Murder in the Balcony

by Margaret Dumas

  I gave him a quick elbow to the ribs before introducing myself. “Hi, I’m Nora. I manage the joint,” I said. “I’m so glad you came tonight.”

  She grinned. “I had to. Where else could I have worn this outfit?”

  The outfit in question was an elaborately embroidered dressing gown worn over crimson silk pajamas that made me want to say the word “opulent” out loud.

  “It’s gorgeous,” I told her. “You could wear it to the opera.”

  She shrugged. “But musicals are so much more fun.”

  “Then you’ll love what we’ve got coming up,” I said. “We’re doing a whole month of musicals in the spring—‘Musical May.’” I’d just thought if it.

  “We are?” Marty asked.

  “Your scoop is dripping,” I told him. There was nobody waiting to pay, so I turned back to the woman. “Are you new to the neighborhood?” Why was she so familiar to me?

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t live around here. But once my cousin told me about your theater, I haven’t been able to keep away.”

  “Really? Who’s your cousin?”

  She grinned again. “I think you know him. Hector Acosta.”

  Chapter 15

  Monica’s jaw dropped. “Cousin Gabriela came to your pajama party?”

  It was Saturday morning and we were having breakfast at Café Madeline before Monica’s cannabis shop opened and way before anyone would think of showing up at the Palace.

  I nodded. “Hector’s cousin.”

  Monica was in her forties, Chinese-American, and only ever wore workout clothes. I’d never known her to work out. Now she rolled the sleeves of her fleece jacket up in preparation for attacking an extremely flaky spinach-and-cheese croissant. “And Raul’s cousin,” she said.

  Raul Acosta, Hector’s brother, had been murdered at the Palace. I’d found his body on my first day there. I’d never known him, but Monica had. They’d worked on something having to do with her running a completely legal pot shop and him coming from a family of notorious crime lords. Reformed crime lords, as Hector was often at pains to stress.

  “Gabriela’s some sort of computer type, isn’t she?” Monica asked.

  “A programmer,” I nodded. “She’s working on something with robotics. She told me a little bit about it last night.”

  A glint appeared in Monica’s eye. “I wonder if she’s reporting back to Hector about you.”

  I was spared answering this by the arrival of Lisa at our table. “Everything okay with you two?”

  “This is so good,” Monica answered, her mouth full of croissant. She made a waving motion, inviting the café owner to join us.

  “Can you sit for a minute?” I asked her.

  She glanced around and apparently found the bustling shop under control. “Are you two talking about McMillan?” she asked as she pulled out a chair, speaking the developer’s name in a whisper.

  “We were just about to.” I turned to Monica. “Have you found anything out?”

  She took a gulp of coffee before answering. “I asked around other shop owners I know in the area, and it seems like a lot of people have been getting interest from a lot of different realtors lately. I mean, that happens all the time in this market, but when you put it all together this seems different. It’s more…strategic.” She seemed pleased with her choice of word.

  The cranberry scone I’d wolfed down suddenly turned into a rock in my stomach.

  “A lot of different realtors?” I asked. “Not just McMillan?”

  “No, but I figure if he’s trying to buy up whole blocks, he might use proxies, you know? So people don’t realize what’s happening and hold out for more money.”

  “That sounds like something a conniving snake would do,” I nodded.

  “Please,” Lisa said. “McMillan gives conniving snakes a bad name.” The look on her face was grim. “I heard the owner of the nail salon is definitely selling. That makes me the only holdout on this side of the street.”

  “That probably means you can name your price,” Monica offered hesitantly.

  “There is no price.” Lisa’s eyes flashed in anger. “I put every cent I had into a mortgage on this place because I was sick of being at the mercy of landlords raising my rent. I own this building, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let myself be ousted—” She cut herself off, shaking her head. “Sorry. I’m just sick of being pushed around.”

  I put my hand over hers. “Don’t apologize. You have every right to be angry. And nobody should be able to force you out.”

  “Damn right!” Monica raised her coffee cup in a toast.

  I turned to her. “What about the Palace? Is McMillan trying to buy our side of the street, too?”

  She shook her head. “Nobody’s made me any offers. I was going to shoot an email to the other owners, asking them, but then I held back.” She scrunched her forehead. “I thought, if they don’t already know McMillan is making offers, I don’t want to tell them, you know? Just in case one of them might want to sell if the price was right. I don’t want to start the thing we want to stop.”

  I nodded. “I’ll check again with Robbie. Although I’m sure she would have told me if she’d heard anything about it.”

  “You haven’t talked to her?” Monica seemed surprised.

  “I talked to her yesterday, but there was a lot of other stuff going on.” Other stuff like my husband proposing to another woman all over the tabloids.

  “Ugh. I heard,” Lisa said. “I couldn’t believe it. Ted seemed so nice whenever he came in here. He really seemed like he wanted you back.”

  “He’s good at that,” I said. “Seeming.”

  “How are you?” Monica asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said automatically. Then I saw the way they were looking at me. “Okay, I’m a mess. Ted still hasn’t had the guts to even send me a text and my lawyers are getting cagey all of a sudden and I think I got all of three minutes of sleep last night. But I will be fine.”

  “Of course you will,” Lisa said. “But let me get you a slice of my chocolate peanut butter tart anyway. Chocolate and peanut butter make everything better.” She squeezed my shoulder before leaving the table.

  “No offense to Lisa’s tart,” Monica said. “But I’ve got something that will actually help you sleep.” She started rummaging around in her bag.

  “Oh, that’s okay. You know I’m not a huge fan.”

  What I meant was that I’m not a huge fan of cannabis products. I’d tried enough to know that I generally preferred a glass of wine. Or maybe a bottle. Which, okay, maybe wasn’t the healthiest way to cope, but I was going through something, all right?

  Monica ignored my protest and pulled something out of her purse, sliding it to me across the table. I looked at it warily.

  “A meditation CD?”

  She gave me a very Monica look. It managed to combine a sort of accepting tranquility with a grounded been-there understanding. She had a deep streak of empathy that had brought me to messy tears with just such a look before. But not in a crowded café.

  Monica had gone through much worse than being left by a philandering husband. Hers had been abusive, and when she’d fled him it hadn’t been to the warm embrace of new friends and enjoyable work doing something she loved. She hadn’t been nearly as lucky as me.

  “What are you smiling about?” she asked me.

  “I just have to tell Robbie something,” I said. “I don’t need to look back to the movie stars of the forties for my strong leading lady role models. I’ve got them right here.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “But you should still take the CD. And the tart.”

  Oddly, I wasn’t thinking about the snake McMillan, my rat of a husband, or the murder of Callie’s boyfriend as I crossed the street to the Palace. I was thinking about Gabriela. Before she�
��d gone into the auditorium to see the movie, I’d told her to say “hi” to Hector for me. Now I found myself wondering why I’d done that. If I wanted to say “hi” to Hector I just had to send him a text. Or call. In fact, given that he’d once bugged my office (for my own protection) I might only have to say it out loud from my desk.

  So why was I making a big deal of it in my mind? Why was I wondering if he’d tell her to say “hi” back, and send us all into a ridiculously eighth-grade level of social interaction? I had enough to think about without Hector and his perfect hair and his deep dark eyes working his way into my head.

  I had Ted to think about. And the inevitability of a messier divorce than I’d imagined. And I had the Palace to think about, finding ways to protect it from real estate pirates and make it profitable. I had June’s event to think about. And Warren’s murder. There was no room for Hector in there.

  But damn if he wasn’t there anyway.

  Late that afternoon I once again opened my office door to find Callie in residence. This time she wasn’t using my computer. She was lying on the couch looking at her phone. On her back with her hair in a great cloud around her she looked a little like a high-tech Ophelia, or one of Esther Williams’ waterlogged chorus girls.

  “Escaping from your mother again?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer until I’d sat at the desk. Then she turned to me. “Are people just basically, like, awful?”

  “I’m guessing you’re still on social media.”

  She sat up. “The police aren’t telling me anything, and I just keep looking at what everyone else is saying. But nobody actually knows anything, you know? Because the police aren’t telling anyone anything. So what they’re all saying could literally all be just…nothing, right?”

  “Have you watched The Women yet?” I asked her.

  She blinked. “I mean, I’ve seen it before.”

  “Remember how everybody gossips all the time? How Rosalind Russell hasn’t got a nice thing to say about anyone, and they all pass rumors and scandal around through the manicurist?” I said.

  “Jungle Red,” Callie replied. “If you ask to get your nails painted Jungle Red you get the good scoop.”

  I looked at her. “The Internet is today’s manicurist. Everybody’s just passing their story around. Everybody’s trying to outdo each other’s scandal. And none of it is any more true now than it was back then.”

  She nodded, then took a deep breath. “I get that. And you’re probably right. But I’m pretty sure Warren was seeing someone else. People have been sending their condolences to this girl named Ingrid. They’re all treating her like she was his girlfriend.”

  Ingrid. Brandon hadn’t gotten the other woman’s name, but someone named Ingrid sounded like someone who would be tall and blonde.

  “Do you know her?”

  “No. I only saw her profile because some of my friends are friends with some of Warren’s friends who are friends with some of her friends.”

  I assumed she used the term “friend” loosely. “How are you feeling?”

  She gave me a look. “Can you possibly know what it’s like to find out your man’s been cheating by reading it online?”

  “I have a vague idea.”

  “It sucks.”

  “Amen, sister.”

  The Women

  1939

  If you’re familiar with this film, the first thing you think of is probably the cast. All women. Not one man. But the tagline on the original lobby poster says it all. Under the glamorous images of Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Rosalind Russell are the words “It’s all about men.”

  It really is. Every scene, whether in an Upper East Side spa, the dressing rooms of a posh boutique, or the ladies’ lounge in a swank nightclub, is overflowing with gossip about who’s marrying whom, and whose husband is stepping out.

  So don’t go looking for anything that will pass the Bechdel test here, my friends. But do go looking for whip smart dialogue, glittering performances, and a window into the lives of the wealthy housewives of 1939. Or at least the lives as Clare Boothe Luce, who wrote the play this film is based on, saw them. (But keep in mind that Mrs. Luce famously had no use for society women.)

  From the first time we meet Mary Haynes (Norma Shearer) with her daughter Little Mary (a blessedly un-cutesy Virginia Weidler) their entire conversation revolves around Daddy. Even the consult with the family cook is all about what Mr. Stephen Haynes should be eating to stay trim and how often he’s staying late at the office these days. Hmm.

  We meet Mary’s friends, all of whom have something to say about marriage and infidelity. Peggy (Joan Fontaine) a newlywed with stars in her eyes, Edith (Phyllis Povah) a self-absorbed mother of seven girls, Nancy (Florence Nash) a sharp-eyed “old maid” writer and Sylvia (Rosalind Russell) a society wife who dips her every word in gleeful poison.

  The term “frenemy” should have been invented in 1939 and applied to Sylvia. Everything with her is “I’m devoted to her, but” or “She’s my very dearest friend in all the world, but…” The “but” is that Sylvia is awful. Hilarious, but awful. Mary finds out about her husband’s affair from the manicurist Sylvia deliberately sends her to.

  Okay. Now Mary knows. Stephen has fallen prey to a shop girl named Crystal (Joan Crawford!). Mary’s mother counsels her to turn a blind eye, as she did when Mary’s father strayed. “It’s about the only sacrifice spoiled women like us have to make.” Okay. Mary tries, and it works for a while, until…until…the fashion show.

  Fashion alert! The fashion show is in color! The gowns, the gloves, the hats! Costume designer Adrian really outdid himself here. It’s all fun, but it also tells us what the idealized day of an idealized wife would be. Frolicking at the beach. Feeding animals at the zoo. Attending a bizarrely formal garden picnic, and a yet more formal evening of theater and cocktails. All frills and no substance. But such pretty frills. And did I mention the gloves?

  It’s in the dressing room after the fashion show that wife and mistress finally meet. They both want the same nightgown. (It costs $225, roughly four grand in today’s dollars, and Crystal boldly says she could use a few more like it.) She’s opened an account in Stephen’s name.

  This is happening, people! Dressing Room Wars! Mary, in an elegant evening gown, is on the moral high ground, telling Crystal she isn’t worried. “You’re even more typical than I’d dared hope.” (In 1939 that was how you called someone a basic bitch.) Crystal, in shiny lingerie, knows sex will win over high morals any day. When Mary condescendingly tells her Stephen wouldn’t like anything as obvious as what she’s wearing, she shoots back with “If anything I wear doesn’t please Stephen, I just take it off.” Crystal drops the mic.

  Inevitably Mary winds up on the train to Reno for a quickie divorce, where she meets a Countess (Mary Boland) and a chorus girl (Paulette Goddard). The countess, whose first husband left her rich and whose next three husbands tried to kill her, is a fool for love, and a lovable one. Miriam the chorus girl is sharper and more cynical. She’s been seeing a married man. They all wind up at the same divorcee dude ranch, run by Marjorie Main, playing Marjorie Main like nobody else can.

  It’s all terribly sad and wistful until Sylvia shows up at the ranch. Her husband has been seeing someone, and it turns out that someone was Miriam. Which leads to a brawl that lets Rosalind Russell prove herself a queen of physical comedy. It strikes me that if she had married a Cuban band leader, instead of Lucille Ball, history might have turned out entirely differently. And now I need to go watch Stage Door, which features both Lucy and Roz expertly cracking wise while Katherine Hepburn learns to act. Oh! And Russell and Ball both played Mame! But I digress.

  Cut to eighteen months later. Crystal has managed to land Stephen in marriage. We find out that she’s in the penthouse now, and the shop girl’s dreary life has become nothing but one long bubble bath. We
also find out she’s cheating on Stephen. Oh, Stephen. You’re so stupid.

  How will it end? In gorgeous evening gowns, of course, and with nails painted jungle red.

  The men:

  For everything this script has to say about women, it totally objectifies men. Stephen isn’t a person. He’s just the prize they fight over. And he doesn’t seem to have much agency. He’s manipulated by all of them (poor thing.) Crystal’s phone call, convincing him to ditch his wife and come over for her fake birthday, is a master class in twisting a lover around your little finger. None of which means I’m on his side. Team Mary!

  The blame:

  Somehow it ends up being Mary’s fault that her marriage breaks up. In fact, Miriam makes quite a speech about how Stephen’s infatuation was like a fever, and Mary shouldn’t have gone off and left him alone, staggering helpless as a lamb around New York with no protection from the she-wolf who was after him. Um. Okay. But Mary buys into it, telling her mother “I had the only one I ever wanted. If it hadn’t been for my pride…” Really? So he gets a pass on his infidelity? The only problem is that you didn’t keep looking the other way? Really?

  Mommy dearest:

  Mary’s mother always has something to say. “You mustn’t kid Mother, dear. I was a married woman before you were born.” And even offers comfort of a sort after the divorce. “Living alone has it’s compensations, heaven knows it’s marvelous to be able to spread out in bed like a swastika.” Like a what? A what?

  Movies My Friends Should Watch

  Sally Lee

  Chapter 16

  Callie and I were interrupted by the chime of an incoming text. She glanced down at her phone then jumped to her feet, panic all over her face.