The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,73

that accosted us last night, outside the Cotton Club?... They were actors Orson hired.”

“Ah. You’re starting to understand how he thinks.”

Gibson nodded. “Yes, I heard somebody mention that he once hired actors to play police, as a practical joke on an actor friend with outstanding warrants.”

“Yes indeed.”

“So he hired those actors—knowing I wouldn’t recognize them—to give validity, through me, an outsider, to that wild excuse he made to you and the cast, based on a nonexistent grudge between him and Owney Madden, over some dancer.”

Houseman’s head tilted to one side. “Well-analyzed—though the dancer exists, she just wasn’t Madden’s protégée. You are proving yourself quite a Shadow-worthy detective, Mr. Gibson.”

“You know why I left our little temporary prison cell back at CBS, don’t you? And slipped back into Studio Eight?”

“I can’t say that I do. I was, frankly, wondering.”

“I found your bloody towel. The one that was used to wipe up all that blood. I sniffed it, by the way. Sickly sweet. Karo syrup, I’d say. Standard ingredient in stage blood.”

Houseman bestowed a tiny smile. “How did you become aware that I had a passkey of my own?”

“Louis the janitor told me—I almost missed it, when he said you’d returned the key ‘first thing.’ But then that seemed an odd way to put it, unless you had borrowed the key the day before, to have a duplicate made, and then returned it to Louis—‘first thing.’ ”

Houseman bowed slightly. “And with that piece of the puzzle, there was little left to solve.”

Gibson gestured with an open hand. “Your accomplice was free to clean up and slip out, while we played out our part of the charade. By the way, Leo the elevator ‘boy’ told me of the woman who left the building, obviously not wanting to be recognized, not long after your accomplice would have made her getaway; he thought she might be Mrs. Welles, but then of course neither Mrs. Welles nor Balanchine were ever at the Columbia Broadcasting Building today. You had their names written into the reception book, knowing Welles’s habit to check up on who’d dropped by, natural enough with all the affairs of the heart he’s been juggling—and easy enough to find a Virginia Welles signature to copy. So I was sent scurrying after suspects who hadn’t even been present when the crime was committed. Classic use of the first tactic of magic—misdirection.”

Onstage Welles was sensing the disbelief around him.

“What is this skeptical murmur?” he said. “Every word is factual—it’s all true!”

“Tell us another one,” somebody said from the audience.

Laughter and catcalls followed, even a little light sarcastic applause.

One of the press photographers in the pit called something up to Welles, and the director leaned over at stage’s edge to hear what the photog had to say. Smiling, the wunderkind got to his feet.

“So you don’t believe me? Come with me, my flock of doubters—follow me, boys! And girls....”

All of them—cast members still in full Danton’s Death French Revolution drag—marched up the aisle after their leader and out into the crisp October night, as if looking for a Bastille to sack.

Gibson walked alongside Houseman. “So you wanted to teach him a lesson—and you enlisted someone else who wanted to get back at Orson, huh?”

With a sideways glance, Houseman said, “You understand, of course, I never imagined this panic would be so extensive—I would not have put Orson through that horror show, had I known—”

“Sure.” Gibson fired up a Camel as they walked, waved out the match, sent it gutterbound. “But I think you did anticipate some kind of panic, otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to talk our bumptious boy out of doing the show in so overt a ‘newscast’ fashion.”

“Granted—had I foreseen the extent of it, however, I wouldn’t have found it necessary to provide him that other opportunity for a comeuppance....”

“So where’s the murder weapon?”

“Back on the Mercury office wall.”

In Times Square, on southeast corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, awash in neon and with a good view of the Times Building and its lighted bulletin, the so-called Moving News sign that circled the venerable paper’s building, Welles assembled his Revolutionary army.

“There,” he said, and pointed, as if to a star. In a way, he was: his own.

ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC, the sign flashed. MARS INVASION BROADCAST FRIGHTENS NATION.

His company, believers again, emitted ooohs and aaaahs, then began to applaud. And Welles, despite all that hovered over him, began to smile, and took a small, humble bow.

A shapely figure in one of the French low-cut peasant