He had only had time to throw up his arms instinctively, half to ward her off, half to catch her and break her fall. Her looming body blurred the runway lights for an instant, and then she had landed across him, one foot still up there on the runway behind her. The black stuff of her mantle came down after her, like a parachute, and half-smothered him. He had to claw at it to free his head, get rid of it.
Those in the rows farther back, who hadn’t been close enough to notice the break in her performance that had come just before the fall, started to applaud and even laugh. They seemed to think it was still part of her routine, or that she had actually missed her footing and tumbled down on him, and either way it struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen.
Benson already knew better, by the inert way her head and shoulders lay across his knees. “Take it easy. I’ve got you,” he whispered reassuringly, trying to hold her as she started to slide to the floor between the rows of seats.
Her eyes rolled unseeingly up at him, showing all whites, but some memory of where she was and what she had been doing still Angered in the darkness rolling over her.
“I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you, mister?” she breathed. “Guess I’ve spoiled the show—” It ended with a long-drawn sigh — and she was still.
The laughter and handclapping was dying down, because her head didn’t bob up again at the place where she had disappeared from view, and they were catching on that something was wrong. A hairy-armed man in rolled blue shirt-sleeves popped partly out of the wings, not caring if he was seen or not, and wigwagged frantically to the band leader, then jumped back again where he’d come from. The droopy music they’d been playing for her broke off short and a rackety rumba took its place. A long line of chorus girls came spilling out on the stage, most of them out of step and desperately working to get their shoulder straps adjusted.
Benson was already struggling tip the aisle with his inert golden burden. A couple of ushers came hustling down to help him, but he elbowed them aside. “You quiet the house down. I can get her back there by myself.”
A man with a cigar sticking flat out of his mouth like a tusk met him at the back, threw open a door marked Manager. “Bring her in here to my office, until I can send for a doctor—” Before closing it after the three of them, he stopped to scan the subsiding ripples of excitement in the audience. “How they taking it? All right, keep ’em down in their seats, usher. No refunds, understand?” He closed the door and came in.
Benson had to put her in the manager’s swivel chair; there wasn’t even a couch or sofa in the place. Even with the shaded desk light on, the place stayed dim and shadowy. Her body gleamed weirdly in the gloom, like a shiny mermaid.
“Thanks a lot, bud,” the manager said to him crisply. “You don’t have to wait; the doctor’ll be here in a minute—”
“The tin says stick around.” Benson reburied the badge in his pocket.
The manager widened his eyes. “That’s a hot one. You’re probably the only headquarters man out there tonight, and she keels over into your lap.”
“That’s the kind of luck I always have,” Benson said, bending over the girl. “I can’t even see a show once a year, without my job horning in.”
The manager took another squint outside the door to see how his house was getting along. “Forgotten all about it already,” he reported contentedly. He turned back. “How’s she coming?”
“She’s dead,” Benson said muffledly, from below one arm, ear to the girl’s gold brassiere.
The manager gave a sharp intake of breath, but his reaction was a purely professional one. “Gee, who’ll I get to fill in for her on such short notice? What the hell happened to her? She was all right at the matinee!”
“What’d you expect her to do,” Benson said short-temperedly, “come and inform you she was going to die in the middle of her act tonight, so you’d have time to get a substitute?” He lifted one of the golden eyelids to try for optical reflex; there wasn’t any.
The hastily summoned doctor had paused outside the door, trying to take in as much of the show free as he could before he had to attend to business. He came in still looking fascinatedly behind him. “You’re too late,” the manager scowled. “This headquarters man says she’s dead already.”
Benson was on the desk phone by now with his back to the two of them. A big belly-laugh rolled in from outside before they could get the door closed, and drowned out what he was saying. He covered the mouthpiece until he could go ahead. “Forty-second Street, just off Broadway. Okay.” He hung up. “The examiner’s office is sending a man over. We’ll hear what he says.”
The doctor smiled. “Well, he can’t say any more than I can. She’s dead and that’s that.”
“He can say why,” Benson countered, dipping four fingers of each hand into his coat pockets and wiggling his thumbs.
The private doctor closed the door after him.
“Now he’s going to stand and chisel the rest of the show free, just because he was called in,” the manager predicted sourly.
“He can have my seat,” Benson remarked. “I won’t be using it any more tonight.”
He brushed a fleck of gold paint off the front of his coat, then another off the cuff of his coat sleeve. “Let’s get the arithmetic down.” He took out a black notebook, poised a worn-down pencil stub over the topmost ruled line of a blank page. The pages that had gone before — and many had gone before — were all closely scrawled over with names, addresses, and other data. Then, one by one, wavy downward lines were scored through them. That meant: case closed.
The manager opened a drawer in his desk, took out a ledger, sought a pertinent page, traced a sausage-like thumb down a list of payroll names. “Here she is. Real name, Annie Willis. ‘Gilda’ was just her—”
Benson jotted. “I know.”
He gave the address on West 135th. “There’s a phone number to go with it, too.”
Benson jotted. He looked up, said, “Oh, hello, Jacobson,” as the man from the examiner’s office came in, went back to his note-taking again.
Outside, 300-odd people sat watching a line-up of girls dance. Inside, the business of documenting a human death went on, with low-voiced diligence.
Benson repeated: “Nearest of kin, Frank Willis, husband—”
The examining assistant groused softly to himself: “I can’t get anything out of it at all, especially through all this gilt. It mighta been a heart attack; it mighta been acute indigestion. All I can give you for sure, until we get downtown, is she’s dead, good and dead—”
The manager was getting peevish at this protracted invasion of his privacy. “That makes three times she’s been dead, already. I’m willing to believe it, if no one else is.”
Benson murmured, “This is the part I hate worst,” and began to dial with his pencil stub.
An usher sidled in, asked: “What’ll we do about the marquee, boss? She’s still up on it, and it’s gotta be changed now for tomorrow’s matinee.”
“Just take down the ‘G’ from ‘Gilda’, see? Then stick in an ‘H’ instead, make it ‘Hilda.’ That saves the trouble of changing the whole—”
“But who’s Hilda, boss?”
“I don’t know myself! If the customers don’t see anyone called Hilda, that’ll teach them not to believe in signs!”
Benson was saying quietly: “Is this Frank Willis? Are you the husband of Annie Willis, working at the New Rotterdam Theater?... All right, now take it easy. She died during the performance this evening... Yeah, onstage about half an hour ago... No, you won’t find her here by the time you get down. You’ll be notified when the body’s released by the medical examiner’s office. They want to perform an autopsy... Now don’t get frightened, that’s just a matter of form, they always do that. It just means an examination... You can claim her at the city morgue when they’re through with her.”