Murder in the Balcony

by Margaret Dumas

  Until! Late at night an Asian clerk (wearing glasses, because this is 1940 and all Asian clerks wear glasses) comes to see the lawyer. There is in existence a letter. Written by Bette on the night of the murder. The original is in possession of the Eurasian wife. Uh oh.

  Our noble lawyer goes to see Bette. He’s got a copy of the letter. In it, she invites Hammond to come see her while her husband is away. Oops. “Howard, I swear to you I did not write this letter,” she says. Two minutes later: “I did write that letter.” Ultimately, she faints. I mean, what other choice does she have?

  Sadly, the lawyer has principles. Even though the Widow Hammond is willing to sell it to them, that would be wrong. Bette does not understand how he could be so cruel (pronounced with two syllables). Surprise: she talks him into negotiating for the letter. Turns out the widow has only one condition: Bette has to bring her the money in person. It’s on!

  Another moonlight night. Bette, released into the lawyer’s custody, will go to the Chinese Quarter to see the widow. The Chinese Quarter is clearly where the fun is. And I bet the best food. But I digress. The car moves slowly down crowded streets. Bette looks ridiculous wrapped in an enormous lace scarf.

  As they wait for the widow in an antiques shop, Bette is drawn to a set of matching engraved daggers. Yup. Noted. They’re led through the back door to an opium den. Because let’s not leave any Asian stereotypes unturned.

  And THEN—Through a sparkling beaded doorway appears…Gale Sondergaard! Because if you’re making a movie in the forties on the Warner Brother’s lot, and you need a sinister female, you go with Gale every time. You may gather from her name that she’s a white lady, but she’s all done up in bejeweled Asian drag and lit to personify Exotic Evil. Okay, but let’s not forget who killed whose husband here.

  The first thing she does is have Bette remove the preposterous lace shawl. Thank you, Gale. And now we have a Diva-off. Looks are exchanged. Eyebrows are incredible. Gale throws the letter to the floor. Bette has to kneel before her, after which she primly says, “Thank you” and leaves Gale to glower in rage and fabulous accessories.

  And we come to the trial. “If ever there was a simple, uncomplicated case, it’s this one,” the lawyer says. Sure, once you’ve bought the evidence. But if you think the trial is where this story will end, you have not seen nearly enough Bette Davis movies. She needs her big moment, her Movie Star scene, and oh, yes, people, she will have it. And you will love it.

  Racism, oh, racism:

  What’s so shocking about the racism here is that it’s so casual. It’s just assumed that the audience will understand that the community of white planters is the only community that matters. The people who actually lived here before them, live here with them, and will be here long after they’re gone, are either servants, mild irritants, or inherently evil. I mean, all they have to say about Hammond’s wife is “Eurasian” and he’s condemned. What would it have been like if he’d married a full-blooded Asian? Or was that just too unthinkable at the time?

  You should still watch this movie. And then you should go out and support any recent movie that was written by, directed by, or stars an Asian cast. Because Bette is eternal, but Hollywood still needs to hear a few things.

  Movies My Friends Should Watch

  Sally Lee

  Chapter 12

  I still hadn’t heard back from Robbie by the time the seven thirty started. Which didn’t mean a thing, I told myself. She was one of the busiest women in Hollywood. Plus she was the single mom of a teenaged daughter. Plus there might be nothing to the rumors about Stan McMillan taking over the neighborhood. There might be no reason to worry.

  I really wished she’d call.

  Meanwhile, I sent a text to Monica. She was both proprietress of a cannabis shop a few blocks away and one-quarter owner of the Palace. We’d met when I’d investigated some shady goings-on at the theater soon after I’d arrived in San Francisco, and had formed a friendship after that.

  Hey Monica. Haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s catch up. I’ve heard some rumors about the neighborhood. Has someone offered to buy the Palace?

  There. She’d get back to me and tell me everything was fine.

  I really hoped she would.

  While I waited, I looked up Stan McMillan. The first thing I noticed is that the real-estate developer wasn’t afraid of publicity. One simple search showed him everywhere. He had the expensively cut graying hair and overly white smile of generic wealth. If Hollywood were to put out a casting call for a “white male executive type” they’d see a hundred of him. In his many online photos he was breaking ground here and shaking hands there, and he appeared to be fond of quotes that sounded like they’d been culled from TED talks on the entrepreneurial spirit of America.

  I hated him instantly.

  When Monica texted back it wasn’t the greatest of news.

  Haven’t heard anything, but I’ve been up to my eyeballs lately. I’ll ask around. Let’s catch up over the weekend.

  It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a confirmation of my worst fears. Yet.

  Brandon had relieved Albert for the evening shift, but I hadn’t had a chance to speak to him alone. Which was partly because he was trying to avoid me—nobody volunteered to clean the downstairs bathrooms if it wasn’t their turn—and partly because we were pretty busy.

  Thursday nights are like that. On the other hand, Mondays had always been slow. The decision to save on expenses by leaving the theater dark had been made before my time and it made sense. It also left Mondays free for events like the one we’d be having with June and the rest of the realtors in a few days. With a little luck it would go well enough to build on. With that in mind, I took position at the candy counter, going through the “Goings On” section of a local website on my phone, trolling for potential business and envisioning nice fat corporate checks. And waiting for Brandon to come back up to the lobby. He could only clean those bathrooms for so long.

  I pounced when he opened the stairway door. And by “pounced,” I mean I gave him a friendly grin and waved him over.

  “So,” I said chummily, “did you hear from anyone interesting this morning?”

  He flushed, which was always his first response. “Last night,” he said. “That detective came over at ten thirty. It totally freaked my mom out.”

  I made a sympathetic noise. “What did he say?”

  He glanced around the lobby guiltily. “That he couldn’t promise Callie wouldn’t find out that I was following Warren.”

  Of course that was the teenager’s main concern. And of course Jackson wouldn’t be able to make that promise.

  “It’ll be fine,” I tried to reassure him. “Especially if what you told the police helps find Warren’s killer. Callie will forgive you for a lot in that case.”

  He looked marginally hopeful at that. “Then I really hope that blonde lady did it,” he said.

  “Did Jackson tell you anything? Does he think she’s important?”

  Brandon thought about it, then shrugged. “He doesn’t really say much, you know?”

  I nodded. I knew.

  I was thinking about Callie as I went upstairs to the office. Which is why I checked myself when I got to the doorway and saw her sitting at my desk, focusing intently on my computer screen. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating, the way I’d thought Trixie was a hallucination when she first started appearing to me. Then she glanced up.

  “I’m totally not looking at your stuff,” she said.

  “Uh huh.” I came in and closed the door. “What are you doing? And how did you get in without me seeing you?”

  “Marty let me in the alley door. I came up the back stairs.” She grimaced in frustration. “I had to come in. My mom, like, banned me from the Internet. She took my phone and locked away literally every computer in the house.”

  “Uh huh,”
I said again. “Why?”

  Another grimace. “She thinks I’m obsessing.”

  Yep, that sounded right. “Are you?”

  “Of course I am! Somebody killed my boyfriend! How can she not expect me to see what everyone is saying?”

  I sat in a chair opposite the desk. “Well, not to side with your mom or anything, but maybe you shouldn’t be seeing all of that. There are a lot of rumors flying around and you could make yourself crazy if you—”

  “Crazier than I already am, not knowing what’s going on?” she demanded. “And besides, I already know what everyone’s saying. My mom didn’t know you gave me my old phone back, so I’ve been seeing everything anyway and I know what everyone’s posting. I just need to see it all on a bigger screen.”

  She swiveled the laptop so I could see what she was looking at. Photos. Most of them blurry and chaotic. Someone’s social media feed.

  “Just about everything’s already gone from Insta,” she said. “But a bunch of people posted on other sites and they’re all still up.”

  The look on my face must have been blank, so she elaborated.

  “Pictures from that night at the bar,” she explained. “Everybody was taking selfies, and, like, video and everything. Once Warren died everyone started posting literally everything. So they’ve got to be here.”

  “Who’s got to be there? The killer?”

  “Maybe. That whole story about the burglary is sketch. Everyone’s saying all his stuff was still in his apartment. What kind of burglar doesn’t take anything?”

  “The kind that gets interrupted by someone coming home?” Never mind that “everyone saying” something didn’t mean it was true.

  She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. I looked it up, and statistically, most burglaries take place between ten in the morning and three in the afternoon. While people are out. Do you know how rare a middle-of-the-night break-in is?”

  “No, but—”

  “Whoever killed him wasn’t after his stuff. They were after him. Tell me honestly, do you really think it was random?”

  “No,” I admitted. But not because of social media. It was because Detective Jackson seemed to think there was more to it than that.

  I looked at Callie. “Okay, let’s assume someone wanted to kill Warren. What makes you think they were at the bar that night?”

  “I keep thinking about that last text he sent.”

  I’d been thinking about it, too. Great minds.

  “Warren saw someone there that night,” Callie went on. “Someone he thought June would ‘lose it’ if she knew about. What if that person didn’t want to be seen? What if it was an escaped criminal or something?”

  “Why would an escaped criminal interest June?”

  “I said ‘or something!’ Maybe it was someone from work who had called in sick, or someone who was cheating on his wife or something. Anything!”

  “Right,” I said in a way that I hoped was calming. “Someone with something to hide. Someone with so much to hide that he’d kill Warren to keep him from mentioning it to anyone?”

  She took a deep breath and ran a hand through the tangles of her hair. “It’s, like, all I can think about.”

  I understood. “You’re looking for this person in all the photos,” I said.

  “But I can only blow things up so much on my phone,” she explained. “I needed a bigger screen, and I didn’t want to ask any of my friends because they’d think I’m, like, crazy or something. I thought maybe I could get in and out of here without you even knowing.” She gave me a haunted look. “Don’t tell me you think I’m crazy.”

  What I thought was that she’d come here because she wanted my help. Whether she’d admit it to herself or not. But that’s not what I said.

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that we can do better than a laptop screen.”

  Ten minutes later I’d hooked the laptop up to the powerful projector that we’d be using for Monday’s event. On Monday we’d plug June’s laptop in and be able to project her PowerPoint slides onto the movie screen. But now instead of that I plugged my laptop in and projected the social media posts of Warren’s friends onto the freshly-scrubbed whiteboard in the break room.

  “We don’t care about anybody in the foreground of the pictures, right?” I asked Callie.

  “I don’t think so. I think whoever Warren saw wasn’t there for his party. If there is a picture of them, I bet it’s someone in the background.”

  “How will we recognize them if we don’t know what we’re looking for?”

  “I have literally no idea,” she said. “I just kind of hope that Warren sent me that text about them because I might know them too.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Half an hour later I felt I’d gotten to know the interior of the Irish Bank intimately. The after-work crowd was pretty much what you’d expect for an established bar in the Financial District. Lots of thirtyish guys with their ties loosened, lots of thirtyish women with aspirational handbags. The crowd thinned out as the evening went on, and more and more of the patrons seemed to be there for Warren’s party.

  Warren himself was all over the place. With his arm around Callie in a lot of the early-evening shots, and then by himself or surrounded by friends later on. I glanced over at Callie to see how she was doing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She sniffed. “I’m fine.”

  I doubted that. “We can probably skip the ones from earlier in the evening,” I suggested. “He didn’t send that text to you until after one, right?”

  She nodded. We kept looking. Callie and Warren’s friends posted a lot.

  “Hang on,” I said eventually. “There, in the corner.” I got up and moved closer to the image on the whiteboard. “The guy with the grey hair.”

  “I don’t know him. Do you?”

  “No, but he’s older than the rest of them. And we’re looking for someone June would lose it over, right? So maybe we should be looking for someone more her age?”

  It was at least a way of focusing our search. We looked for anyone who seemed like they’d be too old for Warren’s gathering, scrolling through the feeds more quickly now. Samantha Beach was there in all her tall blonde splendor, but it didn’t look to me like she and Warren were up to anything. She was in a fair number of pictures, but mainly on the outskirts. If she was the other woman he’d been seeing, they were very good at being discreet.

  And then I saw him.

  “Wait!” I stopped Callie from moving on. “There!” I pointed at a man’s profile in the upper right corner of an image. “That guy.” It was a well-groomed man in his fifties who seemed to be talking to someone just out of the frame. All I could see of that person was an arm with an oversized watch dangling from an undersized wrist. But the main guy I knew.

  “Hang on,” Callie said, and clicked on next photo. In this image the man had moved. He was looking toward the camera, but not at it. It seemed to me like he was looking directly at Warren.

  “Who is it?” Callie asked.

  “Stan McMillan,” I told her. I’d just been looking at dozens of pictures of him online. “Real estate developer and known snake.”

  Was he also a murderer?

  Chapter 13

  Friday morning my phone woke me. I reached for it, seeing but not quite believing that someone was calling me at five fifteen. I hit the Answer button.

  Robbie spoke in a rush. “Nora, are you okay? I just saw. I can’t believe it. I’m so, so sorry. That bastard! How are you?”

  For one half-sleeping moment I thought she was apologizing for selling the Palace to the snake and possible murderer Stan McMillan. Then I woke up.

  “What happened?”

  A brief silence. “You haven’t seen it.”

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning. I haven’t s
een anything. What is it?”

  “Ted.”

  I had a quick mental image of him lying dramatically dead somewhere, the victim of my murderous thoughts yesterday. But that couldn’t be true. If I could think him dead, I’d have done it months ago.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Oh, Nora.” Her voice broke. “It’s all over the gossip sites. He’s back with Priya. He gave her an engagement ring.”

  All of the air left the room and I got a sort of floaty feeling, as if gravity had finally given up. “I’ll call you back.”

  I had to check online. I had to see this for myself. I had to check my messages to see if he’d at least had the decency to text me. I had to get a grip.

  But first I ran to the bathroom. I had to throw up.

  “Canoodling,” I said to Robbie. I’d called her back after pulling myself together. Not that I was together. But I’d called her back. “Have you ever actually heard the word canoodling? I mean, out loud? Spoken by a human being?”

  It was the word emblazoned in hot pink text above the photo of Ted and Priya in a shadowy booth of a swanky restaurant. A booth designed for canoodling.

  “They invented it for the tabloids,” she said. “They must have.”

  “The only thing I want to know,” I said. “The only thing I really don’t understand, is how I can have been such a total and complete idiot.”

  She said all the right best-friend things, but I didn’t hear them. I was looking at another photo, this one of Priya’s movie star smile next to her left hand, the third finger of which was sporting a diamond bigger than the first apartment Ted and I had shared.

  “It’s not so much the diamond,” I told Robbie. “It’s the lying sniveling weaseling cheating lying that I mind.”

  “Damn right,” my best friend said.