Something Wicked (15 page)

Vince Ellis (perennial winner of the island’s annual triathalon) reached the stage door twenty-five yards in the lead. Annie was straining for breath, but she was right behind Max as he plunged up the steps. Eugene and Arthur were trailing far behind.

Screams, sobs, and a hoarse flurry of shouts echoed up the stairwell from the basement.

Thudding down the narrow steps, they found a knot of shaken onlookers clustered around the open door to the boiler room.

Annie craned to see past Arthur’s bony shoulders, then wished she hadn’t.

Shane’s pink cotton sports shirt bunched awkwardly across his chest, forming a depression. The blood trickling down from his pulpy face had collected in a dark, viscous pool. Once he had been handsome; now blood suffused the eye sockets, shards of bone poked whitely through torn flesh.

Annie drew her breath in sharply. “What did that to his face?” she asked, her voice high.

Arthur didn’t turn, but he answered her in a dull monotone. “Gunshot wounds. Several.” And Annie remembered he wore a Purple Heart and an ill-fitting uniform every year in the Fourth of July parade.

It was Janet who found Shane, and Janet who screamed, but the wrenching sobs came from Cindy, who knelt on the gritty cement floor, holding a flaccid hand tightly between her own.

“Shane. Shane!”

T.K. shouldered past Annie, then shoved Arthur and Hugo aside. “Get up, Cindy. Get up.” For once T.K. had
no eyes for his wife, who sagged against a dusty pillar, her hands at her throat, her face crumpled in horror. There was both anguish and fear in his voice as he reached down to grab his daughter’s arm.

“Leave me alone,” she cried, twisting free. Cindy turned a grief-distorted face toward her father. “Don’t touch me. You hated him. You know you did. Oh, leave me alone.”

T.K.’s jowly face turned crimson, and he yanked the girl to her feet and began to shake her harshly. “Shut up,” he shouted. “Shut your mouth.”

Janet flung herself toward them. “Stop it! Stop it, both of you!”

Vince Ellis, the freckles standing out against his face, watched them intently. T.K., his jaw quivering as he stared at his daughter, never even noticed.

From behind her, Annie heard Sam murmur, “Oh, God, I’m going to be sick,” and the sound of running footsteps.

Carla stood just inside the door to the boiler room, her arms folded tightly at the waist, her face a studied blank.

Hugo stared down at the body. “God, if the bastard doesn’t cause trouble one way, he does another. Call the police, someone.”

Eugene sighed and blinked his eyes owlishly. Annie wished he didn’t remind her so forcibly of Teddy Roosevelt, certainly not with the other Teddy so grotesquely dead. She moved so that Eugene wasn’t in her line of vision.

Henny Brawley’s face was pale beneath her makeup, but she stepped forward. Resolutely ignoring the corpse, she took charge. “Max, go upstairs and phone Chief Saulter. Burt, you and Arthur stand guard over the body. And everyone else”—she raised her voice slightly—“move now to the greenroom. We will await the police there.”

Annie wasn’t the least surprised when everyone did exactly as they had been instructed.

It was a dispirited group that waited, nervously avoiding each other’s eyes, talking in disjointed and unconnected phrases.

Annie dispensed coffee from the urn, and Henny passed out the coffee cups and soft drinks. Sam came in, his pudgy face slack and pale, and miserably accepted a soda.

The Hortons bunched together in a far corner, but they might as well have been poles apart for all the comfort they
offered each other. Janet ignored T.K.’s questioning looks, and Cindy’s back was turned to her parents.

Carla sat stiffly in a straight chair, her knees tight together, and stared at the door to the hall. Hugo lit an out-sized cigar and ignored all of them. Eugene paced up and down the middle of the room, his hands clasped behind his back.

As Max entered, everyone looked at him expectantly, then lifted their eyes to the ceiling as a siren sounded faintly.

Chief Saulter entered a few minutes later, accompanied by the two patrolmen who constituted his entire force. Saulter’s shirt was rumpled, and Annie knew he must have dressed hurriedly. He glanced around the greenroom appraisingly. “Everybody stay put, please. We’ll be talking to you as soon as possible.” Then he hurried on down the hall. Max moved to Annie’s side and took her hand. She gave his a grateful squeeze.

Arthur and Burt joined them in the greenroom. Voices murmured down the hall. Someone laughed. Flashes from a camera flickered steadily for some minutes. Janet whimpered once, eyes on the door. And they waited.

It was almost midnight when Saulter returned to the greenroom, rubbing the back of his neck wearily. He checked the notes in his hand. “Deceased identified as Shane Petree, forty-two, resident of Broward’s Rock.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, Harry, you found his wife yet?”

A muffled reply.

Saulter nodded. “Let me know when you do.” Then he turned back to them. “Murder by gunshot. No weapon found. Deceased shot several times in the face.”

A gasp from Janet. T.K.’s mouth tightened.

For the first time Annie thought about guns and shots—and noise. How had none of them heard a gun go off several times? She opened her mouth. Max gently covered it with his hand. She looked up at him sharply.

“Quiet, sweetie,” he cautioned softly. “Whatever it is, let it go for now.”

She subsided reluctantly.

Chief Saulter completed a slow survey of the waiting faces. “Who wanted to kill him?”

Nobody said a word.

Annie passed the marmalade to Max. “I’d say the chief didn’t make much progress last night.”

Max munched the marmaladed English muffin and waved away a dragonfly, who zoomed up, regrouped, and made another sortie. “On the contrary,” he said indistinctly, “he narrowed his circle of suspects comfortably.” Licking his fingers, he ticked off the names. “You. Me. Henny. Janet. Hugo. Arthur. Eugene. Sam. Burt. T.K. Cindy. And Carla.”

“That’s not narrow,” she objected. “That’s a herd.”

“Look at it this way. He’s cleared Vince Ellis and Ben Tippett. They were playing poker during the critical period. Ben lost forty-nine dollars to Vince. And Father Donaldson had left the theater and was watching TV in his living room with his wife. Also—and this is crucial for those of us on that list—the chief’s proved pretty conclusively that it had to be someone who was at the theater, because Cindy, who claims she perched on the rope platform except when it was time for a scene change, swears absolutely nobody came in or out of the stage door all night except one of us.”

“Isn’t Cindy a suspect?” Annie demanded.

“Oh, sure. But between Cindy and Carla, it’s pretty clear no strangers came in. And you would have noticed any new faces coming through the auditorium. Ditto Eugene. That leaves only the basement entrance to the boiler room, and that was bolted shut. So,” he pronounced with satisfaction, “you’ve got yourself a locked-room mystery, Annie Laurance.”

“Not in the classic sense. A locked-room mystery is when a victim is found murdered in a locked room and there’s no way anybody could have gotten in or out. Except, of course, there’s always a trick to it. Read Dr. Gideon Fell’s lecture in
The Hollow Man.
Then you’ll understand.”

Annie realized she had been singularly lacking in tact, when Max shot her a highly offended look.

“But I see your point,” she said quickly, trying to make amends. “Certainly the number of suspects seems to be limited to your list. But isn’t it possible that somebody could have snuck in through a broken window in the basement—”

“And somehow enticed Shane into the boiler room, shot
him, and escaped without anybody seeing or hearing him! Oh, fat chance.”

Diverted, she demanded, “That’s what I wanted to ask the chief last night. Why didn’t anyone hear the shots?”

“Maybe the gun had a silencer on it. Maybe the boiler room absorbs noise.” Max reached for another muffin. “And maybe somebody heard it and decided not to be a hero.”

Annie mulled that over. “You mean somebody might have heard and decided to keep quiet?”

“Sure.”

“But if they’d speak up now, it could help the investigation.”

Max reached across the table and patted her with a sticky hand. “My love, not everyone is imbued with your generally helpful attitude toward the authorities. And, of course,” he concluded, “the easiest assumption is that the sound didn’t carry from the boiler room—”

“Why the boiler room?” she puzzled. “And how did the murderer lure Shane there?”

He finished his second muffin, drained his coffee cup, and poured a refill for each of them from her pink porcelain jug. He looked on top of the world, well rested, devilishly handsome, and quite pleased with himself. He did love to be asked questions. Annie complimented herself on her thought-fulness in plying him with questions she could
easily
answer on her own. She merely liked to think out loud.

Max leaned back and pontificated. “Where was a tryst least likely to be interrupted? The boiler room, of course.” Warming to his theme, he elucidated odiously, “As is obvious to even the meanest intelligence” (Did he think he was Poirot talking to Chief Inspector Japp?), “no one had any business in the boiler room, so where could there be a safer place to plan a murder? As for enticing Shane into the boiler room, that’s easy,” he declared with maddening confidence. “Say it’s one of us—and you’re going to have to give in on that point, sweetie—all the killer had to do was lurk downstairs ’til Shane came out of the greenroom, then give him a wave, and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a phone call and there’s an extension down this way.’ Hell, Shane wouldn’t know where the phones are. And why should he be suspicious? So, the
killer leads him like a lamb into the boiler room, shuts the door, then pulls out the gun, and lets him have it. Simple.”

Annie still resisted the closed-circle theory. “Maybe Shane
met
somebody in the boiler room, unbolted the door, and let the person in.”

“Who bolted the door shut?”

“The murderer,” Annie said triumphantly.

“And how,” Max asked sweetly, “did our murderer exit?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. An unknown killer would then have had to negotiate the cellar corridor, go up the stairs, and leave through the stage door. Or, more impossibly yet, down the stage steps into the auditorium, up an aisle and out through the front foyer, without having been seen by either Cindy or Carla, who were backstage throughout the rehearsal except for brief trips downstairs, or any of the actors going on and off stage, or Annie and Eugene who spent most of the evening in the front seats.

If it wasn’t a genuine locked-room mystery, it was a close relative. Like the passengers in
Death in the Clouds,
they knew who the suspects were. It was a chilling thought.

“But that’s pretty dumb on the murderer’s part,” she said tartly.

“Why so?”

“Why do it at a rehearsal? Why not wait until opening night? Then there would be ushers, ticket takers, all kinds of extra people around. Why do it when it’s limited to”—she flipped up her fingers—“twelve people. Ten, not counting you and me.” She tilted her head.
“Surely
Chief Saulter’s not counting us.”

He slouched back in the comfortable plastic webbed chair. “On the theory that once innocent, forever innocent? I’m afraid I wouldn’t bank on that.”

“But he knows us.”

Max chuckled at her outrage. “Saulter’d be accused of discrimination if he excluded us on a personal basis. Don’t count us out, Annie.”

“So we’re murder suspects. Again.” She shrugged. “Well, the chief may have to consider us formally, but he
knows
we’re okay. I’m not worried.” But Max had a faraway,
thoughtful look on his face. “Hey, you’re not worried, are you?”

“Huh?”

“About the chief suspecting us?”

“Oh, no. No, I was just thinking about what you said. About the murder occurring at the rehearsal. That’s important, Annie. Don’t you see what the murder accomplished?”

“It’s put twelve people in a fix.”

“The play. It won’t open.”

She hadn’t given a thought to the fate of the play. “Oh, sure. I guess that goes without saying.”

“Do you suppose Shane was killed to keep the play from opening?” he asked slowly.

She looked at him in horror. “That’s too crazy. No one would murder someone just to keep the play off the stage, or to ruin the players’ season.”

“But the sabotage happened. Why? It can’t be separate from the murder.”

“Sure it can,” she disagreed. “The sabotage—that was little stuff. Pranks. All except Freddy. And even so, killing a cat is far short of murder. No. I think it’s coincidence.”

“Coincidence? Oh, come on, Annie.”

“Besides, we don’t even know for sure whether the play will be called off. I mean, Eugene could play Teddy and Burt could do Officer O’Hara and we could make up Sam so that he could be Mr. Witherspoon, too.”

Even as she spoke, a dreadful thought curled in the recesses of her mind. Could this just possibly be what Eugene would have assumed? He’d wanted that role so badly…. But that was too crazy, too. Eugene might want to be Teddy, he might be the world’s very best Teddy, but he wouldn’t kill a man over a role in a play. Would he?