Mr. Hardwick drew himself up. His face brightened with affection and the pride of parenthood as he gazed at his daughter’s figure, straight and slender and strong as the trunk of a young birch. Her simple frock of white taffeta with touches of coral at the waist possessed that subtle individual charm which fashion designers can only imitate. Her dark, loosely coiled hair, with stray wisps caressing her healthily tanned cheeks, seemed in constant mutiny against the petty tyrannies of hairdressers.
“I might have known something was to happen.” Mr. Hardwick’s tones were gently playful, as if he were anxious to turn his daughter’s thoughts from the tragedy. “Something always happens where you are. You are a storm petrel, my dear.”
“I was born under Uranus, you know. That explains everything.” She smiled whimsically. There was a touch of the child in the firm oval of her face and the smooth curves of mouth and nose, but the deep-brown eyes held a surprising store of worldly wisdom. She quite baffled her father at times. The impulses of April and June seemed to be constantly clashing within her, and they filled his autumnal days with a never-ending round of surprises.
“I wonder,” he said, eyeing her curiously as a new thought came to him, “whether Uranus had anything to do with your leaving the box just before—before it happened.”
“It’s always safe to blame Uranus,” she parried. “He is such a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know what I would do if——”
She was grateful for the interruption that came just then. The law was already at work, and she sat back and watched the swift precision of its mechanism. Two policemen, one heavy and red-faced, the other lean and sharp-visaged, walked into the theater and stationed themselves beside the body with the air of zealots guarding the coffin of Mohammed. She gathered from the few words they exchanged with Starr that a cordon had been thrown around the building a minute and a half after the call reached the precinct station. They were followed shortly by a puffy little man who let it be known that he was a deputy from the office of the chief medical examiner. The latter had barely begun the usual inspection of the body when two other men entered the auditorium.
One of them, barrel-chested and somewhat pompous in his manners, seemed to be a representative of the district attorney’s office. The other, angular and as loose-jointed as a marionette, with lazy, cinnamon-colored eyes and a complexion that seemed to indicate that he drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigars, was recognized by Helen at first glance. Uranus had brought them together once before. She remembered that his name was Lieutenant Culligore, and that he was attached to the homicide squad of the detective bureau. As his glance flitted slowly over the room, his mind seemed to register each detail without slightest effort. Helen noticed that he gazed at her a trifle longer than on the others, but his face betrayed no recognition.
Then began the questioning, conducted by the stout man from the district attorney’s office, while Lieutenant Culligore made an occasional jotting in his notebook. The members of the audience were interrogated briefly and pointedly, and each one in turn was permitted to depart after leaving his or her name and address. Helen marveled at the matter-of-factness of it all. It seemed almost ruthless, this volleying of questions over a body which was scarcely cold, but she recognized the brisk efficiency with which the procedure was carried out. None of the witnesses had much to tell that was significant, and the only important points brought out were the dying woman’s strange laugh and her mention of Mr. Shei.
Culligore, as was his habit when impressed, curled up his lip under the tip of his nose when these facts were stated, and the stout man raised his brows and nodded grimly.
“Looks as though Mr. Shei had been up to another of his little tricks,” he muttered.