Cue For Murder Read online

  Helen McCloy and The Murder Room

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  The Murder Room

  Where Criminal Minds Meet

  themurderroom.com

  Cue for Murder

  Helen McCloy

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Chapter One: Prologue

  Chapter Two: Persons in the Play

  Chapter Three: Enter First Murderer

  Chapter Four: Ad Lib

  Chapter Five: Leading Juvenile

  Chapter Six: First Lady

  Chapter Seven: Character Part

  Chapter Eight: Enter Rumor Painted Full of Tongues

  Chapter Nine: Aside

  Chapter Ten: Rehearsal

  Chapter Eleven: Behind the Scenes

  Chapter Twelve: Encore

  Chapter Thirteen: Alarums and Excursions

  Chapter Fourteen: Scène-à-Faire

  Outro

  By Helen McCloy

  Dedication

  About the author

  Copyright page

  Chapter One

  Prologue

  THE MURDER MYSTERY at the Royalty Theatre was solved through the agency of a house fly and a canary.

  The fly discovered the chemical evidence that so impressed the jury at the trial, but the canary provided a psychological clue to the murderer’s identity before the murder was committed. Basil Willing is still troubled by the thought that it might have been prevented if he had read the riddle of the canary sooner.

  It began with the canary. Though birds are unblessed with public relations counsels this one made the first page of the Times one spring morning when a weary make-up man snatched a filler at random from the galley file to plug a hole at the bottom of column three.

  BURGLAR FREES BIRD

  New York, April 28—Police are puzzled by the odd behavior of a burglar who broke into Marcus Lazarus’ knife-grinding shop near West 44th Street shortly before dawn yesterday. Nothing was stolen but the intruder opened the cage of Lazarus’ pet canary and set the bird free. The shop is hardly more than a shack in an alley leading to the stage door of the Royalty Theatre.

  On April 28 at eleven o’clock in the morning, Dr. Basil Willing unfurled a copy of the Times at breakfast on a plane from Washington to New York. He read the war headlines with the sensation of individual littleness that an ant must have during an earthquake. It was a relief to come across such a human item as BURGLAR FREES BIRD. That was criminal behavior on a conceivable scale; pleasantly trivial after the murder of peoples, the robbery of continents, and the perversion of cultures. The little puzzle teased his imagination as prettily as a problem in chess or mathematics.

  Why risk incurring the severe penalties for burglary by breaking into a shop without stealing anything? Why prolong the risk by lingering on the premises to free a canary from its cage? Was this erratic burglar a man of sentiment who broke into the shop solely in order to free a bird from a cage that was cramped or dark or dirty? A telephone call to the A.S.P.C.A would have been far less risky and more permanent in its effect. But if freeing the bird were an afterthought, what sort of burglar would be distracted from the serious business of burgling by such a frivolous impulse?

  At the moment Basil believed his knowledge of this “crime” would always be limited to the few facts contained in the news item. The construction of a plausible hypothesis within such narrow limits was a mental exercise as strict, and therefore as stimulating, as the composition of a sonnet. But the longer he played with those few facts, the more clearly he realized that no hypothesis he could construct embraced all the facts adequately. If this were an anagram, some of the letters were missing. The letters he had spelled only nonsense words and stray syllables, unintelligible and tantalizing as a message in an unknown code.

  That afternoon Basil stopped at Police Headquarters to discuss a sabotage case with Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle of the Police Department.

  “Well, well!” For once the Inspector’s shrewd, skeptical face was off guard, relaxed and friendly. “I thought you were marooned in Washington for the duration!”

  “At the moment I’m working with the New York office of the F.B.I.”

  “As a psychiatrist or an investigator?”

  “A little of both. Very much the sort of work I used to do for the D.A. If it weren’t for you I’d be in uniform by this time.”

  “What have I to do with it?”

  “You gave me my first chance to apply psychology to the detection of criminals. Now I’m supposed to be applying it to the detection of spies and saboteurs. But I ought to be with some medical unit. I’m under forty-four, I have no wife or children, and I’ve been in the Medical Reserve Corps ever since the last war. I went straight from Johns Hopkins to a casualty clearing station, and it was through shell-shock cases that I first became interested in psychiatry.”

  “Don’t worry, doc,” said Foyle dryly. “They’ll call you up quick enough if they need you. They probably think that anybody who speaks German like a native and reads a crooked mind like a book is more useful doing what you’re doing now. . . . Funny thing happened to me the other day. I was walking down Whitehall Street sort of fast, the way I always walk when I’m thinking, and a recruiting sergeant sees me and comes rushing up to me with a big smile. Then suddenly he stops and his smile goes out like a light and he shakes his head and turns away. When he first saw me he thought I might do because I’m still thin and wiry and can move fast; but when he got close enough to see my gray hair and the lines in my face he wasn’t interested any more. I suppose I should’ve been glad in a way, but I wasn’t. I felt the way I did the first time a truck driver called me ‘pop’ instead of ‘buddy.’”

  War talk brought the morning paper to Basil’s mind, and that in turn reminded him of the canary.

  “Yeah, it was sort of funny,” admitted Foyle. “I got a report on it from the precinct this morning. I thought it might be a publicity stunt.”

  “For whom?”

  “Wanda Morley. Her new show opens at the Royalty in a day or so, and the knife-grinder’s shop is right next door. But her press agent swears he doesn’t know a thing about it, and her name hasn’t been mentioned in connection with it. If there were any tie-up it would’ve come out by this time.”

  “Is there anything of value in the shop?”

  Foyle laughed. “You should see it! Nothing but a grindstone and a lot of rusty old knives and scissors.”

  “Has Lazarus any enemies who might do a thing like that just to annoy him?”

  “He says not. If people wanted to annoy him wouldn’t they have stolen something? Or injured the bird? It was perfectly all right—just out of its cage flying around the room when Lazarus came to his shop to work yesterday morning. Then he noticed the door of the cage standing open and the broken latch at the window. Those were the only signs that anyone had been there.”

  “But why?” persisted Basil.

  “That’s your headache, doc. My job is to catch the guys who do wrong—not to worry about why they do it! Maybe you can tell me why they always push forward at a fire when we tell them to stand back?” The Inspector weighed his next words. “I wish it hadn’t been a knife-grinding shop.”

  Basil’s interest quickened as if someone had supplied one of the missing vowels to his anagram. “So that’s it?”

  “Looks that way. We made quite sure nothing had been stolen. That can mean only one thing: “Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife—without witnesses.”

  “Murder?”

  “Sure. With malice prepense. But there’s nothing we can do about it. No fingerprints. No clues. . . .”

  Outside in Centre Street, the east wind struck through Basil’s spring overcoat with a sudden, keen thrust. Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife. . . . In his mind’s eye, he saw the dark, faceless figure in the gray, dreamy light just before dawn sliding a moistened thumb along a blade secretly sharpened to a slicing edge. There would be the low humming of a grindstone and a spray of cold blue sparks; but no one would be likely to see or hear anything at that hour in a little shack in an obscure alley running through the theatrical district. Why such stealth unless the purpose were murder in its most inhumane form—with the premeditation of a surgeon and the callous blood-letting of a butcher? That was sound enough as police logic, but . . .

  With an almost audible click, new facts and old fell into juxtaposition. His anagram had become less intelligible than ever. If this were murder in its most in humane form, why
free the canary?

  Like most modern psychiatrists, Basil Willing believed that no human being can ever perform any act without a motive, conscious or unconscious. The unmotivated act was a myth like the unicorn or the sea serpent. Even slips and blunders had their roots in the needs of the emotional nature. He had used his knowledge of that fact to solve his first murder case. But what was the motive here? What feeling had informed the hand that unlatched the door of the canary’s cage yesterday morning?

  However pitiful a winged creature in a cage may be, a murderer planning to use a knife against a fellow human being is hardly in the mood for pity. . . .

  Chapter Two

  Persons in the Play

  THE MODERN ART GALLERY was inclosed in a penthouse on Central Park South. The architect prided himself on being “functional,” but he had forgotten that the principal function of a modern building is resistance to air raids. He had made the north wall of the gallery one great sheet of sheer plate glass. After Pearl Harbor, the management had supplemented the glass with two-inch bands of adhesive tape, criss-crossed in a series of tall X’s and sealed flat and taut with an electric iron.

  Outside, winter lingered in the Park like an insensitive guest who has long outstayed his welcome. The turf was bald and dry and brown. The skeleton trees made a black mesh against a sultry streak of saffron at the western edge of the white sky. Nurses and children, hurrying east to home and supper, bent their heads forward, unconsciously streamlining themselves in order to cleave the April wind. There was not a hint of green in the landscape, but there was a new freshness in the air that hinted of all the green things to come in a few weeks.

  Inside, a crowd of invited guests—largely feminine, furred, perfumed, and voluble—pretended there were no such things as wars and east winds. Soundproof walls shut out traffic noises. A thermostat maintained a temperature as mild and even as that of an embryo. Brilliant, artificial light from concealed sources was refracted in every direction by three blond walls of wax-rubbed pine. There were no shadows. The gallery was a solid cube of light, a medium where people moved and had their being like fish in a tank of illuminated water.

  Now and then one of the guests remembered to glance at the paintings on the walls and tell the exiled artist in schoolgirl French that his oeuvre was épatante and vraie Parisienne. For the most part, they sipped cocktails, nibbled macaroons, admired fragments of T’ang pottery on the twin mantelpieces, or sat down to gossip on settees covered with tight, slippery leather in jade green.

  A young man and a girl were sitting on one of these settees—the one with its back to the glass wall. The girl was pretty, but there was nothing remarkable in her prettiness. Hundreds of girls have chestnut-brown curls that gleam red when light touches them and gray eyes that seem blue under a blue hat. The freckles across her short nose were faded as if she had changed an outdoor life for an indoor light in the last few years. The women in red fox and rayon velvet and flowered hats looked at the beautiful severity of her tweed suit and decided that she was underdressed. The women in silver fox and bagheera and clever black hats looked at the same suit and wondered if they could be overdressed. Something in the short curl of her upper lip and the tilt of her small, stubborn chin suggested that she cared little for their opinions. Her manner was composed and detached, rather businesslike. On her knee was a sketch pad; in her right hand, a soft, black pencil. From time to time, she sketched something in the crowd that pleased or amused her—a piquant profile, an impossible hat, or an ungainly silhouette.

  The young man had slumped down on the seat beside her with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a shade fairer than the girl and about her own age—in the late twenties. His eyes were too round, his mouth too wide, his legs too long; yet the general effect of his appearance was pleasing, for he had the look of youth, health, high spirits, and an affable disposition. At the moment he was not being affable. Neither was the girl.

  “I don’t see why we should wait any longer.”

  “Don’t you?” The man’s eye followed her pencil.

  “Maybe we’d better call the whole thing off.”

  “Now, Pauline—” he began.

  She cut him short. “I don’t like secrets—particularly secret engagements. And I don’t see any reason for it. Both our parents were delighted. Though you don’t seem to realize it, there are other men in the world. Some of them ask me out to dinner and—so forth. If they knew I were engaged to you they—well, it would make things easier all around. As it is, I’m neither engaged nor disengaged. I’m suspended in a vacuum. It’s hard to act as if you were an engaged girl when nobody knows you are. It wouldn’t matter for a short time, but it’s been going on for several months now. Honestly, Rod, I’m tired of keeping my ring in a bureau drawer and looking self-conscious whenever your name is mentioned. I can understand waiting until after the run of the play to get married, but why can’t we tell people we’re engaged?”

  “Because we just can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s—well, you wouldn’t understand. You’ll just have to take it on trust that we can’t.”

  “How are we ever going to get along after we’re married if you don’t trust my understanding enough to tell me things that matter so much to both of us?”

  “And how are we ever going to get along if you don’t trust me at all?”

  Pauline closed the sketch pad and slipped the pencil into a slot in the cover. “Rod, we can’t go on like this. We will have to call it off.”

  “All right, then do!” Rod assumed an elaborate nonchalance. “May I get you a cocktail?”

  “If you will be so kind.” What a dreadful thing politeness was: always the mask of hostility between sexes or classes; never the medium of true friendship or true love. Pauline watched Rod as he rose and disappeared into the crowd. Her lips parted as if she were going to call him back, then closed again without making a sound. To think that so much could be ended by so little! A few sharp words spoken under cover of a chattering crowd and the whole thing was all over.

  Mechanically, she pulled out the pencil again and reopened the sketch book. But the line faltered. Her hand was trembling. Her throat felt swollen and raw. I mustn’t cry. There are hundreds of people looking at me. Her eye caught the outline of a short, fat woman in a short, fat, fur coat pushing through the crowd like a tug through heavy seas. Her quick, nervous pencil pinned the fugitive absurdity to paper with three strokes. She felt the bench yield to a weight at the other end. Someone had sat down beside her. Her eyes were on the sketch pad as a man’s voice spoke.

  “You couldn’t be more detached if you were sketching monkeys at the zoo.”

  She started and turned an arrogantly blank face in the direction of the voice. Then a light came into her eyes. “Basil! What are you doing here?”

  “Sur-réaliste painting is just another form of psychoanalysis to me. What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I might get some ideas.” The pencil noted a young girl’s frivolous, feather hat perched above a solemn, old face.

  “For a portrait of mutton dressed as lamb?”

  “No, costumes. I design them, you know. For the stage. Or perhaps you didn’t know.”

  “No, I didn’t. The last time I saw you, your chief interest in life was—let me see. . . . Was it the rhumba? Or beagling?”

  “Beagling. But that was ages ago.”

  “About fifteen years ago. You were thirteen or fourteen.”

  “And you were an old man—thirty-two or three. But now you’re just about my own age. I believe Einstein was right!”

  He laughed. “When I first saw you, you were fifteen inches long and weighed eight pounds. That was during the last war.”

  She nodded. “I was three when the Armistice came. The family never let me forget that I remarked: Won’t it be funny not to have a war any more?” Her gaze explored his lean, ageless, brown face; his dark, penetrating eyes. In the bright light she saw two single gray threads in the thick, brown hair. She would have said he was thirty-five—thirty-eight at the most. But he must be a year or so over forty now; for she knew he had been in her father’s class at Johns Hopkins in 1916 and had left it for the Medical Corps in 1917.