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

He adjusted his apparatus. “Say when,” he called.

The figures on the screen hardly moved at all this time, eight times slowed down. They drifted lazily — sort of floated. I knew the place to look for on Meadows’ dress now, and I kept my eyes focussed on it and let everything else ride. A moment later something had shown up there.

“Hold it!” I yelled, and the scene froze into a “still.”

Now it was just a magic-lantern slide, no motion at all. I left my seat and stood close up against the screen, keeping to one side so my own shadow wouldn’t blur out that place on her dress. No flame was coming from it yet. It was just a bright, luminous spot, about the size and shape of a dime.

“Back up one!” I instructed. “One” meant a single revolution of the camera. The scene hardly shifted at all, but the pin-point of light was smaller — like a pea now. You couldn’t have seen it from the seat I’d been in at first.

Two heads are better than one. I called him out and showed it to him. “What do you make of this? It’s not a defect in the film, is it?”

“No, it’s a blob of light coming to a head at that place on her dress. Like a highlight, you might say. A gleam.” Which is what I’d had it figured for, too.

“Go three forward,” I said, “and then hold it.”

He came out again to look. It was back to the size of a dime again, and only a turn or two before the flames were due to show up.

“There’s heat in it!” I said. “See that!”

The white spot had developed a dark core, a pin-head of black or brown.

“That’s the material of the dress getting ready to burn. See that thread coming out of the dot? Smoke — and all there’ll ever be of it, too. Celluloid doesn’t give much warning.”

So far so good. But what I wanted to know was where that gleam or ray was coming from. I had the effect now, but I wanted the cause. The trouble was you couldn’t follow the beam through the air — to gauge its direction. Like any beam of light, it left no trail — only showed up suddenly on her dress. The set-up, so far, seemed to fit Nellie’s theory of spontaneous combustion perfectly. Maybe one of the powerful Klieg lights, high overhead and out of the picture, had developed some flaw in its glass shield, warping one of its rays. But the electrician had gone over them afterward and given them all a clean bill of health.

“Start it up again,” I said wearily. “Slow motion,” and went back and sat down. I was farther away now and had a better perspective of the thing as a whole; maybe that’s what did it.

As the scene on the screen thawed and slowly dissolved into fluid motion once more, it gave the impression for a moment of everything on it moving at once. Therefore it was only natural that the one thing that didn’t move should catch my eye and hold it. Tobias’ lorgnette, and the wrist and hand that held it. The three objects stayed rigid, down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, after everything else was on the go once more. The chair she was in had started to rock slowly back and forth, and her body with it, but the forearm, wrist, hand and lorgnette stayed poised, motionless. There was something unnatural about it that caught the eye at once. I remembered she had opened the scene by tapping her lorgnette as well as rocking.

Now, with the fire due to break out any second, she was only rocking. The lorgnette was stiff as a ramrod in her grasp. Not that she was holding it out at full length before her or anything like that, she was holding it close in, unobtrusively, but straight up and down — a little out to one side of her own body. Maybe the director’s orders had been for her to stop fiddling with it at a certain point. Then again maybe not. All I wanted to find out was at what point she had stopped tapping and playing with it. I had been concentrating on Meadows until now and had missed that.

“Whoa, back up!” I called out to him. “All the way back and then start over — slow.”

I let Meadows go this time and kept my eye on Tobias and her lorgnette. The minute I saw it stop — “Hold it!” I yelled and ran over to the screen and examined Meadows’ dress. Nothing yet. But in three more revolutions of the camera that deadly white spot had already showed up on the celluloid-lined hoopskirt. Effect had followed cause too quickly to be disregarded.

“Lights!” I roared. “I’ve got it!”

He turned a switch, the room blazed all around me, and I took that handkerchief out of my pocket and examined the pieces of glass it held. Some were thicker than others — the lens had therefore been convex, not flat. I held one up and looked at my cuff through it. The weave stood out. A magnifying glass. I held it about a foot away from the back of my hand, where I’d already been burned once this afternoon, and even with the far weaker lights of the projection-room working through it, in about thirty seconds something bit me and I jumped.

He’d come out and was watching what I was doing. “Pack that film up again in the box the way you had it,” I said. “I’ll be back for it in a minute. I’m taking it down to headquarters with me!”

“What’d you find out?” he asked.

“Look it up in tomorrow morning’s papers!”

I called Tobias’ dressing-room. “How’s the lay of the land?” I greeted her.

She knew me right away. “I know, it’s Handsome.”

“I was wrong about those eighteen kids,” I told her. “I counted ’em over — only nine.”

She sure was a hard-boiled customer. “Nine to go,” she said cheerfully. “When will I see you?”

“I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes.”

“Where we going?” she cooed when she got in the car.

“You’ll find out.”

Then when we got there, she said: “Why, this looks like police headquarters to me.”

“Not only does, but is,” I told her. “Won’t take a minute, I just want to see a man about a dog.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait outside for you?”

I chucked her under the chin. “I’m getting so fond of you I want you with me wherever I go. Can’t stand being without you even for five minutes.”

She closed her eyes and looked pleased and followed me in like a lamb. Then when the bracelets snapped on her wrists she exploded: “Why you dirty double-crossing — I thought you said you wanted to see a man about a dog.”

“I do,” I said, “and you’re the dog.”

“What’re the charges?” the chief asked.

“Setting fire to Martha Meadows with a magnifying glass and causing her to bum to death. Here’s the glass she used; picked up on the set. Here’s the original harmless glass that was in the frame before she knocked it out; picked up in the trashbasket in her dressing room. The film, there in the box, shows her in the act of doing it. She’s been eaten away with jealousy ever since she faded out and Meadows stepped into her shoes.”

I never knew a woman knew so many bad words as she did; and she used them all. After she’d been booked and the matron was leading her away she called back: “You’ll never make this stick. You think you’ve got me, but you’ll find out!”

“She’s right, Gal,” commented the chief, after she’d gone. “The studio people’ll put the crusher on the case before it ever comes up for trial. Not because they approve of what she’s done — but on account of the effect it would have on the public.”

“She may beat the murder rap,” I said, “but she can’t get around these.” I took a bundle of letters and a square of blotting-paper out of my pocket and passed them to him. “Wrote them in her very dressing room at the studio and then mailed them to Meadows on the outside, even after Meadows had gotten her a job. The blotting-paper tells the story if you hold it up to a mirror. She didn’t get rid of it quickly enough.”