Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “So how did Sally resolve it?” I asked Mom.

  “Like my niece Estelle that was married to Horowitz, the foot doctor.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I never knew till this moment that you had any such niece.”

  “Who says so? Many times I talked to you about her. What a stingy man this husband of hers was! He wouldn’t give her anything outside her monthly allowance, no matter what emergencies came up or how nice she asked him. One day she asked him for a pair of new shoes that her allowance wouldn’t cover. You’d think, being a foot doctor, he’d want his wife should have decent footwear, it’s a matter from professional pride. But no, he told her she couldn’t have one penny more than usual.

  “And then, all of a sudden, like a voice from the heavens, it came to her how to handle him. She went down to the market for the weekly groceries, and she called up Horowitz at his office and told him a crook just snatched her purse, and she didn’t have any money for buying their food for the week. So Horowitz sent his office receptionist down with a credit card, and Estelle charged the groceries. And with the cash she still had in her pocket, because naturally there wasn’t any purse-snatcher, she went to the shoe store and bought the nice pair she wanted.”

  “Didn’t it spoil her pleasure, Mom, that she could never wear those nice shoes in her husband’s presence?”

  “Certainly not. She wore them all the time in his presence. He even asked her once if they were new, and she said, ‘These old things, I’ve had them for years, I’m thinking of giving them to the United Jewish Appeal.’ This is the whole point why I’m telling you the story. Women expect other women to notice what they’re wearing, but from men they don’t expect. On such subjects, in the opinion of women, men are blind, or even if they see something you can always talk them into thinking it’s not what they saw.

  “So you follow what Sally Michaels did? She decided she couldn’t wear the ring onstage; every woman in the audience would notice it. She also decided, if she didn’t wear it, Martin Osborn wouldn’t notice at all. Unless she waved her hand in his face and said, ‘Look, no ring!’ he’d be absolutely blind. Even if it occurred to him later, in the back of his mind, that he didn’t see this ring on her finger during the performance, straight in the eye she’d look him and tell him it was there.”

  “And that’s what you did, didn’t you, Sally?” I said—after going through Mom’s reasoning, but leaving out her niece Estelle and the foot doctor.

  Sally blushed, one of her “pretty” blushes, and giggled a little. “As a matter of fact, it is. I took the ring off as soon as I got to my dressing room on opening night. I wasn’t going to make a spectacle of myself in front of those old biddies I teach school with! I put it on my dressing table and didn’t think about it again until it was time to go home, after the murder and the police coming and all. When I finally remembered it, there it was, on my dressing table. And all through the first act Martin never said a word about it. I’m sure he never even noticed I wasn’t wearing it!”

  “The murderer stole it from Sally’s room early in the evening,” I said, “and wore it during the murder, making sure Roger saw it. Though it must’ve been a major shock that Roger didn’t mention the ring when he first told his story. Then the murderer slipped it back into Sally’s room after the murder. Along with her raincoat, which he dropped on the floor. But why do I keep on saying ‘the murderer’? You all know who it was by now, don’t you?”

  There was a very gratifying silence at this. Mom would have approved.

  “Suppose we run through all the things we know about this character,” I said. “Put the separate details together, and maybe we’ll see a face. First…”

  “First,” Mom had said, raising her index finger, a gesture I could remember from childhood, “why did this Third Murderer go on the stage with Sally Michaels’s raincoat and her ring?”

  “Because she was the perfect person to frame for this murder,” I said. “She has a good motive to kill Osborn. She isn’t so tall she couldn’t disguise herself to look like Harold Hapgood. Everybody knew she liked to be alone in her dressing room while the murder scene was happening on the stage. She’s a natural.”

  “Maybe so. But why does this murderer need such a natural? Stealing those things from her dressing room was a big risk, no? Somebody happens to see somebody who don’t belong there, and right away the murderer is in trouble. Wouldn’t it be easier, if you’re the murderer, you knock out Harold Hapgood, you take from him not only his mask but also his poncho, which he was supposed to wear on the stage anyway, so the other actors wouldn’t be surprised to see it on you? And after you finish the murder, you don’t have to go back to Sally Michaels’s dressing room and return her raincoat and her ring? An extra risk. Why bother with them in the first place? What does the murderer gain from this already?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” If Sally gets arrested for the crime, the real murderer will go free.”

  “He’ll go free anyway, won’t he? As long as nobody recognizes who he is while he’s up on the stage, as long as it could be practically anybody, what’s the point making a frame-up?”

  “Maybe the murderer hates Sally?”

  “Enough to run such unnecessary risks? You talked to everybody that’s involved in the play, some of them don’t like Sally Michaels very much, but did you run across anybody yet that has a reason to hate her? To hate her so much it’s worth getting caught as a murderer so you could do her some damage?” Mom shook her head. “This Sally Michaels is a silly woman that means well. It isn’t hate and revenge that she stirs up in people, it’s pains in the neck. She’s a nuisance, a nudnik, she isn’t an Adolf Hitler.”

  “All right, the point is well taken, Mom. But what’s the answer? The murderer did try to frame Sally, after all.”

  “Certainly,” Mom said. “Not because the murderer hated her but because by this murderer it’s necessary to have a frame-up. Why? Because otherwise this murderer is the first person everybody’s going to suspect, the person that right away will look like the guilty party. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the case, until the evidence started coming in against Sally Michaels, the police did think he was the guilty party.”

  “Mom, there’s only one person that applies to. And he couldn’t possibly—”

  “When Harold Hapgood got knocked out,” Mom went on, “he was put inside the broom closet. And the murderer was in a hurry, so some of the brooms got pulled out and didn’t get put back when the closet door was closed. You found those brooms yourself, Davie, on the floor outside the closet, just before you opened the door and Harold Hapgood came out.”

  “I don’t see what’s suspicious about that—”

  “When this New York actor, this Le Sage, came off the stage and went to the pay phone in the basement, he passed the broom closet to get there. This has to be only a few minutes, five minutes or even less, before the murder scene begins up on the stage. Harold Hapgood has to be knocked out and inside that closet already by the time Le Sage walks by it. How come, when you asked him if he tripped over anything on his way to the phone, he said there wasn’t anything to trip over? How come he didn’t notice the three brooms and the mop that were on the floor?”

  “You think Le Sage was lying about that?”

  “Why should he? If he was the murderer, wouldn’t he tell you he noticed those brooms on the floor, only he was worrying too hard about his long-distance call so he didn’t give them a second thought? The answer is, he’s telling the truth. Those brooms and that mop were positively not on the floor when Le Sage walked by. They weren’t on the floor while the murder was happening up on the stage. They weren’t on the floor until after the murder—”

  “When Harold Hapgood ran down to the basement, locked himself in the closet—pulling out some of the brooms to make room—and pretended he’d been knocked out and dragged in there!”

  “Wonderful.” Mom beamed. “You see how clear it is, if you only open your eyes and take a look?
And this explains a couple more things that were bothering me. First, the argument this Harold Hapgood overheard a few days before the murder. It was in Sally Michaels’s dressing room, and Osborn was telling her, ‘Macbeth is a play about royalty. Lady Macbeth is a queen. She and Macbeth have feelings of guilt.’ Am I quoting the words right?”

  “Yes, that’s what Hapgood heard Osborn say.”

  “Only he didn’t. Osborn wouldn’t say such words. There’s an old superstition with theatre people—how many times did I hear about it the last few days!—that you don’t say the name Macbeth in the theatre, this will bring you bad luck. On the first day of rehearsal Osborn had made a speech to his actors, telling them about this superstition, saying he wasn’t superstitious himself—naturally, who admits such a thing?—but just to be on the safe side, nobody should ever say that name out loud. So all of a sudden, in Sally Michaels’s dressing room—which is certainly inside the theatre—Osborn comes out with the name Macbeth. Not only once, but three times in only a few minutes! I wouldn’t believe it, Davie. There was no such argument, just like Sally Michaels told you. Hapgood made it up to throw in another piece evidence against her.

  “And second, don’t forget about the perfume. Magnolia Blossoms, Sally Michaels’s perfume from Gone With the Wind. Harold Hapgood calls Roger to the theatre last night and tells him he just remembered smelling it on the person who knocked him out. This has to be a lie. If Sally Michaels was wearing this perfume when she knocked out Harold Hapgood, and if she went up on the stage right after and acted the part of the Third Murderer and killed Martin Osborn—tell me, please, why the other actors on the stage didn’t smell her perfume too? How come the first two murderers didn’t mention any Gone with the Wind? How come Roger didn’t notice it when she grabbed him from behind? So Harold Hapgood made this up about the perfume, it was one more part of his framing-up against Sally Michaels.”

  “No, it won’t work, Mom. Greenwald and Imperio—the other two murderers—they both testified that the Third Murderer was standing on eye level with them. He was taller than Harold Hapgood.”

  “Why not? Isn’t this something everybody’s been saying all along? It isn’t easy to go up on a stage and pretend you’re shorter than you really are. But to pretend you’re taller, this isn’t much of a trick. All it takes is you should put on a pair of shoes with the bottoms built up. ‘Elevators’ is what they’re called, am I right?”

  I was pretty excited by now, the way I get when the truth finally comes out of Mom’s mouth. But I was also confused. “But Mom, if Hapgood was the Third Murderer, that seems to raise more questions than it answers. Why did he kill Osborn? And for God’s sake, who killed Hapgood?”

  “The two questions are connected,” Mom said. “Have another bite schnecken, and I’ll answer them.”

  I did as I was told.

  Mom leaned back, smiled gently and said. “The person that killed Harold Hapgood is the same person that put him up to killing Martin Osborn.”

  * * *

  A collective sigh of relief—I could almost feel it on my skin, as well as hear it—had come out of the group as soon as I told them Harold Hapgood was the murderer. It’s nice to know that the murderer is somebody who’s safely dead, and therefore not the person who’s sitting next to you at the moment.

  But when I moved on to Mom’s suggestion, expressed now in my language instead of hers, that Hapgood had just been a pawn in somebody else’s hands, tension filled the theatre again. Suddenly that person sitting next to you wasn’t safe anymore.

  “We’ll go back to our reconstruction now,” I said. “What we still haven’t gone through is the murder itself. Okay, Roger—Fleance—you’ve broken away from the Third Murderer and run offstage. I’ll go on being the Third Murderer. I turn my attention to Banquo now. If I can’t kill the son, I can at least polish off the father. Lloyd, will you go on being Banquo? Murderers One and Two, grab hold of Banquo again, the way you did on opening night.”

  They did it, each holding one of Cunningham’s arms from behind, and I moved toward them and pulled out my dagger. Only I didn’t have one, it had to be invisible, like Macbeth’s “dagger of the mind” earlier in the play.

  “Tell me if I’m doing it right,” I said to the first two murderers. “Be sure and correct me if I make any moves that this character didn’t make on opening night.”

  They nodded, and I moved closer to Cunningham, till my face was only a few inches from his.

  “No, that’s a little too close,” said the Second Murderer, that is, Danny Imperio. “They weren’t eyeball to eyeball, there was about a foot of space between them.”

  The First Murderer confirmed that, so I took a few steps back. Then I lunged, hard enough so that Cunningham let out a loud “Shit!” when my fist pushed into his chest. If I’d had a real knife in my hand, I certainly would have killed him.

  I pulled my fist back from Cunningham’s chest, then pushed it forward again, because Osborn had been stabbed twice. Then I threw my invisible knife to the floor. At this point, on opening night, the murderer had run to the wings, but I stayed where I was and said, “So what did Banquo do after he got stabbed?”

  “He fell forward,” said the First Murderer. Cunningham started to do that, but the two murderers were still holding him by the arms, so his fall was broken before it got started.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Third Murderer was offstage already,” the First Murderer said. “We let go of Banquo and ran out the other direction.”

  They let go of Cunningham, who did a very good imitation of a dead weight hitting the floor.

  “After that, how long was Osborn lying on the stage by himself? It seemed to me like at least twenty to thirty seconds.”

  “That sounds about right to me,” said Allan Franz, from his seat in the audience. “Then I went down the aisle and jumped up on the stage.”

  I urged him to do it instead of talking about it. He got up from his seat, ran down the aisle, and hoisted himself up on the stage. There he got down on his knees next to Cunningham.

  “I picked up his wrist and realized that there was no pulse. Then I yelled out for a doctor.”

  “Who showed up a few seconds later,” I said. I took a pause and went on, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I think that’s all the reconstruction we need to do.” I moved center stage again. “Everybody take a seat. In the audience or on the stage, it doesn’t matter. Just make yourselves comfortable, please.”

  I made my voice more serious than before. They picked up on my tone, as I wanted them to, and it sobered them. Cunningham got to his feet, and he and Franz went back to their seats in the audience. The two murderers took the chairs nearest to them on the stage. Everybody was looking at me.

  God, it is one hell of a high! Being the center of attention, holding an audience in the palm of your hand! I can see why people are willing to devote their lives to it, even if they have to suffer humiliation and discouragement along the way.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “did you notice something about this murder that doesn’t make any sense? It’s very simple, really, once you catch on to it. The Third Murderer, Harold Hapgood, was more than a foot away from Osborn when he stabbed him. And Osborn didn’t fall more than an inch forward, because the other two murderers were holding his arms behind him. A few seconds later they let go of him, and he sank to the floor, by which time the man who killed him was long gone. In other words, Osborn never touched his murderer, he never even had a chance to reach out to him, much less grab hold of his coat. So how did that button get off the murderer’s coat and into Osborn’s hand?”

  I let them think about that for a moment, just like Mom had done for me. “The point is,” I went on, as soon as they started looking as if they were in pain, “Osborn couldn’t have pulled that button off the murderer’s coat. But the button was in his hand. Which means it must’ve been put there later, planted in Osborn’s hand after he was dead. But when? Osborn’s bod
y was in plain sight of hundreds of people from the moment Hapgood ran him through. And a few minutes later the doctor who first examined him found him clutching that button. A lot of witnesses can swear that nobody had a chance to plant anything in Osborn’s hand during those few minutes.

  “Only, that’s not strictly true, is it?”

  I paused, looking around at their blank expressions. Laurie Franz’s was as blank as everybody else’s and the edge was suddenly off my exhilaration. If I expected to go on with this I’d better look away from the girl’s face.

  “One person did approach Osborn’s body after the murder,” I went on. “That’s you, Mr. Franz. Before I could make a move, before a doctor could be called, you ran down the aisle, jumped up on the stage, and knelt down by the body. Will you tell us why you did that, please?”

  * * *

  Allan Franz got to his feet slowly.

  His eyes were fixed on me, and he was smiling a little. He wasn’t much to look at—a bald man with thick glasses—but somehow he dominated the room. “Let me get this straight, Dave,” he said. “You’re saying I shoved a button into the dead man’s hand?”

  “Why did you jump on the stage?” I repeated my question without raising my voice.

  “Why? Isn’t it obvious? I had this strong feeling that something was wrong. Osborn was lying there, but the curtain wasn’t going down—”

  “You went to a rehearsal of Macbeth, Mr. Franz, you saw the cast run through the play. So you knew that the curtain wasn’t supposed to come down right after Banquo got killed. He was supposed to be alone on the stage for a while, so he could say a few words before he died.”

  “That’s it,” Franz said. “When he didn’t say those words, when he just lay there without speaking, that’s how I knew—”