Theater of the Crime (Alan Stewart and Vera Deward Murder Mysteries Book 6) Read online

  Theater

  of the

  Crime

  NEIL LOW

  A Tigress Publishing Book

  ISBN: 978-1-59404-061-0

  1-59404-061-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book Design: Steve Montiglio

  Editor: Peter Atkins

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Requests for such permission should be submitted to:

  Tigress Publishing

  7095 Hollywood Blvd #369

  Hollywood, CA 90028

  Copyright 2014 Neil Low

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or other events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  In loving memory of Bev Mallory, whose advice and encouragement I still treasure. Can you see me now?

  Sitting in the front seats of the lower balcony of the Paramount Theater on Vera Deward’s birthday, Alan Stewart grabbed his arm rests, leaned forward, and stood up at the same moment the music in the orchestra pit stopped. He scowled down at the stage and then glanced to Vera at his side, shaking his head.

  “Something’s wrong there!” he said. “That can’t be part of the act!”

  The applause in the theater stuttered to a stop, as if taking its cue from the organ player, while the fire on stage quickened and merged from the closed coffin to the blazing curtains behind it, smoke billowing to the ceiling and spreading out towards the audience like a colossal tidal wave sweeping across a small Pacific island. The Fire Chief, sitting in the front row, stood and turned toward the audience and shouted what had already become obvious to the unsettled crowd: “FIRE!”

  Alan grabbed Vera’s arm and tugged her toward him. On the main floor below, others in the audience repeated the alarm, telling those not sure of what they were seeing that imminent danger quickly approached. From behind the stage curtains, women’s voices shrieked, and one called out: “The door is locked!”

  “Please exit the building,” shouted the Fire Chief, while his deputy raced up toward the stage. “There’s no need to panic, people! Please move smartly and take your belongings.”

  The smoke continued its push across the auditorium’s ornate ceiling, obscuring the house lights, hovering over the audience, and gracefully descending onto the upper balcony. Alan passed Vera under his arm like a dance partner, and guided her toward the steps that led to the curtained doorway and ramp that would take them to the steps leading down to the front of the theater.

  “If I lose you in the crowd, stay close to the walls and cover your mouth with this,” he said, handing her his white kerchief.

  As they hurried up the steps, the smoke lowered over them, and Alan glimpsed the stage, now fully engulfed in flames, with the fire climbing the velvet curtains in front above the apron, gobbling at it hungrily. The surrounding smoke tasted bitter, while its thickness blurred visibility like a dense harbor fog. A man in a military uniform of some sort, with a Van Dyke beard and fancy walking stick, seemingly appeared out of nowhere and rushed past them, bumping Vera into the wall as he bulldozed his way ahead of others to be first out the door.

  “Hey, jerk!” Alan called after the man.

  Vera clasped Alan’s arm tightly and held it close to her as they started down the ramp, Alan ground his teeth while locking an image of the rude beast in his mind. Below them on the ramp, a fire alarm bell near the ceiling started ringing. Its incessant hammer repeatedly struck a red-colored bell, making a rapid clanging sound.

  “Ignore him, and let’s just get out of here!” Vera shouted through the kerchief. “My honor will survive.”

  They hurried down the crowded stairway, while more men ran past them. Inside the auditorium, the yelling grew louder, but did not completely obscure a shrill scream from the stage.

  “That’s not good,” Alan grumbled as they drew closer to the main entrance, a clogged chokepoint where those escaping the first floor massed together into an unmoving clot of humanity. The man who had banged into Vera adjusted his hat while shoving past others, recklessly poking some with his walking stick, which had a shiny animal’s head on top. He bulldozed into an older gentleman, who stooped forward, stumbled, and fell as his legs couldn’t recover fast enough to catch his balance. A woman behind the fallen man stopped short of him but the surging crowd, fleeing the choking smoke, pressed up against her in terror and knocked her on top of the man, who cried out as someone else stepped on his hand. Others also fell inside the rolling stampede, which added to the panic, and that combined to increase the urgency of the people trying to escape the encroaching inferno.

  “This isn’t going to work!” shouted Vera over the fire alarm, with Alan’s handkerchief over her mouth and nose. Her shoulders slumped as she leaned against the wall on the stairs. “We’ll be trampled before we make it to the door...”

  Alan leaned close to her protectively, as the stairs behind them filled with anxious theater goers, mouths agape and eyes wide and opaque—their brightness dimmed by the billowing smoke that hung near the ceiling. Its own momentum pressed the crowd into the tight knot of people clumped together, cursing and yelling orders to those in the front to move quickly.

  Alan wrapped his arm around Vera’s waist and steered her ahead a few feet, hugging the wall, to where a small alcove jutted out onto a small landing, deflecting patrons away from it like a boulder in a stream. Alan leaned into the small cavity for shelter and then his hip banged against a brass doorknob on an unmarked doorway.

  “What’s this?” he muttered.

  “A metal door,” said Vera. “So it probably leads to the machine room, furnace, and storage below.”

  Alan pressed his tie against his mouth and tried to breathe through it. “Heat and smoke rise,” he said, leaning close and raising his voice over the alarm. “Fires create an air current that moves upward...”

  “Something you’ve read?” asked Vera, gazing hopefully into his eyes.

  “Of course—probably The Boy Scout Handbook—I’m not sure. Even if we have to go back underneath the theater we should have time before the fire starts settling down on us.”

  “I trust your instincts, Champ!” Vera shouted. “They’ve always worked for us before, my detective scholar.”

  The houselights flickered and shrieks filled the smoky air. Alan twisted the knob and opened the door a few inches. Lights reflected off glossy cream colored walls and a metal grated set of steps.

  “You’re right about the machine room,” said Alan, “but it will take us right underneath the fire.”

  Vera pushed away from the wall, slid under his arms, and peeked down the stairway. “I’m not looking forward to running underneath a fire,” she said, “but first we should find the machine room, and beyond that the prop room. At the far end, there should be a delivery door leading to the alley.”

  Vera pulled the door open further and slid through, with Alan following close behind. The
door shut on its own, sealing off much of the noise of the crowd. Down two flights of stairs and forty feet ahead, midway up a wall, another fire alarm clanged away, louder than the one on the ramp they had just left.

  “What if we reach the stairs in back, which is below street level, and find the steps only take us back up to the fire on the stage?” Alan asked.

  Vera took off her high heels, held them in her hand, and led the way down the steps, along a catwalk, past a large boiler and a mass of interconnecting steam pipes and valves.

  “I don’t see we have much of a choice,” she said, over her shoulder. “There isn’t much chance we’d make it out the front door through the stampede, and the fire escapes aren’t easy to reach. We’d never make it through the smoke to get to them.”

  At the end of the boiler room they encountered a closed fire door with a Buffalo fire extinguisher mounted next to it. The large brass cylinder had a rubber hose attached near the top. The heavily embossed lettering said, In case of fire—turn upside down.

  “I hope we won’t need this,” said Alan, as he took the extinguisher from its mounting.

  “Me, too!” Vera said, placing the back of her hand against the door before cautiously pulling it open and stepping though to a large, dimly lit room. “I hope Chief Grayson’s Department is on the way.”

  Alan and Vera serpentined their way through partitions and floor-to-ceiling wooden cages with what appeared to be chicken wire stapled to the frames, each filled with props. The one closest to them had large canvas screens with street scenes, portable signs, furniture, steamer trunks, a stuffed full size horse, a carriage, and a stage coach. The ceiling above sloped downward away from them to a height of about twelve feet, where it leveled off.

  Ahead, footfalls raced erratically across a wooden floor, supported by trusses. Loud shouts from men and women accompanied the running and banging, as if heavy items had been dropped carelessly in the orchestra pit, and then the shouting grew louder, as if a door had been opened, and then a gush of smoke entered their large chamber, suddenly making it feel smaller. The sound of running feet followed the bang, and the voice became clearer.

  The lights flickered again, and Vera seized Alan’s arm.

  “I know you don’t smoke, but did you bring a lighter?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a book of matches in one of my pockets.”

  “Of course you do, you Boy Scout.”

  “They pass them out at The Five Point Café. They have their logo on them. I just picked up a pack to have on hand. Look, there’s the organ on top of the scaffolding, so we’ve reached the orchestra pit. Behind it’s the stage,” Alan nodded his head toward an industrial elevator with steel screens that serviced the stage, situated below a large trap door with smoke seeping through it. To the right of the elevator stood a simple set of stairs without a railing, leading to a smaller trap door, which suddenly opened. Smoke began pouring through the hole, tumbling down the steps. Men’s legs wearing a dark coat, like the dress tunic firemen wear, bounded downward through the smoke, before disappearing into the shadows in back, heading away from them.

  Alan and Vera moved toward the stairs, past the elevator cage. Ahead, a pair of women’s legs in Bedouin pants emerged through the hazy smoke, followed immediately by two more pair, belonging to young ladies. The threesome, dressed in bright silks, stopped at the foot of the steps, coughing, disoriented, glancing about quickly, finally settling on Vera and Alan.

  Instinctively, Alan rushed toward them, offering his arm to lead them away from the smoke. The one with red hair locked large fearful eyes on his.

  “You have to help Tasha, please!” she bellowed in a thick accent, grabbing Alan by the shoulders with a grip that wouldn’t let go. “We got separated up there and couldn’t find her in the smoke. We had to leave her behind. She’s going to die!”

  Behind Alan the elevator cage door slid open and a menacing sword fell to the floor with a clang. A swarthy man dressed as a eunuch in an Arabian Night’s fantasy slid from a pile of mattresses and raced past Alan and Vera, heading toward the back of the building.

  “Like rats fleeing a sinking ship,” snapped Vera.

  A moment later, a gust of air swept across the basement ceiling, caught the fluffing smoke, and pushed it back up the stairs.

  “We want that back draft,” said Alan, inclining his head toward the rear of the building. “It will keep the smoke away. Take these three outside and prop that door open, would you, darling? I’m going up.”

  “No, you’re not!” said Vera. “That’s when people die in fires—saving their cats, their dogs, and their photo albums.”

  Alan shook his head. “You heard what they said. There’s someone up there who needs our help.”

  Vera scowled at Alan. “You be quick and you be safe, Champ! If anything happens to you, I’ll never forgive you. Or me—for letting you go.”

  “Trying to help people in need is in my gene pool,” said Alan. “I’m a rescuer. It’s what Mackie would’ve done.”

  Vera pinched her lips together and shook her head, as she took the young ladies by the arm and led them away. “And we saw how that turned out for him...” she grumbled to herself.

  Alan hurried up the stairs with the soda water extinguisher in one hand. The smoke made a soft wall, brightly lit above the floor, keeping him from sticking his head through the opening. He inhaled deeply as much of the outside air as he could, preparing to stick his head through the hole and launch himself onto the stage. As soon as he took another step up, he felt the breeze gush by him, pushing the smoke up, clearing a way for him. That’s my girl, Vera!

  As Alan set foot on the stage, he caught a heavy wash of spray from a fire hose, the water coming from below the right wing of the stage. Either the fire chief or his deputy had stayed behind, while everyone else fled, giving the fire his best effort. Whoever had directed the hose now moved it to stage right and what little remained of the curtains. At the front apron, the klieg lights continued to shine brightly on Alan, as if he were a performer, while illuminating much of the backstage, now exposed with the curtains having burnt away. Immediately behind the magician’s prop coffin, long strands of sopping black velvet dripped soot on a woman who lay twisted on her side next to a black box pushed against the back wall, as if she were a drunk sprawled in the gutter. She was no derelict though—instead, a dark-haired beauty with sinuous legs protruding through an exotic silk skirt, cut high in the front. Her barely-there kaftan top designed to allow a knife thrower freedom to cast her lethal spell.

  From the Cancan routine during the set change, Alan recognized Natasha Zarenko. She had been the premier high kicker, and also the headliner for the main attraction that the fire had kept him from seeing. He saw plenty of her now, as he set down the fire extinguisher, bent low, and slid his arms underneath her, picking her off the floor as he stood and straightened his back, like Clark Gable carrying Vivien Leigh. But instead of Rhett Butler taking Scarlett O’Hara upstairs to the master bedroom, Alan stepped downward through the trap door and descended through the surprisingly strong breeze. Besides smoke and soot, Zarenko exuded the scent of an expensive perfume, something exotic from Paris or further east, such as a Crusader might have brought home from Arabia, a lot like what Vera would wear.

  The lights flickered again as Alan hit the bottom step and spun toward the back of the building. Madam Zarenko’s head flopped away from his arm, exposing redness near the base of her skull, where the neck hairs swirled back toward the hairline. Alan tossed her gently, catching her, and shifting her weight in his arms so that he could get his arms under her further, carrying her between the wired cages of props, letting her feet lead the way so he wouldn’t bump her head into something. Twenty feet ahead of them city lights and night sky shone through an open door. Inside the basement, the lights flickered one last time before dying for good.

 
The high-pitched siren sang a welcome greeting to Alan as he carried Madam Zarenko through the Paramount’s basement door. Walking under an alley light, he stole a glimpse of the beauty’s face in repose. She had that Hedy Lamarr savage beauty that would make a tango partner go weak at the knees. Vera had wedged open the basement door with a large brick shard, before moving down the alley a few yards away from the building, closer to Pine Street.

  No sooner had Alan cleared the door with Madam Zarenko than her three assistants deserted Vera and ran towards their leader. Red flashing lights from down the alley reflected off the oil coated mud puddles and shiny wet bricks, glaring brightly to where a few of the survivors now huddled around Zarenko.

  “What’s wrong with her?” the ginger asked, gazing up at Alan.

  “I’d say she’s been hit on the back of the head with something,” said Alan. “Did you see or hear something fall?”

  “No, we didn’t,” the ginger said, shaking her head while checking with the blonde and brunette. “Too much smoke and too many people running everywhere. She told us in the dressing room that there’d be a trapdoor and where to find it, and then we got there and turned around—no Tasha!”

  “We need to get her out to the street and find an ambulance and a doctor,” said Alan.

  Vera took off her gloves, gently pulled Zarenko’s hair aside and studied the bruise, probing it softly with her fingertips. She nodded and moved ahead of the group, leading the way. Alan followed with the two escorts hovering close to Zarenko.

  “Maybe there’ll be a doctor in the crowd,” said Vera, “but he’ll be dealing with the seriously injured.”

  Through the rear door two more stagehands stumbled out, coughing, and holding each other up with arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, while dirty hands held colored hankies to their faces. They crossed the alley and leaned their backs against a brick wall, catching their breath, as if they’d run a distance race in record time. A moment later, another figure fumbled at the door and stuck her head out. Yvette LaPierre, the disappearing princess, took a deep breath and then pushed her way through the door without shoes on, wild-eyed, clutching her tattered silk top at the middle. Her silk pants were torn and jagged above cuts to her legs that had drawn blood, as if cats had used them as scratching posts.