The Man Who Couldn't Miss

by David Handler

  “He did? What is it?”

  “I’m supposed to tell you that it’s showtime.”

  Chapter Nine

  He’d brought back everyone to the Sherbourne Playhouse who’d been there last night. Mind you, when I say everyone I don’t mean the likes of Jackie O or Gentleman Gerry Cooney. The celebrities who’d packed the house weren’t summoned back. By everyone I mean Mimi, who looked extremely tense. Her jaw was clenched, her sky blue eyes narrow slits. I mean Cyril Cooper, aka Coop, the ponytailed crew chief, and the volunteers who’d been helping him ready the stage for act two while Greg Farber was busy drowning to death downstairs in the men’s dressing room. Corralling all of them had taken some doing. Nona Peachy, for example, had already split town. Tedone had to put out an APB on the Brown drama student. A Rhode Island state policemen pulled her over on I-95 near Watch Hill.

  “I was on my way to visit a friend whose family has a beach house there,” she told me, wide-eyed, as we all stood clustered on the stage. “Never been so scared in my life.”

  “You have no reason to be. The lieutenant is just being thorough.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t have a cop chase you down on the highway with his siren blaring.”

  By everyone I mean Dini, who looked frightfully pale under the stage lights as Glenda stood watch over her, acting highly indignant. Cheyenne and Durango stood very quietly together near Dini, holding hands. By everyone I mean Merilee, who was calm and unruffled in that way she has of being calm and unruffled at uncommonly tense moments. My ex-wife would have made an excellent NFL quarterback or astronaut, I’ve always felt. By everyone I mean Marty, who wasn’t calm at all. He was chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, his left knee jiggling, jiggling.

  Lieutenant Tedone slurped from a carton of coffee and paced the stage, shooting baleful looks at me. “We’ve put a lot of people to a lot of trouble. I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “That makes two of us, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay, that right there—what you just said—that didn’t fill me with a ton of confidence.”

  “I apologize. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Actually, that’s not true. There’s quite a bit to worry about. But before this hour is over I assure you that you’ll have your killer in custody.”

  The stage set from act one—the French hotel terrace—had been resurrected. The backdrop was in place. Coop’s stagehands had fetched the furniture and props from the warehouse and positioned them just as they’d been last night. Everything was exactly as it had been, minus the rain pouring down. Also minus Sabrina, who was no longer seated in the wings on a folding chair in her frumpy Louise costume, due to her presently being on an autopsy table in the M.E.’s lab. Nona Peachy had been immediately recruited to take her place, maid’s costume, frumpy wig, the works.

  The dressing rooms downstairs were all prepared. The makeup tables were fully stocked. The act two costumes were hanging in readiness—minus Greg’s tweed suit, which, like Sabrina, was presently at the M.E.’s office. As was Greg.

  “Darling, is this absolutely necessary?” Merilee wondered when I asked her, Dini and Marty to change back into their act one costumes.

  “I’m afraid so. We need to reenact what happened down to the tiniest detail. I’ll stand in for Greg.” Although I refused to put on makeup. I also couldn’t wear Greg’s act one costume, which didn’t come close to fitting me. Instead, I wore the ensemble that I was already wearing—my persimmon linen blazer, vanilla pleated slacks, pink shirt, striped bow tie and white bucks. This is why it’s important to dress appropriately for any occasion that might arise, no matter how unexpected or bizarre.

  The curtain was up. Mimi sat in the same front row seat she’d been in last night, as did Glenda and the twins.

  “Are we ready?” asked Tedone, who stood in the wings with Sergeant Angelo Bartucca and a half-dozen troopers in uniform.

  “I believe we are,” I said.

  “Then let’s do this, okay?”

  By “this” he meant run the final lines of dialogue from the end of act one between Sybil (Merilee) and Victor (me). Victor says, “To absent friends” and raises his champagne glass. Sybil raises her glass and says, “To absent friends.” They both laugh rather mirthlessly, then sit down on the balustrade with an incredibly stubborn ham of a basset hound parked between them. There was no denying her so I didn’t even bother to try. “It’s awfully pretty, isn’t it?” Sybil says, gazing out at the view. “The moonlight, and the lights of that yacht reflected in the water—” And Victor says, “I wonder who it belongs to.”

  And then the curtain slowly fell, just as it had last night, minus the roar of applause.

  “Okay, let’s everyone stay put for a moment, please!” Tedone called out before the crew sprang into action to clear the stage for act two. “Just to be perfectly clear, Miss Hawes, where were you and Mr. Miller while Miss Nash and Mr. Farber were saying those final lines?”

  “Right here in the wings next to Sabrina,” Dini recalled.

  “That’s right.” Marty nodded his balding head. “Right here next to . . . sorry, hon, what’s your name?”

  “Nona.”

  “Is that short for Winona?”

  “It’s not short for anything. It’s my name, Mr. Miller.”

  “Call me Marty,” he said, grinning at her.

  “You don’t mind if I continue, do you, Marty?” Tedone asked him.

  “Not a bit, Lieutenant. Go right ahead.”

  “So you two were still here. You hadn’t gone downstairs yet.”

  Dini nodded. “That’s right.”

  Now Tedone turned to the show’s director. “What happened next?”

  “Coop and his crew had fifteen minutes to transform this stage from a rain-soaked balcony in the south of France to Amanda’s flat in Paris,” Merilee replied. “They also rigged up a rain canopy over the sofa so that we could sit on it without getting soaked. A brilliant bit of improvising, Coop. I meant to tell you last night and didn’t get the chance.”

  “Weren’t no big thing,” Coop said modestly.

  “Do it now,” Tedone told him.

  “Do what, boss?” Coop asked him.

  “The set change. Same way you did it last night, canopy and all. On the clock. Can you spare Nona?”

  “If you’re telling me she needs to stand in for Sabrina then so be it. Okay, gang!” Coop called out. “Let’s get it on!”

  And with that his crew immediately sprang into action. One team of stagehands hoisted the backdrop of the harbor and lowered the back wall of Amanda’s Paris flat into its place, complete with windows overlooking the city. One team hustled the balustrade and terrace furniture offstage while another came in with the sofa and end tables, setting them on their marks on the floor. As they worked, swiftly and silently, the Sherbourne Playhouse’s lighting man, an old pro, shifted the moonlit terrace into the interior of an apartment at 10:00 A.M.

  Meanwhile, the play’s three surviving stars, Greg’s stand-in and Lulu hustled down the spiral staircase to the dressing rooms. Mimi and Glenda followed, as did Lieutenant Carmine Tedone and Sergeant Angelo Bartucca. Even though the dimly lit basement corridor was no longer flooded, Tedone asked Mimi to turn the sump pumps on.

  She frowned at him. “Whatever for?”

  “I want the noise level down here to be the same as it was last night.”

  “Of course.” Mimi flicked them on, one by one.

  “I’m not comfortable doing this,” Glenda complained, raising her voice over the rumble of the pumps.

  “Doing what, Mrs. Hawes?” Tedone asked.

  “Leaving the twins upstairs without someone to look after them. Sabrina I knew. I don’t know this Nona person. And that stage crew is a motley group. Some of the language I’ve been hearing . . .”

  “A trooper will watch over them, okay? Sergeant, have a man sit with the twins.”

  Bartucca squeezed past Glenda and darted up the stairs to
take care of it.

  Reluctantly, Glenda stayed put, glancing around warily.

  “We’re just trying to be accurate, Mrs. Hawes,” Tedone explained. “You folks encountered major pandemonium down here. The flooding. The racket that those pumps were making . . .”

  “And everyone was concerned about Dini,” I said. “That’s why you came down here, wasn’t it, Glenda?”

  “Well, yes,” she acknowledged. “My girl was running a fever of a hundred and two point eight that afternoon, and even though she’d gotten some rest at the inn before the show I thought she still seemed unsteady on her feet during act one.”

  “How are you feeling now?” Tedone asked Dini.

  “How do you think I feel?” Dini demanded.

  He reddened. “Sorry, I just meant . . .”

  “No, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I feel better, thank you. My fever seems to have broken.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Tedone turned to me and said, “And you came down here to . . . ?”

  “Check on the flood conditions with Mimi. We got down here just in time to see Marty come sloshing out of the men’s dressing room in his boxer shorts and charge straight across the hall into the men’s john to attend to his roiling innards. The men’s dressing room door was open. Greg was changing into his tweed suit. I waved to him and called out that the show was going great.”

  “As did I,” Mimi said.

  “And how did Mr. Farber seem?”

  “Excited.”

  “Very much so,” Mimi agreed.

  Tedone ran a hand over his face, mulling it over. “So he was changing costumes while Mr. Miller was experiencing his, um, intestinal difficulties. Meanwhile, in the ladies’ dressing room . . .”

  “We were changing for act two,” Merilee said. “Or trying to. It wasn’t easy. It’s a tiny space. Hoagy and Mimi had stopped by. And so had Glenda, who insisted upon checking on Dini.”

  “She was very shaky,” Glenda said defensively. “You weren’t feeling well, were you, dear?”

  “No, I wasn’t, Mother,” Dini allowed. “I felt weak and nauseated. In fact, I had to dash across the hall to the ladies’ room to throw up.”

  Glenda nodded. “I went with her and waited right outside of the bathroom door. I could hear her in there, even over the racket of those sump pumps.”

  Tedone turned to Mimi. “What did you do next?”

  “Started back upstairs. I was hoping our plumber would show up with more sump pumps.”

  “And how about you?” he asked me.

  “I chatted briefly with Merilee in the ladies’ dressing room while she was changing. Then Dini returned from the bathroom, which was my cue to leave. Glenda’s as well.”

  Tedone turned his attention to Glenda. “Mrs. Hawes, were you outside of the ladies’ room the entire time your daughter was in there?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “So you can vouch for the fact that she didn’t leave the ladies’ room.”

  Glenda looked at him in confusion. “And go where?”

  “Say, into the men’s dressing room to kill her husband.”

  Glenda’s eyes flashed at him angrily. “She went from her dressing room to the ladies’ room and then back to her dressing room. She didn’t visit Greg. And she for darned sure didn’t kill him.”

  “Even though he’d been cheating on Dini with another man?” I pressed her. “Even though he’d given her the AIDS virus?”

  Now it was my turn to get a nasty look from Glenda. “I don’t know if you’re trying to bait me, young man, but I don’t appreciate your insinuations.”

  “Duly noted. And thank you for calling me ‘young man.’ That doesn’t happen very often anymore unless I visit my parents at Essex Meadows. Lieutenant, if I may . . .”

  “Go ahead,” Tedone grunted.

  “It seems to me that we have a generous choice of plausible scenarios here,” I said over the rumble of the sump pumps. “But, first, may I ask you to turn those damned things off? I’m getting this weird grinding sound inside of my head and I’d swear I’m starting to hear ‘Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead . . .’”

  “You’re hearing what? Wait, never mind. I don’t even want to know.” Tedone went around and flicked them off.

  Blessed silence.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said. “Dini came out of the ladies’ room after being sick and went into the dressing room with Merilee to change, which meant it was time for me to leave. Mimi had already gone back upstairs. Glenda was heading up the staircase herself. I was just about to join them when Marty came out of the john and asked me if I thought it was safe to flush the toilet. We talked briefly about septic overflow—although not briefly enough to suit me—before he returned to the men’s dressing room from the john. That’s when he called out to me. When I went in there I discovered Greg lying facedown on the floor in the floodwaters with the back of his head bashed in. Now let’s examine the players here . . .” I looked from Merilee to Dini to Marty, then at Glenda before I settled on Mimi. “We know, for instance, that you’re an excellent candidate. You were down here at the time of Greg’s murder and you’ve been harboring a deep hatred for Greg for years. The man broke your heart into a million pieces when he didn’t say, ‘I love you, Mimi. Let’s have our baby together. Marry me.’”

  “What?” Dini shrieked. “Hoagy, what in the hell are you—?”

  “Sorry, Dini. I assumed you knew. I guess he kept that particular nugget to himself. It so happens that Greg and Mimi were a sizzling hot item back when Greg was starring in a revival of Picnic and she was at the height of her cover girl fame. It also happens that he got her pregnant.”

  Dini looked at Mimi coldly. “So I gather.”

  “It was before you two got married,” Mimi said defensively. “He told me you split up after you left Yale.”

  “We went our separate ways for a while,” Dini conceded.

  “All I’m saying is he was flying solo when it happened. He wasn’t cheating on you with me. Not like he was cheating on you with Eugene.”

  “Okay, that’s not helping, Mimi,” I said.

  “Well, excuse me,” she shot back. “But this is your doing, not mine. Why did you even have to bring it up?”

  “Because it speaks to motive. You loved him.”

  “I did. But he didn’t love me. When I told him I was pregnant the thought never occurred to him to do anything other than get rid of it.”

  Glenda bristled. “It’s not an ‘it.’ A fetus is a human life, and abortion is murder.”

  Mimi rolled her eyes at her. “Glenda, I’ve had a hard couple of days, and I already can’t stand you, so kindly spare me the pro-life diatribe or I swear I’ll smack you right in your fat face.”

  “All right, let’s settle down, ladies,” Tedone growled. “Go on, Hoagy.”

  “My point, Mimi, is that last night was finally your chance to get even with him. But after talking to you in your office this morning I don’t believe that you killed him.”

  She tilted her head at me curiously. “And why is that?”

  “Because it was you who brought up that Greg got you pregnant. I didn’t know a thing about it. What killer goes out of her way to drop a motive on herself? Have you ever heard of a killer doing that, Lieutenant?”

  “Can’t say as I have,” he replied, thumbing his jaw.

  “Besides, Mimi, you couldn’t possibly have gone to Sabrina’s room at the inn this afternoon and forced her to shoot up that fatal dose of heroin.”

  Tedone frowned at me. “Why not?”

  “Because if she’d been in Sabrina’s room today Lulu would have smelled her Obsession and started sneezing her head off. She’s highly allergic to it.”

  Merilee nodded. “That’s true, Lieutenant, she is. And she’s very, very reliable when it comes to her allergies, aren’t you, sweetness?” She bent down and gave Lulu a pat. Got a tail thump and low whoop for her trouble.

&nbs
p; “Therefore, Mimi’s in the clear,” I said. “Which brings us to Dini and Glenda—either acting alone or together. Personally, I’ve been leaning toward the idea of together. Let’s set the scene again. I was in the ladies’ dressing room with Merilee. We’d closed the door. Mimi had gone upstairs. Marty was in the john. Greg was alone in the men’s dressing room. The only person who can vouch for Dini actually being in the ladies’ room at that particular moment is Glenda, who was standing right outside of the ladies’ room door. What mother wouldn’t lie to protect her daughter if that daughter, say, went flying out of the ladies’ room and whacked her cheating, bisexual husband in the head with a brick?”

  “And then what about Sabrina?” Tedone asked. “Who killed her?”

  “Glenda, of course. Dini was at the beach with the twins. That left it up to Mommy. Don’t forget she arrived at the beach house at virtually the same time I did, which leaves her unaccounted for at the time of Sabrina’s death. And she’s a retired nurse who knows her way around a hypodermic needle.”

  Glenda glared at me with total contempt. “You have all of the answers, don’t you? And just exactly where did I get the heroin that I used to kill that unfortunate young woman?”

  “That’s a very good question. Where did you?”

  “Young man, I didn’t like you when I first met you. And now I’m liking you even less.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But thank you again for calling me ‘young man.’”

  “And I don’t care for the way your little dog is staring at me.”

  “That’s because you’re behaving toward me in a hostile manner. She’s very protective of me. And she’s not little. She’s just short.” I turned back to Tedone. “Sabrina told me she got an idea during the act break that a slash of bright red lipstick would make Louise, the frumpy maid, look even frumpier. She started down the spiral staircase to the ladies’ dressing room to test it out on Merilee, but encountered such a crowd of people that she turned right around and went back upstairs. But I’m positive she saw something while she was down there. She wouldn’t tell me what, but she was afraid. I could see it in her eyes. My guess? She saw Dini coming out of the men’s dressing room after Dini had just brained Greg. And Dini saw her. Dini’s a big star. She could have derailed Sabrina’s career with one snap of her fingers. So Sabrina kept her mouth shut. Sabrina would have kept it shut, too. But you couldn’t take that chance, could you, Dini? So you had your mom go to the inn and inject her with that ‘Tango and Cash.’ Glenda, how did you manage to shoot her up without a struggle?”