by Dave Daren
Marvin smiled and continued to duck his head in doorways looking for the cast. Meanwhile, Landon turned to AJ and whispered, “This is it. This is my invitation into the Illuminati.”
I just rolled my eyes. Landon was home.
We reached the green room where the dancers were supposed to be congregating. Only one of them sat at a table, browsing her phone. I recognized her face, and I was glad to see she was fully clothed--but two hours of nakedness can’t be unseen.
“Have you seen Beowulf?” Marvin rapped on the open door frame, and she turned to look.
Beowulf? Seriously? Was that the guy’s name?
She frowned. “No, I haven’t. I don’t know where he might be.”
That was when we heard the scream. It was a high-pitched female scream, and it was coming from the other side of the hall. The woman in the green room and our group all rushed in the direction of the disturbance. Just outside a dressing room, a dancer collapsed into a corner and looked like she would be sick.
“Beowulf,” she said. “I can’t-I can’t--”
She slid to the floor and couldn’t continue the sentence
“Someone get her some water!” Vicki barked as she knelt beside the woman and tried to snap her out of her near catatonic state. Landon and AJ rushed to the task.
Marvin and I popped into the dressing room, and it didn’t take long for me to find out what was wrong with Beowulf.
“Oh, my god,” I said as I felt bile rise up in my throat.
In the months I had been back in Sedona, I had been around quite a bit, and I thought nothing could shock me now. I had had a tiger attack a vehicle I was in and then shot it with a tranq gun. I had been an unarmed man staring down a posse of cattle rustlers with guns and still came out on top. I had gotten into a car chase with Russian mobsters. I had been in a face off with a deranged drug dealer that had just shot up an outdoor event. But, this, this I wasn’t ready for.
Marvin got on the phone, and I just stared in shock. There it was. Beowulf laid on the floor, dead eyed and white, with a bloody dagger sticking straight up from his stomach.
Chapter 3
Within minutes, backstage at the PAH turned into a circus. Most of the city officials were still in the building after the performance, and everyone that was anyone in town had a stake in the murder scene, or at least they thought they did.
The police chief and his wife were the first to arrive, with an ambulance and several officers hot on their heels. Then I spotted Matt Chelmi from The Herald working to impress security with a press badge. It took him a while, but he finally got in. The mayor showed up with her husband, and half the city council with spouses and significant others. The whole Performance Arts League was already there.
Then there was a handful of Starbright people who ran around like crazy chickens as if somehow they could try hard enough and write a press release so great that it would bring Beowulf back to life, and exonerate the whole company from the messy scandal. Marvin was largely to blame for this.
“We’ve got the most talented media people in the state!” he roared at the group of cowering professionals standing in a crowd in a hallway. “I expect you to do more than figure it out! I expect you to make this fucking magic!”
The Sedona police chief, Hal Durant, was the only one that seemed to be doing anything productive.
“We need to get the building secure,” he barked at an officer. “No one leaves. And let’s get the scene closed off.”
Durant was a heavy set older man in a tuxedo and a black Stetson hat. He had wide blue eyes with an angry stare that trusted no one. His wife was a tall, slim, brunette in a sequined, ankle length dress, with a matching shawl and clutch.
“Yes, sir,” the officer replied and rushed off.
While the police scurried around, Marvin stayed with his phone attached to his ear, sometimes a phone on each ear.
“Who wasn’t doing their job in security?” he yelled. “I want to know who! I want someone’s head on a platter! ...What do you mean you don’t know? Well, you better find out! We’ve got a dead body here!”
“Well,” the head of the city council asked the mayor, “do we know anything?”
“Hey, Michael,” she sighed. “Yeah, all I’ve heard so far is that the director was murdered in a dressing room,” she said.
“Do we have a murder weapon?” he asked.
“I haven’t heard,” she said.
“Unbelievable. An unbelievable show of incompetence,” Marvin yelled, and everyone turned to stare as he threw a phone on a table. Another one in his pocket went off, and he answered it.
Leonard Colby, the police investigator showed up backstage. He was in full uniform, but his eyes were still puffy, like he had just woken up. He smiled at me and shook his head. He and I had gone to high school together and ran into each other now and then on cases.
“Trouble follows you,” he said.
I laughed. “I think I go around finding it.”
He chuckled. “I heard you were the first to see the body.”
I gestured toward the dancer who was now sitting on the floor with Vicki holding a tissue. “She found him first, but alerted us, and then Marvin and I saw the body.”
Leonard nodded taking it in so I continued. “He was lying face up on the floor in front of the couch with a dagger in the abdomen.”
He whipped out a memo pad and took notes over what I had just said.
“Any idea how long he had been lying there?” he asked.
“Couldn’t have been long,” I said. “The show had only ended less than ten minutes earlier.”
“Well,” AJ jumped in. “He wasn’t in the final curtain call.”
Leonard and I looked at her.
“I didn’t notice that,” I said.
I had been so bored with the end of the show, I hadn’t paid attention. She pulled out her phone and showed us a photo of the curtain call. She was right. He was missing from the lineup. Leonard took this down.
“How long between the end of the show and the curtain call?” he asked.
“Eight minutes,” she said as she studied Landon’s handheld camera.
“Eight?” Leonard asked. “That’s long for a break.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess they were trying to find him.”
“Seems like the dressing room would be the first place they would look,” he shrugged.
“Maybe it was locked?” she suggested.
He smiled at her. “I like the way you think. I’m going to do a sweep, you wait here. We’ll need to get official statements from all of you.”
He left, and Landon shook his head and laughed.
“This is great,” he laughed again. “Perfect. So awesome.”
“Awesome?” AJ said. “There’s a man dead, here. How is that awesome?”
He turned to her. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see, though?”
“No,” she said.
“No, the whole thing, it’s all---” he gestured haplessly as if we should all follow. “This is so great!”
He grabbed the camera out of AJ’s hand and flipped it toward himself. “I want to capture all of this.”
“You have any clues on the murderer?” I asked Landon.
He looked at us like we were crazy. “Well, yeah. You don’t see, it’s the… the… I mean, the whole thing… it’s clear.”
I shook my head. “Well, break it down for us, Landon, cause we’re not following.”
He looked disappointed at us, finally realizing we didn’t get “it,” whatever “it” was.
“Okay, so, it’s like, the agenda that they were on, right?” he eased himself into a chair, and then he noticed a whiteboard on the wall. He grabbed a marker. “Here. Let me show you. It’s like this.”
AJ and I stood in front of his whiteboard and listened, and I was getting a little impatient at the buildup
“So,” Landon wrote down ‘agenda’. “The agenda they were about has to do with freeing the peopl
e. Their whole thing, I don’t know if you caught it, is a straightforward anti-illuminati message. They had all of these symbols--the Alice in Wonderland thing, and the nuclear explosion wasn’t about a nuclear war. It was about End Game.”
I rubbed my face. I had fallen ass first into a Landon Rabbit Hole. I’m usually pretty good at catching them before they start. But I guess I was tired and after seeing a murdered body, my defenses were low.
“You think the Illuminati killed Beowulf?” Vicki asked as she joined the conversation.
“It’s the only real explanation,” Landon responded.
“What about a simple homicide?” she asked. “Those do happen.”
“No,” Landon said. “Not in this case. This is too high stakes.”
“High stakes?” I raised an eyebrow quizzically. “They were a small time dance group. How were the stakes high?”
“No,” Landon shook his head vehemently. “They were so much bigger than that. They were saying something. Trying to warn us about something, and they were taken out.”
“What were they supposed to have been saying?” Vicki asked. She positioned herself onto a table and crossed her legs and stroked her chin with concern. Concern for Landon’s sanity, I presumed.
“The nakedness wasn’t about this whole ‘emotional core,’” he said. “You see, Beowulf’s character was supposed to represent patriots like Ed Snowden, and Alex Jones, and how they are freeing the people, and how we can take back our free nature and not be enslaved by the one world government.”
Vicki and I exchanged glances, and I tried to formulate a polite response. But before I could say anything, Landon laughed and again shook his fist in victory, and his eyes burned bright with passion. “That’s what this whole thing was about. It was about freeing the people. So, that’s why…”
Landon looked around suspiciously, and satisfied that no one was listening he whispered. “That’s why Starbright brought them here.”
“To kill them?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Not just kill them. They could have done that a thousand different ways and much simpler. But to shut them down and make an example of them. You see, this is a ritualistic sacrifice. It’s a symbol. In the story, Beowulf defeats Grendel the monster. Good triumphs over evil, right? But in this case, it was evil who triumphs over good. It’s a symbol! They were getting too close, so they had to send a message to their enemies. It was a human sacrifice.”
He clasped his hands over his head and paced the floor in an adrenaline rush. I listened with morbid amusement.
“What were they getting too close to?” I asked.
“The truth,” he answered.
The truth, I assumed he meant, was that an evil government conspiracy controlled the human populace.
“But, again, why would the Illuminati bother with them?” I rephrased my question from earlier.
“I don’t know,” he said. He toyed with the marker in thought. “Maybe they knew something. Maybe they were about to expose something. Maybe they were getting too big. I think it would be awesome to find out what Beowulf knew. Or who he knew.”
His eyes got bright, and he shook his hands for emphasis at me.
“Dude, his phone,” he growled with emphasis. “His phone would have everything. Everyone he knew, who he was calling, who he was texting. You have to get that phone. You could break the Illuminati wide open here in Sedona. Can you imagine if we could take down the Clintons right here? What if we were the ones? What if we could single-handedly bring down the whole thing here? This is huge! You have to get that phone!”
I blinked and sighed. Although I didn’t disagree that Beowulf’s cell phone would hold important clues to his untimely demise, the thought of serving Bill Clinton with a subpoena suddenly made me very exhausted.
“Well, unfortunately, I don’t even have jurisdiction in this case,” I told Landon. “So, it’s a non-starter anyway.”
He clutched his hands over his head and paced some more and then grabbed the camera he had abandoned earlier. “I’ve got to document this. This is huge.”
It was then that he spotted Matt Chelmi and made a beeline for the news editor. They were out of my earshot, but I watched with amusement at Landon’s animated gestures and at Matt nodding politely.
Vicki brought me a foam coffee cup. “It was all they had back here.”
“So much for five star backstage hospitality,” I muttered as I examined the bland breakroom quality of this universal comfort drink. “How you holding up?” I asked Vicki.
“It scares me how well I am taking it,” she said. She grimaced as she sipped the cup and then abandoned it on a table.
“Well,” I sighed. “This isn’t our first go around with dead bodies.”
“I know,” she said. “Why is it every date we have ends with a murder?”
“We should stop going out,” I said. “It would be better for the population of Sedona.”
She laughed, and we collapsed into some second hand sofa sitting around that looked like it had once been a set piece. I took a sip from the cup and wrapped my arm around her. I noticed there was a wet spot and also noticed I had put my hand in wet green paint.
I moved my hand and watched the scene with Landon and Matt. I couldn’t tell if Matt’s continued interest had to do with the topic, or if he was just calculating potential page views.
“You know what Landon needs?” I told Vicki as I continued to watch the scene with him and Matt.
“What does he need?” she asked.
“He needs a political column,” I said.
She burst out into laughter. “I can see that. He might really get a following.”
“How’s the dancer?” I asked to change the subject.
“Her name was Chloe,” she said. “She’s stabilized. The cops brought some trauma counselors, so they’re talking to her. How much longer does Leonard want us to stay?”
Suddenly, Hal Durant’s voice resonated through the backstage area.
“We’re going to need to clear this space out,” he said. “Unless you are emergency personnel, or have been specifically asked to stay, we’re going to ask you to leave.”
There was a murmur through the gathered masses backstage. We had specifically been asked to stay, so we were unfortunately exempt from going home.
“Again,” he announced, “Essential personnel only please.”
The crowd started to disperse, and a few minutes later it was just our foursome and the cops. Landon and AJ came and sat with us on the couch. It was after midnight, and we were all in much more somber moods. We didn’t say much, the four of us.
“This reminds me of that day with...” Landon didn’t finish his sentence.
“Clifton,” AJ finished his sentence in a reverent whisper, and Landon nodded and stared off.
Clifton was his great-uncle that had died naturally a few months back. But, because of a twisted arrangement between Landon’s cousin, her meth head boyfriend, and a dirty city councilwoman, they covered up the death so they could keep stealing his money. But, our firm, with Landon’s outside help, uncovered the truth.
“Yeah,” I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Dealing with the circumstances surrounding someone’s death had become commonplace for us. This was the fourth one I had handled.
“Do you think we’ll ever get used to this?” I asked Vicki. “Death?”
She was leaning against me with her legs crossed, and my arm draped across the back of her neck. She absentmindedly watched her foot as she shook her leg back and forth. I remembered how just hours earlier my most pressing thought was how she looked in that dress and those shoes.
“I don’t know,” she played with my fingers wrapped around to the other side of her. “Does anyone? Should anyone?”
We let the thought hang in the air for a while. Finally, Leonard called us in for statements. We told him what we knew, one more time for the record.
“It was a good tip about Beowulf being a
bsent from the curtain call,” he told AJ. “And you were right. We confirmed with Chloe and the other dancer, Olivia, that they found the door locked at curtain call. Chloe said she had to get the key from the office because she was concerned about him.”
“Do you have any leads on the killer?” AJ asked.
A shadow passed across Leonard’s face, and he answered slowly, “We do.”
He made eye contact with me, and I knew what he was about to say.
“Julianna Spencer?” I asked incredulously.
“Yep,” he said. “She was there at curtain call, and now no one can find her.”
I remembered her being on stage, but I noticed that I hadn’t seen her yet backstage.
“You don’t really think--” I trailed off.
“Yeaah,” Leonard said and watched my face cautiously.
Julianna and I had had a complicated relationship back then. We were theatre compatriots, and we were never together. But we were... an undefinable something. Complicated. I raised my eyebrows as it occurred to me Leonard thought I might know where she was.
“I haven’t heard from her in years,” I told him. His face softened. I could get disbarred for lying about something like that, and he knew I wouldn’t risk losing my career by offering that information voluntarily.
“What’s the evidence against her?” I asked.
“The dagger was hers,” he said. “And there was a window left open, large enough to crawl out of. We’re trying to find her, see if we can question her. We’re going to work up a warrant in the morning.”
“Was there a motive?” AJ asked.
“They were heard to be in an argument minutes before the show,” Leonard said. “According to the other dancers, they were taking passive aggressive shots at each other on stage the whole performance.”
“What was the nature of the argument?” AJ asked.
“They didn’t know,” he said. “But it was pretty heated. Well, thanks for all your help on this. We’ll let you know if we have any more questions.”
“Please do, Leonard,” I told him.
Leonard nodded in that southern gentleman sort of dismissive way, and the four of us made our way out of the building through a side door.