Pity Him Afterwards

Alden March was the only other actor who’d been here before this summer. Sondgard knew him, as he knew the others, because he’d developed the habit a few years ago of stopping by this house late at night, after a performance, to have a cup of coffee in the kitchen here with Bob and Ralph and the actors. For the last few years, Sondgard’s summer nights had been spiced by good-humored rehashings of the old argument about the actor’s artistic status: Is an actor an artist, or is he simply the interpreter of the artistry of the playwright, as a musician is an interpreter of the artistry of the composer? But aren’t some musicians artists in their own right? Aren’t the most accomplished actors artists in their own right? And what about directors? And so on, and so on.

Alden March came into the kitchen now and looked around, smiling sadly. “Not the usual joyous occasion, Eric,” he said. “But I’m glad to see you nonetheless.”

That Alden was homosexual was no secret. But he kept his opinions to himself, and never strove to press his convictions on males who were not of his persuasion, so there was never any trouble over him. He even managed to spend his summers sharing a room with Tom Burns — who combined perpetual drunkenness with a well-developed lust that verged on satyriasis, totally female-directed — with no problems.

He was not obviously effeminate, with the pseudo-girlish posturing associated with the homosexual. He was, in fact, very masculine in both looks and manner, which had caused more than one woman to offer him her all in a missionary attempt to show him the error of his ways. The missionaries, so far, had all failed.

He had nothing to add to what Sondgard had already learned. He had spent the afternoon in the rehearsal room. He’d stepped out of the room for about five minutes somewhere between two-thirty and three o’clock, and he vaguely remembered others making similar brief trips, but he couldn’t be precise about times. He’d been concentrating totally on the rehearsal.

After Alden, Sondgard took a break, to go through what he’d been told and see if there was anything of importance he’d overlooked. He had so far questioned eight people. Of them, six had alibis; Arnie Kapow and Perry Kent in the theater, Ralph Schoen and Loueen Campbell and Dick Lane in the rehearsal room, Bob Haldemann with Mel Daniels. Daniels really should be considered a non-suspect, too, but Sondgard hesitated to eliminate him. It was remotely possible that Daniels had killed her himself, and then had made a big show of discovering the body. Had there been time enough? Haldemann had left him, he’d gone upstairs, he’d come running back downstairs all in about five minutes. Could he have committed a murder in those five minutes? Unlikely. So he was a possibility, but far from a probability.

And the same was true of Alden March. Alden might actually have left the rehearsal room an hour later than he’d claimed. He had no rock-solid alibi. But Alden was even more unlikely than Daniels, if this was actually a sex killing.

So out of the eight, Sondgard had six impossibles and two improbables. And there was still the strong possibility that it was none of these people at all, but a stranger from outside.

Well, he would try to be dispassionate about this. He would assume, for the moment, that the killer was one of these fifteen people on the list Bob had made for him. Six were eliminated, two were almost eliminated. That left seven, four men and three women. If it was a sex killing, the list was cut to four. Three actors and one stage manager. Ken Forrest, Will Henley, Rod McGee, and Tom Burns.

Sondgard stalled. He sent next for Linda Murchieson and Karen Leacock, who simply verified the earlier statements, and neither of whom had seen any strangers slinking around anywhere. Now only Mary Ann McKendrick was left, and the four men.

Mary Ann McKendrick.

For the last hour and a half, alone in the theater.

“Don’t you have any sense?” He said it aloud, irritating himself further.

But what kind of stupidity was it, when one girl had been murdered, to let another girl stay all alone in an empty theater? If he’d heard of anyone else doing it, he would have said the man in charge was an imbecile.

The man in charge. The whole problem was that he was the man in charge, but he didn’t feel like the man in charge. He was just making motions like a police captain, salving his pride for an hour or two before calling Captain Garrett in. Captain Garrett was actually the man in charge; it was just that Captain Garrett didn’t know it yet.

Sondgard hurried to the doorway, and called, “Mike! Get over to the theater, and tell Mary Ann to come back here. You know she’s over there alone?”

“Son of a bitch!” Mike stormed away, his boots booming heavy across the porch and down the stoop.