Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “Sure I’m worried. I’d be out of my mind if I wasn’t. But if that’s what the kid wants … and she does have the temperament for it. Sensitive. Big swings from high to low and back again. This summer, when she was home with me in Beverly Hills, I never knew what she was going to be from one day to the next. One night last August, for instance, she goes to bed happy as a clam, like Juliet when Romeo climbs up her balcony, and she comes to breakfast the next morning snapping everyone’s head off. Like Juliet when she sees Romeo’s dead body.”

  “Actors are like that usually?”

  “Never knew one who wasn’t. Life isn’t exactly real to them, you know what I mean? They’ve always got to be playing a part—”

  Before he could go any further, the house lights started to dim. Franz immediately swiveled around to look at the stage. His daughter wouldn’t be on it for a few hours, but he was already giving it his full attention.

  I took another quick glance around the audience. Sitting in one of the back rows, way off to the side, was Lloyd Cunningham. I recognized him from other plays I’d seen the Players do, and once I’d bought some stereo equipment from his store.

  He was too far away for me to see the expression on his face.

  * * *

  So now came Macbeth.

  It began in the dark. Actually I don’t think it was supposed to be that dark, I think the lights weren’t working quite right. Anyway, these three dim figures were sitting around a big pot in the center of the stage. And once you adjusted your eyes with a lot of hard squinting, you could just about make out that they were women. They were waving their hands over the pot and muttering to themselves, like three hobos trying to keep warm over their rabbit stew.

  It was a little hard to make out what they were saying, since they tended to put a lot of squeaks and screeches between the words. Aside from that, the voices were awfully ladylike and genteel. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” I made out one of them saying, as she dropped something in the pot, and it was clear from her tone that she was pouring at some tea party for the local gentry and one of the guests had just asked for two lumps.

  My program told me the names of the actresses who were playing these three characters. I recognized them as a local kindergarten teacher, a departmental secretary at Mesa Grande College, and the wife of a retired Air Force colonel.

  Finally they took their pot and left the stage. The lights went up, and several men in cowboy suits came striding in. Their purposeful masculine movements, as well as the guns and holsters around their waists, left you in no doubt that they were military types. Leading them, and standing half a head taller than any of them, was Bernie Michaels, the chiropractor. The one thing you could say for Bernie’s acting was that it was loud; he had a voice that filled the hall. On account of this, plus his long white beard—and in spite of the Stetson on his head, a little too big for him, with a tendency to slip down over his eyebrows—you could easily believe he was a big shot of some sort.

  These cowboys were suffering from a peculiar delusion: they thought they were Scotsmen and that Bernie was their king, Duncan of Scotland. But pretty soon I got used to this. To tell the truth, I was beginning to get caught up in the play. I even began to enjoy it.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving Macbeth any rave reviews. The great Randolph Le Sage, from New York, was one of those actors who read their speeches with a lot of round reverberating “O” sounds. He produced his own echo as he talked, and he did so much spitting that you wanted to throw a towel to his fellow actors. And once, in the scene where Lady Macbeth is egging him on to kill the king, he kept trying to interrupt one of her long speeches, only she wouldn’t let him.

  And Sally Michaels’s Lady Macbeth was pretty much like everything else I had ever seen her do. Before she addressed any remarks to other people on the stage, she took a couple of steps in their direction and pointed at them, in case the audience couldn’t figure out who she was talking to. When she finally spoke, she enunciated each word with great care, pretty much the way she must have spoken to her third-grade classes.

  Even so, the performance moved fast, most of the cast snapped out their lines, and you could understand what everybody was saying. It didn’t take long for me to forget about that crazy cowboy idea, to ignore the Wild West outfits and enjoy the show.

  And one thing in this production was really first-rate. You knew from the moment he first opened his mouth that Martin Osborn, in the role of Banquo, was the best actor on the stage. He spoke his lines so naturally that they didn’t sound like lines at all; they sounded like exactly what this particular man might take it into his head to say at this particular moment.

  After a while I got curious about something, so I turned my neck to try and look at Lloyd Cunningham. I wanted to see how he was reacting to Osborn’s performance. I couldn’t satisfy my curiosity, though; Cunningham wasn’t in his seat anymore.

  All this time, of course, I had been paying special attention to Roger, who wasn’t bad at all. Which started me thinking about how there has to be a little bit of ham, or at least con man, in every good detective. Roger had several small parts, where he got to say some lines of the “Yes, sire” and “No, sire” variety, but his best part was Fleance, Banquo’s teenage son, and he had one nice little scene with his father. Before and after that scene he showed up as several different hangers-on in King Duncan’s court.

  All the minor actors doubled or tripled as somebody else in this production: the three witches, with their black dresses traded in for blue ones, showed up as ladies in King Duncan’s court; the dying Sergeant early in the play got himself resurrected in time to be the drunken Porter who opened Macbeth’s gate; and I saw from the program that little Harold Hapgood, as the Old Man who made a gloomy weather report right after Duncan’s death, was scheduled to show up later on as the Third Murderer.

  So finally we got to the scene of Banquo’s murder. Shakespeare hasn’t actually given Banquo’s son Fleance any lines in this scene, but Osborn had. Roger was supposed to stick in shouts of “Help!” and “Murder!” and “What ho!” while the Third Murderer grabbed him; then he fought his way free and went rushing off. I knew all this because he’d been practicing it around the office for the past four weeks.

  The scene began with a dark stage again. Not quite as dark as it had been for the witches but enough so that it wasn’t easy to make out people’s faces. And it didn’t help that the three murderers wore black masks on their faces, like outlaws in a Western movie.

  Then Banquo and Fleance came on, strolling along, enjoying the night air, and suddenly the murderers were on them. Two of them had Banquo by the arms, and the third one, identified in the program as Harold Hapgood, had his left arm around Fleance’s waist and his right hand flat against his chest just below his chin. Very poor mugging technique, I thought, remembering my years as one of New York’s Finest. The left arm should have been around the neck.

  Then Fleance pulled away from the Third Murderer. To tell you the truth, he didn’t seem to need much strength to do it; the Third Murderer was awfully cooperative about letting him go. Then Banquo yelled at him, “O treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!” And Fleance, letting out horrendous shouts with obvious gusto, flew into the wings.

  The murderers then turned their attention to Banquo. The first two had him pinned by the arms. The Third Murderer pulled out a big ugly-looking knife from under his black cloak and, aiming it directly at Banquo’s middle, he charged at him with a fierce yell. The knife went straight into Banquo’s chest; the Third Murderer pulled it out again, and drove it in again. Banquo’s arms and legs thrashed; the other two murderers seemed to be having a hard time holding on to him. The Third Murderer pulled the knife out again, and a cry came out of Banquo, thick and hideous but cut off short. The two murderers let him go, and he sank to the ground.

  Shakespeare, as I didn’t find out till later, has the three murderers hang around and whisper some lines to each other at this poi
nt. But Osborn had cut these lines. The Third Murderer dropped his bloody knife and dashed offstage in the same direction Fleance had just gone; the first two murderers escaped in the opposite direction. Banquo, sprawled on the ground with his arms stretched out and one leg kicked under the other, remained alone onstage.

  He lay there awhile. The lights didn’t go out, the curtain didn’t go down. Was he supposed to be dead, was there just enough life in him to gasp out a dying speech?

  That’s what I was waiting for, and the rest of the audience must have been waiting for it too, because there wasn’t a cough or a whisper or even heavy breathing in the whole house.

  And then the silence was broken by a shout. “My God!”

  I didn’t realize at first that it had come from Allan Franz, sitting on my left. Only he wasn’t sitting anymore, he was on his feet and running up the aisle. With amazing speed and agility for a man who looked as if he got most of his exercise in a swivel chair, he scrambled onto the stage, ran over to where Banquo was lying, and got down on his knees. I could see him lifting Banquo’s hand, holding it a second, then letting it drop. Then he was on his feet again—the whole process hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds—and he was facing the audience and shouting out, “For God’s sake, is there a doctor out there? I think this man is dead!” There were gasps in the audience, and a woman gave a half scream.

  There were half a dozen doctors out there, and one of them was on the stage in a few moments. Franz moved away, looking a little sick, as the doctor bent down to Osborn, put an ear to his chest, then looked up and muttered something. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the look on his face told it all.

  “See?” I heard a voice from the maverick section say loudly. “I told you about the curse, didn’t I? The play is cursed!”

  And finally I reacted. It had taken me a long time to remember that I was a policeman, a sworn officer of the law, even though I worked for the public defender. If a crime had been committed, it was up to me to take charge of things until the regular cops could be called.

  So I got to my feet and followed Franz’s and the doctor’s routes up the aisle and onto the stage. The doctor was on his feet now, but I didn’t have to get down on my knees in his place to see that Osborn was a dead man. The legs were pulled up, the right fist was clenched. There are positions that arms and legs can get into in death that they just don’t get into when that person is alive. If I’d been up on the stage when he got stabbed, instead of out in the audience, I might have realized right away what had happened.

  Also I saw a lot of blood, and lying a few feet away from the body, I saw the knife. Long glittering blade, black handle, big as the knife Mom uses to carve her pot roast.

  I stepped forward and shouted at the audience, who were just beginning to break out of their trance and make hysterical noises. “Everybody stay seated till the police come! Shut the doors in back! One of you ushers, shut those doors and lock them!” I turned my shouting toward the wings. “Nobody leaves backstage either! Roger, are you there? See to it that nobody leaves! Lock the back doors!”

  I saw him galvanized into life, so I turned back to the audience. “All right, be calm, everybody, get back to your seats. Is there a telephone in this theatre?”

  A voice yelled at me from behind the stage, “There’s a pay phone down in the basement!”

  It was the stage manager, a heavyset man with bulging biceps and a two days’ growth of beard. But right now, as I joined him backstage, he was looking a little green around the gills.

  He led me down a short flight of steps into the basement, then along the damp, musty corridor, with four or five doors off it. On the floor next to one of the doors lay a couple of stick brooms, a beat-up old whisk broom, and a wrung-out mop. We stepped over all this, turned a corner, and there was the pay phone attached to the wall. I put in my quarter, dialed police, and snapped out my message. I was told they’d be along in ten minutes.

  I decided I’d better get back on the stage and do what I could to keep the mob from getting out of hand. So I retraced my steps along the basement corridor. And stopped suddenly.

  From behind a door to my right, I heard banging noises and the sound of a muffled voice. It was the door with the brooms and the mop scattered on the floor in front of it.

  “It’s the janitor’s closet,” said the stage manager.

  I tried the door. It was locked.

  The stage manager pulled out a collection of keys on a chain, fumbled through them, and finally got the door open. Harold Hapgood, with his hair flying in every direction and his face very red, came stumbling out and landed in my arms.

  “Who did this to me? Who’s the son of a bitch—”

  I asked him what he was talking about, and his voice with its lisp much more pronounced than usual, rose to a squeal. “They hit me over the head! My head hurts! The son of a bitch—”

  Then he clapped his hand to his forehead. “My God, I’ve got to get up there! It must be my cue pretty soon! I never missed a cue in my life!”

  “What cue?” I ran after him, grabbing him by the arm.

  “For the murder scene! Let go of me, for heaven’s sake! They can’t do the murder scene without me! I’m the Third Murderer!”

  4

  Roger’s Narrative

  I got four hours of sleep on the night of the murder. Not enough for a growing boy, as my mother would say.

  The cops and the district attorney’s men kept hammering at me till one in the morning, first at the theatre, then down at headquarters. I was an important witness. I was the person who had got closest to the Third Murderer while he was on the stage. He had grabbed me and held on to me for a while before he moved on to killing Banquo. So why wasn’t I able to say who it was? It made them mad as hell that I couldn’t.

  It was two o’clock before I got to sleep, and at seven my phone rang.

  “I just read it in the morning papers,” Dave’s mother said. “How are you feeling, terrible? I’ll come right over, I’ll make you some coffee and some breakfast. After what you went through you shouldn’t have to do it for yourself.”

  “I didn’t go through so much,” I managed to mumble into the phone. “It’s really nice of you, but I don’t have any breakfast stuff in the house.”

  “Not even an egg? Not even a piece toast? This is how you take care of yourself? Your mother would have a fit she should find out! She wouldn’t forgive me in a million years!”

  So eventually I told her I’d get up right away, take my shower, and drive over to her house so she could have breakfast waiting for me. The only thing that worried me, I told her, was being late to work, but she answered that she’d square it with my boss. “I’ve got influence with him. I knew him when he was in his diapers.”

  The morning Republican-American was on my front porch as I left the house. Every once in a while, the paper boy manages to make the porch, instead of some narrow unreachable hole under the hedge. I stopped to look at the headlines; sure enough, the biggest were devoted to Osborn’s murder, crowding Congressional ethics and terrorists down to the lower half of the front page.

  PROMINENT ACTOR MURDERED ONSTAGE;

  SHAKESPEARE PLAY BECOMES BLOODBATH

  The article began:

  Hollywood actor-director Martin Osborn was stabbed to death last night in full view of an audience of two hundred people who had gathered at the Ramon Novarro Theatre for what they thought would be an evening of high culture.…

  And in a small box next to the article was this announcement: “Turn to page 5 for our critic’s review of the performance.”

  On page 5, under the familiar photograph of the paper’s plump, beaming reviewer, I read the following:

  The Mesa Grande Art Players’ production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth was interrupted last night by tragedy (described on page one). It must be reported, unfortunately, that this was the only note of genuine tragedy that occurred in the course of the evening. Your reviewer, of course, along with
the rest of the audience, had a chance to see only the first half of the production. The second half might have risen above the generally plodding and uninspired level of what we did see, though your reviewer has strong doubts, given the ineptitude of most of the major performances.…

  Still, I glanced through the rest of it to see if my name was mentioned. Yes, there it was. “The ill-fated Banquo’s son Fleance, played by Roger Meyer, produced no startling revelations of characterization.…”

  I shrugged this off—what did he know?—and turned to the movie page, where I learned that the new Paul Newman flick, in which he invents the atomic bomb, would be opening on Friday. I made a mental note to see it as soon as possible. The invention of the atomic bomb, even by Paul Newman, wasn’t likely to run very long in Mesa Grande. Now if it had been Sylvester Stallone dropping some of them on Latin American drug traffickers…!

  I drove across town to the old lady’s house. She lives in a much nicer neighborhood than I do. My neighborhood is new and still not very densely populated, but cracker-barrel houses, which in a few years will look like shanties, are springing up around me all the time. Her neighborhood is older, the lawns are wider, the houses are farther apart, and everybody’s doesn’t look exactly like everybody else’s. Her house is two stories high, white, red-shuttered and lace-curtained, kind of homey and inviting.

  I pulled up right behind a dusty old Ford that I recognized immediately. Dave was getting out of it. He waited for me on the front walk, wearing that wry, slightly wary expression.

  “Your mother was nice enough to ask me for breakfast,” I said, as I went up to him. “She thought I’d be too tired to fix my own, on account of what happened last night. She didn’t tell me you were going to be here too.”

  “Didn’t she?” he said. “I guess that was before she developed her headache and discovered she was out of aspirin.”

  We walked up to the front door together, and a few seconds later the old lady was smiling at us and motioning for us to come in.