by James Yaffe
Le Sage got up onstage with them. “Quite so. You can see, then, that I had no opportunity to attack poor Hapgood. I was playing this scene at the very time—”
“No sorry, Mr. Le Sage,” said Danny Imperio, the waiter. “You actually leave the stage before the end of this scene, and Jeff and I have this business where we sharpen our knives for a few minutes. It’s not in Shakespeare, but Mr. Osborn added it. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yes, that’s true,” said Le Sage. “I’d quite forgotten about that. So many entrances and exits, one does get confused. I left the stage and went downstairs to my dressing room. Shall I go there now?”
“Not necessary, Mr. Le Sage,” I said. “Just pretend you’ve gone down there, and stay here with us in the auditorium.”
Le Sage took a seat in one of the side sections, and Roger stuck his head out from the wings. “Banquo—Osborn, that is—was standing next to me while I waited out here. Fleance and Banquo made their entrance together two or three minutes into the murder scene.”
Lloyd Cunningham got to his feet. “I’ll be Banquo, okay? Might as well start getting back into the role. You won’t be needing me for anything else, because I wasn’t even in the theatre at this time on opening night.”
I told Lloyd that I very much wanted him to play Banquo, and he vaulted up onto the stage and headed for the wings on Roger’s side.
“I wasn’t in the theatre either,” Bernie said. “I was watching the mad killer dispose of his third or fourth teenager around this time. At the Mesa Grande Triplex, that is. If you’d like me to run over there now—”
I told him I’d rather he stayed with us, and he laughed and sank down next to Sally again.
“I was in the ladies’ room in the basement,” Laurie Franz said. “I wasn’t feeling well, because … well, I’ve already told you all that.”
She broke off, reddening. Her father squeezed her hand reassuringly.
“I was in my dressing room, as I’ve repeatedly told you,” Sally said. “My last scene took place right after Harold’s appearance as the Old Man. It’s the scene where Macbeth hints that he’d like to get rid of Banquo. I don’t appear again until the banquet scene, after the intermission, so I stretched out on my couch. That’s where I was when Harold got assaulted. And when the murder took place.”
I turned to Le Sage. “All right, Macbeth exits after his scene with the two murderers, and you went downstairs to your dressing room and that’s where you were at the time of the murder?”
“Exactly.”
“The other day, when I questioned you, you told me you paused on the way to your dressing room to knock on Sally’s door.”
“So I did. I wanted to mention to her that she dropped a vital speech in the scene where we plan to kill King Duncan. The speech beginning ‘Was the hope drunk wherein you dress’d yourself?’”
“I couldn’t deliver that speech, Randy dear,” Sally said, giving him her sweetest smile, “because you never gave me my cue for it. You’re the one who forgot your lines, which meant that I had to skip ahead several speeches to make any sense out of the scene.”
“Pardon me, Sally dear, but I’ve devoted a special amount of effort to that particular scene because I feel that the very lines you accuse me of forgetting are precisely the whole key to my character. Therefore there’s no possibility that I left them out—”
“All right, all right,” I said, “so Sally didn’t answer you when you knocked on her door?”
“That’s right. I assumed she wasn’t there, and I went on to my own dressing room. Which is where I was when I heard the commotion in the corridor and found out about poor Marty’s tragic fate.”
“I heard his knock, of course.” Sally’s smile was serene. “I felt quite sure who was knocking too. But I was exhausted, I simply didn’t feel like listening to old theatrical stories. ‘When I played the Dauphin opposite Cornell … when I played a season of Chekhov with the Guild.’ I simply couldn’t let myself be taken out of the necessary mood for the banquet scene. Not to mention that I was rather peeved at him for forgetting my cue—”
I broke in on her. “How cold was the theatre on opening night?”
This was the question Mom had told me to ask Sally, and also Mom had predicted what the result of asking it would be.
“It was an icebox—as usual!” Sally snapped back at me.
“Then how were you able to stretch out in your dressing room and take a rest? Weren’t you too cold to be comfortable?”
“Good Heavens, I covered myself, of course.”
“With what?”
“What I usually cover myself with—my coat.”
Exactly what she was supposed to say. Chalk up another one for Mom.
“You weren’t in your dressing room at all, were you, Sally?” I said. “That wasn’t where you went when you left the stage after your last scene.”
A long pause. Then Sally drew herself up—one of her best poses, she had the chest for it. “You’re supposed to be on my side, aren’t you? How can you insinuate—”
“How do you know she wasn’t in her dressing room?” Grantley pushed his head forward, very alert, no doubt thinking I was giving him ammunition for his case against her. It was necessary to let him go on thinking so for a while.
“You just told us, Sally,” I said, “that you stretched out on the couch and covered yourself with your coat. You had to, or you would’ve been too cold to take a rest. But what coat? You had only one in the theatre with you, that black raincoat. As you told me yourself the other day, you were afraid to bring any of your better coats to the theatre, because it’s so dirty here. The Third Murderer stole your raincoat from your dressing room and wore it up on the stage. How could you stretch out on your couch with that coat covering you, if it was being worn by the murderer onstage at the same time?”
“Because she’s the murderer!” Grantley cried.
I shook my head. “Because she’s a creature of habit, like all of us,” I said. “She always covers herself with that coat when she stretches out on the dressing-room couch. So this time, when she wanted to lie about being in her dressing room, she naturally said she covered herself with the coat as usual. She brought the coat into her lie because it doesn’t have any special significance to her, because she wasn’t wearing it while she committed a murder. Her mentioning it at all proves that she doesn’t have any guilty awareness of it. In other words, there’s something else she’s trying to hide from us, something that has nothing to do with the coat. What is it, Sally? If you weren’t in your dressing room at the time of the murder, where were you?”
In a moment all of Sally’s beautiful offhandedness seemed to collapse on her, and her face screwed up, and she suddenly looked old and wrinkled. “It’s hateful of you. Just hateful.” Her voice was a baby’s petulant wail. “I was in the ladies’ room, that’s where I was! I was in one of the booths. I didn’t come out until I heard people screaming about the murder.”
“For twenty minutes, half an hour, you were in the ladies’ room?” Grantley raised his eyebrows. “What were you doing in there for so long, Mrs. Michaels?”
Her collapsed face glittered with anger, as she turned it on him. “I was going over my script, if you want to know, you rude man! For the banquet scene—my next scene—I was saying the lines out loud to myself!”
“Why in the ladies’ room?” I said. “Why not do that in your dressing room?” I knew the answer already, of course. Mom had figured it out.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sally practically yelled, “do I have to spell out everything for you idiots? Those dressing-room walls are as thin as paper. And Randy’s is right next to mine. If I went over my lines out loud in there, he’d hear every word, and he’d know exactly what I was doing.”
“Why shouldn’t he know?” I said, punching away at her, because it all had to come out before we could move on.
“It’s my memory, for God’s sake! Don’t you see, I just can’t hold on to t
he words the way I used to. It’s what happens to you after a while, it’s what happens to actors and actresses at the end of their careers—” She broke off, and the anger washed away. Her face was red and crumpling again. “Only I never even had the career, did I?”
Then her hands were in front of her face, and her shoulders were heaving.
Bernie stood up next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He glared around at the rest of us, as if daring anybody to persecute her any further.
“It’s a matter of no importance, of course,” muttered Le Sage, “but as I pointed out earlier, I wasn’t the one who left out a speech.”
Nobody seemed to be listening to him.
I waited until the decibel count of Sally’s sobs had lowered a bit. Already I could see the outburst was doing her good. A small gleam in her eyes told me that part of her was looking around, judging the effect of her scene on the audience, and finding it satisfactory.
“Just a few more questions, Sally,” I said, putting on a much milder voice. “After you left the stage, you didn’t go directly to the ladies’ room, did you? You must’ve gone back to your dressing room first.”
She nodded, and Grantley peered at me suspiciously. “How did you know that?”
“Before she could go to the ladies’ room to study Lady Macbeth’s lines, she had to pick up her script, didn’t she?” I shrugged off the deduction modestly. As well I might since, as a matter of fact, it was strictly Mom’s deduction.
“Yes, I popped into my dressing room very quickly,” Sally said. “I grabbed the script from the dressing table and popped out again. I didn’t even shut the door behind me. Then I went straight to the ladies’ room—”
“You picked out the ladies’ room, didn’t you, because the walls aren’t paper thin? If anybody came in, you could hear the door opening and you could immediately stop saying your lines?”
“That’s right.”
“But you kept on saying your lines all the time you were in there?”
“Yes, I told you that.”
“So nobody did come in while you were there?”
“Yes, yes. I’d have heard them if—”
I whirled around, in my best Perry Mason manner, and shot a finger at Laurie Franz. “You told us you were in the ladies’ room for half an hour or more before the murder. How come Sally didn’t see you there?”
* * *
The girl’s face turned very pale. Her father gripped her arm and jumped to his feet. “Now listen, I’m taking Laurie right out of here if you’re going to throw around a lot of wild accusations!”
“She’ll have to explain it sooner or later, Mr. Franz,” I said. “Where were you, Miss Franz, before and during the murder?”
“Don’t you say a word, honey!” Franz looked hard into his daughter’s face. “He’s not allowed to badger you or even talk to you, if you don’t want him to. We’ll call my lawyer—”
“Oh, Daddy, stop it!” Laurie’s face got a little of its color back as she met his gaze. “He’s right. I wasn’t in the ladies’ room. I made up that story about getting stage fright and throwing up. I never get stage fright, I wouldn’t let myself be such a wimp. I love being on the stage, and nothing makes me throw up. I wasn’t prowling around either, hitting people over the head and killing people.”
“Then for God’s sake, honey, why did you have to invent—”
“I just didn’t want to tell you where I really was, Daddy. Because it’s so embarrassing.”
“You don’t have to tell me now,” Franz said.
She shook her head impatiently. “Of course I do. Or they’ll never believe I wasn’t up on stage wearing a mask and pretending to be a man!” She turned to me now, facing me squarely. “For the last twenty minutes of the first act, after my scene as a waiting-woman, I was standing in the wings, on the left-hand side, so I could watch the performance.”
“I don’t get it, sweetie,” said her father. “What’s embarrassing about that?”
“What’s embarrassing is why I wanted to watch the performance. It was because—oh, dammit all!” She suddenly turned and faced Roger. “I wanted to watch you. When you came on as Fleance in the murder scene. You wear those tight-fitting cowboy jeans, and the top button of your shirt is open—well, you obviously don’t know it, but you look terrifically sexy! And when the Third Murderer grabbed you around the neck and pulled you back, and the lower part of your body kind of shoved itself forward—I loved to watch that part, I just couldn’t get enough of it!” She broke off with another sigh and turned back to me. “There you are, and if you think it’s stupid, that’s your problem.”
I sneaked a look at Roger. His face was red, and he couldn’t bring himself to look straight into anybody’s eyes. I was sorry to put him through this, but as Mom had said, “All right, it’ll make him blush a little and feel self-conscious. But in the long run, is a boy his age going to be too upset when a beautiful girl lets him know she loves to eat him up with her eyes?”
“If you were standing in the wings on the left-hand side, Miss Franz,” I said, “how come Roger didn’t run into you there when he left the stage during the murder scene?”
“Because there’s a flat there; I hid myself behind it when he made his exit. I certainly didn’t want him to know what I was doing!”
“Did anyone see you while you were standing there?”
“I don’t think so. Nobody came up to me and spoke to me. Unless Mr. Michaels happened to see me.”
“Me?” said Bernie. “How could I possibly have seen you? I wasn’t even in the theatre then, I was taking in this slasher movie at the Mesa Grande Triplex.”
“No, you weren’t,” Laurie said. “You were standing in the wings at the other side of the stage.”
“Miss Franz,” Ann said, a bit sternly, “you should’ve told us this sooner.”
“How could I? If I told you I saw him there, that would be like admitting I was there.”
But nobody was listening to her by this time. All eyes had turned to Bernie.
* * *
“That’s crazy,” Bernie said. “I left the theatre long before—”
“No, you didn’t, Bernie,” I said. “I was pretty sure of that already. It’s nice to have it confirmed by a witness.”
“How the hell could you ever have figured—”
“You told me the other day that you got into the movie in the middle, saw it to the end, and then saw the first part of it, after which you left the movie house and came back here for the Macbeth curtain call. Just in time to find the police here and push your way in to see if Sally was all right.”
“That’s absolutely the truth! You can check the schedule at that movie—”
“Oh, the schedule checks out all right. That’s not where you slipped up. You don’t go to the movies very much, you told me. It’s been ten years since you went to one here in town. But back in Newark, when you were a boy, you used to go to the movies all the time. You remembered what it was like back then—the double features, the packed houses, one show following immediately after another without any break. But that’s not how the movie houses operate anymore, either here in Mesa Grande or almost anywhere. Nowadays, when a show is over, the lights go up, and everybody who’s in the house gets ushered out, and there’s some attempt to clean up the floors before the next batch of customers are let in.
“Now what are you asking us to believe, Bernie? That you paid to see the second part of the movie, and then paid all over again to see the first part?”
“I might have. Why not? Since I had time on my hands—”
“The truth is, once your role as Duncan was finished, you never even left this theatre. You stayed right here, backstage, not letting yourself be seen.”
“But I didn’t get here till after the police came. You know that—at first they didn’t want to let me inside, I had to get special permission.”
“Sure you did. As soon as the murder took place, you sneaked out the back doors into the
alley. A couple of minutes went by before Roger got those doors locked, and that’s when you managed to get through them. You hid out for an hour or so, maybe you sat in your car in the parking lot, and when your watch showed you that enough time had gone by for the movie to get out, you showed up in front of the theatre, pretended you didn’t know what was going on, and pushed your way inside. Come on, Bernie, that’s the way it happened, isn’t it?”
Bernie had never been any good as a liar. That’s why he always played upright old men, never weasels or villains. He couldn’t tell a convincing lie in real life any more than he could on the stage.
“Okay, Dave, okay.” He threw up his hands. “I was in this theatre all the time. I lied about it because—I just didn’t want to say why.” His mouth turned down now. “I guess I have to say it, don’t I?”
“I can say it for you,” I said. With Mom’s words echoing in my head, it wasn’t hard. “You like to watch Sally act, don’t you?”
An agonized grin twitched at Bernie’s lips. “I like to watch Sally, period,” he said. “And when she’s acting … everybody knows how terrific she is! It gets to me every time!”
Sally looked up at him, and their eyes met for a moment. She had a puzzled expression on her face. Then he quickly turned his eyes away.
“Why, Bernie darling,” Sally said, “that’s just too sweet for words.”
She read the line with a slight tremor in her voice. Not too loud, and perfectly timed. Poor Bernie, I thought, he didn’t have a prayer of getting what he really wanted from her. The best he could hope for was to go on forever being a sympathetic secondary character in Sally’s play, the devoted old friend whose function is to pat the heroine’s shoulder and squeeze her hand supportively.
On the other hand, as Mom had said, “Maybe he prefers having a small part, it’s better than he shouldn’t be in the play it all.”
But there wasn’t any time for psychological doodling. I had a lot more business to do.
I turned the spotlight away from Bernie. “Mr. Le Sage,” I said, “let’s take another look at your story.”