AHMM, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You say the cast are waiting in here?"

  "Yes, but I wish you would talk with my staff first. We have been closed already one hour, and I am still paying."

  The staff, not counting the waitress who had been taken to the hospital, consisted of a chef, three cooks, five servers, and three helpers. The kitchen had been shut down for the night, and the helpers were just finishing up in the dish room. The rest were idling in their street clothes. Nobody had seen or heard anything that might help to explain how or why Cossegrin had been poisoned. Dollinger, who had compiled a list of their names and addresses, showed Auburn the large cupboard where the props for the show were stored. It had no lock and was now quite empty.

  At the door of the small private dining room Auburn met a young woman just coming out.

  "Wait a minute, miss.” Auburn identified himself. “Are you in the play?"

  She looked as if she hadn't slept in three days or had a square meal in three months. Her features were tautly drawn, and the purplish shadows under her eyes hadn't come out of a makeup kit. “Yes. Well, sort of. I mean, I don't have a speaking part. I'm a wraith."

  "You're a which?"

  "A wraith. Kind of a disembodied spirit.” She waved one hand in a vaguely ethereal gesture, and Auburn wondered if she might be a little tipsy. “This was my first time. You can believe it'll be my last."

  "Were you in the scene where all the excitement happened?"

  "Yes. The wraiths come on as soon as Lord Anthony falls down and pretends to be dying. Only he wasn't pretending."

  "So what did you see? Or hear?"

  She rubbed her eyes, maybe to bring back images and maybe to drive them away. “I was waiting behind the screen with the other two wraiths for our cue. When it came, we ran out and bent down, one at a time, next to Professor Cossegrin. The strobe light was flashing, so it was hard to see anything very clearly. I remember thinking he was overdoing the dying bit, gasping and throwing his arms around, since hardly any of the audience could see him down there on the floor.

  "And I smelled something like—oh, like you'd smell in a hospital or a factory, a strong chemical. They say it was cyanide.” She shivered. “Then we came out from between the tables and ran around the room. I was at the far end, by the entrance, when the music stopped and the lights came on and everybody started screaming. And that's all I know."

  "You said this was your first time?"

  "Yes. Professor Cossegrin signed me up. Believe me, it wasn't worth twenty dollars. I wouldn't go through this again for two grand."

  "Are you a student in the drama department?"

  "No, accounting. He's my landlord. I mean was. He owned some apartment buildings next to the campus."

  "Did you have anything to do with the props tonight? The fake champagne or the glasses?"

  "No.” She shrugged. “I didn't even know it was fake."

  He made a note of her name, Jillian Devisser, on a three-by-five-inch file card and went on into the dining room.

  The four women and one man whom Auburn found sitting around the table in the private dining room, all in their early twenties, had been better taken care of than the elderly dinner guests from Wilmot. Each of them was working on a second or third beer. Like Jillian Devisser, some were still wearing parts of their costumes. Dressing cases were strewn over the table and empty chairs.

  Auburn identified himself and explained why he was there.

  "One of us is missing,” said one of the women. “She just went to the little girls’ room."

  "I talked to Ms. Devisser out in the hall."

  "Do we have to be fingerprinted?"

  "Not unless the evidence technician finds a weapon of some kind."

  "How could there be a weapon?” asked the man. “I mean, he was poisoned with cyanide."

  "A bottle of it could turn up somewhere."

  If any of these people were grieving for the late Professor Cossegrin, they weren't showing it. In their advanced state of exhilaration and garrulity, there didn't seem to be much point in trying for individual interviews. Auburn sat at the head of the table and laid out a stack of file cards. “I don't want to keep you here any longer than necessary,” he said. “If you could just give me your names first...?"

  Molly Mitzlin, twenty, was a drama student and played the part of Becky Thinker, one of the three college girls in the play. Jessica Brauer, nineteen, also a drama student, wore a red wig and portrayed Ruby Shooz. Both girls were enrolled in courses and programs with Professor Cossegrin but denied having had any extracurricular contacts with him, other than their roles in The Brides of Dunraven Castle.

  The other two girls, Sarah Calecot and Kelsey Ruhack, played wraiths and had no lines to speak. “All we do is run around and act creepy,” explained Sarah. Like Jillian Devisser, they were students at the university but weren't enrolled in the theater program and had only a passing acquaintance with Professor Cossegrin.

  Jillian came back while Auburn was talking to the lone male, Brad Benediktus. Brad played the part of Igor, Lord Anthony's henchman, and also served as assistant director, helping Bish Gardner manipulate the lighting and other effects at certain times during the performance. Brad was handsome in a rakish, roguish way, with hair swirling in serpentine coils over his collar. He was a chemical engineering student and worked in dinner theater “because it's fun to dress up and walk around with a fake limp and talk like you've got a mouthful of jelly beans. And also,” he added, holding up an empty beer bottle, “the pay is great."

  The cast told a reasonably coherent story of the events leading up to Cossegrin's death. Although the two girls who played Gloria DeVoyd's companions had big parts in Act I, they didn't reappear until the end of Act II. During the scene in which Cossegrin had died, they had been touching up their makeup in the office, which the management let them use as a dressing room. They hadn't known anything was wrong until Weyermueller barged in to call for an ambulance.

  As Jillian Devisser had already told Auburn, the wraiths had passed right by the dying professor without realizing that, for once, his mortal agonies were genuine. But both of the other girls had also noticed the strong chemical smell.

  "How about you?” Auburn asked Brad. “Did you smell it?"

  "Not then, but I smelled it later. It was cyanide, all right."

  "Any idea how it got in the fake champagne?"

  "No, sir. Bish takes care of all that. I just do my Igor bit and handle the board for the horror scenes. And that's where I was while Cossegrin was dying. Flipping switches."

  "Does anybody have any idea who might have had it in for Professor Cossegrin?"

  The women squirmed and looked at each other, but Brad wasn't so diffident.

  "Oh boy,” he said, and threw up his hands in a massive shrug. “The guy was arrogant, egotistical, and overbearing. You couldn't spend five minutes around him without wanting to bash him. Probably every single kid who's ever been enrolled in the drama department had some kind of working plan, in less than a week, for doing him in."

  "That's not fair,” objected Molly Mitzlin. “Sure, he was a hard coach. He pushed you to toughen you up where you needed it. But that's what coaches are for. Does the football coach cancel practice because it's raining?"

  "I'm not talking about the way he directed plays,” said Brad. “I'm talking about the way he used and manipulated and stomped on everybody he came in contact with in real life."

  "Well, I'm sorry, but I just didn't feel that way about him,” said Jessica.

  "No, because he treated women different. Way different. You got a nice dose of anesthetic before he started pushing you around, running your life..."

  "What anesthetic?” demanded Jessica. Auburn wondered if the indignation was real or just something Cossegrin had taught her during one of those coaching sessions.

  "Charm, charisma, seduction,” said Brad, “call it whatever you want. He could turn it on and off like a strobe light."

  "You're just jealous."


  "Jessica, did you know there were two other male parts besides Lord Anthony and Igor in the original script of The Brides of Dunraven Castle? And that Cossegrin wrote them out because he didn't want to share the attention of the women in the audience with any other guys in the cast—except maybe a hunchbacked clown wearing a wig like a toilet brush? But I'm the one who's jealous?"

  "Brad, he cut out those parts because his sense of theater told him the larger cast wouldn't work in the restaurant setting."

  "I hate to interrupt this,” said Auburn, “but it's getting late. Does anybody know of any particular enemies the professor might have made recently? Any shake-ups or conflicts at the university, anybody he fired, any threats?"

  Since these and further questions yielded no responses, he thanked them and sent them home.

  He found the restaurant lobby deserted except for Dr. Mickelhaws and two paramedics, who were packing up their equipment and getting ready to leave.

  Auburn drew one of them aside. “Did you take care of Cossegrin before he died?"

  "No, sir. That was the downtown crew. They were first on the scene, and when they saw he was already gone, they moved on to the next most serious victim."

  "I understand they took her to the hospital."

  "Correct, sir. Her pulse and respirations were both irregular, and the doc in the box said better run her in."

  The man who sat hunched on the wheeled stretcher appeared to be about seventy. He was sallow complexioned, flat faced, and hollow chested, and his waxy features seemed set in a mask of perpetual chagrin. His tie was loose, his jacket awry, his head encircled by an elastic wrap holding an ice pack in place.

  "Dr. Mickelhaws?"

  "Retired,” snapped the other, as if determined not to start off the interview with even the slightest misunderstanding. He put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, peered briefly through them at Auburn and his photo ID, apparently wasn't much impressed by what he saw, and took them off again.

  "I hear you got quite a knock on the head."

  "If you want to call things by their right names, I was the victim of negligent battery."

  Auburn was tempted to advise the doctor to stick to medicine and stop concocting meaningless legal terms, but instead he asked him to describe what had happened during the performance.

  "The play was utter juvenile claptrap—sheer drivel from beginning to end. As soon as things started to look real, I knew something was wrong. Even with that light clicking off and on four times a second, I could tell that the main character, Lord Whatsit, was in genuine respiratory distress. And then I got a whiff of cyanide."

  "How did you know it was cyanide?"

  Mickelhaws scowled at him. “Because it's my business to know such things. I practiced medicine for forty-three years. Spent about eighteen of them doing part-time occupational medicine at Quintilian Corporation and a couple of other factories. You smell that stuff once and you don't forget it. That is, if you survive."

  "So what did you do?"

  "As soon as those loopy females got finished romping by in their peignoirs, I went to see what I could do for him. He still had a pulse, but by that time he was already unresponsive and barely breathing. I tried to get somebody to call for an ambulance, but they couldn't hear me over the loudspeakers. And then lightning struck."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean one of the waitresses slammed into me like a charging elephant and knocked me into the middle of next week. I bashed this left temple on the leg of a table, and that's all I knew for three or four minutes. When I came to, halfway under the table, nobody even knew I was there. They were all running around in circles watching the guy die and wondering why that waitress wasn't looking too good either."

  "I understand she's an EMT."

  Dr. Mickelhaws's frown became positively venomous. “Fiddlesticks. All they know is cookbook medicine. ‘When lips turn blue, add oxygen. Beat vigorously until eyes pop open.’ I'd rather take my chances on bleeding to death or dying of a heart attack than have one of those ninety-day wonders working on me."

  The crew members who had been taking care of Mickelhaws had retreated, ostensibly out of earshot, but the old man was doing his best to make sure they heard every word. “They have no more professional commitment than a shoe salesman, and no more judgment than a ... a blind goose. What they don't know is terrifying. They've got more blank circuits than a gang of nurses, and that's saying something."

  For reasons not immediately apparent, Mickelhaws was evidently brim full of bitterness and hostility against health care professionals who didn't happen to have medical degrees. Since Auburn didn't have the time to stand around listening to the full catalog of his prejudices and grievances, he wound up the interview as swiftly as possible. The doctor had no prior acquaintance with Cossegrin or with any of the people in the production. When Auburn left him he was signing a release for the paramedics and grumbling that the buses had left without him.

  As Auburn was starting down the stairs to the entrance, Nick Stamaty, the investigator from the coroner's office, was just coming in with his field kit and camera.

  "Evening, Cy,” said Stamaty. “You want to be walking tall and smiling wide when you step out there. There are two TV crews set up outside with their cameras pointed at the front door."

  Auburn went back up the stairs and into the restaurant with Stamaty, giving him a quick summary of the case. Then he slipped out through the delivery entrance into the alley behind the restaurant. He reached his car by a circuitous route, getting thoroughly saturated with cold rain in the process, and headed for Chalfont Hospital.

  He found Morgan Carruth in a curtained cubicle in the emergency department, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and gossiping with a nurse or technician in a scrub suit that needed scrubbing. A monitor mounted on the wall behind her was blinking and giving digital readouts of her vital functions.

  "Ms. Carruth?"

  She twisted awkwardly on the gurney and gazed at him with the fuzzy look of a nearsighted person who has lost her glasses. “I'm Morgan."

  Auburn showed identification. “Do you feel up to talking about what happened at the restaurant?” Her companion vanished amid a billowing of curtains.

  "Sure.” She put down her cup and straightened her hospital gown. An adhesive dressing showed where blood had been drawn from one arm—an arm that was pure Grade A beef. Auburn wouldn't have wanted to get in her way as Dr. Mickelhaws had done.

  "According to my information, you're one of the regular waitresses at Weyermueller's?"

  "Servers. Correct."

  "How long have you worked there?"

  "Full-time, part-time—about two years."

  "You're also an EMT?"

  "Correct. I got laid off from the city crew last spring when they cut their budget, and that's when I went full-time at the restaurant."

  "Could you describe what happened tonight?"

  "Okay. At the end of the show we pass out dishes of ice cream to everybody. I had set up folding stands, three of them, along the east side of the room, and I was trying not to fall on my face or trip any of the cast with that strobe light zapping off and on. All of a sudden one of the guests jumps up and squeezes between the tables into the stage area. He kneels down beside the actor who's pretending to be dying and starts waving his hands and shouting ‘911.'

  "Hey, I didn't know this guy was a doctor. To me he looked just like your generic senior citizen who had one too many cocktails. Then I realized that the actor on the floor wasn't acting anymore. So I moved in and started basic life support. He wasn't breathing, and he didn't have a pulse. I figured it had to be a heart attack. I gave him a couple of breaths, mouth to mouth, and started external cardiac compressions. And then I passed out cold myself, because he wasn't having any heart attack—somebody had slipped him a dose of cyanide, and I sucked in enough of those fumes to kill a dog."

  "Do you know any of the people in the cast personally?"

  "No. Most of
them I see every Tuesday, but I've never had any direct contact with them."

  Auburn called headquarters from the hospital lobby to make a progress report and order background checks on Cossegrin and his wife and all the people he'd talked to, then went home.

  The papers next morning exploited all the sensational possibilities afforded by the commission of a murder during the performance of a mystery thriller. Background probes had thus far been completed on only two members of the cast, and there was no word at all yet from the forensic lab on the analysis of the champagne and the glasses (which were actually plastic), or from the coroner's office on the results of the autopsy.

  At nine thirty A.M. Auburn called Cossegrin's home, identified himself to the young male who answered, and asked to talk to Mrs. Cossegrin.

  "She can't talk to anybody."

  "Who am I talking to, please?"

  "This is Dewey. Her son."

  "Please accept my sympathies. I know this is a bad time for the family, but I'd like to arrange to talk to your mother sometime today."

  "She hasn't got anything to say to any reporters or cops. She had nothing to do with any cyanide, and she doesn't know who did."

  "Maybe so,” said Auburn, “but I need to hear that from her."

  After a brief delay a woman's voice came on the line. Again Auburn identified himself and expressed sympathy. “Would it be possible for me to come by and talk to you for a few moments? I'll keep it brief."

  "I—yes, yes. All right. We might as well get it over with."

  The rain had stopped during the night, but the sky looked like a canopy of hammered lead that might come crashing down at any moment.

  The Cossegrins lived in a two-story frame house near the campus, in an older neighborhood traditionally occupied by tenured faculty and members of the university administration. Auburn was admitted by a young man in his early twenties wearing combat boots with the laces missing, short spiky hair with frosted tips, and a steel ring with a jade stone in his left eyebrow—unmistakably Dewey Cossegrin. During Auburn's interview with his mother, Dewey hovered in the background, glowering with vague menace.