Murder at the Palace

by Margaret Dumas

  And I had to admit the possibility that I had Kate and Raul’s roles reversed. I kept thinking of Kate as the main victim, and Raul somehow caught up in it all—in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it was equally possible that someone from Raul’s past (like his brother, perhaps) followed him from Columbia to kill him for some reason and Kate had just gotten caught up in that. Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in which case her past had nothing to do with anything.

  My frustration knew no bounds. And I was frustrated mainly with myself for not being able to see what I was sure was right in front of me.

  Eventually I did the only reasonable thing I could. I opened a bottle of wine from the minibar and called Robbie.

  “It all comes down to the money.”

  We’d been talking for a while before Robbie came to this conclusion. Long enough for me to have outlined my three major scenarios and finished more than half the bottle.

  “I think it does,” I agreed. “But will finding the money point us to the murderer? Who knew about the MacGuffin? And how? And when?”

  “And where is it now?” she finished.

  “Well, it’s not glued to the woodwork in the form of gold,” I said. “Or diamonds in the chandelier, or jewels sewn into costumes.”

  “Okay, so that’s three things down. That just leaves anything else.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s helpful.”

  “Do you know what I thought of this afternoon? Diamonds in the ice machine. I had this amazing visual of the soft drink machine just spewing out diamonds all over the concession stand.”

  “Cool.” I’d had nuttier thoughts.

  “And then I wondered if they could be hiding in plain sight in the ice that Raul was found on.”

  “You have no idea how good it makes me feel that you’re as crazy as I am,” I told her. “But the police drained the ice machine.”

  “And didn’t find seven million in diamonds?”

  “If they did, they didn’t mention it.”

  She sighed.

  “Oh, and I haven’t even started in on Strawberry Hill. How did Kate wind up in the park?” I asked. “I mean, could she have buried something up there?”

  “Anything is possible.” Her tone said anything really wasn’t. “But that wouldn’t be something in plain sight that Monica would have seen all the time, which is the one clue we have from Kate.”

  “Right,” I admitted. Just as well I hadn’t stopped for a shovel in my wanderings.

  I heard Tia’s voice in the background.

  “My daughter has just pointed out the time,” Robbie said.

  I glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s three in the morning. Shouldn’t she be in bed?”

  “Shouldn’t we all?”

  “Goodnight, Nora!” I heard Tia yell.

  “Goodnight, ladies.”

  There was no scenario in which I would sleep that night. I kept feeling like I was just on the edge of seeing something that had been staring me in the face all this time. Something in plain sight.

  I wandered around the hotel room, watched the lights of the city from my window for a while, and finally turned on the TV, looking for Turner Classic Movies. I found it, and recognized The Innocents (1961, Deborah Kerr and Peter Wyngarde). TCM, like the Palace, was making the most of the lead-up to Halloween.

  I stayed with it for a while, but trying to figure out if Deborah was seeing a ghost or losing her mind hit a little too close to home. I looked around the room again, craving a distraction.

  I’d thrown the bag from the boutique on a chair when I’d gotten in, but now I put away the clothes I’d bought: undies, a pair of jeans, a couple tee shirts, and a hoody. That took all of three minutes.

  I’d also bought a new purse. The backpack with all its compartments had driven me crazy long enough. Now I took a simple one-pocket messenger bag out of its tissue, tossed it on the bed, and dumped the contents of the backpack out next to it.

  When I’d left the office I’d swept everything from the desk into the backpack, and it looked like I’d taken more than I’d intended. Included in what I now spilled onto the bed was Kate’s notepad, several extra pens, and the small ledger of movie posters that I’d brought up from the basement days ago and never looked at since.

  I thumbed through the book now, half paying attention to Deborah’s mounting dread on the TV, but getting increasingly absorbed in the collection of poster art Kate had put together. I’d seen the Gilda in the first drawer I’d opened, and the Frankenstein still hung in the tiled entryway of the Palace, along with Dr. Jekyll, Gaslight, and Dial M. Every lineup we’d shown since I’d gotten to the Palace was represented in the locked glass cases lining the way from the ticket booth to the lobby doors.

  The slate would change again on Tuesday, to the theme of “monster mash.” I flipped through the pages of the book, looking to see if there was a poster for Dracula (1931, Bela Lugosi), The Wolf Man (1941, Lon Chaney Jr.) or The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, some poor actor in a rubber costume).

  We had all three, and many more, each entry annotated with where and when they’d been purchased. I wondered where we could display more of them. Maybe hang them on the way up the lobby stairs? This really was a great collection. If they were real they’d be worth a fortune.

  On the TV, Deborah Kerr screamed.

  If they were real.

  If they were real, would they be worth seven million dollars?

  I dove for my phone and did a search. The first hit I found was from an auction house, and it was enough to make me gasp out loud. A Frankenstein had sold recently for over $350,000, and that wasn’t even a lobby-sized poster. A Dracula was up for sale, with a reserve bid of over half a million dollars. How many posters did Kate have? Hanging in plain sight, where Monica might have stared at them every time she passed, if she’d known what they were worth.

  “Calm down,” I told myself out loud. I’d been absolutely sure of three things that hadn’t panned out. I refused to get all excited again. But I couldn’t stop my heart from practically thumping out of my chest.

  I looked at the clock. It was after four in the morning. There was nobody to call. If I was right, a poster worth a fortune could be hanging outside the theater with nothing but a sheet of glass and a single lock to protect it. But if I was right, it might have been hanging there for weeks. I needed to calm down. Think rationally.

  Kate had usually handled the posters herself and had insisted on treating them as carefully as if they’d been originals. I remembered Albert telling me that, as he’d gingerly lifted them out of their drawers and placed them on clean archival paper. And he’d told me that they didn’t use pins to hang them up. They used magnets, to avoid damage. Again, because Kate had insisted.

  An authentic vintage poster would have damage. It would have been hung in some lobby back when the movie was new. It could have creases, stains, or age spots. I’d noticed the Gilda didn’t have any of those signs of legitimate wear. But I hadn’t looked at the others.

  I grabbed the ledger again. Gilda had been bought several years ago, before Kate would have started laundering money for Monica. But Frankenstein had only been purchased a few months ago. And now that I was looking, I noticed that Frankenstein had a tiny dot next to the name, in blue pencil. Gilda didn’t.

  But Dracula did. A check of the rest of the pages told me that twenty-eight posters had blue dots. And they were all bought within the last year. All but three were from the same seller, noted only as Sasha.

  Was I absolutely sure I was right this time? I couldn’t say. But was I sure enough that I absolutely had to go take a look at the posters that very instant?

  Damn right I was.

  Chapter 31

  I may have been out of my mind with excitement, but I hadn’t forgotten that Hector was probab
ly still keeping watch on the Palace. Even in the wee small hours of the morning. Especially then. With that in mind I had the taxi let me out two blocks away.

  I really wanted to go take a close look at the Frankenstein poster hanging in the theater’s entryway. But if Hector were the murderer, going out front would amount to hanging out a flashing neon sign reading “Please Come Kill Me.” Instead I ducked down the side street and peeked into the rear alley. There were no parked cars containing Hector’s watchful associates. At least as far as I could tell.

  I used my new key to open the back door and heard the urgent beeping of the alarm, giving me ninety seconds to enter the code. I felt my way along the wall to the keypad, where I punched in the number 2812, grateful that Marty had made such a production about telling me the new number. I might not have remembered it if he hadn’t. Once I entered the code the beeping stopped. The silence, and the dark, was absolute.

  I continued feeling along the brick wall until I got to the stairs. I knew the prop room was windowless, so I’d be able to turn on lights once I got there. But the thought of inching my way along the maze of basement corridors in the dark was more unnerving than I’d expected. What I needed was a flashlight, and I’d stashed a bag of them behind the candy counter after the fiasco with the search for gold. I decided fumbling up the dark stairs to the lobby was preferable to fumbling around in pitch-black hallways, so I gripped the cold metal railing and made my way up.

  The empty expanse of the lobby was eerily lit by four green Exit signs. They provided the only illumination aside from the dim outline of the lobby doors, the light from the streetlamps barely making it up the entryway. I found the cache of flashlights under the candy counter and grabbed one. When I turned around I caught my breath. There was a dim glowing light at the top of the balcony stairs.

  “Nora!” The light waved, calling my name in a whisper.

  “Trixie!” My response was hushed, but still carried like a gunshot.

  I’d never seen her in the dark before. She came down the stairs, the details of her outline indistinct, surrounded by a faint glow. If I hadn’t known her to be my bubbly usherette friend, she would have scared the living daylights out of me.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered excitedly. “What are you doing here this early?”

  I supposed it had gone from being very late to being very early.

  “I had another idea,” I told her. “And this time I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

  She clapped and glowed a little brighter. “Oh, I knew you would! Gee, you’re clever. What did you think of?”

  “Come with me.” I headed for the basement stairs. “Let’s go see together.”

  I didn’t turn the flashlight on until we were in the stairway, the door closed behind us. Only then did I feel safe. Not that I felt safe at all. But I did feel better with Trixie by my side.

  We went back down the stairs and navigated the warren of hallways to the prop room while I told her what I’d figured out. What I thought I’d figured out.

  “Golly Moses!” She stopped in front of the prop room door, staring at me. I’d just told her how much an original Dracula poster was worth. “For a poster? Why, we used to throw them out after the picture closed! We’d maybe give them to one of the kids sometimes, but we were supposed to throw them out.”

  “I think everybody was supposed to throw them out,” I told her. “That’s why originals are so scarce now, and why the ones that are still around are worth a fortune.”

  “Well, I never.” She shook her head, her curls shimmering in the darkness.

  “I know,” I said, opening the door. “Now, shall we go see if I’m right?”

  “Gee, Nora, I sure hope you are.”

  So did I.

  The prop room was creepy with the lights out, and almost creepier with them on. I jumped when I saw my own reflection in a mirror hung crookedly on the brick wall. The racks and piles I’d ransacked the day before, looking for hidden jewels, now seemed sinister somehow. Probably because it was near dawn and I was operating on pure adrenaline.

  Trixie and I had gone through everything in the room the day before. Everything except the posters. Had we been in the presence of a fortune in art as we’d sighed in disappointment at not finding a fortune in jewels?

  There were a few random lamps and vases on the table near the poster cabinet. I moved them to the floor and got several sheets of archival paper from the top drawer, laying them out on the tabletop to create a clean surface.

  Then I turned back to the cabinet, almost afraid of what would come next.

  “Go on!” Trixie hopped from one foot to the other in excitement.

  I could have started alphabetically. The first poster marked with a blue dot in Kate’s book was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland). But as enticing as that was, I was after a bigger prize.

  I opened the drawer marked “D-G” and again saw Gilda on top. She was gorgeous, but there was no blue dot next to her name in the ledger. I moved through the stack, sliding each poster a few inches aside, not bending any corners, being incredibly careful. The posters were flat in the shallow drawer, each sandwiched between sheets of archival paper. Finally, I saw the corner of the poster I was looking for. Dracula.

  I rubbed my hands on my jeans, wishing I had a pair of the cotton gloves that they use in museums, then lifted the poster out of the drawer.

  I laid it face up on the table.

  Yes.

  Bela Lugosi’s mesmerizing eyes dominated the image, but I wasn’t looking at him. There were several uneven pinholes in each corner, signs that the poster had at some point been hung. More importantly, there were creases. They were faint, but they were there—one down the center and three across. I hadn’t had time to do any real research on how to authenticate posters, but I had done a quick search on my phone while in the taxi. These creases were a very good sign. Before the 1970s, I’d read, posters were almost always shipped from the distributor folded.

  “Gee, he gives me the creeps.” Trixie was on the other side of the table, peering intently at the poster. “Is it real? An original?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think it could be.” I turned it over. Carefully. It was heavier than a normal poster and had some sort of reinforced backing. The top of my head started to tingle. A backing was another good sign. Somebody had thought the poster was worth preserving.

  “Oh, no,” Trixie said. “It’s ruined.” She was looking at a mark in the lower left corner. “Somebody stamped it.”

  “Right,” I said, my mouth suddenly very dry. “A gallery stamped it. I think that means it’s been authenticated. Trixie,” I whispered, hardly daring to say it. “I think it’s real.”

  Her eyes grew enormous. “Oh, Nora. You did it.”

  I turned the poster back over and looked back down at Bela, not sure I could believe it. If the other posters Kate had marked in the ledger also looked this good…I’d finally found the MacGuffin.

  Which might have been my last thought on this earth if Trixie hadn’t screamed.

  Chapter 32

  “Nora! Duck!”

  I reacted without thinking, dropping and dodging as something went whooshing past my ear and slammed into the table with a deafening crack. I turned and saw Todd Randall wielding an iron bar like a club and looking at me like a killer.

  “Nora!” Trixie shouted again.

  “Todd!” I backed away from him, realizing that he stood between me and the door. I was trapped.

  He smiled. At least, he probably thought it was a smile. “Nora. I guess I should thank you.” He nodded toward the poster on the table. “I was getting damn sick of this place.”

  “How did you get in?” Which maybe wasn’t the most urgent question, but it’s the one that came tumbling out of my mouth as I looked frantically around the room for
an escape. Or a weapon.

  “I bought a ticket,” he said. “I’ve been here since the second show yesterday.”

  So much for relying on grainy pictures of him to warn the staff.

  “I guess I owe you,” he said, his eyes flicking past me. He was probably also looking for anything I could use as a weapon. “I had no clue how Ellie hid all that money.” His eyes returned to mine. “But I figured a clever bitch like you would figure it out. I just had to wait.”

  “Nora,” Trixie shimmered into view behind Todd. “I can’t hurt him. I wish I could but I can’t.” She swiped a fist through his torso.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know what?” Todd looked at me narrowly.

  “I know you’re Kate’s husband.”

  I hadn’t known that, not until he’d just called her Ellie. But now, watching the stunned look on his face, I absolutely knew him to be the violent predator Kate had run from. Run for her life.

  “How did you find her?” I asked. I’d surprised him. Maybe I could use that to keep him off guard.

  He made a guttural sound, low in his throat. “Something you should know about hunting,” he said. “The trick is knowing how to wait.”

  While he spoke I took a step to my right. He did the same, unconsciously mirroring me, and I felt a surge of hope. If I could move slowly around the room, keeping him across from me, eventually I’d have my back to the door. And then I’d just have to run.

  “That’s what separates the good from the great,” Todd said. “Waiting. Keeping a sharp eye out. Holding for your moment.”

  Trixie appeared at my side, facing him with me. “I’m going to get help,” she said. “I don’t know how, but I promise I’m going to. Please just keep him talking. Just don’t let him near you until I get you help.”

  I nodded and she vanished. Where she would get help at dawn in an empty theater was something I didn’t want to think about. I just hoped she could do something.