Free Tell Me, Pretty Maiden by Rhys Bowen Page B

booming deep voice. What’s more, she was swearing like a trooper.
    “Jesus, Robert, don’t you damned well dare try to patronize me as if I was a goddamned idiot child. I know what I saw and I am not going out of my head and you blasted well better do something about it, or this show is not going to open. You hear me?”
    “Blanche, please, be reasonable.” The second person had come halfway into the room. He was a small, round, bald-headed man, with sagging jowls and a mournful expression like a blood hound’s, and he reached out to touch her. “Blanche, baby, sit down and have a drink. You’ll feel better. Come to think of it, I could do with one, too.”
    “I am not your baby. I’m nobody’s baby. Get out and leave me alone,” she shouted. “And drink your own whiskey. You can go to hell, all of you.”
    “But what about act two?”
    “I’ll come down for act two when I’m good and ready.” She said. “If I’m good and ready.” She literally shoved him out of the door and slammed it shut. “Martha, I need my calming mixture.”
    “Of course you do, my darling precious one,” Martha said. “Why don’t you lie down and Martha will bring it for you.”
    “And a drink,” Blanche added, sounding like a petulant child now. “A big drink.”
    Her eyes turned toward the bottles on the table and she saw me.
    “What’s she doing here? Who let her in? What did you let her in for?” she demanded.
    Before Martha could answer, I got to my feet. “Miss Lovejoy, I’m here because Oona Sheehan sent me,” she said. “I’m Molly Murphy. She said you needed my services.”
    “Molly Murphy?”
    “Private investigator,” I said. “I gather you’ve been having a spot of trouble in the theater.”
    I saw light dawning on her face, a face that must have been made for the theater. All her expressions were larger than life—her anger, her despair, and now her radiant smile.
    “Miss Murphy—you came. Thank God,” she said.

    S oon I was sitting beside Blanche Lovejoy while she reclined behind her screen and worked her way through a large tumbler of neat whiskey.
    “I was so excited about this play, Miss Murphy,” she said. “I had such high hopes for it. After all this time, a chance to star again on Broadway. I even invested my own money in the production and that wonderful songwriter George M. Cohan wrote a new song just for me. It’s called ‘That’s the Way the French Do It!’ Rather naughty, you know, but that’s what my public has come to expect. I made my name singing naughty songs in vaudeville, after all, didn’t I?”
    I nodded as if I was aware of this.
    “And the part is just right for me. All the leading roles in musical comedy recently have been for silly little girls. As if I could sit on a swing in Florodora like that awful little Nesbitt girl. I’d break most swings unless they had iron chains. The public doesn’t want real women anymore. It wants girlish fantasy. Sixteen-year-olds who flutter their eyes and exude innocence coupled with budding ripeness. And look at me—among all that budding ripeness, I’m just an old overripe tomato.”
    I thought the drink and the calming mixture might be making her maudlin, so I interrupted. “So why don’t you tell me what’s been happening at the theater?”
    “This theater, my dear Miss Murphy, is haunted.” She delivered the line as if she was playing to the top balcony. Then she raised herself from her reclining position. “Ever since we started rehearsals here little things kept going wrong. Unimportant things to begin with—a table falling over and spilling water over the stage. My dress getting caught on a nail and ripping.”
    “They could happen in any theater, I should imagine.”
    “Of course. That’s why I didn’t think twice until I realized that all the accidents were directed at me.” She took another generous gulp of whiskey and coughed. “That dress that got ripped on a nail. I went back and examined the