She’d taken over the theater twenty-three years ago, long before Robbie and her partners had bought it. I didn’t find out how old she’d been at that time, or what she’d done before taking the job. Her life seemed to begin with the Palace.
What I did learn was that when she showed up in the mid 1990s the building had practically been falling down. It hadn’t shown first-run movies since the Summer of Love. After that, it had limped along as a second-run house before finally closing its doors in the early 1980s. Shuttered for years, it had eventually been repurposed for a while as a live stage theater, before being briefly home to a Pentecostal church.
The big turnaround happened when the Palace was bought by two brothers, tech millionaires from Silicon Valley who had dreams of restoring it as a home for classic films. They hired Kate. She poured her heart and soul into it, the brothers poured money into it, and things were just starting to thrive when the dot-com crash of 2001 wiped the brothers out.
After that Kate was faced with the prospect of making the theater actually pay for itself. But she was scrappy and inventive, and somehow managed to keep the place afloat. By hook or by crook, as Albert had said, she kept it going all these years. When Robbie’s partners took it over four years ago they didn’t even think of replacing Kate.
She was loved and respected. From what I could find in the online newspapers, she was active in the neighborhood merchants association and a frequent volunteer for a variety of causes. She spoke occasionally at local film festivals, but apparently turned down more requests than she accepted. She wasn’t married, or in any relationship I could find mention of. She had refused an offer to run for city council. She died in a fall from Strawberry Hill.
I had to believe it was an accident. Who would have killed her? And why? Her life, as far as I could tell, was completely centered on the Palace. In fact, I could see no evidence of a personal life at all. No Facebook page aside from the Palace’s. No Twitter, no Instagram, no social media footprint at all.
And no good pictures, either, I realized. The Palace had a Wikipedia page with half a dozen pictures chronicling the building’s decline and resurrection. There were pictures of the original architect, the Silicon Valley brothers, and a staff photo from sometime during the Great Depression. But only a few pictures of Kate, all of them in group shots, none of them good. It looked like she’d always turned from the camera as the picture was taken, her face a blur. Even in the loving obituaries I found in everything from the San Francisco Chronicle to the newsletter of the local Film Society, the picture they used was grainy and out of focus, the same as one of the group shots, just cropped to show only Kate.
No decent pictures. And no trace of her anywhere online before she took over the Palace. Which left me wondering the same things I’d been wondering at the beginning of all my searching.
What was Kate’s story? And was her fall really an accident?
Chapter 5
My first thought upon waking the next morning was that I should look through Kate’s private email. It wasn’t a noble thought, but at least it wasn’t a thought about my soon-to-be-ex-husband and his internationally sexy paramour, which had been my first thought upon waking ever since he left me. So I told myself it was a step in the right direction and I showered and dressed with a refreshing sense of purpose.
A hundred possibilities had flickered through my head as I’d tried to go to sleep the night before. What if Kate had been on the run? That would explain her aversion to photos and social media. What if she’d had some sort of criminal past and was living in hiding, using an assumed name, keeping a low profile? She might even have been in witness protection. And what if that past had finally caught up with her? What if that past involved the dead man in the ice machine?
I knew the Palace had an email account that Marty had been keeping up-to-date. But Kate had to have had a personal account as well, right? I opened her laptop with the clear expectation that everything was about to be revealed.
And I found out her email was password protected.
Of course.
Since it was Friday there was a new lineup of movies for the weekend, which explained why I saw Marty high on a ladder changing the marquee when I came around the corner half an hour later.
A milk crate of black block letters balanced on top of the ancient wooden ladder, and he was finalizing the show times of the weekend triple feature.
“Sophisticated spirits,” I greeted him, remembering the theme of the films that I’d seen on Kate’s blackboard. It was a triple feature of Blithe Spirit (1945, Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings), Topper (1937, Cary Grant and Constant Bennett), and Topper Returns (1941, Roland Young and Joan Blondell).
“Don’t stand there,” Marty barked. “I could knock this box over and kill you, and I don’t need the temptation.”
So much for yesterday’s truce.
As I went past the ticket booth I noticed that the posters were still of Frankenstein and company and wondered if we had artwork for any of the new slate. If so, they were probably stored somewhere in the basement, and I had no desire to go poking around down there again any time soon.
In the lobby I found Albert and Brandon tidying up the paper coffee cups, candy wrappers, and other assorted detritus that the police had left behind the night before.
When I’d locked up after them, Detective Jackson had told me that the room with the ice machine and the hallway from that room to the outside basement door were still off limits, and clearly marked with crime scene tape. The rest of the Palace was cleared for use.
“Hey you two,” I said. “How are you feeling? Are you okay to work today, Albert?”
He looked like a strong breeze could knock him over, but he’d looked that way before I’d found the body yesterday, so I wasn’t sure how worried I should be.
He waved my concern away. “I’m absolutely fine. Don’t give it another thought.”
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Brandon said, blushing furiously. “I’ve never passed out before in my life!”
He’d probably never seen a corpse on ice before, either, unless I was very wrong about him. “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “It was such a shock. I’m just glad you’re okay. Are you here all day?” The first movie would show at noon and the last would end only a bit before midnight. I sincerely hoped the Palace wasn’t dependent on twelve-hour shifts from high school students and nonagenarians to keep the doors open.
“Mike and Claire will be in for the 6:25,” Albert assured me. “I’ll introduce you when they get here. And Callie should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
“Great.” I looked around the lobby. “Now, how can I help?”
I spent the next hour or so attempting to help but largely staying out of their way as they went about the business of readying the Palace for the day. I was surprised to learn that the whole place was usually staffed by only three or four people per shift. One in the projection booth, one selling tickets, and one or maybe two behind the candy counter, depending on the size of the expected crowd. When Albert went home nobody took his place as a dedicated ticket taker.
I viewed this setting-up period as the calm before an expected storm of customers and took advantage of it by poking around while asking questions of Albert and Brandon. The sweeping staircase up to the balcony was on the right side of the lobby, while on the left-side wall was a small accessible restroom, a storage closet containing more gummy bears than I’d ever seen in one place at one time, and a door to the utilitarian back stairwell I’d noticed upstairs. I poked my head in and saw it went both up to the offices and down to the basement, presumably to the back door that was still taped off by the police.
The lobby was just filling with the heady scent of fresh buttered popcorn when I remembered that we still didn’t have a solution for the broken icemaker.
“I’ll try the yogurt shop next door to see if they’ll sell
us some ice,” I said, almost at the exact moment that Marty arrived, pulling a massive wheeled cooler through the lobby doors.
“I got four bags of ice from the liquor store on Divisidaro,” he announced. “That should see us through the first couple of shows.”
“You’re a genius,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll be in the booth.” He shoved the cooler in my general direction and took the balcony stairs two at a time.
Callie had sent a text to Albert saying she was running late because her bus broke down, so Brandon went outside to open the ticket booth. That left me polishing the candy counter with someone who had known Kate for over twenty years. Albert had to know something that would shed some light on her death. He had to know something about her past.
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Kate’s past.” Albert said.
This was in response to the very awkward interest I finally managed to communicate after several uncomfortable false starts. Turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to probe for details about someone’s beloved dead friend without sounding like a heartless and intrusive monster. I don’t think I completely pulled it off, but Albert didn’t seem to take offense. He just didn’t have anything to say.
“She was a very private person,” he told me. “She’d only been here a few years when she hired me, but she never talked about where she’d come from, or how she’d come to be here.”
“What about her personal life?” I asked. “I don’t want to pry,” (I did) “but none of the write-ups after her death mentioned a partner or children…”
“As far as I know, there wasn’t anyone,” Albert said. “I assumed…” He hesitated. “Well, if I assumed anything, it was that she had been hurt in the past.” He gave me a quick look. “There is a way of not talking about yourself that can say much more than if you did talk about yourself. Do you understand?”
“I do,” I said. Although, having spent the last decade in Hollywood, I knew very few people who didn’t talk about themselves constantly.
He nodded. “I believe Kate had experienced the kind of hurt that you just don’t talk about.”
The kind of hurt that you changed your whole life to escape? I was stopped from digging any further by Callie’s arrival, which prompted Brandon’s return to the concession stand and ended my conversation with Albert. But it had given me something to think about.
What if Kate wasn’t running from something horrible she’d done? What if she was running from something horrible that had been done to her?
I slipped up to the balcony as the moviegoers started to arrive for the early matinee. There were only a handful, which was a little disappointing, but it meant Brandon, Albert, and Callie didn’t need my help. And I’d meant it when I’d told Robbie the night before that I was looking forward to seeing my first movie at the Palace.
I wanted to stake out a front row seat in the balcony, but first I went to the office to drop off my backpack and Kate’s laptop. I looked around the room, wondering if there were any clues about what her email password might be. At home that morning I’d tried the name of every actor, director, and movie title I could think of before admitting that random guesswork was probably not going to yield the best results.
And neither would a casual glance around her office, I reasoned. But if Kate had been anything like me, there might be a Post-it tucked away somewhere with all the information I needed. I sat at the desk and slid the pencil drawer open, then jumped about a foot as the clattering drums and booming trumpets of the 20th Century Fox overture announced another day had begun for Marty at the Palace.
I was really going to have to do something to get used to that, I told myself, my hand on my racing heart. The fanfare had seemed even louder in the office than when I’d heard it the day before in the balcony.
My pulse was just beginning to return to normal when a chime sounded on my phone, making me jump again. I pulled the phone out of my backpack and saw there were two texts.
Baby. This is crazy. I know you want to go full Garbo but I need you. James is saying he didn’t get the waiver, and the DreamWorks people are screaming their heads off about that contract. You know I don’t do conflict. Where are you???
He didn’t do conflict. Right. That’s why he’d had me for all these years. Good old reliable Nora, making sure everything was smooth and easy for Ted Bishop. Well, it wasn’t my job to make anything easy for him ever again.
The second text was from my lawyer.
Nora, I hope you’ve had some time to think about what you want. Leaving the shared domicile may have been a tactical error. Ted has taken occupancy again, which could hurt you. What about the beach house in Maui and the flat in London? It would do you good to establish residency. But more importantly, I need you to instruct me on how you want to move forward. What do you want?
That’s what everyone had been asking ever since the news first broke. What did I want? How should I move forward? Up until this point all I’d wanted was a working time machine that would let me go back six months and keep Ted from ever meeting Priya Sharma. But finding a murdered man and taking over the job of a possibly murdered woman had had an effect on me. Life was short. Sometimes unexpectedly so. Life was too short to keep hoping Ted would change.
I sent the lawyer a text.
I don’t want the house. I don’t want any of the houses. I don’t want Ted’s money. I want mine. I want you to figure out what he would have paid a manager and agent all these years. That’s what I want.
I turned off the screen and stood, feeling a little lightheaded. I had taken a stand. And now I wanted nothing more than to sit in a dark theater and watch a movie.
There were maybe half a dozen people in the balcony, and roughly twenty more down on the main floor. I knew it was only the early matinee on a Friday, but that seemed light to me. Particularly since, scanning the patrons, I was pretty sure most of them had gotten senior discounts.
Fortunately, ticket sales didn’t pay the bills. I’d heard that concession sales and those annoying ads that come on before the show are what keep most theaters solvent. Which reminded me that I should probably take a look at the Palace books. There was a stack of bills on Kate’s desk—my desk—that told me I probably shouldn’t wait.
I was distracted from this line of thought by a light flickering and buzzing. It was the same one Albert and I had noticed the day before. Even as the house lights dimmed for the previews, that light stayed on, humming and flaring in a way that was sure to ruin the movie for everyone in the balcony.
I got up and made my way to the aisle. An elderly woman gestured at me.
“Are you going to tell the management about that?” She pointed to the sputtering light.
I didn’t tell her I was the management. I just nodded and moved along.
Back in the interior hallway, I went up the half flight of steps to the projection booth. I hadn’t been inside it yet, and I don’t know what I was expecting. What I found was a small room, maybe ten feet by twenty, lined with racks of shelves that were overflowing with equipment. Mixed vintages of projectors, splicers, reels, and platters were all jumbled together on carts and tall tables. The only pieces of gear that didn’t look antique were a control board with a Dolby label on it that I assumed worked the sound system and a computer-like thing that was probably a digital projector. Aside from that, the place looked like a storeroom at the Museum of Obsolete Projectors, and Marty was at the center of it.
“What are you doing?” he hissed. “You don’t belong in here. Go away.”
“That light is on the fritz,” I said.
“I know. I saw it.” He ran an agitated hand through his already disheveled hair. “I can’t leave the projectors until after the changeover to the feature. I’ll go fix it then.”
“I’m not asking you to fix it,” I told him. “I’ll do it. Where do you keep the l
adder?” This whole conversation was conducted in urgent whispers.
The preview for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941, Spencer Tracey and Ingrid Bergman) ended, and Marty flicked switches on two projectors in quick succession, causing one to stop turning and the other to start. Another preview began playing.
“The ladder you were using outside,” I persisted. “Where is it?”
“All right!” Marty said. “But don’t use that one. It’s too tall. Use the one in the break room. And try not to get electrocuted. They’d probably blame me.”
By the time I found the ladder in a utility closet off the break room and hauled it back to the balcony, the opening titles of Blithe Spirit had begun. I positioned the ladder, an ancient wooden one that I mentally classified as “rickety,” under the offending light. Thank heavens it was located above the aisle, and not in the middle of all the seats. I climbed up and realized I’d burn my hand if I just reached up to unscrew the bulb. So, cursing under my breath, I climbed down and headed back to the break room for something to protect my hand.
The elderly woman was glaring disapprovingly by the time I got back. I didn’t blame her. We were a good ten minutes into the movie and the séance scene was about to start. I’d found a dry dishtowel, and I used it to reach up and give the bulb a twist, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried for a better grip, afraid of squeezing too hard and breaking the bulb. I twisted again and the whole light fixture seemed to shift.
And that’s when everything went dark.
Blog Post: Blithe Spirit
1945
Blithe Spirit was written and produced by Noel Coward, so you can expect wit and sophistication from both the living and the dead.
Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison), a writer, hires a medium to come to his home and conduct a séance as research for a book. His new wife (Constance Cummings) is charmingly tolerant, his friends are charmingly intrigued, and Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford) is a fizzy combination of eccentric spiritualist and aging British Girl Guide. (Tip: any movie with Margaret Rutherford is probably worth watching.)
Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 4