Death in the Fifth Position Read Online Free PDF Page A

and that Ella Sutton had been murdered.
    The company was kept backstage until nearly dawn. The questioning was conducted by Gleason, an autocratic little man who forbade me to call the press until the first of what proved to be a long set of interviews was concluded.
4
    We met, almost by accident on Seventh Avenue at four-thirty in the morning. She looked very demure, I thought, in a plain cotton dress, and carrying a briefcase which contained her ballet clothes. I stopped beside her on the corner and we both waited for the light to turn green. Lonely taxicabs hurtled by; the city was still and a gray light shone dull in the east, above the granite and steel peaks, beyond the slow river.
    “Hello, Jane,” I said.
    For a moment she didn’t recognize me; then, remembering, she smiled wanly, and her face pale by street lamp, she said, “Are you going to take me out to dinner?”
    “What about breakfast?”
    “I never get up this early,” she said; and we crossed the street. The light was green. A sudden gust of warm wind came bowling up the alley and I caught her scent as Edgar Rice Burroughs was wont to say: warm flesh and Ivory soap.
    “Can I walk you home?” I asked.
    “If you want to. I live on Second Avenue.” We walked nine uptown blocks and seven crosstown blocks to the brownstone where she lived. We paused below in the street … the hot wind, redolent of summer and river and early morning, stirred her streaked blond hair as we stood before a delicatessen while the drama of courtship took place. The dialogue, I must admit, was similar to that of every other couple in this same predicament at this same hour in the quiet city. Should we or should we not? was the moon right? and was this wise? or was it love? Fortunately, being a well-trained girl of casual habits, this last point wasn’t worried too much and at last we walked up the two flights to her apartment.
    The dialogue continued as, both seated on a studio couch in her two-roomed apartment, we were momentarily diverted from my central interest by the murder and, though we were both dead-tired and stifling yawns heroically in deference to my lust, we talked of the death of Ella Sutton.
    “I never thought such a thing could happen to anybody I knew,” said Jane, lying back on the bed, a pillowunder her head. One paper lantern illuminated the room with red and yellow light. The furniture was shabby Victorian, very homelike, with photographs of family and fellow dancers on the walls, over the mantel of the walled-up fireplace. The ceilings were high and the curtains were of faded red plush.
    “Do you think it was really murder?”
    “That awful little man certainly thought it was. Somebody cut the cable … that’s what he said.”
    “I wonder who?”
    “Oh, almost anybody,” she said vaguely, scratching her stomach comfortably.
    “Don’t tell me now that
everybody
hated Ella … it would be much too pat.”
    “Well, almost everybody did. Oh, she was just terrible. But that’s an awful thing to say … her being dead, I mean.”
    “I expect we’ll be hearing a lot about how terrible she was,” I said, moving closer to her on the couch, my cup of tea in my hand (tea was the fiction we had both agreed upon to bring us together).
    “Well, she wasn’t that awful,” said Jane, in the tone of one who wants to think only good of others. “I suppose she had her nice side.” Then she gave up. “God knows what it was, though. I never saw it.”
    “Perhaps God
does
know,” I said, rolling my eyes upward. Jane sighed. I moved closer, the teacup rattling in my hand.
    “She was such a schemer,” said Jane thoughtfully. “She was conniving every minute of the day. That was why she married Miles … he was the conductor and veryimportant to the company. So she married him and then lo and behold she began to get some leads … though the marriage was always a farce.”
    “Didn’t she like him?”
    “Of course not … and after the