Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

  I looked for Monica.

  She was behind the sales counter that ran along the back wall, helping out three employees who were busy at three cash registers. She spotted me at about the same time I saw her, and an expression I couldn’t identify flashed across her face before she smiled hugely in greeting.

  “Nora!” She came out from behind the counter as I approached and gave me a quick hug. “I’m so glad you came! What can I do for you? Tell me what you need.”

  I needed answers about Kate and Raul Acosta, but it seemed a little hasty to just plunge right in without a few polite preliminaries.

  “This place is gorgeous,” I told her.

  She glanced around the store, which was brimming with customers. Most of them women, and most of them my age or older. “It fills a need,” she said, straightening a row of little bottles. “I can’t tell you how tired I get of the stoner dude culture in this business. I wanted to create a safe, welcoming space for people to explore all the beautiful possibilities provided by one of nature’s most perfect plants.” She beamed at me.

  “I think you’ve done it,” I said. “Um, Monica, I can see you’re busy, but I was hoping we could talk. Is this a really bad time?”

  Again, that something flickered across her face and was almost instantly replaced by a smile. “No!” she said. “This is a perfect time. I don’t think the lounge is busy. Let’s go have a nice quiet cup of tea.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Then, “Plain tea?”

  She laughed. “Well there might be some caffeine in it, would that be a problem?”

  “The more the better,” I said, and followed her past the cash registers, through a doorway that led to a windowless space almost the size of the shop out front. This room was painted a darker gray. A comfortable-looking leather bench ran the length of one wall, scattered with pillows. Small tables were arranged down the length of it. Two more tables, large enough to seat six or eight, were in the center of the room. I’d been expecting a Hollywood version of an opium den. Instead it looked like the dimly-lit common room of a very nice college dorm.

  “Have a seat,” Monica said. “I’ll go get that tea.”

  A huge TV was mounted on the far wall, playing a nature documentary at low volume. There was only one person in the room, a fortyish woman, who was ignoring the TV and working on a laptop, earphones connecting her to the computer. I watched the documentary until a snake showed up—as they always seem to do in nature documentaries—then I turned away and tried to come up with the perfect movie to watch in this space.

  I had just settled on Sunset Boulevard (1950, William Holden and Gloria Swanson) when Monica came back, bearing a tray with tea and cookies. “Plain cookies,” she assured me with a grin.

  I’d chosen a spot in the corner away from the other customer, where I didn’t think anyone who happened to walk through the lounge to the employee-only area beyond it would be able to overhear us.

  “Now.” Monica sat, pushing up the sleeves of her jacket. She was once again wearing workout clothes, the kind of trim, put-together outfit that yoga types seem to live in. “How are you? Are you settling in to your new life?”

  She looked at me, really looked at me, with eyes that were filled with compassion. And although I’d intended to ask her what she knew about Kate and her possible connection to a diversifying Columbian crime lord, I found myself answering her with something quite different.

  How was I? “I don’t know,” I heard myself say. I was alarmed to feel tears welling. “I can’t bring myself to look at the texts my husband is sending me, I haven’t returned any of the messages from my lawyers, and I don’t really feel like I’m settling into any sort of new life as much as I’m running away screaming from my old one.”

  She placed her hand on mine, which was suddenly shaking. I didn’t know where the burst of emotion had come from, but it was clear that everything I’d been doing my best to ignore was simmering much closer to the surface than I’d thought. One kind word from a virtual stranger was all it took to have me spilling my guts.

  She squeezed my hand. “You poor thing.”

  Which is what I realized I’d been wanting someone to say to me ever since Ted’s face had first been plastered across the tabloids.

  At which point I didn’t interrogate the pot dealer about Kate’s possible criminal connections. Instead I sobbed in her arms.

  “Okay. There it is. Let it out.”

  The woman at her laptop took no notice of my breakdown. It’s possible that scenes like this happened all the time in the cannabis lounge. She typed away while Monica gave me the kind of comfort I hadn’t known I needed.

  Eventually I sniffed hugely and wiped my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What in the world for?” Monica said. “Everybody needs a good cry now and then.” She handed me a napkin from the tea tray. “All kinds of terrible happens if you don’t let it all out once in a while.”

  I blew my nose. “Are you some sort of witch?” I asked her. “It feels like you’re putting a spell on me.”

  She laughed and made a woo-woo hand gesture toward me. “You will get your groove back,” she intoned.

  “I don’t know if I ever had a groove.”

  “Then you’ll find one,” she said simply. And, for whatever reason, I believed her.

  “I lost it,” I told Robbie. “I mean, I really lost it, right there in the smoking lounge of a pot shop.”

  I’d used an app to call for a ride-share car when I left Monica’s shop. Robbie had called just as I was telling the driver where to take me.

  “Well, if you’re going to lose it, that’s probably as good a place as any,” she now said.

  “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Okay, but do you feel better?”

  I took a deep breath. “Oddly, I think I do.”

  “There’s nothing odd about it. Everyone needs to lose it sometimes, and you’ve kept it together far too well for far too long. It was almost getting weird.”

  “Well, then consider me normal,” I told her. “Painfully so.”

  “I consider you my best friend,” she said. “I’m just sorry I wasn’t the shoulder you cried on.”

  “You’re the shoulder I lean on for everything else,” I reminded her. “Remember, I’m working in your theater and living in your house.”

  “Only my guest house,” she said dismissively. “And it’s not like you don’t have several houses of your own.”

  I winced, watching the scenery of San Francisco pass me by. “Maybe I do. I really should look at all the emails the lawyers have been sending me.”

  “You really should,” she said. “But maybe not right this minute.”

  “Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow,” I suggested.

  “That’s a good little Scarlett O’Hara,” she agreed. Then, “Um…”

  Robbie never hesitated without good reason. “Um what?” I asked. “Tell me.”

  She blew out a breath. “I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, but Ted dropped by last night.”

  Every muscle in my body clenched. I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I didn’t.

  “I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow recap,” Robbie said. “All I’ll say is that never in my life have I ever met anyone more self-centered than that man. And you know the list of divas I’ve worked with.”

  I did. It was a long list.

  Robbie’s voice changed. “Nora, I have to ask you this, and if you don’t want to answer that’s fine, but I had the feeling that, over the last few months—I mean before this insanity all started—I had the feeling you were getting pretty fed up with Ted. Am I wrong?”

  I blinked. Had I been?

  “I’ve been frustrated,” I admitted. “I mean, it just seemed like every single inch of space I had in my head, in my life, had been taken over by taking care of Ted.
It’s like he was the Blob, and his needs just kept expanding and expanding, and sometimes…”

  “I get it.” Robbie sounded relieved. “And I just hope you remember that, as he’s putting you through all this hell. The way I see it, if Ted hadn’t run off with that woman—” she knew better than to utter the name Priya Sharma in my hearing “—you might very well have left him.”

  That thought hit me like a revelation. It was a totally new way of looking at things.

  “Do you think he knew?” I asked. “Do you think, on some level, that he wanted to pull the ripcord before I did?”

  “Well,” Robbie considered. “If he did sense your frustration, it would be totally in keeping with his narcissist character to run away from you rather than doing something crazy like asking how he could make things better.”

  I blinked, thinking of the implications. I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction to this line of thought was a self-hating Ah ha! So I am to blame for him walking out on me! But in Robbie’s careful silence, I had another thought. One that gave me much more comfort. No matter what I did or might ever do, Ted is always going to be a hopelessly self-centered shit.

  I decided to go with that.

  “I don’t think I was ready to leave him,” I finally told Robbie. “But I think I was ready for him to completely change several fundamental aspects of his personality and magically turn into the man I wanted him to be.”

  “Show me anyone who’s married who isn’t ready for that.”

  I laughed.

  “Now that sounds good,” she said. “Hey, I have to go. But I wanted to tell you that I’m still playing phone tag with Naveen. I’m going to try to set up a conference call for tomorrow so the three of us can figure out what the hell has been happening with the Palace books.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “Let me know when.”

  “I love you, you normal person,” she said.

  “You too, you weirdo.”

  We hung up just as the car pulled up at my destination.

  Golden Gate Park. Stowe Lake. Strawberry Hill.

  The place where Kate had died.

  Chapter 19

  By the time I got to the top of Strawberry Hill I had realized two things. One, that it had been far too long since my last spin class. And two, that there were any number of places along the path where a person could plunge over and break her neck.

  Especially if she was pushed.

  The hill was on an island in the middle of the man-made Stowe Lake. And “lake” may have been overstating it. It reminded me more of a moat surrounding the hill. The shallow water was spanned by two arched bridges on opposite sides of the hill, one old, stone, and gothic looking, and the other a newer concrete version. There was a boathouse that was pretty lively, even on a somewhat blustery weekday afternoon. Row boats and paddle boats were available for rental, and hot dogs and t-shirts for sale.

  The whole perimeter of the lake was less than a mile around. Walkers, joggers, and moms watching their kids feed the ducks occupied the path around it. On the island, another path circled the hill and wound gently up to the top.

  Callie had said the walk was so easy you could push a stroller, and she was right. I hadn’t seen any strollers, but I did see a nurse pushing a wheelchair and he seemed to be having no difficulty. The path was paved for a bit, then gravel packed with dirt. And it was the width of a single-lane road, not the sort of trail where one misstep could send you tumbling over. I’d read on a helpful park sign that the stone bridge and the path had been designed in the Gilded Age so San Francisco’s gold rush kings and railroad barons could drive their carriages up to the top to enjoy a picnic with a spectacular view. That’s why it was called Strawberry Hill. No rich man’s picnic was complete without strawberries.

  In this less-gilded age, the path was overgrown with cypress and redwoods, but the view was still spectacular with the Golden Gate bridge peaking over the trees in one direction and houses stretching all the way to the ocean in another. It was impossible for me to see the city laid out like that and not have scenes from San Francisco-set movies pop into my head. There were dozens of them. San Francisco, of course (1936, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable), Vertigo (1958, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak), and The Maltese Falcon (1941, Humphrey Bogart and every bad-guy contract actor on the Warner Brothers lot) were just three from my top-ten list. Oh, and Pal Joey (1957, Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak again). So make that four. Or I could have a whole different list for San Francisco musicals.

  I took a moment to ponder the cinematic history of my new city, then got down to the business of figuring out how I would kill someone by pushing them off Strawberry Hill.

  When I’d first started thinking about it, I’d wondered doubtfully whether Kate’s fall had been suicide, and now that I saw the landscape I was more than doubtful. In a city full of tall buildings, why would you throw yourself off a wooded hillside? And the suicide theory assumed she was remorseful for having killed Raul Acosta. But why would she have killed him in the first place?

  So if not suicide, what about an accident? I couldn’t see that either. Even if she’d fallen, she wouldn’t have had the momentum to fall very far. Unless she was moving pretty fast. Running, maybe? Running from someone?

  But from whom? And why? The obvious answer was that she was running from the person who had killed Raul. But what in the world would have made her run to the park? Which was, by the way, a good four miles from the theater. Even in my wildest imaginings I couldn’t see that happening.

  The only thing that made any sense was that she’d been pushed. And the only person I could imagine pushing her was the person who had killed Raul that day. But as to why the killer had dragged or chased her here to push her off a hill, I was out of theories.

  Could the killer have pushed her to her death? On the one hand, it seemed possible. There were several spots, including from the picnic grounds at the top of the hill, where it was almost a straight drop down. On the other hand, Kate would have to have been incredibly unlucky to fall far enough to break her neck. There was a ton of undergrowth and branches and fallen tree trunks that she could have grabbed to stop herself from being killed. In theory, at least.

  I shivered in my sweatshirt and sat on a rock near the hilltop picnic grounds, stumped. I had hoped that seeing the place where Kate had died would send everything clicking into place. Or at least send something clicking somewhere. But no.

  A group of maybe fifteen birders had set up cameras and telescopes on tripods near the picnic tables at the top of the hill. I watched them for a while, envying their obliviousness to everything but the black-crowned night heron that their leader was pointing out in hushed reverence. The bird moved and cameras went off like a fusillade. I felt a little sick at the sound. It reminded me of the paparazzi.

  I stood to go, and then it hit me. Cameras. There were cameras all over the place. People taking pictures of birds, of their kids, of the rowboats and the trees and the bridges.

  Had someone taken a picture of Kate that day? Was some tourist, or some random birder, walking around with the evidence of who had killed her on their camera?

  I waited until the heron had flown and the crowd was milling around in search of new sightings, then I approached the elderly woman who seemed to be in charge of the group. She had frizzy gray hair and wore the kind of hat that said she took sun protection seriously, even on an October afternoon.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Hi. Do you lead these tours often?”

  “Every Wednesday,” she said cheerily. “Are you interested in our feathered brethren?”

  “I am,” I lied. “But I’m hoping there’s a group that meets on Fridays.” Because Kate had been killed on a Friday.

  “Oh, that would be Kelly,” she said, and began rummaging around in her fanny pack. She withdrew a business card and brandished it with a clear sense of trium
ph. “We’re both with the same Meetup group. She’s wonderful. You’ll love her talks.”

  She handed me the card and I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. Would Kelly’s group be willing to share the photos they’d taken on the last Friday of September? I could only hope.

  But I could do that really well. I could hope.

  I made my way back down to the boathouse and summoned another ride-share to take me back. While I was waiting for it I sat at one of the picnic tables and looked for the other business card that I’d gotten recently. Detective Jackson’s.

  My backpack was so organized that I could never find anything. Made of incredibly soft leather, it had zippers upon pockets upon compartments. I had to dig around in most of them before I found the detective’s card tucked away in the smallest exterior pocket. I pulled it out along with a folded piece of notepaper. I called.

  “Detective Jackson.” Of course I got his voicemail. “This is Nora Paige from the Palace theater. I’m calling because I’d like an update on the investigation, and also because I’ve had an idea. There’s a group of birdwatchers that meets at Stowe Lake on Fridays…”

  The message I left was probably too long, and definitely too complicated, but I think I got the point across. The police should look at what was on those birder’s cameras. With any luck, they’d find Kate in the background somewhere, accompanied by her killer.

  Satisfied, I did some people-watching while I waited for the car. The line at the boathouse snack bar moved slowly, and there were only a few hearty souls in rented rowboats on the water. Still, I was willing to bet every single one of them had a camera phone.

  What would be the most efficient way to ask anyone who had been at the lake on that Friday to check their phones for pictures of Kate? I could put a flyer up at the boathouse. That might get some of the regulars. But the tourists? The ones most likely to have taken lots of pictures? They were probably long gone by now.

  I shuffled the two business cards and folded notepaper while I thought about it, wondering how effective social media might be in getting a request out. Eventually I found myself glancing at the notepaper. It was the page from Kate’s notepad that Marty had torn off on my first day. He’d written the theater’s Wi-Fi password on the back of one of Kate’s programming lists.