A Chorus of Detectives Page 9

  Gatti shook his head. “They are as puzzled as we.”

  “We must do something,” Emmy announced emphatically. “We cannot allow this to continue.”

  “What can we do?” Amato asked. “We—”

  “I don’t know—something,” Emmy interrupted. “We can’t just sit around watching this happen without trying to stop it.”

  “What can we do?” Scotti repeated, his face lighting up. “We can find the killer ourselves, that is what we can do!”

  “Oh, Toto,” Amato sighed.

  “And why not?” Scotti went on enthusiastically. “We have experienced detective right here, do we not?” He gave Gerry a little hug.

  “Oh, Toto,” she sighed.

  “Two detectives,” muttered a tenor voice from the corner.

  One and a half, Amato thought. “Toto, do you seriously ask Gerry to go look for man who has already killed …”—he stopped to count—“… five people?”

  “Ah.” Scotti hadn’t thought of it that way. “No, that is not safe.” He considered a moment, and then came up with a solution. “I know! I investigate also! I stay with her every moment!”

  “And do you carry loaded gun with you every moment?” Amato asked with a touch of asperity. “Gerry, tell him you do not look for this killer.”

  “Ah, Pasquale,” she smiled, “don’t you get tired of being the sensible one all the time?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But someone must. You are not being sensible now.”

  “I haven’t said I’ll do it.”

  “You do it,” Scotti urged.

  “She’ll do it,” Amato sighed.

  “I’ll do it if you’ll help, Pasquale,” Gerry said unexpectedly. “With three of us sticking together, there can’t be any real danger, can there?”

  “Me? You want me to be detective?”

  “Sì, Pasquale!” Scotti beamed. “You make good detective! Come now, say you help us investigate!”

  “I have a better idea,” Emmy Destinn said suddenly. “Why don’t we all investigate?” They all stared at her. “With seven people out looking for an answer, one of us is bound to uncover something, don’t you think?” Dorothy Caruso suddenly remembered something she had to do in another part of the apartment and fled. “Excuse me, I should have said six people,” Emmy remarked dryly, not really surprised at Dorothy’s flight. “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think it’s a grand idea, Emmy!” Gerry said without hesitation. “Safety in numbers!”

  She and the two baritones argued about it a little, and Amato reluctantly found himself being persuaded to do the very thing he’d been trying to talk the others out of doing. He turned to Gatti-Casazza. “What do you think, Mr. Gatti? Do we help them investigate?”

  Gatti shuddered. “I am terrified of this man, whoever he is. But Emmy is right—we cannot sit and watch and do nothing.”

  “Then you do it?” Scotti asked.

  “Come vuole,” Gatti acceded.

  Scotti gave a cheer, the two women applauded his decision, and Amato nodded in resigned acceptance. None of them bothered to ask the sixth person in the room; they’d all assumed Caruso would be eager to jump in head first. So they were surprised when the tenor announced somberly, “An investigation is not necessary.”

  “Not necessary?” Gerry echoed. “Why ever not, Rico?”

  “Because,” he stood up to make his announcement, “I already know who is the killer.”

  There was a tense silence, which Emmy broke by saying loudly, “Well? Who?”

  Caruso paused dramatically and then said, “It is Beniamino Gigli.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rico!” Gerry said in annoyance.

  “Non è vero,” Gatti objected.

  “But it is true!” Caruso protested. “Gigli, he hates the chorus! So many years he works to get to the Metropolitan—and then when he does get here, the chorus, they make fool of him!”

  “You could say the same of Rosa Ponselle,” Emmy pointed out. “Except that part about working for years to get where she is.”

  “What about Giulio Setti?” Amato asked. “Tell us, Mr. Gatti—is he not in danger of losing his job because he no longer can control the chorus? Tell us true, please.”

  “I am forced to consider it,” Gatti admitted unhappily. “But Setti is no killer—I know him for twenty years. Besides, my assistant has as much reason to hate the chorus as Setti.”

  “Edward Ziegler? Why?”

  “His life is made miserable by the chorus. He must prepare their contracts, negotiate their demands, keep everybody happy …”

  “He does all the dirty work, you mean,” Gerry said. “Well, let’s not forget Alessandro Quaglia, as long as we’re naming names. He has no love for the chorus either.”

  “It is none of them!” Caruso cried. “Per dio, I tell you it is Gigli!”

  “I hope you are wrong, Rico,” Scotti said earnestly. “I and Gerry, we sing Tosca with Gigli after Christmas.”

  “Do you have any evidence, Rico?” Emmy asked. “No? I thought not. So you see, we do need to investigate … perhaps to prove you are right?”

  Caruso thought about that. “True, it is best I have evidence when I turn Gigli in to police.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Emmy said with a straight face.

  “So, what do you say, Rico?” Gerry teased. “Do we have enough get-up-and-go left to do it one more time?”

  He winked at her. “I think we manage. One last fling.”

  “Good, that’s settled,” Emmy said. “Well, Gerry, you are the expert. Where do we start?’

  “When do we start?” Scotti asked eagerly. “Now?”

  “Afraid not,” Gerry answered him. “Quaglia has called a Faust rehearsal this afternoon—I’m going to be working.”

  “I accompany you,” Scotti announced expansively. “I will be your bodyguard.”

  “And I will be yours,” Amato grinned.

  “We all go to the opera house,” Caruso declared.

  “That’s where we’ll start,” Emmy nodded in satisfaction.

  The small, damp fifth-floor room of the Elizabeth Street tenement building was the site of a great deal of frustration. An ad hoc committee of six was trying to figure out why Mrs. Bukaitis’s bomb had failed to go off.

  “I cannot find anything wrong with it,” Antanas said. “The wires are all connected the way they are supposed to be.”

  “Perhaps the alarm clock does not work,” a man with an ear missing suggested.

  “It is a new clock,” Mrs. Bukaitis said. “I paid one dollar for it.” Someone murmured disapproval at the inflated price.

  “Are you sure the clock was running?” the only other woman there asked. She was frail and had a bad cough; talking was an effort. “Maybe you forgot to wind it.”

  “I did not forget to wind it,” Mrs. Bukaitis replied with a touch of irritation. “It was ticking when I left it.”

  “The dynamite,” a gray-bearded man said. “It must be the dynamite.”

  Mrs. Bukaitis looked at Antanas, who shrugged. “It is the dynamite the city uses,” he said. “I took it from a shed at a construction site.”

  “Unfortunately,” the one-eared man sighed, “we have no way of testing it.”

  The last person in the room, who had remained silent until now, snorted in derision. “Amateurs! We are amateurs!” He was a dark, stocky man with a perpetual sneer on his face. “We cannot even build a bomb that works!”

  “We are new at this, Lucien,” the frail woman said. “It takes time to learn these things.”

  “And what if it had gone off?” Lucien plowed on, ignoring her. “What would it have accomplished? It would have blown a hole in the stage of an opera house.” He gave his disgusted snort again. “An opera house!”

  “Lucien,” the gray-bearded man reprimanded mildly.

  “Not just an opera house,” Mrs. Bukaitis objected. “The Metropolitan Opera House—the favorite gathering place of the privileged classes of
New York. It is these spoiled, self-indulgent Americans we must reach—”

  Lucien swore. “We must make the Americans understand the war against oppression is not over just because they say it is over. And the way to do that is through a military strike. We should be planting bombs in the naval shipyard in Brooklyn, not in opera houses!”

  The one-eared man disagreed. “If we want to attract the Americans’ attention, we must hit them where they feel it most—in the purse. Wall Street, the new stock exchange they are building. That is where we should be placing our bombs, in Wall Street.”

  They all started talking at once and did not stop until Antanas roared for quiet. “We have been through all this before,” he said. “We do not yet have access to the shipyard or to Wall Street, but Mrs. Bukaitis can come and go as she pleases in the opera house. It is a good place to test our bombs—which obviously need some testing.” He looked at the glowering man. “And it is safer, Lucien. There are no armed guards in opera houses.”

  Mrs. Bukaitis pressed her lips together; she’d not told the others that the Metropolitan was now as tightly guarded as a military base. It was the first time in her life she’d had a chance to do something to help the cause on her own. In Vilnius, it had always been her late husband who made the decisions and took the risks. She was determined not to lose her first chance to prove herself; if Antanas knew about the guards at the opera house, he would order her to abandon her mission. She would bite off her tongue before she told him. “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “There is only one thing to do,” Antanas said. “Start over. We must build a new bomb. And this time, we do it right.”

  Captain O’Halloran walked through the Broadway entrance of the Met and came to a quick stop. It had been five years since he’d last set foot in the Metropolitan Opera House, and the foyer was a lot smaller than he remembered. There was the box office off to the side, but there was no dramatic central staircase or other accoutrements of opulence. This part of the opera house looked more like the interior of a bank than anything else.

  In the auditorium a rehearsal was in progress, but at the moment there was just a lot of talking going on. O’Halloran slipped into the last row and sat down, giving himself a few minutes to get reoriented. He suffered from mixed feelings; he was attracted to the opera house but leery of it at the same time. Twice in the past ten years he had stood on that immense stage and arrested a man; and both times he’d needed the assistance of eccentric, theatrical, self-aggrandizing opera singers to do the job. Sometimes O’Halloran thought all opera singers should be kept in cages. Other times he admitted he kind of liked them.

  Some sort of argument was going on between the stage and the orchestra pit, but the captain couldn’t make out what they were saying. He looked up at the sunburst chandelier suspended from the waffle-grid ceiling that had been painstakingly decorated with paintings and gold leaf. The fronts of the boxes on both sides of the auditorium were ornately carved, matching the six-story-high gold proscenium arch with the names of composers carved across the top. The stage, O’Halloran thought, must be close to a hundred feet wide. All in all, the opera house was a reflection of an earlier day, an age of prosperity and urbanity. A self-assured time, not at all like the present day with all its fears and uncertainties.

  By the time O’Halloran’s eyes had adjusted to the dim auditorium light, he could make out the figure of someone sitting about fifteen rows in front of him. A big man, filling the seat he was in and hunching over a little. Gatti-Casazza? O’Halloran didn’t know the man on the podium in the orchestra pit, but the lady on the stage he was arguing with—the captain knew her. Oh yes, indeed he did know her.

  “Quaglia, you are insane!” Geraldine Farrar screamed.

  O’Halloran laughed to himself and stood up; some things never changed. He walked quietly down the aisle until he could see the face of the other man sitting in the auditorium—yes, it was Gatti-Casazza. He moved into the row behind the general manager and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, Mr. Gatti.”

  Gatti twisted in his seat and scowled, not recognizing him. “This is a closed rehearsal. You should not be here.”

  “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Gatti? I’m Captain O’Halloran, of the New York Detective Bureau.”

  Gatti’s face lit up as he remembered. “O’Halloran! Certo, certo!” He lifted a big paw to shake hands. “I am glad to see you, Captain. Are you come to find who is doing these terrible things to our chorus?”

  “I’ve come to try. Anything happen today?”

  “No, except the choristers no longer try to cooperate. Spike’s death discourages them all. Maestro Quaglia, he takes them through the Soldiers’ Chorus three times and they still do not sing it right.”

  O’Halloran filed the conductor’s name away. “I’m going to nose around a little. I’d like you to come with me.”

  As the two men made their way backstage, the argument between soprano and conductor abruptly came to a halt. Quaglia gave the downbeat, the orchestra played, and Gerry began to sing.

  But she sang only three notes before Quaglia made the cut-off sign. “It is still not right!” he protested. “If you just—”

  “How can it ever be right when you keep interrupting?” she interrupted. “You had no reason to stop me then! Let’s get on with it.”

  “No reason! You call three flatted notes in succession no reason?”

  “I was not singing flat!” she screamed. “You think you have perfect pitch, Quaglia, but you don’t!” She whirled to the other singers on the stage. “Did any of you hear me singing flat?” Nobody said a word. Gerry threw a look of triumph at the conductor.

  Backstage, O’Halloran grinned and asked Gatti-Casazza, “Was she flat?”

  “No,” Gatti said worriedly. “Quaglia is mistaken. Everybody is in bad mood … argumentative.”

  O’Halloran looked at the various members of the chorus waiting backstage—so many of them! But he wanted to talk to as many as he could; a couple of them might know something they didn’t realize was important. Then he saw that someone was already talking to a few of them. O’Halloran groaned. Surely Enrico Caruso wasn’t playing detective again!

  The tenor recognized him immediately. “Lieutenant O’Halloran! You are here! Bene, bene! Now we find the killer!” He grabbed O’Halloran’s hand and pumped it up and down, grinning like a child who’s just been given an unexpected treat.

  “What do you mean, ‘we’, Mr. Caruso?” O’Halloran was pleased by the warm welcome but surprised by Caruso’s appearance; the tenor did not look his usual robust self. “You haven’t been doing my job for me again, have you? A little interrogating, maybe?”

  “No, no!” Caruso grabbed his elbow and steered him away from the listening choristers. “I ask them not to make trouble for Gigli. They do it out of love for me, but they promise not to do it anymore, Lieutenant.” He nodded complacently, as if he’d just made everything crystal-clear.

  O’Halloran sighed. “It’s Captain O’Halloran now. Who—”

  “Captain! You are promoted! Ne godo proprio!” He pounded the policeman on the back. “Captain O’Halloran! Magnifico!”

  O’Halloran endured Caruso’s congratulatory thumping and asked, “Who is Gigli? You say the chorus was making trouble for him?”

  “Beniamino Gigli, he is new tenor who tries to take my place,” Caruso said in an offhand manner. “But the chorus, they do not want him to take my place. They know me long time, Captain. Captain! It sounds good, no?” He gave O’Halloran a whack on the shoulder and then got back to the subject. “The choristers play tricks—they upstage him, they drop props they are supposed to hand to him, they bump him when he has a high note. Not nice. They do same thing to Rosa Ponselle … they are jealous of Rosa, I think. But now they stop. I say, you must leave Rosa and Gigli alone. They promise.”

  O’Halloran had heard of Rosa Ponselle. He wondered if the opera world considered upstaging a heinous-enough offense to lead to murder.
Dumb idea—even opera singers weren’t that crazy. “Mr. Caruso, you aren’t thinking of conducting an investigation yourself, are you? I hope we settled all that last time. You understand you’re not to meddle in police affairs, don’t you?”

  The tenor drew himself up. “And why not? I am policeman too!”

  O’Halloran stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Since last March I am policeman. Mayor Hylan says I am. For my silver jubilee!”

  The captain remembered. The city of New York had honored Caruso on the anniversary of his twenty-five years in opera; as part of the ceremonies, the mayor had made the tenor an honorary member of New York’s finest. As his first ‘official’ act, Caruso had gone to the opera house and arrested Gatti-Casazza. “Now, Mr. Caruso, I’m sure you understand what the word ‘honorary’ means. You can’t—” He broke off when he saw a twinkle in the tenor’s eye. “All right, all right, you’ve had your little joke. But I’m going to warn you anyway. I don’t want you looking for whoever’s been attacking the chorus singers. This man is dangerous—do you want to get yourself killed? Promise me you won’t let me catch you playing detective.”

  With the request worded that way, Caruso was able to give his promise.

  “And Miss Farrar too?”

  “For Gerry, I promise nothing. I never know what she is going to do. You must ask her.”

  O’Halloran nodded and decided there was no time like the present—or as soon as she was off the stage, rather. He ambled back to where Gatti-Casazza was listening earnestly to something Emmy Destinn was saying. The captain just caught the end of it: “The ones I’ve talked to say anyone could have gone into the greenroom and added poison to the pitcher. The guards were guarding the people, not the room and its contents.”

  The police detective reintroduced himself; Emmy remembered him but not his name. “It’s been a while, Captain O’Halloran,” she said, putting old name and new rank together easily. “Are you in charge of the investigation?”

  He said he was. “You’ve been talking to the chorus singers about the last murder?”

  She frowned. “It is impossible not to talk about it.”