Chapter 3

Everyone came pummeling down the stairs to see what had made the new girl scream her head off. After that a certain amount of time was taken up by us all completely freaking out, and then Brandon fainted, so we closed the lid on the dead man and hauled Brandon back up to the lobby. Albert sat down alarmingly suddenly on his ticket-taker’s stool, all the color drained from his face, and I reached for my phone to call an ambulance for him.

Callie beat me to it. “911?” she said. “Yeah. We’ve got one unconscious guy, one possible heart attack guy, and one, like, dead guy. You should probably send everyone.”

“I am not having a heart attack,” Albert said, with ruffled dignity, as Brandon moaned and came around.

Nevertheless, 911 sent everyone.

  

“And you’d never seen the victim before?”

I was questioned by a heavyset detective with a hipster goatee and a voice like melted chocolate. He’d told me his name at least three times, but I hadn’t registered it. I think I might have been in shock.

I shook my head.

“You’re sure?” he persisted.

“I just got here,” I said. “I mean, not just to the theater, but to the city. I got here yesterday and I don’t know anyone.”

He nodded and wrote something down.

“Is there someplace you could wait for a while?” he asked. “Do you have an office or something? We may have more questions later.” He glanced around the lobby, which was filled with a cluster of police talking to Marty and Callie, a cluster of EMTs checking out Albert and Brandon, and several other clusters of grim-faced professionals doing the things they do when a dead body turns up in an ice machine.

“Sure,” I said, wanting nothing more than a few moments away from everybody. I probably had an office somewhere. I’d just have to find it.

  

It wasn’t my office. It was Kate’s office. That much was clear from the second I found it.

It was upstairs on the balcony level in an administrative area hidden behind an unmarked door so camouflaged by the ornate carving of the wall’s wooden paneling that I wouldn’t have noticed it if Albert hadn’t pointed it out on our tour.

The door opened to a hallway which gave access to the projection booth, a tiny restroom, a staff break room, and at the far end against an exposed brick wall, another stairway. The back stairs, I thought. Narrow, iron, and utilitarian.

Halfway down the hall was the closed door to Kate’s office. I still had Kate’s keys in my jeans pocket, but the door was unlocked. The room was lined with crowded shelves and dominated by an enormous old oak desk and a freestanding blackboard. Both looked like they could have been in the room since Clark Gable was number one at the box office. Shabby furniture cluttered the space, and a window looked out over the top of the marquee to the street below.

The blackboard was covered in cramped handwriting. There were calendar grids for September, October, and November, each with the schedule of films filled in for the month. Clearly nobody had updated it since Kate’s death. The slate changed on Tuesdays and Fridays and seemed always to consist of two or three features on a common theme. That added up to a lot of movies.

Robbie had told me the films were ordered many weeks in advance, and the slate was already booked through the holidays. Still, the prospect of keeping up with the programming and sourcing of films might have seemed a little overwhelming if I hadn’t already been overwhelmed by the vivid image of a dead man’s frost-glazed face staring at me from a bed of ice.

I sat at the desk in an ancient wooden rolling armchair made somewhat more comfortable by a faded crimson pillow. Kate’s desk was cluttered with brochures for film festivals, fliers for special events, and dozens of notes scrawled on pages pulled from a scratch pad next to the telephone.

Telephone. Right. A beige hard-wired multi-line monster, looking like it dated from the Eighties. What about a computer? A quick glance around the place didn’t reveal one. A pale blue IBM Selectric typewriter, yes, but no computer.

Seriously?

“I brought you this.”

I jumped at the sound of Callie’s voice. I had turned away from the door, but now saw her standing in the hallway, looking in. She held my leather backpack by one thin strap. “It was in the balcony. It’s yours, right?”

“Oh, right.” I must have left it there a thousand years ago at the end of Albert’s tour. I looked at my watch. It had been two hours. “Thanks.”

“Sooooo…” Callie stepped into the room a little gingerly, looking uncomfortable. She dropped the backpack on the desk. “Are you, like, okay?”

“Absolutely not.” I said. “There’s body in the ice machine. Are you okay?”

“Probably not.” She shrugged, then, “Sorry about all that stuff about Ted Bishop earlier.” She gave me a quick glance, then looked away. “Are, like, we okay?”

I blew out a breath. “Sure.”

“Cool.” Her shoulders relaxed a bit. “What are you doing?”

I looked around the room. “At the moment, wondering whether that blackboard is the most advanced technology in this place.”

“Oh. No. Kate had a laptop. Marty’s been using it to send out the email blasts and update the website and everything.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised. “You know he’s going to go nuts with this.”

Marty seemed pretty nuts to begin with, but I let that thought go unspoken. No, I didn’t. “More nuts?”

She grimaced and slumped onto an ancient leather sofa under the window. “He’s really not that bad,” she said. “He just tends to go from zero to furious in, like, no seconds.”

“I noticed.” She was the third person to tell me Marty wasn’t that bad.

She shot me a look. “He took Kate’s death hard. I mean, we all did,” she said. “But the rest of us just miss her. We don’t think someone killed her. And I heard the cops say that guy has probably been down there for about two weeks, which is right around when Kate died, so you know…What?”

She must have seen what must have been a confused look on my face. “Who thinks someone killed Kate?”

“Marty,” she said, her tone implying that I needed to keep up. “He’s been going off about it ever since she died.”

I stared at her. “How did Kate die?” Robbie had said “accident” and I had automatically filled in “car crash,” but I didn’t really know.

“She fell,” Callie said. “She was walking on the path up Strawberry Hill—at Stowe Lake?” Seeing my baffled expression, she explained. “It’s in Golden Gate Park, and it’s a totally easy path. I mean, like, people do it with strollers and stuff. But she must have slipped or something and...” Her jaw flexed and she looked away from me. “Her neck was broken.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. “Callie, I’m so sorry.”

She waved my words away. “Anyway, that was two weeks ago, and now the cops say this guy downstairs has been dead for like two weeks, sooooo…”

“Marty’s going to go nuts,” I concluded. And, I reasoned, going nuts might be a perfectly rational reaction. The timing was suspicious.

“Did you know him?” I asked Callie. “I mean, the…” I made a vague gesture toward the basement.

“The dead guy?” she said. “I don’t think so. But I didn’t really take any lingering looks.” She shivered.

Right. Neither had I. But the sight of him was still burned in my brain.

  

After Callie left, I started sorting the clutter of Kate’s desk into organized piles. Because if you can’t control unfaithful husbands or bodies turning up in your basement, at least you can control random paperwork, right?

Pamphlets and brochures in one stack; bills (a rather alarming number of them), in another; miscellaneous correspondence; and lastly the handwritten notes, most of them seemingly of ideas for future programming.

I found one that read ‘Have / Have,’ ‘Sleep,’ and ‘Millionaire’ and assumed it referred to To Have and Have Not (1944, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart), The Big Sleep (1946, ditto), and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable). It took me a bit longer to figure out that ‘Rain,’ ‘Charade,’ and ‘Yankees’ probably referred to Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds), Charade (1963, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn), and Damn Yankees (1958, Gwen Verdon and Tab Hunter). The connection among those films was the director Stanley Donen. One of my favorites. I would probably want to include Indiscreet (1958, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman) in any Stanley Donen lineup, but that was just me.

And that was assuming there would still be a Palace to keep showing these movies. I tried not to think about the fact that finding a body in the basement might have cast the slightest bit of doubt on the Palace’s future. And on my first day, no less.

Kate’s last note was still on the scratch pad. It was longer than the others, and I didn’t immediately see the connective thread among “Win,” “M,” “Lace,” “Sorry,” and “Gas.”

I gave up, stretched, and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. I knew I should go back downstairs to ask the detective when they might be finished with their work. There were movies to either show or cancel based on his answer. When I opened my eyes again Marty was standing in the doorway watching me.

“I put a sign in the box office window and told everyone to go home,” he said. “The cops won’t tell me anything, but it looks like they’ll be here for a while, and I know I’m not the manager or anything, but I—”

“Thank you.” I cut him off before he could launch into a full-blown rant. “I’m sure that was the right call.”

He didn’t seem to know what to do with that. He shrugged, then came into the room. I saw he was carrying a laptop, which he set none too gently on the desk. “Callie said you were looking for this.”

“Right. She told me you’ve been taking care of everything, and—”

“Someone had to,” he said. “Just like someone has to get out the ladder and change the marquee in the morning and someone has to run the projectors and fix them when they break down, and someone has to order the concessions, and—”

“Marty,” I said. “I’m trying to thank you.”

He gave me a close look, checking for signs of mockery. Then he sniffed and looked away. “The Wi-Fi network is ‘PalaceWeb’ and the password is Hitchcock, capital ‘H’ and ‘K,’ one instead of the ‘I.’”

I must have looked baffled because he blew out an exasperated breath, grabbed a pencil, and plucked Kate’s last list from the top of the pile. He wrote the password on the back of it, then handed me the paper.

 

H1tchcocK

 

“Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I tucked it into a pocket of my backpack.

“Stop thanking me. It’s unnerving.”

He looked away again, and I broke what threatened to turn into an awkward silence with a suggestion. “Should we go downstairs to find out what the hell is going on?”

“We should,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”

His agreement felt like a small victory. “Did you catch that cop’s name? The one who seemed to be in charge?”

“The bear with the voice like liquid heaven?” he said. “I think it’s Officer He-Wants-Me-But-He-Doesn’t-Know-It-Yet.”

I raised my eyebrows. “No, I think it’s Detective He-Wants-You-But-He-Doesn’t-Know-It-Yet.”

Marty gave me a look. “Don’t,” he said. “We’re not friends yet.”

Noted.