A Motive For Murder (12 page)

Because no phone calls or outside contact with the
world is allowed, the boys are trapped with a cast of Marine-like
counselors for six weeks and transformed from little monsters into
young men.

The plot was utterly preposterous, the dialogue
puerile, and Mikey Morgan hardly more appealing than he had been
during
The Nutcracker.
But he was adorable, that was
undeniable. The movie had obviously been filmed more than a year
earlier, before Mikey’s latest growth spurt He had a long face and
a mop of blond hair that hung over his eyes. His nose was straight
and his mischievous eyes sparkled intensely. His smile was his
trademark and Mikey flashed it often while onscreen, the wide grin
splitting his face with impish confidence. Not a freckle, much less
a pimple, marred his smooth skin.

“He’s a much better actor than he is a dancer, don’t
you think?” Auntie Lil said loudly at one point. “Given the
ridiculous plot, of course.” Several people near the front glanced
back at them irritably. People in Manhattan tended to go to
matinees to escape the ever-present talkers that evening shows
attracted.

“Not bad,” T.S. agreed, eyes glued to the screen.

Shushing Auntie Lil became unnecessary as the plot
took a bizarre and ironic twist: the boys in the movie—led by Mikey
Morgan’s character—had slipped away during a five-mile camp run and
were circling back toward the waterfront. There, Mikey crawled
under the foundation of a small shack and emerged with a thick
rope. The boys ran back to the head counselor’s cabin and invaded
the private bathroom, fashioning an elaborate slipknot noose around
the edge of the metal shower’s floor rim before running the end of
the rope out a window and over a nearby tree limb. Their intent was
to snare the instructor in midlather, stringing him up like an
animal trapped by the natives in an African safari movie.

“Are you seeing what I’m watching?” Auntie Lil
whispered.

“Of course I am,” T.S. whispered back as indignant
sssshhhs echoed at them from all sides.

Sure enough, in the middle of the night, as the boys
waited breathlessly outside, the counselor entered the shower stall
and began loudly singing as he soaped up in the buff, unaware of
the rope coiled around his feet.

The boys banded together outside the window and, at
an opportune time, grabbed the end of the rope and pulled. In a
flurry of Hollywood editing, the rope uncoiled and tightened around
the counselor’s feet, flipping him upside down and leaving him
hanging from the ceiling like a well-dressed gazelle. The shower
was, in reality, too small for such a move, but this was Hollywood
after all and the miracle of editing made anything possible.

The few children in the audience giggled hysterically
at the sight of a bare butt, but Auntie Lil and T.S. were left
speechless at the implications.

“That was bizarre,” T.S. said after the show.
Positively creepy.”

“Yes,” Auntie Lil agreed, “more than a little
macabre. And I think we know where the killer got his technique.
All we need now is a motive.”

Bobby Morgan’s funeral was scheduled for 11 P.M., a
time that he would probably have endorsed, as it gave him maximum
newspaper and television coverage. Legions of reporters hovered on
the edges of the well-dressed crowd and a dozen media vans blocked
the streets nearby, littering the sidewalks with thick black
cables.

Auntie Lil, T.S., Herbert, and Lilah arrived an hour
early and positioned themselves on the front steps, where they
could watch the well-dressed mourners pay their respects and,
possibly, cut a few deals within the hallowed walls of St. Paul’s
Church. Auntie Lil insisted on waiting for the appointed hour
before entering because she wanted to sit in back to observe the
crowd better. They settled into a pew of their own near the rear.
Auntie Lil immediately fumbled in the depths of her enormous
pocketbook in search of her glasses. She located them next to a
paperback she had been missing for weeks and a theater program from
a show she had seen in 1983. As the priest entered from the rear of
the church and raised his arms for the benediction, she adjusted
the glasses carefully on her nose and scrutinized the room for
familiar faces.

Most of the other board members were present,
including a conspicuously sobbing Lane Rogers. Her mascara trickled
down her cheeks as she heaved great sobs into a ragged tissue, her
immense shoulders shaking with the effort. She was flanked by the
ever-present Ruth Beretsky, who held a pack of Kleenex obediently
at the ready for her friend. Hans Glick sat stiffly in the aisle
seat next to Ruth, his back ramrod straight and his eyes fixed on
the profusion of flower arrangements with a disapprov–ing frown. He
was no doubt mentally calculating how to arrange the blooms in a
more logical fashion.

Mikey Morgan sat in a front row, inadvertently framed
by a gigantic wreath of carnations dominating the altar. He was
wearing a custom-cut black suit with boxy shoulders and pipe-stem
legs that made him look years older. His somber face added to the
impression. Auntie Lil was struck by how much he had aged since he
had starred in the movie they had seen the day before. His mother
sat next to him. She was a petite woman with close-cropped brown
hair and a triangular face. She wore a simple navy suit, a string
of pearls, and matching earrings. Her arm was draped protectively
over the back of the pew behind her older son. She was remarkably
thin, given that she was the mother of four children. The rest of
her brood sat in descending order to her right. Auntie Lil knew
that Bobby Morgan had moved to Los Angeles two years before,
following his divorce, and taken only Mikey with him. Though the
younger children had presumably not seen him much since, their
rigid posture and stunned expressions belied their disbelief that
their father—however distant—had died. The row of tiny faces,
crumpled in bewilderment, triggered the first pangs of true regret
in more than one mourner’s heart.

Many of the pews were jammed with fashionably thin
colleagues whose almost bizarrely deep tans, frosted or feathered
hair, and loosely constructed designer clothing marked them as
members of the Los Angeles entertainment community. There was more
makeup per square inch of skin than at a Mary Kay cosmetics
convention. Interspersed among these glowing humans sat the paler
and more diverse New Yorkers, their faces grim. Unlike the
uniformly fit West Coast contingent, the New Yorkers ranged in size
from the emaciated to the downright obese. Among the emaciated were
many members of the corps de ballet, who had turned out to pay
their respects to the man whose death they had witnessed. They
dotted the room with their own brand of brightly colored,
free-flowing fashion.

Artistic Director Raoul Martinez sat in a third-row
pew, his mane of glossy black hair gleaming with multicolored
reflections from a nearby stained-glass window. His wife, Lisette,
sat regally beside him, her long neck swaying slightly to the organ
music floating in on waves of flower-scented air. She was an exotic
figure, dressed in austere black that highlighted the extreme
angles of her sculptured cheekbones. Her hair was pulled back in so
severe a knot that Auntie Lil wondered if her grimace was due to
her hairstyle. Tears glistened prettily on her eyelashes as the
priest began the opening prayer.

Many of the couples in the crowd held hands or draped
arms around each other for support. Raoul and Lisette Martinez were
an exception. They sat side by side without acknowledging each
other’s presence. They were joined in their row by a subdued
Paulette Puccinni, wearing a black caftan, and Jerry Vanderbilt,
whose face was respectfully somber. Although the crowd repre–sented
numerous opportunities for comment and gossip, neither Paulette nor
Jerry looked up to the task. In fact, they both seemed queasy at
their proximity to death.

Andrew Perkins sat in the opposite pew, next to a
willowy teenager whose sullen frown proved she was his daughter
much more than the fact that she was a plainer version of the
self-possessed dancer of a few nights before. Julie Perkins looked
younger without makeup, though still much older than her years. Her
blond hair was combed to midback and anchored with a wide black
velvet ribbon. The simple style suited her delicate, deerlike
features. She had the preternatural bearing of a well-trained
dancer, which gave her a grace that was eerie in so young a child.
Her hands did not simply turn the pages of the prayer book; they
posed and fluttered in a delicate progression. As the service began
she inched farther and farther away from her father until she had
opened the space of another body between them. Several other young
dancers, possibly from her class, sat quietly on her other side. As
the atmosphere inside the church grew increasingly stuffy and the
music louder, they began to weep as only teenagers can weep: with
wide eyes, flowing tears, and an enthusiastically morbid
realization that death could happen to them as well at any time.
Julie Perkins wept with the same ritualized style she had used to
ignore her father: her shoulders moved in delicate rhythm to the
organ, her hands spread out like paper fans over her face, her head
held at a becoming angle.

“Who are those people?” T.S. whispered to Auntie Lil
when a pew of gray-haired, plainly dressed people caught his eye.
Two men and three women, all in their late sixties or early
seventies, sat in the second row. Their faces were stamped honestly
with their age; no artifice or surgery had been used to mask the
wear and tear of passing years. The men had stiff crew cuts of a
style long gone from favor. The women had white hair swept and
lacquered into obedient mounds. Though clad appropriately in dark
suits and dresses, their dated attire looked curiously new, as if
their clothes had hung unused for decades between funerals. When
the coffin was brought down the center aisle, all three women
produced handkerchiefs and began to cry in unison, like an elderly
Greek chorus.

“That’s his family,” a woman behind them whispered in
response to T.S.’s question. When she leaned forward, a cloud of
perfume preceded her, choking his nostrils. Thank God Lilah didn’t
fumigate herself like that, he thought. Thank God she smelled of
nothing more than soap and fresh air.

“They’re his uncles and aunts,” the woman continued,
as if savoring her grasp of inside information. “They’re straight
out of
On the Waterfront.
Can you believe it? I could cast
them as extras tomorrow.”

T.S. glanced behind him and caught a glimpse of a
woman so thin that her arms protruded from her black linen dress
like a child’s mistakenly grafted onto an adult body. Her face was
deep bronze, the skin stretched tight and the hair relentlessly
feathered in too casual spikes. He turned quickly back around and
calmed himself with a peek at Lilah. Lilah seemed so more vibrant
and human, with her delicate wrinkles and silver hair. Were these
the people Bobby Morgan wheeled and dealed with? They were like
well-dressed Halloween ghouls.

The service itself was curiously devoid of
emotion.

People wept, but with the exception of the teenagers,
they shed their tears sparingly and surreptitiously repaired the
damage to their makeup when they were done. They were playing out a
script, reacting on cue, producing appropriate rather than true
feelings. Few among the crowd seemed genuinely sorry that Bobby
Morgan was dead.

“He shows no emotion whatsoever,” Auntie Lil
whispered as the service drew to a close. She nodded toward Mikey
Morgan. He sat stone-faced next to his mother, staring at his
father’s coffin. Not a muscle twitched. He could have been in a
trance.

The doors of the church were heavy and soundproofed.
As two men in suits opened the heavy slabs for the pallbearers who
would lift the coffin into the waiting hearse, a wall of sound
invaded the church like the roar of a terrifying beast: people
shouting, horns honking, engines racing. It was more than typical
New York City chaos.

As one of the first people to follow the casket
outside, Auntie Lil soon found out what the commotion was all
about: the Reverend Ben Hampton was back. He had chosen to stage a
demonstration at Bobby Morgan’s funeral. Though a tasteless
occasion for protest, she had to admire his sense of drama. Ben
Hampton was dressed like a preacher at an old-time Southern revival
and held a black Bible aloft from his perch on a makeshift platform
set up on the church steps. Dozens of reporters and television
announcers elbowed each other for room before him. They competed
with Hampton’s regular protestors, who were dressed in black and
held a coffin labeled RACIAL EQUALITY on their shoulders.

The Reverend’s words were inaudible to few beyond the
immediate crowd, but whatever he was saying must have made for good
copy. Not a single reporter reacted to the real coffin being
carried down the church’s front steps. In a perfect example of the
fickle interests of the American public, Bobby Morgan had been
replaced by a fresher story before his own had even drawn to an
end.

Suddenly a squad of patrol cars swarmed to a halt
behind the television vans. A sleek black limousine eased in behind
them like a shark gliding silently toward its prey. A silver-haired
man dressed in Armani strode from the car holding handcuffs aloft.
He was followed by a pack of faithful flacks in slightly less
expensive suits.

“The police commissioner,” Lilah told them. “What’s
he doing here?”

As cameras clicked and whirred, the commissioner
pushed his way through the crowd behind a wedge of uniformed
officers. Climbing up the church steps until he reached the
Reverend Ben Hampton, he held the handcuffs up for the cameras and
proclaimed, “Benjamin Hampton, you’re under arrest for the
premeditated murder of Robert K. Morgan, with malice aforethought.
You have the right to remain silent...”