Murder at the Palace

by Margaret Dumas

  “She’s coming around,” Marty said, which is when it first dawned on me that I must have lost consciousness.

  “What happened?” I tried to sit up, but Albert gently restrained me.

  “There, now, not too fast,” he said. “You’ve had quite a bump.”

  “Sooooo,” Callie drawled. “Am I calling the EMTs or what?” Her omnipresent phone was in her hand.

  “No!” I said, this time managing to sit. “We don’t need lights and sirens out front for the second day in a row. Who’s running the theater? We didn’t stop the show, did we?”

  Marty gave me a look that almost verged on approving. “No. The people in the balcony are probably the only ones who even noticed anything.”

  “Good.” I cautiously felt the top of my head and located a throbbing lump. “What happened?”

  “The whole light fixture fell on you,” Albert said. “Luckily Marty was there, and he caught you as you tumbled off the ladder.”

  “You caught me?” I asked Marty.

  “Calm down,” he said. “It’s not like you fell into my arms. The light came down just as I got out to the balcony, and you sort of slithered down the ladder. I just hoisted you up before you got all the way to the floor.”

  “Well, thank you anyway.” It was just as well that I’d been unconscious for all the slithering and hoisting. If I’d been awake I’d have died of humiliation. Then again, if I’d been awake I wouldn’t have needed any hoisting.

  “I told you I’d fix it,” Marty groused. “If you’d been capable of waiting five minutes this never would have happened.”

  “Yeah…but if you’d fixed it yesterday this also never would have happened,” Callie pointed out.

  “Well excuse me for getting all distracted by the dead man in the—”

  “That’s enough!” Albert held up his hands, causing the bickering colleagues to momentarily back down.

  The new woman was watching all this action as if it was the most amusing thing she’d seen in years. She was dressed in costume, in a pale blue uniform of wide-legged pants and a military-looking little jacket with two rows of buttons and epaulettes on her shoulders. She even had on a little brimmed cap with a gold braid. She must have been one of the employees I hadn’t met yet, wearing some sort of ye olde movie palace costume for Halloween.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  At my greeting her expression changed completely. She looked amazed. Thunderstruck. She pointed to herself, her blue eyes growing enormous. “Me?”

  “Yeah, hi.” What was wrong with this girl?

  And just as I completed that thought, she vanished.

  I yelped.

  “What, what, what?” Albert, Marty, and Callie were all looking at me like I’d lost my wits.

  “Did you—?” I pointed to the empty space where the young woman had been, staring wildly at the trio of concerned faces.

  “Maybe we should call the EMTs,” Marty said.

  “Nora, are you, like, losing it?” Callie asked.

  “No, I’m…did anybody else—”

  But my question died on my lips. Nobody else had seen anything because there had been nothing to see. I’d had a serious crack on the head. I’d imagined something. Someone. I wasn’t losing my mind, I just had a concussion or something.

  Albert was staring at me intently.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling myself together. I’d spent the night before compulsively reading up on the Palace’s history. The vision I’d had was just a remnant of something I’d seen in a picture on Wikipedia. “I just need some Aspirin. And coffee. I could really use some coffee.”

  “I’ll send Brandon up with some,” Callie said. She glanced at the clock on the wall over the blackboard. “I should get back to the booth. He’s alone down there, and—”

  “Go,” I told her. “I’m fine. All of you please just go back to work. Thank you, but don’t worry. It’s just a bump on the head.” And a hallucination, but I pushed that thought to the very back of my mind.

  Marty gave me a doubtful look as Callie left. “You shouldn’t be alone after a head injury.”

  “Are you inviting me to hang out in the projection booth with you?”

  The look of horror on his face was almost comical.

  “I’m kidding,” I told him. “Let me just grab that stack of bills,” I nodded to the pile on the desk, then realized what a really bad idea nodding had been. “I’ll take them and Kate’s laptop down to the candy counter and start sorting things out. That way Albert will be able to keep an eye on me. At least until I’m cleared to go watch a movie.”

  I still hadn’t seen a damn movie.

  Brandon brought a battered old stool up from the basement, and I installed myself at the far end of the counter in the lobby. It gave me a chance to see the Palace in operation as one feature ended and the crowd came in for the next one. I use the term “crowd” charitably, as it consisted of only a dozen or so more patrons, most of them seniors.

  Callie came in from the ticket booth after the rush, such as it was, subsided. Brandon immediately got her a soft drink and turned sixteen shades of pink as he handed it to her. She took it wordlessly and joined me at the counter. Albert had gone upstairs to the break room and I assumed he’d told her to keep an eye on me.

  “Heeeyyy…” she said. “You haven’t died of a brain bleed. Nice.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “So, what’s with you and Brandon?” He was occupied with getting just the right amount of butter on a customer’s popcorn, and since the customer was giving loud and exacting instructions, I didn’t think he’d hear us talking about him.

  “Oh,” Callie said. “He’s, like, in love with me or something.” She shrugged. “He’ll get over it.”

  “Uh huh.” I wasn’t so sure.

  “Sooooo, I have something for you, but I don’t want you to get all weird about it.” Callie pulled a purple foil packet out of her sweatshirt pocket. She handed it to me and I read that it contained one grape-flavored cannabis lozenge.

  I looked at Callie with raised eyebrows. Cannabis is legal in California, and back in LA it seemed like edibles were as commonplace as granola bars. Still, most people don’t go around just handing out pot candies to their new managers.

  “I don’t know if you, like, partake,” Callie said. “But I just figured you might need a little help sleeping, what with everything…”

  By “everything” I supposed she meant my errant husband and shattered life.

  “And if your head still hurts, this might do a better job than Aspirin,” she said. “It’s like, a low, low dose, but it’s really good. I got it at Monica’s shop.”

  “Thanks, Callie,” I said. “Maybe later…” I didn’t tell her I had already hallucinated once that afternoon without the benefit of psychotropic drugs.

  She shrugged. “Cool. Whatever.”

  I decided to shift the subject. “Who’s Monica?”

  “Monica Chen. She owns the Potent Flower, down on Divisadero. It’s this totally cool, woman-centric, amazing pot shop. She was really good friends with Kate.”

  “Really?” Now she had my interest.

  “You should totally go to her shop. The address is there on the back.” She pointed to the lozenge I still held. “Monica knows everything. She can totally figure out, like, the exact right thing to help you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”

  Monica knows everything, and Monica was really good friends with Kate. Yes, I would go visit her shop. Totally.

  I puttered around in the lobby until the last feature ended, and met two more employees, Claire and Mike, when they showed up to relieve Brandon and Callie for the evening shows. They were high school students, brother and sister, but their resemblance was so strong they might have been twins. Both had masses of dark brown curls and f
reckles like constellations across their faces.

  Albert went home when the shift changed. Before he left I asked him whether there was a second projectionist to relieve Marty.

  “Nobody else knows the equipment,” Albert told me. “Kate used to, but with her gone there’s only Marty.”

  I thought about that as I took over Albert’s ticket-taking duties. There was a lot of equipment up in that projection booth, and if Marty was the only one who knew how to work it all, no wonder he was so exhausted and irritable. He must have been working nonstop ever since Kate’s death.

  The teenagers and I shut down the concession stand and tidied up the lobby while the last feature was playing. Then they went down to the basement to clean the restrooms, and as soon as the movie ended they both grabbed brooms and started sweeping out the theater behind the last of the moviegoers.

  Marty came galumphing down the balcony stairs as the last patrons left. He seemed surprised to see me still in the lobby.

  “You’re here.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be alone after a head injury, remember?”

  “Right. Are you…?” He pointed in the general direction of the lump on my head.

  “Fine,” I said, reaching up to touch it. “Just a little tender.”

  “Hrumph.” He nodded and moved toward the lobby door. “Have you set the alarm?”

  “What alarm?”

  He stopped with his hand on the door. “The alarm alarm. The burglar alarm.” He glared at me and went to the small metal panel in the wall near the door, pulling a key ring out of his pocket.

  He opened the panel while talking. “The code is 1927, the year the theater was built. There’s a keypad here and on the wall downstairs by the basement door.”

  I looked over his shoulder. I’d turned off the lights the night before but hadn’t set the alarm. Oops.

  “Once you see the yellow light flash you have ninety seconds to leave and lock the door behind you. Are you two done?” This last was addressed to Claire and Mike, who had come back into the lobby pulling on jackets and scarves.

  They nodded in unison and waved goodbye as they went out the door.

  “Do you have your stuff?” Marty asked me, his hand poised above the alarm keypad.

  I grabbed my backpack, Kate’s laptop, and my sweater from the counter and followed Marty out the door. Once outside, I locked the door behind us.

  “Make sure you punch in the code to turn off the alarm if you’re the first one in,” Marty said. “You’ve got ninety seconds for that, too.” He hesitated. “Are you okay to get home?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

  Which was true, but when we left the shelter of the entryway and the cold wind hit me, it seemed like Robbie’s comfy cottage was a million miles away. And home was even farther.

  My most urgent thought upon waking the next morning was of coffee. The lump on my head had given me weird dreams that vanished as soon as I tried to remember them and left me feeling unrested and uneasy.

  I was too antsy to hang around the house. I decided to go to the theater early and have a real look through Kate’s office. I still hoped to find her email password somewhere. Maybe something in her emails would shed some light on why she, and possibly Raul Acosta, had died.

  I stopped at Café Madeline for the most caffeinated beverage they offered, then went across the street to open the Palace. After turning off the alarm I went straight upstairs, stopping in the break room to put on a pot of yet more coffee before heading to Kate’s office.

  When I opened the door, I didn’t quite understand what I saw. It was something from the dream I couldn’t remember. It had to be. Because what I saw couldn’t be real.

  The uniformed blonde from my hallucination was sitting behind Kate’s desk.

  And she was looking at me with something like hope.

  Chapter 7

  She stared at me, a blue-eyed blonde who looked like she just stepped out of the chorus line in a Busby Berkeley musical. “Can you see me?”

  I nodded. I could see her, but was she real?

  “And hear me?”

  I barely noticed as the backpack and laptop bag slipped off my shoulder to the floor. “Yes.” My voice sounded strangled. What was happening?

  She had the arched penciled brows and cupids-bow lips of a Jean Harlow wannabe. She pursed those lips now and gave a low whistle. “Well, if that don’t beat…”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She looked as amazed as I felt. “Eighty years,” she said. “More than that, I think? What year is it?” She looked confused for a moment, then focused on me again.

  “All that time and nobody’s ever seen me. I mean, some people thought they saw something, maybe out of the corner of their eye, a flash of light or something. I was holding a flashlight when it happened, you know.” Her hand fluttered up to her forehead. “Well, no, you don’t know. How would you know? You weren’t born yet.” She shook her head and then beamed at me. “But now you’re here.” She made a delighted sound that was half laugh and half gasp. “You can really see me? I haven’t finally gone crazy?”

  If one of us was crazy it probably wasn’t the hallucination. It was probably the person having the hallucination. I groped my way to the couch and sat down hard as my legs gave out. This is what a mental breakdown felt like.

  “Say, are you all right?” She stood, and I held up my hands. I didn’t want her coming any closer to me.

  “Don’t be scared,” her face crumpled in concern. “Honey, please don’t be scared. I promise I’m not that kind of ghost. I’m just so darned glad you can see me. You don’t know how lonely I’ve been.”

  One word of that declaration stood out to me. I had a hard time repeating it.

  “Ghost?”

  She nodded, curls bouncing. “Ghost, spirit, apparition, specter…I don’t mind what you call me.” She came around the desk—not through it, thank heavens—and sat on the couch, at the far end, away from me. I scooted back. “But, gee, I’d like it if you called me by my name. Nobody’s said my name in all these years. It’s Trixie—Beatrix, really, Beatrix George, but everyone calls me Trixie. Or at least, everyone did.” She shrugged and smiled encouragingly.

  “Trixie,” I repeated faintly.

  She sighed. “Boy, that sounds good. It makes me feel like I’m really here again. What’s your name?”

  “Nora,” I said. I was having a conversation with a ghost named Trixie. That’s all. Just a normal, everyday conversation with a ghost named Trixie. Happens all the time. To crazy people.

  “Nora,” she repeated, then grinned. “If you tell me your husband’s name is Nick, I’m going to think you’re pulling my leg.”

  A ghost who made jokes about the Thin Man movies. That sounded about right. That’s just the kind of ghost I’d hallucinate when I lost my mind. Sure.

  “Now, tell me, Nora—”

  But whatever the ghost was going to ask was interrupted by the boom and thunder of Marty blaring the 20th Century Fox fanfare. I jumped and yelped. Trixie gasped and vanished.

  One minute she was sitting there at the end of the couch, little blue cap on her head and look of delighted anticipation on her face, and the next minute she was gone.

  “Trixie?” I felt like an idiot.

  There was no response.

  Of course there was no response.

  “Trixie, are you there?”

  “Who’s Trixie?”

  I may have screamed the tiniest little bit at the sound of Marty’s voice. I jumped to my feet and turned to the door. “Did you do that?”

  He crossed his arms. “I told you I require an overture to start my day.”

  I waved my hands. “Not the music. Did you…” But the look on his face had turned from defensiveness to bafflement. And how could
he have made Trixie appear? I’d seen state-of-the-art holograms in Hollywood, but they’d been nothing like as realistic as the ghost I’d just been chatting with.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Who’s Trixie?”

  “I’m writing a screenplay.” The lie surprised both of us. “I was just trying out some dialog.”

  He looked at me suspiciously, and I really couldn’t blame him, but he let it go. “Whatever. I just wanted to tell you that there are doughnuts in the break room.” He gave me one last look, then shrugged and left.

  I sat down, shaking, and looked wildly around every inch of the room.

  “Trixie?” I whispered.

  Nothing.

  There was no way I was going to sit in that office alone after that. I bolted.

  I found Marty in the break room, pouring a cup of coffee. A box of doughnuts was open on the table next to the latest issue of Classic Monsters of the Movies.

  I almost didn’t go in, but I figured even grumpy Marty was going to be better than solitude in my current state. He may have been a lot of things, but at least he was undisputedly human.

  “Finished writing?” he said in a way that implied he didn’t believe for a minute that I’d been writing a screenplay and not talking to myself like a crazy person.

  “Thanks for the doughnuts,” I non-answered, perching on a chair at the table.

  “I didn’t bring them. Monica did. She’ll be back up after she’s had a look in the basement. She wanted to meet you.”

  “Monica?” I repeated. “Wait, who’s in the basement?”

  “Monica.” He put the pot back on the warmer and turned to the table, piling three doughnuts on the magazine before picking it up to go. “She was a friend of Kate’s.”