A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Preview of Death

It was what somebody or other has called life’s darkest moment. My forehead was dripping perspiration and I stared miserably down at the floor. “But, Chief,” I said when he got all through thundering at me, “all I had was a couple of beers and besides I wasn’t on duty at the time. And how was I to know that that wasn’t the right way out of the place? I only found out it was a plate-glass window when I came through on the other side of it. And my gun didn’t go off, you can look for yourself. It was some car out in the street that back-fired just then and made everybody clear out in such a hurry. You’re not going to break me for that, are you?”

“No,” he said, “but I’m going to give you a nice quiet assignment that’ll keep you out of trouble for awhile. You’re going to look after Martha Meadows from now on, she’s been getting threatening letters and her studio just called and asked us to furnish her with protection. That’s you until further orders.”

“I resign,” I said when I heard that.

He switched his cigar from the left-hand comer to the right-hand comer without putting a finger to it, leaned half-way across his desk at me, and went into another electrical storm. A lot of fist-pounding on the mahogany went with it. You couldn’t hear yourself think, he was making that much noise. “Resign? You can’t resign! Over my dead body you’ll resign! What d’ya think this squad is, a game of in-again out-again Finnigan?”

“But — but Chief,” I pleaded, “bodyguard to a — a movie actress! All the rest of the boys will laugh at me, I’ll never be able to live it down! And what’ll the wife say? Dock me, break me — anything but that!”

He rattled some papers around and held them up in front of his face. Maybe to keep from weakening, I don’t know. “Ahem — now not another word out of you, Galbraith. Off you go. Get right out there and don’t let her out of your sight until further notice. Remember, your job isn’t to trace these threats or track down whoever sent ’em, it’s just to keep your eye on Martha Meadows and see that nothing happens to her. You’re responsible for her safety.”

“O.K., Chief,” I sighed, “but I really should be wearing a dog collar.”

No doubt about it, I was the unhappiest, most miserable detective that ever started out on an assignment as I walked out of headquarters that day and got in a taxi. The sooner I got busy on the job, I figured, the sooner the chief might relent and take me off it. The taxi, and everything else from now on, was at Miss Meadows’ own personal expense, but that didn’t make me like her any the better. Without actually wishing her any harm, I was far from being a fan of hers at the moment.

The studio, on Marathon Street, looked more like a library than anything else from the outside. The gateman picked up a phone, said: “From headquarters, to see Miss Meadows,” and everything opened up high, wide and handsome. I passed from hand to hand like a volley-ball getting to her; and all of them, from the gateman right on up, seemed glad that I had been sent over to look after her. You could tell she was well liked.

She was in her bungalow dressing-room resting between scenes and having her lunch when they brought me in. Her lunch was a malted milk and a slice of sponge cake — not enough to keep a canary alive. She had a thick make-up on, but even at that she still looked like somebody’s twelve-year-old sister. You sort of wanted to protect her and be her big brother the minute you set eyes on her, even if you hadn’t been sent there for just that purpose — the way I had. “I’m Jimmy Galbraith from headquarters, Miss Meadows,” I said.

She gave me a friendly smile. “You don’t look a bit like a detective,” she answered, “you look like a college boy.”

Just to put her in her place I said: “And you don’t look a bit like a screen star, you look like a little girl in grade school, rigged up for the school play.”

Just then a colored woman, her maid I guess, looked in and started to say, “Honey lamb, is you nearly—” Then when she saw me she changed to: “Look here, man, don’t you bring that cig-ret in here, you want to burn that child up?” I didn’t know what she meant for a minute, I wasn’t anywhere near Meadows.

“Hush up, Nellie,” Martha Meadows ordered with a smile. “She means this,” Meadows explained, and pointed to her dress. “It has celluloid underneath, to stiffen it. If a spark gets on it—” She was dressed as a Civil War belle, with a wide hoopskirt the size of a balloon. I pinched the cigarette out between my fingers in a hurry.

“Just cause it ain’t happen’, don’t mean it can’t happen,” snapped the ferocious Nellie, and went about her business muttering darkly to herself. The dressing-room telephone rang and Meadows said: “Alright, I’m ready whenever you are.” She turned to me. “I have to go back on the set now. We’re shooting the big scene this afternoon.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I’ll have to go with you, those are my orders.”

“It’s agreeable to me,” she said, “but the director mayn’t like outsiders watching him. He’s very temperamental, you know.”

I wasn’t even sure what the word meant, so I looked wise and said: “He’ll get over it.”

She started up and the three of us left the bungalow. I let the maid and her go in front and followed close behind them. They walked along a number of lanes between low one-story studio buildings and finally came to a big barn of a place that had sliding doors like a garage and a neat little sign up: Set VIII, Meadows, Civil War Picture. People were hanging around outside, some in costume and some not. They made way for her respectfully and she passed through them and went in. She bowed slightly to one or two and they nearly fell over themselves bowing back.

Inside, the place had a cement floor criss-crossed over with a lot of little steel rails like baby train tracks. They were for moving heavy camera trucks back and forth, and cables and ropes and wires and pulleys galore were dangling from the rafters. Canvas back-drops were stacked, like cards, up against the walls. But it wasn’t out here they were going to shoot the scene at all. There was a sound-proof door with a red light over it leading in to the “stage” itself, where the action was to take place.

Before we got to it, though, a bald-headed man in a pullover sweater came up to Meadows. He was about five feet tall and with a beak like an eagle’s. A girl carrying a thick notebook, like a stenographer’s dictation pad, was following him around wherever he went. I had him spotted for the director as soon as I looked at him.

“Who is this man?” he asked — meaning me. Then, when she told him, he raised both hands to his head and would have tom out some hair, only, as I said before, he was bald. “No,” he said, “I cannot work! There are too many people hanging around the stage already! First it was your colored maid. Now a detective! Who will it be next?”

A big argument started in then and there about whether I was to go in or stay out, with Meadows taking my part and the script-girl trying to calm the director down. “Now, Stormy,” she kept saying, “please don’t excite yourself, this isn’t good for you, remember how sensitive you are!” Finally I cut the whole thing short by saying I’d phone the chief and leave it up to him, as he was the one who had given me the assignment. But there was no telephone in the place and I had to go outside and call up headquarters from the studio cafeteria next door.

The chief went off like a firecracker. “What’s the matter with them anyway? First they ask me for a bodyguard for her, then they start shooing him away. You go in there, Gal, and if they try to keep you out, quit the case cold and report back here to me. I’ll wash my hands of all responsibility for her safety!” Which was music to my ears, as I hadn’t liked the job from the start.

Sure enough, when I got back, the sound-proof door was already closed, the red light was on above it to warn that “shooting” was going on, and they had all gone in without waiting. There was a guard stationed outside the door to keep people from opening it by accident.

“She left word for you to wait out here,” he told me. “Stormann bullied her into going in without you.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” I burned. “The little shrimp! Who does he think he is? He may be the whole limburger around here but he isn’t even a bad smell to us down at headquarters!” The chief had told me what to do, but Stormann’s opposition somehow got my goat so beautifully that instead of quitting I hung around, just for the pleasure of telling him a thing or two when he came out. To crash in now would have ruined the scene, cost the company thousands of dollars, and maybe gotten Meadows in bad with her bosses; so I didn’t have the heart to do it.

“They’ll be through about four,” the guard told me. It was now a little before two.

Whether I would have stuck it out for two whole hours, outside that door, just to bawl Stormann out — I don’t know. I never will know. At 2:10 or thereabouts the door suddenly opened from the inside without any warning and through it came the horrible unearthly screams of the dying. Nothing could scream like that and live very long.

“Something’s happened!” he blurted. “That’s not in the scene! I know, because they were rehearsing it all morning—”

It was Meadows’ maid. Only she was almost white now. Her voice was gone from fright. “Oh, somebody — quick, somebody!” she panted. “I’ve been hammering on this door—” But she wasn’t the victim. The screaming went right on behind her.

I rushed in, the guard with me. The sight that met us was ghastly. Martha Meadows, with the cameras still playing on her, was burning to death there before everyone’s eyes. She was a living torch, a funnel of fire from head to foot, and screaming her life away. She was running blindly here and there, like some kind of a horrible human pin wheel, and they were all trying to overtake her and catch her to throw something over her and put the flames out. But she was already out of her head, mad with agony, and kept eluding them, ducking and doubling back and forth with hellish agility. What kept her going like that, with her life going up in blazing yellow-white gushes, I don’t understand. I’ll see that scene for years to come.

But I didn’t stand there watching. I flung myself at her bodily, head first right into the flames in a football tackle. With stinging hands I grasped something soft and quivering behind that glow that had once been cool, human flesh. The pillar of fire toppled over and lay horizontal along the ground, with the flames foreshortened now and just licking upward all around it like bright scallops. With that, a blanket or something was thrown over her, and partly over me, too. As it fell with a puff of horrid black smoke spurting out all around the edges, the last scream stopped and she was still.

I held my breath, so as not to inhale any of the damned stuff. I could feel rescuing hands beating all around the two of us through the blanket. After a minute I picked myself up. My hands were smarting, my shirt cuffs were scorched brown in places and peeling back, and sparks had eaten into the front of my suit. Otherwise I was alright. But what lay under the blanket didn’t move. Five minutes ago one of the most beautiful girls in America, and now something it was better not to look at if you had a weak stomach.

As if in gruesome jest, the winking eyes of the cameras were still turned upon her and, in the deathly silence that had now fallen, you could hear the whirring noise that meant they were still grinding away. No one had thought of signalling them to stop.

The guard who had been outside the door, though, had had the presence of mind to send in a call for help even before the flames had been beaten out. The studio had a first-aid station of its own a door or two away, and two men arrived with a stretcher and carried her out with them, still under the blanket. Nellie went with them, bellowing like a wounded steer and calling: “Oh, Lawd, oh Lawd, don’t do this to my lamb! Change yo’ mind, change yo’ mind!”

Stormann was shaking like a leaf and incoherent with shock, and had to be fed whiskey by one of the electricians. The girl with the notebook, the script-girl, was the only one there who seemed to have kept her head about her. I went up to her, dabbing some oil they’d given me onto the red patches on the back of my hands and wrists, and asked: “How’d it happen?”

It turned out she wasn’t as bright as I thought she’d be. “It happened right here,” she said. “I was following very closely, the way I’m supposed to — that’s my job.” I looked to find out where “here” was, but instead of pointing any place on the set, she was pointing at her book.

“See — where it says ‘Oh won’t he ever come?’ That’s her line. She’s supposed to be waiting by the window for her lover. Well, she spoke it alright, and then the next thing I knew, there was a funny flickering light on the pages of my book. When I looked up, I saw that it was coming from her. She had flames all over her. Well, just from force of habit, I quickly looked back at the book to find out whether or not this was part—”

I gave her up as a complete nut. Or at least a very efficient script-girl but a washout otherwise. I tackled Stormann next. He was on his third or fourth bracer by now and wringing his hands and moaning something about: “My picture, my beautiful picture—”

“Pull yourself together,” I snapped. “Isn’t there anyone around here who has a heart? She’s thinking about her book, you’re thinking about your picture. Well, I’m thinking about that poor miserable girl. Maybe you can tell me how it happened. You’re the director and you’re supposed to have been watching what went on!”

Probably no one had ever spoken to him that way in years. His mouth dropped open. I grabbed him by the shoulder, took his snifter away from him, and gave him a shake. “Let me have it, brother, before I go sour on you. I’m asking you for your testimony — as a witness. You can consider this a preliminary inquest.”

I hadn’t forgotten that it was his doing I’d been kept out of here earlier, either. Seeing that he wasn’t up against one of his usual yes-men, he changed his mind and gave until it hurt. “No one was near her at the time, I can’t understand what could have caused it. I was right here on the side-lines where I always sit, she was over there by that win—”

“Yeah, I know all that. Here’s what I’m asking you. Did you or did you not see what did it?” Not liking him, I got nasty with him and tapped him ten times on the chest with the point of my finger, once for each word, so it would sink in. The idea of anyone doing that to him was so new to him he didn’t dare let out a peep. “No,” he said, like a little kid in school.

“You didn’t. Well, was anyone smoking a cigarette in here?”

“Absolutely not!” he said. “No director allows it, except when the scene calls for it. The lenses would pick up the haze—”

“Did she touch any wires, maybe?”

“There aren’t any around, you can see for yourself. This whole thing’s supposed to be the inside of an old mansion.”

“What about this thing?” I picked up a lighted oil lamp that was standing on the fake window sill, but when I looked, I saw that it had an electric pocket-torch hidden in it. I put it down again. “Who was playing the scene with her? She wasn’t alone in it, was she?”

“Ruth Tobias. That girl crying over there.” I let him go back to his pain-killer and went over to tackle her. She was having grade-A hysterics across the back of a chair, but, as I might have known, on her own account, not poor Meadows’.

“Two whole years—” she gurgled, “two whole years to make a come back. I’ve waited — and now, look! They won’t hire me again. I’m getting older—”

“Alright sis, turn off the faucets,” I said. “Uncle wants to ask you something. What happened to her?”

She had on one of the same wide dresses as the kid had, but she was gotten up to look older — black gloves and a lorgnette with her hair in a cranky knot. At that, she wasn’t out of her twenties yet, but looked as though she’d been used as a filling-station for a bootlegger while she was out of work the last few years.

“I played her older sister,” she sniffled, “although they really had a nerve to cast me in an older part like that. I had to take anything I could get. I was in that rocker there on the set, facing her way. I’m supposed not to approve of the fellow she’s intending to run off with, but all I do to show it is to keep rocking back and forth. She had her back to me, over at the window — I tell you I was looking right at her and all of a sudden, fffi, she was on fire from head to foot! As quickly as that, and for no earthly reason that I could make out! All I had time to do was jump back out of the way myself—”

“You would,” I thought, but without saying so.

She gave me a sort of a come-on smile and said: “You’re not a bad-looking guy at all for a detective.”

“That’s what my wife and eighteen kids tell me,” I squelched her.

“Hmph” she said, and went over to chisel a drink from Stormann.

Just then they sent word in that, impossible as it sounded, Meadows was still breathing. She was going fast, though — just a matter of minutes now. They’d given her morphine to kill the pain.

“Is she conscious or out?” I asked.

“Semi-conscious.”

“Quick then, let me have a look at her before she goes!”

It was a slim chance, but maybe she, herself, knew what or who had done it. Maybe she, alone, of all of them, had seen what caused it and hadn’t been able to prevent it in time to save herself.

On my way out, I collared the guard, who was back at the door again keeping out the crowd of extras and employees who had heard the news.

“Consider yourself a deputy,” I said to him in an undertone. “See that they all stay where they are until I get back. Whatever you do, see that nothing’s touched on that set — not even a match stick. Keep everything just the way it is—”

It was a monstrous thing they showed me in that bed, dark as the room was. Without eyes, without ears, without nose, without any human attribute. An oversized pumpkin-head, a Hallowe’en goblin, made of yards and yards of interlaced gauze bandaging. It stood out whitely in the greenish dimness cast by the lowered shades. A crevice between the bandages served as a mouth. Atop the sheets were two bandaged paws. She was conscious, but partly delirious from the heat of the burns and “high” from the morphine that kept her from feeling the pain in her last moments. The faithful Nellie was there beside her, silent now and with her forehead pressed to the wall.

I bent close to the muffled figure, put my face almost up against the shapeless mound that was Martha Meadows, to try to catch the garbled muttering which came through the bandages. I couldn’t make it out. “Martha Meadows,” I begged, “Martha Meadows, what caused the accident?”

The muttering stopped, broke off short. I couldn’t tell whether she’d heard me or not. I repeated the question. Then suddenly I saw her head move slowly from side to side, slowly and slightly. “No — accident,” she mumbled. Then she repeated it a second time, but so low I couldn’t catch it any more. A minute later her head had lolled loosely over to the side again and stayed that way. She’d gone.

I went outside and stood there, lost in thought. I hadn’t found out what I’d come to find out — what did it — but I’d found out something else, much more important. “No — accident” meant it had been done purposely. What else could it mean? Or was I building myself a case out of thin air? Delirium, morphine — and a shaking of the head in her death-throes that I’d mistaken for “no”? I tried to convince myself I was just looking for trouble. But it wouldn’t work. I had an answer for every argument. She’d known what I was asking her just now. She hadn’t been out of her mind.

Death will strike during unconsciousness or sleep, maybe, but never during delirium. The mind will always clear just before it breaks up, even if only an instant before. And hadn’t she gotten threatening letters and asked for protection? Anyway, I told myself, as long as there was a doubt in my mind, it was up to me to track it down until there wasn’t any doubt left — either one way or the other. That was my job. I was going to sift this thing down to the bottom.

Nellie came out. She wasn’t bellowing now any more like she had been on the set. “They musta been casting her in heaven today, but they sure picked a mis’able way to notify her,” she said with a sort of suppressed savagery. “I’m gonna buy me a bottle a’ gin and drink it down straight. If it don’t kill me the fust time, I’ll keep it up till it do. She’ll need a maid on the set up there fust thing and I ain’t gonna leave her flat!” She shuffled off, shaking her head.

I was hard-hearted enough to go after her and stop her. “That’s all right about heaven, auntie, but you don’t happen to know of anyone down below here who had a grudge against her, do you?”

She shook her head some more. “Stop yo’ mouth. She was everybody’s honey. Didn’t she even go to the trouble of axing ’em and coazing ’em to give that Miss Tobias a job in her picher on account of she felt sorry for her cause she was a back-number and nobody wanted her no-how?”

“What about those threats she got, where are they?”

“She turned ’em over to her supe’visor. They weren’t nothing, everybody in the business gets ’em. It means you a big-shot, that’s all.”

“You were there when it happened. What’d you see?”

“Weren’t nothing to see. ’Pears like it musta been some of this here sponchaneous combusting.”

That gave me an idea, but I hung it up to dry for a while. I rang headquarters and spilled what had happened to the chief. “Something new — an invisible accident. Right under everybody’s nose and yet nobody saw it. Guess I better stay on it for a while, don’t you?”

“You park your can on it till it breaks. I’ll let the studio hot-shots know.”

When I got back to the set they were all there yet — all but Stor-mann and Tobias! “I thought I told you—” I snarled in the guard’s ear.

“They’ll be right back,” he whined, “they told me so. Stormy only stepped next door to get some more liquor. The electrician that was supplying him ran out of it. And she went to take off her costume. She got jittery because Stormy was nervous and started smoking around her. After what happened to— Besides, they weren’t under arrest. Nobody here is, and you don’t know Stormy. If I’d a’ tried to stop him, it woulda been good-bye to my job—”

They were back in no time at all. Tobias was back first and I made a mental note of that. Since when does it take a man longer to dig up some liquor than it does a woman to change clothes from head to foot — besides, scraping off a stage make-up in the bargain? That was another little chip stacked against Stormann. I had three of them so far. He hadn’t wanted Meadows to bring me on the set with her. He bullied her into going in alone while my back was turned. And lastly he’d found an excuse for leaving the set, taking him longer to get back than it had a conceited frail, like Tobias, to do herself over from head to toe.

The ace turned up when I checked up on the electrician who’d been supplying him.

“Why, no,” he admitted, “I got another bottle left. I told him so, only he got a sudden notion his own was better quality and went out after it.”

What a dead give-away that was!

He had the staggers when he showed up, but he had enough decency left to straighten up when he saw me and breathe: “How is she?”

I made the announcement I’d been saving until he got there — to see how he’d take it.

“I’m sorry to say — she’s quit.”

I kept my eyes on him. It was hard to tell. Plop! went the bottle he’d brought in with him and he started folding up like a jack knife. They picked him up and carried him out. It might’ve been the drink — but if he hadn’t wanted to be questioned, for instance, it was the swellest out he could’ve thought up.

Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I’m frank to admit I stuck a pin in him before they got him to the door — just to see. He never even twitched.

I turned a chair around backwards, sat down on it, and faced the rest of them. “I’m in charge of this case now,” I said, “by order of police headquarters and with the consent of the studio executives. All I’m going to do, right now, is repeat the question I’ve already asked Mr. Stormann, Miss Tobias, Nellie, and the script-girl. Did any of you see what caused it?” This meant the electricians, stage-hands, and the two cameramen. They all shook their heads.

I got up and banged the chair down so hard one leg of it busted off. “She wasn’t six feet away from some of you!” I bawled them out. “She was in the full glare of the brightest lights ever devised! All eyes were on her watching every move and she was the center of attraction at the time! She burned to death, and yet no one saw how it started! Twenty-five pairs of human eyes and they might as well have all been closed! Well, there’s one pair left — and they won’t let him down.”

I suppose they thought I meant my own. Not by a damn sight. “Now clear out of here, all of you, and don’t touch anything as you go!” I pointed to the chief electrician. “You stay and check up on those lights for defects — one of ’em might have got overheated and dropped a spark on her. And don’t try to hold out anything to save your own skin. Criminal carelessness is a lot less serious than obstructing an agent of justice!” I passed my handkerchief to the guard. “You comb the floor around where she was standing. Pick up every cigarette butt and every cinder you find!”

The rest of them filed out one by one, giving me names and addresses as they went. I wasn’t worried about getting them back again if I wanted them. They all reacted differently. Some were frightened, some just curious, some cracking wise. The script-girl’s nose was still buried in her book. She hardly looked up at all. Tobias glided by me with a little extra hip-action and purred over her shoulder: “Lots of luck, Handsome. And if you find out you were mistaken about those eighteen kids of yours, look a lady up sometime.”

“Thirtieth of next February,” I told her.

The chief cameraman came out of his booth with a round, flat, tin box — packed under his arm.

“Where you going with that?” I asked him.

“Drop it in the ashcan on my way out,” he said. “It’s what we took today, no good now any more.”

“Ashcan — hell,” I snapped. “Those machines of yours are the other pair of eyes I told you about! How soon can you develop that stuff?”

“Right away,” he told me, looking surprised. “But we can’t use this roll — it’s got her whole death-scene on it and it’ll turn your hair white just to look at it.”

“You do it yourself,” I warned him, “don’t call anybody in to help you. And don’t touch it, leave it just the way it is. Can I trust you?”

“Meet me in half an hour in projection room A,” he said. “She was a swell kid.”

The electrician came down from way up high somewhere and reported the lights all jake. No crossed wires, not a screw out of place anywhere.

“You dig up a typewriter and get that all down on paper, sign it, have a notary witness it, and shoot it in to me at headquarters — Galbraith’s the name. It better be on the level, the pay-off is withholding information from the authorities.” Which didn’t mean anything, but it was good enough to throw a scare into him. I never saw anyone take it on the lam so quick in my life.

The guard passed me my handkerchief back with a cigarette butt, a wire frame, and a lot of little pieces of glass in it.

“The butt’s Stormann’s,” he pointed out. “He was smoking it after it was all over. I saw him throw it down and step on it before he went after that liquor. I remember because Tobias yapped ‘Don’t come near me with that thing! You want it to happen to me, too?”’

I wondered if that remark meant anything. Did he want it to happen to her, too? Get the point? I knew what the pieces of glass and the frame were right away — a busted lorgnette like I had seen Tobias fiddling with.

“Meadows had it around her neck I guess,” he suggested, “and it fell and smashed when she started to run around crazy.”

I felt like telling him he didn’t know his ears from his elbow, but I kept quiet about it. These pieces of glass were clear, that burning celluloid would have smoked them up plenty if they had been anywhere near Martha Meadows. But there was an easy enough way of settling that.

“Get the wardrobe-woman in here and tell her to bring a complete list of every article she furnished Meadows and Tobias for this picture.”

She was a society-looking dame, with white hair, and had had her face lifted. She had typewritten sheets with her.

“Did you supply Meadows with a lorgnette?”

“Why no,” she said. “Young girls didn’t wear them even in those days.”

“But Tobias wore one. Is this it?” I showed her the pieces.

“It must be,” she returned. “She turned in her costume a little while ago and explained that she’d broken her lorgnette while that awful thing was happening to poor Martha. You see I have everything else crossed off but that. We usually charge players for anything that isn’t returned to us, but in this case of course nothing like that will happen.”

That explained something that had bothered me for a minute or two. Because I’d distinctly seen the lorgnette on Tobias after the accident, when she was making those first passes at me. She must have broken it later — while I was outside in the infirmary with Meadows. But a chiseler like her who would cadge a drink from Stormann would try to make them believe it had happened during all the excitement — to get out of paying for it.

“You keep those two lists just the way they are now, I may want to see them again.” I folded up the handkerchief with the pieces of broken glass and put it away in my pocket.

A kid came in and said: “The rushes are ready for you in projection room A,” and took me over there.

It had rows of seats just like a miniature theatre and a screen on one wall. I closed the door and locked the cameraman and myself in.

“It’s ghastly,” he said, “better hang on tight.”

“Run it through at normal speed first,” I said. “I’ll see if I can stand it.”

I sat down in the front row with the screen almost on top of me. There wasn’t much to it at regular speed — about five minutes worth of picture — what they call a “sequence.” It was pretty grisly at that. It opened on Tobias sitting there in the rocker, broadside to the camera. Meadows came in almost at once.

“I’m going away with him tonight,” she said.

Tobias opened her lorgnette and gave her the once-over through it. Meadows went over to the window, and the camera followed her part of the way. That left Tobias over at the left-hand side of the screen and partly out of the picture, with just one shoulder, arm, and the side of her head showing. She started to rock back and forth and tap her lorgnette against the back of her hand. I had my eyes glued to Meadows though. She turned around to look at her “sister.”

“Oh, won’t he ever come?” she said.

Her face sort of tightened up — changed from repose to tenseness. A look of horror started to form on it, but it never got any further. Right then and there the thing happened.

The best way I can describe it is, a sort of bright, luminous flower seemed to open up half way down her dress, spreading, peeling back. But the petals of it were flame. An instant later it was all over her, and the first screams of a voice that was gone now came smashing out at my eardrums. And in between each one, the hellish sound-track had even picked up and recorded the sizzling that her hair made.

“Cut!”

I turned around and yelled back at him: “For Pete’s sake, cut, before I throw up!” and I mopped my drenched forehead. “I did — twice — while I was processing it,” he confessed, looking out of the booth at me.

It hadn’t told me a thing so far, but then I hadn’t expected it to — the first throw out of the bag.

“Go back and start it over,” I shivered, “but, whatever you do, leave out that finale! Take it up where she turns at the window. Slow-motion this time. Can you hold it when I tell you to?”

He adjusted his apparatus. “Say when,” he called.

The figures on the screen hardly moved at all this time, eight times slowed down. They drifted lazily — sort of floated. I knew the place to look for on Meadows’ dress now, and I kept my eyes focussed on it and let everything else ride. A moment later something had shown up there.

“Hold it!” I yelled, and the scene froze into a “still.”

Now it was just a magic-lantern slide, no motion at all. I left my seat and stood close up against the screen, keeping to one side so my own shadow wouldn’t blur out that place on her dress. No flame was coming from it yet. It was just a bright, luminous spot, about the size and shape of a dime.

“Back up one!” I instructed. “One” meant a single revolution of the camera. The scene hardly shifted at all, but the pin-point of light was smaller — like a pea now. You couldn’t have seen it from the seat I’d been in at first.

Two heads are better than one. I called him out and showed it to him. “What do you make of this? It’s not a defect in the film, is it?”

“No, it’s a blob of light coming to a head at that place on her dress. Like a highlight, you might say. A gleam.” Which is what I’d had it figured for, too.

“Go three forward,” I said, “and then hold it.”

He came out again to look. It was back to the size of a dime again, and only a turn or two before the flames were due to show up.

“There’s heat in it!” I said. “See that!”

The white spot had developed a dark core, a pin-head of black or brown.

“That’s the material of the dress getting ready to burn. See that thread coming out of the dot? Smoke — and all there’ll ever be of it, too. Celluloid doesn’t give much warning.”

So far so good. But what I wanted to know was where that gleam or ray was coming from. I had the effect now, but I wanted the cause. The trouble was you couldn’t follow the beam through the air — to gauge its direction. Like any beam of light, it left no trail — only showed up suddenly on her dress. The set-up, so far, seemed to fit Nellie’s theory of spontaneous combustion perfectly. Maybe one of the powerful Klieg lights, high overhead and out of the picture, had developed some flaw in its glass shield, warping one of its rays. But the electrician had gone over them afterward and given them all a clean bill of health.

“Start it up again,” I said wearily. “Slow motion,” and went back and sat down. I was farther away now and had a better perspective of the thing as a whole; maybe that’s what did it.

As the scene on the screen thawed and slowly dissolved into fluid motion once more, it gave the impression for a moment of everything on it moving at once. Therefore it was only natural that the one thing that didn’t move should catch my eye and hold it. Tobias’ lorgnette, and the wrist and hand that held it. The three objects stayed rigid, down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, after everything else was on the go once more. The chair she was in had started to rock slowly back and forth, and her body with it, but the forearm, wrist, hand and lorgnette stayed poised, motionless. There was something unnatural about it that caught the eye at once. I remembered she had opened the scene by tapping her lorgnette as well as rocking.

Now, with the fire due to break out any second, she was only rocking. The lorgnette was stiff as a ramrod in her grasp. Not that she was holding it out at full length before her or anything like that, she was holding it close in, unobtrusively, but straight up and down — a little out to one side of her own body. Maybe the director’s orders had been for her to stop fiddling with it at a certain point. Then again maybe not. All I wanted to find out was at what point she had stopped tapping and playing with it. I had been concentrating on Meadows until now and had missed that.

“Whoa, back up!” I called out to him. “All the way back and then start over — slow.”

I let Meadows go this time and kept my eye on Tobias and her lorgnette. The minute I saw it stop — “Hold it!” I yelled and ran over to the screen and examined Meadows’ dress. Nothing yet. But in three more revolutions of the camera that deadly white spot had already showed up on the celluloid-lined hoopskirt. Effect had followed cause too quickly to be disregarded.

“Lights!” I roared. “I’ve got it!”

He turned a switch, the room blazed all around me, and I took that handkerchief out of my pocket and examined the pieces of glass it held. Some were thicker than others — the lens had therefore been convex, not flat. I held one up and looked at my cuff through it. The weave stood out. A magnifying glass. I held it about a foot away from the back of my hand, where I’d already been burned once this afternoon, and even with the far weaker lights of the projection-room working through it, in about thirty seconds something bit me and I jumped.

He’d come out and was watching what I was doing. “Pack that film up again in the box the way you had it,” I said. “I’ll be back for it in a minute. I’m taking it down to headquarters with me!”

“What’d you find out?” he asked.

“Look it up in tomorrow morning’s papers!”

I called Tobias’ dressing-room. “How’s the lay of the land?” I greeted her.

She knew me right away. “I know, it’s Handsome.”

“I was wrong about those eighteen kids,” I told her. “I counted ’em over — only nine.”

She sure was a hard-boiled customer. “Nine to go,” she said cheerfully. “When will I see you?”

“I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes.”

“Where we going?” she cooed when she got in the car.

“You’ll find out.”

Then when we got there, she said: “Why, this looks like police headquarters to me.”

“Not only does, but is,” I told her. “Won’t take a minute, I just want to see a man about a dog.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait outside for you?”

I chucked her under the chin. “I’m getting so fond of you I want you with me wherever I go. Can’t stand being without you even for five minutes.”

She closed her eyes and looked pleased and followed me in like a lamb. Then when the bracelets snapped on her wrists she exploded: “Why you dirty double-crossing — I thought you said you wanted to see a man about a dog.”

“I do,” I said, “and you’re the dog.”

“What’re the charges?” the chief asked.

“Setting fire to Martha Meadows with a magnifying glass and causing her to bum to death. Here’s the glass she used; picked up on the set. Here’s the original harmless glass that was in the frame before she knocked it out; picked up in the trashbasket in her dressing room. The film, there in the box, shows her in the act of doing it. She’s been eaten away with jealousy ever since she faded out and Meadows stepped into her shoes.”

I never knew a woman knew so many bad words as she did; and she used them all. After she’d been booked and the matron was leading her away she called back: “You’ll never make this stick. You think you’ve got me, but you’ll find out!”

“She’s right, Gal,” commented the chief, after she’d gone. “The studio people’ll put the crusher on the case before it ever comes up for trial. Not because they approve of what she’s done — but on account of the effect it would have on the public.”

“She may beat the murder rap,” I said, “but she can’t get around these.” I took a bundle of letters and a square of blotting-paper out of my pocket and passed them to him. “Wrote them in her very dressing room at the studio and then mailed them to Meadows on the outside, even after Meadows had gotten her a job. The blotting-paper tells the story if you hold it up to a mirror. She didn’t get rid of it quickly enough.”

“Good work, Gal,” the chief said; and then, just like him, he takes all the pleasure out of it. “Now that you’re in for promotion, suppose you step around to that grill and pay the guy for that plate-glass window you busted.”