a person who knew the place to stab. And then he just twitched a couple of times. And …”

But Weigand wasn't looking at him. Weigand was staring down at the body. Clinging to the rough wool of Bolton's trousers, visible now that the body was straightened and laid flat, was a length of orange silk. It fell away from the body and lay bright against the neutral carpet of the aisle. It was—

“Look,” Pam North said, unexpectedly behind the Lieutenant, “it's a swatch. He was going to match something.”

“A what, Pam?” Weigand asked. Kirk was looking at Mrs. North with some surprise, and Dr. Francis with interest. But Weigand did not seem surprised.

“A sample,” Mrs. North said. “From some material for—” she bent, not looking at Bolton more than she had to, and examined the strip of orange silk—“for a dress, I think,” she said. “Something he was going to match for a woman, probably.”

Weigand knelt beside Bolton's body and smoothed the silk between his fingers. Then he drew it from the loosened hand and stood up. He held it out to Kirk.

“Was one of the costumes to be made of this material?” he asked. “One of the dresses for the play, I mean? You'd know, wouldn't you?”

He waited, then, because Kirk waited to answer. Kirk made a great business of looking at the silk and a great business of thinking about it. At just the moment when thought might reasonably be concluded, he shook his head, slowly.

“No,” he said. “I wouldn't know, necessarily. Not unless it had been decided upon … this might just have been something Mary was showing one of the girls as a possibility. So I wouldn't …”

He trailed off and looked at Weigand. It was an inquiring look, and Weigand recognized it with interest. It was the look of a man who wondered whether he was putting something over. Weigand nodded at him, cheerfully.

“Naturally,” Weigand said. “I see how you might not recognize it.”

Anything, within reason, to satisfy a suspect, Weigand believed, at this stage of the game. But Kirk knew something about the orange silk; knew something he didn't want Weigand to know. Weigand felt like shaking hands with him. Kirk had produced a ripple in waters previously too calm.

“A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive.” That was the classic definition from the “Rules and Regulations and Manual of Procedure for the Police Department of the City of New York.” Weigand agreed with it entirely. He welcomed, as cases started, small discrepancies which nurtured suspicion and encouraged inquisitiveness; or, more exactly, small things which localized suspicion. Five minutes before, Weigand had been suspicious of fourteen—no, with Jimmy Sand, fifteen—people. Now Kirk, who knew something he didn't want to tell, had taken one step forward from the even line of suspects. And every little helped.

Weigand changed the subject. He told Kirk he wanted to try something. Would it be possible to run through the second act again, for his benefit? Run through it, as nearly as possible, precisely as they had run through it earlier.

“Because,” Weigand said, “I want to get things clear in my mind. It's all very confused now, naturally—where people were, and all that; because we can take it, I think, that Bolton was killed during the run-through. Would that be possible, Mr. Kirk?”

Kirk pushed back the hair, waited for it to fall, and said, “Sure.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “swell! We kill two birds with one stone—you get the picture, we get more rehearsal, which heaven knows we can do with.” Kirk ran his hand again through the forelock and pulled it anxiously. “Every time I think of Monday I quake,” he said. “The next time I let anybody talk me into opening a show cold, I'll …” He broke off. “Sure,” he said, “I'll go line them up.”

He turned and went off down the aisle, calling, “Jimmy! Hey, Jimmy!” Weigand heard Jimmy say “Yeh, Humpty.” Weigand looked after him and turned to Pam North, who was looking after him, too.

“He knows about the material,” Mrs. North said, suddenly. “The orange silk, I mean. It belonged to the pretty girl.”

“Miss Grady?” Weigand said. Mrs. North was impatient with him.

“She is
beautiful
,” Mrs. North explained. “It's a great strain on her. And Mr. Kirk doesn't care. The other girl—the James girl.
She's
pretty. And Mr. Kirk does care. Therefore—the silk belonged to her.”

Weigand said, “Um-m.” He was about to go on when one of the detectives who, now that the body was gone from its cramped place in the seat, had been examining the seat and carpet beneath it with devoted care, interrupted him. Did the Lieutenant want to have a look before they cleared things up and took them away?

“What things?” Weigand said. Detective Stein pointed with a shaft of light from his electric torch. Weigand said “Um-m-m” again and bent closer.

There were several things to see; following the guiding finger from the flashlight, Weigand checked them off:

Wedged in between backs of two seats immediately in front of the seat in which Dr. Bolton had sat: a paper cup, crumpled at the bottom where it had been forced into the small gap. In the bottom, Weigand's finger told him, a quarter of an inch of water. For a moment Weigand was puzzled; then it was obvious. The cup was intended as an ashtray—the water in the bottom to extinguish cigarettes. There were no cigarettes in it.

On the floor, a little to the left of Bolton's chair, a cigarette, broken in two in the middle as if the fingers which held it had suddenly twisted convulsively; as, Weigand thought, they very well may have. The cigarette had been lighted, but it had fallen before more than two or three drags had been taken, and then it had, lying on the carpet, gone out. Weigand took the light from Stein and bent lower, examining the cigarette carefully without touching it. It was marked at one end with a manufacturer's insignia which Weigand recognized.

“Virginia,” Weigand said. “Straight; so it went out.”

“Right,” Stein said. It was not parody; it was emulation.

On the carpet near the cigarette, two paper matches, both burned.

Weigand said “Um-m-m” and withdrew. Stein pointed to the carpet behind the seat Bolton had occupied. Obediently, Weigand illuminated the carpet with the torch.

There was another burned paper match there. It was, however, a special paper match, being shaped like a bottle. Weigand picked it up and regarded it with interest.

“I think,” he told Stein, “that I'll keep this one. It might come in handy.”

IV

T
UESDAY—4 P.M. TO 4:58 P.M.

Humphrey Kirk called Weigand from the stage.

“Ready when you are, Lieutenant,” he called and Weigand, saying “Right” on the way, went up the stairs over the orchestra pit. Everybody looked at him.

“To fix times and things like that, I'm going to have you run through the second act just as you did earlier this afternoon,” Weigand told them. “I don't expect an exact duplication, of course, but you ought to be able to come pretty close—with the lines to help you and everything. I want those who were not on the stage, but were somewhere else in the theatre, to go where they were earlier. I'll have one of my men go with each of you who was somewhere else. Is that clear?”

Several people nodded. Kirk said he thought they all understood.

“Right,” Weigand said. “Now is there anybody who wasn't in the theatre when the run-through started?”

Mary Fowler waited a moment, evidently for someone else to speak, and then spoke herself. She said she wasn't in the theatre when the run-through started.

“I'd had to go to my place for some samples,” she said. “I was late getting back—not that that was unusual, I'll admit. They'd already started when I got in. And first I tried to come in the front, and that delayed me more.”

“Through the front of the theatre?” Weigand asked. Mary Fowler, her protruding eyes looking at him intensely, nodded. “How was that?” Weigand said.

She had thought the front doors might be open, she told him. Sometimes they were, and since she didn't need to go back-stage at once, it would have been easier to come through the front of the theatre. But the doors were locked and, although she saw Evans inside, he pretended not to hear her and—

“Wait a minute,” Weigand told her. “Who's Evans?”

Kirk snapped his fingers.

“I forgot about Evans,” he said. “He's the custodian of the theatre—sort of a watchman who looks after things when it's shut up. He's always around somewhere; I forgot all about him. He's not one of our crowd, really; he belongs to the bank.”

“To the bank?” Weigand repeated.

The Consolidated Bank, Kirk told him—the bank that owned the Forty-fifth Street Theatre and employed Evans as watchman. Weigand nodded.

“Find this man Evans,” he called to Stein. Stein said “Right” from somewhere in the rear. Weigand turned back to Mary Fowler.

“I'll send a man with you,” he said. “About what time did you get here?”

It was, Mary Fowler told him, about twenty minutes after one. Weigand looked at his watch and nodded. She was to do again for the detective who would be with her, what she had done before, pretending to herself that it was three hours earlier in the afternoon. And—

“I got here late too,” Christopher broke in, sulkily. “Do you want me to go out and come back?”

Weigand nodded.

“One detective can go out with you and—is it
Miss
Fowler?”

“Miss,” Mary Fowler told him.

“One man can go with both of you,” Weigand said. “After Miss Fowler comes in, he can wait with you. Or did you come in before she did?”

“After,” Christopher said shortly. “She was sitting out front when I came in and I stopped and spoke to her.”

Weigand looked at Miss Fowler, who nodded. Weigand said, “Right.”

“You were the only two who weren't in the theatre when the run-through started?” he asked. Nobody said anything.

“Right,” Weigand said. “You can start it then, Kirk.” The detective looked at his watch again. “Start it in three minutes. That will make it 4:12 instead of 1:12, and keep our times even.”

Kirk nodded. Weigand went down the temporary steps to the orchestra and stopped. He said: “Hold it.”

“Were the lights on out here?” he asked. “I assumed they weren't.”

“No,” Kirk said. “They weren't. Want them out?”

Weigand did. Kirk yelled “Fleming!” and when Fleming came waved at the auditorium. Fleming nodded, and went off stage. The house lights suddenly went out.