Murder in a Hurry (20 page)

With the light, with the gradual subsidence of those around her, Liza, still standing, could look anxiously for Brian, could look with a kind of desperate hopefulness. But she could not see him anywhere. And then a man who, unnoticed, had come down the right center aisle, stopped at the end of her row and, very politely, spoke her name.

“Miss O'Brien?” he said, as if he were in doubt. She turned toward him. “Could I see you a minute, Miss O'Brien?” he asked. He seemed to hesitate. “I have a message for you,” he said. He was still polite, his voice very quiet, almost small.

She heard what he said with, at first, relief—relief that Brian had sent her a message—but then with rising fear that the message was about, not from, Brian Halder, and that it would be that something had happened to Brian. She nodded, quickly, anxiously, and at once began to work her way to the man at the end of the row. “Really!” somebody behind a pair of the plump, reluctant knees said, in a tone meant to be audible. “Really!” But Liza paid no attention.

When she reached the man he touched her arm, kept his hand on it, but without closing his fingers, leaving the touch a friendly suggestion only, and began to walk up the aisle. She went with him, felt herself hurrying. At the end of the aisle he spoke, without stopping, without indicating that she could stop. “They want you back there, Miss O'Brien,” he said.

Fear was in her throat, now; her throat was dry and stiff with it. And now she realized that fear had been in her throat, at her throat, since Sherman Pine had pitched forward into the lighted box which was a vicar's living room in Surrey.

She started obediently toward the doors opening from the theater, but the man—and now she thought she had seen him before, recently, but could not remember where—said, “No, this way,” and directed her, still with the slight pressure on her arm, toward the aisle which ran down on the extreme right of the auditorium. When they reached the head of the aisle he said again, “This way,” and they walked down it, he half a step behind her, but his fingers still on her arm. Those sitting nearest, along the extreme right aisle, looked at them curiously; she could feel question in the way they looked.

The aisle led them behind the boxes, which were cut off by drawn curtains. At the very end of the aisle there were several steps leading up and, at the top of them, a door. The man reached around her when she stopped on the lowest of the stair treads and pulled the door toward him and said, “Watch your step, miss.” She went through and heard the door closed behind them, and was in a narrow passage which was dimly lighted and oddly cluttered. On her right, leaning against a brick wall, were great flats of canvas; on her left were other flats, but these were fixed upright, in a solid wall, and the name of the play and numerals were painted on them in white. She realized that she was outside the vicar's living room; that this was the outside of the box which, to the audience, seemed authentically a room. “Watch it,” the man said again, and she realized she had almost stumbled into a platform built against the outside of the box set and then, looking at it, realized that it was like a porch outside a door, and that the door was one of those (one set a little higher than the others, on a low balcony) which opened onto the set, and through which the actors had all evening been coming and going.

To her right, after a moment, the outer wall became a corridor, fairly wide but still cluttered—there were several boxes, and on one of them two men were sitting and now were looking at her. She realized that the corridor was the one leading to the stage door; could see, at the far end, the opening behind which the stage doorman sat. But the man who had been sent for her said, “This way, miss,” and led her to the left, along a very narrow passage which took them, she realized, behind the set. After they had traversed this, they came out into a relatively open space, but one which seemed crowded with people.

“Well,” one man said, and he was excited, spoke excitedly, kept pulling at his necktie, already pulled far to one side. “Well, do we or don't we?” He jerked his necktie from one side to the other, and used, in a tone inappropriate, words appropriate to prayer.

“Keep your shirt on,” the man he was speaking to told him. “The lieutenant will be here any minute.”

“But listen,” the excited man said. “You o.k.'d the announcement.
Now
you hold us up.”

“I told you why,” the other man said, and now Liza realized he was the tall, dark detective she had seen with Lieutenant Weigand at the Sutton Place house, and again with Brian at the Norths' apartment. “I told you I wanted to—see who was there. Didn't want them rushing out.” He sounded as if he had explained this several times, were tired of explaining it. “Try to get it through your head that the show
doesn't
have to go on,” he said. “There's no law it has to. There's a law—” He broke off. He said, to the man behind Liza, “Oh, got her all right?” and then to Liza, “Hello, Miss O'Brien.”

She tried to say something, and her throat was too dry for words.

“Take her—” the man began, and then looked again beyond her, and this time also beyond the man who had brought her, and said, in a surprised tone, “Well, hello.”

“Hello, Mr. Stein,” Pamela North said. “And before you ask, we came to see Mr. Pine act and it was a theater a man Jerry knows had a play in once and he showed us around, so we came.” She paused, “I mean, we knew how to come,” she said. “Down the right aisle. Where's Bill? And is Mr. Pine—?” Pam stopped.

“No,” Detective Sergeant Stein said, “he isn't. He got slugged, knocked out, apparently concussed. He isn't—” Then he seemed to feel he had already said too much, and looked at Liza O'Brien.

“Listen,” the man with the wandering necktie said. “For God's sake, listen! Do we or don't we? That's all I want to know. Do we or don't we?”

“What,” Bill Weigand said from behind the Norths, “does this man want to do, or not do?”

Stein showed relief.

“Finish the performance with the understudy,” Stein said. “I didn't know whether you—?”

“How long will it take?” Weigand asked the excited man, who threw up both hands in what seemed to be incipient madness and then said, quietly enough, “Twenty minutes.”

“Anything on the stage we need?” Bill asked, this time of Stein, and Stein shook his head.

“Hit back here,” Stein said. “Standing at the door, waiting for cue. Somebody hit him just as he started to open the door and he fell in.” Stein paused. “Very startling,” he added. “Quite an entrance.”

“Can you finish without using this door?” Weigand asked the excited man, who threw up his hands again, stopped midway and said, mildly, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

He was told that, in that case, he might get on with it. His response was to jerk his necktie to the other side of his collar, then throw both hands into the air, then cry out for someone named Tom. “For God's sake,” he cried, “where's Tom for God's sake?” A man ten feet from him got up from the box he had been sitting on and said that there he was. “For God's sake where have you been?” the excited man said, but did not wait to be answered. “You'll have to go from the other side,” he said. “But work over to this side, so the grouping will be right. It's—” Then he flung his hands into the air again. “For God's sake,” he demanded, and now of Bill Weigand, “
why
can't we use this door? Do you realize he'll have to make a complete cross? Without a
line?
While the others just
wait?
”

Bill Weigand smiled faintly. He looked at Stein, who shrugged. “Actually,” Stein said, “I don't know what we'll get, Lieutenant. Or even what we'll look for.”

“Right,” Bill said to the excited man. “Use the door, then. But get on with it.”

“Get
on!
” the excited man said then. “Get on!”

Four people detached themselves from shadows and Liza saw that they were the vicar, Inspector Brunk and the couple from London. The vicar stepped on a cigarette.

“Take it from the
scream,
” the excited man said. “Di. For God's sake where's Di?”

Nobody seemed to respond to his excitement, but the woman who had been playing poor dear Agatha, and whose head, it was now evident, was not really in the hatbox, spoke from another window and said, “I'm right here, darling.”

“Then get on, everybody,” the excited man said, and jerked his necktie under his left ear. “Oh, for God's
sake!
”

The vicar, the inspector and the couple from London went through the door, into the box set, out of sight. The excited man went to the door and looked in at them. Now he whispered, carryingly. “Move in, darling,” he said. “For God's
sake
move in.” What resulted from this was invisible, but apparently satisfactory. The excited man withdrew from the door and the man named Tom took his place. The man named Tom, Liza noticed—was amazed to find herself noticing—licked his lips, then rubbed his hands together as if they were damp and he hoped to dry them. “Di,” the excited man said to poor dear Agatha. “Are you ready, darling?”

The woman merely sighed, but she stood up.

“I'll cue you,” the excited man said. He looked back into the set. What he saw seemed to content him, since he pulled his head back out, closed the door, took a deep breath and said, suddenly, in the same tense whisper, “Take her up!”

One could hear the curtain going up. But more than that, one could suddenly hear silence. The sound which ended had touched only the subconscious—a dim, multitudinous sound it had been, of some hundreds of people moving restlessly, talking, making the strange, inchoate noise of humanity en masse. But when it stopped, as the curtain rose, the silence rang in the conscious ear.

There was a period during which one might have counted, slowly, up to five. Then the excited man whirled toward the actress who had been poor dear Agatha and gestured violently with both hands. And the actress screamed.

Pam North jumped into the air and almost screamed herself; through Liza O'Brien the scream ran jaggedly, laceratingly. The excited man beamed and then Tom, standing by the door, leaning forward, like a spring runner crouching for a start, whistled the first bar of the passage from the madrigal. He was off in pitch; the excited man threw up his hands, in pantomime of horror, but he had moved by then to a place where Tom could not see him. Tom finished the phrase, getting back on pitch midway; they could see his shoulders rise with a deep breath. Then he opened the door and walked into the set. The show was going on; the excited man collapsed on a box, spent.

“Goodness,” Pam North said to the actress who had been Agatha. “I thought you were dead. I mean—whose head was it, then?”

The actress looked rather relieved and said, “Oh, that. Mine, darling. Of course. But poor dear Lola can't scream, so I give my all, darling. But it's supposed to be Lola, being killed.”

“Oh,” Pam North said. “I—”

“Look,” Bill Weigand said, then, and Pam had never heard so much bafflement in his assured voice. (Not even when he's really baffled, Pam thought.) “Look. Do all these people have to be here?” He spoke to the excited man; he waved a hand generally around the shadowy open space, which did seem rather full of people.

“Mine do,” the man said. “And for God's sake, Inspector, keep your voice down! They'll hear you out front.” He put his hands into his hair; then he put his head down in his hands.

“Now, Doctor,” the voice of Inspector Brunk came muffled through canvas, thicker even than it had sounded earlier. “There's a small point on which I'd like your opinion.” Beat. “As a medical man, you'll understand.”

“Anything—” a voice which presumably was that of the substituting Tom said. “—this nasty business, Inspector—”

It was confused, confusing, even absurd. And yet, for Liza, the very grotesqueness of this mingling of what was real and what was merely pretended, the way the untrue almost parodied the true, became a babbling comment upon it, enhanced the growing dread she felt that all that was happening was part of an irremediable collapse of all that mattered; of all that had, in Brian's apartment only a little time ago, seemed regained, almost assured.

“Earlier this evening,” the inspector was saying, to someone, his voice rumbling through the canvas walls of the vicar's living room in Surrey—“earlier this evening, now, where would you say you were?”

“Where's Pine?” Bill Weigand asked the dark detective sergeant. “What does he say?”

“Dressing room,” Stein said. “Nothing. He's still out. He—”

“For God's
sake,
” the excitable man said, becoming excited again, pulling at his tie again. “They'll
hear
you out front!”

“Now, sir,” the rumble came through the canvas walls. “If you'll just whistle this little tune? Just as an experiment, like?”

“Through here, I guess,” a voice said from somewhere in the shadows, and at its clear, unmuted sound the excited man clutched his hair and appeared about to pull it out. Then he leaped up and rushed off into the shadows, going “Sh-h-h-h. Sh-h-h-h!”

A young man in white coat, white trousers, came out of the shadows into which the excited man had gone, and he looked astonished. Two other men in white, carrying a stretcher, came after him. One of them stumbled over something and said “Jeeze!”

The phrase from the madrigal was whistled onstage. “Thank you, sir,” the inspector's grumble said. “Now, miss, if I could trouble …”

There was a kind of absurd, cluttered speed about everything, but it was the speed of confusion; it was meaningless.

“This way, Doctor,” Sergeant Stein said. “I'm through here. Watch it.”

“Lieutenant,” Liza said. “Lieutenant. Please—where's Brian? Is he—”