“What’s that?”
“Just why am I supposed to take your word for any of this?”
That one set me back. I stammered, “Well — well, you just — well, all you have to do is ask. Just ask everybody, the same as I did, and see if the stories check out or not.”
“Is that right? And why am I supposed to take their word for it?”
“Well, you’ve got to take somebody’s word!”
“Why?”
“For Pete’s sake, do you think we all did it together? Do you think it’s a great big scheme with eighteen people in it?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s been known to happen.”
“You’re nuts,” I said, before I thought.
He flushed. “You watch your language,” he said. “You’re not in New York now.”
“I could tell that by the police procedure,” I told him. I said that after I thought. I didn’t care whether I got him mad or not, he’d got me mad.
“You just go on back to your the-ay-ter,” he said, “and let me handle the police procedure.”
“So you don’t care what I found out.”
“Not a particle.”
I got to my feet and left. But hanging around theater five years had made it impossible for me to leave anyplace without an exit line. I delivered it from the doorway: “I just want you to know something, Mister. We aren’t laughing at you because we’re from New York. We’re laughing at you because you’re such a lousy cop.
Which didn’t help matters at all, but I felt better.
Back at the farmhouse, I had a kitchen conference with Ling, over two cups of coffee. I told him what had happened between me and Einstein, and he shook his head and said, “We sure got a winner, Andy.”
“I noticed.”
“That’s what they do with the cops who don’t work out,” he said. “They can’t bump them off the force, because they’re on State Civil Service, and they never goof up enough to satisfy the regulations. So they’re ship-peel off to some backwoods corner of the state like Clinton, where nothing much ever happens so they can’t do too much harm.”
“This one’s doing a lot of harm,” I said. “This one’s lousing up our whole season. We’ve got six weeks to go this summer, and he may never let us open.”
“I wrote a friend of mine in New York,” Ling said. “A lawyer. Maybe he’ll know some way we can force Einstein to let us open up again.”
“That’s all we need,” I said. “A New York lawyer wandering around. Einstein would clap us in irons just to save face.”
“Let’s wait and see what my friend has to say. In the meantime, you tell everybody what happened, and tell them you’ve quit your amateur detecting.”
“Why quit? The only way we’ll open is to give Einstein the killer.”
“You don’t really have to quit if you don’t want, But you’re doing too good a job. If you keep poking around, the killer may figure you’re too dangerous to live.”
“So I tell everybody I’m quitting, and then I poke around on the sly.”
“If you want to. I know I wouldn’t. Why not hold off at least until my friend writes back?”
“If you say so.”
“It’s up to you, Andy. I just wouldn’t want to see you get your throat cut.”
“Neither would I.”
Edna came in, then, from town, and we exchanged information. I told her about my interview with “Captain” Einstein, and she told me about local opinion in town. Local opinion in town pretty much agreed with Einstein that we were a crazy bunch of beatniks from New York who’d ganged up to kill one of our number, and local opinion in town wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we came riding in with burning brands and set fire to the whole town one night. That’s the way beatniks were.
“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all,” I said. “I’d like to see Clinton in flames.”
Edna said, “My mother doesn’t want me to come out here any more. She’s “afraid all you beatniks will murder me, too.”
“My plans are a little bit different from that,” I told her.
Ling got to his feet and said, “Okay, I can take a hint.”
After he left, Edna and I took her Plymouth out to a secluded section of Berger’s Kill and necked the afternoon away. It was a lot more fun than playing detective.
When we got back to the theater, it was suppertime. Edna stayed over, and afterwards I said, “Get the stopwatch from Ling and come on over to the theater. I want to check something out.”
She got it, and we went over, and turned on all the lights. Then Edna timed me with the stopwatch while I played murderer.
I sat in a chair in the first row of the audience. Edna sat on the stage apron, as beautiful as a new love, dressed in an old flannel shirt and faded blue jeans. Every once in a while, I’d look at her in a certain light or at a certain angle, and I’d think about the acting bug and the perpetually ailing mother, and they wouldn’t seem so all-fired important any more.
Well. Anyway. When she nodded to me, I got to my feet and sauntered away to the left. Then I ducked through the door beside the stage and up the steps past the prop room door to the green room. I turned right and crossed the green room, flanked by two dressing rooms on each side of me, and through the well-oiled soundproof door to the wings. The lightboard was just to my right. No one could come through this door without being seen by Russ, if he was working at the lightboard.
I tip-toed across the flooring to the edge of the drop cloth, and then I could walk naturally, the double thickness of drop cloth and carpet muffling my steps. I went over to where the sofa had been — the police had taken it away, apparently for further scrutiny — and stood there a few seconds, as long as I imagined it would take to stroke a sharp knife across a sleeping woman’s throat. The curtain was open today, and Edna watched me, glancing from time to time at her watch and smiling encouragingly.
Turning, I retraced my steps, came around through the wings and the green room and down the steps and through the door and back over to the same seat in the front row, where I’d started from. Edna thumbed the watch, studied it, and said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds.”
“I doubt he did it any faster than that,” I said, “and I bet he did it maybe a minute or two slower.”
Then she said, “What did you do with the knife?”
“What knife?”
“The knife you killed Heather with.”
“I wasn’t using any props, honey, I—” And that’s where it hit me.
She looked at me and grinned. “I can be a detective, too, Andy,” she said.
“And I can be a defective. You’re right, you’re right, forget the two minutes and seventeen seconds. The killer had to get rid of the knife. He had to pick up the knife, too, come to think of it.”
She bounced down from the apron and said, “It might still be here. If it was a good enough hiding place for right after the murder, it might be good enough forever.”
“I hope it isn’t that good. I looked up at the stage and around at the auditorium and said, “Well, where shall we begin?”
“The dressing rooms, I suppose.”
We searched the four dressing rooms, and we didn’t find anything. So we tried the prop room. The prop room is down underneath the stage, a long narrow low-ceilinged room formed when the stage platform was put in. It’s barely five feet high, and we keep all our permanent props down there. Permanent props are bric-a-brac and whatnot and thingamajigs and assorted white elephants that might come in handy some day.
I owned one of the four keys to the bolt-and-bar prop room door lock. The other three belonged to Ling and Archer and Russ. So I said to Edna, “if there’s something down here, like the knife for instance, it cuts our suspects down to two.”