The seventh shot A detective story
gently; Barrison had an idea that the old sleuth was truly sorry for
the girl, but he never willingly left a trail. “What did he say?”
“He said—he said: ‘If you knew the state of mind I’m in, you’d think I
was showing great self-control toward you, this minute!’ That’s exactly
what he said.”
“What did he mean by that?” demanded the inspector, surprised and not
taking the trouble, for once, to hide it.
She was silent.
“I asked you, Miss Merivale, if you have any idea what he meant by so
peculiar a greeting? Can you think of anything in your acquaintance—in
your relation with him—which might explain it?”
“Yes!” she said, lifting her head and answering boldly. “I know
perfectly well what he meant. He was excited or probably he would not
have said it then, for he cared awfully about his profession, his work
on the stage, and he would ordinarily have been thinking most of that,
just then. But he meant—I am sure he meant that—the darkness gave
him—opportunities.”
“Opportunities?”
“Opportunities—such as—such as—he had abused before.”
There was the pause of a breath.
“You mean,” said Inspector Lowry, “that he had forced his attentions
upon you in the past?”
“Yes.”
“Against your will? I asked you—against your will?”
“I had always refused his attentions,” she answered, with hesitation.
The detectives noted the change of phrase as she answered, but the
inspector made no comment.
“Very well,” he said. “What did you answer then? I presume you turned
round to face him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did you answer?”
“I didn’t say anything—then.”
“Ah—not then! What did you do, Miss Merivale? Did you hear me?”
“Yes, I heard you. I did not do anything. I stood still. I was
frightened.”
“You stood still, facing him. Could you see him?”
“Yes. He was just below me. I could see him, and I thought I heard him
laugh in a—a dreadful way. He came up two of the steps, and I could see
his face.”
“It was not the dark scene yet?”
“No; the lantern was not yet out. It was dark, but not pitch dark. His
face frightened me. He had frightened me before.”
“And did Mr. Mortimer speak to you again?”
“Yes.”
The answer came in a gasping breath, and Norman Crane seemed to echo
it unconsciously. He was following every syllable that she spoke with
a terrible attentiveness, and at that last “yes” he shuddered and drew
his breath quickly. Lowry fixed him with that disconcerting, unexpected
look of his.
“So that was what you heard through the open door!” he said, making it
a statement, not a query. “Well, Miss Merivale, he was coming up the
steps toward you, and he said——”
“He said, ‘When I pick you up to-night to carry you onto the stage—I
shall kiss you!’”
The shudder that came with this admission shook her. Her eyes turned
toward the body which, for some reason, had not yet been taken away,
and in their gaze there was fear and loathing, and—it might be—contempt.
“Ah!” said Inspector Lowry, apparently unsurprised. “And what did you
answer, Miss Merivale?”
She hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were still fixed upon that dead
face, awful in its paint and powder, such a handsome face, lately so
full of compelling charm, even now a face that one could scarcely pass
without a second look.
“What did you say, Miss Merivale?”
She paused for only a moment; then, looking straight at the inspector,
she replied very deliberately indeed:
“I said: ‘If you do that—I shall kill you!’”
CHAPTER XI
IN THE STAR DRESSING ROOM
A brief pause followed Sybil’s unexpectedly dramatic statement. Then
Inspector Lowry bowed gravely.
“That is all, Miss Merivale,” he said, without looking at her. “We
shall not want you for a while, though I shall have to speak to you
again later. I should advise you, as a friend, to go to your own
dressing room to rest.”
“May I—mayn’t I—go home?” she asked piteously. But on such points as
these no amount of courtesy or human sympathy could make Lowry less
inexorable.
“Not just yet,” he said calmly. “Later, we shall see. Go and rest, my
dear young lady. Do go and rest!”
Norman Crane started forward to help her, but, to every one’s surprise,
Claire McAllister, the extra woman who had been kept for possibly
relevant testimony, was before him.
“You come with me, you poor kid!” she exclaimed, as tenderly as she
possibly could. “I’ll see to you. Gee, but this is a bunch of boobs,
not to see that you’re about as apt to get in wrong as a two-months’
one! Come on, deary!”
They vanished within the dressing room wherein Sybil had dressed for a
possible triumph that selfsame evening—hard as it was for any of them
to believe it. That evening? It might just as well have been a month
earlier, and even Dukane, the imperturbable, was haggard with the
strain already.
To him Lowry said something in a low voice, and the manager turned at
once to Mortimer’s valet, still standing at the door:
“Wrenn, clear the couch in there. We are——” He paused, respecting the
man’s feelings, and ended gently: “We are bringing him in.”
They carried the big, splendidly made form into the room which he
had left such a short time before, in such a high tide of life and
strength. There was nothing of tragedy in this setting. Barrison looked
about him curiously, as though he were in a queer sort of dream in
which all manner of incongruities might be expected.
There were brilliant electric bulbs topping and framing the glass on
the dressing table; Barrison knew that actors were obliged to test
their make-up under various lighting effects, and there was something
darkly strange in this array of lights still ready for a test that
could not come again—for Mortimer. At that same table, under the same
bulbs, other stars would put on paint and wigs and costumes. This one
would do so no more.
In that vivid glare, the litter of the paraphernalia of make-up glowed
with a somewhat gay, decorative effect. Rouge boxes and cold-cream jars
and sticks of grease paint lay just as he had left them. Evidently
Mortimer had been “touching up” for the last act, and the valet had not
yet had time to clear up or put away anything.
Lowry’s keen eyes ran over the room, in that seemingly cursory but
actually minute inspection which characterized his methods. There was
nothing about it unlike other theatrical dressing rooms. There was
the usual long dresser with its rows of brilliant bulbs; there were
the clothes hanging on the walls; there was the couch—now bearing
that tragic burden, the magnificent body in khaki—the big trunk, the
two chairs—the small one by the table, and the easy one for rest and
visitors. Apparently, there was nothing in the room for a detective to
note, save the dead man, and—here the inspector’s glance became more
vague, a sure sign that he was particularly interested, for he was
looking at Wrenn.
The old man, in his decent black clothes, was standing near the couch;
and he was watching the intruders with a sort of baleful combination
of terror and resentment. The fear which he had shown in his face when
he looked out of the dressing-room door a few minutes since, had not
vanished from it; but to it was added another, and a not less violent
emotion. He was angry, he was on the defensive. He might, for the
moment, have been some cornered animal, frightened, but nevertheless
about to spring upon his enemy.
It was against Lowry’s principles to ask questions at such moments
as might be considered obvious; so it was Dukane who said, with some
asperity:
“What’s the matter, Wrenn?”
The old man’s face worked and his voice shook, as he returned:
“Mr. Dukane, sir—you—you aren’t going to let all these people in here,
to poke and pry about among my poor master’s things? It’s—it’s a wicked
shame, so it is! I’d never have thought it possible! It’s an outrage——”
“You’re crazy, Wrenn!” said Dukane, trying to remember the old fellow’s
bereavement, and doing his best to speak kindly instead of impatiently.
“These are detectives, officers of the law. They are on this case, and
they have a perfect right to do anything they want to.”
“But, sir”—the old servant was working himself up more and more, and
his cracked voice was growing shrill—“what are they doing here, sir?
What can they have to do here? Can’t his—his poor body rest in peace
without a—a lot of policemen poking——”
The inspector interrupted him placidly. “Much obliged for the
suggestion, Wrenn! We might not have thought of searching this dressing
room, but, thanks to you, we certainly will now!”
“Of course,” he said to Barrison later, “we’d have had to do it anyway,
but I wanted to scare that old chap into thinking it was chiefly his
doing!”
Wrenn gasped. “Oh, sir, oh, Mr. Dukane!” he implored. “Can’t he—lie
in peace—just for to-night? I—I’d like to sit with him to-night, sir.
Surely there’s no harm?”
“Was he so very kind to you?” said the inspector sympathetically.
Wrenn hesitated. “Mostly he was, sir,” he said at last, quite simply.
And then he added in a queer, forlorn way: “I—I’ve been with him a long
time, you know, sir.”
The detectives, despite Wrenn’s protests, searched the room with
methodical thoroughness. If there was one single thing, no bigger than
a pin, which ought not, in the nature of things, to be in a dressing
room of this kind, why, they were there to find it.
“But why?” Dukane whispered to Barrison. “Not that there is the
slightest objection—but what is it Lowry expects to find?”
“He doesn’t,” replied Barrison. “He’s from Missouri; he wants to be
shown. We always search the premises, you know——”
“But it wasn’t here he was killed.”
“No; but it was so near here that——Hello! They’ve got something!”
He spoke in the tone of suppressed excitement that a fox hunter might
have used.
The plain-clothes man with the inspector had opened the trunk, and was
staring into it with a puzzled face. At the same moment, Wrenn emitted
a low moan, as though, after a struggle, he found himself obliged to
give up at last. He staggered a trifle, and caught at the back of a
chair to steady himself.
“Well,” said the inspector, softly jocose. “Haven’t found the murderer
in that trunk, have you, Sims?”
“No, sir,” said the officer; but his voice was as puzzled as his eyes.
“Only this.”
He took something out of the trunk, and held it up in the unsparing
glare of the dressing-room lights. It was assuredly an odd sort of
article to be found in a man’s theater trunk. For it was a piece of
filmy white stuff, with lace upon it, badly torn.
“A sleeve,” said the inspector, with an obvious accent of astonishment.
“A woman’s sleeve—let’s have a look at it.”
He took it into his own hands. Clearly, it was the sleeve and part of
the shoulder of a woman’s dress or blouse, trimmed with elaborate, but
rather coarse and cheap lace. On the front, where it had evidently been
ripped and torn away from the original garment, were finger prints,
stamped in a brownish red.
The inspector’s eyes strayed to the dressing table with its array of
paints and powders.
“Anything there that will correspond? Barrison, take a look, while
Sims goes through the rest of the trunk.”
Barrison returned with a jar.
“It’s bolamine,” explained Dukane. “They use it for a dark make-up,
to suggest tan or sunburn. Mortimer would naturally use it in an
out-of-door part of this sort.”
“On his hands, too?”
“Surely on his hands; only amateurs forget the hands.”
“Ah!” said Lowry. “We’ll have the finger prints examined and compared
with Mortimer’s, though it’s scarcely necessary, I imagine. It’s so
evident that——”
Wrenn broke in, almost frantically:
“It’s only a make-up rag, sir! Every one uses make-up rags, sir, to
wipe the make-up off!”