Death Takes a Bow Read Online Free Page B

stage from the speakers’ room, and it preceded a tall, evidently angry man. He was a high, lean man and apparently about seventy, and his voice crackled in the upper register.
    â€œWell!” he said. “What’s this? What’s this? Something the matter with him?”
    The tall old man was obviously annoyed. He seemed to be addressing, chiefly, Mrs. Williams. At any rate he was looking at Mrs. Williams. He was looking at her angrily.
    â€œMr. Sproul seems—seems to have been taken ill, Dr. Dupont,” Mrs. Williams said. “The doctor”—she gestured vaguely toward Dr. Klingman—“the doctor thinks he’s dead.”
    â€œI don’t think it,” Dr. Klingman said. “He is dead. Completely.” He looked at Dr. Dupont, whom he evidently knew. “Very unfortunate, Doctor,” he said. “Very irregular.” There was, in spite of everything, the faintest touch of raillery in the physician’s tone. The tone accepted and lightly ridiculed the older man’s annoyance at so improper an interruption to orderly procedure. Then Mr. North placed the tall man. Dr. Dupont, scholar not medico, was president of the Today’s Topics Club. He ran it, Mr. North remembered hearing, on the highest plane of the intellect, and with notable asperity. He was not, Mr. North supposed, a man to countenance such extravagances as seemed to have occurred.
    â€œIrregular?” Dr. Dupont repeated. “Unfortunate!” He glared at the physician. “Irregular !” He spluttered slightly. He turned his glare to Mr. North.
    â€œHave to get him out of here ,” he said. Mr. Sproul became, ludicrously, matter out of place, through the fault of Gerald North, who had put him there. Mr. Sproul became, it was clear, a responsibility solely of his publishers. Of Mr. Sproul, as such, Dr. Dupont washed his hands. He looked severely at Mr. North. Mr. North was conscious of annoyance.
    â€œWe’ll have to get the police,” he said. “It will have—to be looked into.” He was conscious of a certain inadequacy in the words. “The doctor says it may have been poison,” he added. “You can’t move him around.”
    â€œCertainly you can’t leave him here ,” Dr. Dupont said, with asperity. “In front of all these people.” He looked at the people. “Most of them members,” he added. His tone was accusing.
    They couldn’t, Mr. North repeated firmly, do anything else. It was a matter for the police; it was a matter to be left in abeyance for the police. If Dr. Dupont liked, Mr. North would notify the police. Or Dr. Dupont could. But somebody had better. Then Mr. North thought of something and started for the door leading to the speakers’ room. Halfway he turned.
    â€œNobody should touch it,” he said. He said it loudly, so that the restive audience could hear. “It’s a matter for the police.”
    That, he thought, ought to give Dr. Dupont pause; it ought to make an auditorium full of people sentinels over the body of Victor Leeds Sproul, protecting it from molestation by the weight of public attention. Assuming that anybody wanted to molest it. Meanwhile, Mr. North wanted to get into the speakers’ room.
    He entered by the door from the stage as Y. Charles Burden, elegant and saturnine as always, but now evidently in a hurry, entered by the door leading from the corridor. Mr. Burden confronted Mr. North.
    â€œWhat the hell?” Mr. Burden inquired. “What the bloody hell?”
    â€œOur man’s dead,” Mr. North told him. “No tour. No more books. No more Sproul.” Mr. North looked intently at Mr. Burden. “Probably,” Mr. North added, “somebody killed him. In front of all of us.”
    As he spoke, Jerry North was looking quickly around the room. He knew what he was looking for, but he did not see it. There should be a glass. Or glasses. Sproul