Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [130]
Klayman broke free of his inertia and rushed at Bancroft, and Johnson did the same from another angle. One of the Secret Service agents seated next to the vice president flung himself over her as Bancroft raised the weapon in two unsteady hands and squeezed off a shot. It was far off the mark, whizzing ten feet over Maloney’s head and striking the front of the balcony.
“Sic semper tyrannis!” Bancroft shouted.
Klayman beat Johnson by a step and tackled Bancroft, sending him facefirst into the orchestra pit, where he landed on the percussionist’s drum set, scattering its pieces in every direction, cymbals crashing, drums hitting other orchestra members.
Panic and fear filled the theatre. Some people tried to run from it, but the aisles were clogged. Others raced to the front to better see what was happening. The Secret Service valiantly tried to extricate the VP from the mob but found it virtually impossible to move her to safety. Eventually, a corps of agents and uniformed police formed a V-shaped wedge and pushed people aside on their way to the lobby and out into the street.
Johnson, gun drawn, had scrambled down into the pit and had pinned Bancroft to the floor, a knee in his back, his weapon pressed against the back of the actor’s neck. Klayman, with a uniformed cop, joined him, and Bancroft’s hands were cuffed behind his back. Klayman saw the gun the actor had used jutting out from beneath a snare drum, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and retrieved it.
“You stupid bastard,” Johnson growled at Bancroft, who whimpered beneath the big detective’s weight, and the pain in his arms and wrists caused by having been handcuffed.
Mac’s and Annabel’s initial reactions were like everyone else’s in the audience: shock, disbelief, then a need to take action. They stood at their seats while the chaos around them developed and kept their attention on the stage where the bizarre, unrehearsed scene had played out before their eyes. There was as much bedlam on the stage as in the house. Some huddled together and cried; others came to the stage apron to peer down into the orchestra pit, where Johnson and Klayman had pulled Bancroft to his feet and were leading him into the hands of a dozen other officers.
“I don’t see Clarise,” Annabel told her husband, standing on tiptoe in search of her friend.
“She’s probably backstage.”
“No, I don’t see her. I want to find her.”
They left the area in which they’d been seated, and threaded a path through people in the direction of the stage. The front of the theatre was relatively empty now, most audience members having headed up the aisles toward the lobby. The Smiths skirted the orchestra pit in which musicians packed their instruments while discussing what they’d just experienced, came up an aisle that paralleled a far wall, and reached doors linking the theatre to the building in which Ford’s Theatre Society’s offices were housed. Before the incident, the Secret Service and MPD had been stationed at the doors, but had abandoned their posts in the aftermath of the shooting. Annabel opened one of the doors and prepared to go through it.
“Mac!”
The voice belonged to Dean Mackin, Mac’s boss at GW.
“I need to speak with you for a minute,” Mackin said.
“I’ll go up to Clarise’s office,” Annabel told her husband, “and see if she’s there.”
“I’ll be up in a minute,” he said.
Annabel closed the door behind her. The turmoil in the theatre hadn’t spilled over into the small, three-storey building that was home to Ford’s Theatre Society. The short hallway in which she stood