A Midsummer Night's Scream Part 11

Mel was nodding.

"You're not surprised?" Officer Jones asked.

"Let me tell you what I found in his room," Mel said. "He had a huge number of shoes in one of those hanging things on the back of his closet door. I picked out a loafer that looked as if it'd never been worn, and out fell a tidy roll of hundred-dollar bills. Same thing under his socks and T-s.h.i.+rts. That's why I had Miss Turner sign that statement that she'd given me permission to look over his bedroom."

"You couldn't have surprised me more if you'd kicked me in the head," Jones exclaimed. "They seem to live so frugally and modestly in that old house. It's the original wallpaper and carpeting, it looks like to me. Do you think all the shoes were full of cash?"

"I didn't think I should look further without a warrant. Miss Turner isn't going to like that."

"I think Miss Turner is telling us what Sven tells her," Officer Jones said. "And it's not the truth."

"I agree. If I hadn't heard from his boss and Miss Turner how shy and antisocial he is, I'd be thinking about blackmail."

"That was my first thought, too, when you told me about the shoe."

Jane had left a message on Mel's cell phone. "Give me a ring and tell me what you've learned about the janitor if you have a moment free."

He called her back as soon as he'd applied for the warrant and asked for a police officer rotation to guard the hospital room Sven was in for twenty-four hours a day. If it was blackmail, one of his victims might drop in to make sure Sven didn't survive.

"I know more about the janitor than I want to know or understand yet."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not allowed to tell you. But his blood pressure is getting better, he's moving a bit and making sounds. He'll probably survive. Whether his thinking and memory are seriously impaired can't be known yet."

"Not allowed to tell me?" Jane asked, a bit put out. He'd suddenly lost the urge to be forthcoming.

"That's right. You might know eventually, but not yet. I have a lot on my plate today. I'll try to catch up with you later."

There was well over a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars hidden in Sven's room. In every shoe there was cash. Rolled bills were hidden in sock b.a.l.l.s and even stashed in puzzle boxes.

Miss Turner was furious when Mel told her it would have to be at least temporarily confiscated for her own safety. "It was counted out by several law officers. Sometimes this large an amount of cash is tempting. Not that I believe any of the officers are crooks. But not all of them are close acquaintances of mine. You might find yourself being robbed."

"But where's the money going?"

"Into a safety-deposit box. I'll call for an armored car to take it. Now, you must count the bundles yourself to a.s.sure that it all comes back, if circ.u.mstances prove that it really belongs to you and your brother."

"Of course it does. I'm just surprised at how it's added up."

"I'll open each bundle and you flip through, counting the hundreds," Mel offered.

"That would take me days. I'm going to have to trust your people to at least know how to count money."

"I wish you wouldn't. But I can promise you this-I watched every single bill counted and bundled, and n.o.body took a single bill."

"Then you can call your truck and give me a receipt."

"Gladly," Mel said.

Jane had called Sh.e.l.ley after her conversation with Mel. "Our source of information has dried up. Mel called and said some weird things about knowing about something he didn't quite understand yet and couldn't talk about."

"That sounds fascinating," Sh.e.l.ley said. "Why do you suppose he said he didn't quite understand it yet?"

Jane shrugged. "I have no idea. He did add that someday he might be able to tell us about it."

"I hope so. I hate teasers that are never revealed."

"So do I. I'm so glad this whole play thing will soon be out of our lives. Who are your caterers this time?"

"The ones I had to cancel earlier. They agreed that with sufficient time to prepare, I wouldn't lose my deposit. Which is sensible. We only haveto go to the theater for four more days, including tonight. I was wrong about the opening night. The play doesn't start until seven on Friday, so the cast and crew have time to find their own dinners."

Rehearsals resumed on Monday evening. Since the second crime had taken place outside the theater and involved someone none of them admitted they'd ever met, the practices didn't have to stop. Everyone had been questioned about whether they'd ever been in the building when the janitor was. n.o.body, it appeared, was aware that there was a janitor.

Sh.e.l.ley was trying out yet another catering company, and was extremely unhappy with them. They were late to arrive. The food was bland and skimpy. They barely cleaned up after themselves. Jane suspected that the owner would receive a piece of Sh.e.l.ley's mind before the evening was over.

The background scenery was finished and done well. It truly looked like an elegant room. It had a sense of depth. The man who supplied the props had been in earlier and set up chairs, a sofa, rugs, lamps, and tables with ornaments, books, and flowers. The fireplace, which had a narrow mantel, was strewn artfully with what looked like genuine old family pictures in black-and-white and even sepia.

Seeing things coming together well had appara ently made Professor Imry slightly less offensive. His goal was in sight at last, Jane a.s.sumed. She settled in a chair in the front row of the theater to work on her needlepoint, but she soon realized there wasn't a good enough light to make color choices. So she put her supplies away and took her "emergency" paperback out of her purse.

Jane didn't go anywhere without a book to read. Not even on short drives. She'd once been caught in a traffic snarl that clogged a whole lane because a truck was on its side. All she'd had to read in the car was a Horchow catalog, which she had practically memorized by the time she could creep far enough to take a side street.

There was enough light to read an old Ngaio Marsh paperback while Sh.e.l.ley was probably on the pay phone in the lobby, tearing a strip off the owner of the catering company.

She was also half watching the rehearsal. It was interesting to her that the book she was reading also took place in a theater. This rehearsal seemed to be going well. Everybody knew their lines. n.o.body but the butler, who was still making side remarks, flubbed a single one. Ms. Bunting was wonderful. This pleasant woman in real life playing a nasty old woman was amazing to watch. Denny's replacement was barely okay. He, like Imry, didn't have an appealing personality.

But n.o.body else really sparkled. How could they with such a dreary, stupid, humorless, point-lessly plotted script? For a moment, Jane felt a tiny bit sorry for the director/scriptwriter Imry. She wondered if there would even be a second performance.

Mel was starting to have doubts. Both Sven' s boss and his sister, who knew him best, had claimed he was too shy to talk to strangers. There was no good reason to doubt either woman's judgment. Maybe the blackmail theory was, in fact, wrong. Could a timid person like Sven muster the courage to blackmail anyone? He didn't seem to have the nerve to even speak to strangers. He couldn't imagine Sven confronting anyone repeatedly for cash, much less arranging for where and when the cash would be exchanged.

On the other hand, Mel knew he'd clearly done the right thing by seizing the money for the time being. He'd put an extra officer on duty watching the Turners' house, just in case word leaked out that it was full of cash. Everybody involved in counting the money knew that it had been removed. That might not discourage a neighbor or one of the people who did the counting from thinking they might have missed some of it.

Could a man in his forties and his sister in her fifties have genuinely stashed away that much money? It was possible. Apparently Hilda had once had a well-paying job. She could have turned her earnings over to her brother. And the story of Sven's gambling could be accurate. Hilda had also told Officer Jones that neither she nor her brother had children or had ever married.

The Turner siblings certainly hadn't spent much on themselves or the house. It seemed stuck in the late nineteen-fifties. Same wallpaper. Same paint. Same old-fas.h.i.+oned kitchen and bath, though the bath had handicapped equipment installed. That wasn't a frivolous expense, it was a necessary one. They could simply be the most frugal people in the world. Who or what were they saving the money for?

Fifteen.

Having taken care of Sven and Hilda's situation for the time being, Mel turned his attention back to Dennis Roth's murder. He made his fifth try at the Roths' answering machine, which again didn't work. Two different cops in the suburb the Roths lived in had tried to find a neighbor who knew when they might be home. Apparently the Roths weren't sociable enough to have told them. As he cruised through the paperwork one last time, he found that one of his researchers had discovered that Denny was adopted. But the original birth certificate wasn't available.

It wasn't much help. It might be possible to do a search of some sort for a baby named Dennis born on the same date, which might lead to a birth certificate. But what would that prove? Just that he was probably born illegitimate.

The background check of Professor Imry was just as useless. Born three years earlier than Denny in a small town in western Oklahoma, he'd gone to grade and high school there, then went to Chicago to the university that now owned the theater. His grades all through his life had been high C's and low B's. Medical records showed nothing out of the ordinary except one episode of asthma. Census records in Oklahoma merely gave information that his father was a Nazarene minister and that his mother was a housewife a few years older than her husband. Both parents had been born in the same town as their only son. There had been a sister named Carol two years older than the boy.

The Buntings were harder to trace. All that could be found was their theater and film credits. He wondered briefly if their name was really Bunting, or if they'd chosen it because it sounded and looked good on the credits. No arrests, no birth certificate in any state for John Bunting. And no record of his wife's maiden name. He debated over asking them outright what their real names and dates and places of birth were, but he decided it probably wasn't worth the trouble. Ms. Bunting obviously was too small and frail to have delivered the lethal blow. And John Bunting, who was usually drinking, wouldn't have had the coordination to do it accurately.

Joani had one record for soliciting three years earlier. He wasn't surprised bui didn't think she had the strength or motive for killing anyone, letalone an actor she had probably never met until the first rehearsal.

The rest of the cast and crew were exactly who they said they were. No criminal records. Only a few parking violations and speeding tickets.

Imry himself was still his prime suspect. Growing up in a small town in the back of beyond with a minister father must have been horrible for him. He obviously craved fame and fortune in the arts, even though his lack of talent and unpleasant personality seemed to doom him to failure.

Even Sven and Hilda Turner were more interesting than Imry was.

At this point, Mel was becoming slightly discouraged. Gathering fingerprints, background information, and sc.r.a.ps of possible evidence was slow and tedious, and ninety-nine percent of it wasn't relevant. It wasn't all that unusual for a case to proceed slowly unless the criminal was stupid or caught red-handed committing the crime.

Often there was simply too much information to absorb at once and make connections. Census reports, t.i.tle searches, and examinations of property taxes were often farmed out to professionals in those fields. Then there were transcripts of all the interviews that had been conducted by other officers.

Like most experienced detectives, Mel had his own way of working through the ma.s.ses of paperwork and figuring out problems. First, he read through all the reports again and again. Items found at the scene of the crime, information revealed in background checks, questions asked, and the answers given.

He made notes in the margins of anything he found remotely interesting. Most important and time-consuming, but most valuable, was the process of reinterviewing people other officers had interviewed and asking different questions. Quite often unexpected questions triggered more memories. Often people who had been interviewed later thought of something they saw or knew that seemed too trivial to bother reporting. Most of the interviews his subordinates had conducted didn't include a vital question: Had you ever met Dennis Roth before this play was cast?

Jane received a long-distance call that afternoon. It was from a 212 area code, and her heart skipped a beat.

"This is Melody Johnson. Have I reached Jane Jeffry?"

"This is she."

"I have good news. Please pardon the slight delay. I've pa.s.sed copies of your book to a few of the marketing people, just to show them why I'm so eager to buy it. They loved it as much as I do."

Jane was speechless for a moment.

"Are you there?"

"Yes. It's just such a wonderful surprise that ittook my breath away for a second. Do you want changes?"

"That's your first question?" Melody said with a laugh. "No."

"So where do we go from here?" Jane asked. "You realize this is my first book sale."

"I'd like to work out the details of the contract with an agent. Do you have one yet?"

"No, I don't."

"I dislike dealing with a first-book author who doesn't know the ropes and might suspect she's not getting what she deserves. Would you like me to suggest some agents?"

"Could you wait a day for me to ask Felicity Roane about this? She's the one who encouraged me so strongly to submit it to you."

"That's a good idea. Then we can compare our lists. Congratulations, Jane. You're going to be published. I know how important this is, especially the first time. Get back to me as soon as you can find Felicity. Here's my telephone number."

Jane knew it was on her caller ID, but she was afraid she'd push the wrong b.u.t.ton on the phone and lose it. She wrote it down on the back of her grocery list.

After dancing around the house, singing, "I've sold a book, lucky me," she transferred Melody's number to her address book in case she lost the shopping list.

Now the big question was who to tell first.