Death in a Summer Colony (9 page)

18

“S
ome people thought it was a cruel trick,” said Sterling Shevlin, “casting Malcolm Wudbine as Colonel Protheroe, the most disliked man in St. Mary Mead. And while it is easy to make comparisons between the two, it was no trick, indeed. Malcolm, like he always does, showed up one evening in early June at my cottage with a couple of bottles of Bombay Sapphire. And you see, that’s just the essential Malcolm, far too busy and important to show up and read for a part, but having the time to spend an evening sitting around and talking. And, as usual, before departing, asking if there was a role for him this season.”

Ray looked across at Shevlin as he listened.

“I told him there wasn’t much in Murder at the Vicarage for someone his age. If the people who dramatized the story had stayed closer to Agatha Christie’s book, I would have the perfect part, but as it was in the play, Colonel Protheroe was only a cadaver, and I was planning to use a dummy in the part.

“You can imagine my surprise when he expressed interest in the role. He said it was just perfect. He wouldn’t have to learn any lines, said that was getting harder every year. Malcolm told me he liked being part of the play every year because of the energy he absorbed from other cast members. He liked the tension and excitement and spending time with some of the younger actors. There was also something about that being a replacement for the grandchildren he never had. Malcolm, he was such a bundle of contradictions. There were so many things I liked about him, yet at times over the years, I was the target of his prejudices.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“I used to bring my then companion, Ellis, with me. Malcolm seemed very offended by that. At the time I heard he had started a whispering campaign. He reportedly feared that the colony would become a second Saugatuck. So I confronted Malcolm directly. Ellis and I marched up to his house, the old place before he flattened it and built Gull House. We demanded to talk to him. At first one of his employees said he wasn’t available. I told the young woman that we weren’t going to leave until we had a conversation with Malcolm. She disappeared in sort of a panic. Eventually we were escorted into the library. You can always tell a library created by an interior decorator. None of the books look read, they are just adornments. Eventually Malcolm arrived. I told him what I had been hearing and how offended I was. Well, of course, he denied the whole thing. He was at his most charming, served us sherry, a very good sherry, and told us how much he hated bigotry of any kind. He’s a real chameleon, a lying SOB. But I have to say that after that confrontation, I didn’t hear anything more.”

“Let’s talk about last night,” said Ray. “Were you part of the group that accompanied Tony Grattan down to the theater from the cocktail party?”

“No, I was ahead of the group by 10 or 15 minutes.”

“What were you doing?”

“I have a pre-performance ritual. I love being in an empty theater. I like walking around with just the working lights on. I try to envision how the show should go, and I make a little list of final instructions. I think about each of the main characters and what they have to do to create the necessary tension. Actually, I’ve been doing this from the first rehearsal, but this is my last chance to help people focus. Once you get a cast beyond learning their lines and blocking, it’s all about tone and nuance. Right before they go onstage, I try to remind each of them of one or two things that will make their character more believable.”

“Who else was in the building?”

“Well, I don’t think anyone was. I didn’t see anyone, but this is a big rambling place. It supposedly has a history of being one of the favorite places for teens to have assignations, probably some of their parents, too. In the costume shop and the property area, there are lots of places one, or shall I say two, can disappear. And then there’s the ghost.” Shevlin looked at Ray. “I can tell, Sheriff, you don’t believe in ghosts, but there is one here. I’ve been in this building for years, sometimes alone, at times in the company of others, when I, we, have heard her laughter. It’s never from the same place. I don’t know how to explain it, eerie, almost hysterical, and definitely sexual. Earlier this summer we had a heating and cooling guy working on the ventilators. He was here and heard it several times. He told me he’d never work here again.”

“To the best of your knowledge, no one else was in the building?”

“As far as I know, no one of a non-spectral nature. I think I heard the ghost, but I don’t pay any attention to her anymore.”

“And then the cast arrived?”

“They all came in together. They were noisy and in high spirits. I think alcohol and the kind of weather we were having last evening played into it. Most of us resonate with violent weather. It causes a kind of madness. Of course, I was immediately concerned about their behavior. When you talk to the cast members, some will tell you I was cross with them, a misinterpretation on their part. I needed them to quiet themselves and start getting into character.”

“Two questions. First, was there anyone missing who should have been here? Second, was there anyone around who shouldn’t have been here? And was there anything out of place, anything that seemed wrong or unnatural?”

Shevlin rubbed his balding pate with his right hand, fingers spread like he might be running them through hair. Then he pulled off his glasses, the heavy horn-rimmed frames, and wiped his eyes, first the left then the right, with a rumpled handkerchief.

“I hear your questions, but other things are bouncing around in my brain. Something is wrong, unnatural. Did I see anything? Let me ponder that for a moment. I don’t think so. But something was completely wrong. We do a play about murder. We wrap the scariest piece of the human experience with the cozy atmosphere of an English village. People drink tea and eat biscuits as they try to puzzle out the real killer from the many possibilities. And so no one in the audience has to work too hard, Miss Marple, with her unerring logic and amazing memory for detail, eventually identifies the killer. It’s a comfortable evening of theatre—dinner and drinks before, dessert and drinks after, and some light mental gymnastics in the middle. What took place last night is completely unnatural. I am struggling to believe this really happened. Murder, it’s not part of my experience. It’s not part of the experience of anyone here. It’s the stuff of theatre, film, and TV.”

“But it is real,” said Ray. “It was carefully planned and skillfully executed. Again, was there anyone backstage who shouldn’t have been there?”

“No one that I saw. It was just the cast and the crew. Malcolm was late, that was his custom. There was the usual anticipatory buzz, the kind of energy that gets everyone prepared for the opening curtain.”

Shevlin looked at Ray, “The first scene went very well, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Where were you?”

“I usually try to go around the outside of the auditorium and sneak in a back door to watch, but with the rain starting to fall, I just stayed in the wings and listened. Then at the end of the scene, actually it was a bit before the end, I slipped out the stage door and headed for the john. I knew there would be a line, and I was ….”

“I understand.”

“Then I came right back. I was in the green room giving positive strokes and waiting for the next scene. We made this an extra long break in consideration of our…”

“Yes, that’s been explained to me. So you were in the green room the whole time after you returned to the building.”

“Yes, until I walked backstage with Grubbs. That was after the lights came back on.”

“And at that time was the whole cast in the green room?”

“To the best of my knowledge. People were spread out through the adjoining areas, the dressing rooms and makeup area. So if you’re asking who was there and who wasn’t, I can’t answer that. I remember a conversation with Tony Grattan and an overlong exchange with Florence Carlotta. It’s not a static situation with people sitting around in assigned seats.”

“Do you know anyone who would want Malcolm Wudbine dead?”

“I know scores of people who have been pissed at Malcolm over the years, myself included. But dead, that’s a different story. For example, you have Verity, his first wife, Miss Marple in the play. I guess it was a bloody divorce, theirs. That was years and years ago. In spite of that they successfully reared a son. And here in the theatre, this year, as in years past, I won’t say that they were excessively fond of one another, but they were able to get along without any overt enmity.

“What I’ve heard many times over the years, Sheriff, is people saying something like, ‘I wish Malcolm would just go away.’ Then people end up adding, ‘Of course, he should be good enough to leave a big stack of money in our care.’ Malcolm had us all hooked. He was the goose that laid the golden egg. His fortune kept this place going, not that we couldn’t have figured it out on our own if there had been no Malcolm. He just made it so easy. His money would fix any problem, and we didn’t have to dig into our own pockets. It was like having someone around who was always good enough to pay
the mortgage and the taxes. That’s real addictive.”

“Did you ever have any financial dealings with Malcolm Wudbine?”

“Oh heavens, no. The first step to investing is having something to invest. I’ve never been there. The fluctuations of the market, up or down, have never affected me, not one bit.”

“Is there anything else about Wudbine or the events of last night that…?”

“I didn’t sleep last night, not much. I’ve always kidded myself into believing that I had a unique ability to see into the human heart. As a writer and actor, I’ve often run the scripts of those around me in my own head. I thought I could tell what others were thinking. I don’t want you to believe that I’m completely delusional, but now it’s clear…that…well…I don’t know where I was quite going. What I’m trying to say is that there is a killer in our midst, and I don’t have any idea who that might be. This morning in the hours before dawn I worked through the cast and crew, their appearance, language, gestures, moods, even their unique odors. I thought about every nuance. I can’t make it work. I can’t see any of them as killers. I can’t think of anyone who would have a motive, or anger, or passion to do anything like that.”

19

A
s Ray looked across the desk, Verity Wudbine-Merone didn’t appear quite the same as he had remembered her. Her sprightliness, so evident the evening before at the colony cocktail party was gone. She seemed weary and dispirited, her Lord and Taylor resort-wear replaced by a shapeless sweatshirt and jeans.

“Hard night,” he said.

“Very. People needed to gather. People needed to talk. And somehow, I don’t quite understand their thinking, many felt compelled to express their sympathies to me, like I was the widow. I know it’s not possible to march up to the big house on the hill and see the real Mrs. Wudbine, but….”

“I don’t understand?”

“Brenda Wudbine, my successor, has never been part of the community. Most people here don’t know her. Most have never seen her. I know Brenda from weddings, graduations, and funerals. Other than guilt by association, I bear the woman no ill. But I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable going up to Malcolm’s palace. It’s foreign territory, by invitation only. I don’t think anyone just dropped by. And from what I’ve heard, by evening Brenda is too smashed to make any sense.”

Ray noted her last response before asking, “Did you see your son?”

“I did. I slipped away at one point and went over to his cottage. Elliott and I sat on his porch and drank champagne and smoked. I haven’t had a cigarette in years. We had a good talk, then he went to be with his wife.”

“Champagne?”

“Hardly an appropriate choice, but it was cold, had alcohol, and was there in my fridge, part of what we’d staged for the afterglow party. I’ve read that the bubbles make the alcohol go to your head quickly. That’s what I wanted. I’m struggling with this. Not so much his death, but the fact that he was murdered, an affront to the sanctity of our community. Even his last act around here was offensive.”

They sat in silence for several minutes as Verity sipped from a tall paper container of coffee. “Miss Marple, the character I was playing, would tell you that I’m the natural suspect. I had the motive—albeit of ancient malice at this point—the means and the opportunity.”

“And would Miss Marple name you the killer in the final scene?”

“I think not. She would know that I don’t waste time on old grievances. Malcolm and I went our separate ways thirty-some years ago. He hurt me greatly, but I did my best to shed that as quickly as I could. I wasn’t going to be continually poisoned by his evil.”

“So tell me about your relationship with Malcolm Wudbine.”

“Where should I begin?” she asked.

“In the beginning, and only a summary, please.”

“We met in college. Malcolm was a big, handsome farm boy with broad shoulders and wonderful curly brown hair. He had a great smile and was the life of the party, every party. He had a wonderful singing voice, and could sit down at a piano and belt out romantic ballads. He was loved by everyone: women, men, and dogs. People just followed him around.

“We fell in love our junior year and as was the custom in those days, we married after graduation—without ever living together, imagine that. I taught math, and he went to graduate school, Northwestern, MBA. Eventually he was brought into the family business. My father and Uncle Sid ran a small-town bank, a place that catered to farmers and area merchants. Malcolm transformed the place. He had new ideas, was very aggressive. His primary goal was to make a lot of money. Before long he had bought up most of the other small banks in the area. While my father and uncle didn’t especially like his business methods, they were delighted with all the cash he generated. For the first time in their lives, they were suddenly wealthy, modestly so, but in the chips. I think it was about this time that Malcolm decided that if he wanted to make some real money, he had to move on. It was, perhaps not too coincidentally, about the time our marriage ended.”

“Your differences were…?”

“Other women, right from the start, actually, before the start. I heard years later that the night before our wedding he had a tryst with one of his former flames, and his groomsmen had to drag him out of bed and get him showered and sober before they brought him to church. I learned to overlook his dalliances for years, but when he told me we were moving to Chicago, that gave me an exit ramp. He was generous in the divorce, and the size of my later inheritance from my father was directly tied to Malcolm’s time at the family bank.

“And it all worked out, Sheriff. Two years after Malcolm left, I married a very nice man. We had a child together, a daughter. John was a great stepfather to Elliott during his growing up. While pretty much an absentee father, Malcolm seemed to be around for all the important events, didn’t interfere in between, and always met his financial obligations to Elliott and me.”

“Was Malcolm up here in the summer during those years?” probed Ray.

“That was the peculiar thing. I got the summer cottage in the divorce. Of course, I should have. By that time Malcolm could have bought a resort home almost anywhere in the country, but for some perverse reason he wanted a place up here. And it worked out because Elliott got to see his father more often, and Malcolm really didn’t intrude on my life.”

“The hyphenated name, Wudbine-Merone?”

“I did that for my children. Elliott had a mother who was a Wudbine, and Jenny, my daughter, had a mother who was a Merone. In our small town people got used to our hyphenated name.”

“From your description, the relationship with Malcolm remained amicable?”

“More or less. In recent years I’ve been concerned about how hard Malcolm worked Elliott. And I’m not always sure he was very nice to him. I sense he treated his son like just another member of his staff, someone at his beck and call 24-7. Then I would think I needed to back off. Elliott is an adult. He needed to fight his own battles. And I think the same goes for his wife, my daughter-in-law.”

“She’s the other Wudbine in the playbill…”

“Yes, Jill. She and Elliott married after she graduated from law school. Shortly thereafter she became Malcolm’s personal lawyer. I think these days most of her time and energy is devoted to looking after his foundation. You know she’s Richard Grubbs’ daughter?”

“No, he didn’t mention that.”

“Not surprising. They are not close. After Jill and Elliott were married, she bonded to Malcolm. In the beginning they seemed to have a father and daughter bond, later he seemed to treat her like a loyal servant. Strange marriage, Jill and Elliott, but I keep out of it.”

“Strange, how?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. She has no affect, like she has Asperger’s or something close to that.” She paused, glanced out the window, and looked back at Ray. “There’s another part of the story you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“Malcolm, the womanizer, the consummate Lothario. In the early days, after our divorce and before he remarried…how do I explain this…Malcolm just had a way with women. He would manage to seduce someone new every summer, mostly colony women. In addition to his wonderful cottage—the first building, not that cement bird—he always had a big boat, a cabin cruiser. And before the helicopter, he kept an airplane here…you know…with pontoons. He’d land on the lake and drive it right up on the beach. He did a lot of entertaining. I think that’s how he isolated his prey. Taking people out on the boat or for airplane rides. Veronica Grubbs—Richard’s wife, Jill’s mother, pretty woman—she was one of them. Richard seemed quite crushed, but somehow they got through it. And a year or two later she was dead, breast cancer. Very sad. I don’t know if Jill is aware…well, she must at least have heard rumors.

“I was surprised when Jill showed up to read for the play. She’s never done that before. I couldn’t imagine her acting. Like I said, the woman is without affect. But Sterling saw something that I certainly didn’t see. I must say, freed from who she is in real life, Jill is quite remarkable. On stage she is alive with warmth and emotion. I’ve never seen that before, never. It’s totally foreign to the Jill I’ve known for…well…since the time she was a little girl.”

“Could Richard or someone else who was cuckolded by Malcolm…?”

“I’ve wondered about that. But I don’t think so. That was so long ago. When he started bringing his own retinue of pretty women, he stopped hitting on colony wives. Now what he does around Chicago, that’s another story.

“Sheriff, we’re not killers, not here in the colony. That said, few tears will be shed as the result of his passing. If Malcolm’s demise had only happened some other way. A heart attack would have been perfectly acceptable. Or, perhaps, crashing in his beloved helicopter, taking that Amazon personal trainer and pilot with him. But murder, I can’t think of anyone who would commit murder.”

“When did you arrive at the theatre last night?”

“Just about everyone in the cast came together. I had to change into my costume and do makeup. I was in the first scene, so I wanted some time to settle into my role and go over my lines.”

“And after the first scene?”

“I checked my makeup and was sitting in the back corner of the green room. I was going over lines again. I have a big part in the second scene. I like to act out the part in my head before I go onstage. Although I’ve never had this happen, I’m so afraid of going blank. Maybe that’s a false fear, part of being 70.”

“That’s where you were when the lights went out?”

“Yes, I just stayed put.”

“Last night in the backstage area, was there anyone around who wasn’t a member of the cast or crew?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about in the last few weeks. Anyone unfamiliar to you, not part of the colony?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s hard to say. There’s a lot of coming and going. People have guests and visitors. And there’re tradesmen in and out, carpenters, and whatever. But the people I know, I can’t see any of these people as killers. It doesn’t fit. I believe it’s got to be someone from the outside, maybe a team of people. Professionals. People who were trying to get even with Malcolm. God only knows how many people he’s screwed along the way: other billionaires, the Mafia, foreign potentates….”

“Why here, why during the play?”

“I thought about that. Usually Malcolm has one or more of his security people lurking about. It’s only up here that he feels comfortable enough not to have someone around all the time. Elliott says, though, that up at his father’s place,” she pointed in the general direction of Malcolm’s property, “he’s got all types of cameras, motion detectors, and what not. Looks like Fort Knox or the White House.”

“It has been alleged that Malcolm provided investment services to some of the residents of the colony. Do you know anything about that?”

“I’ve heard that over the years. What you need to know is I did everything in my power not to have conversations about Malcolm. My only connection to him for decades was about matters that concerned Elliott. People learned long ago not to talk about him in front of me.

“So, Sheriff, if I can go back to playing Miss Marple again, I don’t think you’re going to catch the killer by looking at the cast or crew, or anyone else in the colony. Like I said, I’d bet he’d made some big-time enemies. When it came to money, he’d be
ruthless. And it’s public knowledge that he’d made billions, especially in the last ten years. He was frequently mentioned in Forbes and Bloomberg. Chicago Magazine did a big profile on him a few years back.

“I think you’re looking for some highly skilled professional killers. And they didn’t fly commercial. Send one of your minions over to the airport to check the log of private jets that have arrived and departed the last few days. I bet the killer is long gone. You’re spinning your wheels here. I don’t mean to be dismissive, but finding Malcolm’s killer is probably beyond the reach of a local sheriff. It’s going to take the FBI or Interpol to figure this one out.”