at the Opal Room. A rumba orchestra was doing wicked things. We were very groomed and expensive and chic that night. Very gay, too, because it was our first wedding anniversary and we were pleased about it.
Other people were dancing there, too, I suppose. I didn’t notice them, except maybe to feel sorry for them for not having Iris, wonderful and dangerous in a gown that didn’t cover much territory above the hips.
“Darling,” she said, “we do a mean rumba, don’t we?”
“Yes, darling,” I said. “We do.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Peter Duluth!” she said. “Twelve months later, and it still sounds—voluptuous!”
It was then that we saw the Black Beard.
He was sitting alone at a table close to the dance floor. A massive, imperial gentleman, immaculately black and white, with a white carnation in his lapel. His beard sprouted magnificently—jet-black and godlike.
There was an empty champagne bottle at his side. It didn’t look as if it was the first empty champagne bottle that had been there that evening. He was gazing at it and weaving slightly in his chair.
We were only a couple of feet away when he looked up and saw us. At least, it was Iris he saw. Naturally. Somewhere, above the beard, his eyes lit up, and the beard waggled in a roguish, satyr smile. One heavy lid lowered at Iris in a ponderous wink.
Then suddenly, as he really focused on her, his face went blank, and another expression came—a kind of shocked amazement that was almost horror. “You!” he said.
He tried to get up, sank back, and then did get up. He leaned across the table toward us. Very slowly, he said, “I warned you. On page eighty-four I warned you. You must be mad dining out tonight—of all nights—when your picture is all over The Onlooker?”
That was an odd thing for a complete stranger to say. But I didn’t rumba Iris away. Something kept us there. I think it was the Ancient Mariner quality of the black beard and the steady, unwavering stare.
He swayed slightly. The black beard bobbed in a refined little hiccup.
“The white rose!” he said, “And the red rose!” And then, emphatically: “They mean blood.”
He stopped. I pushed Iris backward and then sideways. Fantastically, I was a little scared. I don’t think Iris was. I think she was just curious.
She smiled suddenly and said, “Go on. The white rose and the red rose…What about them?”
“The white rose—and the red rose. They’re out. You know they’re out.”
He raised one of the large hands. The gesture practically toppled him forward into the champagne bottle. Pointing a weighty, ambassadorial finger, he said, “It’s life or death for you, young lady. You must realize that.” He paused. “The elephant hasn’t forgotten.”
The music was throbbing, and all around us sleek, expensive people were dancing sleekly and expensively. He was only an old drunk with a black beard. There was nothing to be alarmed about.
And yet…
“Life or death,” he said. “You mustn’t die, young lady. You are too beautiful to die.”
No one around seemed to have noticed anything. The music was seething. I started pushing Iris away from the man.
We were on the opposite side of the floor when I said, “Is that Beard a part of your past, darling?”
“I—I never even saw him before.” There was a shaken look in her eyes. “Life or death! Why should the white rose and the red rose mean blood—for me?”
“Just drunken nonsense,” I said.
“He said my picture was in The Onlooker. It isn’t in The Onlooker, Peter. Or is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We neither of us read The Onlooker. But millions of other people do. It tells you all about everything so snappily. We pretended we had lost interest then. We went on acting like two elegant people being gay on their wedding anniversary. But it was all rather synthetic.
Suddenly Iris said, “After all, Peter, you’re a famous play producer and I’m a sort of actress. Maybe I am in The Onlooker.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s—let’s buy a copy.”
“Yes. Let’s.”
We scuttled off the dance floor. That showed just how skin-deep our indifference was.
The Opal Room is part of the ultra-swank St. Anton Hotel. We hurried through the tables with the music tom-tomming behind us. We were out in corridors with inch-thick carpets and enormous mirrors. We reached a sort of central lounge which housed a magazine stand.
We went to the stand. Everyone turned and stared at Iris. They always do—especially after midnight. One man stared in particular. He was thin and sharp-nosed and youngish in a gay trench coat with a light gray hat. I noticed him vaguely because he was biting his nails. Biting them savagely and looking at Iris, with something nasty about his mouth.
At the stand I said, “The Onlooker, please,” to a depressed blonde.
She gave it to me. Iris snatched it and started leafing through the pages. I stood at her side.
Two women with exotic perfumes swished by, patting their necks. The man in the gray trench coat stood there nibbling at his nails and watching Iris sidelong behind a cigarette.
“Farming,” read Iris. “Sports…female discus-throwing champion…that’s not me…Theater…Circus opens at Lawrence Stadium tomorrow…No…Art…Oh, look, Peter!”
I was looking, all right. It was uncanny. There under the heading Art was a photograph. It was a photograph of a very beautiful woman, a woman whom anyone except a husband could easily have taken for Iris. Dark, with those same amazing eyes, that devastating bone structure.
Under the photograph it said: Eulalia Crawford. And under that: She does everything except stick pins in them.
“Eulalia Crawford!” said Iris.
“She’s a dead ringer for you.”
“Nonsense.” Iris looked ominous. “She’s at least ten years older.”
“Not to a drunken Beard in a dim light,” I said, trying to wriggle out of that. “It’s obvious he mistook you for her.”
We read what it said about Eulalia Crawford. It didn’t help much. It told us that Eulalia Crawford was a “pulchritudinous, amazingly talented” doll-maker. She had a studio downtown. She made the smartest portrait dolls for the smartest people. In fact, after a modest beginning designing carnival figures, she had lifted the doll business into the realms of art. “I do everything with dolls,” she had told the reporter laughingly, “except stick pins in them.”
“Eulalia Crawford, the doll-maker!” said Iris. “Peter, I’ve—I’ve heard of her. She—she’s a sort of a relative.”
“A relative?”
“Yes.” Iris looked excited. “A fifth cousin, or something like that.”
“It explains why you look alike,” I said. “But that’s all it explains.”
“But she’s in danger—terrible danger,” said Iris slowly. “I could tell he meant it, Peter. The Beard, I mean. I could tell from his face. He really knows there’s danger for her. The red rose, and the white rose, he said life or death.”
We stood there in that elegant lounge. From somewhere far off the rumba sidled through to us, a torrid echo of the South. I looked up. I caught the eye of the man in the gray trench coat. He glanced away.
“If there’s danger for Eulalia,” said Iris suddenly, “we must warn her.”
“Warn her?”
“Yes.” Iris looked beautiful and purposeful. “After all, she’s blood of my blood and—”
“But just because a crazy, drunken Beard—”
“He wasn’t a crazy Beard. He was very sane.”
“Then, if you think so, go back and get the truth out of him.”
She shook her head. “He’d be suspicious once he knew I wasn’t Eulalia. And if I was Eulalia he’d know I wouldn’t have to ask him the truth. I must telephone Eulalia.”
“But what will you say?” I asked.
“Tell her about the Beard and the red rose and the white rose and page eighty-four and the elephant.” Iris looked calm.
She started toward a lighted sign saying Telephones. I sighed and followed. As I did so, I happened to glance over my shoulder, and I noticed that the man in the gray trench coat was strolling very casually after us.
Iris reached the Manhattan phone book ahead of me. Efficiently, she started turning pages, murmuring, “Crawford, Eulalia…Crawford, Eulalia…Here she is.”
She disappeared into a phone booth. The man in the trench coat loitered aimlessly. Soon Iris came out again, and said: “Cousin Eulalia—I liked that ‘Cousin!’—wasn’t there, Peter. But she’s expected any minute. A man answered, a man with a stammer.”
“A stammer?”
“Yes. A stammer. He said it would be fine for us to go down right away.”
I stared. “You mean we’re going to Eulalia now?”
“We certainly are.” She looked dreamy and thrilled to the bone. “We’ve wined and dined and danced, Peter. Now we plunge into a romantic adventure, and that, darling, is exactly my idea of how to celebrate our first anniversary.”
I had a strong feeling that I didn’t agree.
The man with the gray trench coat seemed to have lost interest. I saw him ahead of us, moving away down the lounge toward the main door of the hotel.
I went back to the Opal Room and paid my check. I peered through the dancers, looking for the wretched Beard who had started the trouble. I couldn’t see him.
When I got back to Iris, she had unchecked her silver fox cape and had it over her shoulders. She looked exactly the way a girl in a silver fox cape should look—slender and beautiful and distinguished. We started toward the swinging doors leading to the street.
Iris said, “You noticed that man in the gray trench coat, Peter? I—I didn’t like him.” Her expression was rather odd. “The way he looked at me. Almost as if he knew me and…”
“And what?”
But she didn’t say any more about it, because at that moment we got tangled up with a large, liveried doorman who started calling us a taxi. We got into it and I gave Eulalia Crawford’s address.
It was raining—a slight drizzle spattering the windows of the taxi. Iris seemed remote, her thoughts like a thin layer of cellophane between us. Once she turned to look out of the rear window. She didn’t say anything. Then, later, as we swung off Fifth Avenue somewhere in the ’teen streets, she turned around again.
Softly she said, “I may be crazy, Peter. But I think we’re being followed. Look.”
I scrambled around and stared out through the rear window. I could see the bright headlights of a private automobile. It was just swinging off Fifth Avenue behind us.
“It’s been there ever since we left the St. Anton,” said Iris.
I protested strenuously. “Do we have to go through with this screwball idea?”
“It’s such a heavenly screwball idea,” said Iris. “And if someone is following us…”
“What?”
“Then it probably means the whole thing is serious. All the more reason to warn Eulalia.”
The taxi was crawling now in a dimly lit, deserted side street. The driver was peering out of his window at the house numbers. The other car was still behind us.
“Two-thirty-five,” said the driver. “Here we are.”
He had stopped in front of a house. There were lighted windows in it, and the door, white-painted, showed a brightly illuminated hallway. I paid the fare and we stepped out. The taxi drove off.
And then it all happened, like something in one of those artificially speeded-up movies.
The car which had been dawdling behind us suddenly accelerated and came roaring forward. We swung around. We stood there by the curb, hypnotized for a moment, watching the car zoom through the dead, dark street toward us.
And as we watched it, something hurtled out of it—something large and red, soaring through the air and splashing on the damp sidewalk at our feet. We both stared down at it. I felt a kind of amazement, teetering over into horror. Because the thing was a bouquet of roses—deep scarlet roses.
I was still staring stupidly at the roses when Iris gave a little cry, grabbed at my arm, and said, “Duck, Peter!”
I followed her lead, half collapsing to the sidewalk, and only just in time.
A split second later the sharp report of a gun snarled, once and then again. I heard bullets, whistling close to my ear.
“The door!” shouted Iris. “Get to the door!”
Quicker than seemed humanly possible, we both half ran, half scrambled to the outer, glass-paneled door of two-thirty-five. I tugged the door open and pushed Iris in. I dashed in behind her, slamming the door.
The second inner door was locked. We were trapped there in the little hallway. Outside in the street I could hear the car engine roaring at a standstill. What was to prevent the gunman getting out of the car and coming here?
I looked around wildly at the buzzers. I saw Eulalia Crawford’s name coupled with another woman’s name. I made a stab at the buzzer. I hit the wrong one.
I stared dazedly. The car engine was still roaring outside. Then an answering buzz sounded in the inner door. Like a flash Iris pushed the door inward. I didn’t know what was going on in the street any more. I think I heard the car drive away. But I didn’t care. I slammed the door behind us.
“Eulalia’s studio,” panted Iris. “The man on the phone said it was on the top floor.”
We started tumbling up the stairs. What sort of a wedding anniversary was this turning out to be?
Iris said breathlessly, “Did you see the man who shot at us?”
I hadn’t. I said so. “But you did?”
She nodded. “I saw him. Peter, he was wearing a gray trench coat and a gray hat. He was the man who bit his nails. The man who was in the vestibule of the St. Anton.”
That was a shock, and yet suddenly it gave a sort of sense to the fantastic thing that had happened.
“The man from the St. Anton,” repeated Iris. “And the bouquet of red roses! The red rose—and the white rose.”
We had reached the top floor but one, and were hurrying down a dimly lit hallway when a door opened and a woman in a pink wrapper peered out. In an uneasy moment I realized she was the woman whose buzzer I had pressed by mistake.
I muttered, “Sorry. A mistake. We want Miss Crawford.”
She slammed her door shut.
I joined Iris on the top landing. There was only one apartment up there. Its door had the elegantly painted legend: Eulalia Crawford, Dolls, Inc. Outside the door, propped against the wall, was a dainty red cellophane umbrella. There was a small puddle of water on the linoleum beneath it.
“See! Her umbrella’s still dripping, Peter. That means she hasn’t been in long.”
Iris looked radiant now. Her finger went forward to press the little buzzer in the doorframe. Shaken as I was, seeing her do that made me sensible again.
“Stop!” I said. “Don’t press the buzzer.”
Her hand remained poised. “Why ever not, Peter?”
“You’ve got to be sensible. The man at the St. Anton, he—he mistook you for Eulalia Crawford, the way the Beard did. He saw you reading The Onlooker. He followed us to this house. He was sure then, so he shot at you. He tried to kill you because he thought you were Eulalia.”
“Bright boy,” said Iris. “Go to the head of the class.” Her hand moved slowly toward the buzzer.
“Don’t, Iris. I’m not going to let you get into this any deeper.”
“Nonsense.” Iris looked determined. “Eulalia’s the only one who can explain. And if you think I’m going through life never knowing why I was shot at, you’re crazy.”
She rang the buzzer then, imperiously. We waited, but there was no reply.
“That’s funny.”
She rang again. After the drone of the buzzer stopped, a deep silence enveloped the top floor of two-thirty-five.
Iris stooped down then, so that she could see under the door. “The lights are on inside, Peter. And the umbrella’s dripping. She must be in.”
Her hand slipped to the doorknob. She turned it and, surprisingly, the door opened.
Iris stepped into the little hall. This was mad, crazy…I followed her, closing the door behind us.
It was an ordinary little hall. But I didn’t like the silence. I don’t quite know why. Possibly because, if Eulalia was there, she had no right to be so quiet. Ahead of us was the main room, the studio.
We could see only part of it, through the archway leading from the hall. But it was rather a weird sight—because of the dolls. There were dozens of them, sprawled over everything—life-size dolls, middling-size dolls, small dolls, dolls of women in evening gowns, and men in tuxedoes, dolls of different nationalities, dolls of clowns, ballet dancers, trapeze artists in tights—every sort of doll. And somehow they were sinister.
Iris was almost on the threshold of the studio. Softly she called, “Miss Crawford.”
I tautened. Nothing happened.
Iris stepped into the studio. She made a sound—a sharp, choking sound.
“Iris! What is it? What—?”
I ran to join her. The swarm of dolls stared from their dozens of baleful, sightless eyes. All through those awful moments, I was conscious of them as a sort of horror background. But they were only a background. Because I saw at once what Iris had seen. Part of the studio had not been visible from the hall. It was visible now, all right.
There was a desk—a large, modernistic desk. It was, inevitably, strewn with dolls, little dolls. But it wasn’t the dolls. In a chair in front of the desk was a woman. She was wearing a lemon-yellow evening gown. I couldn’t see her face, because she was slumped forward, the little dolls clustering around her. But I could see her back. And I could see the knife plunged deep into the flesh between the shoulder blades.
“Peter—is—is she dead?” Iris ran toward the woman, her hand going out.
“Don’t touch her, Iris!”
I was at her side. I was looking down at the woman’s face. It was in profile, resting on her hands, gazing pointlessly at a little over-turned doll of a blonde woman in spangled tights. That was really the worst moment.
“Eulalia!” breathed Iris.
But I could only think—Iris. In those awful seconds the resemblance was like a blow on the mouth. Eulalia Crawford was older, yes. But she was terrifyingly like Iris—the hair, the lovely, serene profile, the way the cheekbones curved.
My thoughts were reeling. Just a few moments before, Iris had been shot at. Why? Because she was mistaken for Eulalia Crawford. That’s what I had thought. But…what about this? Hadn’t Eulalia been dead—even then when the bouquet of red roses was hurled at us from the car?
Iris’s voice came dimly: “Peter, the—the man who answered the phone. The man with the stammer. He must have murdered her. He urged me to come. He left the door open so we could get in. Because he wanted us to get in. He wanted people to think that we—” She had moved around the desk. Sharply she called, “Look, Peter! Oh, look!”
I joined her, numbly. She was pointing.
There behind the desk, strewn haphazardly across the carpet in a sort of nightmare canopy, were dozens of roses. But this time the roses were not red. They were white.
Iris’s hand went down to the desk, supporting her. There was a blue book lying there with gold lettering. She touched it, and it moved, revealing something beneath it—a piece of paper with writing on it.
Iris picked it up and stared at it. “Peter, she—she must have been writing this when it happened.”
Quaveringly, she started to read.
Dear Lina:
I have to write to you to warn you. Because there’s danger—mortal danger. The white rose—and the red rose—
Iris handed the letter to me. “There’s more. But I—I can’t read it.” She paused. “Lina! Eulalia—and now Lina, too.” She was very pale. Suddenly she said, “Peter, what are we going to do?”
What, indeed? Call the police? That was the normal thing to do when you discovered a body. But could we call the police? What could we say? We had broken into a strange woman’s apartment. Why? Because of the red rose and the white rose.
What were the red rose and the white rose? We didn’t know. Who had told us about them? A drunken black-beard. Who was the drunken black-beard? We didn’t know. Where could we find him to check our story? We didn’t know. Why hadn’t we, a reputable play producer and his reputable wife, called the police in the first place if we thought something criminal was afoot? We didn’t know. At least, we did know. It was our wedding anniversary, and we thought we’d have some fun. Fun!
The whole madhouse tale scuttled through my thoughts. Who on earth would believe that? Certainly not the hardheaded police.
I glanced at the front door. The sight of it decided me. It seemed to decide Iris too. Almost simultaneously we said, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Together we ran to the front door. Iris’s hand went forward for the knob.
It was then that we heard the scratch of a key in the lock outside.
Wildly I thought, That other name by the buzzer—Eulalia’s roommate!
The door was pushed open inward. And a woman stood there. I shall never have more than the vaguest impression of that woman. A youngish woman with very blonde hair and very red lips.
She was just as startled as we. She came toward us, staring. Every possible sign of guilt must have been scrawled across our faces. Eulalia’s roommate went on staring.
“Who—who are you?” she asked.
Who were we? We stood there, stiff and lifeless as the dolls.
“What are you doing here?”
Then her eyes left us. She gazed into the room beyond. I saw the horror coming into her face. And then she screamed. “Eulalia!” And, with a rising hysterical crescendo, “You killed her! You murdered her!”
After that she wasn’t saying any actual words. It was just a long, animal scream.
We were beyond any reasonable process of thought then. The woman’s blind terror infected us, too. With amazing teamwork born of panic, Iris and I dashed toward the woman, pushing her aside, and bolted along the landing outside to the stairs. In a split second we were stumbling downward.
We were out on the dark street, out in the drizzle—running. And, miraculously, there was a taxi. I hailed it. By a supreme effort we managed to change ourselves into a languid couple in evening dress who nonchalantly needed a taxi.
“Where to?” said the driver.
“Where to?” echoed Iris. “Oh—uptown. Somewhere gay and expensive. The Continental, I think. Yes, the Continental.”
That was smart of her. I would have given our home address. Now that we were fugitives from justice that might well have been fatal.
After the horror of two-thirty-five, the impeachably upper-crust atmosphere of the Continental was soothing. We were taken to a table. The lights were dim and the orchestra was playing a dreamy waltz. Everyone was dancing. Dancing seemed a very sensible thing to do. We danced.
I loved it—having Iris close in my arms. For a few misguided moments I really started thinking this was a nice wedding anniversary after all. Then, inevitably, Iris brought us back to reality.
“Running out like that!” she said softly. “We were crazy, Peter. We lost our nerve.”
She was soft and warm in my arms. “Yes,” I said. “We did.”
“That girl who broke in on us, that roommate of Eulalia’s,” said Iris. “Of course, she thinks we killed Eulalia.”
“Yes,” I said dreamily. Iris waltzes divinely.
“And when the police come, she’ll be able to give them a perfect description of us. So will the woman whose buzzer we rang. And the two taxi drivers—the one who took us there and the one who brought us here. It oughtn’t to be hard for the police to catch up with us.”
“True,” I agreed, worried.
Suddenly I didn’t want to dance any more. I wanted a drink. We had the waiter bring highballs to our table. Mine didn’t help my mood any. Iris’s romantic adventure!
Iris was clasping her drink in both hands, looking ethereal. Slowly she said, “You know, Peter, we’ve done everything but confess to that murder.”
“Exactly.”
“Probably the police are after us even now. And it’s not only that. The man with the gray trench coat shot at us once. Maybe he wants to shoot at us again.”
“Goody,” I said dourly.
“And I don’t see how we can possibly exonerate ourselves unless—”
“Unless—what?”
“Unless we find out the truth. I mean the truth about the red roses and the white roses. Then we could go to the police and make a clean breast of it.”
“And how could we find out the truth?”
“I don’t know,” Iris confessed helplessly, and then opened her pocketbook. “Maybe this! This letter Eulalia had started to write.”
She pulled it out and handed it to me.
I groaned. “So you stole valuable evidence, too! That’s another ten years on our sentence.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Iris looked rueful. “I just forgot to put it down.”
I stared with a jaundiced eye at the brief, cryptic scrawl.
Dear Lina:
I have to write to you to warn you—
Iris leaned over and looked too. “We know that—about warning Lina of the red rose and the white rose. But that other line I couldn’t read. Can you make it out?”
I stared at the sprawling, indecipherable script. “ ‘The white rose and the red rose are out,’ ” I read. “ ‘And the—something…The—the crocus is opening.’ ”
The note broke off there. We stared at each other. “The crocus!” exclaimed Iris. “The red rose—the white rose—the opening crocus.”
“The whole damn’ botanical garden.”
“Lina would know,” said Iris. “There’s danger for her—just the way there was danger for Eulalia. Lina would be able to tell us everything.”
“Lina—U. S. A.,” I said. “She’s going to be a cinch to locate.”
Iris wasn’t listening. Suddenly her eyes lit up. “The Beard!” she exclaimed.
“To hell with the Beard,” I said.
“But, Peter, the Beard knows everything. He could prove our story was really on the level. If we took the Beard to the police, everything might be all right.”
“I might remind you that we don’t know the Beard’s name. We don’t know where he lives or what—”
“That doesn’t matter.” Iris was her old, enthusiastic self again. “There aren’t so many black beards in New York.” She rose, wrapping her silver fox around her. “Come on. We’re going to find the Beard.”
Five minutes later we were in a taxi driving back to the St. Anton. I was sure the Beard wouldn’t be there any more. But Iris was bubbling over with hope again.
He wasn’t at the Opal Room, of course. We weaved through the tables, fine-combing the guests. Then we divided forces and started excavating the lounges. I had no success. I was returning empty-handed to the main vestibule when Iris came running radiantly toward me.
“The doorman!” she exclaimed. “He’s a lovely doorman. He got the Beard a taxi about an hour ago. And he heard him tell the driver to go to the Gray Goose.”
The Gray Goose was a half-way fashionable night club in the Fifties. We bundled ourselves into yet another taxi and dashed to the Gray Goose.
We didn’t check our coats. We went straight into the ballroom. Two pianos were playing boogie-woogie. A few couples were dancing; but most of them were snuggled up in booths. We started pushing into booth after booth, systematically, peering. And in the last booth we found him.
He was more majestic even than my memory of him. Words could not do justice to the splendors of his beard.
“Hello,” said Iris.
Slowly, little by little, he moved his head. Slowly his eyes lit up in a wicked, goatish leer. “Buriful girl,” he said.
Iris slipped into the booth, sitting down across from him. I squeezed in after her. She leaned forward, saying urgently, “You remember me, don’t you? The Opal Room. You mistook me for Eulalia Crawford.”
“Y’re not Eulalia Cr’wford.” His great hand unfolded from the stem of his champagne glass, groped forward, and fell—flop—on Iris’s. “Y’re much more buriful th’n Eulalia. Younger. My mistake!”
Such superb drunkenness seemed to nonplus even Iris. “You must remember me,” she pleaded earnestly. “You told me about the white rose and the red rose.”
The Beard’s hand left Iris’s. He giggled. Then, suddenly, he brandished his arm at a hovering waiter. “Drink!” he said. “Drink for the buriful girl. Champagne.”
As the waiter slipped away, the Beard’s aimless gaze settled for the first time on me. “Who’sh tha’?” he demanded.
“He’s just with me,” said Iris. “He’s—he’s not important.”
That was startling, to say the least. Iris was looking rather wild-eyed now. She said desperately, “You’ve got to understand. Please. This is terribly important for us. It’s—it’s life or death. The elephant never forgets. You mustn’t forget. Page eighty-four. You’ve got to help us.”
“Nasty man! Buriful girl.” The Beard sank back into his red leather corner. “Tell that man—go away. Won’t have him here.”
Iris gave a rather sickly smile. Then she leaned toward me and breathed, “It’s no good, darling. He just doesn’t like you. But he likes me. Maybe, if you go away, I can get something out of him.”
“But I don’t want to leave you with that drunken—”
“Go to the bar, darling,” she whispered. “Wait for me there. I’ll try to get him to talk.”
I went to the bar and, perching myself on a high stool, ordered a highball. I was on my second drink when Iris appeared from the inner room. She was looking a little dazed, but rather triumphant, too.
“What a man!” she said. And then, “But I’ve got Lina.”
“You’ve got Lina? You mean—you know who she is?”
“No. But I know her name, where she lives. He’s terribly canny, Peter, the Beard. He’s not telling a thing. But I tricked that out of him. Because he thought it was funny. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘isn’t this funny?’ And he chanted it.”
“Chanted what?”
“A name. Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown. Sixteen-seventeen, Smith Street, Brooklyn.”
Iris chanted it, too. Personally, I thought the Beard was right. It was a riotously funny name.
Iris was looking pale. “I’ve been thinking, Peter. And—and there’s only one thing to do. The Beard is hopeless until he sobers up. Now, Lina…”
“Lina?”
“Lina knows the whole story. This thing that happened to Eulalia—I think it’s going to happen to Lina.”
“Of course it is,” I said savagely. “She’s got the red rose and the white rose and the crocus after her. And, so far as I care, they can all catch up with her and—”
“No, darling. They mustn’t catch up with her. Don’t you see? Time’s everything. Maybe we can still warn Lina in time. And, if we warn her, then she’ll have to tell us the truth. That’s the only way we can get out of this—this jam.”
I was beginning to see. “You want us to go to Lina now?” I glanced at my watch. “Now—at two-forty-five A.M.”
“Oh, I know it’s crazy. Everything’s crazy.” Iris’s lips were trembling. “But, darling—please go to Lina now.”
“Me! You mean I have to go alone?”
“Darling, I can’t let the Beard get away now. I simply can’t. We need him. I’ve got to cling to him through thick and thin. But you don’t.”
I finished my drink in one gulp. I didn’t want to go to Brooklyn.
“Peter, I know it’s late. But here—” She fumbled in her pocketbook and brought out Eulalia’s letter. “If you show her this, she’ll know you’re on the level. You—you will go, won’t you?”
I took the letter. I kissed her. “I’ll go.”
“Darling!” she smiled. “And, as soon as you’re through, go straight back to the apartment. I’ll try and get there as soon as possible—with the Beard.”
“With the Beard? Do we have to adopt the Beard, too?”
“Of course. Tomorrow morning he’ll be sober. Tomorrow morning he’ll be worth his weight in roses.” Iris was adamant. “Remember, darling. Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown.”
I nodded. “Sixteen-seventeen. Smith Street. Brooklyn.”
“Oh, darling,” she whispered.
I kissed her again. She was utterly beautiful and magnificent and exciting. And I left her to the tender mercies of the amorous Beard. I’ve never hated doing anything so much in my life.
Sixteen-seventeen Smith Street was a squat, dirty house in a row of uniformly squat and dirty houses. The Browns, I discovered, lived in the basement, and judging from the lighted window, someone was awake—either Mr. or Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown. I located the buzzer and pressed it.
The door was pulled open almost before I’d stopped ringing. The speed of it all startled me. In the obscure light from the hall I could see the woman who stood there on the threshold only dimly—a dark, fluttering little thing with big, big eyes.
“Oliv—!” She broke off with a birdlike, swooping gesture of her hand. “Oh, I—I thought it was my husband.” And then, before I had time to open my mouth, she was explaining nervously, “My husband works late at the restaurant. He—he forgot his key. I was waiting up for him.”
We stood there in the dark area, watching each other.
“Are you Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown?” I asked.
“Yes, yes.”
Thank heavens, Lina was alive, anyway!
“What do you want?” She started a little chirping laugh and then, as if the unconventional hour of my visit suddenly frightened her, she added jerkily, “What do you want—so late at night?”
“I’ve come for Eulalia Crawford,” I said.
“Eulalia!” The words came in a thin little Phoebe-bird peep, and Lina’s small hands took wing again. Impulsively one hand alighted on my sleeve. She was pulling me into the hall. She closed the door behind us. She was almost running ahead. Her face was ashen.
I followed into the living-room. There was too much old-fashioned furniture in it, but it was kind of pathetically neat. There were two framed photographs on the mantel—a photograph of a muscular blonde in tights with a toothy smile, and another photograph of a dark little slip of a thing gleaming with tawdry spangles. That second picture was Lina herself. I could tell. She was older now, though.
She was hovering in front of me, staring.
“What is it? Why did Eulalia send you?”
I thought of Eulalia’s letter. That was as good an opening gambit as any.
I pulled the crumpled piece of paper from my pocket. Watching her, I held it out. “Eulalia wrote this to you,” I said.
She stared at the fantastic note. “The white rose—and the red rose!” She looked up. Her lips were as pale as her cheeks. “The roses…”
I didn’t say anything.
Her tongue came out, wetting her lips. I’ve never seen such real terror in any human eyes. “The letter isn’t finished. It isn’t in an envelope. It isn’t finished. You—you brought it—” She broke off. “What’s happened to Eulalia?” And then, in a small, tortured sob, “She’s dead! They killed her!”
How had she guessed that? What was I to say? “Mrs. Brown—” I began, and found it difficult to go on.
She stepped back. “They killed Eulalia. And you brought this letter to me. You brought it!” She was still backing away. “You’re one of them. You’ve come to get me, too. The roses…”
It was then that the sound of the front door buzzer echoed sharply in the hall. Lina swirled around. “Oliver!”
She dashed away from me, calling her husband’s name despairingly. I could hear her little footsteps pattering in the hall. “Oliver!”
I heard the basement front door open.
“Oliver—”
Lina’s voice stopped in a little choking gasp. There was a moment of entire silence. Then another voice sounded, a man’s voice—a voice that stammered hesitatingly. It said, “H-hello, Lina, d-darling. I’m sure you’re g-glad to s-see me.”
The sound of that stammering voice toppled me off whatever solid ground there was left. The stammering voice which had answered Iris over Eulalia’s phone, the voice of the man who had murdered Eulalia!
I glanced wildly around the stuffy Victorian room. I took a pointless step toward the hall.
And then, ripping through the silence, two revolver shots sounded in brutal, rapid succession. One…two…just like that.
The nearness of those shrill explosions was appalling. The quiet that came after was appalling, too. And then, sprouting out of that quietness like a thin, weak tendril, twined a small wailing sound that shriveled into a hissing sigh. A sigh—then the small, subdued noise of a little body crumpling to the floor.
All that came in a second. I hadn’t time even to move a finger before it was over, and I heard the clatter of footsteps running away from the door.
I dashed forward out of the living-room into the hall. I knew what I was going to see, of course.
Lina was there, tumbled in a little limp heap by the open front door. There was blood. But it wasn’t the blood that was the worst. Thrown over the little prostrate body, like a bizarre funeral canopy, were roses—dozens of pure white roses.
Some of the petals weren’t white any more. They were a vivid scarlet where the blood had splashed them. I dropped to my knees, bending dazedly over Lina. The red rose and the white rose—they mean blood!
Vaguely, as I knelt there by the night’s second corpse, I realized I could still hear the running footsteps of the murderer growing fainter on the dark street outside. Blindly obedient to impulse, I jumped up and ran out. I clambered up the iron stairs to the street and stood there at their head.
I could just see the man. He was running to a parked car. I could make him out, a thin, tall figure. I had been thinking, instinctively in terms of the man with the gray trench coat, who bit his nails. But, as he reached the car, I caught a glimpse of his profile in the light from a street lamp. It was gaunt and angular, but it wasn’t the same profile. He wasn’t wearing a trench coat, either. And the most arresting thing about that fleeing figure was his hair. For it was a vivid, gleaming white.
So there were two men with guns abroad that night!
Long before I could have done anything to stop it, the murder car sprang forward and roared away out of sight. I stood there at the head of the iron stairs, trembling under the delayed impact of shock.
The gunfire had not shaken Brooklyn out of its small-hours’ sleep. Probably the cavernous pit of the basement had muffled the reports. In any case, the alarm had not as yet been sounded. But soon Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown himself would return from the restaurant. Soon the cry of “Murder” would echo through the night, shattering the stillness, spreading like ripples across a black lake.
That brought me back to thinking violently about myself. Here I was hopelessly committed to this second corpse—I, Peter Duluth, the man who, almost certainly, was under suspicion of one murder already.
There was only one possible thing to do next. Poor Lina was dead, her secret still undisclosed. There was nothing I could do for her. So long as I stayed there I was jeopardizing my entire future and Iris’s.
Get away, Peter Duluth. Get away—now. Scram!
I made my second major retreat that night. I walked out on Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown, the waiter or whatever he was. I left him to face his tragic homecoming—alone.
When I let myself into our apartment, it was in total darkness. Iris wasn’t there. I turned on all the lights, hating Iris’s not being there. It was half past four. Surely all the night clubs were closed by now.
I mixed myself a drink and gulped at it while I paced up and down the room. I was full of forebodings. Iris had already been shot at that night. And the Beard—we knew nothing about him. Why had we assumed so readily that he was a friend? For all we knew, he was one of the gang.
Why had I left Iris to cope with him alone?
I worked myself up into a frenzy of nerves. I’d never felt so helpless. And then, about half an hour later, I heard the incalculably sweet sound of her key scratching the front door lock. I ran out into the hall just as the door opened. And she was there. Iris was there.
She stepped into the apartment and then turned back to the corridor, crooning, “Come on, Pussy. This way, Pussy.”
I started toward her, saying, “Iris…” Then I stopped dead in my tracks.
Slowly progressing into the room was a large, ponderous figure in black, a figure with the massive dignity of a Supreme Court Justice. But, defying all laws of probability, he was moving on all fours. One large hand padded forward and then another, the substantial rump proceeding soberly behind. The solemn face with its majestic black beard looked unutterably out of place when it stared up at me from six inches above the floor.
The Beard navigated the threshold. Iris closed the door behind him. She turned to me. She looked beautiful but frayed.
“Hello, Peter,” she said. “He’s been like this ever since we came out of the elevator. He thinks he’s a pussy cat.”
She was trying hard to smile.
I was still suffering from my gnawing anxiety at her absence. “Where—where have you been?”
“Driving up and down Fifth Avenue,” said Iris, “looking for Easter Bunnies.”
“You can’t see Easter Bunnies in September,” I said sensibly.
“He can.” Iris shot a withering glance at the sportive Beard. “He could see Niagara Falls in Times Square at this point.” And then, despairingly: “Peter, what shall we do with him?”
“You haven’t got anything out of him?”
“Nothing!” Iris wrung her hands. “It’s hopeless. I don’t even know his name. He—he just says to call him Pussy.”
“Pussy!” said the Beard gravely.
And started a laborious attempt to sit up on his haunches. Fantastically, although I’ve never seen a drunker man, he had not lost one particle of his dignity.
I looked at Iris over his head. She looked back at me. “At least I managed to bring him home,” she said wearily. And then, thinking about me, “But—but Lina. Did you see her? Did you get anything?”
“Lina,” I said, “is dead.”
“Dead! Iris’s lips went pale. “You mean you found her dead like—like Eulalia?”
“She was alive when I got there. She was murdered right under my nose.”
Iris’s eyes were bleak. Very softly she breathed, “And the roses?”
“Of course the roses. White roses. Her body was strewn with them.”
“Peter!”
The Beard, who had been squatting there imperviously, suddenly sat down on the carpet. Iris and I exchanged a harassed glance.
“We’d better get him on a couch in the living-room,” said Iris. “I can’t bear this—this weaving around.”
Somehow we managed together to propel the Beard to a couch. He seemed to like it. He nestled back and closed his eyes.
“Now,” said Iris to me, “tell me everything.”
I did. I told her that whole miserable Brooklyn saga. When I had finished, we both turned and stared at the Beard.
“He’s our only hope now,” breathed Iris. Ponderous lids still hid his eyes. Impulsively Iris bent over him, took his large shoulders and shook him. His eyes popped open. “You’ve got to listen,” said Iris passionately. “Lina’s dead. Eulalia’s dead. The white rose and the red rose—they’ve murdered Eulalia Crawford and Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown.”
“Eulalia,” repeated the Beard slowly. “Lina.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve got to help us. Eulalia and Lina are dead—murdered!”
The Beard lifted a large hand and started beating solemn, unrhythmical time in the air. “Eulalia, Lina…Zelide, Edwina,” he said. “Eulalia, Lina…Zelida, Edwina.”
Iris glanced at me triumphantly. “Tell us,” she said sharply. “Tell us. Who is Zelide? Who—is—Zelide?”
The Beard stared. “A bird,” he said.
“A bird!” Iris shrugged hopelessly. “Edwina, then. Who is Edwina?”
“ ’N elephant,” said the Beard promptly. Then his eyes shut once more. He started to snore. The drunken oracle had obviously said his last say.
“It’s no good, darling,” I said.
“But—but it’s got to be.” Iris swirled round. “I’ve been with him for hours. That was the only time he answered me. Peter we’ve got to wake him up. We’ve got to get him sober.”
I looked hopelessly at that vast monument asleep on the couch. I said, “We might try black coffee.”
“Coffee—yes.” Iris became excited. “We’ll make some. Right now.”
She hurried into the kitchen. I followed. Cans and percolators and things clattered around, and a few minutes later the coffee was done.
We went into the living-room together, Iris carrying the coffee on the tray as if it were butter on a lordly dish.
“I—” she began.
Then she stopped. Because the couch where the Beard had been so epically asleep was empty.
Iris put down the coffee. We both started a feverish and unsuccessful search of the apartment, under the piano and everywhere. We went out into the hall. The front door was open, telling its own story.
“He’s gone,” wailed Iris.
That was self-evident. The Beard had been far craftier than we had anticipated. He must have pretended to be asleep. And, during the minutes we had spent in the kitchen, he had made his getaway. The priceless bird had flown.
A mean gray stain of dawn was tinging the sky as we went to bed.
The first thing that swam into my consciousness when I awoke again at some indeterminate daylight hour was the rustle of paper. I opened heavy eyelids. Iris was standing by my bed, fully dressed, and indomitably beautiful. But I didn’t like the way she looked. It made me suddenly awake. She looked pale and ominous. In her hand she was clutching a morning paper.
“Hello, darling,” she said brightly.
“The paper,” I said. “Does it say anything about us?”
She didn’t speak. She sat down by me and spread the paper out in front of me. It was the front page. At the bottom left corner, I saw the headline screaming about the two mysterious murders. I scanned the column below. There was all the stuff you would expect. Two women killed in different parts of the city…white roses strewn over both. Then there was a paragraph. It read:
Miss Doris Lomas, Eulalia Crawford’s roommate, surprised two suspicious characters red-handed in the apartment when she returned from a dance. Miss Lomas told the police how she opened the front door of the apartment and saw a man and a woman actually bending over the body of Miss Crawford. They fled when they saw her. But she was able to give a detailed description of both of them…
Detailed description was right! Miss Lomas had a very keen eye. There followed a description of Iris and me, exact to the last zipper.
As I read on, distraught, I reached this:
Mrs. Clarence Stark, who lives in the apartment below, also saw the murder suspects, and her description fits closely with that of Miss Lomas. Already the taxi driver who drove them to Miss Crawford’s apartment from the luxurious St. Anton Hotel has been traced. A second taxi is believed to have driven them from the scene of the crime to the Continental. There the trail ends. But the police are sanguine that soon…
I stopped. I couldn’t read any more. Iris’s hand slipped into mine.
“The hunt,” said Iris, “is up. The bloodhounds are in full, baying pursuit.”
It was so indeed. Our worst fears had been justified. Now we were officially stamped as probable murderers pursued by the Law.
“We’ve only got a little time,” said Iris. “A very little time. And we’ve got to do a lot of thinking.”
“We needn’t bother thinking,” I said gloomily. “We can save that for the long evenings in the penitentiary.”
Iris looked at me and decided I wasn’t being co-operative. She went out, and came back soon with a tray of breakfast. Balancing the tray with one hand, she pushed the paper off my lap onto the floor. Then she put the tray down in front of me.
“Zelide,” she mused. “The Beard called her a bird. Why a bird? We’ve got the facts if only we could put them together. The white rose, the red rose, the crocus and—Edwina, the elephant.”
She broke off with a sudden little cry. Her body had gone tense. She was staring down at something on the carpet.
“Peter,” she breathed, “The elephant!” Then she plunged onto her knees by the bedside. I heard her fingers rustling the newspaper wildly. “Peter! I think I’ve got it.”
I pushed the breakfast tray aside. I rolled out of bed onto the floor beside her. “I saw the advertisement. I never realized.”
She grabbed my arm and pointed triumphantly at the newspaper. I stared. Staring back at me from a large ad in the paper were three prancing elephants.
“See, Peter? Eulalia’s letter to Lina. We read it wrong. Eulalia’s writing was so bad. We thought she said, ‘The crocus is opening.’ She didn’t. She said, ‘The circus is opening!’ ”
Above the elephants, in bold, black letters, were the words: THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN. GALA OPENING TODAY AT THE LAWRENCE STADIUM.
“That’s the clue,” breathed Iris. “The circus! Why didn’t we guess? Edwina, the elephant. And—and Eulalia had those dolls—those clowns, trapeze artists, and things.”
“There was a photograph of Lina in Brooklyn,” I cut in, remembering. “A photograph of her all dressed in spangles. She must have been with the circus one time!”
“So must Eulalia. Carnival dolls! Don’t you remember how The Onlooker said she’d started her career making carnival dolls? That’s the tie-up between them. Now the others. Zelide. That sounds like a circus name, Zelide—the bird. Zelide…Oh, look, Peter.”
Once again Iris was crouched over the paper. She was pointing at the bottom of the advertisement. There, listed with the other attractions, was the announcement: Madame Zelide, World-Famous Aerialist, with her Amazing Bird Ballet.
“Zelide—the bird!” exclaimed Iris.
We stayed there crouched together on the floor, staring at each other.
“See how it all makes sense now?” cried Iris. “Eulalia and Lina and Zelide—they must all have been together in the circus.”
“And Edwina the elephant?”
That didn’t faze her. “Eulalia, Lina, Zelide, and this elephant, Edwina, they all ganged up together and did something connected with roses—something that harmed the man who bites his nails and the man who stutters. That happened in the past. And now the two men are having their revenge.” She tossed back her lovely dark hair and looked radiant. “We’ll be okay now, darling. Zelide will be able to straighten everything out.”
I clambered back into bed and started eating my breakfast. But I wasn’t given any peace. Iris clambered onto the bed, too, reached over my coffee for the telephone book and started leafing through it madly.
“What you doing?” I said.
“Lawrence Stadium,” she muttered. “Lawrence Stadium…Here we are.”
She dialed a number. Then she began chattering excitedly into the phone to several different stadium extensions, asking for Madame Zelide. Her face, which had been alight with hope, went grave. Then she turned to me, whispering, “Zelide’s not there.”
I dunked toast in my coffee. “Then ask to speak to Edwina, the elephant,” I said.
Iris withered me and said into the phone, “Do you know where I could reach Madame Zelide, please?…Okay…Thanks.”
She slammed down the receiver. “Zelide,” she said, “is staying at the St. Anton. See how it all ties up?”
“At the St. Anton?”
“That explains what happened to us last night. The two gunmen must have divided up the job. The one who stutters was detailed to get Eulalia and Lina. The one who bites his nails was detailed to get Zelide at the St. Anton. While he was there he saw me, mistook me for Eulalia, and figured his buddy had slipped up on the job. So he tried to kill me. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Iris picked up the telephone again. She dialed.
After a brief talk with someone at the St. Anton she hung up disconsolately. “It’s no good, Peter. Zelide went out last night and she hasn’t come back yet—or called.”
“I thought as much,” I said darkly. “Farewell, Zelide—corpse number three.”
She laid her head against my shoulder. It was nice, even though it did get in the way of my breakfast. She seemed to be thinking. Finally she looked at her watch. “The circus begins at two.”
“So what?” I demanded.
“So—we go to the circus.” Iris pushed herself around so that she was staring vehemently into my face. “That’s the only place we can hope to find out anything.” She paused. “You never know. Maybe we’ll even stumble into the Beard there. Don’t they have bearded men in circuses?”
“Bearded ladies, darling,” I said. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe the Beard is a lady.”
Iris patted her hair and looked far away.
“The Beard is not a lady,” she said. “You can take that from me.”
It was about one-thirty when we left the apartment. Iris was elaborately glamorous in an outfit which culminated in an exotic Dietrich veil. I, very Palm Beach and groomed, sported a pair of heavy sunglasses. The veil and the sunglasses were a forlorn attempt at disguise. The aggressive chic was intended to disconcert policemen, too; because Iris had the bizarre theory that the more over-privileged you seemed the less criminal you looked.
We made the circus, unmolested. And the moment after I’d bought ringside tickets and we’d joined the festive throng scrambling into the great stadium I felt more secure.
Iris looked at her watch and said, “It’s going to start any minute, Peter.”
“So—what do we do?”
“Zelide, of course.” She looked tense through the veil. “We’ve got to see if she’s come. We’ve got to warn her before the performance begins.”
We both looked around through the crowd. Iris said, “Downstairs to the side shows. That’s the way to get backstage.”
We started wriggling and pushing through children. We were running down broad stone stairs, and finally, with a kind of breathless rush, we reached the broad, long basement where the side shows were.
We stopped then, and stared.
Animals were everywhere, in cages with lurid, jungle backdrops. Macaws, flaming scarlet, were screeching and the tallest man in the world was sharing a sandwich with a tattooed lady. Strolling toward us, hand in hand, were the fat woman and a little golden-haired midget.
We hurried to the fat woman and the midget. Iris asked urgently, “Where can we find Madame Zelide, please?”
The midget jerked with a tiny thumb over her shoulder. “Dressing-rooms back there, lady. They’ll tell you.”
We left them and hurried on through the animal cages toward the rear of the basement. There, at the end of the long room, we found ourselves in an insane outcrop of elephants. Elephants were everywhere.
Iris gave a little exclamation, pointed, and breathed, “Peter, look! Edwina!”
I looked, and she was right. The legendary Edwina was quite definitely there. She was in an open stall of her own in regal solitude, a vast brown elephant with tree-trunk legs, vague kindly eyes, and an immense pink ribbon around her neck. A message hung on the stall said in large letters: EDWINA, THE OLDEST ELEPHANT IN CAPTIVITY.
“Edwina,” said Iris in an awed whisper, and fluttered with her hand. “If the Beard’s right, Peter, she knows the whole truth about the roses.”
Edwina lifted her trunk into a sort of essebend, flicked her ears above the pink ribbon, and whistled. And then, from the distant arena, a crash of cymbals blared.
The circus had begun.
I said urgently, “We’d better get to Zelide.”
There was an archway ahead. We hurried to it and found ourselves at the mouth of one of the vast entrances to the arena itself. Here there was wild activity as the opening parade started swaying out into the ring.
Iris grabbed a clown. “Zelide?” she said, “Where’s Zelide’s room?”
The clown pointed backward. “Down the corridor, first to the left, first to the right—the third room.”
We scurried on to Zelide’s room.
Iris knocked on the closed door. Nothing happened. She knocked again.
“She’s not there, Peter. She—” Impulsively Iris pushed the door inward. I stepped in after her. The room was empty. I closed the door behind us.
The room was tawdry. It smelled of stale make-up. A curtained closet bulged with theatrical costumes. There was a cluttered dressing table. And a mirror above it, encircled with pinned-up photographs.
I went to the dressing table and looked at the photographs. Iris was with me. All the pictures were of the same woman—a blonde with a dazzling smile. They were all signed scrawlingly: Zelide. The face was dimly familiar. Then I remembered the photograph at Lina’s home.
“We’re on the track,” I said. “Lina had a photograph of Zelide, at her house.”
“And the doll at Eulalia’s,” breathed Iris. “Do you remember the little blonde doll in tights that was on the desk by Eulalia’s head? That must have been Zelide, too.”
We looked at each other.
“What are we going to do, Peter? She isn’t here. It’s no use staying.” Then, desperately, “She can’t be dead, too.”
She broke off. She was looking down at the dressing table. Balanced precariously between jars of cold cream was a brown-paper package. It had Zelide’s name on it and a plastering of stamps. It was marked: URGENT, RUSH, SPECIAL DELIVERY.
Iris and I had the same idea simultaneously. Both our hands went out for that package. I got it first. Rush, urgent…It might be something. It just might.
“Unwrap it!” Iris cried.
I started tearing off the wrappings. “It’s—it’s only a book,” I said.
But I went on unwrapping it. And suddenly we saw the book. It came out with the back of the dust cover on top. It consisted of a single, large photograph of a majestic gentleman with a magnificent, sprouting black beard.
“Peter!” exclaimed Iris. “It’s the Beard!”
I turned the book over. I looked dazedly at the title. It said: CRIMES OF OUR TIMES. And, underneath, the author’s name: EMMANUEL CATT, AMERICA’S MOST DISTINGUISHED CRIMINOLOGIST.
“The Beard!” said Iris again. “The Beard wrote it. And last night he called himself Pussy, because his name’s Catt,” she added. “Peter, look. There’s a note clipped inside. Open it, Peter.”
My hand was rather wobbly as I moved to open the book. I pushed the back dust cover off, and it flopped limply. And then I gave a grunt of surprise. The binding under the paper cover was blue—blue with gold lettering. That conjured up sharp memories.
“This book!” I said. “There was a blue book with gold lettering on Eulalia’s desk. He must have sent each of them a book.”
There was a note clipped to the flyleaf. It said, in neat, meticulous handwriting: See page 84. Just that. See page 84. Period.
“Page eighty-four!” exclaimed Iris. “That’s what the Beard said to me. ‘I warned you on page eighty-four.’ ”
I leafed shakily through the book, glancing at the chapter headings as the pages flicked by. One chapter would be called: The Mystery of Something or Other; the next, the Mystery of Something Else. Suddenly I stopped.
On page 84 began Chapter Eleven. And it was called: The Mystery of the White Rose and the Red Rose. Penciled into the top corner were the words: The Red Rose and the White Rose are out. You must realize your danger, Madame Zelide. E. C.
“Here!” said Iris, awed. “The solution was here all the time in the book.”
“Lina can’t have gotten her book,” I said, “because she had not been warned when I got there.”
Tensely we both stared down, scanning the first paragraph of Chapter Eleven. It read:
Perhaps the most fascinating of all modern crimes is the strange case of Tito Forelli, the trapeze artist, who hurtled to his death, at the gala opening of the circus in New York on September 18, 1931. To me, the enduring interest of the case lies in two facts: Firstly, that three women, all telling the same story brought a murder conviction where there was no particle of concrete evidence; secondly that the protagonists of the drama bore the fragrant, fairy-tale names of “White Rose,” and “Red Rose.” Forelli’s partners in the trapeze act, the two Rosa Brothers, inevitably earned their colorful names, since one had bright red hair, while the other was prematurely white. They…
Suddenly Iris breathed, “Peter! Listen. Someone’s coming.”
I started. We both stood there motionless. And, with a queer kind of menacing distinctness, footsteps sounded on the bare cement of the corridor outside. The ominous human tap-tap, coming closer and closer, made Zelide’s dressing-room a trap.
We had broken in unauthorized. If we were discovered there might be a scene which would make us conspicuous. And, with the police after us, that was the one thing we couldn’t afford.
The footsteps were up to the door now. They stopped dead outside. I saw the curtained clothes closet. I grabbed Iris’s arm. Dropping the book back on the table, I pulled her with me behind the curtain, clattering it along the iron rail to conceal us.
We were only just in time. As we pressed back against Madame Zelide’s downy feather capes, I heard the door of the dressing-room open. Through a little crack in the curtains, I could see the table with the book lying on its crumpled wrapping paper. Then the person who had come into the room walked into my range of vision.
I caught my breath. He was the man from the St. Anton; the man with the gray trench coat; the man who had shot at Iris; the gunman who bit his nails!
Just seeing him was a shock. But there was something else. He was hatless, and for the first time I saw his hair. It was red.
For an excruciatingly prolonged moment he stood there by the table, gnawing at his nail. Then he picked up the Beard’s book and opened it.
I saw his fingers turning the leaves rapidly. Then he gave a sharp little grunt. Furtively he slipped the book under his arm. Then, as quickly as he had come, he left.
Iris and I scrambled out of the closet together. Iris said hoarsely, “Peter, did you see his hair? The man who killed Lina and Eulalia had pure white hair, didn’t he? You told me. White hair—red hair. They are the roses. The two gunmen were the Roses all along. And the roses they threw were a sort of trade-mark.”
It had been as simple as that! “The protagonists bore the fragrant, fairy-tale names of White Rose and Red Rose.” The two trapeze artists who had murdered their partner, Tito Forelli, ten years ago, had been convicted on the evidence of the three women “all telling the same story.” The two Rosa Brothers now seemed to be taking a terrible revenge on the women whose evidence had convicted them—Eulalia, Lina, Zelide.
I remembered the Beard’s sinister remark: “The white rose and the red rose are out.” Not out in the garden. No. Out of prison!
Iris and I stared at each other. She said, “The Red Rose came here to steal the book because he didn’t want Zelide warned. That means Zelide is still alive. That means they’re still after her.”
Her reasoning was a little higgledy-piggledy, but she’d most likely got the right idea. Emmanuel Catt must have read of the release of the two Rosa Brothers. He must have realized the great danger for the three women which that release would precipitate and he had sent each of them a copy of his book, to warn them. His warning had failed miserably with Eulalia and Lina. And now the book for Zelide had been stolen.
Zelide might be here any minute. Heaven alone knew where the drunken Beard could be found. Iris and I were the only ones now who could warn her of the terrifying vendetta which had singled her out for its third victim. Zelide’s life was in our hands now.
We hurried out of the dressing-room into the corridor with no conscious plan. From far away I could hear the brassy blare of the circus band.
The passage was empty. The Red Rose had betaken himself off as neatly as he had come.
We stood there a moment ineffectually. The band had thumped into Yankee Doodle. Somehow that rollicking music in the distance made the immediate silence far deeper.
Suddenly the silence and the loneliness were shattered. From around the far end of the corridor debouched a wild, riotous assembly. In that motley swarm of people I made out the fat woman, the tallest man in the world, a couple of flaxen-haired midgets, youths in green tumbler uniforms, a plump, important ringmaster and a bevy of young, blonde aerialists in feather capes.
They were all in a state of high jubilation. Some were brandishing wine bottles, others were humming snatches of the Mendelssohn Wedding March. A fringe of clowns pranced around the edges like excited poodles.
There were two people in the center of the group around whom the gala pandemonium was focused. One of them was a swarthy, Greek-looking man, broad and beaming. The other was a woman whose arm was looped through his—a blonde with a mauve toque perched on stiffly waved hair.
That muscular blonde, that patently just-married blonde on the arm of her happy groom, was to me the sheerest dream of delight. There was no mistaking that flashing, toothy smile which had grinned at me from so many photographs. Zelide at last!
The procession came closer and closer. The voice of the top-hatted ringmaster rose importantly: “Ah, Madame Zelide, you scare us. You are not at your hotel. You do not come for the performance. No one knows where you are. Something terrible has happened to Madame, we say. And now it is this—this happy event—a bride. Madame Zelide no longer.” He kissed his own plump forefinger. “From now on, Madame Annapopaulos.”
“Madame Annapopaulos!” chorused the crowd in happy unison.
“Ah,” said Madame Zelide Annapopaulos coyly, beaming at her groom, “but the circus she still come first. I say to Dmitri, my career she always comes first. I say to Dmitri, whatever happens, I must take the performance. So I come. I am here.”
“Madame Zelide is here for the performance,” chanted the blonde aerialists in well-trained reverence.
I had never seen so much innocent joy. And the irony of it surged over me. Last night Zelide had been saved by Cupid. While gunmen, out for her life’s blood, prowled the elegant lobbies of the St. Anton, she had been amorously, respectably, and securely lodged in the arms of Mr. Annapopaulos.
The procession had swarmed right up to us now and was already pouring past us through the door into Zelide’s dressing-room. The happy bride and groom were swept straight past us into the room out of sight.
“Twenty minutes, Madame,” said a voice inside the room. “In twenty minutes our ballet goes on. You must be quick. Quick.”
They had all vanished from sight into the room now, all except two clowns who stood in the doorway.
Iris said, “Come on, Peter. We’ve got to warn her before she goes on for her act.”
We both started forward toward the dressing-room door. The clowns were still there, standing with their motley, rainbow backs toward us.
Iris prodded at one and said, “Let us by, please. We’ve got to see Madame Zelide.”
Inside the room we could hear loud, raucous laughs and the clinking of glasses. Slowly the two clowns turned around—a blue clown and a white clown. They stood there, blocking the doorway, staring at us.
“Please let us in,” said Iris again. “We have to see Madame Zelide at once.”
The eyes of the white clown flickered unpleasantly. Suddenly he swung around and shut the door of the dressing-room, so that we were barricaded from the people inside. There were only the clowns, then, and us—no one else in that deserted corridor.
“Let us by—” began Iris.
And then she stopped, with a little piping gasp. Because, very slowly, the white clown lifted a cupped hand to his mouth and gnawed at his thumbnail. The hand stayed there for a split second, then it swooped down to the broad pocket of his costume. Long before we could do anything, he had whipped out a revolver. He was aiming it directly at Iris.
“One peep out of either of you,” he said, “and I’ll shoot the dame in the belly.”
With the gun still pointed straight at Iris, the Red Rose talked to the blue clown out of the corner of his mouth. “This is the guy and the dame I told you about—the dame I thought was Eulalia last night.”
The blue clown shifted sparse shoulders and stammered, “I—I th-thought s-so.”
Iris was very pale. Probably I was, too. I thought of Eulalia dead and Lina dead. I looked into those bright, fanatical eyes. The Rosa Brothers had been trapeze artists. Of course, it would have been simple for them to get themselves hired, incognito, at the circus.
I knew just how far to trust that revolver.
“Get moving,” said the Red Rose. He jerked his painted head. “Down the passage. Get moving.”
We had to, of course. I took Iris’s hand. We started down the empty passage in the direction the Red Rose indicated. The two clowns fell in behind. The Red Rose’s revolver was pressed against Iris’s back.
“Left, here,” said the Red Rose. “Down that passage to the left.”
We turned into it, Iris and I, hand in hand. It was a narrower passage with no doors in it, a lonely, gray passage.
“If we see anyone,” said the Red Rose, “and if you bat an eyelid, I shoot.” After a pause, explaining, he added. “I don’t know what you know or what your game is. But we got important work to do. We ain’t having you or no one else butting in, see?”
We came to the end of the corridor. There was a door, a tall, steel door. Hanging from a hook on the wall was a key. White Rose took the key. He opened the door outward. Inside there were stairs going down into blackness.
“Turn around,” said the Red Rose.
We turned around. We stared straight into his clown’s face, straight at the revolver.
“Back down those stairs,” he said.
We moved slowly backward, down, down into darkness. The Red Rose loomed above. Was he going to shoot now?
The revolver shifted slightly in his hand. He said, “You’re lucky you’re still alive. Just keep thinking about that.”
Then suddenly we didn’t see him any more. There was nothing but utter darkness and the vague, musty smells of a cellar. The door above us had been slammed shut.
I heard the rattle of a key in the lock. Then there was no noise but our own quick breathing. I was relieved because as the Red Rose had said, we were alive.
We stood there, precariously, halfway down the dark stairs that led to—what?
Iris said huskily, “We must find the lights.”
Lights—in that darkness!
She started up the stairs again, gropingly. I felt in my pocket for matches. I brought out a box and made a little flickering light.
“The switch must be by the door.”
We reached the steel, impregnable door. There was a switch right by it. Before the match sputtered out, I twisted the switch.
Nothing happened.
I flicked it around and around. No light came. It was broken.
Iris said, “We must go down into the cellar. Maybe there’s another way out.”
We started down the stairs, lighting match after match, penuriously, because there were not very many. We were down in the bowels of the cellar, tripping over old gym horses, slats, broken poles, all the odd, useless junk that ends up in a sports stadium cellar.
Then suddenly, after a match had burnt out, Iris gave a little cry, stumbled, and clutched me. “Peter, light a match. Quick. I think there are steps here.”
I lit the last match but one. As its cone of flame sprouted, I saw that Iris was right. We were in a corner by the wall, and concrete stairs led up. We scrambled up them. The match went out. Falteringly I lit the last match. I held it above us. The steps seemed to lead straight to the ceiling.
“They must lead somewhere.”
Iris was scrambling ahead. She reached the top. “Keep the match alight,” she said; and, instantaneously, the match flickered out. There were queer, shuffling sounds in the darkness. Then Iris said, “The ceiling’s wood. I think it’s loose.”
She gave a cry of jubilation. Because suddenly there was light, a square of light. And I saw Iris against it in silhouette. Iris, glamorous, chic, elegant, and disheveled, standing at the top of the steps, her hands above her head supporting a square trap door. There was straw everywhere.
She wriggled herself up. I went after her, squeezing through.
Straw was all around us on the floor. Vaguely I began to realize we were in a stall, an animal stall. With a tingle of excitement I recognized it. It was empty now. But we had been here before. This was where Edwina and her train had been.
“Quick,” I said, gripping Iris’s arm. “We’ve got to get to Zelide’s dressing-room. What’s the time?”
Iris glanced at her little wrist watch. “Two forty-five. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe she’s already in the arena.”
Together, we ran out of the open stall, through the great archway and headlong into the entrance to the arena itself. The music was playing, loudly, throbbingly. People were everywhere, stagehands, hangers-on, whatever they were, all crowded around the entrance to the ring.
We pushed into the crowd. Iris was ahead. Then she swung round, clutching my hand. “Look, Peter.”
In front of us, almost near enough to touch and yet infinitely unget-at-able, I saw a serried row of hippy, feathered blondes marching smartly away over the red, white, and blue sawdust toward the distant center of the ring. Marching grandiosely at their head was a single, even more majestically feathered blonde.
Madame Zelide herself!
We were at the very brink of the ring. We started running forward.
Iris called, “Madame Zelide!”
Then she stopped, because someone had gripped her from behind. I was gripped, too.
A voice said, “Are you nuts? You can’t go on there. The performance is on.”
We swung around desperately and stared at a lot of nondescript men.
“We’ve got to get to Zelide,” I said. “It’s a matter of life or death.”
One of the men spat. Another man, an old, gnarled man with spectacles, had a newspaper. He was staring at us through the spectacles with a queer, intent sort of stare. He looked down at the front page. “Murder of Eulalia Crawford,” he read. “Wanted by the police, a man and a woman answering…”
The other men were crowding around excitedly, looking at the paper, too. We stood there, circled by them. For a moment I felt like a trapped animal.
Really before either of us knew it, Iris and I were pushing through the circle, scrambling away and running—running like mad.
“The audience,” Iris panted. “We’ve got our tickets, Peter. That’s the best place to lose ourselves—in the audience.”
Vaguely I was conscious of confusion, shouts behind us, but we rushed on through the deserted sideshows, past the bored cage animals, upstairs to the actual entrance to the auditorium. I had the tickets ready in my hand. We swung through doors and automatically became anonymous, just two molecules in a vast body of people.
Our seats were ringside seats, I knew—a box. No attendants were around at the moment. Iris and I started down through the tiers toward the front of the great oval house.
In the arena, the feathered, bespangled blondes were splaying out to the rhythm of the band, each of them moving to her own individual hanging trapeze. I could see the stately figure of Madame Zelide herself, bowing in the center of the ring. Very magnificent she looked.
We were down at the front row now. Ahead of us I could see two empty boxes. I didn’t know whether one was ours or not. I didn’t care. I navigated Iris ahead into one. I followed.
The sound of footsteps and voices came from behind us. Guiltily we spun around. Iris gave a little gasp. I stared, like a fool.
Coming down the steps between the packed rows of seats were a man and four impeccably Social Register dowagers. And the man, infinitely respectable in discreet, ambassadorial serge, wore a beard—a black beard, a magnificent, godlike beard. His eyes, perhaps, were ever so slightly rheumy and morning-afterish, but he proceeded down the steps with all the sober dignity in the world.
Emmanuel Catt, America’s Most Distinguished Criminologist, had come to the circus. For one paralyzed second, Iris and I stared at him. Then, as one, we pounced.
Iris said, “You! At last we’ve found you.”
The Beard drew himself up. He fixed us both with a cold eye and said, “I haven’t the pleasure of knowing you, and there is straw in your hair. Please let me pass.”
So he didn’t know us! So the Beard, sober among his dowagers, was a respectable Dr. Jekyll who disowned the evil, alcoholic, midnight acquaintances of his drunken Mr. Hyde other self.
“But you must remember us.” Iris stared at him. “How could you forget—after last night? Pussy!”
The dowagers gave one glacial, co-operative sniff and swept into the next box. A faint flush tinged the Beard’s cheeks. “Ah—last night, I—ah—was not myself.”
“But the Rosa Brothers,” said Iris wildly. “They’ve murdered Eulalia and Lina! It was in all the papers! And now it’s Zelide!”
“I haven’t seen a paper,” the Beard said mechanically. Then he realized what Iris had said. “Murdered Eulalia and Lina?” he gasped.
“Yes, yes. And now they’re here at the circus disguised as clowns. They’re after Zelide. She’s right here—out in the ring.”
The Beard was utterly shaken. “But she must be mad. I warned her.”
Suddenly there came the ominous rolling of drum taps. As one, Iris and I and the astounded Beard swung around to face the ring.
The moment for the great Bird Ballet had come. Like clockwork, with the first roll on the drums, the blonde “birds” lifted their arms and gripped their trapezes. Rather ponderously, they began to swing onto the trapezes and then levitate as the ropes carried them upward. The drums rolled on.
And Zelide still stood there in the center of the ring. A huge trapeze was lowering above her head. The blonde “birds,” in mass ascension, soared higher and higher. Vaguely I saw men up there, men in fancy costumes, hanging high up on the ropes, maneuvering them. Zelide gave a final bow.
The trapeze, lowered from above, came closer and closer. She lifted a hand for it.
And then, as the thunderous drum-roll reached its climax, something incalculably unexpected happened. Suddenly, as if materializing from nowhere, there were roses—a shower of roses tumbling down, down, splashing to the sawdust and around Zelide’s feet.
Red roses…and white roses…red roses…and white roses…
The audience buzzed its approval. A pretty gesture, the final touch of showmanship. But, to us, the appalling, sinister implication of those roses was almost more than we could endure.
And, as we stood there, taut as steel, helpless, Zelide reached for the trapeze. She was easing herself up onto the bar.
It was then that Iris screamed, “Look! ’Way up there in the ropes!”
She stared up. I stared up. The Beard stared up. And we saw them—saw them up there almost at the peak of the giant arched roof. Two clowns, swinging expertly on ropes, close to the cables that supported Madame Zelide’s trapeze. Two clowns—a blue clown and a white clown. Clowns who, to the vast audience, were just another prop in the pageant; just part of the act.
The Red Rose and the White Rose.
And, as we stared up, I caught the sudden flash of something in the shaft of light from a baby spot. Something in the hand of the Red Rose—something gleaming and steely.
A knife!
Of course! That was the crazy plan—to cut halfway through one of Madame Zelide’s trapeze ropes, to wait until she started to swing, and let her hurtle herself to her doom.
“Look!” I clutched at the Beard’s arm. “The two clowns up there—they’re the Roses.”
“They dropped the roses,” said Iris.
“And the Red Rose has a knife. I saw it gleaming. He was cutting through one of the trapeze ropes. Don’t you see? When Zelide gets high enough, when she starts to swing…”
For one teetering second the three of us—Iris, the Beard, and I—stood petrified in the box.
Then the two clowns started swarming down their ropes. All the other men were swarming down, too, past the ascending blonde aerialists. No one else but us would have singled out the Roses. No one but Iris and I, who were supposed to be safely locked in the cellar, could possibly have guessed what they had done—guessed that, right there in front of an audience of thousands, they have prepared their fantastically brazen and cunning plot to murder Zelide.
The Roses were halfway to earth. Madame Zelide was rocking on the trapeze, ready to make her triumphant aerial ascent.
Overcome with a common, desperate urgency, the Beard and Iris and I started scrambling over the front of the box and dropped down into the ring. Somewhere behind us the Beard’s dowagers screamed. It was a fuse setting off a splutter of shouts and calls behind us. But, indifferent to them, we started running over the bright red, white, and blue sawdust toward Madame Zelide and the trapeze.
The drum-roll went on. Slowly, portentously, Madame Zelide and her trapeze started to rise upward, slowly upward. Attendants were running after us now, agitated, angry, with thumping footsteps and hoarse, high voices.
The Beard was ahead, his role of respectable escort to dowagers abandoned. A bearded Jupiter running with the fleetness of Mercury. We stumbled on through the sawdust. The Roses on their ropes were slipping nearer and nearer to earth. They were of vital importance. But first there was Zelide. Zelide had to be stopped in her regal ascent.
We reached the trapeze. The Beard was still ahead. It was a mad, March-hare moment. Zelide was dangling above our heads, getting higher and higher. I saw her tightsheathed legs swinging. I saw the Beard running ahead of me, immensely dignified and portentous.
Suddenly the legs and the Beard made contact. I saw Emmanuel Catt, America’s Most Distinguished Criminologist, leap with extraordinary dexterity into the air. I saw his large hands fold over Zelide’s ankles and tug her from the ascending trapeze.
Then, in a wild, farcical heap, the bearded dignitary and the world-famous, would-be-loved aerialist were tumbling together on the sawdust in an inextricable confusion of blonde hair, black beard, and roses—red and white roses.
The ringmaster was shouting and swishing with his whip. The attendants were closing in all around us. The whole vast auditorium was in an uproar.
The whole picture had become a kind of idiot’s blur to me. Only one thing was vivid—the realization that the blue clown and the white clown had clambered down their ropes to earth. The two of them stood there for a second, staring at our swirling little group. Then they started running, swiftly for the far exit from the arena.
Vaguely I heard Madame Zelide’s voice, high, shrill with furious indignation. Vaguely I heard the Beard’s voice, answering gravely. But this was no time for explanations. I rushed to the Beard. I grabbed his arm.
“The White Rose and the Red Rose are escaping,” I pointed. “There! We’ve got to get them.”
I had a brief glimpse of Zelide’s face, saw it grow pale with horror beneath the sawdust-sprinkled blonde hair. “The White Rose and the Red Rose!” she gasped. “They’re here?”
That was all, because the Beard and Iris and I were on the run again. The three of us, buoyed up by the wild exhilaration of the chase, started dashing across the huge arena after the fast-vanishing figures of the two clowns.
“Hurry, darling!” Iris cried.
It was surely the maddest race in history. Behind us, stumbling, shouting, panting, came tumblers, attendants, aerialists, everyone and anyone who happened to be around. At first, I think, they were chasing us. Then with a majestic spurt of speed, Madame Zelide, herself, caught up with us. Her tights were twisted, her blonde hair was wild, but she was splendid and formidable, and she was shouting, “Get them! Murderers!”
The gigantic audience had gone crazy. I didn’t blame them. They had come to see a circus. Now they had a lunatic track-race on their hands. The roar of them surged over us like a titanic wave.
“The Roses,” panted Zelide. “So they try to kill me like they kill poor Forelli. They—”
“I warned you,” put in Emmanuel Catt, lumbering at her side. “I sent you a copy of my book with a note. I marked page eighty-four. I never dreamed that you would not read it.”
“Nothing I get, no book, no note.”
“The Red Rose stole it,” put in Iris.
“I should have guessed they were here,” panted Zelide, her blonde hair streaming. “Just as I go on, Edwina, she break the line in her act. She charge at two clowns. I should have guessed.”
Ahead, we could see the White Rose and the Red Rose. They had almost reached the exit. People were lounging around it, staring blankly. We shouted out to them to stop the clowns. But they didn’t get the idea at all. The two Roses slipped into the little group of watchers—and disappeared.
“After them!” I shouted.
We padded on at the head of our motley band. We reached the exit to the accompaniment of a final roar from the circus audience. We plunged into the little tangled group that was clustered there.
I saw a large, swarthy, prosperous man in a cutaway with a pink carnation. Zelide’s husband, Mr. Annapopaulos himself!
He pushed to his wife’s side. “Zelide, what have we? What then goes on?”
“The Roses,” stammered Zelide. “They are out of prison. They try to take their revenge, to murder me.”
Everyone seethed some more.
“The clowns!” I exclaimed. “The two clowns who just ran in here. They’re the murderers!”
I stopped because another voice broke in harshly: “That’s the guy. That guy and that lady—them’s the ones wanted in the papers for the Crawford murder.”
I spun round, to see the gnarled old man with the spectacles, who had almost captured Iris and me before we got to Zelide. He was pointing at us. And suddenly, from nowhere, three policemen appeared.
I never thought I’d be glad to see policemen. We rushed to them and we all started talking at once. Emmanuel Catt won. The beard gave him added weight in official eyes. Maybe they even knew him by reputation. “…tried to cut through Madame Zelide’s trapeze rope and kill her…attempted murder…two other murders…desperate criminals…disguised as clowns…just went through here…”
Everyone started chattering then. The gnarled old murderer-catcher, in particular. He pointed down a corridor and shouted, “They went that way. Two clowns.”
They started running then, the three of them, down the corridor which the old man had indicated. The Beard and Iris and Madame Zelide and Mr. Annapopaulos and I followed, with the others scrambling after us.
“At least one of them has a revolver,” shouted Iris. “They’re dangerous.”
We sped on, tumbling down one corridor, then another. There was always someone who had seen them, someone pointing ahead and shouting, “That way! That way!”
We passed Zelide’s dressing-room—and on. Suddenly, as the corridor wound to the left, I realized what was happening. Obviously the Roses had not planned this escape beforehand. If their cunning project had worked, they would merely have slipped down their ropes, mixed with the throng of other clowns, and actually watched the murder “accident” take place.
Iris and I, by our escape from the cellar, had thrown a monkey wrench into their schedule.
From now on they would have to improvise. But, circus performers from ’way back, they certainly knew all the ropes at the stadium, and they had the key to the cellar into which they had locked us. Almost definitely they would try to escape that way. Down into the cellar, locking the steel door behind them, under the ring, and then up into the animal stalls, far away from the hue and cry.
I pushed through the crowd until I could grab one of the policemen. “Let the others go on,” I said. “You come with me. I think I know how we can head them off.”
The policeman looked blank but came. In a second we were hurrying back against the crowd, shoving our way forcibly. Iris noticed us first, then Zelide and Mr. Annapopaulos, then the Beard. They too started pushing their way after us.
I caught Iris’s eye and nodded.
Soon the crowd, hot on the chase, had swirled on toward the cellar door, abandoning us.
“Quick,” I exclaimed. “Get to the animal stalls.”
They obeyed me—just because they were too dazed to do anything else. We ran on, down corridor after corridor until we reached the side entrance to the arena. We passed it, hurried under the tall archway, and then, suddenly, we were in the animal stalls. No one was there. No one at all.
Right in front of us, ranged along the walls on either side, were the elephant stalls. And the elephants themselves, their act over, lumbered around in them.
I said, “There’s a trap door from the cellar. It comes up in one of the elephant stalls. I’m almost sure they’ll be sneaking up that way.”
“Which stall?” said the policeman sharply.
I didn’t know. I looked at Iris. She was uncertain, too.
“I—I think it was over there.” She pointed to a stall to the right.
We hurried toward it, a taut, keyed-up group—the Beard and the policeman, Mr. Annapopaulos with his prosperous arm around his bride’s waist, Iris in the Dietrich veil, and me in what was left of my Palm Beach suit.
The elephants shuffled and watched us.
“Yes,” Iris said. “I’m almost sure it’s here.”
She stopped, with a little scream. We all stood petrified in our steps. Because, from behind us, an all too familiar voice had sounded, steely, and very, very low:
“Hands up. Every one of you. Turn around. Stick your hands up.”
Slowly, in unison, like some weird sort of circus act, the six of us wheeled around, our hands groping up into the air above our heads. We stood there, staring, the six of us: the policeman, the criminologist, the bridegroom, the aerialist, and Iris and me, the two suckers.
Standing there in front of the other row of elephants and squarely behind two pointed revolvers, were the clowns, the white clown and the blue clown—those nightmare clowns who, once again, had turned the tables.
And it was all so tragically simple. Iris had picked the wrong stall. The Rosa Brothers had come up from the trap door behind us. They had us beautifully under control—but beautifully. Even the policeman was without a plan.
And the Roses were very much on the job. In the grotesquely painted faces the two pairs of eyes were cruelly bright and steady. The Red Rose’s pink tongue slid out over his scarlet lips. He was staring straight at Zelide.
“Step forward, Zelide,” he said. “Out here, away from the others.”
Zelide gave a little moan. Mr. Annapopaulos kept his large arm stubbornly around her waist. Neither of them moved.
“We got you at last, Zelide. Just like we got Eulalia and Lina. Ten years we had to wait—ten years sweltering behind bars where you put us. You—” The eyes were fanatical now, half crazy. “Get forward.”
The elephants weaved with their trunks all around us, shuffled their straw, flicked their ears, and looked bored. Somewhere along the line one of them trumpeted and started an uproarious clatter.
Zelide looked grimly at Mr. Annapopaulos. “It is no use, Dmitri. You too must not suffer. I go.”
“No, no…”
“Yes.”
I admired her then. Zelide was a really brave woman.
“Come out, Zelide.” The White Rose had the rest of us covered. The Red Rose kept his revolver pointed on Zelide. She took a step forward, very erect.
“This way.” The Red Rose jerked along the stalls with his revolver. “Down here.”
Zelide moved forward. The Red Rose stepped in behind her. They started up the aisle between the elephant stalls. It was horrible. A sort of mock execution, a terrible, half-mad mockery of an execution.
Zelide moved along. The elephant down the line trumpeted again. Zelide walked more quickly. She reached a stall. The Red Rose was close behind her. Then, like lightning, Zelide dived into the open stall. There was a scuffling and the wild trumpeting again.
Then Zelide’s voice screaming, “Edwina! Get him, Edwina! The Red Rose! Get him!”
It was sheer lunacy from then on. The Red Rose stiffened. I saw him jerk the revolver around. I saw his finger on the trigger. A shot was fired. The trumpeting teetered over into a wild, animal scream of fury. Then an elephant was charging—a vast mammoth of an elephant charging, breaking out of the stall, head raised, trunk bristling, a huge, inexorable elephant with an immense pink ribbon around its neck. Edwina!
I saw the Red Rose hesitate, stare in horror at that terrifying sight. Then he started to run, and Edwina was lumbering after him.
“Get him, Edwina. Get him!”
The White Rose still had us covered. At least, up till then, he had. But, as Zelide’s voice rang out again, he faltered and glanced over his shoulder. Instantly, all with the same idea, Mr. Annapopaulos, the policeman, the Beard, and I leaped forward, knocked the revolver out of his hand, and tumbled him to the floor.
I scrambled up, leaving the White Rose to the tender mercies of the others. I wheeled around to Edwina. I was just in time to see her head trundle down. Then there was a scream—a human scream. I saw the immense pink ribbon flapping. Then I saw other colors. I saw the white of the clown, waving helplessly in the air, encircled by the viselike trunk.
Zelide ran out of the stall. Iris and I ran forward, too.
For a moment the Red Rose was, madly, up in the air there, screaming. Then he was hurled to the ground.
Zelide rushed forward. “Edwina!” she shouted. “Leave him alone now. Don’t kill him. Leave him, Edwina!”
Even in its fury, the elephant seemed to hear and obey. She backed, trumpeting, shaking her trunk.
Zelide and Iris and I rushed forward. The Red Rose was there, twisting and turning in the straw. I pounced on him. He had no strength left. I saw Zelide’s eyes gleaming with triumph.
“Edwina—she save me. I know if I can get him to her stall, she save me. The Roses—they remember and hate for ten years. But Edwina remembers forever. Edwina, the elephant, she never forgets.”
The others were hurrying to us now, lugging the White Rose with them. I pulled the dazed Red Rose to his feet. We all crowded around.
“Edwina, she is shot. But a little revolver shot—to Edwina it is a mere flea-bite, yes?” Zelide was coping enthusiastically with Edwina.
Edwina seemed to love it. She was puffing a little, but she was perfectly calm again. And her trunk stopped weaving. Ever so delicately, she curled its tip around Zelide’s waist.
“Edwina!” we shouted. “Edwina! Bravo, Edwina!”
And, she smirked. I swear she did.
There was high festivity and merry-making in the dressing-room of Madame Zelide, world-famous, world-beloved aerialist. The Red Rose and the White Rose had been taken away by the police. Soon we, too, would have to follow to the police station. But at the moment our joy was unconfined.
Sweet red wine was pouring with abandon. Madame Zelide and Mr. Annapopaulos, giving vent to their warm Southern temperaments, were kissing everyone at random.
They kissed me, both of them; they kissed Iris. They even dared to kiss the Beard, who, dowagers forgotten, was beaming broadly, perched on a stool. Everything was confusion.
No one seemed to realize that Iris and I were still at sea. We’d been through hellfire. We’d run the gamut of every kind of emotion. We’d got straw in our hair—actually and figuratively. But we still had only the mistiest idea of what it was all about.
That didn’t seem to matter.
At the peak of the toasts, the door burst open, and the ringmaster, resplendent in top hat and tails, surged in on a wave of enthusiastic blonde aerialists. He rushed to Madame Zelide and kissed her. Then he swept the Beard and Iris and me into a mass embrace.
“You save the circus!” he said. “When it happens, when you tug Madame from the trapeze, I say—the end. The most terrible thing! But now we find the trapeze rope—she was half cut through. Those fiends, those madmen! Certainly Madame would have plunged to her death. You save us from the most terrible of tragedies.” His enthusiasm mounted: “Free tickets. For every performance I give you free tickets. The best—boxes.”
I managed to disentangle myself.
“But if only someone would tell us something, anything. For example: Why did Edwina hate the Roses?”
Madame Zelide gulped red wine and stared. “But they were so cruel to her—always. Edwina, she love Tito Forelli. The Roses hate him. Once they attack him, the two of them together, and Edwina went to his rescue. After that they hate her, too. Always they think out mean, cruel tricks to plague her. Edwina does not forget. No.”
“But why,” added Iris, in an attempt to get someone to stick to the point, “why did the Roses hate Tito Forelli?”
Emmanuel Catt rose majestically. We were obviously now entering his domain. “That,” he began, “is one of the most fascinating cases in criminal history. I have—ah—made a study of it in my book, Crimes of Our Times. I shall give you a copy. The murder of Tito Forelli shows the psychopathic jealousy motive coupled with the perfect crime and the relentless Nemesis as supremely as any…”
“But it is so easy to say,” broke in Zelide, who seemed in no mood to hand over the spotlight to a mere criminologist. “Ten years ago Forelli is the partner of the Roses in a trapeze act. He is the star, by far the best. And the Roses were madly jealous.”
“Professional jealousy at its—” began the Beard.
“And there was Eulalia Crawford, too,” Zelide dived in. “The girl who then makes the carnival figures for us. She is beautiful, attractive. And she loves Forelli. That makes the Roses even more madly jealous, because the Red Rose, too, loves Eulalia. The White Rose, he was never so bright in the head, just the—how do you say?—shadow of his brother, ready to do anything for the Red Rose, die for him, kill for him.”
“A typical moronic assistant, a gangster’s bodyguard.”
“And so, the Red Rose, his jealousy gets stronger and stronger and his hate. And, together with his brother, he thinks out a plan to kill Forelli so that the Red Rose can have Eulalia. The plan, it is perfect, they think. During the trapeze act they will drop Forelli, they will send him hurtling to his death. All the world will think it is an accident, yes—a simple accident. It happens often with aerialists. No one will suspect.”
Zelide paused for breath. The Beard charged in: “The perfect theoretical murder, no evidence, no clues.”
“Dmitri, more wine for Mr. Catt,” broke in Zelide torridly. “You see, Mr. Duluth, it worked, their plan—yes. And they were proud—proud as clever murderers who would never be discovered. In the papers, everything, it said—accident. Tito Forelli die by accident. Partners absolved. Eulalia then was to be for the Red Rose. But they were fools, stupid fools. For Eulalia hated Red Rose and suspected them.
“She was cunning, Eulalia. She know they are vain, boastful. She praises them, how clever they are, feeds their vanity. There is little Lina, she was with our ballet then, and she was Eulalia’s greatest friend. There was I, too. I then was only an unknown little aerialist, and I, too, am a friend of Eulalia’s. She comes to ask, makes us hide in a room, and she brings the Roses in. She praises them, so cunningly: ‘You are so clever and so smart, so much more clever than Forelli.’
“And they fall in the trap. When Lina and I are there as witnesses, we hear the Red Rose laugh and say boastfully to Eulalia, ‘Sure, we more clever than that Forelli. We fixed him. We got his number okay.’ ”
“So Eulalia,” broke in the Beard gravely, “tricked them through their vanity into a murder confession in front of witnesses. Although there was no shred of evidence, the three women went to the police. The police believed them. And, afterward, the jury believed them, too. The Rosa Brothers were sent to prison as murderers for ten years.”
“And they never forgive us,” said Zelide. “Oh, in time we forget. Until this afternoon everything was from my mind. But the Roses never forgot.”
So that was it! Sketchily, vaguely as it had been told in competitive duet, the story emerged plain as glass. Two mean, revengeful, small-time crooks who had planned what they thought was the perfect murder, only to be outwitted by three girls.
Two small-time crooks, brooding in prison, harping on their wounded pride and their hatred for the woman one of them had loved and her friends. Two crooks, distorted by their hate, living only for one thing—release and revenge, a second chance to prove themselves smarter than the women who had defeated them.
And the revenge of the Rosas had reaped terrible havoc—for themselves, for two of the women, for all of us. But it was over now, thanks to Edwina, whose slow, stubborn impulse to revenge had been even stronger than theirs.
Everyone, the ringmaster, the fluttering blonde “birds,” Mr. Annapopaulos, they had all been listening to that strange tale in rapt astonishment.
But the Beard was now the central figure. He stood in Jove-like splendor, twisting the glass of cheap red wine rather shudderingly. I could imagine how he felt about it after last night’s champagne.
“All along,” he said, “since my study of the case, I felt there would be great danger when the Rosa Brothers were released. I know their type—the little Caesars, the little men with the big egos and a vast capacity for hate and revenge. Yesterday I tried to warn the three women. I should have done much more. But last night I—was unfortunately not quite myself.”
He paused there and looked at Iris. The black beard twitched. Slowly, almost infinitesimally, an eyelid lowered in a wink. It was clear that Emmanuel Catt’s lamentable exuberance of the night before was to be our own particular little secret.
“I admit I was a failure, a tragic failure,” he said. “But now I drink to the two people who, knowing nothing at all about the issues at stake, managed, by their ingenuity and their courage, at least to save—Madame Zelide. I propose a toast. I toast the two most resourceful people I have ever encountered. I toast Mr. and Mrs. Duluth!”
Everyone grabbed glasses, even the respectful blonde aerialists. There were shouts, applause, confusion. Glasses were waved on high. Feather capes fluttered.
I turned to look at Iris. How did she manage to be so utterly beautiful after all we’d been through? I lifted my glass to her. She lifted hers to me. She smiled—that quick, dazzling smile which always catches the breath right out of me.
“Mr. and Mrs. Duluth,” she breathed. “Twelve months later, darling—and it still sounds voluptuous.”
I leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were so soft and warm, so very, very right.
“Mr. and Mrs. Duluth!” shouted the blonde “birds” with an abandon which almost certainly stemmed from the red wine. “Bravo, Mr. and Mrs. Duluth! Bravo!”
I hated taking my lips away from Iris’s. I could have done without the ecstatic aerialists, too, and Madame Zelide, and Mr. Annapopaulos, and the ringmaster, and the Beard.
But I didn’t really care. Because, suddenly, I was sure of one thing. Against all odds, it had turned out to be a good wedding anniversary, after all. It certainly had.
An honest-to-goodness, super-colossal wedding anniversary!