Awaken the Devil

by A. J. Chase

  Chandler was sick to death of the presence of the police at the theater. They were disturbing the flow of rehearsals and making people nervous. In the week and a half since Charlotte's death, almost every girl in the line had dissolved into a mass of hysteria every time that he so much as entered the room. Then again, perhaps that was his fault and not the authorities'.

  He had no doubt that they were noticing the special attention detectives Wallace and Pettigrew were giving to Chandler and his possible involvement in Charlotte's murder. He, personally, was of the opinion that Charlotte had been killed by accident. That the murderer, whoever he or she was, had mistakenly assumed that Chandler was carrying on with Charlotte behind closed doors.

  And that made his idiotic assignation with Fielding all the more foolish. What if they had guessed correctly? What if it had been Fielding? The thought was almost unbearable. He had avoided her with a kind of fervor over the last days, hoping that no one would even begin to guess that he had given in to his overwhelming desire for her in a moment of incredible weakness, and worse yet that all he could think of when he saw her was doing it again.

  She acted like Fielding always acted—calm and sensible. And he wanted to drag her behind the nearest door he could lock and feel her around him again. But it was out of the question.

  Pettigrew followed around behind him as he went on his rounds. He almost appreciated the chaperoning the git was doing. It made it easier not to even be tempted by Fielding's presence. It was now mid-December, and the time crunch was making him feel all the more suffocated. Most of the numbers were shaping up, and Jason, his male principle, was finally starting to get his act together.

  He worried about Profundo, and Armand had chosen this little cheerleader, bleached-blonde type that Chandler had scarcely noticed from the line to replace Charlotte. Chandler was not impressed, but it was Armand's baby, and he was terribly upset about Charlotte, so he let the man do what he wanted in respect to the casting.

  He was headed backstage, Pettigrew still trailing behind him like a puppy, when Wallace stopped him. Wallace was different. Rather than an annoyance, Chandler perceived the younger man as a threat. Wallace was smart and wily. He disappeared for long hours at a time and then would suddenly materialize at Chandler's side asking another seemingly random question. Chandler knew they weren't random, but were designed to trap him in some kind of deceit. He was involved in a kind of deceit, just not the sort that Wallace expected to find him guilty of.

  "Could you do me a favor, Bentley?" Wallace scratched the scar that ran across one of his dark eyebrows.

  "That depends on what it is." He always felt like he was engaged in a battle of wits with the good detective, and he didn't want to lose.

  "Do you think you could sort of crouch over for me. You know, bend at the knees a little." Although it was an idiotic request, he could see that Wallace was serious.

  "Did you need a piggy back ride?" He requested dryly.

  Wallace chuckled and shook his head. "No. No. I can walk myself thanks. If you could just, you know, humor me."

  Chandler was not a little bothered by Wallace's easy demeanor and good old boy behaviorism. They masked a snake-like intent that told him he could treat Pettigrew however he liked, but he had to watch Wallace very, very carefully. He sighed and bent at the knees feeling quite idiotic and in a hurry to get back to work. The younger man looked him up and down and nodded his head. "Thanks. See you around."

  That moment came sooner than Chandler might have expected. It was not so much seeing as hearing. He was coming back out of his office half an hour later, having both finally shaken Pettigrew and finished some very important paperwork. He paused, his hand inches from the handle, when he heard Fielding's sweet, throaty murmur on the other side of the door then an answering languid drawl from Wallace. What were they talking about? For a horrifying second, he was afraid they were discussing him, but that proved to be untrue when he focused on their words.

  "You don't look like a Zach to me," she was saying. Her voice caressed his skin leaving goose bumps in its wake.

  "That's because I'm not a Zach." He could imagine the detective leaning against the wall feet crossed at the ankle.

  "I didn't know there was another name that started with a Z."

  "There isn't one that any normal person would have. It's Zavad. It's Hebrew for 'a gift'. Most of my friends call me Zave, you know like Dave with a Z. What about you? What kind of name is Fielding?"

  "Oh, it's old English for 'it was my mother's maiden name'."

  Zavad Wallace laughed, and Chandler had to brutally tamp down the annoyance that came with the knowledge that the detective was hitting on Fielding. He wanted to open the door and break up the party, but he could not even afford to think about it. His annoyance would give him away. He knew it would. He would just have to stay put until they left.

  Wallace suddenly had his investigation voice on again. "Do you spend a lot of time out of the theater with the other members of the cast?"

  "Sometimes. With Leslie and Daphne mostly."

  "What about Bentley, you see him around much outside these doors?"

  Fielding's tension was palpable in her voice, only because he knew her. He might not have noticed if he'd been a stranger, she was so good at sounding calm and rational. "I've seen him around," she admitted finally. "In public places. Other theaters, some restaurants. Things like that." She didn't elaborate, and to Chandler's surprise Wallace left it alone.

  "Are you going out with someone from the cast this weekend? Saturday?" He asked instead. For a moment Chandler was furious with the idea that Wallace was thinking of asking her out. Even more while he held his breath waiting to see if she would be receptive.

  "No." The lilting curve of her voice sounded like an invitation for the man to make his move. Any man. She sounded like the vocal embodiment of sex. He had a sudden hot memory of her whispered words, molten in his ears as he drove into her against the wall. He bit his bottom lip to keep himself from interrupting them. "I sing at my Uncle's big Christmas party every year. I have since I was about fifteen. He rents a ballroom at the Plaza. It's very nice. His friends and employees love it. If he's well enough he'll go, but either way, as long as he's alive I'll still have to throw it."

  "Sounds nice. What does your uncle do?"

  There was a long silence, and he almost fell against the door straining to hear what they were doing. Finally Fielding said, "He's in publishing. A few magazines, a small paper, a trade journal for steel mill workers. That kind of thing."

  "Nice. What about your parents? What do they do?"

  "My parents are dead." Again, he noted that she didn't seem to sound all that upset about it. He was a fool. He was, for the first time in his life, drowning in jealousy, over a woman who, reasonably, acted like she could take him or leave him. And all she was doing was chatting with another man. A good-looking man who was years younger than he was and probably wasn't hauling around the kind of baggage that he was.

  Suddenly Wallace moved because he could hear his footsteps, they sounded different than Fielding's. "Well, see you around." He gave his customary warning of a goodbye. "Have fun at the Plaza."

  Chandler listened to them both leave, thinking hard. The Plaza was a nice hotel, and he hadn't moved in over three weeks. Last time when he had run into her at the theater it had merely been a coincidence, but this time he was going to take a page out of Helena's book and make his own luck. This afternoon he was moving into the Plaza, and by Saturday night he would have to decide what he meant to do with his engineered coincidental meeting and his infantile jealousy. But between now and then all he could do was ignore her and wait.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By Friday, it was clear something was wrong with Leslie. Fielding didn't know what it was, but the other woman's behavior was really starting to make her nervous. Leslie, who had never been a rod of steel, was even more nervous than usual, jumping at every sound or sudden motion. She spent an unusua
l amount of time standing alone in the corner or talking in whispered tones to Detective Wallace, although Fielding had never seen her so much as chatting with Detective Pettigrew. Not that she blamed her. Pettigrew was a big jerk, and she also tried to avoid him if she could. It wasn't too hard—he spent all his time dogging Chandler.

  Chandler was another subject she was a little sour on. She knew she had to stay away from him. She shouldn't have given in to her urges in the first place, but since she had, a stupid little part of her wanted him to acknowledge it. She prided herself on being a practical woman, but nevertheless she was still a woman, and the feminine part of her wanted to demand that they face up to what had happened between them instead of just ignoring each other. Their behavior towards each other was odd, but when had it ever been normal over the course of her presence here? She wanted strongly to pull him into some handy room and demand that he at least admit that he had touched her so deeply.

  But she couldn't do that so she focused all her attention on Leslie instead. She spent free time between numbers quizzing the younger woman, trying to figure out what had gone wrong in her life in the last few days. Finally, by the time that Friday came around and Leslie was still a bundle of raw nerves, Fielding was tired of beating around the bush. "Seriously, Leslie, what's the matter with you?"

  They were between numbers, and there were some problems with the music. By next week the real orchestra would begin working with them, but for now they were still subject to the vagaries of technology.

  'What do you mean? There's nothing wrong with me." She skirted away from her nervously. Fielding sighed. Clearly Leslie wasn't going to make this easy.

  "You're a terrible liar. Why don't you just tell me what's wrong. Is it Detective Wallace? Did he do something to upset you?"

  Leslie's pale, almost purple, eyes wandered over to the omnipresent detectives assigned to Charlotte's case. Wallace was giving one of his rare wicked grins that seemed an unfair weapon against women the world over.

  "He's Jewish," Leslie murmured in a tiny voice.

  Fielding restrained a smile. "Yes, I guessed that. But I don't think he did that just to spite you."

  She glanced at Fielding as though she had just realized the terrible sounding words that had come out of her mouth. "I didn't mean it the way it sounded. It's just that my parents…" She bit her bottom lip.

  "Warned you about the evils of Judaism?" Fielding offered.

  She smiled then it immediately faded. "No. But they would be mad."

  "About what? That you're working with a Jewish cop?" Then Fielding's mind sudden gained a clarity she should have had for days. "Working is all you're doing with him, right?"

  Vivid color lit up Leslie's cheeks. "I didn't mean to think about him like that."

  "Like what?" Fielding aimed for understanding and came up with their conversation of almost two weeks earlier at Mitchell's. "It was him. He was the stranger you were attracted to." She gaped at Wallace. Undeniably he was attractive, but to Leslie? There was a certain ragged edge of someone who had seen too much and lived too hard about Wallace. Leslie was an innocent, almost like a novice nun. The idea seemed impossible.

  "Shhh." She pressed her finger to her lips and shot a worried glare around them as though someone might have heard. Yes, the horror. Fielding rolled her eyes and then looked back at the detectives.

  "So is that why you're so jumpy? Because you had the bad manners to fall in lust with a Jewish cop?"

  Leslie shook her head and looked around her again before leaning in closer. "I found it. The weapon, the one that killed Charlotte."

  "But…where? I mean when did you find it?"

  "On Monday, just as I was leaving the theater. I went to the costume closet and there it was hidden behind the rack for the opening number."

  "Are you sure it's the right knife?" What could they find out from it? Enough to make an arrest before Chandler fell victim to circumstantial evidence and the natural desire to point fingers?

  "Yes." Leslie's slight shoulders convulsed. "It still had her blood all over it. No fingerprints. Not that Zave expected any."

  Of course not. Even the most inexperienced killer would know to buy a pair of gloves, and this person had to be on top of things to have murdered five times over and still not get caught. And what an odd place to leave the weapon, almost as if he or she wanted it to be found. Had the murderer wanted it to be found? Why? A plea for help? An attempt to cause confusion? Fielding just didn't know.

  "Look, Leslie, do you think you could meet me in the costume closet in like twenty minutes. Just to show me what you saw, exactly how you found it?"

  A tiny wrinkle formed between the girl's brows. "Why?"

  For a wild moment, Fielding considered telling her the truth. She liked Leslie, and she needed someone to lean on, but she couldn't bring her into this. It was bad enough that Daphne knew. She had misinterpreted what kind of person Daphne was. She had taken a slow, country drawl and good manners for stupidity and sweetness, and neither had turned out to be true. Daphne was both smarter and meaner than Fielding ever would have guessed on first contact. Leslie wasn't dim, but she was sheltered, and Fielding wasn't sure the woman could take another heavy secret.

  "Morbid curiosity," she lied.

  Leslie worked her bottom lip looking like she was going to achieve some real damage if she kept on chewing like that. "Alright. Just right after because I have to be somewhere by two."

  The agreement was barely out of her mouth when the music started up again. With another sideways look at her detective, Leslie headed back out onto the stage and Fielding followed.

  When they broke up for the day, Fielding pushed her way through the loitering crowd and into the room they were now using as a dressing room since no one wanted to go back into the room where Charlotte had been found. She didn't bother changing, merely pulled a sweater on over her leotard and tights and slipped on ballet style flats to replace her tap shoes.

  Fielding didn't want Leslie to lose her Dutch courage before she had a chance to see where the knife had been found. She threw her bag over her shoulder and headed for the costume closet.

  She was still a few hundred feet away, rounding the corner, when she heard the scream. She knew that sound. It had nearly come out of her own mouth just two weeks before. It was horror, fear. She dropped her bag and flew around the corner grabbing the door frame to catch her balance and ripping open the door to the costume closet.

  She hated the idea of what she might find there, but when she turned on the light there wasn't much to see. The room really was empty this time. There was no helplessly prone body on the floor, no smell of death blanketing the room. Just the eerie silence that comes after a scream and a small puddle of blood near the door.

  She heard someone come up behind her and saw Detective Pettigrew, as usual sans Wallace. He looked into the room over Fielding's shoulder and cleared his throat loudly. "What's all the screaming about young lady?"

  "It wasn't me." There was no body this time, but she hovered on the edge of throwing up again anyway. "But I think I know who it was."

  When she didn't say anything, Pettigrew grabbed her by the shoulder and shook. "Well, who was it girl?"

  Had she not been in a daze, she would have hated him for treating her that way. As it was, she hardly noticed. Other people had heard Leslie's scream and were starting to gather. When she found her voice again, she whispered, "It was Leslie. Leslie Sanford. She's gone."

  For the sake of an openly ailing Mac, who had been let out of the hospice for the night, and his incredibly expensive party, Fielding tried for happiness or at least some semblance of normality Saturday. But the way that Mac, Josh, and the elfish Janine were looking at her, she knew she had failed.

  She was sick with worry over Leslie. What if something bad happened to her? Had already happened? It seemed unlikely that she had fled of her volition after screaming and bleeding just for the heck of it. Where was she? Fielding alternated between hope a
nd despair. Poor Leslie.

  She had dressed carefully for the festivities despite not feeling in the holiday mood. Her floor-length red gown was a silky satin drape with a plunging cowl neckline and a small train. She looked like she was ready to party, even if she didn't feel it. Gazing around she could easily believe that all of the two hundred people who had received an invitation were in attendance.

  Everyone, including Mac in his wheelchair and the normally ultra-casual Josh, was dressed as if they were getting ready to visit the queen. Janine, who did indeed look like a pixie, was slightly more playful in a strapless black gown with big white polka dots. The large red sash along the empire waist was tied in a big, whimsical bow against Janine's slender back.

  She was cute. Fielding had to admit. She wasn't sure 'hot' would have been the word she would have applied. Her hair was cut boy short and dyed fire engine red, perhaps in honor of the holiday. Her large gray eyes gave her the same kind of Disney baby-animals look that Daphne had honed except, unlike Daphne, she had a liberal sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and her eyebrow was pierced and currently sporting a sparkly red ring. She also watched every movement with keen intelligence and had a witty conversation that, in between sets, kept Fielding's mind off the horror that was her life.

  There was plenty of alcohol in the room between sets as well and she probably should have been capable of drowning her sorrows and worries in a glass or four. Most people were. But Fielding couldn't. No matter what, these problems would still be with her, looming large. She put down her mostly full wine glass, grabbed the mic, and launched into "White Christmas" with a kind of verve that she definitely didn't feel.

  Chandler had spent all afternoon deciding that he wasn't going to find Fielding at her uncle's party after all. It took all afternoon to convince himself that no place was safe to hide his meeting with Fielding. Even an anonymous hotel. She had told people she was going to be here, people from the cast. What if one of them came by and saw the two of them together. No, he was better off not trusting in any sense of anonymity. Besides, he was better off not getting any further enmeshed with Fielding than he already was. No, he would just stay in his lovely recently remodeled suite and work.