by R. T. Jordan
Polly made a loud purring noise as she picked up Elizabeth’s hand and held it to examine the stone and its unique setting. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been drooling over this ring ever since first laying eyes on it at your lovely party. Look everybody,” she called more attention to Elizabeth. “It’s a Mexican Opal! About ten carats, I’d say. Stunning. And a gold granulation setting…” Polly tsk-tsked, to express her covetousness.
“After all that Mom had done for me, I thought it fitting to spend my first big paycheck buying her something I knew she’d treasure,” Missie proudly boasted.
Then Lauren Gaul suddenly leaped from her chair and rushed to Elizabeth’s side. “That’s the ring!” she wailed.
Elizabeth instantly tried to pull her hand out of Polly’s but Polly was too fast and her grip too tight. She held on firmly, keeping the hand and ring on public display.
Again Lauren shouted, “That’s the ring! The hand that reached under the stall door…was wearing that exact ring. I’ll never forget it!”
Chapter 29
Polly let go of Elizabeth’s hand and eyed her with renewed curiosity. She held firmly to her microphone as she slowly circled the chair on which Elizabeth sat.
Elizabeth displayed a mean, curled lip sneer, like an angry pit bull ready to sink its jaws into someone’s throat. If she hadn’t been wearing her wrap-around dark glasses, everyone would have seen the rage in her eyes as well.
“My, my, my,” Polly sang. Then she looked out into the audience and called, “Placenta, darling, would you bring me a lovely glass of champies, please?” Then Tim sidled up to his mother. Polly looked at him and said, “Hon, have you been keeping score this evening?”
Tim shook his head and said, “Poor Elizabeth, she’s forever being left alone. I felt bad the night she and Missie came to dinner. I was such an ungracious host leaving her to sit and drink by herself while Placenta and I gave Missie the grand tour of Pepper Plantation. Sorry again, Elizabeth,” he said.
Polly patted her son on the back. “Nonsense, dear,” she excused his behavior. “Elizabeth has learned to make her own kind of music. In fact, that evening she took a self-guided tour of our little home. Well, at least a tour of the drawers and cabinets in the living room. It’s where she picked up that little Oscar charm she’s wearing tonight.”
All eyes in the room moved in unison to catch Elizabeth’s response to being called a thief.
“I happened to be watching from the balustrade of the second floor,” Polly said. “I wasn’t spying, I promise. I’m not Homeland Security, for crying out loud. I was simply pacing about waiting to make my entrance.”
Elizabeth was crestfallen. “I’m so very sorry, Polly,” she said with deep contrition. “It’s true that I was snooping around. But I didn’t take it on purpose, I swear. It was in my hand when I heard everybody coming back to the room. I closed the cabinet and hurried back to my chair. I didn’t notice that I still had your little Oscar until it was too late to put it back. I was going to put it back the next time you had us over. Here,” she said, unclasping the gold chain from around her neck, and offering to return the item.
Ever the gracious hostess, Polly waved away Elizabeth’s offer. “Nonsense, dear. In civilized cultures, if someone admires something of yours, it’s considered rude not to make them a gift of it,” she said. “By all means, please keep the little sucker. It belonged to a great star. Not much of an actress, but a star nonetheless. And obviously whatever star shine it once possessed hasn’t rubbed off on me. It wasn’t doing any good just sitting around taking up space. But, speaking of taking up space,” she said, “I still have to ask myself, what else may you have accidentally absconded with? I don’t mean from my home, dear. But you seem to be the only one here without a real alibi for the time frame in which Sedra Stone was supposedly killed. Did you take…um, Sedra’s life?”
Missie jumped to her feet. “Polly!” she bellowed. “How could you…? How dare you insinuate…!” “Mother wouldn’t harm a…she was with me the whole evening!”
Tim turned and said, “Actually, you were wrecking the sheets with Mike for forty minutes that night. Remember?”
Adam Berg stepped into the fray. “Now you’ve gone way too far,” he said. “What you’re implying is insane. This is an old blind woman, for crying out loud. She couldn’t have possibly done anything…”
“Semi-blind. Or so we’re told. And she’s Polly’s age, which is not old,” Tim contradicted Adam.
“Thank you, dear!” Polly exuberantly praised Tim. “I’m putting you back in my will.”
Lauren followed Adam’s tirade with one of her own. “I was threatened by this woman. It was her, I know it from the ring! Missie bragged that it’s a one-of-a-kind! The ring proves that Elizabeth passed that note under the stall door! Now that I think of it, she looks strong enough to be the one who attacked me on the night of Trixie’s death, too. And her letter threatened that Sedra would leave in a body bag, and she did. Isn’t that enough to get the police involved?”
Polly spoke into her microphone again and said, “Placenta! A star is parched. Where the hell’s my drinkie?” Then she returned to the melee in progress on the stage and spoke to Lauren. “I know how upset you are sweetheart, but your suggestion that dear Elizabeth may have been involved in Sedra Stone’s demise is circumstantial at best. Surely that fabulous detective Archer interrogated everyone at the scene of the crime. Didn’t you detective?” Polly looked out into the audience and spied Archer walking toward the stage.
A murmur swept through the audience as the guests watched Archer, a man previously little noticed, wend his way through the crowd. When he reached the stage, he ascended the three steps and walked to Polly’s side.
To the crowd Polly said, “Detective Archer is becoming so famous on the television these days, he’s more familiar to the masses than I am. It wouldn’t be a true Hollywood murder investigation without this precious man giving us regular updates on the eleven o’clock news!” Then she looked into the detective’s eyes. “I’m delighted that you accepted my invitation. Now, be a love and clear up a few things up for us—from a seasoned detective’s point of view. I’m just as curious as Lauren, and I think I speak for everybody else, when I ask, who killed Sedra Stone?”
Detective Archer was silent for a moment. Then he took Polly’s microphone. He looked at Elizabeth Stembourg and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you ma’am,” he said. “I apologize for not having spoken with you before.”
Polly’s voice was loud enough not to require any amplification from the mic she’d given to Archer. “But surely you spoke to Elizabeth during the investigation. You interviewed everybody who worked on the movie.”
“Oops,” Archer confessed. “I didn’t think an old blind woman could have had anything to do with taking out a faded television star—especially in the particular fashion of her demise. But now that you’ve brought her to my attention, and the fact that relatives don’t make the best alibis, and that she’s been accused of writing a death threat, well I think there’s some explaining to be done.” He returned his attention to Elizabeth. “Now, Mrs. Stembourg, no one’s insinuating anything, but please tell us where you were at the time of Sedra’s death?”
Elizabeth became flustered. She stuttered, “I, I was alone.”
“And what were you doing while you were alone?”
“Watching ‘Animal Planet.’ In Dana’s trailer. Yeah, and there was a documentary on about bird eating spiders in New Zealand. Check the listing, I’m sure that was the program.”
Detective Archer pushed the red button on his micro cassette recorder and made a note to himself to check the TV Guide listing. He knelt beside Elizabeth and as gently as possible said, “Mrs. Stembourg, would you do me a big favor? Would you think back to that night and try to recall if you saw or heard anything unusual that might lead us to whoever perpetrated the crime of killing Sedra Stone? I’m just thinking that since you were all alone in that trailer, maybe
you can recall something…anything…even something that made no sense to you at the time. Think back, would you?”
Elizabeth folded her arms across her chest and looked at Missie. Both women seemed to be reading the other’s thoughts as they shrugged their shoulders in unison. “You mean after the big blow up between Sedra and Dana?”
“Anything,” Archer pressed.
Elizabeth shook her head. “I kept the sound up on the television so I wouldn’t have to hear Missie carrying on next door.”
“And you’ve got great hearing,” I suppose, Archer suggested.
“As a matter of fact, even with the volume up high, I heard more than I wanted to. And before I knew it, Sedra was pounding on my door.”
Polly shot to attention. “Sedra came over? So you were probably the last one to see her alive! What time was that?”
Elizabeth said, “I don’t remember. Ten. Ten-thirty.”
“What did Sedra say?” Polly persisted. “Did she talk about her fight with Dana? Did she seem overly agitated about anything? Did she say why she was still on the location?”
Elizabeth paused. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Now I remember. She did appear very upset. Like she was particularly worried about something. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that she was writing and that the noise from the television was distracting her. She came in herself and actually turned the show off. I was furious because now I had absolutely nothing to do until Missie had her little organism.”
“You let her get away with that?” Polly said.
“I said some things that I maybe shouldn’t have. Things that made her more upset,” Elizabeth said. “Then she left, so I just sat there for a while. I was lonely. So after a few minutes I decided to go next door to Sedra’s to apologize and borrow a bottle of champagne. Plus I guess I wanted some company, even if it was Sedra.”
Tim considered the time of night and the state of inebriation that Elizabeth claimed to have been in. He tried to sound as concerned as possible when he asked, “How’d did you manage to maneuver the trailer steps and find your way to Sedra’s in the dark? You could have fallen and hurt yourself.”
She made a “Pfft” sound.
“I knocked on Sedra’s door and she told me to beat it, that she was busy. She dismissed me, the way she always has. No matter how many times we’ve met she still doesn’t know who the hell I am. Oh, she knows that I’m with Missie, but I could be Missie’s maid for as much recognition as Sedra ever pays to me. But I plopped myself down on her steps and wouldn’t leave until she gave me another drink. I guess just to get rid of me, she gave me a bottle. Then she told me to scram. The bottle hadn’t been refrigerated. I’m like Polly, my champagne has to be ice cold.”
“What else did she say?” Polly asked.
“Before Sedra closed the door she warned me not to get sick all over the grass in front of her trailer. Said if she stepped in anything, she’d find me and rub my nose in the mess as if I were a dog.”
Again, Polly cut in. “Darling, from the way you put away the champagne at my dinner, I thought you had a hollow leg. You weren’t even drunk.”
“I never get drunk,” Elizabeth agreed, then caught herself. “Um, but that night I hadn’t had so much as a peanut to eat.”
Detective Archer spoke into his tape recorder and recapped all that Elizabeth had stated. Then he asked, “Some time between ten o’clock, and when her body was found at around midnight, Sedra Stone threatened you. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Elizabeth said, as if the concept of Sedra threatening her had somehow never actually computed.
“How did that make you feel?” Polly asked in the way that Freudian analysts pry their patients into digging for deeper understanding of why they want to kill their mothers.
“I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t have a gracious bone in her body.”
Placenta finally arrived with Polly’s champagne. “Sorry it took so long, she apologized. “I TiVO’d ‘Fear Factor’ and got caught up with Danny Bonaducci being stripped half naked, drizzled with honey, and hog-tied over a fire ant hill. Not a complete turn-off, for a redhead.” She looked at Elizabeth. “You were telling us about clobbering Sedra Stone with a bottle or something?”
Elizabeth huffed in frustration. “Never! I was saying, Sedra berated me and told me to jump in the pool. I figured she meant that would make me sober up. Now I think she probably knew the pool was empty and wanted me to break my neck. So I said she had a good idea and that I was going to the pool. But first I told her off.”
“What about?” Polly asked.
“About how my Missie had another film job she had to start, and that Detention Rules! better wrap on time, or else. Sedra laughed in my face and said she intended to milk the job for all the overtime she could get. Then she baited me. She said, ‘Careful you don’t drown.’ But she didn’t say it like she had the least bit of genuine concern. It was more like there was a punchline of a joke waiting for me. But off I went to the pool building.”
Polly confidently said, “But the door to the pool building was locked, right? Duane is so careful about these things.”
“I don’t lock up the school,” Duane conceded. “Just the gym where the sets and camera equipment are kept.”
Elizabeth nodded her head. “The door was unlocked. So I went inside. Of course I saw right away that the pool was empty. But I didn’t know if Sedra knew, or if she possessed the slightest bit of concern for anyone other than herself. Still, I hoped that she might be worried about a supposed drunk woman taking a swim by herself or falling in a cement pit, and come and check up on me, ‘cause I sure as hell wasn’t finished telling her off. But I climbed up the stairs to the ten meter platform and waited anyway.”
“For?” Detective Archer asked.
“For Missie to find me and feel bad about leaving me alone. Or, the unlikely chance that Sedra might check on me and I could continue trying to convince her to stop wasting time on the set and just finish the show so that Missie could move on. Then, low and behold, Sedra actually opened the door and came inside. Maybe she had a second thought about telling me to take a swim. She looked around and when she saw where I was, so high up, she said I was totally stupid and tried to coax me down. I pretended to be terrified of heights and needed help. She said she’d call 911. I said it would look terrible in The Peeper if a story was printed that said Missie Miller’s mother was found drunk. So she reluctantly agreed to come up and help me down herself. Good, I thought, ’cause I wanted to bargain with her and maybe share the champagne, if she was rational about the work situation. While Sedra was on her way up the steps I removed the foil wrapper from around the champagne bottle cork and untwisted the wire. Not all the way. I didn’t want the cork popping out before I was ready.
“When Sedra finally reached the top, all huffing and puffing, and looking every minute her sixty-something years, saying she hated heights, I asked her if she was going to finally act like a professional and follow orders to do the work and get the film in the can by Saturday.”
Tim exclaimed, “You were Laura’s phantom! You put the threatening letter under the stall door!”
“Alright!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “But it was harmless. If this freakin’ film kept on falling farther and farther behind schedule, Missie’d never be able to start her new movie. I wanted Sedra to wrap it up. I didn’t want to hurt her. Just scare her a little.”
Polly and the others had gathered around Elizabeth like a village of peasants ready to stone the Laird’s tax collector. “You’d do anything to make Missie a star,” Polly said, repeating the exact words that Elizabeth had spoken the night of the dinner party. “Anything,” she reiterated. “You’ve said as much. So tell us, Elizabeth, are you a cold-blooded killer? Did you push Sedra Stone to her death?”
Elizabeth cried out, “No way! I said I only wanted to scare the bitch! Honestly, I never touched her!”
Missie forced her way through the circle of accusers and calmly
said, “Mother, don’t say another word. You don’t remember anything because you were drunk. Remember!”
Polly handed her own flute of champagne to Elizabeth and said, “I think you need this more than I do. Drink up, honey. Placenta will bring a bottle and we can all relax. So what happened next?”
Elizabeth put the rim of the glass to her lips and emptied it with one long swallow. Ignoring Missie’s command, she resumed her story. “I realized that I’d given that note to the wrong person because I believed Sedra when she claimed not to have any idea about what I was talking about when I said she had been warned in writing to finish her job and get out,” Elizabeth said. “Sedra reiterated that this was her chance to return to the limelight and she didn’t care about any threat, that she’d had plenty of those during her lifetime. We argued back and forth until she finally gave in and agreed that she should complete her last scene then move on. But I knew it was only a ploy so I’d come down from the platform. I suspected that she wasn’t going to budge in the way of quitting the movie anytime before she absolutely had to. And I hated her for thinking I was dumb enough to believe her. I didn’t know what to do. And just then, Missie arrived on the platform. I hadn’t heard her come in. Sedra was surprised, too, and almost lost her balance and fell right then.”
Suddenly, all eyes on the room were focused on Missie Miller. “What a place to find your mother, way up on a diving pool platform. It was dangerous. So I quietly climbed up the stairs so I wouldn’t startle her or Sedra. Yeah they were surprised to see me all right, but grateful, too, I think. Sedra especially because she didn’t want to have to somehow get Mother down on her own.”
“Missie to the rescue!” Polly cheered. “Thank God you finished your business with Mike when you did and, that you thought to check the pool for your missing mother. Brava! Saved the day.”