Cue For Murder

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A murder has taken place on stage and it seems that one of three people must be guilty. The crime was committed in full view of the audience and players, but no one can say whom the murderer is. There appear to be no clues, the suspects are all well trained in the art of dissimulation, and all three deny any knowledge of the crime.

It looks like the perfect murder, until Dr Basil Willing, psychiatrist-sleuth, begins to investigate the peculiar behaviour of a pet canary and a housefly.

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

THE MURDER MYSTERY at the Royalty Theatre was solved through the agency of a house fly and a canary.

The fly discovered the chemical evidence that so impressed the jury at the trial, but the canary provided a psychological clue to the murderer’s identity before the murder was committed.
Basil Willing is still troubled by the thought that it might have been prevented if he had read the riddle of the canary sooner.

It began with the canary. Though birds are unblessed with public relations counsels this one made the first page of the Times one spring morning when a weary make-up man snatched a filler
at random from the galley file to plug a hole at the bottom of column three.

BURGLAR FREES BIRD

New York, April 28—Police are puzzled by the odd behavior of a burglar who broke into Marcus Lazarus’ knife-grinding shop near West 44th Street shortly
before dawn yesterday. Nothing was stolen but the intruder opened the cage of Lazarus’ pet canary and set the bird free. The shop is hardly more than a shack in an alley leading to the
stage door of the Royalty Theatre.

On April 28 at eleven o’clock in the morning, Dr. Basil Willing unfurled a copy of the Times at breakfast on a plane from Washington to New York. He read the war
headlines with the sensation of individual littleness that an ant must have during an earthquake. It was a relief to come across such a human item as BURGLAR FREES BIRD.
That was criminal behavior on a conceivable scale; pleasantly trivial after the murder of peoples, the robbery of continents, and the perversion of cultures. The little puzzle teased his
imagination as prettily as a problem in chess or mathematics.

Why risk incurring the severe penalties for burglary by breaking into a shop without stealing anything? Why prolong the risk by lingering on the premises to free a canary from its cage? Was this
erratic burglar a man of sentiment who broke into the shop solely in order to free a bird from a cage that was cramped or dark or dirty? A telephone call to the A.S.P.C.A would have been far less risky and more permanent in its effect. But if freeing
the bird were an afterthought, what sort of burglar would be distracted from the serious business of burgling by such a frivolous impulse?

At the moment Basil believed his knowledge of this “crime” would always be limited to the few facts contained in the news item. The construction of a plausible hypothesis within such
narrow limits was a mental exercise as strict, and therefore as stimulating, as the composition of a sonnet. But the longer he played with those few facts, the more clearly he realized that no
hypothesis he could construct embraced all the facts adequately. If this were an anagram, some of the letters were missing. The letters he had spelled only nonsense words and stray syllables,
unintelligible and tantalizing as a message in an unknown code.

That afternoon Basil stopped at Police Headquarters to discuss a sabotage case with Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle of the Police Department.

“Well, well!” For once the Inspector’s shrewd, skeptical face was off guard, relaxed and friendly. “I thought you were marooned in Washington for the duration!”

“At the moment I’m working with the New York office of the F.B.I.”

“As a psychiatrist or an investigator?”

“A little of both. Very much the sort of work I used to do for the D.A. If it weren’t for you I’d be in uniform by this
time.”

“What have I to do with it?”

“You gave me my first chance to apply psychology to the detection of criminals. Now I’m supposed to be applying it to the detection of spies and saboteurs. But I ought to be with
some medical unit. I’m under forty-four, I have no wife or children, and I’ve been in the Medical Reserve Corps ever since the last war. I went straight from Johns Hopkins to a casualty
clearing station, and it was through shell-shock cases that I first became interested in psychiatry.”

“Don’t worry, doc,” said Foyle dryly. “They’ll call you up quick enough if they need you. They probably think that anybody who speaks German like a native and reads
a crooked mind like a book is more useful doing what you’re doing now. . . . Funny thing happened to me the other day. I was walking down Whitehall Street sort of fast, the way I always walk
when I’m thinking, and a recruiting sergeant sees me and comes rushing up to me with a big smile. Then suddenly he stops and his smile goes out like a light and he shakes his head and turns
away. When he first saw me he thought I might do because I’m still thin and wiry and can move fast; but when he got close enough to see my gray hair and the lines in my face he
wasn’t interested any more. I suppose I should’ve been glad in a way, but I wasn’t. I felt the way I did the first time a truck driver called me ‘pop’ instead of
‘buddy.’”

War talk brought the morning paper to Basil’s mind, and that in turn reminded him of the canary.

“Yeah, it was sort of funny,” admitted Foyle. “I got a report on it from the precinct this morning. I thought it might be a publicity stunt.”

“For whom?”

“Wanda Morley. Her new show opens at the Royalty in a day or so, and the knife-grinder’s shop is right next door. But her press agent swears he doesn’t know a thing about it,
and her name hasn’t been mentioned in connection with it. If there were any tie-up it would’ve come out by this time.”

“Is there anything of value in the shop?”

Foyle laughed. “You should see it! Nothing but a grindstone and a lot of rusty old knives and scissors.”

“Has Lazarus any enemies who might do a thing like that just to annoy him?”

“He says not. If people wanted to annoy him wouldn’t they have stolen something? Or injured the bird? It was perfectly all right—just out of its cage flying around the room
when Lazarus came to his shop to work yesterday morning. Then he noticed the door of the cage standing open and the broken latch at the window. Those were the only signs that anyone had been
there.”

“But why?” persisted Basil.

“That’s your headache, doc. My job is to catch the guys who do wrong—not to worry about why they do it! Maybe you can tell me why they always push forward at a
fire when we tell them to stand back?” The Inspector weighed his next words. “I wish it hadn’t been a knife-grinding shop.”

Basil’s interest quickened as if someone had supplied one of the missing vowels to his anagram. “So that’s it?”

“Looks that way. We made quite sure nothing had been stolen. That can mean only one thing: “Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife—without witnesses.”

“Murder?”

“Sure. With malice prepense. But there’s nothing we can do about it. No fingerprints. No clues. . . .”

Outside in Centre Street, the east wind struck through Basil’s spring overcoat with a sudden, keen thrust. Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife. . . . In his
mind’s eye, he saw the dark, faceless figure in the gray, dreamy light just before dawn sliding a moistened thumb along a blade secretly sharpened to a slicing edge. There would be the low
humming of a grindstone and a spray of cold blue sparks; but no one would be likely to see or hear anything at that hour in a little shack in an obscure alley running through the theatrical
district. Why such stealth unless the purpose were murder in its most inhumane form—with the premeditation of a surgeon and the callous blood-letting of a butcher? That was sound enough as
police logic, but . . .

With an almost audible click, new facts and old fell into juxtaposition. His anagram had become less intelligible than ever. If this were murder in its most in humane form, why free the
canary?

Like most modern psychiatrists, Basil Willing believed that no human being can ever perform any act without a motive, conscious or unconscious. The unmotivated act was a myth like the unicorn or
the sea serpent. Even slips and blunders had their roots in the needs of the emotional nature. He had used his knowledge of that fact to solve his first murder case. But what was the motive here?
What feeling had informed the hand that unlatched the door of the canary’s cage yesterday morning?

However pitiful a winged creature in a cage may be, a murderer planning to use a knife against a fellow human being is hardly in the mood for pity. . . .

THE MODERN ART GALLERY was inclosed in a penthouse on Central Park South. The
architect prided himself on being “functional,” but he had forgotten that the principal function of a modern building is resistance to air raids. He had made the north wall of the
gallery one great sheet of sheer plate glass. After Pearl Harbor, the management had supplemented the glass with two-inch bands of adhesive tape, criss-crossed in a series of tall X’s and
sealed flat and taut with an electric iron.

Outside, winter lingered in the Park like an insensitive guest who has long outstayed his welcome. The turf was bald and dry and brown. The skeleton trees made a black mesh against a sultry
streak of saffron at the western edge of the white sky. Nurses and children, hurrying east to home and supper, bent their heads forward, unconsciously streamlining themselves in order to cleave the
April wind. There was not a hint of green in the landscape, but there was a new freshness in the air that hinted of all the green things to come in a few weeks.

Inside, a crowd of invited guests—largely feminine, furred, perfumed, and voluble—pretended there were no such things as wars and east winds. Soundproof walls shut out traffic
noises. A thermostat maintained a temperature as mild and even as that of an embryo. Brilliant, artificial light from concealed sources was refracted in every direction by three blond walls of
wax-rubbed pine. There were no shadows. The gallery was a solid cube of light, a medium where people moved and had their being like fish in a tank of illuminated water.

Now and then one of the guests remembered to glance at the paintings on the walls and tell the exiled artist in schoolgirl French that his oeuvre was épatante and vraie
Parisienne. For the most part, they sipped cocktails, nibbled macaroons, admired fragments of T’ang pottery on the twin mantelpieces, or sat down to gossip on settees covered with tight,
slippery leather in jade green.

A young man and a girl were sitting on one of these settees—the one with its back to the glass wall. The girl was pretty, but there was nothing remarkable in her prettiness. Hundreds of
girls have chestnut-brown curls that gleam red when light touches them and gray eyes that seem blue under a blue hat. The freckles across her short nose were faded as if she had changed an outdoor
life for an indoor light in the last few years. The women in red fox and rayon velvet and flowered hats looked at the beautiful severity of her tweed suit and decided that she was underdressed. The
women in silver fox and bagheera and clever black hats looked at the same suit and wondered if they could be overdressed. Something in the short curl of her upper lip and the tilt of her small,
stubborn chin suggested that she cared little for their opinions. Her manner was composed and detached, rather businesslike. On her knee was a sketch pad; in her right hand, a soft, black pencil.
From time to time, she sketched something in the crowd that pleased or amused her—a piquant profile, an impossible hat, or an ungainly silhouette.

The young man had slumped down on the seat beside her with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a shade fairer than the girl and about her own age—in the late twenties. His eyes were
too round, his mouth too wide, his legs too long; yet the general effect of his appearance was pleasing, for he had the look of youth, health, high spirits, and an affable disposition. At the
moment he was not being affable. Neither was the girl.

“I don’t see why we should wait any longer.”

“Don’t you?” The man’s eye followed her pencil.

“Maybe we’d better call the whole thing off.”

“Now, Pauline—” he began.

She cut him short. “I don’t like secrets—particularly secret engagements. And I don’t see any reason for it. Both our parents were delighted. Though you don’t seem
to realize it, there are other men in the world. Some of them ask me out to dinner and—so forth. If they knew I were engaged to you they—well, it would make things easier all around. As
it is, I’m neither engaged nor disengaged. I’m suspended in a vacuum. It’s hard to act as if you were an engaged girl when nobody knows you are. It wouldn’t matter for a
short time, but it’s been going on for several months now. Honestly, Rod, I’m tired of keeping my ring in a bureau drawer and looking self-conscious whenever your name is mentioned. I
can understand waiting until after the run of the play to get married, but why can’t we tell people we’re engaged?”

“Because we just can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s—well, you wouldn’t understand. You’ll just have to take it on trust that we can’t.”

“How are we ever going to get along after we’re married if you don’t trust my understanding enough to tell me things that matter so much to both of us?”

“And how are we ever going to get along if you don’t trust me at all?”

Pauline closed the sketch pad and slipped the pencil into a slot in the cover. “Rod, we can’t go on like this. We will have to call it off.”

“All right, then do!” Rod assumed an elaborate non­chalance. “May I get you a cocktail?”

“If you will be so kind.” What a dreadful thing politeness was: always the mask of hostility between sexes or classes; never the medium of true friendship or true love. Pauline
watched Rod as he rose and disappeared into the crowd. Her lips parted as if she were going to call him back, then closed again without making a sound. To think that so much could be ended by so
little! A few sharp words spoken under cover of a chattering crowd and the whole thing was all over.

Mechanically, she pulled out the pencil again and reopened the sketch book. But the line faltered. Her hand was trembling. Her throat felt swollen and raw. I mustn’t cry. There
are hundreds of people looking at me. Her eye caught the outline of a short, fat woman in a short, fat, fur coat pushing through the crowd like a tug through heavy seas. Her quick, nervous
pencil pinned the fugitive absurdity to paper with three strokes. She felt the bench yield to a weight at the other end. Someone had sat down beside her. Her eyes were on the sketch pad as a
man’s voice spoke.

“You couldn’t be more detached if you were sketching monkeys at the zoo.”

She started and turned an arrogantly blank face in the direction of the voice. Then a light came into her eyes. “Basil! What are you doing here?”

“Sur-réaliste painting is just another form of psychoanalysis to me. What are you doing here?”

“I thought I might get some ideas.” The pencil noted a young girl’s frivolous, feather hat perched above a solemn, old face.

“For a portrait of mutton dressed as lamb?”

“No, costumes. I design them, you know. For the stage. Or perhaps you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t. The last time I saw you, your chief interest in life was—let me see. . . . Was it the rhumba? Or beagling?”

“Beagling. But that was ages ago.”

“About fifteen years ago. You were thirteen or fourteen.”

“And you were an old man—thirty-two or three. But now you’re just about my own age. I believe Einstein was right!”

He laughed. “When I first saw you, you were fifteen inches long and weighed eight pounds. That was during the last war.”

She nodded. “I was three when the Armistice came. The family never let me forget that I remarked: Won’t it be funny not to have a war any more?” Her gaze explored his
lean, ageless, brown face; his dark, penetrating eyes. In the bright light she saw two single gray threads in the thick, brown hair. She would have said he was thirty-five—thirty-eight at the
most. But he must be a year or so over forty now; for she knew he had been in her father’s class at Johns Hopkins in 1916 and had left it for the Medical Corps in 1917.

“Basil, you’re old enough to be honest with me. Will you answer a personal question frankly?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Thank heaven you’re not polite!” She sighed. “How do I look to you? Pretty or ugly?”

“I thought women’s handbags were provided with mirrors.”

“I thought psychologists taught that people never see the same face in the mirror that they show to other people.”

“My dear Pauline, you are a Baltimore girl and all Baltimore girls are pretty.” He looked at the ringless left hand holding the sketch pad. “Any particular reason for doubting
it?”

Pauline’s eyes were on the crowd around the buffet. “I just wondered if maybe I was—well, plainer than I realized. You get so used to your own face you can’t see it
objectively; and it always looks young to you because you get it mixed up with your memories of youth. That’s why old women wear such youthful hats.”

Basil smiled. “You can still wear youthful hats, Pauline. But you do look a little pale—possibly anemic.” His clinical glance considered her. “Been dieting?”

“No, only working. I’ve just finished Wanda Morley’s new show. It opens tonight at the Royalty.”

“The Royalty?” There was a new note in Basil’s voice. “You mean the Royalty Theatre on West 44th Street?”

“Of course. Sam Milhau puts on all Wanda’s shows at the Royalty. It was a tough job. Adaptations of Victorian styles. She’s reviving Fedora.”

“Sardou’s Fedora? Isn’t that a pretty musty old piece of fustian?”

Pauline smiled. “Modern playwrights don’t go in for sugared ham. That’s Wanda’s meat, so she has to play revivals. It was Candida and Mrs. Tanqueray last
season. It’ll be Lady Windermere or Madame X next. Wanda wants to do everything that Bernhardt and Ellen Terry and Fanny Davenport did. She even imitates their foibles. And yet,
goodness knows, she looks modern off-stage!”

Basil’s glance followed Pauline’s through a sudden rift in the crowd to a woman who had just entered the gallery. She would have drawn glances anywhere. She was thin and supple as a
whip, with a flashing, feline grace that made every gesture a work of art. Her black hair was parted in the middle, sleekly waved and brushed up in two little wings above either ear. Her face was a
creamy oval, slashed with a long, thin mouth, stained scarlet. Her eyes were tilted and tawny, their golden spark heightened by gold and topaz earrings. She wore black with a leopard-skin cap far
back on her dark head and a leopard-skin muff on one arm.

“Wanda Morley?” asked Basil.

“Yes. Fascinating, isn’t she?” There was a tart flavor to the speech. “And yet you can’t say just why,” went on Pauline. “It’s a sort of miracle.
Hollywood has just established a formula for female allure—bleached hair, blubbery lips, tapering hips, and great udders that make you wonder about the butter-fat content per quart of human
milk. Then along comes Wanda and breaks all the rules—dark hair, thin lips, no hips, and no bosom—and yet she makes all the finished products of the Hollywood beauty factories look as
ersatz as they are. You can’t reduce her to a formula. Her eyes are too slanting, her mouth too wide, and all of her is too thin. She ought to be downright ugly, and she would be if
she just weren’t so extraordinarily beautiful. Basil, do you suppose beauty is purely psychological after all? Put Wanda on paper and she’s hideous. She’s easier to caricature
than any other actress on the stage. But there’s something in her nature that pulls all her features together and suggests the idea of beauty almost hypnotically. Why don’t you
psychologists find out what makes women like that tick?”

“It’s probably a kind of suggestion,” agreed Basil, “based on self-suggestion. Some of the French psychologists have a theory that luck is a product of self-suggestion.
Perhaps a woman is only beautiful when she believes in her own beauty sincerely without any conscious effort.”

“Then beauty is really vanity!”

Basil caught an undertone. “You don’t love Wanda, do you?”

“I hate her.” Pauline spoke as tonelessly as if she were saying: It’s going to rain.

“Any particular reason?”

“She’s an intellectual fraud, and she can’t act.”

“That might account for dislike but—hatred?”

“I was just being colloquial. But I don’t like her. She says things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well, what I suppose you’d call catty things. At home I used to read novels where women talked like that; and I always thought the author was just using them as mouthpieces for his
own spite, because I never knew any woman in real life who talked that way. But the minute I met Wanda I thought: Th. . .