Mom Doth Murder Sleep
Page 22
With good behavior, Franz will serve four years. His name will appear in the Hollywood columns at regular intervals, thanks to his press agents. And since four years is about how long it ordinarily takes him to prepare a picture, he’ll be out just in time to start shooting his great autobiographical epic of crime, punishment, and redemption. His future looks reasonably bright, unless his insomnia continues to plague him.
* * *
Now how do I feel about this case? Was I upset that after all my efforts Allan Franz got off with such a mild punishment? Frankly, I never let that sort of thing bother me. I learned a long time ago that what a cop does—catching criminals—and what the lawyers do after that, are two entirely separate matters.
And after all, if it hadn’t been for this case, my relationship with Roger wouldn’t be what it is today. Between friends, even when one of them is old enough to be the other one’s father, there should never be any secrets, there should always be nothing but the truth. Roger knows the whole truth about me now, and he couldn’t be handling it better. In every case we’ve worked on since last fall, including a few where Mom got into the act, the kid has gone out of his way to recognize my peculiar contributions to the success of the investigation.
Only one thing about this still bothers me. It has nothing to do with how I look in Roger’s eyes. More with how I look in my own eyes. Have I been letting myself depend too much on Mom? I’m capable of solving the tough ones myself, aren’t I? So why do I have to take the line of least resistance and run to her? The next time I get a tough one …
* * *
On the last day of Franz’s trial, in early January, when the jury brought in its verdict, Roger and I were in court.
We sat in the middle of the courtroom, with a decent view of everything that was going on. But Roger’s eyes had only one object they wanted to look at. For the whole morning’s proceedings—in fact, throughout the whole two weeks of the trial—he’d been looking at Laurie Franz, who sat in the front row just a few feet behind her father. I was pretty sure that Roger never got to see her at any other time.
At noon, the verdict having been announced and the judge having set a date for sentencing, the court was adjourned and Roger and I followed the crowd into the hallway. And suddenly we were face-to-face with Laurie Franz.
“Laurie, thank God!” The words came rushing out of Roger, he didn’t seem to give a damn that he was in the middle of a crowd of people and everybody was listening to him. “I’ve been trying to reach you, I keep leaving my name on your answering machine, but I guess you’re not getting the messages. Have lunch with me, will you. We have to talk.”
Her face was paler and thinner than it had been a few months ago, when she was Lady Macduff and Roger was Banquo’s son Fleance and Macbeth was out to get the pair of them. Her eyes were very bright as she fixed them on Roger.
“What will we talk about?” she said. “Will we talk about how you’re a lackey for these small-town redneck politicians who have railroaded my father into prison? Will we talk about how you and the crooks who employ you don’t care if you ruin the life of an innocent man, just so you can make your headlines and get votes for the next election? Will we talk about the type of person who tells somebody he cares about her and the next day stabs her in the back?”
“Laurie, that’s not what I did!”
“Oh, go to hell!” she said. “I’d rather die than see your face again!”
She turned away and was quickly lost in the faces around her. Most of them were staring in Roger’s direction, showing the eager delight people feel when they’re watching a good show.
“She’d rather die than see my face again.” Roger managed a little laugh. “You know where she got that one, don’t you? It’s almost word for word from that prison picture her father directed. Natalie Wood says it to Robert Redford.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’ll stand you a drink.”
* * *
That night Roger was supposed to have dinner with me at Mom’s house. He told me he wouldn’t be there. He was feeling sick, he was coming down with the bug that was around, he’d call Mom and apologize to her and ask for a rain check.
Later, while I helped Mom dispose of a roast chicken, I told her what had happened at the courthouse that morning.
She looked thoughtful, but at first she didn’t make any comments. Then I told her something Roger had told me about himself a few days ago. He hardly ever went to the movies anymore. And when he stayed home, he hardly ever looked at old movies on his VCR.
Mom lifted her chin and got that familiar look of determination on her face. “All right, enough is enough,” she said. “What this boy needs is a big dose of something.”
“What something? They don’t make a medicine that’s good for what’s ailing him.”
“Who says they don’t? The name of this medicine is truth.”
“What truth are you talking about, Mom?”
She didn’t seem to hear my question. “We’ll have a quick dessert and coffee,” she said, “then maybe I’ll send you home. It’s late, and I’ve still got some letters to write.”
EPILOGUE
Dear Roger,
Getting this letter from me will be a big surprise for you. Especially since I could call you up on the phone and ask you over for a cup of coffee and talk to you straight into your face. But I didn’t want to do this because I thought maybe it would be embarrassing for you, talking about such things to another person, especially an old lady. I know how it is at your age, practically everything is embarrassing. Believe it or not, I was twenty-two years old myself once.
So I’m putting all the facts into this letter and personally driving to your house to slide it under your door. And the reason I’m doing this, I have a good idea what’s going on inside of you right now. My son Davie told me you spoke to the girl today, and what she said to you. It wouldn’t take any Albert Einstein to figure out how this made you feel. My heart goes out to you like I was your own mother. If your mother was here now, instead of a thousand miles away, I’m positive she’d do for you what I’m going to do.
For the last few months already I knew these facts. I kept them locked up inside of me because I was afraid the truth could hurt you. But since you’re hurting anyway, what harm can it do if you hear it? Maybe it could even do you some good.
So here it is, the truth about those murders, the whole truth, and nothing but …
To begin with, I’m pointing out to you three or four peculiar things that I noticed about those murders.
First of all, Allan Franz decides to kill Martin Osborn because Osborn is blackmailing him, he’s saying to him, “Your daughter or your picture!” So how did Allan Franz find out about this affair and about this blackmail? Martin Osborn called him long distance and laid it all out for him. What number did Osborn call? The number of Franz’s home in Hollywood. This big mansion that the girl told you about, with more rooms than she and her father can possibly live in, and a phone in practically every room. And when did Osborn make this call? Late at night, after midnight, six weeks or so before the murder, in other words, in August. Before school began, you’ll notice. Exactly the time when this girl was home for the summer vacation.
Once I knew all these facts, could I stop my mind from playing around with a certain possibility? Suppose this girl was home in the mansion when Osborn’s long-distance call came. Suppose she picked up the extension in her room when the phone rang, only her father picked it up a little sooner. Suppose she heard Osborn’s voice on the line and listened in, without letting them know she was doing it, to what Osborn was telling her father.
All right, you’re saying, that’s a lot of supposing. Is there any evidence for all these supposes?
First piece evidence: When they were sitting together at the opening night, Allan Franz talked to Davie about his daughter. He said she was a temperamental girl, and lately her moods were changing all the time, suddenly she was going from up to do
wn without any reason. He gave an example of this: how the girl, living with him in Hollywood last summer, went to bed one night as happy as clam chowder and the next morning when she came to the breakfast table she was snapping off everybody’s head. He compared her to Juliet from William Shakespeare. One night she’s happy because she’s in love with Romeo, the next morning she’s miserable because he’s dead.
For such an overnight change in a girl’s mood, even a temperamental girl, there has to be a good reason. Something happened to her. So what was it? What could happen to her between going to bed at midnight and waking up the next morning at nine? No visitors came to the house and woke her up from sleeping, or why didn’t her father mention them? Nothing upset her in the morning mail, because her mood was already changed when she came down to breakfast. I’m telling myself there’s only one thing that could come into her life in the middle of the night—a phone call. And we know already about one phone call that came to Franz after midnight, the call from Martin Osborn where he explained how he was using the girl’s feelings to blackmail a movie part out of her father. If the girl did happen to overhear her boyfriend saying such a thing to her father, this would be a plenty good reason for her to suddenly act unhappy. Romeo is worse than dead; he’s turned suddenly into a schmuck. How much more would a girl need to change her mood overnight?
So how big a coincidence can you swallow? If you don’t have a pretty big suspicion she listened in to this phone call, you’re the type never has any suspicion about anything, and I’d like to sell you my old car.
Second piece evidence: The night after the murder, when you took the girl for a date and brought her home to her apartment, she confessed to you about her affair with Osborn, and she said how the two of them were planning they should run away to New York right after the play closed. But she told you something else earlier that same night. She told you Lloyd Cunningham liked her so much during the Macbeth rehearsals he asked her to play the leading part in the next production of the Mesa Grande Players—Oy, Wilderness! She told him she certainly would, and she was very excited at the idea because it’s the part of the mother and she never yet had a chance to act like a character who’s twice as old as she really is.
So explain this to me: How could she accept this part and be excited about playing it if she was planning to run away to New York right after Macbeth and wouldn’t even be in town for the next production? The answer is: By this time, when she was offered this mother part, she knew—she didn’t just think, she knew—she wouldn’t be going to New York with Martin Osborn. By this time she already overheard the long-distance phone conversation, and she hated Martin Osborn in the guts, and she had no intention she should run away with him.
No, I’m not saying she’s the real murderer of Martin Osborn. I’m not saying she helped her father do it either. She isn’t that type girl, from what you told me about her. She isn’t the type that does things for herself. All her life, when there were things she wanted should be done, other people did them for her. Servants picked up her clothes and cleaned up her room. Cooks brought her food to the table. Tutors made sure she got through school. And most of all, her father, her darling daddy, made the way smooth for her, popping up with his checkbook or his connections if only she expressed a desire for something she didn’t have.
It’s a pattern, you follow me? People get into patterns when they’re little children, they don’t get out of them so easy later on. This little girl overhears the phone conversation, she realizes what Osborn is doing to her, she hates him twice as much as she used to love him. Nobody does a better job hating, in my experience, than spoiled little children when somebody suddenly won’t let them have their way. It would make her very happy somebody should do him a lot of damage, ruin his career, ruin his reputation, fix it he should get beaten up. Even if somebody should happen to kill him, she’s ready to laugh all through the funeral. But getting revenge, hurting or killing somebody, is dirty work, and she isn’t accustomed she should do her own dirty work.
Luckily, she knows all about what her father is like. He isn’t so different from her, he also don’t feel happy unless he’s getting his own way. You give orders to other people all your life, and you get paid a fortune for doing it, pretty soon you start assuming this is the law of nature. She knows how much her father loves her, she knows he wouldn’t sit by and let her be betrayed by this seducer. She also knows he’ll never let himself be blackmailed, he’ll never let somebody give him orders about his own pictures. In other words, she’s as sure as anybody can be about anything in this world that sooner or later her father will try, in a big way, to get Osborn out of her life.
As long as he’s got a reason to do it. But if she tells her father she overheard the phone call, if she tells him her love for Osborn has turned inside out into hate, if she tells him she’ll never see Osborn again, her father wouldn’t have no reason for doing anything bad to him. So what does she do? Nothing. She keeps her mouth shut. She don’t say a word to her father or to Osborn about what she overheard on the phone. She pretends like she’s still crazy about Osborn and wants to run away with him, and she lets him go on with his blackmail. Because this is the way to make sure Daddy will try to get rid of the man that treated her so bad.
Naturally she can’t be positive her father will go as far as murder. Maybe murder isn’t even in her mind. Or at least in the top of her mind. Who knows what’s in the underneath part of her mind? Whatever happens, it wouldn’t be her fault, would it? She isn’t going to do a thing.
Incidentally, this is why she went into the wings on opening night and watched the scene of Banquo’s murder. It wasn’t on account of your legs, Roger, I’m sorry to break this to you. It was on account of she hated to let Osborn out of her sight. Any day, any minute even, she expected her father was going to make something happen to him, and she wanted, if possible, to see it with her own eyes.
Does this make her a guilty party in the murder? Not legally. Even if there was evidence that could stand up in court, she couldn’t be put on trial. A crime is something a person does. People don’t go to jail for what they don’t do.
So whatever this little girl did or didn’t do, to me it looks like she’ll get away with it. Maybe the next time too. Maybe for the rest of her life. On the other hand, who knows, one day her trickiness and her coldness could come up and hit her in the face. This also happens in this world of ours, from time to time. Occasionally there’s justice, otherwise how would we know what we’re missing without it?
Meanwhile, there’s one good thing that came out of all this. You found out what type person she is. You found out she’s the type that sleeps like a baby no matter what she’s got on her conscience. Nothing is on her conscience, in fact, because she never had one. Believe me, Roger, my darling boy, you’ll feel better from knowing that what you lost wasn’t worth having in the first place.
All right, I understand you’re not feeling better right this minute. I understand this letter wouldn’t do you much good, words were never any medicine for suffering. All I can say to you is, give it time. After a while, when you’re feeling more like thinking it over, you’ll thank me for telling you the truth.
Sincerely, with all my love, and I hope it won’t embarrass you if I sign this letter
Mom.
P.S.—How would you like it to come here for dinner next Tuesday night? I won’t have Davie or his little legal secretary or any other old people. Only young people your age. I know a few of them, including some very nice young girls that are going to the college. You’re under no obligation to like them. You don’t even have to enjoy the dinner. Just humor an old lady and be here.
Love again,
Mom.
Also by James Yaffe
Mom Meets Her Maker
A Nice Murder for Mom
About the Author
James Yaffe is an English professor and writer-in-residence at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he lives with his wife and three chil
dren. A transplanted New Yorker, Mr. Yaffe first introduced Mom and Dave in the page of Ellery Queen Quarterly Magazine. You can sign up for email update here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Prologue
1: Dave’s Narrative
2: Roger’s Narrative
3: Dave’s Narrative
4: Roger’s Narrative
5: Dave’s Narrative
6: Roger’s Narrative
7: Dave’s Narrative
8: Roger’s Narrative
9: Dave’s Narrative
10: Roger’s Narrative
11: Dave’s Narrative
12: Roger’s Narrative
13: Dave’s Narrative
14: Roger’s Narrative
15: Dave’s Narrative
16: Roger’s Narrative
17: Dave’s Narrative
Epilogue
Also by James Yaffe
About the Author
Copyright
MOM DOTH MURDER SLEEP. Copyright © 1991 by James Yaffe. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.