Roland Gates didn’t move. I hadn’t seen him since the divorce and his ignominious retreat from Broadway. He looked exactly the same—like a handome, dissipated lizard. He laughed a thin laugh.
“Come, come, Peter, surely I’m permitted to bring messages of good-will to my ex-wife—even if she is in the arms of my ex-producer.”
Mirabelle hadn’t heard him until then. I was sure of it. But that laugh must have seeped into her confused, racking thoughts. I felt her body tense suddenly in my arms.
It was a bad moment for her to face Gates. I would have done anything to make it easier for her—anything including strangling, as a matter of fact, preferably strangling him. I started to move toward him, but her fingers tightened on my lapel. She whispered: “No, Peter. Don’t do anything.”
I knew then that she wanted to face the situation herself. If she felt that way, it was best to let her get it over with. She had to go through with this sometime.
And she did it superbly. For one second she didn’t move. She stood with her back to him, staring at me, her face twitching slightly, completely out of control. Then, like some trick shot on the movies, I saw her expression change, saw the amazing transformation which turned her in a flash from that broken, haunted creature into the Great Mirabelle Rue.
When she wheeled around to Gates, she was completely poised. Her eyebrows, tilting upward, registered mild surprise. “Why, Roland, I didn’t notice you. But then you always sneak into rooms, don’t you?”
I could tell Gates was a little nonplussed. He’d thought he had caught her with her hair down and he’d been hoping to extract every ounce of satisfaction out of it. His eyes, green and flat as an iguana’s were watching her.
“You’re looking rather under the weather, Mirabelle,” he said.
“Do I? I’m feeling particularly fit.” Mirabelle glanced at me indifferently. “Aren’t you going to ask Roland what he came for, Peter? He always comes for something. I expect it’s money.”
I felt absurdly exhilarated. Mirabelle had done such a sweet piece of table turning.
“Yes, Roland,” I said, “want me to write you a check?” ‘Thank you, Peter, but I’m financially solvent. I’m glad to hear you are, too. Last time I saw you, you were rather too solvent—alcoholically.” Gates strolled to a chair, perching himself on the arm and lighting a cigarette. “As it happens, I came here because I’m intensely interested in your and Mirabelle’s future. I understand you’ve been having some trouble down at the Dagonet?” Mirabelle’s eyes widened. “Trouble, Roland? Why, no, we haven’t had any trouble.”
“I’m glad I was misinformed.” Gates blew two jets of smoke from his nostrils. “Even so, I’m a little wormed for you. They tell me you’re running Wessler without an understudy. You’re taking a big chance, you know. He’s very undependable, and he’s got in wrong with the Nazis. If anything happened to him—well, that’d probably be the end of your come-back, wouldn’t it?”
I knew what he was working up to. Gerald had warned me of it the night before. But Mirabelle’s hand on my arm kept me from saying anything. “Go on Roland.”
“It has occurred to me that I’m the person to help you,” continued Gates. “Give me a copy of the script, let me learn the Wessler role. When—I should say, if — he cracks up, then I can take over. I feel it’s a part that would interest me. I also feel it would be amusing for Mirabelle and me to team up again.” He flicked ash on to the floor. “How do you feel about it, Mirabelle?”
Mirabelle gave him one long, curious look. Then she turned her back on him as if she had completely banished him from her consciousness. She held out both her hands tome.
“I promised Gerald to have cocktails at five, Peter. Til have to fly.”
Very slowly and deliberately she picked up her gloves, fixed her crazy hat at the glass, moved to the forgotten borzoi, looped the lead around her arm and coaxed the animal forward.
She brushed past Gates, came up to me and kissed me. “Eddie’ll call me when the theater’s ready for rehearsal again, won’t he? Oh, and the script alteration, you’ll take it up with Henry?” “Yes,” I said.
“And Gerald, too. You won’t forget what we decided about Gerald? I know you’ll be able to do something.”
She moved to the door leading to the outer office and threw it open so that we were in full view of my business manager, my press agent, Miss Pink and about a dozen nondescript callers.
Just as she reached the threshold, she veered round suddenly and offered Gates one gloved hand. He took it
“Good-bye, Mirabelle.”
“Good-bye, Roland.”
Then while her audience in the outer office watched in expectant silence, Mirabelle withdrew her hand from his, peeled off her gloves and tossed them into the scrap-basket.
“Oh, Roland, you asked me a question. You wanted to know whether I thought it would be amusing to have you playing with me at the Dagonet.” Her smile was sharp and glittering as an icicle. “I don’t think it would be very amusing, Roland. I don’t think it would be amusing at all. Besides, the theater’s being fumigated. It wouldn’t be safe for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THAT WAS what I called a thoroughly devastating remark. But it didn’t devastate Roland Gates. Nothing did. He just moved to the door, closed it on the departing figure of Mirabelle and drawled:
“Surprising how women bear grudges—like elephants or is it rhinoceroses?”
“Rhinoceroses,” I said pointedly, “are the animals with the tough hides.”
Gates sighed. “I presume you share Mirabelle’s exaggerated sentiments about me? You don’t want me to understudy Wessler?”
“I don’t,” I said bluntly. “You ought to know my opinion of you. I expressed it fairly forcibly at the time of the divorce.”
“Yes, as I remember, you were a little shrill.” Gates was watching me with a blank, sardonic stare. “You think I’m a wicked, wicked man, don’t you, Peter? I’m afraid that sojourn of yours in the nut-house made you rather smug.”
I looked at that neat, masklike face, thinking back to some of the unspeakable things that came out in Mira-belle’s divorce testimony. I said: “It’s made me smug enough to feel a very strong desire to throw you out of this office. Before I do, however, it might interest you to know that the doorman told me you slipped him five bucks to let you into the Dagonet last night.”
Gates took that very calmly. “I expected him to pass on the good news. In fact, I left my calling card to make sure he’d get the name straight.”
I was in a damn awkward position. I wanted like hell to find out what Gates had been doing at the Dagonet the night before. But it was vitally important to keep him from knowing exactly how much trouble we were having.
While I was thinking of something to say, his mouth twitched m a quick reptilian smile. He continued. “It’s a waste of time trying to be discreet, Peter. I know what happened at the Dagonet last night.”
That was not so good, but there was just a chance he was blurring.
He wasn’t. “Yes, Peter, I met an old acquaintance of mine at Sardot’s—a Mr. George Kramer. After we’d sent his little nephew home to bed, we had a couple of drinks. Kramer told me all about Theo’s intriguing experience in the upstairs dressing-room.”
I’d guessed, of course, that there was some sort of tie-up between Kramer and Gates. I might have known this would have happened. Although I made a feeble attempt to go on being nonchalant, it was impossible to fool Gates. He was enjoying himself immensely.
He said: “You’re probably dying to hear what frightful abominations I perpetrated in your theater last night. But I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed when you hear the truth. I went there with the simple and benign intention of finding out whether my ex-wife had received a little present I’d sent her. I was a mere onlooker in the melodrama.”
He crossed to a chair and sat down again on the arm, lighting a cigarette. “Ill tell you just what happened to me. Having
disposed of the doorman I went upstairs to stage level and down the corridor to the first star dressing-room which I presumed to be Mirabelle’s. I was just going to the door when it was hurled open from inside and a man—that old fellow Comstock—dashed right past me and staggered toward the stage. He was gasping and wheezing and gibbering something that sounded like Lillian —as if he’d just met up with all the fiends in hell. Distinctly pulp, Peter.”
Gates tossed his cigarette on to my carpet and watched it smoldering a few seconds before he crushed it “I was quite non-plussed. By all the laws of fiction, I should have squared my jaw and gone into that room to investigate. But I’m afraid I didn’t. I turned tail and ran.”
His pink tongue came out like a chameleon’s after a fly. “Action continued in the best dramatic tradition. When I was about half way down the stairs I heard a crash of glass behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Up on the landing I saw a man hurrying away from that same dressing-room. I only had the briefest glimpse of him. But that was more than enough. I accelerated and was out of the Dagonet as rapidly as even you could have wished.”
I had quite forgotten it was Roland Gates who was telling me that story, quite forgotten that I loathed him and was supposed to be putting up a front. I could only think how amazingly this fitted in with Lenz’s theory; how the man Gates had seen must have been the person who had staged that fantastic tableau in the wardrobe, the person who had used Eddie’s pane of glass and smashed it, the person who was at the root of all the major and minor disturbances at the Dagonet.
And the craziest part of it was that this person had been a man. Presumably the woman with the light tan fur had been thrown in as a bonus.
“Did you recognize him?” I said uneasily. “Did you see his face?”
“Did I see his face?” Gates glanced up, his small, pointed teeth showing in two level lines. “That’s the purplest patch of my story, Peter. I didn’t see his face—because he didn’t have a face to see. There was nothing but a pair of eyes staring out of a grayish, featureless blank.”
He said that so suddenly, with such calculated calmness, that he threw me completely off balance. A woman with a light tan fur, a phantom sabotager of rat-traps and now a man without a face—all massed together in one afternoon. Things had gone so very, very far beyond a joke. I felt a violent nostalgia for the good old alcoholic days in Lenz’s sanitorium where the worst that could happen to me would have been a chance encounter with a homicidal maniac. What were homicidal maniacs to the ordinary, run-of-the-mill visitors at the Dagonet Theater?
Gates was saying: “That, Peter, is my little anecdote. As experiences go, it was interesting and certainly worth the five-dollar outlay.”
I wasn’t listening to him. My mind was beginning to function along rational lines again. I forced myself to visualize the large, comforting form of Dr. Lenz. And Dr. Lenz made me think of Wessler’s lost modeling clay. Lenz had suggested that the man in the wardrobe might have distorted his face with the clay. There was a reasonable explanation for Roland Gates’s apparition.
That made me feel a little better, but not very much. Gates had crossed to the desk and was leaning over it languidly. He said: “I read in this morning’s paper that Comstock brought the drama to a fitting climax by dying on stage. You claim to shudder away from my morals, Peter. But even I am shocked by what that implies. It isn’t at all savory to frighten an old man with a weak heart to death.” He paused, smiling that fixed, flat smile. “In fact, I imagine that in a court of law it would come under the heading of murder.”
I was still too confused to catch on to the way things were going.
“Yes,” continued Gates, “I think it certainly rates as murder in the first, second, or third degree. Even if it doesn’t, it’s something that should intrigue the authorities. Ill be extremely interested to hear the police verdict.”
I started to see exactly what he was planning in that cold, saurian mind of his. I said: “You know I haven’t told the police.”
“You haven’t? You’re conniving at a felony?” His eyebrows slid upward. “I suppose I see your point. It would be unfortunate for your come-back production if the police took over at the Dagonet, wouldn’t it? You’d probably be kept from opening indefinitely. Lucky I didn’t report what I saw last night.” His small hand with its femininely pointed nails reached past me and picked up a copy of the script of Troubled Waters. “Don’t you think it might be a sound idea for me to learn Wessler’s part after all?”
“So you want that part in exchange for holding back on the police,” I said, trying to keep myself in control for just a little while longer. “This is a stick-up.”
“Stick-up?” echoed Gates. “My dear Peter, be civilised. The police mean nothing to me. I think they are a tiresome institution. They would, however, seem even more tiresome if I felt I was part of your company. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be frank. Mirabelle was ill-bred enough to wave our dirty linen under the noses of the sentimental public and has done a certain amount of damage to my reputation. The surest way to repair that damage is to show the public that Mirabelle and I are reunited again—on the boards, at least. Your play seems to me to be the ideal vehicle for my rehabilitation.”
He twisted the corner of the manuscript “I shall only appear on stage, of course, if Wessler should be indisposed. I can learn the part and I need not intrude myself at rehearsal. There won’t be anything official about it.” He slipped the copy of the script into his overcoat pocket “Is that okay by you?”
He knew and I knew that he held all the cards.
“Anything’s okay by me,” I said softly. “You can learn the part; you can learn it backward, forward and sideways; you can have more fun. But there’s just one little formality I’d like to go through first. It may possibly make you change your mind.”
I doubled my right hand into a fist; I swung; I slugged him very hard and square on the jaw.
I hadn’t done anything like that since my prep school era. But, apparently, it’s a trick you don’t forget.
The only thing I had enjoyed that day was the sight of my business manager, my press agent and Miss Pink removing Roland Gates from the carpet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BUT my moment of elation was very short lived. After Roland Gates had been removed, restored and sent on his way, I slid into suicidal gloom. It wasn’t just the fact that I’d been either successfully or unsuccessfully blackmailed into taking Gates on as Wessler’s unofficial understudy—though Heaven knew, that was bad enough. It was the cumulative effect of all the shattering things that were happening to my play, and my own ability to make any sort of sense out of them.
Miss Pink came in again with letters to sign. I started signing them, then I stopped. Instead of adding “Peter Duluth” to a chatty letter for the editor of Stage, I turned the notepaper over and began scribbling with furious abandon on the back.
This is what I wrote:
REASONS WHY TROUBLED WATERS CAN’T
CONCEIVABLY SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY
(1) A homicide concealed from the police.
(2) Roland Gates.
(3) Uncle George Kramer.
(4) A malignant Siamese cat
(5) A lady with a light tan fur.
(6) A gentleman with a mask of modeling clay.
(7) Someone who lets rats out of traps.
(8) Gerald Gwynne who wants to go to Hollywood.
(9) Mirabelle Rue who’s scared of something, who’s got a damn phoney brandy bottle, who’ll probably have a nervous breakdown.
(10) Conrad Wessler who’s almost blind (?), who’s the probable victim of some obscure plot, who’s probably going nuts like his half-brother.
(11) Theo Ffoulkes who’s got a cough and will probably die.
(12) Peter Duluth who at any minute is going to order a case of Scotch, lock himself in a padded cell and burst into tears.
I stared at that document for a long time, wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t attempt
to think or to plan. I just brooded.
Then a sluggish memory of my promises to Mirabelle seeped through the gloom. I could see Gerald before rehearsal at the Dagonet and try to stop him from walking out on us. But Henry Prince probably wouldn’t show up at the theater. I told Miss Pink to get Henry on the wire. That, at least, showed the germs of constructive action. If I could get Henry to agree to Mirabelle’s script alteration, there was a fighting chance of eliminating Mr. Kramer from the cast as a step toward eliminating him from our lives.
Henry’s voice sounded on the phone. I told him Mirabelle’s suggestion for switching around the first act to cut out the business magnate role. With unexpected fluency, I urged on him the obvious dramatic advantages of such a move. I had put several other script changes up to him in the past and he had been meek as a lamb about okaying them. I fully expected him to give way on this point.
But I might have known. His voice went suddenly stiff and stubborn. He said he had written the play with the Comstock-Kramer role as an essential factor. He would not dream of consenting to its removal.
He went on and on like that, showing a tenacity I’d never before suspected. He concluded in a tone that wasn’t quite so emphatic: “Besides, Mr. Duluth, however I may feel, I can’t have the role cut because I have promised Uncle George to—let him play it.”
That gave the whole show away, of course. Henry didn’t really want the part left in any more than Mirabelle wanted it out. Neither of their reactions had anything to do with the play itself. They were connected solely with Mr. George Kramer. Mirabelle was so scared of him that she was desperately eager to get him out of the cast; Henry was so scared of him that he was desperately eager to keep him in.
I rang off. I thought of the five-hundred-dollar check which Kramer had forced Henry to borrow from me that morning. I picked up my black list.
With a despairing flourish, I added a thirteenth item to the category of disaster. I wrote:
(13) Henry Prince who’s completely under Uncle George’s thumb and is probably being blackmailed by same.
Puzzle for Players Page 12
