Murder in a Hurry (19 page)

“I—” Liza began, and then smiled and nodded to Pam and Jerry North, who were standing a little distance off. “Hel-
lo
,” Pam said, across several people. The four joined and there was talk only of the mimic murder, still attenuatedly potential, and none of the thing they were thinking about. But that was fine, Liza thought, looking quickly up at Brian, seeing that, for the moment, the strain was no longer in his face. Then the lobby lights went down and up again in signal, and cigarettes spurted from fingers, dusted the sidewalk with momentary sparks. They went into the theater.

(The inconspicuous man who, forty-five minutes earlier, had leaned against the iron fence and looked at nothing in particular, lingered after most had gone back into the theater; continued, absently, to smoke a cigarette. Another man, larger, ruddy of face, lingered too. Then, without preliminary, he spoke to the inconspicuous man. “Yours too?” he asked. The inconspicuous man said, “Yeah.” “Mine,” the larger man said, “are K for Kentucky eight and ten. You want I should call in for both of us?” The inconspicuous man gave it thought; then he nodded. The larger man went off up the street toward Broadway; the other drifted into the theater. He stood in the rear of the house, leaning against the barrier, looking toward the stage.)

The second act was chiefly Inspector Brunk's. He appeared early—large, a little cockney (he had played in the original London production) and steadily affable. He pointed out that the matter of Mrs. Mumble's head constituted a nasty piece of work and agreed with the vicar that it was difficult to tell what things were coming to. (There was a momentary pause in plot development at that point while the inspector and the vicar commented on the Labor Government, their remarks proving unilluminating to all but half a dozen in the audience, who laughed in high, well-bred tones.) It then became, as the inspector himself pointed out, time to get down to cases, and down to cases they got.

Movements became more intricate thereafter, with much coming and going by the couple from London, the anomalous man of middle age and the brusque old lady. The last left the stage, indeed, toward the middle of the act and did not return, which led the more adventuresome thinkers in the audience to put two and two together. From time to time, under unexpected circumstances, someone whistled the phrase from the madrigal, but each of these musical interludes was more or less satisfactorily explained. (The young man of the couple from London, for example, was showing the young woman of the couple how it went. He was warned by the inspector who, in a rather groping way, felt that scale practice was adding a confusing note to an already confused situation.)

In one fashion or another, all the characters save the servant were got out of the vicar's humble—sixty-five by thirty foot—living room toward the end of the act, and the servant went around lighting lamps, while dusk deepened rapidly, watt by watt. She still had a lamp to go when the whistling was heard again, this time much louder and clearer than before. Almost at once, someone knocked on an off-stage door and the servant, who previously had been established as unable to tell “Roll Out the Barrel” from “God Save the King,” went briskly and obediently off-stage. The audience sighed audibly, expecting never to see her again.

But in this they were wrong, since she reappeared almost at once and was carrying a hatbox. This she put down on a table downstage center and left there. She returned to lamp lighting, now and then pausing to look doubtfully at the hatbox. Darkness continued to deepen. The servant circled toward the hatbox, moved away from it, reached out and touched it, withdrew her hand, started to leave the room, was drawn back to the box. Finally, she began to loosen the strap which held the top of the box. (And one susceptible member of the audience said, in a shaking voice, “O-o-oh!” The voice was to Liza O'Brien, although she was caught as others in the audience were by the carefully nurtured suspense, faintly familiar. But, watching the woman on the stage, she did not try to identify it.)

The strap was loosened, there was a moment's hesitancy, the top of the box was lifted off. The actress's scream was worth the waiting for. It brought the vicar first, but the others—all the others—were on his heels. The serving woman had fainted by that time, leaving clear the vicar's way to the hatbox. He looked into it, shuddered, swayed and then got control of himself by an effort easily visible to the last row balcony.

“Poor dear Agatha,” the vicar said, the madrigal was whistled off-stage and the curtain came down.

This time Brian Halder was already standing when Liza twisted in her seat and looked back at him; this time he did not catch her eye, or did not seem to. He began to move, sidling toward the aisle on his right.

Liza herself moved quickly, then, but she had four obstructing, and rather petulant, seat occupants to pass. And, once in the aisle, her progress was again impeded by slowly moving people. Brian, not waiting for her, as it had been clear from the first he did not mean to do, already was through the lobby when she reached the head of the aisle; by the time she reached the open gate in the iron fence across the passage to the stage door, Brian was out of sight. She went down the passage after him.

Brian merely looked at her, merely shook his head, when she found him, talking again to the doorman. Already there was defeat in his eyes, in the tone of his voice.

“That's my orders,” the doorman said. “Nobody goes in. Mr. Pine don't want to see you, I guess.”

“But he's here,” Brian said. “I only want to see him a minute. It's important.” He reached toward his hip pocket. But the doorman shook his head.

“Won't do no good,” the doorman told him. “That's my orders. See him after the show; see him somewhere else.” He looked at Brian's tallness, his evident strength. “And,” he said, “don't try to crash, mister. See why?” He motioned with his head down the dimly lit passage beyond his cubby-hole. Liza looked and, more slowly, Brian turned to look also. A uniformed policeman was standing there, regarding them. His regard was detached, but without sympathy. Liza saw Brian's face, Brian's body, recognize and admit defeat.

The group in front of the theater already was dissolving into it when Brian Halder and Liza O'Brien again reached the sidewalk. Three men, one of them inconspicuous yet, to Liza, vaguely familiar, were standing together, smoking, as if reluctant to return to the reticent carnage going on within. They did not look at Brian and Liza; were still talking after the tall, dark-eyed young man and the slight girl had gone into the lobby. They continued to talk for several minutes longer. Then two of the men, one the markedly inconspicuous one, went into the theater and the third went down the passage toward the stage door. The two who had entered the theater were late for the start of the last act, but they did not seem to mind, nor did they seek to find seats. They stood, at some distance from each other, leaning lightly on the barrier, looking toward the stage.

Sherman Pine was already on-stage when the last act curtain rose. He was kneeling beside the collapsed maid servant, with a black bag on the floor near him. It was clear at once that he was a physician, summoned to the vicarage to give succor, although not to the contents of the hatbox. The hatbox, its purpose served, had been removed. After the audience had rustled to its seats, Sherman Pine arose and announced, with gravity and a British intonation, that he thought she'd do. “Shock, y'know,” he said to the vicar. “A peculiarly nasty business.”

Shortly thereafter the vicar left the room, announcedly to wash his hands; the inspector, after looking protractedly at the door through which the vicar had departed, appeared to reach a decision and went after him and the physician was left alone with the inert body of the maid servant. He looked around, including the audience in his survey, and then puckered his lips to whistle. No sound came, however, and he reached toward his black bag. But at that moment the pretty girl, whose activities during the second act had been so intermittent that the audience had almost forgotten her, came in through another door and began to whistle. She did not seem to see the again kneeling physician at once; then did so with a start of surprise, and with the surprise ceased to whistle the phrase from the madrigal.

Sherman Pine arose again, greeted the girl (whom he had, it now appeared, known all the time) and was moving toward her, perhaps to take her hand, when the inspector appeared at his door and beckoned with emphasis, his manner indicating that, elsewhere in the vicarage, something—not hell, perhaps, but purgatory—had broken loose. Pine, expressing bewilderment with his back, went to the door and, with the inspector, through it.

Somewhat later, after several other characters had, absently as it seemed, whistled the madrigal phrase, the vicar, the inspector, and the couple from London were in the room, wondering about things, when there was a scream off-stage right. They were frozen for a moment, turning toward that side of the stage. Then a door there opened, rather convulsively, and Sherman Pine fell in, headlong.

Since the available actors were already expressing alarm and horror to the tops of their respective bents, there was nothing immediately in their attitudes to indicate that this was not an expected method of entrance on the part of Mr. Pine. But then the vicar, not at all in the voice he had used before, said, “My God!” and ran toward the fallen man. And then, more or less stepping over Pine, a man in the unmistakable uniform of the New York police force entered, looked at the audience in horrified surprise, and turned back to call, in a loud, uncultivated voice, “Hey! Sergeant!” into the backstage area. And that, as the author of the play might well have said had he been present, tore it. That really tore it.

Realization that this was a variation on the theme of violence, was something not written in advance and acted out with calculation, spread slowly through the audience. (Some of its members, indeed, only dimly realized that things had not gone according to plan until they read, the next morning, the continuing story of the Halder case in the
Daily News
.) A wave of sound, which became conversation, which was punctuated by sharp demi-screams, rolled through the theater and then people began to stand up, and to point, as if this no longer merely mimicked violence demanded some special gesture of attention.

Liza O'Brien turned in her seat and then, to see better, she too stood up. But she did not look at the stage, where now there were several men around the fallen actor. She looked back, searching anxiously, desperately, for sight of Brian Halder. But Brian was not in his seat, or standing in front of it. Brian was not anywhere she could see.

10

Wednesday, 10:33
P
.
M
. to Thursday, 12:25
A.M.

Liza looked around, looked every place, but still she could not see Brian's tall figure. Where he had been there was now no one; still only the stage lights illuminated the auditorium of the Wrayburn Theater, and the people in it were shadows. Only those behind her, touched by the light which emanated from the stage, had faces. Looking down toward the stage, she could see only the backs of shadows.

The uniformed policeman who had come onto the stage a moment after Sherman Pine had pitched forward through the door, was standing now, having moved farther on-stage. He was looking, still with an expression of unhappy surprise, at the people who almost filled the orchestra section. Then, curiously, he looked up at the balcony and his surprise seemed to be enhanced. It was incongruous, Liza thought, that this policeman, doing nothing, had somehow managed to become the dominating figure on the stage.

The actors who had ruled there, had been characters in an intricate mimicry of violence, stood now close together, their faces expressing nothing more marked, more projected, than any ordinary human faces. They looked toward stage right, looked down, ignored the uniformed patrolman who appeared to ignore them in turn. Now there were two men, both in civilian clothes, squatting by Pine and one of them apparently was a doctor. And still the curtain stayed up, as if there were, on the part of someone, an obligation to give the audience all, and more than, it had paid for. Then one of the men squatting beside Pine, the one who was not the physician, stood up and turned toward the off-stage area and called out, loudly, “Somebody put the damn thing down.”

Almost at once the curtain went down, was hurried down; it was as if a bedroom shade, left up, forgotten, had suddenly been remembered, almost convulsively pulled against intruding eyes. As the curtain went down, there was a little sigh through the audience. After a moment then a man came out in front of the curtain, pushing it back again and again with his right hand as if he were swimming against it, while he worked in from the wings. He held up his hand. He said, “Please.” The audience rustled still, and again he said “please.” Then Liza recognized that the man was the actor who had played the part of the vicar.

He got attention, finally. He spoke carefully, projecting his voice, giving each word, each syllable, value.

“The management has asked me to say that there is no cause for alarm,” he said. “No cause of any kind. One of the actors, Mr. Sherman Pine, has been slightly injured by—er, by a fall. The management asks your forbearance for a few moments and then, if Mr. Pine is unable to continue, the play will go on with an understudy.” He stopped, looked around, smiled with formal informality, spoke in a lighter tone. “Won't you just sit down and wait a few moments?” he said. “I assure you it's nothing serious.”

For an instant, Liza could feel doubt and uncertainty in the people around her; could feel a reluctance to accept this minimization of unscheduled drama, a kind of disappointment that what had promised so well had come to so little. But then, here and there, a man or a woman did sit down, accepting what the actor said and then he, knowing his job was done, began to work his way back across the stage to the side from which he had come. And then the house lights, tardily, came up.