Finally he grinned, and asked, “Well, what’s the verdict?”
Karen studied him for one moment, then a smile broke through. “I guess you’ve got as much right to suspect me, Ben.” Turning to look back out the vent, she added, “I don’t trust my judgment, anyway. I’ve not had a great deal of success with it.”
He felt her grow tense. “What is it, Karen?”
“You haven’t looked down at the ground, I guess.” She pulled her head back and quietly explained, “The knife is down there—right under this window.”
He stared at her, then ordered, “Go on down.” Once he’d lowered her, Ben stepped into the higher noose and peered down. As he returned to Karen, he said, “Yes, it’s there. Come on, let’s tell the others.”
“Wait until after dinner. Then we can see what kind of reaction we’ll get.”
Following dinner Ben announced, “We’ve found the murder weapon—Karen did, that is.” Dani and Karl both looked excited, but most of the others just seemed surprised. “It’s on the ground just under the vent.”
Sid broke the ensuing silence, “That sort of points to you, don’t it Savage? You’re the only one can shinny up that rope.”
“You don’t know that, Sid,” Holtz protested. “All we know is that Ben is the only one who has done it.”
“Aw, get real, Holtz!” Vince snorted. “You know you couldn’t go up that blasted rope! You’re too old, and I’m too heavy. I can pump iron, but that kind of trick takes a little guy.”
Dani said, “Maybe the killer didn’t climb the rope. He could have thrown it through the vent.”
Lonnie broke in instantly, “No way! Don’t you remember how long it took us to get that piece of steel in, to make that rope fast? And he’d have to be in a hurry. Besides, if he missed, the knife would make a racket when it hit the floor.”
“Haven’t you all forgotten something?” Dani lashed out angrily. “Ben came here looking for me! He wasn’t waylaid like the rest of us. He’s one of my employees!”
Rachel asked quietly, “But how long have you known him, Dani?”
“Well, actually, not over a month,” she stammered.
“Well, that’s not long,” Betty spoke up. “Stone is clever! We all know that. He knew you were going to be here, so why couldn’t he have sent this man to join you, all the time planning to have him show up later?”
Dani opened her mouth to argue, but paused. She suddenly cast a look at Ben, who was regarding her carefully. He said nothing, and finally Vince argued, “Look, Reverend, I know you like the guy and all that, but he’s a good candidate for our hit man. You’ve worked for the law. Now if you didn’t really know Savage and somebody handed you the facts, wouldn’t you put him at the top of the list of suspects?”
They were all looking at Dani, and her certainty about Ben seemed suddenly to weaken. Vince could be right. She thought, But Dom Costello recommended him! Her whirling mind balanced that against No one else could have climbed the rope and thrown the knife out.
She took a deep breath, then responded, “It does look bad for Ben, but it’s all circumstantial. For all you know, I may be able to climb a rope! Or Bix there. I want to try something. Karl has tried to get us to look at ourselves ever since I’ve been here, and some of you haven’t done it. I think it’s about the only chance we have, so I’m asking you to try it.”
“Try what?” Betty demanded.
“We all know, more or less, who we say we are,” Dani said intensely. “But one of us isn’t who he says he is. He’s a liar as well as a murderer, put here by Stone to be his paid assassin. I think he came in with a false identity—and I say we’ve got to test each other until we find someone who’s lying.”
“How do we do that?” Vince asked quickly.
“I’ll show you, if you just do as I ask.”
They wavered, and there were loud protests from Sid and Betty, but finally they were brought into line by Vince, who said, “All right, we’ll all go along. What’s the plan, Reverend?”
Dani said, “First, we all write a biography.” She held up her hand as Bix cried out, “I’m no writer!” “I simply mean one sheet of paper, with the basic facts. Where you were born, your education, all the jobs you’ve had, your hobbies. I’ll make out a form so that all you have to do is fill it out.”
After a vast amount of grumbling, they all agreed. “All right,” Dani said. “Commander, I want you to help me—and you, Karen—and Ben.” She shook her head when Sid protested against her choice of Savage. “He’s had training at this sort of thing—and the rest of us will monitor him,” Dani pointed out.
In less than an hour, the four came up with a form.
“I’ve been trying to get this done for a long time.” Holtz shook his head. “And now you do it, Dani!”
They gathered the others, and Dani read out the items they had to include.
The next hour was very quiet. Dani filled out her own list quickly, then watched the others. Vince finished first and grinned as he handed it to her. “Strictly X rated, Reverend. Hope you won’t be too shocked.” One by one they all finished, with Lonnie trailing in with a much-erased paper.
Dani explained, “All right, we’ll go over every biography. The person we’re examining will have to answer all questions. If he’s told the truth on this sheet, his answers ought to be right. But if he’s lied about something, one of us may pick up on it.” She smiled and said, “For example, it says on my sheet, that I’ve lived in Boston for a few years. Some of you have probably been in Boston. You ought to ask me about it: Where is the city hall? What’s the name of the zoo? Who’s the mayor? That sort of thing. Try to catch me in a lie.”
“Sounds about as bad as Stone’s idea about confessions,” Rachel said sharply. She looked unhappy, but then shrugged and said, “Still, it’s something to try. Who’s first?”
“I say Savage,” Sid replied, and Vince nodded at once.
“All right,” Dani looked at Ben. “Any objections?”
“No.” Ben leaned back in his chair and glanced around the room. “Fire away.”
“All right.” Dani read Ben’s paper aloud, then explained, “Anybody can ask a question about any of these items.”
“I have one,” Bix began. “My brother’s in the marines. You say you were, too, Ben. In which battle were the most marines killed—ever?”
“Iwo Jima.”
Rachel asked suddenly, “Who was Al Schmidt?”
“A marine who was blinded in the Big One, but they made a movie out of that one, so I could have seen it.”
“Well, they didn’t make no movie about this one,” Bix said. “Who’s the commander of the corps?”
“General Al Gray.”
“What color’s the dome of the Capitol in Denver?” Candi asked.
“Gold.”
“That’s right!” she said. Then she asked, “What’s the name of the burlesque on Tenth and Elm?”
Ben shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“I know!” Vince said with a grin. “It’s the Majestic.” He laughed and said, “But I guess Ben here is above such things.”
They bounced questions off Ben for an hour, and he answered them readily. Finally Karl said, “The circuses in America are tawdry things, not like in Europe. I went many times there. You say you were a performer. What was your specialty?”
“Flyer on the trapeze,” Savage answered.
Holtz leaned back and studied him. “Who was the first man to do a trapeze act?”
Ben looked at him in surprise, but said at once, “A Frenchman named Leotard invented it. That’s where the name of the costume comes from. That was in 1859. He was swimming one day in Toulouse, and he noticed the cords that opened the overhead windows hanging down over the pool. He got the idea of tying a bar on two of them, and he learned to swing out over the pool and drop in.”
Candi was staring at Ben, and she asked, “You really did that, Ben? It always scares me to death just to watch! What’s it lik
e?”
“It’s about as free as anyone ever gets, Candi,” Ben said slowly. He ducked his head, and they could see that he was remembering. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft that he seemed to be talking to himself. “We spend our lives fighting earth. Learning to walk, then falling down. Getting from one place to another. Always being pulled back to earth. Closest we come to forgetting gravity is swimming, I guess.”
He stopped, seeming to have forgotten that they were there. “You come out of your dressing room, and everything is pretty grubby. The lights hit your face, and you start up the rope. Then you get to the platform, and somehow everything fades away. The crowd’s still making a lot of noise, but it seems far off. You’re up there away from it all, just the clean cut of ropes falling away in straight lines and the gleaming bars of the traps.
“Then you watch as your catcher, across from you, starts swinging, and the pulse of the whole circus, the whole world, is beating in your head. You put your hands on your bar, exactly eight inches apart. Then you slip off the platform, and the old earth catches you, and down you go! You hit the bottom and give the best kick you’ve got, trying to drive yourselves through the top of the tent. Up to the top of the forward swing, and there’s that one split second when you’re just floating. You know the world’s going to pull you back, but for that one moment, you’re free and loose and out of everything!”
The room was quiet, and Dani was staring at Ben, her eyes wide.
“Down you go, and you follow through, kicking back, straining to get every inch of height. All the time the beat is going. It’s in your catcher, in you, in the band. And if you don’t have that beat going, you’d better stay off the traps and learn to sell shoes.
“But the beat is there, and you’re at the top of your last backswing. Then you drop, and as you go up, the beat is going—and it says now—and you turn loose of the bar and fire out into pure space!
“All the other acts have a wire or a pole somewhere. The flyer has nothing, just space. As you clear the bar, you double and make a spinning ball out of your body, and you go spinning through space, way up there over the world.”
He stopped suddenly and looked around. For the first time since Dani had known him, his face seemed vulnerable.
“How do you know when to stop spinning and get your hands out?” Holtz asked.
Ben laughed shortly. “Most people don’t.”
“Who was the best?” Dani asked suddenly.
“Alfredo Codona.”
“What made him so good?” Bix asked.
“He did a triple,” Ben said quietly.
“Is a triple that hard?” Vince wanted to know.
“Back in his day, it was a sure way to die. That was in 1917, when Codona was in Havana. At that time three men had done a triple somersault, none of them French. An American named Gayton, a man named Hobbes, in London, and another named Dutton. But Codona canceled all his appearances and took three years off—and he got it.”
“It looks impossible,” Karen said, shaking her head.
Ben said, “When you leave your bar, you’re traveling at a speed of sixty-two miles an hour. At that speed, you’ve got to turn completely over three times in a space of not more than seven feet. At that exact instant you have to break out and land in the hands of your catcher—who’s got to be in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time.”
The room was very quiet, and Dani saw that they had all forgotten the purpose of their activity. She asked softly, “Did you ever fall, Ben?”
He jerked his head toward her, and his voice was strained. “Everybody falls,” he whispered.
Remembering the name he had called when he had first arrived, Dani asked, “Who was Florrie, Ben?”
The question has been softly put, but Savage’s reaction was galvanic! His head went back, and he stiffened as though an electric current had shocked his body. He shook his head and said nothing.
At once Holtz attacked, “You must answer the question! Who was Florrie?”
Ben got to his feet and started to walk out of the room. When he was halfway to the door to the sleeping quarters, Dani called out desperately, “Ben, answer the question! You must know how this makes you look!”
He stopped and for one moment stood with his back to them. Then he turned, and his mouth had a hard, bitter line. Ben’s eyes penetrated Dani, seeming to ignore the others. In a clipped voice, not at all like his own, he barked out, “I don’t guess we have to have Maxwell Stone to dig out our private griefs. You’re just as good at it as he is, Miss Ross.” After scanning the room, looking into each face, his eyes came back to Dani, and he said quietly, “Who was Florrie? Why, she was a girl I knew once.” As he disappeared into the sleeping quarters, they all stared with shock at the empty door.
Rachel asked Dani cynically, “Where does that get us, detective?”
Dani sat there, stunned. Her heart told her that Ben was no murderer, but his refusal to speak about his past looked bad. She looked to Holtz, who was regarding her, and her eyes pleaded for help.
He shook his head, his face lined with strain. “We must not make too little of this. It looks bad for Ben. But we must also not make too much.”
“There’s still that knife under the vent, Commander,” Betty broke in sharply. “And he’s had the training to kill a man just the way Rosie was killed.”
“Yes. As I say, it looks bad. But let us not take any vote tonight. It may be that Ben is our assassin, but I will not turn my back on any of you yet. Now, it is late. We will have more of this tomorrow.”
They broke up, and Dani went to bed wearing so many clothes and covering herself with so many blankets that she could hardly turn over. She was more upset than she had shown the others. Ben Savage had been the one person in the absurd tragedy she had believed in without reservation. Now she felt as if someone had jerked a ladder out from under her, and she had nothing to cling to.
That night the winds that moaned through the vents were no sadder or more ominous than Dani’s dreams.
11
“Is It Just for Good People?”
* * *
Doc, I feel rotten!” Vince caught Karen as she came out of the sleeping quarters. He shivered in the icy air and tried to smile, but it didn’t come off. “Guess I’ve got the grandpappy of all bad colds.”
Karen’s quick glance took in the uncontrollable shaking. When he broke out into a spasm of coughing, she said, “Sit down, Vince, and I’ll check your temperature.” While he sat with the thermometer between his lips, she took his pulse. She took out the thermometer, glanced at it, then ordered, “Unbutton your shirt, Vince.” He flinched as the cold metal of her stethoscope touched his chest.
“Whatcha think, Doc?”
“Take two of these aspirin every four hours, and I want you to stay in bed for a couple of days.” She ignored his protests, and after he ate a little breakfast, he went back to bed.
She sat at the table with Ben, Rachel, and Holtz, and Rachel asked, “What’s the matter with Vince?”
“I think it’s the flu—but he’s been spitting up a little blood. Could easily develop into pneumonia.”
“Wonder we don’t all get it!” Rachel said. Her dark eyes showed a trace of humor, and she laughed. “Wouldn’t it be a big joke on Mr. Maxwell Stone if we all died of natural causes instead of being murdered according to his little plan?”
Karen stared at her, then shook her head. “It’s too serious to joke about, Rachel. This is no place to take care of a sick man. I’ve seen epidemics of this lay everybody out; and in this freezing prison, it’d be deadly. This cold—it’s terrible!”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Ben said. Surprisingly, his bitterness of the previous night seemed to be gone.
He’s hurt inside, though. Karen thought. He’s covering it up well, but something about that girl stays with him all the time!
“The heat from the stoves is going right up,” he said, gesturing toward the lofty area above.
“If we had some sort of canvas and some rope, we could rig a canopy overhead that’d hold the heat in.”
At once they all saw what he meant, and Holtz slapped the table. “Exactly! Sort of a tent, you mean? Yes!” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and asked, “How much canvas, Ben? And what kind?”
Savage looked up, then across the room, calculating, “Take at least a thousand square yards, I think. Nylon, maybe, or some kind of tenting material. Have to have several spools of three-eighth-inch nylon rope.” He shook his head as Holtz wrote this down and said, “Nothing to anchor to on the walls. Only way I can think of is to drill some holes; then you’d need some clips or eye bolts to anchor the ropes to the holes.”
“You don’t think Stone will give us all that?” Rachel scoffed.
“We won’t know until we ask,” Holtz pointed out. He questioned Ben carefully. Once he’d dropped the paper through the slot, Holtz said, “It’s in the hands of God now.”
“No, it’s in the hands of Maxwell Stone!” Rachel corrected him, but she smiled unexpectedly and glanced toward Dani, “But I guess you’d say that Stone was in the hands of God, wouldn’t you?”
“We are all in God’s hands, Rachel,” Dani answered. “I know some of you don’t like to hear sermons, but I’d like to have our service now—here around the table. Would that be all right?”
Rachel stared across at her, then said, “Sure, if you’ll let me pick the sermon. I’d like to hear an explanation about why all this has happened. Two people dead, the rest of us pretty fair candidates for the same. Where’s your God in all this, Dani?”
Dani stood, knowing that Rachel was taunting her. She prayed quickly for guidance, then began slowly, arranging her thoughts as she spoke.
“You’re not the first person to ask that question, Rachel. As a matter of fact, one of your own people asked it a lot more strongly than you just put it. You’ll find it in the book of Job. Let me read you the first two chapters.” She read the ancient story carefully, then looked around at them. “Job lost everything—his money, his home, his family—even his health. And he was so overcome by the terrible losses, that in chapter three he cursed the day of his birth. He longed for death, and his faith in God seemed to be gone, for in the last two verses he cried out, ‘I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest but only turmoil,’ and in chapter seven, he asked the same question that you’ve asked, Rachel—and the same question, I believe, that everyone asks at one time or another. This is the way it reads in the New International Version.” She quoted from her memory:
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