I certainly did. “When was this?”
Elliot put his soup spoon on the dish and thought. “Possibly February.”
“Just a couple of months ago.” I paused. “Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought you said you hadn't spoken with Jerome in quite a while.”
“Did I? I don't remember that.” He smiled again and finished his lunch.
Was there anything else Elliot had neglected to mention about Jerome?
* * *
I finished the restaurant schedules and looked over tonight's rehearsal plan. My cell clanged.
“Hi, Carol,” I said.
“Dodie, Pauli just texted me. He said he would be a few minutes late.”
“No problem. I'll be here. Can you ask him to bring his camera?” I wanted to add a picture from the herb garden out back. Henry had an extensive array of herb potsârosemary, basil, thyme, chives, parsley, cilantroâon a patch of ground behind the restaurant. It had a kind of English garden, idyllic vibe and would give the Windjammer a country feel.
“Of course.”
“Will you be at rehearsal tonight? Lola mentioned something about hair and wigs,” I said.
“I have to work 'til seven but I could stop by afterward and pick up Pauli, too,” Carol said.
“Great. I'll feed him dinner.”
* * *
It was four o'clock by the time Pauli got out of school and picked up his digital camera. “Do you want to see your website,” Pauli asked eagerly, sucking back a Coke and barbecue potato chips.
“Sure. But let me get Henry.” Henry could use a pick-me-up, and the website might be just the medicine he needed.
We stood over his shoulder as Pauli unveiled the site like it was a gourmet meal. He was busting his buttons with delight. And he had every right. The Windjammer had never looked so good! The dining room appeared welcoming, the menus mouthwatering, and the pictures from the street made the place look almost stylish.
Eat your heart out, La Famiglia
, I thought. “This is wonderful, Pauli. Right Henry?”
“Yeah.” Henry looked pleased and scanned the pages as Pauli pointed out a few required bits of editing here and there.
Pauli's eyes glittered. “We really crushed it.”
He'd done a beautiful job with the website, and the Windjammer came off looking appetizing and classy.
“Let me know what I owe you, Pauli,” Henry said, patting the kid on the back before he headed off to the kitchen.
* * *
Pauli and I stood on the back stoop of the Windjammer. Next door was the ELT. Its loading dock was still framed in yellow crime scene tape. On either side of the dock was an extra-large garbage can with the debris of the scene shop: pieces of lumber, some old plaster board, paint buckets. Midway between the two cans were the faded remains of the white chalk outline where Jerome's body had lain.
I averted my eyes and forced myself to study the patch of ground that Henry used as his garden. The entire area was about six square yards, with a brick walkway surrounding a plot of land now overgrown with an assortment of weeds. The perimeter was outlined with a wire fence to discourage grazing critters. Henry had only recently moved his herb pots from the kitchen to outdoors; it would be a few weeks before he planted the herbs in the ground.
“Looks like Henry needs to do some work here,” I said and pulled a tall stalk of common pigweed that was threatening to take over. In the corners of the yard, dandelions poked their heads through cracks in the brick pathway. Altogether, the herb garden was not the most photogenic site.
Pauli gazed through the viewfinder as he meandered around the yard and checked out angles.
“Do you see any possibilities here?” I asked doubtfully.
“Uh-huh.” Pauli snapped photos, standing, lying down, facing the restaurant, and facing the alley behind the restaurant that served as a back entrance to a row of houses and businesses.
I walked around, trying to find different points of view. Following Pauli's lead, I sat on the ground looking up at a forty-five degree angle through the spiny stems of the rosemary plants. “Pauli, come look here. Maybe you can sharpen the rosemary in the foreground, and blur the back wall of the theater.”
Pauli duly marched over and plopped himself down beside me. He clicked off picture after picture, then scooted on his butt a few feet right and left to capture the lacy sprigs of the parsley and the rich green plumpness of the basil leaves.
“Awesome,” he said.
I leaned back on my arms and closed my eyes while he worked and absorbed the warmth of the late afternoon sun. My mind wandered to this morning's phone call with Marshall Wendover. What did he know that he wasn't saying?
“Uh, Dodie?”
I squinted. “Yeah?”
“I think I have enough.”
I brushed off my hands and shifted my weight forward to stand up. I looked up and over the garden to the ELT as I got to my feet. “I didn't notice that before,” I said.
“What?” Pauli was busy scrutinizing his handiwork.
“That window,” I said.
Pauli glanced up. “It's broken,” he said.
A second-floor window at the back of the theater had been punched out. All that remained was the serrated outline of a large hole. Reminded me of the library.
“I'll bet no one even knows about it. We've had some heavy rains lately. I hope nothing important got wet,” I said.
Pauli nodded to be polite and tucked his camera into its case.
“Thanks for your work on the website, Pauli.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“And thanks for your work on that other . . . project.”
Pauli grinned. “Piece of cake.”
Chapter 20
T
he atmosphere in the theater was much as Elliot had predicted: businesslike and professional, with one additional element. Uneasiness had permeated the rehearsal, and I could sense folks waiting for the other shoe to fall. Elliot was his charming, jovial self, Lola's smile flickered like a flashlight with a failing battery, and Walter was grim-faced. Nevertheless, the show had to go on.
Pauli, sprawled in the last row of the house with his laptop, edited the Windjammer web page while I doodled thoughts on theme food. When Lola took a break, I intended to ask her about the rooms upstairs and check out the broken window.
“Hi, Dodie,” Carol said, panting as she sank into a seat beside me.
“Long day?”
“I had four perms, five colors, and seven cuts. I was there by myself for four hours. Two of my girls are still out sick. I think something is going around,” she said as Pauli sneezed.
She raised her voice. “Pauli!”
He removed his iPod earbuds.
“Take the echinacea when you get home.”
He grunted an assent.
Walter called the cast to the stage, delivered some general notes about professionalism and learning lines, and continued to stage Act III, pushing actors around the set and having them mimic his line readings. Romeo was right about one thing. Walter was making the cast look like puppets.
Lola crept up the aisle and whispered, “Let's go to the dressing room. I have the makeup sheets and hair notes there.”
Carol pulled herself upright. “Pauli, stay here. We'll go home in a few minutes.”
He nodded.
We followed Lola down the aisle and onto the far right side of the stage, trying to create as little disturbance as possible. We needn't have worried. Walter was lying on the floor prostrate with grief as he demonstrated Juliet receiving the news that Romeo had killed Tybalt. The Nurseâthe bearer of the bad tidingsâwrung her hands and wailed. Edna was having a ball overacting and Lola grimaced. “Oh, brother.”
Carol opened a door at the back of the stage that led to a green room and two decent-sized dressing rooms, one for men and one for women. Lola unlocked the women's and flicked on the lights, a series of bulbs outlining mirrors mounted above a counter that could accommodate half a dozen actors. Across the room was a corresponding set-up.
Lola and Carol bent their heads over sketches of hairdos and makeup.
“What's upstairs?” I asked Lola. “I'd like to check out the rooms. Are they locked?”
“Why?”
“Today when Pauli and I were out in the herb garden behind the Windjammer I noticed that there's a broken window on the second floor. Somebody should check out any damage.”
“All right, there's not much up there. A prop shop, some storage, nothing else. I wonder how a window got broken.” Lola pulled out a key. “Here's the master,” she said. “It will lock or unlock all of the doors in the theater.”
“Thanks.”
“The light is at the top of the stairs,” Lola said.
“Got it.”
Lola and Carol resumed their conversation as I stepped into the hallway and faced a flight of stairs that led to the second floor. Though I'd been under the stage in the costume shop, I'd never been above the stage. The propped-open dressing room door sent a shaft of light onto the first few steps. At the top of the steps, a short hallway was flanked by doors at either end. I flipped on a wall switch and nothing happened. I tried a few more times for good luck, but again, nada. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and hit the flashlight app.
I stood still to get my bearings. The door to my left was marked S
TORAGE
, and when I unlocked the door and peeked in, I saw racks of costumes and dozens of boxes stacked floor to ceiling, but no broken window. The Windjammer would be to my right, I reasoned. I unlocked the door at the other end of the hall. It was unmarked but had to be the prop shop.
Inside the dusky interior, the room was spooky. An odd collection of objects used in previous ELT productions filled shelves: kitchen utensils, bottles of every shape and size, shelves of books, several dolls with scary, painted features, bouquets of fake flowers in dirty glass vases, and three cowboy hats. The room gave off the odor of mold, and the floor was grimy. It needed a good cleaning. A large center table, marked up and gouged, was obviously the construction area. On it were a hot glue gun, a stapler, and containers of fluids.
I directed my flashlight at the far wall and lit a small bank of windows; the middle one had a large hole in the center of the pane. I moved to the wall and was about to reach for the window frame when my foot crunched shards of glass. I had been thinking kids had thrown a baseball or a rock. But if someone had thrown an object at the glass from the outside, a substantial number of broken pieces should have been on the floor. But they weren't; there were only a few fragments.
Maybe the window was broken from the inside
, I thought.
I waved my light around the walls and floor more carefully to see what I might have missed on first entering. I bent down. There were lighter, cleaner square patches on the floor, the same size as the table legs. The table had been moved. Something was wrong here. The air was stifling and oppressive, and I felt like I couldn't get my breath. The room began to whirl and I dropped my cell. I put out a hand to steady myself, grabbing a shelf of books, and volumes tumbled down, clattering to the floor and creating a pile at my feet. I stooped to retrieve my flashlight. Burrowing my hand in the heap of books, I pulled a paperback from where it was hidden partway under the bottom shelf of the bookcase. I felt the hairs on my neck rise.
“Dodie, are you okay?” Lola said from the doorway.
She and Carol had heard the noise and came up to see me sitting on a mound of books, speechless. I held up the paperback: it was Cindy Collins's latest mystery,
Murder One and a Half.
Jerome had been reading it the night of auditions.
“What is it?” Carol chimed in.
I tried to fan the pages open, but they stuck together, held in place by a thick, hardened, dark splotch of something. My hands shook.
“Dodie, talk to me.” Lola entered the room and stood above me.
“I think I know where Jerome died.”
* * *
Theatrical scoop lights saturated the prop shop with a harsh brilliance to help the crime scene investigation unit do its work. Ralph was standing guard at the bottom of the stairs leading to the upper hallway, and Suki was assisting the CSI team.
I sat on the top step with a container of caramel macchiato that Carol insisted on buying for me. Downstairs, it was chaos, according to Lola. Once I had called Bill, Lola had stopped rehearsal, much to Walter's irritation, and informed everyone that the police would soon be at the theaterâagain. The actors had taken the occasion to cut out, and Penny was flapping her arms and nudging her glasses, trying to maintain order. Fat chance.
“You doing okay?” Bill asked me quietly.
I nodded and sipped my drink. “I think so.”
“That was some skillful detection out in the herb garden.”
“Just an accident,” I said.
He frowned. “Could have taken us months to discover this place.”
I had the feeling he was speaking about himself, maybe kicking himself for not having the entire theater thoroughly searched.
“Do you think there's other evidence in the room besides the book?” Unaccountably, I had begun to shiver despite the fact that the upstairs was warm. Bill gave me his jacket.
“Even though the murderer obviously cleaned up well, there are always microscopic traces of blood they miss. But the book is a major find.”
“What was the dark stuff on it?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“We'll take it to the lab to check it out.”
“Chief?” Suki poked her head out the prop shop door.
Bill followed Suki into the prop room. From below, I could see Lola moving up the steps.
“Oh, it's all too much,” she said and sat down beside me.
I put an arm around her shoulders. “At least I didn't have to watch rehearsal.” I tried to lighten the mood.
“Dodie, that's not even funny. Things are going haywire. With the police here and Walter freaking out and actors insecure, I'm thinking we should cancel the show.”
“You can't do that, can you?”
“The ELT has never done it, that's for certain.” She shook her head. “It could mean the end for Walter. That and the missing money.”
The missing money made me think about a thousand dollars, which made me think about the documents service. I whispered, “You know how I told you about Pauli and me in Jerome's email?”
“Yes. And the document company.”
“I made an appointment to go there.”
Lola grabbed my arm. “You did? When?”
“Tomorrow. Don't say anything about this to anyone. I haven't even told Bill.”
“Why not?”
“When I mentioned Jerome's email over dinner, Bill went a little crazy because of the hacking. Illegal, etc.”
“Oh. But maybe he'll think differently now that you've found out where Jerome was murdered.”
“Maybe. But I want to have something definite to give to him.”
“Mum's the word,” Lola said.
Bill walked into the hallway holding one of the containers that had been on the table, now in a plastic evidence bag. “Looks like a nail in the coffin. So to speak.” He held it up. “Liquid polyurethane.”
“Jerome used that to make props. You create a mold and then pour it in. It's like rubber,” Lola said. “He'd made firearms and statues and all kinds of things.”
“When the lab guys examine this, I have a feeling it's going to match resin that was on Jerome's trousers.”
“So he was definitely murdered here?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Bill said.
“And the broken window?”
“It's preliminary but the fracture pattern is consistent with gunshots. A weapon was probably fired in there. We'll check out the ground outside beneath the window.”
Carol took Pauli home and Lola and I hung around for another hour, waiting to see what other secrets the prop room revealed. But aside from numerous evidence bags with wood splinters from the floor and bookcase, and samples of dirt from various surfaces, there was little else to report.
I said good-night to Bill, and we trudged down the stairs. Walter was in his office, his head in his hands, bent over the prompt book. For once, Penny was not at his heels, waiting to do his bidding.
“Walter, I'm going,” Lola said simply.
Walter looked up, dark rings under his puffy eyes, his face slack and ashen.
Romeo and Juliet
âand possibly Jerome's murder investigationâhad taken a substantial toll on him. “Walter, are you all right?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Of course not,” he said and began the litany of rehearsal crises. Walter did have a lot on his mind, but much of it was his own doing. Not that I thought he was capable of seeing the truth.
“Are they finished upstairs?” he asked.
“Still at it,” I said. “Do you want me to hang around and lock up? I'm pretty wired and doubt I'll get to sleep anytime soon. Besides, tomorrow is my day off.”
Lola shot me a look of pure gratitude. “That would be thoughtful, wouldn't it, Walter?”
He nodded numbly.
“Come on, Walter, let's go home. Thanks, Dodie.” She smiled and held Walter's jacket for him. I watched the two of them walk out, Lola's arm around his shoulders.
I had two options. I could lounge inside the theater or sit in Walter's office, the holy of holies. He must have been really disconcerted about the evening's events to let me stay here alone. I gazed at the interior of the office. In addition to the props and costume pieces piled on each of the two desks, there were now a handful of foils leaning into one corner, a lady's hoop skirt in another, and three two-by-fours stacked up against the drawers of a filing cabinet. All of this
Romeo and Juliet
paraphernalia was more evidence that Walter was juggling too much, trying to negotiate rehearsal and scenery and costumes.
I sat at his desk and pulled some blank sheets of paper from a wire mesh basket marked S
CRAP
. Maybe I could analyze his budget and find money somewhere for a real balcony and Elizabethan underwear. I knew Walter was a little sloppy when it came to bookkeeping, but I'd seen him stash a file in the top drawer of the desk when he thought no one was watching.
I assumed the desk was locked, but no harm in giving it a try. To my amazement, the drawer opened, revealing a compartment filled to the brim with papers, old programs, pencil stubs, ball point pens that didn't write, and assorted rubber bands and paper clips stuck in place by a sticky brown gunk which I recognized as spilled coffee. On top of the debris, a manila folder was jammed into a thin slice of space. I withdrew the file and shut the drawer. It closed halfway, then refused to budge.
Geez.
A half-open drawer would be a dead giveaway that I had been snooping. I yanked and pushed and jiggled for a few minutes, then decided to start from scratch. I pulled the drawer out and off its tracks. When I'd removed the file initially, I must have inadvertently shoved something that slipped down behind the drawer.
I reached into the open space. My fingertips just barely touched an object, but it was too far back for me to grasp it. I got down on my knees and angled my body so that my arm extended another inch or two into the drawer space. Now I came in contact with the offending item. It was hard and smooth. Glass, I imagined. I cautiously traced its outline.