Messrs. Kelly and Sheets, meanwhile, had not been idle. Between them they had settled upon a workmanlike plan of action. It had the merit of sanity and common sense, virtues abundantly possessed by both detectives.
It was by now reasonably certain, they agreed, that all the murders had been the work of a single directing mind, even—it seemed likely—of a single hand. The situation offered difficulties of reconciliation, to be sure, but to the hard, logical minds of Messrs. Kelly and Sheets difficulties were only temporary obstacles. Once a common factor had been established, they would become actual aids to investigation.
In short, to solve the murder of Ellis Greene it was necessary first to solve the murder of Amos Bluefield. Similarly, to solve the murders of Gaunt and Lear, it was imperative to return to beginnings. After a fashion, it was the method of Walter Ghost.
To date, the activities of the two police detectives had resulted only in the apprehension of Clay Ridinghood. It had been quite a coup, in its way. But it was beginning to worry them. Was Ridinghood, after all, the common factor in all the crimes? That he had murdered Lear was easy to believe, since there had been both motive and opportunity; but to connect Ridinghood with the deaths of Bluefield and Gaunt had been another matter. No motive was apparent, and as for opportunity, it was certain that the stage detective had been playing his part in Milwaukee, with his principal, at the time of the first two murders.
It had begun to look as if Ridinghood would have to be freed, unless stronger evidence against him could be found. Certain it was that he had not murdered Greene. The lockup keeper would not have let him out long enough to accomplish that.
“And I’ll tell you something in confidence, Billy,” observed Detective Sergeant John Kelly to his associate. “He didn’t kill Lear, either!”
Sheets agreed—reluctantly. “Neither did the Carvel female,” he returned sadly. “They both of them just wanted to.”
“It ain’t a crime,” said Kelly, without emotion. “There’s a flock of wrong birds I’d like to bump off myself—not all of them criminals. Lear had it coming to him, if the lady told the truth—and she probably did. But it’s a wonder some shyster hasn’t got Ridinghood out, by this time. We haven’t a thing to hold him on. We certainly get away with crime, ourselves, in this business! If the Carvel person was better looking we’d probably have the town around our ears.”
He shrugged. “Well, they’re digging up Amos and Hubert this afternoon. Like to see’em?”
“Hell, no!” said Sheets. “An exhumation gives me the willies. You find out too much about what happens to you after you’re planted.”
“I kinda like’em,” said Kelly, with a grin. “Keeps a guy’s hat from getting too small for him. They won’t find out anything we don’t know, anyway. Bluefield and Gaunt were killed the same as Lear and Greene, don’t make any mistake about that.”
“Pity they couldn’t find a stickpin, or something, on Bluefield Mex,” observed Sheets. “He’s the one person who could have killed them all— except all the people in the world we don’t know anything about,” he added dryly.
Detective Sergeant John Kelly spat accurately for a distance of twenty feet. “We’ll get him,” he said. “We’ll get him! Whoever he is, we’ll get him, and we’ll get him plenty.” He drained his glass.
“Suits me,” said Sheets laconically. After a moment he continued: “And when we get him he’ll have a dress suit in his wardrobe.”
Kelly was startled. “He’ll what? Why will he have a dress suit in his wardrobe?” He looked suspiciously at his companion. “You’ve been thinking again!”
“I know it ain’t safe.” Sheets was apologetic. “But I remembered last night that Bluefield wore a dress suit when they found him in the window.”
“So did the dummy,” said Kelly. “It always wore one.”
“It wasn’t Bluefield’s,” argued Sheets defensively. “The dummy wore his own suit on the hook, and Bluefield wore his own in the window. They didn’t swap.”
“What are you getting at?”
“The man who killed Bluefield had to catch him while he was wearing a dress suit—didn’t he? So he could be planted in the window and look like the dummy!”
“Hmph!” said Kelly. “Where was Bluefield the night of the murder, eh?” He thought about it for a minute.
Sheets was impatient. “Where was he just before the murder? That’s the question. Nobody ever found out.”
“Well, where was he?” asked Kelly.
“How do I know? The worst of fellows like that is, they wear evening clothes after six o’clock every night, anyway.” Sheets was disgusted with the whole tribe of them. “Maybe he was with a girl. Maybe he went to a show! That’s what I was thinking.”
“Say!” Again Kelly was startled. But he shook his head impatiently after a moment. “We keep forgetting that Lear’s show wasn’t in town the night Bluefield was killed.”
“Who said it was? There were other shows in town. What I mean is this: We’ve got to prove that Bluefield and Gaunt were theatre hounds, or something of the sort, to connect them with the Lear case. It’s a series of theatrical murders, Johnny, me boy, any way you look at it. Every one of the killings was stage-managed by a veteran. What’s more, I believe Greene was at a theater the night he was killed.”
“He was killed at nine o’clock,” said Kelly. “Everybody knows that.”
“Maybe he was! They didn’t find him till midnight, though. These doctors don’t know everything. There’s that Maxwell girl, too. She used to be on the stage, and what is she now? Engaged to marry one of Bluefield’s clerks!”
“Sands and Clarke are watching the Maxwell girl,” said Kelly. “They say she’s all right.”
“Sands and Clarke!” sneered Detective Sergeant William Sheets. “Are we taking the word of Sands and Clarke for anything? A couple of Orangemen! Well, what about it?”
“I think you’re crocked on the theater,” admitted Kelly. “You’re stage-struck! But you may be right, at that. You think we ought to go to all the theaters and ask about Bluefield?”
“Don’t you?”
Kelly thought it over. “Maybe I do,” he agreed. “We might do worse.”
He looked about him. The jolly little barroom in which they sat, and in which the conversation had gone forward, was a pleasant spot. One did not leave it without reluctance. Detective Sergeant Kelly raised a thick forefinger, and a sleek Italian-looking individual rushed forward solicitously.
“Two more beers, Sebastian,” ordered Detective Sergeant Kelly, “and make it snappy. We’ve got work to do, whether you have or not. Got any pretzels?”
“No pretzels!” The man called Sebastian smiled apologetically. “Got ham sandwich, got hot dog, got bin sup! What you like, keed?”
“No pretzels!” observed Detective Sergeant Kelly. “This is a hell of a speakeasy! Well, bring me some ‘bin sup’! How about you, Billy?”
“‘Bin sup,’” grinned Detective Sergeant William Sheets.
They inhaled their bean soup with great gusto and went forth again into the wicked world on the trail of the murderer of Amos Bluefield.
One theater, after all, they agreed, was as good as another, and the Alhambra was perhaps better than most. It had been the scene of the murder of Patrick Lear, for one thing, and its employees were all familiar suspects. For another thing, it was close at hand.
Their assurance as they entered the manager’s office suggested that at least they had been born in the house.
Sam Sultan, the manager, was out, but a sleek assistant gave them cigars and apprehensive appraisal. Nobody else had been murdered, he confessed, in reply to Kelly’s first sardonic question, and the show was doing very well. Very well indeed.
He regretted that he was unable to say whether Amos Bluefield had been in the theater on the evening of the first murder. He had not known Mr. Bluefield personally, although once he had purchased a tie in the Bluefield shop. It was unlikely, he thought, that anybody around the place would know. Just possibly, the box office clerk! Just possibly, the principal usher, who had a good memory for faces! But he doubted it.
He hardly cared to answer for Mr. Sultan, but he was certain the house manager and Bluefield had not been acquainted. Had they been, he felt sure, Mr. Sultan would have mentioned it at the time of the murder. Certainly he would have mentioned it at the Lear inquest.
“There wouldn’t be any reason to mention it at the inquest over Lear,” said Kelly morosely.
He shrugged. Everybody he wanted to talk to was out. None of them would appear until after dinner. He drew moodily on his cigar and cocked an eye at Sheets, who had just risen from his chair.
On the wall of the office, among many others, was a photograph of a pretty young woman, boldly and angularly inscribed across the lower righthand corner. It was this portrait that had caught the eye of William Sheets during a lackadaisical inspection of the gallery. It had occurred to him that the subject looked astonishingly like the young woman known as Nancy Maxwell.
With suppressed excitement he approached the photograph and read the inscription diagonally across its corner. His face fell.
“To Sam Sultan, with all good wishes,” ran the legend, with no particular originality; and then there was a name: “Roberta Ballantyne.”
“Roberta Ballantyne,” repeated Sheets aloud. “Never heard of her!”
He looked appealingly at Kelly, who joined him, leisurely, in front of the photograph.
The substitute manager hastened to their aid. “You must have heard of her,” he chuckled, scoring one at the expense of the police. “She’s in the show.”
“Of course she is,” said Kelly. “Ballantyne! She’s the old housekeeper in the first act, isn’t she? Good Lord, what a make-up! We saw her before she’d taken it off, Billy. This is the way she really looks, I suppose. Why, she’s just a kid, and she takes the part of an old woman!”
The assistant laughed. “She ain’t exactly a kid,” he observed. “The photographer did that. But she ain’t very old, either. About thirty, I guess.”
“Well, well,” said Detective Sergeant Kelly, and he contrived to jostle his associate with his elbow. “Thirty, eh? Quite a baby! Quite a baby! I’d kinda like to adopt her. Tell Sultan we’ll see him after the show starts, to-night, will you? We can’t wait here all afternoon.”
In the street he seized his companion by the arm and registered delight. Sheets, also, was beaming.
“You saw it, then?” he asked happily.
“Saw what?”
“Who she looks like.”
Kelly was puzzled. “You mean you thought she was someone else?”
“Holy cow!” observed Sheets profanely. “She’s either Nancy Maxwell or her sister.”
Kelly looked at his accomplice for a moment in complete surprise.
“Bunk!” he ejaculated, at last. “That’s the bunk, Billy. What put that into your head?”
“It’s what made me look at the picture,” said Sheets. “Why the devil did you think I looked at it?”
“I thought you recognized the Ballantyne woman without her make-up,” groaned Kelly. “I was handing you a lot of credit for it. She doesn’t look like the Maxwell person any more than I do. What I want to know is why she gave her picture to Sultan.”
“Because he collects’em, and she’s a goodlooking girl. There’s others on the wall.”
“She’s a minor character,” asserted Kelly, “and she gave Sultan her picture because they’re playing around together. Collects’em? He collects women, that’s what Sultan collects. It’s a hunch, Billy, and take it from me, it’s a good one. Why, you crazy bum, don’t you see it yet?”
“See what?” Sheets was truculent. “I saw that she looked like Nancy Maxwell.”
“To hell with Nancy Maxwell! All actresses look alike, anyway. This Ballantyne woman is the old housekeeper of the show. She came into Lear’s dressing room the day he was killed—while the bunch was standing around looking at him. It was this Ballantyne woman that picked that square of paper off the floor—‘Dead Man Inside!’ And Sultain was in the room and took it away from her!”
Sheets agreed. “That’s right. I forgot all about it.”
“And now we find her picture on Sultan’s wall, inscribed to Sultan. To hell with Bluefield! I’m going back on the Lear case.”