Death in the Fifth Position Page 5

  “And you left it?”

  “Not until after the murder last night.”

  “Who did you see when you returned at five-thirty, who was backstage?”

  “Just about everyone, I suppose: Mr. Washburn, Eglanova, Giraud, Rudin … no, he wasn’t there until about six, and neither was Miles Sutton now that I think of it.”

  “Is it customary for all these people to be in the theater such a long time before a performance?”

  “I don’t know … it was a première night.”

  “Eglanova was not in the première, though, was she?”

  “No, but she often spends the day in the theater … so does Giraud. He sleeps.”

  “By the way, do you happen to know who will take Sutton’s place tonight?”

  I paused just long enough to sound guilty; I kicked myself but there was nothing to be done about it. “Jane Garden … one of the younger soloists.”

  But he missed the connection, I could see, and not until all the interviews had been neatly typed up and my fingerprints had been discovered on the shears would he decide that I had cut the cable so that Jane could dance the lead in Eclipse.

  He asked me a few more questions to which I gave some mighty flip answers and then he told me to go, very glad to see the last of me, for that day at least. I have a dislike of policemen which must be the real thing since I’d never had anything to do with them up until now, outside of the traffic courts. There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of a group of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil. Of course, the good citizens would say that it takes an ape to keep the other apes in line but then again it is piteous indeed to listen to the yowls of those same good citizens when they come afoul the law and are beaten up in prisons and generally manhandled for suspected or for real crimes: at such moments they probably wish they had done something about the guardians of law and order when they were free. Well, it was no problem of mine at the moment.

  I found Jane already downstairs in her rehearsal clothes. I gave her a big kiss and then, when she asked me if I had had anything to do with her getting the lead in Eclipse and I said that I certainly had, I got another kiss. She asked me all about the investigation.

  “Everybody’s being pumped,” I said. “They just got through with me. You better go look on the bulletin board and find out what time they’ll want to see you.” We looked; and she was to be questioned at six o’clock.

  “What did he want to know?”

  “Just stuff. Where I was when it happened … who else was around, and gossip.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Not much of anything … in the way of gossip: it’s his job to find out those things.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Wilbur and Louis appeared, both in work clothes. “Come on, Jane,” said Louis. “We got work.” He winked at me. “How’re you doing, Baby?”

  I called him a rude but accurate name and marched off to telephone the newspapers about Jane’s coming debut as a soloist … it wouldn’t get in till tomorrow but then, perhaps, we might be able to get a few of the critics out to report on her the next night. Needless to say, we were scheduled to do Eclipse at every single performance until we closed. After I had made my calls and arranged for some photographs of Jane to be sent around by messenger, I left the building with every intention of going to get something to eat … I was getting light in the head from hunger and the heat. I was so giddy that I almost stepped on Miles Sutton who was lying face down in the corridor which leads from the office to the dressing rooms.

  2

  “What’s going on here?” were, I am ashamed to say, my first words to what I immediately, and inaccurately, thought to be a corpse, the discarded earthly residence of our conductor who lay spread-eagled on his belly in front of the washroom door.

  The figure at my feet moaned softly and, thinking of fingerprints, I nevertheless was a good Samaritan and rolled him over on his back, half expecting to see the hilt of a quaint oriental dagger sticking through his coat.

  “Water,” whispered Miles Sutton, and I got him water from the bathroom; he drank it very sloppily and then, rolling up his eyes the way certain comedians do when their material is weak, he sank back onto the floor, very white in the face. I trotted back into the bathroom, got another cup of water, returned, and splashed it in his face. This had the desired effect. He opened his eyes and sat up. “Must’ve fainted,” he whispered in a weak voice.

  “So it would appear,” I said; at the moment there was very little the conductor and I had in common. I stood there for several seconds, contemplating him; then Sutton pulled out a handkerchief and dried his beard. His color was a little better now and I suggested that, all in all, it might be a good idea for him to stand up. I helped him to his feet. He lurched into the washroom; I waited until he came out.

  “Must be the heat,” he mumbled. “Sort of thing never happened before.”

  “It’s a hot day,” I said … it was remarkable how little we had to say to each other. “Do you feel O.K. now?”

  “A bit shaky.”

  “I don’t feel so good myself,” I said, hunger gnawing at my vitals. “Why don’t we go get something to eat across the street? I’m Peter Sargeant, by the way; I’m handling publicity. I don’t think Mr. Washburn introduced us.”

  We shook hands; then he said, dubiously, “I don’t suppose I should hang around here. They may want me for the rehearsal.”

  “Come on,” I said, and he did. Very slowly we walked down the brilliant sunlit street; shimmering waves of heat flickered in the distance and my shirt began to stick to my back. Miles, looking as though he might faint again, breathed hoarsely, like an old dog having a nightmare.

  “Must have been something you ate?” I suggested out of my vast reservoir of small talk.

  He looked rather bleak and didn’t answer as we walked into an air-conditioned restaurant with plywood walls got up to look like the paneling in an old English tavern; both of us perked up considerably.

  “Or maybe you got hold of a bad piece of ice last night.” This was unworthy of me but I didn’t care. I was thinking of food.

  We got ourselves a booth and neither of us spoke until I had wolfed down a large breakfast and he had had several cups of coffee. By this time he was looking less like a corpse. I knew very little about him other than that he got good notices for himself and orchestra, that he conducted the important ballets with more than usual attention to the often eclectic performances of the Grand Saint Petersburg stars who have a tendency to impose their own tempo on that of the dead and defenseless composers. I disliked his face, but that means nothing at all. My character analyses based on physiognomy or intuition are, without exception, incorrect; even so I have many profound likes and dislikes based entirely on the set of a man’s eyes or his voice. I did not like Sutton’s eyes, I might add, large gray glassy eyes with immense black pupils, and an expression of constant surprise. He fixed me now with these startled eyes and said, “Did you talk to the Inspector?”

  “Just for a little bit.”

  “What did he ask you?”

  “Nothing much … the standard questions … where were you on the night of May twenty-seventh kind of thing.”

  “Such an awful thing to have happen,” said the husband of the murdered woman with startling conventionality; well, at least he wasn’t hypocrite enough to pretend to be grief-stricken. “I suppose everybody’s told him we weren’t getting along, Ella and me.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, righteously, “but obviously he knows. He wanted me to say that you hated her … I could tell by his questions.”

  “He practically accused me of murder,” said Miles; I felt very sorry for him then not only because of the spot he was in but because I was quite sure that he had murdered her … which shows something or other about mid-twentieth-century morality: I mean, we seem to be less and less aroused by such things as private murders in an age when public
murder is so much admired. If I ever get around to writing that novel it’s going to be about this sort of thing … the difference between what we say and what we do—you know what I mean. Anyway, I didn’t make the world.

  “Well, you are a perfect setup,” I said, cold-bloodedly.

  “Setup?”

  “Everybody in the company knew you wanted a divorce and that she wouldn’t give it to you … I heard all about it my first hour with the company.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’d kill her.”

  “No, but a cretin like Gleason would think that you were the logical one … and you are.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there are others.” He looked purposefully vague and I felt very compassionate; he was in a spot. “Who?”

  “Well, there’s Eglanova.” That did it; my instinct was right. Miles had cut the cable and then planted the shears in Eglanova’s wastebasket. I wondered if he had managed to implicate her in his interview with Gleason.

  “What did she have against Sutton?” Not that I didn’t know.

  “She was being retired against her will and Ella was the only available dancer with a big enough name to head the company … All the others are either tied up with contracts or else cost more than Washburn will pay. With Ella gone, he would have to let Eglanova dance another season.”

  “It seems awfully drastic,” I said mildly.

  “You don’t know much about ballerinas,” said Miles Sutton with the exhausted air of one who did. “Eglanova doesn’t want to retire, ever; she feels she’s at her peak and she would do anything to stay with the company.”

  “But that’s still going a bit far.”

  “She hated Ella.”

  “So did just about everybody; they didn’t all kill her … or maybe they did … formed a committee and …” But, no, this was getting a little too feckless, even for me. I subsided.

  “Besides, who else could have done it? Who else would benefit as much by her death?” Well, you would, lover, I said to myself, you you you, wonderful you in the shadow of the electric chair. He must’ve read my mind, which isn’t as difficult a feat as I sometimes like to think. “Aside from me,” he added. “So far as we know.”

  “So far as I know, and I should know … I was married to her seven years.”

  “Why wouldn’t she let you have a divorce?”

  He shrugged, “I don’t know. She was like that … a real sadist. She married me when she was just a corps de ballet girl and of course I helped her up the ladder. I suppose she resented that. People usually resent the ones who help them.”

  “Why didn’t you just go ahead and divorce her?”

  “Too complicated,” said Miles, evasively, looking away, tugging at his wiry orange beard. “By the way, will you be at the inquest tomorrow?”

  I said no, that this was the first I’d heard of it.

  “I have to be there,” said Miles gloomily. “The funeral’s after that.”

  “Church funeral?” I made a mental note to call the photographers.

  “No, just a chapel in a funeral home. I got her a lot out at Woodlawn.”

  “Very expensive?”

  “What? No, not very … the funeral home handled everything. Awfully efficient crowd.”

  “It’s a big racket,” I said. “I know, but it saves all sorts of trouble.”

  “Open or closed casket at the service?”

  “Closed. You see there was an autopsy this morning.”

  “What did they find?”

  “I don’t know. Gleason didn’t say. Probably nothing.”

  “You know,” I said, suddenly struck by a novel idea, “it might have been an accident after all.”

  Miles Sutton groaned. “If only it were! No, I’m afraid they’ve already proved that those shears did the trick. Gleason told me that the metal filings corresponded to the metal of the cable.”

  A cold chill went up my spine, and it wasn’t the Polar Bear Airconditioning Unit for Theaters, Restaurants and Other Public Places. “What about fingerprints?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Fingerprints are pretty old-fashioned now, anyway,” I brazened. “Every kid knows enough not to leave them around where the police might find them.”

  “Then Jed Wilbur could have done it,” mused Sutton. “He never got along with Ella.”

  “But, as I keep pointing out, even in a ballet company dislike is insufficient motive for murder.”

  “Maybe he had a motive,” said Miles mysteriously, kicking up some more dust. I’ll say this for him, if Miles did his act with the police the way he did with me he’d keep them busy for a year untangling the politics and private relationships of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet.

  “Well, motive or not, he’s not the kind of person to endanger his career. That gentleman is the opportunist of all times. If he was going to knock off a dancer he wouldn’t do it on the opening night of his greatest masterpiece …”

  “Even so,” said Miles, reminding me of the giant squid in those underwater movies … spreading black ink like a smoke screen at the first sign of danger. “And what about Alyosha Rudin?”

  “What about him?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “Know? Know what?”

  “He was Ella’s lover before she met me. He got her into ballet when she was just another chorine.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” This was a bit of gossip I hadn’t heard.

  “He’s been in love with her all these years … even after she married me.”

  “Why would she marry you to get ahead when she had the regisseur of the company in love with her?”

  Miles chuckled. “He wouldn’t help her … thought she couldn’t dance classical roles worth a damn … which was quite true, then. She was just another little girl who hadn’t studied enough. But he didn’t take into account her ambition, which I did. I got her solos in spite of him and she was always good. She was one of those people who could do anything you gave her to do well, even though you might have thought she’d fall flat on her face.”

  “And Alyosha?”

  “He was surprised how well she turned out.”

  “And he stayed in love with her?”

  “So she always said.”

  “He seems a little old for that kind of thing.”

  Miles grunted to show that I was too young to know the facts of age. Then we paid our checks and went back to the theater. A crowd of newsmen met us at the door. Miles scooted inside quickly and I paused to butter them up a little, promising them impossible interviews in my dishonest press-agent way; they were on to my game but we had a pleasant time and I was able to tell them about the funeral the next day; I promised them full details later, time and place and so on.

  I watched the end of the rehearsal. I knew that, as a rule, rehearsals which involve just the principals don’t take place on the stage but at the West Side studio; in this case, however, Wilbur had insisted on rehearsing Louis and Jane on stage to the music of one piano. He wanted to get Jane used to the stage, immediately.

  She looked very efficient, I thought, as I sat on the first row and watched her move through the intricate pas de deux with Louis; she acted as though she had been dancing leads all her life and I experienced a kind of parental pride. Wilbur seemed pleased; especially with the way she did her turns fifteen feet above the stage, scaring the life out of me as I recalled the night before … it was just possible that we had some homicidal maniac in the company who enjoyed seeing ballerinas take fatal pratfalls. If Jane was at all aware of any danger she certainly didn’t show it as she pretended to eclipse the sun with a transfigured expression that I had seen on her face only once before, that morning when she had slid blissfully into a hot bath.

  “All right, kids, that’s enough for today. You’ll be fine, Jane,” said Jed Wilbur as she came floating down out of the ceiling. “Remember to take it a little slower in your solo.
Keep it muted, lyric. Remember what you’re doing … when in doubt go slow. The music will hold you up. You have a tendency to be too sharp in your line, too classical … blur it a little.” And the three walked off stage. I headed for the office where we had the largest sack of mail I think I have ever seen … requests for tickets, for souvenir fragments of the cable, as well as advice from ballet lovers on how to conduct the investigation; I’ll say one thing for the balletomanes, they really know their stuff; they follow the lives and careers of their favorites with rapt attention and remarkable shrewdness. Many of the letters that I glanced at openly suggested that Miles Sutton and his late wife had not been on the best of terms … now how could strangers have known that? From the columnists?

  Mr. Washburn summoned me into the inner office, a spacious room with a thick carpet and a number of Cecil Beaton photographs of our stars, past and present, on the walls. He looked fit, I thought, in spite of the heat and excitement.

  “The police have been very agreeable,” he chuckled, handing me one of those special filtered cigarettes which I particularly dislike. I took it anyway. “They have consented not only to let us finish our season but, after the inquest tomorrow, to conduct the investigation a little more discreetly than had been Gleason’s intention.” Mr. Washburn looked like a very satisfied shark at that moment … one who had been swimming about all day in the troubled waters of City Hall. “There’ll be two plain-clothes men backstage at every performance and, of course, no member of the company is allowed to leave New York … and they all must be available at a moment’s notice, leave messages where they can be found.”

  “What’s our policy about the funeral tomorrow afternoon?” I asked, after I had first assured my employer that his wishes were, as always, my command.

  Mr. Washburn frowned. “I suppose the principals had better attend. I’ll be there of course … you, too.”

  “And the press?”

  He gave me a lecture on the dignity of death, the privacy of sorrow; after which he agreed that the press should be fully represented at the last rites.