Who's Kitten Who?
Page 28
Corey heard my question. “It means somebody totally destroyed it,” he explained in a choked voice. “It’s not even that difficult. All you have to do is shove one end of a bare wire into a wall socket and touch the other end to the metal of the lighting board. The resulting power surge is enough to blow up the motherboard.”
“Look!” Jill exclaimed, glancing up at the ceiling. “Somebody took a long stick and pushed all the lights out of place!”
“Wow,” Kyle observed. Like everyone else, he sounded dazed. “It’ll take hours to reset them all!”
“It’s over,” Derek said in a dull voice, sinking into one of seats that was still intact. “The entire production. It’s done.”
“You don’t mean that!” Betty protested.
“Betty, there’s no way we can open in twenty-four hours,” Jill said mournfully. “Not when practically everything in the entire theater has been destroyed.”
I had to agree. Looking around, I couldn’t imagine how we could even clean the place up, much less put together new sets and costumes and lighting and everything else that was required to stage the production in such a short time. Then there was the fact that all those things required money, something I suspected was in pretty short supply.
And the most horrifying part was that all this destruction was intentional. Someone had worked hard to make sure She’s Flying High wouldn’t open on Friday night—someone who clearly felt the show mustn’t go on.
The entire company remained silent for what seemed like a very long time. And then Wendy, the little girl who played Amelia as a child, piped up in her sweet voice, “Derek? I don’t know if this would help, but I have a dress at home that’s the same style as my costume. I could wear that tomorrow night.”
“Thanks, Wendy,” Derek replied tiredly. “But I don’t think—”
“I have a long dress that looks a lot like my costume in the Presidential reception scene,” one of the other female cast members volunteered.
“We could probably throw something together for sets,” the stage manager said. “It wouldn’t be as nice, of course. But still, we have all day tomorrow to work on it.”
“And we can rent a new lighting board,” Jill interjected. “A sound board too.”
“If I spend the next twenty-four hours doing nothing else, not even sleeping, I can probably redo all the lighting,” Corey offered. For the first time, I detected a note of optimism in his voice.
Slowly, Derek rose to his feet. His face flushed, he said, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. There’s nothing I want more than to see Simon’s production come to life on the Theater One stage. I meant it when I said it’s the best way I can think of to honor his talent and his creativity. If there really is some way we could pull this off…” His voice became too choked for him to continue.
It didn’t matter, since everyone else in the room filled in for him. The theater was suddenly buzzing with the excited chatter of the cast and crew as they shared their plans, each one coming up with ways to contribute to the reconstruction of what had been so brutally destroyed.
I had to admit, I was touched by their commitment to bringing Simon Wainwright’s production to life. Derek was right. Simon deserved this.
He also deserved justice. Reminding myself of that simple fact banished any feelings of defeat I may have been feeling. Instead, I felt energized. The horrifying destruction laid out before me only made me more determined than ever to find out who his killer was.
Friday morning passed in a blur. On Pet People, I did a segment on techniques for breaking dogs and cats of bad habits. The whole time I was on the air, I hoped desperately that no one would call in to blab that it wasn’t exactly a skill I’d mastered with my own menagerie. I couldn’t forget the day Nick’s parents had shown up at my cottage to find that Hurricane Max and Hurricane Lou had struck simultaneously.
I spent the rest of the day zigzagging around Long Island, making back-to-back house calls. So it wasn’t until late afternoon that I managed to make the one stop I’d been thinking about all day.
As I pulled up in front of the house Kyle and Ian shared, my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what I was going to say or do. I didn’t even know if I’d find anyone at home.
But I wasn’t about to let any of that stop me. Especially when Ian, the man who currently held the number one spot on my list of suspects, answered the door. I was curious about why it took almost three minutes of knocking, accompanied by Monty’s loud barking from out in the backyard, for him to open it. Still, there could have been a million different things he was busy with.
“Jessica,” he greeted me, sounding surprised. “I wasn’t expecting you. Did you set up an appointment with Kyle that he forgot to tell me about?”
As usual, I found his English accent disarming. But I tried not to let it distract me.
“I just made a house call nearby,” I said, hoping my lying skills were up to snuff. “I figured I’d stop by and take another look at Monty. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“Not at all,” he assured me.
Still, I noticed that he looked distracted. His wire-rimmed glasses were slightly askew, as was the baseball cap he was wearing once again. His hair was in disarray as well. Something about him seemed off balance somehow. “Do you mind if I come in?” I asked after what seemed like an awfully long silence. “Or I could go around back and check on Monty out there.”
“No need,” he chirped. “I’ll let him in. Please, come inside—and I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness. I was just on the phone with a rather irate client, one of those people who’s impossible to please. I’m afraid I have a tendency to let that sort of thing get to me.”
The inside of the small house looked pretty much the same way I remembered it from my other visits. What did you expect? I asked myself. A copy of How to Murder Your Best Friend lying open on the floor? Blood-soaked weapons? A half-written confession letter sitting on the coffee table?
“Difficult clients are definitely the hardest part of being in business for yourself,” I said, trying to make conversation. Or, more accurately, trying to lead the conversation around to the topic I realized I had to broach. “But the appreciative clients make it all worthwhile. Fortunately, there are some I’ve had for nearly a decade, ever since I started practicing medicine.”
Before he had a chance to make a comment that would steer the conversation off in a different direction, I continued, “Speaking of people we’ve known for a long time, a funny thing happened to me the other day. I ran into someone from your past.”
“Really?” Ian asked, his English accent making the word sound more like Rally? “Who was that?”
I took a deep breath. “A professor from Brookside University. Someone in the theater department. I treated his, uh, his cat.”
“What’s his name?”
“Professor Hendricks. I think his first name is Garvin.” I studied his face, searching for signs of confusion.
Instead, he said, “Garth, not Garvin. Garth Hendricks. And of course I know him. Quite well, in fact. At least I used to, back in my college days.”
“Did you take any courses with him?” I probed.
“Yes. Several. I was in a number of his productions as well. That was a requirement in all his acting classes.”
I was trying to think of a response when Ian retreated to the kitchen. A few seconds later, Monty came bounding into the house, leaping around and wagging his tail and barking gleefully.
“Here’s our boy,” Ian exclaimed, sounding as happy as the Weimaraner. As soon as he ruffled his ears, Monty lay down on his back, no doubt looking for a good tummy-scratching.
“Come here, you funny goofus,” Ian said in a deep, throaty voice—without even a trace of an English accent. “Moofus, woofus. Moofus, goofus…”
I froze. I recognized those words. Even more, I recognized the voice.
It belonged to Kyle, not Ian.
And it d
idn’t have even a trace of an English accent.
A chill ran through me as, in a blinding flash, I understood what I was seeing.
Kyle and Ian were the same person.
Even though my head was buzzing, I could hear Professor Hendricks’s words in my head, as if someone was playing a tape of something I’d heard before. He had said that Kyle was particularly good at playing character parts.
In other words, Kyle was a first-rate actor.
Something else he’d said suddenly stood out most in my mind.
I remember him doing a fabulous job as Alfred Doolittle, Eliza Doolittle’s humorously tipsy father, in My Fair Lady, Kyle’s former theater professor had commented. He was quite convincing.
My Fair Lady was set in London—and Alfred Doolittle had a strong Cockney accent.
Which meant Kyle was good at imitating accents. Especially English accents.
Like Ian’s.
As I studied Ian more closely, watching him cavort with Monty on the floor, I realized why his hair looked strange, not to mention slightly off balance.
It was a wig.
I looked past the beard and past the glasses and realized that the features on that face belonged to Kyle Carlson. And while the last time I’d met Ian, on a scheduled visit, his eyes had been dark, this time they were blue. Like Kyle’s. As if he hadn’t had time to put in his tinted contact lenses.
My stomach was suddenly lurching as if I was a passenger on the Titanic.
Is it really possible? I wondered, questioning the words I was hearing and the image I was seeing. Could Ian Norman really be no more than somebody Kyle created, playing the role of his fictitious roommate in the same way he played a character onstage?
Except this character was designed to do more than entertain. He had been created to provide Kyle Carlson with an alibi for the night of the murder.
As this unbelievable truth came into clearer and clearer focus, something else kept nagging at me. After a few seconds, the fog cleared and I knew what it was.
That it began with Lieutenant Falcone—and his New York accent. The way he dropped his Rs at the end of most words. I remembered thinking, Somewhere out there, there’s a tremendous warehouse filled with all the Rs that people living in the New York area have discarded.
Kyle’s “roommate” was named Ian Michael Norman. If someone pronounced his last name without the R, it became no man.
I thought about his first two names, remembering the way he’d made a point of telling me his middle name. Ian Michael. Which meant his initials were I. M.
Put them all together and you ended up with I Am No Man.
I felt as if a jolt of electricity had just gone through me. He had me fooled. All of us, in fact, including Lieutenant Falcone.
There was no such person as Ian Norman. Kyle’s “roommate” was really Kyle, wearing a wig and a fake beard and using the English accent he’d already mastered by the time he went to college.
Which means Kyle must have killed Simon, I concluded, my mind racing. Why else would he have gone to all the trouble of inventing a fake roommate to provide him with an alibi?
I thought fast, trying to remember all the other pieces of the investigation that suddenly made sense.
When the Port Players first learned that Simon was dead, Kyle was one of the few who insisted the production should come to a halt. Then it suddenly seemed as if he’d changed his mind. But in the eleventh hour, someone destroyed the theater, making it seemingly impossible for She’s Flying High to open after all.
Kyle had also insisted all along that Lacey was the killer. He’d been the only person aside from Aziza who claimed that Lacey had been stalking Simon during the last weeks he was alive. And that had been only with my prompting. He could easily have made up the story about finding one of Lacey’s threatening letters in Simon’s backpack—and he could have reconstructed the type of letter we had talked about, then sent it to me anonymously.
He could have followed me to the Brookside University campus the night I went there to find Professor Hendricks too. Perhaps he had even guessed that sooner or later my snooping would lead me there. He could have also set me up at Theater One by leaving me an anonymous message to meet him there, then sending me a warning by sneaking around in the dark and leaving the trapdoor open on a dark stage. He certainly knew his way around the theater well enough.
Which meant he would have known about the props closet and the eclectic assortment of items stored inside—including a ceramic Buddha that was heavy enough to kill a man with a single blow. And he possessed the physical strength to drag his victim over to a trunk and push him into it.
It all made perfect sense. For the moment, however, I knew I had to concentrate on getting myself out of there without letting on that I’d finally seen through Kyle’s charade—despite his skill as an actor.
“I can see from here that Monty’s wounds look great,” I said, hoping that whatever I’d learned about acting over the past two weeks was helping me sound the way I usually did. “Here, let me get a better look.”
I crouched down and saw that his cuts were, indeed, practically healed.
“Monty’s in great shape,” I announced with an air of finality as I stood up. “Ian, would you do me a favor and tell Kyle to continue with the antibiotics I gave him until they’re all gone?”
Usually I would have explained how important it was to complete the entire course in order to keep the bacteria from building up resistance and over time reducing their efficacy. But I just didn’t have the heart.
Not when I knew the next thing I had to do was contact Lieutenant Falcone and tell him that Kyle Carlson had murdered Simon Wainwright—even though a major piece of the puzzle was missing, and that was why.
I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t get Lieutenant Falcone on the phone, since after five o’clock on a Friday evening wasn’t exactly prime time for communicating with anyone. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t frustrated.
I left him a message on his voice mail, begging him to call me back as soon as possible. Then, after thinking about it for about eight seconds, I called back and left him a second message. This time I told him the reason it was really important that he call me back right away was that I’d figured out who had killed Simon Wainwright.
I dashed home to let Max and Lou out, feed my entire menagerie, and take a quick shower. By that point, it was close enough to cast call that I figured I might as well go over to the theater. After all, I wasn’t about to find anything productive to do with the little time I had left. Especially since I was already feeling pretty jittery.
I was about to knock on Betty’s door when I remembered that she’d spent the whole day at Theater One, helping reconstruct scenery and throw together costumes. So I drove to Port Townsend in my red VW by myself, aware that more and more butterflies were gathering in my stomach with each passing mile.
As I walked into the theater, I expected to find it throbbing with activity. Instead, it was deserted.
But I was astonished by how far it had come in the past twenty-four hours. New scenery replaced the fake trees and hand-painted backdrops that had been destroyed. Even though the substitutes were much simpler, they certainly did the job. The torn seats had been repaired with duct tape, and the cables that had been hanging from the ceiling were nowhere in sight. I noticed a new lighting board and a new sound board, both slightly different models than what I remembered seeing before. And a rack of costumes stood on the stage. They weren’t nearly as elaborate as the ones Lacey had spent weeks making. But they would do.
When I heard someone clear his throat behind me, I turned and saw Corey wrapping a length of cable around one arm.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Dinner break,” he replied. “In fact, I’m off to meet the rest of the group. Want to come along?”
“No, thanks.” By that point, my stomach was in such turmoil I couldn’t imagine putting even a single morsel of food into it.
I decided that one of the best ways to do that was by getting into costume. As soon as I said good-bye to Corey, I rummaged through the rack of costumes until I found the one that duplicated my aviator suit. Actually, it was nothing more than a white blouse and a pair of khaki-colored Dockers that had been shortened to capri length, with elastic sewn into each hem. But at least my goggles and my leather helmet, both looped onto the hanger, had survived the heartbreaking assault on Theater One.
I’d just brought the outfit into the women’s dressing room when I heard a door slam.
“Corey?” I called, surprised that I wasn’t alone after all.
But no one answered.
I realized immediately that it couldn’t be Corey. The door I’d heard bang shut was close by. In fact, it had to have been the door to the men’s dressing room.
“Hello?” I called, wondering who else besides me had stayed behind. “Who’s there?”
Once again, there was no response.
“Derek?”
Nothing but silence.
“Doug?” I tried again, this time using the names of other male members of the cast and crew. “Brent? Robert?”
In a choking voice, I added, “Kyle?”
I let out a little scream when somebody suddenly leaped into the doorway of the women’s dressing room.
But it wasn’t Derek or anyone else from the Port Players. Instead, the man standing just a few feet away from me was Ian Michael Norman, complete with his curly reddish-brown wig, fake beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and tinted contact lenses, just like all the other times I’d been in his company.
This time, however, there was one thing about Ian that was distinctively different. He was clutching a knife the size of a machete.
Chapter 18
“All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
—Samuel Butler