May I suggest that you are in the valuable position of changing the way people view movies forever, and by destroying the existence of this blemish on our country’s cannon of film, you will rewrite history in the eyes of future film aficionados? I see it as irresponsible for you to continue to preserve these movies, because their very presence forever alters the way film is viewed from a historical perspective.
This is more than a suggestion. It is your obligation as a patron of the arts.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Moviegoer
It was quite a letter: well written, well argued, and the kind of thing that would have been kept in a file and pulled out each year at the office holiday party if it hadn’t led to an act of vandalism.
Another email from John Phillips popped into my inbox. News about the break-in was the subject. I opened the second attachment and stared at a newspaper clipping. The action described undermined the humor of the letter. I toggled back to the letter and printed off a copy. Somebody had to have looked into the letter and connected the two. I called John back.
“John? You said ‘he’.”
“I said what?”
“He. You referred to the writer as ‘he’. But I’m sitting here reading this letter and there’s no signature.”
“Well sure I said he. That’s what ties the whole thing together. There was a name on the return address of the envelope and I don’t know a lot of women named Richard Goode.”
Richard Goode, I kept telling myself, was a common name. I didn’t want to think that there was a bigger reason for the murder at the theater, that the man responsible for our programming, the man who dealt with stress with a bag of mary-jane, the man whose chair I had occupied not even ten hours ago, was involved in this, but pieces of what I knew fit. He had access to the pillows in my trunk, and had fought me on the Doris Day film festival. But other pieces of the puzzle remained unconnected to him, not making sense.
I held the letter in my hand and grew angry. People’s lives were at stake. Their futures. And I doubted that Richard had told the police about his anti-Doris Day stance. I called the Mummy and left a message on his voicemail for him to call me back. His home number was at the studio and I’d promised Tex—I’d promised Tex nothing. We were beyond promises of me minding my own business. We were officially in “I’m involved” mode. I looked up Richard’s home address.
The addition of Mortiboy to the family unit presented a couple of unforeseen problems, not the least of which was what to do with the two of them while I was gone. So I did the unimaginable. I let the two of them have free reign of the apartment and I left.
Richard Goode lived in east Dallas, in a neighborhood not very far from the Mummy. More flat roads, many of them unpaved. It was on the way to Garland, and the further you drove in that direction the more you got into the part of Texas people thought of when they never lived here: flat, dusty, less cosmopolitan, more folksy. The real estate was cheaper than in Dallas county or Collin county, which put the smarter, more frugal folks out that way instead of in the higher profile areas like the forever burgeoning downtown. Richard hadn’t gone far enough in that direction to really benefit. He was frugal-adjacent.
Prior to today, I’d been to Richard’s place one time, and I relied on memory and instinct more than the address on the piece of paper, made two wrong turns, but eventually drove down the alley that led to his house. There were no cars in the driveway. I parked the Explorer at the curb and caught the tail of my tunic in the door when I shut it. The fabric tore when I tried to yank it free.
I approached the front door and rang the bell. No answer. I knocked for good measure, waited a couple of minutes, and headed around back. The street was deserted. No children playing, no people lounging on their front porch. Unusual for a residential neighborhood.
The back door was preempted by a screen door that hung from one broken hinge. I pulled it open and knocked on the door between. Unexpectedly, the door swung open.
“Hello? Richard? Are you home?” I called through the hallway. No voices met my question. “Richard?” I called one last time.
Common sense, courtesy, and general intellect told me to leave. But instinct, coupled with questions about why the back door was open if no one was home, why the neighborhood was noticeably quiet, and why Richard Goode’s name was signed to a letter sent to AFFER years ago, trumped common sense. And if answers were on the other side of the floor that separated me from the rest of the house, then I was going in.
I tiptoed across the worn floor, a poorly measured and cut piece of linoleum roll made to look like tile. The seams by the bottom of the cabinets were not lined up and grime had since discolored the gap. As a decorator, I had a knack for assessing a room quickly, picking out the pieces that made up the personality of the person. It was a necessary skill in being able to design a new room for people who wanted to feel at home in it, not feel like they’d walked into a stranger’s house.
At first glance, Richard’s living room was a study in post-college dorm room. Mismatched bookcases lined three walls. A futon, unfolded, faced the flat screen TV, probably worth more than all of the furniture combined. An empty wine bottle sat on the makeshift coffee table. Even though the bottle was empty, he’d shoved the rubber cork back into the neck.
“Richard?” I called again, answered only with more silence. I scanned the bookcase. The shelves were packed, upright and then covered with books on their sides. Books on filmmaking. Directors. Producers. Script Supervisors. How to break into Hollywood. How to make it in the movies. How to do anything and everything I could imagine relating to the industry.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. Richard had a computer set up on a small table by the front door and a tiered bookcase next to it. I moved forward, no longer aware that I was trespassing in another person’s house. The shelves of this bookcase were full, too, this time with scripts. Shelf after shelf of scripts. I slid one out of its space on the shelf. The Monkey Conspiracy by Richard Goode. I slid it back in and pulled out another. Venom and Intimacy by R. Godenov. A third: Freak Show Superhero by Ricardo Godinsky. I got the feeling he’d been experimenting with pen-names that never quite worked.
I pulled another script off of the bottom shelf. Raging Bull. Next, Taxi Driver. Next: Fitzcarraldo. He kept his own assortment of unsold screenplays on the shelves by those of works that he respected. I knew he respected them. He’d pitched some of these very same movies to the Dallas Independent Group for Movies over the past year and I’d been there to hear it. There was no surprise in finding proof of Richard’s passion for film; you didn’t become the director of a film society that presented only old movies on the big screen if you didn’t like—no, love—that kind of thing. Yet was this an interest, a passion, or an obsession? Before I’d read that letter I would have thought the former. Seeing this, coupled with the declarations he made in the letter, I wasn’t sure.
A car turned into the cul de sac. I had more questions now than I’d arrived with, but there was no time to search for answers. I had to get out of there.
I ran out the back door and pulled the door shut behind me. Two steps away I doubled back and tried the knob. It was locked. The handbrake clicked on a car out front and I hurried down the stairs and around the side of the house. A green sedan sat in Richard’s neighbor’s driveway.
I remoted the doors to the SUV and hopped in, flipping the visor down and shielding my face with my hand while passing the neighbors. I drove to the theater. Two blocks away, as I sped through an intersection, I passed a black Jeep on a side street. The next thing I knew, I’d picked up a tail.
Two traffic lights and three stop signs later, I pulled over. Tex parked his jeep in front of me. So much for faking him out and making a clean getaway.
He approached my car and draped his tanned forearms over my open window. “What are you doing in this n
eck of the woods?”
“I was looking for someone,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun.
“Anyone I know?”
“How long have you been following me?”
“Who said I was following you? I saw you blow through that intersection and thought I’d see what you were up to.”
“Move your car, please,” I demanded.
“I don’t think so, Night.”
My fists balled up and I punched the steering wheel. “I could report you for harassment if I wanted. You have no right—no right!—to question me about my comings and goings!”
“You might have a point. Go where you’re going. I’ll follow. If you want, I’ll drive and save you the gas.”
I threw him a curve ball. “Fine. I have a lead on your case and you can drive me. It’ll save us both time.”
“You’re going to see Hudson?”
“No. I’m going to the Mummy.”
“Forget the Mummy. Carrie Coburn’s murder was a mistake. The Mummy isn’t involved in this.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Cowboy.” He took a half a step backwards. “You can’t even connect all four murders with Hudson. You have twenty-year-old unproven allegations and the current murder of the previous victim’s mother. You say Carrie Coburn’s murder was a mistake? What about Pamela Ritter’s? What does she have to do with Hudson? Try as you want, you can’t wrap it all up into one neat package. There’s no connection.”
“Night, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you’re wrong. We found our connection between Hudson James and Pamela Ritter.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“What connection?” I asked. My foot relaxed against the brake and the truck glided forward, tapping the back bumper of Tex’s Jeep. I threw it into park and turned off the ignition.
“You don’t know?”
“They dated?” I blurted out before I could self-edit.
“What? No, well, I don’t know about that.” He looked at me oddly, as if he was assessing why I’d jumped to that conclusion. “He did some contract work for her. Staging, I think it’s called. Hired him to come into a couple of the houses she was selling and fix stuff up so it fit the fifties look.” He paused for a couple of seconds, and watched my expression.
For no good reason, I felt betrayed, but fought to keep that from showing on my face.
“And if that’s not enough for you, it seems Thelma Johnson had a yard sale a couple of weeks ago. Pamela bought a couple of pieces of furniture and hired Hudson James to fix them up. But she never paid him, for that job, or for a couple of others. We found the invoices, a couple of them with handwritten notes.”
“Hudson wouldn’t kill someone over unpaid invoices,” I said. My eyes broke contact with Tex’s, which I instantly regretted. He continued to stare at me, making me feel all the more self-conscious. “How much?”
“Enough to make him confront her.”
My eyes flitted around while I thought, not settling on any one thing in particular. I was trying to piece this together. So she owed him money. And he’d sent invoices, that wasn’t too big of a surprise, it was standard in the industry. And he’d included a couple of notes? Well, that was just polite. But why hadn’t he told me? Staging was more the job of a decorator than a handyman. When we’d talked about the murders, why hadn’t he mentioned he had a relationship with Pamela, or that he’d recently worked on furniture that came from Thelma Johnson’s house? Those two omissions troubled me more than I cared to admit to Tex.
“Okay. So you have a connection between Hudson and Pamela. Considering his skill set, it’s not such an odd connection. That can’t be enough to give you a warrant for his arrest.”
“It wasn’t.”
“There’s more?”
“I’m not going to throw the case to prove to you I did my job.”
“And I’m not going to let you use me as bait to catch an innocent man.”
“Damn it, Madison! Don’t you think this job is hard enough without me having to keep you out of trouble, too?”
“Then stop it! Stop following me! Stop watching me! Leave me out of it!” I turned the key and threw the car in reverse. I hit the gas. I peeled out, narrowly missing the left bumper of Tex’s Jeep. Three blocks later there was still no sight of him in my rearview mirror.
If Tex wanted to find me, he would, because I drove directly to the theater like I told him I was going to. But even after I parked the car and sat in the lot for five minutes collecting scattered thoughts and wits, he didn’t show up. Whether he had a better lead on Hudson than following me around or not, it seemed as though, for the time being, I’d shaken my tail.
I went to the Mummy for one reason: Richard. The theater was his home away from home and just maybe I’d learn something else if I spent some time looking at things through his eyes.
I went in through the back door. The air was mingled with the scent of dust and stale popcorn. We popped fresh popcorn for all of our events but often kept the leftovers in large plastic bags in the back room, for after hours viewings and donations to local shelters. One of the bags sat by the back door, never having been couriered to its next stop. The plastic had split and a stream of kernels was strewn across the floor in a diagonal pattern. Several kernels had been flattened by the sole of a shoe. I placed my foot next to the footprint. It was almost double the size of my yellow canvas sneaker. A man’s shoe.
I crossed through the kitchen and turned into the office. It was empty. No sign of Richard or anyone else. In fact, there were no signs the theater had ever reopened at all.
I sat in Richard’s chair and looked around the room. What did he see when he sat here? What made this his office versus the office of a different manager?
The bookcases, unlike his bookcases at home, were bare. Shelves held knickknacks like ceramic popcorn bags, empty film reels, and the kind of fake Oscar statues popular at Academy Awards parties around the country. Nothing seemed out of the norm. Nothing looked like it represented anyone other than the twenty-eight year old who operated the theater. We all knew his contacts in the industry had landed him here, contacts he’d made getting his Masters of Fine Arts. He’d been, to the city of Dallas, an example of what could be accomplished with passion and networking skills. But add that letter into the mix and suddenly he wasn’t the person I knew. Suddenly, he was a stranger.
Footsteps. Over my head. Clear creaking of the boards in the balcony, making the kind of noise that can only come from a person advancing across the floor. I’d left everything of mine in the car except for the keys. They were on the desk, somewhere. Frantically, I padded my palms over the piles of paper that covered the scratched wooden surface, looking for the metal lump. When my left palm landed on them I knocked the papers aside and saw my name written in block letters. TELL MADISON—
I pushed more of the papers aside. Tell me what? Was this what I was looking for?
TELL MADISON SHE’S NEXT.
The handwriting matched the handwriting of the other threats. And it matched ‘anonymous,’ the signer of the letter that John Phillips had faxed me. I had my proof, my connection. But I still didn’t know what it all meant. I couldn’t begin to fathom what Richard’s hatred of Doris Day’s movies had to do with the murders of four different women, but what it didn’t relate to was Hudson. It was something for me to take to the homicide division to make them rethink their one track investigation.
I pushed the rolling chair away from the desk and stood. My right shoelace caught in the wheel of the chair and I fell, slamming my left kneecap into the ground. Even painkillers couldn’t mask the explosion of nerve endings that caused me to cry out.
“Madison?”
I heard behind me. I struggled to get up, to get out of there.
“Madison, wait!”
I foug
ht unsuccessfully to free my shoelace from the chair’s wheel. The casters bobbled while I kicked my foot back and forth. I removed the shoe with the toe of the other foot and pulled myself from the floor. The chair crashed into a stack of metal film reels, a cacophony of noise echoing around the room. Worse, Richard stood in the doorway, blocking my exit.
TWENTY-SIX
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
I stood facing him, balanced on my bare right foot. My hand had closed around one of the metal film reels and I held it in front of me like a shield of protection. My left knee pounded with pain. In seconds I assessed the situation: I was hurt, but he was unarmed. In fact, he was disheveled, with a couple of days beard growth, and he didn’t smell altogether fresh. He took a step toward me and I pushed the metal reel out.
“Stop!” I yelled.
“You’re hurt. Sit down. I want to help you.”
“Stay where you are.”
“Madison, what’s going on? Are you the one who’s after me?” he asked.
“After you? You just came after me! I know you’re the one who’s been leaving me threatening notes. And I know about the letter to AFFER, so back off and let me call the cops.”
“No!” he hollered.
My hand rested on the receiver of the phone, and quite frankly the last person in the world I wanted to call was Tex, except that I kind of did want to call him because here I was face to face with a person who was somehow tied to the murders. Only Tex didn’t believe me and I didn’t know how to make him understand without more information.
Pillow Stalk (A Mad for Mod Mystery) Page 18