A Chorus of Detectives (25 page)

A dead silence crept over the room. “Tell us,” Gerry whispered.

“Someone fires a gun backstage tonight. Twice. Two times he shoots at chorus baritone.”

Scotti swallowed. “Is he …?”

Gatti's expression lightened. “No! He is not even hurt! Ziegler says the man with gun must fire from great distance—because of the guards, you understand? He misses first time, fires again, misses second time, everyone starts shouting, he runs away!”

“
Per dio
,” Caruso breathed heavily, “you do right when you keep the guards!”

“Did anyone see him?” Amato asked, appalled.

Gatti shook his head. “Ziegler says it happens too fast. He says killer is obviously man not used to handling guns.”

“It is not over,” Amato said dully. Dorothy began to cry.

“Do not cry, Doro,” Caruso said, on the verge of tears himself.

“One good thing,” Gatti said, getting over his initial shock. “We eliminate Beniamino Gigli from list of suspects. He is on stage singing at time shots are fired!”

“Good, good!” Gerry cried. “That's a start!”

Scotti still couldn't believe it. “Mrs. Bukaitis is not murderer?”

“No, Toto,” Gatti said. “She is bad woman, but she is not murderer.”

“Then my investigating—it is for nothing!”

“That's not true, Toto,” Gerry said firmly. “You stopped a bomber before she could build a working bomb.
You saved a lot of lives
. No one else in this room has done that.” Scotti straightened his shoulders.

“Gatti!” Emmy cried, having just thought of something. “When did this shooting take place?”

“Eh, ten, fifteen minutes ago, Ziegler says.”

“Call Rosa Ponselle. Get her on the telephone—be sure you talk to her and not to her sister. If Rosa is at home right now, we can eliminate another suspect!”

“Oh, Emmy,” Caruso said, wide-eyed. “You are smart lady!”

Dorothy found Rosa's number for Gatti, and everyone pushed after him into the hallway where the telephone was. They all held their breath while the connection was being made. “Rosa?” Gatti said in a voice higher than usual. “Is it you?” He nodded to the others; there was no mistaking Rosa Ponselle's voice. “I have bad news.” He explained to her what had just happened as the others drifted back into the sitting room.

“Well, Gerry, you wanted something solid to convince the others,” Emmy said. “Now you've got it.” Gerry thought that was a tasteless remark and said so; Emmy shrugged and turned away.

“Let's see where we stand,” Gerry said. “Rosa Ponselle was at home at the time of the shooting. Beniamino Gigli was on stage.”

“And Mrs. Bukaitis is locked up in the jailhouse,” Scotti said gloomily.

“So we've just eliminated half our suspects,” Gerry went on. “Well, I can tell you right now who our team's candidate is—Giulio Setti. He's the only one left. I presume he was at the opera house tonight?” This last was directed toward Gatti, who was just then coming back into the room.

“Of course,” Gatti said. “He is always there.”

“Our team has two suspects left,” Amato said, “Ziegler and Quaglia.”

“Ziegler is there,” Caruso was quick to point out.

“Who conducts tonight?” Amato asked.

“Bodanzky,” Gatti said. “But Quaglia is there also!”

“
Cielo!
” Amato exclaimed. “Quaglia never goes to listen to other conductors work! Why is he there?”

“Because Ziegler asks him to come. Bodanzky, he is ill. An hour before curtain, he tells Ziegler he cannot conduct tonight. So Ziegler calls Quaglia. Then Bodanzky says he is feeling better, he thinks he can conduct after all. Ziegler asks Quaglia to stay, in case Bodanzky cannot finish the performance.”

“So he wouldn't have been there at all if Bodanzky hadn't gotten sick,” Gerry said. “But he
was
there, so we can't eliminate him. All our remaining suspects were there—Quaglia and Ziegler and Setti.”

Amato nodded. “One of those three.”

One of those three
.

10

Captain Michael O'Halloran cursed himself for a fool. He'd let himself be distracted from the pursuit of a killer by the ravings of a political fanatic. He'd been too quick to accept Mrs. Bukaitis as the perpetrator of the Metropolitan chorus killings, too quick to pull the police out of the opera house. Thank God Gatti-Casazza had kept the guards he'd hired; the general manager had shown a better feeling for security than he had.

It was the omnipresent guards who had forced the killer to fire his gun from a distance—not a great distance, but enough to make him miss. He could have moved in close and got his man, but not without getting caught. Perhaps he could have gotten the guard as well; but the chorus singers stayed together in small groups pretty much all the time now. No single chorister-guard pair was going to wander off alone and become an easy target. The killer might have gotten one or two in close, but he couldn't have gotten six or eight.

O'Halloran was puzzled by the variety of methods the murderer used. First an urn bashing a woman's head in. Then a hanging. Then a death resulting from a fall. Then a stabbing. Then a falling piece of scenery, which missed. Then a poisoning, which didn't. And now a shooting, which also missed. It was as if once the killer had crossed over the boundary and committed that first murder, he'd found a pleasurable excitement in what he'd done. So he'd made his vendetta into a game, varying his approach each time for the sheer morbid enjoyment of it.

The captain leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. Whoever this man was, he was sicker than most O'Halloran had come up against. Sicker and slicker and still anonymous. And he was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company; outsiders had not been permitted backstage since the night Teresa Leone was stabbed. The killer could be a singer, a conductor, a stagehand, an orchestra musician, a member of management. Nor had O'Halloran totally ruled out the possibility that this killer of choristers might be a chorister himself, unlikely as that seemed.

But there were some with more reason to hate choristers than others. O'Halloran had received answers to the wires he'd sent to the Naples and London police. Giulio Setti had lied when he said Alessandro Quaglia's first job in opera had been assistant chorus master. Quaglia had told the truth when he said he'd started out as a violinist in the orchestra. But he had lied about something else; he'd not begun his career at the prestigious San Carlo Opera as he claimed but at a slightly lesser house, an old theatre called Il Fondo. Of the two lies, O'Halloran thought Quaglia's the more understandable; everyone puffed up his credentials on occasion.

So it looked as if Setti were deliberately pointing the finger of suspicion at Quaglia. The chorus master might be trying to blacken the conductor's name as a way of protecting his own position at the Met, since it was Quaglia who'd been most vocal in demanding the other man's dismissal. Or was Setti honestly convinced that Quaglia was guilty? Quaglia had told O'Halloran that he'd been at home at the time the one chorister was hanged and in fact had learned of it only when the first violinist telephoned and told him. O'Halloran checked with the violinist, who verified Quaglia's story … to a point. The violinist had not called until around eleven o'clock, hours after the chorister had died. So, no alibi for Quaglia.

The answer O'Halloran had gotten from the London police was especially illuminating; Quaglia had had so much trouble with the chorus at Covent Garden that his invitations to return had become fewer and fewer and might have ceased altogether. Quaglia's signing a contract with the Metropolitan had made an open break unnecessary; Covent Garden didn't wish to alienate a conductor they found serviceable and reliable although ‘uninspired'.

Uninspired. From what O'Halloran understood of opera folks, that was one of the most insulting things you could say about a musician. But Covent Garden had reason not to be too fond of Maestro Quaglia. According to the police report London had sent, Quaglia had once tried to strangle a member of the chorus. Covent Garden had tried to smooth things over, saying that the two men had gotten into an altercation and had both gone for the other's throat. No one was hurt, and no charges had been filed; the whole affair had been pretty well hushed up. But the report made it clear that the police considered Quaglia to be the instigator of the fight.

What if Quaglia didn't know he was a second-rate conductor? What if he just saw that he wasn't receiving the respect accorded Toscanini and the other great conductors, nor was his work on the podium recognized as being the superior kind of music-making he obviously thought it was? A true second-rater would then look about for someone or something else to blame. In this case, the chorus would make a perfect scapegoat. Before Covent Garden there'd been trouble at La Scala, and now there was more trouble at the Metropolitan. Perhaps there were even incidents with other choruses at other opera houses that O'Halloran didn't know about. But Quaglia could reason that the recognition he felt due him had been denied by three major opera companies, and all because he'd been undermined by the destructive behavior of the choruses. Quaglia's resentment could have been building for years until he reached a day when something just broke, when he had to take action to right what he saw as a dreadful wrong.

Self-preservation was a strong motive.

Unfortunately, Giulio Setti had the same motive. His case was much more direct: he'd lost control of the chorus and was in danger of losing his job. At his age he couldn't hope to go on to another major opera company; for Setti it was a matter of hanging on in New York or retiring. And in spite of everything that had been happening, it was obvious the man loved his work. The chorus master could have set out to kill off the worst troublemakers in the chorus as a means of sustaining a way of life he loved. The only problem with that theory was that Teresa Leone, the chorister who'd been stabbed, hadn't been a troublemaker.

The difficulty was that O'Halloran couldn't quite see how Setti could have managed the killings physically. He'd long since passed his prime, and he was not a big man. Two of the killings required a certain amount of strength. Well, perhaps only one; he could have taken Teresa Leone by surprise—the body showed no sign of a struggle. But how in the world could Setti have managed to hang a healthy, good-sized man less than half his age?

Quaglia, on the other hand, was built like an ox. He could have managed it.

There was one other man who might feel threatened by the chorus, although the nature of that threat wasn't quite clear to O'Halloran. Edward Ziegler's job put him in constant contact with the chorus. He negotiated their contracts, he listened to their complaints. It fell to him to find a proper response whenever the choristers threatened to strike—which had already happened a couple of times this season. Considering all the trouble the chorus had been causing lately, O'Halloran could see how Ziegler might grow to hate the choristers.

But why kill them? Ziegler's job was not threatened, as Setti's was. Ziegler was not denied his proper prestige and recognition, as Quaglia thought
he
was. What was to be gained? Nothing, speaking from a rational point of view. But that's where it got tricky; the killer, of course, was anything but rational. Clever. Sneaky. Crafty. But not rational.

If there was any one person at the Met who epitomized rationality and civilized self-control, O'Halloran thought, it would have to be Edward Ziegler. An elegant, reserved, high-class man—a bit frosty, perhaps a little more proper than he really needed to be. Conventional wisdom had it that it was exactly that type of person who blew up the worst if he ever lost control; the resulting behavior was all the more shocking because of its contrast to what one expected of such a person. Like Quaglia, Ziegler appeared to have enough physical strength to overpower another man and hang him.

O'Halloran tried to visualize Ziegler losing control of himself and couldn't do it. Could a man like that kill out of mere hatred? Not that hatred was ever really
mere
. O'Halloran wondered if there was something missing, perhaps something in Ziegler's background he didn't know about. The trouble was, the man seemed so damned sane!

They all did; they all three appeared to be sane, law-abiding, and respectable. True, Quaglia was given to indulging in temperamental outbursts—like the screaming match with Geraldine Farrar. But that sort of exhibition wasn't all that unusual in an opera house; it wouldn't be wise to attach too much importance to it. Nevertheless Quaglia had already demonstrated a potential for violence at Covent Garden. On the whole, of the three with the most obvious motives, O'Halloran thought Alessandro Quaglia the most likely suspect.

But ‘likely' didn't win court convictions; what he needed was some one piece of hard evidence. And he didn't have the foggiest notion of where to get it. After mulling it over for a while, Captain O'Halloran decided to fall back on an investigatory technique he'd used during his lowly detective days. It didn't win him any friends, but it sometimes got results.

He would go to Quaglia, to Setti, and to Ziegler and tell each one individually that he was the prime suspect in the case. Then he would sit back and watch. He'd watch their reactions, what they did next, what they failed to do. He would invite each man to make a mistake.

And then he'd wait to see who accepted the invitation.

Geraldine Farrar sat listlessly turning the pages of the
Times
. She'd cut her practice session short that morning; all her top notes were missing. There was no point in trying to force a sound that just wasn't there.

She read the political news first. Only last month Gerry had participated in the nation's electoral process, the first time in her life she had been permitted to do so. There was fighting in Ireland. Twenty thousand aliens a week were landing on American shores. The mayor of New York was asking for 769 more patrolmen.