Murder & Sullivan Read online

  I am the spectre of the late

  Sir Roderic Murgatroyd,”

  Who comes to warn thee that thy fate

  Thou canst not avoid.

  “Alas, poor ghost!” answered Robin.

  Right, Joan thought. But it’s going to be all right, as long as David doesn’t suddenly wake up and start singing “Beware!”

  He didn’t. The understudy made it through “When the Night Wind Howls” as if he’d been rehearsing with them all along. His voice was stronger and better trained than David’s. Joan wondered why he hadn’t been given the part in the first place. Political pressure?

  When the long dialogue began and she was free to watch, she could see how Alex and John had known that David was out like a light even before he should have sung—his head was on his chest.

  By now the word had spread throughout the orchestra, with those who could see whispering into the ears of the ones who couldn’t. Her hands folded, Alex was shaking her head.

  When Robin refused to carry off a lady, as his ghostly ancestors commanded, and began to cry out in pain, Joan thought surely David would wake up, but he didn’t move. Could it be that he was awake now, but had decided not to disrupt the operetta? Then Robin yielded, and the ghosts sang,

  We want your pardon, ere we go,

  For having agonized you so.

  Finally, singing softly, they returned to their frames.

  Painted emblems of a race,

  All accurst in days of yore,

  Each to his accustomed place

  Steps unwillingly once more!

  The tremolo swelled to Alex’s cutoff. Knowing that the following dialogue would be brief, Joan reached forward promptly to turn the page to the next number. But instead of old Adam’s line, she heard a loud thud and shocked gasps. Then a scream.

  “Oh, my God!” John whispered. Alex was staring at the stage in horror. The ghosts were scrambling back down out of the frames—except for David, whose frame was empty at last.

  Jumping to her feet and scarcely noticing the resulting twinge in her ankle, Joan saw the costumed body lying on the stage and the dagger sticking out of its back.

  Behind her a child’s voice cried, “Get up, Daddy!”

  Laura. Dear God.

  “Curtain! Curtain!” someone yelled, and it closed with a rush. Now everyone was talking at once, in the orchestra and in the audience. Trapped in the pit, Joan felt helpless.

  Fred, where are you?

  Then she saw him running down the aisle. Ignoring the stairs, he vaulted onto the stage behind her and disappeared behind the curtain.

  10

  Pallid ghosts,

  Arise in hosts,

  And lend me all your aid!

  —MR. WELLS, The Sorcerer

  The body was surrounded by costumed ghosts, a weeping woman wearing sedate Victorian black, and a man in jeans. Fred pushed his way through, repeating “Police” and “Back off!” in a louder voice than he would have chosen had the noise level been lower. A white-haired man in black kneeling beside the body looked up, his stage makeup grotesque at close range.

  “He’s dead.” The man spoke calmly.

  “Don’t touch him,” Fred said. It was too much to expect, but at least the weapon was still in place. He bent to feel the carotid, just in case.

  “I had to establish that there was no pulse.” The man stood up. “I didn’t let anyone else touch him.”

  “Who are you?” Fred straightened.

  “Dr. Cutts.”

  Fred had heard of Cutts, a G.P. of the old school. “Lieutenant Lundquist, Oliver Police. Thank you, Doctor.”

  “Lieutenant, thank God!” cried a man in a sailor suit. Fred recognized Richard, the Jolly Jack Tar of the operetta. “This is terrible!”

  “This is murder,” Fred said quietly. The noise level had dropped, at least behind the curtain. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am,” said the sailor. “I’m the director. Duane Biggy.”

  “Mr. Biggy. Is there a phone to call 911?”

  “We did call. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “No. I happened to be in the audience.”

  “Oh, my God! The audience!” Biggy lost his directorial cool. “What do we do about them?”

  “They all saw it. Tell them a doctor and the police are here, and ask them to be patient and stay in their seats for a few minutes.” Those who haven’t already left by now, Fred thought.

  Biggy took a deep breath and stepped outside the curtain. The buzz in the auditorium died down as he made his announcement, adding on his own hook that all tickets would be honored for a future performance. The orchestra struck up the overture again, and Biggy returned.

  “Who is he?” Fred asked. From the back, and in costume, the body could be any dark-haired white man of medium build.

  “David Putnam,” Biggy answered, and he looked toward the woman in black.

  “Judge Putnam?” God help us all.

  “I’m his wife.” The woman in black choked back a sob.

  His widow, Fred thought. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  “The children!” she said, and her sobs stopped. Fred waited. “The children are out there—our little girl and our son. They must have seen it!”

  “And you?”

  “I didn’t see anything. I was waiting backstage to come on after the next song. Our older daughter is still downstairs. Lieutenant, I need to find my children!”

  “Yes.” Fred turned to Biggy. “Is there someplace private for Mrs. Putnam and her children to wait? I’ll want to talk to them.”

  “There’s an upstairs dressing room,” the director said.

  “My nurse is in the cast,” Dr. Cutts murmured. “Could we ask her to stay with Ellen and the children?”

  “Of course,” Fred said. “Where are the others?” Why haven’t they all come running?

  The doctor rolled his eyes toward Biggy.

  “I insisted that they all stay downstairs until just before their next scene,” Biggy said. “That’s why only Ellen and Bob, here, saw it from the wings.”

  “Bob?”

  “Bob Cutts.” Dr. Bob Cutts, Ellen Putnam.

  “So right now no one should be backstage?”

  “Only the crew.” Biggy pointed to the man wearing jeans.

  “Good. I don’t want anyone going back there until we can check it out.” No siren yet—where were they? “And as far as the rest of the cast knows, the performance is continuing?”

  Biggy nodded. “By now they must be wondering why they haven’t been called.”

  “Suppose you tell them Mr. Putnam’s been injured and ask them to wait down there. Remind them that Dr. Cutts is here and ask the nurse to come with you—you know who she is?” Biggy nodded. “And the Putnam child.”

  “Amy,” Ellen Putnam said. “Her name is Amy. Duane, don’t tell her he’s—” She couldn’t say it.

  “Mrs. Putnam, you go with him,” Fred said. “We’ll bring your other children to you.” And you can all watch each other until I have some backup, he told them silently.

  “Don’t let them see,” she said. Too late, he thought. Then he remembered what the little girl had called out. Maybe she didn’t realize yet what had happened.

  “We won’t,” he promised, wondering again when “we” would arrive. When she left the stage in the direction of the stairs, he heard a little voice.

  “Mama? Mama!” Turning, Fred saw Mrs. Putnam united with her son and small daughter. Behind them, two uniformed officers entered by the stage door. Good.

  He filled them in quickly and left one to preserve the crime scene onstage while the other went to radio for help and report his presence. Now, finally, he could look at what had been behind David Putnam while he was so vulnerable in that picture frame.

  Pausing a moment to let his eyes adapt to the dim light backstage, he recognized the scenery from the first act. A few folding chairs were scattered around. To his right, or stage left, were
a clothes rack with a couple of costumes hanging on it and a box of theatrical props. Was that where the dagger had come from? The back wall was plain brick—fire brick, he hoped, looking at the flammable sets and curtains. He crossed behind the stage. Against the wall near the corridor that led to the stairs he saw pulleys for the curtains. Overhead were lights, more pulleys, and other things he didn’t have names for.

  He came back to the picture frames. Putnam’s frame was stage left, the one farthest from the stairs. Was there any other entrance? He’d have to ask, but it looked as if whoever stabbed him had to cross behind all the other frames to reach him. What had the other ghosts noticed behind them? Probably not much, once they were facing forward. His own loafers made little sound on the wooden floor.

  He looked at the steps without expecting to see anything—no blood had leaked around the dagger onto Putnam’s dark coat. There couldn’t have been much of a struggle with all those people watching and listening, or he’d have heard. He himself didn’t remember seeing any movement during the first minutes of the second act, before the ghostly portraits came to life. Nor had he noticed the one who stayed in his frame—until he fell. He’d have to ask the other actors, who would have known what to expect.

  “Fred?” A familiar voice came from the stairs. Peering into the gloom, he saw a middle-aged man in a sport coat and wire rims, and smiled.

  “Over here, Johnny.” Good with crowds, slow to panic, Sergeant Ketcham had a calming influence in situations like this one—if there was such a thing as a situation quite like this one.

  “They said that you were back here.” Ketcham crossed behind the frames to where Fred stood. “And that the victim’s Judge Putnam.”

  “Of all people, and we’ve got the cast and a whole audience full of witnesses, though we probably won’t get much from that bunch. I was in the middle of them, and I didn’t notice a thing.” He shook his head.

  Ketcham nodded. “We’re calling in off-duty guys to help. And you caught this one.”

  Fred nodded. He already felt relieved, just knowing that he’d be working with Ketcham. Quickly, he told the sergeant what little he knew.

  “So,” Ketcham said, “unless someone from outside sneaked in, it looks like one of the people on the stage now.”

  “An outsider would stick out back here, with Biggy even keeping the cast away.”

  “Do we know for sure that no one slipped up here long enough to do in the judge and then disappeared back down there?”

  “Could be.” Fred pictured the scene out front. “Or it could even be an orchestra member, if it happened before the pit went up. They’re pretty well trapped in there, once it rises. We need to establish when Putnam was last seen alive.”

  They looked at each other and headed for the stage, where the photographer and evidence techs were already at work. Dr. Henshaw, the coroner, hadn’t arrived yet; the body still lay as it had fallen, facedown, crumpled, legs curled. The black handle protruded between the shoulders of the frock coat at an angle that suggested an assailant shorter than the victim—unless, Fred thought suddenly, he’d been standing on a lower step. In that case, it meant a tall man—or a woman who would stand out in a crowd. He put Putnam at about five ten.

  Without discussion, Ketcham took over calming the agitated cast and crew, assuring them that with their help, the police would do their best to find the killer, and that they would be detained for as short a time as possible. He stepped outside the curtain, where Fred heard him telling the audience and orchestra that Putnam had indeed been murdered. They were free to leave, he said, but he asked for voluntary statements from anyone who had noticed anything unusual before Putnam fell to the stage, or who had talked to him between acts, or who had any other information that might help the police. Officers would be waiting at the exits to take their statements.

  Fred sent Officer Jill Root, a young woman with a good dose of common sense, to stay with Mrs. Putnam.

  “Keep your ears open. We’ll be there before long,” he promised. Ketcham returned, and the two of them took the cast members and the others backstage, out of sight of the body, but in view of what had to be the murder scene itself.

  “We need your help,” Fred told them. “Were you all backstage before the second act began?” Mistake. Everybody started talking at once. He spread his palms out toward them. “Whoa. One at a time. Mr. Biggy, can you answer that?”

  “Yes, this group was here. After Robin and old Adam—that’s Steve here, and Ed over there—” He waved, and Fred recognized the tall young redhead and the short servant with big ears from the operetta. “After they opened the act, I brought up Esther Ooley, our Rose Maybud, and the chorus.”

  “They were downstairs until the end of the first scene?” So it wasn’t a mob scene at first, either.

  “That’s right. So were Ellen and Bob.” Mrs. Putnam and the doctor. “Their little dance comes after the song Steve and Bob sing when the ghosts go back to their frames—but we didn’t get that far.”

  Reaching into his breast pocket for his ever-present notebook, Fred’s fingers touched the program he had folded and stashed there. Good. Between the cast list and the synopsis, he could keep track of who was who and where, at least the ones who had been onstage.

  “And when did you last see Putnam alive?”

  “He passed me on the stairs. I didn’t talk to him after that. I checked that all the ghosts had climbed into their frames and then went downstairs.”

  “Did anyone actually see Judge Putnam climb into his?”

  “I did,” said a blond ghost whose muscles were visible through a double-breasted cutaway and canary-yellow waistcoat.

  “Your name?”

  “Chris Eads. My frame’s next to his. We talked some.” His voice was pleasant enough, but it betrayed him as Hoosier rather than the English lord he was portraying.

  “Did you see anyone come past your frame?”

  “Just him.”

  “What did you notice after he was in his?”

  “Nothing. You don’t see much, once you’re in that thing.”

  “Anybody else?” No response. He looked at the stage crew, who stood apart from the actors. “You guys see anything at all behind Putnam? A person who shouldn’t have been there? Anyone doing anything out of the ordinary?” They all shook their heads. He turned back to Eads. “When did he quit talking?”

  “He didn’t say much. Nothing after I climbed up. He never did. Not that I could have heard him. You don’t hear each other in those things, either.”

  “Is that true?” Fred asked the others. There were general murmurs of assent.

  “It made the ensemble singing difficult,” said a tall, dark, good-looking, middle-aged man in a blue satin costume that made him vaguely resemble Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. “We really had to watch the conductor to stay together before we climbed down out of the picture frames to the stage.”

  “So even if he made some kind of noise, you might not have heard him?” Fred asked.

  “Might not,” Eads said. “For a while there it was pretty noisy.”

  “Or he could have been alive until right before he fell?” By then only the crew, the doctor, and the wife would have been backstage—and Biggy.

  “He was long gone by then,” said Blue Boy. “I had to sing his solo.”

  “You kept going after you knew he was dead?” Fred thought that was carrying “the show must go on” too far.

  “We thought he was asleep,” said a bewigged ghost wearing a long brown velvet coat over white satin. Asleep? In a performance? Fred raised an eyebrow.

  “Like the other night,” said a balding ghost with a mustache and trim beard, wearing doublet and hose, a ruff around his neck, and a sword at his side. “He fell asleep in rehearsal.”

  “It’s true. That’s why I had Pete ready to take over with no warning,” Biggy put in. “I heard his voice when it should have been David’s, and I was sure David had done it again.”

  “You’re Pet
e?” Fred turned to the ghost in blue, who nodded.

  “Pete Wylie.”

  “When did you notice, Mr. Wylie?”

  “I had my eye on him when we started marching around. He was supposed to stay up there when the rest of us came down, but his chin was on his chest. It was still there when his cue came, so I took over. Once I started singing, I just hoped he wouldn’t wake up all of a sudden.”

  “Yeah, well, you got your wish,” Fred said, and was sorry he had. He tried to remember what had happened before the ghosts had started marching around, but it was hopeless.

  “Did anybody notice him before that?” Ketcham asked.

  “The frames are too deep,” said a blond man of twenty-five or thirty, about five ten, wearing a loose robe tied with a sash. “Like blinders on a horse. I wish now we hadn’t built them that way.”

  “You are …?”

  “Zach Yoder. I helped with the sets.”

  “I didn’t notice him either,” said young Robin. Fred pulled the program out and checked it. His name was Steve Dolan, and he looked young enough to be carded at a bar. “I was talking to the portraits, but I didn’t actually see them—I was concentrating on that speech about calling welcome Death to free you from your cloying guiltiness. That’s a real bear.”

  “Before that, I was onstage with Esther—Rose Maybud—and the chorus,” Biggy said. “But I didn’t see him; we had to watch the conductor. And nobody else mentioned him when we went off.”

  “And before that, it was Steve and me,” said the man Fred had recognized as old Adam. Edward Kleinholtz, according to the program. His lines and wrinkles had been painted onto a baby face—impossible to guess his age. “We opened the second act. We were running over our lines together while they were climbing into their frames.”

  “What about the weapon?” Ketcham asked. “Is it part of the play?”

  They all looked at Biggy this time. He gulped.

  “It looks like the little one Liz threatens Steve with at first.”

  “At first?”

  “First she threatens me with the little one,” Steve said. “When I say, ‘And this is what it is to embark upon a career of unlicensed pleasure!’ she throws it at me and challenges me to take her on—only she’s got a big one.”