Collected Stories

Stage Fright

Now, here was the room…

Armchairs at the sides, flanked by drum tables, and a green sofa in the middle of the carpet. A telephone on the end table beside the sofa, ashtrays on the drum tables, and magazines on the coffee table in front of the sofa. On the first wall, to the sofa’s right, a portrait of an angry-looking young blond woman in a breakaway frame. On the second wall, to the sofa’s left, a mirror smeared lightly with soap. On the third wall, behind the sofa, a glass-doored secretary containing books, this flanked by two tall windows through which could be seen a bit of formal garden and a lot of blue sky. There wasn’t any fourth wall; that was the curtain separating this room from the audience, who were now mumbling impatiently because it was twenty minutes to nine and the curtain hadn’t yet opened. And the curtain hadn’t yet opened because Heather Sanderson was lying on the sofa with her throat cut.

Sterling McCall and I wasted a good three and a half minutes arguing about who should go out and soothe the patrons, because somebody had to and neither of us wanted to. I thought he should because he was, after all, the producer, and he thought I should because I was, after all, the publicity and public relations man and this was, after all, public relations with a capital PR.

“Ling,” I said, “I can’t go out there, for God’s sake. I saw her, I’m still all shaken up.”

“Andy,” he said, “I can’t go out there, for God’s sake. You know how I stutter when I’m upset.” But he didn’t stutter when he was passing the buck.

And it didn’t help to have Bobbi Barten, her feral eyes all aglitter, interrupting all the time, telling us, “I could go on, Ling, you know that. You know that, Andy. We don’t have to cancel the show, I know it’s a terrible thing but I know the part, and you know what they say about The Show Must Go On. I mean, I am her understudy, and we could still go on.”

I give us both credit, Ling and I, we didn’t succumb. Ling didn’t want to have to give a lot of customers back a lot of money, and neither of us wanted to go out on stage and talk to the patrons, but we didn’t succumb. I said, “Forget it, Bobbi, this isn’t your big chance. There isn’t a Broadway producer in the house.”

She glowered, and sulked, and said, “I’m only trying to help,” and went back to her song and dance, while Ling and I continued to argue about who was going to go out there.

It was a foregone conclusion. I didn’t pay his salary. He did pay mine. So I went out from the wings, from where we’d been arguing by the light board, and walked along the strip of flooring between the edge of the drop cloth and the bottom of the curtain, not looking at the sofa, where Heather Sanderson, the girl in the painting in the breakaway frame, had now departed her own breakaway frame, leaving it behind with its throat cut.

You’ve always got to poke at the curtains to find where they meet, so you can get through. It looks funny out front maybe, but it doesn’t feel funny when you’re the one doing it. Particularly when you’ve got to stand there, poking at the curtain, with the body on the sofa seven feet behind you.

I got out there at last, just as some dimwit backstage dimmed the house lights. I turned my head and croaked, “Lights!” and a few patrons laughed. The lights came on again, and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my unfortunate duty to announce that the performance of A Sound, Of Distant Drums scheduled for tonight—” And so on.

I spent only a couple of minutes out there, not telling them about the body they weren’t seeing, only that the show was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances beyond the control of the management and they would get their money back if they would make a line at the box office, and during the second minute there was a lot of rustling, as some of them yakked together and others of them got up and started out, to be first on line. As I was finishing, I heard the sirens coming out from town. They sounded to me exactly like fire engine sirens, even though I knew it was the police. I expected the audience any second to figure fire engines too, and get trampled in a rush or something, but they didn’t. Nobody really believes in real life drama, and thank God for small favors.

When I got off, I went through the wings and into the green room and collapsed in a wooden folding chair. I wiped my face with my show handkerchief, and Edna Stanton brought me a paper cup full of Mountain Valley water, from the cooler in the corner. She asked me if I had any idea who did it, and I told her I couldn’t begin to guess, which is the same thing I told a man named Detective Einstein ten minutes later, in the office upstairs over the lobby where the people were getting their money back and trying to figure what was going on. So I had to stay, and two by two the patrons left the Red Barn Theater and drove their cars back to Clinton, three miles down the pike.

That isn’t a very original name for a repertory summer stock theater, the Red Barn, but what are you going to do? We happened to be operating in a red barn, just like a lot of other summer stock outfits, and of course we had the same gag as them — the Red Ink Theater — because, same as them, we never made any money.

Face it, it’s impossible to run a repertory theater with less than twenty-five people, including actors and stagehands and business manager and set designer and director and stage manager and a lot of other people. So we did it with nineteen, and we lost money. That is, Sterling McCall lost money. That is, the local business types who backed Sterling McCall lost money. Except they ran free ads in the program, and the theater being there did attract vacationers to stick around overnight or a couple of days, so the local business types maybe didn’t lose money, either. On paper, everybody lost money.

But even so, this year we had a star. Heather Sanderson. By summer stock standards, she was a star. There are two kinds of people who are stars by summer stock standards. The first is the kind of person who never made it really big, but almost did, who once was second lead in an Alan Ladd movie or once was ingenue in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway, the kind you may have heard of but you can’t remember their name. The second is the kind who made it very big, but lately they’ve been on the wane, and haven’t been doing very much on Broadway or television or in the movies in the last few years, the kind about whom you say, “What ever happened to Heather Sanderson?”

Nothing, that’s the trouble. Until now. Now, she had her throat cut.

Anyway, Heather Sanderson was this second kind of summer stock star. Back in New York, Ling knew a guy who knew a guy, or something like that, and dickering was arranged, and over her agent’s dying body Miss Heather Sanderson signed for the smaller chunk of a forty-sixty profit split. The agent was right; there weren’t going to be any profits.

Actually, the set-up we’ve got is pretty good, and we figure sooner or later it’s going to get itself a reputation like Eaglesmere or the Music Tent or the Dark Horse Players, and then we should make some loot out of it. In the meantime, it’s a good way to get a tan and three square during the summer, and a credit for the resume besides.

So we’ve got this farm. The land itself is turning back into woods and weeds, and we’ve got just the two buildings, which these local businessmen formed a committee and bought and lease to us for a dollar a year. There’s the farmhouse, where we all live, and the barn, which we converted into our theater. The seats are folding chairs and most of the stage lights are made out of tin cans and aluminum foil and the flies are jerrybuilt and never work right, but it’s a theater just the same, and we put on shows in it. Nineteen of us.

There’s Sterling McCall, who’s the producer and the business manager both, which is even more dangerous than it sounds, though I don’t suppose he steals as much as he could, which is something. And there’s me, Andy Pelliteri, publicity man and prop hustler and stagehand and occasional bit-parter. And Edna Stanton, who already mentioned, who’s secretary and ticket-taker and costume maker, the only local citizen in the crow, saddled simultaneously with the acting bug and a perpetually ailing widowed mother, and they’re the only reasons I don’t ask her to marry me, but either one of them would do. And hairy-chested Russ Barlow, light man and sound man and general technician. And non-chested Charlie Wilbe, set designer and set painter and carpenter. And Archer Marshall, phony director. And thirteen actors which, now that I think of it, is an unlucky number. Anyway, these thirteen actors spend their evenings performing this week’s play and their afternoons rehearsing next week’s play and their mornings swimming and sun-tanning at Berger’s Kill. Kill is a word in Dutch that mean creek. It is also, as we were dramatically reminded, a word in English.

I was the one found her. No, that’s wrong, I was the one noticed she was dead. She was a lush, you see. Maybe because she’d been on Mount Olympus and was now back in the valley with us mortals. Anyway, she was still conscientious, and she never missed a performance. She managed that by racking out on the set every afternoon, stewed to the nostrils, usually around three o’clock. At eight, half an hour before curtain, I would wake her. She’d totter away to the star’s dressing room — an eight by eight plywood partition, just like the other three — and put on her face and costume.

So she was there. The curtain was closed, and she was there on the sofa, and out front the rest of them had pushed the chairs out of the way and were rehearsing Love Among The Falling Stars, which was the play for next week. Edna Stanton, who was assistant director and carried the book, read Heather’s lines. At six, the rehearsal broke, and they put the chairs back in place and went oft for supper.

At eight, they were all in their dressing rooms, getting ready. The early arriving patrons were parking their cars on the pounded turf between the barn and the house. I left the green room and went through the wings and out on-stage — my steps muffled by the rug over the drop cloth — and went over to the sofa and shook Heather’s shoulder and said, “Eight o’clock, honey chile. Time for the trouper to shise and rine.”

Sometimes she was hard to wake up. This was one of the times. She was lying on her side, face pressed into the sofa back, knees bent, shoes off. I shook her again, yakking some more, and pulled her shoulder a bit, and saw the new red mouth in her neck.

When I hollered, Russ Barlow looked over from his light-board, where he was doing something or other, and he told me later that I was on my knees in front of the sofa, with a face like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. White, in other words. I don’t remember being on my knees, but I believe it. I believe I didn’t have the strength in my legs to stand up for a minute or two.

How long do you suppose fifteen minutes is? Sit in front of a clock and watch the second hand go around fifteen times, and it takes forever. Sit in front of a man with a gun, who promises to blow your head off in exactly fifteen minutes, and you barely have time to take a deep breath. All I know is it was fifteen minutes before we called the cops. In the meantime, everybody ran around and jabbered.

If I hadn’t hollered, we might have buttoned it up, just Russ and Ling and I maybe. But I hollered, and a couple of people came out from the green room, and went back and told the others. So everybody knew, and everybody talked, and nobody thought about calling the cops.

That’s not right. Not everybody knew. Seventeen people knew. But nobody at all thought to tell Edna Stanton. She was still out front, taking tickets, letting the people in. It wasn’t her fault; nobody told her.

At any rate, Ling finally thought of phoning the cops, which he did. He phoned the Clinton cops, and they said they’d be out in maybe half an hour, both cars were out right now. Clinton is a small town, seasonally swollen by vacationers.

And it was another fifteen minutes before any of us thought about the audience. By then, of course, it was after eight-thirty, and the patrons were all in their seats. Ling sent Nancy Stewart quick like a bunny to tell Edna to close shop, and then we fooled around a while, wondering what to do till the lawman came, and then we wasted three and a half minutes deciding who was going to break the news to the customers, and I lost.

I told all this to Detective Einstein, who wasn’t city police after all. The theater was outside the city limits, which the city cops had remembered in the nick of time, and they’d passed the buck on to the state police. So Detective Einstein was a plainclothes State Trooper, or something like that.

Anyway, he was a rat. I don’t have anything against police in general, but I have nothing good to say about Einstein. I told him the whole story, and I also told him that I personally had spent most of the afternoon in town with the station wagon, picking up some of the props for next week’s show, and then he said, “I hope, for your good as well as ours, that we find our murderer soon.”

I said, “Me, too.”

He said, “Because this theater is closed until our investigation is completed.”

He didn’t have to do that. Say nobody was supposed to leave the area, okay. Say nobody was supposed to touch anything on stage until the crime lab people — who showed up from Springfield a little before eleven — were finished with it, okay. Say everybody had to submit to a search, of his person and his room and his belongings, okay. Say everybody had to be available at all times for questioning, okay. But he didn’t have to close us.

What did he gain?

He gained nineteen people who wouldn’t have cooperated with him to drag him out of quicksand, that’s what he gained.

The only way I could figure, it was gratuitous nastiness, because he thought we were laughing at him. You run into that all the time. He thought we were all from New York, because we were actors and like that, and it’s a national phobia that people always think people from New York are laughing at them. Except in Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles, places like that, where they don’t care.

He was some detective. Right off the bat, he was wrong on two counts. We weren’t laughing at him. We weren’t laughing at him because one of us had been killed and we didn’t feel like laughing at all. And not a one of us had been born and raised in New York, though we all — except Edna Stanton — had gravitated there in our late teens or early twenties, to get involved with Theater. Most of the rest of them as actors. Me as a playwright. I probably have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where, but I own a portable typewriter and I type on it, so I’m a playwright. Which, naturally, is why I was off in the world’s south forty, playing publicity man.

Anyway, the theater was closed. Nobody was happy about it, with the possible exception of Einstein. We all got surly, and he called us all together the next morning and sat us in the audience’s chairs, and stood on the stage apron and talked to us about cooperation. Ling, who is not a coward, got to his feet and said cooperation was a two-way business, and how about opening the theater? And Einstein said, “As soon as our investigation is completed. If you people cooperate, it will be completed that much sooner.”

Ling’s theory was that Einstein was using the Army’s mass-punishment system. As though we knew who had killed Heather Sanderson, and he was punishing us all until somebody told him. Maybe so, maybe not. The point is, none of us had much faith in him as a detective.

So, when we had our own meeting in the living room of the farmhouse that afternoon, Ling suggested that it was more or less up to us to hand the good Captain (I speak sarcastically) the killer’s head on a silver salver. “It was one of us,” he said. “One of the eighteen in this room. I hate to say that — I hate to think it, even — but there it is.”

Jack Andrews, boy character actor, said, “Why does it have to be one of us? Why not somebody we don’t even know? Came up from New York, maybe.”

Ling said, “How did he get into the theater?”

That right there was the stickler. There are four entrances into the theater — through the lobby and through the scene dock and through the green room and through the back way onto the stage — and they’re kept locked. Five years ago, our first year up here, we had a lot of trouble with local vandals. Don’t let anybody ever tell you New York City breeds the worst kids. These little masters of high comedy out in the boondocks here would push a door open in the middle of the afternoon, throw a stink bomb — a smoldering strip of film, say — and run away giggling like mad, while we tried hopelessly to air the place before that evening’s performance. Things like that. So the doors are kept locked, all four of them, all the time. The lobby door is unlocked before a performance and locked again afterward. All nineteen of us, of course, have keys to at least one door.

So it was one of the group, one of the people we knew to have been in the theater, rehearsing, all afternoon. The actors were acting, the director was directing, Russ Barlow was working on his light board, Charlie Wilbe was working on next week’s set over in the scene dock, Ling was up in the office working on the books, and so on.

As it turned out, I was the only member of the group who wasn’t in the theater all afternoon. I picked up the station wagon at two-thirty, and went to town. I spent two hours returning last week’s props — since it was Monday — and two hours more picking up some of next week’s props, and didn’t get back to the theater till half past six. “Captain” Einstein had checked my alibi, and it was complete. I had spent a busy afternoon.

So Ling made me Chairman of the Committee on Grisly Evidence. I said, “No.”

Ling said, “Andy, you’re the only one. You’re the only one of us who couldn’t possibly have killed Heather. If I appoint anybody else, I just might be appointing the killer. That wouldn’t work out so well.”

“Why don’t you appoint yourself? You’re the boss around here, for God’s sake.”

“I might be the killer,” he said.

“Phooey.”

“All right, Andy, who’s your candidate for killer?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then don’t say phooey, Chairman.”

So I was Chairman. I became resigned to the fact, and then I sent everybody else away and talked with Edna Stanton and Russ Barlow.

Barlow first:

Q: Where were you all afternoon?

A: Working on that unprintable lightboard.

Q: There are ladies present.

A: If she ain’t heard it before, she don’t know what it means.

Q: All right, never mind. Did you see Heather on the sofa?

A: Sure. I saw her go over there. She made an unprintable pass at me again, the dried-up old unprintable.

Q: What time was this?

A: Three o’clock. On the button.

Q: How do you know it was on the button?

A: Because I finally got the unprintable clock on the unprintable lightboard working at two minutes to three. I set the clock, see? Then she come staggering in, like always, and tried to rape me.

Q: And then she went over to the soft?

A: Like a tug in a heavy gale.

Q: And you spent the entire afternoon at the lightboard?

A: I had a couple head breaks. You know. And I went out and watched the rehearsal a while.

Q: Can you give me the times you were away from the lightboard?

A: I went away at three o’clock, right after she racked out on the sofa, and came back at three forty-two. The unprintable clock was still working.

Q: Did you leave there any other times?

A: A little after four, I went over to the scene dock and got a screwdriver from Charlie. The little one. Mine was too big.

Q: You said something about head breaks.

A: Yeah, two of them. The first one was at three o’clock, when I hung around out front and watched the rehearsal a while. The second one was at five-thirty. On the button again. And I got back at twenty-four minutes to six. I was watching that unprintable clock. You know it’s busted again?

Q: I didn’t know that.

A: I looked at it this morning. It conked out at midnight.

Q: But it was working right yesterday?

A: On the button. With my watch.

Q: And when you went to get the screwdriver from Charlie, in the scene dock?

A: A couple minutes after four. Say five after. And I wasn’t gone more’n two minutes.

Q: We’ll give it lots of leeway-Sometime between four o’clock and ten after, you were gone for two minutes. Right?

A: Right.

Q: Did that cop ask you these questions?

A: Not in so much detail.

Q: How do you mean?

A: He asked me where I was between three and six, and I told him by the lightboard. So he asked me if I was there every minute of the time, and I said no, I took a couple head breaks.

Q: That’s all? He didn’t get the times?

A: Nope.

Q: Then how the devil does he expect to get anywhere?

A: Don’t ask me. You know these unprintable cops.

So I thanked him, and sent him away, and said to Edna, “Now, we’ve got ourselves a timetable. That GP they brought in, calls himself a medical examiner, said she was killed no later than six o’clock. She got there at three. Russ was in plain view most of that time, so she had to be killed either between three and three-forty-two or between four and four-ten or between five-thirty and five-thirty-six.”

She said, “Unless Russ is lying, Andy.”

“Okay. If he’s lying, that means he did it himself. If we use his timetable and eliminate every other possibility, then it was him.”

She said, “I think you’re wonderful, Andy.”

So the great detective necked with a suspect a while. Although she wasn’t really a suspect. Not to me.

We were interrupted by Einstein, back to ask some more questions of his own. But still not the sensible ones. He was asking us about what we did for a living back in New York, and did we know Heather before this summer, and where we lived before New York, and things like that. Then he went away again, presumably to send teletypes all over the place and find out whether or not we were, as he suspected, a gang of desperate criminals posing as actors.

I went back to my own questioning, of Edna this time:

Q: When did this rehearsal start?

A: Two o’clock. Well, it was supposed to start at two o’clock.

Q: Everybody was late, I take it. As usual.

A: Some of the kids had gone off to Berger’s Kill in Archer’s car. They didn’t get back till almost two-thirty.

Q: You were holding the book, right?

A: That’s right. And the watch.

Q: Oh, god glory! A line rehearsal?

A: Sure. Monday, you know. We went through the whole play, for lines and timing.

Q: Starting when?

A: At twenty to three. And it ended at quarter to six.

Q: Get the master script, will you, honey? And lots of paper and pencil.

A: I was going to tell you all this before, but you started kissing me.

Q: I may do it again.

I did. But I waited till she brought back the master script.

A master script is something like a three-dimensional maze, with the Start at page one and the Finish three acts later. It’s made up by the assistant director, held by her during rehearsals, and shared by the stage manager and light man and sound man during performances.

Here’s the way it’s made up: The assistant director takes two copies of the script (acting version, from Samuel French) and cuts them up into their separate pages, then glues one page each to a sheet of loose-leaf filler paper. This bundle is then put, hopefully in proper order, into a filler. The assistant director marks, in pencil around each glued-in page, all of the director’s instructions for movement and stage business, with arrows to the appropriate actor and place. Light cues are added later, in blue pencil, and sound cues in red pencil. Line changes are made in pen. Pretty soon, the whole thing is impossible for anybody in the world to read, except a stage manager, who uses it as his Bible during each performance.

The master script of Love Among The Falling Stars, which Edna now brought me, was practically clean. There were a few line changes inked in, that was all, and tiny pencil notations at the beginning and ending of each scene. These pencil notes had been made yesterday afternoon by Edna, timing the rehearsal for pace. It had, as they always do, run overlong.

They’d started act one at twenty minutes to three, and had gone through the three scenes of that act without a break, finishing at twenty to four. That was when Russ had grown bored with watching, and had gone on back to his recalcitrant lightboard and his unprintable clock. Archer Marshall, phony director, had yakked at them about interpretation of various lines for fifteen minutes, and at five to four they had started act two, going through both scenes without a break and finishing at twenty-five to five. After ten minutes of directorial advice, and five minutes of head break, they had gone on to act three, from ten to five till quarter to six.

Number one: Russ had been at the lightboard during the entirety of both act breaks.

Number two: If it was one of the twelve actors who had killed Heather Sanderson, he or she had to do it during a period when he or she had no lines, the character not then being onstage.

Number three: In later questioning, the entire cast corroborated Edna’s alibi. She had taken no breaks at all during the entire afternoon, but had sat at all times on the stage apron, in front of the curtain, holding the ‘book’, the master script, timing the rehearsal and prompting people who forgot their lines.

Number four: Aside from the twelve actors, this left four other suspects; Archer Marshall, phony director; Sterling McCall, producer; Charlie Wilbe, set builder; and Russ Barlow, technician.

So. Edna and I decided to leave the actors for later and see if we could eliminate all four of the others at the outset. That evening, after supper and after Edna had driven her vintage Plymouth back into town and home and mother, I started questioning more suspects:

Charlie Wilbe:

Q: You were working on next week’s set all afternoon, Charlie?

A: Since nine o’clock in the morning. Jack Andrews and Ray Hennessy helped out in the morning, before lunch.

Q: But you worked alone all afternoon.

A: Sure. They was all rehears-in.

Q: What time did you start, in the afternoon?

A: Just about two, maybe a few minutes after.

Q: What work were you doing?

A: Fixin up a design for the set, mostly. Checkin to see what flats and doors and stairs I had around the dock, and puttin a design on paper.

Q: Was the scene dock door open or closed?

A: Open. You know how hot it gets in there, middle of the afternoon. No ventilation at all. One of these days, I’m goin to knock a window in the wall there, Ling or no Ling. I put it up high enough, nobody’s goin to get in from outside.

Q: Could you see the stage at all, from where you were working?

A: Part of the time. Up till maybe three-thirty, I was around and about in the dock there, cataloging what I had to work with, lumber and paint and muslin and the rest of it.

Q: And after three-thirty?

A: I was workin on paper, on the design. I pulled my little table over by the door, for the breeze, and sat there the whole time after that, right up to six o’clock.

Q: All right, now. Your scene dock is off the wings to stage-left, the opposite side from the green room and “the dressing rooms. And you were sitting in the doorway, looking out toward the stage. Could you see Russ Barlow?

A: Over there at the lightboard? Sure. He had a light playin right on him, where he was workin there. I don’t know if he could see me so good, inside the doorway like I was.

Q: Well, how much were you looking out at the stage? I mean, most of the time you were looking at the paper you were working on, weren’t you?

A: Maybe half and half. I’d keep lookin out there, visualizing the way the sets would go — we got a three-set show for next week, with set changes at the scene breaks, so I got to figure stuff with double-sided flats, swiveled on king pins, and stuff like that. I did a lot of lookin out at the stage, trying to see how it would all fit. I could look right through the double arch in the set on that side, and see the sofa and Russ both.

Q: And you didn’t see anyone else on-stage at all?

A: Not a one. I couldn’t see Heather on the sofa because of the angle.

Q: Well, would it have been possible for anyone to have walked out on stage, maybe out to the middle—

A: You mean kill Heather while I was sittin there? Not a chance. I was facin that way all the time, and lookin out every few seconds.

Number five: Russ’s story was corroborated by Charlie. This still left Charlie a suspect during the first act, but it also limited the time of the murder to before three-thirty.

Number six: When I went back and asked Charlie how much “Captain” Einstein had asked him, I got the same answer as from Russ. Einstein had wanted to know where he was, and if he’d been looking at the stage steadily for three hours, and a simple no was all the answer he stayed around for.

After Charlie, I questioned Archer Marshall, phony director, who smelled, as usual, of Kentucky’s finest:

Q: You were running a line rehearsal all afternoon, is that right?

A: Absolutely.

Q: You started the rehearsal at twenty to three?

A: I suppose it was something like that. I called the rehearsal for two o’clock, but you know the kind of cooperation I get around here.

Q: But everybody was present when you did get started?

A: In body, if not in mind.

Q: During the afternoon, I suppose people left the group from time to time, to go to the bathroom or whatever. Did you ever have to wait for somebody, who’d stayed away too long?

A: Oddly enough, no. But of course it was just the first rehearsal, so I suppose they weren’t bored with the show yet.

Q: Did you have to have someone read for somebody else who was absent at any time during the rehearsal?

A: That is one practice I refuse to have anything to do with, particularly in a line rehearsal.

Q: Well, Edna read for Heather, didn’t she?

A: Andy, you don’t want me to speak unkindly of the dead, do you?

Q: All right, never mind—

A: We could consider ourselves fortunate if Heather attended any rehearsals, but certainly not a line rehearsal.

Q: All right. Now, what about you? Did you leave the group at any time?

A: Oh, am I a suspect? Hew delightful.

Q: Did you?

A: Yes, I suppose I did. I imagine someone else w ill tell you if I don’t.

Q: Where did you go?

A: Over to the house a minute. I suppose I was gone five minutes in all.

Q: You left the theater completely? Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?

A: No. It locks automatically when you close it. I unlocked it when I came back, and then it locked again.

Q: What did you go over to the house for?

A: These questions are getting just a trifle personal, Andy. I don’t want you to think I murdered poor Heather, of course, but on the other hand you aren’t an official investigator, are you?

Q: All right, never mind that. Just tell me when you went over to the house.

A: When? To the minute? I really couldn’t say.

Q: During which act, then?

A: Oh, first act. Definitely. I couldn’t have lasted into the sec— Well. Is that all?

That was all. Marshall had gone over to the house for his bottle, of course. If he was telling the truth. On the other hand, he’d very conveniently gone after that bottle during the first act, which had been going on during the time span I was interested in.

Number seven: Archer Marshall was still a suspect.

After Archer, I questioned Ling:

Q: All I want to know is where you were between three and three-thirty yesterday afternoon.

A: You’ve got it narrowed down that much?

Q: I sure do.

A: Well, I’ll be derned. Good boy, Andy. I was in the office, upstairs over the lobby.

Q: Anybody with you?

A: Not a soul. Just me and the phone. That rang from time to time, but I wouldn’t know exactly when.

Q: You’ve got a window in the wall overlooking the auditorium. Did you spend any time looking through that window, watching the rehearsal going on?

A: You mean, did I see anybody slink away and go around the side toward the stage? Sony, Andy. I was at my desk all afternoon. Doing my own typing a lot of the time, in fact, since Archer stole Edna from me.

Q: Okay, Ling. Thanks.

A: If you’ve got it narrowed way down like this, Andy, down to a specific half-hour, you ought to go talk to Einstein.

Q: I want to hand him the killer on a platter.

A: Silver salver.

Q: I never pronounce that right.

A: Anyway, you ought to go to Einstein with what you’ve got. Really, Andy. Maybe it’ll get him on the stick. Besides, if you get too close, the killer may go after you.

Q: That’s a happy thought.

A: You talk to Einstein, Andy.

So I talked to Einstein. I had the suspects narrowed down to nine, half the original number. Of the nine now exonerated, I was one and so was Edna, Russ was fully accounted for, and six of the actors had parts sufficiently large in act one to preclude their leaving the group for any length of time. That left, still on my list of suspects, the other six actors, plus Charlie Wilbe and Ling and Archer Marshall.

I gave it all to Einstein, carefully and in detail, and he sat there behind his desk and just looked at me. No expression at all. He was a short and heavy man, well-jowled, and when he had no expression at all on his face he had no expression at all. Just a head, with smallish eyes and roundish nose and palish lips.

When I was finished, he nodded once and said, “Very cute. Very neat.”

“I just asked questions,” I told him. “I just asked around, that’s all.” I was feeling kind of smug, and proud of myself.

Then he said, “Now, you tell me just one thing more, my city-slicker friend.”

“What’s that?”

“Just why am I supposed to take your word for any of this?”

That one set me back. I stammered, “Well — well, you just — well, all you have to do is ask. Just ask everybody, the same as I did, and see if the stories check out or not.”

“Is that right? And why am I supposed to take their word for it?”

“Well, you’ve got to take somebody’s word!”

“Why?”

“For Pete’s sake, do you think we all did it together? Do you think it’s a great big scheme with eighteen people in it?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s been known to happen.”

“You’re nuts,” I said, before I thought.

He flushed. “You watch your language,” he said. “You’re not in New York now.”

“I could tell that by the police procedure,” I told him. I said that after I thought. I didn’t care whether I got him mad or not, he’d got me mad.

“You just go on back to your the-ay-ter,” he said, “and let me handle the police procedure.”

“So you don’t care what I found out.”

“Not a particle.”

I got to my feet and left. But hanging around theater five years had made it impossible for me to leave anyplace without an exit line. I delivered it from the doorway: “I just want you to know something, Mister. We aren’t laughing at you because we’re from New York. We’re laughing at you because you’re such a lousy cop.

Which didn’t help matters at all, but I felt better.

Back at the farmhouse, I had a kitchen conference with Ling, over two cups of coffee. I told him what had happened between me and Einstein, and he shook his head and said, “We sure got a winner, Andy.”

“I noticed.”

“That’s what they do with the cops who don’t work out,” he said. “They can’t bump them off the force, because they’re on State Civil Service, and they never goof up enough to satisfy the regulations. So they’re ship-peel off to some backwoods corner of the state like Clinton, where nothing much ever happens so they can’t do too much harm.”

“This one’s doing a lot of harm,” I said. “This one’s lousing up our whole season. We’ve got six weeks to go this summer, and he may never let us open.”

“I wrote a friend of mine in New York,” Ling said. “A lawyer. Maybe he’ll know some way we can force Einstein to let us open up again.”

“That’s all we need,” I said. “A New York lawyer wandering around. Einstein would clap us in irons just to save face.”

“Let’s wait and see what my friend has to say. In the meantime, you tell everybody what happened, and tell them you’ve quit your amateur detecting.”

“Why quit? The only way we’ll open is to give Einstein the killer.”

“You don’t really have to quit if you don’t want, But you’re doing too good a job. If you keep poking around, the killer may figure you’re too dangerous to live.”

“So I tell everybody I’m quitting, and then I poke around on the sly.”

“If you want to. I know I wouldn’t. Why not hold off at least until my friend writes back?”

“If you say so.”

“It’s up to you, Andy. I just wouldn’t want to see you get your throat cut.”

“Neither would I.”

Edna came in, then, from town, and we exchanged information. I told her about my interview with “Captain” Einstein, and she told me about local opinion in town. Local opinion in town pretty much agreed with Einstein that we were a crazy bunch of beatniks from New York who’d ganged up to kill one of our number, and local opinion in town wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we came riding in with burning brands and set fire to the whole town one night. That’s the way beatniks were.

“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all,” I said. “I’d like to see Clinton in flames.”

Edna said, “My mother doesn’t want me to come out here any more. She’s “afraid all you beatniks will murder me, too.”

“My plans are a little bit different from that,” I told her.

Ling got to his feet and said, “Okay, I can take a hint.”

After he left, Edna and I took her Plymouth out to a secluded section of Berger’s Kill and necked the afternoon away. It was a lot more fun than playing detective.

When we got back to the theater, it was suppertime. Edna stayed over, and afterwards I said, “Get the stopwatch from Ling and come on over to the theater. I want to check something out.”

She got it, and we went over, and turned on all the lights. Then Edna timed me with the stopwatch while I played murderer.

I sat in a chair in the first row of the audience. Edna sat on the stage apron, as beautiful as a new love, dressed in an old flannel shirt and faded blue jeans. Every once in a while, I’d look at her in a certain light or at a certain angle, and I’d think about the acting bug and the perpetually ailing mother, and they wouldn’t seem so all-fired important any more.

Well. Anyway. When she nodded to me, I got to my feet and sauntered away to the left. Then I ducked through the door beside the stage and up the steps past the prop room door to the green room. I turned right and crossed the green room, flanked by two dressing rooms on each side of me, and through the well-oiled soundproof door to the wings. The lightboard was just to my right. No one could come through this door without being seen by Russ, if he was working at the lightboard.

I tip-toed across the flooring to the edge of the drop cloth, and then I could walk naturally, the double thickness of drop cloth and carpet muffling my steps. I went over to where the sofa had been — the police had taken it away, apparently for further scrutiny — and stood there a few seconds, as long as I imagined it would take to stroke a sharp knife across a sleeping woman’s throat. The curtain was open today, and Edna watched me, glancing from time to time at her watch and smiling encouragingly.

Turning, I retraced my steps, came around through the wings and the green room and down the steps and through the door and back over to the same seat in the front row, where I’d started from. Edna thumbed the watch, studied it, and said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds.”

“I doubt he did it any faster than that,” I said, “and I bet he did it maybe a minute or two slower.”

Then she said, “What did you do with the knife?”

“What knife?”

“The knife you killed Heather with.”

“I wasn’t using any props, honey, I—” And that’s where it hit me.

She looked at me and grinned. “I can be a detective, too, Andy,” she said.

“And I can be a defective. You’re right, you’re right, forget the two minutes and seventeen seconds. The killer had to get rid of the knife. He had to pick up the knife, too, come to think of it.”

She bounced down from the apron and said, “It might still be here. If it was a good enough hiding place for right after the murder, it might be good enough forever.”

“I hope it isn’t that good. I looked up at the stage and around at the auditorium and said, “Well, where shall we begin?”

“The dressing rooms, I suppose.”

We searched the four dressing rooms, and we didn’t find anything. So we tried the prop room. The prop room is down underneath the stage, a long narrow low-ceilinged room formed when the stage platform was put in. It’s barely five feet high, and we keep all our permanent props down there. Permanent props are bric-a-brac and whatnot and thingamajigs and assorted white elephants that might come in handy some day.

I owned one of the four keys to the bolt-and-bar prop room door lock. The other three belonged to Ling and Archer and Russ. So I said to Edna, “if there’s something down here, like the knife for instance, it cuts our suspects down to two.”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “unlock the door, then, and let’s find out.”

So I unlocked the door, and dragged the heavy thing open, and led the way down the stairs. The only light was a bare bulb oh the wall beside the door, which I switched on on my way by.

It was dusty down there, and jam-packed full of junk. Edna took one side, and I took the other, and we searched for sharp implements not covered by dust.

We’d been looking maybe three minutes, when all of a sudden there was a shattering of glass and the light went out. I spun around, just in time to see and hear the door chunk closed. And then, in pitch blackness, the sound of the bar being dropped into place, and the lock-bolt slamming home.

And there we were.

You couldn’t see a thing in there, not a thing. The lone door was heavy and solid, and it fit into the jamb without a crack showing. There was even a step up at the threshold, against which the bottom edge of the door nestled as snug as lovers in a clinch. The walls on all four sides were simply wooden slats in front of concrete block foundation or packed earth. The ceiling was the reinforced floor of the stage.

Not only was there no light, there was no sound. Beneath the thick stage floor, with the addition of the drop cloth and carpet atop that, we were effectively muffled off from the world. We could hammer on the door if we wanted, but no one would hear us. The bar kept the door absolutely snug against the jamb, so there was no vibration. It was thick heavy wood, and when hit it gave off only a dull thud, which you could barely hear ten feet away.

In the first few seconds after the door slammed shut and the light went out, there was only silence and blackness and astonishment and terror. Then I heard a faint bumping sound to my left, and a trembling hand touched my arm, slid down it, grasped my hand.

I could hear her breathing, rapid shivering breaths. I reached out toward her, involuntarily straightening up, and cracked my head against the ceiling. I swore, and she started to giggle, and I grabbed her and held her tight, because the giggling wasn’t because anything was funny, it was just the prelude to screaming.

Gradually, the trembling left her body, and in the darkness I stroked her hair and murmured her name and silently cussed myself for a thousand different kinds of fool for letting her get into a spot like this.

He meant us to die here. The theater was closed, no one would be coming over for days, not until Einstein relented, and that wasn’t the most foreseeable of futures.

There was no food here. There was no light. And there was very little air.

We would suffocate in this dungeon before we’d starve. And we might go crazy and hurt ourselves in the darkness before that.

“Edna,” I whispered. “Sweet Edna. Darling. Edna.”

Gradually, she calmed, and finally she answered, whispering, “Andy! What are we going to do? Oh, Andy, what are we going to do?”

“Light,” I said. “Light first, and then we’ll be able to think better. I’m going to let you go now. Is it all right? Just for a second, I’ve got to find my matches.”

“All right,” she whispered. There was no need to whisper, but I understood why she did. I had to fight the same urge myself.

I released her, and took out my matches, and lit one. First, I smiled with what I hoped was reassurance at her pale face, and then I counted the matches still in the folder. Twelve.

“There ought to be candles down here,” I said. “Something that will burn, anyway. I’ll hold the match, you look.”

That was part of it, of course, part of the way to kill us. If we just stood there in the darkness, sooner or later we would die. So we had to act, we had to more. And every motion, every step, every movement of an end table or opening of a carton, swirled the dust into the air, choking us. Every match we lit — and every candle, if we found any — used up the air that much faster. Every act we made used up our energy and our strength that much sooner.

We found the packet of birthday cake candles on the tenth match, just as it was beginning to burn my fingers. I lit the eleventh, and we found a cracked china plate, and lit the candles, one by one, setting them in their own wax drippings on the plate. We lit four candles, and then we could see. With four candles left.

Birthday candles burn fast. In that stale dusty air, they also burned low. We were on the second four before I found two larger candles, stuffed away in the bottom of a carton beneath a lot of maroon drapery. They were large red Christmas candles. We lit one of them, and blew the little candles out, and then we looked around to see if there was any way to save ourselves.

To begin with. I hied to get more air into the room. There were a couple of rusty cavalry sabers down there. I took one of them and jabbed it down against the line where the door met the step. I finally managed to jam it down in, but when I applied leverage, trying to separate door and step just a fraction of an inch, the saber broke and I went reeling back down the stairs. So that wouldn’t work.

It was hot in there, and my mouth was already parched and dry. I couldn’t seem to get enough air in my lungs. Edna’s breathing was loud and ragged, and we were both stiff and cramped from having to stoop constantly under the low ceiling.

With the candle, I studied the door and the walls. The only place that seemed even remotely possible was the wall to either side of the stairwell. These two triangular sections were, with the door itself, the only part of the room above ground level. On the right side, the wall separated us from one of the dressing rooms. On the left side, it separated us from the auditorium.

The auditorium side was impossible. The proscenium wall, of which this was a part, was concrete block faced with plaster. That left the other side, leading to the dressing room.

The local businessmen who’d bought this place and paid for the conversion of it to a theater had done too damn good a job. They’d been afraid of a fire, or of the building collapsing, or any sort of disaster like that that would have reflected on them in the community. So the conversion had built solidly.

This wall separating us from the dressing room — separating us from life — was a three-quarter inch thickness of plywood nailed to two-by-four uprights and supports, with another three-quarter inch thickness of plywood on the other side forming the wall of the dressing room. And it was the only possibility.

I made Edna sit down, to conserve her strength, and I took the other saber and started to poke with it at the wall. I knew I couldn’t cut through the wood with a lousy tool like that, so what I tried to do was dig out the nails holding it to the two-by-fours. They were finishing nails, countersunk.

I kept at it and kept at it, and the saber was just too big and awkward. I threw it away in disgust finally, and Edna got to her feet, saying, “Should I look for something else? Something better?”

“Anything, for God’s sake. With a sharp point on it, and short enough to handle.”

We both searched, and I’d just run across a little wooden box containing lots of spools of thread and two pairs of scissors when Edna said, in a funny rising sort of a voice, “Andy?”

I looked over at her. She was staring at something in front of her. “What is it?”

“Andy, please?”

I went stumbling over doodads and whatsits to her side, and looked where she was looking.

Do you remember the Raggedy Ann doll, with the triangle eyes? There was Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, and down among all the other junk in the prop room was a Raggedy Ann. Looking at it, for a minute I became Raggedy Andy.

There was a knife stuck in it, right through the body. And a couple of brown stains on the material just under the knife blade, as though the doll had bled. Raggedy Ann looked up at us with her black triangle eyes, and she had a knife stuck all the way through her.

“That’s it,” I said. Then I realized I’d whispered it. I cleared my throat and spoke aloud. “That’s what he used.”

“He was watching us,” she said. She looked at me, and her eyes were wide, and not triangle-shaped at all. “He watched and watched, and if we hadn’t come down in here he wouldn’t have bothered us.”

“He knew we’d find it.”

“Andy, my mother will start to worry, she’ll call the police. They’ll search for us, won’t they?”

“Not on your life. I’ll tell you just what he did when he left here, after he locked us in. He took the station wagon away and hid it, and if anybody says, ‘Where’s Edna?’ he’ll say, ‘I don’t know, and I haven’t seen Andy either.’ And everybody’ll say, ‘Those two crazy kids eloped, at a time like this, what do you think of that?’ ”

“They won’t even look for its.”

“Not here they won’t. They’ll look in New York, or in some state where there’s no waiting period to get married, but they won’t look in here.”

“Andy, I’m scared.”

“That’s two of us.” I remembered the scissors then, and went over and got them. “But we’ve still got a chance,” I said, showing them to her.

I went back to work. She insisted on helping me, using the other pair of scissors.

The scissors helped. Finishing nails have practically no head at all, but the scissors could grip them and give me at least a little leverage, once I’d dug some of the wood away. But whoever had done this job had loved hammering» nails. There were thousands of them, millions. Or at least it seemed that way.

The first candle gave out, and we lit the second. The room smelled like a decayed tooth. I felt dizzy, and there were green and yellow flashes at the corner of my eyes.

Edna fainted. I half-carried, half-dragged her down the steps and stretched her out on the floor. Her breathing was quick and jagged. I went back up and fought nails out of plywood with sewing scissors.

The second candle burned out, and we were in darkness again. I had less than half of the nails out. But the bottom corner, farthest from the door, was free. I went cautiously down the steps and pawed around in the blackness till I found the saber, and brought it back up the steps again. I closed my eyes against the dust, and by touch alone managed to slip the saber in between the corner of the plywood and the two-by-four. I pushed it in almost to the hilt, where the metal was thick and should be less prone to break. Then, with some leverage to help me, I tugged on the saber, trying to pry the plywood free.

The sound of squealing nails was then the most beautiful song in the world. I heaved on the saber, again and again, and each time the nails would squawk, and each time I edged the saber higher up the wall. I kept slamming my fingers between the saber handle and the wall corner, but I didn’t care. Not then. All I cared about was the beautiful sound those nails made.

I got it off. One huge chunk of plywood, millions of nails still sticking out of its other side. I wrestled it slowly down the stairs, afraid any second it would slip away from me and go crashing down onto Edna, but I finally got it tucked away to one side, and then I went back up and attacked the other side of the wall.

That was easier. I only had to push, with nothing beyond the plywood to hold it back. I sat on the top step, my back braced against the other wall, and kicked out with both feet until I saw light around the edges of the plywood, and then I kicked it even harder.

Air came in, that was the thing. Air and a touch of gray dim light, and for the first time I really thought there was a chance I might live through this.

And for the first time, I got mad at the beast that had locked us in here to die. Up till now, I’d been too worried about Edna, and too worried about myself, to have room for any other emotion. Now I had plenty of room. Plenty of room. And I needed every bit of it.

I kicked the wall down, and went crawling out to partial gloom. The theater lights were out, but there was a window in the green room, over the exit door, and daylight streamed through that, some of it finding its way into this dressing room, the door not completely closed.

I staggered to my feet and went stumbling out of the dressing room and out to the wings and the lightboard. I threw the master lever up, and every light in the place went on. Then I went back around to the prop room door and unlocked it, and carried Edna up out of there.

I left her on the sofa in the green room, still unconscious but breathing more regularly, and went back into the prop room and found the doll with the knife in it. He might even have been dumb enough to leave his fingerprints on the knife handle, so I carried it out by the doll’s left arm. I went out of the theater and around the building to the farmhouse. The sun was high. It was almost noon. We’d been in there fifteen hours.

Jack Andrews was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Where the hell have you been? Where’s Edna?”

“Just listen to me,” I said. It was one of two, Ling or Archer.

But he said, “You married?”

“Do I look married? Listen to me, God damn it.”

He saw the Raggedy Ann I was carrying, then, and said, “What the hell is that?”

“Shut up, Jack. Just shut up, that’s all. You let me ask the questions, God damn it.”

“I just don’t—”

“Shut up! Now! Now, tell me, where did you go after supper last night?”

“Where did I—”

“Now stop that. Answer, don’t ask. Where did you go after supper last night?”

“Well— A bunch of us went into Clinton, to the movies.”

“Did Archer go?”

“No, it was just—”

“Did Ling go?”

“If you’ll let me talk, I’ll tell you who—”

“Did Ling go?”

“No, it was—”

“All right, never mind.”

He started asking questions again, and I went around him to the front of the house and upstairs. Ling and Archer, unlike the rest of us, had private rooms, facing each other down at the end of the hall.

I tried Archer first. I went storming into his room and found him sitting at his writing table, the bottle tilted up over his mouth. He ducked it down fast, spilling some, and glared at me, starting to spout things about knocking first, and I overrode him, saying, “I got about ten seconds, Archer. I want you to listen, and answer fast. Where did you go after supper last night?”

“Go? I didn’t go anywhere, I stayed right here.”

“In this room?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Well, of course. What in the world—”

I held the doll up by its arms, and showed it to him. “I think you’re it, Archer,” I said. “I’m going to Einstein with this, and this time I’m going to force him to listen. Your fingerprints may still be on this knife, but either way you don’t have any alibi for either time; and—”

“Either time? Now, wait, wait.”

“You wait, Archer.” I backed for the door. “Just wait for Einstein.”

“Wait, please. I wasn’t alone!”

I stopped, my hand on the knob. “What?”

“Bobbi Barten was with me. Ask her, she’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to bruit it around, Andy, you can understand that, but—”

He kept talking. I suppose he did, he would. But I wasn’t listening, because I was listening to something else. Somebody was running down the hallway.

I yanked open the door, and went after him. He’d been in his room, he’d heard me shouting at Archer, he’d come out in the hall to listen, and as soon as he’d heard Archer come up with an alibi he’d known it was all over.

“Ling!” I shouted, but he kept going. I could hear his footsteps going down the stairs.

I ran after him, and got to the head of the stairs just as the front door slammed. I went down, three at a time, and as I got to the front door I heard the sudden growl of Ling’s own car starting, the red MG he kept parked around at the side of the house.

I went down off the stoop and around to the side, and he came roaring straight at me, hunched over the wheel. I threw the Raggedy Ann at him, and jumped out of the way of the car just in time, and rolled over and over and sat up just in time to see the collision.

Einstein was arriving, just turning his official car off the road when Ling came barreling out from beside the house in the little MG, and they met head-on.

So Einstein got his man after all.

They both lived through it, and I’m sorry to say I can’t feel happy about either of them. But at least the accident hospitalized Einstein, and the state had to send up another man, who turned out to have a brain in his head.

It was Ling. In the hospital, he told how and why.

How: He looked down from his office window, and saw Russ watching the rehearsal, so the coast was clear. He’d started to kill her twice before, but somebody had been in sight both times. He got the knife out of his desk drawer, where he’d been keeping it for a couple of weeks, and went downstairs and out the front way and around to the green room entrance. He went in, and on-stage, and heard Charlie Wilbe wrestling flats around deep in the scene dock. He went over and cut her throat, and blood spurted unexpectedly, so he went down into the prop room and wiped his hands off with an old piece of drapery. He was mad at the blood being on his hands, and I guess that’s why he jabbed the knife into the Raggedy Ann. He left it there, hidden deep in with all the junk, figuring there was too much sharp weaponry down there anyway for one more or less to be suspect, and he’d gone back to work. While he was gone, the phone was off the hook, just in case any calls came in.

And why: That was in the contract in his desk drawer. He’d told us all it was a sixty-forty profit split he had with Heather Sanderson, and that was partially true. It was a sixty-forty split of the profits over and above Heather’s salary. And her salary was a thousand dollars a week, eleven thousand for the full season.

He’d been convinced her name would pack them in. He’d been wrong. At the end of the season, there wouldn’t be any profit. And there wouldn’t be any eleven thousand for Heather. Also in the contract was what she would get in lieu of salary. The theater.

So he was getting revenge, because she hadn’t fulfilled her promise to load the theater with customers. And he was saving the theater. He killed her the way he did because he had a refinement for his revenge: Her murder would publicize the theater. In death, she would draw the patrons as she hadn’t drawn them in life.

If he hadn’t tried to kill Edna and me, I would almost sympathize with him. Heather was a has-been and a lush, and she’d taken Ling for a ride.

As to why he’d suggested I play detective in the first place, the reason wasn’t exactly ego-building. He figured I couldn’t possibly learn anything dangerous, and I might inadvertently help by goofing things up and confusing the cops. At the very least, he hoped my eager-beaver amateur detecting would convince Einstein we were on the up-and-up, so he’d let us open the theater again. But when I started doing so much better than Einstein, and when I started searching the theater, he got rattled.

But there was, from it all, one happy conclusion. Edna could never convince her mother she’d been out all night only because someone had tried to murder her. When she got home, she found her bags packed, and her mother gave her the bit about never darken my door again.

So what could she do? She had to marry me.

Paid in Full

“Old bills,” I said. “I insist on that, they must be old bills.”

“Of course,” he murmured, smiling at me in that secretive way he affected. His face always looked hooded to me, remaining me of those blackout shields on automobile headlights in the war. With that face, with that smile, with that insinuating honeyed voice, no word he said could possibly sound sincere or truthful. But surely no one can lie all the time.

Most of what I knew of him I doubted. His name for instance, which he’d murmured was Sylvan Kelso, and which sounded too unlikely to be either the truth or a falsehood. His claimed feelings of friendliness for me, which I understood at once was artificial; I’ve had such buddies before, among insurance salesmen and candidates for minor political office. And the nation for which he claimed to be operating: Bulgaria! That couldn’t possibly be true.

The only truth of which I was sure was that he wished to buy from me what I was perfectly willing to sell. Willing, that is, if all my conditions were satisfactorily met, which is why we were meeting for the third time here in this dim bar in Arlington, not far from Chain Bridge.

“And small denomination,” I said to him now, as we sat crouched toward one another in the rear booth. “Nothing bigger than a twenty.”

“Ahh,” he said, “that will make a bulky package.”

“Not very,” I said. “Two packages, anyway. Half before, half after.”

“Your distrust, Mr. Stilmont,” he assured me in oiled tones, “is quite unnecessary.

“I’ve got to protect myself,” I told him.

“Of course you must. Certainly.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re liable to pull.”

He spread doughy hands. “Not a thing, Mr. Stilmont,” he said, “I do assure you. After all, why should I do anything to offend you? This is merely our first transaction.”

“Our only transaction,” I said, somewhat bitterly. “You know as well as I do there’s only the one valuable file I have access to. Once the deal is done, I’m sold out.”

“Temporarily, Mr. Stilmont. But surely in the future, as you climb the ladder of success in government employment, additional occasions will arise when we can be of… profitable service to one another.”

I was about to tell him the answer to that one was also no, but at the last second refrained. If Kelso really did think I might be useful again in the future, so much the better; it would make him less likely to double-cross me or make trouble for me.

But whether he knew the truth about me or not, I surely knew the truth about myself. I had climbed the ladder of success in government employment as far as the Civil Service system could carry me. I hovered at the edge of the executive level now, and here I would hover until retirement. In order to attain the upper ranks in government service, it is necessary to have either one of two things: superlative ability or political influence. I had neither.

Why do you suppose I’d undertaken this transaction in the first place? Do you think I’m a traitor, a spy? Do you think I’m here by choice? Let me tell you something that the progression o your own life has perhaps not yet demonstrated to you. Expenditures increase. Year by year, decade by decade, house by house, job by job, expenditures gradually but unceasingly increase. So long as income also increases — so long, in fact, as one continues to advance in one’s occupation — all is well. But when income levels off, when one has ceased to advance in one’s occupation, then, my friends, all is Hell.

I won’t blame my wife, I won’t blame my children, and I won’t even blame myself. I am the victim, perhaps, of nothing more willful or malicious than a natural law, as though I’d been struck down by a slow lightning bolt.

Be that as it may, the end result of these inexorable economics was my presence here for the third time in a grimy neighborhood tavern with the stout man who called himself Sylvan Kelso, whose assurances rang with such a tinny click, that I was constantly on the verge of throwing over the whole thing, rushing home, and struggling along without the forty thousand dollars.

Well. I went over the points once more in my mind: Old bills. Small denominations. “Oh, yes,” I said. “One thing more. The most important of all.”

Kelso smiled like drawings of the moon. “Merely state it, Mr. Stilmont,” he murmured.

“No counterfeits,” I said. “I’ve heard of that stunt, don’t think I haven’t, people being paid off in counterfeit money smuggled into the country. I worked in the Treasury Department three years and believe me you can’t pass any phony money on me.” My having worked in the Treasury Department was true, but it hardly made me an expert on counterfeit bills; I’d been a file clerk, nothing more. So far as I know, I’ve never so much as seen a counterfeit bill in all my life.

But I was relying on Kelso’s not knowing these details, and apparently he did not, for he smiled more moonlike than ever and said, “Not a chance of it, my dear Stilmont, not the slightest chance. That was a German trick anyway, we wouldn’t do anything of that sort.”

“I just want you to know,” I said, “that I’m keeping my eyes open.”

“As you certainly should,” he declared, thumping his fat palm on the table. “A cautious man is a delight to do business with.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Now, what about payment?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said, lowering his voice, leaning toward me, “when you leave work, walk to the south-east corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street. Near the corner, on the 12th Street side, there will be parked a black taxicab with red lettering. The numeral seven will appear directly beneath the handle of the right front door. The taxi will be driven by a woman wearing an unusual hat.”

“All taxis in Washington,” I said, overstating it slightly, “are driven by women wearing unusual hats.”

“Then concentrate on the numeral seven,” he said. “You will enter this taxi, you will say ‘Dumbarton House, please,’ and the taxi will start off, with you in it.”

I said, “Dumbarton House? Where’s Dumbarton House?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You won’t be going there. On the floor in back you will find an attaché case containing the first half-payment and the camera, plus a typewritten sheet of directions for the camera’s use. You will, taking care not to be seen by passersby, assure yourself of the genuineness of the money, and that it appears in the proper amount, and then you will read the camera instructions until you are certain you can operate the camera correctly. You will then hand the instruction sheet to the driver, and tell her where you wish to be driven.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all for tomorrow,” he said. “The next day, Friday, you will photograph the proper documents as agreed. Once again, after you leave work for the day, you will find the same taxicab waiting in the same place as before. You will enter it, bringing both the camera and the attaché case in which you received your first payment. Now empty, of course. You will be driven to a place where the film may be verified, and then you will take your second payment and go on with your life as though nothing at all had occurred.”

“I want more detail about that last part,” I said. “Where I turn over the camera and get my second payment.”

“Certainly,” he said. “As soon as we order another round of drinks. Barkeep! Two more vodka martinis.”

Well. We got our fresh drinks, and we went over the details of the transaction until I was satisfied, or at least prepared to settle for what I had. Then, understandably nervous and tense, I made my way to my home in Bethesda, downed some straight bourbon in the kitchen, and got into bed beside my sleeping wife. Since I had, in the last few years, developed the habit of spending an occasional evening at a local tavern, there was no excuse necessary; had my wife awakened, my breath would have been sufficient indication of my recent whereabouts.

I slept badly, awaking time after time from terrible dreams in which monsters chased me while I ran through walls of molasses, and at the breakfast table had to listen to a recital of unpaid bills. I drove to work as usual, left my car in its usual slot at the parking garage on E Street, and arrived at work with trembling hands and a splitting headache. All the gins of a hangover, one might say, except that I hadn’t drunk enough the night before to justify such strong symptoms. No, it wasn’t alcohol, it was worry and fear and doubt and shame and shaky determination.

A man does what he can with what he has. All I had of any value was one fairly unimportant national secret. That it was important enough to someone to earn me forty thousand dollars was my very good fortune, and I told myself again and again I’d be a fool to pass this by. Just once, in my lifetime, just once.

An apparently chance encounter had led me into all this in the first place, and of course it was not by chance, but a recital of its appearance and subsequent reality seems unnecessary here. Kelso contacted me, that is sufficient, and found in me someone willing to listen.

That day stretched like a taut rubber band, along which I crawled toward four-thirty an eternity away. Three times my duties took me near the cabinet in which the documents were filed. Harry, the archive guard, told me an unfunny joke about a bellydancer and an eel. We had known one another’s faces for years.

Four-thirty, at long last. I walked to Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street, found the cab, boarded it, was driven aimlessly around Washington while I checked and counted the money — all here, all old bills, all so beautiful to the eye and the hand — and while I familiarized myself with the camera. This camera gave the appearance of a cigarette lighter. It had to be held directly above the flat document, on which a strong light was to shine. The camera should be ten to twelve inches above the document. And so on.

“I’m done,” I said at last to the woman cabdriver in her unusual hat; berries and leaves, on black straw. “Take me to Universal Parking Garage at E Street.”

“The instruction sheet,” she said.

“Oh. Sorry.” I handed it to her, and she drove me to my car.

By the time I got home, the attaché case was safely stashed in the trunk. Late that night, after my wife had gone to sleep, I went out to the garage and transferred the cash to my coffee cans. For several years I have saved Maxwell House coffee cans, piling them up on a shelf above my workbench, using a few of them to store nails and washers and whatnot, vaguely convinced I’ll be using the others for something eventually. Well, now was that eventually. Into the coffee cans went the twenty thousand dollars, and back into the trunk went the empty attaché case.

The actual photographing of the documents was simplicity itself. I took the documents away to my office — Harry told me a racial joke — switched my desk lamp on, and took the pictures in quick succession, five of them. The documents were merely pages of figures, tabulations, specifications, dry as dirt and no doubt meaningless to most people. Essentially meaningless to me as well, although necessary to me from time to time in connection with my administrative duties.

The tiny camera, full of treasonous film, seemed hot in my trouser pocket, branding my thigh. All afternoon I kept holding my watch to my ear, unable to believe it hadn’t stopped. Was it only, was it only, was it only…?

Was it at last four-thirty? Thank God.

The same cab was there again, but this time as I entered it, carrying the empty attaché case, I discovered another passenger already occupying the far side of the rear seat. As I hesitated, he said, “Not to worry, Mr. Stilmont. I am merely to accompany you.”

He didn’t look dangerous. Quite the reverse, he was a pale and slender lad, the kind brought to mind by the word ‘effete.’ I slid in beside him and said, “Where’s the money?”

“On the seat beside our driver,” he said. “You can put that case on the floor there.”

I put the case on the floor, leaned forward, and saw an identical case on the front seat. I said, “I assume I can look at it now.”

“If I might have the camera,” he said.

“I’m glad to get rid of it.” I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. Then — we were in motion by now, darting through Washington traffic — I took the new case onto my lap, and determined that it contained twenty thousand dollars in genuine, old, small bills.

Wonderful, wonderful.

We stopped in front of an elderly boarding house on 8th Street NE. “Wait here,” said the young man, and left the cab, and went into the building.

In a way, I wanted to make conversation with the woman driver, merely to have the reassurance of the sound of voices, but in another way I felt as though I didn’t want to talk to anyone again.

I’d been over it and over it, rationalized it to the last detail. This information I was selling, this would help the opponents, the enemy, the other side — whoever and whatever they were — but only to a small extent, and surely to a degree easily counterbalanced by similar spy networks in their camp. What I had sold was not decisive. I would feel guilty about it the rest of my life, no doubt, but it would be a guilt of manageable size.

The woman, for her part, sat stolid and unmoving, gazing straight ahead through the windshield, her hands resting easily on the steering wheel.

After ten minutes or so, the young man appeared in the doorway, came trotting down the stairs, smiled at me, said to the woman, “Fine,” and went walking away.

The woman said, “Where to?”

“Universal Parking Garage,” I said.

That night I filled the rest of my coffee cans. On Saturday I purchased a new set of tires for my car, paying cash, and also bought a power saw. On Sunday, I took the family to a drive-in. Monday morning I phoned into the office that I was sick, and went shopping. I bought two suits, some other clothing, a decent fishing rod, a pair of sunglasses, and a case of good scotch. I deposited three hundred dollars in our checking account, went home, and explained to my wife I’d won a boxing pool in the office. This was to be my only splurge. From now on, my extra money would be inserted into my income ten, twenty, thirty dollars at a time. It would make the difference, all the difference, give us just that little extra to get us over the hump of our economic bind.

I was beginning to feel better than I had in years.

Tuesday evening they came and arrested me. State police, not Federal. They wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t explain a thing, until they had me in an office surrounded by serious looking men in plain clothes. Then one of the — gray-haired, trim, a pipe smoker — said, “You seem to have come into bit of money all of a sudden, Mr. Stilmont.”

“Money?” I said.

He picked up some bills from the desk; old, small denominations. “You passed these bills Saturday,” he said, “at Ben Franklin Shopping Center. And these you deposited in your personal checking account just yesterday.”

“Counterfeit,” I said.

He said, “I beg your pardon?”

“They did it to me anyway,” I said. “That’s what I was afraid of all the time, counterfeit bills. But I thought, old bills, used bills, how could they be counterfeit? Did you get them, too? Just so you got them, too.”

He said, “I’m not entirely sure I understand, Mr. Stilmont.”

I said, “Those bills. They’re counterfeit, right? Just as I thought they would. That’s how you got onto me.”

“These bills,” he said, holding them up so I could see them, “are perfectly valid. Excellent bills.”

I said, “But—”

“These bills,” he said, “were part of the two hundred thousand dollar haul in the armored car robbery in Baltimore last Wednesday. The numbers of those bills were known, Mr. Stilmont.” He leaned toward me. “Now,” he said, “let’s talk about the rest of the money, Mr. Stilmont.”

The Spoils System

The “supine credulity” of man is said to be his most charming chracteristic; certainly the proponent of the “fast sell” must find it so.

It was in the catacombish club car of the Phoebe Snow, that crack passenger express that roars across the Southern Tier of the Empire State with the speed of an income tax refund, that I most recently met Judd Dooley, a man with a strong sense of family. He is named for his infamous grandfather, the Judd Dooley celebrated in song and wanted poster, the man who, with the aid of patent medicine, gold watch, and lost silver mine stock, opened the great Midwest to the rapid patter, the fast shuffle, and the quick getaway back around the tum of the century, a man sadly neglected by the television industry, which owes him a great deal.

The contemporary Judd Dooley is continuing the family tradition in a ceaseless barrage of non-violent outrages from Kennebunkport to Mexicali, and is usually good for a reminiscence or two on his latest depredations against a public which has grown no less puerile since Grandpa’s time.

Of course, there have been subtle differences in both the customer and the approach since Grandpa Dooley last foisted a genuine gold brick on a fatuous farmer in the bunco belt of the great Midwest. Judd tells me that today’s farmer is a much different cookie from the bucolic boob who supported his grandfather, and a much tougher cookie to crumble. But, says Judd, with a light of reverence in his eye, Grandpa would have felt right at home in today’s suburbia, where the modern housewife controls the income and the modern con man controls the outgo.

“I have just come from Cleveland,” Judd told me, as we sat over Scotch on the rocks while the Phoebe Snow struggled out of Binghamton, “a town with suburbs that would have made Grandpa cry with delight. I was plying the Free Home Demonstration gizmo through a split-level development when—”

“Free Home Demonstration gizmo? I don’t think I know it.”

“You don’t? It’s a little gem — the quickest fast-fin dodge since the invention of Something For Nothing. All it requires is a pocketful of forms, an identification card, an ingratiating smile and ten minutes of rapid chatter. The brand name involved is Electro-Tex Limited, and if the name sounds familiar, you’re half hooked already. The merchandise is a combination washer-dryer-television-radio-popup toaster-oven that retails for a stratospheric sum I won’t even mention. But the company is about to commence an intensive advertising campaign, built around the inane concept of the satisfied customer. Therefore, I have been sent around by the company to selected housewives to offer them a Free Home Demonstration, for a trial six week period, during which time they may have the Electro-Tex Push-Button Dew-It-Awl Wonder Whiz in their home, absolutely free, on the condition that we may use their name and a statement of satisfaction from them in our advertising.”

“I imagine Mrs. America is normally interested by this time,” I said.

“Interested? She couldn’t be more excited if I were giving her a season pass to the Garry Moore show and a two-week vacation for two in Saskatchewan. She is frothing at the mouth.”

“You’ve got her hooked, all right. But where does the swindle come in?”

“With all the wonders I am offering,” said Judd, “could anyone in the world quibble over a measly five-dollar damage deposit?”

“In advance, of course.”

“If I had to wait until after the merchandise showed up, I’d be riding on top of the train, not inside here in the warm. But, as I was saying, I was working this gizmo with great success and dodging the pedigreed hounds who infest suburbia like one of the plagues of Egypt, when I happened to spy a personable young man working the same side of the street and coming my way. His briefcase was black, bulging and polished to perfection. His eyes twinkled with bland sincerity behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles, and his suit was so stark in its lines it’s a wonder he didn’t cut himself putting it on. Here, obviously, was another man in the same line of work.

“Not wanting either of us to create problems for the other, and since there were so many suburbs to choose from in the locality, I called to him, hoping we could work out an equitable distribution of the terrain.

“His name was Dan Miller, and he was perfectly agreeable to a division of spoils. Our occupations being what they are, we were both equipped with maps of the city, so we hunkered down on the sidewalk, surrounded by dogs, children and young men delivering ten cents-off coupons, and divided the city between us in the age-old manner of the conquering invader. We learned that we were staying at the same hotel, a second-class but clean ‘hustlery’ called the Warwick, and made a date to meet in the cocktail lounge to compare notes on our sectors for future use.”

I got to my feet. “Another Scotch?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “yes.”

When I returned with the Scotch, swaying a bit (only an inveterate seafarer could feel really at borne on the Phoebe Snow) I asked, “Was this Dan Miller working the Free Home Demonstration gizmo, too?”

“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the glass, a man with whom first things are always first. “No, he was collecting donations for the Citizen’s Committee to Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful, with some magazine contest for the most beautiful neighborhood in the country as a tie-in. The donation games are all right, in a way, but I only work one when I’m really desperate. He’d have to do more talking per housewife for maybe a dollar donation than I had to do for a five-dollar damage deposit. Dan Miller looked to me like a boy who was building a stake. I’ve already got a couple of permanent dodges that give me a steady trickle of income, mail order things and other gimmicks along the same line, so I haven’t had to fall back on any of the smaller routines for a couple of years now.

“At any rate, I didn’t see Dan Miller for about a week, not until I was finished with my half of the territory. I don’t drink while I’m working, not even an after-dinner cocktail. It’s one of the rules Grandpa instilled in me, and I’ve never known Grandpa to be wrong yet. So I didn’t go to the cocktail lounge until a week later, when I had run out of territory and receipts.”

“Receipts?”

Judd nodded. “Another of Grandpa’s dictums,” he said. “Never leave a sucker empty-handed. Always give him something for his money, some little memento he can press between the leaves of the family bible, even if it’s just a little scrap of paper with Theodore Roosevelt’s signature scrawled on it.

“Well, as I was saying, when I’d completed my tour of Cleveland, I counted my gains and discovered I had damaged the Cleveland deposits to the tune of four thousand dollars. It was time for a celebration. I donned my money belt, a legacy from Grandpa, and went down to the cocktail lounge for a quiet toot.

“Dan Miller was there, happy as an early-morning disc jockey, and it turned out that he had just finished beautifying his half of the city to the tune of twenty-five hundred iron men. We had a congratulatory toast, and then Dan turned serious. He said, ‘Judd, what do you do with your admirable profits?’

“ ‘Spend it or bank it,’ I told him. ‘But mainly spend it.’

“He shook his head. ‘Bad business,’ he told me. ‘Think about your old age. You should invest it. A solid investment today will bring joy to your declining years.’

“For just a minute, I didn’t know what to say. Did Dan Miller think my declining years had set in already? Was he really going to try to sell me gold mine stock? It didn’t seem possible, so I said, ‘Dan, just what do you have in mind?’

“ ‘Uranium mine stock,’ he whispered. He leaned close to me, looking earnestly at me through his plain-glass spectacles. ‘I’ve been putting all of my cash into uranium stock for over a year now,’ he confided. ‘I’ve got over nine thousand dollars worth of stock. And it’s a reputable New York firm, one that’s been in business since the eighteen-fifties. Uranium stock just can’t go anywhere but up. The way I’m salting it away, I’ll be able to buy Long Island for my country estate when I retire.’

“ ‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I’ve never put much faith in stock, since I’ve sold a share or two myself from time to time.’

“ ‘This is legit,’ he insisted. ‘On the up and up. Come on up to my room, and I’ll show you their brochure.’

“More out of a professional interest in the competition than for any other reason, I joined Dan Miller successively in the lobby, an elevator and his room, where he bolted the door, drew the blinds, and slammed the transom before taking a whole sheaf of papers out of a battered suitcase.

“I looked it all over. The stock certificates were fancy things, all curlicues and whirligigs and gewgaws and whereases, and the brochure had been written by a man who could name his own price on Madison Avenue. The Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company really did things right.

“Dan hovered around me while I leafed through the evidence. ‘What do you think of it, Judd?’ he asked me.

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to admit it does look pretty good.’

“ ‘Can you think of a better or safer place for your money?’ he wanted to know.

“I had to admit I couldn’t.

“ ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I was about to send them a telegram, telegraph my profits and tell them to send me a batch more shares. Why don’t we double up on the same telegram, send your money too, and tell them to add you to the list of stockholders?’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose that is the thing to do. It certainly does look like a better deal than three and a quarter percent interest at a bank.’

“So we went down to the Western Union office in the lobby, and I reached into my shirt and pulled three thousand dollars worth of damage deposits out of my money belt. We spent about half an hour getting the message down to fifteen words, then went back to the cocktail lounge to celebrate our good fortune, good sense and good security.”

Judd sipped musingly at his Scotch, and the silence was broken only by the clatter of the Phoebe Snow bucketing down a Sullivan County mountainside. Finally, I said, “Did you get the stock certificates?”

“Came just before I left Cleveland,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a bundle of stock certificates. He handed them over, and I studied them. To my unpracticed eye, they looked perfectly legitimate. But so did the Confederate money handed out in Wheaties boxes a few years back. I’m anything but a judge.

I gave the certificates back, saying, “Do you suppose they’re all right?”

“No,” he said. “They’re as phony as Dotto.”

“But — you pumped three thousand dollars into them!”

“There wasn’t much else I could do,” said Judd. He smiled rather sadly. “I couldn’t very well tell Dan Miller that the Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company was one of my little projects, now could I?”