CHAPTER XI

IN THE STAR DRESSING ROOM

A BRIEF pause followed Sybil’s unexpectedly dramatic statement. Then Inspector Lowry bowed gravely.

“That is all, Miss Merivale,” he said, without looking at her. “We shall not want you for a while, though I shall have to speak to you again later. I should advise you, as a friend, to go to your own dressing room to rest.”

“May I—mayn’t I—go home?” she asked piteously. But on such points as these no amount of courtesy or human sympathy could make Lowry less inexorable.

“Not just yet,” he said calmly. “Later, we shall see. Go and rest, my dear young lady. Do go and rest!”

Norman Crane started forward to help her, but, to every one’s surprise, Claire McAllister, the extra woman who had been kept for possibly relevant testimony, was before him.

“You come with me, you poor kid!” she exclaimed, as tenderly as she possibly could. “I’ll see to you. Gee, but this is a bunch of boobs, not to see that you’re about as apt to get in wrong as a two-months’ one! Come on, deary!”

They vanished within the dressing room wherein Sybil had dressed for a possible triumph that selfsame evening—hard as it was for any of them to believe it. That evening? It might just as well have been a month earlier, and even Dukane, the imperturbable, was haggard with the strain already.

To him Lowry said something in a low voice, and the manager turned at once to Mortimer’s valet, still standing at the door:

“Wrenn, clear the couch in there. We are——” He paused, respecting the man’s feelings, and ended gently: “We are bringing him in.”

They carried the big, splendidly made form into the room which he had left such a short time before, in such a high tide of life and strength. There was nothing of tragedy in this setting. Barrison looked about him curiously, as though he were in a queer sort of dream in which all manner of incongruities might be expected.

There were brilliant electric bulbs topping and framing the glass on the dressing table; Barrison knew that actors were obliged to test their make-up under various lighting effects, and there was something darkly strange in this array of lights still ready for a test that could not come again—for Mortimer. At that same table, under the same bulbs, other stars would put on paint and wigs and costumes. This one would do so no more.

In that vivid glare, the litter of the paraphernalia of make-up glowed with a somewhat gay, decorative effect. Rouge boxes and cold-cream jars and sticks of grease paint lay just as he had left them. Evidently Mortimer had been “touching up” for the last act, and the valet had not yet had time to clear up or put away anything.

Lowry’s keen eyes ran over the room, in that seemingly cursory but actually minute inspection which characterized his methods. There was nothing about it unlike other theatrical dressing rooms. There was the usual long dresser with its rows of brilliant bulbs; there were the clothes hanging on the walls; there was the couch—now bearing that tragic burden, the magnificent body in khaki—the big trunk, the two chairs—the small one by the table, and the easy one for rest and visitors. Apparently, there was nothing in the room for a detective to note, save the dead man, and—here the inspector’s glance became more vague, a sure sign that he was particularly interested, for he was looking at Wrenn.

The old man, in his decent black clothes, was standing near the couch; and he was watching the intruders with a sort of baleful combination of terror and resentment. The fear which he had shown in his face when he looked out of the dressing-room door a few minutes since, had not vanished from it; but to it was added another, and a not less violent emotion. He was angry, he was on the defensive. He might, for the moment, have been some cornered animal, frightened, but nevertheless about to spring upon his enemy.

It was against Lowry’s principles to ask questions at such moments as might be considered obvious; so it was Dukane who said, with some asperity:

“What’s the matter, Wrenn?”

The old man’s face worked and his voice shook, as he returned:

“Mr. Dukane, sir—you—you aren’t going to let all these people in here, to poke and pry about among my poor master’s things? It’s—it’s a wicked shame, so it is! I’d never have thought it possible! It’s an outrage——”

“You’re crazy, Wrenn!” said Dukane, trying to remember the old fellow’s bereavement, and doing his best to speak kindly instead of impatiently. “These are detectives, officers of the law. They are on this case, and they have a perfect right to do anything they want to.”

“But, sir”—the old servant was working himself up more and more, and his cracked voice was growing shrill—“what are they doing here, sir? What can they have to do here? Can’t his—his poor body rest in peace without a—a lot of policemen poking——”

The inspector interrupted him placidly. “Much obliged for the suggestion, Wrenn! We might not have thought of searching this dressing room, but, thanks to you, we certainly will now!”

“Of course,” he said to Barrison later, “we’d have had to do it anyway, but I wanted to scare that old chap into thinking it was chiefly his doing!”

Wrenn gasped. “Oh, sir, oh, Mr. Dukane!” he implored. “Can’t he—lie in peace—just for to-night? I—I’d like to sit with him to-night, sir. Surely there’s no harm?”

“Was he so very kind to you?” said the inspector sympathetically.

Wrenn hesitated. “Mostly he was, sir,” he said at last, quite simply. And then he added in a queer, forlorn way: “I—I’ve been with him a long time, you know, sir.”

The detectives, despite Wrenn’s protests, searched the room with methodical thoroughness. If there was one single thing, no bigger than a pin, which ought not, in the nature of things, to be in a dressing room of this kind, why, they were there to find it.

“But why?” Dukane whispered to Barrison. “Not that there is the slightest objection—but what is it Lowry expects to find?”

“He doesn’t,” replied Barrison. “He’s from Missouri; he wants to be shown. We always search the premises, you know——”

“But it wasn’t here he was killed.”

“No; but it was so near here that——Hello! They’ve got something!”

He spoke in the tone of suppressed excitement that a fox hunter might have used.

The plain-clothes man with the inspector had opened the trunk, and was staring into it with a puzzled face. At the same moment, Wrenn emitted a low moan, as though, after a struggle, he found himself obliged to give up at last. He staggered a trifle, and caught at the back of a chair to steady himself.

“Well,” said the inspector, softly jocose. “Haven’t found the murderer in that trunk, have you, Sims?”

“No, sir,” said the officer; but his voice was as puzzled as his eyes. “Only this.”

He took something out of the trunk, and held it up in the unsparing glare of the dressing-room lights. It was assuredly an odd sort of article to be found in a man’s theater trunk. For it was a piece of filmy white stuff, with lace upon it, badly torn.

“A sleeve,” said the inspector, with an obvious accent of astonishment. “A woman’s sleeve—let’s have a look at it.”

He took it into his own hands. Clearly, it was the sleeve and part of the shoulder of a woman’s dress or blouse, trimmed with elaborate, but rather coarse and cheap lace. On the front, where it had evidently been ripped and torn away from the original garment, were finger prints, stamped in a brownish red.

The inspector’s eyes strayed to the dressing table with its array of paints and powders.

“Anything there that will correspond? Barrison, take a look, while Sims goes through the rest of the trunk.”

Barrison returned with a jar.

“It’s bolamine,” explained Dukane. “They use it for a dark make-up, to suggest tan or sunburn. Mortimer would naturally use it in an out-of-door part of this sort.”

“On his hands, too?”

“Surely on his hands; only amateurs forget the hands.”

“Ah!” said Lowry. “We’ll have the finger prints examined and compared with Mortimer’s, though it’s scarcely necessary, I imagine. It’s so evident that——”

Wrenn broke in, almost frantically:

“It’s only a make-up rag, sir! Every one uses make-up rags, sir, to wipe the make-up off!”

“Ah!” said Lowry. “You provided yourself with these make-up rags, then?”

“Yes, sir!” Wrenn spoke eagerly. “I asked the chambermaid at the hotel for some old pieces for Mr. Mortimer, and——”

“Wrenn, don’t be a fool,” said Lowry, speaking sharply for the first time. “In the first place—unless I am much mistaken—make-up rags are used only when the make-up is taken off—right, Mr. Dukane?”

The manager nodded.

“And then—why, in that case, was this rag so precious that you had to shut it up in a trunk, before it had been used? For I take it that a make-up rag doesn’t show just one or two complete sets of finger prints when a man gets through with it! It must look something like a rag that’s used on brasses or an automobile! Also, I see that there are two or three cloths already on the dressing table.”

He turned his back on Wrenn, and examined the bit of linen that he held, while the other detectives held their breath.

“This,” he said at last, “was torn from the dress of some woman who was in the dressing room to-night, at some time after Mortimer was made up.”

He turned to Dukane, with the faintest shrug, and said:

“You know, when I tried to reconstruct the crime by putting every one in their places—the places they had occupied at the time of the shooting—I was attempting the impossible. For there evidently was some one else here, some one who has gone; some one”—his eyes flew suddenly and piercingly to Wrenn—“whom this man wishes to shield.”