“Mr. Thorpe can be very helpful, Al,” Staples said “He knows a lot about these people.”
Bray studied me. “You know Lanisch?”
“I don’t know any of them personally,” I said. “But I do know who they are.”
Staples said, “He filled me in on the way over. Don’t worry, Al, he’ll stand in the corner and he won’t say a word.”
“He’s your guest,” Bray said, as though saying he’s your responsibility. Turning away, he said, “They’re all upstairs.”
Staples gave me an encouraging smile, which I hesitantly returned. Leaving the uniformed cop to his guard duty at the front, we followed Bray through a stark high-ceilinged living room to a small elevator with a porthole window in the door.
The movie business had apparently been very good indeed to Huga Lanisch, if it had bought him this town house. It was quite some place, five stories high, done in a kind of Bauhaus-modern style, full of white walls and chrome balls and sharp diagonals. There was also this elevator, which the three of us crowded into and which rose at a slow enough pace for Bray to give us the full story en route. “There’s a special room upstairs where they show movies,” he said. “Six people were in there, including Wicker, and when the movie was over Wicker was dead in his chair. He’d been shot in the back of the head and the gun was on the floor behind him. No prints.”
Staples said, “Could anybody else get in during the movie?”
“No. There’s only one door, and anybody coming in has to walk right in front of the screen.”
“So the killer’s definitely one of the five others watching the movie.”
Bray looked sour. “One of them,” he agreed, and the elevator stopped. He pushed open the door and we followed him into a square high-ceilinged room with black carpeting and puffy white low chairs and another uniformed cop. “This way,” Bray said, and the three of us trooped across the room and through an open doorway on the far side.
The scene of the crime. Oh, my God, and the victim himself, lying sprawled in a white leather chair and looking perfectly ghastly. His eyes were open and staring ceilingward, but the eyeballs were sunk too deep in the sockets, as though everything inside there had shriveled. A great sticky-looking stain the color of beaujolais smeared the white leather back of the chair. My victim had been much more discreet.
With difficulty, I forced myself to look at the rest of the place, which was a very plush little screening room. Ten of the white leather chairs, on chrome rollers, were scattered about the gray carpet, intermixed with small white formica parsons tables. The entire wall to the left of the entrance formed the screen, flanked by drapes which would probably close when no movie was being shown. Framed movie posters were mounted on the side walls, and a small but generous bar was built in at the back.
Staples said, “I thought you said there was only one door.” He nodded toward a second door, next to the bar.
“Projection booth,” Bray told him. “It’s like a little closet in there, and no other way out.”
“Ah.” Staples walked around the body in the chair, studying it from different angles. “Deader’n hell, isn’t he?”
Bray said to me, “If you’re going to throw up, there’s a John back past the elevator.”
“I’m not going to throw up.” In fact, I wasn’t at all queasy, though I preferred not to look at the dead man. Bray had simply been letting me know again that he didn’t like my being here.
Staples, having studied the corpse long enough to memorize it, now said, “Fine. Where’s our suspects?”
“Back this way.”
We went out through the other room again, past the elevator, down a short white hall, and into a bookcase-enclosed room done in shades of orange and brown. Tall narrow windows at the far end of the room showed the February nakedness of tree branches and the rear of some building on 68th Street. The low chrome-armed chairs in here were covered with brown corduroy and on them were sitting half a dozen distressed-looking people. I saw no one I knew, but two or three of the faces were familiar, probably from press parties. All of the faces were troubled and nervous, as though we were tax men here for an audit. Another uniformed policeman stood stolidly in a corner, pretending to be a guard in a bank.
Bray addressed the group: “I’m sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll try not to take much longer. I’m Detective Sergeant Bray, and this is Detective Sergeant Staples. We’d like to find out what happened. Does anybody have any suggestions?”
The troubled faces turned toward one another, this way and that, but the only one who spoke was a tall slender ash-blonde woman in black slacks and a pearl gray sweater, who asked, as though hoping against hope, “I suppose it must have been one of us?”
“It does seem that way,” Bray told her. “I’m sorry. Unless someone has another theory?”
But no one did. The faces remained troubled, and attentive.
Bray said, “All right. Then we might as well begin.”
The interrogation that followed was informal in style but very thorough, starting with the names and functions of everyone present. The oldest man here, sixtyish, almost completely bald, stocky, with a vaguely Mittel-European accent, was our host, Hugo Lanisch, co-producer of the film they’d been watching. The slender blonde in the black slacks was his most recent wife, Jennifer; in her early thirties, cool and beautiful and well-bred, she looked as though she’d come with the town house, and probably she had.
There was one black among the white faces, a bearded plump fortyish man named Gideon Fergus, who’d been hired to write the music for the film. I remembered his work from several black exploitation movies; mostly bongos and electric guitars.
Then there were two people from United Films, the company that had financed the movie and would be its distributor. The stout black-haired mid-forties woman with the serious hornrim glasses and the overly loud way of speaking was Ruth Carr, the East Coast story editor and presumably the one who had interested United Films in the project in the first place. And the 35-year-old slender fag in the leather pullover and big yellow glasses and long blond hair was Barry McGivern, the company’s assistant advertising director.
Finally there was the projectionist, a neatly dressed young man of about 25 named Jack March. An executive in embryo, March had an earnest expression, short blond hair, metal-rim glasses and a modest California tan. He had apparently decided his role at a murder was to look very alert, in case anybody should want coffee.
Having established names and pedigrees, Bray turned the floor over to Staples, who cheerfully but insistently worked out where everybody had been seated during the screening. With only six in the audience, they had not clustered together but had been fairly widely distributed through the room. Staples eventually had to produce paper and pencil and do a sketch plan of everybody’s position, but when he was finished the layout was clear. Wicker had been the farthest from the screen, so that any of the others could have left his or her seat, traveled on hands and knees, and approached him from behind without being seen by anyone else.
Except the projectionist. Young March had been watching the film through a small window next to the projector, but it turned out he’d seen the movie before — he was the messenger who’d brought it here from the cutting room on the west coast — and he hadn’t been completely attentive. He explained there were always things to be done in the projection booth, but that was undoubtedly a polite falsehood; the second time through, A Sound Of Distant Drums was probably more than a bit boring. Besides, if the killer had stayed on his knees behind Wicker the projectionist would have been unlikely to see him in any case.