A little worried, I turned to go when, quite by chance, I glanced at the wastepaper basket which stood just inside the door: something glittered underneath the make-up-stained pieces of Kleenex and the dead roses. I bent over and picked up a large pair of brand-new shears.
I have since tried, unsuccessfully, to recall what I thought at that moment. As far as I can recollect I thought, rather idly, that it was curious that a perfectly good set of shears should be thrown out like that, and in Eglanova’s dressing room, too. I had perhaps some vague notion that her maid might have borrowed them from one of the grips and then had absently thrown them out. In any event, I took them out of the dressing room and placed them neatly on top of a tool chest near the north side entrance.
It wasn’t until an hour later, after the performance was over, that I began to worry a little because, by that time, the assistant district attorney had arrived, accompanied by a medical examiner and a detective named Gleason who announced to the assembled company that someone had deliberately cut all but a strand of that wire cable with a pair of shears, or maybe a saw, and that Ella Sutton had been murdered.
The company was kept backstage until nearly dawn. The questioning was conducted by Gleason, an autocratic little man who forbade me to call the press until the first of what proved to be a long set of interviews was concluded.
4
We met, almost by accident on Seventh Avenue at four-thirty in the morning. She looked very demure, I thought, in a plain cotton dress, and carrying a briefcase which contained her ballet clothes. I stopped beside her on the corner and we both waited for the light to turn green. Lonely taxicabs hurtled by; the city was still and a gray light shone dull in the east, above the granite and steel peaks, beyond the slow river.
“Hello, Jane,” I said.
For a moment she didn’t recognize me; then, remembering, she smiled wanly, and her face pale by street lamp, she said, “Are you going to take me out to dinner?”
“What about breakfast?”
“I never get up this early,” she said; and we crossed the street. The light was green. A sudden gust of warm wind came bowling up the alley and I caught her scent as Edgar Rice Burroughs was wont to say: warm flesh and Ivory soap.
“Can I walk you home?” I asked.
“If you want to. I live on Second Avenue.” We walked nine uptown blocks and seven crosstown blocks to the brownstone where she lived. We paused below in the street … the hot wind, redolent of summer and river and early morning, stirred her streaked blond hair as we stood before a delicatessen while the drama of courtship took place. The dialogue, I must admit, was similar to that of every other couple in this same predicament at this same hour in the quiet city. Should we or should we not? was the moon right? and was this wise? or was it love? Fortunately, being a well-trained girl of casual habits, this last point wasn’t worried too much and at last we walked up the two flights to her apartment.
The dialogue continued as, both seated on a studio couch in her two-roomed apartment, we were momentarily diverted from my central interest by the murder and, though we were both dead-tired and stifling yawns heroically in deference to my lust, we talked of the death of Ella Sutton.
“I never thought such a thing could happen to anybody I knew,” said Jane, lying back on the bed, a pillow under her head. One paper lantern illuminated the room with red and yellow light. The furniture was shabby Victorian, very homelike, with photographs of family and fellow dancers on the walls, over the mantel of the walled-up fireplace. The ceilings were high and the curtains were of faded red plush.
“Do you think it was really murder?”
“That awful little man certainly thought it was. Somebody cut the cable … that’s what he said.”
“I wonder who?”
“Oh, almost anybody,” she said vaguely, scratching her stomach comfortably.
“Don’t tell me now that everybody hated Ella … it would be much too pat.”
“Well, almost everybody did. Oh, she was just terrible. But that’s an awful thing to say … her being dead, I mean.”
“I expect we’ll be hearing a lot about how terrible she was,” I said, moving closer to her on the couch, my cup of tea in my hand (tea was the fiction we had both agreed upon to bring us together).
“Well, she wasn’t that awful,” said Jane, in the tone of one who wants to think only good of others. “I suppose she had her nice side.” Then she gave up. “God knows what it was, though. I never saw it.”
“Perhaps God does know,” I said, rolling my eyes upward. Jane sighed. I moved closer, the teacup rattling in my hand.
“She was such a schemer,” said Jane thoughtfully. “She was conniving every minute of the day. That was why she married Miles … he was the conductor and very important to the company. So she married him and then lo and behold she began to get some leads … though the marriage was always a farce.”
“Didn’t she like him?”
“Of course not … and after the first few months he was on to her, too. Only she’d never let him get a divorce. He was too useful to her, a perfect front …”
“And then he killed her.”
Jane shuddered. “Don’t even think it,” she said in a low voice. “He’s so wonderful … I mean as a conductor; I don’t know him very well outside the theater. Anyway he’s a nice man and Ella was a bitch and I see no reason for him to get in trouble on her account,” she concluded spiritedly, disregarding all ethics in her emotional summary.
“I suppose he’s the likeliest suspect,” I said. I was curious about the whole affair, as anyone would be. It was an unusual experience to be involved in a murder during one’s first day on a new job. Yet, aside from the novelty of my situation, it had occurred to me dimly that some end might be served by this event, that I might somehow be able to make use of this tragedy, an ignoble sentiment certainly but then I belong to an ignoble tribe which trades on the peculiarities and talents of others, even on their disasters.
“I guess so,” said Jane unhappily. “Lord knows he hated her. On the other hand so did a lot of people. Eglanova, for instance.”
“Why? What did she have against Ella?”
“Don’t you know?” And for the first time (but not the last) I received that pitying dancer’s glance which implied that though I might not be entirely a square I was none the less hopelessly ignorant of all that really mattered: the dance and its intricate politics. I said I didn’t know, humbly.
“Mr. Washburn was all set to fire Eglanova this year. She’s practically blind you know. It’s got so even the audience notices it … why they even applaud her when she finishes a pirouette in the right direction … then she’s always losing her partner in Giselle. She’s lucky she’s got Louis. He adores her and he follows her around on stage like a Saint Bernard. If she had any other partner she’d’ve ended up among the violins in the orchestra pit long ago.”
“So Washburn was going to get rid of her?”
“I should say so. Only he acted as though she were retiring of her own free will. We were to end this season at the Met with a Gala Eglanova Evening, to celebrate her thirty-one years as a star; only now … well, I suppose she’ll have to do the next season. You see Ella was all set to take her place.”