P N Elrod Omnibus
Page 21
That clue shoved to the side, she thought seriously about motivation. Why would anyone want to kill the production? Not one of her people would benefit if it died—quite the contrary.
What about Isabel? She believed in this show, but was that just a cover? Her grand plan to prove herself to be a powerful dramatic actress as well as a comedy star was backfiring in the tabloids. Derisive articles were surfacing without any of the writers having seen her work. Unfair, but bad news sold. If Isabel stopped the production in the face of the mishaps, then the critical feeding frenzy would never happen. Of course, she’d lose the chance to dispel the mockers by delivering a solid performance.
Perhaps James Keating? He’d more than once voiced the thought that they should quit and close down the show before anyone got hurt, but always deferred to Isabel’s wishes. Could he be tired of playing second banana?
By the third night at watch, Cassie was exhausted. She had to keep up a strong front to inspire confidence, but that and the hard work of rehearsals drained her. At eleven she said good-night to the last of the crew, locked the door, and made a round of the dark and silent theater. While others might find the cavernous quiet and deep shadows ominous, she was in her home element. Each creak was as familiar as her own breath. When no boogeyman obligingly leaped out so she could whack him with her bat and solve her problems, she retired to the dressing room area to get a much wanted shower.
Having seen the Hitchcock movie enough times to be sensible about the vulnerability of bathing females, she not only locked the dressing room door, but propped a chair under the knob. Any would-be Norman Bates would have a tough time sneaking up on her, especially if the toolbox she’d balanced on the chair fell off.
Which it did, just as she finished her final rinse and cut the water.
The terrific crash nearly made her leap out of her freshly scrubbed skin. Dripping, she struggled frantically into a terry robe and grabbed her bat. Her heart hammered so loud she could barely hear anything else as she approached the dressing room door—
Which was being forced open.
Swallowing her fear and outrage, she nipped quick as a cat behind the door, ready to deliver a Babe Ruth-style homer to the intruder.
The chair abruptly tumbled over, and a black figure cautiously edged inside. She gulped again. He was awfully big for a poltergeist.
No matter. He was a trespasser and she was within her rights. She swung the bat hard, giving a banshee yell for good measure.
He whirled barely in time to duck and deflect the blow to the side. He yanked the bat from her grasp and drove bodily toward her. She buried her fist into his belly, using plenty of knuckle. The man doubled over. Cassie dodged, rolled, and grabbed up the bat again, coming to her feet with it ready in hand as he recovered enough to turn on her.
“You?!” she screamed, caught between disbelief and rage.
“Grrg!” said Quentin Douglas, holding his gut.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He waved one hand, palm out, backing away from her threat. “Uh-a-ha-ooo?”
“I’m watching the place,” she answered, understanding the question even if articulation was lacking. “Why are you here? You’re the poltergeist?”
He violently shook his head, then found a chair and dropped into it, breathing heavily. He didn’t look like a poltergeist. But then he’s an actor, she reminded herself.
“I’m here to watch out for trouble,” he wheezed out a few moments later. “With the stuff that’s going on. . .it seemed the right thing to do. I was worried about you.”
Wow. Her last guy would never have done that for her. “I can take care of myself.”
“I noticed,” he said, rubbing his stomach.
“How long have you been here?”
“Since the first night I arrived.”
“What? You’ve been creeping around every night without me knowing?!”
“I happen to be very good at it. That’s why Isabel recommended me when Hopewell gave notice. She knew about my training. She thought it might be an asset to theater security.”
Cassie relaxed. Marginally. She still held her bat ready. “Are you all right?”
“Just bruised pride. If my service buddies ever found out I was decked by a half-pint like you—”
She growled and tightened her grip on the bat.
“Take it easy! That was a compliment. You’ve got a killer arm. If red hair is mentioned they won’t hassle me.”
Mollified, she eased off. “Why’d you come in here? Trying to cop a peek?” She tightened the tie on her robe, suddenly aware of drafts.
“That would be wonderful, but I saw someone lurking in the hall outside. I chased him, then lost him. When I returned I found the door’s lock jimmied, so I thought I’d better check to make sure you weren’t hanging from a coat rack with a knife in you.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks. Shouldn’t we go looking for the lurker, then?”
“We—sure, when you’ve dressed for the part, but don’t go to any trouble on my account. In the meantime, I’ll start looking around.”
“Oh, no you don’t. You stay right here and watch my back.”
He grinned, his wicked eyes lighting up.
“Figuratively!”
Growling, she retreated to the shower and threw on clothes, then returned, still damp, but ready for anything.
Apparently recovered from the blow to his gut and pride, he reported that all was quiet. “He’s probably gone by now. I didn’t get a good look at him. It was too dark. It might have been a woman.”
“I’m still turning on all the lights and going through this place room by room.” She headed for the master switches backstage.
“Wait a second. . .do you smell gas?”
She sniffed. He was right.
“Basement,” she said decisively, pivoting and running for the stairs. “We have butane tanks to fuel stage-fire effects, but they’re locked up in a cage. I don’t see how—”
Quentin followed, using the flashlight he carried to guide them down the stairs. “Who has the keys to the cage?”
“There’s no key, just a trick padlock, it’s a joke around here—” She stopped cold. On the bottom step was a single candle burning in a holder. She scrambled the rest of the way down and slapped the flame out. The gas smell was worse; she felt a headache coming on.
Quentin surged past her. Some of the cage wire had been cut through. He thrust his hand into the hole and shut off the valves on the hissing tanks.
“Out!” he ordered, and she did not argue with him.
* * *
Three hours before curtain Cassie called a meeting. She was mad as hell, but not showing it. In fact, she looked cheerful and rested. That was enough to alert her people that something was up.
“We’re going to have the best show we’ve ever put on,” she said as an opening.
Nell, who knew her very well, showed alarm.
“We can also relax, our troubles are over. The poltergeist blew it. I know who’s been trying to kill this production.”
“Who?” demanded Keating, holding tight to Isabel’s hand.
Cassie grinned. “Someone who didn’t know the ins and outs of this old place. One of the jokes here is the huge padlock on the butane cage.” She quickly explained about what she and Quentin had discovered the night before. “This theater was supposed to blow up, burn down, or at least be so damaged as to make the show impossible. The culprit, not knowing that a trick catch on the padlock would open it, didn’t have time to cut through the hasp, and smashing it might have been too noisy, so he cut the cage wires instead—and that was the giveaway.”
“How so?” asked Isabel.
“A woman or a small man could have got a hand through the cage wires and wouldn’t have needed to cut the wires to turn the tank valves on. Anyone inside the Sullivan company would have known to just pop the trick padlock. Only an outsider, a man unable to get his big hand through, would have thought it necessary t
o cut the wire to get to the tanks.”
People exchanged looks and Nell’s eyes narrowed. She would be the one to point out the flaw in Cassie’s logic—that a member of the company would be smart enough to cut the wires as a cover.
Cassie pressed forward before Nell could speak and spoil the build. “So why the hell were you trying to kill this production—Mr. Keating?”
Keating, no actor, went a sickly gray. “That’s slander!” he snarled. He stood, squaring his shoulders, recovering his cool. “My lawyers will strip you to the bone.”
Isabel shot to her feet. “James?”
“Bel,” he said patiently, “this is what happens when you deal with amateurs.”
She looked at Cassie.
Who looked right back and asked, “Did he happen to go missing between eleven and twelve last night? As in turn off his cell phone?”
Everyone knew he never did that. The annoying thing was always going off during rehearsals, and even Isabel couldn’t get him to silence it.
She went pale as she rounded on him. “Where were you?”
“I had a business call and took it in the hotel lobby. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“That would be a first. You’re always on that thing. You don’t care who’s around.”
“Oh, Bel, really. We’ve had talks about your ego before—”
“My ego?”
“Sweetie-pie, you need a reality check. This project of yours is too expensive, even as a tax write-off.”
“You self-absorbed, penny-pinching bastard! It’s my damned money!”
“And the critics are eating you alive even before opening night. Face it, you’re a star, not an actress!”
Cassie calmly fitted her baseball bat into Isabel’s hand. “Here, honey, have a party.”
* * *
The Graham-Keating engagement, along with James Keating’s right arm, which he’d raised to ward off the blow, was officially broken, so screamed a tabloid headline a few days later.
Despite Keating’s threats of legal reprisal for slander and assault, everyone in the company stuck to the story that he’d fallen off the stage into the old orchestra pit. The police investigation stalled, while the show went on.
Isabel Graham, drawing from that afternoon’s inspiration, gave a riveting performance as one of the most vicious, bloody-minded Lady Macbeths the critics had ever had the pleasure to cower from; they also enthused about newcomer Quentin Douglas, sparking talk of a Broadway revival of the play.
“Two weeks and he’s history,” chided Nell to Cassie at the opening night celebration party. “Yeah, sure. You change your mind about dating actors yet?”
“Maybe,” Cassie admitted, returning Quentin’s look from across the stage. He started toward her, eyes twinkling again. “He didn’t seem to care that I clobbered him, so there’s hope. . . .”
“Then you go, girl!” Nell pushed her forward. “And give him one for me!”
* * * * * * *
__________
GRAVE–ROBBED
Author’s Note: I always wanted to do a story where vampire Jack Fleming crashes a séance and the invitation to trib to MANY BLOODY RETURNS, edited by Toni L.P. Kelner and Charlaine Harris was NOT to be missed. But this vampires and birthdays-themed story did not come easy. Originally Jack’s partner Escott was going to be in on the action, but after 17 hours of tearing my hair, trying to write him in, I gave up and reluctantly kicked poor Charles to the curb. After that the story just about wrote itself. A writer’s sub-conscious always knows best!
Chicago, February 1937
When the girl draped in black stepped into the office to ask if I could help her with a séance, Hal Kemp’s version of “Gloomy Sunday” began to murmur sadly from the office radio.
Coincidences annoy me. A mournful song for a dead sweetheart put together with a ceremony that’s supposed to help the living speak with the dead made me uneasy—and I was annoyed it made me uneasy.
I should know better, being dead myself.
“You sure you’re in the right place?” I asked, taking in her outfit. Black overcoat, pocketbook, gloves, heels, and stockings—she was a walking funeral. Along with the mourning weeds, she wore a brimmed hat with a chin-brushing veil even I couldn’t see past.
“The Escott Agency—that’s what’s on the door,” she said, sitting on the client chair in front of the desk without an invitation. “You’re Mr. Escott?”
“I’m Mr. Fleming. I fill in for Mr. Escott when he’s elsewhere.” He was off visiting his girlfriend. I’d come to his office to work on the books since I was better at accounting. Littering the desk were stacks of paper scraps covered with dates and numbers—his usual method of recording business expenses on the fly. After a couple hours of dealing with the monotony, I was ready for a break.
“It was Mr. Escott who was recommended to me.” Her tone indicated she wanted the boss, not the part-time hired help.
“By who?”
“A friend.”
I waited, but she left it at that. Nothing unusual in it, much of Escott’s business as a private agent came by word of mouth. Call him a private-eye and you’d get a pained look and perhaps an acerbic declaration that he did not undertake divorce cases. His specialty was carrying out unpleasant errands for the unable or unwilling, not peeking through keyholes. Did a séance qualify? He was interested in that kind of thing, but mostly from a skeptic’s point of view. I had to say mostly since he couldn’t be a complete skeptic what with his partner—me—being a vampire.
And nice to meet you, too.
Hal Kemp played on in the little office until the girl stood, went to the radio, and shut it off.
“I hate that song,” she stated, turning around, the veil swirling lightly. Faceless women irritate me, but she had good legs.
“Me, too. You got any particular reason?”
“My sister plays it all the time. It gets on my nerves.”
“Does it have to do with this séance?”
“Can’t you call Mr. Escott?”
“I could, but you didn’t make an appointment for this late or he’d be here.”
“My appointment is for tomorrow, but something’s happened since I made it, and I need to speak with him tonight. I came by just in case he worked late. The light was on and a car was out front. . .”
I checked his book. In his precise hand he’d written 10am, Abigail Saeger. “Spell that name again?”
She did so, correct for both.
“What’s the big emergency?” I asked. “If this is something I can’t handle I’ll let him know, but otherwise you’ll find I’m ready, able, and willing.”
“I don’t mean to offend, but you look rather young for such work. Over the phone I thought Mr. Escott to be. . .more mature.”
Escott and I were the same age but I did look younger by over a decade. On the other hand if she thought a man in his mid-thirties was old, then she’d be something of a kid herself. Her light voice told me as much, though you couldn’t tell by her manner and speech, which bore a finishing school’s not so subtle polish.
“Miss Saeger, would you mind raising your blinds? I like to see who’s hiring before I take a job.”
She went still a moment, then lifted her veil. As I thought, a fresh-faced kid who should be home studying, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her expression serious.
“That’s better. What can I do for you?”
“My older sister, Flora, is holding a séance tonight. She’s crazy to talk with her dead husband, and there’s a medium taking advantage of her. He wants her money, and more.”
“A fake medium?”
“Is there any other kind?”
I smiled, liking her. “Give me the whole story, same as you’d have told to Mr. Escott.”
“You’ll help me?”
“I need to know more first.” I said it in a tone to indicate I was interested.
She plunged in, talking fast, but I had good shorthand and scribbled notes.
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Miss Saeger and her older sister Flora were alone, their parents long dead. But Flora had money in trust and married into more money after getting hitched to James Weisinger Jr., who inherited a tidy fortune some years ago. The Depression had little effect on them. Flora became a widow last August when her still-young husband died in a sailing accident on Lake Michigan.
I’d been killed on that lake. “Sure it was an accident?”
“A wind shift caused the boom to swing around. It caught him on the side of the head and over he went. I still have nightmares about the awful thud when it hit him and the splash, but it’s worse for Flora—she was at the wheel at the time. She blames herself. No one else does. There were half a dozen people aboard who knew sailing. That kind of thing can happen out of the blue. You can’t anticipate it.”
I vaguely remembered reading about it in the paper. Nothing like some rich guy getting killed while doing rich-guy stuff to generate copy.
“Poor James never knew what hit him, it was just that fast. Flora was in hysterics and had to be drugged for a week. Then she kept to her bed nearly a month, then she read some stupid article in a magazine about using Ouija boards to talk to spirits and got it into her head that she had to contact James, to apologize to him.”
“That opened the door to the medium?”
“James is dead, and if he did things right he’s in heaven and should stay there—in peace.” Miss Saeger growled in disgust. “I’ve gotten Flora’s pastor to talk to her, but she won’t listen to him. I’ve talked to her until we both end up screaming and crying, and she won’t see sense. I’m just her little sister and don’t know anything, you see.”
“What’s so objectionable?”
“Her obsession. It’s not healthy. I thought after all this time she’d lose interest, but she’s gotten worse. Every week she has a gaggle of those creeps from the Society over, they set up the board, light candles, and ask questions while looking at James’ picture. It’s pointless and sad and unnatural and-and—just plain disrespectful.”