Cue For Murder полностью

The medical examiner had gone. Men from the Department of Public Welfare had come to take the body. In the glare of a baby spotlight focused on the alcove, Basil stood taking his last look at Adeane. My life is so dull . . . nothing ever happens to me . . .

Basil left the alcove and walked down to the footlights where Inspector Foyle was standing with a knife in his hand—a surgeon’s scalpel with a grooved handle of tarnished silver and a newly sharpened blade.

“Same sort of knife—same wound—stabbed any time within the last hour, and the first act lasts almost an hour. Again, a dozen witnesses saw the victim enter the empty alcove alone and shut the door. Again, only three actors entered the alcove during the performance, and it was the same three—Wanda Morley, Rodney Tait, and Leonard Martin.”

Basil touched the knife handle with his fingertips. It was sticky. “Better send it to Lambert.”

Foyle laid the knife on the domino table, beside a new book still in its dust jacket. “This book was in his pocket—Victor Heiser’s autobiography. Deals mostly with medical experiences in the tropics. What would Adeane want with that?”

“Material for a play no doubt.” Basil turned the pages slowly. “He said something about reading Heiser at the medical library.”

Foyle looked more puzzled than ever. “Why Adeane?”

Basil smiled. “He had no tact. No, I’m not joking. He really had so little sympathy—so much egoism that he could not put himself in the position of others—including the murderer. Violence fascinated Adeane but he had no personal experience of it until tonight. He got his sadism from the German psychologists and the hard-boiled novelists. Murder was never quite real to him. He didn’t understand how real it is to a murderer. How terribly in earnest a murderer can be when he thinks his own life or liberty is at stake. Adeane discovered something. Perhaps that’s why he was in such an odd state of elation this afternoon—intoxicated with a new sense of power. It must be quite an experience to bait a murderer—like teasing a tiger. But I think that’s what he did. . . .

“Instead of coming to you or me with his discovery, he tried to blackmail the murderer. I don’t mean that Adeane sneaked up to the murderer in a dark corner and hissed: Ten thousand dollars by midnight or I will tell all! I don’t believe it was even blackmail for money. I think he wanted to enlist the murderer’s help in getting his precious play produced. That was an obsession with him. And just as he hinted to Margot Ingelow that she owed him something for his giving her an alibi, I suppose he let the murderer know indirectly by some hint or innuendo the nature of the thing he had discovered assuming mistakenly that the murderer would buy his silence by helping with the play.”

The Inspector was dubious. “Would a man connive at murder just for the sake of getting a play produced?”

“Ask any unproduced playwright! No, seriously, Adeane was a completely callous egoist, consumed with his own ambition. These men with vast ambitions and slender talents who prey on the arts since the arts became profitable in the last hundred years or so are not quite human. If you have no talent you have to rely on tricks in order to get on, and such a career hardly develops the ethical sense. If you had cornered Adeane he would have said that the thing he discovered didn’t prove murder absolutely, so he wasn’t really sure of it; but it did cast suspicion in a certain direction, and so . . . what’s the harm in making use of that? Such things are done in business every day old man, so why not in play producing, etc., with a wink and nudge, one man of the world to another.

“He played with murder as innocently as a child plays with a loaded gun, and—the gun went off. What we must ask ourselves now is simply this: What did Adeane know that no one else knew?”

“You say Adeane was the witness who gave Margot Ingelow her alibi?” said Foyle. “Could that have anything to do with it?”

“Hardly likely since Margot Ingelow was with Pauline, Milhau, and me tonight when the second murder was committed. She seems to be cleared.”

“How did Adeane happen to take the part of Vladimir?” asked Foyle.

There was a sudden glint of amusement in Basil’s eyes. “That question can be answered easily, if you send for the boy who was to have played the singing peasant boy in the last act.”

A few moments later a patrolman escorted the peasant boy onto the stage. He really looked like a peasant now in the gay green and red costume Pauline had designed for him—a handsome, virile peasant with gold earrings in the lobes of pointed, faun ears under the wavy black hair.

“Tell the Inspector what you did at rehearsal this afternoon,” said Basil.