Читать книгу The Death of a Celebrity - Footner Hulbert - Страница 9

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Cynthia lived in a small walk-up apartment, parlor, bedroom, and bath, in a converted dwelling in West Fifty-fifth Street, not half a mile from Gavin’s place. She let herself in and threw her coat on a sofa. Her little living-room no longer seemed the same haven of peace and freedom. One of the first things that caught her eye was a framed photograph of Siebert on her desk. She thrust it face down in a drawer. After a while she drifted back to the desk and, taking out the photograph, looked at it a long time. She glanced at the clock—10:50. After painful hesitation, she picked up the telephone and dialed a number. Her expression suggested that she had no intention of humbling herself, but was willing to give Siebert a chance to say he was sorry.

He did not answer. She hung up and, going slowly into the bedroom, started to undress. For a long time she lay open-eyed in her bed, waiting for the telephone. It did not ring. When she finally slept with wet lashes on her cheeks, her sleep was broken by bad dreams. Distorted faces formed and dissolved in front of her: Gail Garrett; Mack Townley; the envious Emmett Gundy; the sharp-featured elevator boy; even Hillman, weak, desperate, and furtive.

She was awakened by a roaring that seemed to be inside her head. It resolved itself into the ringing of the telephone bell. She glanced at the bedside clock; 7:30. Her face cleared as if by magic, and she ran into the next room with shining eyes.

But it was not the deep voice that she longed to hear, and her face fell. This was a man’s voice so distracted and broken she did not recognize it.

“Miss Dordress?”

“Yes. Who is it?”

“Hillman, Miss! ... Oh, Miss! ... There has been an accident ... I don’t know how to tell you ...!”

An icy hand was laid on Cynthia’s breast. “My father?”

“Yes, Miss.... Come quickly!”

“What has happened?” cried Cynthia.

The frantic Hillman had already hung up.

She threw on her clothes anyhow and got a cab at the door. In five minutes she was at the door of the Madison Avenue apartment. Short as the time was, a thousand horrors had suggested themselves. She fought them off by saying to herself: Hillman is a fool! He exaggerates the trouble.

There was a different boy on the elevator. This was Harry, whom Cynthia liked. “What has happened?” she asked him breathlessly.

He turned away his head. “I don’t know, Miss. They’ll tell you.”

He is afraid to tell me! she thought; it is the worst!

Hillman opened the door of the apartment. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hands shaking. At the sight of her his eyes filled with weak tears. “Oh, Miss ...!”

“What has happened?” cried Cynthia.

“Your father ...” He was unable to go on.

Cynthia turned to run to her father’s bedroom.

“Not there. He’s in the studio.”

When she turned in that direction, he caught hold of her. “You mustn’t go in there.”

Cynthia, frozen, dropped weakly in a chair, staring at the man. “Is he? ... is he? ... am I too late?”

Hillman nodded. “Mr. Dordress has passed away.”

“No! It can’t be so!”

“Yes, Miss. Many hours ago.”

Cynthia covered her face with her hands. She did not weep. “Send for Mr. Mappin,” she whispered.

“He’s on his way, Miss.”

When the bell rang Cynthia turned her haggard face to see who it was. Two or three important-looking men pushed in as if they had a right to enter. One was in uniform with a lot of gold braid. Police! Several underlings followed, carrying paraphernalia of different sorts.

“This way, please, gentlemen,” stammered Hillman, leading them towards the studio.

“What are the police doing here?” whispered Cynthia.

When the bell rang again she went to the door herself. It was Lee Mappin. He took her in his arms. “My dear, dear child!”

She drew herself away. “Never mind me. Go in there, Lee. In there! And for God’s sake come and tell me what has happened.”

She dropped back in the chair and waited like a woman of stone.

When Lee entered the studio he saw the body of his friend lying huddled on the floor near the fireplace. He drew a long breath to steady himself. Gavin’s right arm was outstretched, and near it lay a black automatic as if it had been knocked from his hand as he fell. Under his head a pool of blood had spread out on the parquet floor and coagulated. The wound itself was hidden. Gavin’s eyes were fixed and staring. Near him a police photographer was kneeling on the floor, preparing to take a picture of the body. Lee looked around the room. The set-up was familiar to him: captain of the precinct; lieutenant of detectives, another detective, medical examiner, fingerprint expert, and so on.

Captain Kelleran knew him. “Good God! Mr. Mappin, what are you doing here!” he exclaimed.

“Gavin Dordress was my oldest friend,” said Lee.

“I didn’t know that. You have my sympathy.”

“When did this happen?” asked Lee.

“About nine hours ago. Say ten-thirty or eleven last night. There is nothing here to interest us professionally. Clearly a suicide.”

“He had everything to live for,” murmured Lee.

“He left a letter,” said the captain, handing Lee a manila sheet that appeared to have been torn off a pad on Gavin’s desk. “I take it that’s his handwriting?”

Gavin as a young man had taken the trouble to form a highly decorative hand. The quaintly formed characters were inimitable. “Undoubtedly,” said Lee. He read the letter with a masklike face.

“Do you recognize the gun?” asked the captain.

Instead of answering directly, Lee went to the desk at the other end of the room and pulled out the middle drawer. He said: “Gavin kept his gun here. It’s gone. It was of the same style and caliber as that on the floor. We may assume that that is his gun.”

“So you see ...” said the captain, spreading out his hands. “We’ll check fingerprints on the gun to make sure. There are powder burns around the wound.”

There was something else about the drawer that made Lee look thoughtful. He returned to the fireplace. The fire had been out for many hours. On top of the dead embers lay the charred remnants of many burned papers. One sheet had partly fallen out, and the top of it was unburned. Lee could read a typed title: “The Changeling.” So Gavin had burned the new play before killing himself. This was no business of the policeman’s and Lee said nothing about it.

Taking the letter, Lee returned to Cynthia in the foyer. She raised her questioning eyes to his, and he said simply, “Gavin has left us.”

“What was it?” she whispered. “Heart? ... Why the police?”

“He took his own life.”

Cynthia, wildly staring, stammered, “No, Lee, no!”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “You must face it, my dear. He had the right to leave us if he wished to.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But he couldn’t have done it. ... Last night when I left him there was no such thought in his mind. He was looking ahead to our future....”

“Then it was a sudden impulse.”

“No, Lee! Dad was not a creature of impulse. He was stable!”

Lee handed her the letter. A spasm of pain crossed the girl’s face at sight of the decorative characters. There was neither salutation nor signature. She read:

“I have reached the summit of my life—indeed I appear to have passed it. I have done my best work. There is nothing before me but a slow decline in power. I wish to be remembered by my best, and so I choose to write The End while I can do it firmly. Men live too long.

“What are the thoughts of a man who pauses on the brink of the unknowable? I have often wondered. Now I know. He thinks of his childhood; the first tree climbed; the first little creek that was swum from bank to bank. Those were the biggest successes of life. Later he remembers the words that remained unspoken; the wine untasted; the kisses that were not given. They are the sweetest. He hears the first sleepy notes of awakening birds, and sees a lake gleaming in the dawn. And always the stars, his unchanging companions, who mocked him when he was set up, and comforted him when he was cast down.

“This is the last thought: Man is not worthy of his beautiful earth. The worst that has been said about man’s life is true; it is cruel, ugly, and evil—but who would give up the privilege of sitting in on so magnificent a show? I have seen it, and I leave the theater without regret.”

Cynthia’s tears were falling fast before she came to the end. Some moments passed before she could speak. “Was this all?” she whispered. “Nothing ... not one word for me?”

“That is all,” said Lee.

“He would not leave me without a word!” she cried. “Lee, I will not believe that he killed himself! ... There are people who wished him dead.”

“It must be faced,” said Lee. “There is the gun, the powder marks. The letter sounds like Gavin.”

“It sounds like him,” she agreed; “but it has a made-up sound. It is like something he might have written in a play.”

“Cynthia, my dear, you are only tormenting yourself!”

“Why shouldn’t I be tormented?” she burst out. “He would not leave me without a word.... Listen, Lee, we came close to each other for a moment last night as I was leaving. There was nothing much said. We understood each other without speaking. You cannot mistake such a moment. After that he could not have left me without a word. I do not believe he killed himself. I will never believe it.... Look at this letter! Notice how in the first line he has changed ‘apex’ to ‘summit’; down below he wrote ‘most men’ and then crossed out ‘most,’ and changed ‘abyss’ to ‘unknowable.’ Would a man be thinking about literary effect when he was about to die?”

“Habit, perhaps,” said Lee. “He wrote the letter. How else can it be explained?”

“It sounds like something out of a play,” insisted Cynthia. “Let us read the new play and see if there is not a clue there.”

“He burned it,” said Lee.

“Burned it? Why should he?”

“Well, he implies in the letter that he was dissatisfied with it.”

“Implies! Implies! Words can imply so many things! He doesn’t say that he was dissatisfied with it. He told me he thought it was good.”

“Sometimes there is a reaction. Every writer knows what that is.”

Cynthia was not listening. “Lee, suppose that this letter is something that Dad wrote for his play. He was always making changes and inserting new pages either in type or longhand. The murderer found it. He would then be obliged to destroy the rest of the play, wouldn’t he, in order to conceal the fact that this had been taken from it?”

“That is too far-fetched!” objected Lee.

“What do you mean, far-fetched?”

“It is incredible that the murderer—if there was a murderer—should have stumbled on something that came so pat to his needs.”

“Perhaps he read the play first and this letter suggested the plan of the murder.”

“Gavin would allow no one to read the play.”

“There were plenty of people who were crazy to get a line on it. Hillman may have betrayed Dad while he was out. Hillman ...” She pulled up suddenly, and her eyes widened.

“What is it?” asked Lee.

“Hillman has something on his mind.”

“Naturally, after ...”

“Oh, this began many days ago.”

“Where does Hillman live?” asked Lee.

“I don’t know. It’s in Gavin’s address-book.”

Captain Kelleran came out of the studio with his men tailing after him. He bowed to Cynthia with grave sympathy and drew Lee aside. “There is nothing in this case for the police,” he said. “With an ordinary magnifying-glass we could identify Mr. Dordress’ fingerprints on the gun without the necessity of taking photographs. The medical examiner will hand you the necessary permit for burial, and we will trouble you no more. Please convey my sympathy to the young lady.”

“Thank you. She will appreciate it, Captain.” Lee shepherded them out through the door.

When they were left alone Cynthia came and wound her arms around Lee’s neck. “Thank God I have you!” she said.

“Bless your heart!” he murmured.

“Have I convinced you that Gavin did not kill himself?” she asked, looking deep into his eyes.

“No, my dear,” he said gravely. “So far this is only a surmise on your part. We must have evidence.”

“Then look for it! Look for it!” she said, urging him with her hands. “Before anything is moved or changed, before anyone else comes. You can lay bare the truth, Lee, if anybody can.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said.