The Giant Rat of Sumatra Page 6

  Frank kept walking, as casually as possible. As soon as he heard Gordean’s dressing-room door close, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. That had been a little too close.

  What had Gordean meant by his last remark? Frank wondered. The part about Moriarty wasn’t hard to figure out. Professor Moriarty was the criminal mastermind who had tried to murder Sherlock Holmes by pushing him over the edge of a waterfall. But what did the Prince of Wales have to do with it?

  “Ha!” Frank said, as the answer came to him. The Prince of Wales, of course, was Prince Charles. And Frank remembered that the family name of Prince Charles’s father was Mountbatten or, in the original German, Battenberg. So the Prince of Wales was a perfect nickname for Charles Battenberg!

  That left a couple of big questions. When Gordean wished for a Moriarty, did he really mean that he wanted someone to kill Battenberg? If so, was he simply wishing, or was he secretly trying to make his wish come true? And how was the person named Tershous connected?

  As Frank drew closer to the stage, he saw Susanna standing in the wings, watching the rehearsal. She noticed him and smiled. “Hi,” she said in a low voice, when he joined her. “How’s it going?”

  Frank replied, “I was about to ask you that.”

  “No more dummies, gas attacks, or falling scenery,” Susanna told him. “So far. I guess we should be grateful for small favors. It’s funny—I always dreamed of working in theater. I never thought that it would be like this.”

  “It’ll all get straightened out,” Frank said.

  Susanna shook her head. “Don’t I wish! Still, it could be worse. Imagine how poor Hector feels.”

  “Why?” Frank asked.

  “You didn’t know?” Susanna replied. “He turned down a juicy supporting role in a TV series to take this part. It was just the pilot, but if it went over, he’d be set for years. And what does he have instead? Third billing in a musical that’ll probably close in out-of-town tryouts. Not a great swap.”

  “Could he still change his mind?” Frank asked.

  “Take the TV role, you mean?” Susanna said. “I don’t know. It might still be open, I guess. But it wouldn’t matter. He can’t walk out on his contract here. If he did that, he’d be finished in show business.”

  Frank was thinking that there was an obvious solution to Hector’s problem. But he kept it to himself. There wasn’t much Hector could do to make The Giant Rat of Sumatra a hit . . . but he could do any number of things to make it a failure. And that failure could mean success for him!

  • • •

  When the rehearsal ended, Hornby and O’Lunny gave the cast a pep talk, then sent everyone off to rest for the evening performance. Joe and Frank wanted to hang around and continue their investigation. But O’Lunny took them aside and said that it would look more natural if they left, too.

  During the drive home, Frank gave Joe a full report on his visit to Gordean’s dressing room. As a finale, he pulled the wadded up shopping bag from his pocket and said, “And look, Joe. I found this in Gordean’s wastebasket. It’s from Value Plus. That’s where that ammonia came from.”

  Joe glanced over, then returned his eyes to the road. “The shopping bag, the empty spool of leader,” he said. “Gordean’s dressing room was full of evidence against him. Are you sure he didn’t write on the mirror, ‘Stop me before I commit more acts of sabotage’?”

  Frank laughed and said, “You think it sounds like a frame, don’t you?”

  Joe thought for a moment before saying, “Well, yes, I guess I do. I mean, everybody knows Gordean’s heavy into fishing. Why would he go out of his way to use that leader, knowing it would point straight to him? And the ammonia—why leave the bottle where it was bound to be spotted, with the price tag still on it, and then toss the bag in your own dressing-room wastebasket?”

  “Crooks do sometimes make stupid mistakes,” Frank pointed out.

  Joe said, “Sure—starting with the decision to turn crooked in the first place. But the guy we’re after is obviously pretty smart, if he’s avoided getting caught for this long. But the business with the fishing leader is just a little too dumb. It smells of frame.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Frank conceded. “But I still think there’s something there. When we get home, we should try to find out who Tershous is. That’s the person Gordean told his friend not to trust. I don’t know where that piece fits in this puzzle, but I’m willing to bet that it fits somewhere.”

  Once home, Joe and Frank said hi to their mother, snagged a couple of pieces of their aunt Gertrude’s cherry pie and a half-gallon of milk from the fridge, and headed for their basement crime lab. Joe booted the computer and ate some pie while he waited. He took a drink of milk, then logged onto the World Wide Web. Ninety seconds later he was studying the home page of America’s leading theatrical newspaper.

  “What was that name again?” he asked, as he clicked on the Index.

  “It sounded like Tershous,” Frank replied. “I’ve never heard of it before, though.”

  Joe scanned the T entries in the index. “Neither has this paper,” he reported. “I’ll try using the search engine.”

  He typed in the name and pressed Return. Almost instantly, the search turned up a near-hit. “Lestell, Tertius,” he read aloud. “Producer-director. There’s a hyperlink to his home page.”

  Joe clicked on the link to Lestell’s page, with Frank looking over his shoulder. What came up on the screen was a brief biography, a list of plays Lestell had produced or directed, and a photo that showed a tall bald man with a wide smile, surrounded by a dozen admirers.

  “Frank, look,” Joe said, pointing to one of the people in the photo, a short stout man standing next to Tertius. “Isn’t that Ewan Gordean?”

  “At this resolution, I couldn’t swear to it,” Frank replied. “It does look like him, though. But if he’s such a buddy of this guy Lestell, why was he warning somebody against him?”

  “That’s for him to know and us to find out,” Joe said. “And we’d better start to work on it the minute we get back to the Orpheum.”

  • • •

  After an early dinner, Joe and Frank drove back to the theater. As they signed in, the stage-door guard said, “You fellows are among the first to come in. I was starting to wonder if they’d called off tonight’s show and forgotten to tell me.”

  “Do you know if Mr. O’Lunny is here yet?” Frank asked.

  The guard laughed. “You bet—he practically lives here! You’ll probably find him in the office. You know where that is?”

  “Sure, thanks,” Frank said. As he and Joe walked down the hall, Frank said, “I thought I’d try to get the story on Lestell. You want to tag along or do some scouting around?”

  “I’ll scout and then get back to you,” Joe said.

  Joe wandered through the backstage area, watching for anything out of the ordinary. He was still surprised by how big the rear area of the theater was. From the audience, the stage looked small, but it actually took up just as much space as the auditorium itself.

  Joe approached the corridor that led to the dressing rooms. At the far end of the hall, someone was bending down next to one of the doors. Joe stepped back out of sight, then peered around the corner. He was just in time to see the person hurry away. The light was too dim for him to identify more than a vague form.

  Joe walked down the hall to the door. From under it, the corner of an envelope stuck out. He looked both ways, then knelt down and fished it out. The flap wasn’t stuck down, but rather tucked inside. Joe opened it and found a typed note inside. It read, “The evidence you need is inside the pub.”

  He glanced at the cardholder on the door. It confirmed it was Battenberg’s dressing room, which didn’t surprise Joe. Apparently some friend who wanted to stay anonymous had decided to help Battenberg solve the mystery.

  “Inside the pub,” Joe read again, recalling that the street scene in the second act included a pub. But the actors never
actually went inside it. He wasn’t even sure that what looked like the door to the pub really opened.

  Only one way to find out. He put the envelope back where he had found it. Then he returned to the stage. It was set up again as Holmes’s sitting room. The street scene was in back, on the turntable. In the half darkness, Joe walked over to the pub and tried the door. It resisted for a moment, then swung open.

  Joe stepped inside and looked warily around. He was in a narrow space between two sets of tall wood and canvas flats. The closest thing he saw to evidence was a couple of crumpled candy wrappers on the floor and a footprint in the dust. Was that worth a closer look? He walked toward it.

  Joe’s stomach lurched as the floor gave way under his foot. Dimly, in the back of his mind, he realized someone had rigged a false floor. He was falling through painted canvas over an open trapdoor!

  9 Left Hanging

  * * *

  Joe thrust his arms out to either side in an effort to stop his fall. How wide was the hole in the floor? His life might depend on the answer to that question.

  He felt the shock as his elbows and forearms smashed against the floorboards. Pain raced through his upper arms and shoulders, then down the long muscles of his back. All his weight was suspended from his outstretched arms. It was like doing a chin up with some overweight pizza lover clinging to your ankles.

  “Help!” Joe shouted. He took a deep breath and shouted again. “Somebody, help!”

  There was no response. Joe knew his calls for help were muffled by the sets that loomed over him. He would have to get out of his dire situation on his own.

  Did he dare let himself drop? Joe’s martial arts training had taught him how to fall and do a tuck and roll. If he were faced with jumping from a second-floor window to the ground, he would have simply counted to three and jumped. But to jump from an unknown height, to an unknown surface, that was another matter. At best he could expect to land on concrete and shatter a few bones. And what if the dark space below him was filled with sharp-angled machinery?

  His arms felt as if they were being slowly pulled out of his shoulder sockets. He couldn’t keep up the downward pressure for much longer. It would be so easy to relax, to let his arms fold up over his head and to slide through the hole in the floor to . . .

  No! Joe clenched his teeth and tried to push himself up. The veins in his neck felt ready to explode. After three seconds he knew that it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t have the leverage it would take to lift his weight up out of the hole.

  If he couldn’t lift himself, could he somehow manage to throw himself? He remembered watching an Olympic pole-vaulting competition on TV. In his mind he saw the athletes twist themselves upward, almost vertically, and fling first their feet, then their curved bodies, over the horizontal barrier. Could he manage to do something like that?

  Slowly, carefully, he set his body swinging forward and backward. The motion put an intense new strain on his arms and shoulders, and he knew he couldn’t keep it up for long. He would have one shot at making his goal, no more.

  He waited until his legs were at the very peak of their swing backward. As his body, like a pendulum, began to swing down and forward, he pulled his knees up and jackknifed at the waist. Joe threw his head backward to give added leverage to the movement.

  Now! Joe straightened his legs at the knees and swung them up with all his strength. It worked. His legs had cleared the edge of the opening. Gratefully he felt the solid floor under his heels and calves. But he wasn’t out of danger yet. Most of his body was still hanging in space, supported by his failing arms.

  Joe grabbed a deep breath and arched his back. Pushing off with his right arm, he rolled to the left. For one awful moment he felt himself start to fall again. He made one last frantic twist. Then he lay stretched out on his side, panting.

  How long was it before he felt he could try to stand up? A minute? Two or three? He never knew. And when he did push himself to his feet, wincing at the ache in his shoulders, he had to stand still until the ground stopped spinning.

  Carefully skirting the open pit in the floor, he pulled open the pub door and stepped out onto the stage just as Bettina, the stage manager, came in his direction.

  “Hey, what were you doing back there?” Bettina asked, giving him a suspicious look.

  “Nearly getting myself killed,” Joe responded. “Look—that trapdoor’s open.”

  Bettina looked. “Uh-oh,” she said. “I’d better take care of that. I wonder how it happened—not that it would have mattered if people kept out of places where they’re not supposed to be.”

  She walked quickly toward the raised platform that served her as a control booth. Joe kept pace with her. “How do those trapdoors work?” he asked.

  She glanced over at him. “Each one has a motor to open and shut it,” she told him. “They’re controlled from a panel at my desk. Down in the basement there’s a movable scaffold with a platform that rises. It’s all pretty primitive. This house hasn’t been used for theatrical productions in thirty years or more.”

  “So there was a platform under me the whole time?” Joe asked. He was slightly disappointed that the danger he’d escaped wasn’t more spectacular.

  “I didn’t say that,” Bettina said. “We’re not using the scaffold, so it’s pushed over to the side, out of the way. If you’d gone through the trap, you would have fallen twenty feet to a cement floor.”

  Joe gulped. “Oh,” he said. Somehow that didn’t make him feel any better. “Well, thanks. I’ll see you.” He crossed the stage and headed for the hallway that led to the dressing rooms. His first job was to retrieve the envelope from under Battenberg’s door—if it was still there. Someone had quite possibly lured him to the trapdoor. Whether the person wanted Joe or Battenberg to take the plunge wasn’t clear. Why hadn’t he tried to get a closer look at the person who’d left it there? Joe felt frustrated. He couldn’t even be sure whether it had been a man or a woman.

  The corner of the envelope was still sticking out from under the door. Joe fished it out and continued down the hall to the office. Inside, Frank and O’Lunny were talking. When Joe walked in, O’Lunny looked up and said, “Joe—is anything wrong?”

  Joe told them about his adventure and showed them the note.

  Frank studied it for a moment, then turned and typed the contents on the office computer. After printing it, he looked at the output and said, “Identical. Here, see for yourselves.”

  Joe took the note, put the new printout on top of it, and held the two pages up against the light. “You’re right,” he said.

  “Most laser printers have a Times Roman font built in,” O’Lunny said. “I know the one I have at home does.”

  “True, but the same font can be a little different from one printer to another,” Frank told him. “These printouts aren’t absolute proof. But it looks as if whoever wanted to make Battenberg or Joe fall through that open trapdoor also had access to this office.”

  O’Lunny looked gloomy. “That eliminates all but about two dozen people,” he said. “Namely, the entire cast and crew of The Giant Rat of Sumatra. We lock the door when we know no one will be around, sure. But during run-throughs and performances, it’s usually open. People feel free to wander in and out. They don’t even—”

  Just then the door flew open and banged against the wall. Li Wei rushed in. She stared at O’Lunny with narrowed eyes and said, “Do you realize what that idiot Hornby is planning to do?”

  “Oh, hello, Li,” O’Lunny said. “Have you met Joe and Frank Hardy? They’ve just joined us.”

  Li Wei continued to stare at O’Lunny. “So you do know,” she said tautly. “In other words, you agree.”

  “You mean, about cutting ‘Foggy River’?” O’Lunny replied. “No, frankly, I don’t. It’s one of our best songs—”

  “The best,” Li Wei interrupted.

  O’Lunny raised his hands, palms upward. “Could be,” he said. “I told Gilbert how good it was
when he suggested cutting it. I could tell he liked it, too. But it doesn’t matter. Our star has taken a violent dislike to the song. He flatly refuses to sing it. What was Gilbert to do?”

  “Fire Battenberg for breach of contract,” Li Wei retorted.

  “Just when we have a chance at Broadway?” O’Lunny said. “Please, be serious. But I promise you this, Li. If for any reason Charles leaves the cast, ‘Foggy River’ will go back into the play.”

  Li Wei stood tense and silent for a long moment. She seemed to be collecting herself. Then she looked at O’Lunny and said, “Poor Donald. You don’t realize it yet, but you’d be so much better off if something or somebody made Hornby drop out from the play. The rights would revert to you, and you’d find a new and better producer within twenty-four hours. Why are you so loyal to a fool like Hornby?”

  “I value loyalty,” O’Lunny said simply. “And if I’m loyal to my teammates, they’re more likely to be loyal to me. Don’t you agree?”

  Li Wei gave him a long cold look. Then she whirled around and stalked out of the office.

  O’Lunny stared blankly at the empty doorway. Then he shook his head and looked over at Joe and Frank. “I’m sorry, fellows,” he said. “I need a few minutes to think.”

  “Of course,” Frank said. “Just one question. Does the name Lestell ring a bell with you?”

  O’Lunny blinked. “Tertius Lestell? Of course. He’s a well-known producer. He and Gilbert used to be partners, as a matter of fact. Then they had a falling out. I don’t know the details. I do know what everyone in show business knows: they hate each other. Either of them would do anything to see the other one fall on his face.”

  • • •

  As curtain time drew near, Frank prowled around, on the watch for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Joe was back in the dressing room, getting into his costume and makeup. The mood backstage was excited. A little too excited?

  Frank wasn’t sure. Maybe the frantic feeling was normal for one of the first performances of a new play. Still, there was a hectic note in the way the cast members spoke, a certain jerkiness in the way they moved, that seemed almost feverish. They were like the audience at a horror flick, both expecting and dreading that something terrible was about to happen.