by Bruce Barber
Keyes heard the bells, and felt them as well - painfully, as if the bronze clappers were inside his own head.
Stratford’s real people, as opposed to its Theatre People, were behaving much as real people throughout North America behave on Sunday morning. Some were in church, on their way to church, or on their way home from church. Many more were worshipping at home before their television screens. These people worshipped strange and exotic gods: evangelical freaks, wise-cracking rabbits, athletes struggling with one another like mating mastodons, gabby matrons with flour-dusted forearms, demonic super machines – automobiles, trucks, boats, motorcycles, and even less logical devices.
A few people were out of doors. Some of these jogged. Others dreamily walked their dogs, or children, or both.
The coffee shops were busy as they always were on the morning after a theatre party. Relationships had dissolved or exploded during the double wake the night before, and subsequently new ones had been established. Some of the survivors of this great game of musical beds looked remarkably fit; others were less fortunate, and looked desperate, as if they knew terrible mistakes had been made. Nobody was very pretty. They had been pretty the night before, but on this Morning After they relaxed in their stubbly beards and ratty hair, doing nothing to disguise bleary eyes, lined and pouched faces, general grubbiness. They wore anything but what the pious world would consider “Sunday clothes.” They celebrated no cult on Sunday morning. Their rituals had been performed on Saturday night, first in the theatre, then on the dance floor, then in their several beds. They were the Bacchae, or what was left of them.
There was another reason why Keyes chose not to get up, a reason more difficult and more solemn than having a hangover. He had a new suspicion as to who had killed Alan Wales, had suspected it even when he went to bed the night before, but had not allowed himself to admit it.
It was because of this inadmissible knowledge that he had spent Saturday afternoon and some of Saturday night playing the part of the first of all detectives, Poe’s Auguste Dupin. He didn’t want to accept what his instinct had tried to tell him from the beginning. He would have liked to find another murderer for Alan Wales.
Unfair as it was of him, he would have preferred to convince himself that George Brocken was the killer. He didn’t know Brocken or particularly care for him, so he had imagined him in the role easily. But Brocken turned out to be only a meddler, and an artist of the theatre who valued effect above all else.
Keyes had never seriously suspected Kiri, either. She was too obviously Wales’ victim, and as he had found out, had been too much in love with him. Playing detective with her was largely the fault of her sequins, or her stars, as he preferred to think of them. No one with imagination could ignore the discovery of so many small silver stars in such ominous, or at least mysterious, places. And by investigating Kiri he had managed to avoid for a few more hours his inevitable confrontation with the real murderer.
It was already evening when Keyes finally got himself going. Betty’s house was silent and seemed empty. Most of the people who came to Stratford for Shakespeare were on their way home now. There were occasional performances on Sunday evening, but the theatres were closed on Mondays. Betty’s other guests, in any case, seemed to have fled.
“Betty,” Keyes called tentatively in the direction of the kitchen, “are you in there?”
Evidently she was not, so Keyes went in and helped himself to his landlady’s tea, minus her personal additives. He took the tea to the second floor balcony down the hall from his room, and sat sipping and smoking, screened from passersby on the street below by the leaves of the giant elm tree on the front lawn. The evening was mild and pleasantly calm. With the majority of the tourists gone, the stench of exhaust fumes had diminished and the carbon monoxide level was down.
He felt better when he had drunk a cup of black Ceylon, and better still after three of them. He starred a fourth, but realized that another cup of tea would, as his mother always said, leave his back teeth floating, and so he did not finish it.
“Why is it so difficult to be moderate in this town?” he grumbled at himself.
At last, he dressed and got himself in motion. As he walked along the riverbank, Keyes smelled flowers, or imagined that he did – the last of the roses, he supposed. He also smelled decay, the sweet odour of rotting leaves.
He crossed the river on the dam that contained Lake Victoria, then climbed the hill beyond it to the old house where Sandra lived. There were no lights burning in it, but that, he knew, didn’t mean that Sandra wasn’t home. She liked the twilight and often sat by her window looking out into it.
“L’heure bleue,” she had often called it in her precise but un-French French. “It’s my favourite time of day.”
Keyes climbed the steps to the front door. It stood a bit ajar.
Again he called out for somebody, as earlier he had called out for Betty.
“Hello,” he said. “Is anyone home?”
His voice echoed up the staircase, or some voice did, sounding almost too sepulchral to Keyes to be his own.
Something creaked a storey above him, then the house was silent again.
“Hello up there,” he called again. “Sandra, it’s me. It’s Claude.”
Again there was no reply. Even so Keyes sensed that he was not alone. He put his hand on the banister and started to climb in the darkness. The gentle spiral of the staircase made this easy enough even with so little light.
On the second floor landing something loomed up before him, loomed so abruptly that he almost lost his footing.
“What do you want?” a voice shrieked. “Sandra’s not here.”
The voice belonged to Grace Lockhardt. Keyes recognized it, but only barely. He had never heard it like this before, so shrill and overwrought, almost hysterical.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” he said as calmly as he could. After the fright Grace’s apparition had given him, he was feeling a bit unsteady. “Aren’t the lights working?”
“She’s not here. Go away.”
Keyes ran his hand along the wall, found a light switch, and pushed it. A sickly glimmer from a chandelier on the floor below transformed the darkness into still another version of twilight. Grace shrank back into the shadows of the second-storey hall. She was dressed in some sort of wrapper. Her hair was all about her face, a face streaked by tears. Her eyes were wide and ferocious. Keyes had seen cornered animals with that look in their eyes – cats and even smaller creatures. He knew better than to go any closer to her.
“I’ll scream,” Grace said in a strangled voice.
“I’m sorry, Grace. I just wanted to speak to Sandra. Can you tell me where she is?”
At last the frightened woman seemed to recognize Keyes. She straightened up and pawed her hair away from her face.
“Oh, it’s you,” she mumbled. “I thought..”
“What did you think?”
“I’ve been asleep... your voice; I thought you were Alan.”
“No, Grace, not Alan. Just Claude. Are you all right?”
“I suppose so... no – I’m frightened.”
“Frightened of what? Wales is dead.”
Grace shook her head desperately, then struggled again with her matted hair.
“It’s not that,” she said.
“What, then?”
“Sandra... she didn’t come home last night.”
There was raw anguish in the woman’s voice, in her face, in the way she held her hands and her body.
“But you were together at the party...” Keyes began.
“She sent me home... in a cab... said she’d be along soon. I waited all night.”
Grace stopped, gasping for air, then burst again into tears.
“I’m so afraid,” she groaned, as Keyes put his arm around her and led her into her apartment.
“What you need is a cup of tea,” he said. “I’ll make some.”
Keyes did so, then finally succeeded in calming Grace down by promising to go
off in search of Sandra.
“But where could she be?” Grace wailed as he was closing the door to her apartment behind him.
A good question, Keyes thought. Stratford was not a big town but it did have many hiding places, at least enough to obscure the many romances of its theatrical population, its tourists, who did not always arrive in legally married couples, and its randier locals.
“Sandra might be anywhere,” Keyes confided to a passing cat, as he left the house.
Then it occurred to him that she might even have left town. Trains ran to Toronto and all the Canadian cities beyond. There was a daily train south, which terminated in Chicago. There were buses, and taxicabs, and airport limousines, and planes that could be chartered out of the small private airport...
In the end, however, Keyes did not think that Sandra would run away. She had a contract, after all, and scheduled performances in the days to come. She was too loyal to her vocation and to the actors she worked with to walk out on a production. She was a trouper.
Again he crossed the river by the dam. The Avon’s waters at that point were very deep, deep enough to hide a body, surely, or several of them. There had been a case only a few seasons earlier – a suicide, or a murder perhaps... There had never been any very satisfactory explanations for that grim event.
“Not Sandra,” Keyes told himself. “She gets angry, furious, but she’s not a candidate for the Slough of Despond. She’s still in Stratford... somewhere.”
(4:6) Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Part II
Inevitably perhaps, he went to the Festival theatre. There was no performance that evening. The big building was nearly deserted, slumbering. Even so, there were lights at the stage entrance, and a man on duty there. He was knitting. He had always been knitting in those distant days when Keyes had first known him.
“Hello, Ivor,” Keyes said. “What are you making now?”
Ivor looked up, squinted, then smiled as he recognized Keyes.
“Evening, Claude,” he said. “Socks for the Red Cross. They always need them.”
Keyes mumbled something about supposing that they always did.
“You’re probably looking for Miss Edel,” the old man went on.
“I probably am,” Keyes agreed. “Has she been here?”
Ivor nodded. “All afternoon. She said she wanted to run some lines. Hasn’t even been out to eat.”
“I thought maybe she’d go out for something with me.”
“You never give up, do you? Still carrying a torch.”
“Can’t help it, Ivor.”
“Oh, I understand, all right... It wouldn’t be easy to get over a woman like that, I don’t imagine.”
Keyes said nothing. He had thought his torch-light safely hidden under a bushel. But if Ivor knew he was in love with Sandra, then everybody in the company probably knew as well.
“Want me to call her down?” the guard asked.
“No. I’ll go up. Even if she agrees to dinner, it’ll take her a while to get ready.”
Ivor laughed. “She’s always on, isn’t she, Claude?”
“Always,” Keyes agreed.
Sandra was not in her dressing room, and for a moment Keyes thought that Ivor might have made a mistake about her presence in the theatre. She might, he supposed, have left without being seen by Ivor.
He was about to go back downstairs when he heard a voice, only barely. But faint as it was, he knew the voice was Sandra’s. Like a dog homing on a familiar call, he followed the sound of her.
Sandra was downstage centre, on the great thrust-stage that jutted away from the proscenium out into the awesomely dark and empty house. There was no illumination for her except a work light, raw and harsh. She was wearing rehearsal clothes, a full black skirt over a black leotard, soft little boots, also black. She had some sort of a tropical shawl – a serape of many colours –
bundled about her torso. Her hair was bound up piratically by still more black. Keyes thought her
very beautiful.
In spite of what Ivor had promised, Sandra was not merely running lines. She was performing as if to a full house, and one that had in it somewhere not only royalty but a dozen of the world’s greatest producers.
“...the smell of blood still...” Keyes heard her say in the moment before she perceived him approaching from the shadowy wings.
“Hello, Claude,” she said. She was making nervous motions with her hands, a combination of her ring-twisting mannerism and of the guilty hand-washing from her performance of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene.
“I went to your flat. Grace is a mess.”
“Poor Grace. I just couldn’t deal with her last night. I couldn’t deal with anybody...”
“You’ve been here all that time?”
Sandra nodded. “I slept in my dressing room... but I didn’t sleep.”
Keyes put his hand out to her, but she turned and crossed to the far side of the stage.
“I’d rather not be touched,” she said. “Don’t take it personally.”
He laughed, briefly and without humour.
“It’s my great flaw,” he said. “I can’t help taking things personally.”
“Maybe that’s why you weren’t a very good actor,” Sandra said. There was a touch of tenderness in her voice, but only a touch.
“Maybe,” Keyes said. “You can talk to me, you know.”
Sandra looked at him oddly. “I am talking to you.”
“I mean about Alan.”
“What about Alan...?” She paused, then went on. “I see. About the murder, you mean.”
“Is there anything else to talk about on a night like this?”
“Perhaps not. Have you figured it out, then?”
Keyes hesitated. Something about her tone made him unsure of himself; she had always had a talent for making him feel insecure.
“You know who killed him?” Sandra continued, pressing him now, defying him, almost.
“I think I do.”
“And exactly what do you think?”
“I’ve seen you play Vittoria Corombona, Sandra,” Keyes said.
“Vittoria...?”
“Vittoria could have done it, and the part of you that is Vittoria... don’t ask me to make sense of it. I can’t.”
Sandra turned slowly and looked into the phantom audience.
“Yes,” she said solemnly. “Vittoria could have done it. But Claude, I’m not Vittoria, except when I’m playing her onstage. Another of the reasons you weren’t a very good actor, you know, is that you could never keep straight what was stage and what was life.”
Keyes said nothing to this, but as usual he had to admit that Sandra’s judgement of him was sound. Illusion? Reality? He had often been muddled by the distinction. Never, perhaps, more than now.
“No, Claude, I didn’t kill Alan.”
He accepted it at once, absolutely.
“I apologize, then,” he said. He meant it.
“But I know who did...”
Then, still gazing out into the house, Sandra told him about it, or told that invisible audience. An audience was the only judge, the only jury, that she had ever respected, and an audience, or the symbol of one, was what she now addressed.
Keyes listened, as he had always done, and wondered whether he would or should applaud this performance when Sandra had done with it.
She told about her romance with Wales, about the passion, the violence, the hatefully delicious humiliations. She told Keyes that her lover had come to her dressing room that night to make love to her, or, as he more precisely put it, to “have sex with her.”
“I probably would have,” she said, “if there had been only a bit more time, another few minutes.”
She told him that Wales had whispered to her in the wings just before intermission, demanding to see her.
“I thought I knew exactly what he wanted,” she said grimly. “And I was right, but he wanted it from that slut who strips.”
Keyes thought about in
terrupting to explain that the “slut who strips” wasn’t really a bad sort of a kid, but in the end he knew better than to try this.
“He also wanted to punish me,” Sandra added.
“Punish you? For what?”
“For not giving him what he wanted when he asked for it.”
And for being The Real Thing, Keyes thought. Frauds like Wales hated nothing so much as The Real Thing.
“He asked you to meet him on the Marquee deck,” Keyes guessed.
Sandra nodded. “There was no one there when I went out. I whispered his name a time or two, then I heard something at the far end of the deck – a sort of scuffling sound.”
“Down by that strange hole...”
“I went there – quietly, in case it was someone else.”
“But it wasn’t someone else,” Keyes supplied.
Sandra took a deep breath, then let the air out very slowly. She was making those motions with her hands again, wringing them as she had been when Keyes found her on the stage. He was suddenly afraid for her, as Grace had said she was, afraid she might faint or scream, or tear her hair out.
“Sandra...” he began.
But she wouldn’t let him speak.
“It was Alan all right,” she said, her voice grating with emotion, “and his whore. She was down on her knees in front of him, and she wasn’t tying his shoes.”
“You think he wanted you to see...?”
“I know he did.” She paused. “He wanted to see how I’d react. I suppose he expected me to cry, or plead, or something.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Of course I didn’t, but I reacted, all right and a bit more extravagantly than he probably expected. I went down the ramp, down the steps... I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself in that frock I was wearing.”
Keyes couldn’t help but laugh. He had seen Sandra angry and could imagine how awesome she must have been, in full costume and bearing down on Wales and Kiri – not much less awesome, he thought, than the Spanish Armada.
“The girl looked up from her work,” Sandra went on. “She didn’t say anything; I guess she’d been taught not to talk with her mouth full. Then she disappeared.”
“And Alan?”
Sandra’s great bosom heaved. “Alan... laughed at me.”
“Alan lived dangerously,” Keyes allowed.
“So I punched him in the mouth.” She said it simply, as if that had been her only choice of action.
Again Keyes felt the impulse to laugh, and might have done so uproariously over the whole farcical scene Sandra was describing, had it not ended in such a macabre fashion.
Sandra held up her hand. “I hit him hard. Broke the stone in my ring.”
“You broke a couple of his front teeth, too.”
“I have rarely enjoyed anything so much.”
Keyes thought for a moment. “But I still don’t understand...”
Sandra refused to be rushed. She had become the principal speaker in this scene, and was playing it accordingly.
“He didn’t laugh after that,” she said. “He whined a little about this face. Then he grabbed me. I’d had enough by then, and besides, I had a scene to do.”
“But he grabbed you.”
“Tore my frock,” Sandra said. “Ripped the shoulder...”
“You should have called for help.”
“I should have, but I didn’t, and then I couldn’t – Alan started choking me.”
Sandra put her hand to her throat and drew her collar