Chapter II: "mr. Shei"

For a moment longer she leaned against the pillar. Then she heard laughter--laughter that was low and sibilant and edged with the insinuating twang that sometimes characterizes the laughter of a madman. It was soft and gentle, yet she thought it was the most fearful sound she had ever heard. It gripped and shook her, and she knew instinctively that it came from the woman in the rear.

Something urged her forward, but her nerves and limbs rebelled. Others beside herself must have heard that soul-shaking laughter, for the hush that had fallen over the house ended abruptly in a jumble of loud sounds. The curtain descended with a rhythmic chugging, there were exclamations of surprise and horror, and the audience sprang from their seats as the lights went on. With startled faces they looked to left and right and rear, and several of them excitedly inquired what had happened. No one seemed to know, but as if moved by a single impulse, they scrambled in the direction whence the laughter came. Then they stopped, huddled in a half circle, and stared.

What they saw seemed all the stranger by contrast with the flowery scents in the air and the rich and brilliant hues of the surroundings. All eyes were fixed on the woman whose peculiar demeanor had aroused Helen's interest. Her extravagant attire and her wild, gypsylike beauty seemed typical of the oddly assorted characters who made up Vincent Starr's circle of intimates. A filmy drapery embroidered with gold-touched flowers hung like an iridescent fog over her gown of silver tissue. Her bare arm was flung out over the top of the next seat, and her head had fallen back against the elbow.

Murmurs of awe and consternation fell from the lips of the onlookers. Before their eyes the pallor of death was creeping into the woman's face, and her cheeks and forehead were beaded with the perspiration of the death struggle. Now and then her figure writhed with a slow, snakelike motion. A film of gray was gradually dimming the luster of the eyes. Only the lips were still red.

As if to fling a taunt in the face of approaching death, the woman was laughing. It sounded wildly unreal and fantastic, and the spectators stood as if gripped by an unearthly enchantment. It seemed as though the woman's spirit was flitting away on waves of hysterical mirth.

The sounds grew husky, then ceased. The woman's glazing orbs looked out over the fringe of faces. A fluttering ray struggled with the blinding film before her eyes, and she seemed to be looking for someone who was not there. She stirred as if trying to gather her waning energies. Her lips trembled, a few faint sounds broke on the tense silence, and again her gaze strayed gropingly over the crowd.

"Mr.--Mr. Shei," she whispered.

Those closest to her recoiled as from a physical blow. The name spoken by the dying woman had contributed the final touch of weirdness to the scene. The two words went from mouth to mouth in a succession of solemn whispers. Faces turned rigid and white, and men and women looked at one another with mute fear in their eyes.

Then someone with more presence of mind than the others, suggested calling a physician. A strain of drawling laughter from the dying woman mocked the proposal. It rose to a shrill pitch, then died abruptly in a low sing-song moan that was like a chant of death. The lips were still moving, but the onlookers knew, even without the sagging of the body and the broken light in the eyes, that the woman was dead. A spell seemed to have lifted and an oppressive essence appeared to have gone out of the air.

"Awful!" wailed a woman, edging away from her place in the huddled throng. "I shall hear that laugh as long as I live. And what was that she said about Mr. Shei?"

The name and the prefix were all anyone had been able to make out, but they had been enough to send a thrill of fear and astonishment through the crowd. Of the mysterious "Mr. Shei" little was known except that he was a versatile and very elusive criminal, with a penchant for deep scheming and spectacular tactics, and that so far the police had matched their wits against him in vain. He flashed in and out like a meteor, without leaving trace or clew, and his audacity and impudence were as dumfounding as the magnitude of his exploits.

"Did she mean," inquired someone, "that Mr. Shei was here--that she saw him?"

"What else could she have meant?" The speaker cast an uncertain glance at the dead woman. The grayness and the rigidity of her features clashed bizarrely with the brilliant coloring of her gown. "Likely as not Mr. Shei murdered her."

"But there is no wound. And she made no outcry. She only laughed. And such a laugh! I can hear it still!"

"Mr. Shei is diabolically clever," observed another, "and he goes about his business in his own way. It would be quite in character for him to kill without inflicting a wound and to let his victim go to her death laughing."

The group fell silent. Helen, who had remained in the background, trying to control her sense of horror while she pondered what she had seen, touched the arm of the woman in front.

"Who is she?" she inquired.

"Don't you know?" The woman, busying herself with a vial of smelling salts, gave Helen a puzzled look. "Why, she is Virginia Darrow. Never attend her studio parties? That's strange. But I forget that you are something of a stranger among us, Miss Hardwick."

Helen smiled faintly, and the next moment her attention was attracted to her father. Mr. Hardwick had joined his daughter shortly after the lights went on, and until now he had been a silent spectator. With difficulty he elbowed his way through the crowd to the dead woman's side, and regarded her closely. Presently he raised her right arm, which had hung limply at her side. Just above the elbow was a small, faint discoloration, not unlike the puncture made by a hypodermic syringe. He nodded thoughtfully and seemed about to speak, but just then Vincent Starr, followed by several members of his company, came up the aisle and wedged a path through the huddled spectators.

He seemed to take in everything at a single comprehensive glance. He was pale, and his fingers trembled, but Helen noticed that he had taken pains to arrange his attire before coming out to ascertain the cause of the commotion. His long and glossy hair was neatly combed, his cravat was carefully adjusted, and just the proper width of cuff showed beyond the edge of his sleeve. She watched him narrowly while he questioned those about him. Somehow she sensed that it was in keeping with Vincent Starr's character to be squeamish about the minor details of his appearance even when face to face with a tragedy. Suddenly, as she heard him issue orders to right and left, she remembered the note Virginia Darrow had sent him, and she wondered, without knowing exactly why, whether he would say anything about it.

At the same time she was forced to admire his quickness of wits and the ease with which he mastered his feelings. In an incredibly short time the police had been notified of the occurrence and the doorkeepers had been given orders to allow no one to leave the building. Starr, in his habitually suave tones, asked his guests to be seated and expressed his regrets that such an unpleasant affair should have taken place under the roof of the Thelma. There would be an investigation and a great deal of questioning, he explained, but it would be only a formality. If the mysterious Mr. Shei--he smiled queerly as he spoke the name--had invaded the Thelma, he would undoubtedly be caught.

The crowd scattered among the seats in the auditorium and lapsed into the small talk with which one sometimes masks an inward turbulence. Helen, seated beside her father on a lounge in a corner, let her glance roam aimlessly over the scene. She supposed she would be questioned along with the others, and she wondered how much or how little she would be able to tell. Now that she tried to clarify the confusion in her mind, she saw that during the evening she had received two sets of impressions. Both had been equally strong at the time, but now they seemed to clash and quarrel with each other, and one of them had all but vanished with the drop of the curtain. Yet she felt it was the more important one of the two. The other had to do with the face she had glimpsed in the shadows. With the varicolored lights glowing on all sides, her recollection of it seemed unreal and fanciful. It appeared to be a thing of darkness and dreams. Her one remaining impression of it was a sense of malignity and horror. She felt words were inadequate to describe it.

She shrugged her shoulders slightly, as if to banish harassing thoughts, and turned to her father. His face was drawn and a trifle pale, and she remembered the family physician had once said something about an incipient heart ailment and the necessity of avoiding excitement. She tilted her face close to his.

"I'm sorry I got you into this, dad," she said.

Mr. Hardwick drew himself up. His face brightened with affection and the pride of parenthood as he gazed at his daughter's figure, straight and slender and strong as the trunk of a young birch. Her simple frock of white taffeta with touches of coral at the waist possessed that subtle individual charm which fashion designers can only imitate. Her dark, loosely coiled hair, with stray wisps caressing her healthily tanned cheeks, seemed in constant mutiny against the petty tyrannies of hairdressers.

"I might have known something was to happen." Mr. Hardwick's tones were gently playful, as if he were anxious to turn his daughter's thoughts from the tragedy. "Something always happens where you are. You are a storm petrel, my dear."

"I was born under Uranus, you know. That explains everything." She smiled whimsically. There was a touch of the child in the firm oval of her face and the smooth curves of mouth and nose, but the deep-brown eyes held a surprising store of worldly wisdom. She quite baffled her father at times. The impulses of April and June seemed to be constantly clashing within her, and they filled his autumnal days with a never-ending round of surprises.

"I wonder," he said, eyeing her curiously as a new thought came to him, "whether Uranus had anything to do with your leaving the box just before--before it happened."

"It's always safe to blame Uranus," she parried. "He is such a convenient scapegoat. I don't know what I would do if----"

She was grateful for the interruption that came just then. The law was already at work, and she sat back and watched the swift precision of its mechanism. Two policemen, one heavy and red-faced, the other lean and sharp-visaged, walked into the theater and stationed themselves beside the body with the air of zealots guarding the coffin of Mohammed. She gathered from the few words they exchanged with Starr that a cordon had been thrown around the building a minute and a half after the call reached the precinct station. They were followed shortly by a puffy little man who let it be known that he was a deputy from the office of the chief medical examiner. The latter had barely begun the usual inspection of the body when two other men entered the auditorium.

One of them, barrel-chested and somewhat pompous in his manners, seemed to be a representative of the district attorney's office. The other, angular and as loose-jointed as a marionette, with lazy, cinnamon-colored eyes and a complexion that seemed to indicate that he drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigars, was recognized by Helen at first glance. Uranus had brought them together once before. She remembered that his name was Lieutenant Culligore, and that he was attached to the homicide squad of the detective bureau. As his glance flitted slowly over the room, his mind seemed to register each detail without slightest effort. Helen noticed that he gazed at her a trifle longer than on the others, but his face betrayed no recognition.

Then began the questioning, conducted by the stout man from the district attorney's office, while Lieutenant Culligore made an occasional jotting in his notebook. The members of the audience were interrogated briefly and pointedly, and each one in turn was permitted to depart after leaving his or her name and address. Helen marveled at the matter-of-factness of it all. It seemed almost ruthless, this volleying of questions over a body which was scarcely cold, but she recognized the brisk efficiency with which the procedure was carried out. None of the witnesses had much to tell that was significant, and the only important points brought out were the dying woman's strange laugh and her mention of Mr. Shei.

Culligore, as was his habit when impressed, curled up his lip under the tip of his nose when these facts were stated, and the stout man raised his brows and nodded grimly.

"Looks as though Mr. Shei had been up to another of his little tricks," he muttered.

Culligore pursed his lips and chewed a dead cigar. There was a slow twinkle in his eyes which seemed to say that life wasn't quite so serious as it seemed, despite the sordid and ugly affairs with which he came in daily touch.

Helen did not know how it happened, but the house was almost empty when her turn to be questioned came. Her face showed no sign of the trepidation she felt as she stepped forward. She knew, as she turned her face toward the stout man, that three pairs of eyes were watching her with more than ordinary intentness--her father's, Lieutenant Culligore's, and Vincent Starr's.

The stout man gave her a listless look as he inquired her name and address. She fancied he was sniffing inwardly, and that after looking her over he had decided that she probably could give no information beside what had already been brought out. At any rate, his questions were few and perfunctory and gave her no opportunity to practice the evasions she had mentally rehearsed while the others were being questioned. As she turned away, she saw a mildly reproachful look in her father's face and one of amused understanding in Culligore's.

"Well, doctor?" The stout man turned on the medical examiner, whose rubicund face wore a puzzled scowl. "What do you make of it?"

The examiner wagged his head. Being a man of science, he was strongly averse to forming hasty conclusions.

"There is an abrasion on the right arm that might have been caused by a hypodermic syringe," he announced.

"And the laugh--how do you account for that?"

"I am not accounting for it, but there are certain drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter. Most of them have to be taken into the system by inhalation, however, in order to produce such an effect."

"I see." The stout man looked a bit impatient. "In plain words, then, it's a case of murder?"

"I wouldn't say that. It might prove a far-fetched guess."

"All quibbling aside, don't the scratch on her arm look as though somebody had shot a dose of poison into her with a needle?"

The examiner pondered. "It could mean that, but it doesn't necessarily follow. An autopsy will be necessary to establish the exact cause of death. Why should a murderer use a hypodermic injection when there are so many simpler and easier ways of accomplishing the same result?"

The stout man guffawed. "Mr. Shei never picks the simple and easy way. When he wants to pull off a crime, he always dresses it up in flossy trimmings. And he always plays safe. Now, my idea is that the safest thing in the world to kill a person with is a hypodermic syringe. It makes no noise, there's no smoke, no bullet, no powder marks, no anything, and it don't leave any clews behind."

The examiner smiled skeptically, as if he had his own views on the subject. "The autopsy will tell. What I fail to understand is why you seem so certain that Mr. Shei, as he calls himself, has had a hand in this affair."

"Miss Darrow saw him, didn't she?"

"She called out his name, if I understood the witnesses correctly, but she did not say she had seen him. It's possible she imagined she saw him. The same drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter also produce hallucinations. However," and he pulled a cigar from his pocket and lighted it carefully, "whether Miss Darrow did or did not see Mr. Shei is for you gentlemen to decide. Good-night."

He strode out. The stout man made a wry face and stroked his chin. Evidently the medical man had given him something to think about. Helen, too, had found food for reflection in the doctor's statement. She stood beside her father a few feet from the others. She had remained for no other reason than a feeling that Culligore, who had been watching her covertly from time to time, might try to detain her if she made a move to go. She believed the lieutenant had rightly guessed that she had not told all she knew.

Starr, who had unobtrusively slipped out of the building while the late colloquy was in progress, returned with the report that he had questioned the doorkeepers and the watchman, and that they had seen no suspicious looking characters about the place. They were positive no one had entered or left the building either before or after Miss Darrow's death. Starr ended by inquiring whether it were not possible that the murderer, granting that Miss Darrow had been murdered, was still hiding in the building.

The stout man rather scouted the suggestion, but he instructed the two uniformed officers to make a thorough search.

"If this is Mr. Shei's job, you can bet your sweet life he's made a safe get-away," he grumbled. "He probably sneaked out through one of the fire exits."

The two policemen withdrew. Starr, gliding about with the softness of a panther, found a piece of drapery and covered the body. Helen's lids contracted as she followed his movements. It struck her as odd that during the entire questioning he had made no reference to the communication Miss Darrow had sent him a few minutes before her death. She wondered whether he had forgotten it or was deliberately withholding it. In the latter case, what could be his reason?

"How about the motive?" suggested Lieutenant Culligore. It was one of the few times he had spoken since the investigation began. "Know of anybody who could have had a reason for getting Miss Darrow out of the way, Mr. Starr?"

Starr stood for a moment with head lowered, deep in thought. Then he slowly shook his finely proportioned head. "No, I don't. I knew Miss Darrow quite well. As far as I am aware, she had no enemies. I can't imagine why----"

He checked himself. Then he gaped, and his eyes widened, and he looked as though an important matter had just occurred to him. Finally, with a sheepish smile, he began to search his pockets.

"This dreadful affair has upset me completely," he murmured; and then, as if in answer to the question that had flashed through Helen's mind a few moments before, he produced a crumpled piece of paper. "If I had not been so flustered I should have shown you this at once," he added.

He smoothed out the message and handed it to the stout man. The latter's face clouded as he read it aloud:

Mr. Shei, like a fool, rushes in where angels might fear to tread.

V. D.

A pause followed the reading. Culligore's upper lip brushed the tip of his nose, a sign that he had found a problem to ponder. A blank expression came into the stout man's face. He looked bewilderedly at Starr.

"What do you suppose she meant by that?" he asked.

"That's just what I wondered when the note was brought me," explained Starr, a blend of sadness and self-reproach in his tones. "Miss Darrow was a strange woman, full of subtleties and queer whims. The note startled me at first; then I decided it was only a jest. At any rate, it was time for the curtain, and I dismissed the matter from my mind. Now, in the light of what has happened, I can see it was meant as a warning."

"Warning?" echoed the stout man.

"Undoubtedly." Starr gazed regretfully into space. "In some manner Miss Darrow must have become aware that Mr. Shei was in the house, and she chose this method of warning me of his presence. I was a fool not to see it."

He paced back and forth, running his fingers through his thick hair and muttering self-reproaches. The stout man looked as if he were trying to untangle a mental knot. Again he read the note.

"If Miss Darrow wanted to tip you off that Mr. Shei was in the house, why didn't she say so in plain words?"

"Facetiousness," said Starr grimly. "Virginia Darrow was the kind of woman you would expect to be facetious at her own funeral. Why didn't I realize that she was trying to warn me? I remember now that she behaved in a peculiar manner all evening. Whenever I happened to look in her direction, I found her gazing at me in a strange way. I didn't understand then, but I suppose now that she was trying to send me an ocular message. When that failed, she sent me the note. Oh, why didn't I----"

He made a gesture of distress and self-disgust. Helen, watching his every movement, remembered that it was Miss Darrow's odd way of staring at Starr that had first attracted her attention to the woman. The recollection started a train of new thoughts, but Culligore's voice interrupted it.

"If Miss Darrow was right and Mr. Shei was in the house," he told the fat man, "then you and I might as well hand in our badges and look for new jobs."

The other jerked up his head. "You don't think that----" he began in startled tones, then broke off and grinned complacently. "Not a chance of that. Mr. Shei couldn't have been in the audience. I gave all of them a pretty stiff quiz, and every one gave a good account of himself. Anyhow, they're the kind that get their names and pictures into the society columns of the Sunday papers. A bunch of harmless nuts--that's all."

He looked at Starr, as if realizing that the epithet had been a trifle brusque, but the manager seemed amused rather than offended.

"I think you are right," he murmured. "The audience was composed of invited guests. I am willing to vouch for every one of them. Furthermore, you have their names and addresses, and you can communicate with them whenever you wish. If Mr. Shei was really in the theater, he came here as an unbidden guest. In all likelihood he stole in while the house was dark during the first scene of the last act, and departed as soon as he had accomplished his purpose."

It sounded plausible enough, Helen thought; yet her mind was heavy with a giddying whirl of suspicions and contradictions. She slanted a reluctant glance toward the chair containing the body. With a shiver she turned away, and a look at her father's drawn and tired face warned her that he should be in bed. Then she glanced at the man from the district attorney's office, and finally at Culligore. His face was a mask, but his occasional glances in her direction troubled her. The two uniformed officers had not yet returned from their search, and she wondered what they would have to report.

Once more her eyes flitted over the little group, and then, with a suddenness that choked a cry in her throat, everything was blotted from sight. In a twinkling impenetrable darkness had descended upon the house. Somewhere a door banged. She felt her father's tightening clutch on her arm. The stout man swore. Dark shapes were darting hither and thither. She heard a fragmentary cry, followed by a crash and a succession of thuds. A thrust sent her sprawling to the floor, and her mind drifted into a state of semi-stupor during which she was conscious of nothing but the swift and silent movements of the shadowy shapes.

Voices and the return of light jolted her mind back to consciousness. She struggled to her feet and blinked her eyes at the strange scene. Her father, dazed but apparently unharmed, sat a short distance away, with his back to the wall. The stout man, seemingly unconscious, lay in a twisted heap on the floor. Culligore was staring about him groggily and muttering something about a blow on the head. A policeman, one of the pair who had been sent off to search the house, was helping Starr to his feet.

With the attention to detail that comes in moments of great bewilderment, Helen noticed that Starr made a ludicrous picture. His attire, so faultless and immaculate a few minutes ago, was now in a sorry state of disorder. A streak of crimson stained his shirt front, and he held a handkerchief to his nose. He wabbled drunkenly across the floor, but all at once his figure stiffened and a blank look came into his face. His lips formed unspoken words as he raised a finger and pointed toward a seat in the last tier.

As she followed the pointing finger, things swam in confusion before Helen's eyes. Starr, speechless and crestfallen, was indicating the chair where the body of Virginia Darrow had been. As she stared stonily toward the empty chair, Helen felt an impulse to cry out. She came a few steps closer, then stopped with a shudder and dazedly swept her hand across her forehead.

"It's--it's gone!" she cried huskily.