Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “Here’s your aspirin, Mom,” Dave said. “But are you sure you ought to be on your feet? Especially since you had the bug last night?”

  “I started feeling better a couple minutes ago,” she said. “I tried to call you but you left already. So you don’t have a kiss for your mother?”

  He gave her a kiss, though the wry look didn’t leave his face. “And look who happened to drive up at the same time,” he said. “You forgot to mention you were having Roger for breakfast this morning?”

  “My headache pushed it right out of my mind.” The old lady moved past him and planted a kiss on my cheek. “So come into the kitchen, the omelets are ready.”

  “Omelets! And enough for three people,” Dave said as she took us both by the arm and steered us into her kitchen. “And do I smell blueberry muffins? And look at that, fresh-squeezed orange juice! And all this you did while you were suffering from that headache!”

  The old lady smiled gently, pointing us to our seats. “At my age the only cure for aches and pains is to think about something else.”

  In a few minutes those muffins and that omelet had eased the exhaustion out of my eyes and my bones. As I finished my coffee the old lady said, “So you both had an interesting night last night. I’ll get you another cup coffee while you tell me about it.”

  * * *

  Dave made a remark, apparently addressed to the ceiling, about singing for your supper and that there’s no such thing as a free breakfast. Then he started in.

  He repeated everything he’d seen and heard from his position in the audience. He repeated all conversations verbatim. I’d marveled before at his memory. The trick was to keep your eyes and ears open, to notice what was happening around you, not just to let it wash over you like your morning shower. I’d been practicing this trick for months, but I wondered if I would ever learn to do it as neatly as Dave did.

  All the time his mother listened intently, her head cocked forward a little. Once or twice she interrupted him to ask him to repeat something. Like she was his superior officer, and he was her subordinate delivering an official report.

  This thought made me squirm. That crazy suspicion was coming into my head again.

  “It took the cops about ten minutes to get there,” Dave was saying. “Sammy Sierra. He’s the lieutenant that gets the important homicides. We’ve got a pretty good working relationship. Which naturally didn’t stop him and his crew from grilling Roger and me twice as long as anybody else in the place.”

  “They talked to everybody that was in the theatre?” the old lady asked.

  “They got names and statements from the whole audience, and from everybody that was on the stage and behind the stage. And some of them, including Roger, they hauled down to headquarters so the assistant DA could give them a going-over.”

  “Do you happen to know, did they find out if anybody got out of the theatre before you yelled that the doors should be locked?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, Mom, Sammy wasn’t telling me. I was pretty quick about getting them to shut the auditorium doors, and Roger was just as quick about the doors in back, but there were still a couple of minutes after Franz said Osborn was dead when there was a lot of confusion, people shouting, some of them starting up the aisle.”

  “And the murderer himself,” I put in, “could’ve left the theatre through one of the back doors as soon as he got offstage.”

  The old lady shook her head. “No, this isn’t possible. If the murderer left the theatre right after doing the murder, everybody would’ve noticed he was missing.”

  “You’re assuming the murderer was somebody everybody knew,” Dave said, “somebody in the cast or the backstage crew. You can’t automatically make such an assumption.”

  “Assumptions I don’t make automatically. I make them logically. This murderer is somebody who knew how the character he acted was dressed up, with a long black coat and a mask over his face. Who knew when he was supposed to walk on the stage, where he was supposed to stand, how he had to grab hold of Roger, how the other two actors would hold on to the victim so he could stab him nice and easy, how he’d run off the stage right afterward. Who also knew what lines he had to say, that he could say them in a whisper so nobody could recognize his voice, that he had to put on a little lisp like the regular actor did. In other words, this was somebody that belonged with the play, an actor or one of the stage crew. If such a person suddenly disappeared after the murder, everybody would miss him.”

  “Maybe he’s not actually in the play,” I said. “Maybe he’s the husband or wife or a close friend of one of the actors, something like that. And the person who’s in the play told the murderer all those details—”

  “Not so stupid.” The old lady turned a soft, approving smile on me, and I found myself blushing a little, the way I used to do as a kid if the teacher praised me in front of the class. “Definitely a possibility. But not a likelihood. Hearing what happens secondhand, from somebody else’s description, is different from seeing it yourself, with your own eyes. If you only heard it secondhand, you’d be crazy you should go up on the stage and try to do it right the first time, when you’re committing the murder. This would be like acting in a play in front of an audience before you ever had any rehearsals.” She turned back to Dave. “So where did the police find the costume?”

  “What do you mean, Mom?”

  “This murderer had to get rid of the black cloak and the mask after he finished doing the murder. Did he drop them somewhere on the floor in the back of the stage? Where did the police find them?”

  “As far as I know, they haven’t been found yet. Sammy Sierra didn’t mention them to me last night.”

  “Did he say who is it the police are suspecting right now?”

  “He didn’t even drop a hint. Maybe Roger can answer that. He was down at headquarters for an hour after I went to bed.”

  The old lady turned her gaze on me.

  “I was questioned by one of the assistant DAs,” I said. “The new one, he’s kind of young-looking. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the feeling they’re not sold on Harold Hapgood’s story. He kept asking me if I was sure it wasn’t Harold who grabbed me, how come I didn’t react in some way if it was a different person. As if they think maybe Harold did the murder himself and invented that conk on the head to give himself an alibi.”

  “So what story did you tell to the police?”

  “It doesn’t really amount to much,” I said. “I was in position for the murder scene, just as I’d been dozens of times at rehearsal. Upstage, to the left, facing my father. Banquo, that is. Martin Osborn, that is. The Third Murderer came up behind me, the way he always did in rehearsal—”

  “You could hear his footsteps?”

  “Well, Fleance isn’t supposed to, of course, but I always can. What I have to do is pretend I’m being taken by surprise. Well, a second later he had his left arm around my waist, pinning my arms to my side, and his right arm around my neck—no, around my chest, with his right hand flat against it, a couple of inches below my chin. Well, what I did then, I struggled a little. Not so hard that I’d break away from him too soon. I waited for my cue, when Banquo yells, ‘Fly, good Fleance!’ Then I broke loose from the Third Murderer and started yelling ‘Help, murder!’ and so on, and I ran offstage to the left.”

  “And there wasn’t anything you noticed when this Third Murderer was holding on to you? Anything that maybe could be a clue who it was?”

  “I sure can’t think of anything. I didn’t even see what he was dressed like or what his face looked like.”

  “You keep calling him ‘he,’” Dave put in. “So you could tell it was a man, right?”

  “No, I’m not even sure about that. I expected it to be a man, because it was usually Harold who did it to me. But now that I think of it, there wasn’t anything particularly man-like about him. Or woman-like. The other people onstage could say a lot more about who it was, they were facing him—her.
And later on, when he ran offstage—”

  “You saw him when he ran offstage?” the old lady said.

  “Just for a split second. Because I didn’t go straight down to my dressing room in the basement, the way I usually do after that scene. I stood in the wings for a few minutes.”

  “How come you did that?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, it’s the first time we ever did the play in front of an audience. And the murder of Banquo was the end of the first half. So I was curious, after the curtain went down—”

  “You were curious would there be any applause from the audience?” The old lady laughed, which somehow made me blush again. “So after you ran off the stage, you stood in the wings—this is what they call them? Like birds? And you saw maybe the murder happening?”

  “No, I couldn’t actually see Banquo being stabbed. That was on the right-hand side of the stage, there was no way of seeing it from where I was standing. But after it happened, the Third Murderer came running offstage on my side and went past me, to the stairs a few feet away from me, and down into the basement.”

  “You saw his face then?”

  “No, he was moving much too fast. All I really saw was a streak of black. And the face was black too, he was still wearing that mask.”

  “Did it seem to you he was running like a man or like a woman?”

  “I just can’t answer that. With that cloak flapping around him, I couldn’t see his legs or his arms, I had no sense of how he was running. Except that he was in one hell of a hurry.”

  “This didn’t strike you as peculiar?”

  “I suppose it did. But I wasn’t letting myself think about it. I still wanted to hear that applause from the audience. I turned back to look at the stage, and a minute or two after that—well, all hell broke loose. Then Dave was up onstage yelling at me to lock the back doors, and that’s about all I had any time to think about.”

  “Did anybody get out the back doors before you locked them?”

  “I didn’t see anybody. But if they made it before I got there, I wouldn’t have seen them, would I?”

  “And you didn’t see this murderer anywhere either? Or the black coat and the mask he was wearing?”

  “I’m afraid not. Lieutenant Sierra and the assistant DA weren’t too happy with my story either. They made it pretty clear they think I know more than I’m telling.”

  “So don’t you?”

  The old lady settled back in her chair and took a nibble out of a piece of coffee cake.

  “What are you getting at, Mom?” Dave said. “Roger wouldn’t lie about this.”

  “Who’s talking from lying? Sometimes what’s in your memory gets lost in the back of your head. Isn’t this what the psychoanalyzers are for? You lie down on a couch, you talk about when you were a baby and you got toilet trained, and suddenly you remember what you forgot.” She turned back to me. “You didn’t see anything about this murderer when he grabbed hold of you. So did you hear anything? Anything he said, even the way he sounded when he breathed?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “And the way he smelled?”

  “I didn’t notice anything. I suppose he smelled no different from the way Harold usually smelled.”

  “When he grabbed hold of you, was there something peculiar about how it felt?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I remember noticing afterwards that my neck wasn’t sore— Wait a second!”

  The old lady was beaming again. “You figured it out finally, am I right?”

  “The way he held me when he grabbed hold of me! In rehearsals he always threw his right arm around my neck. He got carried away sometimes, he held on too tight, my neck was usually a little sore afterward. But last night he didn’t touch my neck. He put his right arm over my chest, his right hand flat against it. But what’s this supposed to prove? That last night’s Third Murderer wasn’t Harold Hapgood, because he grabbed me differently than Harold did?”

  The old lady frowned and shook her head. “This I have to think about a little more. Right now I couldn’t tell you what this proves.”

  As soon as she said this, I found myself feeling a twitch of disappointment. Like I really expected her to come up with the answers, to dig deeper into the truth than other people could.

  But why didn’t I expect this from Dave? Plenty of times, since I started working for him, I’d seen him unravel cases that baffled everybody else, I’d heard him come out with amazing logical deductions. So why was I turning to his mother now, instead of him?

  “Damn it, it’s after nine, we’re late for work already!” Dave’s voice cut sharply into my thoughts. “This conversation is a waste of time anyway, Mom. The police haven’t arrested anybody, the public defender hasn’t got a client, so Roger and I don’t have any reason to think about this case.”

  He had his hand on my arm, and I barely had time to thank his mother for the breakfast before he hustled me out the front door.

  5

  Dave’s Narrative

  Driving down to my office, I thought about my relationship with Mom. Plenty of love and affection, but with a strong lacing of exasperation. I mean, there always came a time when we’d use the umbilical cord to play tug-of-war. No sooner do I decide, for instance, that the Meyer kid has to start seeing less of her than she not only invites him for dinner, she invites him for breakfast too.

  What’s more, if she’d planned it deliberately, could she have done a better job of letting him in on exactly what I didn’t want him to be let in on? No wonder that puzzled look came onto his face halfway through the omelet and was still there when I finally got him out of the house!

  All right, there was only one thing to do. I’d make a date to meet Mom for lunch today, and I’d explain to her how important it was that a certain distance be maintained between a man in a position of authority and the people working under him.

  I’d explain it, but how would she take it? This question almost made me run a red light. I could hear the tone of Mom’s voice, so soft and gentle and full of scorn. Her talent for making me feel like a naughty little kid was as impressive as ever, even after all these years. For the sake of my irrational childish vanity, was she going to deprive herself of the pleasure of shoveling food into this sweet earnest kid, fixing him up with nice Jewish girls, administering chicken soup when he had a cold? For her it was just like having a son in his early twenties again, instead of a grouchy old widower in his fifties who insisted on leading his own life and resisted all her matrimonial schemes.

  My office is located in the new courthouse in downtown Mesa Grande. A magnificent-looking structure if your taste goes to mongrels: half ancient Greece, with columns and a portico, and half Spanish-pueblo, with pink adobe and a bell tower. The magnificence extends to the courtrooms, judges’ chambers and jury rooms on the first and second floors, and to the suite of rooms occupied by the district attorney and his minions on the third floor; but the architects and decorators ran out of magnificence by the time they got to the public defender’s quarters on the fourth floor.

  We’re shoved into the back, with a spectacular view of the dark alley next to the side wall of the county jail. Moving through a frosted-glass door, our clients find themselves in a tiny waiting room with a couple of hard benches. This connects to a slightly larger room for Ann Swenson and to a cubbyhole that my self-respect requires me to call “my office.” Just about enough space in it for my desk, my chair on one side of it, and a second chair on the other side of it. This second chair is where Roger spends much of his time when he isn’t off doing legwork for me and Ann. Having increased the public defender’s budget so I could hire an assistant, the City Council hasn’t seen fit to provide anywhere for him to work.

  We both reached the waiting room that morning within a few seconds of each other, but there was no chance for me to give Roger his orders for the day. Half a dozen cases were in various stages of investigation, there was plenty for him to do, but Mabel Gibson, who manned the wait
ing-room reception desk, forestalled all that. “Oh my goodness,” she cried, “you’re twenty minutes late, and she’s been asking for you since nine!”

  Mabel’s children are all grown and her husband is a large, unemotional man, like a solid brick wall. With nobody to fuss over at home anymore, she does her fussing over the three of us.

  We went into Ann’s office and found a visitor with her, sitting in the chair across from her desk. It was Bernie Michaels, the chiropractor, who had played King Duncan in last night’s Macbeth. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man whose grizzly beard and solemn blue eyes gave him a look of great dignity. With the Mesa Grande Art Players he specialized in kings, business executives, kindly old doctors, and, in one production, Abraham Lincoln.

  He scrambled to his feet and shook my hand and Roger’s warmly. He was sweating a little around his whiskers.

  “You both know Mr. Michaels, I see,” Ann said, cool and businesslike as always, without a word about our being late. “So we can get straight to the matter at hand. The murder at the theatre last night. The police have arrested Mr. Michaels’s ex-wife.”

  “It isn’t true,” Bernie said. “Sally wouldn’t ever do such a thing. I know she gets excited, maybe she says things she doesn’t really mean. But that’s only because she’s got this—this dramatic side to her. She always wanted to be a stage actress, and she kind of likes to play parts.”

  Ann cut in, “Mrs. Michaels has asked us to handle her defense. She sent Mr. Michaels to us for that purpose.”

  “I guess that sounds kind of funny,” Bernie said. “On account of Sally and me being divorced. But you have to know, there was never any bitterness, we’ve gone on being friends.”

  I didn’t comment. I hadn’t been in town yet at the time of the divorce, but I’d heard the rumors. As the gossip-mongers told it, very few men of Sally’s acquaintance, if they were over sixteen and more or less presentable, hadn’t found their way to her bed.

  “What makes them think she did it?” I said.