Murder at the Palace

by Margaret Dumas

  Will they retrieve the statue and live gorgeously ever after? You’ll have to watch and see. And by that I mean you have to.

  Parisian Thoughts:

  The statue is watched over by very French guards. You know they’re so French because of their mustaches.

  The look on Audrey’s face after being kissed by O’Toole is the look we all imagine we’d have after such an encounter. Pure dazed bliss.

  No two people have ever made smoking look sexier. Is that how they stayed so thin? This is not a productive line of thought.

  Is this movie the reason I started calling my father “Papa?” Audrey is beyond adorable every time she says it.

  So Many Good Lines:

  This movie is so pretty you could watch it with the sound off. But then you’d miss lines like these:

  “I’m a society burglar. I don’t expect people to run about shooting me.”

  “It’s national crime prevention week. Take a burglar to dinner.”

  “You know, for someone who started lying just recently, you’re showing a real flair.”

  And delightful exchanges like these:

  A: “Well, you don’t think I’d steal something that didn’t belong to me, do you?”

  P: “Excuse me, I spoke without thinking.”

  P: “Ah, yes. That does it.” (on seeing her in her burglary disguise)

  A: “Does what?”

  P: “For one thing, it gives Givenchy a night off.”

  Movies My Friends Should Watch

  Sally Lee

  Chapter 27

  The lobby chandelier hung on a clever cable system that allowed it to be lowered down slowly for cleaning. I didn’t know this at the time, but Marty did, and he tore down the stairs, heading straight to the little metal box in the wall by the doors. The box held the alarm system keypad, the master light switches, and another control that I’d never really noticed.

  “Keys!” Marty turned to me. “Where are Kate’s keys?”

  They were in my backpack, which I’d left on the break room floor. Brandon ran back up for it, and then I had to dig around in all its pockets while everyone fidgeted nervously, craning their necks toward the light fixture.

  I found the keys and handed them over to Marty, who tried two before fitting the right one into a small keyhole. He turned it and we heard a low rumble as the cable system engaged.

  We had about forty-five minutes before the film would end and people would start filing out into the lobby. I’ve never seen anything move more slowly than that chandelier. It was agonizing. We automatically formed a circle around where it would arrive, looking up and straining to see any extra hidden sparkles. I realized Claire was standing next to me, looking up with the rest of us. I’d forgotten all about her, but she’d been covering for Brandon at the concession stand.

  “Why don’t you go take care of the ticket booth?” I said. “People could start showing up any time.”

  Nobody would show up an hour before a show, not to the Palace, but the teenager ambled off obligingly, asking no questions about the sudden urgent need to clean the chandelier.

  The rest of us were just about ready to jump out of our skins. I had a moment of worrying about Albert’s heart. Then the chandelier finally arrived at eye level and the five of us leapt on it like lions on a wildebeest. I held my breath as we examined each and every crystal.

  And found nothing.

  Again.

  I went up to the office to text Robbie with news of my defeat. Sick of rooting around in my backpack, I just dumped its entire contents onto the desktop and picked the phone out of the pile.

  No gold in the woodwork. No diamonds in the chandelier. No MacGuffin.

  Robbie sent one word back.

  Yet.

  Which is why I loved her.

  Everybody else had gone back to work after the chandelier fiasco. I sat in the office alone, trying to clear my head.

  The phone pinged with a text, and I glanced at the cracked screen. It was Detective Jackson, finally getting back to me about Hector’s whereabouts. Or not.

  You will be kept informed of developments in the case as the need arises.

  Well. So much for tricking him into telling me anything useful.

  Hector himself had sent about a dozen texts and left three voicemails, all variations on a theme of “where are you?” If he wasn’t a crime lord and coldblooded killer I would owe him an apology for making him worry. I sent him a quick text saying I was fine and that I’d be in touch. Hopefully that would keep him at bay, crime lord and coldblooded killer or not.

  I scrolled through my texts, selectively ignoring the ones I didn’t want to deal with and realized that Monica had never answered the one I’d sent her about Todd. Which meant I was in exactly the same spot I’d been yesterday afternoon, except exhausted from the misspent adrenalin of two consecutive wild goose chases.

  I might never find the MacGuffin. If this were a movie, it might end with a scene set a hundred years in the future, with the Palace being demolished to make room for a robot factory or something. The camera would pan in on something small and valuable in the rubble, and the audience would cry “No!” as a bulldozer covered it forever. What would that something be?

  “Hey, Nora. Watcha thinking about?”

  I jumped about a foot when I heard Trixie’s voice.

  “Oh!” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you!” She was perched on the arm of the sofa.

  “It’s fine.” I put a hand over my racing heart. “How are you?” I hadn’t seen her since she’d run through Todd the morning before, trying to defend me.

  “Fine. What happened with that fella? Did the police come?” She craned her neck to see behind the closed blinds out the window. “The pictures are different. How long have I been gone?”

  “Just since yesterday.” Marty must have changed the marquee earlier that morning to show the “ladykillers” weekend lineup: Dial M for Murder, which had ended as we’d raised the woefully diamond-less chandelier back up, and Gaslight, which was currently underway.

  “What happened?” Trixie scooched forward, her eyes wide with curiosity.

  I filled her in, editing the details to avoid the things that might take too long to explain to a 1930s usherette, like legal pot shops that couldn’t use banks.

  “So we need to find what Kate hid in the theater,” I concluded. “Do you have any ideas? Did you ever see her doing anything that looked odd, or see her tuck something away anywhere?”

  Trixie made a face while thinking. “I don’t know. All I can think about since you said ‘diamonds’ is diamonds.”

  “Diamonds are like that,” I acknowledged.

  Trixie thought some more. She was the most fidgety thinker I’d ever seen. Eyebrows were raised and lowered, lips were arranged in a twist or a pout. Ears were tugged. Finally, she looked at me and shrugged. “Allora,” she said. “That’s what Kate would say when she was stumped, and brother, am I stumped.” She sighed. “‘Allora, allora, allora.”

  “Is that Italian?”

  Trixie nodded, chewing daintily on a fingernail. “Kate was learning it. She listened to lessons on her contraption, so I was learning it, too.” She recited: “Roma è così bella! Dov’è l’hotel? C’è l’hotel. Fa bene!”

  “Trixie, that’s amazing! You learned all that from listening to her lessons on the laptop?” Which reminded me, where was the laptop? I got up and pulled it out from behind the couch where I’d stashed it the night before.

  She waved a hand modestly. “Oh, it’s nothing. I took French in high school, and Italian isn’t that different. I figure I could find my way to my hotel in Paris or Rome any old time.” She blinked, her smile fading. “Not that I ever will.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” My heart went out to her. After eighty plus years of loneliness she was still b
right and inquisitive, and, although it was weird to say this about a ghost, lively. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for her to know she was trapped within these walls for all eternity.

  I had a sudden vision of a bulldozer knocking down the Palace at the end of its story. What would happen to Trixie then?

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “I can see Paris or Rome anytime in the movies.”

  Okay, now she was ripping my heart out.

  “Maybe I’ll go watch the picture,” she said. “That might help me think.” Then she sat up straight. “Gaslight! We’re showing Gaslight!”

  I didn’t see what the excitement was about. “Right. You missed the beginning, but—”

  “Nora! Gaslight! The jewels! The jewels are in the dress!”

  I caught up with her. In the movie Charles Boyer is trying to make Ingrid Bergman think she’s losing her mind. She hears something in the attic every night and he tells her there’s nothing there. What she hears is Boyer, the fink, in the attic looking for the fortune Ingrid’s aunt left her. But none of that matters. What matters is that in the end we find out the fortune is in the form of jewels, sewn into an elaborate costume the aunt had worn as an opera singer.

  Jewels. Hidden in plain sight.

  And we had a rack of old costumes downstairs.

  I’d already leapt to my feet before some modicum of sense kicked in. I held up both hands.

  “Wait!” I yelled, more to myself than to Trixie. “I cannot go running all over this theater like a crazy person again.”

  “Okay,” Trixie nodded, eyes shining. “We’ll walk.”

  All we found hidden in the costumes of the Palace was dust. And some well-fed moths.

  We’d gone down to the prop room where I’d looked through the posters a few days ago with Albert. I didn’t get my hopes up (okay, that’s a lie) and didn’t tell anyone what I was doing.

  Once downstairs, Trixie and I methodically went through every article of clothing, every accessory, every belt and boot and umbrella. I spotted a pair of earrings—cheap costume things—and wondered if this is what Monica had been doing the day I met her, when she said she’d come to the theater to recover the earrings she’d loaned Kate.

  It bothered me that I hadn’t heard back from her.

  There were a few cloudy old mirrors and dusty paintings hung haphazardly on the walls around the room. After exhausting the possibilities of the costumes and props, I took a good close look at every single gilded frame, but couldn’t convince myself that anything was real gold. Nor were any of the paintings lost masterpieces. At least as far as I could tell.

  Trixie had helped, as much as she could without being able to physically move anything. This was her first wild goose chase of the day, so she was more optimistic than I was, but eventually even she had to admit that we were wrong.

  “Allora,” I said. “What now?”

  “I’ll keep thinking,” Trixie said. Then I got a text and when I looked up from my phone she was gone.

  The text was from Hector.

  Clearly something has caused you to mistrust me. When you realize you are wrong in this, I will be here.

  Which really made me hope he wasn’t a coldblooded killer. Because if he was just a nice guy, he was quite a nice guy.

  I went back up to the office. The contents of my backpack were still spilled all over the desk. I noticed the page torn from Kate’s notepad among the rest of it.

  Something had bothered me about this list when I’d looked it over at Stowe Lake. There were too many movies for it to be a regular lineup.

  “Win,” “M,” “Lace,” “Sorry,” and “Gas.”

  The words hadn’t registered when I’d looked at the list before. But now, given the films we were playing, two of them jumped out at me. “M” could be Dial M for Murder, and “Gas” could be Gaslight. Both were movies where husbands plotted to kill their wives, which is why this weekend’s lineup was dubbed “ladykillers.” What if the rest of the titles on Kate’s note had the same theme? “Sorry.” That could be Sorry, Wrong Number, which I’d just been thinking about the night before. Another husband plotting his wife’s murder.

  This made sense. With the unifying theme, “Lace” suddenly clicked in my mind as Midnight Lace (1960, Doris Day and Rex Harrison), where the suave English husband is trying to drive his rich American wife to suicide. And “Win” had to be Rear Window (1954, Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart), where the two leads think they witness Raymond Burr disposing of his wife’s body and set out to prove a murder.

  I sat back, stunned. Now that I saw it, how had I not seen it before? And what did it mean? Marty had torn this page off the notepad on Kate’s desk. That meant it was probably the last note she had written. Possibly on the day she died.

  We were showing Gaslight and Dial M now. She wouldn’t have wanted to show them again any time soon. So the list probably wasn’t for a lineup. It meant something else.

  If Kate had been married I would have leapt to the conclusion that this was her dying clue and that her husband was her killer. But Kate hadn’t been married.

  Had she?

  Chapter 28

  Monica, text me back. I need to know if Kate was married. If she was ever married.

  The answer came two minutes later.

  Are you all right? They just gave me my phone back.

  They? They who? I was replying when her next text came in.

  I’m in the hospital. I was attacked last night.

  While I’d been hanging out at the hotel the night before, Monica had been bashed on the head from behind as she’d entered her house. She didn’t regain consciousness until she was at the hospital. Which was after someone had ransacked her home and attempted to break into her shop.

  “Thank God for the guards,” she said, propped up in her bed. The hospital was only a few blocks away from her shop. I’d slipped out the back door of the Palace and called for a ride share the minute I’d gotten her text. When I got to her room she’d been surrounded by visitors. She sent them all away as soon as she saw me in the doorway.

  “They took my keys,” she told me. Her head was bandaged and she had an IV in her arm. “They must have thought they could just disarm the alarm at the shop, but I have guards on duty around the clock.”

  I could see why. Cannabis shops must be tempting targets for break-ins, what with all the drugs and cash and everything.

  The thief had run off at the first shout from the guards but they still called the police, which led to a patrol car being sent to Monica’s house where she was found unconscious.

  “Thank God,” I agreed. She’d taken a blow to her head, which had knocked her out. If she hadn’t gotten to the hospital she might have died. Just like Raul.

  Monica gripped my hand. “I was so worried about you. If they came for me…”

  I squeezed her fingers gently. “I was too paranoid to go home,” I told her. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if I had.

  She gave me a weak smile. “Paranoid is good.” She took a deep breath and shifted her position in the bed. “I guess this means you were right. Kate’s killer doesn’t have the money.”

  “No.” Whoever had attacked Monica was obviously still looking for the MacGuffin. “What did the police say?”

  She snorted. “Something amounting to the opinion that I was asking for it by running a drug den.”

  “That’s insane,” I protested. “You run a legal business!”

  She grimaced. “Welcome to my world.”

  “Did they even tell Detective Jackson?” I asked. “Did they even make the connection to—”

  “Well they wouldn’t, would they?” she asked. “Not without knowing about the money laundering.”

  Oh. Right. The money laundering. The illegal money laundering. Right.

  I rubbed my e
yes. “I think we have to tell them.”

  Monica gave me an agonized look. “I can’t do that to Kate,” she said. “I’m responsible for her death. I can’t be responsible for destroying her memory.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her that she wasn’t responsible for Kate’s death, and that nothing could destroy the memories of the people who loved her. But then I thought about everything I’d learned that day, and I said something different.

  “You’ve kept all of Kate’s secrets.”

  I gave her a steady look. She held it for a moment before turning away.

  “I think it’s time you tell me,” I said. “Tell me about Kate’s past. About Kate’s husband.”

  It was a guess, but Monica swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded.

  I held my breath until she spoke.

  “Kate Winslow wasn’t her real name,” Monica said. “She chose it when she was staying in a shelter in Winslow, Arizona.”

  I held myself back from asking questions. She would tell me in her own way.

  “It was the last in a network of shelters she’d stayed in, moving across the country, relying on good people who risked their lives to help women like her escape.”

  I made a small sound. Monica glanced at me and nodded.

  “She was running,” she said. “Running for her life. I don’t know where she was running from, but it didn’t matter. She was running from the man who would have killed her if she’d stayed.” She looked straight ahead. “From her husband.”

  I swallowed.

  “She’d been in shelters and safe houses for two years by the time she got to Arizona, and the people who ran the network believed she was finally safe. They gave her new paperwork, a new identity, and told her to build a new life. She built it here.”