by Glenn Ickler
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, what if Vinnie wasn’t the intended target? What if somebody else was supposed to eat the poison?”
“That’s crazy,” Erik said. “Who else could it have been?”
“Well, according to the advance story in our paper, a square dance caller named Scott Hall was supposed to have been the one who sampled the square meal at Heritage Square that morning.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now suppose that for some reason somebody who had access to strychnine wanted to kill Scott Hall. Suppose that person was the one who hired that goon to steal Fairchild’s costume and deliver the poison.”
“Who’d want to kill Scott, for god’s sake? He’s a great caller.”
“Somebody might have had an issue with him. Something personal perhaps.” I was thinking it was time for Al to show up. We were getting close to got’cha time and I wasn’t sure I could stop Erik if he decided to take off running before I had something incriminating on my tape.
“Any idea who that somebody might be?” Erik asked.
“Actually, I do,” I said. “Al has some photos of a square dancer on the Heritage Square stage looking guilty as hell just as Vinnie is taking a bite.”
“Really?”
“Really. Want to see them?” I held up three prints that I’d pulled from my inside sport coat pocket.
Erik was standing against the stage right wall with his left hand behind his back. I could see motion in his shoulder and arm but I couldn’t see what the hand was doing. A metallic clanking noise above my head told me what it was. He had loosened a line that held a heavy steel pipe hanging high above the stage. That pipe, to which several hundred pounds of stage lights were attached, was falling toward the spot where I was standing.
I dove forward, launching myself headfirst farther onto the stage, but I didn’t go far enough. The rigging missed my head and torso, but it crashed onto my right ankle, pinning it to the stage. Where the hell was Al when I needed him?
I was lying on my right side, with my head toward Erik. As I struggled to pull my leg free, he walked toward me and picked up the photos that had gone flying when I hit the deck. He looked at them and smiled. “Interesting,” he said.
“We thought so,” I said. “The police have a copy. They’re on their way here, even as we speak.”
“Then I should probably be going elsewhere, shouldn’t I,” he said.
“Help me up before you go?” The ankle, which had been numb, was beginning to feel like someone had jabbed a red-hot knife into it.
“I kind of like you where you are. In fact, I think you’re going to still be there after acquiring a fatal head wound from your fall. I’m sure the police will be happy to pick you up when they get here.” He turned and went backstage.
“Tell me, why’d you want to kill Scott Hall?” I yelled.
“You were right when you said it might be something personal. The son of a bitch was banging my wife.” He bent down with his back to me and picked up something.
“How’d you find out?” At least my tape was rolling, recording the story even if I couldn’t move.
“I came home half an hour early from the theater one night and saw a car pulling away from in front of the house. It had license plates I recognized. They said ‘Do-Si-Do’ on them.” What Erik had picked up was a wooden belaying pin heavy enough to use as a deadly club. He came back and stood over me with the club in his right hand while he continued to tell his story.
“I knew it was Scott’s car and that Scott has a reputation as a skirt chaser, so I hired a private detective to shadow my wife. Sure enough, our high-level club caller was calling some basic horizontal figures at my house while I was working at the theater at night. And when there was too much time between available nights, they were dosi doing it in a motel during the day.
“What the private eye also found out was that Joyce and Scott were draining money out of the theater—she’s the treasurer—and they were planning to take over as anonymous buyers when I was forced to give it up.”
“No wonder you were pissed,” I said. I paused in my struggle to get loose because the ankle was hurting too much. Where the hell was Al?
“Pissed isn’t the word for it,” Erik said. “When I read in the paper that Scott was going to be the taste tester at the fair, I had a really bright idea. At first I was going to knock out Fairchild and deliver the stick myself, but then I thought of Grubby. If he did it, I could be onstage when Scott bit the dust, or in this case the stick. The perfect alibi.”
“How did you know a scumbag like Grubby?”
“He works in this building as a janitor. He has a thing for theater so he’d stop in and chat. Told me all about doing time for assault, how he almost killed a guy with his bare hands. Seemed like the perfect messenger to deliver the goods to Mr. Scott Casanova Hall and send him to that great dance hall in the sky.”
“The perfect crime that went awry,” I said.
“Who’d have thought the asshole would pass the stick to Vinnie? I really feel bad about that. I liked Vinnie.”
“Did you also plan to send your wife away to resume dancing with her caller?”
“Oh, yeah. That little slut was next on my list. In about six months she was going to have a terrible accident. But I can’t stay here running lines with you, pleasant as it is. So if you’ll be kind enough to turn your head a bit I’ll give it a whack so it looks like you bumped it when you fell. After that I’ll be calling 911 and telling them there’s been a terrible accident here in the theater—a reporter was standing in the wrong place when a loose line let go. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time under the stage lights, Mr. Reporter.”
Like a striking snake, his hand darted out and his fingers grasped my hair. He yanked my head up and twisted it sideways so the back was exposed to the club he was raising over his head. “I read somewhere that right behind the ear is the best spot to hit,” he said.
“What’s going on in here?” a male voice yelled from the entrance to the theater.
Erik released his grip on my hair, letting my head slam onto the floor. “Exit stage right,” he said, and in a flash he was gone out the back. Thank God for Al.
Chapter 34: Where’s Al
But it wasn’t Al. The man who’d hollered ran down the aisle and onto the stage. As he looked down at me, I realized that I’d never seen that chubby-cheeked, red-bearded face before.
“What the hell happened?” the man said. “I heard a crash all the way upstairs in the bar.”
“Lights fell on me,” I said. “I’m pinned. Please call 911.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed. What a freak accident.” He pulled a cell phone out of his pants pocket and punched in the three magic numbers.
“You don’t know how lucky,” I said. “It wasn’t an accident.”
“Jesus, you mean somebody dropped them on purpose?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
A 911 dispatcher answered the call and the man explained the situation. When his conversation with the dispatcher ended, he squatted beside me. “They’re on the way. While we’re waiting, let me see if I can lift this thing enough for you to pull your leg out.”
He was a short, stocky man with thick arms, big shoulders and a beer gut. He wrapped his hands around the steel pipe and grunted. The only noticeable change was his face turning red.
“This son of a bitch is heavy,” he said.
“Guess we’ll have to wait for the rescue squad. My name is Mitch. I’m a reporter here to do a story. Thanks for showing up when you did.”
“I’m Ernie. I’m the bartender in the restaurant upstairs. Lucky for you there were no drunks making a racket so I could hear the crash down here.”
“As I said, you don’t know how luc
ky. The bastard was about to finish the job with a whack on the head.”
“Jesus, do you know who he was?”
I was about to reply when another male voice yelled, “Hello,” from the back of the theater. This time it was Al. “What the hell happened?” he said.
I sat up and braced myself on my elbows to answer him. “You won’t believe what happened.”
Al was starting down the aisle toward us when a figure appeared behind him. As the figure came closer, I saw it was a woman dressed in black. The figure was carrying something in her right hand. The figure was Willow and the something was a knife with a blade long enough to disembowel a cow.
Willow’s shriek was loud enough and shrill enough to wake the ghost of Hamlet’s father or any other spirit residing in the Parkside Players Theatre. “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” she screamed as she leaped toward Al with the knife raised at arm’s length above her head. Al spun to face her at the sound, saw the knife and swung the camera bag that hung from his neck forward and upward just as Willow brought the knife down.
The knife sank deep into the heavy canvas camera bag. Willow tugged at the handle to pull the blade out of the bag, but the blade didn’t move. Before she could give the knife a second pull, Al slugged her in the face with his right fist. Willow staggered backward with blood running from her nose. The knife remained impaled in the camera bag.
Willow screamed again. “Why didn’t you read my e-mails? I showed you what I was going to do.”
“What the hell?” Ernie said.
“Help him,” I said. “He’s my photographer.”
Ernie rose from beside me and started running toward Willow. Al also started running toward Willow, who had turned and was dashing up the aisle toward the exit. As she reached the open doorway, she collided with a man in a blue-and-white EMT uniform, bounced off him and disappeared.
“What the hell?” said the EMT.
“That’s what we all say,” Al said. “Welcome to the Parkside Players madhouse production.”
Two EMTs, whose nametags said “Jack” and “Jill,” squatted beside me. Jack said, “Looks like it’s gonna take some muscle to get this thing off of you.”
A light bulb blinked on in my brain. “Actually, if you pull on the ropes that run through those pullies, you can lift it without busting a gut,” I said, pointing at the line that Erik had released. I asked myself why I hadn’t thought of this simple solution while Ernie was grunting and straining his gut. I chalked this mental vacuum up to shock.
Jack grabbed the line and raised the rigging enough for Jill to pull me out while delivering the news that my ankle appeared to be broken. In addition to the searing pain in the ankle, my head was throbbing from banging down onto the floor. I thought about what would have happened to my head if Ernie hadn’t interrupted the action and decided not to complain about this little bump.
The EMTs stabilized my ankle with inflatable braces, loaded me onto a gurney and wheeled me out to the ambulance. Meanwhile Al was on his cell phone, calling the police to report the attacks by Erik and Willow, and the city desk to report my injury.
As Jill was poised to close the ambulance doors, I tossed my car keys out to Al and told him where it was parked.
“I’ll drive it home and you can get it after Martha picks you up at the hospital,” Al said.
Oh, god, Martha! I would have to call Martha and tell her I’d been wounded by still another killer on the run. “Martha might just leave me there,” I said. “She keeps telling me to be more careful.”
“You can tell her you were stage struck.”
The ambulance doors closed with a clang that started bongo drums pounding in my aching head.
* * *
I had just been wheeled out of x-ray and was counting the ceiling tiles in a little room somewhere in the bowels of Regions Hospital when a trio of cops, two in uniforms and one in a baggy brown suit, appeared. Wearing the suit was Mike Reilly, a stocky, crew-cut homicide detective who hated reporters and photographers. In my case at least, the feeling was mutual. We had crossed verbal swords at more than one crime scene during my tenure at the Daily Dispatch.
“What kind of a mess did you make this time?” Reilly said, bending over me until the tip of his wide, flat nose was approximately three inches from mine. His breath was a combination of today’s cigarette smoke and yesterday’s garlic. I wondered if he’d ever heard of mouthwash.
“Erik Erickson killed Vinnie Luciano,” I said. “I’ve got a confession on tape.”
“It looks like you’ve also got a busted leg. So who’s this Erickson character? Where is he now? And where’s the tape?”
“Erickson owns Parkside Players Theatre. He took off and I’ve got the tape.”
“Let’s have it.” He straightened up and held a hand palm up over my face.
“Not till I’ve copied it,” I said.
“Bull shit. If you’ve got evidence I want it now.”
“I could make you get a warrant. If you play nice I’ll speed things up by giving you a copy as soon as I can make one.”
Reilly’s face turned the color of a red delicious apple but he pulled his hand away. “So tell me what happened at the theater. How did you get this so-called confession and the broken leg?”
I told my story while Reilly took notes. I had reached the point where Erik was grabbing my hair when a doctor interrupted the narrative to tell me that my ankle was broken in two places. “We’ll take you down and put on a walking cast as soon as these officers are finished,” he said.
“This story’s just gettin’ good,” Reilly said. “It might be awhile.”
“Just press the call button for the nurse when you’re ready,” the doctor said.
“Lucky me; I’ve just been on stage and now I’ll be in the cast,” I said. The doctor chuckled politely but Reilly did not even smile.
The doctor stopped in the doorway on his way out. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “Your wife is in the waiting room ready to take you home when you’re ready.”
Martha must have claimed to be my spouse in order to get in. “Does she look friendly?” I asked.
“She looks beautiful,” he said. “Is that enough?”
I wasn’t sure. Martha always looked beautiful, no matter what her mood. I silently hoped for forgiveness and went back to answering Reilly’s questions. He finally ended the session when I promised to deliver the tape of Erik’s confession by 8:00 a.m. the next day.
It seemed like hours before Martha was able to join me. A kind nurse led her to the room where the walking cast was being applied and she stood patiently, and silently, beside me while the work was being done. When the man wrapping the cast stood back and pronounced it complete, Martha threw her arms around me and gave me a long, long kiss. I assumed that I was forgiven for my not-so-careful behavior.
“Let’s go get my car,” I said when I came up for air. “Al took it to his place. I can take him downtown to pick up his car.”
Martha pointed at my heavily encumbered right foot and ankle. “How are you going to drive? We’ll take my car to Al’s house, let him drive your car to our place and then I’ll take him downtown to get his.”
When I climbed the steps to the Jeffreys’ front door wearing my walking cast, I had a problem keeping my balance. Once inside, Carol greeted me with a running hug that almost tipped me over. When I regained my balance, Al greeted me with an open laptop computer and an order: “Sit down and look at this shit.” He put the laptop down on the kitchen table and I pulled out a chair and sat.
The excrement in question was an e-mail from Willow that said she planned to send both him and herself to heaven, where they would be joined forever in a loving embrace. The attachment was a photo of the knife she’d left embedded in Al’s camera bag, with a notation that this blade wo
uld transport them to heavenly bliss.
“This woman is way nuttier than we thought,” I said.
“She’s a total psycho,” Al said. “I’ve got the cops hunting for her. I forwarded this e-mail and they came to the house and pulled the knife out of my camera bag. The guy questioning me left just a minute before you got here.”
“Do they know where Willow lives?”
“I couldn’t help them with that. She never told me where she hung out, but it’s probably upside down in a cave along the river bluffs.”
“I’m surprised she can come out in the daylight. Anyway, let’s hope they pick her up, or down, before she comes after you with another weapon.”
“I’m wearing a helmet and a Kevlar vest until that loony’s in a padded cell.”
“You’re saying you have a vested interest in her capture?”
“I’m a-dressing the situation appropriately.”
We got my car home with a Japanese three-vehicle shuttle: Martha and I in her Toyota, Al driving my Honda and Carol meeting us at our apartment with her Subaru to take Al home.
Martha helped me up the steps and into the dark apartment. We saw the red flasher blinking on the kitchen phone before Martha turned on the room light. I hobbled to the counter, picked up the receiver and pushed the play button.
“I’ve got your cat,” said a female voice. “I’ll call again tomorrow.”
Martha was exuberant. “Somebody’s found Sherlock.”
I was less enthusiastic. “That somebody sounds an awful lot like Willow.”
Chapter 35: A State of Chassis
When my life gets hectic, I often think of the last line of Sean O’Casey’s classic Irish play Juno and Paycock. The drunken Captain Boyle, whose neighbors call him a “paycock” because of his flamboyant strutting manner, closes the show with this observation: “The whole world’s in a terrible state of chassis.”