The Miser's Dream

by John Gaspard

  Chicago Magic was next door to the theater and I slipped quietly into the store and silently up to my third floor apartment. I stopped briefly on the second floor landing but saw no light under the door, which confirmed my suspicion that my uncle Harry had already gone to bed. I made a mental note to discuss Quinton Moon and his alleged impending lecture in the morning, and then headed up the last flight to my apartment.

  I was tired and ready for bed, but old habits die hard and before I knew it I found myself at my desk, scrolling through my new emails, sorting the cream from the spam. As I waited for one particularly large email to open, I glanced out my window and was surprised to see there was still one light burning at the Parkway Theater next door.

  My apartment overlooks the projection booth in the theater, and even though it’s very much an obstructed view, I have often enjoyed peering into the room from my odd vantage point, trying to figure out what movie is playing by the way the lights bounced off a mirror on the far wall of the booth.

  There was no movie running at the moment, but something else immediately grabbed my attention. I stood up to get a better view and confirmed my worst suspicions. Even from this new angle there was no denying my first impression had been correct.

  There was a body on the floor of the projection booth, lying in what appeared to be a small pool of blood.

  Chapter 2

  I considered, for one brief moment, not calling the police. Not because I didn’t want to do my civic duty, but because I’ve probably called the police about dead bodies a few too many times in my life. People were beginning to talk. Common sense won out, of course, and I quickly placed a call to 911 and did my best to outline what I had seen. This resulted in the almost immediate arrival of a squad car, and several minutes later two patrolmen and I were peering through my window and trying to determine what we were actually seeing on the floor of the projection booth at the theater next door. We agreed it looked like a body and that the body looked dead.

  The patrolmen quickly, in their terminology, “escalated the event” and fifteen minutes later Homicide Detective Miles Wright stood next to me as we stared through the window.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” he finally said. Wright has the gravelly voice of a lifelong smoker and the yellow teeth to prove it.

  “Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, doing something?” I asked, trying to nudge him toward some form of action.

  “Patrol guys are all over it,” he said, turning from the window and looking around my apartment. “You are far more inclined toward action than I am. He’s dead. It’s cold outside. It’s warm in here.”

  He pulled out his glasses and studied the spines of books on the bookshelf. “Besides, the theater is locked up tight. We’ve got a call into the manager and the patrol guys are working on opening the front door. He’ll still be dead when we get in.”

  He sat down heavily on my couch and took out a pack of gum, offering me a piece. I shook my head.

  “What do you think of all this snow?” he continued, as if we were just a couple of guys hanging out, shooting the breeze. “Gotta be some kind of record, don’t you think?”

  “So you think he’s dead?”

  Wright glanced at me and then at the window. “Yeah. He looks plenty dead.”

  I returned to my vantage point and studied the form splayed out on the floor of the booth. I had to agree with Wright—he looked plenty dead. I turned back to the detective, who was seated comfortably on my couch. “Where’s your bitter half?”

  “You mean better half?”

  “You’ve known him longer than I have.”

  He nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you were right the first time,” he said as his phone began to buzz. “He’s on his way.” He reached into his coat and pulled out his phone, listening for a few seconds before hanging up. He turned to me as he pushed himself up from the coziness of the couch.

  “We’re in,” he said.

  “Okay, it looks like there’s ‘in’ and there’s ‘in.’”

  Wright and I were standing at the base of the stairs to the theater’s projection booth. The patrol officers had forced the theater’s front door open, and one of them was now struggling with the projection booth’s impressive metal door. He turned and looked down at us.

  “It’s locked,” he reported. “There’s no keyhole on this side. Looks like it’s locked from the inside.”

  Wright snapped his gum. “Any other way in?”

  The patrolman shook his head. “There are some square holes on the front wall for the projectors, but they’re barely a foot in diameter. And the window we saw the body through is barred, tiny, and two stories off the ground.”

  Wright scowled and turned to see the other patrolman approaching. This cop looked new and a little nervous. “Crime scene team is here,” the young man reported diligently. “They say there’s no way to pull any footprints from out front—too many people have come and gone.”

  Wright nodded and gestured toward the two exit signs on either side of the theater’s large screen. “Take a gander out those two back doors and if you see any footprints, get the team to tent it quick. Otherwise snow will erase all evidence in about ten minutes, at the rate it’s coming down.”

  The young cop nodded and headed down the aisle.

  Wright’s partner arrived at the same time as the theater’s manager, and the contrast could not have been more amusing. Homicide Detective Fred Hutton is tall and wide and grim and humorless. He’s a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of cop and doesn’t suffer fools (or anyone else, especially me) gladly. He’s also married to my ex-wife, which adds a flavor all its own to our prickly, ever-evolving relationship.

  The theater’s manager was just as tall as the detective, but she wore it better than he did, possessing that willowy stance you see with supermodels. However, at this moment, she looked nothing like a supermodel. Unless that supermodel had been dragged out of bed and forced back to work in the middle of the night to face a dead body, with no time allotted for dealing with makeup or bedhead hair.

  If I was remembering correctly, her name was Tracy. We’d had a couple amusing conversations since she took on the job last spring, particularly about the way in which she’d radically changed the line-up of movies at the theater and subsequently made it once again a cool destination. She’d also instituted First Thursdays, a sort of open mic for variety acts, which had pulled my uncle Harry and many of his magician cronies back onto the stage. The Parkway Double Plays were also her brainchild and whenever I thought of a possible title combination, I’d offer it up as a potential programming suggestion, being careful to use her terminology and not Harry’s preferred term.

  Detective Wright had just finished bringing them both up to speed on the situation when two of the crime scene techs finished their work on the hinges and were able to remove the massive metal door to the projection booth. The techs stepped into the booth and Homicide Detectives Fred Hutton and Miles Wright followed. Their body language told us we were to remain where we were, but by leaning forward, both Tracy and I were able to get a glimpse into the small, square room. Tracy gasped and pulled back.

  “That’s Tyler,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  “The projectionist?”

  “Yeah. He worked here when I started. He’s been here forever.” Tracy backed away, clearly not wanting to see anything else. Oddly enough, my instincts led me in the exact opposite direction, and I took another step closer to the open doorframe.

  From this new, slightly improved vantage point, I could see Tyler’s body, facedown, sprawled on the floor. A fresh red stain on the rear of his t-shirt suggested a bullet to the back, while a small puddle of blood surrounding the body completed the tableau. Several feet away, also on the floor, lay a really tiny handgun, which the detectives were scrutinizing with great intensity.

  Since no one was holding me back,
I took two more steps forward, which gave me a better view of the entire room. As the patrolman had said earlier, the front wall of the room had two square holes cut through the concrete, for the projectors’ lights to shine through.

  Advances in technology must have negated the need for two projectors at some point, as there was currently only one in the booth, though markings on the floor indicated where another projector probably stood for years. A large metal stand with a round, flat plate sat behind the remaining projector, and film was spooled off the plate, across a roller system in the ceiling, and then in (and presumably, out) of the projector.

  Against the wall where the missing projector once stood was a wooden stand with a Blu-ray player, mixer, and cables that ran through the other hole in the wall. I leaned to my left, peering around the corner of the booth, where I could see the cables as they snaked out of the hole in the wall. They stretched up to a video projector in the ceiling. This refinement must have been the theater’s fledgling move toward digital projection.

  I turned to peer back into the booth.

  In addition to the projector, there was also a large worktable, a weight-lifting bench with a set of loose weights neatly stacked next to it, and four more different colored weights near what I took to be two large film canisters. Both were open and appeared empty, at least from this angle. Handwritten labels on each of the two canisters read “LAM.”

  An open-air toilet was wedged into one corner, which probably explained the lock on the inside of the projection booth door. I guessed that projectionists needed to answer the call of nature like anyone else, but don’t always have the luxury of heading downstairs to the restroom when the need arose. The base of the toilet looked cracked and moldy, and may have accounted for the small puddles of water I noticed on the floor.

  My visual tour of the room was interrupted by an exclamation from Detective Wright. He was pointing to an envelope which lay open on the worktable.

  Homicide Detective Fred Hutton moved across the room, just finishing pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He gave the second glove a practiced snap and picked up the envelope, prying it gently open. Even from my distant vantage point, I could see the envelope was full to bursting with cash.

  After several minutes of my gawking, the cops had clearly had enough.

  Detective Wright instructed one of the patrolmen to escort Tracy and me back to the lobby, where they would join us for brief questioning. We made our way back downstairs and stood around silently for several minutes. Tracy sat in one of the lobby’s overstuffed chairs, while I took a position leaning against the candy counter.

  “What do they think it is?” she asked, running a hand through her thick, red, bedraggled hair. “I bet it’s suicide. If I was handicapping this, I’d put even money on suicide.”

  “Did he seem like the suicidal type?”

  She shrugged. “He had secrets.”

  “Well, the police haven’t said anything,” I said. “But it looks like he was shot in the back and the gun was on the floor across the room. I’m no expert, but I think that rules out suicide.”

  “But didn’t they say the room was locked? From the inside?”

  “Indeed it was. And therein lies the mystery,” I said, looking over as the two detectives made their way into the lobby.

  “We’ve tented the area over the southwest exit door, the one to the left of the movie screen,” Detective Wright was saying quietly. “It appears someone stepped out the door, and then turned around and came back into the theater. They left prints in the snow, but the footprints may have been compromised by the falling snow. And, also, by the very act of turning around.”

  “They stepped outside and stepped back in,” Homicide Detective Fred Hutton repeated. “Do you think they saw someone and didn’t want to be spotted?”

  “That would be my first guess. We’re going to do a door-to-door in the morning to see if any of the neighbors saw something.”

  Homicide Detective Fred Hutton nodded and then surveyed the room, looking first at Tracy and then taking an even longer look at me. “He spotted the body?” he said to Wright. He put a spin on the word “he” that I didn’t like and spoke as if I wasn’t standing ten feet from him.

  Wright nodded. “The window in his living room has a decent view right into the projection booth.”

  Homicide Detective Fred Hutton grunted and headed across the lobby toward me. “Eli,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Good evening, Homicide Detective Fred Hutton,” I said by way of response. “Or, actually, I suppose at this point I should say good morning.”

  This produced another nonspecific grunt from him.

  Since our initial meeting, when he introduced himself as Homicide Detective Fred Hutton, I have consistently referred to him by his full name and title, much to his consternation and my amusement.

  He didn’t like it the first time I did it, and likes it even less now. For me, it never gets old.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, getting right to the point.

  “I don’t have much more to add beyond what your partner described,” I said. “I came home, glanced out my living room window and saw what appeared to be a body lying on the floor of the projection booth.”

  “Do you make it a habit to peep into the projection booth?” He had taken out his notepad and was writing small, spidery notes.

  “Sometimes,” I replied, trying to remove any tone of defensiveness from my voice. “But I’m not sure I would use the word ‘peep.’ I like to see if I can figure out what movie is playing.”

  He raised an eyebrow at this. “And how does that work?”

  “There’s a small mirror on one wall and if you get the angle just right, you can see light bouncing off something or other and sort of get a sense of part of the movie screen…” My voice trailed off and I met his eyes for a moment before looking away. He shook his head with a sigh, and then returned to his note taking.

  “And then what did you do?”

  It took me a moment to realize we were off my window peeping habits and back onto the body on the floor. “I called 911,” I said.

  “And what was your relationship with the projectionist?”

  This question took me by surprise. “None,” I said, perhaps a tad too quickly. “I’ve never met him.”

  “You repeatedly and routinely stare into his workspace and yet you’ve never met him?”

  “Not only have I never met him,” I said, again working hard not to sound too defensive, “but I’ve never really even seen him. I mean, completely.”

  This produced a hard stare from Homicide Detective Fred Hutton, which caused me to stammer a bit as I continued my response. “I mean, I’ve seen his arms, his legs, I’ve seen him moving around in there, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen his face.”

  We met each other’s eyes again and then he returned to his notebook. “Interesting,” he said, scribbling something quickly. “I think that’s all we’ll need from you for now. We may want you to come down and make an official statement in the next day or two.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure what the protocol was in a situation like this. “You want me to leave?”

  “Nothing would make me happier,” he said without humor as he turned and headed across the room to Tracy. She had witnessed his treatment of me, and I could see she was bracing for a difficult conversation.

  I pushed against several of the glass lobby doors until I found one that was unlocked. I was about to step into the cold night when I heard one of the crime scene techs come into the room and report to Detective Wright how much money they had found in the envelope in the projection booth.

  When I heard the figure, it was all I could do to avoid doing a double-take with an accompanying cartoon sound effect. I successfully squelched the impulse and continued on my way out the door.

  Chapter 3 />
  “Seventy-five thousand dollars?” Harry gave a low whistle as he stroked his thick white beard.

  “That’s what the crime scene guy said. I saw a stack of money in an envelope on the table, but I was surprised it was so much. Must have been large denomination bills.”

  “Must have been. My, you had quite the evening last night, didn’t you?”

  My uncle Harry and I were having breakfast together in his apartment, as we did most mornings. However, our topics of conversation usually focused on more mundane things, like a new rye bread he was thinking of trying or the need to order more invisible thread for the magic shop. Dead bodies and large sums of cash were, at least up until today, infrequent but welcome breakfast subjects.

  The daily breakfast ritual began soon after I moved back into my apartment above Harry’s. At the time, I had just gotten divorced and my aunt Alice had recently died. It made sense to return to my boyhood home, if only for a while.

  Harry seemed to like the company at breakfast and it gave us an important and valuable opportunity to strategize on ways to upgrade and improve his magic store and its standing in the marketplace.

  I should point out we never seized that opportunity, not even once, but instead usually spent the time just reading the paper or kibitzing on topics both obscure and unimportant.

  “It sounds like the police have a classic locked room mystery on their hands,” Harry said as he headed to the coffeemaker to pour his second cup of the day. He filled the mug to the halfway mark and then added a generous amount of chocolate milk to round out the rest of the cup. “Dead body on the floor, gun nearby, a stack of money on the table and the door locked from the inside. Yes, quite the puzzler.”