11

Bill Weigand parked his car in the upper West Fifties and told the Telegraph Bureau where the car was, and that for some time he wouldn’t be in it, and where he would be. He walked a quarter of a block and looked at his destination and involuntarily shook his head.

It had been a very foolish place to build a theater, even in the twenties, when it had seemed that New York could never have enough theaters. Probably it had been a “jinx house” even then, which was only a way of saying that it had been, usually for a few nights at a time, occupied by plays which couldn’t find better lodging and that usually because they deserved none. And “The Excelsior” is not really a name anyone in his right mind would wish on a theater.

The name of the theater was still lettered across its façade. It was lettered now in the empty sockets of light bulbs long since shattered. The brick of the façade had once been painted white. That had been a mistake, too.

The theater into which Livingston Birdwood’s production of Uprising, a play in three acts by Lars Simon, based on a novel by Anthony Payne, was to open during the holidays, was ten blocks south, where theaters belong. It was by no means new—no theater in New York is really new—but it was bright with paint, and lights sparkled on it. It was also occupied by a musical which only now, after rather more than two years, was beginning to dwindle away.

Plays must rehearse somewhere. The Excelsior was a hulk, but it still had a stage of sorts. Electricity could be turned on when needed, and if ancient wiring started fire, those within could always run and the reluctant owners of the building could chortle. The insurance company might sigh, but with resignation, since it had long since got its own back.

From the sidewalk, the theater looked as dead as the empty sockets of its sign. Bill Weigand looked at it and felt doubt; wondered whether, conceivably, Livingston Birdwood had directed him up a blind alley. It was a cobweb of a thought, and he brushed it away and went into the lobby. Plaster had fallen off the lobby ceiling and not been brushed up. There was no one in the lobby. There was no sound except that of his shoes gritting on plaster dust. It was getting on in the day. Perhaps they had packed up and gone home.

The doors from lobby to orchestra were closed against him, flatly, offering no handholds. Gone away and sealed the place up after them? No—a single door with a knob on it. Bill turned the knob and pulled and the door opened, and he went in. They had not packed up and gone home.

The auditorium was not really large. The Excelsior had been built for “intimate” productions, which had turned out to be intimate to the point of disappearance. But now it looked like a dark cavern—a dark and extremely cold cavern. Bill buttoned his topcoat and resisted the inclination to turn its collar up.

The stage seemed far away, and the center aisle sloped toward it. Over the stage a single bright bulb dangled from a cord, threw down harsh light. In seats nearest the stage half a dozen people sat, dark blobs against the light. Under the hanging light, a man sat on a wooden chair, beside a wooden table, his right leg resting on another wooden chair. Toward the rear of the stage, and to the left as Weigand faced it, a woman in a mink coat stood with her back to him and faced a brick wall.

The man, seen in profile—he was looking at the woman in the mink coat—was young and handsome and dark-haired. A smaller man, whose hair was also dark but was noticeably scant, walked from a canvas flat leaning against a wall (the flat was marked “Laura Darling Scene 2”) toward the man in the chair. The walking man said, “Yackety yackety yackety it was you who began it.”

The handsome man wheeled quickly to face the newcomer.

“Not I, Sybil,” he said, and laughed lightly. “I—”

“Damn it all, Blaine,” the smaller man said. “How often do I have to tell you? It’s hot as hell. It’s got all of you, the heat has. Also, damn it to hell, you’ve got to start wearing it. Otherwise, you’ll be skipping all over the damn place when we open.”

“I’m sorry,” the handsome man said.

Nobody had paid any attention to Bill Weigand. He sat down in an aisle seat. A broken spring pronged him. He moved to the next seat.

“Blaine.” Blaine Smythe. Back in the cast, apparently. Which was mildly interesting, and certainly convenient.

The woman in the mink coat turned. She was pretty, with the highly visible face of an actor.

“Lars,” she said. “I still think there ought to be drums. Thump-thump, thump-thump. They’re natives, aren’t they? I’m looking out this window because I hear the drums—boom-boom-boom, boom. I’m scared out of my wits because of the damn drums.”

“No drums,” Lars—Lars Simon, he would be—said, His tone was weary. “These natives haven’t invented drums, darling. Also, they’re sneaking up through the jungle. Slither, slither, slither. That’s what you hear, darling. Not boom, boom.”

“The audience can’t hear slither,” the girl in mink said. “But it’s your play, darling. Slither, slither. God, it’s cold in here.”

“Button up your overcoat,” Lars Simon said, with no sympathy in his voice. “All right. Sybil comes in left.” He went back to the flat and then walked away from it, as he had before. “Yackety yackety yackety it was you who began it.”

Blaine Smythe seemed to stiffen when he heard the voice. This time he turned slowly, twisting his body but leaving his right leg extended on the chair.

“Not I, Sybil,” he said. And laughed lightly. “I—”

The woman in the mink coat turned from the “window.” She turned abruptly.

“If not you,” she said, “who? That’s the question, isn’t it, George? Who? If not you—”

“Too fast, darling,” Lars Simon said. “Look, darling. The three of you have been cooped up in here for two days, and they’re coming through the jungle.”

“Slither slither,” the girl said.

“You’re very funny, darling,” Lars said. “You’ve got on each other’s nerves. O.K. But it’s hot as hell and you’re tired. Beat down. Do it tired, darling. Do it hot.”

“With my teeth chattering,” the girl said. “Ing gives us a barn to work in and—”

Lars looked at her.

“All right, darling,” the girl said. “Cue me, Blaine.” She turned and faced the brick wall. Damn it all, Bill Weigand thought, she looks precisely as if she were looking out a window. Even under all that coat.

“O.K.,” Lars said. “From Sybil’s entrance. Yackety yackety yackety it was you who began it.”

Blaine Smythe turned even more slowly in his chair. As he turned, he used one hand to lift his right leg a little. He spoke as he turned. “Not I, Sybil. I—”

The young woman turned. Now there was a kind of slump in her slender body, weariness in her slower movement; weariness, yet with hysteria under the weariness, in her voice as she spoke. “If not you,” she said, “who? That’s the question, isn’t it, George? Who—”

She broke. In quite another voice, she said, “Listen, Lars. It’s your play. But do you really want me to say ‘if not you’ again? When it’s slowed down this way? To me, darling, it doesn’t hold.”

Lars Simon said, “Hmmm,” thoughtfully and then, “Could be you’ve got—read it again, darling.”

Darling read it again.

Lars nodded. “All right,” he said. “Stop with the second ‘who.’ Only, lean on it a little. Let’s take it again. Sybil comes in and yackety yackety yackety—”

They took it again. The girl “leaned” just perceptibly on the second “who.”

“O.K.,” Lars said. “Faith’s cue is the second ‘who,’ then.”

He looked at his watch. “All right, children,” he said. “We’ve got that in the works. No use trying to set the rest without Faith. Joe?” From some place a man’s voice said, “Yeah.” “Light this crypt up, will you, Joe?” A few lights came on—two where a cluster once had been; half a dozen dimly outlining the arch. “All right, children,” Lars said. “Ten o’clock tomorrow.” He came across a runway built over the orchestra pit and down steps. Bill Weigand got up and walked down the center aisle. “And Blaine,” Lars Simon said; turning back to the handsome man still sitting by the table. “Tomorrow you bring it along, O.K.? And wear it?”

“Sure,” Blaine Smythe said, and stood up. And as he stood, Bill Weigand saw, for the first time, that a rifle was lying across the wooden table. It had been shielded, before, by Blaine Smythe’s body.

Smythe moved quickly, with grace, across the stage to the runway. The half dozen dark blobs stood up from their seats and became two women, one middle-aged, the other hardly more than a girl, and four men, one of them a remarkably tall and obviously muscular Negro. “And Tommy,” Lars said, “do you mind putting on the choppers, tomorrow? So you can learn to talk with them. And not, buddy, look so goddamn Harvard?”

The tall Negro laughed. He had a low, musical laugh.

“You Amherst boys,” he said. He talked Harvard, Weigand thought. “All right, Lars. Tomorrow, ferocious native with pointed teeth. Trouble is, Lars, I bite myself. But—O.K.”

Bill Weigand had almost joined the group before anyone seemed to notice him. Then they all turned and looked at him. There was nothing impolite in the way they looked at him. But they looked at an alien.

His identification of himself did not change that, but Blaine Smythe raised his eyebrows, and Lars Simon said, “My God. Who goes willingly?”

Bill Weigand looked as amused as he could manage. He mentioned routine.

“All right,” Lars said, “I shot my mouth off. Said he was a pain in the neck and—oh my God, I told somebody he ought to drop dead. I can hear myself. He ought to drop dead, I said. And dead he dropped.”

He held out his hands, wrists close enough together. Bill Weigand did not try to look amused. Lars Simon looked at him a moment. “I’m sorry, Captain,” he said, in quite another voice. “It isn’t funny, is it?”

“No,” Bill said. “It’s not very funny, Mr. Simon. But it is routine. A couple of questions for you. A couple for—it is Mr. Smythe, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Smythe said. He looked at the watch on his wrist. “I have got a date,” he said. “Will it take long?”

There was no reason why it should take long. And certainly no reason why the others should wait. The others looked rather as if they’d like to. “Run along, children,” Lars Simon said, very much as if he talked to children. They went up the aisle. At the head of it, the young woman in mink stopped and called back. “You really mean ten, darling?” she called. “You’re damned right, darling,” Lars Simon told her up the length of the aisle. “And Tommy. Don’t forget the choppers.”

“Grrr,” Tommy said. He did two steps of what appeared to be a tribal dance.

The three sat in orchestra seats, Simon and Blaine Smythe in one row with a vacant seat between them, Bill Weigand in the row in front, twisted (somewhat uncomfortably) so that he could look at them.

The first was simplest, as it always was. Smythe had, he sad, left the cocktail party shortly after the brawl between Willings and Payne. He had gone to his apartment, which was in the Murray Hill area. He had stayed in it until about seven-thirty, when he had picked up a friend and gone to dinner. “Same friend I’ve got a date with now,” he said, and looked at his watch again. Weigand looked at his own. It showed twenty minutes after four. He said, again, that he’d try not to keep Mr. Smythe long. “Girl friend,” Smythe said, without being asked. “They don’t like to be kept waiting, Captain.”

When it was his turn, Lars Simon was not so quick, nor did he seem so assured. He said that he had still been at the party—what was left of the party. He had not known Payne had been shot until, apparently, about fifteen minutes after it happened. When he had gone out, the police were already there. Somebody had told him Payne was dead, and he had gone home. Home was in Brooklyn Heights.

Probably, while still at the party, he had been with people who would remember that he was with them?

“They’d thinned out, damn it,” Simon said. “There was a girl who wants to write plays. There’s always somebody who wants to write plays. Wanted to talk about writing plays, for God’s sake. I don’t know who she was. I don’t know when it was. Most of the time I was sitting at a table in a corner having a scotch and writing.”

Weigand repeated the last word, his inflection rising.

“Not on paper,” Simon said. “In here.” He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Second act. Payne had made a hell of a pitch about one scene and I finally said, ‘What the hell?’ But I still didn’t like it and I was trying to work it out so it would make sense and still get by with him. He was a bastard to work with and—” He stopped. He said, “Hell,” with considerable simplicity.

“A problem,” Weigand said, “which no longer arises, does it?”

“Sure,” Lars Simon said. “That’s why I killed him, Captain. Terribly sincere artist, that’s me. Guy gets in the way of my great art and—poof! No more guy.”

“Lars,” Blaine Smythe said, and sounded solicitous. “Why be any more of a damn fool than you have to be?”

“He wants motive,” Lars Simon said. “I’m the obliging sort. Sincere and obliging. That’s me.”

“It was that made you say he ought to drop dead?” Bill asked.

“Things like that,” Lars said. “All right, he got in my hair.” He rubbed his hand hard against his thinning hair, apparently by way of emphasis. “And brother, if I’d killed everybody who got in my hair since I started in this racket—” He spread thin, expressive hands.

“Right,” Bill said. “You didn’t kill Payne. He annoyed you, but you didn’t kill him. You don’t know the name of this girl who wants to write plays?”

“No.”

“By the way—that rifle.” Bill Weigand gestured toward the stage. “It’s a working gun?”

“With blanks. It’s a prop. Natives closing in on these three, who are all that are left—only they’re not, but now it looks that way—and all they’ve got is this popgun. Natives got the hunting rifles and—” Very evidently he stumbled on sudden realization. “Payne was shot with a rifle?” he said, and no levity was left in his tone.

“A twenty-two,” Bill said. He nodded, this time, toward the stage.

“Yes,” Lars said. “It’s a twenty-two. And so far as I know it just kicks around here between rehearsals. Joe sees it’s on hand when we want—Joe!”

A man came from behind a flat, stage right. He said, “Yeah?”

“That damn gun,” Lars said, and pointed. “Where do we keep it?”

“With the other props when we get the other props,” Joe said. “Which reminds me. About that—”

“Where, Joe?”

“Where it is now, unless we’re setting it different. Then—hell, it just gets leaned against a wall, out of the way.”

Lars Simon looked at Weigand.

“You’ve got ammunition for it?” Bill asked, across the orchestra pit.

“Blanks. What the hell?”

Bill said he didn’t know what the hell. He told Lars Simon that, for a day or so, they’d have to get along without the rifle. Lars did not seem surprised. He said that, all right, they’d use a broomstick and go “bang!”

“Listen, Captain,” Blaine Smythe said. “You don’t want me any longer, do you? I’ve got this—hell, you don’t think I’d do anything to good old Tony? And anyway, I wasn’t there.”

“Right,” Bill said. “I understand Mr. Payne got you fired. From this part. Apparently, now he isn’t around—”

Blaine said, “Oh, that,” in a tone which dismissed that. “He got a bee in his bonnet. Sure. Nothing would have come of it. Look, Captain, you’re not that crazy. To get the idea I—hell, man, I could get any one of half a dozen parts. Some of them a helluva lot better, if that’s all right with you, Lars.”

Lars Simon leaned back slightly and looked at the ceiling far above them. He said, “Sure, Blaine.”

“Mr. Smythe,” Weigand said, “I understand you and Mrs. Payne—the present Mrs. Payne—are quite good friends.”

He was asked what he meant by that. He said he meant no more than he said by that. He said it was a very simple question.

“Listen,” Smythe said, “if you mean—”

“No,” Bill said. “Only what I said. Asked. Are you?”

Smythe didn’t know what he meant by “good.” He said they’d met each other around from time to time. He said he’d taken her out a few times. “But that was before she married Payne.” He said there had never been anything more than that to it. “Matter of fact,” he said, “she’s not my type. Probably I’m not her type, either. Anyway, she never acted like it.” He looked at Bill Weigand intently. “Somebody tell you different? Or, are you trying a game?”

“No game,” Bill said.

“Then?” Smythe said, and once more looked at his watch and, from it, at Weigand, with accusation.

“Go keep your date,” Bill said. “If we think of any more questions we’ll look you up.”

Blaine Smythe stood up quickly. So, not quite so quickly, did Lars Simon.

“Couple more things I’d like to ask you, Mr. Simon,” Bill said. “If you haven’t got a date too?”

“My wife’s used to waiting,” Lars Simon said. “Poor wretch.”

Bill watched Blaine Smythe, tall and suave of movement, walk up the aisle.

“Mr. Simon,” he said, when Smythe had gone out the door, “Payne did get him fired?” Lars nodded. “Why?”

“Thought he knew something about acting,” Lars said. “Payne did. Said Blaine didn’t ‘feel’ the part. Feel, for God’s sake. Went over my head to Birdy. Ing Birdwood. He had money in it, you know. Payne had. Or maybe Lauren had. You knew she’s got money?”

“Yes.”

“So Birdy gave Blaine notice. Can at this stage, you know.”

“So now he’s got the part back?”

“That’s right. Now he’s got the part back. He’s good, as a matter of fact.”

“Good enough to have half a dozen other parts for the taking?”

“Captain,” Lars said, “they all talk that way, the poor bastards.”

“He didn’t have?”

“I don’t know he didn’t have,” Lars said. “Of course, the season’s moving along. This time of year, things are pretty much set. Off Broadway’s another matter. Could be off Broadway. Only, Blaine isn’t exactly an art-for-art’s-sake sort of bloke. Or Equity-minimum-for-art’s-sake either.” He looked at Bill Weigand with enhanced interest. He said, “You figure a bloke would kill another bloke for a job?”

Bill said nobody could tell what a bloke would kill another bloke for. He said that if reason entered into murder, there would be no murder. He said, “You don’t want to gossip, I suppose? I can’t insist if you don’t.”

“About what?”

“You heard what I asked Smythe.”

Lars Simon considered. In due time he nodded his head slowly. He stopped nodding his head, and looked at the stage, where there was, at the moment, nothing worth looking at.

“No,” Lars said, “I guess I don’t, Captain,” and then looked at Bill. “Which,” he said, “I suppose you’ll take as an answer.” Bill said nothing. “I will say this,” Lars said. “From what I hear, Tony Payne was a bit of a heel where women were concerned. So if Lauren, who’s a nice girl from what I’ve seen of her—” He let it hang there, for the moment. Then he said, “Payne had latched onto a babe. A chick—a very downy chick. But I suppose you’ve turned that up?”

“Right,” Bill said. “One, anyway. I suppose you mean Jo-An Rhodes?”

“Don’t know her name, actually. Pretty little dark thing. Saw them together once or twice and Payne looked—well, you know how men look sometimes. As if he were about to—absorb her. Could be she had a boy friend. Looked the type that would, if boys are what they ought to be.” He looked at the stage again. “I don’t argue all of them are,” he said, rather absently.

People rather kept pointing at Jo-An Rhodes and, by indirection, James Self. In murder investigations, people are rather inclined to point—to point away. Sometimes, of course, merely wishing to be helpful.

“This rifle of yours,” Bill said, and Lars shook his head and said, “Not mine. Birdy’s.”

“Right,” Bill said. “This prop rifle. Anyone, obviously—any member of the cast, anybody associated with the production—could walk in and pick it up. Take it anywhere and use it. Get it, back for the next day’s rehearsal.”

“As you say. Obviously. But as far as that goes, anybody, in the cast or not, could walk in and pick it up and, as you say, use it.”

“The theater’s not kept locked?”

“If you call this barn a theater—no. With what? Nothing works. Why? There’s nothing worth stealing.”

“The rifle. And anybody who knew it was here, lying around loose, could have told anybody else.”

Lars supposed so. Then, somewhat belatedly, the idea seemed to cheer him.

“And this anybody could walk in any time,” he said. “As you did yourself, Captain.”

There was no special point that Bill could see in their continuing to agree with each other about the rifle.

“When I came in,” he said, “you were cueing Smythe. But I gather you’re not really playing the part?”

Lars Simon laughed. He said, “My God no. I was standing in for Faith. Faith Constable.”

“Who had the day off?”

That was not it. Faith Constable did not have the day off. None of the boys and girls got days off. Not at this stage. Faith had showed with the others. “She’s a trouper, the Lady Constable.” But, an hour or so after she had arrived, she had got a telephone call. “Believe it or not, we’ve got a telephone in this dump.” She had told Lars that something had come up, and that he would have to get along without her for the afternoon. She had not said what had come up. Lars had raised no objection: “You don’t with La Constable. She knows who she is. In a nice way, but she knows who she is.”

Simon had no idea—no idea at all—what had suddenly “come up”?

He had not. It was clear, however, that it was something Faith Constable thought important. “As I said, she’s a trouper.”

A detective, mind concentrated on a case, risks obsession. There was no reason to suppose, Bill told himself, that what had seemed “important” to Mrs. Faith Constable had any relation to what was, at the moment, most important to Homicide, Manhattan West. All sudden and unexplained movements are, however, interesting.

As a matter of routine, no one else in the case bore a grudge against Anthony Payne? Nobody Lars Simon knew of?

Lars considered briefly. It was a hell of a big cast. The ones Weigand had seen were only principals. There were a lot of walk-ons, mostly natives.

“Payne did have a habit—bad habit—of treating Tommy as if he were a native,” Lars said. “You saw Tommy? Harvard ’56, cum laude. I don’t imagine it bothered Tommy. He’s the most goddamn well-adjusted bloke I ever saw.” He considered again. “Among actors, anyway,” he said.

“Mr. Payne has been attending rehearsals?”

Lars rubbed his receding hair with both hands, in apparent anguish. He said, “And how!” He turned to Bill Weigand. “Do you really have to catch the bloke who spared us Payne?” he said.

Bill said he had to try, and went across the runway over the orchestra pit and got the rifle. There was no point in bothering about any fingerprints which might be on it. If it had a story to tell, its grooves would speak mutely. Ballistics would decipher the word.

In his car, Bill Weigand call the Telegraph Bureau to see whether anybody wanted him. Nobody did. With the motor started, Bill wrestled briefly with temptation. He might now go home, where Dorian was waiting. He might, showered and changed, with her beside him, drive across town and downtown and have with Pam and Jerry North the drink to which they had been invited. The temptation was considerable.

In the back seat of the car there was a rifle which might—and of course might not—prove to be a State exhibit. And, above the soft sound of the Buick’s motor, he could hear a voice—a legal voice. “Now, Captain,” the voice said to an inner ear, “you found this rifle, you say. And you took it at once to the office, of course, and marked it properly and dispatched it, as is required in the regulations of the department, for ballistic examination? Oh—you didn’t do that? You took it home with you? Up to your apartment? Is that right? And then you and your wife went to the apartment of Mr. and Mrs.—let’s see, now. North, isn’t it?—and still had the rifle with you? Carried it around quite a time, didn’t you, Captain? You’re sure that there was no opportunity for somebody to substitute another rifle for the one you say you found in the theater? That’s what you say, Captain? Remembering you are on oath. You expect this jury to—”

Bill Weigand, who was only a few crosstown blocks from his apartment which overlooks the East River, drove downtown to West Twentieth Street, and carried the rifle upstairs, and put a tag on it and initialed the tag, and called for a patrolman to take it to ballistics. The patrolman gave him a receipt for it, and put his own initials under Weigand’s on the tag, and took the rifle downstairs again to a police car and drove off with it.

The telephone on Bill’s desk rang. Connecticut State Police, Ridgefield Barracks. Reporting: Mrs. Anthony Payne had returned to her house on Nod Road. She had returned alone at a little before five. The State Police had been keeping an eye on the house at the request of Anthony Payne who, some days before, had told them that the house would be empty, that he and his wife would be in New York and that the couple who constituted the staff had been given the time off. At a little before five, the eyes being kept—those of Trooper Owen Cutler—had seen lights go on in the house. To verify, he had driven up to it and found Mrs. Payne there, alone. (Alone by her statement; he had not, of course, searched.) He had expressed sympathy, been thanked, driven off. Did Captain Weigand want any further steps taken?

Bill hesitated. He could not think of any. But still—Would they mind keeping an eye on the house, as manpower permitted? Not that anything would happen. But still—

The State Police said, “O.K., Captain.”

So—it was still not much after five. Bill checked through his mind. He found a nagging in his mind. There is always something and what now was this—this vague and unsatisfactory thing; this kind of scratching, as if something shut out sought admittance or something inside wanted out? Something he had passed over which should not have been passed over, and which now was scratching his subconscious? Weigand flipped the mental pages of the day, and turned up nothing. Well, if it was important, it would nag, would tickle, its way to the surface. Meanwhile—

The telephone rang. A young woman was at the desk downstairs and wanted to see Captain Weigand. Young woman named Jo-An Rhodes. Did Weigand want—?