The Cutthroat

Isabella Cook’s melodious contralto voice sounds as if Our Maker had chosen it to harmonize with each and every one of her beautiful features. The winsome blonde wears her hair in the modern style of the heiress Gabriella Utterson, who is key to the terrifying plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Barrett and Buchanan had risen with a flourish, exchanging a private glance. Say what they could about their leading lady — and they could say plenty — the “Great and Beloved” never missed an entrance nor any opportunity to boom a show in which she had negotiated a percentage of the take. Another glance said, Worth every penny.

“My dear, how good of you to stop in.”

“Come sit between us.”

And she did, prompting the first question, which started, of course, with condolences.

“With the greatest sympathy for the recent loss of your husband, Miss Cook, may I ask you, as a recent widow, do you find it terribly difficult having to perform night after night in such an arduous role?”

Isabella smiled bravely. “It would be much harder, if not impossible, without the firm shoulders of Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan to rely on, and to lean on, and, I am grateful to say, occasionally weep on.”

The lady from Chicago wondered how to couch the big question in her readers’ hearts. “Would it be fair to say they make you feel a little less lonely?”

Isabella Cook smiled at one, then the other. “More than a little.”

Now — how to ask? — which of the handsomest actors that ever graced the modern stage made the widow feel the most less lonely? But the male reporters were growing restive, and whiskey had made one cocky.

“Jekyll or Hyde?”

Isabella obliterated him with an innocent, “My favorite Jekyll and my favorite Hyde do everything necessary to make the show go on.”

Their stage manager entered on cue. “Excuse me, Miss Cook. Excuse me, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Buchanan…”

“Yes, Mr. Young?”

“You scheduled a principals’ rehearsal.”

The actors rose as one. “Duty calls, gentlemen and lady. Mr. Young will see you back to the dining car.”

But before the reporters could drain their glasses and close their notebooks, it suddenly all went to blazes. “Just one more question, please?”

The wire-service reporter, an old man reeking of whiskey and nickel cigars, had yet to speak. He had come aboard at Columbus. The publicist didn’t know him, and they had assumed he had been put out to pasture, covering theater news. He had put a dent in the whiskey, and had nodded amiably at the actors’ jokes. Now, just as they were wrapping things up, he had a question.

“Have you run into any difficulty selling tickets owing to the reports of murdered women?”

28

Jekyll and Hyde’s publicist stood, wild-eyed and speechless, in the swaying car.

John Buchanan said, “What?”

Jackson Barrett asked, “What do you mean?”

All three of the showmen noticed belatedly that the old man reeking of whiskey and nickel cigars had the crafty eyes of a seasoned police reporter with a nose for a big story. Or the cynicism to create one. “What I mean,” he said, “is that since you’ve been on tour, young girls have been getting murdered and mutilated. I’m curious whether the horror of these crimes has affected ticket sales?”

“Why would it?” blurted Barrett. Buchanan tried to stay him with a gesture, which would have been futile if Isabella Cook had not laid her hand on his arm.

“Well, you boys may be too young to remember, but when I was a young pup reporter in New York, Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde company came back early from London with their tails between their legs. They had opened to wonderful reviews, as good as they got here. ‘The curtain fell upon a shock of silence,’ said the Telegraph, ‘followed by a roar of sympathetic applause.’ But then Jack the Ripper started murdering. Girl after girl, like is happening here. London audiences stopped buying tickets. As if they were saying, Too much blood in the street. Who wants to see it in the theater, too?”

Buchanan said, “We’ve noted no falloff in bookings.”

“No empty seats?”

“None,” said Barrett, and the publicist finally got a hold on himself to claim, “The wraps are actually increasing.”

The “wrap” was the money taken in at the box office, counted when the curtain went up, stacked in brick-size packs wrapped in paper, and delivered under armed guard to the Jekyll & Hyde Special’s steel safe, to be divvied up at prescribed intervals with the Deaver brothers.

“Why do you suppose your ticket sales have not been affected yet?”

“Audiences love the play,” said the publicist, “because it is a piece with class written all over it, and it has a great plot.”

“What about Alias Jimmy Valentine?” asked Barrett.

“What about it?”