Read The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) for Free Online

at it with scripts in their hands. To their left was an organ, but no one was there. To their right was a small flight of four steps leading to a contraption that looked like a glassless window. On the platform behind the steps was a wheel mounted on a table with a handle in the center of the wheel so it would be turned. Another contraption on wheels next to it held small wooden doors, one on each side, and next to the steps was a wooden box filled with sand. A man was standing in the box, with a script in his hand.
    Behind the two men at the microphone was a glass partition with three men seated behind it all wearing earphones.
    “Take it from the top of four, Nigel,” came a voice. “One more time and then all the way through.”
    A portly man with a grey mustache wearing a dark suit and vest nodded. I recognized him from dozens of movies as Nigel Bruce. At his side stood Basil Rathbone in a tweed jacket and sweater. Rathbone looked out into the audience and directly at me, as if he knew me, and then turned back to the script.
    Bruce let his face become perplexed so he could fall into character and said something like, “Rain had always depressed him when he wasn’t working on a case,” and the man in the box shuffled his feet, ran up the four stairs and opened one of the doors.
    Rathbone said something like “Aha, we have a visitor,” and the show went on with Rathbone as Holmes discovering a mad old killer named Amberly, who has gassed his wife and her doctor to death in a sealed room. Up to the last minute, I suspected Professor Moriarty, even though he had nothing to do with the episode.
    After the announcer stepped forward and reminded the dozen people in the audience that “A little cold may be the start of a serious illness,” I vowed to take his advice and buy some Bromo Quinine Cold Tablets. The show came to an end, and the director’s voice came across tinny and cracked, saying, “That’s good enough for day. Thanks Basil, Nigel.”
    Rathbone smiled and waved toward the glass partition, and Bruce nodded. A guy in the audience ran up on the platform to help the sound-effects man wheel away his props, and a woman with a script in her hand started to talk to Bruce. Looking less thin than he did in the movies, Rathbone walked directly toward me with his hand outstretched. I would have guessed he was a few years older than I was. His grip was firm and up close he gave the impression of being both agile and solid.
    “You must be the man who so urgently has to see me,” Rathbone said as precisely as he spoke on the radio, though a bit faster. “Let me guess what it’s all about. You are a representative of Howard Hughes, conducting some kind of investigation about our dinner last week. Your investigation concerns something violent or potentially dangerous. It does not involve any danger to my person, but it does involve something to do with national security, or at least Mr. Hughes thinks it does.”
    Rathbone took out a silver cigarette case, offered me one, which I refused, lit his own and looked at me with some amusement.
    “Pretty good,” I said, as Nigel Bruce and the woman moved past us saying good night to Rathbone, “Holmes couldn’t have done it better.”
    Rathbone laughed and ushered me out into the hall.
    “Holmes,” he said, “had a little trick which I have learned. He withheld obvious information and disclosed things in an order designed to surprise his audience. My wife called me and told me someone had called and mentioned Hughes and that she had told him I was rehearsing. The only contact I have had with Hughes in the last three years was at his home last week. He talked about the war and seemed particularly agitated. When I saw you sitting in the audience, clearly a man who has known violence in his life as evidenced by your visage, I began to put things together. You are not a policeman or you would have so announced yourself. You did not rush over here. Hence, my life was in no