Prima Donna at Large (33 page)

“No trouble,” I smiled. “Not now, now that we've found you. Come with me, Uncle Hummy—I want to talk to you.”

Just by talking while Caruso sang we were attracting disapproving stares and angry mutters. Fortunately we also attracted the attention of both Scotti and Emmy, who came shouldering through the crowd from opposite directions. “Uncle Hummy!” Scotti cried. “We look everywhere for you!” Which did nothing at all to reassure the uneasy old man. “Do you—”

“Silenzio!”
someone commanded us.

I motioned the others into a doorway. “I'll take Uncle Hummy to the limousine,” I said, speaking as low as I could. “Toto, you're going to have to find Amato and the two of you rescue Caruso from this crowd. Emmy, will you collect Mildredandphoebe?” I pointed down toward the corner of the street. “I'll wait there with the limousine.”

“Going?” Uncle Hummy asked shakily.

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” Emmy said reassuringly. “Just go along now, Uncle Hummy. Don't worry.”

I took the old man by the arm and led him away while the other two went to round up the rest of our party. Personally, I was delighted to get away from Mulberry Street. We'd been there for over an hour; and while Caruso had been given a hero's welcome, not one single person had recognized
me
.

Neither Uncle Hummy nor I spoke on the way to Mott Street, but once we were in the limousine I couldn't wait any longer. “Uncle Hummy, the night Philippe Duchon was hurt—did you see something? Did you see someone with Duchon's throat spray?”

A look of terrible anxiety came over the old man's face. He dropped his eyes without speaking and began fiddling nervously with the contents of the peddler's tray in his lap—some candles, about a dozen small boxes of matches, a few bunches of sachet. Hardly enough to keep him in newspapers.

“Uncle Hummy? What is it—are you afraid?”

A barely perceptible nod.

“Oh, you mustn't be afraid!” I cried. “We won't let anything happen to you, I promise you that. Do you understand? We'll take care of you.”

He hesitated, but then shook his head.

“Uncle Hummy, do you know that the police suspect
me
?”

He looked up, alarmed; that meant something to him. I reminded him that Duchon himself had accused me, right before he collapsed on stage, and the police were equally suspicious. Tears welled up in the old man's eyes, and finally he choked out, “Saw him. Take spray.”

“Saw whom? Who was it?”

He shook his head helplessly. “Name.”

“You don't know his name?” That was odd; Uncle Hummy knew everybody at the Metropolitan, I thought. Unless possibly … “Uncle Hummy, what did he look like? Was there anything different about him, anything unusual?”

Shakily, he drew one finger along the line of his jaw.

A scar.

Silently I nodded, and didn't press him further. There was no need; I had my answer. I sat quietly for a moment, trying to assimilate it. Then I started up the motor.

By the time I got to the corner I'd indicated, Emmy was already there with the two girls. I couldn't see the men, but there was a lot of angry shouting going on further up Mulberry Street.

“That crowd's getting ugly,” Mildred said as she got into the limousine. “They don't want to let Mr. Caruso go.”

“Ugly,” Phoebe echoed. Both girls stared long and hard at Uncle Hummy, the elusive object of their long search.

“Here they come,” said Emmy.

Amato and Scotti were shoving their way through the surly crowd, with Caruso between them.
“Basta!”
Amato shouted, and pushed away a belligerent-looking young man. I hoped there wouldn't be a fight. Caruso was pale and a bit shaken, as he had every right to be.

Emmy had the door of the back seat open for them. Scotti squeezed in front with Uncle Hummy and me and the other two piled in the back. “Go!” Amato cried.

But I couldn't; there were people all around the limousine, and even
on
the limousine. A woman leaned over and shouted something at me through the windscreen, and I could hear fists banging on the roof. Uncle Hummy looked scared to death, and I didn't feel much braver. “What do I do?” I asked Scotti.

“Go, start, drive,” he said tightly. “They get out of the way.”

So of course that was the time the limousine decided to get temperamental; and instead of the gradual acceleration I had in mind, we jerked forward in a series of ear-splitting backfires. But it did the trick; the good people of Mulberry Street jumped back in alarm, and I was able to drive away. It wasn't a smooth getaway, but get away we did. There was one huge sigh as eight people let out the breaths they'd been holding.

“I'm hungry,” Emmy said.

17

It was my first time in a police station, and it wasn't a place I cared to visit again in the immediately foreseeable future. The atmosphere was depressing; the place was a focal point for crime, after all. Everyone there had some connection with wrongdoers. As did we.

Caruso, however, was feeling his oats; he was the only one of us who'd ever been in a police station before and so he appointed himself our guide and instructor. The man had been impossible ever since I told the others that Osgood Springer was the one Uncle Hummy had seen with Duchon's spray bottle. “I am right!” he'd cried. “I say all the time it is Mr. Springer! I figure it out, no?”

It did no good whatsoever to tell him that he hadn't figured out a thing, that he'd merely made a wild guess. He simply would not listen; he was determined to take credit for solving the mystery and that was that. He went on and on about it until even good-natured Scotti began to get irritated with him.

We'd dropped Mildredandphoebe off; they'd done their job and there was no need to subject them to a police interrogation. I owed those girls more than I could say, and I planned to repay them in every way I could think of. But I was going to have to postpone thinking about that for a while, because we weren't quite finished yet. Because of Uncle Hummy.

The minute he saw the police station he'd started to cry. He'd kept crying even as we went in, turning to me once and saying something that sounded like, “You promise.” While we were explaining to Lieutenant O'Halloran how we'd found Uncle Hummy and what he'd seen, the old man went right on crying. I tried to get him to tell me why he was crying but he wouldn't.

Lieutenant O'Halloran looked as if he wanted to cry himself. It couldn't have pleased him, learning that a group of girls had succeeded where his police force had failed. He bellowed at us that we should have given
him
the sketches Caruso made of Uncle Hummy, and Caruso bellowed back that the lieutenant was just put out because he hadn't thought of the idea himself. O'Halloran asked sarcastically if Caruso thought the police kept an artist on the payroll, and Caruso said why not? It sounded like a good idea to him.

In frustration the police detective started yelling at me, since I was the one who'd had the idea of sending the gerryflappers out with the sketches in the first place. Emmy looked at me and rolled her eyes, Scotti sprang to my defense, and Amato tried to reason with the lieutenant. I just waited until he'd sputtered himself out.

“Why is he crying?” O'Halloran asked, pointing to Uncle Hummy.

“He's afraid,” I said. “Of Osgood Springer, I suppose. I don't know why else he'd be crying.” I told the lieutenant everything I had learned during my period of snooping; I couldn't tell how much of it he already knew.

“You five wait here,” the lieutenant instructed us, and hauled Uncle Hummy off to another room.

So the five highest-paid singers on the Metropolitan Opera's roster sat twiddling their thumbs while the police interrogated Uncle Hummy. Scotti and Amato tried to talk about Osgood Springer and how desperately he must have wanted Jimmy Freeman to succeed, but Caruso kept turning the talk back to his own “detecting abilities.” We sat and stared at the walls for a while, but that didn't help. Emmy's stomach growled.

Eventually Lieutenant O'Halloran came back. “Well, we finally found out your Uncle Hummy's real name. It's Umberto.”

“Is that his first name or his last name?” Emmy asked.

“Both. Umberto Umberto. And it's not Osgood Springer he's afraid of, it's the police. It seems Mr. Umberto was in trouble with the police some years back, through no fault of his own. There was an unpleasant incident involving a very young girl—you understand? She tentatively identified Uncle Hummy, but it turned out to be another man who looked like him. The girl was frightened and simply made a mistake, and Uncle Hummy was released immediately. But the experience so disturbed him that he's been terrified of the police ever since. That's why he was crying.”

“Poor old man,” I murmured. I made a mental note to buy him a Victrola when this was all over.

“He's all right now,” O'Halloran said. “We reassured him we just needed his help and there'd be no trouble at all for him. He says he saw the man with the scar on his jaw taking a spray bottle into Duchon's dressing room.”

“What do you do about Osgood Springer?” Amato asked.

“I've sent a man to bring him in. Once Uncle Hummy identifies him in person, we'll place him under arrest and try to get a confession.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, this is a tremendous load off my mind. I was beginning to fear we weren't going to find whoever was responsible.”

I decided to ask a question I'd asked before without getting an answer. “Lieutenant, the note Duchon wrote me on the night all that happened—the one asking me to stand while he was singing his aria? Will you tell me now where you got it?”

He shrugged. “I found it on the floor of your dressing room.”

“But I keep my dressing room locked. And I have the only key.”

Unexpectedly he grinned at me. “Any policeman who can't pick a lock isn't worth his salt. It was easy, believe me.”

I thought of Phoebe and her hairpin and believed him. “You searched my dressing room without my permission?”

O'Halloran started to shrug off my protest but then changed his mind. “Miss Farrar, I owe you an apology. Not for suspecting you—that's part of my job. But I shouldn't have yelled at you a little while ago. Your idea worked, and you have helped us. So I want to thank you.”

For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I felt uncomfortable. “Perhaps you'd better save your thanks, Lieutenant—until you have the villain locked up in a cell.”

They all stared at me. “What is wrong, Gerry?” Scotti asked.

“I don't know,” I said uneasily.

We knew soon enough. The man O'Halloran had sent to fetch Osgood Springer came back without him. “He's not at home,” the man said. “His housekeeper said he'd gone to the opera house—some sort of last-minute rehearsal. You know how big that place is, Lieutenant. I thought I'd better get some help.”

“A last-minute rehearsal?” Emmy said. “What opera?”

“The housekeeper said
Bore Us Good Enough
, sounded like.”

I stood up. “Shall we go, Lieutenant?” Jimmy Freeman sang a small role in
Boris Godunoff
, a Russian giant of an opera that no conductor at the Met would touch except Toscanini. And where Jimmy Freeman was, Osgood Springer could not be far behind.

Two or three uniformed policemen in the station house were watching us as we left. One of them called, “Hey, Mr. Caruso—you gonna ask Miss Farrar for a rematch?”

Caruso turned beet red and hurried out through the door to the sound of laughter. I didn't join in; we were on our way to find a man responsible for another man's death, and this was no time for levity.

The
Boris
rehearsal had just ended when we got there. The orchestra musicians were packing up to leave, and most of the singers were still there. Then I saw something that made my heart sink: Toscanini and Gatti-Casazza were communicating through an intermediary. Gatti would say something to one of his assistants, and the assistant would run over to Toscanini. The Maestro would listen and answer, and the assistant would run back to Gatti. The two old friends had reached the point where they were no longer speaking to each other at all.

But that was not my concern now. The immediate problem was finding Osgood Springer and getting Uncle Hummy to identify him. Lieutenant O'Halloran had brought four men with him who immediately started looking for Springer; the lieutenant himself remained on the stage with Uncle Hummy. Emmy Destinn announced that if she was going to starve to death, she might as well do it on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and asked a stagehand to bring her a chair. Caruso announced that sitting down was an excellent idea and asked the stagehand to bring a chair for him too—and, as an afterthought, one for me as well. At that point the stagehand just shrugged and started dragging on chairs for anyone who felt like sitting.

Scotti, Caruso, Amato, Emmy, and I—we sat scattered about the stage, far from the orderly semicircle we'd made when Lieutenant O'Halloran first questioned us after that fateful performance of
Carmen
. Gatti-Casazza came up on the stage and asked the lieutenant what was going on. O'Halloran told him, and Gatti's face registered first shock and then relief. Shock at the impending arrest, relief that the man the police were looking for was not a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company.

Toscanini must have been watching because he immediately came on the stage too; but instead of approaching O'Halloran, who was still talking to Gatti, he came over to where Scotti and I were sitting and asked us. “They're looking for Osgood Springer,” I said. “Uncle Hummy saw him taking a spray bottle into Philippe Duchon's dressing room.”

“Ah.” Toscanini thought a moment. “How do they know it is the right one?”