Murder at the Palace

by Margaret Dumas

  “The Monica who runs the pot shop?”

  He stopped on his way to the door, looking surprised. “How do you know that?”

  “Callie mentioned her. What’s she doing in the basement? There’s still crime scene tape—”

  “I know. I told her not to go back there. But she’s looking for a pair of earrings she loaned Kate for a lobby display a while ago.” At my look of utter confusion Marty sighed heavily, put the magazine back down, and sat. “Kate staged displays in the lobby for some features. A few months ago we showed Jezebel, and she put up a mannequin in a red ball gown. She got a wig from a costume shop, and Monica loaned her these old earrings she had. Now she wants them back, so she’s looking down in the prop room for them.” He raised his eyebrows. “Satisfied?”

  “I didn’t know we had a prop room.”

  “If you saw it on your first day you probably assumed it was a junk room.” He took a huge bite of a jelly doughnut and wiped the red filling off his chin with the back of his hand.

  “Should we put a display together for the mad scientists?” The movie lineup would change on Tuesday, and we would be showing a double feature of Dr. Jekyll and The Mad Ghoul (1943, Turhan Bey and Evelyn Ankers). “Maybe something with lab coats and beakers?” Anything to avoid going back to Kate’s office and facing the fact that I was losing my mind.

  Marty finished the doughnut in one more bite. “That’s a management call,” he said when he’d swallowed. Then he raised his eyes to something behind me.

  I turned, half expecting to see my bubbly delusion waving from the doorway. What I saw instead was a fortyish-looking Asian woman in workout clothes. “You must be Nora,” she said.

  I stood. “And you must be Monica. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  She looked surprised. “Really? Did you know Kate? I thought—” She glanced nervously at Marty.

  He stood, gathering up coffee, magazine, and doughnuts. “I have things to do,” he said. “I always have things to do.” He gave me a pointed look before leaving me alone with Monica.

  She still hovered near the door. “Um, did Kate mention me?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. I never met Kate. Callie told me about your shop. She said I should go see you.”

  “Oh, right.” She seemed weirdly relieved. “Yes, please do. I hear you’re going through a challenging time. I’m sure I have something that could help.”

  I’d been going through a challenging time yesterday, when I’d only had to contend with the public humiliation of a divorce and one, or possibly two, murders. Now I was losing my mind on top of it. I didn’t think pot candies were the best of all possible ideas.

  Nevertheless, “Thank you. And I’m so sorry for your loss. I know you and Kate were close.”

  She nodded and moved into the room. “It’s been hard. It isn’t easy to make new friends as an adult. Everyone already has their own lives, their own interests…” She sat, and I found myself joining her at the table. “But Kate and I clicked from the beginning. Both of us were running neighborhood businesses, and she’d started her life over again when she came here all those years ago, too.”

  And suddenly I forgot all about the morning’s hallucination. This was the source of information about Kate’s past that I’d been looking for.

  I gave Monica a very genuine smile. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  Chapter 8

  Monica couldn’t stay. She had to get to her shop, which was unfortunate because for about two minutes the thought of quizzing her about Kate had distracted me from the whole losing-my-mind-and-seeing-ghosts thing.

  “Stop by the shop any time,” she said as I walked down to the lobby with her. “I can give you some tips on the neighborhood.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. “Hey, did you find your earrings?”

  “Oh! No.” She flushed for some reason. “But don’t worry about it. I’m sure they’ll turn up. And they weren’t expensive, so it really doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll still keep an eye out,” I told her.

  We said goodbye at the doors and I watched her go down past the ticket booth to the sidewalk, where she met Albert on his way in. They hugged and chatted for a moment and I tried not to feel completely nosy for watching them.

  Monica had seemed friendly, but there was a weird nervousness about her. I was willing to bet she knew more about Kate’s life than anyone else. She might even know where Raul Acosta had fit in.

  Albert came in with a blast of chilly air.

  “Good morning, Nora. Are you fully recovered?” He gestured toward his head.

  “I’m fine,” I told him. Aside from a slight case of psychosis. “I take it you know Monica.”

  He nodded, taking off his coat. “She’s a lovely girl. I haven’t seen her much since Kate passed. What brought her by?”

  “Lost earrings,” I told him. “She was looking for them in the prop room.”

  Albert frowned. “I hope our thief didn’t strike again.”

  “Thief? What thief? I thought we only had a murderer.”

  He grimaced. “We showed a Richard Widmark double feature last spring, including the one where he pushes the old woman down the stairs in her wheelchair.”

  “Kiss of Death,” I said automatically (1947, Widmark and Victor Mature).

  “Right. Well, Kate got her hands on an old wheelchair and she tipped it over at the bottom of the lobby stairs with a shawl across it.” He grinned.

  Once again I regretted never meeting Kate.

  “Unfortunately,” Albert continued. “The wheelchair went missing from the prop room after we stowed it away. We couldn’t find it last week when we were going to use it for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

  “Oh.” Bette Davis had famously terrorized the wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford in Baby Jane (1962, Davis, Crawford, and a very unappetizing rat). “And you think someone stole it?”

  “Well, if they did, they must have needed it more than we do,” he said philosophically.

  He’d walked past me and now stood at the bottom of the lobby stairs.

  “When—” I wanted to ask him exactly when this had all happened, but I was distracted by someone at the top of the stairs. Someone wearing a vintage usherette uniform and waving cheerily at me.

  “Nora! Hey, Nora! Can you still see me?”

  I froze, staring at the apparition. Albert looked from me to the top of the stairs and back to me again. “Are you all right?” he asked. He glanced up again. “Is something there?”

  I blinked. This could not be happening. Again.

  “Nora?” Albert said.

  “Excuse me, Albert.” I dashed past him up the stairs, much to Trixie’s delight.

  “Oh, you can still see me! I’m so—”

  “Not here,” I muttered under my breath as I went past her. If I was going to have a full-scale breakdown it wasn’t going to be in front of the nicest old man in the world.

  I went to the office and Trixie followed me.

  “I’m so sorry I went poof like that,” she said. “It happens when I’m startled or scared or something. I wish I could control it, but—”

  I went to Kate’s office and slammed the door behind us. Behind myself. There was no us. There was just me and a manifestation of the massive stress I’d been under since Ted left.

  “Look,” I turned on the manifestation, intending to tell her in no uncertain terms to go away and leave me alone, and was confronted by big blue innocent eyes and a radiantly thrilled smile.

  “You have to tell me everything, Nora,” she said. “What’s it like out in the world these days? I haven’t left the theater in all this time.” She perched on a wooden chair and looked up at me, all eyelashes and hope. “At first I could watch the pictures to figure out what was going on, but when they stopped showing new ones I started to lose track o
f things a little.” A shadow passed across her face. “Sometimes I went away for I don’t know how long, and every time I came back things were so different.” She shook her head, shaking the momentary gloom away. “But now you’re here and I feel, well, not quite alive again, but not so much like a ghost anymore either.” She beamed. “So, tell me, what’s happened in the world? Is everything better? I know we won the war, but there was another one, wasn’t there? Tell me that was the last one. I hope everybody’s safe now and there’s peace and everybody has a job and there’s a chicken in every pot and everyone just learned to get along with each other. Is that what it’s like?” She gazed up at me.

  Was that the utopia a woman of the 1930s would have dreamed of? I must have thought so, because I was the one hallucinating her. Even so, I was not about to shatter the optimistic illusions of a figment of my own imagination. Instead, against my better judgment, I asked her a question of my own.

  “What do you mean when you said you went away? Where did you go?”

  “Oh.” She sat back, her features clouding. “Just…away. Nowhere. Or if I do go somewhere I don’t remember it when I get back here.”

  I sat on the couch opposite her, intrigued despite myself. Maybe, if she was some sort of avatar conjured up by my own imagination, I might be able to learn something from her—something my subconscious was trying to tell my conscious self. And maybe when I figured it out she would go away for good.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  She blinked. “Because I loved Eddie Wheeler more than was good for me.”

  It was not the answer I was looking for. I wanted to know what Trixie—figment of my deranged mind—needed me to realize. What I got was why Trixie—self-described ghost—was haunting the Palace.

  “Gee,” she said, her voice filled with wonder. “I never thought about it like that before. All these years, if I thought about why I was still here, I thought it was just because I missed my chance. But when you put me on the spot like that…” She blinked. “I think it really was because of Eddie.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Who’s Eddie?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “I was an usherette,” Trixie told me. “I got the job when I was still in school, and gee, it was swell. I got to see all the pictures before anyone else did. You should have seen the Palace back then—why, it was just about the most elegant spot in the world. Certainly the most elegant spot I’d ever seen, except for in the pictures.

  “All the kids from school came here, and I felt so grand in my uniform.” She straightened her spine and ran a hand along the line of gleaming buttons on her jacket. “I may not have been able to get a second look from Eddie Wheeler in Mrs. Brocken’s American History class, but boy, when I was here and all dressed up…” She nodded and gave me a look. “He noticed.”

  “I’ll bet he did,” I said. She was, after all, an imaginary bombshell in a gold-embroidered cap.

  She sighed deeply. “After I graduated they made me Head Usherette. There were eight of us then, so I had seven other girls under me. I never thought I’d have that kind of responsibility. But it was different, because the Head Usherette is the one who has to shush people and shine her flashlight on couples playing hanky-panky in the balcony.” She grimaced. “And sometimes Eddie Wheeler and his girl were one of those couples.”

  “Oh.” I thought I knew where this was going.

  She nodded. “Sure, he came to the pictures every Saturday night. He was a big man after graduation. He got a good job and rode the streetcar to the Financial District every day in a clean shirt and a tie.” She glanced at me. “And good jobs weren’t easy to come by then. We were in a Depression, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “The awful thing was, Eddie always had some girl on his arm. Different girls all the time.” She sighed. “But he still talked to me. Every Saturday night when he’d come in he’d say, ‘Hiya Trixie, how’s show business?’ and we’d talk a little, and sometimes he’d buy me some licorice or something, even though he had another girl with him. And sometimes they got pretty steamed, too.” She raised a penciled eyebrow.

  “You really liked him,” I said.

  “Boy, I sure did,” she sighed. “And he liked me too. I know he did. He’d have gotten those other girls out of his system after a while, and then he’d have realized I was right there, all the time. The one for him. Just like in the pictures.” She stared off into the distance, looking wistful and longing and tragic and brave.

  I knew she was just a hallucination, but she was kind of breaking my heart.

  “Then something happened,” I said.

  Her gaze returned to me. “We were showing The Awful Truth,” she said. “And Rivka—she was another usherette and my best friend in the world—she came and found me and said there was trouble in the balcony. So I went up and I saw that it was Eddie and some other guy, someone I didn’t know. This guy was in the front row, and Eddie and his girl were in the row behind him, and they were arguing. Not shouting or anything, but it was loud enough that all the other people around them were shushing them and looking angry. So I shine my light on them and tell them to quiet down or take it outside. Eddie looks really surprised, like he didn’t expect me to be like that, but what else could I do? They do quiet down, and I think everything’s going to be all right, and then Eddie’s girl says ‘Are you going to let him get away with talking to me like that?’ and the other guy turns around and says to Eddie ‘Your dime-a-dance gal has quite a mouth on her.’ And Eddie stands up and so does the other guy and I go over to stop things, because I can tell they’re both plenty mad, and then the other guy says something else that I don’t catch, but it must have been something terrible, because Eddie just hauls back and pops him one.”

  Trixie’s eyes were huge, but they weren’t seeing anything in the room around us. They were seeing a dark balcony more than eighty years ago.

  “The guy doesn’t see it coming. He falls back, and crashes into me, and I…I go right over the balcony, right over the side, and I drop my flashlight, and I remember thinking that it would break, and they’d take it out of my paycheck, and then before you know it I’m down in the seats below the balcony, looking back up at Eddie looking down on me. And for a minute that’s all I see, just Eddie, looking at me.”

  Trixie’s eyes fluttered. She seemed almost to flicker in front of me.

  “Then I hear the screaming, and I look around, and the lights have gone up and they stopped the show and everyone in the seats around me is yelling and pointing at me, or covering their eyes and looking away, and it takes me a minute.” She cleared her throat. “It takes me a minute to realize what they’re seeing. And it isn’t me standing there looking up at Eddie. It’s me…broken. It’s me laying across the seats and staring up at nothing because my eyes don’t work anymore. It’s me dead.”

  I held my breath.

  “And then everything happens at once. First, it’s the oddest thing. I see a gentleman on a horse, just as plain as day, come riding down the aisle. He’s all dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and wearing a top hat.” There was wonder in her voice. “And he’s looking right at me—not at the broken me, but at me—and he’s holding the lead to another horse, a beautiful white one, and he holds it out to me, like I’m supposed to get on the horse or something. And then I hear the yelling from the balcony, and I look up, and a couple of guys have grabbed Eddie, and they’re saying he pushed me. They’re saying he killed me and they’re calling for the cops.”

  She looked at me, desperation in her eyes.

  “And then the gentleman on the horse says ‘Beatrix, I’ve come for you,’ but I don’t want to go. They all think Eddie killed me and he didn’t, and I’ve got to make them understand that it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to hurt me. And then the gentleman says, ‘Beatrix, it’s time,’ but I barely even hear him. I run right past him up the aisle, and I
practically fly up the balcony stairs to Eddie, but nobody can see me. Nobody can hear me yelling that Eddie didn’t mean to hurt me. And then I look down, and the gentleman is looking up at me, and I can hear what he says, even over all the shouting, and he says ‘Beatrix, please dear, it’s now or never,’ and I can see he’s starting to fade a little, and I want to go to him, and I feel myself being sort of pulled to him, sort of floating, and then I hear Eddie yell ‘Trixie!’ and I stop myself. I stop myself from going to the gentleman and I look over at Eddie and he isn’t looking at me, he’s looking down at the broken thing and calling my name, and I go to him, but I can’t make him see, I can’t make him understand that I know he didn’t mean to hurt me.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “And when I looked for the gentleman again, he was gone.”

  She looked at me, and despite myself I wanted nothing more than to put my arms around this girl and comfort her.

  The instant I moved toward her she disappeared.

  Poof.

  Chapter 9

  Okay, I admit that after-midnight online searches for ghosts on blustery October nights were arguably not the best thing for my mental health, but I couldn’t not look up Trixie when I went home that night. And the sanity-restoring news was that I found her.

  Beatrix George was a real person.

  My first stop was the Wikipedia page for the Palace that I’d found before. I zoomed in as far as I could on the photo of the Depression-era staff. There were a couple dozen employees, all wearing uniforms that were heavy on buttons and braid. They stood in rows on the sweeping lobby stairs and faced the future like they had no idea what it was about to do to them. Trixie was in the third row from the top. That blond hair stood out like a beacon.

  Good. I had seen her photo before I conjured her up. Good.

  Next I tried to search the online archives of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner, but neither of them went back far enough. I could probably go to the library and scroll through microfilm, but in the end I didn’t need to. Because the guys who had made that TV show about the haunted Palace had done all the work for me.