“Who murders her?” asked Mr. Washburn.
“The father, of course,” said Jed Wilbur evenly.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then Mr. Washburn chuckled. “Obscure motivation, isn’t it?”
“No, very classical … guilt, jealousy, incest.”
“Wouldn’t he be more inclined to kill the girl’s husband?” I suggested, appalled at the implications.
“He was a rational man … he realized that the boy was only fulfilling his nature … the boy had no connection with him; the girl had; the girl betrayed him and the brothers … the mother, too.”
“I’ll be very interested to see how you work this out,” said Mr. Washburn with greater control than I would have had, similarly confronted.
“By the way,” I said to Wilbur, “the Globe wants to know if you have any statement to make about this Communist deal.”
“Tell them I’m not a Communist … that two boards have cleared me already.” Wilbur seemed more relaxed now and I wondered why … after all, the pickets were at this very moment marching up and down the street outside with placards denouncing not only him but us. We found out soon enough. “I’ve been signed to do the new Hayes and Marks musical this fall.… You can tell the Globe that.” And Mr. Wilbur marched off in the direction of Louis’ dressing room.
“I guess that clears him,” I said. Hayes and Marks, sometimes known collectively as Old Glory, are the most successful, the most reactionary musical comedy writers on Broadway. To be hired by them is a proof of one’s patriotism, loyalty and professional success.
“The little bastard,” said Mr. Washburn, lapsing for the first time in my brief acquaintance with him, into the argot of the street. “I knew there’d be trouble when I hired him. I was warned.”
“What difference does it make? You’ve got at least one good ballet out of him and by the time you open with Martyr in New York next year the whole scandal will be forgotten. From what I hear the police are going to arrest Miles any minute.”
“I wonder why they don’t?” mused Mr. Washburn, suggesting also for the first time that a member of his company might, after all, have been guilty of murder. It was obvious this exchange with Wilbur had shaken him.
“I know why,” I said boldly.
“You know?”
“It’s those shears … they aren’t sure about them … they can’t figure what my role in all this is.”
“I’m sure that’s not the reason.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t know … I don’t know.” Mr. Washburn looked worried as the dancers trooped noisily by, costumed for Scheherazade. “Oh,” he said, as we both watched one blonde trick march past us, rolling her butt, “Lady Edderdale is giving a party for the ballet tonight … just principals, no photographers, except hers, of course. You be there, too, black tie … right after the last ballet. I’m not so sure that it’s a good policy to be going out to parties so soon after an accident, but she’s much too important a patron to pass up.”
I was thrilled, I have to admit. She gives the best parties in New York … a Chicago meat heiress married to a title … I wondered idly if I might find myself a rich wife at the party—every wholesome boy’s dream of heaven. Thinking of marriage, I asked Mr. Washburn whether Eglanova was married at the moment or not.
He laughed. “She has a Mexican divorce at the moment … I know it far a fact because I helped her get it when we were playing Mexico City.”
“Who was she married to then?”
“Don’t you know? I thought you would have noticed it in her biography … but, no, come to think of it, we haven’t used it in the program for nearly five years. She was married to Alyosha Rudin.”
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Once a Lady always a Lady, as the saying goes; especially in the case of Alma Shellabarger of Chicago who married the Marquis of Edderdale when she was twenty and then at twenty-four married someone else and after that someone else and so on until now, at fifty, she had no husband, though she still uses the title of Marchioness in spite of all the other names she has been called along the way. No one seems to mind, however, because she gives great parties even though her income is not as large now as it was when she appeared in the fashionable world with a face like a bemused horse and all that Shellabarger cash, from slaughtered pigs and sheep. Nevertheless, her blood-drenched income is adequate … though there is no longer the Paris house or the Amalfi villa or the Irish castle … only the Park Avenue mansion and the Palm Beach house, where lavish parties are given, in season. I am told that at her dinners neither pig nor sheep is served, only poultry, fish and game … real sense of guilt as any analyst would tell you at the drop of a fee.
Mr. Washburn and I arrived before the rest of our company. As a rule, he waits until Eglanova is ready and then he escorts her; but tonight, for some reason, he couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. Both of us were hot in our tuxedos … his white and mine black, an obvious clue to our respective incomes. Fortunately, the house was cool … a gust of freshened air met us in the downstairs hall, a vast room with grey marble columns, marble floor and Greek statuary in niches. A footman took our invitations and led us up a flight of stairs where, so help me, a butler announced our names to a hundred or so decorative guests in a drawing room which looked like the waiting room at Penn Station redecorated by King Midas … the guests looked as though they might be waiting for trains, too, I thought, as we moved toward our hostess who stood beneath a chandelier at the room’s center, all in green and diamonds, receiving her guests with a half-smile and mumbled greetings as though she weren’t quite sure why she was there, or why they were there.
“Dear Alma,” said Mr. Washburn, beginning to expand as he always does in the presence of money.
“Ivan!” They embraced like two mechanical toys, like those figures which come out of old-fashioned clocks every hour on the hour. I bowed over her hand in the best Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet style.
“You poor dear,” said Alma, fixing my employer with yellow eyes. “What a disaster!”
“We must take the good with the bad,” said Mr. Washburn gently.
“I was there!” breathed Alma Edderdale, shutting her eyes for a moment as though to recall, as vividly as possible, every detail of that terrible night.
“Then you know what it was like …”
“I do … I do.”
“The ghastly fall …”
“Can I ever forget?”
“The end of a life … a great ballerina’s life.”
“If there was only something one could do.” That did it, I thought. Mr. Washburn would immediately suggest an Ella Sutton Memorial Ballet, sets, costumes and choreographer’s fee to be paid by that celebrated patroness, the Marchioness of Edderdale. But Mr. Washburn is as tactful as he is venal.
“We all feel that way, Alma.” Then he paused significantly.