Audition for Murder

by P. M. Carlson

  “I’m not going,” said Cheyenne. “I’ll get it now.” The three went out.

  “What are you going to do with all your spare time?” asked Tim.

  “What spare time?” said Ellen. “I’ve got a whole term to make up this week.”

  “Still no time for the flying harness?” teased Jason.

  “Not for me. I’m a grownup now.”

  “Speaking of grownups,” said Chester, “did anyone notice that lady in the second row? The one with the laugh?”

  “The dirty-minded one? God, yes!” said Rosencrantz. “When Rob asks us if we live in fortune’s secret parts, you know that gesture he uses? She had a fit. I loved her.”

  They continued discussing the audience reaction. Eventually a couple of property crew members drifted in from clearing the final scene. Cheyenne returned with Judy’s account book and slouched against the doorjamb, asking if anyone had seen Paul. No one had. Nick leaned over to Ellen and said, “Ellen, excuse me. Lisette really ought to be here by now. Would you mind checking, making sure there’s no zipper stuck or anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d go, but I don’t know if everyone else is down.”

  “Looks like they are. But I don’t mind,” said Ellen. She jumped up, pushed past Cheyenne, and ran up the stairs, wondering vaguely why her roommate had gone off so early when she knew perfectly well that they were to meet in the greenroom first. Well, she and Rob probably wanted some time together first.

  The dressing-room floor was deserted, the cement hall still brightly lit but noiseless except for the quiet padding of Ellen’s sneakers on the hard floor. She knocked, then opened the door of the women’s dressing room, and for an instant was exasperated. Lisette had taken off her outer costume but was lounging on her makeup table with only her slip on, nowhere near dressed. Words were scribbled in greasepaint on the mirror that reflected her bright hair. Then something about her posture silenced Ellen, and she hurried in to her, concerned. She was too still. Ellen felt her forehead, cool and damp, and picked up the limp wrist. There was no pulse. She raced to the hall phone and dialed the campus police.

  “Emergency!” she said. She was screaming. She brought her voice under control. “We need an ambulance at the theatre. Stage door, second floor. Real fast. Somebody collapsed.”

  She hung up and hurried back to her. She couldn’t remember her first aid. Head down, wasn’t it? And blow in the mouth. She started to pull her back off the table, holding her by the waist, and saw the hypodermic syringe, lying partly under the still hand on the table. No time to worry about that. She dragged her off the folding chair to lie on the floor and began artificial respiration, hoping she was doing it right. After a few breaths she heard footsteps running on the stairs. Nick and a campus policeman, probably from the traffic-control car that had been outside, came in simultaneously.

  Nick didn’t pause. He took over Ellen’s job and said to the policeman between breaths, “Can we use your car?” The policeman nodded.

  “I’ll radio for someone else to come here, to make the report,” he said over his shoulder. “Young lady, don’t let anyone else in until the officers arrive.” He and Nick rushed out with her, and a second later Ellen heard the siren. She went back into the hall and closed the door behind her and stood there, stunned, listening to the rise and fall of the siren fading into the distance.

  Jim was coming up the stairs. “Nick said he thought something must be wrong,” he said anxiously.

  “She’s awfully sick,” said Ellen. “The police said not to let anyone in there. God, Jim!”

  “What happened?”

  “I just don’t know. There was a hypodermic.”

  He took her hand and they stood quietly together. Other people drifted up from the greenroom to investigate, and she answered their questions briefly, as best she could. Then a pair of officers arrived and entered the dressing room. They looked around, and one of them used his radio to call for technicians and detectives. The lighter-haired one went down to the outside door and politely stopped a couple of people who were leaving.

  “Please,” said Ellen to the other. “What’s happening? Do you know how she is?”

  The darker-haired officer looked at her, a glimmer of pity behind his professionally neutral expression. “Dead on arrival,” he said.

  Fifteen

  The next few hours went by in a daze. A courteous, gray-haired man, Detective Sergeant Hawes, arrived with another plainclothes detective to take charge. The police technicians photographed and fingerprinted the dressing room, collected dust and scraps of paper, and inspected the message that had been printed in grease pencil on Lisette’s mirror. Sergeant Hawes called the hospital, where someone was still with Nick.

  “Fred? Listen, we’ve got what looks like a suicide note here on the O’Connor case. Would you ask the husband if she’s made threats or anything? Yeah, I’ll hang on.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Really? That definite? Well, okay, we’ll treat it as murder. But listen, tell him we’ll want him to look at it. Doubt if he’ll recognize the writing. It’s printed. Okay. It says, ‘Nicky, goodby. I can’t live with what I did to Jennifer.’ No, that’s all.” He listened a moment. “Bruised arms? Okay, I’ll ask.”

  Nick, poor Nick, thought Ellen, and wished she could be with him to help. Help! What a stupid thought. She found herself gripping Jim’s hand as though she would fall off a precipice without him.

  Sergeant Hawes, replacing the receiver, noticed Ellen’s dazed stare. “Miss Winfield?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d just like to go over what happened tonight—carefully.”

  He asked her about everything, in great detail, from the last time she had seen Lisette hurrying up the stairs to the moment he himself had arrived. He was especially concerned that nothing had been moved in the room. He made her sit at a table to demonstrate exactly how Lisette had been lying when found, before being pulled to the floor.

  “I’m not sure about her legs,” Ellen said, keeping herself analytical and detached. “Her head was on her right arm like this, turned away from the door. I had to walk around to her other side to see her face. Her left arm was bent like this. The hypodermic was under her right hand.”

  He nodded and made careful notes and sketches. Then he said, “Would you say Mrs. O’Connor ever gave any indications she might commit suicide?”

  “Never,” said Ellen firmly. Then she shrugged. “Of course I only knew her this one term. She seemed hardworking and easy to get along with. My roommate knew her better, I think.”

  “Your roommate?”

  “Maggie Ryan. She was dating Rob. Rob Jenner. They went around with the O’Connors a lot.”

  Sergeant Hawes had a program. He said. “Jenner. That would be this Hamlet?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s from New York too?”

  “Yes. He might be able to help you even more than my roommate. He knew the O’Connors before. They’d worked together.”

  Sergeant Hawes, attentive, wrote it all down. “Was there any enmity between Mrs. O’Connor and any of the others?”

  Ellen paused. What could she say? But someone in that huge cast would talk if she didn’t. She could at least put it in context. “Well,” she said, “there was Laura Eisner.”

  “Yes. I’d heard about that. The kid that vandalized the sprinkler system.”

  “Yes. She was jealous of Lisette, I guess. Defaced her photos, drugged her one night. But she hasn’t been in the theatre since we found out she was the one.”

  “I see,” he said, writing busily. “What’s her address?”

  “Buckley Hall. 3058,1 think.”

  “Was she here tonight?”

  “No. She’s been coming to classes and leaving instantly.”

  “We’ll check. Any other friction?”

  “No. Even Judy came around.”

  “Judy?”

  “Judy Allison. She or Laura probably would have be
en cast as Ophelia if they hadn’t hired Lisette.”

  “Did she get along well with her husband?”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  “I’m told she was a very beautiful woman. Sexually demonstrative.”

  “When she was acting!” said Ellen indignantly. “In one scene she had to be very seductive to Jim. But that didn’t mean anything.”

  Sergeant Hawes’s kind eyes moved to Jim. “This is Jim?”

  “Jim Greer,” said Jim.

  “Did it mean anything?”

  “No,” said Jim. “Of course Lisette is a very beautiful woman, and in that scene she was very blatantly sexual toward me and toward David Wagner. But it was just acting.”

  “David Wagner?”

  “He was Laertes in the play.”

  “Did he have any jealous girlfriends?”

  God, thought Ellen, this can’t be real. But Jim was answering calmly, “I doubt it. He dated a couple of girls in the undergraduate acting program. But none of them were especially serious.”

  “He’s also the dean’s son,” said Ellen acidly.

  That, at least, made the sergeant pause. “Dean Wagner?”

  “Right.”

  Hawes nodded soberly and made a note.

  “Can you think of anything else? Any attachments? Quarrels?”

  “Not really. Both O’Connors are really very pleasant. Talented, and good to work with.”

  “She is reported to have bruises on her arms.”

  “Damn. I was afraid of that,” said Jim.

  “What?”

  “In the mad scene. She was really into it tonight. I had to grab her arms very tight, or I think she really would have stabbed herself.”

  “I see.” Hawes wrote it down. “We’ll want to talk to everyone who was here. They’re speaking to Mr. O’Connor at the hospital. You said Miss Allison went early to the Oasis?”

  “Yes, she and Grace Halliday.”

  “Okay, we’ve sent a man over there. And Mr. Jenner?”

  “Rob left, said he’d be at the party later.”

  “How about Miss Ryan?”

  Ellen found herself becoming nervous. She said, as calmly as she could, “She wasn’t there either.”

  Jim said, “Didn’t Tim mention he had seen Maggie and Rob driving off right after the show?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Ellen, relieved. “Maggie must be coming later with him.”

  “Who’s Tim?” asked Sergeant Hawes.

  “Tim Anderson. He’s in charge of the properties.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me just send someone to check on Miss Eisner’s dorm, and then you can point him out to me.”

  Thankful to be able to comply at last, Ellen led the way to the greenroom and introduced Sergeant Hawes to Tim. The sergeant then dismissed Ellen, asking her not to leave the building. She and Jim found seats on the greenroom sofa.

  She had little sense of time passing. Every now and then fragments of the real world would crash into her churning thoughts; one policeman quietly asking another, “Is it suicide, then?” and the reply, “Husband says not, poor sucker. But that loony kid was in her dorm with two witnesses. And even the husband says the note must be hers, something about a Jennifer Brown. Shook him up,” and the first policeman again, “Probably doesn’t want to believe it.” Or Sergeant Hawes, quietly, to a member of the costume crew, “You say she was arguing with Mr. Jenner?” “Oh, it was nothing serious. Just once. They were in a bad mood or something.” Or Cheyenne, curt as usual, “I heard nothing at all from that floor. Ask Grace and Judy. It was silent.” Through it all, there was Jim, quiet but warmly present.

  Rob came in, sometime late, slipping into the crowded room without Ellen noticing until he spoke quietly, leaning over beside her. “Ellen, I saw the lights still on and came back. What’s happened?” He knelt by the arm of the sofa.

  “It’s Lisette. She ... I guess she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “They took her to the hospital. They said, dead on arrival.”

  “Oh, my God. Poor Nick. Goddamn it!” He struck his knee violently, and then ran a hand through his blond hair. “Where is he, Ellen?”

  “He went to the hospital with her. I guess he’s there. I don’t know.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. There was something on the mirror, a suicide note. But Nick says it can’t be suicide.”

  Rob’s worried blue eyes settled on Sergeant Hawes across the room. “If it isn’t…” He paused.

  “Yeah. He’s been asking to talk to you.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Rob, where’s Maggie?”

  “I don’t know.” He was still looking at Sergeant Hawes thoughtfully.

  “But Tim said you left with her.”

  “Oh.” His look switched to her, alertly. “Right. But I don’t know where she is right this minute. Probably back at the dorm.”

  “Maybe I should call.”

  “Tell her I want to talk to her too, okay?” He shook his head. “This is unbelievable. Poor Nick!”

  Ellen went into the hall and rang her own room, but no one answered. She looked at her watch on the way back; two-twenty. Sergeant Hawes was talking to Rob, both of them quiet and polite.

  “I’m glad you came back, Mr. Jenner,” the sergeant said. “We just want to get an idea of where everyone was. Just routine.”

  “I understand.”

  “Could you tell me what you did?”

  “I was with Maggie Ryan. A special friend.”

  “Yes, fine.” The sergeant seemed satisfied. “You did not go to the Oasis, I’m told?”

  “No, we wanted to be more alone. We did stop for a minute at Joe’s.”

  “This was right after the show?”

  “As soon as I could change.”

  “Fine. You knew the O’Connors, I believe? Can you tell me anything about Mrs. O’Connor?”

  “A wonderful woman. I’ve always been fond of her.”

  “You’re a friend of hers? Or his?”

  “Both. More his, I guess—we worked together once before. Nick and I get along well, and here at Hargate we spent a fair amount of time together.”

  “Would you say Mrs. O’Connor was likely to commit suicide?”

  He hesitated. “Sergeant Hawes, I really don’t know.”

  “Just your impression.”

  “I thought she was a lot more stable than she was in New York a couple of years ago.”

  “Stable. I see.” Sergeant Hawes looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Nick is the one to ask.”

  “Mr. O’Connor is more or less in a state of shock. You can understand that.”

  “Sergeant Hawes, can I see him? He’s my friend.” Rob was almost pleading.

  “Of course, in a minute. Can you tell me more about Mrs. O’Connor’s former problems?”

  “Look, Sergeant Hawes. Why are you asking? Because as far as I know it’s irrelevant.”

  Sergeant Hawes was courteously brutal. “We’re proceeding on the assumption that it was murder, Mr. Jenner, until we’re sure it was not.”

  “I see.” Rob was silent a moment, his face unreadable. Finally he said, “When I knew her before, she was alcoholic. Possibly on drugs too. But I’d swear she was off both this whole term.”

  So it was true, then, thought Ellen. She had wondered why Lisette never drank.

  Sergeant Hawes was nodding. “Thank you, Mr. Jenner. That’s very helpful. Her husband knew of this too?”

  “Nick? God, yes! He’s the only reason she lived this long!” He caught himself and shook his head. “I’m just guessing, Sergeant Hawes. I don’t know. My impression then was that she was a beautiful, talented, sad lady. But all this term she’s seemed beautiful, talented, and happy.”

  “A happy marriage?”

  “Very. Look, where is Nick?”

  “Our officers are taking him back to his apartment.” />
  “Please, can I go to him?”

  “In a moment. I understand that you and Mrs. O’Connor quarreled sometimes.”

  “Quarreled? No.”

  “She accused you of directing, I believe.”

  Rob looked confused. ‘”Directing? Oh!” He nodded. “I wouldn’t really call it a quarrel. Letting off steam, maybe.”

  “I see. Now, Mr. Jenner, did Miss Ryan come back with you?”

  “Maggie? No.” He turned to Ellen. “Ellen, Maggie’s in the dorm, isn’t she?”

  “No,” said Ellen. “Not answering the phone, anyway.”

  “Strange,” said Rob. He looked worried. “I’ll try to call her.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jenner. You can go now. You’ll be with Mr. O’Connor?”

  “Right. If he’ll have me.”

  “Fine.” Sergeant Hawes, looking a bit weary, watched Rob go dial the telephone and hang up again in a moment without having spoken. Then the sergeant glanced around the room. “How many of you have I already talked to?”

  Most people raised their hands.

  “Good. Okay. Those people can leave. Check out with the officer at the door. Tell him where you’ll be. I’ll try to finish with the rest of you as soon as I can.”

  Jim and Ellen joined the file of people moving up the stairs and out into the pleasant night. In the parking lot, Rob was waiting for her. “Ellen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got to go to Nick. But I have to talk to Maggie as soon as I can. Could you give her this?” He handed her a note.

  “Okay.” She looked carefully into her bag as she put the note in.

  “It’s important.”

  “Okay.” Ellen hesitated, looking around the lot, then added, “If she isn’t there I’ll put it on her pillow.”

  “Thanks.” He ran to his car and drove off toward Nick’s. Ellen started slowly along the sidewalk toward the end of the building, thinking.

  “You didn’t drive tonight?” asked Jim.

  “No, the weather is so nice. God, Jim, I want to see Nick.”

  “Yeah. Poor guy.”

  She glanced at him. “I hope Maggie’s there when I get back. She probably doesn’t even know about this yet. Rob didn’t know.”

  “Right. And that detective wants to talk to her.”