Cue For Murder полностью

“No, thanks. I’ve had breakfast.” Basil dropped into a wicker chair. It was a day of cool wind and brilliant sunshine, hard and clear as a diamond. Not a cloud flecked the pure blue of the sky. The horizon was sharp as a line drawn with a ruler, and every detail of the landscape stood out precisely—flower-beds and fruit trees in the garden, barges on the river, even houses on the Long Island shore.

“This isn’t a purely social call. Can you tell me when you last saw this script?”

“Last night when you showed it to me.”

“And before that?”

“It was in my dressing room yesterday afternoon.”

“Who could have taken it?”

“Why—anybody—” One by one, Wanda dropped four lumps of sugar in her coffee. “Everything was in confusion—the eve of an opening is always hectic. Everyone was running in and out of my dressing room all the time.”

Basil watched her, feeling like a man who is about to pull the firing pin on a hand grenade. Of course, it might not go off, but . . .

“Miss Morley,” he continued, “the police are bound to identify Vladimir as John Ingelow sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be wise for you to anticipate them?”

Her eyes flashed in the sun, but the face, schooled to mask emotion, remained impassive. At last she spoke. “So you know. How did you find out?”

“Last night at the theater I saw a woman in a black and white dress. Pauline identified her from my description as Margaret Ingelow. Pauline’s description of her husband John Ingelow fitted Vladimir.”

Wanda seemed disappointed. “You mean you identified Vladimir on the strength of a physical description? That’s just guessing! If I’d denied it—”

“Not a physical description.” Basil shook his head, smiling. “A psychological description. I had already seen Vladimir for a few moments and surmised or ‘guessed’ if you like, that he was an only son of wealthy parents, born in Philadelphia, educated in France and returned from Panama recently. Also that he was a horseman. Pauline’s description of John Ingelow included all those details—too many to be coincidental.”

“But if you only saw Vladimir for a few moments, how could you ‘guess’ so much about him?”

“I first saw him in a cocktail bar near the theater early last evening. He behaved with the immature arrogance Adler attributes to an only son or a younger son. He ordered an exotic drink—rum, gum, and lime. That is a favorite substitute for whisky and soda among junior officers of the Army in Panama. Rum, sugar-cane syrup, and lime juice are cheap native products. Only senior officers can afford to import whisky there. Vladimir’s sunburn suggested the Panama visit had been recent. When he asked the bartender the way to the stage door, he said he’d been all ‘around the square.’ A New Yorker would have said ‘around the block.’ His guttural ‘R’ was Philadelphian. That suggested he had been born in Philadelphia—not that he just lived there, since accent is usually determined by birth, no matter how widely a man travels. After death, the medical examiner noticed that his legs were slightly bowed. In such a healthy, prosperous young man that suggested long hours in the saddle rather than rickets in childhood. The police found a slip of paper in his pocket which seemed to read: RT, F:30.

“Of course ‘RT’ suggested Royalty Theatre—a memorandum of his appointment with you that evening. Such memoranda usually include time as well as place, and it was just seven-thirty when I first saw him in the neighborhood of the theater, looking for the stage door. The ‘:30’ was clear enough, but what about that ‘F’? Then I remembered that the French always write the figure 7 with a cross bar—‘F’—so it looks like a capital letter F in its customary hand-written form. It only remained to link Vladimir with you, and that was easy. When you opened the door of your dressing room to me last night, you smiled as if you were welcoming someone you expected. Then you saw my face, and the smile turned into a look of surprise. I wasn’t the person you had expected, though at first glance you took me for that person. In the cocktail bar I had noticed that Vladimir was just my own height and dressed as I was. I had heard him asking for the stage door and I saw no one else backstage dressed that way. Obviously you had mistaken me for Vladimir, and that meant you did know him in spite of your denials. I suppose it was he who sent you the red roses at the end of the first act?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where he was between the time he left the cocktail bar and the time he reached your dressing room?”

Wanda was surprised. “Didn’t he come directly to me?”

“He left the bar several minutes before I did. But you were still expecting him when I reached your dressing-room door, or you wouldn’t have mistaken me for him.”