Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

  “O.K., then,” Wesley Strothers said, and came down the wooden steps, his heels clattering on them. He sat in a center aisle seat in the fifth row, across the aisle from a man who, to Pam and Dorian, was a bald head attached—but how was not apparent—to a hand which held a cigarette. “Get on with it when you’re ready, Marv,” Strothers said.

  Phyllis Barnscott was on the stage. (It had been on seeing her there, evidently inaccessible for the time, that Pam and Dorian had sat to wait.) The red-haired Jane Lamont was on the stage, and Sidney Castle, the leading man. They stood now, near the footlights, and looked down at the bald-headed man, who said they would take it from the telephone scene. “Gabble, gabble, gabble and what not and Pudgy wouldn’t,” Mr. Marvin Goetz, director of Around the Corner, said in a tired voice. “And try to get something in it. All right, get it set up.”

  Miss Barnscott left through a door at stage left. Miss Lamont—who wore slacks and a yellow blouse—went upstage to a chair and table, sat on the one and lifted a telephone from the other. She put the telephone in her lap. Castle stood near by and looked dourly down at her.

  “For God’s sake, Sid,” Goetz said. “Can’t you see you’re screening her?” Castle moved back and to a side a step or two. “Last Tuesday night you were catching flies,” Goetz said.

  “I don’t know how,” Castle said.

  “Pushing that damn handkerchief into your pocket, pulling it out again. That’s how. Doing takes.”

  “Well,” Castle said, “I can’t just stand here.”

  “You can damn well try,” Goetz said. “All right. Lisa says and so forth and so forth and—”

  “Do you want the line?” Jane Lamont said.

  “The cue, sweetheart,” Goetz said, in a tone of inexpressible weariness. “Just the cue. Get the beat anyway you want. Now.”

  “Yackety, yackety, yackety and the rest of it,” Jane Lamont said into the telephone, and as she said this Castle’s handsome, but previously rather sullen, face was radiant with delight, “and Pudgy wouldn’t.”

  “Tell him—” Castle said.

  The door, stage left, through which Phyllis Barnscott recently had gone began to vibrate. It did not open. “Damn thing’s stuck again,” Phyllis, behind it, said angrily to anyone who would listen. “Why nobody—” The door opened suddenly. Miss Barnscott seemed to have been propelled through it.

  “We’ll get it fixed,” Goetz said. “Billy? Where the hell’s Billy?”

  “All right, Mr. Goetz,” a young man said, appearing part way through an obviously practical window, stage right. “Get on it right away.”

  “Don’t quite close it this time,” Goetz said, to Phyllis Barnscott. “All right. From the same place.”

  “Yackety yackety yackety and the rest of it,” Jane said into the telephone, and Castle’s face burst into a smile.

  “Tell him—” Castle began, through the smile, and Phyllis came through a door which, this time, opened—and was left open.

  “Too fast,” Goetz said in a tone of anguish. “A beat too—go ahead. Go ahead!”

  “Don’t tell me you’re trying it again!” Phyllis said, in a tone that bubbled. “Because if you—is that the way you want it, Marvin. Or, ‘Don’t tell me?’”

  “Sweetheart,” Marvin Goetz said, threateningly. “I love you. We all love you. Why would it be ‘Don’t tell me?’ What do you think it means?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Phyllis Barnscott said. “I never have had. Mr. Wyatt? Are you out there, Mr. Wyatt?”

  “Oh, God,” Sam Wyatt said, from a shadowed seat off the right aisle—a seat two rows in front of two dark figures in adjacent seats. “Do we go through that again?”

  “Now, Sammy,” Goetz said. “Tell the pretty lady. Just once more.”

  “And,” Phyllis said, “why the beat’s wrong. Tell me that, darling. I’ve got to come clear over to her, don’t I? And the way it is I’m just here”—she moved back a step, and stabbed at the floor with a heel—“when I get to ‘again.’ And look where I’ve got to get.”

  “Hold it a beat,” Goetz said. “Two beats, if you need them.”

  “And she’s saying it again,” Wyatt said. “Not to you again, particularly. I’d think—”

  Wesley Strothers stood up. He walked up the center aisle, and turned to cross behind the barrier. As he walked, he shook his head.

  “Try it again, darlings,” Goetz said.

  “Yackety yackety yackety and the rest of it,” Jane Lamont said, and Castle smiled again, and Phyllis, who had returned to the open door, but this time not through it, stepped into the living room (“Which so perfectly sets the tone of this delightful comedy”—John Chapman in the Daily News) and said, after holding it a beat, “Don’t tell me you’re trying again to—”

  “Dorian,” Pam North said, in a tight whisper. “Beyond the door. That’s Mullins! Surely that’s Mullins. And—”

  But she stopped, because at that moment the french doors upstage parted and Miss Naomi Shaw stepped through them. She wore a white sports dress, and her soft hair was held back from her face by a ribbon. She stood with her back to the doors, her hands, held behind her, touching them delicately.

  “There’s no use going on with—all this,” she said, in her cadenced voice. “I’m so dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid there isn’t any use at all.” She shook her shining head, slowly, tenderly. She turned a little toward the doors she had just parted, so that now the beautiful—as someone had said, the “Lilting”—line of throat and chin was accented. “Come, darling,” she said. “Come and help me tell these dear, dear people. Because—it’s so dreadfully hard.”

  There was movement in the right aisle. It was the movement of the tall figure of Wesley Strothers down it. He walked down until he reached the seat from which Wyatt had spoken. He stood beside the dark blot which was Sam Wyatt.

  Robert Carr came through the french doors. He blinked slightly in the glare from the unshaded bulb. He seemed a little embarrassed. Naomi moved—she seemed to flow—to the right so that he stood beside her.

  “Robert married me this morning,” Naomi Shaw said, with the simplicity which many consider the essence of art. “We found we just couldn’t—”

  (“I knew it,” Pam North said to Dorian, in a whisper. “I knew it was a love scene. Because kidnappers don’t shout at their work, of course. It would be so—”)

  “—drove to that dear little town in Delaware,” Naomi said, and now she moved downstage a little, leaving Carr by the doors. He stayed there for a second. Then he moved to his left, away from the glaring light. He stood there, a square, solid man with a square brown face—and somewhat the air of a man who wishes something were over.

  “He simply made me,” Naomi said. “But really, it was that he made me see. See how wrong we were before to let little things—” The break was unconscious, was tremulous. The break was a refinement of the actor’s craft. “When there could never be anyone else,” she said. “Not for either of us.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Marvin Goetz said, and stood up in his seat. “I’ll be eternally—”

  “Marvin,” Naomi said. “Dear Marvin. Oh—I love you all. This is so—so hard for me.” There were tears in her soft, her indescribable, voice. “Please understand. Please? It is bigger than both of us.” She paused at that, for an instant. “It’s so hard to get the words right,” she said, and smiled, disarmingly. “I’m not good at words. Not like you are, Sam—are you out there, Sam?”

  “Oh,” Sam Wyatt said from his seat, “I’m here all right.”

  “Your lovely play,” Nay said. “But—you can get someone else. It won’t be hard, really. Jane—dear Jane. Or—or Phyllis. Or someone? That’s true, isn’t it, Wes? Tell them it’s true, so I won’t feel such a—such a—traitor.”

  There was no answer to this. The silence was complete. Marvin Goetz sat down again. Naomi lifted a slender hand, as if to push back—as in the play she so often did—her softly heavy hair. But one
could only suspect that she had forgotten the hair was now held back, so smoothly did the gesture become the gentle touching of her right temple. Naomi had—and Pam was surprised to notice this, so subtle had been the movement—moved forward, so that now she was close to the footlight trough.

  “I so want you to understand,” Naomi said, and by implication, if not in fact, reached out her hands toward those scattered in the seats in front of her. Phyllis, Jane Lamont and Castle were in a group, not far from the practical window. Robert Carr, who now had put his hands in his jacket pockets, stood alone, upstage and to the left. It was, Pam thought, as if, symbolically as well as in fact, the people of the theater had withdrawn from him, as from a pariah. “So hope you will understand,” Naomi Shaw—no, now Naomi Carr once again—said, in the softest (and most hopeful) of tones. “It’s always been Robert and me. From so many years ago, when we were growing up together, so far away from—all this.” “All this” was identified, apparently as everything in front of her, by the most graceful of gestures.

  “We didn’t always realize,” Naomi said. “I thought—you all know I thought—I could find someone else. Dear Brad—poor dear Brad. I was so fond of him but—but it wasn’t the same. And then Robert came back to me.”

  She had her audience, now. There could be no doubt of that. (But why, Pam thought, does she need all this? She’s hinted, not quite said. It’s as if—as if she were deliberately building it. But she must, Pam decided, be wrong in that, for why would she?)

  “And then,” Naomi said, “Robert heard he had to go to—it’s Pakistan, isn’t it, dear?” She turned slightly toward Robert Carr.

  “Chile,” Carr said. His voice seemed flat after hers, downright.

  “Of course,” she said. “Chile, of course. He heard it last night and—and he came to me. He has to go—it is tomorrow, isn’t it, darling?”

  “Yes,” Carr said.

  “And then I knew,” Naomi said. “Knew nothing else mattered. Not even my lovely play. Knew I had to go with him—Where he went I had to go. Always—that nothing else—”

  Marvin Goetz stood up again.

  “Sweetheart!” he said, and said it as an oath. “You’re walking out on us? Just like—”

  There was a shot, and the explosion roared in the theater. A rather large chunk of plaster fell out of the proscenium arch. Carr, in a movement like a cat’s, threw himself to one side. Mullins came through the door at stage left with a revolver in his hand, and Bill Weigand came through the french doors, down to Naomi. He pushed her aside, toward the group at her right. Somewhere there was sudden, violent shouting; somewhere, behind the barrier against which Pam and Dorian sat there was the noise of men hurrying. A door banged somewhere.

  These things did not happen in sequence, but at once. And the house lights came on.

  Two men were struggling in the aisle at the right. The taller shouted, “No you don’t. Not again!” and they went down together, on the floor between the seats.

  Mullins ran across the stage and down the wooden stairs. And two men who had been sitting very near in the darkness came out of their seats.

  The struggling men rolled in the aisle. The taller man, who was on top, forced the hand of the smaller slowly upward, apparently against desperate resistance. And, between the two hands, clasped in struggle, there was an automatic pistol.

  “Got it!” Wesley Strothers said, gasping a little from his effort. “Just in—”

  Mullins reached them first. He wrenched the automatic from the hand that held it, pulled Strothers off Sam Wyatt. Wyatt, for a moment, lay on his back on the floor, and made no effort to get up. One of the men who had been sitting close pulled him to his feet.

  “Oh God,” Sam Wyatt said. “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”

  “Hit anybody?” Strothers said, his voice still high, excited. “Carr all right?”

  “Quite all right,” Bill Weigand said, and then Pam saw, and Dorian saw, that Bill had not moved from where he stood near the footlights, at the center of the stage. “Nobody was hit. The shot went very wild.”

  “Thank God for that,” Strothers said. “I was afraid for a moment I wouldn’t be able—” He did not finish.

  “You may as well come up here, Mr. Strothers,” Bill said. “You too, Wyatt.”

  But Strothers had already started down the aisle. Wyatt came with Mullins’ hand—the hand which did not hold the automatic—hard on his arm. Sam Wyatt kept shaking his head, like a man who has been struck hard, is dazed by the blow. (Even now, Pam thought, I’m sorry for him. But how—?)

  Strothers went up the wooden stairs; Wyatt was propelled after him. Naomi Shaw was across the stage, held tight against Carr, who was watching with his face intent, his eyes narrowed. Facing Weigand, Strothers began to speak.

  “When she said she was going with him,” Strothers said. “Leaving the play. I’d been standing there, listening, and—and Sam moved. I felt him move, more than saw him. Then I looked and he’d got this gun out and was aiming at Carr. Then I jumped him, but the gun went off before I could stop it.” He turned, abruptly, to Sam Wyatt. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’ve gone crazy, Sam.”

  “It’s no use,” Wyatt said, in a dull voice. “All the time, I knew it wasn’t any use.” He turned, then, to face Strothers squarely. “Always a jump ahead, weren’t you?” he said, and his voice was no longer dull. His voice vibrated with hatred. “A smart louse, Strothers. For the kind of louse you are. Want to know what kind?”

  Sam Wyatt told the tall, dark-eyed producer—told him in crude, hard words.

  Pam North expected Bill Weigand to interrupt. But he did not interrupt. He let Wyatt finish. Wesley Strothers listened, his face unchanged. Then Strothers shook his head, pityingly.

  “That was the way it happened, then?” Bill said, when Wyatt had finished telling Strothers what kind of a louse he was. “You don’t deny it happened that way?”

  Bill’s voice was even, unexcited. But there was an odd quality in it. Dorian Weigand clutched Pam’s arm as she heard Bill speak. “Listen,” she said. “When he talks that way—”

  Apparently the odd note in Weigand’s voice reached Wyatt’s ears, as well. He looked at Weigand, and then his face began slowly to change.

  “Do I need to?” he said, and waited. Weigand made a just perceptible motion with his head—a motion to which Mullins responded—before he answered. Then Bill Weigand said, “No, Mr. Wyatt. You don’t need to.”

  Strothers whirled. And Mullins, behind him, took him by both arms. For an instant, it seemed that Strothers would try to break the big detective’s grasp. But then he stood quiet, unresisting.

  “I tell you,” Strothers said, “he tried to kill—”

  “No,” Bill said. “Oh, it might have worked. Except—I already knew, Strothers. And so, I was waiting for it. For something like it.”

  He turned away, then. He turned toward Naomi, who was still circled by Carr’s arms.

  “Was it all right?” Naomi asked.

  “It was very good, Mrs. Carr,” Weigand said. “Very good indeed.”

  “Oh,” Naomi said. “I really can act, captain. I’m quite good, really.”

  13

  Monday, 6:30 P.M. and after

  Bill had promised to drop by for a drink, when he could and if he could. Pam had taken Dorian home with her, more or less as a hostage. “Because,” Pam said, “he must have known all the time, or at least for part of the time. And I thought Sam Wyatt and then Phyllis Barnscott, and he’s got to tell me why I was so wrong.”

  “It’s possible,” Jerry said, stirring, “that you’re slipping.” He shook his head, elaborately. He said, “Tut, tut,” in a tone of commiseration. He was, almost at once, disturbed to feel that Pam took seriously what was not seriously intended. “You were right about some of it,” he said. “You were right about the cat. And, basically, about the tea-towel.”

  “I didn’t come out right,” Pam said. “There’s no use trying to cheer me up. Of course
, maybe I’ll feel better after a drink, but that will just be a feeling, won’t it? Just an illusion.”

  Martini came and looked at her.

  “Even Teeney notices it,” Pam said. “She sits there and looks sorry for me. Don’t you, Teeney?”

  Martini said, “Yah.” She repeated it.

  “Scolding me,” Pam said. “Thinking, how did I ever get mixed up with a human like that? Ashamed of me.”

  Jerry gave her a drink. Dorian said, “There, there, Pam. There, there.”

  The doorbell rang. They let Bill Weigand in. He looked tired. He also looked contented. Given a drink, he looked pleased.

  “All right,” Pam said. “How?”

  “How,” Bill said. “How, Jerry. How, Dorian.” They responded politely, each saying, “How.” Pam said, “You three!” And then she said, “You might have got Mr. Carr shot. I suppose you planned that?”

  “She’s cross,” Jerry said. “She thought it was going to be Miss Barnscott.”

  Bill nodded. He said, “No, I didn’t plan to get Mr. Carr shot. But then—he didn’t get shot, of course.” He gently removed Sherry from a chair and sat in it. She had made the chair very warm.

  “You forgot it was a stag party,” Bill said. “That was where you went wrong, Pam.”

  “A—” Pam said and then, suddenly, she tapped her forehead with two clenched fists. “I’ll never live it down,” she said. “Not inside. Of course it was a stag party.”

  “Look,” Jerry North said to Dorian Weigand, “have you any idea what they’re talking about?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s Braithwaite,” Pam said, and appeared to be restored. “It’s numbing. Does he admit it, Bill?”

  Strothers admitted nothing. It was not to be assumed he would. Thanks to the evidence of two detectives, who had been attentive witnesses, in their seats behind Sam Wyatt, it was not necessary that he should. At least, the assistant district attorney for homicide hoped it would not.