CHAPTER XV

A MORNING CALL

MISS LEGAYE lived at a very smart little hotel near Fifth Avenue. It was not one of the strictly “theatrical” hostelries, since Kitty had always had leanings toward social correctness. But the house was patronized by so many actresses of exactly the same predilections that it could not help being run with an indulgent and sagacious understanding of their tastes and peculiarities, and might almost as well have been one of the just-off-Broadway variety.

When Barrison and Tony Clay presented themselves at the “Golden Arms” at twenty minutes after eight in the morning, they found the hotel barely awake. The clerk who had just come on duty at the desk eyed them with surliness and distaste. The very electric lights, turned on perforce, because of the outrageous dinginess of the morning, seemed to glare at them with disfavor. Bell boys looked unrelentingly cross; a messenger boy was making his exit with as much dripping and mud as he could; and a departing patron appeared to be becoming quarrelsome over a fifteen-cent overcharge.

“Well?” demanded the clerk. He looked frankly ugly; ugly in temper as well as in features. He could see that they were not incoming guests, for they had no luggage; and it was too early for callers of any reputable type. He put them down as a breed suspicious, being unknown, of neither fish nor fowl variety. “Well?” he repeated urgently.

Barrison produced a card. “We would like to see Miss Legaye,” he suggested pleasantly.

As he put down the slip of pasteboard on the desk counter, his quick eyes noted a bell boy standing at the news stand, taking over an armful of assorted morning papers. Obviously, the lad was just going up to leave them at the doors of the guests; they would have to work quickly, he and Tony, if they were to get ahead of them.

“Miss Legaye,” repeated the clerk. “Miss Legaye. Are you guys dippy? Miss Legaye always leaves word that she ain’t at home to no one till after twelve o’clock. Now beat it!”

Barrison sized up the clerk, and decided on his course.

“Say, brother,” he murmured, with a confidential accent, “we don’t mean to annoy Miss Legaye; we want to give her a boost. Get me? We’re reporters, and we’re looking for a first-class story. Say, take it from me, she’ll be keen to see us if you’ll just phone up!”

The slang won his case. The clerk looked at him with more respect.

“Say, you’re talking almost like a human being!” he remarked. “Want me to phone up for you, eh?” He waited a perceptible space. “Times is hard,” he declared, in an airy manner, “and phone calls is high. Did I hear you say anything?”

“Maybe not me,” said Barrison, who had laid a dollar bill on the desk. “But I’ve known money to talk before now.”

The clerk actually chuckled. “You’re on,” he said, pocketing the bill with a discreet look around the almost deserted office. “I’ll phone up!”

He turned around a minute later to inform Barrison that Miss Legaye would see him at once.

A few minutes later they were knocking at the door of Kitty Legaye’s apartment. Resting against the lintel were half a dozen morning papers; clearly she had ordered them ahead, in the expectation of criticisms of the first night. The indefatigable bell boy had been ahead of them, but there was still time to rectify that.

The boy who had piloted them had vanished. Barrison picked up the whole bundle, and gave them a vigorous swing down the corridor. This had barely been accomplished when the door opened, and an impeccably attired lady’s maid asked them to please come in; Miss Legaye would see them in a moment.

Kitty’s parlor was like Kitty herself, discreet, yet subtly daring; conventional, yet alluring. She had made short work of the regulation hotel furnishings, and replaced them with trifles of her own, which gave the place a dainty and audacious air calculated to pique the interest of almost anybody.

One of the modern dark chintzes had been chosen by the little lady for her curtains and furniture coverings; she also had dared to put cushions of cherry color and of black on the chaise longue, and futurist posters in vivid oranges and greens upon the innocuous drab wall paper. The extreme touches had been made delicately, without vulgarity. Barrison, who had rather good taste himself, smiled as he read in this butterflylike audacity a sort of key to little Miss Kitty’s own personality.

She came in almost immediately, and, though Jim had never admired her, he was forced to admit to himself at that moment that she was very charming and quite appealing.

The creamy pallor which was always so effective an asset of hers seemed a bit etherealized this morning, whether by a sleepless night or the gray, rainy light. Her dark hair was pulled straight back from her small face, with a rather sweet absence of coquetry; or was it, instead, the very quintessence of coquetry, brought to a fine art? Her big brown eyes were bigger and browner than ever, and her slim, almost childish little figure—which looked so adorable always in its young-girl frocks before the footlights—looked incomparably adorable in a straight, severely cut little white wrapper, like the robe of an early martyr.

She came forward to meet them quickly, but quite without embarrassment.

“Mr. Barrison!” she exclaimed, rather breathlessly. “What is it? Of course I said I would see you at once. I knew you wouldn’t come without some good reason. What do you want of me?”

Her eyes were as clear as the brown pools in a spring brook, and Barrison felt suddenly ashamed of himself and—almost—wroth with Grace Templeton for putting him up to this.

“Miss Legaye,” he said, with some hesitation, “I am already calling myself all sorts of names for having aroused you at this unearthly hour. And you were not well, too.”

“Oh, that headache!” she said. “That is all gone now! I got to bed early, and had a really decent sleep for once, so I am in good shape this morning! But—what did you want to see me about?”

Just as Barrison was trying to find words in which to answer her properly, the maid spoke from the doorway:

“You told me to take in the papers, miss, but there’s none there.”

Kitty turned in astonishment. “Not there! But they always leave them at eight, and I particularly said that I wanted all of them this morning. That’s funny! Never mind; you can go down to the stand and get them, and Mr. Barrison can tell me what I want to know first of all. Oh, Mr. Barrison, tell me about last night! Did it all go off as well as it seemed to be going when I left?” She looked with honest eagerness into his eyes.

Barrison felt most uncomfortable, but he forced himself to say steadily: “Have you really not heard anything about what happened last night, Miss Legaye?”

If it were possible to turn paler, she turned paler then; and her eyes seemed to darken, as though with dread; yet there was nothing in her look but what might come from honest fear of the unknown.

“Mr. Barrison! What is it that you are trying to make me think? What do you mean? Oh—oh!” She drew in her breath sharply. “Is that what it means? Is that what you came here for—to—tell me something? Is that it, Mr. Barrison?”

Her eyes pleaded with him, looking earnestly out of her little white face. She looked a butterfly no longer; rather, a tired and frightened little girl. “Won’t you tell me what it all means?” she begged.

“Miss Legaye,” Jim said gently, “there was a tragedy last night at the theater after you left.”

“A tragedy?”

“Yes; there was—a murder.”

She stared at him, as though she did not yet understand. “A murder?”

“Miss Legaye, I see it is a shock to you, but you must hear it from some one; you might as well hear it from me. Mr. Mortimer was shot last night during the last act, and is dead.”

She shrieked—a thin, high, deadly shriek, which rang long in the ears of the two men. Her face grew smaller, sharper; she beat the air with her hands. The maid ran to her.

News? Oh, Heaven, yes! There was no question of this being news to her; it was news that was coming close to killing her.

“Say that again!” she managed to say, in a slow, thick utterance that sounded immeasurably strange from her lips. “Alan Mortimer was murdered? You said that? You are sure of it?”

“Yes, Miss Legaye.”

She flung up her hands wildly, and fainted dead away.