Read Online Tell Me, Pretty Maiden by Rhys Bowen - Free Book Online Page B

you’re invited to supper, Captain Sullivan?” she called through the closed door.
    “I’m afraid I won’t be home for supper, Mrs. O’Shea,” Daniel called back. “I’ve a detective assignment.”
    I grinned. “And I have a date with a ghost,” I said.

EIGHT
    The Casino Theater on Broadway at West Thirty-ninth was where Blanche Lovejoy’s new play was about to open. I wasn’t at all sure what I could do for Blanche Lovejoy. How did one prove that a theater was or wasn’t haunted? If I made actual communication with a spirit, she’d stop production and that would presumably put a lot of people out of work, unless she could find another theater at the last minute. And to be quite honest, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted a face-to-face encounter with a ghost, especially a malevolent one that was trying to kill Miss Lovejoy.
    As soon as I spotted the Casino Theater, I could tell that Miss Lovejoy wouldn’t want to move to another theater unless it was absolutely necessary. It was a magnificent-looking building—more sultan’s palace than theater, with carved stonework, arch-ways, vaulted windows. Lit only by the electric lights from the buildings around it, the stonework seemed to glow. On one corner a round tower seemed to reach up into the heavens and I could just glimpse the metallic dome on top. There was a sign on the marquee, although it wasn’t yet illuminated.

    OPENING NEXT WEEK,
    Miss Blanche Lovejoy
    makes her triumphant return in
    Ooh La La.

    The engraved glass front doors were firmly locked but I finally located the stage door down an alleyway. I went in and found myself in a dimly hit hallway.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” a voice from the darkness demanded.
    I must have jumped a mile. I hadn’t seen the little kiosk built into the wall and the man’s face in the window floated like a disembodied head. “We’re not open to the public,” he said. “So I must ask you to leave right away.”
    “I have a message for Miss Lovejoy,” I said. “From Miss Oona Sheehan. It’s urgent.”
    “From Miss Sheehan, huh?” I could now see that he was an older man with a round face and not much hair, and most of him was hidden behind the booth in which he sat, making me feel that I might be talking with the man in the moon. “What a lovely gracious lady she is. So you know Miss Sheehan, do you? She worked here a couple of years ago.”
    “I know Miss Lovejoy will want to see me as soon as she has a minute,” I said.
    “From Miss Sheehan, you said?” He repeated the words.
    “Yes.”
    “They’re in run-through. We open next week.”
    “I won’t disturb her until she has a minute free,” I said, “but Miss Sheehan was most insistent that the message be passed along tonight.”
    He squinted at me, sizing me up. “Well, you can’t be trying to get a job,” he said. “We’ve all the chorus girls we need.”
    “Do I look like a chorus girl?” I asked.
    “You’d be surprised. It takes all types, my dear. When they first come in here, all fresh-faced and no lipstick or rouge, you’d think they were somebody’s granddaughter, straight from the farm. Soon they start dressing themselves up and painting their faces and then they look like everyone else in this ridiculous profession. Some of them aren’t changed by it, but for some of them it goes to their heads. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Stage-door Johnnies with more money than sense, flowers, champagne out of slippers. Nonsense all of it and it makes some of the girls go off the rails. I try and keep an eye on them. Sort of grandfather figure . . . I’m Old Henry. That’s what they call me. Old Henry.”
    I could tell he liked to talk and that we’d be there all night if I wasn’t careful. From far off I could hear the thump-thump of music and then female voices raised in song. Then squeals. Then a deep man’s voice shouting, “Wait, don’t go!”
    “Coming to the end of act one,” Old Henry said. “That