The Fourth Wall by Barbara Paul Page A

my nose. No, I had no idea who had destroyed the set, or why. Yes, the play would close temporarily until a new set could be built. No, I didn’t know what steps the police were planning to take—see Sergeant Piperson.
    Piperson’s announcement that I was this madman’s target left me more confused than ever. If he’d attacked Sylvia Markey and Ian Cavanaugh simply because they were in my play, why had he gone after Loren Keith as well? Loren had nothing to do with Foxfire; our designer was a man who’d been in Paris for the last two months working on sets for a ballet company. Did that mean Loren’s blinding was coincidental after all? It looked that way, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it.
    â€œStay tuned for the CBS Late Movie,” the well-informed newscaster told me. “Tonight it’s The Life of Emily Zola .” Starring Paul Muni as Emily?
    By the next day the police had worked out what had happened. The theater building showed no sign of forced entry, so the vandal—hereafter known as He —must have hidden somewhere after the performance and spent the night in the theater. The night watchman was alone after about midnight, which was the time Gene Ramsay’s guard left. He might have planned to wreak his havoc during the night hours; but the theater district is well patrolled at night, and He may have decided it was too risky with the police checking in every hour or so.
    The night watchman went off duty at six, when his relief took over. The box office didn’t open until ten, so that meant He had four hours to do his damage with only one frail old man to take care of. That way if any especially loud crash leaked through the auditorium doors, there’d be no one in the box office to hear it.
    Here the police began to speculate. Anyone planning such extensive damage needed equipment—a knife for slashing, an ax for smashing, paint for throwing, tools of some sort for ripping out the wiring. And the chloroform. All this would make a sizable bundle, something one couldn’t just leave with the coat check girl to be picked up later. So the police theorized that after chloroforming the watchman, He took the watchman’s keys and unlocked the loading doors at the back of the theater. Then He could have driven a station wagon or a pickup to the loading area and moved his gear inside. This would have been in broad daylight; but to anyone who saw him, He probably looked like any workman doing his job. Police were now searching for witnesses.
    Who the hell was this vicious set wrecker? The police said there were three possibilities:
    1.    He was someone connected with Foxfire , someone who had a legitimate reason for being in the Martin Beck Theatre. This would include the cast, the backstage crew, the front-of-house crew, the producer, the director, the assistant director, and the playwright.
    2.    He was someone who’d come into the theater as a member of the audience.
    3.    He had come into the theater the previous day in the guise of a workman or delivery man and had just stayed.
    And a sort of side category: He might be She .
    The police were inclined to dismiss possibility number three. There are a lot of places to hide in a theater, the police said, but not that many. There were just too many people all over the place for too many hours for him to remain successfully concealed during the evening performance. Coming into the theater as a member of either the company or the audience and hiding after the performance was much more probable. If a member of the company, He would have had to check himself out on the doorkeeper’s list but not actually leave. Tricky, but possible.
    So there were all sorts of leads for the police to follow. A check on any deliveries made to the theater the preceding day. Possible witnesses to a workman unloading something at the back of the theater. What brand of paint was used, how