Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

  “The kind of person who doesn’t deserve you.” Hector began pacing, his hands forming fists. Then he stopped. “And why? Why does he need the money? He’s supposed to have those Silicon Valley billions, yes?”

  “I don’t know about billions, but lots and lots of millions.”

  “In any case, the amount of money he’d been getting from the theater, even at its most, shouldn’t have been that significant to him.”

  I thought about it. “Maybe it isn’t about the money. Maybe he just doesn’t like me.”

  “Impossible,” Hector said dismissively.

  I poured more wine and thought about it. “Maybe it’s just the principle of the thing. If the Palace can make more money, it should make more money.” I shrugged. “Or maybe he’s got us all snowed. Maybe he isn’t rolling in it. Maybe he spent it all. Maybe he’s strapped for cash because this new game took a ton of investment. And maybe he’s not convinced it’s going to be the success everyone thinks it is. Oh!” I sat up. “Or maybe it will be a huge success and he killed his partner so he wouldn’t have to split all the profits.”

  “I do so enjoy it when you weave a chain of maybes,” Hector said.

  “Screenwriter’s habit.” I fell back into the cushions. “Maybe I should go back to screenwriting. Fictional problems are so much easier to solve.”

  “How would you solve this one in a movie?” Hector sank onto the couch next to me. “Would Tommy have been the one to collapse on that stage?”

  “That would have a certain appeal.” I made a face. “But it would just create a new set of problems.”

  “I agree. The police would undoubtedly come looking for you. You would have had an entirely justifiable motive for killing him.” His eyes glittered. “So would I.”

  “Aw, thanks. That’s so chivalrous.” I shot him a look. “Also deeply disturbing.”

  We were prevented from exploring further plotlines by Brandon throwing open the door.

  “Nora! Are you watching? S was poisoned!”

  “I only know about poison from what I’ve seen in the movies,” I said.

  Marty, Callie, and I were slumped on stools at the far end of the concessions stand while the seven-thirty show was underway. Hector had left hours ago, and I’d sent Brandon and Albert home after the five-fifteen. Albert because he was looking tired, and Brandon because he’d been driving us all crazy with his endless stream of updates on the poisoning of S Banks.

  “You only know about most things from what you’ve seen in the movies,” Marty pointed out.

  “True,” I agreed. “Sadly, in this case I don’t think Arsenic and Old Lace is going to be very helpful.” Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Cary Grant, Pricilla Lane and two sweet old ladies whose elderberry wine you should absolutely refuse) was many things, but a useful source of information on present-day poisonings wasn’t one of them.

  “I mean, I kind of can’t believe it was murder,” Callie said. “Right there onstage in front of a million people.”

  “One point eight million people,” I corrected her. “At least, that’s what Brandon said. If you include everyone in the eighteen theaters and all the fans watching the webcast online.”

  “Who decides to murder someone in front of 1.8 million people?” she asked. “And why?”

  “And how?” Marty asked. “Do you think it was in that smoothie thing he drank? I one hundred percent think there was something in that.”

  “I thought he looked puffy,” I said. “Did you guys think he looked puffy?”

  “He looked stoned,” Marty said. “Even before he took that drink onstage.” Marty had gotten himself a coffee and was systematically adding eight sugar packets to it. “That was weird, wasn’t it, that he brought that out onstage during his big announcement?”

  “Not if he was paid to,” Callie shrugged.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you notice how he turned the label so everyone could see it while he drank? I bet he’s got an endorsement deal or something. Like half the people you see on Insta.”

  I’d stopped looking at Instagram and all the rest of the social media sites right about the time Ted’s infidelity had been a trending topic.

  “Do you think that’s true?” I wondered. The way he’d paused for a drink had seemed weird to me at the time, but what did I know about tech people?

  “I’d bet on it,” she said. “Which doesn’t mean that’s how he was, like, poisoned. I mean, would it happen that fast?”

  “That depends on what they used,” Marty said authoritatively. “In Arsenic and Old Lace it worked right away, but they mixed a teaspoon of arsenic, half a teaspoon of strychnine, and—”

  “Just a pinch of cyanide.” We both finished the quote, exchanging a look.

  Callie shrugged. “Okay, but in D.O.A. it took days.”

  “Right,” I agreed. In D.O.A. (1949, Edmond O’Brien) the victim had lived for several days. “But that was because he had to survive long enough to solve his own murder. And wasn’t it some weird sort of radium something?”

  “It was movie poison,” Marty agreed. “I think it was arsenic in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, and that took forever, but Bogey was trying to make it look like natural causes.”

  A husband killed his wife with poisoned milk in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947, Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck) and a wife suspected her husband of trying to kill her with poisoned milk in Suspicion (1941, Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine). “I wonder if guys got away with a lot more poisoning back when doctors thought women could die of ‘nervous complaints,’” I mused. “And when drinking milk at bedtime was a thing.”

  “Probably. And I think arsenic used to be, like, legit easy to get,” Callie said. “Can you even get it anymore?” She looked at Marty.

  “How would I know?” He shifted his coffee cup away from her.

  “I mean, what did Claude Raines use to poison Ingrid Bergman in Notorious?” Callie was getting into this now. “Because that wasn’t fast, either.”

  “No,” I agreed. In Notorious (1946, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant) Bergman had lingered long enough to thwart the Nazis. “But is that because Ben Hecht was a screenwriter who knew his poisons or just because he needed Ingrid to hang in there until Cary could rescue her?”

  “You’re the writer,” Marty said. “You tell us.”

  I stood and held up my index finger. “I’m not a screenwriter anymore.” I held up another finger. “We don’t know what poison killed S.” A third finger. “And we’re not going to figure anything out by analyzing the famous poisonings of classic films.”

  Marty looked at Callie. “Two out of three of those are true.”

  I didn’t ask him which he meant. I didn’t want to know.

  Blog Post: Arsenic and Old Lace

  1944

  “Insanity runs in my family,” Mortimer Brewster tells his bride, about midway into this movie. “It practically gallops.”

  And we’re off. This is screwball comedy of the highest order, my friends. This is Arsenic and Old Lace. You may have seen the play this film was based on as a high school theater production, with some sixteen-year-old girls made up with gray wigs as the sweet old murderous aunts. But if you haven’t seen this movie you are in for a treat. Every role is perfectly cast. Just look at them—Raymond Massey, Jack Carson, Edward Everett Horton, Peter Lorre! It’s a who’s who of classic character actors. And we haven’t even mentioned Cary Grant.

  Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, and we meet him as he’s in line to get a marriage license. This wouldn’t be that unusual, except he’s the author of a tome known as “The Bachelor’s Bible,” and was the last guy in New York anyone ever expected to marry. But the lady in question, Elaine Harper, is just too lovely, too sweet, and too charming not to marry. (She’s played by Priscilla Lane, and I forgive you if you don’t know her. She r
etired from films only four years later, at the ripe old age of thirty-three.)

  But back to that marriage license. However lovely, sweet, etc. Elaine is, Mortimer has some major last-minute cold feet. “How can I marry you? Me—the symbol of bachelorhood…I’ve written four million words against marriage. Not only hooked, but to a minister’s daughter, and not only a minister’s daughter but a girl from Brooklyn!”

  That’s what we in the business call laying out the central conflict. Or, at least, it would be the central conflict if it weren’t for what Mortimer was about to discover at his dear old aunties’ house…

  The aunts in question, Abby and Martha (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, respectively) live in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and a delightful proximity to a leaf-strewn graveyard. One can only wonder what it would be worth in today’s real estate market. The Brewster Sisters are, according to the (reassuringly Irish) cops on the beat “two of the dearest, sweetest, kindest old ladies that ever walked the earth.” Well yes, but they’ve got some interesting hobbies.

  An eccentric relative is a requirement of any self-respecting screwball comedy, and that role is filled here by Mortimer’s brother Teddy (John Alexander) who lives with the aunts and believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, charging up the stairs as if they were San Juan Hill, and much occupied by digging the Panama Canal in the cellar.

  It’s to this delightful home that Mortimer brings Elaine after the wedding. She lives with her father the minister just across the graveyard, and needs to pack a suitcase, because they’re bound for Niagara Falls. “Whistle when you’re ready,” he tells her, and goes to tell the aunts the happy news—quickly, because he’s keeping the taxi waiting. They have a train to catch.

  But it would be an extremely dull movie if Mortimer and Elaine actually made their train to Niagara. Instead, while looking for the draft of his latest anti-marriage book, Mortimer happens upon a gentleman, hidden in the window seat and very clearly dead. Nobody, nobody, has ever been better at reactions to insane situations than Cary Grant, and this has to be his best. He stares, he rears back, he slams the seat shut and sits on it, then has to look again. The body is still there.

  Assuming Teddy has finally cracked, he tells the aunts it’s time to send his brother to the Happy Dale Sanatorium, and fast. “Teddy’s killed a man, darlings!” But they already know about the gentlemen and advise Mortimer to forget all about him. “We never dreamed you’d peek,” Abby says reproachfully.

  It seems the aunts, not Teddy, have been killing lonely old gentlemen who respond to their ad for a room to rent. It’s a kindness, they feel, as the men in question have no families and no place to go. They’ve been poisoning them with perfectly delicious elderberry wine of their own deadly recipe, and Teddy has been burying them in the cellar, blithely assuming them to be canal workers who died of yellow fever. They’re up to an even dozen, they tell Mortimer happily. All given decent Christian burials, so he shouldn’t worry about a thing. But he is worried. “Now, I don’t know how I can explain this to you, but it’s not only against the law…it’s wrong. It’s not a nice thing to do.”

  So here we are: Aunties happily frosting a wedding cake, a body in the window seat, trick-or-treaters at the back door, Teddy digging in the basement, and bride whistling the wedding march from across the graveyard while the taxi waits outside. It’s a lot for Mortimer to take in. Which is right about when his psychopath of a missing brother shows up, accompanied by an alcoholic plastic surgeon, looking for a place to hide out from the law. The brother is played by Raymond Massey (looking an awful lot like a scarred-up Boris Karloff) and the surgeon is a perfect Peter Lorre. Oh, and did I mention they have their own dead body to dispose of? I mean, come on! You’ve got to watch this movie!

  Screwball thoughts:

  Let’s take a moment to appreciate the screwball—a manic flavor of romantic comedy that veers so far into the absurd that there’s a danger of never making it back. (Observe not one but two panthers roaming around Connecticut in Bringing up Baby.) The action is fast, the dialogue is faster, the cast is overflowing with eccentric characters, and the physical comedy ramps up to a crescendo of slapstick. At the center of all of this lightning-paced insanity is someone who’s just trying to do something normal, like leave for his honeymoon with his sweet, clueless bride. (One more thing: I don’t care how hard they tried, nobody made a real screwball after 1949.)

  Hollywood gossip thoughts:

  The gowns here aren’t anything spectacular, but they are by Orry-Kelly, who shared an apartment (and, he later claimed, a bed) with Grant before either of them moved to Hollywood and got famous. I’ll leave you to imagine what the gossip at the fittings might have been.

  Movies My Friends Should Watch

  Sally Lee

  Chapter 7

  I did not drink milk at bedtime that night. Not because I had a husband who might poison me with it—Ted had been far more devious than that—but because a glass of red was much more likely to help me get some sleep.

  Except it didn’t. I finally gave up and opened my laptop a little after two. Something Hector had said was nudging at my brain. Why would Tommy May be worried about money?

  A quick search told me what I already knew. Tommy had developed an indispensable travel app about five years ago. It handled all the information a person would need to plan and take a trip, bringing together airlines, hotels, restaurants, public transportation, and even handy little tidbits like where to find a good movie theater in Manila. It tracked your habits and remembered if you liked a high-floor room or were allergic to shellfish, but it went a lot deeper than that. The more you used it, even when you weren’t travelling, the more it found out about you, making its recommendations more accurate. And it was totally free.

  So how did Tommy make the millions—hundreds of millions—he was allegedly worth? I searched “How do free apps make money?” What I found made me very happy that I’d never bothered to download Tommy’s app.

  “Am I the last person in the world to know about ‘Big Data’?” I asked Monica.

  We’d met the following morning for coffee at Café Madelaine, across the street from the Palace. The café was a busy neighborhood hub of caffeine and yumminess that had only recently reopened following a fire a few months ago.

  “Probably,” she said. “Since it isn’t heavily featured in films of the forties. Why do you know about it now?”

  I made a face. “Tommy. I’m trying to figure him out.”

  She was silent until I glanced up to find her regarding me with one of those deeply accepting, fully understanding looks that she was so good at. If she hadn’t been a pot entrepreneur she’d have made a great therapist.

  I attempted a smile. “Know your enemies, right?”

  “It was completely unfair of him to spring that all on us in the meeting Monday,” she said. “Closing the Palace? There’s no way that’s going to happen. Tommy is being completely unreasonable. And don’t forget he’s only one of four owners.”

  True, but I hadn’t liked the way Mitch, in LA, had nodded along with what Tommy had said in the meeting. If Mitch agreed with Tommy’s plan to close the Palace, the board would be evenly split. I didn’t know what that might mean.

  But at least I knew Monica and Robbie were on my side. On the Palace’s side.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What I’m trying to figure out is why Tommy’s being so insistent. Why does he need the money from the Palace? He should be worth a fortune, what with all the personal data from his users that he’s been gathering and selling for years. And this game should mean even more money.”

  “Especially now that his partner’s dead,” Monica said meaningfully.

  I looked at her. “And here I thought I was a terrible person for wondering about that.”

  “We might both be terrible people.” This didn’t seem to overly concern
Monica. She leaned forward. “What do you think? Did Tommy kill his partner? To get more profits from the game?”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of coffee and raspberry muffins, brought to us by Lisa, the owner of the café. “Are you guys talking about the game? Are you playing?” She’d brought coffee for herself as well and pulled up a chair to join us. In her early forties, she was just a few years older than me, with the comfortable figure of a professional baker and hair she was letting gray naturally.

  “No, I’m not playing. Are you playing? Why?” Despite all the research I’d done in the wee small hours I’d had no desire to download the treasure hunt game.

  “Um, because I could find a million-dollar coin somewhere?”

  “Sure, there’s that,” I allowed. “Except it’s two million today. During the webcast Tommy said a million dollars was going to be added to each coin’s value every day they weren’t found.”

  “So don’t be too hasty,” Monica advised. “You might want to give it a few days.” She broke off a piece of muffin and popped it in her mouth.

  “What’s the game like?” I asked Lisa.

  “I’m barely into it, but it looks like you solve puzzles that lead you to clues for more puzzles that lead you to…you get the idea. And those AR things are everywhere. They appear as characters in the game to give you the clues, or sometimes to send you off in the wrong direction.”

  “Sounds kind of cool.” Monica took her phone out.

  “It is, but I’ve gotten far enough to figure out that the world of the game is huge,” Lisa said. “There are maps upon maps upon maps, and you need to learn the routes and navigate everywhere in this giant virtual space.”

  “That must be the tie-in with Tommy’s travel tech,” I guessed.