Death of an Angel (23 page)

Wyatt stopped, turned, looked more puzzled than he had before. Then he shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I've got enough to worry about. Anyway, there wasn't an opening last night.”

He waited.

“I hadn't realized that,” Bill said. “Run along, Mr. Wyatt. We'll be seeing you.”

Wyatt went.

“Loot,” Mullins said, “Mrs. Hemmins went back into the servants' quarters after she heard Fitch stirring around—after she heard the bell ring. To wait for the servants' buzzer. If the upstairs bell rang again, maybe she wouldn't hear it. Maybe she was banging things around.”

“Right,” Bill said.

“Funny, Wyatt didn't think to bring that up.”

“No,” Bill said. “Not very. He's not supposed to know the layout, remember. He's said that. He can't suddenly know it now, to get himself off a hook.”

Mullins nodded, thoughtfully, to that. He said, “Another thing, Loot-I-mean-captain. You figure he doesn't really know about the Shaw babe?”

Bill was drumming, lightly, on his desk with the tips of his fingers. He said it was possible.

“And Strothers doesn't? Don't any of them read the papers?”

Bill imagined that Strothers knew.

“Then what's the point of this rehearsal?”

“There cap be two points,” Bill said, and still spoke abstractedly, still looked at the opposite wall, and spoke as much to himself as to Mullins. “One, he knows Miss Shaw will be back. Two, he's decided he can get along without her. Put somebody else in. Like Miss Barnscott, for example.”

Mullins thought for a time. He said it was all screwier than ever. The telephone interrupted him. He said, “Mullins speaking,” and handed the telephone to Weigand.

“Right,” Weigand said, after he had listened for a moment. “Ask her to come in, will you?” There was another moment. “Yes,” he said. “Both of them, of course.”

Weigand and Mullins watched the door. It was only a matter of seconds. Naomi Shaw came through it first.

12

Monday, 1:30
P.M.
to 2:25
P.M.

Pamela North and Dorian Weigand sat in the last row of the orchestra of the Forty-third Street Theater, their backs to the barrier. They were waiting to ask Phyllis Barnscott whether she had murdered Bradley Fitch, and afterward Mrs. Rose Hemmins and whether, subsequently, she had arranged the kidnapping of Naomi Shaw. “Although,” Pam had said, “I don't really think that. The other things, yes. Because she knew Mr. Fitch had hangovers, having been with him so much and probably, when you come down to it, in the mornings. And she would be the one to get breakfasts and clean up afterwards and that explains the tea-towel.”

Dorian had said, “Well—” to this. She had said it several times, first on the telephone when she had been invited—urged—to accompany Pam when things were put up to Phyllis. “Because,” Pam had explained, “I promised Jerry,
and
Bill, or as good as, that I wouldn't go off on my own this time, and if you're with me, I'm not, am I?” Dorian had noted that this was somewhat specious but had then added that it would be very pleasant to have it turn out Phyllis Barnscott. “Because, frankly,” Dorian had said, “she's a patting blonde.”

They had not found the bright, blond actress at the Algonquin, as they had hoped. But there they had encountered Jasper Tootle, finishing an early lunch, and from him learned that Phyllis had been summoned to rehearse. “Taking advantage of the layoff to tighten up some scenes,” Jasper had explained, but had shaken his handsome head over it, and admitted he didn't know precisely why. “With Nay God knows where,” he had added.

They had found a sign in front of the theater which told them “No Performance Tonight” and had found the lobby empty and, although one of the ticket windows was open, no one behind the grille to question their entrance. They had found their way in; it appeared that anyone who cared to could find his way, this Monday afternoon, into a theater which, only a few days before, had spilled over. They had taken the first seats they had come to, since it had been instantly apparent that they would have to wait before they could charge Phyllis Barnscott with murder.

The curtain was up and light glared on the stage. It glared from a single, powerful bulb on a standard, a little to the right of stage center, as they looked at it from the auditorium. There were people on the stage, in the glare. There were also, less brightly lit, people in the orchestra seats. A flight of temporary wooden stairs ran up from the orchestra to the stage. A tall, slightly stooped man was standing with his back to the light, talking to those on the stage, but with his voice raised to carry to others in the seats.

“—all stick around,” he said. “The assumption we're going on is, she'll get back. Be found—get back somehow. If she doesn't—O.K., we've wasted time. If she does, we've rubbed the rust off, and there's a hell of a lot of rust. O.K.?”

Nobody said anything. The light on the stage reached only a little way into the auditorium; beyond its limit the shadows deepened. Here and there in the shadows, cigarettes glowed. There seemed, indeed, to be a good many people in the theater, scattered widely, but for the most part in the rows closer to the stage. But at one side, well back, a cigarette glowed and diminished, glowed again. And halfway back, on the other side of the house, there were two dark figures, sitting side by side.

“O.K., then,” Wesley Strothers said, and came down the wooden steps, his heels clattering on them. He sat in a center aisle seat in the fifth row, across the aisle from a man who, to Pam and Dorian, was a bald head attached—but how was not apparent—to a hand which held a cigarette. “Get on with it when you're ready, Marv,” Strothers said.

Phyllis Barnscott was on the stage. (It had been on seeing her there, evidently inaccessible for the time, that Pam and Dorian had sat to wait.) The red-haired Jane Lamont was on the stage, and Sidney Castle, the leading man. They stood now, near the footlights, and looked down at the bald-headed man, who said they would take it from the telephone scene. “Gabble, gabble, gabble and what not and Pudgy wouldn't,” Mr. Marvin Goetz, director of
Around the Corner
, said in a tired voice. “And try to get something
in
it. All right, get it set up.”

Miss Barnscott left through a door at stage left. Miss Lamont—who wore slacks and a yellow blouse—went upstage to a chair and table, sat on the one and lifted a telephone from the other. She put the telephone in her lap. Castle stood near by and looked dourly down at her.

“For God's sake, Sid,” Goetz said. “Can't you see you're screening her?” Castle moved back and to a side a step or two. “Last Tuesday night you were catching flies,” Goetz said.

“I don't know how,” Castle said.

“Pushing that damn handkerchief into your pocket, pulling it out again. That's how. Doing takes.”

“Well,” Castle said, “I can't just stand here.”

“You can damn well try,” Goetz said. “All right. Lisa says and so forth and so forth and—”

“Do you want the line?” Jane Lamont said.

“The cue, sweetheart,” Goetz said, in a tone of inexpressible weariness. “Just the cue. Get the beat anyway you want. Now.”

“Yackety, yackety, yackety and the rest of it,” Jane Lamont said into the telephone, and as she said this Castle's handsome, but previously rather sullen, face was radiant with delight, “and Pudgy wouldn't.”

“Tell him—” Castle said.

The door, stage left, through which Phyllis Barnscott recently had gone began to vibrate. It did not open. “Damn thing's stuck again,” Phyllis, behind it, said angrily to anyone who would listen. “Why nobody—” The door opened suddenly. Miss Barnscott seemed to have been propelled through it.

“We'll get it fixed,” Goetz said. “Billy? Where the hell's Billy?”

“All right, Mr. Goetz,” a young man said, appearing part way through an obviously practical window, stage right. “Get on it right away.”

“Don't quite close it this time,” Goetz said, to Phyllis Barnscott. “All right. From the same place.”

“Yackety yackety yackety and the rest of it,” Jane said into the telephone, and Castle's face burst into a smile.

“Tell him—” Castle began, through the smile, and Phyllis came through a door which, this time, opened—and was left open.

“Too
fast
,” Goetz said in a tone of anguish. “A beat too—go ahead. Go
ahead!
”

“Don't tell me you're trying it
again!
” Phyllis said, in a tone that bubbled. “Because if you—is that the way you want it, Marvin. Or, ‘Don't tell
me?
'”

“Sweetheart,”
Marvin Goetz said, threateningly. “I love you. We all love you. Why would it be ‘Don't tell
me?
' What do you think it means?”

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Phyllis Barnscott said. “I never have had. Mr. Wyatt? Are you out there, Mr. Wyatt?”

“Oh, God,” Sam Wyatt said, from a shadowed seat off the right aisle—a seat two rows in front of two dark figures in adjacent seats. “Do we go through that again?”

“Now, Sammy,” Goetz said. “Tell the pretty lady. Just once more.”

“And,” Phyllis said, “why the beat's wrong. Tell me that, darling. I've got to come clear over to her, don't I? And the way it is I'm just here”—she moved back a step, and stabbed at the floor with a heel—“when I get to ‘again.' And look where I've got to get.”

“Hold it a beat,” Goetz said. “Two beats, if you need them.”

“And she's saying it
again
,” Wyatt said. “Not to you again, particularly. I'd think—”

Wesley Strothers stood up. He walked up the center aisle, and turned to cross behind the barrier. As he walked, he shook his head.

“Try it again, darlings,” Goetz said.

“Yackety yackety yackety and the rest of it,” Jane Lamont said, and Castle smiled again, and Phyllis, who had returned to the open door, but this time not through it, stepped into the living room (“Which so perfectly sets the tone of this delightful comedy”—John Chapman in the
Daily News
) and said, after holding it a beat, “Don't tell
me
you're trying
again
to—”

“Dorian,” Pam North said, in a tight whisper. “Beyond the door. That's
Mullins!
Surely that's Mullins. And—”

But she stopped, because at that moment the french doors upstage parted and Miss Naomi Shaw stepped through them. She wore a white sports dress, and her soft hair was held back from her face by a ribbon. She stood with her back to the doors, her hands, held behind her, touching them delicately.

“There's no use going on with—all this,” she said, in her cadenced voice. “I'm so dreadfully sorry, but I'm afraid there isn't any use at all.” She shook her shining head, slowly, tenderly. She turned a little toward the doors she had just parted, so that now the beautiful—as someone had said, the “Lilting”—line of throat and chin was accented. “Come, darling,” she said. “Come and help me tell these dear,
dear
people. Because—it's so dreadfully hard.”

There was movement in the right aisle. It was the movement of the tall figure of Wesley Strothers down it. He walked down until he reached the seat from which Wyatt had spoken. He stood beside the dark blot which was Sam Wyatt.

Robert Carr came through the french doors. He blinked slightly in the glare from the unshaded bulb. He seemed a little embarrassed. Naomi moved—she seemed to flow—to the right so that he stood beside her.

“Robert married me this morning,” Naomi Shaw said, with the simplicity which many consider the essence of art. “We found we just couldn't—”

(“I
knew
it,” Pam North said to Dorian, in a whisper. “I
knew
it was a love scene. Because kidnappers don't shout at their work, of course. It would be so—”)

“—drove to that dear little town in Delaware,” Naomi said, and now she moved downstage a little, leaving Carr by the doors. He stayed there for a second. Then he moved to his left, away from the glaring light. He stood there, a square, solid man with a square brown face—and somewhat the air of a man who wishes something were over.

“He simply made me,” Naomi said. “But really, it was that he made me
see
. See how wrong we were before to let little things—” The break was unconscious, was tremulous. The break was a refinement of the actor's craft. “When there could never be anyone else,” she said. “Not for either of us.”

“Well I'll be damned,” Marvin Goetz said, and stood up in his seat. “I'll be eternally—”

“Marvin,” Naomi said. “Dear Marvin. Oh—I love you all. This is so—so hard for me.” There were tears in her soft, her indescribable, voice. “Please understand.
Please?
It is bigger than both of us.” She paused at that, for an instant. “It's so hard to get the words right,” she said, and smiled, disarmingly. “I'm not good at words. Not like you are, Sam—are you out there, Sam?”

“Oh,” Sam Wyatt said from his seat, “I'm here all right.”

“Your lovely play,” Nay said. “But—you can get someone else. It won't be hard, really. Jane—dear Jane. Or—or Phyllis. Or someone? That's true, isn't it, Wes? Tell them it's true, so I won't feel such a—such a—traitor.”

There was no answer to this. The silence was complete. Marvin Goetz sat down again. Naomi lifted a slender hand, as if to push back—as in the play she so often did—her softly heavy hair. But one could only suspect that she had forgotten the hair was now held back, so smoothly did the gesture become the gentle touching of her right temple. Naomi had—and Pam was surprised to notice this, so subtle had been the movement—moved forward, so that now she was close to the footlight trough.