He hung up, murmured under his breath: “Funny how a strange word they don’t understand, like ‘autopsy,’ always throws a scare into them when they first hear it.” He eyed the manager’s swivel chair. It was empty now, except for a swath of gold-paint flecks down the middle of the back, like a sunset reflection. He grimaced discontentedly. “I shoulda stayed home tonight altogether. Then somebody else would have had to handle the blamed thing! Never saw it to fail yet. Every time I try to see a show—”
II
Next day at eleven a cop handed Benson a typewritten autopsy report.
Benson didn’t place the name for a minute. Then: “Oh yeah, that girl in the show last night — Gilda.” He glanced down at his own form with rueful recollection. “It’s going to cost me two bucks to have the front of that other suit dry-cleaned. Okay, thanks. I’ll take it into the lieutenant.”
He scanned it cursorily himself first, before doing so. Then he stopped short, frowned, went back and read one or two of the passages more carefully.
“...Death caused by sealing of the pores over nearly the entire body surface for a protracted period. This substance is deleterious when kept on for longer than an hour or two at the most. It is composed of infinitesimal particles of gold leaf which adhere to the pores, blocking them. This produces a form of bodily suffocation, as fatal in the end, if less immediate than stoppage of the breathing passage. The symptoms are delayed, then strike with cumulative suddenness, resulting in weakness, dizziness, collapse, and finally death. Otherwise the subject was perfectly sound organically in every way. There can be no doubt that this application of theatrical pigment and failure to remove it in time was the sole cause of mortality—”
He tapped a couple of nails on the desk undecidedly a minute or two. Finally he picked up the phone and got the manager of the New Rotterdam Theater. He hadn’t come in yet, but they switched the call to his home. “This is Benson, headquarters man that was in your office last night. How long had this Gilda — Annie Willis, you know — been doing this gilt act?”
“Oh, quite some time — five or six months now.”
“Then she wasn’t green at it; she wasn’t just breaking it in.”
“No, no, she was an old hand at it.”
He hung up, tapped his nails some more. “Funny she didn’t know enough by this time to take it off before it had a chance to smother her,” he murmured half under his breath. The report should have gone into his lieutenant, and that should have ended it. Accidental death due to carelessness, that was all. She’d been too lazy or too rushed to remove the harmful substance between shows, and had paid the penalty.
But a good detective is five-sixths hard work and one-sixth blind, spontaneous “hunches.” Benson wasn’t a bad detective. And his one-sixth had come uppermost just then. He folded the examiner’s report, put it in his pocket, and didn’t take it into his lieutenant. He went back to the New Rotterdam Theater on 42nd Street, instead.
It was open even this early, although the stage show didn’t go on yet. A handful of sidewalk beachcombers were drifting in, to get in out of the sun. The manager had evidently thought better of his marquee shortchange of the night before. The canopy still misleadingly proclaimed “Gilda, the Golden Dancer,” but below it there was now affixed a small placard, so tiny it was invisible unless you got up on a ladder to scan it: “Next Week.”
The manager acted anything but glad to see him back so soon. “I knew that wasn’t the end of it! With you fellows these things go on forever. Listen, she keeled over in front of everybody in the theater. People are dropping dead on the streets like that every minute of the day, here, there, everywhere. What’s there to find out about? Something gave out inside. It was her time to go, and there you are.”
Benson wasn’t an argumentative sort of person. “Sure,” he agreed unruffledly. “And now it’s my time to come nosing around about it — and there you are. Who shared her dressing room with her — or did she have one to herself?”
The manager shrugged disdainfully. “These aren’t the days when the Ziegfeld Follies played this house. She split it with Vilma Lyons — that’s the show’s ballad singer, you know, the only full-dressed girl in the company — and June McKee. She leads the chorus in a couple of numbers.”
“Are her belongings still in it?”
“They must be. Nobody’s called for them yet, as far as I know.”
“Let’s go back there,” Benson suggested.
“Listen, the show’s cooking to go on—”
“I won’t get in its way,” Benson assured him.
They came out of the office, went down a side aisle skirting the orchestra, with scattered spectators already lounging here and there. A seven-year-old talking picture, with Morse Code dots and dashes running up it all the time, was clouding the screen at the moment. They climbed onto the stage at the side, went in behind the screen, through the wings, and down a short, damp, feebly lighted passage, humming with feminine voices coming from behind doors that kept opening and closing as girls came in from the alley at the other end of the passage, in twos and threes.
The manager thumped one of the doors, turned the knob, and opened it with one and the same gesture — and a perfect indifference to the consequences. “Put on something, kids. There’s a detective coming in.”
“What’s the matter, isn’t he over twenty-one?” one of them jeered.
The manager stood aside to let Benson pass, then went back along the passageway toward his office with the warning: “Don’t gum them up now. This show hits fast once it gets going.”
There were two girls in there, working away at opposite ends of a three-paneled mirror. The middle space and chair were vacant. Benson’s face appeared in all three of the mirrors at once, as he came in and closed the door after him. One girl clutched at a wrapper, flung it around her shoulders. The other calmly went ahead applying make-up, leaving her undraped backbone exposed to view down to her waist.
“You two have been sharing the same dressing room with Annie Willis,” he said. “Did she usually leave this shiny junk on between shows, or take it off each time?”
The chorus leader, the one the manager had called June McKee, answered, in high-pitched derogation at such denseness. “Whadd’ye think, she could go out and cat between show’s with her face all gold like that? She woulda had a crowd following her along the street! Sure she took it off.”
They looked at one another with a sudden flash of enlightened curiosity. The McKee girl, a strawberry blonde, turned around toward him. “Sa-ay, is that what killed her, that gold stuff?” she asked in a husky whisper.
Benson overrode that. “Did she take it off yesterday or did she leave it on?”
“She left it on.” She turned to her bench mate, the brunette ballad singer, for corroboration. “Didn’t she, Vilma? Remember?”
“Where is this gold stuff? I’d like to see it.”
“It must be here with the rest of her stuff.” The McKee girl reached over, pulled out the middle of the three table drawers, left it open for him to help himself. “Look in there.” It was in pulverized form, in a small jar. It had a greenish tinge to it that way. He read the label. It was put up by a reputable cosmetic manufacturing company. There were directions for application and removal, and then an explicit warning: “Do not allow to remain on any longer than necessary after each performance.” She must have read that a dozen times in the course of using the stuff. She couldn’t have failed to see it.