Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “I certainly didn’t see anybody. But you don’t pay any attention to noises in an empty theater. You’ve got nylon ropes and steel cables under tension, you’ve got lights with reflectors that expand and contract as they heat up and cool down. There are acres of canvas hanging up in the fly.”

  “In the which?”

  “The fly.” Studebaker started up the ramp. “The space above the stage. It’s about four stories high and it’s full of thermal air currents. Things never stop swinging up there. Pulleys creak, battens squeak, and sometimes a bird or a squirrel gets in. When you don’t hear anything in a theater you go to the doctor to see if you need a hearing aid.”

  As they reached the top of the ramp, Stamaty appeared in the wings at stage right. “The guy from the rental agency is here,” he called to Studebaker. “He wants to empty the tank and he’s looking for a drain.”

  The man from Aardvark, with a vigilant Kestrel at his elbow, was uncoiling hose from a portable pump.

  “I don’t know how safe it is to touch that thing,” Studebaker told him.

  “Should be okay as long as it’s unplugged.”

  “We think there’s a possibility,” Auburn explained, “that some current is getting into the machine through the spilled water from some wiring down below.”

  The Aardvark man wore a black plastic clip-on bow tie, and the name patch on his short-sleeved white shirt read RON. “That could be,” he conceded, “but I doubt it. There’d have to be a complete circuit.” He gnawed at a ragged mustache and kept his back turned toward Ballard’s body, while with Studebaker’s help he started pumping water from the dunking tank.

  “Were you the one who rigged up this machine earlier this afternoon?” asked Auburn.

  “Along with a buddy, Chris Stollard.”

  Auburn got out a file card and recorded the full name of Ronald Edward Reese and other particulars.

  “Were you personally acquainted with Ballard?”

  “Yes and no. We went to high school together at Matthew Arnold, back in the eighties. But I don’t think he remembered me. At least, he didn’t let on if he did. Of course, I didn’t have this bush on my lip back then.”

  “Have you ever had any accidents like this with a dunking machine before?”

  “Scratches and bruises. Never heard of anybody getting a shock. And I don’t believe Ballard got one, either. The grounding prong in the plug is intact and the polarity of the outlet is okay. That means that, as long as it was plugged in, all the bare metal was grounded. And all the wiring and relays inside are double insulated.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Kestrel. “The wiring will have to be examined, either here or at headquarters.”

  “This is the only one of these things we’ve got,” objected Reese. “It may already be scheduled for another rental in the next couple days.”

  The appearance of Lieutenant Savage on the stage squelched the minor tiff that was brewing between Kestrel and Reese.

  “Public Safety will have to impound your machine,” he informed Reese in a tone of finality. “If we don’t, the coroner’s office will. There’s too much at stake here to do things any other way.

  “A man just died in mysterious circumstances. Your company is going to be facing liability issues, and so is the city as the owner of the auditorium. Ballard’s life insurance company is going to want to know what happened to him. Even if nobody presses criminal charges there’ll be suits and claims and counterclaims. Besides, he was a public figure. The national news services have this by now. Everything we do will be scrutinized, analyzed, interpreted, and packaged for mass consumption by the media in their usual warped and cynical style.”

  Reese had finished draining the dunking tank and was coiling up hose again. “Do what you have to,” he said. “I don’t own the business, I just work there.”

  “Sergeant Kestrel will give you a receipt for the machine,” Savage told him, “and you’ll have it back just as soon as he’s finished with it.”

  Savage drew Auburn aside as the mortuary squad came in to remove the body. “Mandy Follette is in satisfactory condition,” he said. “Just a fainting spell, like we thought. I let Crivelli and the two TV guys go. They said they had urgent commitments elsewhere, and we don’t want to ruffle the feathers of any of our local media people right now.

  “We’ve got everything Crivelli saw and did on videotape. The camera crew says they spent the whole afternoon together, most of it up the street at the Sahara Club. You can track them all down tomorrow, but I want you to get a statement from Garner tonight—Ballard’s manager, or agent, or whatever he is.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the lobby. If you can’t pick him out, you go back on patrol duty tomorrow. I’ll give you a little hint: He’s the only one out there wearing a green scarf.”

  As it turned out, Garner was practically the only one out in the lobby, period. A compact, mobile man in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a scotch-and-brandy complexion, he slipped on a pair bifocals briefly to examine Auburn’s ID with a vaguely theatrical air.

  “I can’t tell you what an ordeal this has been,” he said. “Look how I’m shaking.”

  “I know it’s been a rough evening for you,” said Auburn. “I won’t take any more of your time than I have to.”

  “What can you tell me about Mandy? The hospital isn’t giving out any information.”

  “I understand she’s doing okay.”

  “Does anybody have any idea what happened to Vance? Heart attack and electric shock seem to be the obvious possibilities.”

  “We won’t know anything until after the autopsy and a thorough examination of the dunking machine.” If then, thought Auburn.

  They sat on an ornamental built-in bench, hard as flint, at the side of the lobby while Auburn recorded basic identifying data on Garner. “How long had you been working with Ballard?” he asked.

  “As his campaign advisor, about four months. But I’ve known Mandy for years, and I met Vance before their wedding.”

  “Did you fly in with them this morning?”

  “No, I got in yesterday to make arrangements for all the activities we had scheduled for today.” He looked at his watch. “About now, a lot of people in formal attire are finishing a very expensive dinner at the Docksider Restaurant. But the guest of honor’s chair is empty.”

  “What can you tell me about what happened here tonight?”

  Garner’s account added little to what Auburn already knew from the video and his interview with Studebaker. He said he’d spent the interval between the test run with the dunking machine and curtain time with Ballard in the latter’s room at the Skyliner Hotel across the alley from the theater. They’d reviewed plans for the dunking stunt and touched up Ballard’s address for the dinner.

  “Whose idea was this dunking?”

  “Ballard’s. He was the kind of guy that’d do anything to get his name in the paper and his face on TV screens. At different times he was a professional athlete, a movie actor, and a politician. Those three breeds of cat all have one thing in common: king-sized egos. What else do you need to know?”

  “About Ballard’s relations with the people who were here tonight?”

  Garner nodded with a humorless, introspective smile. “Well, his marriage was one long series of temperamental clashes. As long as he was a starting linebacker and Mandy was Hollywood’s favorite ding-a-ling, they got along fine together. But after one too many injuries put an end to his athletic career, Vance turned up in Hollywood himself, playing a former football star in a movie called Running Back. It didn’t get any Oscar nominations, but it pulled down megabucks at the box office.

  “Mandy resented that, felt like she’d been upstaged, and she’s been fighting it ever since. The battle of egos got worse with each picture Vance made, and things really went sour after they made one together because that was a flop, and suddenly nobody was sending either one of them any more scripts.

&nbs
p; “But don’t try turning that into a motive for murder. Vance’s death was obviously an accident, and Mandy’s one and only offensive weapon is her tongue. As for the rest of the people here tonight, they’re all local. Vance didn’t know them from Adam.”

  “What about Crivelli?”

  Garner emitted a faintly contemptuous chuckle. “Oh, yes, Vance knew him, all right. He was an old flame of Mandy’s, and he presumed on that to weasel some kind of favors out of Vance.”

  “I understand they had an argument this afternoon. Were you there at the time?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an argument,” said Garner. “Just an exchange of good-natured ragging, as they were leaving by the stage door. I didn’t hear enough of it to tell you what it was about.”

  Garner denied any knowledge of significant conflicts involving Ballard or of threats against him. His plans for the immediate future were highly uncertain, but he expected to be in town for at least the next couple of days.

  Auburn set out on a tour of exploration so as to gain a better understanding of the comings and goings of the principals. At the rear of the building, huge overhead doors opened out to a loading dock on the same level as the stage. He nearly locked himself out of the building while ascertaining that the steel fire doors could be opened from outside only with a key. Six parking places just off the alley were empty except for a large panel truck with the Aardvark logo and a cruiser pulled in obliquely with its lights flashing, where the hearse had just left. A few onlookers lingered in the alley but kept their distance. The April night was cool and damp.

  Kestrel was puttering with the dunking machine. Auburn stood for a long time looking up into the lofty space above the stage, which Studebaker had called the fly, where canvas backdrops swung gently in the shadows, cables dangled, and rows of lighting fixtures sprouted like nightmare flowers from tubular steel boughs.

  At eleven that night, he watched Hi Crivelli bleat forth the latest sensation during his regular newscast. “Well, it wasn’t just a publicity stunt, but was it murder? That’s the question that has police baffled as they try to put together exactly what happened at Pierce Hall this evening, where Hollywood hunk and aspiring lawmaker Vance Ballard died after tumbling into a dunk tank during a benefit appearance for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society ...”

  The victim’s widow was reported to be resting under heavy sedation in her hospital room.

  Next morning Auburn was up an hour earlier than usual. As he’d expected, the death of Vance Ballard had become a media circus, preempting topics of graver import from the national news. The local paper contained a hastily assembled summary of Ballard’s career, still shots from some of his films, and a picture taken at his and Mandy’s wedding. Although the results of a midnight autopsy didn’t make it into the morning papers, every TV and radio station blared forth the news that Ballard had almost certainly died by electrocution.

  Ordinarily Auburn had to construct a picture of a homicide victim from what others told him, with hints gleaned from an examination of the corpse. In this case, he already had an overabundance of mental images of the victim from his many appearances on the movie screen. Was the real Ballard anything like the naive and charmingly inane ex-football star who couldn’t adjust to life after college in Running Back? Or the wealthy stockbroker in Mousie! Mousie! whose inability to accept his child’s mental retardation drove him to alcoholism and suicide? Or the senator who committed one fatal indiscretion in The Slippery Slope? Or the evil wizard outwitted by leprechauns in Charmed, I’m Sure?

  Before leaving home, Auburn called headquarters to verify the preliminary autopsy findings. Burns on both of Ballard’s hands and an absence of organic disease strongly supported the conclusion that he had suffered a fatal electric shock. At two A.M. a team of troubleshooters from the power company had descended into the pit under the stage at Pierce Hall and traced the old organ cable to a fuse box hidden behind piles of scenery. A safety inspector from the city engineer’s office was now at the scene checking for evidence of code violations or recent tampering.

  The death of Vance Ballard looked to Auburn more like an accident all the time, but he wasn’t getting paid to cut corners by following cozy preconceptions.

  He started his day with a visit to Mandy Follette at Chalfont Hospital. Several local media people were lurking in the lobby and corridors of the hospital, but Auburn managed to get past them without being recognized. He conferred briefly with a uniformed policeman standing guard in a lounge before knocking and entering Mandy Follette’s room.

  He was on the point of expressing his condolences to the new widow, but at his first sight of her the words froze on his lips. Sitting up in bed breakfasting on dry toast and mineral water, she seemed the picture of placid contentment. By some miracle of cosmetics and stagecraft, she looked more like a new bride than a new widow. A bedside stand was buried in flowers.

  Auburn showed identification and apologized for intruding.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “When this stuff they’ve got me on wears off, I’ll probably come apart at the seams, but I’m okay for now. Ask me what you have to.”

  The newspapers strewn over the bed seemed a logical point of departure. “I believe you’re aware that we’re investigating your husband’s death as a possible homicide,” he said. “Was there anyone at the theater yesterday who you believe might have had a reason to kill him?”

  “You mean besides me?” Mandy Follette the movie star was known for her lilting laugh, her captivating pout, her general air of brainless vulnerability. None of those features were in evidence this morning. “Vance was arrogant, vain, and selfish. But that’s an occupational disease that all public figures suffer from, myself included. He could be just as charming in real life as on the screen, and thoughtful, and sincere. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to kill him.”

  “I believe you were at the theater while the dunking machine was being installed and tested?”

  “Yes. In fact, I threw the ball for the test.”

  “Where did you go after that?”

  “We all went across the alley to the hotel. Vance and Malcolm Garner were working on Vance’s speech for the dinner last night, so I went out for a walk. Just around town, watching the rush-hour traffic. I’ve never been here before and I wanted to see the town where Vance grew up.” She sank back against the pillows. “And I got lost.”

  “When did you get back to the theater?”

  “I was just coming through the lobby doors when I heard the bell and the horn from up on the stage, and I knew Vance had gotten dunked. So I hurried on through the lobby, and as I was coming down the middle aisle I saw them pulling him out of the water, and everybody was yelling that he wasn’t breathing and his heart had stopped. I’d been rushing along the sidewalks for the past ten minutes, and I hadn’t had much lunch. Anyway, the next thing I knew I was in the ambulance.”

  “How well did your husband know Hi Crivelli?”

  “Hardly at all. Hi and I went to grade school together. He turned up in Hollywood three or four years ago and I introduced him to Vance.”

  “Did you hear them arguing at the theater yesterday?”

  “No, but if they had an argument I can tell you what it was probably about. Vance helped Hi get a job as a sportscaster at one of your local TV stations. I wouldn’t want this to get into the papers, but, well, Vance made a business proposition out of it. Hi promised to pay him a commission, a percentage of his salary for the next five years. Vance knew Hi had moved up to doing the weather, and then become a news anchor, and he expected Hi to come up with bigger payments.”

  She was looking paler by the minute under her makeup. Auburn finally got around to expressing his condolences and left her to grieve in solitude.

  He phoned Crivelli from the lobby of the hospital and found him at home. In twenty minutes he was ringing the doorbell of Crivelli’s bachelor condo on the south fringe of downtown.

  Everybody in town, as Studebaker had put it
, knew Hi Crivelli. A former Olympic skater, he had attained increasing prominence and exposure in the past two or three years as a local television personality, master of ceremonies at public functions, promoter of popular causes, judge of talent contests, distributor of prizes, and all-around social climber.

  Crivelli came to the door wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and about eight dollars’ worth of hair spray. “You the detective who called?”

  Auburn showed identification.

  Crivelli showed more teeth than a ten-speed bike. “Come on in. Place is a mess. I had three reporters here at six o’clock this morning.” He moved cups off the coffee table. He didn’t offer Auburn any coffee.

  “I’ll try not to take too much of your time. I’d just like to get your input on what happened at the theater yesterday.”

  Crivelli knew nothing and took twenty minutes to say so. After the test with the dunking machine around two thirty he’d rushed to the studio for the three o’clock live news spot. When he left the theater, Ballard, Garner, and Mandy were walking across the alley together toward the Skyliner Hotel. The men from the rental agency were already gone. As far as he knew, that left only Studebaker and the remote camera crew at the theater.

  “How close were you to Ballard?” he asked.

  “Me? Not close at all. You can’t get very close to a guy who’s that madly in love with himself.”

  “I understand you had some business arrangement with him. Something about a recommendation for a job?”

  The plastic smile turned into a sullen frown. “That’s confidential. I don’t know where you got that, but it’s confidential. The program director at Channel 4, Carl Hagan, was an old buddy of Ballard’s. Ballard got him to hire me to do live sportcasts and fill in the rest of the time with odd jobs around the studio. But since Ballard was as mean as a snake, all his favors had price tags.

  “He charged me a commission, a percent of my salary from the station. Handshake agreement, payments in cash, nothing in writing. That was okay with me till I found out I couldn’t deduct the commission payments for income tax purposes without a canceled check or a receipt.”