Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I got up and banged the chair down so hard one leg of it busted off. “She wasn’t six feet away from some of you!” I bawled them out. “She was in the full glare of the brightest lights ever devised! All eyes were on her watching every move and she was the center of attraction at the time! She burned to death, and yet no one saw how it started! Twenty-five pairs of human eyes and they might as well have all been closed! Well, there’s one pair left — and they won’t let him down.”

I suppose they thought I meant my own. Not by a damn sight. “Now clear out of here, all of you, and don’t touch anything as you go!” I pointed to the chief electrician. “You stay and check up on those lights for defects — one of ’em might have got overheated and dropped a spark on her. And don’t try to hold out anything to save your own skin. Criminal carelessness is a lot less serious than obstructing an agent of justice!” I passed my handkerchief to the guard. “You comb the floor around where she was standing. Pick up every cigarette butt and every cinder you find!”

The rest of them filed out one by one, giving me names and addresses as they went. I wasn’t worried about getting them back again if I wanted them. They all reacted differently. Some were frightened, some just curious, some cracking wise. The script-girl’s nose was still buried in her book. She hardly looked up at all. Tobias glided by me with a little extra hip-action and purred over her shoulder: “Lots of luck, Handsome. And if you find out you were mistaken about those eighteen kids of yours, look a lady up sometime.”

“Thirtieth of next February,” I told her.

The chief cameraman came out of his booth with a round, flat, tin box — packed under his arm.

“Where you going with that?” I asked him.

“Drop it in the ashcan on my way out,” he said. “It’s what we took today, no good now any more.”

“Ashcan — hell,” I snapped. “Those machines of yours are the other pair of eyes I told you about! How soon can you develop that stuff?”

“Right away,” he told me, looking surprised. “But we can’t use this roll — it’s got her whole death-scene on it and it’ll turn your hair white just to look at it.”

“You do it yourself,” I warned him, “don’t call anybody in to help you. And don’t touch it, leave it just the way it is. Can I trust you?”

“Meet me in half an hour in projection room A,” he said. “She was a swell kid.”

The electrician came down from way up high somewhere and reported the lights all jake. No crossed wires, not a screw out of place anywhere.

“You dig up a typewriter and get that all down on paper, sign it, have a notary witness it, and shoot it in to me at headquarters — Galbraith’s the name. It better be on the level, the pay-off is withholding information from the authorities.” Which didn’t mean anything, but it was good enough to throw a scare into him. I never saw anyone take it on the lam so quick in my life.

The guard passed me my handkerchief back with a cigarette butt, a wire frame, and a lot of little pieces of glass in it.

“The butt’s Stormann’s,” he pointed out. “He was smoking it after it was all over. I saw him throw it down and step on it before he went after that liquor. I remember because Tobias yapped ‘Don’t come near me with that thing! You want it to happen to me, too?”’

I wondered if that remark meant anything. Did he want it to happen to her, too? Get the point? I knew what the pieces of glass and the frame were right away — a busted lorgnette like I had seen Tobias fiddling with.

“Meadows had it around her neck I guess,” he suggested, “and it fell and smashed when she started to run around crazy.”

I felt like telling him he didn’t know his ears from his elbow, but I kept quiet about it. These pieces of glass were clear, that burning celluloid would have smoked them up plenty if they had been anywhere near Martha Meadows. But there was an easy enough way of settling that.

“Get the wardrobe-woman in here and tell her to bring a complete list of every article she furnished Meadows and Tobias for this picture.”

She was a society-looking dame, with white hair, and had had her face lifted. She had typewritten sheets with her.

“Did you supply Meadows with a lorgnette?”

“Why no,” she said. “Young girls didn’t wear them even in those days.”

“But Tobias wore one. Is this it?” I showed her the pieces.

“It must be,” she returned. “She turned in her costume a little while ago and explained that she’d broken her lorgnette while that awful thing was happening to poor Martha. You see I have everything else crossed off but that. We usually charge players for anything that isn’t returned to us, but in this case of course nothing like that will happen.”

That explained something that had bothered me for a minute or two. Because I’d distinctly seen the lorgnette on Tobias after the accident, when she was making those first passes at me. She must have broken it later — while I was outside in the infirmary with Meadows. But a chiseler like her who would cadge a drink from Stormann would try to make them believe it had happened during all the excitement — to get out of paying for it.

“You keep those two lists just the way they are now, I may want to see them again.” I folded up the handkerchief with the pieces of broken glass and put it away in my pocket.

A kid came in and said: “The rushes are ready for you in projection room A,” and took me over there.

It had rows of seats just like a miniature theatre and a screen on one wall. I closed the door and locked the cameraman and myself in.

“It’s ghastly,” he said, “better hang on tight.”

“Run it through at normal speed first,” I said. “I’ll see if I can stand it.”

I sat down in the front row with the screen almost on top of me. There wasn’t much to it at regular speed — about five minutes worth of picture — what they call a “sequence.” It was pretty grisly at that. It opened on Tobias sitting there in the rocker, broadside to the camera. Meadows came in almost at once.

“I’m going away with him tonight,” she said.

Tobias opened her lorgnette and gave her the once-over through it. Meadows went over to the window, and the camera followed her part of the way. That left Tobias over at the left-hand side of the screen and partly out of the picture, with just one shoulder, arm, and the side of her head showing. She started to rock back and forth and tap her lorgnette against the back of her hand. I had my eyes glued to Meadows though. She turned around to look at her “sister.”

“Oh, won’t he ever come?” she said.

Her face sort of tightened up — changed from repose to tenseness. A look of horror started to form on it, but it never got any further. Right then and there the thing happened.

The best way I can describe it is, a sort of bright, luminous flower seemed to open up half way down her dress, spreading, peeling back. But the petals of it were flame. An instant later it was all over her, and the first screams of a voice that was gone now came smashing out at my eardrums. And in between each one, the hellish sound-track had even picked up and recorded the sizzling that her hair made.

“Cut!”

I turned around and yelled back at him: “For Pete’s sake, cut, before I throw up!” and I mopped my drenched forehead. “I did — twice — while I was processing it,” he confessed, looking out of the booth at me.

It hadn’t told me a thing so far, but then I hadn’t expected it to — the first throw out of the bag.

“Go back and start it over,” I shivered, “but, whatever you do, leave out that finale! Take it up where she turns at the window. Slow-motion this time. Can you hold it when I tell you to?”