A Midsummer Night's Scream Part 4

Then she cornered Ms. Bunting to try on both of the dresses Tazz had selected for her. Holding the dress bag, Jane was present as well. The everyday one for the first two acts was a drop-waisted pink silk dress with a long string of fake pearls. It had three-quarter-length sleeves. "Other jewelry will be decided on later," Tazz told the actress.

Tazz then called in Imry to approve it. He even managed to eke out a compliment for Tazz on how well it suited the actress and the play.

"The formal dress will be along the same lines, but with black sequins. Don't dare let anyone who smokes near you, Ms. Bunting," Tazz warned, "or the sequins might catch fire-they're notoriously flammable. Even though the sequined one is supposed to have been sprayed with a fire r.e.t.a.r.dant. I haven't chosen jewelry because I don't think it's needed. Just wear your own wedding ring and maybe a pair of smooth silver bracelets."

"You look like a queen," Jane said.

"I feel like one," Ms. Bunting said, pirouetting in front of the three-sided mirror in her dressingroom. The skirt flared nicely. "I'll have to find an occasion to do this, just to show off."

"I don't think the director will object to this," Tazz said. "We won't bother getting his approval of this one."

The next morning, Jane called Ms. Bunting at her hotel and offered to pick her up and take her to the needlepoint cla.s.s.

"It's sweet of you to ask, but I have some shopping to do first, so I'll just take a cab. I have the owner's card with the address in my needlepoint bag. I'll see you then."

Ms. Bunting was only a few moments late. She had a bag from a toy store. "For my grandchildren," she said. As she set the bag down, soft baby toys tumbled out. Jane bent over to pick them up and put them back.

Martha introduced Ms. Bunting to the others, explaining that she, Martha, had bent the rules because Ms. Bunting was a famous actress who had known Sylvia Sidney, who was not only an actress but had written a very good needlepoint book.

Tazz said, "Ms. Bunting and I have met before. I'm providing her costumes for the play she's going to be in in another week, right here in Chicago."

Both Jane and Martha had brought along their copies of Sylvia Sidney's book. Everyone, even those who had never heard of Sylvia Sidney, pa.s.sed it around and asked questions about her.

Then they all pulled out their needlepoint work to show how they were coming along so far. Tazz's was the most complex. She'd done half of an American flag in the center, which would be surrounded by borders of stars and stripes in different st.i.tches. They were all marked out on the canvas, and she had the kinds of st.i.tches she was using on grid paper.

Ms. Bunting had barely started, but she'd used the upper left corner to do a section of bargello st.i.tches in the darkest shades of each of her three colors and said she intended to do the same st.i.tch in the opposite corner with the lightest shades of the same three colors.

Sam's consisted of fairly boring colors, and he'd st.i.tched a little too tight, but he'd tackled some very complex st.i.tches. "Don't worry," he a.s.sured the rest of them. "I know the first ones I did need to be ripped out."

Sh.e.l.ley had tried to catch up with Jane and had done an elongated cashmere st.i.tch with her medium colors.

What most surprised Jane was that Elizabeth's looked the best, in spite of the muddy oranges, greens, and reds. She was way ahead of everyone else. She'd completed nearly a quarter of her project and used what looked like the most difficult st.i.tches in the pattern book. There was an impressive Scotch plaid rectangle, which adjoined a long thin triangle of French knots.

Jane smiled at Elizabeth, who was, in this case at least, every bit as compet.i.tive as Sh.e.l.ley.

Seven.

Elizabeth turned out to be rather tactless, in spite of her seemingly upper-crust facade.

After everyone had oohed and aahed over one another's work, Elizabeth said to Ms. Bunting, "Those cute toys must be for your great-grandchildren."

"No. They're for my daughter's children." "My goodness. She must have had them quite late in life."

Ignoring the obvious suggestion that Ms. Bunting must be at least in her nineties, Ms. Bunting said, "No, it was I who had my daughter late in life. I'd always wanted children, but suffered three miscarriages early in our marriage. I'd given up ever having children. Then, when I was forty-two, and doing a very silly movie in England, I found myself pregnant again. It was the worst movie I was ever in, but I was taking such good care of myself that I wasn't paying attention to what was going on around me."

She continued, "John, of course, was deeply embarra.s.sed at becoming a father at forty-three. I don't think, frankly, that he'd have enjoyed the role at any age."

"So, was your daughter born in England?" Elizabeth persisted.

"Unfortunately not. She was born on the s.h.i.+p on the way home. I was afraid to fly. By the time the terrible, endless film was done, I was seven and a half months along."

"It must have been hard, raising a baby at that age. Did you keep acting?" Elizabeth asked.

"I had to. It was the only skill I had," Ms. Bunting said, picking out colors for her next sampler block. "Besides, John and I earned our living acting together. I took along a day nanny and a night nanny, then later both nannies and a teacher. It was very expensive and we had to work even harder to afford the help. I came as close as this," she said, holding her forefinger and her thumb a half inch apart, "to having a nervous breakdown once."

Ms. Bunting abruptly changed the subject. "I think these colors will go well together. Do you agree?" She was holding up three skeins-two light and one medium colors.

Jane leaped in and asked, "What would it look like if you used the darkest instead of the medium?"

This was enough to cut off any more personal questions from Elizabeth. Jane thought it was about time Elizabeth's snoopiness was squelched.

The conversations s.h.i.+fted back to color and pattern choices, with Martha as busy as a hen advising various students. It drifted off into recipes for a bit, then to having pillows made of their work when it was done or having them mounted in acid-free paper and double gla.s.s, front and back.

An hour later, packing-up commenced. Ms. Bunting was spending the afternoon with her grandchildren to give them their toys. Elizabeth asked Jane, Sh.e.l.ley, and Ms. Bunting where they had found the wonderful jewelry bags in which they kept their floss, scissors, and needles. Sh.e.l.ley explained about the department store and that they were meant for jewelry.

Jane and Sh.e.l.ley were going home, Sh.e.l.ley intending to get ahead of Jane in the needlepoint ranks.

Jane planned to work on her second book. Elizabeth, not surprisingly, was headed to a Junior League planning committee.

Tazz was on her way to her warehouse to find the right size costumes.

Sam had to pick up his truck from the garage where he had left it to have the tires rotated while he was in cla.s.s. He asked Martha if she had a paper bag without the needlepoint shop logo he could put his things in. He didn't want the mechanics to see what he had along.

When Jane returned home, she decided she had to monitor her time. She'd have to put in two hours on her book for each hour of working on her needlepoint. Over a ham sandwich and Fritos, she made notes of what Let.i.tia would be doing next. Then she'd do at least half a chapter and still have time to do a bit of needlepoint before dressing to go out with Mel at five to his favorite steakhouse restaurant. Detective Mel VanDyne and Jane had been friends and lovers for a long time.

But shortly after noon, Mel called. "I'm going to have to stand you up. I've got a murder victim at a theater."

Jane asked warily, "What theater?"

"Why does it matter?"

"It just does."

"It's that one that belongs to the college drama department."

"Who's dead?"

"Jane, I don't even know that yet. I'm still five blocks away. You might want to let Sh.e.l.ley know. Isn't that the building her husband donated to the college?"

When he hung up, she immediately rang Sh.e.l.ley. "You're going to have to cancel the caterers this minute. I just heard from Mel that someone's been murdered at the theater."

"Who?"

"Even Mel doesn't know yet."

"I'm hanging up and calling the caterer right now. Thanks for letting me know."

Jane's afternoon was shot. She couldn't keep her mind on her book or her needlepoint and sat down to watch the Home and Garden channel to clear her head of this news. She couldn't, however, help speculating about the ident.i.ty of the victim. Her best guess was Professor Imry. He'd made enemies of almost everyone involved.

He'd mildly insulted Sh.e.l.ley, and he'd irritated both John and Gloria Bunting with his silly insistence on calling actors by their script names at all times. He'd come out on the wrong side of a tiff with Denny Roth about grammar. But who would kill him for getting his grammar wrong? That wasn't even close to being a motive for something so horrible.

And what if it wasn't Imry? Who else could it be? And how was Mel certain it was murder when he hadn't even reached the scene yet? Maybe someone had just had a terrible accident. A fall. A stroke. A heart attack.

She turned the television off, suddenly horrified that it might be Gloria Bunting who was the victim. It would break Jane's heart if it was. She would also be sad if it was Tazz.

The phone rang again. This time it was Sh.e.l.ley. "I caught the caterers before they'd started the preparations, so all I've lost is my deposit. This is clearly going to close the theater for at least a day,maybe longer. Do you think I should warn the next one in line?"

"I would if I were you."

"Have you heard back from Mel? Who was murdered? Was it really murder or was it an accident?"

"I don't know anything else. But I've also wondered as well."

"Couldn't you call Mel on his cell phone and ask?"

"That would be worth more than my life is. He'd be furious. Call your other caterer, then let's rent a movie and order a take-out dinner for the two of us and our kids."

"Sounds like a good plan. But we'll have to make sure to catch the local newscasts. Maybe some reporter knows more than we do."

Mel had the whole staff working. The scene-of-thecrime people had quartered the dressing room where the body was found. The doctor had been there to p.r.o.nounce formally that the victim was dead of causes unknown, but presumably from a blow to the back of his skull. The photos had all been taken and the body moved to the police morgue.

Professor Imry had turned up at two in the afternoon and had been having mild hysterics and demanding to see the officer in charge the whole time.

With everything being competently done on the ground floor, or at least in progress, Mel finally took the time for a preliminary interview with the director. He met with him in the lobby.

"Mr. Imry-" he began.

"Professor Imry, if you don't mind. You wouldn't let me call you Mister, would you?"

Mel's first thought was that Imry was right. His second was that his own t.i.tle was harder to come by and far grittier than Imry's, but he didn't let his annoyance show.

"Professor Imry, how many people have keys to the theater?"

"Why do you ask? Nearly everyone, obviously. Actors are artists and sometimes want to work alone on the stage trying out movements, or how many strides it takes to move where they need to be."

Mel wanted to smack some sense into this man. This was a serious security violation. The college that owned the theater would be horrified if they knew.

"So all the actors had keys? Who else?"

"The janitor. I don't think the costumer needed a key. Let's see, who else? The lighting director had a key-he was going to work with his two students in a dark setting one evening. The electrician-he had to make sure that all the connections were functioning properly. The woman from the art department had one.""The art department?" Mel asked.

"For the use of the students who were going to build and paint scenery backdrops. n.o.body in their street clothes wants to run into wet paint, you see?"

"So nearly everyone and his mother could have come in here at any time?"

"I wouldn't have put it quite that way," Imry said, clearly offended.

"Did you take into consideration the matter of safety? Did you get approval from the college to give out all these duplicate keys?"

"I didn't think it was necessary. Who could have imagined this sort of thing was going to happen?"

Mel asked for a list of people who had keys, and their telephone numbers and addresses. "I'll have one of my officers call everyone in to get their fingerprints. That can be done in the lobby." He also asked if Imry knew the victim's next of kin. It was vital to reach them.

"I don't have that information, but the registrar of the college will. I think the telephone number is in my office. I'll get it."

"No, you won't. Tell me where your office is and I'll find it. You're not to go anywhere but the lobby for now."

Mel then asked, "Where were you last night after the rehearsal?"

"I went home to do some work on my next script," Imry answered warily.

"Can anybody back you up on this?"

"Maybe someone in the apartment complex where I live noticed me come in or took note that my car was parked in my a.s.signed place."

"Give me your address."

Imry did so. And Mel asked another question. "Were you on good terms with Dennis Roth?"

Imry hesitated just a second too long. "As actors go, he was okay."

"That's not what I asked."

"I'll be honest with you. I thought he was a good actor or I wouldn't haven't engaged him for this role. He looked the part. But I didn't much like his att.i.tude."

"Why was that?"