by Parnell Hall
“It’s Act Two. I don’t come in till the end.”
“Isn’t it near that now?” he said. “I timed the show, remember? For the murder. As I recall, Act Two comes down long about now.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
I slammed down the phone, ran down the hallway and came racing up the stage-right stairs with only a couple of lines to spare. Jesus Christ, that was cutting it close. It wouldn’t do to come onstage panting for breath, so I stood there blowing air slowly in and out of my lungs, trying to calm down.
I looked up to see the whole cast standing in the wings watching me. All the men, anyway. The women were out onstage. But the guys were there waiting for their entrances, and they sure were looking at me funny.
I’d just had time to think that when Nellie Knight came offstage to get me. No, I hadn’t missed my entrance—her character comes to fetch me in the play.
And suddenly I was onstage. And the actress playing Catherine was grabbing my hand and going into this long monologue about how glad she was to see me but I must leave at once.
I wasn’t listening to her. In my mind the phrase kept revolving, “The actor was not on the scene.”
What the hell did that mean? If I could solve that, I could solve the whole thing.
And then the moment passed and everyone was rushing out onstage and grabbing my hand, so glad to see me and wouldn’t I stay, and I agreed to do it and the act was over.
I got out of there and called Chief Bob again.
He had it!
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “So you don’t tell anyone, and you sure didn’t get it from me. But Sy just called.”
“And?”
“It was cyanide.”
36.
YOU WANNA KNOW WHERE MY head was at during Act Three?
So do I.
It sure wasn’t in that show.
I got my lines out and I must have said ’em all right, because occasionally I could hear the audience laughing.
But I really wasn’t there.
Penbridge had been killed. Poisoned. Given cyanide. Murder, made to look like a natural death. One clever enough to have fooled the doctor. Granted, if this Ed Macy wasn’t the swiftest doctor in the world it would not have surprised me. Even so, the man had been killed, and there had to be a reason why.
I was hard pressed to look for one, never having met Mr. Penbridge. I’d have to start questioning everybody. And I wouldn’t know where to start.
Yes, I would. I’d start with Beth. For a lot of reasons.
Hey, give me a break. I mean she’s a good source of information. She was the one who tipped me off to the relationship between Walter and Margie-poo. Which was my only concrete lead at the moment.
And which would be an excellent motive for murder.
Take a middle-aged man like Herbie. Married to an unattractive woman. A man in the arts, in the position of being the producer/director of a summer theater. A man used to working with beautiful women. A man with a taste for that life.
And then let it happen. Grant him the affair. With a very young and nubile and attractive woman. Add in the fact that he himself has gone middle-aged dumpy and is no longer the sort of man to attract that sort of woman.
But when he does—when he goes middle-aged crazy and chases the impossible dream, and then to his enormous surprise suddenly realizes it—well, you don’t trifle with that man. You don’t play games with that man. You don’t cheat on that man. You don’t treat his passion lightly and throw it back in his face.
Because if that were to happen, here’s a man could easily snap. Go over the edge. Do something rash, desperate and out of character.
Like kill.
Yeah, that was the problem. The profile fit Herbie all too well. The simplest of all solutions. An age-old scenario, and a very common one. The lover; scorned, kills the other man. Piece of cake.
Only it couldn’t have happened.
Herbie was innocent. Bob and I had already established that. Because Herbie and Amanda were standing right next to me when the light fell. No way Herbie was involved in the attempt on my life.
Moreover, it made no sense that he would be. For Christ’s sake, he brought me here. He sure didn’t bring me here to kill me. And if he were the killer, he didn’t bring me here to solve the crime. No, more than likely, he brought me here because twenty years ago I played the fucking part.
Unless ...
Here I was really on shaky ground. Not that I wasn’t on all the rest of it. But here in particular I was really winging it.
Unless my original premise was true. That Herbie really did bring me in to solve the crime. That he really did want a private detective. That one way or another, Herbie suspected foul play in Walter’s death and brought me in for protection. Either because he thought he might be accused of the crime or because he thought the killer might really be after him.
I smiled at Margie-poo, who had just told me I had a low, shopkeeping mind, and said, “That’s the Swiss national character, dear lady.”
Which meant my scene with her was almost over. I couldn’t remember having said a word of it. But we were in the right place onstage and she didn’t look at all perturbed, so I must have done okay.
Minutes later I was offstage, stumbling blindly back to my dressing room with all these thoughts chasing around in my head. I had a strong urge to call Chief Bob again. I resisted it. No reason to drive the guy crazy. Just because I was driving myself crazy.
I sat in my dressing room, trying to calm down. Onstage, Avery Allington was flirting with Nellie Knight. Which meant I needed to get upstairs because the whole end of the play was coming up again.
Which meant this was somewhere around the time Goobie Wheatly died.
In what way was Goobie Wheatly’s death connected with the death of Walter Penbridge? Was one death the result of the other? Or were they two in a series? And, if so, was the series as yet incomplete?
And what would complete it?
Was there an ominous portent contained in that falling light?
I shuddered involuntarily, stood up, headed back to the stage. I climbed the stairs, stood there waiting for my cue.
I couldn’t see the stage manager from where I was standing, just as I couldn’t see Goobie Wheatly the night he died. It occurred to me to wonder if his replacement was still alive.
I peeked around the corner of the masking flat. Yes, there he was. Sitting in the chair with the prompt script in his lap, just the way Goobie Wheatly was found.
Only alive.
I wondered if I could tiptoe up behind him and stab him to death. Would he see me? Or hear me? Goobie certainly hadn’t. I was tempted to take a few steps just to see if he turned his head.
Except my cue came, and suddenly I was out onstage. And there was Avery asshole Allington challenging me to a duel. For alienating the affections of Margie-poo. Which I hadn’t done.
But if Walter Penbridge had played the role, he had alienated the affections of Margie-poo. Only not from Avery Allington. From Herbie.
But Herbie had played Sergius. Twenty years ago, to be sure, but he had played the part.
So shuffle the names around, plug in your cast of characters, and there you are. Walter/Bluntschli alienates the affections of Margie-poo/Raina from Herbie/Sergius, and Herbie challenges Walter to a duel.
And kills him.
Good god, it all fit so perfectly it had to be right.
Only it couldn’t be.
Because someone tried to drop a light on my head.
With that thought, I involuntarily looked up. The lights hanging from the grid all appeared perfectly solid.
It was only a split second, but when I looked back I saw Avery Allington and Margie-poo looking at me kind of strange. Why not? I had certainly never looked up in the grid in the middle of a scene before. Why would I? The action simply made no sense. What the audience must have thought of it I couldn’t imagine. But I didn’t care.
&
nbsp; Because in that split second I had had a revelation, and everything was suddenly crystal clear.
37.
RIDLEY WAS STANDING ON THE chair blowing pot smoke out the window when I climbed the ladder to the light loft. He must have been doing it out of force of habit—it was eleven o’clock at night, and aside from us there wasn’t a single person in the scene shop.
I’d followed him there from the theater after the show. I was hoping the son of a bitch would turn on, and he didn’t disappoint me. And doing it in the light loft couldn’t have been better. Ditto his standing on the chair.
His back was to me, of course, since he was facing the window, and I crept up on him real quietly, but the floor of the loft creaked when I stepped off the ladder and he wheeled around.
His face for once was animated. It was a caricature of alarm and surprise. His face was flushed and his eyes were bulging out of his head. He had a joint cupped in his hand, trying to hide it. He coughed and exhaled a great cloud of smoke. He blinked, turned back to the window, raised his hand and made a motion which I assumed was flicking away the joint.
“Hey,” I said. “No need to start a fire. I’m not a narc.”
He winced at the word. Then he half-hopped half-slid down the chair and wound up sitting on it. He ran his hand over his face, as much to shield it from me as anything else, I would imagine.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Good thinking,” I told him. “You’re right, Ridley. I want something. If I get it, I won’t turn you in for this.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Let’s take this very slowly, Ridley, and make sure you understand. I just caught you smoking dope. That happens to be a crime. You may not agree with the law, but it happens to be on the books. Which means you’re in the wrong. Not just with the law, in terms of the playhouse, too. Goobie would have booted you for drugs, wouldn’t he, Ridley?”
Ridley’s eyes were wide. “Hey, man,” he said, “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to get the truth, Ridley. You wanna come out of this with your ass, you better tell the truth.”
Ridley looked as if he were about to cry “But I don’t know anything.”
“You’re wrong, Ridley. You do. You know a lot. And you know what? You’ve already lied about it. Got yourself in bad. ’Cause, when a guy lies in a murder investigation, you know what that looks like? It looks like he’s guilty.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Can you prove it?”
His eyes got wide. “I don’t have to prove it. That’s the law. They have to prove I did.”
“The murder, yes. But there are other things.”
He looked at me pleadingly “Please.”
“You don’t have to be the fall guy, Ridley. You want to cooperate, you don’t have to take the rap.”
“The rap? What do you mean, the rap? The rap for what?”
“Where’s the light, Ridley?”
The change of subject was too much for him. He frowned, blinked, blinked again. “What?”
“The light, Ridley. Where’s the light?”
“What light?”
“What light do you think, Ridley? The Leko. Where’s the Leko?”
“What Leko?”
“The one that fell, Ridley. I’m talking about the one that fell.”
His eyes shifted and I knew I had him.
“It broke,” he said.
“Yeah, it broke, Ridley. But you fixed it, didn’t you? I know you did, because I saw you do it. I watched you. You sat there on the stage with the broken Leko. You took another broken Leko and you took the parts out of it and used it to fix the light. You took two Lekos that didn’t work and you made them into one that did. Didn’t you, Ridley? Isn’t that what you said you did?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So where’s the light?”
“Huh? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do, Ridley Don’t you remember what you told me? You put the two lights together and you made a new light to replace the one that fell. But when you took it up in the grid to hang it, you discovered all your lights were there. Because the light that fell wasn’t your light. Because someone took the light up on the grid and dropped it on the stage. Isn’t that right, Ridley?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“So where’s the light, Ridley? You didn’t have to hang it in the grid because all your lights were there. So where is it? Is it here in the light loft? Is it in the lighting booth back in the theater? Take me to it, Ridley. Wherever it is, I want to see it. Right now.”
Ridley said nothing, avoided my eyes.
“Come on, Ridley,” I said. “It’s show time.”
I waited him out, till he had to look back up at me.
“Show me the light.”
38.
RIDLEY’S A LOUSY ELECTRICIAN.”
Herbie blinked. He cocked his head to one side and squinted up at me. “You dragged me away from my table to tell me this?”
Indeed I had. We were in Morley’s. I’d gone there straight from my little chat with Ridley in the light loft. I’d found him sitting alone in the corner with Margie-poo, told him we had to talk privately, and unceremoniously dragged him off to one side.
“I’m sorry, Herbie,” I said. “But this can’t wait.”
Herbie looked genuinely puzzled. If I hadn’t known what I did, I might have felt sorry for him.
“What can’t wait?” he said. “You wanna complain about Ridley?”
“I’m not complaining, Herbie. I’m trying to make a point.”
“What point?”
Before I could answer, Amanda came in the front door and bumped right into us.
Herbie’s eyes lit up when he saw her. He reached out and grabbed her by the arm.
“Did you hear?” he said. “Sold out! Monday night, and we sold out. You should have been there. It was wonderful.”
Amanda’s smile was patronizing. “Of course we sold out, Herbie. We’ve had front-page headlines for three days. Someone got killed and people are curious, right? It’s nice we sold out, Herbie, but you can’t take it as a vindication of your theory of opening on Friday nights.”
“We’re sold out tomorrow night, too,” Herbie said.
She smiled, looked at me, shook her head. “He doesn’t listen, does he? Only hears what he wants to hear.” She pointed a finger at me. “And you,” she said, accusingly, “you didn’t turn in your health form.”
I almost winced. I hate annoying shit like that. Under any circumstances. Right now, it was almost more than I could bear.
“Right,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”
“Please,” she said. “You’re only here two more days. I don’t want to have to chase you to New York for this.”
I resisted the impulse to ask her what the urgency would be to file a health form for insurance purposes for a job which had already been satisfactorily completed, with the employee suffering no accident or ill health.
“I promise,” I said. “First thing tomorrow morning.”
“Fine,” she said. “Well, I, for one, need a drink.”
As she moved off to the bar I grabbed Herbie and said, “Let’s get out of here for a minute.”
“Why?”
“Before someone else interrupts us.”
“Why, Stanley? What’s the big deal?”
“Please, Herbie. Just do it. This is hard enough.”
He looked at me funny, but he nodded and we went out the front door.
Morley’s was set back from the road with a parking lot out front, which was about half filled. To the left of the parking lot was a private house. To the right was a vacant lot.
The vacant lot looked good. I led Herbie over there.
“Now, what’s all this about Ridley?” he said.
“It’s not about Ridley, Herbie. It’s about you.”
“Me? What do you mean, me? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the murder, Herbie. Goobie Wheatly’s murder.”
“Right,” Herbie said. “I know you’ve been working with Chief Bob. You got something?”
“I’m afraid I have.”
“Well, don’t be so damn gloomy. Let’s have it.”
“The evidence points to you.”
Herbie stared at me. “What?”
“It points to you, Herbie. The evidence indicates that, during Act Three, while you were supposedly sitting in the last row of the theater taking notes on the act, you slipped out through the back door into the lobby, went downstairs through the greenroom, up the stage-right stairs—while all the actors were out onstage, so no one saw you—and stabbed Goobie Wheatly dead.”
Herbie was still staring at me with his mouth open.
“What I need you to do, Herbie, is to tell me just exactly what you were doing during Act Three of the dress rehearsal that night. Where you were sitting, what notes you took, who saw you there, anything specific you remember about the show that you could describe that would be an indication that you had to have been sitting there that night to have seen it, or any other evidence of any type that you would like to offer to indicate the fact that you are innocent. I’d like you to do that, Herbie,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I couldn’t resist adding, “If it’s a problem ...”
Herbie blinked his eyes. Once, twice. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t believe this.”
“Believe it, Herbie. It’s where we’ve got to. You’re my friend, and that’s why I’m talkin’ to you now. Anyone else, I’d be talkin to Chief Bob. But you, I gotta bring it to you.”
“Bring me what? And what’s this about Ridley? I don’t understand.”
“That was the stumbling block, Herbie. Why you couldn’t have done it. Remember the first night, the light that almost fell on my head?”
“Of course I do. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That was your alibi, Herbie. That put you in the clear. The murderer tried to drop a light on my head—you were standing next to me when it happened, so you couldn’t be the murderer.”
“Drop a light on your head. Are you kidding me?”