A Chorus of Detectives (18 page)

Walk it off
. He strode purposefully toward the corner and looked up at the street sign: Thirty-ninth Street. Gerry lived on West Seventy-fourth; he was heading in the wrong direction.

She was going to be furious. Thirty-nine from seventy-four was what? He puzzled over it a minute and then decided that anything that hard to subtract was bound to be too far to walk. He hailed a taxicab.

In Gerry's apartment building, the elevator motor said,
She's going to be furious. She's going to be furious
all the way up. Down the hallway, there's the door. After two or three attempts, Scotti located the doorbell and pushed it. She's going to be furious.

And then she was in the doorway, blocking his entrance. “Do you have any idea,” she asked icily, “what time it is?”

“You are furious,” he said sadly.

“You were supposed to be here at eleven o'clock! I've been waiting for you the better part of an hour!”

“I am inves, I am inveshigay, I am asking questions.”

Gerry peered at him closely. “Toto, are you tipsy? What have you been doing?”

He pulled himself up to his full height. “I,” he announced with dignity, “I am this morning
carousing
. With other women. With
three
other women. Are you not jealous?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “What other women?”

He ticked them off gloved fingers. “Mrs. Reilly. Mrs. Poplofsky. And Just-Call-Me-Maude. Three of them.”

Gerry blinked and said, “I think I'll wait to ask for an explanation of that one. Right now, you'd better get some coffee in you. Come on in.”

Two cups of coffee later, Scotti was able to tell her of his morning's visit with selected members of the Met's cleaning crew. To his surprise. Gerry seized on Mrs. Bukaitis's trying to get into her dressing room as the most important matter he'd uncovered. “Maybe I should add another lock,” she said.

Scotti said it wouldn't hurt. “I think she steals. But,
cara mia
, the important thing is that she does something around the stage platform. The platform that is right under the trap door!”

“Honestly, Toto, you can't think that's evidence of anything?” Gerry objected. “A scrubwoman standing in one place instead of another place? Your Mrs. Popplesofty didn't actually see her doing anything, did she?”

“Poplofsky. She saw her trying to hide a box.”

“A box. Oh, that sounds ominous, that does. Toto, I'm glad you had a nice gossip with the girls, but don't make too much of it.”

He was hurt. “At least I try.”

She gave him a quick kiss by way of apology. “And you'll go on trying. And so will I, if we can ever get started. We'd better hurry—it's after noon, and Setti may already have left. Come on, let's go.”

They took Gerry's limousine to Setti's house on Forty-second Street and got there just as the man himself was coming out the door. They offered him a ride; Setti, who usually walked the short distance to the opera house, squinted up at the snow and accepted. When they were all tucked in comfortably under the lap rug, the chorus master asked why they wanted to see him. “More questions, I suppose. Why does everyone think I see something nobody else sees?”

“Oh, we're all being asked questions,” Gerry said with a show of casualness. “But there's something you're in a position to know that nobody else is. It's about Teresa Leone. Didn't you miss her before the performance started?”

He shrugged. “I count heads, I end with right number.”

“
Un momento
,” Scotti interrupted. “Teresa Leone—which one is she?”

“The mezzo-soprano who is stabbed,” Setti said. “Right before
Carmen
.”

Gerry asked, “When did you take your head count?”

“Eh, twenty minutes before curtain, perhaps fifteen.”

“Mm, that doesn't leave much time. I suppose the killer just waited for any chorister who strayed away from the others. What do you do after you make your count, Mr. Setti?”

“Usually I listen to complaints. I do not stab the singers.”

“Of course not—I didn't mean to imply you did.”
Not yet, anyway
. “But do you move around a lot? Do you remember actually seeing Teresa during that fifteen- or twenty-minute period?”

“I move around, yes.” Setti wrinkled his forehead. “I think I see her, right before curtain.”

“But didn't one of the other choristers say she'd gone looking for Teresa a
half hour
before the curtain … and couldn't find her?” Not true; Gerry had made that up just to see what Setti would say.

“Eh, then perhaps I am mistaken,” was what he said. “Or she is. I do not remember—no one knows these details are important until later.” At that moment the chauffeur pulled up to the Broadway entrance of the Metropolitan. “Now I must bid you adieu, Miss Farrar,” Setti said. “I have busy day awaiting me and I can answer no more of your questions.” He nodded to Scotti, climbed out of the limousine, and went into the opera house.

“And so,
carissima
?” Scotti asked. “What do you learn?”

“I learned I need to know a lot more about interrogating people,” she said frankly. “Maybe he's only pretending he ended up with the right number when he counted. Who's to check up on him? Maybe she was already dead by then.”

“He could make mistake when he counts,” Scotti suggested.

“Yes, that too, I suppose,” Gerry sighed. “Well, that was a waste of time. When I retire from the opera,” she said dryly, “I don't think I'll be opening a detective agency.”

“Of course not,” Scotti teased. “Who would consult eighty-five-year-old detective?”

Gerry laughed. “You may still be singing in your eighties, but I won't. I always said I'd retire at forty.”

“You always
say
it, yes.”

“And I mean it, Toto. I'll be forty in, let's see, fourteen months. Only fourteen more months! Oh dear.”

“You do not retire,” he said firmly. “Not for many, many years. No. You do not.”

“One more season, that's all. One more, and then it will be time to stop.”

“No! You do not talk this way! Gerry, you must not say you go! How can I sing when you are not here? Do not even
think
of leaving!
Ne la prego!
”

She saw she was distressing him and let the subject drop.

Gatti-Casazza hated what he was doing.

Across the table from him, a stick-thin young man was shoveling in food as if he hadn't eaten for a week.
Doesn't Gigli feed him?
Gatti wondered. The young man's name was Roberto; when Gatti had invited him to share a noonday meal, he'd told his guest to choose any restaurant he liked. Roberto had chosen the one in the world's largest hotel, the Pennsylvania, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Thirty-second Street. Neither man had been in the capacious new hotel before, and both were impressed by so much open floor space in one of the highest-priced areas of real estate in the world.

Roberto was Beniamino Gigli's valet, and Gatti had set for himself the unpleasant task of prying information out of him. Roberto had hinted that he could use fifty dollars for a new winter coat, and Gatti had agreed to the amount. He, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, was going to bribe the valet of one of his star singers to give away secrets about his employer!
Vergognoso!
Shameful, shameful. Even worse, the fifty dollars would have to come out of his own pocket.

The way Roberto was eating, the meal could well cost another fifty. Gatti decided the valet was just a pig. A skinny pig. “How do you enjoy your meal?” he asked.

“Needs wine,” Roberto answered around a mouthful of lobster.

“
Sì
, a good meal, it is not complete without wine. I wonder why the Americans do not understand that.”

Roberto belched delicately and patted his mouth with a napkin.

It wasn't until dessert that Gatti could force himself to start the questioning. According to the valet, his employer went almost nowhere without Roberto in attendance. Gatti took that with a grain of salt but started asking anyway as to the tenor's whereabouts on the nights the murders took place. Gigli was in the opera house on the
Mefistofele
night, when the chorister had been hanged with his own suspenders. Of the other times, Roberto said Gigli was home every time except once, when he went out to play cards.

Gatti wasn't sure whether to believe him or not. He did not think Roberto was lying to protect Gigli, but he could be lying to protect himself; if he admitted he didn't know anything, he might not get his fifty dollars. Gatti seized on the one specific thing the valet had said. “How do you know he is out playing cards?”

“Because he takes me with him!”

“No, no—I mean how are you so sure of which night this is?”

“Eh, that is easy. The card-playing, it goes on until four o'clock in the morning! And I, I must be up at six to take the dog out to do his business! It does not matter if I get no sleep—every day I must go out with the dog and come back with the newspapers. And the day after the card-playing, I am so sleepy I can barely make out what the headlines say. But when I can, I see that a man falls through the stage at Metropolitan Opera and dies!”

“
Pagliacci
,” Gatti murmured.

“
Sì
, during
Pagliacci
. I rush home and wake Mr. Gigli—I remember he is very angry. Then I show him newspaper … and he turns white like ghost! I remember he says,
‘Misericordia!
In the opera house, they are dying—and I worry because Scotti takes my money!'”

“Scotti?” Gatti asked, startled. “Antonio Scotti?”

“
Sì
, Mr. Antonio Scotti. He is big winner in the card-playing.”

Gatti let the smile he was feeling spread slowly over his face. Now if Toto could just remember which night it was he cleaned out Beniamino Gigli …

The waiter arrived with the check—not quite fifty dollars. Roberto cleared his throat. “I tell you what you want to know?”

“Yes, Roberto, I think perhaps you do.”

Roberto cleared his throat again.

Gatti nodded and took out his wallet. Slowly, because it hurt, he counted out five ten-dollar bills. “There you are, Roberto. Fifty dollars, as we agree.”

“And another fifty not to tell Mr. Gigli.” The valet smiled at him innocently. “Do you want Mr. Gigli to know you ask questions about him behind his back?”

Gatti ground his teeth and opened his wallet again.

Mrs. Bukaitis emerged on to the south side of Delancey Street and paused to get her bearings. She didn't like Delancey; too many people, too much traffic, too much noise. The street had been widened on the south side when it was made the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge; now anyone crossing the street had to watch out for a continual string of streetcars as well as the automobiles that showed so little respect for those on foot. The newer buildings on the south side sported dentists' signs in almost every other doorway; all the remaining doors opened into offices of one sort or another as well. Nobody lived there.

But it was the older, north side of the street that was Mrs. Bukaitis's destination. Uptown, the policemen who'd directed traffic had long since been replaced by electric traffic lights, but Delancey Street had neither. Mrs. Bukaitis chose her moment and darted through a gap in the traffic. She sheltered briefly in the second of the two streetcar stations that trisected the street; she stood shivering and staring out at the bridge to Brooklyn that she'd never crossed. The bridge's pedestrian walkway was empty; the wind blowing off the East River was cruel in December.

Pulling her coat collar close, Mrs. Bukaitis crossed the remaining lane of traffic and stepped to the safety of the sidewalk in front of Wildman's Men's Shop. The north side of Delancey was all old tenement buildings, with stores on the ground floor and barely livable rooms above. Mrs. Bukaitis headed west until she came to a dingy café and went in. If the place had a name, nobody knew it. The grease on the windows reflected a yellow tint over the cheerless brown interior; a Christmas wreath had been nailed to one wall in a halfhearted attempt to add a little color to the place.

Mrs. Bukaitis looked around quickly; Antanas was not there yet. Opening the big black bag she'd brought with her, Mrs. Bukaitis pulled out the pocket watch she'd ‘found' in the chorus dressing room at the Metropolitan. It was still early; Antanas would be there before long.

The café's cook-owner always kept a large kettle of soup simmering on the stove. Into the kettle went any leftover bits of vegetable or grain or fat or fish or fowl that came to hand; the regular customers called it surprise soup. Mrs. Bukaitis asked for a bowl.

The wind outside made the window glass rattle in its frame. Mrs. Bukaitis sat at a battered table where she could keep an eye on the door and warmed her hands over the steaming soup bowl. There were perhaps half a dozen other customers in the small café, all of them talking and eating at the same time. Mrs. Bukaitis ate her soup in silence. She'd just finished when Antanas came in. He was carrying the box under one arm.

He slid into the chair opposite her and kept the box on his lap. In a low voice he told her, “He says this one is all right. He says the only reason it might not go off is if the dynamite's no good.”

“Isn't there any way to tell?” she asked.

“Not without testing other sticks from the same batch. I don't want to do that—it might give us away. We'll let
this
one be the test. If it doesn't go off this time, I'll have to get some different dynamite.”

Mrs. Bukaitis nodded. “I'll set it on Monday.”

“Why not today?”

“Because on Monday Geraldine Farrar is singing. Every seat in the house will be taken.”