Death of an Angel
A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery
Frances and Richard Lockridge
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
1
Thursday, June 16, 10:27 P.M.
to Friday, June 17, 1:15 A.M.
Naomi Shaw wore white—a white dinner dress which clung to her. She stood with her back to french doors, and her hands, held behind her, touched the doors, as if about to push them open. Her lovely chin was up a little and there was the look on her heart-shaped face, in her dark eyes, of one surprised by a great delight. Behind her, beyond the doors, a garden lay in moonlight. And then Naomi Shaw spoke, in that voice so widely considered beyond description.
“I’ve got—” she said, and there was the check there—the indescribable check. “I’ve got to remember Pudgy.”
The thousand-odd people who sat (or stood) in front of her became breathless with laughter. They turned red with laughter; they clutched the area of their diaphragms. They held on to their knees; they leaned back in their seats. They wiped their eyes. The curtain came down on the second act of Around the Corner, and the thousand-odd laughed on, and clapped their hands together and made small, strange sounds of utter happiness. House lights came up, a little slowly, as if reluctant to intrude. People looked at one another and said, “Oh. Oh!” Pamela North, one in from the aisle, sixth row center, looked at Gerald North, on the aisle, and saw him blurriedly through the tears of laughter. “Oh,” Pamela North said. “Oh! Jerry!”
“Got to remember Pudgy,” Gerald North said, and shook again. “Pudgy!”
“I know,” Pam said. “Of all things! And even when you know it’s coming—” Words failed Pamela at this point. They returned to her. “Somehow,” she said, “it’s better each time, isn’t it? Shall we go have a cigarette?”
They went, more slowly with each step, up an aisle which clogged with men and women, most of whom continued to laugh, to say, “Pudgy!” to one another and, on that magic word, to laugh again. They reached the head of the aisle, and a man who stood there, clutching the rail with both hands, looked at them and shook his head. He had a long, sad face. It did not appear that he had heard, or seen, anything to laugh at. He spoke to the Norths.
“They think it’s funny,” he said. “Why? That’s all I want to know. What’s so damned funny about it?”
He looked anxiously at Pam, as anxiously at Jerry.
“It’s the way she says it,” he told them. “It’s got to be that, hasn’t it? Hasn’t it? Because what else is so damned funny?”
“Everything,” Pam said. “Just everything, Sammy. The way—the way it keeps coming up. I mean everything keeps coming up.”
“The running gag,” Samuel Wyatt said. He shook his sad head. “You tell me, Jerry.”
But he did not look, now, at Gerald North. He looked at the flushed faces of those coming up the aisles. He seemed to look in wonderment.
“Come on,” Jerry said. “Let’s get out of this. Out on the sidewalk.”
He put a hand on the shoulder of Samuel Wyatt, playwright, and Wyatt permitted himself to be led away. He seemed to move in a daze, to grope his way through the crowded lobby, into the warm June night of Forty-third Street. He took the cigarette Jerry North offered him and stared at it, as if its use were beyond conception.
“In your mouth,” Pam explained, slowly and carefully. “One end. You light the other. See?”
She demonstrated.
“You knew it was funny when you wrote it,” Gerald North told Wyatt.
“Did I write it?” Wyatt said. “Pinch me.”
“All right,” Pam said, and did. Wyatt said, “Ouch!” but his heart was not in it.
“A hundred times,” he said. “A hundred times she’s said, ‘Pudgy,’ and every time—every damned time—they fall apart. Do you realize it’s been a hundred times? Tonight.”
It was, Pam told him, a delightful play. And Naomi Shaw was—
“Delectable,” Wyatt said. “‘Since Miss Shaw is delectable,’ Brooks Atkinson said. And Dick Watts said she was a lovely girl.”
“Broth of a girl, surely,” Jerry said.
“Just lovely girl,” Wyatt told him. “You could hear the ‘r’s’ rolling, of course.”
“Mr. Nathan said she was a dish,” Pam told them. “He liked the play, too. Everybody liked the play. You know that, Sammy.”
“Why?” Samuel Wyatt enquired. “That’s all I want to know. Every night—every other night, anyway—I come here and stand back there and look at them, and I still don’t get it.”
“It’s funny,” Jerry said. “You wrote a very funny play, Sam.”
“I suppose so,” Wyatt said. “I don’t remember. It must have been funny, mustn’t it? I watch the damned thing and watch it, and I say, ‘Sure, it’s got to be funny. Sure it has,’ and—The hell with it. I’ll buy you drinks. Champagne. Very, very very old cognac.”
“No,” Jerry said. “We’re going back. You’re not?”
“Never,” Wyatt said. “So help me, Jerry. Never. Until tomorrow night, anyway.” Abruptly, he snapped his fingers. A buzzer sounded. He snapped his fingers again, but did not seem conscious that he did so. The crowd on the sidewalk began to thin. Wyatt took several quick, almost jerky, steps, away from the Norths. He stopped and came back.
“You coming to this binge?” he demanded.
“I don’t—” Jerry began, and Pam said, “Of course, Sammy. Aren’t you? But of course you are.”
Wyatt gestured, again abruptly, both hands raised to the level of his head, fingers spread. He started away again, and now the Norths turned toward the theater doors. They looked back. Wyatt smiled at them suddenly, the smile very wide on his long and narrow face. He waved. He went.
“Writers are strange things, aren’t they?” Pam said.
“Yes,” Jerry said.
They went down the aisle, found their seats. The house lights were still up.
“Has he always been like this?” Pam asked.
A good deal like this, Jerry told her. When Wyatt was a novelist—merely a novelist—it had been very hard to get him to read proofs. When he was got to read them, it was very hard to prevent him from rewriting, in entirety; a practice of which publishers disapprove.
“Once he’s done with anything, he hates it,” Jerry said. “Sees no possible good in it. If critics like it, the critics are fools. If it sells, the public is a fool. Now he’s got—this.”
The lights began to dim.
“It must,” Pam said, “be very baffling. It—”
The curtain began to rise. Somebody behind Pamela North said, “Shh-h!”
Naomi Shaw was lying, face down, on beach sand. She extended brownly and beautifully from a white bathing suit. (It had been at this moment of the play, some weeks previously, that a gentleman on convention had risen from his second row seat, held arms out in entreaty and bellowed. It had been necessary to remove him, but sympathy had been widespread.) It occurred to Pam, now, that her husband’s lips moved, although he made no sound. It was to be presumed that he merely moistened them. A very tall, very tanned, very handsome young man, wearing bathing trunks, entered, stage left. Naomi rolled onto her back, like a kitten, and looked up at the man. (From the rear of the balcony, someone whistled softly.) Naomi spoke.…
At last the curtain stayed down. Naomi had bowed, holding the hand of a blond girl, slightly taller than she, in another fashion—but how ordinary were all other fashions!—lovely. She had bowed with handsome man and blond girl held in either hand; she had bowed with the entire company, which, stretched in line across the stage, was more numerous than anyone had remembered. She had bowed alone. She had bowed again. But then the curtain was adamant.
“Do you,�
� Jerry said, as they stood on the sidewalk, “do you really want to go to this brawl?”
“Yes,” Pam said. “I’d love to.”
They had time to kill. They went to the lobby of the Algonquin, where time dies easily, without protest. They sipped scotch and plain water.
“The money,” Pam said, “must simply be pouring in, mustn’t it?”
“To Wyatt?”
“To everybody,” Pam said. “To Mr. Strothers and—oh, everybody. Even, in a small way, us.” But she paused, then. “Only,” she said, “it doesn’t, does it? Oughtn’t there to be just a trickle? After all, five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars. I’m still surprised at us.”
Jerry was also surprised at them. Never before had the Norths spread the wings of theatrical angels—or, a little more accurately, cherubim. But Samuel Wyatt was a friend, as well as author—and author who actually sold—on the list of North Books, Inc. He was also persuasive. And the Norths had liked the play, even in type—even without (although now that was unthinkable) Naomi Shaw. It still surprised them, nevertheless, that they had invested five hundred dollars in Around the Corner.
“When the profits start,” Jerry explained, “Strothers has to pay off the cost of production. The nut, they call it. Then profits. Then our trickle.”
He meant, Pamela supposed—with some incredulity—that the nut wasn’t paid off yet? After all those weeks, after the hundredth performance, when you still had to wait weeks and weeks for tickets?
It wasn’t, Jerry pointed out, a cheap production. It was not a cheap show to keep running. Money poured in; money also poured out. But it was about time for profits. Jasper had said that only yesterday.
“Jasper?” Pam said.
She was told she remembered; she was told that nobody could forget. Jasper. Jasper Tootle.
“It’s just,” Pam said, “that I don’t like to believe it. Why Tootle?”
Jasper Tootle came, Jerry explained gently, from a long line of Tootles. It was a name like any other name. As a literary agent for, among many others, Samuel Wyatt, Jasper had made it widely known.
“Has he got money in it, too?”
Jerry thought he had. He said a good many people had.
“And Mr. Strothers himself?”
Wesley Strothers, producer of Around the Corner, had put into it everything he could scrape together. At least, he had told Wyatt so; told Wyatt so frequently; told him sometimes with passion. (The passion had arisen when Wyatt had proved reluctant to make changes which Strothers knew—but knew—would make all the difference. “The general idea was,” Wyatt had told Jerry, who now told Pam, “that Wyatt was trying to send him to the poorhouse.”)
“Well,” Pam said, “it’s turning out nice for everybody. Hadn’t we better go?”
They went.
When a play achieves its hundredth performance, the theatrical columnists report a “milestone,” being dedicated to the verbally familiar. Somebody provides a party for the cast, the producer, such angels as may be in the vicinity, and friends of friends. To such celebrations, even the author of the play frequently is invited. It is true that these traditional festivals vary somewhat in brightness since, with plays as with people, it is not only where you’ve got, but your condition on arrival. Now and then a play is glassy-eyed at the milestone, and staggers to it, hands extended gropingly toward Hollywood. But others approach grandly, and of this group Around the Corner, that pleasant June evening, was one.
It had run its hundred, and might well run forever. It had, to be sure, a cast of eleven, and was a three-setter, of which the beach set of the last act was the most troublesome. (Sand gets into everything.) Phyllis Barnscott, the second lead, did not come cheap and Sidney Castle likewise knew his value by the week. Naomi Shaw’s cheek (even before her percentage of the gross) was signed by Wesley Strothers with averted eyes. His signature quivered, had nothing of the boldness evident, for example, on the check made out to Jane Lamont, who might, except that she understudied Naomi and so had to stick around, have gone home midway of the second act.
But the gross was the thing, and for weeks it had hardly wavered. One thousand and sixty-two people could sit in the Forty-third Street Theater, and some would stand. In a week they could pay $33,500 for the privilege. Even in Holy Week, the gross had dipped only into the upper twenties and in the week after Easter there were standees in layers, and even the boxes were filled by those who felt that half of Around the Corner was better than none. Tickets for October were at the printers; tickets for August were selling nicely. The sky, in short, was cloudless. And Bradley Fitch was giving the party, in his duplex on Park Avenue.
In the taxicab, Pam North pointed out, with doubt in her voice, that they were not dressed. She dangled this, however, only briefly, pulling in just before Jerry—who is not essentially a party man—snapped. It didn’t really, Pam said, matter. Jerry raised his eyebrows.
“We’re the literary element,” Pam said. “Like Sammy. Nobody will expect anything.” To this, Jerry said, “Oh,” and the cab stopped. A doorman, white-gloved against the contamination of taxis and other creeping things, opened the door for them. He waited, detached, tolerant, while Jerry paid. But he walked across the sidewalk with them, and held open a heavy glass door. He could hardly have done more had they arrived properly, chauffeur-driven.
They joined a tall, dark man who stood, a little stooped, waiting the arrival of an elevator. He looked at them from dark eyes, over which the brows jutted. He looked at them, for a second, as if somewhat puzzled. But then he said, “Oh, hello. Glad you could make it.” Then he looked around the lobby. “Didn’t bring Sam with you?”
“Bring Sam?” Pamela said. “Why bring Sam, Mr. Strothers? That is—”
The elevator door opened.
“Foolish thing to say,” Wesley Strothers said, and stood back to let them go ahead into the car. “Somehow got the idea you were—oh. Remember now. Saw you talking to him in front of the theater. Got the idea you were together.”
“We ran into him,” Jerry said.
“Writers I don’t get,” Strothers said. “Morbid, that’s what they are. Ever notice that, South?”
“North,” Jerry said. “Yes, or ebullient. Or, for the most part, just like anybody else.”
“Not our Sammy,” Strothers said. “This is where we get out. You know Fitch?”
“No,” Jerry said. “Somebody called and invited us. I suppose Sam suggested it.”
Wesley Strothers, to this, made a sound without words. Pam led them into an anteroom, which appeared to be a living room, furnished with a sofa and two modern arm chairs. A wide door, painted a dusky red, was in the wall they faced. The elevator door closed behind them. It was of the width of the door opposite and painted the same color.
“Swank,” Strothers said. His voice was low pitched, rumbled slightly. Yet laughter seemed to stir in it. “Do you well here, as Brad says. Also calls it his little pied-à-terre. Quite a boy, Brad is.” He pressed a button beside the red door, and musical notes occurred within. “Nice boy, all the same,” Strothers said, and the door opened. “’Evening, Henry,” Strothers said, to a butler in a black coat. “Party started?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Strothers,” Henry said. “It has indeed, sir.”
It had indeed. It had started in a big room beyond the entrance foyer—a room, Pam thought suddenly, too large for anything she could think of. It had—for heaven’s sake, Pam thought. There’s a chandelier! There was. It was prismed.
“Used to be his mother’s apartment,” Strothers said. “Accounts for everything.”
A tall man—tall and broad of shoulder and tapering down—left a group which was under the chandelier, and came forward. He advanced a hand. He told Pam that she must be Mrs. North. He said he had heard so much about her. She admitted that she was; did not ask what he had heard, or from whom. He said, “Bradley Fitch. Glad you could come. Mr. North, sir. ’Lo, Wes,” thus taking care of everyone. Momentarily, then, he looked o
ver them, toward the door from the foyer. He smiled and nodded over them, but briefly. He waved to a large man, probably in his middle fifties, whose round, pink face had been touched soothingly by many barbers, who had the most dignified of double chins. The woman with him, who was blond and much younger, who was the second lead in Around the Corner—why can’t I ever remember names when I ought to? Pam demanded of herself—came just to his shoulder.
“Ah,” the tall man said. “Gerald, my boy. Been hoping you’d turn up.” His smile, which was all affability, encompassed the others. “And this is the little lady.” He extended a hand, which Pam accepted. It was a plump hand, but firm. It appeared that she was the little lady in question.
“Tootle,” the big man said. “Jasper Tootle,” and to this Pam said, “Oh. Of course.” It did, for some reason, seem inevitable.
“Where’s Naomi?” Strothers said, and spoke to the blond girl, who was much, Pam thought, more exciting to look at now that the Naomi enquired of was not beside her.
“Taking a shower, darling,” the blonde said, and then, “I’m Phyllis Barnscott,” to Pamela and Gerald North. Fitch said, “Oh, sorry. I’m a hell of a host,” and the Norths identified themselves. Fitch looked around the big room and made gesturing motions, emphatically, with his head, and a waiter brought a tray. On the tray, champagne bubbled coolly in wide glasses. Phyllis said, “Ummm!” and reached. Phyllis had, Pam North realized suddenly, an amusing face.
“Nobody has to drink this stuff,” Fitch told them. “There’s plenty of everything.”
There was indeed, Pam thought, and sipped champagne.
“Excuse me a minute, cousins,” Bradley Fitch said, and went elsewhere, and Phyllis Barnscott moved beside Pam North.
“You’re friends of Sammy’s, aren’t you?” she said. She looked around the room. “He’ll never come, will he? There’s just too much of everything for Sammy.”
“He—” Pam said, and broke off and said, “He just has come.” Phyllis turned, too, and they watched Samuel Wyatt, who stood inside the door from the foyer. He was a slight man, he wore a dark suit which fitted him limply, on his long face there was an expression of incredulity. He stood alone, and snapped the fingers of his right hand.
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