Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

  “I should have,” she whispered.

  “That’s just crazy.” Marty spoke from the doorway. I had no idea how long he’d been standing there. He ignored the rest of us and focused completely on Callie. “This was not your fault. It happened because the world is a terrible place and terrible things happen in it.”

  “Marty, please!” Albert said.

  “My point is,” he went on, “There’s no blame. There’s no ‘I should have.’ There’s just a terrible thing that happened. And now we have to deal with it.”

  Callie released her hand from Albert’s and took another swig from the bottle.

  But Marty wasn’t finished. “I called your mother,” he said. “She’s on her way.” Callie’s eyes opened wide with what looked like alarm. Marty held up a hand. “Don’t even start. When terrible things happen you need your mother.” He turned on his heel and left.

  We all sat in somewhat stunned silence after that. Callie was the first to speak.

  “Sooo…you literally can’t meet my mom.” She was looking at me. “And I need my phone back.”

  Callie was serious about not letting me meet her mother. When she saw a beige Mercedes pull up to the curb in front of the ticket booth, she practically ran out the lobby doors. It was nearing dusk and still drizzling, so I didn’t even get a glimpse of the woman I had never thought about before. Of course, now that I’d been made aware of her existence and banned from meeting her, I was irrationally curious.

  The car pulled away and I stood looking out at the soggy evening until a tentative voice interrupted my thoughts.

  “Is she okay?”

  Brandon flushed a deep red as soon as I looked at him. His pale skin and ginger hair made him susceptible to that sort of thing.

  “No,” I told him. “But she will be.”

  I knew he had a massive crush on his coworker. Everyone knew, as he was constitutionally incapable of hiding his emotions. But while a six-year age difference wouldn’t be a big deal for someone of my advanced years, it was an insurmountable gap for a high school kid and a grad student. “Poor Brandon” had been a regular theme of conversation over the past few months, as Callie’s relationship with Warren had played out like a rom-com montage set to Gershwin tunes right under his tortured gaze.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  It was a good question. I’d only been able to make her tea. “Let’s take our cue from her, okay? If she wants to talk about it, we talk, but if she doesn’t, we don’t push.”

  He nodded, but there was something else, I could tell. Finally he spoke again. “What if I know something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He squirmed, his complexion deepening further. “What if I know something about Warren? Something that might make it easier. Should I tell her?”

  The lobby was empty, with Marty in the projection room and Albert out in the ticket booth. A dozen or so patrons had settled into one movie and the crowd for the next hadn’t yet arrived. Nevertheless, I found myself speaking softly, matching Brandon’s low tone. “Something like what?”

  He swallowed, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Like maybe Callie wasn’t the only girl he was seeing.”

  I stared at him, taking in the implications of what he’d just said. All the implications.

  First things first. “Brandon, have you been…” I carefully avoided the word stalking. “Spying on Callie?”

  “Of course not!” He looked appalled. “Never! I totally respect her.”

  “Sure, sure. But…” I prompted.

  He looked at the carpet “But I may have been looking into Warren a little bit. Just to protect Callie.”

  “Right.” I paused. “For her own good.”

  “Yes!” He looked relieved that I’d understood.

  I understood more than he knew.

  “Okay,” I said. “Two things. One—it is not cool to spy on a friend. Or on the person that friend is dating. Especially if you have feelings for that friend. It’s not cool and it’s kind of creepy and I know you don’t want to be that guy.”

  “I’m not that guy!” he protested. “I was just—”

  “You were just trying to protect a grown woman who was making her own choices,” I told him. “A grown woman who would not thank you if you told her.”

  This seemed to register with him. “I guess not.” He took a breath. “You said two things. What’s the other?”

  “The other is a question.” I looked at him. “Is what you know about Warren anything you should tell the police?”

  Chapter 4

  There was nothing in the news about Warren’s death. I had no idea if the police were treating it as a break-in gone bad or something else. I’d hoped to get a little information from June, but when I spoke to her the next morning, she told me that they’d asked her a million questions but hadn’t given her any more information.

  I was worried about Callie. I’d gotten someone to cover her shifts and sent her a text the night before, telling her to take as much time off as she needed. So I wasn’t expecting her when she showed up at the lobby doors soon after I put the coffee on.

  “How are you? Are you okay?”

  She winced, dropping her things to the floor and settling on the stool by the candy counter. “Not to be rude or anything, but can you do me a favor and, like, chill?”

  “I’ll chill as soon as I know you’re okay.”

  “I mean, I’m not okay,” she said. “But I’m not a total mess or anything. I just wish I knew what happened.”

  “Didn’t the police tell you anything?”

  She made a face. “I haven’t talked to them yet. My mom told them she gave me a sleeping pill and that I was in no condition to talk to anyone.”

  Wow. “Did she?”

  “She doesn’t believe in sleeping pills,” Callie said, taking the cup of coffee I handed her. “She slathered my back with Vicks VapoRub and gave me a couple shots of tequila.”

  My eyebrows went up.

  “You’d have to know my mom,” she said, sipping. Then she seemed to realize what that meant. “Not that you ever will. She’s, like, a crazy person.”

  “Everyone thinks their mom’s a crazy person when they’re your age,” I told her. Whereupon I immediately felt ancient. “And who knows? Maybe VapoRub helps.” Or maybe just having your mother rub your back while you cried helped. Yep. Probably that.

  “When are you talking to the police?” I asked her.

  She glanced at the clock above the lobby doors. “Nine.” Which was about ten minutes away. “I’m meeting them at the café across the street. It’s that detective, the one who was here before?”

  “Really? Detective Jackson?”

  She nodded. Jackson had investigated the deaths at the Palace back in October, when I’d first come to San Francisco. As far as I knew he was on the homicide squad, so that seemed to say they weren’t thinking this was a simple burglary gone wrong after all.

  “Sooo…” Callie looked up at the painted stars on the ceiling. “I was kind of wondering…I mean, I know you’re busy and everything…but would you come with me? For, like, I don’t know, moral support or something?”

  It seemed like torture for her to make the request.

  “Let me get my jacket.”

  “Detective Jackson,” I greeted the policeman as he rose from the window table at Café Madeleine, a coffee-and-pastry-scented paradise located across the street from the theater. He smiled in recognition, which only slightly countered the imposing presence he projected. A tall, heavyset man with deep brown skin and a hipster goatee, he was made even larger by the quilted parka he wore that chilly morning.

  “Ms. Paige,” he nodded, then turned his attention to Callie. “Ms. Gee. My condolences on your loss.”

  I’d forgotten about the detective’s voice. Full, deep
, and resonant, it was a major component of his overall aura of authority.

  Callie asked the server for a triple latte, then turned to the detective. “What happened? Have you caught them yet?”

  He had a small notebook, which he opened while looking at Callie. “We’re doing everything we can. How long had you been seeing Mr. Williams?”

  “Why? What does that have to do with it?”

  “It’s important to get as complete a picture as possible,” he said. “His colleagues say you’d been dating for several months?”

  “Since November,” I volunteered. Something in the way the detective looked at me implied that I shouldn’t volunteer anything else. I let Callie talk.

  “Right before Thanksgiving,” she said. “We totally clicked.”

  As she described her whirlwind, made-for-each-other romance I couldn’t help thinking about what Brandon had revealed the day before. Had Warren really been seeing someone else while he and Callie were together?

  “We were both, like, super busy all the time,” she was saying. “I mean, he was interning at the real estate office and finishing up his last coursework before taking his exam. And I work at the Palace while I’m in grad school too. Film school. I’m making a documentary.” She ran a hand through her hair, lifting it away from her face in an automatic yes-I-know-I’m-very-cool gesture. “But even with all that, we saw each other literally all the time.”

  The coffee came, and we paused in the conversation to blow and sip and wait for the server to walk away. The owner of the café, Lisa, was giving me curious glances. We’d become friendly and she was probably wondering what was up with this intense conversation.

  “Tell me about the night of the party,” Detective Jackson said. “The night you all went to the bar.”

  Callie nodded, swallowing. “The Irish Bank, downtown.”

  “Did you go there often?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s, like, not my usual kind of place, or Warren’s. But he had to go to the Financial District that afternoon to do some mortgage thing or something, so he was downtown when he checked the website and found out he’d passed. He went to the nearest bar—the Irish Bank—and started live streaming to let everybody know. A bunch of his friends started showing up when they all got off work, and it was kind of a scene by the time I got there.”

  “Which was…?”

  She blinked. “I left here around four and took the bus, so probably, like, five? A little before?”

  “And who was there when you arrived?”

  She thought about it and started counting off attendees. I only recognized a few people from June’s firm among many names. Then the detective started getting into the details of who had come later, and who had left when.

  “There was sort of a wave of his work friends,” Callie said. “They’d all come together, but they all left around the same time, too. They didn’t stay long.”

  “Was anybody from the office still there when you left?”

  Callie thought about it. “I think by then it was only, like, Sam. The rest of them were mainly his buddies from school.”

  “But Sam, he was still there?”

  She grimaced. “Um, I usually try to keep it all gender non-binary, but Sam isn’t a he. She’s a woman. Samantha?”

  Jackson flipped back a few pages in his notebook. “Right. Samantha Beach. She was one of the last people known to have been at the bar.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed Callie’s face. “Really? That’s random. But she was still there when I left to come back here.”

  “Which was…?”

  “Around ten thirty. Warren called a rideshare for me because I needed to be back by eleven for the pizza party.”

  The detective gave her a quizzical look.

  “It was a theme party for the midnight movie,” I supplied. “We’ve just started having them on Friday nights. Last Friday we showed Roman Holiday” (1953, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.)

  “The party started at eleven thirty,” Callie said. “We sold pizza and cannoli in the lobby, and if you showed up wearing a tiara you got in for half price.”

  “If you showed up on a Vespa you got in free,” I said. The midnight movies, so far, had been fairly successful. I was hoping they’d turn into real events–the kind that brought in real profits.

  A horrible look crossed Callie’s face. “Ohmygod. Were we having the party when Warren…?” She turned to the detective with huge eyes.

  He gave her a steadying look. “We don’t have the official report yet, but it looks like he died early Saturday morning.”

  That was good. I mean, that was awful, but at least it meant Callie didn’t have to have the mental image of her boyfriend being murdered while she was dishing up pizza to the tune of “Mambo Italiano.”

  But it also meant she didn’t have an alibi. Which probably isn’t the first thing that would have occurred to me a few months ago, before I’d taken an interest in the murders that had happened at the Palace. Now it was a disturbing thought.

  The detective asked his next question. “When did you leave the theater?”

  “The movie ended around two,” Callie said. “So I think we all cleared out by around two thirty.”

  “And then you went home?”

  “I totally crashed,” she nodded.

  “I arranged rideshares for the team,” I told Jackson. “On my account. They’ll have a record of when they took Callie home.” And the fact that they took her to her apartment, not Warren’s.

  “Do you normally do that?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “The midnight movies are a new thing. Callie and Marty usually bike or take the bus, but at that hour only the Owl service would be running, and they’d been great about taking on the extra work, so…”

  “Right.” Jackson jotted something in his notebook. Then, to Callie, “Do you have a roommate?”

  “Two, but they were…” her voice trailed off. I could see her realizing why he might be asking her that particular question. Was she a suspect?

  She blinked a few times, reorienting herself. When she answered her voice had a more guarded tone. “I sent Warren a text when I got home. He didn’t answer so I went to bed. And no, nobody saw me until I came in for the late shift on Saturday.”

  “That would have been around four thirty in the afternoon,” I supplied, not at all liking where this conversation was going.

  “I sent Warren a few texts on Saturday,” Callie said. “But after how much he drank at the bar I figured he was sleeping all day. When he still didn’t answer by the afternoon, I just got mad. If I’d realized something was wrong…” She turned to the detective. “What happened to him?”

  “We’ll know more as the investigation goes on,” he responded, maddeningly.

  “June said his neighbor found him?”

  He nodded. He didn’t elaborate.

  “And that there had been a break-in or something?”

  He regarded her. “Where did you hear that?”

  She glanced at her phone on the table. “Everybody.”

  Wait. Was Jackson saying it wasn’t a break-in?

  A look of weariness settled on his face. “Ms. Gee, I would strongly advise you not to look to social media for news of the investigation. I can tell you that we’re checking out every lead we have and doing everything we can to find out what happened to Warren.” He cleared his throat. “Did he contact you at all after you left the bar Friday night?”

  She nodded. “A couple times, while I was working…what?”

  The detective was looking at her intently. “When did he send his last text?”

  She slid her phone closer and started tapping the screen. “Here. 1:17.” She looked up. “Does that help? Why can’t you just look at his phone?”

  “It’s missing,” Jackson replied.

>   Callie’s jaw dropped. “No way. Warren always had his phone. It was, like, surgically implanted in his hand.”

  “Well, now we know he still had it at 1:17 in the morning,” he said. “What did he say in the text?”

  Callie’s world was still rocked at the thought of a phoneless Warren. She glanced down at her screen and read aloud.

  “June’s going to lose it when I tell her who I just saw at the bar!”

  She looked up. “With five exclamation points and a hand grenade emoji.”

  The detective’s face probably matched mine as he held out his hand for her phone. Intense curiosity. Who had Warren seen? Did it have anything to do with why he’d been killed? Because I didn’t believe for a second that Jackson thought this was a routine burglary.

  Blog Post: Roman Holiday

  1953

  Okay. All right. This is the one. This is the movie I want you to watch if you think you don’t like old movies. Because this is the one that will turn you around. You will be powerless to resist it. It’s that good. Am I not being clear? I LOVE this movie.

  The credits begin by INTRODUCING Audrey Hepburn. It’s her first movie! And she’s absolutely ethereal in it. She plays Princess Ann, and she’s on a goodwill royal tour of Europe. (We don’t know what country she’s princess of, but really, who cares?) Has anyone ever looked more like someone who should be called “her serene highness” as she watches parades and launches ships and waves regally to crowds? This woman was born to wear a tiara.

  But late at night back at the Palace, being tucked in with milk and crackers, she looks more like a teenager than a royal. And like a teenager she longs to rebel, even if it’s only by wearing pajamas instead of a high-necked nightgown. She has no idea she’s about to rebel on a much more cinematic scale.