Cue For Murder

Chapter Two. Persons in the Play

THE MODERN ART GALLERY was inclosed in a penthouse on Central Park South. The architect prided himself on being “functional,” but he had forgotten that the principal function of a modern building is resistance to air raids. He had made the north wall of the gallery one great sheet of sheer plate glass. After Pearl Harbor, the management had supplemented the glass with two-inch bands of adhesive tape, criss-crossed in a series of tall X’s and sealed flat and taut with an electric iron.

Outside, winter lingered in the Park like an insensitive guest who has long outstayed his welcome. The turf was bald and dry and brown. The skeleton trees made a black mesh against a sultry streak of saffron at the western edge of the white sky. Nurses and children, hurrying east to home and supper, bent their heads forward, unconsciously streamlining themselves in order to cleave the April wind. There was not a hint of green in the landscape, but there was a new freshness in the air that hinted of all the green things to come in a few weeks.

Inside, a crowd of invited guests—largely feminine, furred, perfumed, and voluble—pretended there were no such things as wars and east winds. Soundproof walls shut out traffic noises. A thermostat maintained a temperature as mild and even as that of an embryo. Brilliant, artificial light from concealed sources was refracted in every direction by three blond walls of wax-rubbed pine. There were no shadows. The gallery was a solid cube of light, a medium where people moved and had their being like fish in a tank of illuminated water.

Now and then one of the guests remembered to glance at the paintings on the walls and tell the exiled artist in schoolgirl French that his oeuvre was épatante and vraie Parisienne. For the most part, they sipped cocktails, nibbled macaroons, admired fragments of T’ang pottery on the twin mantelpieces, or sat down to gossip on settees covered with tight, slippery leather in jade green.

A young man and a girl were sitting on one of these settees—the one with its back to the glass wall. The girl was pretty, but there was nothing remarkable in her prettiness. Hundreds of girls have chestnut-brown curls that gleam red when light touches them and gray eyes that seem blue under a blue hat. The freckles across her short nose were faded as if she had changed an outdoor life for an indoor light in the last few years. The women in red fox and rayon velvet and flowered hats looked at the beautiful severity of her tweed suit and decided that she was underdressed. The women in silver fox and bagheera and clever black hats looked at the same suit and wondered if they could be overdressed. Something in the short curl of her upper lip and the tilt of her small, stubborn chin suggested that she cared little for their opinions. Her manner was composed and detached, rather businesslike. On her knee was a sketch pad; in her right hand, a soft, black pencil. From time to time, she sketched something in the crowd that pleased or amused her—a piquant profile, an impossible hat, or an ungainly silhouette.

The young man had slumped down on the seat beside her with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a shade fairer than the girl and about her own age—in the late twenties. His eyes were too round, his mouth too wide, his legs too long; yet the general effect of his appearance was pleasing, for he had the look of youth, health, high spirits, and an affable disposition. At the moment he was not being affable. Neither was the girl.

“I don’t see why we should wait any longer.”

“Don’t you?” The man’s eye followed her pencil.

“Maybe we’d better call the whole thing off.”

“Now, Pauline—” he began.

She cut him short. “I don’t like secrets—particularly secret engagements. And I don’t see any reason for it. Both our parents were delighted. Though you don’t seem to realize it, there are other men in the world. Some of them ask me out to dinner and—so forth. If they knew I were engaged to you they—well, it would make things easier all around. As it is, I’m neither engaged nor disengaged. I’m suspended in a vacuum. It’s hard to act as if you were an engaged girl when nobody knows you are. It wouldn’t matter for a short time, but it’s been going on for several months now. Honestly, Rod, I’m tired of keeping my ring in a bureau drawer and looking self-conscious whenever your name is mentioned. I can understand waiting until after the run of the play to get married, but why can’t we tell people we’re engaged?”

“Because we just can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s—well, you wouldn’t understand. You’ll just have to take it on trust that we can’t.”

“How are we ever going to get along after we’re married if you don’t trust my understanding enough to tell me things that matter so much to both of us?”

“And how are we ever going to get along if you don’t trust me at all?”

Pauline closed the sketch pad and slipped the pencil into a slot in the cover. “Rod, we can’t go on like this. We will have to call it off.”

“All right, then do!” Rod assumed an elaborate nonchalance. “May I get you a cocktail?”

“If you will be so kind.” What a dreadful thing politeness was: always the mask of hostility between sexes or classes; never the medium of true friendship or true love. Pauline watched Rod as he rose and disappeared into the crowd. Her lips parted as if she were going to call him back, then closed again without making a sound. To think that so much could be ended by so little! A few sharp words spoken under cover of a chattering crowd and the whole thing was all over.

Mechanically, she pulled out the pencil again and reopened the sketch book. But the line faltered. Her hand was trembling. Her throat felt swollen and raw. I mustn’t cry. There are hundreds of people looking at me. Her eye caught the outline of a short, fat woman in a short, fat, fur coat pushing through the crowd like a tug through heavy seas. Her quick, nervous pencil pinned the fugitive absurdity to paper with three strokes. She felt the bench yield to a weight at the other end. Someone had sat down beside her. Her eyes were on the sketch pad as a man’s voice spoke.

“You couldn’t be more detached if you were sketching monkeys at the zoo.”

She started and turned an arrogantly blank face in the direction of the voice. Then a light came into her eyes. “Basil! What are you doing here?”

“Sur-réaliste painting is just another form of psychoanalysis to me. What are you doing here?”

“I thought I might get some ideas.” The pencil noted a young girl’s frivolous, feather hat perched above a solemn, old face.

“For a portrait of mutton dressed as lamb?”

“No, costumes. I design them, you know. For the stage. Or perhaps you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t. The last time I saw you, your chief interest in life was—let me see. . . . Was it the rhumba? Or beagling?”

“Beagling. But that was ages ago.”

“About fifteen years ago. You were thirteen or fourteen.”

“And you were an old man—thirty-two or three. But now you’re just about my own age. I believe Einstein was right!”

He laughed. “When I first saw you, you were fifteen inches long and weighed eight pounds. That was during the last war.”

She nodded. “I was three when the Armistice came. The family never let me forget that I remarked: Won’t it be funny not to have a war any more?” Her gaze explored his lean, ageless, brown face; his dark, penetrating eyes. In the bright light she saw two single gray threads in the thick, brown hair. She would have said he was thirty-five—thirty-eight at the most. But he must be a year or so over forty now; for she knew he had been in her father’s class at Johns Hopkins in 1916 and had left it for the Medical Corps in 1917.

“Basil, you’re old enough to be honest with me. Will you answer a personal question frankly?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Thank heaven you’re not polite!” She sighed. “How do I look to you? Pretty or ugly?”

“I thought women’s handbags were provided with mirrors.”

“I thought psychologists taught that people never see the same face in the mirror that they show to other people.”

“My dear Pauline, you are a Baltimore girl and all Baltimore girls are pretty.” He looked at the ringless left hand holding the sketch pad. “Any particular reason for doubting it?”

Pauline’s eyes were on the crowd around the buffet. “I just wondered if maybe I was—well, plainer than I realized. You get so used to your own face you can’t see it objectively; and it always looks young to you because you get it mixed up with your memories of youth. That’s why old women wear such youthful hats.”

Basil smiled. “You can still wear youthful hats, Pauline. But you do look a little pale—possibly anemic.” His clinical glance considered her. “Been dieting?”

“No, only working. I’ve just finished Wanda Morley’s new show. It opens tonight at the Royalty.”

“The Royalty?” There was a new note in Basil’s voice. “You mean the Royalty Theatre on West 44th Street?”

“Of course. Sam Milhau puts on all Wanda’s shows at the Royalty. It was a tough job. Adaptations of Victorian styles. She’s reviving Fedora.”

“Sardou’s Fedora? Isn’t that a pretty musty old piece of fustian?”

Pauline smiled. “Modern playwrights don’t go in for sugared ham. That’s Wanda’s meat, so she has to play revivals. It was Candida and Mrs. Tanqueray last season. It’ll be Lady Windermere or Madame X next. Wanda wants to do everything that Bernhardt and Ellen Terry and Fanny Davenport did. She even imitates their foibles. And yet, goodness knows, she looks modern off-stage!”

Basil’s glance followed Pauline’s through a sudden rift in the crowd to a woman who had just entered the gallery. She would have drawn glances anywhere. She was thin and supple as a whip, with a flashing, feline grace that made every gesture a work of art. Her black hair was parted in the middle, sleekly waved and brushed up in two little wings above either ear. Her face was a creamy oval, slashed with a long, thin mouth, stained scarlet. Her eyes were tilted and tawny, their golden spark heightened by gold and topaz earrings. She wore black with a leopard-skin cap far back on her dark head and a leopard-skin muff on one arm.

“Wanda Morley?” asked Basil.

“Yes. Fascinating, isn’t she?” There was a tart flavor to the speech. “And yet you can’t say just why,” went on Pauline. “It’s a sort of miracle. Hollywood has just established a formula for female allure—bleached hair, blubbery lips, tapering hips, and great udders that make you wonder about the butter-fat content per quart of human milk. Then along comes Wanda and breaks all the rules—dark hair, thin lips, no hips, and no bosom—and yet she makes all the finished products of the Hollywood beauty factories look as ersatz as they are. You can’t reduce her to a formula. Her eyes are too slanting, her mouth too wide, and all of her is too thin. She ought to be downright ugly, and she would be if she just weren’t so extraordinarily beautiful. Basil, do you suppose beauty is purely psychological after all? Put Wanda on paper and she’s hideous. She’s easier to caricature than any other actress on the stage. But there’s something in her nature that pulls all her features together and suggests the idea of beauty almost hypnotically. Why don’t you psychologists find out what makes women like that tick?”

“It’s probably a kind of suggestion,” agreed Basil, “based on self-suggestion. Some of the French psychologists have a theory that luck is a product of self-suggestion. Perhaps a woman is only beautiful when she believes in her own beauty sincerely without any conscious effort.”

“Then beauty is really vanity!”

Basil caught an undertone. “You don’t love Wanda, do you?”

“I hate her.” Pauline spoke as tonelessly as if she were saying: It’s going to rain.

“Any particular reason?”

“She’s an intellectual fraud, and she can’t act.”

“That might account for dislike but—hatred?”

“I was just being colloquial. But I don’t like her. She says things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well, what I suppose you’d call catty things. At home I used to read novels where women talked like that; and I always thought the author was just using them as mouthpieces for his own spite, because I never knew any woman in real life who talked that way. But the minute I met Wanda I thought: There really are women like that, and this is one of them!”

Basil’s thoughts reverted to Pauline’s home environment—secure, kindly, generous. He had never heard Pauline’s mother or sisters say anything spiteful or envious, or even gossipy. To a girl coming from that environment, it would be a shock to meet one of those simple-minded climbers who know no other form of social intercourse but war.

“I’m just as bad as she is now,” Pauline was saying. “You have to hit back.”

Wanda Morley had reached the buffet. People turned to look at her. Some smiled and spoke, but her responses were brief. She paused to speak to a man. Rod joined them. Wanda refused a cocktail with a gesture, took a cigarette from her bag and put it between her lips. Both men produced matches. She smiled impartially at either, hesitated a moment, then leaned toward Rod.

Pauline’s pencil traced a side view of Wanda, exaggerating her fluent suppleness so that it looked boneless and snaky. The line wavered. Pauline’s hand was shaking. She crossed out the imperfect sketch with slashing strokes.

“Black hair and golden eyes,” remarked Basil. “Rather like a puma. Those three would make a neat composition. You could call it Puma with Stag and Sheep.”

Rod was the stag—long-legged and fleet-looking, with a round, intense eye and a flaring nostril. The other man was the sheep—narrow forehead, pendulous nose, dull eyes set close together.

Pauline’s answering smile was cheerless. “Pumas prey on deer and sheep, don’t they?”

“That’s the point. Do you happen to know these victims?”

“The sheep is Leonard Martin. The stag is Rodney Tait. They’re both in Wanda’s company. Rod brought her here this afternoon. He’s supposed to be getting a cocktail for me now, but he seems to have forgotten all about it.”

“Can I—?”

“No, I don’t believe I want one after all.” There was a snap as the point of Pauline’s pencil broke. “She only does it to annoy because she knows it teases!”

“Does what?”

“What’s she’s doing now. Preying.”

There was something a little avid in the red-lipped smile and the bright, yellow eyes set off by the pale face and black clothing. The color scheme was carefully planned, vivid as a playing card, and the features looked just a little larger than life. The face would have been eye-catching on a hoarding or a stage, but it was a little overwhelming at close range. Wanda was a poster, Basil decided, and Pauline a miniature. Wanda’s beauty would bloom under a spotlight that would wash out Pauline’s softer coloring and more delicate features.

Wanda was talking to the two men with animation. Her thin mouth writhed against her face like a small, red snake. It was extraordinarily mobile—proud, wistful, ironic, beguiling in bewildered succession. Smoke trailing from the cigarette in her hand traced the suave line of each gesture as visibly as sky-writing. To Basil, it seemed that Wanda was performing the part of the charming and successful actress; conscious of many eyes upon her, yet less sensitive to their impact than a person unused to living in public. Just as an object that is constantly handled acquires a patina—worn, hard, smooth, glossy and a little soiled—so the surface of Wanda’s personality seemed to have been glazed and tarnished by the curious glances that were always sliding over her face and figure wherever she went.

“Oh, Lord, here she comes!” murmured Pauline.

Wanda had dropped her cigarette in an ash tray. Her flat, limp muff was tucked under one elbow as she drew on long, beige gloves. She moved forward slowly, still talking to Rod and Leonard, her small, dark head tilted on the long, flexible white column of neck. She drew them in her wake as a magnet draws steel filings.

“Why, Pauline, darling! What a surprise to see you here! Somehow one just never thinks of a costume designer as being interested in real art.”

Pauline smiled. “If ever you meet any of your friends in heaven, Wanda, I’m sure you’ll say: Darling, what a surprise to see you here!”

Wanda wasn’t listening. Her eyes had shifted to Basil. Their glance was as intimate as a caress. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“Dr. Willing, Miss Morley. Mr. Tait, Mr. Martin.” Pauline was curt.

“Not Basil Willing—the famous psychiatrist!”

Even as Basil told himself this was boloney his ego began to purr.

“To think of actually meeting you! Pauline, dear, you must bring him to my opening tonight. You have an extra ticket, haven’t you? Dr. Willing, it would mean so much to me to know you were in the audience! We’re all going to have supper at the Capri afterward and wait up for the reviews in the morning papers. You will join us, won’t you?”

The very suddenness of the invitation made Basil hesitate. “Well—”

“Of course you will!” Wanda swept on imperiously, and he saw she didn’t really care whether he came or not. In the language of the stage, she was simply using him to feed her lines in her chosen role of Fascinating Femininity. At the same time, he realized that some men would fall for this sort of thing. Certainly Rod and Leonard seemed to be falling for it.

“I wish I could stop to talk now,” pursued Wanda, “but I’m giving an interview to a reporter from the Sun at six-thirty, a photographer from Vogue is coming at seven, and I must have at least one hour’s rest before I go to the theater. You have no idea how I hate all this fuss and bother and publicity! It’s so false. If only I could live a real life in some quiet little suburb doing all my own housework and caring for a husband and children!”

“Why don’t you?” Pauline’s voice was small and dry. “It’s a free country.”

“My dear girl!” A hint of shrillness broke through the smooth surface of Wanda’s trained voice. A hint of color darkened her cheeks. Basil had seen similar symptoms in neurotic patients brought face to face with the cause of a neurosis they would not admit. He decided that Wanda was one of those chronic self-deceivers who becomes allergic to truth. At least truth had much the same effect as a chemical allergy on her vaso-motor system. But she rallied quickly with practiced ingenuity. “Special talents impose special responsibilities. I can’t just think of myself as if I were a nobody. I have a duty to my public and my art. Think of all the people who would be thrown out of work if I disbanded my company. Not only actors, but stage-hands and ushers and—people like that!”

Pauline laughed.

“Now Dives daily feasted and was gorgeously arrayed

Not at all because he liked it, but because ’twas good for trade.”

“Really, Pauline, that sounds almost communistic to me.” Wanda looked at a slender gold band on her wrist. The little watch was covered with a cabochon topaz in place of the usual crystal. “Heavens, it’s nearly five-thirty now! I must dash! Good-by, darling! Dr. Willing, I’m counting on you tonight. Good-by, Leonard . . .

Rod started to go with her, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Don’t bother to come with me, Rod. Sam Milhau is driving me home. We have a few things to talk over before tonight. The boy who was to play Desiré has fallen ill, and we’ll have to cut out his lines. Fortunately there are only a few!”

Rod seemed a little piqued at this dismissal. Pauline was amused. Leonard’s thoughtful eyes followed Wanda as she passed through the crowd like a breeze through a field of poppies, leaving a trail of turning heads behind her.

A waiter presented a tray of French pastry. Pauline took a strawberry tart. Basil and Rod followed suit. Leonard eyed the remaining tarts and savarins with distaste and shook his head.

“Poor Wanda!” cried Pauline. “She’s beginning to ham off-stage as well as on!”

Leonard’s long face broke into a wry grin of appreciation, but Rod was dismayed.

“That’s not like you, Pauline. Great artists have to be conceited. Don’t you remember what Huneker said about Rodin? His vast store of conceit kept him going all the years the public neglected him.”

“The public isn’t neglecting Wanda,” returned Pauline. “Not with two press agents working night and day to keep her on every theatrical page in town. And it’s not her conceit I mind; it’s her hypocrisy. She leads the sort of life most suburban housewives would give their eye-teeth to lead; but she flatters them by pretending that they’re the lucky ones and that she’s the martyr to circumstance who deserves everyone’s sympathy. She never sends her picture to the papers without a covering letter to explain that she just hates publicity. She never wears an orchid without telling everyone present that what she really wanted was a simple bunch of violets. You’re never quite sure whether she’s apologizing for being a success or rubbing it in. I suppose it’s her idea of being ‘democratic.’ I prefer honest snobbery.”

“Pauline!” protested Rod. “That isn’t fair.”

“Isn’t it?” Pauline lifted her chin and looked at him. “I believe you’re half in love with her!”

It was the true word spoken in jest. Rod chose to take it lightly. “Don’t be silly!” he cried. “We’re just good friends.”

“You sound like an old, divorced couple!” Pauline shut her notebook with a snap and rose. “Can I give anyone a lift uptown?”

“Yes,” said Rod. “If you’re including me.”

“Of course.” Pauline took a narrow envelope out of her purse and turned to Basil. “Here’s your ticket for tonight. She thrust the envelope into his hand. “Do come if you can! Better dress. Wanda likes her first nights plushy. Good-by!” Pauline slipped away in the crowd. Rodney Tait followed her.

There was a flicker of mild amusement in Leonard Martin’s eyes. In a close-up he looked sickly and underweight; he was gaunt to the point of emaciation. Loose skin sagged in folds and creases on his long face as if he had lost flesh recently. It had a dark tinge, nearer bronze than tan, that contrasted vividly with his pale blue eyes and the fringe of sandy hair above his ears. His high, bald forehead shone waxily in the brightly lighted room. His manner was gentle, almost apologetic. Basil wondered what part such a tired, discouraged, quiet, little man could play in a dashing melodrama like Fedora.

He was speaking now in a voice as mild as his eyes. “I suppose we’ve confirmed your belief that all theater people are crazy?”

“Stimulating is the word I should have used.”

“Wanda is certainly stimulating.” Leonard exhaled a deep sigh. His breath was heavy as if he had been eating overripe fruit. “She’s rather like an X-ray,” he mused. “When you’re first exposed to her, you think there’s no harm done! Her technique is so obvious! Then weeks, or even months later, you may discover you’ve been badly burned.”

“Is that what happened to young Tait?”

“I don’t know. But Wanda ought to leave Rod alone. He’s only a boy and she—well, she wouldn’t like me to say how long she’s been on the stage. . . . I must be off now. Shall I see you this evening?”

“I expect so.” Basil looked down at the ticket envelope in his hand. It was covered with fine print, but two words stood out in larger type: Royalty Theatre. “Have you seen the pictures?” he asked suddenly. “There’s a rather curious animal study over here.”

They squeezed through the crowd to the first row of a group standing in a semi-circle before a small painting in oils. At a little distance it looked like a turquoise matrix. There was a brown plain wide open to a turquoise blue sky mottled with tan clouds. Cunning perspective gave the spectator a feeling of infinite distance, airy and sunlit. In the foreground, drawn on a small scale, there was a row of crumbling Doric columns. A tiny brown ape sat on one of them, cross-legged, holding a yellow bird. He had just pulled off its wing. Three pear-shaped drops of dark red blood were falling toward the ground, high-lighted like rubies.

Leonard looked at the painting, and Basil looked at Leonard. His only response seemed to be the same mild, quizzical amusement he had shown as they discussed Wanda.

“The draughtsmanship is sound, but I’m afraid the subject is a little over my head. Is it supposed to inspire pity or cruelty? My chief feeling is disgust. I suppose that’s because I don’t like monkeys. And I do like canaries!”

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