The seventh shot A detective story
Barrison sized up the clerk, and decided on his course.
“Say, brother,” he murmured, with a confidential accent, “we don’t
mean to annoy Miss Legaye; we want to give her a boost. Get me? We’re
reporters, and we’re looking for a first-class story. Say, take it from
me, she’ll be keen to see us if you’ll just phone up!”
The slang won his case. The clerk looked at him with more respect.
“Say, you’re talking almost like a human being!” he remarked. “Want me
to phone up for you, eh?” He waited a perceptible space. “Times is
hard,” he declared, in an airy manner, “and phone calls is high. Did I
hear you say anything?”
“Maybe not me,” said Barrison, who had laid a dollar bill on the desk.
“But I’ve known money to talk before now.”
The clerk actually chuckled. “You’re on,” he said, pocketing the bill
with a discreet look around the almost deserted office. “I’ll phone up!”
He turned around a minute later to inform Barrison that Miss Legaye
would see him at once.
A few minutes later they were knocking at the door of Kitty Legaye’s
apartment. Resting against the lintel were half a dozen morning papers;
clearly she had ordered them ahead, in the expectation of criticisms of
the first night. The indefatigable bell boy had been ahead of them, but
there was still time to rectify that.
The boy who had piloted them had vanished. Barrison picked up the
whole bundle, and gave them a vigorous swing down the corridor. This
had barely been accomplished when the door opened, and an impeccably
attired lady’s maid asked them to please come in; Miss Legaye would see
them in a moment.
Kitty’s parlor was like Kitty herself, discreet, yet subtly daring;
conventional, yet alluring. She had made short work of the regulation
hotel furnishings, and replaced them with trifles of her own, which
gave the place a dainty and audacious air calculated to pique the
interest of almost anybody.
One of the modern dark chintzes had been chosen by the little lady
for her curtains and furniture coverings; she also had dared to put
cushions of cherry color and of black on the chaise longue, and
futurist posters in vivid oranges and greens upon the innocuous drab
wall paper. The extreme touches had been made delicately, without
vulgarity. Barrison, who had rather good taste himself, smiled as
he read in this butterflylike audacity a sort of key to little Miss
Kitty’s own personality.
She came in almost immediately, and, though Jim had never admired her,
he was forced to admit to himself at that moment that she was very
charming and quite appealing.
The creamy pallor which was always so effective an asset of hers
seemed a bit etherealized this morning, whether by a sleepless night
or the gray, rainy light. Her dark hair was pulled straight back from
her small face, with a rather sweet absence of coquetry; or was it,
instead, the very quintessence of coquetry, brought to a fine art?
Her big brown eyes were bigger and browner than ever, and her slim,
almost childish little figure—which looked so adorable always in its
young-girl frocks before the footlights—looked incomparably adorable
in a straight, severely cut little white wrapper, like the robe of an
early martyr.
She came forward to meet them quickly, but quite without embarrassment.
“Mr. Barrison!” she exclaimed, rather breathlessly. “What is it? Of
course I said I would see you at once. I knew you wouldn’t come without
some good reason. What do you want of me?”
Her eyes were as clear as the brown pools in a spring brook, and
Barrison felt suddenly ashamed of himself and—almost—wroth with Grace
Templeton for putting him up to this.
“Miss Legaye,” he said, with some hesitation, “I am already calling
myself all sorts of names for having aroused you at this unearthly
hour. And you were not well, too.”
“Oh, that headache!” she said. “That is all gone now! I got to bed
early, and had a really decent sleep for once, so I am in good shape
this morning! But—what _did_ you want to see me about?”
Just as Barrison was trying to find words in which to answer her
properly, the maid spoke from the doorway:
“You told me to take in the papers, miss, but there’s none there.”
Kitty turned in astonishment. “Not there! But they always leave them at
eight, and I particularly said that I wanted all of them this morning.
That’s funny! Never mind; you can go down to the stand and get them,
and Mr. Barrison can tell me what I want to know first of all. Oh, Mr.
Barrison, tell me about last night! Did it all go off as well as it
seemed to be going when I left?” She looked with honest eagerness into
his eyes.
Barrison felt most uncomfortable, but he forced himself to say
steadily: “Have you really not heard anything about what happened last
night, Miss Legaye?”
If it were possible to turn paler, she turned paler then; and her eyes
seemed to darken, as though with dread; yet there was nothing in her
look but what might come from honest fear of the unknown.
“Mr. Barrison! What is it that you are trying to make me think? What do
you mean? Oh—_oh_!” She drew in her breath sharply. “Is that what it
means? Is that what you came here for—to—tell me something? Is that it,
Mr. Barrison?”
Her eyes pleaded with him, looking earnestly out of her little white
face. She looked a butterfly no longer; rather, a tired and frightened
little girl. “Won’t you tell me what it all means?” she begged.
“Miss Legaye,” Jim said gently, “there was a tragedy last night at the
theater after you left.”
“A tragedy?”
“Yes; there was—a murder.”
She stared at him, as though she did not yet understand. “A murder?”
“Miss Legaye, I see it is a shock to you, but you must hear it from
some one; you might as well hear it from me. Mr. Mortimer was shot last
night during the last act, and is dead.”
She shrieked—a thin, high, deadly shriek, which rang long in the ears
of the two men. Her face grew smaller, sharper; she beat the air with
her hands. The maid ran to her.
News? Oh, Heaven, yes! There was no question of this being news to her;
it was news that was coming close to killing her.
“Say that again!” she managed to say, in a slow, thick utterance
that sounded immeasurably strange from her lips. “Alan Mortimer was
murdered? You said that? You are sure of it?”
“Yes, Miss Legaye.”
She flung up her hands wildly, and fainted dead away.
CHAPTER XVI
A SCARLET EVENING COAT
It was a real faint. They had a good bit of difficulty in getting her
out of it.
There wasn’t much room in Jim Barrison’s mind for anything except
self-reproach. He _knew_ that the tidings of Mortimer’s murder had come
upon Kitty Legaye like a stroke of lightning. She had no more been
prepared for it than she would have been prepared for the end of the
world. He had an idea that the end of the world would, as a general
proposition, have affected her much less. Barrison was no new hand, and
not too soft-hearted or gullible; and he knew that what he had looked
upon that morning was sheer, absolute shock and grief, unlooked for,
terrible, devastating.
Poor little Kitty, with all her frivolities, had bigness in her. As she
struggled back into the gray world, she obviously tried to straighten
up and steady herself. The terror was all the time at the back of
her brown eyes, but she was doing her best to be game, to be, as she
herself would have expressed it, “a good sport.”
Of course, she wanted particulars, and he gave them to her, feeling
like a pickpocket all the time. Papers were obtained, and she was
induced to take coffee with brandy in it, and—at last—she broke down
and cried, which was what every one had been praying for since the
beginning.
Probably never in his clear-cut, well-established career had Jim
Barrison experienced what he was experiencing now: The sense that he
had brought unnecessary suffering upon an innocent person, and brought
it in a peculiarly merciless and unsportsmanlike way. He felt savage
when he thought of that “tip” of Miss Templeton’s—or did he, really?
He was obliged to confess to himself that, where she was concerned,
he would be almost sure to discover approximately extenuating
circumstances!
It was partly to soothe his own aching conscience that Jim forced
himself to ask a few perfunctory questions.
“You don’t mind?” he asked Kitty.
“Naturally I don’t,” she said, trying not to cry, and choking down
coffee. “You’ve been awfully kind, Mr. Barrison. If there’s anything I
can do to help, please let me. You know”—she looked at him in a sudden,
piteous way—“I had expected to marry Mr. Mortimer. Maybe you can guess
what all this means to me? Will you tell me what you wanted to know?”
“For one thing,” he said, “we want to establish as nearly as we can
when the murderer—the murderess, as we think it was—entered the
theater. Old Roberts says that he went out through the alley to the
street to get you a taxi——”
“Dear old thing!” she whispered.
“Yes; he is a nice old sort. He made it very clear that it was only
his devotion to you that induced him to leave his post. Well, it seems
almost certain that some one passed him, and perhaps you, in the alley
last night. You don’t remember seeing even a shadow that might be
suspicious?”
She shook her head thoughtfully.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But I was in a hurry, and wasn’t looking out
for anything of that sort. Roberts knows I was in a hurry?” She spoke
quickly.
“Oh, yes. He says you were in a hurry, and not feeling well. The point
is, did you see anything at all on your way to the taxi?”
“Nothing. I was only thinking of getting home and to bed; it had been a
horrid evening.”
Now, of course, the obvious thing for Jim Barrison to do then was to
take his leave. More, it was manifestly the only decent thing for him
to do. He had proved conclusively that Kitty had not expected the
news of Mortimer’s murder; in addition, she had declared that she had
noticed no one on her way out to the taxi the night before. On the face
of it, there was nothing further to be found out here. And yet, after
he had got to his feet and taken up his hat, he lingered. As a matter
of fact, he never was able, in looking back afterward, to tell just
what insane impulse made him blurt out suddenly:
“Miss Legaye, you were wearing a red wrap last night, weren’t you?
Something quite bright, scarlet?”
She looked up at him faintly surprised. “Why, yes,” she answered, “you
saw it yourself, just as I was going out.”
Jim hesitated, and then said something still more crazy: “Would you—do
you very much mind letting me see it—now?”
She stared at him in undisguised astonishment. “Certainly,” she said,
rather blankly. “Celine, will you bring my red evening coat, please?”
The maid did so at once; it flamed there in the gray light of that
rainy morning like some monstrous scarlet poppy. Barrison lifted a
shimmering, brilliant fold, and looked at it.
“It’s a gorgeous color!” he said, rather irrelevantly.
“Scarlet!” whispered Kitty, in a strange tone. “And to think I was
wearing _that_ last night. I do not believe that I shall ever feel like
wearing scarlet again! You are going, Mr. Barrison?”
“Yes; you have been very patient with me, and very forgiving for having
been the bearer of such bad news. Good-by. I won’t even try to express
the sympathy——”
“Don’t; I understand. Mr. Barrison, _why_ did you want to see this
coat?”
“It was just an impulse!” he declared quickly. “You forgive me for
that, too?”
She bent her head without speaking, and the two men went away.
“Tony,” said Jim Barrison, when they were in the street once more,
facing the wet blast, “it’s no lie to say that facts are misleading.”
“It’s no lie to say they very often mislead _you_!” retorted Tony,