“You say she left it on yesterday. Why? Have you any idea?”
Again it was the McKee girl who answered, spading her palms at him. “Because she mislaid the cleanser, the stuff that came with it to remove it. They both come together. You can’t buy one without the other. It’s a special preparation that sort of curls it up and peels it off clean and even. Nothing else works as well or as quick. You can’t use cold cream, and even alcohol isn’t much good. You can scrub your head off and it just makes a mess of your skin—”
“And yesterday it disappeared?”
“Right after the finale, she started to holler: ‘Who took my paint remover? Anybody seen my paint remover?’ Well, between the three of us, we turned the room inside out, and no sign of it. She emptied her whole drawer out. Everything else was there but that. She even went into a couple of the other dressing rooms to find out if anybody had it in there. I told her nobody else would want it. She was the only one in the company who used that gilt junk. It wouldn’t have been any good to anyone else. It never turned up.”
“Finish telling me.”
“Finally Vilma and me had to go out and eat. Time was getting short. Other nights, the three of us always ate together. We told her if she found it in time to hurry up after us. We’d keep a place for her at our table. She never showed up. When we got back for the night show, sure enough, she was still in her electroplating. She told us she’d had to send Jimmy the handyman out for something and had eaten right in the dressing room.”
Benson cocked his head slightly, as when one looks downward into a narrow space. “Are you sure this bottle of remover couldn’t have been in the drawer and she missed seeing it?”
“That was the first place we cased. We had everything out. I remember holding it up in my hand empty and thumping the bottom of it just for luck!”
His wrist shot out of his cuff, hitched back into it again, like some sort of a hydraulic brake. “Then what’s it doing in there now?” He was holding a small bottle, mate to the first, except that its contents were liquid and there was a small sponge attached to its neck.
It got quiet in the dressing room, deathly quiet. So quiet you could even hear the sound track from the screen out front.
It got quiet in the dressing-room, deathly quiet. So quiet you could even hear the sound track from the screen out front: “This is Ed Torgerson bringing you latest camera highlights from the sport news of the day.”
They both had such frightened looks on their faces, the superstitious fright of two giddy, thoughtless creatures who have suddenly come face to face with nameless evil.
The McKee girl’s lower lip was trembling with awe. “It was put back — after! Somebody wanted her to die like that! With us right here in the same room with her!” She took a deep breath, threw open her own drawer, and with a defiant look at Benson, as if to say, “Try and stop me,” tilted a small, flat gin bottle to her mouth.
The ballet singer, Vilma Lyons, suddenly dropped her head into her folded arms on the littered dressing table and began to sob.
The stage manager bopped a fist on the door and called in: “The customers are waiting to see your operations. If that dick’s still questioning you in there, tell him to put on a girdle and follow you out on the runway!”
III
“Yes, sir, boss, I’m Jimmy, the handyman.” He put down his bucket, followed Benson out into the alley, where they wouldn’t be in the way of the girls hustling in and out on quick changes. “Yes, sir, Miss Gilda sent me out last night between shows to try to get her another bottle of that there stuff, which took off the gold paint.”
“Why didn’t you get it?”
“I couldn’t! I went to the big theatrical drugstore on Eighth where she told me. It’s the only place around here where you can get it and even there they don’t keep much on hand, never get much call for it. The drugstore man told me somebody else just beat me to it. He told me he just got through selling the last bottle he had in stock, before I got there.”
“Keep on,” Benson said curtly.
“That’s about all. The drugstore man promised to order another bottle for her right away from his company’s warehouse or the wholesaler that puts it up, and see that it’s in first thing in the morning. So I went back and told her. Then she sent me across the street to the cafeteria to bring her a sandwich. When I came back the second time, she was sitting there acting kind of low, holding her head. She said, ‘Jimmy, I’m sorry I ordered that bite, after all. I don’t feel well. I hope nothing happens to me from leaving this stuff on too long.’ ”
All Benson said was: “You come along and point out that druggist to me.”
“Come in, Benson.”
“Lieutenant, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a report here from Jacobson that I haven’t turned in to you yet. I’ve been keeping it until I know what to do about it.”
“What’s the hitch?”
“Lieutenant, is there such a thing as a negative murder? By that I mean, when not a finger is lifted against the victim, not a hair of her head is actually touched. But the murder is accomplished by withholding something, so that death is caused by an absence or lack.”
The lieutenant was quick on the trigger. “Certainly! If a man locks another man up in a room, and withholds food from him until the guy has starved to death, you’d call that murder, wouldn’t you? Even though the guy that caused his death never touched him with a ten-foot pole, never stepped in past the locked door at all.”
Benson plucked doubtfully at the cord of skin between his throat and chin. “But what do you do when you have no proof of intention? I mean, when you’ve got evidence that the act of withholding or removal was committed, but no proof that the intention was murderous. And how you gonna get proof of intention, anyway? It’s something inside the mind, isn’t it?”
The lieutenant glowered, said: “What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You bring your bird in and you keep him until you get the intention out of his mind and down in typewriting! That’s what you do!”
The man was alone when he started down the three flights of stairs in the shoddy walk-up apartment on West 135th. He was still alone when he got down to the bottom of them. And then somehow, between the foot of the stairs and the street door, he wasn’t alone any more. Benson was walking along beside him, as soundlessly as though his own shadow had crept forward and overtaken him along the poorly lit passage.
He shied sideways and came to a dead stop against the wall, the apparition was so unexpected.
Benson said quietly: “Come on, what’re you stopping for? You were leaving the house, weren’t you, Willis? Well, you’re still leaving the house, what’s the difference?”
They walked on as far as the street entrance. Benson just kept one fingertip touching the other’s elbow, in a sort of mockery of guidance. Willis said, “What am I pinched for?”
“Who said you were pinched? Do you know of anything you should be pinched for?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then you’re not pinched. Simple enough, isn’t it?”
Willis didn’t say another word after that. Benson only said two things more himself, one to his charge, the other to a cab driver. He remarked: “Come on, we’ll ride it. I’m no piker.” And when a cab had sidled up to his signal, he named a precinct police station. They rode the whole way in stony silence, Willis staring straight ahead in morbid reverie, Benson with his eyes toward the cab window — but on the shadowy reflection of Willis’s face given back by the glass, not the street outside.