Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  A remote television crew was wheeling equipment down a side aisle. One of the three men came forward and mounted the stairs at stage left.

  “Why, here’s our champion skater,” said Garner.

  The face of Hi Crivelli, the local TV news anchor, was all too familiar to Reese. He thought he detected in Garner’s tone a trace of the mild scorn with which most residents of the metropolitan area, Reese himself included, regarded Crivelli.

  “Just passing through,” Crivelli said breezily. “Want to get the lay of the land. Gotta do a live news spot at three.” He made Vance and Mandy a fawning obeisance, cold-shouldered Garner, and totally ignored Studebaker and the men from Aardvark. After peering into the tank, he dipped a finger into the glittering, restless water as if to test its temperature. Then, shading his eyes with one hand, he struck a pose while he peered around the empty hall as if planning where and how to stand so that the camera would catch him at the most flattering angle.

  By the time Reese gave Studebaker the signal to turn off the water, his colleague Chris had made two trips to the truck parked in the alley, bringing in a cement block on a length of polypropylene rope and a net bag containing about two dozen softballs. Reese positioned the cement block on the triangular metal perch above the water and they all gathered around for the trial run.

  “You’ll want to measure off a line for the pitchers to toe, about twenty feet back from the target,” he said. “Unless you plan to do a lot of swimming.” He handed a ball to Vance Ballard.

  “Don’t give it to me,” said Ballard. “I’m the dunkee.”

  “No comment,” said Mandy. Her fourth ball, thrown underhand from a distance of about a yard, struck the target squarely, allowing the cement block to crash into the tank. A plume of water shot upward, a bell like a fire alarm jangled stridently for a few moments, an ah-oo-ga horn joined in the din, and a display of red, white, and blue lights flashed on and off in the backdrop of the perch. Mandy clapped her hands.

  While waiting for the turbulence of the water to subside, Reese walked around the tank looking for leaks. Then he fished out the cement block while Chris packed up the tools.

  “Aren’t you guys staying around for the fun?” asked Garner. “What if we have a malfunction?”

  “You won’t.” Reese gave him a receipt to sign. “We’ve got a truckful of tables and chairs to set up for a wedding reception by six thirty. Just let me check your power supply before I go.”

  Garner, Crivelli, and Studebaker left the stage in a group, closely followed by the Ballards. “The doors open at four,” Garner reminded them all as they separated in a rear passage. He waited while Ballard and Crivelli engaged in a brief but animated discussion at the door to the loading platform. Once Crivelli had dashed off to the television studio to do his three o’clock live news update, Garner steered Ballard across the alley to the Skyliner Hotel for a conference.

  After finishing his dinner and filing pans, dishes, and silverware in the sink for future reference, Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn tried to remember whether he’d brought his bowling shoes in from the car last week. When the phone rang, he immediately gave up the inquiry, on the assumption that he wasn’t going to make it to bowling tonight. He felt even more certain of that when he found that the caller was his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage.

  “You a Vance Ballard fan, Cy?” asked Savage.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Stamaty just called in from Pierce Hall. He’s got a fatal electrocution over there, possibly a homicide. The victim is Ballard, and his wife, Mandy Follette, is in the hospital in a coma.”

  Auburn closed his eyes to aid reflection. Not once during his three years in pro football, much less during his eight years in films, had native son Vance Ballard condescended to return to his hometown. Now that his acting career had stalled and he’d decided to try his hand at politics, he was suddenly very much in the public eye locally.

  If Auburn remembered correctly the agenda that had been sketched out at report this morning, Ballard’s dunking stunt at Pierce Hall, a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, had been sandwiched in between a luncheon at Republican Party headquarters and a black-tie dinner, a fundraising function of a different sort, that evening. Dunking stunt ... fatal electrocution, possibly homicide ...

  The southbound traffic in the 200 block of DeWire had been reduced to a single crawling lane by a dense phalanx of police cars, rescue vehicles, ambulances, and TV trucks massed in front of the Civic Auditorium, better known as Pierce Hall. He had to park more than a block away, and at that he barely beat the police evidence van to the spot.

  As a boy, Auburn had attended Saturday morning cartoon festivals at Pierce Hall for fifty cents. Even in those days the city council had been trying to decide whether to upgrade and remodel the place, sell it, or tear it down and build a municipal parking garage on the site. So far, none of the above had happened. Dark, drafty, and dirty, the hall eked out a humble existence as the official venue of the local philharmonic orchestra and the Civic Theater Guild. Otherwise it was used only a few times a year for miscellaneous celebrations, ceremonies, and public meetings.

  Auburn made his way with difficulty through a dense throng of onlookers on the sidewalk, which included TV cameramen and reporters. A uniformed patrolman let him in one of the tall doors of tarnished brass that flanked the box office. In the dimly lighted lobby police officers, rescue personnel, and civilians of indeterminate status milled around in ill-defined groups, all talking at once.

  Lieutenant Savage broke off from one of those groups and collared Auburn. “Up on the stage, Cy. Stamaty’s in there somewhere.”

  The presence of the lieutenant at the scene after hours was an indication of the gravity of the case and the repercussions it was likely to have in the press and elsewhere. Auburn knew better than to suspect Savage of turning up just to make sure he got his name and picture in the paper.

  “What’s this about Mandy Follette being in a coma?” Ballard’s endless squabbles with his actress wife were perennial fare for the tabloids and scandal sheets.

  “They found her unconscious in the center aisle, up near the back, right after this happened. The paramedics took her to the hospital. I think she probably just fainted, but don’t quote me on that. Temporary loss of consciousness isn’t my department.”

  In contrast with the lobby, the cavernous auditorium was silent and nearly empty. The green velvet curtain was down. Between the front row of seats and the stage, three men stood hunched over a TV monitor. If Auburn had been mildly surprised to find Lieutenant Savage at the scene, he was positively dumbfounded when he saw that G. Lawrence Lodewick, the county coroner, was one of the men watching the monitor.

  A once-prominent local surgeon now semiretired, Lodewick had been coroner for more than thirty years. In Auburn’s seven years as a detective, he’d never seen the coroner outside a courtroom. Certainly Lodewick had never turned up at a death scene before. Eventually it dawned on him that the coroner had been present for Ballard’s dunking stunt because of his political affiliations and his alignment with Ballard’s sponsors.

  As soon as he recognized Auburn, Lodewick had the TV technicians run the tape back to the beginning for a replay. After a preliminary jumble of junk and another two or three minutes of inane burbling by the emcee, Hi Crivelli, the show got under way. Auburn watched Vance Ballard squirming on his perch while three pitchers in succession hurled balls in the general direction of the target, obviously with no intention of hitting it. The fourth, an athletic type with an arch and determined look, missed the target with his first ball but connected solidly with the second.

  The sound effects provided by the dunking machine briefly drowned out the roar of the crowd as Ballard plummeted out of sight amid a gush of water. His head appeared again almost immediately as, smiling grimly and clinging to the ladder with one hand, he reached up with the other to grip the perch, which by now had sprung back to its horizontal position. Abrup
tly his head flew back, his upper body went rigid, and he disappeared again below the surface of the water.

  For about two seconds the audience maintained a stupefied silence. Then the auditorium erupted in a storm of confusion and horror. Crivelli, the emcee, stood mute for perhaps the first time in his career. Then a stocky man in a yellow coverall appeared from nowhere, plunged both arms into the tank, and pulled Ballard’s head and shoulders above the water level. Crivelli, dropping his microphone, now came to the other’s aid. Almost immediately the scene was crowded with more rescuers. The videotape ended as the curtain came down.

  “We don’t experiment on human subjects with electric shock the way the Nazis did,” said Lodewick in his pompous, droning voice. “The animal protection groups won’t even let us do it on monkeys. But it’s not as if none of us had ever seen what a strong current of electricity does to the human body. We still use electric shock to treat depression. A few of us have even had the revolting experience of watching films of judicial electrocutions that had been made for legal documentation. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Ballard took a massive jolt of electricity as he was trying to climb out of the water.”

  “I understand there’s some concern about the possibility of homicide,” remarked Auburn.

  “To me,” said Lodewick, “this looks like just another freak accident designed to give the coroner a few more gray hairs. Nowadays politicians rely on smear campaigns to demolish their opponents. They don’t resort to homicide—at least not in these latitudes.

  “That being said, we’re still going to go the distance to prove that this wasn’t first-degree murder. After all, Ballard grew up here in town. He may have left somebody behind who’s been waiting all these years to get back at him for something. You know the saying: Man is the only cold-blooded mammal.” After that exit line, Dr. Lodewick marched up the center aisle with pontifical dignity and left the auditorium.

  Auburn turned toward the stage. “Nick?” he called. “You back there?”

  “Come through the door on your right, Cy. Then up the iron stairs.”

  Auburn emerged from among dusty and moth-eaten hangings onto the stage, where every available floodlight and spotlight seemed to have been turned on. Having watched the video of Ballard’s death, he found the scene here almost anticlimactic. The dunking apparatus, looking like a hybrid between a pinball machine and a children’s wading pool, occupied center stage.

  Between it and the curtain lay Ballard’s body, his hair and clothes still sopping wet and his face mottled an intense shade of lavender. The paramedics had ripped up his shirt and attached monitor pads to his chest before retiring in defeat to run Mandy Follette to the hospital.

  Nick Stamaty, the coroner’s investigator, was kneeling beside the body. In addition to the regulation pair of rubber gloves, he was wearing a disposable plastic apron to protect his trousers from the film of unsavory gray muck on the stage that had resulted when several gallons of water had mingled with several generations of dirt.

  “Don’t touch that,” he warned, as Auburn approached the dunking tank. “We don’t know exactly how he got shocked. If he did.”

  “Did you watch the video? The guys who pulled him out—”

  “Even so ...” Stamaty stood up. “Absolutely nothing in his pockets. I guess he was figuring on getting dunked at least once. Know what that reminds me of?” He pointed to the sign hanging above the dunking machine. “Bring down the bomber?”

  “Not offhand, but I’m sure you won’t keep me in suspense for long.”

  “Arithmetic. ‘Eight minus five leaves three, bring down the seven.’ Can I call the mortuary crew, or is Kestrel coming over to test the water for cholera germs?”

  “He’ll be here eventually. I think I beat him to the last parking place this side of the river.”

  Almost immediately Sergeant Kestrel, the evidence technician, appeared on the stage with his field kit and camera case. Stamaty dutifully repeated the warning about electric shock just as if Kestrel weren’t a perennial thorn in his flesh.

  “Somebody’s going to have to go over it eventually,” objected Kestrel.

  “The people from the rental agency are on their way in.”

  “Did anybody think of unplugging it?”

  A hefty middle-aged man in a paint-splashed yellow coverall emerged from the wings. “Long ago,” he said. “Which one of you is Sergeant Auburn?”

  Auburn showed identification.

  “I’m Don Studebaker. The other detective officer said I should give you a statement.”

  Auburn got out a three-by-five-inch file card and his pen. “I was just watching you on videotape,” he said. “You took quite a chance, pulling Ballard out of the water.”

  “Fools rush in,” said Studebaker, with the synthetic affability of a compulsive extrovert or a born salesman. “I was at the switchboard there in the wings when it happened. I couldn’t see Ballard—all I knew was that something had gone wrong. I hit the switch to drop the curtain and ran out here onstage. Everybody was standing around with their faces hanging out, and there was Ballard completely underwater. I thought maybe he had a heart attack from the sudden cold, or hit his head when he went down.”

  “What’s your position here, Mr. Studebaker?”

  “Don. Stage manager. It’s just a part-time job. I’m retired Navy. Spend most of my time selling real estate. Can I show you something down below?”

  “Sure,” said Auburn, hoping he wasn’t setting himself up for a sales spiel about a lakefront retirement cottage in Tennessee.

  He followed Studebaker down a ramp leading from the wings at stage left to a subterranean storage and work area, a mysterious place of dust and deep shadow. “I came down here to check on the wiring under the stage,” said Studebaker. He switched on a flashlight and led the way among an indescribable jumble of props, lumber, canvas, rope, and buckets of paint. “And here’s what I found.” He shone the light upward to reveal gleaming patches of wetness on the undersurface of the strongly braced stage, on which Kestrel and Stamaty’s footfalls resounded like drumbeats. “Now take a look down there.” He offered the flashlight to Auburn.

  “Thanks, I’ve got one.”

  They were standing at the brink of a dark and cobwebby pit, about eight feet square and at least eight or ten feet deep. Its walls were lined with brick, its floor carpeted with rubbish, among which a heavy electrical cable lay coiled like a python in its terrarium at the reptile house. A stream of water had run down one wall and formed a puddle on the floor.

  “When they built this place,” explained Studebaker, “it had a pipe organ, and the wind supply came from a blower down in this pit. The organ wore out years ago and they sold it for parts.”

  “Surely that cable isn’t live after all these years?”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m the last of a long line of stage managers here, and I don’t think some of those other guys could even read, let alone wire up a spotlight the right way. There must be about three miles of wiring in this place that I’ve never been able to trace out. That organ cable comes out of a piece of underground conduit, and God only knows where the other end of it is, because I sure don’t.” He started back toward the ramp.

  “But even supposing the cable is live,” objected Auburn, “there’s no way the water that spilled out of the tank could have run all the way down here fast enough to pick up any current from it.”

  “Ah, but there is,” said Studebaker. He stopped at the foot of the ramp and switched off his flashlight. “A couple of hours before he got dunked, we did a trial run with a cinder block on the seat, and four or five gallons splashed out onto the stage.”

  “Wasn’t that sheet of plastic under the tank then?”

  “Yes, but it isn’t plastic, it’s canvas, and there’s a big slit in it. Probably army surplus from the Civil War. On my annual budget, a family of one could starve. I guess I don’t have to explain that to a fellow city employee.”

  “You
say you did a trial run?”

  “Not personally. The guys from Aardvark ran the test, but I was up there with them.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Mandy Follette—she threw the ball—and a guy named Garner, that’s Ballard’s campaign manager, and Hi Crivelli, the emcee. And of course Ballard himself.”

  “Are you acquainted with any of these people?”

  “Never saw any of them in person before this afternoon, except Crivelli. Everybody in town knows Crivelli, but he doesn’t know me.”

  “They did this practice run a couple hours before the public event?”

  “It must have been around two thirty or a little after, because Crivelli said he had to get back to the studio in time to do a live news spot at three.”

  “What time did the dunking program start?”

  “The doors opened at four and the curtain went up at four thirty.”

  “Where were you in the meantime?”

  “Right here. I had to hang the sign over the machine and change a burned-out spot up in the balcony.”

  “What about the rest of the people you mentioned?”

  “They all left.”

  “Together?”

  “Pretty much. The rental guys had their truck parked by the loading dock out in the alley. The others left that way too. Ballard and Crivelli were having some kind of argument as they went out.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  “Something about payback time, percentage. Maybe some kind of business deal that went sour. I only overheard about ten seconds of it.”

  “Did they all come back together for the program?”

  “Ballard and Garner did, but Mandy Follette wasn’t with them. She must have come in late through the lobby. The people who ran out that way to call the paramedics found her at the back of the center aisle, unconscious.”

  “What are the chances that somebody tampered with the dunking machine between the test run and showtime? Did you see or hear anything unusual before the show started?”