A Christmas Peril

by J. A. Hennrikus

  Just at the point when I realized I was starving, there was a knock on the door. Harry arrived at the door with a white to-go container. A blue cheddar burger and fries from the Beef and Ale. He handed me a diet soda and sat on the other side of the desk, opening his own container of nirvana.

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked him.

  “Your car was in the parking lot, and I took a chance. Gene always gives me a second burger for you, so it’s great that I can actually give it to you this time. Normally it feeds Dimitri.”

  “Food soothes the savage beast,” I said. I took out a fry and munched on it.

  “Is it true about Brooke?” he asked, dipping his fries into the container of ketchup he’d placed in the middle of the desk. I pushed it back to him. Compromising the perfect, fried greatness of Beef and Ale fries was sacrilege.

  “Car accident, from what I know. How did you hear?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s all over the news. Peter, then Terry, then Brooke? The national press has picked it up.”

  “Have you spoken to Eric?”

  “No. He isn’t replying to texts. They seem to be under lockdown.”

  “They’re using the house as an interrogation center for the family, rather than making them run the gauntlet past the press into the station. Emma has given them permission to do what they need to do.”

  “Is that smart? Letting them into the house?” he asked.

  “It’s probably still a crime scene, so they don’t have a choice. Besides, it’s much better for them to cooperate.” Harry looked skeptical, so I continued. “The presumption is that whoever killed Peter was in the house that night, right? Well, for my money, the prime suspect was Terry. Then he’s killed. No accident. Killed. Probably with the same caliber gun as Peter—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Peter was killed by a 25mm. I didn’t see Terry up close, but he still had a good amount of his skull, so it was probably a small caliber.”

  “Thanks for the image.” Harry tossed his fries into his container and closed the lid. I grabbed it and dumped his fries into mine. Yes, it was upsetting, but I’d seen a lot worse than Terry, a lot closer up. Besides, the puzzle had me. If Terry killed Peter, then who killed Terry? And what about Brooke? Did someone help her move to the great beyond? The timing was too coincidental, but it made no sense.

  “Hello, earth to Sully … where were you just then?”

  “Trying to make sense of something that doesn’t. Sorry, Harry. Let’s change the subject. You ready for tonight’s dress?”

  “Jeez, Sully, I don’t know. Thank God Stewart’s here, that’s for sure. He and Patrick have been working together all day. And Frank’s got the place pretty well wired so Connie can feed Patrick lines or direction.”

  “Let’s hope Connie can rewire if needed.”

  “It’s under control. Besides, Frank came back a little while ago.”

  Frank was back? And there were two hours before the show? That bit of information got me to leave my fries.

  • Twenty-Five •

  I finally found him downstairs, in the trap room—the room beneath the stage that can be used for storage, for trap doors, for access to the orchestra pit, for actors to move from one place to another, and for errant sound designers to hide out. I could never find the trap room easily and had spent five minutes wandering the downstairs halls. I was tired and confused, and couldn’t quite remember what I knew versus what I was supposed to know, and what I was at liberty to say. Brooke’s death was common knowledge at this point, as was Terry’s. I felt as though there were tumblers in my brain that should have been sorting the details into the truth, but something was stuck. Hopefully Frank would help loosen it up.

  He was hunched over his laptop tapping away, oblivious to my presence. I watched for a few seconds.

  Finally he noticed me standing in the doorway. “Sully,” he said, semi-lowering the lid of his laptop and turning it away from me.

  “Hey Frank. Heard you had a conversation with the police last night? Sorry, that was probably my fault. I told them about the website.”

  “It’s okay. They wanted to confirm that we saw Mr. Holmes going into his office, and to find out more about the new setup.”

  Frank looked miserable, which, under the circumstances, was understandable. But he couldn’t look me in the eye. Again, could be understandable since I’d gotten him dragged into a police station, but he didn’t seem pissed. Just miserable.

  “Did you hear about Brooke?” I asked gently.

  “Yeah, saw it on the web.”

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” I pulled up a rehearsal cube and sat down across from him.

  “Yeah.” His voice caught.

  “I’d heard that you knew her pretty well.” For the first time, Frank looked at me. I shrugged and smiled.

  It was his turn to smile, or at least try to. “I didn’t know her that well. She, uh, tried to, uh … ”

  “She made a pass at you?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times.” He gave me a “can you believe it?” look. “But I didn’t, you know.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the laptop. “It seemed wrong. She was pretty wasted half the time. And besides, I knew Mr. Whitehall and thought that sleeping with his wife wouldn’t be cool.”

  That was one way to put it. “Did Peter know she’d made advances?”

  “Not from me. I kinda felt sorry for her, you know? We got caught a couple of times. Mrs. Bridges walked in once, and Mr. Holmes walked in another time. After that, she stopped making passes. She even apologized.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah, she said something like ‘Terry said it was unkind of me to put you in that position.’ Then, it was weird, you know, but she asked if we could be friends. So when I came over to do work, I’d make sure to check in with her, and we’d talk.”

  “About what you were doing?”

  “No, I’d promised Mr. Whitehall I wouldn’t tell anyone about that. Mostly about family, stuff like that. We both had family in Western Mass. She didn’t visit a lot, but I did. We’d talk about the kielbasa festival, polkas, stuff like that.”

  It seemed Frank knew a Brooke that few if any other people knew. It was interesting that she seemed to be trying to reconnect to a part of herself that she’d tried, successfully, to ignore. I wondered if drinking her father’s hooch had been part of embracing her roots.

  “You said she’d been drinking? Was it the stuff her father made?”

  “The samogon? Yeah, mostly.”

  “She spilled some of it on me once. Smelled like cough medicine.”

  “It’s grain alcohol and raspberries. Takes a while to make, but it cures what ails you.”

  Connie’s voice came over the loudspeaker that was piped into the trap room. “It’s four o’clock. Just reminding everyone we’re going to do a tech run with the Ghost of Christmas Future in fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s me, Sully. I have to run a couple more tests.” Frank started to lift the top of his computer back to a viewable level.

  “A few more questions first. I heard that Brooke came by the theater last night. Is that true?”

  The lid was being lowered again, physically and emotionally.

  “Frank, if I found that out, someone else will. With her accident—”

  “So it was an accident?” Frank’s relief was palatable.

  “So far as I know, it was an accident. Why?”

  “I was afraid she’d done it on purpose.”

  “Because of something she said?”

  “No. I was worried, is all. Sorry, Sully, I really need to get back to work.” He turned back to his computer and away from me. I left the room to go up to the office. But we both knew I’d be back.

 
While producing a show, a creative set designer can, very early in the process, talk a director and general manager into a stylistic set enhanced by projections. Early in the process, this seems like a good idea. But so did hiring Patrick King. The projections weren’t going well, and there hadn’t been a run-through with them working yet. Instead, there had been slides with helpful descriptions like “cloud” or “sunny day.” Connie assured me this was the least of our problems, and that Frank was working with the images the set designer had created, trying to make them work with our projection system. I had no idea what that meant and wondered when Frank was finding the time. Or the mind space.

  I grabbed a cup of coffee, a pad, and a pen from my desk and went into the theater. Dimitri and Connie were conferring with Frank, who now had his laptop sitting next to another laptop at the tech table. Connie called for quiet and they did a quick run-through of the first projection, which, to my untrained eye, looked pretty good. I walked toward them as they discussed the logistics.

  “It does look much better, Frank, but are you sure it’ll run on the computer in the booth? Or does it have to run on yours?” Connie asked.

  “I’m copying all my files to the booth computer, so it should be okay. I need to take my laptop with me to run the sound cue for … ” Frank was saying.

  “Frank, Patrick can’t hear … ” Gabe called from backstage.

  “Be right there,” Frank called back. “Connie, can you finish copying these files over? Just the ones in this folder.” Connie and I looked at where he was pointing, and she nodded. Frank picked up a box and headed backstage, Dimitri in tow, presumably giving more notes.

  Connie was clicking the files over when her headset buzzed. She put it on and grunted a few times. “Sully, I need to go backstage. Don’t ask. Can you copy these? It takes a while, not sure why. And you need to do them one at a time.”

  “Sure. Glad to be able to do something useful.” And I was. Almost as glad as I was to get a chance to look at Frank’s computer.

  I selected the first file and started to copy it over. It was called CC_actI_scene4_ghosts. All of the files had similar naming patterns—Christmas Carol, Act I, Scene 4, Ghosts. Pretty easy to follow, which was good, depending on who was running the cues from the booth.

  Connie was right; the copying was really slow. Thankfully it seemed that the booth computer was the slow one, not Frank’s, so I was able to look around while the files copied. I did a search; Frank’s naming convention seemed to hold true for everything—he clearly and concisely named files in an easily recognizable format. Given the number of projects he was balancing, it made sense that he kept things clear. And it was a break for me. I looked for files that were last accessed within the last twenty-four hours—ever since Frank and I had seen the feed showing Terry going into his office. Then I sorted the files by type and ran down the list, quickly. A couple were called TH_office. Terry Holmes? I copied those and a few others from yesterday to the booth computer, in a folder on the C drive.

  I wasn’t sure how much more time I had, but I opened Frank’s web browser anyway. The wireless network he’d installed in the theater was up and running. I logged into my Gmail account and sent myself the TH_office files. I would have sent more if I’d had time. I copied another file for the show to the booth computer, and then went back to the browser. It was 25 percent done. My email was taking forever to go through, so I kept my pointer on the X on the upper right corner. Now 55 percent. I’d figure out how to get them off the booth computer later if I had to. Up to 70 percent.

  Frank was coming through the curtain. Heading toward me. Did he walk more quickly when he realized I was copying the files, or was that my imagination? Up to 89 percent. Connie came out, called to Frank. He stopped, but he never stopped looking at me. Email sent. Sign out. Clear cache. Just like you taught me, Frank, I thought. I closed the search window and starting copying the last projection file as Frank and Connie walked up to the table.

  “The last file is being copied now,” I said, getting up from the chair.

  “Thanks, Sully. Gabe,” Connie said into her headset, “could you come out once Patrick is set? We need to run through a few things before we start.” She turned to me. “I called half hour,” she started to explain. “We needed to do a run through of the Ghost of Christmas Future graveyard scene, but we didn’t get to it.”

  Half hour, the half hour before a performance, was sacrosanct. It was time for the actors to get ready to run the show.

  “Not a problem.” I was careful to look Frank straight in the eye,and smile. “I’ll go check my email.”

  I closed and latched the office door. It was probably paranoid, but I wanted to see what these TH_office files were in peace. Watching the projections on screen had got me to thinking. I clicked on the link on my email and was thrilled when the file picked a program to open automatically, rather than making me pick one. I hated it when my computer wanted me to think for it, since it was usually for something I really couldn’t figure out on my own. Sometimes new media made me feel old.

  Frank and I had seen Terry going into his office over the web. Or had we? Frank had told me that we were looking at a live picture, and I took his word for it. Why wouldn’t I? But maybe … I watched as a small snippet of Terry Holmes walking down the hall to his office filled the web window. I tried to remember if it was the same thing I’d seen yesterday, but the lovely hand gesture at the end was absent. I clicked open the second file, and this one was what I remembered, complete with Terry flipping the bird at the end of the video clip. Was this a recording of the actual moment I’d seen? Or had I been watching a recording?

  If so, that meant Terry could have been dead when I “saw” him flip the bird. The idea made my head hurt. If the timeline I was keeping was screwed up, the suspect list had shifted again.

  At this rate, I was never going to see the last act of A Christmas Carol. I couldn’t decide what to do. Should I call Gus and give him a heads-up, or call Regina? A knock at the door prolonged my decision-making.

  “Sully, you in there?” It was Regina. She won. But who, besides me, was going to lose?

  I opened the door. “Do you want to come in?” I asked Regina.

  “I came by to watch rehearsal for a while and get Gabe, but I had trouble focusing. Connie said you’d be in here.”

  “Want some coffee? I have one of those cup-at-a-time coffee makers in here. Hot chocolate too.”

  “Do you have decaf? I want to be able to grab some sleep tonight.”

  “Grabbing some shut-eye between shifts?”

  “More like dismissed, with thanks.” Regina sounded like she felt a mixture of incredibly pissed-off and hurt, in equal measure. I’d been there more than once, but I didn’t think camaraderie was the reason for her visit.

  “Let me guess. The chief got a phone call—”

  “Text.”

  “From the mayor?”

  “A state rep.”

  “Who was worried about … ?”

  “Oh, who knows? Whatever it was, my boss decided to take over the case, which is fine. But I guess he didn’t like hearing my opinions.”

  “Which isn’t fine.”

  “Which sucks.”

  “Sure does.” I handed her a cup of coffee and watched her take a sip.

  I figured I’d start with the files and go from there. I would take a risk and go for full disclosure. Regina would be upset, could even drag me over to the station, but the only way I would win her trust was by being honest.

  So I told her about the flash drive and the note from Peter. As I told her the story, I handed both items over.

  “I don’t suppose you have printouts?”

  “I do, but not here. They were all PDFs. I could copy some out if you want.”

  “Do you have the spreadsheets on your computer?” she asked, nodding toward the laptop on my desk.<
br />
  “No,” I answered, patting my laptop. And I didn’t. This was my work computer. Technically, the Cliffside’s computer. The files were on my personal computer, which was in the knapsack under my desk. I’d learned long ago to keep work and my personal life separate. Even though the lines were blurry, I dedicated the office computer to accounting files and office correspondence. That way, if I ever left the theater for good, the work would stay. And if anyone wanted to check up on me, they could. Full disclosure, just not of my personal stuff.

  “Tell me what they say.”

  “Here’s what I was able to understand from the one I was looking at. They track money being shuttled from account A to account B for a short period. The principle would be shipped back to account A, but the interest stayed in account B. The money wouldn’t stay for long, but it was a lot of cash, so the interest seemed to add up.”

  “To?”

  “A couple million dollars.”

  Regina whistled. “Any notes on who was doing the moving?”

  “No, none. The more I think about it, the more I think it may not have been provable, at least not yet. I think the spreadsheets are the incredibly well-educated guesses of Peter Whitehall.”

  “Which he sent to you because?”

  “I think he’d asked around and knew he could trust me.” The story of Emma wanting to hire me was Emma’s story to tell, with Gus in the room with her. “I noticed the other note said ‘In the event of my death’ or something like that? Was that from Peter?”

  “Yeah, it was. There also was a report and a bottle.”

  “I saw the bottle. Was the report on what was in the bottle?”

  Regina shook her head. “Sorry, I can’t go there.” She started to shift toward the front of her seat, ready to hoist herself up.

  “Hold on. I have something else to show you.” She settled back in the chair and watched as I clicked on the two files I’d emailed to myself. She watched them each twice more before she turned to me.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  So I did. I told her about the projections for the show and how Frank had named the files. I told her about thinking back to the picture of Terry giving us the finger and how something seemed wrong. “So, if you’re using my statement that Terry was in the hallway at six o’clock, it doesn’t stand up anymore.