If I hadn’t hollered, we might have buttoned it up, just Russ and Ling and I maybe. But I hollered, and a couple of people came out from the green room, and went back and told the others. So everybody knew, and everybody talked, and nobody thought about calling the cops.
That’s not right. Not everybody knew. Seventeen people knew. But nobody at all thought to tell Edna Stanton. She was still out front, taking tickets, letting the people in. It wasn’t her fault; nobody told her.
At any rate, Ling finally thought of phoning the cops, which he did. He phoned the Clinton cops, and they said they’d be out in maybe half an hour, both cars were out right now. Clinton is a small town, seasonally swollen by vacationers.
And it was another fifteen minutes before any of us thought about the audience. By then, of course, it was after eight-thirty, and the patrons were all in their seats. Ling sent Nancy Stewart quick like a bunny to tell Edna to close shop, and then we fooled around a while, wondering what to do till the lawman came, and then we wasted three and a half minutes deciding who was going to break the news to the customers, and I lost.
I told all this to Detective Einstein, who wasn’t city police after all. The theater was outside the city limits, which the city cops had remembered in the nick of time, and they’d passed the buck on to the state police. So Detective Einstein was a plainclothes State Trooper, or something like that.
Anyway, he was a rat. I don’t have anything against police in general, but I have nothing good to say about Einstein. I told him the whole story, and I also told him that I personally had spent most of the afternoon in town with the station wagon, picking up some of the props for next week’s show, and then he said, “I hope, for your good as well as ours, that we find our murderer soon.”
I said, “Me, too.”
He said, “Because this theater is closed until our investigation is completed.”
He didn’t have to do that. Say nobody was supposed to leave the area, okay. Say nobody was supposed to touch anything on stage until the crime lab people — who showed up from Springfield a little before eleven — were finished with it, okay. Say everybody had to submit to a search, of his person and his room and his belongings, okay. Say everybody had to be available at all times for questioning, okay. But he didn’t have to close us.
What did he gain?
He gained nineteen people who wouldn’t have cooperated with him to drag him out of quicksand, that’s what he gained.
The only way I could figure, it was gratuitous nastiness, because he thought we were laughing at him. You run into that all the time. He thought we were all from New York, because we were actors and like that, and it’s a national phobia that people always think people from New York are laughing at them. Except in Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles, places like that, where they don’t care.
He was some detective. Right off the bat, he was wrong on two counts. We weren’t laughing at him. We weren’t laughing at him because one of us had been killed and we didn’t feel like laughing at all. And not a one of us had been born and raised in New York, though we all — except Edna Stanton — had gravitated there in our late teens or early twenties, to get involved with Theater. Most of the rest of them as actors. Me as a playwright. I probably have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where, but I own a portable typewriter and I type on it, so I’m a playwright. Which, naturally, is why I was off in the world’s south forty, playing publicity man.
Anyway, the theater was closed. Nobody was happy about it, with the possible exception of Einstein. We all got surly, and he called us all together the next morning and sat us in the audience’s chairs, and stood on the stage apron and talked to us about cooperation. Ling, who is not a coward, got to his feet and said cooperation was a two-way business, and how about opening the theater? And Einstein said, “As soon as our investigation is completed. If you people cooperate, it will be completed that much sooner.”
Ling’s theory was that Einstein was using the Army’s mass-punishment system. As though we knew who had killed Heather Sanderson, and he was punishing us all until somebody told him. Maybe so, maybe not. The point is, none of us had much faith in him as a detective.
So, when we had our own meeting in the living room of the farmhouse that afternoon, Ling suggested that it was more or less up to us to hand the good Captain (I speak sarcastically) the killer’s head on a silver salver. “It was one of us,” he said. “One of the eighteen in this room. I hate to say that — I hate to think it, even — but there it is.”
Jack Andrews, boy character actor, said, “Why does it have to be one of us? Why not somebody we don’t even know? Came up from New York, maybe.”
Ling said, “How did he get into the theater?”
That right there was the stickler. There are four entrances into the theater — through the lobby and through the scene dock and through the green room and through the back way onto the stage — and they’re kept locked. Five years ago, our first year up here, we had a lot of trouble with local vandals. Don’t let anybody ever tell you New York City breeds the worst kids. These little masters of high comedy out in the boondocks here would push a door open in the middle of the afternoon, throw a stink bomb — a smoldering strip of film, say — and run away giggling like mad, while we tried hopelessly to air the place before that evening’s performance. Things like that. So the doors are kept locked, all four of them, all the time. The lobby door is unlocked before a performance and locked again afterward. All nineteen of us, of course, have keys to at least one door.
So it was one of the group, one of the people we knew to have been in the theater, rehearsing, all afternoon. The actors were acting, the director was directing, Russ Barlow was working on his light board, Charlie Wilbe was working on next week’s set over in the scene dock, Ling was up in the office working on the books, and so on.
As it turned out, I was the only member of the group who wasn’t in the theater all afternoon. I picked up the station wagon at two-thirty, and went to town. I spent two hours returning last week’s props — since it was Monday — and two hours more picking up some of next week’s props, and didn’t get back to the theater till half past six. “Captain” Einstein had checked my alibi, and it was complete. I had spent a busy afternoon.
So Ling made me Chairman of the Committee on Grisly Evidence. I said, “No.”
Ling said, “Andy, you’re the only one. You’re the only one of us who couldn’t possibly have killed Heather. If I appoint anybody else, I just might be appointing the killer. That wouldn’t work out so well.”
“Why don’t you appoint yourself? You’re the boss around here, for God’s sake.”
“I might be the killer,” he said.
“Phooey.”
“All right, Andy, who’s your candidate for killer?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Then don’t say phooey, Chairman.”
So I was Chairman. I became resigned to the fact, and then I sent everybody else away and talked with Edna Stanton and Russ Barlow.
Barlow first:
Q: Where were you all afternoon?
A: Working on that unprintable lightboard.
Q: There are ladies present.
A: If she ain’t heard it before, she don’t know what it means.
Q: All right, never mind. Did you see Heather on the sofa?
A: Sure. I saw her go over there. She made an unprintable pass at me again, the dried-up old unprintable.
Q: What time was this?