Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “But you don’t do any writing, Mom, except letters,” I said to her once.

  “And don’t I turn out plenty of those?” she answered me. “Believe me, there are professional novelists don’t produce as many words per year as me.”

  I told her answering machine that I had called, and just as I was hanging up I heard Mabel Gibson greeting Roger in the outer office.

  He had come to deliver his official report on his afternoon’s activities. He had managed to talk to Greenwald and Imperio, the first and second murderers. Their description of what had happened on the stage last night pretty much jibed with what Assistant DA Grantley had already told us. They had the definite impression that the Third Murderer was taller than he had been in rehearsals; they had found themselves looking into his eyes during their scene instead of looking down at him. Neither of them had found this particularly queer while the scene was going on. “I figured old Harold had gone out and bought himself a pair of elevator shoes,” said Greenwald, the high school student. “You know, he gets kind of self-conscious about his height, like a lot of short guys do.” Greenwald and Imperio laughed. They were both pretty short guys.

  I told Roger about Grantley’s list and was about to give him his orders for tomorrow when my phone rang.

  It was Mom, and of course she was delighted that I wanted to have coffee with her after dinner. “I’ll make some nice schnecken,” she said. “But it has to be early, because it’s the Sabbath and I’m going to services at the temple. And you’ll ask Roger, if he isn’t busy, maybe he’ll come too?”

  This was annoying. With Roger right there in the room with me, I couldn’t exactly tell her he was busy or that I wanted to talk to her in private. What’s more, in that tiny office of mine you can’t stand far away from anything or anybody, so the chances were he had heard her voice over the phone.

  He had. “Oh, that’s very nice of her,” he said. “Thank your mother for me, will you, Dave, but I’m afraid I’ve got a date tonight. I’m having dinner with Laurie—Laurie Franz.” A faint tinge of pink was spreading over his cheeks. He went on quickly, “She’s on your list of people who don’t have alibis, so by going out with her I’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone.”

  Which fit in perfectly with my plans.

  Ann returned from court with the news that the judge had set a reasonable bail for our client and she was out of jail. Her ex-husband Bernie had picked her up in his car and was taking her out to a restaurant to cheer her up.

  I fixed myself a quick snack that night in my house. I’m not much of a cook, but since Shirley’s death I’ve gotten pretty good at heating up frozen dinners. Then, around six-thirty, I drove to Mom’s place.

  * * *

  The delicious smell of schnecken and coffee enfolded me as soon as I opened the front door. It made me feel less nervous about the task ahead of me. How could a woman who was capable of concocting such ambrosia possibly slap me down with sarcasm?

  She made me comfortable in my favorite easy chair and settled into the sofa across from me. While I sipped and munched, I also talked. “The reason I wanted to come over tonight, Mom, I’ve got something important to tell you. About Roger.”

  A look of concern came over her face. “You said he’s doing a good job in the office. You said Ann Swenson is happy with him too. So is it something about his health maybe? He don’t eat the right food, that schlemiel—”

  “He’s still doing a good job, and his health is fine, as far as I know. The point is, I want him to go on doing a good job.”

  “So why shouldn’t he?”

  I took a deep breath and came out with it. How Roger, though he was certainly a nice kid, was also my assistant at the office. How it’s always a mistake to mix business with social pleasures. How you can’t run an operation efficiently if the respect of the people who are working under you is undermined.

  “Roger isn’t showing respect for you?” Mom said. “I’m surprised. He always talks polite to you whenever I’m with you together. Is he putting on a show for my benefit?”

  “No, I’ve got no complaints about his politeness. But the point is, he could change in the future if you keep on doing things, Mom, that could … that could … compromise my dignity.”

  “What things are you talking about?”

  “Well … you know the way, sometimes, I talk over my cases with you. And sometimes you make suggestions. Well, you’ve been doing that in front of the kid. Today at lunch, for instance, you asked all those questions about this Osborn killing. And you made some deductions about how somebody is trying to frame Sally Michaels. Well, don’t you see, Mom, how easily Roger could misunderstand what’s going on? He could come to the conclusion that … well, the point is, I don’t think you should see him as often as you’ve been doing. I think you should stop having him over for dinner. Except on special occasions.”

  And now, I thought, would come the explosion. Now, in her sharpest, most sarcastic voice, Mom would let me know what a baby I was.

  “Davie, Davie,” she said.

  Her voice was low; there was no sharpness or sarcasm in it at all. She came around the table and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said. “And I give you my solemn promise. I wouldn’t talk about your cases with you no more if Roger is in the room. You’re right, I enjoy his company. At my age, when people usually have some grandchildren to act foolish over … But you’re my son, my flesh and blood, so I’ll stop having him so much for dinner.”

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek, and then she was back in her seat at the other side of the table.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. If I had tried to speak up, I think I might have done something crazy, like shed a tear or something. Which is all right for men to do nowadays, so I’m told, but I was born a few years too early.

  Finally Mom broke the silence. “Of course,” she said, just as cheerfully as if the previous conversation hadn’t occurred, “Roger isn’t in the room with us now, so what did you find out this afternoon about the murder?”

  Naturally I told her everything. I repeated verbatim my talks with Harold Hapgood and Randolph Le Sage, Roger’s report of his interviews with the two murderers, Ann’s news about bail for Sally Michaels.

  “So who’s next on your list for the third degree?”

  “I keep telling you, Mom, I don’t give the third degree. Next on my list is Lloyd Cunningham. I’ll go over there first thing in the morning.”

  “You think he’s a good suspect, you could throw him to the police in Mrs. Michaels’s place?”

  “Don’t you think so, Mom? Osborn insulted Cunningham in front of the whole cast. Hurt his pride so badly that Cunningham lost his temper and gave up the part of Banquo. He not only must’ve been mad at Osborn, he must’ve resented the whole production.”

  “So he kills a man to make sure a play don’t go on?”

  “I know it doesn’t sound rational. But they’re a funny breed, actors. Their motives aren’t the same as ordinary people’s.”

  Mom was nodding her head, frowning. “This I agree with. The problem is, nobody tells you ahead of time who are the actors and who are the ordinary people.”

  “Meaning what, Mom?”

  “Meaning it’s like William Shakespeare said. You remember? ‘All the world is a stage, and all the men and women are playing around on it.’ This comes from a play of his called ‘The Way You Like It.’ This Cunningham, when you see him tomorrow morning, ask him a question for me, will you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “When he got into that fight the other day and quit the play, it’s because he got mad at what the big Hollywood director, Allan Franz, said about his performance. He was too nice and sympathetic, Franz said. He wasn’t making his character tough enough. Am I remembering this right?”

  “Yes, you are. But what’s the question you want me to ask Cunningham?”

  “Ask him if he agrees with the critici
sm. Was he making the character too nice and sympathetic?”

  “Why should that be important, Mom?” was what I felt like saying. But I knew she wouldn’t explain it to me, so I said, “I’ll make a note of it.”

  Then I finished my schnecken, and Mom asked me if I’d like to go to the Friday-night service with her. I told her I couldn’t because I had a date. “Naturally,” she said. “Your little secretary.”

  “A paralegal isn’t a secretary. It takes several years of training—”

  “You’ve got a good heart, Davie,” Mom said, patting me on the cheek. Then, as she showed me to the door, “Give my love to Roger. Let him know I’m very busy these days, with the High Holidays coming along, so that’s why I’m not inviting him for dinner for a while. I wouldn’t want he should think it’s anything personal.”

  So I left her house feeling guilty as hell. And what else is new?

  8

  Roger’s Narrative

  In Mesa Grande, when you go out on a date with a sophisticated girl who’s used to big-city excitement and culture, where do you take her anyway? Nightclubs and bars are strictly for the proletariat—country music and topless chorus girls wearing sombreros. Occasionally some kind of concert or poetry reading is going on at the college, but most of the time you’re pretty much limited to the movies.

  Not that that’s really a limit, in my opinion. What better way could a couple of civilized human beings find to pass the time?

  Laurie Franz was used to Mesa Grande, of course, she’d been going to the college for a year. Still, this was the first time I’d officially asked her out (I don’t count informal coffees after rehearsals), so I wanted to do it right. Luckily, the Richelieu Hotel has four or five restaurants, each one designed to appeal to a different taste and mood, and one of them, Le Cardinal Rouge, is French and elegant. I took Laurie there, and she picked her own live lobster from the tank (the most expensive item on the menu), and I ordered the broiled sole (the cheapest item on the menu).

  You may ask how I could afford to take her to Le Cardinal Rouge at all, on what the city pays me, and the answer is I couldn’t. But I had to consider the competition, all those rich men’s sons who were her fellow students at her expensive little liberal arts college in the Rockies, and all those swinging types who swarmed around her swimming pool back in Beverly Hills.

  During dinner we talked about a lot of things. Like her ambition to be an actress someday. “I mean, a good actress,” she said. “Not just a pretty face and a good body, like most of them in the movies these days. I want to learn my craft and really get in touch with my inner nature. I want to go to New York and study with one of the great teachers they’ve got there. Stella or Uta or Sanford. And then I’ll act on Broadway for a while, or off Broadway where you can do the whole repertoire—Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams. And then I’ll go into the movies, when I’m ready to make a real contribution. When I can raise the standards, like Meryl’s done.”

  She talked about the famous people who came to her house for dinner while she was growing up. “Daddy knew them all, they were his close friends, and they all made a fuss over me. They wanted him to put them in his movies, that’s why. Oh, it was horrible. The hypocrisy! If you want to see real hypocrisy, you have to go to Beverly Hills.”

  She talked about her mother, who had divorced her father when Laurie was just two years old. “She ran away with this actor, he was French, and they went to France together. That’s why Daddy got custody of me. She acted in a couple of French movies, and then she and her husband got killed in an auto accident. Daddy went through a terrible time when he heard the news. He hadn’t ever stopped loving her. He married twice after the divorce, but neither of those women lasted long; they moved into the house for a while and then they moved out again. I don’t remember my mother at all. I’ve seen pictures of her, but I just don’t remember.”

  She crinkled up her face, a mixture of sadness and puzzlement. I thought it was one of the most touching and at the same time sexiest expressions I’d ever seen. Carole Lombard, only up-to-date.

  She talked about the big house in Beverly Hills where her father still lived by himself (“though occasionally he’ll have a friend in, if you know what I mean”). She still called it home, though it was more like a palace really. Dozens of rooms, with a TV set, a telephone extension, and a bar built into the wall of almost every one of them. She talked about the high school she’d gone to, where practically everybody had a father or a mother or both in the movie business.

  She’d done a lot of acting in high school, she said, and also in her first year at college. She hoped to do even better parts with the Mesa Grande Players. “Do you know what Lloyd Cunningham told me? Only a few days after rehearsals began, he told me he liked my work so much he wants to cast me later this winter in the big production he’s directing. Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! But the most exciting thing about it is he wants me to play the mother. I’ve never played an older woman before, but Lloyd says he has complete confidence that my talent is up to it.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “You just bet I am! I told him definitely yes, and I’ll kill him if he backs out of that promise!”

  Then she talked about Mesa Grande College, and her mixed feelings about going there. “It’s an awfully nice place, I have a lot of good friends, and I like my classes pretty much. And of course I love the mountains. But on the other hand, I just don’t know if I should be going to college right now at all. I’d really like to quit school and go right to New York and get started with my career. But Daddy won’t let me quit. He says I’ll be a better actress in the long run if I get a good liberal arts education. Meryl did go to Vassar, after all. What do you think? You don’t think Daddy is right, do you?”

  What I thought was, she was nineteen years old and a baby, and I found her almost unbearably attractive, and what interested me about her least, I’m ashamed to say, was her future as an actress. What I said to her was, “I have to agree with your father, don’t I? If you went to New York, when would I ever get to see you again?”

  She laughed and blushed a little, and on the whole I decided that my first little step at intimacy had gone down very well. It would be worthwhile trying a few more steps.

  After dinner, I tried them. That is, I took her to the movies. But even being the movie nut that I am, I didn’t pay much attention to the screen. She didn’t either. I’m surprised they didn’t kick us out of the theatre.

  When the lights went up at the end of the main feature, we had to get out of there. Here in Mesa Grande the movie houses don’t run one show straight into the next one; there’s always a long break, and they send you out of the theatre so they can clear some of the candy wrappers off the floor.

  We were both in something of a state by then. Expectations had been aroused, and they demanded to be fulfilled pretty soon. She had an apartment, actually the whole first floor, of a nice little white clapboard house a few blocks from the campus. A lot of Mesa Grande students live in this kind of house, but mostly they share a floor with two or three other people; their allowances from their parents don’t usually stretch to paying for the whole thing by themselves.

  Laurie’s living room was furnished a lot better than most student apartments. The chairs and sofa were new and comfortable, and on the walls were framed posters of her father’s movies. A door led to a kitchen, and a second door, I supposed, led to the bedroom. Its furnishings must be new and comfortable too, I thought. But I didn’t get a chance to find out. We were too much in a hurry; the couch in her living room had to be good enough for us.

  What we did next has nothing to do with the murder, so I’ll skip to afterward, when we more or less got ourselves tidied up and she made coffee and brought it in from the kitchen.

  While we drank it, I turned the conversation to the murder. I played fair with Laurie, though. I told her I was involved in the investigation and she was one of the people I was supposed to questi
on.

  “You don’t suspect me, do you?” she said, smiling, but I couldn’t help noticing it was a pretty weak smile.

  “Of course not. But you were backstage at the time of the murder, so maybe you saw something that’ll turn out to be significant. Something you hardly even noticed; you’ve put it out of your mind because you don’t think it matters.”

  “If I’ve put it out of my mind, how am I going to tell you about it?”

  “Well, that’s my job. By asking you the right questions, and sort of leading up to it subtly, maybe I can jog your memory. It’s no big deal, actually, it’s what we’re trained to do.”

  Okay, I felt like a horse’s ass even while I was saying it.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have much to tell me. She had been a waiting woman at Macbeth’s court in one of the earlier scenes and had gone down afterward to the dressing room she shared with the Weird Sisters. Suddenly she had started to feel sick.

  “My big scene wasn’t till the second half,” she said, “but I was already beginning to get nervous about it. This always happens to me when I’m in a play. I feel nauseous and feverish, and I’m not all right again until I throw up. The same thing used to happen to Laurence Olivier.”

  “Did you throw up last night?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I did. I went to the ladies’ room. It’s in the basement across from my dressing room, I just barely made it in time. I went into a booth and shut the door, and afterward I sat there for quite a while, because I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t get sick again.”

  “How long was all this before the Banquo murder scene?”

  “Oh, it couldn’t have been too long before. Because on the way to the ladies’ room I saw Martin—Mr. Osborn—standing in the wings.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Just standing. Kind of stiff and erect, you know, the way you do when you’re getting ready to make an entrance. And you don’t want anybody to say anything to you because you’re trying to make sure you remember your first lines. And you were standing next to him.”