Cue For Murder

Chapter Twelve. Encore

A THRILL OF EXCITEMENT poured through Basil’s nerves. He had a sharp sense of something ominous and evil. His taxi seemed to crawl through the westward traffic. He left it at the corner of 44th and Fifth and walked the rest of the way to the theater.

He had to cross the street to get past the box-office door. There was a great turn-out for the “second first night” of Fedora as one of the critics called it. The sidewalk in front of the theater was black with people and car after car discharged its load of sensation-hungry men and women—the same type that haunts dreary courtrooms during a spectacular murder trial. Milhau’s taste might be questioned, but his business sense was beyond reproach.

Basil slipped through the crowd to the mouth of the alley—an inconspicuous figure this evening in a light overcoat and a soft felt hat. There was a light in the window of the knife-grinder’s shack. Lazarus opened the door himself. His time-worn face was always so grave that it was hard to tell now if he were really more troubled than usual. He led the way to the bird cage. Dickie had decided on the avian equivalent of a night raid on the ice box. He was plunging his beak into his seed cup so vigorously that the seeds were sprayed all around the floor of the cage. His small, beady black eye rolled as if he were enjoying such unaccustomed late hours.

“Are you sure he couldn’t have escaped by himself this time?” asked Basil.

“Oh, no. I went out to get a bite to eat, and I left Dickie in his cage with the door securely latched. When I came back the cage was empty, and the door was standing open. Dickie was flying all around the room. I had some trouble catching him—I was afraid I might hurt him. He seems all right now but—after this I don’t like to leave him alone here tonight. . . .”

Basil saw that to an old man without a future, without a family, and perhaps without friends, this pet canary meant more than an ordinary man leading a normally gregarious life could understand. “If you’ll wait here until the performance is over, I’ll see if the bird can’t be taken elsewhere for a while.”

“Thank you, I’ll be glad to wait.” Lazarus sat down at the grindstone and took up a pair of shears. “I have plenty of work to do.”

Basil’s glance fell on a long, red mark like the scratch of a cat’s claw across Lazarus’ forefinger. “Have you cut your hand?”

“Oh, that.” Lazarus smiled. “See the scars?” He held out his hand, and Basil saw a dozen faint, thin white lines across the forefinger. “If you ever find an unidentified corpse with scars like that on his forefinger you’ll know he’s a knife-grinder. No matter how careful a grinder is he always cuts that part of his finger every few months.”

At the stage door Basil saw one of the assistant producers. “Where is Mr. Milhau?”

“In his apartment, Dr. Willing. I’ll show you the way.”

“I know the way to his office already.”

The man grinned. “His apartment is something else again.”

They passed down a dimly lit passage and went up a narrow, enclosed stairway to the top of the theater. To Basil’s surprise he was ushered into a comfortably furnished living room.

“Hello, come right in!” Milhau was holding a champagne cocktail in one hand, and his plump cheeks were flushed a bluish pink. His thick, pale lips stretched in a rubbery smile, but his eyes were glazed and unhappy. “I live in the country so I don’t use this place much,” he confided. “And then only when I’m in town for the night. It was built and furnished by the former owner of the theater.”

Through a haze of cigarette smoke Basil saw a group of men and women clustered around a buffet supper table. They were mostly assistants and secretaries from Milhau’s office; but Basil caught a glimpse of Margot’s splashy black poppies on their white ground surrounded by a group of men, and he saw Pauline’s light brown curls bronzed by lamplight.

“Aren’t you going to watch the performance?” he asked Milhau.

“Oh, yes.” Milhau chuckled like Santa Claus with a surprise in his pack. “Grab a cocktail and a plate of creamed chicken, and I’ll show you.”

“I’ve just had dinner, thank you.”

Milhau led the way to the end of the room where Pauline and Margot were sitting. He stepped to the wall and touched a spring. A panel in the wall slid back noiselessly. Basil looked down through the opening into a brilliantly lighted world. The walls were painted red and blue and green. There was a silver samovar in front of a fireplace and a table set for dominoes in the center. It was an oblique of the stage.

“Mrs. Ingelow didn’t want to appear in public this evening,” went on Milhau. “So I told her we could watch the whole performance very comfortably from up here without anyone knowing she was in the audience.”

Basil’s glance circled the stage. “You can’t see the alcove from this angle?”

“Only when the doors are open. Then we get a foreshortened view of it.”

Basil told Milhau about the canary.

“That’s too bad. Lazarus is attached to that bird. He’s had it three or four years. I can’t understand anyone playing a joke on a nice old man like that.”

“It happened before you know. Just before the other murder.”

“I know, but what can I do?”

“Why not tell Adeane he needn’t play Vladimir? You could use a dummy tonight.”

“A dummy always looks like a dummy.” Milhau pouted like a spoiled child. “A rich man like Ingelow is always making enemies, but nobody has it in for Adeane. He’s a harmless little guy who writes bum plays. Just because he’s playing Vladimir doesn’t mean his life’s in danger. Besides—”

“Besides what?”

“It’s too late now.”

Basil’s glance followed Milhau’s through the gap in the wall. The curtain was rising.

By this time Basil knew that wretched play of Sardou’s by heart. Even the fact that he was seeing it from a bird’s-eye view failed to give it any novelty. He marveled at the ability of the actors to put so much freshness and vitality into those never-to-be-forgotten lines.

Four! Six! Is the master away?

“Too fast, too fast!” muttered Milhau in real distress.

Basil, his eyes on the stage, heard Pauline’s voice: “They’re nervous. All of them.”

He turned his head to smile at Pauline and caught the glitter of triumph in Margot’s eyes. After all, this was why she was doing it—to rasp all their nerves until the guilty one broke down.

It was impossible to see the actors’ faces. Even their figures were rudely foreshortened. But their voices came through clearly, each one taut and humming as wire stretched to breaking point. Their words tumbled out of their mouths faster and faster, as if they were frightened amateurs. The gestures that were so carefully formed the first night and even at the rehearsal were sketchy and blurred now—rather like a shorthand version of something that had been written in precise script.

“I’m glad the audience is here from morbid curiosity,” whispered Milhau. “Nothing else would hold them in their seats with a performance like this!”

“I don’t like the effect of that white dress of Wanda’s,” said Pauline suddenly. “It is too stark and bleached for such a somber background.”

The count’s room—quickly!

The people clustered around the peephole could feel the breathless hush in the unseen audience below as Leonard threw back the double doors. From this angle they could just see the hump under the coverlet made by Adeane’s body and the arm that dangled, but his head was hidden from view.

“Well, anyway he didn’t move this time,” said Milhau.

Just then Adeane’s arm shifted slightly. It was hardly more than a shiver, but the audience must have seen it. There was a single shrill titter. Then a ripple of giggling—cheerless and hysterical. Milhau swore under his breath. Margot was vastly amused. Pauline was worried.

From that moment on the actors on stage completely lost their heads. Wanda forgot her next line, and the prompter’s voice could be heard plainly. A moment later the same thing happened to the veteran Hutchins. They could not recover the sympathy of the audience. Giggles greeted the most serious lines in the play. At first Basil thought it was purely the hysteria of a morbid audience. Then he realized that the hysteria was in the actors, not in the audience. Their acting was so bad tonight that they were making the play a burlesque of itself. It was vividly brought home to Basil that the acting of Wanda’s company rather than Sardou’s lines and situations had made the performance two nights ago seem interesting and lifelike. This play was anything but “actor-proof.”

Everything that was false or faded in Sardou’s ideas of love or politics or play construction was mercilessly emphasized by the ragged performance. Every flaw in each individual actor’s technique and personality was exposed. Wanda seemed a gushing poseuse; Hutchins a pompous, declamatory windbag. When Hutchins said: He cannot escape now, every hand is against him a male voice laughed outright. Yet Hutchins didn’t say it so very differently from the way he had said it the other evening. The ambassadorial dignity was only a shade more flamboyant. Even Leonard lost his magic touch and gabbled the part of Grech. Rod was phlegmatic as usual when he first came on as Dr. Lorek, but the giggling of the audience soon got him so on edge he could hardly remember a single line. An almost clinical demonstration of partial amnesia from shock, Basil decided.

“Oh, God!” muttered Milhau.

“What now?”

“He skipped ten whole lines. They can’t go back and pick them up. That this should happen to me! My best company—Wanda and Leonard and Rod—laughed at when they’re in a serious play! It’ll ruin them and me too! What will the critics say?”

Margot looked as if she could bear it.

“I saw something like this in London once,” said Pauline. “The Gate Theatre players did a version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. They didn’t alter a single line of the original play but by acting absurdly and putting the wrong emphasis on every line they made it perfectly hilarious—much more subtle than an ordinary burlesque.”

“Sure, and look what happened to the Broadway version of Vient de Paraitre,” added Milhau. “That was the play about the little nobody who became a best selling author overnight through a fluke. When the curtain rises on the second act he’s sitting at an enormous desk with an enormous portrait of himself on the wall behind him. It was supposed to be serious, but the minute the curtain rose on that scene the first night the audience laughed its head off. So after that they played the whole thing as low comedy.”

“Couldn’t you pretend that you had intended this as a travesty of Fedora all along?” suggested Basil.

“Too late for that now,” moaned Milhau. “All the write-ups have been serious. Wanda’s a serious actress!”

The climax of the first act had come. Dr. Lorek came down stage from the alcove. This is the end.

Vladimir! Wanda, now a vision in white velvet and ermine instead of gold tissue and sable, sped upstage to Adeane. Speak! She lifted slender arms like a white swan spreading its wings, and suddenly, like the legendary death cry of the swan, a raucous shriek came from her lips. She dropped like a bird winged in flight and rolled down the three shallow steps that led from the alcove to the rest of the stage. The audience laughed and laughed and laughed. It was so funny the way everyone on stage was overacting this evening—even Wanda Morley!

Milhau was at the telephone. “Ring down that curtain! Tell ’em Wanda is sick. We can’t go on like this, or we’ll be ruined! Give ’em their dough back, and tell ’em to get the hell out of here—politely, of course. . . . What? WHAT?”

Milhau put the receiver back as if it were too heavy for him to hold. His plump cheeks sagged. Pauline looked at him, her blue eyes bright with fear of the unknown. Margot was still cool and composed, even smiling a little. Would anything short of a kick from a mule ever stir that woman wondered Basil. It was Margot who spoke: “Something wrong? Wanda?” she asked in her small, crisp voice. Basil realized that she hoped something was wrong with Wanda. Perhaps that was her inmost reason for reviving Fedora.

“No.” Milhau answered her, but he was looking at Basil, dully, uncomprehendingly. “No, not Wanda. I could understand that. I mean . . .”

“What is it?” cried Pauline in a voice that cracked.

Milhau answered in the same lost voice. “Adeane. Just like the first time. Only there was more blood and—Wanda saw it. That was when she shrieked.”

II

The medical examiner had gone. Men from the Department of Public Welfare had come to take the body. In the glare of a baby spotlight focused on the alcove, Basil stood taking his last look at Adeane. My life is so dull . . . nothing ever happens to me . . .

Basil left the alcove and walked down to the footlights where Inspector Foyle was standing with a knife in his hand—a surgeon’s scalpel with a grooved handle of tarnished silver and a newly sharpened blade.

“Same sort of knife—same wound—stabbed any time within the last hour, and the first act lasts almost an hour. Again, a dozen witnesses saw the victim enter the empty alcove alone and shut the door. Again, only three actors entered the alcove during the performance, and it was the same three—Wanda Morley, Rodney Tait, and Leonard Martin.”

Basil touched the knife handle with his fingertips. It was sticky. “Better send it to Lambert.”

Foyle laid the knife on the domino table, beside a new book still in its dust jacket. “This book was in his pocket—Victor Heiser’s autobiography. Deals mostly with medical experiences in the tropics. What would Adeane want with that?”

“Material for a play no doubt.” Basil turned the pages slowly. “He said something about reading Heiser at the medical library.”

Foyle looked more puzzled than ever. “Why Adeane?”

Basil smiled. “He had no tact. No, I’m not joking. He really had so little sympathy—so much egoism that he could not put himself in the position of others—including the murderer. Violence fascinated Adeane but he had no personal experience of it until tonight. He got his sadism from the German psychologists and the hard-boiled novelists. Murder was never quite real to him. He didn’t understand how real it is to a murderer. How terribly in earnest a murderer can be when he thinks his own life or liberty is at stake. Adeane discovered something. Perhaps that’s why he was in such an odd state of elation this afternoon—intoxicated with a new sense of power. It must be quite an experience to bait a murderer—like teasing a tiger. But I think that’s what he did. . . .

“Instead of coming to you or me with his discovery, he tried to blackmail the murderer. I don’t mean that Adeane sneaked up to the murderer in a dark corner and hissed: Ten thousand dollars by midnight or I will tell all! I don’t believe it was even blackmail for money. I think he wanted to enlist the murderer’s help in getting his precious play produced. That was an obsession with him. And just as he hinted to Margot Ingelow that she owed him something for his giving her an alibi, I suppose he let the murderer know indirectly by some hint or innuendo the nature of the thing he had discovered assuming mistakenly that the murderer would buy his silence by helping with the play.”

The Inspector was dubious. “Would a man connive at murder just for the sake of getting a play produced?”

“Ask any unproduced playwright! No, seriously, Adeane was a completely callous egoist, consumed with his own ambition. These men with vast ambitions and slender talents who prey on the arts since the arts became profitable in the last hundred years or so are not quite human. If you have no talent you have to rely on tricks in order to get on, and such a career hardly develops the ethical sense. If you had cornered Adeane he would have said that the thing he discovered didn’t prove murder absolutely, so he wasn’t really sure of it; but it did cast suspicion in a certain direction, and so . . . what’s the harm in making use of that? Such things are done in business every day old man, so why not in play producing, etc., with a wink and nudge, one man of the world to another.

“He played with murder as innocently as a child plays with a loaded gun, and—the gun went off. What we must ask ourselves now is simply this: What did Adeane know that no one else knew?”

“You say Adeane was the witness who gave Margot Ingelow her alibi?” said Foyle. “Could that have anything to do with it?”

“Hardly likely since Margot Ingelow was with Pauline, Milhau, and me tonight when the second murder was committed. She seems to be cleared.”

“How did Adeane happen to take the part of Vladimir?” asked Foyle.

There was a sudden glint of amusement in Basil’s eyes. “That question can be answered easily, if you send for the boy who was to have played the singing peasant boy in the last act.”

A few moments later a patrolman escorted the peasant boy onto the stage. He really looked like a peasant now in the gay green and red costume Pauline had designed for him—a handsome, virile peasant with gold earrings in the lobes of pointed, faun ears under the wavy black hair.

“Tell the Inspector what you did at rehearsal this afternoon,” said Basil.

The moist black eyes rolled uneasily. “Aw, gee it was only a gag. I spoke the last line, and they all got mad at me. It’s supposed to be bad luck. The guy who was gonna play Vladimir says he won’t play, and then Adeane. says he’ll do it, he’s not superstitious. What the heck, it wasn’t my fault. How could I tell that—that—” The boy’s eyes rolled toward the alcove. There was nothing there now but the crumpled coverlet on the couch. He swallowed and dropped his eyes. His hands were twitching.

Basil’s voice came into the silence quietly. “How much did you get for that?”

“Ten bucks.” The boy kept his eyes on the ground.

“From whom?” cried Foyle eagerly.

“Don’t you know?” The boy looked up in surprise. “From Adeane himself. He wanted to play Vladimir.”

The Inspector was disappointed.

“All right, you can go,” said Basil.

The boy scuttled through the wings to the stage door.

“Why on earth did Adeane want to play Vladimir?” demanded Foyle. “In order to test some theory about the murder by seeing the play from Vladimir’s point of view?”

“Nothing so impersonal and disinterested,” returned Basil. “He did it to attract Milhau’s attention to himself and his plays, and he succeeded. He actually got Milhau to say he’d read the stuff.”

“And then—just as he got his first real chance—he was murdered.” Foyle brooded. “If only he’d given us a hint of what he knew—”

“He wasn’t interested in helping us. Adeane was never interested in anything but Adeane.”

Foyle turned back to the knife on the table as if he greatly preferred a tangible clue to all these tenuous suppositions. A new idea came to him. “Did Rodney Tait carry that surgical bag on stage tonight?”

“Yes, but the bag was empty. This afternoon all the remaining knives were left in Milhau’s office safe.”

“Were they counted first?”

“No. Rod just dumped them on Milhau’s desk in a heap. Anyone in the theater could have helped himself to a knife before they were put in the safe.”

“They should have been counted. I’ll have to ask Tait a thing or two about that.” Foyle rose grimly. “I’m going to question the whole bunch now in Milhau’s office. Want to come?”

“No, I think I’ll look around here a bit.”

The plywood door at left quivered after Foyle’s departure. Alone, Basil prowled restlessly around the stage. He had little faith in the sort of inquisition going on now in Milhau’s office. Official questions put people on guard. They only let slip the important things in their unguarded moments when everything was casual and spontaneous. Foyle had left Adeane’s copy of Dr. Heiser’s autobiography on the table. Apparently he thought it of no importance. Again Basil turned the pages. Why had Adeane bought the book when it was available at the medical library? A passage on native medical diagnosis in India caught Basil’s eyes. He read it with growing interest. . . .

A light footstep distracted him. He turned and saw Margot through the gap in the wings at left. She paused. “It’s all right, Dr. Willing. The Inspector questioned me first and said I could go.”

He waited as if he expected something more of her. She came through the wings onto the stage. She was carrying the white hat; the smooth brown hair was slightly disordered, the black and white linen dress crumpled. She looked tired. As they were on the stage, he gave her a cigarette and lighted it.

She sank into Fedora’s armchair before the fire. “You hold me responsible for this latest development don’t you?”

“I haven’t said so.”

“But you’ve looked it.”

“I’m more responsible than you,” he replied soberly. “I felt it was all wrong this morning at rehearsal, but I didn’t put a stop to it because it was only a feeling—nothing positive.”

“I don’t think either of us is responsible,” she answered. “People make their own lives and their own deaths. Adeane made his. He was the sort of fool who would think it smart to bait a murderer.”

Basil held out his hand. “Will you give me the staples you took from his manuscript?”

She looked at him astonished and indignant. “I don’t know what you mean!”

“Will you let me see your bag?”

She hesitated. Gently he took it from her—the same patent leather bag she had carried yesterday. He opened it. There were all the usual things—coin purse, handkerchief, lipstick. He opened the zipper compartment. There were a pair of brass staples, and other things—a diamond ring, a bright new paper clip, a tin bottle top, a small pair of gold nail scissors, a shining new copper penny, a glass clip from some Woolworth store, and a scrap of tin foil.

“How did you know?” she asked him.

“You were called Magpie—behind your back. They are extraordinary birds, famous for other things besides their black and white plumage. They are crafty; they imitate human speech like parrots and—they have a trick of stealing and secreting anything that glitters, regardless of its value. Anything from a diamond ring to a scrap of tinfoil. They are almost the only animals who can be considered kleptomaniacs. When I saw your flushed face and shining eyes the day Adeane’s staples disappeared I was sure of it. Some nicknames are friendly. Others are derisive. Magpie is that sort.”

She took it calmly as if it were an old story to her. “Would you base such a serious charge on a pair of staples and a nickname?”

“I’m not making any charges. But there are one or two points that must be cleared up between you and me. No one else need know anything about it. Was this the cause of your quarrels with your husband? The thing that drove him to Wanda Morley?”

Margot’s detachment was almost inhuman as she answered calmly. “Yes. He didn’t mind my—taking things, but he said I was . . . cold and unfeeling. . . . You—a psychiatrist—don’t have to be told that people like me usually have a sort of emotional numbness.”

Basil nodded. He had had many such cases among patients of less wealth and influence than Margot. He had had disputes with many magistrates who refused to believe that a poor man or woman could steal for any motive other than want. Sometimes they were boys—more often girls for girls were apt to be brought up more strictly than boys. Always the kleptomania had been associated with extreme prudery or frigidity. The pathological thief always prided herself on her moral “purity” and insisted in self-defense that stealing was a far less serious offense than “sin.” Yet the pleasurable excitement she derived from uneconomic stealing was obviously erotic. Like the pyromaniac she simply transferred the orgiastic emotions from sex to something else that was also immoral but not in her opinion so “obscene” and “wicked.” It was another curious example of the way civilized society’s condemnation of nature tends to encourage perversion in myriad forms.

“It started at school, when I was about fourteen,” said Margot with the same inhuman calmness. “Things disappeared. There was a secret investigation, and I was caught. They didn’t expel me publicly. They just asked my parents not to send me back at the end of the term. I was taken to doctors and so forth, but it didn’t do any good.”

“Ingelow knew nothing about this when he married you?”

“No. We didn’t have the same circle of friends. We met at a horse show. I think it was my calmness and detachment that attracted him to me at first. My parents were delighted. They were old-fashioned, and they believed that marriage would cure any little aberrations of mine. Of course it didn’t. I just don’t have the sort of feelings about love and marriage and children that most women have. I can’t help it. I’m made that way. And yet, the funny part of it was that I did really love John as much as I could love anyone, only I just couldn’t show my feelings. Wanda didn’t love him at all. But she has strong sensual feelings for all men, and no false shame about exhibiting them. So—he thought she loved him. She’s the sort of woman who sees the unhappy marriage of another woman as her opportunity. The moment I took her home and introduced her to John she saw how things were with us and went after him.

“I’ve learned a lot in the last few months. I’ve learned that appearances are far more important than actuality. I’ve learned that to most people—certainly to most men—love is primarily a sensation and only secondarily a sentiment. But all this knowledge has come too late to me to do any good. I know these things intellectually, but emotionally I don’t know them at all.

III

When Margot had gone, Basil went down the aisle to Milhau’s office. The little room was crowded. Foyle sat at Milhau’s desk. Wanda, Rod, and Pauline were looking surprised and angry. Leonard seemed tired; Hutchins, worried; and Milhau himself embarrassed.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” Milhau was saying as Basil came in. “Glamour is part of a star’s stock in trade. She’s got to have some guy with her wherever she goes. She can’t pop into a restaurant by herself as if she were a nobody. And she’s got to have some fellow falling for her all the time. I didn’t know about Ingelow and Wanda because they were keeping it dark until he got his divorce. When he was off in Panama, Wanda started going around by herself. That was awful—bad publicity for her and for the show. I told her to get herself an escort if she had to hire one, but she just laughed at me. Something had to be done so I talked it over with my publicity boys and one of them cooked up this scheme. He got it out of Shakespeare.”

“What?” interrupted the Inspector incredulously.

“Sure. Why not? There’s a play of Shakespeare’s about a couple named Beatrice and Benedick. They don’t care a hoot about each other, but their pals play a joke on them by telling Beatrice that Benedick’s nuts about her and vice versa. So I told Wanda that Rod was nuts about her, and I hinted to Rod that Wanda was falling for him. They were both flattered. She began asking him to go places with her, and he didn’t dare refuse. I had a camera man trail them whenever they were together, and the publicity boys saw the shots were published with captions and—”

“Why, you—”

“So that was—”

“You nasty little beast!”

The three exclamations came from Wanda, Pauline, and Rodney. All three were converging on Milhau. He backed toward the desk as close to the Inspector as he could get. “Now—now—don’t get excited!” begged Milhau. “You know it’s an old Hollywood custom—these publicity romances. People aren’t going to fall for a glamour girl on stage or screen if she’s a dud off stage and—”

“Dud!” shrilled Wanda.

“In Hollywood the victim of the ‘romance’ is in on the secret!” cried Pauline.

Rod doubled his fist and advanced on Milhau without saying anything.

“Listen to reason will you?” Milhau scuttled around the desk, putting the Inspector between himself and Rod. “It was for your own good. I was building you up as a male lead by making every newspaper reader think Wanda was nuts about you—”

“Am I interrupting?”

Everyone turned. Lazarus was standing in the doorway. In one hand he held the bird cage under its burlap cover. His eyes sought Basil. “You said I could leave Dickie in some other place tonight where he would be safer.”

This concern for the safety of a pet canary when a human being had just been murdered should have been funny. But no one laughed or even smiled. Milhau’s little publicity stunt was forgotten immediately. In a loaded silence, Foyle rose and took the bird cage. He pulled off the cover and set the cage on Milhau’s desk. Dickie was asleep, head tucked under one wing. As light smote him suddenly, the head came out and the eyes blinked, but he remained on his perch, a little ball of yellow feathers, as if the presence of so many strangers frightened him.

“This is the canary I told you about,” said Foyle. “You’ll agree it’s a rather curious coincidence, and it has occurred twice. Before each of these murders this canary has been let out of its cage. On both occasions the knife used was sharpened recently—presumably in Mr. Lazarus’ workshop across the alley. That explains why the murderer broke into the workshop, but it doesn’t explain why he released the canary. Can anyone suggest an explanation? Miss Morley, perhaps you can tell us.”

“No. I can’t.” Wanda was staring at the bird. Her face was twisted out of its usual shape by some fierce emotion. Basil thought it was fear.

“You’re sure this wasn’t another publicity stunt of some sort, Mr. Milhau?” went on Foyle.

“No.” Milhau seemed honestly puzzled. “I tell you what, Jake,” he said to Lazarus. “You can leave the bird here in my office if you like. I’ll lock the door.”

Foyle shut his notebook with a snap and rose.

“Can we go now?” queried Hutchins wearily.

“Yes, that’ll do for tonight. But you must all hold yourselves ready for questioning tomorrow.”

“Where shall I put Dickie?” Lazarus asked Milhau.

“He’ll be O.K. right on the desk.” Milhau helped to readjust the burlap cover.

As the others moved toward the door, Hutchins laid a hand on Basil’s arm. “Funny about Sam adapting Shakespeare to a modern publicity stunt, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Basil looked at Hutchins questioningly.

“Shakespeare is applicable to so many modern situations,” went on Hutchins gravely. “All evening I’ve been trying to recall a line from Othello. It goes something like this: Were it my cue to murder I should have known it without a prompter. . . .”

Foyle was standing at the door of the outer office, a bunch of keys in his hand. He pressed an electric switch in the wall. Light flooded the lobby beyond. The silence was shattered by a woman’s scream.

It was Pauline. Rod hurried to where she was standing—just inside the lobby beyond the door.

“Anything wrong?” said Foyle sharply.

“No. It’s nothing. I’m—I’m sorry.” She shrank away from all of them. Her face was almost as distorted as Wanda’s had been a moment ago and by the same emotion—fear. She tried to smile, but her mouth only quivered. “My nerves must be on edge.”

Basil’s glance surveyed the lobby. It was empty except for one uniformed policeman standing against a red velvet curtain weighted with gilt fringe.

“You didn’t see anything or anybody?” persisted Foyle.

“No. I—I just stumbled.” Her eyelids dropped. “I’d like to go home now. Right away.”

“All right.” Foyle switched off the light in Milhau’s office and locked the door on the outside with a key from the bunch he held. “Going my way, doc?” he said to Basil.

“No. If you don’t mind I’m going to stay here a little longer.”

The little group of people in the lobby halted. Pauline turned. “You’re going to stay here alone?”

“If I may?” Basil looked at Foyle.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Do you think it’s quite safe?” asked Leonard.

“He won’t be entirely alone,” Foyle answered for Basil. “We always leave a patrolman on guard at the scene of a murder for a day or so.”

“Only one?” cried Pauline. “In a huge place like this?”

“It’s largely a matter of form,” answered Foyle. “We’ve finished the investigation here. Anything that could shed light on the crime—even a section of scenery that was splashed with blood—has been removed to the police laboratories.”

“Still . . .” Pauline looked at the sheer walls of the auditorium and the vaulted ceiling half lost in shadows. “One man . . .”

“Let me stay with you,” said Rod to Basil.

“No, I’ll be all right.” Basil smiled as if he didn’t think Rod would be much help in any circumstances.

“I don’t like the idea Dr. Willing,” said Hutchins seriously.

“Neither do I,” put in Wanda. “But Dr. Willing is very obstinate.”

Basil turned to Milhau. “May I borrow your keys?”

“The Inspector’s got them now. He’s running everything around here.”

Foyle handed the bunch of keys to Basil. “You can leave them with the patrolman when you go.” As the others drifted away, he went on in a low voice. “What’s the big idea?”

“The theater is the setting of both murders. I want to study its topography and absorb its atmosphere.”

“Sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“No, thanks. I can do better alone.”

Foyle looked down through the glass doors to the outside lobby. The others were leaving by the box office door. “What do you think of that bunch? Do they know anything?”

“At least four of them did—and one of the four is dead now.”

“Who are the other three?”

“Pauline, Hutchins, and Wanda.”

“What about putting tails on all of them?”

“I wouldn’t. I’d give them a little more rope. . . .”

III

After Foyle’s departure, Basil went down the aisle and crossed the stage. Beyond the wings he re-discovered the enclosed stairway that led to Milhau’s apartment. The door was locked, but he found the key on Milhau’s ring and unlocked it. When he switched on the light he saw everything just as they had left it—soiled plates and glasses in disarray on the supper table, chairs gathered before the panel in the wall, the panel itself pulled back to reveal the stage below. Even the stage was unchanged. Again he was looking down on Vladimir’s parlor in the antique Muscovite style with Parisian decorations. Footlights and spotlights had been turned out, but a single work light was burning.

He spent some time examining the apartment without discovering anything of interest. Then he sat down wearily in one of the armchairs. He smiled a little as he remembered Mark Twain’s advice to an apprentice author who had got into difficulties with his own plot: Have you tried thinking? The same advice held good in solving a complex crime. He reviewed the case from beginning to end—from the moment in the Washington plane when he had read the item about the canary in a newspaper to the moment when Pauline had screamed in the lobby just now. Slowly the churning sediment of his disturbed thoughts began to settle to the bottom of his mind leaving the clear essence of the case on top. That was the real reason he had wanted to stay in the theater after the others were gone—so he could be utterly alone in an empty place where he could hear himself think. From the first he had suspected the murderer. Now he was morally certain of the murderer’s guilt. How was he going to prove it in court? He would have to rely on Lambert’s evidence once the knife handles had been subjected to a spectroscope. That was rather a pity because most juries didn’t like chemical evidence . . . too technical . . .

Motion drew his eye to the gap in the wall. Far below something was moving across the shadows of the dimly lighted stage. Startled, he leaned forward. Whatever had moved was gone.

He waited. Again there was movement. Now he saw it clearly, in the path of the work light—a small yellow bird—a canary—flying across the stage.

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