A lieutenant from the Homicide Squad met him at the door and conducted him to the stage itself. The curtain was raised, the auditorium empty. Under the glare of footlights and a double bank of auxiliary lights overhead, the scene looked rather absurdly like the second act of a routine mystery play. An assistant medical examiner was working over a still figure in an alcove at the rear of the set. A police stenographer was writing in a notebook at a table in the foreground. A fingerprint man was busy with lens and insufflator over a silver samovar and a set of Sèvres tea cups. A police photographer was focusing a camera on the stage from the wings. Other detectives were comparing a designer’s drawing of the set with an architect’s plan of the theater building and scrutinizing every square inch of the actual boards and scenery.
Close at hand there was no illusion of a princely “parlor in the antique Muscovite style.” Here it was painfully obvious that the carved oak doors were plywood encrusted with plaster and paint, the Byzantine frescos crude oils on canvas, and the burning embers in the fireplace an artful contrivance of red cellophane and winking electric light bulbs.
A fat fly from the alley had drifted through the stage door with the Inspector. Now it cruised lazily around the set on transparent wings exploring the scene with detached, almost scientific interest in the odd behavior of the human species.
Without removing hat or coat, Foyle dropped into the armchair before the “fire” where Fedora had waited for Vladimir during the first act. Shoulders hunched, chin sunk on his chest, he listened impassively to the lieutenant’s verbal report.
“And no one in the theater could identify Vladimir?”
“No one.”
“Where is Miss Morley now?”
“Her maid took her to her dressing room before we got here. There’s a doctor with her now. The others are in Milhau’s office.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, sir. Except one witness who says he knows you. Some name like Billings.” The lieutenant consulted his notes. “No, Willing. A Dr. Basil Willing. I didn’t pay much attention to him. Put him with the others in Milhau’s office. There’s always one fellow in these mix-ups who claims to be an intimate friend of yours or the Commissioner’s. It usually turns out he sat next to you at a ball game once twenty years ago.”
A smile softened the Inspector’s close mouth. “New to Homicide, aren’t you?”
“Transferred from Narcotics when Lieutenant Samson was detailed to Enemy Aliens, sir.”
“Well, if you stick around long enough, you’ll find out that Dr. Willing is a mighty handy man to have around when you’re trying to break a tough case. Incidentally, he’s one of the D.A.’s medical advisers. I’ll see him at once.”
The lieutenant colored richly and withdrew. When he came back Basil was with him. “If you’d only said you were in the D.A.s’ office . . .”
“I was going to. Then I realized that the moment I did every witness would shut up like a clam in my presence. I thought it would be more interesting to wear an invisible cap for a while.”
Foyle asked the lieutenant to collect Vladimir’s belongings and then greeted Basil with a tired grin. “Hello, doc. Who did it?”
“Isn’t that a little premature?” Basil had retrieved his hat and overcoat from the usher. He piled them on the sofa and sat down. “I’m not that good!”
“But you have the knack of seeing things other people miss. Where did you sit during the first act?”
“Fourth row, center.”
“Good Lord, you were practically on the stage!” Foyle sat up and stared. “Your eyes are good. You’re a doctor of medicine. How could you be so close to Vladimir and not see that he was dying?”
“You underestimate the murderer.” Basil took out his cigarette case. “As I’m on stage now I suppose I can smoke?”
Foyle shrugged. “That’s the Fire Department’s headache not mine. I believe the stage is the one place where you can smoke in a theater.”
Basil lit his cigarette and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. “I needed that. How do actors endure the No Smoking regulations back stage night after night?” He annexed one of the Sèvres saucers as an ash tray and settled himself more comfortably against the back of the sofa. “This crime was hatched in an ingenious brain.”
“What do you mean?”
“The character of Vladimir is supposed to be dying all during the first act. He has no lines to speak—no gestures to make. He just lies still on the bed in that alcove at the rear of the stage. The only light in the alcove comes from one votive candle burning under a red glass shade in front of the icon on the wall. Candlelight flickers deceptively and a red-shaded light is always dim. Not only that, but Vladimir is made up to look like a dying man—white face, blue shadows around eyes and mouth, gray lips. He is even supposed to assume the look of a man exhausted by pain, scarcely conscious. Now do you see what an unique opportunity for murder that provided? No one on stage or in the fourth row or anywhere else in the audience can tell at what moment the look of pain and exhaustion on Vladimir’s face ceased to be artifice and became reality. No one knows when he first turned white from a mortal wound under his white mask of grease paint.”
Foyle’s glance went swiftly to the alcove and then to the fourth row of seats in the orchestra. “I can see how you and the rest of the audience might mistake the real thing for acting and lighting and make-up at that distance, but what about the other actors on the stage? Are you asking me to believe they didn’t see that Vladimir was really suffering?”
“If they say so, how are we going to prove they are lying?”
“Conspiracy?”
“It might be. Or it might be the truth. Either way it protects the murderer. According to Milhau, the producer, who also directed the play, the first act is supposed to run forty-eight minutes—from eight-forty to nine twenty-eight. It’s impossible for us to fix the moment within those forty-eight minutes when the murder was committed. That makes it practically impossible to discover who committed the murder.”
“Why should that depend on timing?”
“When the curtain rises, four actors are discovered on stage playing dominoes. All four were on stage tonight when Vladimir crossed the stage alive and well and entered the alcove before the curtain rose. One of them spoke to him. He is said to have answered with a grin as he shut the double doors of the alcove behind him. The alcove has no other door and no windows or openings of any kind backstage. It even has a ceiling so no one could have climbed over the walls. After Vladimir entered that alcove, he could only be reached by someone crossing the stage to the double doors in full view of the actors on the stage and the people in the audience.
“During the first act, there were only three people who entered the alcove, actors who approached Vladimir separately on three different occasions as part of the action of the play.
“Therefore the murder must have been committed in full view of the audience by one of those three actors. But as we cannot fix the actual moment of the murder within the forty-eight minutes the first act lasted, we have no way of proving which of the three people who could have murdered Vladimir actually did so.
“As a rule a murderer tries to escape detection by dissociating himself from his murder with a false alibi, and that is often the very thing that leads to his detection. This murderer realized there is safety in numbers. Instead of giving himself an alibi, he has merely obliterated the alibi of two other people. Instead of dissociating himself from the murder, he has contrived to associate other people with it on the same terms as himself. He has dissipated suspicion by diffusing it equally among three people. He’s perfectly willing for us to know that he was at the scene of the crime when it was committed, because at least two other people were in exactly the same place at the same time. In ordinary circumstances no murderer could take the risk of having two witnesses to his crime. But the peculiar circumstances of Vladimir’s role in this play made it possible to commit a murder before several hundred witnesses on the stage, in the wings, and in the audience before their very eyes.