Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “Unless our client wore her own raincoat, Mom,” Dave said. “Unless she’s guilty to begin with.”

  “This,” said the old lady, “isn’t a possibility.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “From everything you told me about her so far. What is it in life that means more to her than anything else? Playing big parts in front of audiences, am I right?” If she killed this Martin Osborn, what was she doing except closing down the play and giving up her chance to act Lady Macbeth? And halfway through yet, before she gets to do the scene where she’s sleepwalking! This is the scene that plenty actresses would die happy they should only be asked to act it in public. Believe me, Davie, if your client wanted to kill Martin Osborn, she’d wait till the last night of the play.”

  She turned back to me now. “You did good questioning the witnesses. It’s too bad you couldn’t do just as good questioning yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Certainly you know. Now it’s time you should know that you know. Do me a favor, all right? Ask yourself one question—only don’t just answer it right away, off your head, but give it a little bit thought.”

  “Sure I will. What is it?”

  “This morning you remembered how the murderer grabbed you from behind and put his hand on your chest. So can you push a little harder? Did you see something else, only it’s gone to sleep in the back of your mind?”

  I shut my eyes and tried to think back to that moment. It was hard. It had all happened so fast, and I had been standing onstage in front of two hundred people, worrying about screwing up my lines.

  “I wish there was something,” I said. “But I just can’t—”

  “Take it piece by piece, maybe it’ll wake up,” she said. “When I’m giving a dinner party, and I’m trying to remember at the last minute if there’s something I forgot, what I do is I take it piece by piece. First I see myself meeting people at the door. It’s a cold night maybe, they’ll have hats and coats; have I got enough places to hang them all up? Then I see them coming into the living room; I’m offering them drinks and appetizings. Did I pick up the crackers for the chopped liver? Have I got enough chairs for them to sit in? You see what I mean?”

  “Yes I do. I’ll try it.”

  I shut my eyes again and went through it piece by piece. Third Murderer tiptoeing up behind me. The sound of soft breathing. The hands grabbing me. First the left hand around my waist, my arms being crushed to my sides. Then the right against my chest. High up, applying pressure. My eyes blinking down, a quick flash of that hand on my chest. A couple of fingers. Curling.

  But that was it. Nothing more would come to me. I shook my head, furious with myself. “I’m sorry. Something’s kicking around in there—”

  “All right, all right,” the old lady pushed in. “You did good. Now forget about it.”

  Dave broke in at this. “Wait a second, Mom, if he’s getting close—”

  “Don’t be so impatient, Davie. Just like when you were a little boy.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “There’s a time to concentrate, and there’s a time to put the problem out of your mind and think about other things. Let it simmer on the back of the stove for a while.”

  I could see Dave doing some simmering of his own, but he didn’t raise any objections.

  7

  Dave’s Narrative

  I never had such a frustrating lunch. I was alone with Mom for about fifteen minutes, during which time I told her about my morning with the assistant DA and with Sally Michaels. Then, just as I was getting up the nerve to read her the riot act about the way she was treating Roger, along comes the kid himself. And it turns out Mom invited him! As if she’d known all along what I wanted to say to her, and she was making sure I couldn’t say it.

  Right after lunch, before I could send Roger off to question those two actors and maybe have a few minutes alone with Mom, she announced that she had shopping to do, slid into her little Japanese car, and went tootling off. Pulling away from the curb a little too fast, as usual, with a screeching of gears and tires. And the insurance companies raise their rates for teenagers!

  So Roger headed to a phone booth, to find out if Greenwald and Imperio, the two actors who played First and Second Murderer, were home and able to see him. And I headed east to drop in on Harold Hapgood at his insurance agency. I didn’t call up first. I decided I’d have better luck if I took him by surprise.

  My destination was one of the malls that have been springing up to the east over the last ten years, since Mesa Grande started its big spurt of growth. (Nothing can spring up to the west, because the Rocky Mountains are standing in the way; our local real estate interests would love to figure out how to raze them, but so far they haven’t been able to swing it.) Each mall is surrounded by a collection of identical cracker-barrel houses, and each collection has its own fancy name, Buckingham Acres or Hidalgo Towers or Chateau des Alpes. It’s amazing how out here in the West, where people pride themselves on being plain down-to-earth Americans and look down their noses on those decadent foreigners, nothing sells a piece of dry rocky real estate better than giving it an old aristocratic European name.

  Harold Hapgood’s insurance agency was in a small building next to the Mall des Alpes. He lived in an apartment on the second floor, above his office. A frosted-glass door had the words “Hapgood and Hillary, Insurance” painted neatly on it. In the outer room, which didn’t seem to be a waiting room but an office in its own right, a short, skinny, pasty-faced man, probably in his forties, with a long nose and bloodshot eyes, sat behind a desk; next to the desk was a wheelchair. I had done a little research on Hapgood and his partner, Theodore Hillary, Jr.—I have a valuable friend who works in the morgue at The Republican-American—and I remembered that there had been some kind of an auto accident a few years back and Hillary had lost the use of his legs.

  I introduced myself. This usually produces a look of surprise and sometimes even anxiety on people’s faces; not too many people can take the unannounced visit of a detective in their stride. But Hillary didn’t even bat an eyelash. He gave a dry grating cough and said, “Harold’s busy with a client. If you don’t have time to wait, he’ll call your office and set up an appointment.”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world,” I said, settling myself into a chair.

  “Well, I don’t.” The words seemed to come spitting out of him. “This happens to be where I work. If you don’t want to buy any insurance, I’d appreciate it if you left your number and went on your way.”

  This reception was pretty much what I had expected. Hillary—according to my friend at the newspaper morgue—came from an old Mesa Grande family (third generation is old in this neck of the woods) and had been brought up with money. Most of it had been taken away from him by his older, more respectable relatives once they became aware of his “life-style”: that’s the word people use here to label things they don’t want to sully their lips with by describing more specifically. Since then Hillary had gone into the insurance business, buying this office space and the living quarters above it. Ten years ago he had taken in twenty-two-year-old Harold Hapgood as his partner, on the second floor as well as the first. But breeding shows, in spite of everything: Hillary still talked to the hoi polloi in the same abrupt plantation-owner manner he had been brought up to.

  Before he and I could fight it out any further, a door at the other side of the room opened, and Hapgood appeared. He was blinking, looking bewildered and a little flustered: in other words, his normal look. “What’s going on?”

  “I told this ‘gentleman’”—it was easy to hear the quotation marks that Hillary put around the word—“we’re tied up. You go back to work, Harold, I’m quite capable of dealing with this.”

  “Cut it out, Teddy, the man’s a police officer.” Hapgood turned his blink in my direction. “I’ll be happy to talk to you. Of course I will.”

  I followed Hapgood into his office, w
hich was just as small as Hillary’s. The desk and chairs looked as if they had been picked up at one of the secondhand furniture close-out sales that were held in town regularly. The walls were unadorned, except for a framed insurance license and a photograph of a much younger Hapgood and Hillary, slightly out of focus, standing side by side. Hapgood smiling a little vaguely, Hillary scowling angrily.

  “I appreciate your giving me the time, Mr. Hapgood,” I said, pursuing my usual strategy: very respectful at the beginning, so they won’t be ready for it when the gloves come off later on. “I’ll be as quick as I possibly can. In case you haven’t heard, the police arrested Sally Michaels for the murder of Martin Osborn.”

  “Yes, I had heard.” Hapgood gave a quick little nod, and licked his lips nervously.

  “Mrs. Michaels has asked the public defender to handle her case, and as the chief investigator for the public defender’s office, it’s my job to talk to everybody who might have any information about the crime.”

  “And who says he has to talk to you?” These words came snapping out from the other room.

  The door was still open. Hapgood sighed, got to his feet, and crossed the room to shut the door.

  “You’d better let me sit in on this, Harold! You’ll be grateful for a witness—”

  “You do understand, Mr. Hillary,” I said, “the public defender has the same legal status as the district attorney. Citizens have the same obligation to answer our questions—”

  “I know all about that. But there’s no law says a citizen has to let you browbeat him and claim afterward that he said things he didn’t really say.”

  “Really, Teddy,” Hapgood put in, “I’m sure it’s all right—”

  “You’re not sure of anything. That’s why I’m around. Or God knows what would’ve happened to you all these years!”

  Hapgood shut the door gently and returned to his desk. He gave me an apologetic half-grin. “If you’ll tell me how I can help you.”

  “I know you’ve been all over this with the assistant DA,” I said, “but I want you to describe exactly what happened to you last night. When you were attacked and locked in the broom closet.”

  “It was terrible, awful,” he said, “I was walking along the corridor in the basement, on the way to the stairs—”

  “What were you doing in the basement?”

  “I’d been in my dressing room. Changing into my costume for the murder scene. I was playing the role of Third Murderer. He’s a very mysterious figure. He isn’t in the earlier scene, when Macbeth hires the first two murderers to kill Banquo, and nobody knows why Shakespeare put him into the later scene. One theory has it that the Third Murderer is actually Macbeth himself, in disguise. Mr. Osborn wasn’t taking that view in the present production, of course—”

  “For God’s sake, Harold,” came the voice from the other side of the door, “stick to the point! You’ll keep this man here forever!”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Hapgood,” I said. “I’ve always been interested in Shakespeare. And you seem to know a good deal about him.”

  A small smile flickered on Hapgood’s face. “Well, I’m a great reader, that’s what it is actually. Especially of dramatic literature. The theatre has always been one of my greatest … One gets so little opportunity in a community like this.…”

  “Stagestruck, from childhood!” A contemptuous hoot came from the other side of the door. “Tell him about your idiotic daydreams, Harold! He still has them, believe it or not! Childish fantasies about running off to New York or Hollywood, and becoming an actor. An actor! With his height and looks? How much demand can there be in the movies for midgets? They already made the Wizard of Oz! You can talk till you’re blue in the face, Harold, but you’ll never get me to believe the big shots out there have lost their minds!”

  Hapgood’s face was red rather than blue. I spoke up fast. “Why were you changing into your costume such a short time before you had to go onstage?”

  “Oh, Third Murderer isn’t my only part in the play.” Hapgood’s lisp, hardly evident at all up to now, was suddenly more obvious. A sign of how agitated Hillary had made him, I guessed. “I was onstage only ten minutes earlier, as the Old Man who tells the audience about the sinister birds that have been flying all over the kingdom since King Duncan’s death. I had to wear a headdress and an Indian blanket for that part. The Old Man is supposed to be an Indian medicine man, that was Marty Osborn’s concept. And then I had very little time to get back to the dressing room and put on my mask and my poncho for the Third Murderer.”

  “Did anyone see you in the dressing room while you were making this change?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I do share the dressing room with several other people, those of us who have several small parts in the play. The first two murderers and the Meyer boy, who plays Banquo’s son Fleance. But nobody came into the dressing room while I was changing into my Third Murderer costume. It took me only a few minutes, and then I started down the hallway to the stairs that lead up to the stage level. And then—well, I’m very confused as to just what happened then. That is, it was quite awful, like a sudden explosion inside my head—”

  “You didn’t hear anything or see anything before this explosion?”

  “I just can’t remember. There was no warning, I’m sure of that. No sounds behind me, no flash of movement or anything like that.”

  “Do you have any idea where the person who hit you came from?”

  “I can’t be sure. Maybe from one of the rooms along the hallway.”

  “Those are the other dressing rooms, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. And the broom closet itself.”

  “And you didn’t notice, as you walked down the corridor before you were attacked, if any of those doors was open? Or even slightly ajar?”

  “One of them might’ve been open, but it didn’t register on my mind. To tell you the truth, I get so nervous before I go onstage, all I could think about was my opening line, which is absurd, because it happens to be only one word. The word is ‘Macbeth.’”

  “All right, so what happened after the explosion?”

  “I have no idea. The blow knocked me out, I suppose. I was struck just below my left ear; it hasn’t left much of a bruise, though it still aches quite a bit. Well, the next thing I’m sure of I was on the floor, propped up against a wall. Feeling quite horrible. And then, bit by bit, I became aware of this damp musty smell. Then I realized where I must be, though I didn’t see any brooms, which struck me as peculiar. Later on, of course, I found out that my attacker had thrown the brooms into the corridor, to make room for me, I suppose. Well, after a few minutes, I got to my feet. It wasn’t easy, I was terribly dizzy at first, quite close to throwing up, but I managed to try the door and found I was locked in. So I hammered on it with my fists for a while and called out for help, despairing that anybody would come. But pretty soon the stage manager opened the door, and—you were there too, weren’t you?”

  I told him I was, so he didn’t have to go on with what he did next. “And what about your costume?” I said. “Were you still wearing it?”

  “It took me a while to notice that. Whoever put me in the closet hadn’t taken much from me. The black mask was gone, but I was still wearing my poncho. I still had the dagger too.”

  “What dagger?”

  “The one I’m supposed to stab Banquo with. It’s long, with a heavy gold hilt, and the blade curves a little. Very ugly-looking. It’s made of wood and papier-mâché, of course. Completely harmless.”

  I looked at him hard for a moment, and suddenly his voice rose to a squeak. “I’ve told you the truth, I swear to God! The police know I’m not lying, they told me so when they talked to me this morning. Jeff and Danny say it wasn’t me on the stage. They say the murderer was wearing Sally’s raincoat, not my poncho.”

  “You could’ve stolen the raincoat from her dressing room and put it back in there before you locked yourself in the broom closet.”

 
“I didn’t, I didn’t! And what about my motive? Why would I kill Martin Osborn?”

  “He insulted everybody in the cast at one time or another. Maybe he insulted you once too often.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” A kind of bitter inward-turning titter came out of Hapgood. “Look at me, will you. What kind of person do you think I am? My parents were both doctors in this town, I went to high school in this town—can you imagine what my childhood must’ve been like? Once people figured it out about me … Don’t you think I’ve heard plenty of insults in my life? Don’t you think I’ve had to swallow insults for as long as I can remember? You’ve seen Teddy. Can you imagine what it is to live with—” He broke off, raising his hands in the air. “Oh, what’s the use? In my whole life nobody’s ever given me the benefit of the doubt, so why should I expect you to be any different? I’ll say it once more, and then I’ll keep quiet and you can believe whatever you want to believe. I didn’t kill Marty Osborn. His getting killed is the worst thing that could’ve happened to me just now.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because of the play. I’m doing really well in the play. I’ve done a lot of things with the Players before, but this is the first time—as the Old Man and the Third Murderer, and later on as Old Siward—I’ve really had a chance to make an impression. I mean, I’m doing those parts really well. Allan Franz himself told me, in person, what excellent work I was doing. And now, with Osborn getting killed, the play will be canceled, and nobody will ever see my work!”

  His face was red and scrunched up. I was afraid he was going to cry.

  But he didn’t. Instead he looked up at me suddenly, with a sharp little gleam in his eyes. “You don’t care about the truth, do you? Anything to get your client off. After all, I’m not the one who had a fight with Martin Osborn and threatened to kill him!”

  “You’re saying that’s what Sally Michaels did?”

  “I heard her myself, didn’t I? Just a few days ago. She and Martin were in her dressing room, and I was in mine just a little ways down, and they were talking so loud I could hear every word. Martin was telling Sally he didn’t like the way she was doing the sleepwalking scene. ‘Macbeth is a play about royalty,’ he said. ‘Lady Macbeth is a queen, she’s glorious, she’s larger than life. In her sleep she’s tormented by titanic bloodcurdling feelings of guilt over the crime she and Macbeth have committed. You’re playing the scene as if she’s a suburban housewife who’s dissatisfied with the bathroom soap because it won’t wash the grease stains off her hands.’