Death in the Fifth Position

  “Now,” said Gleason, in a voice which was, for him, gentle, “why did you come here tonight?”

  “To see Miles.” Her voice was emotionless; she kept staring at the white sheet.

  “Why did you want to see him?”

  “I … I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of his being arrested. You were going to arrest him, weren’t you?”

  “He was guilty.”

  She shook her head, slowly. “No, he didn’t kill her … but I told you that once, when you came to see me.”

  “What did you intend to do tonight? Why did you come?”

  “I wanted to … to get him to run away, with me, the two of us. We could have gone to Mexico … any place. I wanted …” But she didn’t finish her sentence; she looked dully at Gleason.

  “You couldn’t have got away,” said Gleason quietly. “He couldn’t have got away. You see, he was watched every minute; didn’t you know that? Why, there was even a man watching this building tonight.”

  Mr. Washburn gave a start. “You mean …”

  Gleason nodded, looking very pleased with himself. “I mean, Mr. Washburn, that at one-ten you were seen entering this building and at one-twenty-seven you left it, in a great hurry. What were you doing here?”

  Mr. Washburn shut his eyes, like an ostrich heading for a sandpile.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “I came to talk to Miles.” Mr. Washburn opened his eyes and his voice was even and controlled: he was still the intrepid Ivan Washburn, the peerless impresario … he could take care of himself, I decided.

  “And did you talk to him?”

  “Yes, I did … and if you’re implying that I killed him you are very much mistaken, Inspector Gleason.”

  “I implied no such thing.”

  “Don’t even think it,” said Mr. Washburn coolly, as though he were saying: if you go after me I’ll see that you end up pounding a beat in Brooklyn. “I had some business I wanted to talk over with Miles. That’s all.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “His contract, if you must know. I told him that it would not be renewed. That we would tour without him.”

  “What was his reaction to this?”

  “He was upset.”

  “Why did you tell him this tonight? Why didn’t you have him come to your office tomorrow? Or you could have written him.”

  “I wanted to tell him myself. He was a friend of mine, Mr. Gleason … a very good friend.”

  “Yet you were prepared to fire him?”

  “I was indeed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I suspected that sooner or later you would arrest him and that, even if you didn’t, too many people thought he was a murderer … too many of our backers, to be blunt about it.”

  “I see … and you left in the middle of a party to come tell him this?”

  “We both seem agreed that I did,” said Mr. Washburn.

  “Could anyone else have visited Sutton this evening?” I asked, eager to get my employer off the hook.

  Gleason ignored me. “Did you notice anything unusual about the deceased?”

  “He was not deceased when I arrived, if that’s what you mean, and he was very much alive when I left.”

  “I meant did he act peculiar in any way, say anything which might throw light on what subsequently happened.” Excellent sentence, Gleason, I said to myself; he was beginning to face up to the fact that none of his “deceased” talk was going to get him anywhere with this gang.

  “He objected to my firing him and he said that he did not kill his wife no matter what the police thought and that he would welcome a trial.”

  “So he told us,” said Gleason. “And we were perfectly willing to give him a chance to tell all, under an indictment, of course. But then what did you say?”

  “I told him that I was convinced of his innocence, but that no one else was, that I would be only too happy to take him back after a trial, presuming he was acquitted.”

  “You got the feeling, then, that Sutton was looking forward to a trial?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But you said …”

  “As a matter of fact, he was terrified of appearing in court. As you know he took drugs and he was positive that the prosecution would throw all that at him … I can tell you that he was not afraid of the murder charge … I don’t know why but he wasn’t; it was the drug thing that disturbed him: the idea not only of being sent to jail for it, or whatever the law is, but, worse, of having it taken away from him even for a few days during the trial …”

  “He was going to give all that up when we were married,” said Magda in a tired, faraway voice. “There’s a place in Connecticut where they cure you. He was going to go there. We were to spend our honeymoon there.” She stopped abruptly, like a phonograph when the needle’s lifted.

  “Then when you left the … Sutton he was alive and angry.”

  “I’m afraid so … angry, I mean.”

  “Did anyone else come to see him in the last hour?” I repeated.

  “I’m asking the questions,” snapped Gleason. “Was that fire escape watched?” I asked, just to be ornery. “The one outside the kitchen window.”

  “So you noticed there was a fire escape, eh?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you at the party, too?”

  “Yes … remember, Mr. Gleason, I’m the one without a motive.”

  Gleason gave me a warning or two about the possible dangers into which my insouciance might yet lead me.

  While we had been talking, the detectives had ransacked the apartment and the photographer had taken pictures of everything in sight. They were now ready to push off. Gleason, receiving a signal from his chief lieutenant, stood up, rubbing his hands together as though washing them of the guilt of others.

  “I will see all of you, tomorrow. Can you get home alone?” He turned to Magda.

  “Yes … yes,” she said, stirring in her chair.

  “You better see her home, Macy.” The detective in question nodded and helped her to her feet.

  “I hope,” said Mr. Washburn, “that this turns out to be the end of the whole ugly business.”

  “Or the beginning,” said Gleason darkly.

  “I presume that you had a case against him. Now that he is dead … suicide, accident, who knows how he died? … the fact remains that a man about to be arrested for a murder has died and so the case … Oh, Lord, look!” Mr. Washburn leaped back and we all turned to stare at the figure on the floor. The sheet which covered him had caught fire from the still smoldering head and a yellow flame, like a daffodil in the wind, blossomed on the white sheet. I was not there, however, to see it put out; I had followed, as quickly as I could, Mr. Washburn’s blind dash down the stairs to the street outside.

  3

  For once I didn’t really want to see the newspapers; neither did my employer but of course we read them all, together, in absolute silence. “Death Company” … “Slain Dancer’s Husband Suicide” … “Mystery Death of Murder Suspect” … “Second Death in Jinx Ballet” … Needless to say, we had all the front pages to ourselves. When we had finished the lot we looked at one another. Fortunately, at that moment, Alma Edderdale saw fit to telephone and I left the office and headed for the Met.

  A crowd had gathered at the stage door, for no particular reason … just to be as near as possible to a couple of murders and, better yet, to be near a murderer. I pushed my way through them and went immediately to Jane’s dressing room. She had been asleep when I got home from Sutton’s apartment the night before and she had been asleep when I left in the morning, at nine o’clock, to help Mr. Washburn with the reporters who had, for three hours, made our lives miserable at the office.

  She was mending one of her costumes; the day was cruelly hot and she wore no clothes.

  I gave her a long healthy kiss, tilting her chair back so far that she kicked the air gracefully with he
r long legs, to keep her balance.

  “Is it true?” she asked, when we were done and I was again composed.

  I nodded. “Has Gleason seen you yet?”

  “I don’t see him till four something. He killed himself, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But … like that! Did you see him?”

  I shuddered, remembering. “I’ll say. It was the awfullest sight … worse than the war … at least then you were usually looking at people you didn’t know, and there were so many of them …”

  “But the papers act as if he’d been murdered.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But how could he kill himself in that way?”

  “He might’ve passed out … you know he was taking an awful lot of the stuff, whatever it was he took … you remember my telling you how I found him passed out in the hall the day after Ella died.”

  “Let’s hope this is the end of the whole mess.”

  “I hope so, too.” But I knew that we hadn’t come to the end of the trouble … I’d taken to calling it “the trouble” in my mind, like one of those Negro spirituals.

  “How’re the kids in the company holding up?”

  “Scared to death,” Jane smiled. “They’re positive we’ve got a maniac around … they go everywhere in pairs, even to the john.”

  “And the thing I always liked about dancers was that they had no imagination.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re against ballet.”

  “I am … I am,” I said, locking the door. “But I’m not against you …” And I headed for her with an insane leer, scaring hell out of her. Then, before she had time to complain, I was out of my clothes and we were together on the floor, doing it like Mamma and Poppa as Eglanova would say … she likes the old-fashioned, heart-to-heart method, with no thrashing about … so do I, on hot days at least, when anything else would use up too much energy. After we finished, we lay side by side for a bit on the cool dirty floor.

  “We shouldn’t have done that,” said Jane, at last.

  “Why not? We missed last night. At least I did.”

  “I did, too.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t have a frolic with that Senator?”

  “With who?”

  “That big middle-aged job with the gray hair you were talking to at the party … the red face.”

  “Oh him! Was he a Senator?”

  “I should say so.”

  “He told me he was a broker named Haskell.”

  “I hope you got your money in advance.”

  “Don’t be dirty.”

  A knock on the door brought us both to our feet in a flash. “Wait a second,” called Jane in the cool voice of one used to keeping her head in crises. Since I had not taken off my shoes and socks, I was able to dress with a speed which did credit to my military training. Jane slipped into a bathrobe and opened the door while I sat down before the dressing-table mirror and dried my sweaty face with a handkerchief as Magda entered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know …”

  “Come on in,” said Jane briskly, offering her the third and last chair. “How do you feel?”

  “Awful … naturally.”

  “I thought you were too sick to come to the theater?”

  “I am,” said Magda, and she did look ill. “I wanted to come, though. To talk to you, to my friends here. You have no idea what it’s been like this last week with my family around and everything, not being able to see Miles …” Her voice broke a little. “The family wouldn’t let me see him but he came once, anyway, when they were out and we talked and made plans and then I went to see him last night.”

  “Have you seen Gleason yet today?” I asked quickly, before she could start weeping. “Yes.”

  “What does he say—what about the autopsy?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me but I told him that someone had killed Miles … I don’t know how but someone did.”

  “But why? If somebody else murdered Ella then they certainly wouldn’t murder Miles just as he was about to be arrested for Ella’s murder.”

  “Oh, but they would,” said Magda. “You see, Miles knew who killed Ella.” I must say this gave us both a jolt.

  “How do you know he did?”

  “Because he told me so the last time I saw him. He told me not to worry … that if they tried to charge him with murder he would tell everything.”

  “But he didn’t tell you who it was?”

  Was it my imagination or did she pause just a second before she answered? Before she said: “No, he didn’t tell me.”

  “Did you tell Gleason all this?”

  “Oh yes … I told him a lot more, too.”

  “The sooner it’s finished the better,” said Jane emphatically, taking out her sewing kit and going to work on the torn costume.

  We talked a little more and then, seeing that the girls had a lot to discuss, I wandered on stage where Alyosha was giving some directions to the electricians. He looked very dapper in a Lord Byron shirt, magenta slacks, with a silk handkerchief tied about his lean neck and his monocle screwed in one eye.

  “We must have everything right for tomorrow,” he said to me as the electrician walked away. “Anna will do Swan Lake.”

  “And for once, it won’t be her ‘last’ performance,” I said.

  Alyosha smiled. “No, she won’t be able to weep this year. Ten more years I give her. She is at her peak.”

  Well, you better get her some contact lenses, I said to myself, trying to imagine the old star at sixty reeling about the stage in Giselle.

  “Have you seen Wilbur today?”

  I said that I hadn’t.

  “I was told he was to start rehearsing the new ballet today … if he is he should send out a call for the dancers he wants. They are all eager, naturally.”

  “I think he intends to use most of the company, but not until the season closes.”

  “If you see him, though, tell him to let me know which dancers he will want … he is not used to our system.”

  I said that I would and we parted.

  My interview with Gleason was more amiable than usual.

  He looked very hot in a white crumpled suit which made me think of a photograph I once saw of William Jennings Bryan when he was down in Tennessee fighting evolution.

  Where were you at such and such a time and did you for any reason leave the party before such and such an hour? No sir I did not sir. We got through the preliminaries without a blow. Then the first of the brass tacks.

  “Where, Mr. Sargeant, did you find those shears?”

  “I found them, now that I think of it, in Eglanova’s dressing room … someone had put them in the wastebasket. I took them out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  “I wasn’t sure it had any bearing on the case.”

  “Aren’t we to be the judges of that?”

  “Certainly … I didn’t remember at the time. So many things had happened.” I’m no fool … I’ve watched some of those investigations over television: all you have to do is say you can’t remember, or that you’ve suddenly remembered, and you’re legally safe.

  “It might have made it easier for us if you’d been able to remember at the time.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “I wonder if you realize how serious all this is, Mr. Sargeant.” For some reason Gleason had decided to handle me with tenderness.

  “I do.… It was a dumb thing, wasn’t it? For someone deliberately to put the shears in her wastebasket to throw suspicion on her … I mean, if she had cut the cable she’d never keep The Murder Weapon in her own dressing room.”

  “Very sound reasoning,” said the detective; if I hadn’t already been acquainted with his simple mind I would have thought he was indulging himself in a bit of irony at my expense.

  “What did the autopsy turn up?” I asked, disregarding all his previous statements to the effect that it was not my place
to ask questions.

  “If you would just let us …” He began with a show of patience.

  “Mr. Gleason,” I lied, “I have the representatives of all the wire services, foreign and domestic, as well as reporters from every daily in town, waiting at my office for some word from Anthony Ignatius Gleason as to the outcome of the autopsy this morning.…” That did the trick … Gleason for Mayor, Honest, Courageous, Tireless.

  “As a rule the district attorney’s office handles releases to the press but since the boys are so eager you can tell them that Miles Sutton had a heart attack and fainted, falling face forward onto the lighted stove. He was not attacked or poisoned … unless you can call a system which looked like a drugstore poisoned.”

  “That’s certainly a load off my mind,” I sighed. “Everybody else’s, too.”

  “It would seem,” said Gleason, “that the case is closed.”

  “Seem? Weren’t you going to arrest him for murder?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “He did kill her, didn’t he?”

  “We believe so.”

  “Then tell me; why did you wait so long to arrest him? What couldn’t you prove?”

  Gleason blinked and then, quite mildly, answered: “Well, it happened that of all the people involved Sutton was the only one who had an alibi … the only one who could not, if his story was true, have gone backstage between five and eight-thirty and cut the cable.”

  I whistled.

  “There are times when a good alibi can be more suspicious than none at all. But we managed to break it. I won’t say how because we weren’t entirely sure but we had a theory and we thought we could prove it in court.”

  “Then I can tell the papers that the case is finished?”

  Gleason nodded. “You can tell them that.”

  “They’ll want to interview you.”

  “They know where to find me,” he said quietly … Gleason for Governor, Man of the People.

  Needless to say, my announcement to the press that afternoon caused a sensation. Everyone in the company was wild with excitement and relief and I felt like a hero even though I was just the carrier of the good news from Aix to Ghent.

  After the last reporter had cleared out of the office, grinding the last cigarette butt into the expensive carpet, I sat back and enjoyed a few minutes of much needed solitude. The two secretaries in the next room made a restful steady noise of typing: “Miss Rosen and Miss Ruger, the talented duo-typists, made their Manhattan debut last night at Town Hall with a program which featured Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Two Typewriters with Black and Red Ribbons.” I seldom get a chance to be alone any more … it wasn’t like college or even the army when I would have long stretches of being by myself, when I could think things out, decide what to do next, figure just where I stood on any number of assorted topics like television, Joyce, deism, marionettes, buggery and Handel’s Messiah. Maybe I should take a long rest … I’d saved up quite a bit of cash and … but my dream of solitude was shattered by a telephone call from Miss Flynn.