A Chorus of Detectives Page 8

  “Someone call a doctor!” Quaglia commanded the room at large.

  Spike’s eyes grew larger as he understood that all these important people were worrying about his stomachache. “I don’t need a doctor. It’s just indigestion.”

  “A doctor,” Quaglia insisted. “We take no chances. Where is a doctor?”

  “One of my doctors, he is here!” Caruso cried. (Dorothy had insisted on it.) “I get him!” He hurried away.

  Spike’s mouth fell open at the sight of the most famous singer in the world running off to fetch him a doctor. “I took some Bromo-Seltzer.”

  Setti put his hand on the young man’s forehead. “No fever. It could be indigestion.”

  “I know it’s indigestion,” Spike said. “In the dressing room, one of the men brought in a huge Italian sausage and I had some.”

  Amato’s eyebrows shot up. “I eat sausage three, four times every week. It never makes me sick.”

  The young singer smiled ruefully. “Not all of us can eat garlic without paying a penalty. It always makes me queasy—I should have known better.”

  “Oh, you poor boy!” Rosa cooed. He was at least two years older than she. “Why not lie back down until the doctor gets here?” She sat beside him. “Here, let me help.” With a minimum of maneuvering, Spike ended up with his head in her lap. “Isn’t that better?” she asked.

  “Oh, much better, yes.”

  “Where is that doctor?” Quaglia muttered.

  Gatti pulled out his watch. “It is time. We must start the performance.”

  Quaglia shook his head. “I do not go into orchestra pit until I know this is not another attack on the chorus.”

  “I’m sorry, Maestro, but I must insist,” Gatti said quietly. “You can do nothing here—”

  Edward Ziegler came rushing in. “What is it? What is it?”

  “A stomachache,” Amato smiled, shaking his head. “From eating good Italian sausage.”

  “I heard one of the choristers had been—”

  “No, no!” Gatti said. “Do not allow that rumor to spread! We do not know what is wrong yet—a doctor comes.”

  Ziegler walked over to where Spike was lying happily with his head in Rosa Ponselle’s lap. “You don’t look sick to me,” he accused.

  The smile on Spike’s face was quickly replaced by a grimace of pain. He helped the effect by groaning a little. “A glass of orange juice might help.” He pointed to a pitcher that stood on the small table next to the settee.

  Rosa poured a glass. She put one hand under Spike’s head to raise him up and held the glass to his lips. “How’s that?”

  He drank half the juice. “Better.” She put the glass on the table. Spike laid his head back in her lap and grasped her hand. “How soft your hand is!”

  “You must lie still,” she whispered.

  Ziegler looked at Gatti. “This is what everybody’s so excited about?”

  “Here is the doctor,” Setti announced.

  A thin man carrying a black bag followed Caruso into the greenroom. It took him only a few pokes and prods to come up with a diagnosis. “Gas,” he said bluntly and saw Rosa wince. “Excuse me, Miss Ponselle. I should have said a digestive problem.”

  Spike looked up soulfully at Rosa. “A bad digestive problem,” he murmured. She made soothing noises and stroked his forehead.

  “I have something here that’ll have him up and around in no time,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry—it’s nothing serious.”

  Only then did the others relax. Now it was official: No one was trying to poison the chorus. The men exchanged sheepish looks. “Look at us,” Quaglia said sourly. “One chorister gets a tummy-ache and we all panic.”

  “I do not panic,” Caruso sniffed. “I go get doctor.”

  “Now we start the performance,” Gatti announced firmly and led the way out of the greenroom.

  Rosa carefully lifted Spike’s head off her lap. “Lie still, now. Take your time.”

  “Come back?” he asked hopefully.

  She smiled and said maybe and followed the men to the stage. The curtain was going to be a little late tonight.

  Gatti did a quick check; the soloists were in their places and Quaglia was on his way to the orchestra pit. The general manager kept thinking of what the conductor had just said, about how quickly they’d all panicked once they thought another chorister might be in danger. Young Spike had been too interested in winning Rosa Ponselle’s sympathy to be seriously ill; but was this to be the pattern from now on? Every time a chorus singer became indisposed, everything else would grind to a halt?

  Gatti found himself a place in the wings where he could stand out of the way; general managers were fifth wheels during a performance. He mumbled a little prayer, hoping the audience had not had time to grow restless while waiting for the late curtain.

  Out front, the talkative audience hadn’t even noticed the opera was late in starting, and at least two of its members were grateful for the delay. Geraldine Farrar and Antonio Scotti had dawdled and were only just then arriving; they made their usual grand entrance into the artists’ box—and found Emmy Destinn already sitting there.

  “Emmy!” Gerry smiled bravely, not really welcoming the other soprano’s company for the next few hours. “I thought you avoided Rosa’s performances!”

  “Not at all,” Emmy answered sharply. “I just avoid Rosa.”

  “Now, Emmy,” Scotti said reprovingly. “Rosa means well.”

  “She’s a nosy little girl who’s never been taught any manners.” Emmy turned to Gerry. “And you—at a Verdi performance, Gerry?”

  “I just don’t sing Verdi—I do listen to him.” Gerry had decided years ago that either Verdi’s music wasn’t right for her voice or her voice wasn’t right for Verdi’s music, a puzzle she didn’t particularly care to resolve.

  The truth was, they were all three there for the same reason. This was Caruso’s first time back on the stage since the night he’d hemorrhaged. They were worried about him.

  Quaglia had made his way to the podium and now faced the orchestra with both arms lifted in the air. Down came his arms and the orchestra sounded three powerful trumpet blasts, paused, and sounded three more. Then they were into the haunting, uneasy theme music associated with the opera’s heroine.

  Rosa Ponselle and Pasquale Amato opened the opera, and it wasn’t until after Amato had exited that Caruso made his first entrance. He and Rosa immediately plunged into a long and dramatic duet, and the three singers in the artists’ box held their breath.

  They needn’t have worried. The tenor’s tone was pure and his control was perfect. He was holding back some, though—a cause for rejoicing because that meant he had decided to be sensible. But even holding back, Caruso still had more power than any other tenor in the opera company, including the sweet-voiced Gigli. It was going to be all right.

  The full chorus didn’t make its appearance until the second act, another cause for breath-holding. But whether it was because they were concerned about Caruso or because they just weren’t in the mood for pestering Rosa, the choristers behaved themselves. They did nothing they weren’t supposed to do. And they sang. They sang like the professionals they were, loving what they were doing and doing it well. A ripple of excitement began to run through the responsive audience.

  “I am glad we do not miss this,” Scotti whispered.

  The excitement continued to build as the opera progressed; and upon the completion of her big final-act aria, Pace, pace mio Dio!, Rosa received a standing ovation. The two sopranos in the artists’ box joined in with sincere enthusiasm; Scotti called out, “Brava! Brava!”

  Whatever Emmy Destinn thought of Rosa Ponselle personally, the older soprano was still a musician before everything else; she responded wholeheartedly to the younger woman’s performance. “How is it possible to have a voice like that?” she murmured.

  “By special arrangement with God,” Gerry answered wryly.

  The opera came to an en
d, and the cast was called back for curtain call after curtain call. The audience finally began to leave, exhausted but happy. The three singers in the artists’ box held court for a few minutes, but finally told their well-wishers that they were eager to get backstage. All the way down to the stage level they chattered happily, still keyed up by the performances they’d just heard.

  So they were all three laughing and talking when they swept on to the stage behind the closed curtain … and found everyone there standing like statues. Singers, stagehands, guards—all frozen in place, identical expressions of shock on all their faces. The only sound was that of Rosa Ponselle crying, her face buried in Caruso’s shoulder.

  “Rosa!” Gerry gasped, hurrying over to her. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Spike’s dead,” Rosa sobbed. “Someone poisoned him after all.”

  5

  “This,” Captain Michael O’Halloran said to himself, “has gone far enough.”

  Even with the backstage area of the Metropolitan Opera swarming with hired guards as well as selected members of the New York police force, the madman on the loose had still managed to work his dirty deed. And if O’Halloran’s best men couldn’t put a stop to it, then O’Halloran himself was going to have to step in.

  He’d resisted. When the stabbing of the chorus singer had been reported, it had been all O’Halloran could do to keep from grabbing his hat and dashing straight to the opera house. Even when the investigators he’d assigned to the case came back with word that the stabbing was only one of a series of suspicious-looking incidents, O’Halloran had confined himself to making suggestions and giving orders. He was a captain now; his role was to supervise investigations, not do the investigating himself.

  O’Halloran had been involved in two earlier cases at the Metropolitan, back when he was still a lieutenant with the New York Detective Bureau. Both times, a Metropolitan singer had decided to play detective, imperiously meddling in the case without so much as a by-your-leave. First it had been Enrico Caruso, who’d stumbled and bumbled around and ended up accusing the wrong person. But much to everyone’s surprise, his blundering had actually helped turn up the real killer in the end. The second time it was Geraldine Farrar who’d undertaken her own investigation; at the eleventh hour she’d stopped O’Halloran from arresting an innocent man.

  He was simultaneously grateful to and exasperated with both singers. O’Halloran had no patience with amateurs who meddled in police business; but he had to admit that in those two cases the meddling had helped. He’d warned the investigators he’d assigned to this new case to be on the look-out for self-appointed detectives, but so far they’d reported no interference from anyone.

  Because this time it’s different, O’Halloran thought. Those other two times had dealt with a single incident each—violent death in both cases, horrible and unnerving, but at the same time manageable. Most people could cope with the idea of disaster striking and then moving on; you suffered your losses, picked up the pieces, and went on with your life. But the repeated, inexplicable malevolence of what was happening at the Met right now—that was something altogether different.

  Captain O’Halloran shuffled through the various police reports on his desk, trying to get it clear in his mind the order in which the various incidents had taken place. Evidently the first of them had been the death of the woman chorister during a performance of Samson and Delilah. A stage urn had fallen on her head, killing her instantly. The episode had been labeled an accident at the time, understandably. Then one of the men in the chorus had hanged himself, or so it had appeared. Accident and suicide, no cause for suspicion yet.

  But now O’Halloran’s investigators were convinced that those first two deaths were homicides, and O’Halloran saw no reason to disagree with them. The next thing to happen had come during a performance of I Pagliacci, at a time when ex-detective Enrico Caruso was on the stage. A trap door in the stage floor had given way and two men had fallen thirty feet; one had died, the other had been seriously injured. Again, an accident—on the surface of things.

  That, however, was the last such incident that could be dismissed as an accident without question. The stabbing of the chorus woman during a performance of Carmen—starring that other ex-detective, Geraldine Farrar—could only have been willful murder. O’Halloran mulled that over for a while. He accepted his detectives’ theory that one person was behind all these frightening goings-on; to think otherwise would be to stretch coincidence beyond the breaking point. But between the Pagliacci staged ‘accident’ and the Carmen murder, the killer must have undergone a change of attitude. He was no longer satisfied with arranging murders that everyone was willing to accept as accidents. Now he wanted the world to know what he was doing; he wanted to be recognized. He wanted the chorus to understand he was out to get them.

  O’Halloran frowned. That didn’t jibe with the next incident, though—a flat had fallen to the stage during a performance of Mefistofele, barely missing four of the chorus women. A failure, from the killer’s point of view, but one that again carried the appearance of an accident. Or perhaps that time it really was an accident? People in an opera house do not call the police every time a flat breaks loose from its moorings; and by the time O’Halloran’s detectives had found out about it, it was too late to check the rope that had been used to raise and lower the flat. The rope had either been discarded or was being used elsewhere; one rope looks pretty much like any other. If it wasn’t a true accident, then maybe the killer was having second thoughts about making his presence known. Or maybe he’d counted on someone’s looking at the rope and seeing it had been cut.

  The captain was inclined to think the latter was the true explanation. For when his latest attempt at murder had failed to be recognized as such, the killer had turned to the most obviously premeditated form of murder there was: poison. You can’t say you administered a slow-acting poison in the heat of anger or in a fight. You can’t say you thought it was sugar you were sprinkling on your victim’s oatmeal, not if you expect to be believed. No, the use of poison was a calling card that no one could ignore or explain away. The sausage the victim had eaten part of and to which he’d attributed his indigestion had been taken to a police laboratory and analyzed; it contained nothing a good sausage should not contain. The poison had been added to a pitcher of orange juice the younger singer was drinking from in the greenroom.

  O’Halloran’s detectives had investigated the five victims’ backgrounds and private lives but had found nothing useful. The man who’d been killed falling through the trap door had once been arrested for shoplifting when he was a boy; but other than that one misdemeanor, none of the victims had a criminal record. None of the five posed a threat to anyone else. There was no connection among them except the Metropolitan Opera; these five didn’t even socialize together when they were away from the opera house. Singing in the chorus was the only thing they had in common.

  O’Halloran was a man who took his work home with him, and his wife had grown so tired of hearing about the Metropolitan Opera that she’d urged him to take over the investigation himself. It has to be stopped, doesn’t it? she’d asked reasonably. So, stop it. What she’d meant was Stop talking about it and do something, but O’Halloran had waited until the assigned detectives admitted they were stumped. Only then did the captain make up his mind to involve himself personally.

  He’d start off by paying a visit to the opera house; then he’d decide whom to talk to. O’Halloran called for a police car, shrugged on his overcoat, and picked up his new gray Stetson. He’d reluctantly thought of saving the hat for special occasions, but his wife had convinced him that a Captain of Detectives needed to be well dressed all the time. That was one of the things he liked best about Bridget; she was always able to come up with sensible reasons for doing things he already wanted to do.

  There was a spring in his step as he left the office. It was good to be working a case again, and he was determined not to let up until he’d
learned why someone had set out to kill off the entire chorus of the Metropolitan Opera.

  “I’m afraid,” Geraldine Farrar told her friends. “For the first time in my life, I am truly afraid.” Antonio Scotti wrapped a comforting arm about her shoulders. “Not even getting caught in Germany when the war broke out was as bad as this. This is the kind of fear that gets down inside your bones—does anyone understand what I’m talking about?”

  “I understand,” Emmy Destinn said quietly.

  “Ah, Emmy.” Pasquale Amato sat down beside her and patted her hand. “Do not think of the violent war years. Think of …”

  “Think of now?” she asked wryly. “The non-violent postwar years?”

  “È vero, it is not much better. A small war, inside our opera house.”

  “But how can you fight a war when you don’t know who the enemy is?” Gerry cried. “This faceless killer moves among us like an invisible man and strikes whenever he pleases! I’m surprised the entire chorus hasn’t resigned. I know I’d quit, if I were a chorister.”

  “This morning, they say they quit—all of them,” Gatti-Casazza muttered. The others gasped. “But Ziegler, he persuades them to stay,” the general manager assured them hastily. “He promises each one a personal armed bodyguard. One guard assigned to one chorister, you see. These guards, they go with them everywhere—in the dressing room, on stage, everywhere.”

  “Cielo!” Scotti exclaimed. “So many people!”

  “It is necessary,” Gatti said worriedly. “We must now find costumes for all the guards to wear. And the women choristers, they do not want men in their dressing room. So we must find women who know how to shoot the guns … and the expense! The budget, it is ruined. Ruined!”

  They had gathered at the Carusos’ Vanderbilt apartment in the morning after the latest chorus murder. Dorothy Caruso was trying to play hostess and listen at the same time, while her husband sat moodily in a corner, saying nothing. “Don’t the police have any idea at all who is responsible?” Dorothy murmured.