A Law Edwards mystery by Sam Stefanik
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5. In this soliloquy, Macbeth reflects on the futility of life after hearing of his wife’s death:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more”
NOTE: Scranton, Pennsylvania is actually 100 miles from Reading. I’ve adjusted the geography to suit the story. For our purposes, it’s only 30 minutes by car.
1
Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)
Walt drove us along Sansom Street and parked across from the ancient Benjamin Franklin Hotel. Once upon a time it had been a decent hotel located several blocks back from the bustling Washington Square theater district. Now it was a tumbled down wreck for transients and low life. They should’ve taken a wrecking ball to the place years ago, but it clung to existence as a home of last resort for people who were either on their way up from nothing, or on their way down to nothing.
Charlie easily unfolded his extra-tall frame from the back seat and called out, “be right back!” He slammed the door, wrapped his brown shearling jacket around him, and rushed across the street on denim clad legs. He was going to fetch his friend Judy. She was a chorus girl he met his first day in the city. The two had taken up together and were spending a lot of time in each other’s company. She was nice enough and pretty, but I worried about where their relationship might lead.
Walt grumbled about the way he slammed the door. “I wish he wouldn’t do that. It’s a brand-new car.”
I didn’t like the car, so I didn’t address his upset about the way Charlie treated it. I grumbled about Judy. “I don’t like this. He’s infatuated with her.”
Walt wasn’t as concerned as me. “An infatuation is all it is. The poor boy is lonely and he’s hurt. Emily broke up with him right before Christmas and he’s been heartsick ever since.”
“I hear you, but they shouldn’t be getting in this deep. He’s gotta go home in a few weeks and then what? She’s a chorus girl. No way she could live on a farm and Charlie could never make it here, nor would he want to. Plus, his folks are due to visit in February. What the hell am I gonna tell David if he shows up and his son is head-over-heels in love with a fucking chorus girl?”
He dismissed my concerns. “They’re not getting married. They’re having fun together. They’re both young people. Young people are supposed to have fun.”
“Yeah, I worry about the fun they’re having. She could trap him, and then what?”
“Trap him, how?”
“With a baby, that’s how! It would be so much easier if he was queer.”
“You’re being silly. Judy is a nice girl.”
I admitted that she seemed like a nice girl, but I still didn’t like it. There was something about her that didn’t sit well with me. Her eyes never matched her expression. She could be laughing fit to beat the band but her eyes always looked sad. The difference made me question if anything she did was genuine. I also thought she was very forward. She’d practically thrown herself at Charlie when they met.
I understood why she did. He was very attractive; broad and strong and rugged with hazel eyes and blond hair that fell to his shoulders. He’d grown his hair out at the behest of Miss Emily and her gigantic ass. I suppose it wasn’t enough to keep her interested because she broke up their relationship. Charlie was caught completely by surprise.
I assume the fresh hurt was why he was so receptive to Judy when they met backstage at a play Stephan adapted the choreography for. Larry also built the sets. Larry and Stephen leveraged their attachment to the production to get Walt and Charlie and me tickets in the orchestra pit and permission to hang around in the wings both before and after the play.
I didn’t think much of the production. The play was called ‘Hair’ and was all about hippies and the war and sex. I’m not easily shocked, but between the drugs and the flower children nonsense and the perversion of the Gettysburg Address, I didn’t appreciate the play, if you could even call it that. I also thought the nudity was distasteful.
Walt interrupted my brooding. “I wonder what’s taking so long. Usually, he goes in and they come right out.”
“Maybe he had to go up and get her.”
I shivered and checked the heater controls on the dashboard. They were set to maximum. We were on our way to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square to see the Christmas display. I didn’t know what to expect. Walt and I had been there to see the gardens in the summer. They were breathtaking. The flowers were beautiful and there were brick paths to walk and a pond with ducks and fountains and a big glass conservatory with plants from all over the world. I didn’t know what they could possibly display in frigid January, but I hoped it would be impressive for Charlie’s sake.
Walt saw an advertisement for the event in the newspaper and suggested we go. Even though the holiday was over, the display was still open for a few more weeks. He liked the idea of going later because the crowds would be less. I hoped he was right.
I didn’t look forward to being outside in the cold, but the conservatory would likely be open. It would be heated to protect the plants, and I could warm my painful joints. When we announced our plans to Charlie, he asked if he could invite Judy. Walt agreed immediately.
I doubt I would have refused, but I wished there was a way to separate the pair. Even if Walt was right and she was a ‘nice girl’ the relationship was doomed no matter what because at the end of the month, Charlie had to go back to Montana.
As if drawn by my thoughts of him, Charlie hurried down the steps from the hotel entrance and crossed the street at a run. He came to the passenger side of the car and leaned down to look at me through the glass. I ran the fancy power window down. “Something’s wrong!” He said.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s not in the lobby. She won’t answer the phone. She won’t come to the door. I knocked and knocked and nothing.”
I didn’t think there was anything to worry about. “Maybe she got called for work. She’s trying to make it in the business, right? Maybe her break came and she had to go.”
He shook his head. “There’s a record on in the room. It must be a 45 because it keeps repeating. I listened to it three times. Also, there’s water running.”
“Water?”
He nodded. “I can hear it through the door. It sounds like a tub faucet open full blast.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I told Walt to stay put and followed Charlie inside.
We went in through the tarnished brass revolving door and crossed the lobby to the stairs. The space had never been grand, and now it was a wreck. The desk man snored from a swivel chair. A compact television blared a western from the counter. In the reception area near the door, two men who were old before their time huddled around a checkerboard and drank cheap whiskey from flat bottles. I shook my head and held back a snide comment about it being a ‘classy joint.’
The elevator was out of order, so we had to climb three flights up the fire stairs. My arthritic knees didn’t appreciate the work, but they did it. We arrived at the door. Charlie beat on it with a fist the size of a cantaloupe. There was no answer from inside.
I pressed my ear to the door and heard pop music. There was an upbeat baseline and a man singing. I could make out a few of the words. He kept talking about ‘Judy in Disguise.’ Charlie’s friend’s name was Judy. I guessed the tune was some kind of a joke.
I listened harder and heard the full rush of a tub faucet. I didn’t like it. 45 records average about three minutes. If it played three times while Charlie waited, that’s nine. Plus, he came back down to get me from the car and had to wait while I struggled up three flights of stairs. Both the record and the water had been running the whole time. Something was very wrong inside that room.
I tried the door but it was locked. I rattled it against the jamb, but it held firm. As worn out as the hotel was, the doors were secure. I stood back and told Charlie to kick it in.
He stared like I was crazy. “You want me to what?”
“Kick the door in. Something is wrong. We’ve got to find out what.” I realized he’d probably never kicked a door in before. I arranged him for the task. I brought him within range, pointed at the panel right next to the latch and explained. “Bring your leg up, aim your foot right there, and boot it as hard as you can.”
He raised his leg like I told him and kicked, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He was obviously nervous about breaking down his friend’s door. I yelled to bully him out of his fear. “There’s something wrong in that room! Your friend could be in trouble! KICK THAT DOOR IN!”
He gritted his teeth, reared back, and kicked the door damn near off its hinges. It flew open with the tearing sound of dry wood and a metallic clatter as the latch broke from the jamb and fell to the floor. He started to enter, but I stopped him.
“No, no, no; let me.”
He tried to argue but I cut him off. “Charlie! Please!”
He stood still and folded his arms over his chest. I entered the room. The bed was unmade and there were clothes hung all over like she’d been doing laundry in the bathtub. Skimpy underthings in a whole rainbow of colors decorated lampshades and both rails of the old brass bed. They also hung from every knob of the dresser drawers. A portable record player blared from the dresser. It had a stack of 45s at the bottom of the fat spindle. The arm that would have held the records down was set to the side so the machine would repeat forever. It cycled again as I watched it.
The music started with the baseline. “Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, Judy in disguise…” I ignored it and looked for the source of the rushing water. There was a bathroom off the main room. The sound came from there. The door was ajar but not open. I rapped on the panel and called out even though I was almost certain no answer would come.
I pushed the door open on squeaky hinges. Judy was in the tub under the water. Her eyes were open and fixed. Her skin was bloodless alabaster with a frigid blue tinge. A double-edged razor blade sat in a rusty stain on the floor. I could see the slices on her right wrist. They went longways, not across. I assumed her left wrist matched. There was no blood in the tub, but the water must’ve been running for hours so it had likely all been washed down the overflow drain.
I didn’t have to touch her to know she was dead, but I did anyway. I noticed something in her right hand. I tried to lift it out of the water to look, but the flesh was stiff and the arm wouldn’t work the way it was supposed to. I did my best to force the fingers open just enough to see that the thing was a wadded-up piece of paper.
I looked around until I noticed a torn-open envelope on the toilet tank. The letter, or whatever it was, had been addressed in a neat, feminine hand to Judy Diamond at the hotel. The return address was 1725 Prospect Avenue, Scranton. That was pretty close to Reading where Walt grew up. The last name that headed the address was Spencer and there was no first name or initial. I wrote the name and address down out of some long-forgotten detective’s impulse and felt a wave of hot anxiety over having to tell Charlie his friend was dead.
I didn’t want him rushing in and stirring up the scene. I also didn’t want him to see her the way she was. His last memory of her shouldn’t be the image of her dead in a dirty hotel bathtub. There was nothing anyone could do for the poor girl. I remembered a sergeant from The Great War who had a method of dealing with nervous soldiers. I borrowed it for Charlie.
I left the room and closed the shattered door behind me. Charlie knew something was wrong. He must’ve seen it in my expression. “What is it, Law?”
I slapped his face as hard as I could. The slap hurt my arthritic hand more than it hurt him, but I didn’t let him know that. I waited just a second for him to get mad, then I yelled. “I slapped your face! YOU MAD?” His hands were fists at his sides, but he didn’t raise them. I poked his chest. “YOU MAD?”
He roared in my face. “YES, I’M MAD!”
I wanted him mad because there’s clarity in anger. Anger helps to keep grief and fear at bay. I hoped he could hold onto the anger to get through what I was about to say. I grabbed his shoulders. “Listen, listen closely. No matter what I say to you, do not go into that room. You hear me?”
He nodded tightly, still angry. “Yes.”
“She’s dead.”
“She’s what?” He asked. There was no way he hadn’t heard me. He just didn’t want to believe.
I explained as much as I knew. “It looks like suicide. She’s been dead for hours. We’ve got to call the police.”
He shook his head. “No!”
He tried to push me aside so he could enter the room. I slapped his face again. He looked as if he barely felt it. “Why do you keep hitting me?”
“LISTEN TO ME! It’s bad in there. It’s so bad. Don’t look.”
“I have to.”
I half figured he would force the issue. I didn’t argue with him. “Put your hands in your pockets and don’t touch anything. Especially don’t touch her.”
He nodded, and I led the way inside. The record player reset again. “Bum, bum, bum, bum, Judy in disguise…” The water ran just like before.
I guided him into the bathroom and made sure he didn’t step on the razor blade. He peered into the tub. A single sob escaped his throat. “Jesus Christ!” He took his hands out of his pockets and started to reach.
I yelled at him again. “CHARLIE, NO!”
He stopped in the middle of the motion and whispered. “She looks so cold.”
I patted his arm and rubbed my hand up and down his sleeve. “She’s not cold. She’s not in pain. She’s beyond all that. We’re the ones who have to feel the pain. No one can hurt her where she is.” I pushed him gently toward the door. “Please, let’s go. We need to telephone the police. There’s lots to do now.”
He let me guide him out of the room and back down to the lobby. We didn’t see a soul on the way. The fact that we hadn’t seen anyone even though Charlie had kicked a door in and we shouted at each other in the corridor, told me the residents of the hotel were used to trouble. They were so used to it that they no longer bothered to see what the matter was.
I sent him to bring Walt in from the car. He went like he was numb. I shut myself in a filthy telephone booth that was littered with cigarette butts. I didn’t dare tell the desk man to call the police, because I didn’t want him to blunder upstairs and mess things up.
The Market Street shopping district was a few blocks to the north of the hotel. There was a police precinct up there to protect the stores, but I couldn’t remember the number of it. I dialed the operator. She connected me right away. I reported the death to the desk sergeant. He promised to send a car. I hung up the phone and opened the booth to see Walt and Charlie waiting for me.
Walt shook his head like he didn’t believe the situation. “Charlie said…is it true? Is she…?”
“She is.”
“Are you certain?”
“I am.”
“Should we phone for a doctor to make sure?”
Charlie answered. “She’s gone.”
We loitered in uneasy silence while the desk man snored, and the checker players played, and the water ran on the dead girl upstairs. The silly pop song played in my head. I kept hearing the first few words over and over. “Judy in disguise.” I wondered what the fuck it meant, then I remembered it was modern music and likely didn’t mean anything.
A pair of uniformed cops showed up. I directed them upstairs but didn’t join them. The detectives came a little while later. We joined them. Charlie stood in the doorway, Walt remained in the hall, and I hitched my ass on the dresser to take the weight off my knees. Mercifully, someone had unplugged the record player to stop the nonsensical music from repeating endlessly. They also shut the tub off.
A man in his early middle-age and dressed in a grey-flannel suit introduced himself as Detective Mike Stone. His partner, later in middle-age and wearing a brown suit, was Detective Steve Beyer. Stone spoke to me while Beyer looked around. I was giving Stone my account of how I found the body while Beyer shot an occasional question at me from the side.
I opened with an opinion. “She’s been dead for a while, probably since last night.”
Stone cut me off. “How do you know?”
“The blood on the razor blade was dried to a crust. That takes a while.”
He nodded and made a note on a little flip-cover pad. I drew a breath to go on when Beyer called out from near the open door. “Who kicked the door in?”
Charlie answered that he did. Beyer examined the door jamb where the latch used to be. “That’s destruction of property.”
I spoke up from the dresser. “He did it at my say so. If there’s to be any trouble over the door, I’ll pay for it. We were worried about our friend, and I didn’t want to waste the time sparring with the desk man. He might be a doper for all I know. Is he still asleep?”
Stone smiled. He had a nice smile. “He is. We didn’t bother to wake him. We’ll have to on the way out, but it’s obvious you could blow this flophouse to the moon, and it wouldn’t bother him a bit.”
Beyer shot another question. “Why not turn the water off, or stop the record player?”
“I didn’t touch anything because it wasn’t my crime scene.”
Stone latched onto the way I phrased my answer. “Your scene? What’s that mean?”
“I was a beat cop and a detective here in Philly back in the twenties and early thirties. I worked the Snyder Avenue Station for Captain Herb Marshall.”
Stone made another note. “Old habits die hard, huh?”
“Something like that.”
Beyer spoke up again. He was examining a light blue lacy brassiere that dangled from a lampshade. He looked at it with the same inquisitive intensity that he’d used on the door jamb. “What’s your old habits tell you about this here?”
“I would have written it up as a suicide. The room is a mess, but it’s a natural mess. There was no struggle. I don’t like the razor blade on the floor, but it doesn’t bother me enough to wonder about it. It looks like she got a letter and was distraught by whatever was in it and killed herself over it. I don’t like that she didn’t leave a note, but not all of them do.”
Stone took his turn to ask a question. “Tell me about the letter.”
“There’s an envelope on the toilet tank and she’s got a wad of paper in her hand. I assume it was a letter, but I don’t know. I know it was from a woman.”
Stone interrupted. “How do you know?”
“The penmanship on the addresses is a woman’s hand. A man writes to convey information. He prints, or if he writes in cursive, he dashes the words off and has done with it. As long as it’s legible, he doesn’t care how it looks. A woman wants to make an impression. She either writes very neatly, or she sprawls across the page to show off the art of her text. The envelope was addressed very neatly. It doesn’t have to be a woman’s writing, but it very likely is.”
Stone nodded and made another note. “Good observation. That explains the envelope; what about the letter?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t try to pry it out of her hand. I just noticed it. If it’s been in the water as long as I think it has, probably since last night, you won’t be able to read it.”
Stone took an extra turn to ask another question. “Why was the water on?”
“She was cold. She turned it on to add hot water to the tub and died without turning it off. It ran all night and drained out the hot water tank on this floor, then it ran cold until someone shut it off. I bet only the hot water tap was open, right?”
Beyer answered. “Right. What do you think about the record player?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. These kids today love music. They can hear it whenever they want with all the records and stuff around. There’s no radio in here. Death is pretty fucking lonely. She set up the stack of records with the one that was named after her on top, then she got in the tub and did what she did.”
Stone looked toward Charlie. “All that sound alright to you?”
He answered bitterly. “None of it sounds alright, but it’s probably what happened.”
Stone apologized for his choice of words. “I’m sorry, young man. We see a lot of this kind of thing in our work, and we get numb to it. I didn’t mean any harm.”
I pointed at Charlie and asked the detectives a question. “Do you still need him?”
Beyer shook his head without a word. He’d given up on the brassiere and was staring at a smeary water glass on the nightstand. Stone gestured toward the bereft youth. “You can go, son. We’ll need a statement from you. Would you come to the stationhouse with Mister Edwards tomorrow?”
He nodded and started to leave. I added an instruction before he did. “Take Walt with you. Go for a walk around the block maybe. I’ll just be a few more minutes.”
He agreed and left. The questions got more direct after he did. Beyer jerked a thumb toward the bathroom where Judy still rested under the water. They decided not to drain the tub until the photographer showed up. “What do you know about that one?”
“Judy Diamond, chorus girl. I thought it was a stage name, but she said it wasn’t. I’ve got friends who work in the theater; a choreographer and a set builder. They got us tickets to a play. Charlie is the brother of the set builder. He’s visiting from Montana. I’m a friend of the family. The boy had his heart broken back home and he met Judy backstage when we saw a production of Hair.”
Stone stopped me. “Is that any good? I’ve heard a ton about it.”
I shook my head. “Fucking atrocious, but I’m not a connoisseur. As for him and Judy, they took up together and have been spending some time. I don’t think there’s been any hanky-panky. They never stayed overnight and haven’t spent much time alone. Honestly, I didn’t like her. She seemed nice enough but there was something a little off that didn’t sit well with me.”
Beyer nodded like he understood, but he didn’t nod to me. He nodded to a smudged pushbutton light switch he was inspecting. “You’re in the business for a while you see the stuff that no one else does.”
“Exactly; you can’t ever get away from it. I didn’t like it, but Charlie is only here for a little while, so I tried not to come between them. He’s supposed to go home in two-and-a-half more weeks. He came on January 2nd and he’s staying to the end of the month.”
Stone piped up. “Where is he staying?”
“With me. I own a building on Broad and Vine. There’s an empty apartment he’s using. I live next door.”
“What building?”
“The one Walt’s Special is in.”
Beyer actually turned toward me when I mentioned the restaurant. “Isn’t that owned by some queer?”
The question made me mad but not mad enough to show my anger. I settled for a simple statement of fact. “It was. The controlling interest has been sold to the head chef. The queer you mentioned was the man in the hallway. I’m queer to. We’re partners in business and in life.”
Beyer pivoted away from me to examine a light fixture. Stone made a mark in his notebook. “I don’t think any of that matters. This is a simple enough case. We just need the statements to close the file. We’ll have an autopsy as a matter of procedure, but if there’s no blood in her veins and very little water in her lungs, it’ll be pretty plain what happened. Open and shut.”
As if to punctuate the simplicity of the case, he flipped the cover of his pad closed and slipped it in his pocket. The interview seemed to be over, but I asked to make sure. “Are we done?”
He started to nod, then came up with another question. “You said you didn’t like the razor blade on the floor. I don’t much like it either. Any thoughts?”
“Likely just woman’s logic. She cut her wrists and tossed it on the floor because she didn’t want it to cut her body in the tub.”
“What about the fact that she didn’t leave a note?”
I shrugged because I wasn’t sure. “Maybe she’d run out of things to say or maybe she didn’t think anyone would care. I don’t know.”
“That makes as much sense as these cases ever do.” He finished the nod he hadn’t completed before and said we were done. “You can go. Thank you for your help, Mister Edwards.”
I waved goodbye and made my careful way down all three flights of stairs and out onto the street. Walt and Charlie sat in the running station wagon. They hadn’t bothered with a walk because it was too cold. I guessed that meant Walt was cold. Charlie was from Montana. The mid-thirty-degree temperatures we were having probably felt like a mild spring day to him.
I got in the passenger seat. Walt asked an obvious question. “I guess we should go home.”
I agreed. “I’m in no mood for Christmas displays now.”
Charlie burst into tears in the back seat. I threw my door open and got out, then climbed into the back with him. I patted his shoulder through his sheepskin-lined leather jacket. He bawled like his soul was leaving his body. My heart broke.
Walt didn’t know what to do. I met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Go ahead. Take us home.”
He put the car in gear and set off. Charlie wept into his palms, like he was ashamed of his grief. “WHY? Why did she do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I would have helped if she needed help.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to burden you with whatever the trouble was.”
He took his hands from his face to shout at me. “THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR!”
I patted his shoulder some more. “Maybe she needed more help than she was willing to ask for. I don’t know. I don’t know why anyone would take their own life, but it happens a lot. People do it every day. Something goes wrong inside them, and they feel like there’s no way they can keep going forward. Does it really matter?”
He took my question as a dismissal of his friend’s plight and got mad. He leapt upon me, grabbed my arms, and shoved me across the back seat until I was pinned to the door. He screamed hellfire in my face. “FUCK YOU! Of course, it matters!”
Walt saw what happened and shouted while he looked for a place to pull over. “Take your hands off him!”
I kept my voice even and calm because I didn’t want Charlie to punch my face. “I don’t mean that it doesn’t matter. I mean that no matter why she did it, we can’t bring her back. The end result is the same.”
He released me and backed all the way across the seat until he huddled against the other door. His hands shook violently. The poor boy seemed as afraid of what he’d done as I should have been afraid of what he might do.
Walt wrenched the car to the side of the road and slammed it in Park. He jerked around in the seat. “HOW DARE YOU?” He pointed his finger. “DON’T YOU EVER TOUCH HIM AGAIN OR YOU’LL FUCKING DEAL WITH ME!”
Charlie jammed his hands under his ass to keep them still and apologized in a whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought he meant…it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”
I sat up off the car door and tugged the wrinkles out of my overcoat. “No harm done. Everything is fine and we’re all friends again.” I met Walt’s eyes with mine. “We’re all friends again.”
He huffed and muttered while he righted himself in the seat. “Friends, humph!” He jerked the rearview to look at Charlie and pointed at his reflection. “You keep your fucking hands to yourself, young man, and we’ll stay friends.”
Charlie started to cry again and apologized some more. “I’m sorry!”
I slid over next to him to show that I was fine. “No harm done.”
He took his hands from under his butt to grab my jacket again. This time he did it to hold my attention instead of to threaten. “I have to know why. Please, Law! Help me find out why.”
“It won’t bring her back.”
His face scrunched and he sobbed. “PLEASE!”
I gave in. “Alright, Charlie, alright. We’ll find out why.”
“Can I…may I have a hug?”
“Sure.”
He wrapped his huge, powerful arms around me and sobbed on my shoulder. Walt watched carefully until I nodded for him to get moving. He put the car in gear and drove us home.
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