“And it couldn’t have slipped and fallen of its own accord. If it had, it would just have been cracked—not smashed into fragments like this. Someone must have kicked against it after Comstock had been frightened.”
Iris’s eyes were incredulous. “But no one was in the theater except all of us on stage. The others had gone— all of them, that is, except the doorman.”
“He’d gone too,” I said. “He’d gone out for a glass of beer.”
As we started down the stairs to the stage door, I was still too confused to do any thinking. There was only one thing I wanted to do—and that was to get out of the Dagonet Theater as quickly as possible.
I walked faster as we drew abreast of the doorman’s room. Mac was the last person I felt like talking to and I would have scuttled past if he hadn’t called my name:
“Mr. Duluth.”
He was standing at the door of the alcove with his scrap-book clasped in one horny hand. The Siamese cat, looking very smug and sentimental, was perched on his old shoulders pressing her pink bow against his ear.
“Mr. Duluth, I’m sorry I stepped out for a glass of beer. I didn’t figure you’d be needing me.” The doorman bent toward me and whispered: “I saw them take him out on a stretcher; just the way they did with her. Is he dead?”
“Yes,” I said shortly. “Mr. Comstock’s dead.”
Mac peered over his spectacles, a queer gleam in his eyes. “Strange things happen in the theater. Mr. Duluth. Yes, sir, strange things. It’s almost like it was a judgment.”
While I was struggling with this superfluous remark, he opened the scrap-book and exposed the fly leaf. On it was inscribed:
“Mackintyre Reed—a Press Record of the Dagonet Theater, 1900-19.”
“I got everything here,” he muttered. “I put everything in. Everything.” He shuffled the pages until he came to a certain place. He handed me the book, pointing at a yellowing newspaper clipping. The Siamese cat on his shoulder blinked and gave a low, unnecessary miaow.
“Read that, Mr. Duluth.” Mac shook his head somberly.
“Maybe you’d find it sort of interesting.”
I stared at the clipping. Iris stood close at my elbow, reading too.
The extract was from some New York paper, dated November, 1902. It read:
GIRL FOUND DEAD IN HUMPHREY
FREMONT’S DRESSING-ROOM
Police are investigating the tragic and mysterious death of a nineteen-year-old girl which took place last night at the Dagonet Theater during the first performace of the play Without Honour. The body was discovered in a dramatic manner by Mr. Humphrey Fremont, well-known young actor, who played one of the leading parts in the piece. After receiving the applause of the first night audience at the final curtain, Mr. Fremont returned to his dressing-room. He turned on the lights and crossed to the mirror, preparatory to removing his make-up. To his horror, he witnessed a ghastly sight. There, reflected from the mirror, he saw the white, distorted face of a girl. Mr. Fremont turned to find the young woman hanging dead in his wardrobe.
Humphrey Fremont admitted to the police later that he had been intimate with the girl but that he had stopped seeing her. It is believed that she committed suicide.
The girl was identified as Mrs. Lillian Reed by her husband, Mackintyre Reed, an attendant at the theater.
I shut the book very slowly, trying to keep calm. I didn’t dare look at Iris. Then I heard her voice. She was whispering almost inaudibly:
“Lillian!”
I stared at the doorman. “She was your wife?”
“Yes, sir. She was my wife.” The old man retrieved the book and slipped it under his arm. There had been no emotion, hardly any interest in his voice. “They arrested Humphrey Fremont for a while. Guess they thought he might have killed her. But it didn’t come to nothing. He was let go free.”
He looked up, his old face dark with some unfathomable memory. I had a dim idea of what he was going to say next—but it was all so fantastic that I wouldn’t let myself believe it.
“Maybe you’re wondering what became of Humphrey Fremont. I been wondering too—for a long while. He went to England on account of the scandal and I lost sight of him. That is, I did till tonight.”
Mac had found a grubby handkerchief and was polishing his spectacles. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.
“Maybe Humphrey Fremont did change his name, but he couldn’t change his face. No, sir. I recognized him right away tonight even though it’s so long since I saw him last.”
Iris’s hand clutched my arm.
“Yes,” said the doorman, “he might have called himself Lionel Comstock. But he was still Humphrey Fremont to me…”
CHAPTER FIVE
IRIS and I looked at the doorman—owlishly. Then Iris said in an odd, piping voice:
“Come on, Peter. We’d better get going.”
That seemed like a very good idea. With a pinched smile at Mac and the Siamese cat, I navigated Iris out into the cold November night of the alley.
We knew all the crazy truth about Lillian now. Lillian had been the doorman’s wife; Lionel Comstock had been Humphrey Fremont, the man who had done Lillian wrong and caused her suicide at the Dagonet over thirty years ago.
But where did that get us? It explained why Comstock had kicked at having to play at the Dagonet; it explained why the old man had reacted so violently to Theo’s story of what she’d seen upstairs. But apart from that we were still at a dead end—an even deader end. What had come out at Comstock from that broken mirror? What had Theo Ffoulkes seen upstairs? How had Wessler’s statue of Mirabelle become so bizarrely crushed and how had the pane of glass in the passage been smashed at a time when there had been no one there to smash it?
My mind was a mixed salad of speculations as I pushed open the prison-like iron grille which separated us from the street and clanged it behind us.
We were just looking around for a taxi when a long-legged figure neatly avoided a speeding automobile and landed on the sidewalk in front of us. With his hat tilted on the back of his curly head and a hand on his hip as if to cover a concealed forty-four Eddie Troth looked more than ever like a Gary Cooper-cum-Goldwyn cowboy. He also looked worried.
“Seen Gerald?” he asked.
Iris and I said no we hadn’t seen Gerald.
My stage-manager started to tell us how Gerald had been eating a sandwich with him at Sardot’s and had suddenly jumped up and dashed out of the place.
“Just as if he’d seen a ghost,” mused Eddie. “I wondered… .” He broke off, his eyes moving from my face to Iris’s. “Talking about seeing ghosts, what the hell’s happened to you two? You look terrible.”
Eddie had been my stage-manager ever since he quit his masseur career at the Thespian Hospital. He was close to me as my right hand. I told him just what had happened. I also got him to establish the fact that both the mirror in Wessler’s dressing-room and the pane of glass in the passage had been intact when he had left the theater. He stared at me blankly for a second, then he gave a low whistle.
“Tie that,” he said.
“On the contrary,” I said bitterly. “Untie that.”
I waved at a taxi, pushed Iris into it and left Eddie gawping on the sidewalk.
In the taxi, Iris said:
“Peter, I’ve just been thinking. If Lillian Reed was the doorman’s wife and Comstock had been responsible for her death, isn’t it possible that the doorman …?”
“Listen,” I said, “will you do me one little favor?”
“Yes,” said Iris.
“Leave Lillian in her grave for a while,” I said. “Don’t make the night any more hideous than it is.”
I leaned over and kissed her, letting my mouth stay against the warmth of hers.
“I love you,” I said. “And isn’t everything awful?”
I guessed I was taking it all more tragically than I need have done. At that stage of the game, there was no real reason to visualize the whole show dr
opping to pieces. But I was still a convalescent drunk. And there’s nothing in the world more liable to fits of suicidal gloom than a convalescent drunk.
For two solid years after the appalling night at the Ashbrook Theater when my wife had been trapped and killed in a backstage fire, I had spent twenty-four hours a day pickled in alcohol. When finally I hit Dr. Lenz’s sanitorium, I had been close to the border-line between curable and incurable. Dr. Lenz had performed a minor miracle in getting me back into some sort of shape. But the major miracle had been worked by Iris, whom a peculiarly benign providence had sent to the sanitorium too.
By the time Lenz let us loose again on the world, I had been cured of my alcoholism and heavily infected with two other passions: one to marry Iris, the other to make an actress out of her.
I was making an actress out of her. That was going swell, but Lenz had put his professional ban on the marriage idea. He had told me I wasn’t straightened out enough yet to make a reasonable husband for anyone. There was to be a six months’ trial of good behaviour before he was prepared to bestow his bearded blessing on the bride and groom.
It was pretty cockeyed, leaving the date of my wedding up to my psychiatrist. But I knew what a mess I’d been in before Lenz played God with my life. I was humble and ready to take whatever he felt like giving.
Not that it wasn’t tough at times. Now, as I looked at the soft shadows under Iris’s eyes, the exciting curve of her mouth, was one of those times. But I’d learnt to control myself.
“What are you thinking about?” said Iris. ‘Never you mind,” I said.
The taxi dropped us outside the Belmont where we were both living, chaperoned by the five hundred and eighty-six other inhabitants of the apartment house. Iris had a modest bed-sitting room on the fifth floor. I, as producer putting on a brave show to the world, rented an entire suite in solitary splendor ten floors above.
We took the elevator to my suite. I felt a smashing desire for a drink. But I wasn’t going to admit it to Iris. She threw her hat and coat onto a couch and crossed to the window, gazing out at the blue-gray night of the East River.
“Your view’s much nicer than mine, darling,” she said meditatively. Then she turned so that she faced me. “Peter,” she said, “why don’t we say hell with Dr. Lenz and get married now—right away?”
I stared at her. Iris had never shown signs of insubordination before. She’d never been so stunning to look at either, with her hair blue-black against the cream drapes and her skin so soft, so exciting.
“We know how we feel, Peter. We know what’s right for us better than Lenz does. Tonight there was Comstock. If anything else happened to the play—Peter, I’d go nuts if anything else happened to the play and I didn’t have you all the time.”
I knew then how her mind was working. She wasn’t thinking about herself; she was thinking of me. She knew I was getting jittery again; she knew there was a good chance of my making a fool of myself if we had any more trouble at the Dagonet. I had hold of her arm and took her to the couch. She dropped down on it, drawing up her legs like a little girl. I was at her side, my hands on her knees.
“Listen darling,” I said. “It’s very sweet of you. But it wouldn’t work out yet. Lenz said no funny business until we were both normal citizens again.”
“But marriage isn’t funny business and I feel exactly like a normal citizen.”
“But I don’t. I feel very lawless and unbridled.”
I kissed her twice. That made me feel better. She crinkled up her nose. “Darling, I can do the most spectacular things with scrambled eggs and in my negligee I have often been admired for my old-world charm. I…”
“No,” I said.
“But I can’t wait three more damn months. I can’t Peter.” I saw her lips were trembling. She looked down at a cushion and started to twist its corner as if she hated it. “And I’m not just an impatient virgin chasing the one sucker who’s given me a rush. I’m having other bids, you know. Very attractive ones.”
I looked at her. I didn’t know what she meant, I didn’t have a chance to ask her, either, because the phone by the couch rang. I leaned over her and took up the receiver.
“Hello,” I said.
“Where’s Mirabelle?” It was Gerald Gwynne’s voice, taut, more worried than I’d ever heard it. “They wouldn’t let me into the theater. They said she’d gone. She isn’t at her apartment. Where is she?”
“She went home with Wessler,” I said.
“Wessler? You let her go home with that damn German shepherd?” My juvenile sounded angry now, too. He hated Wessler just because Mirabelle reacted against him. “Why didn’t you let her wait for me? You might have known I was coming back.”
I told him then what had happened. I didn’t see why not. Even if he did look like Robert Taylor’s kid-brother, he had the temperament of a heavy-weight prize fighter. Nothing was going to rattle him.
He didn’t say anything while I talked. He didn’t seem to give a damn about old Comstock, either. All his anxiety was for Mirabelle.
“Was she on stage when it happened?” he asked faintly.
“Yes.”
“My God, and she saw it, heard what he said about the mirror. Is—is she all right?”
“She seemed all right when Wessler took her home.”
“Did she take her brandy with her?”
“No. That is, yes, she did, but the bottle was empty.”
Gerald didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said: “Peter, this is bad. We’ve got to do something about it.”
“About the brandy?”
“Don’t be a dope. Listen, I wasn’t going to tell anyone: I was scared it would get back to Mirabelle. But you better know. And you’ve got to do something about it. I was having a sandwich with Eddie in Sardot’s tonight and I saw him. He’s back in town. Mirabelle’s delightful ex —that stinker Roland Gates.”
That was a sock between the eyes. ‘“But he can’t be,” I said. “After what came out at the divorce, he’s through on Broadway. No management would touch him. He can’t …”
“Yes, he can,” cut in Gerald furiously. “Gates is so crazy about himself he’d never realize he was through. He’d never even realize Mirabelle was through with him. That’s what I’m scared of. She put up with him all those years; he still thinks he just has to whistle and she’ll come back. That’s why he’s here. He’s going to try and get Mirabelle again.”
With any other man, that would have been incredible, but not with Gates. I knew him.
“I saw him just as he was leaving Sardot’s,” Gerald was saying. “I quit Eddie and chased after him. He went straight across the street. He was hanging around the stage door of the Dagonet, that damn black hat of his pulled down over his eyes. Waiting for Mirabelle. I went up to him, told him to get the hell away.”
I could imagine that scene vividly. Gerald, stubborn, protective young Gerald who guarded Mirabelle like a bulldog and who loathed Gates’s guts.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He had the nerve to talk to me. He said: ‘I hear Peters got a hit and there’s a swell part for Mirabelle.’ I said what of it. Then he said: ‘I also hear there’s a heavy male lead, quite in my line. Peter’s crazy to count on Wessler; he was through after that accident. I’m going to suggest my own services as understudy!’ He said that, Peter. He wasn’t being funny, either. He meant it.”
“He’s nuts,” I said.
“I know it. But he’s dynamite. We’ve got to keep Mirabelle from seeing him. Thank God I managed to scare him away tonight.”
“How did you do that?” I said.
Gerald laughed; it wasn’t at all the liquid laugh of Broadway’s youngest and most swooned-over juvenile. “I said if he didn’t get the hell away and stay the hell away from Mirabelle—I’d murder him.”
There was a long pause. Then Gerald said,
“I guess that’s all.”
It was quite enough. I was going to ring off when he s
poke again in a funny, difficult voice.
“By the way,” he said, “how’s Iris? Is she all right?”
“She’s all right,” I said. “Goodnight.”
Iris was still sitting on the couch, twisting the cushion.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He wanted to know if you were all right.”
She gave me an odd look. Then she said: “What else?”
I told her about Gates, then grunted dejectedly. “If all the goddamndest things aren’t happening tonight,” I said. “But I guess I may keep out of the gibbering stage so long as I have you.”
I shouldn’t have given her that opening. I was asking for it. She slid forward again and kissed me.
“You’d have me with you all the time,” she said softly, “if you’d up and marry me.”
She almost won out then. But I was saved by divine intervention. A shrill, familiar sound cut into my thoughts.
Iris took her lips away from mine.
“Damn,” she said, “there’s the buzzer.”
CHAPTER SIX
I WENT to the door. There, like the voice of conscience, stood Dr. Lenz. I straightened my tie, hoped there wasn’t lipstick on my ear and tried not to look as guilty as I felt.
Lenz moved into the hall—a magnificently bearded one-man procession. Without speaking, he took off his hat and coat, folded the coat, put them both on a chair and then deposited on top an imposing leather briefcase. His hands clasped behind his back, he walked into the living-room, bowed at Iris and sat down in a steel chair which was both too small and too frivolous for him.
It was an unnerving entrance. I broke the silence: “Any news from the hospital?”
Lenz nodded. “We have examined Mr. Comstock. It is virtually certain that he died from heart failure. Fortunately we were able to get in touch with his regular physician who established the fact that there had been a leaky valve—that any shock or over-exertion might have been sufficient to bring on an attack. I suggested that the strain of acting could easily have been the cause of death.” He paused, adding with a solemnity which made each word as imposing as a Delphic utterance: “The other doctors agreed.”
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