The Hamlet Trap (12 page)

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Authors: Kate Wilhelm

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: The Hamlet Trap
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“What did you read in the cards for Laura?”

She scooped ice cream from the bottom of her glass and looked at it. “I can't tell you. I never tell anyone what someone else's cards say, you know? It would make people nervous.”

“I know,” Constance said, sighing. “Do you use the Waite pack?

I used to read but I had to stop. People acted as if the cards told what would happen, not just say what might happen if they didn't do something. They simply didn't understand that they could change things by taking charge of their own lives.”

Sunshine was nodding. “I use that pack, too. That's what I always tell people. I don't believe in determinism, you know? It isn't like you don't have control over your own life. Laura said wrecking her car was a sign that fate was determined to keep her here. She thought the cards agreed with that. But she could have got on a bus. I came here on a bus. She could have walked. Ro walks everywhere practically. She could have ridden a bicycle like Ginnie. But she thought it was fate.” Sunshine leaned closer to Constance and said in a near whisper, “She was trying to make up her mind about something and wanted me to read for her. But I didn't have my cards. Ro looked in my bag and saw them one day and threw me out and said if I ever brought them back, he'd burn them. He would do that, you know? He thinks the actors and actresses are little children and he has to take care of them and the cards might upset them. So I didn't have them.”

“What day was that?” Constance asked. “Do you want more ice cream?”

She wanted more. They waited until she had a dish of lime sherbet—better for you than real ice cream, she told them. Constance repeated her question.

“The day Ro thought I spooked Ginnie again and threw me out. He's always throwing me out.”

“You mean the day Laura was killed?”

“She wasn't killed that day,” Sunshine said gently. “She was killed that night, you know?”

“So you met Laura somewhere after you left the theater. Where?”

“William said I could shop for some things that Shannon wanted and take them out to her and be back at the theater by six with his car. William's nice to me. Shannon is, too. I was going to the store and saw Laura and gave her a ride and she said she wanted me to read, that she had a question she needed answered, and I told her I didn't have the cards, but I'd go get them after I took the stuff out to Shannon. She got in the car and went with me. She waited in the car at the store and at Shannon's house. Then we went back to her house and I made her some more rose-hip tea because she had such a bad cold. She didn't like it, you know? Some people don't understand that sometimes the taste isn't the important thing. It would have helped her cold.”

Constance nodded thoughtfully, then said, “You haven't told any of this to the police, have you?”

“I don't talk to police. They didn't ask me. You know the criminal mind and the police mind are exactly the same? It's circumstances that turns one into a cop and the other into a crook, you know?”

“I've heard that before,” Constance said. She stifled a grunt when Charlie kicked her under the table. He looked sleepy-eyed, as if he might be dozing off and on. “How did Laura's question come out? I've never had any luck answering direct questions about what people should do.”

“I told her it doesn't work that way. She finally asked what would be the outcome if she did A. And then what the outcome would be if she did B. Both were very bad.”

“Did she seem to make a decision?”

Sunshine shook her head. “She kept going back and forth. Then she thought Gray was coming home and she didn't want to see him until she had more time to think. I told her if William was going to be busy until six, Gray would be, too, but she called him anyway and said she wasn't going to be home and he said he was eating with Eric and didn't care. And she said, I'll make you care, goddamn it,' but she already had hung up and he didn't hear her. That's when she decided, you know?”

“It sounds as if you may be right,” Constance agreed. “Did she stay there when you left?”

“Oh yes. She was looking for something to drink, something alcoholic, you know? I don't hang around with people who are poisoning themselves, so I left.”

“Sunshine, did she tell you anything to indicate what A and B were? It's very important.”

Sunshine shook her head. “Just A and then B. I told her it works better if I don't know. That way I can't read anything into the cards, have any real influence, you know?”

She talked on until Charlie and Constance had to leave for their appointment with Ro. As they put on their coats, Charlie said in his soft and easy voice, his working voice, Constance called it, “Sunshine, thank you for talking to us.”

“To her,” Sunshine said, nodding at Constance.

“Right. To her. What you've told Constance is vital evidence, Sunshine. You must realize that. I know you're a good woman, a gentle woman with a lot of compassion for other people, a lot of understanding. I wouldn't like to see someone like you hurt because you withheld evidence, but you could find yourself in trouble over it. You have to go to the police, tell them what you've told us—Constance.”

She shook her head, smiling gently. “I don't talk to police. I'll read your cards tonight. Good night.”

“Well,” Constance said after they were alone again. “Are you going to tell?”

“Eventually,” he said. “Eventually.”

FIFTEEN

Ro Cavanaugh's apartment
had enough art to qualify as a museum, Charlie thought when he and Constance were admitted. There was a spacious foyer with a carved Chinese cabinet that held ivory and jade carvings. Above that hung a Chinese silk embroidery of a dragon in a garden. Before they could examine the objects in the foyer, Ro was ushering them into the living room, and it, too, was filled with carvings, paintings, statuettes, plates. … A flawless glass-topped coffee table with beveled edges had a pedestal made from a bronze dolphin with a patina that suggested centuries in the sea. A hanging lamp was made of twisted translucent porcelain in pastel colors. There were floor-to-ceiling windows on both end walls that reached up two stories. A balcony on the second floor overlooked the living room; on the wall up there were oversize paintings—Mire, Kandinsky, some Charlie did not recognize. He took a deep breath. He was afraid to touch anything.

“This is very lovely,” Constance said, gazing from one object, one painting to another. The couch was covered with ivory velvet; the chairs with red-and-ivory-striped silk. At the far end of the room were a mammoth television and a ten-foot-long cabinet with film cassettes. Around the corner from it was another, equally long cabinet with a stereo, records, and rows of music tapes.

“I pick up things when I travel,” Ro said. “These are from Spain.” He went to a chest and lifted a carved bull, done in dense black wood. There were other pieces—a matador, a picador… . Above them were the two symbols of the theater—the laughing face and the crying face, done in gold, or at least gold-plated. “Those are from England,” he said, noticing where Constance was looking. “Irish gold. Now what can I give you to drink?”

“Anything except root beer,” Charlie said.

“Martini?”

“That would be very nice,” Charlie said.

As Ro started to cross the living room toward the kitchen, Constance asked, “Would you mind if I go up on the balcony and look at the paintings?”

He looked pleased. “Delighted. I'll do the mixing.”

She went up the broad stairs from the living room, pausing now and then for another look around; the perspective changed everything again and again. On the balcony she went from one painting to another. Ro and Charlie were out of sight in the kitchen. She opened one of the doors and glanced around the room—his bedroom apparently, as neat and decorated as the downstairs. She did not enter. At the other end of the balcony was the second door. When she reached it, she looked inside that room also. Smaller than the other one, a spare bedroom. The bed was piled high with boxes and books. She was almost relieved that the entire house was not as neat as a showplace. When Charlie and Ro returned to the living room she was standing before the Kandinsky, a dizzying melange of lines and colors.

“You like that one?” Ro asked from the living room. She nodded and started back clown the stairs. “I do, too. The windows are east and west exposures; it changes from morning to night with the different quality of light.” He handed Constance a glass when she joined them. “You might as well see the rest of my place.”

He took them back through the foyer into a hall that led to his study. On the interior wall there were shelves and a collection of clowns. “This is what Draker wanted to see,” Ro said, surveying them with a glum expression. They were molded, cast, carved from all kinds of materials—wood, bronze, silver, glass, china. Some were gaily painted, others not. All were beautiful. He pointed to one of the bronze ones. “That's a mate to the one at the theater, the one the murderer used.”

Charlie picked it up. It was very heavy, bronze, fifteen inches tall, a thin, lugubrious clown. A hell of a weapon, he thought, but said nothing.

The desk here had the same cluttered messy look as the one at the theater, with papers in precarious stacks, magazines, some of them open, books with slips of paper sticking out, a road atlas…

Ro led them through the kitchen to complete the tour. He dismissed it with a wave. “Hardly ever use it, except to mix drinks, or breakfast now and then. When Ginnie lived here, I had a housekeeper who cooked and I hated it. She liked things to be on time.” He smiled grimly. “I fired her the day Ginnie left for college.”

“It must have been hard, having a child on your hands suddenly. I'd be afraid to bring a child in here,” Constance said.

“Well, she wasn't a little child,” Ro reminded her. “She was thirteen. She was… disturbed. We went on a six-month trip and she seemed to mature a lot during that time. I understand that's common, a spurt in maturity about then. Anyway, she was a good kid. I increased my insurance coverage, just in case, but it wasn't necessary. She was a good kid always. And, of course, she was busy with high school and she took dancing lessons and voice, acting. For a time I thought she would become an actress, like her mother, but she decided backstage was more exciting finally. She's a gifted artist, could have gone into fine art, made it as a painter.”

He was keeping an eye on the time, Constance realized. Now he said, “I made a reservation for seven-thirty. It's about a five-minute walk, maybe ten at the most. I'd offer to drive you, but I seem to have a dead battery. Damn cars are nothing but trouble, I just leave it in the carport most of the time.”

“Well, we can drive, or we can walk. If it isn't raining,” Charlie said. “You always walk, even if it's raining?”

“Sure. Why not? Only exercise I get, and Ashland's only so big, you know. You can get anywhere in town in ten minutes. If it's raining, I carry an umbrella. Leave them all over town, of course, but umbrellas are cheaper than car repairs and gas.”

“Just wondering how you know you have a dead battery if you never use your car,” Charlie said easily.

Ro gave him a shrewd look. “They came looking the day they found Laura. Wanted me to back it out of the carport so they could look it over. They gave up on it right off. Dust all over the windshield and a dead battery. I could have let it roll out of the carport, but then I'd have had to push it back in and I said they needed a warrant or something before I'd do that. They never came back with anything official.”

He drained his glass and put it down. “You want another one? If we're late at the restaurant it won't matter. They'll hold my table all night if they have to. I'm one of their best customers.”

“I need something to eat fairly soon,” Constance said.

Ro started for the closet for coats and said abruptly, “That's why I didn't take it seriously, that Ginnie was in trouble with that pissant detective. They've been all over the place asking questions, going away again. Eric, William, Juanita, Gray, it's been the same with all of us. I assumed it was like that with Ginnie.”

Over dinner Ro talked about starting the theater thirty years ago. “I knew the minute I saw it that it was perfect,” he said. “Angus Bowmer had already started up the Oregon Shakespearean Festival again. It stopped during the war and then came back stronger than ever. I knew he was right, that you can make a small town into a great theater town, bring in people from all over the world. It's happened here. Over four million people have come to Ashland to see excellent theater. I decided not to touch Shakespeare, that's Bowmer's field, and that just left me everyone else. I wanted a repertory group from the start. I used to say it was all for Lucy, Ginnie's mother, but I was kidding about that. I wanted to run a good theater from the time I first saw a live production. A bunch of amateurs doing
The Cherry Orchard
. They were terrible, the production was lousy, the sets old bed sheets and boards on orange crates, and it was the most exciting thing I had ever seen in my life. I was ten.” He laughed at the memory. “Lucy wasn't even born yet and I already knew where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do.”

“There must be a theater gene in your family,” Constance said. “You, your sister, now Ginnie.”

“And my father,” he added. “He was in radio. He got me my first acting job on a radio station, back in the days of radio drama. A damn shame that died out. It was a hell of a lot better than anything on television. The sound effects, all those voices. You can make people believe anything with the right sound effects. A hell of a lot better. I made our mother see to it that Lucy got dancing lessons, voice, everything she needed to get a start. Our mother didn't like acting, theater, any of it. She was jealous, I guess, because that was all the rest of us cared about.”

He seemed to be looking into the past, a distant expression on his face, dreamy almost. “Lucy was the star in my first production,” he said. “She was four and a half. She cried because she was so scared of the audience at first, and then we couldn't drag her behind the curtain later. She wanted to keep bowing. She had learned how to blow kisses with both hands. The audience loved it.”

“How old were you?” Constance asked.

Again he smiled. “Sixteen. I wanted to take the show on the road. Mother wouldn't let me. All I asked for was five dollars. I was sure we'd make enough to keep it running forever.”

He needed little prompting to continue the story. He had gone to New York University and lived at home until his father left and the boyfriends started. By then he had had many jobs acting on radio and he thought his chances in Hollywood were too good to stay East; he had already made the move out of his mother's apartment and out of her life. He had thought then, and still thought, he admitted, that she had driven their father away.

“Then you and Lucy were reunited,” Constance said when he paused. “Was that on the West Coast?”

His face became guarded. “She came out here,” he said. “She didn't like living with our mother either by then.”

“How old was she?”

“Twelve. Just a kid. Like Ginnie was when she came to live with me.”

“Strange that Lucy didn't go to your father.”

He shook his head. “She had no reason to trust him. He'd run out on us as far as she was concerned. Besides, I'd given her money and told her that was what it was for. If she ever decided to leave, to take a train and come to me.”

Their waiter cleared the table, brought coffee. Charlie added sugar to his, and as he stirred it he said, “She owed you a lot. You provided for her, wanted to make her a star. Yet she moved away, took Ginnie away with her, and never even told Ginnie about you. Why was that, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“None of that has anything to do with what's happening here now.”

“Probably not, but if they try to prove that Ginnie's been disturbed in the past, they won't have to look much beyond the time she came to live with you. No secrets in a town this size, I understand. And that will send them into the more distant past. It'll all come out, whatever it all is. That's the trouble with murder, Mr. Cavanaugh. Nothing that was believed decently buried stays buried. It all gets dragged out and examined again.”

Ro drank coffee, his eyes narrowed; he signaled to the waiter. “Just bring the pot, will you, Bill?” He waited, then poured for himself. Finally he said, “I'll tell you about it, Mr. Meiklejohn, but if you bring it up when you don't have to, if you exploit it in any way, I'll come after you. And I'll get you.”

Charlie added more sugar to his coffee. “You seem to forget that I'm here to help her.”

“I haven't forgotten,” Ro said quietly. “I just want to make sure you don't forget that, either. This is ancient history, let's keep it like that. Lucy met Ginnie's father when she was in school. She was nineteen, he was twenty. Kids, both of them. Vic was crazy in love with her. She was a beautiful girl, talented, wonderful in every way. I didn't blame Vic for falling the way he did. I blamed him for insisting on marriage right off the bat. They were too young. His parents were well off, bound to raise a stink over it. I was on my way to Europe that spring. I'd already found Harley's Theater and knew it was going to be mine, but I had to see other theaters before I made a bid on it. Anyway, they decided to go, too, and the three of us were abroad for almost a year. By then Vic was twenty-one, no longer under his parents' control. They came to Ashland with me. Lucy was excited about the theater, as much as I was. Ginnie was born and then the fire between Vic and Lucy began to dim a little. He began to drink too much. I saw the same pattern there had been with my parents, one of them involved with theater, the other feeling neglected, left out.” He sighed. “I blame myself. We were too busy for me to see what I should have seen. I was older than they were, I should have done something about them. We were all too busy. Hanging scenery, painting, taking multiple parts, learning lines, doing everything. All of us.”

Constance wanted more coffee, but she was afraid that any motion might interrupt his flow. She waited. Charlie was unmoving; he looked sleepy.

“That day, the day Vic died,” Ro went on, “I saw Lucy in town. She had said something about going to the doctor and I knew Ginnie had been sick with a cold. I assumed she had taken Ginnie for that. She passed me in her car and I followed her out to their house, to see how Ginnie was. It wasn't far, ten minutes out of town. The roads were unpaved then. Lucy was driving so slowly that I caught up with her and was right behind her when we turned the last curve and saw the fire. The house was blazing. Lucy jumped out of her car and started to run toward the house. I caught her and threw her to the ground. She was screaming that Ginnie was in there, Vic was in there. I can't remember much of the next few minutes. I was inside, found Ginnie, still in her room, terrified. I wrapped a blanket around her and ran out with her. The blanket was on fire, my hair. Ginnie was screaming hysterically, saying over and over, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

His face looked twenty years older than it had minutes before. Constance now poured the coffee for them all. He lifted his cup and drank without bringing his gaze back from that distant place. “Someone slapped out the fire in my hair. Someone tried to put Ginnie in Lucy's arms and she refused to take her. She was fighting to get free, to run into the house. She was screaming at me, “Why did you bring her out and not Vic? Let me go get him out.”

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