by James Yaffe
“Who’s been telling lies about Sally?” Bernie put in. “Just tell me who!”
But Ann just kept her eyes on Sally. And finally she gave a grunt and got to her feet, and we left the house.
* * *
It was after five, no point going back to the office. Ann told Roger and me to have a restful Sunday and went off in her car. Roger said good night too. The look on his face was positively pitiful. A small animal that somebody had kicked, and he was coming back for more because he thought he deserved it.
“Listen, I’m going to my mother’s for dinner,” I said. “She’d love it if you came too.”
“But she isn’t expecting—”
“She’ll have plenty of food, believe me. Today’s the Sabbath, so she did all her shopping for the week yesterday. And she’s always got twice as much as she and I can possibly eat.”
He brightened up a little. So I got into my car, and he followed me in his. On the way I asked myself why the hell I was doing this. After the long lecture I’d given to Mom about how she should stop paying so much attention to this kid!
When she opened the door to us and I muttered my explanation, I was expecting a certain look to appear on her face. That look that gave new meaning to the word “ironic.”
It didn’t appear. She smiled and hugged us both, and assured us, as she led us into the living room, that there was enough pot roast to fill up half a dozen growing boys.
During the pot roast, she asked offhandedly how our investigation of Osborn’s murder was going. I brought her up to date, fully expecting her to hammer out two or three brilliant deductions that I hadn’t begun to think of and to issue two or three orders as to what steps I was to take next. But instead, when I got to the end of my report, she blinked her eyes and looked completely bewildered.
“What a mishmash it sounds like,” she said. “The more you find out, the more it looks like you’ve got a client that could spend the rest of her life in jail. Believe me, Davie, for a million dollars I wouldn’t want your job. Such complicated thinking you have to do, so many facts and ideas you have to keep sorting out in your head. Only to think about it makes me dizzy!”
I swallowed a piece of pot roast the wrong way and coughed for a while. Mom as the poor helpless female who couldn’t keep her balance in the face of complicated problems was a concept I had trouble digesting. Then I realized what she was doing. She was following through on our talk yesterday, she was protecting my dignity and self-respect in front of my assistant. For a moment I felt like going over to her and hugging her.
“So I’ve got an extra-special dessert tonight,” Mom was saying, “on account of it’s the Sabbath. Mrs. Gilhooly from down the street just gave me her recipe for Black Forest cake. It’s about time I learned how to cook some of the native dishes out here. If you’re in Rome, you should eat what the Romans eat. Naturally I added a little more sour cream, and also some chopped walnuts—”
We finished dinner and helped Mom with the dishes, and suddenly the phone rang. It was for me.
The voice was hoarse and hurried, and spoke in a whisper. I couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman. It said my name, and when I agreed to my identity it said, “I’ve got information, vital information.”
“How did you know I’d be at this number?”
With a touch of impatience, the voice said, “You put it on your answering machine.” The voice was right. When I went to Mom’s for the evening, I always left her number on my machine. “Do you want this information or not?”
“About what?”
“The Osborn murder, of course. I could always change my mind and give my information to the police.”
“All right, I’m listening.”
“I won’t give it to you. To your assistant. Young Roger Meyer. He’s the only one I’ll talk to.”
“Is there any reason—”
“I trust him. I won’t argue with you about it. You can contact him, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“You tell him this. I’ll be at the theatre at eight tonight. The Ramon Novarro Theatre, eight sharp. That’s curtain time. Tell him to be there.”
“In front of the theatre?”
“In the theatre. I’ll meet him on the stage. Don’t tell me he hasn’t got a key, because I know everybody in the Macbeth cast was given one. And he’s to come alone! If you’re with him, if anybody’s with him, you won’t get a thing out of me!”
I heard the phone ringing up at the other end.
I waited a few seconds, thinking things over. Anonymous calls are usually a waste. They come from nuts, they don’t lead to a damn thing. But once in a dozen times maybe, they’re not a waste, you actually learn something from them. Which means you have to check them all out, regardless of the odds. Even if they sometimes lead to real trouble, real danger.
So far, since Roger came to work for me, it hadn’t happened, but I guess I knew all along that I’d have to face it eventually. Police work is mostly tramping from place to place, talking to people, writing endless reports. But occasionally somebody shoots at you, and somebody even gets killed.
I had told all of this to Roger when I hired him. It was nothing for me to feel guilty about.
So I turned to him now and told him about the call. And he looked at his watch and said, “I’ve only got twenty minutes.”
Meanwhile, neither of us was looking at Mom.
We all went to the front door, and Roger and I thanked Mom for the delicious dinner.
Her answer was “I’ll be home all night. There’s a play on television, about this girl that lost both her legs but she still won the Olympics skiing championship. So give me a call. It don’t matter how late, I’m not sleeping so much these days anyway.”
Her expression couldn’t have been calmer and more cheerful. In a murder case full of actors, Mom was completely at home.
12
Roger’s Narrative
“I’ll follow you down in my car,” Dave said, after his mother shut the front door.
“You can’t do that, can you? This character wants me to be alone. He won’t talk to me if you’re with me.”
“Who’s going to be with you? I’ll park around the corner, and I’ll stand across the street. In case you don’t come out again in a reasonable amount of time.”
“That’s taking too much of a chance. Suppose he spots you?”
“How’s he going to spot me? You think you’re working for an amateur?” He hesitated, then he said, “You’ve got your gun, I suppose?”
I didn’t know one end of a gun from the other when I came to work for Dave last summer. In the family and the world I come from, guns belong to Mafia types from The Godfather or to those Mexican bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, never to real human beings. The biggest shock I got when I first came to Mesa Grande was from seeing the inordinate number of gun stores in the downtown shopping section. Dave arranged for me to take a quick course at the local police training school, but I didn’t enjoy it very much, and I never strapped that uncomfortable holster around my waist unless I had specific instructions to do so.
“No, I don’t actually have it with me,” I said. “It never occurred to me I’d be working tonight.”
“I’d give you mine, only I don’t happen to be carrying it tonight either.” He gave a sigh. “Okay, you probably won’t need it. This way, at least, there’s no danger you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.”
He took another pause, and then he said, “You don’t do anything stupid, you understand? You don’t try to show off what a big hero you are. You’re not Bogart, and you’re not trying to bring in the Maltese Falcon.”
He sounded as if he was actually worried about me. It gave me a very nice feeling. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Maltese Falcon was a thing, not a fugitive.
Driving downtown, I was conscious all the time of the lights from his car shining through my rear window. Then I turned onto the street where the theatre is, and
those lights couldn’t be seen anymore. I parked the car near the theatre and started toward the little glass door with the small sign above it. As I walked, I wondered why I had never realized before how dark and deserted this street was.
I took out my key to the theatre entrance and put it in the lock, and then I realized I didn’t need it. The door was unlocked already. My whispering host must have got here before me.
I went through the door and into the empty lobby.
* * *
The lobby, really just a hallway, wasn’t completely dark. Some light was seeping through from somewhere, enough so I could see the shapes of tables and chairs and the two large doors leading into the auditorium.
I went to the nearest of these doors, and as soon as I opened it I saw where the light was coming from. Across the empty auditorium, with its rows of deserted seats, was the stage. The curtain was open, and a single light bulb was hanging about a third of the way down from the ceiling. It was turned on, a large splash of yellow cutting through the black. Even from the back of the auditorium, it hurt my eyes to stare at that bulb.
Then I saw that the stage wasn’t empty. Underneath the bulb was an armless wooden chair, the kind the backstage area was full of. And somebody was sitting in that chair.
I could feel my heart giving a little jump. Not that I was actually scared. As I had been telling myself ever since that phone call came, this was strictly a routine assignment. We had dealt with anonymous informers before, and mostly they were lame pathetic types more likely to feel fear than to arouse it. This informer had asked to talk to me personally, but that didn’t mean he was planning to hurt me. Nobody could possibly be out to hurt me. I’m a nice guy, I never did anybody any harm in my life. Getting beaten up or killed was what happened in movies.
“Is that you, Roger?” A voice came across the auditorium at me, high and quavery, but still carrying perfectly. I recognized the slight lisp immediately.
I don’t mind saying I felt a little rush of relief. If there was anybody in the world nobody had to be afraid of, it was poor inoffensive ineffectual Harold Hapgood.
“Harold, what are you doing here? Are you the one that made that phone call?”
“Yes, that was me.” He was leaning forward in his chair, and as my eyes got used to the strange light I could see his hands squeezed together in his lap and the pale intense look on his face.
“You don’t have to stand back there,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you, for heaven’s sake. Come up here where we can talk.”
I started down the aisle to the stage. Harold got up suddenly and moved toward the wings. I thought for a second he had got cold feet and was going to beat it out of there, but all he did was reach into the area to the left, hidden from the front, and pull out another one of those wooden chairs. He placed it next to his on the stage, and when I got down the aisle he motioned for me to climb up and join him.
So I did, and for a few moments we sat next to each other, neither of us saying anything. A couple of easygoing rural types sitting on the front porch, enjoying the night air and the stars, with all the time in the world. Like one of those old Will Rogers movies.
Pretty soon I began to feel silly. “So what’s this all about, Harold?”
He gave a little start. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I guess my mind was wandering. I’ve been under such a strain.”
“What kind of strain?”
“The play, to begin with. Macbeth is such a— Oh my God, I said it, didn’t I? I said that name—inside the theatre!” He crossed himself quickly three times and mumbled something in a prayerful tone. Then he looked up at me a little sheepishly. “Where were we? Yes, the strain I’ve been under. I know I haven’t got the biggest parts in the play. But that doesn’t mean I’m not serious about them. I throw myself into them as if I was playing the leading role. There are no small parts, only—”
“Everybody knows how conscientious and hardworking you are,” I said.
“I certainly try. And it was truly gratifying to have somebody like Allan Franz, a real authority, tell me that he understood what I was trying to do. So if Lloyd is able to get the show started again—” He broke off, the excitement fading from his face. “I shouldn’t be talking this way, it’s terrible of me. How could I forget what’s happened? There’s been a murder, a fellow human being got killed. And the murderer actually attacked me; I might’ve been killed too!”
“Probably not, Harold. All he wanted was your mask, and to keep you from going on the stage.”
“But what if I had happened to turn around and see the murderer’s face? If she didn’t stop at killing Marty Osborn, why would she stop at killing me?”
“So you’ve decided Sally is the guilty party, have you?”
He moved to the edge of his chair and peered at me very hard. “I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve known Sally for such a long time. I mean, not socially or anything like that. I’ve heard the rumors about that sort of thing, but there’s certainly never been anything like that between Sally and me.”
“Why have you changed your mind about her, Harold? Why do you believe she’s guilty now?”
He wet his lips. “I remembered something, that’s why. Late this afternoon, while I was at my desk in the office, it suddenly came back to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner—”
“What did you remember?”
“When the murderer hit me over the head the other night, I told you I couldn’t see who it was. And that was true, I didn’t see anything. But what I remembered this afternoon is that I smelled something. Just before I blacked out, I got a strong whiff of perfume. And when I woke up in the broom closet, that same perfume was still in my nose. Magnolia Blossoms, Roger! The perfume Sally always uses.”
“You couldn’t be mistaken?” I said. “You only had a second or two to get a whiff, and a lot of perfumes have pretty much the same smell.”
“Not Sally’s brand. It’s terribly strong. If you get too close to her when she’s wearing it, you feel as if you’re drowning in the Old South.”
“All right, but why are you coming to the public defender with this? Why don’t you go to the police?”
He frowned a little. “I thought about doing that. That would be my duty as a citizen, I guess. But like I told you, I’ve known Sally a long time, I’d like to help her if I could. And Martin Osborn—he wasn’t a nice man, was he? The way he used to speak to me sometimes. And when all’s said and done, Sally and I are both artists, and we of the profession ought to stick together.”
“But why me, Harold? Why didn’t you bring this to the public defender directly? Or to Dave, my boss?”
He blinked, sort of bewildered. “I don’t know. I just felt I could say it all easier to you. Maybe it’s because we’re close to the same age. I mean, I’m still in my twenties. Almost. And Mrs. Swenson and your boss—don’t you get the feeling sometimes that you can’t really trust people that old?”
“Another thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are we here? Why didn’t you come to the courthouse to give me your information, or to my house, or ask me to your house or your office? I don’t see the point of meeting in this empty theatre.”
At this the look on his face was suddenly confused, with maybe a touch of fear mixed in. “This afternoon, when I remembered about the perfume, I wasn’t alone. Somebody was in my office with me, somebody had dropped in to discuss insurance problems with me. And then this memory came to me, and I blurted it out. Out loud. Just a couple of words, and then I realized who was in the room with me, so I shut up fast. But it seemed to me—what I blurted out might have made this person suspicious. So I didn’t think you and I ought to meet publicly. And my own place may not be safe anymore, and your house may be watched too.”
It all sounded pretty farfetched and melodramatic to me. I decided that Harold was acting and thinking pretty much like a teenager. Indulging in adolescent fantasies, making his dreary life dramatic. Y
ou couldn’t exactly blame him for that. Shut up for his whole life with Teddy Hillary and his wheelchair—
“Okay, Harold,” I said, as we both got to our feet. “I’ll pass this on to the public defender first thing in the morning. She’ll be in touch with you and tell you what to do next.” I held out my hand to him. “I’m grateful to you, believe me. Well, we shouldn’t be seen leaving here together, should we? So suppose you go first.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea.” He looked pleased that I was joining in on his game. He reached out to take my hand.
Our fingers touched, and it was as if the contact suddenly set off a switch somewhere. The bulb above our head went out. Absolute darkness exploded on us.
A second later the explosion wasn’t outside me. It was inside my head, turning me into a living fireworks display. And then a lot of blackness came and snuffed the fireworks out.…
* * *
I don’t know how long it was before I woke up again. The process was slow and painful. It involved a certain amount of gagging and coughing, which luckily didn’t lead to actually throwing up. At last, my eyes managed to pull themselves open, and I noticed that I was on the floor somewhere, in the dark. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could sure as hell smell something: it was the smell of smoke.
The end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca flashed into my mind. Judith Anderson, as Mrs. Danvers, standing at the window with the flames licking around her. And I couldn’t help remembering that Mrs. Danvers didn’t get out alive.
13
Dave’s Narrative
I parked my car on the side street around the corner from the theatre. Whoever the mystery caller was, he might be peeking out a window or hovering in a doorway to make sure Roger wasn’t bringing any company with him.
Then I got out of my car and walked to the end of the street where I had a good view of the entrance to the theatre. There was a street lamp on this corner, but it didn’t give out much light. Every year the local newspaper runs half a dozen letters from citizens complaining about the inadequacy of street lighting in Mesa Grande, demanding an end to penny-pinching with people’s safety, and every year the City Council goes on ignoring the problem.
