by James Yaffe
“Well, I don’t blame Sally for losing her temper. Martin could be very cutting and unkind. ‘How dare you say such a thing to me?’ Sally said. ‘I could kill you for that!’ Then she walked out of her dressing room, and there was nothing else for me to hear.”
“Was anyone with you when you overheard all this?”
“No, I was alone. That’s why I was able to concentrate on it so intently. That’s why it’s positively engraved in my memory, word for word.”
“Have you told the police about it?”
“Not yet. If you want to know, I was going to keep quiet about it so Sally wouldn’t be in any worse trouble than she is already. I don’t really believe she could kill anybody. I’m convinced she couldn’t. But now, with you coming in here and making accusations against me—” He broke off and covered his face with his hands. The sobs, which had threatened to burst out of him before, made their entrance now.
And sure enough, the door flew open and Hillary, planted in his wheelchair, came plowing into the room. “What are you doing to him? We’ll sue you! My cousin is a lawyer and he’ll be glad to handle our case—”
I got to my feet and moved past Hillary to the door, careful to be completely calm and unperturbed. “Thank you, Mr. Hapgood,” I said. “Sorry to disturb you.”
“Never mind thank you!” Hillary swung the wheelchair around to point it at me, as if he expected to run me over with it. “I’m reporting you to your superiors! We’re taxpayers, we pay your salary—”
“By the way, Mr. Hillary,” I said, “where were you sitting at the theatre last night?”
“Me? I wasn’t there! I was at home, right upstairs, looking at television!”
“You didn’t go to Mr. Hapgood’s opening night?”
“You think I’m some kind of masochist? You think I deliberately watched him making a damn fool of himself, prancing around in front of strangers, pretending to be somebody he isn’t? Isn’t it bad enough he wastes his time on that idiocy? Now if you don’t get out of here right this minute—”
* * *
I called my office from a phone booth in the mall, and Mabel Gibson told me that Leland Grantley had just sent over a list for me. It contained the names and addresses of everybody connected with Macbeth who didn’t seem to have an alibi for the time of the murder.
I had her read the list to me over the phone, and I copied it down, which didn’t take long because there were only five names on it:
Lloyd Cunningham
Randolph Le Sage
Sally Michaels
Bernie Michaels
Laura Franz
Sally and Bernie I had talked to already, so I decided to move on to Le Sage.
His address sounded familiar to me—1210 East Jalapeno Avenue. After a moment I realized it was the same address where Martin Osborn had lived. I drove there and found one of the new condominiums, in Spanish style but with picture windows and sun porches, that were replacing the old residential houses in the downtown area.
I remember Roger telling me that Martin Osborn had bought this apartment shortly after coming to town last May. It hadn’t been cheap.
The front of the building had a sweeping gravel driveway and a long blue awning, like a New York Park Avenue apartment house. But there was no Park Avenue doorman. You went into the small vestibule and looked up whom you wanted to see on the callboard and pushed the button. One of the cards on the board had “Osborn” printed on it, and scrawled underneath in pencil was “Le Sage.”
I pressed the button, not knowing if I was going to get any response; once again I had thought it was a good idea to surprise him if I could. A few moments later Le Sage’s voice was on the intercom, asking me who I was, and then the vestibule door clicked open.
I was in a small lobby with one elevator and a potted plant. I took the elevator up to the sixth floor and found Le Sage waiting for me in his doorway. Over his suit he was wearing a bathrobe, purple and heavy, and an ascot scarf was wrapped around his neck up to his chin. Onstage he had looked tall, with a clean, hawklike profile and long white hair sweeping in waves over the back of his neck. In person he looked smaller, the profile was a little more ragged, and the white hair had streaks of dirty gray in it. He looked older too, at least into his late fifties.
“I know you, don’t I?” he said. He had thick whitish eyebrows and long lashes, and he blinked his eyes a lot. Some admiring theatre critic or girlfriend must have told him once that they were expressive.
I introduced myself again and reminded him that he may have seen me at the theatre last night. Then I started giving him my spiel about his obligation to answer my questions just like the district attorney’s. He cut me off with a friendly laugh. “Delighted to tell you anything I can, my dear fellow. I’ve been over this all several times with various official-looking types, but I never resent telling a story more than once. Gives me a chance to polish my delivery, you know. An Actor is never off the stage.”
I write “Actor” with a capital A because somehow that was the way he pronounced it.
“My only problem,” he went on, “is that I’m expecting a rather important phone call at any moment, so I do hope we can make this as fast as possible.”
He ushered me into the apartment, which had a large sunken living room, ornately decorated in a kind of up-to-date Art Deco style. Most of what was in it, from the slinky contour chairs to the hanging plants in the picture window, looked as if it had been delivered from the factory last week.
The exceptions to that were on the walls. Among the slick shiny reproductions of abstract expressionist paintings were several framed posters advertising various movies—grade-B horror movies from the fifties and sixties, as far as I could tell from a quick glance. Martin Osborn’s name appeared on them all, though never above the title.
“Sit down, sit down.” Le Sage waved me into one of the contour chairs—which, as always with that type of furniture, turned out to be a little too low and a little too hard for me. He himself dropped onto the sofa. The half-sofa, that is: it had one arm, and half a back, then it looked as if some machine had come along and chopped off the other half of it.
“It’s a lovely flat, isn’t it?” he said. “Poor Marty kindly offered to put me up here while I was doing the play. So much nicer than some cold impersonal hotel or motel.”
I agreed that it was a nice place. I kept my words to a minimum. Le Sage was a talker, and the best thing you can do with a talker is sit back, keep your mouth shut, and let him enjoy his favorite music, the sound of his own voice.
“A real plus factor,” Le Sage was going on, “is that Marty’s digs are on the top floor. High enough so you can enjoy an unobstructed view of the mountains. Rather spectacular, aren’t they? Though, of course, being a true New Yorker, I can take just so much of the great outdoors. Rodgers and Hammerstein did Oklahoma! so much better than God, don’t you agree?”
I didn’t bother to tell him I was a New Yorker myself.
“May I offer you a drink? A bit early for you, is it? Well, if you don’t mind—” He poured himself a heavy order of Scotch from a liquor cabinet hidden in the bookshelf, splashed a little club soda into it, then resumed his position on the sofa. “You probably want to ask me what I was doing while poor Marty was being slaughtered in Shakespearean fashion up on the stage. And did I see anything suspicious, did I notice the masked figure before or after, et cetera. That’s what the police, in and out of uniform, have been asking me. They swarmed over this place this morning, the ones who weren’t questioning me were poking around in Martin’s things, pulling clothes from his drawers and his closets. And they carted off several boxloads of papers from his desk. If there was anything among them useful to your client, it’s all been destroyed by now, I suppose. That was my practice anyway when I was a district attorney.”
I knew what he was saying, but I put a puzzled look on my face, because he obviously wanted me to.
He laughed when he saw it. “No, no, I don’t mea
n I was ever in the law-enforcement game professionally. I played a DA once in a movie. Dreadful old stinker; anybody who says they made them better in the old days hasn’t seen any of my masterpieces. I never hesitated to suppress evidence that would do the defense attorneys any good. Incidentally, I had the same low moral standard when I was a defense attorney.”
He laughed again, polished off his drink, and refilled his glass. “If I’m giving you the impression I drink too much, that’s quite right. Not on a regular basis, though. I don’t touch a drop while I’m working, it’s Martin’s demise that’s plunging me into the filthy habit today. If Macbeth ever gets started again, I’ll be dry as a bone. Well, all of us alcoholics say that, don’t we? We can stop anytime we like. That’s what I always said when I was an alcoholic. On stage and screen, that is. In real life I’m not one. I gladly refer you to my wife and teenage children back in New York.”
He took a quick look at his watch. “Twenty after already? That can’t be right. Is that what you have, my dear fellow?”
I told him my watch said twenty after.
“Damn!” It came out of him in a low mutter. “What’s keeping the bloody fellow? Said he’d call back in an hour!”
“You were talking about what you were doing at the time of the murder?” I said.
“Yes, certainly. In brief, my last scene, the one where I hire the two murderers to kill Banquo, is over about five minutes before Banquo’s murder. Rather nice little scene, actually. These creatures fill me with disgust and horror, but I know I have to use them, so I put on a certain smarmy ingratiating manner, a subtle form of flattering them. Very underplayed. Well, you were at the performance, weren’t you?”
He paused, his head cocked forward slightly. After a moment I got the idea. “Yes, that was a terrific scene,” I said.
He leaned back again. “So nice of you to say so. At any rate, I went down to my dressing room right after the scene to stretch out a bit. Thank God I’ve got one of my own, though a dreadful cramped airless little cell it is. I was there no more than ten minutes or so when I heard the disturbance in the hallway. Loud voices, people running about, general hysteria. I moved down the corridor and found a cluster of people ahead of me, milling about. Shortly afterward I learned of the tragedy.”
“Did anybody see you when you went to your dressing room?”
“I don’t believe so. I did knock briefly on the door of Sally’s dressing room before I went into my own. Wanted to have a word with her about a scene we played together earlier, the scene in which Lady Macbeth taunts Macbeth into killing Duncan. Sally left out an entire speech in that scene—‘Was the hope drunk wherein you dress’d yourself?’ ending with ‘the poor cat i’ the adage?’ Thus depriving me of one of my best lines, the one about doing ‘all that may become a man.’ She never left that speech out in any of the rehearsals, of course. Her idea was to make me look bad in front of an audience. So unprofessional. Well, at any rate, I never did get to talk to her about it, because she didn’t answer my knock.”
“You’re saying Mrs. Michaels wasn’t in her dressing room?”
“Nothing of the sort. All I’m saying is that she didn’t answer my knock.”
“Were you surprised when you heard about Osborn’s murder?”
“I don’t follow you exactly. I presume murder is always a surprise. And Marty was an old and valued colleague.”
“Does it surprise you that he should have been a murder victim? Was he the type of man to make enemies?”
“Most of us make enemies, you know. Especially in the Profession. Actors are high-strung people, we’re deeply ambitious and deeply insecure at the same time. An extremely explosive mixture.”
“Can you think of anyone who might’ve hated Osborn enough to kill him?”
“My dear fellow, I’m certainly not going to name names. Since I’ve absolutely no proof, that would be slander, wouldn’t it?”
“What about Mrs. Michaels? You know the police have arrested her?”
“Poor Sally. You’ll never convince me there’s a murderous bone in her body. All you have to do is look at the way she plays Lady Macbeth.”
“Anybody else in the company?”
“Well, Marty was the director, my dear man. While a play is in rehearsal, everybody hates the director. Especially the Actors. Natural enemies, you know. But I’ve never known of a case where this animosity led to actual homicide.”
“What about you, Mr. Le Sage? Did you think of Osborn as your natural enemy?”
“Of course I did. He was directing me. Which is as good as saying he was trying to control my inner being, violate my individual integrity, stamp on my talent. But that’s only at rehearsals. Off the stage he was one of my oldest and dearest chums. Would he have let me stay here with him in this apartment otherwise? Incidentally, it’s a vexing question in my mind how long I can stay here. Does Marty have any family, any official heirs, somebody who might be ordering me to push along to a hotel?”
“He doesn’t seem to, actually. How far back do the two of you go? Where did you first know each other?”
“Oh, we go back to Marty’s Hollywood days. I had my fling out there too, in the late fifties, when we were both a good deal younger. Marty and I were featured players together in several notably vile productions. We discovered—excuse me, do you have twenty of now? You do? Well—what was I saying? Yes, Marty and I discovered that we both yearned to return to the Theatre so we could feel artistically clean again. I did return, shortly afterward. At considerable financial sacrifice, as a matter of fact, but I’ve never regretted it. And Marty jumped off the Tinsel Town Treadmill through the expedient of marriage.”
“You knew his wife?”
“Never had the pleasure of meeting the woman. I gather she was a good deal older than himself, and a good deal richer. I’m afraid I pretty much lost touch during his married years. Only the annual exchange of Christmas cards, and an occasional meeting when he happened to come to New York. They lived in Cleveland, that was his wife’s native habitat, I believe. And unless I happened to be on tour, what would ever get me to Cleveland?”
He straightened up from his half-reclining position on the half-sofa and took another look at his watch. “I’m sorry, I’ll have to ask you to leave now. My damn agent in New York—it could be he told me to call him back in an hour—”
I stood up, but I didn’t start to the door. “Just one more question, Mr. Le Sage. How did you happen to come out here to act in Macbeth? You must have a pretty busy schedule back in New York.”
“I certainly do. But I’m between engagements at the moment. The show I was in just closed. Lovely little play, off Broadway, but the critics missed the whole point of it. And I won’t be resuming my work on the telly until a month or so from now. I’ve got a running role on this daily soap opera, ‘How Shall I Love Thee?’ Maybe you’ve seen me, I play the heroine’s doctor father, they write me in whenever the middle-aged housewives get bored at seeing nothing but teenage muscular development. So when Marty called me a few months ago with this urgent request, I couldn’t turn him down, could I? Required some doing with Actors’ Equity, of course, had to fill out several hundred forms. But old friendship does have its obligations.”
“And how long did you agree to be out here?”
“My contract says two months, rehearsals and performances included. Equity won’t allow me to be with the show any longer.”
“You’ll be going home earlier, though, if they close the play now?”
“Possibly. Though I do believe my contract specifies they have to pay me the full amount regardless of unforeseen circumstances. I’m not sure of that. I leave that sort of thing to my agent—”
The phone rang. Le Sage gave a little jump, and his face twitched, the biggest dent I had seen yet in his unflappability. “You will excuse me, won’t you?”
He waved me to the door. I could see the bind he was in: he didn’t want his caller to hang up, but he didn’t want me in the room
when he started talking. I decided to let him stew, you never know what might come out of that. So I just stood where I was.
Finally, after the third ring, he grabbed the phone. “Le Sage here! Hold on a moment, will you, Max!”
He put the receiver down and strode up to me. “You’ll have to leave!” he said between his teeth. “You can find the lift by yourself, can’t you?”
I wasn’t even out the door before he was back at the phone, snatching up the receiver.
I shut the door, but lingered outside long enough to hear his next words: “What do you mean, they’re not interested?”
* * *
Back in my car, I consulted Gantley’s list again. It might be a good idea, I decided, if I left Laurie Franz to Roger. That left Lloyd Cunningham for me. But it was three o’clock already, and I was losing steam. I told myself I’d get stale if I didn’t take a break.
The truth is, what was bothering me had nothing to do with Martin Osborn’s murder.
I went back to the office and called Mom’s number. If she wasn’t busy tonight, maybe I could drop in after dinner and have coffee with her, and finally tell her what was on my mind about her and Roger. But instead of Mom, I got her answering machine, with her voice announcing brightly, “This is me. So wait till the buzz and tell me who you are.”
Since coming to Mesa Grande, Mom had been moving into the second half of the twentieth century with a vengeance. In addition to driving a Japanese car, she had filled her house with all the newest electronic miracles: she had a VCR, a television with remote control, a little CD player, and she was beginning to make noises about how nice it would be to have a word processor.
