“No. I can’t.” Wanda was staring at the bird. Her face was twisted out of its usual shape by some fierce emotion. Basil thought it was fear.
“You’re sure this wasn’t another publicity stunt of some sort, Mr. Milhau?” went on Foyle.
“No.” Milhau seemed honestly puzzled. “I tell you what, Jake,” he said to Lazarus. “You can leave the bird here in my office if you like. I’ll lock the door.”
Foyle shut his notebook with a snap and rose.
“Can we go now?” queried Hutchins wearily.
“Yes, that’ll do for tonight. But you must all hold yourselves ready for questioning tomorrow.”
“Where shall I put Dickie?” Lazarus asked Milhau.
“He’ll be O.K. right on the desk.” Milhau helped to readjust the burlap cover.
As the others moved toward the door, Hutchins laid a hand on Basil’s arm. “Funny about Sam adapting Shakespeare to a modern publicity stunt, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Basil looked at Hutchins questioningly.
“Shakespeare is applicable to so many modern situations,” went on Hutchins gravely. “All evening I’ve been trying to recall a line from Othello. It goes something like this: Were it my cue to murder I should have known it without a prompter. . . .”
Foyle was standing at the door of the outer office, a bunch of keys in his hand. He pressed an electric switch in the wall. Light flooded the lobby beyond. The silence was shattered by a woman’s scream.
It was Pauline. Rod hurried to where she was standing—just inside the lobby beyond the door.
“Anything wrong?” said Foyle sharply.
“No. It’s nothing. I’m—I’m sorry.” She shrank away from all of them. Her face was almost as distorted as Wanda’s had been a moment ago and by the same emotion—fear. She tried to smile, but her mouth only quivered. “My nerves must be on edge.”
Basil’s glance surveyed the lobby. It was empty except for one uniformed policeman standing against a red velvet curtain weighted with gilt fringe.
“You didn’t see anything or anybody?” persisted Foyle.
“No. I—I just stumbled.” Her eyelids dropped. “I’d like to go home now. Right away.”
“All right.” Foyle switched off the light in Milhau’s office and locked the door on the outside with a key from the bunch he held. “Going my way, doc?” he said to Basil.
“No. If you don’t mind I’m going to stay here a little longer.”
The little group of people in the lobby halted. Pauline turned. “You’re going to stay here alone?”
“If I may?” Basil looked at Foyle.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Do you think it’s quite safe?” asked Leonard.
“He won’t be entirely alone,” Foyle answered for Basil. “We always leave a patrolman on guard at the scene of a murder for a day or so.”
“Only one?” cried Pauline. “In a huge place like this?”
“It’s largely a matter of form,” answered Foyle. “We’ve finished the investigation here. Anything that could shed light on the crime—even a section of scenery that was splashed with blood—has been removed to the police laboratories.”
“Still . . .” Pauline looked at the sheer walls of the auditorium and the vaulted ceiling half lost in shadows. “One man . . .”
“Let me stay with you,” said Rod to Basil.
“No, I’ll be all right.” Basil smiled as if he didn’t think Rod would be much help in any circumstances.
“I don’t like the idea Dr. Willing,” said Hutchins seriously.
“Neither do I,” put in Wanda. “But Dr. Willing is very obstinate.”
Basil turned to Milhau. “May I borrow your keys?”
“The Inspector’s got them now. He’s running everything around here.”
Foyle handed the bunch of keys to Basil. “You can leave them with the patrolman when you go.” As the others drifted away, he went on in a low voice. “What’s the big idea?”
“The theater is the setting of both murders. I want to study its topography and absorb its atmosphere.”
“Sure you don’t want me to stay?”
“No, thanks. I can do better alone.”
Foyle looked down through the glass doors to the outside lobby. The others were leaving by the box office door. “What do you think of that bunch? Do they know anything?”
“At least four of them did—and one of the four is dead now.”
“Who are the other three?”
“Pauline, Hutchins, and Wanda.”
“What about putting tails on all of them?”
“I wouldn’t. I’d give them a little more rope. . . .”
III
After Foyle’s departure, Basil went down the aisle and crossed the stage. Beyond the wings he re-discovered the enclosed stairway that led to Milhau’s apartment. The door was locked, but he found the key on Milhau’s ring and unlocked it. When he switched on the light he saw everything just as they had left it—soiled plates and glasses in disarray on the supper table, chairs gathered before the panel in the wall, the panel itself pulled back to reveal the stage below. Even the stage was unchanged. Again he was looking down on Vladimir’s parlor in the antique Muscovite style with Parisian decorations. Footlights and spotlights had been turned out, but a single work light was burning.
He spent some time examining the apartment without discovering anything of interest. Then he sat down wearily in one of the armchairs. He smiled a little as he remembered Mark Twain’s advice to an apprentice author who had got into difficulties with his own plot: Have you tried thinking? The same advice held good in solving a complex crime. He reviewed the case from beginning to end—from the moment in the Washington plane when he had read the item about the canary in a newspaper to the moment when Pauline had screamed in the lobby just now. Slowly the churning sediment of his disturbed thoughts began to settle to the bottom of his mind leaving the clear essence of the case on top. That was the real reason he had wanted to stay in the theater after the others were gone—so he could be utterly alone in an empty place where he could hear himself think. From the first he had suspected the murderer. Now he was morally certain of the murderer’s guilt. How was he going to prove it in court? He would have to rely on Lambert’s evidence once the knife handles had been subjected to a spectroscope. That was rather a pity because most juries didn’t like chemical evidence . . . too technical . . .
Motion drew his eye to the gap in the wall. Far below something was moving across the shadows of the dimly lighted stage. Startled, he leaned forward. Whatever had moved was gone.
He waited. Again there was movement. Now he saw it clearly, in the path of the work light—a small yellow bird—a canary—flying across the stage.
Chapter Thirteen. Alarums and Excursions
BASIL WENT to the switch and turned out the apartment lights. Then he closed the door and went down the enclosed staircase. His footfalls sounded loud in the stillness. He had no idea if they could be heard beyond the walls that enclosed the stairs. At the foot he paused to listen. There was no sound. He opened the door and stepped across the wings to the stage.
A few hours ago it had been all lights and bustle. Now the work light—a single bald bulb dangling from a wire in the roof—made a patch of sickly white light in the shadowy stillness. A sudden flutter startled him. Again the canary flew across the patch of light and perched on a rope attached to a pulley overhead. Eyes like black pinheads shone in the faint light.
The murmur of traffic from the world outside only seemed to underscore the silence here. There was something disturbing about that silence—a sense of something beyond it, listening and waiting and watching. No wonder the haunted house is always the empty house he thought, as he left the patch of light and stepped into the deep shadow of the wings.