Murder in the Balcony

by Margaret Dumas

  He looked at the carpet “But I may have been looking into Warren a little bit. Just to protect Callie.”

  “Right.” I paused. “For her own good.”

  “Yes!” He looked relieved that I’d understood.

  I understood more than he knew.

  “Okay,” I said. “Two things. One—it is not cool to spy on a friend. Or on the person that friend is dating. Especially if you have feelings for that friend. It’s not cool and it’s kind of creepy and I know you don’t want to be that guy.”

  “I’m not that guy!” he protested. “I was just—”

  “You were just trying to protect a grown woman who was making her own choices,” I told him. “A grown woman who would not thank you if you told her.”

  This seemed to register with him. “I guess not.” He took a breath. “You said two things. What’s the other?”

  “The other is a question.” I looked at him. “Is what you know about Warren anything you should tell the police?”

  Chapter 4

  There was nothing in the news about Warren’s death. I had no idea if the police were treating it as a break-in gone bad or something else. I’d hoped to get a little information from June, but when I spoke to her the next morning, she told me that they’d asked her a million questions but hadn’t given her any more information.

  I was worried about Callie. I’d gotten someone to cover her shifts and sent her a text the night before, telling her to take as much time off as she needed. So I wasn’t expecting her when she showed up at the lobby doors soon after I put the coffee on.

  “How are you? Are you okay?”

  She winced, dropping her things to the floor and settling on the stool by the candy counter. “Not to be rude or anything, but can you do me a favor and, like, chill?”

  “I’ll chill as soon as I know you’re okay.”

  “I mean, I’m not okay,” she said. “But I’m not a total mess or anything. I just wish I knew what happened.”

  “Didn’t the police tell you anything?”

  She made a face. “I haven’t talked to them yet. My mom told them she gave me a sleeping pill and that I was in no condition to talk to anyone.”

  Wow. “Did she?”

  “She doesn’t believe in sleeping pills,” Callie said, taking the cup of coffee I handed her. “She slathered my back with Vicks VapoRub and gave me a couple shots of tequila.”

  My eyebrows went up.

  “You’d have to know my mom,” she said, sipping. Then she seemed to realize what that meant. “Not that you ever will. She’s, like, a crazy person.”

  “Everyone thinks their mom’s a crazy person when they’re your age,” I told her. Whereupon I immediately felt ancient. “And who knows? Maybe VapoRub helps.” Or maybe just having your mother rub your back while you cried helped. Yep. Probably that.

  “When are you talking to the police?” I asked her.

  She glanced at the clock above the lobby doors. “Nine.” Which was about ten minutes away. “I’m meeting them at the café across the street. It’s that detective, the one who was here before?”

  “Really? Detective Jackson?”

  She nodded. Jackson had investigated the deaths at the Palace back in October, when I’d first come to San Francisco. As far as I knew he was on the homicide squad, so that seemed to say they weren’t thinking this was a simple burglary gone wrong after all.

  “Sooo…” Callie looked up at the painted stars on the ceiling. “I was kind of wondering…I mean, I know you’re busy and everything…but would you come with me? For, like, I don’t know, moral support or something?”

  It seemed like torture for her to make the request.

  “Let me get my jacket.”

  “Detective Jackson,” I greeted the policeman as he rose from the window table at Café Madeleine, a coffee-and-pastry-scented paradise located across the street from the theater. He smiled in recognition, which only slightly countered the imposing presence he projected. A tall, heavyset man with deep brown skin and a hipster goatee, he was made even larger by the quilted parka he wore that chilly morning.

  “Ms. Paige,” he nodded, then turned his attention to Callie. “Ms. Gee. My condolences on your loss.”

  I’d forgotten about the detective’s voice. Full, deep, and resonant, it was a major component of his overall aura of authority.

  Callie asked the server for a triple latte, then turned to the detective. “What happened? Have you caught them yet?”

  He had a small notebook, which he opened while looking at Callie. “We’re doing everything we can. How long had you been seeing Mr. Williams?”

  “Why? What does that have to do with it?”

  “It’s important to get as complete a picture as possible,” he said. “His colleagues say you’d been dating for several months?”

  “Since November,” I volunteered. Something in the way the detective looked at me implied that I shouldn’t volunteer anything else. I let Callie talk.

  “Right before Thanksgiving,” she said. “We totally clicked.”

  As she described her whirlwind, made-for-each-other romance I couldn’t help thinking about what Brandon had revealed the day before. Had Warren really been seeing someone else while he and Callie were together?

  “We were both, like, super busy all the time,” she was saying. “I mean, he was interning at the real estate office and finishing up his last coursework before taking his exam. And I work at the Palace while I’m in grad school too. Film school. I’m making a documentary.” She ran a hand through her hair, lifting it away from her face in an automatic yes-I-know-I’m-very-cool gesture. “But even with all that, we saw each other literally all the time.”

  The coffee came, and we paused in the conversation to blow and sip and wait for the server to walk away. The owner of the café, Lisa, was giving me curious glances. We’d become friendly and she was probably wondering what was up with this intense conversation.

  “Tell me about the night of the party,” Detective Jackson said. “The night you all went to the bar.”

  Callie nodded, swallowing. “The Irish Bank, downtown.”

  “Did you go there often?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s, like, not my usual kind of place, or Warren’s. But he had to go to the Financial District that afternoon to do some mortgage thing or something, so he was downtown when he checked the website and found out he’d passed. He went to the nearest bar—the Irish Bank—and started live streaming to let everybody know. A bunch of his friends started showing up when they all got off work, and it was kind of a scene by the time I got there.”

  “Which was…?”

  She blinked. “I left here around four and took the bus, so probably, like, five? A little before?”

  “And who was there when you arrived?”

  She thought about it and started counting off attendees. I only recognized a few people from June’s firm among many names. Then the detective started getting into the details of who had come later, and who had left when.

  “There was sort of a wave of his work friends,” Callie said. “They’d all come together, but they all left around the same time, too. They didn’t stay long.”

  “Was anybody from the office still there when you left?”

  Callie thought about it. “I think by then it was only, like, Sam. The rest of them were mainly his buddies from school.”

  “But Sam, he was still there?”

  She grimaced. “Um, I usually try to keep it all gender non-binary, but Sam isn’t a he. She’s a woman. Samantha?”

  Jackson flipped back a few pages in his notebook. “Right. Samantha Beach. She was one of the last people known to have been at the bar.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed Callie’s face. “Really? That’s random. But she was still there when I left to come back
here.”

  “Which was…?”

  “Around ten thirty. Warren called a rideshare for me because I needed to be back by eleven for the pizza party.”

  The detective gave her a quizzical look.

  “It was a theme party for the midnight movie,” I supplied. “We’ve just started having them on Friday nights. Last Friday we showed Roman Holiday” (1953, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.)

  “The party started at eleven thirty,” Callie said. “We sold pizza and cannoli in the lobby, and if you showed up wearing a tiara you got in for half price.”

  “If you showed up on a Vespa you got in free,” I said. The midnight movies, so far, had been fairly successful. I was hoping they’d turn into real events–the kind that brought in real profits.

  A horrible look crossed Callie’s face. “Ohmygod. Were we having the party when Warren…?” She turned to the detective with huge eyes.

  He gave her a steadying look. “We don’t have the official report yet, but it looks like he died early Saturday morning.”

  That was good. I mean, that was awful, but at least it meant Callie didn’t have to have the mental image of her boyfriend being murdered while she was dishing up pizza to the tune of “Mambo Italiano.”

  But it also meant she didn’t have an alibi. Which probably isn’t the first thing that would have occurred to me a few months ago, before I’d taken an interest in the murders that had happened at the Palace. Now it was a disturbing thought.

  The detective asked his next question. “When did you leave the theater?”

  “The movie ended around two,” Callie said. “So I think we all cleared out by around two thirty.”

  “And then you went home?”

  “I totally crashed,” she nodded.

  “I arranged rideshares for the team,” I told Jackson. “On my account. They’ll have a record of when they took Callie home.” And the fact that they took her to her apartment, not Warren’s.

  “Do you normally do that?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “The midnight movies are a new thing. Callie and Marty usually bike or take the bus, but at that hour only the Owl service would be running, and they’d been great about taking on the extra work, so…”

  “Right.” Jackson jotted something in his notebook. Then, to Callie, “Do you have a roommate?”

  “Two, but they were…” her voice trailed off. I could see her realizing why he might be asking her that particular question. Was she a suspect?

  She blinked a few times, reorienting herself. When she answered her voice had a more guarded tone. “I sent Warren a text when I got home. He didn’t answer so I went to bed. And no, nobody saw me until I came in for the late shift on Saturday.”

  “That would have been around four thirty in the afternoon,” I supplied, not at all liking where this conversation was going.

  “I sent Warren a few texts on Saturday,” Callie said. “But after how much he drank at the bar I figured he was sleeping all day. When he still didn’t answer by the afternoon, I just got mad. If I’d realized something was wrong…” She turned to the detective. “What happened to him?”

  “We’ll know more as the investigation goes on,” he responded, maddeningly.

  “June said his neighbor found him?”

  He nodded. He didn’t elaborate.

  “And that there had been a break-in or something?”

  He regarded her. “Where did you hear that?”

  She glanced at her phone on the table. “Everybody.”

  Wait. Was Jackson saying it wasn’t a break-in?

  A look of weariness settled on his face. “Ms. Gee, I would strongly advise you not to look to social media for news of the investigation. I can tell you that we’re checking out every lead we have and doing everything we can to find out what happened to Warren.” He cleared his throat. “Did he contact you at all after you left the bar Friday night?”

  She nodded. “A couple times, while I was working…what?”

  The detective was looking at her intently. “When did he send his last text?”

  She slid her phone closer and started tapping the screen. “Here. 1:17.” She looked up. “Does that help? Why can’t you just look at his phone?”

  “It’s missing,” Jackson replied.

  Callie’s jaw dropped. “No way. Warren always had his phone. It was, like, surgically implanted in his hand.”

  “Well, now we know he still had it at 1:17 in the morning,” he said. “What did he say in the text?”

  Callie’s world was still rocked at the thought of a phoneless Warren. She glanced down at her screen and read aloud.

  “June’s going to lose it when I tell her who I just saw at the bar!”

  She looked up. “With five exclamation points and a hand grenade emoji.”

  The detective’s face probably matched mine as he held out his hand for her phone. Intense curiosity. Who had Warren seen? Did it have anything to do with why he’d been killed? Because I didn’t believe for a second that Jackson thought this was a routine burglary.

  Roman Holiday

  1953

  Okay. All right. This is the one. This is the movie I want you to watch if you think you don’t like old movies. Because this is the one that will turn you around. You will be powerless to resist it. It’s that good. Am I not being clear? I LOVE this movie.

  The credits begin by INTRODUCING Audrey Hepburn. It’s her first movie! And she’s absolutely ethereal in it. She plays Princess Ann, and she’s on a goodwill royal tour of Europe. (We don’t know what country she’s princess of, but really, who cares?) Has anyone ever looked more like someone who should be called “her serene highness” as she watches parades and launches ships and waves regally to crowds? This woman was born to wear a tiara.

  But late at night back at the Palace, being tucked in with milk and crackers, she looks more like a teenager than a royal. And like a teenager she longs to rebel, even if it’s only by wearing pajamas instead of a high-necked nightgown. She has no idea she’s about to rebel on a much more cinematic scale.

  After the court doctor gives her an injection to help her sleep, she escapes the palace, nestling in between the champagne bottles in the back of a caterer’s van. She hops out the back when she gets to downtown Rome. Who wouldn’t? It’s lovely and moonlit, and she’s still stoned on whatever the doctor gave her.

  Enter Gregory Peck. You’ll be forgiven if you sigh audibly when you first see him, tie loosened at a late-night poker game with the guys, looking more like a movie star than any man has a right to. Gregory Peck, you guys. Even without the voice he’s swoon-inducing. And then when he speaks? I raise a disbelieving eyebrow at any woman who says she wouldn’t give up her throne for him. You know you’d at least think about it.

  Gregory (Joe) is a reporter with a ticket to see the princess at a press conference in the morning. Eddie Albert is his buddy and a photographer who is likewise on princess duty. When Gregory leaves the game to stroll handsomely through the moonlit streets, he finds Audrey snoozing outside by a fountain. And now we have a movie!

  He wakes her and she sleepily quotes a poem. “If I were dead and buried and I heard your voice, beneath the sod my heart of dust would still rejoice.” Yes, Audrey. We all feel that way about Gregory Peck’s voice. And of course he doesn’t just leave her there. He helps her. Because she’s lovely and quotes poetry and he’s a decent guy. Tall, dark, and decent. And did I mention his voice?

  So here’s where the whole thing just takes off. He doesn’t realize she’s the princess (at first) and she doesn’t tell him when she wakes up in the morning in his apartment (wearing his pajamas). There’s attraction and humor and something called charm that you’ll notice and say “Huh. Wow. That’s so nice and fresh and completely devoid of irony that I don’t quite know how to process it.” My advice: don’t process.
Just enjoy.

  The runaway princess decides to make a day of it, wandering around a gorgeous sunny Rome. She buys comfortable shoes. She eats gelato on the Spanish Steps. She gets an adorable short haircut that my mother reliably informed me caused a worldwide stampede of woman going to the hairdresser in 1953. I so want that haircut!

  When she meets up with Gregory again there are Vespa rides and teasing at The Mouth of Truth statue and dancing by moonlight on a riverboat. Of course, let’s not forget that Gregory is a reporter for all of this, and Eddie Albert is a photographer. The story of the madcap princess is worth a lot of money. Plot complications!

  Of course I won’t tell you how it all works out. You probably think you know. Ha! If it starred Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts, you might know. But this is a classic film. The rules are different. All I can tell you for sure is that if you don’t start reaching for the Kleenex at the end, surely you have a heart of dust.

  Roman thoughts:

  I mean, Rome. The film proudly announces with the opening credits that it was photographed and recorded in its entirety in Rome. Was it ever. The city is gorgeous and crumbling and crowded and proud. They absolutely could not have made the same movie on a back lot.

  That LOOK! If you’ve seen the movie you know the one I mean. The one at the end. I find it completely overwhelming every single time. You know how I feel about dialogue, but that look is enough to make any self-respecting screenwriter just thrown down their pen and give up. Words are so not necessary.

  This is not the first (or last) movie to offer the perspective that when you pretend to be someone else it frees you to be who you really are. Maybe we all just need to take off our tiaras now and then. Have some gelato. Listen to some music. Fall in love with a handsome stranger. Maybe we all need to go to Rome. I know I do.

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