Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (16 page)

Then they were in Laura Redmond’s shop, gazing at the paintings that were hung and were propped up and were hidden and were half finished and were just being started and were—at least three of them—just purchased by Margot and destined to be delivered to her shop the following day.

Then they were somewhere else

Clay pots were all around them.

Except Nina was nowhere other than that accursed theater, which kept drawing her mind back into it.

The worst thing about it, she decided…

…oh hell, there was no single worst thing about it.
 
It was all worst.

But one of the contenders for Worst Thing in the Universe Ever Prize was the fact that Clifton Barret
 
and his quick short brutal right cross to the jaw had ruined
Hamlet
forever.

“Oh that this too too solid flesh could…”

SLAP!

“To be or not to…”

SLAP!

“The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.”

SLAP!

“My hour is almost come, when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames…”

SLAP!

And then they were gone and on their way to some other place.

It was just in front of this other place, where they’d just gotten out of the car, that Helen Reddington found them.

At first, she thought that Helen had simply materialized, as she had seemed to do on stage some hours earlier.

But then she saw a bicycle, a sole bicycle, in the rack beside the door, and knew how the materialization had been accomplished.

“Helen!” exclaimed Margot. “Helen, Nina has been telling me how much she enjoyed the rehearsal!”

Let’s see
, thought Nina,
how good an actress you really are.

Helen beamed.

“We were happy to have her there! Yes, yes, I think things are coming together nicely!”

Pretty damned good.
 
Pretty damned good.

“Nina…”

“Yes, Helen?”

“I wondered if…well, I wondered if we might talk a bit.”

Margot, sensing the ‘in private’ that hung two feet above a small mimosa tree and seemed to have nowhere to go or anything to do, dissipated it by saying:

“I’m going to be inside here for a time; why don’t the two of you wander through that magnificent jungle of statuary in the back, and chat there?”

Which is what they did.

It took them some time to make their way through a maze of hedges that guarded whatever ramshackle center of craft and hand wizardry that Margot had now brought them to—for Nina had now lost track of their comings and goings and had no idea where they were—but get through it they did, and they were rewarded by the sight of a massive football field of statuary lying seemingly discarded in front of them.

“Good grief, look at all this!” Nina found herself whispering.

Helen, younger and therefore more cynical, simply moved her head from side to side, narrowing her gaze.

They took several steps forward, then more steps, until finally they were surrounded by what would certainly have been the largest most massive, most wonderful cemetery lawn in the world except that there were no dead people under it.

To begin with, there were birdbaths. Big birdbaths, wide birdbaths, petite little cute birdbaths, ornate birdbaths, Greek birdbaths, simple rustic birdbaths, birdbaths for eagles, romantic and flowery birdbaths, obscene and dirty and vulgar birdbaths—it seemed such a shame, Nina found herself wondering, that, just as there were apparently no corpses buried in the most wonderful graveyard in the world, there were also no birds bathing in the thousand million or more swimming pools that had, by dint of light gray limestone and loving workmanship, been offered up to them.

Perhaps because there was no water.

There were not only birdbaths, of course.

There were tiny little concrete rabbits the size and shape of bowling balls with frozen ears; there were ornamental flowers weighing fifty pounds apiece. There were little shepherd boys and girls, ogling each other, and there were lambs and cows and deer and dogs and cats and animals of indeterminate nature.

There, far across the—what? Yard? Football field?
 
Memorial Park?—at any rate there across it was a monstrous concrete horse, at least ten feet high, and certainly able to hold the entire Greek army, which was just waiting until another Troy could be built for the chance to jump out and wreak
 
havoc.

Somehow they found themselves attracted to this beast, and had been making their way toward it for some time, avoiding rock toad frogs that had somehow made their way onto the narrow sidewalks, when Helen said:

“I went to Margot’s shop after rehearsal. Well, no…I went home first and made sure Grandmamma was all right.
 
Then I went to the shop. They gave me a list of the places you and she might be going this afternoon. Finally, I got lucky.”

“Well, I…”

There was nothing to say, of course, and so she simply let the sentence die, aware as it expired of the somnolent growling of an airplane engine high above them.

Nina looked up. There, circling lazily overhead, was a World War I vintage biplane pulling behind it a large red banner upon which had been written, in old English script, the words HOT SAUSAGE!

How strange
, she found herself thinking, as she stared out over the field of monuments around her.
 
How strange it all is.

“Nina, I wanted to explain to you about…well, about what you saw today.”

“You don’t have to do that, Helen.”

“I want to.”

“It’s really not any of my business.”

“I know you must be concerned. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

Again, nothing to say.

The horse grew larger as they approached it.

The airplane continued to circle.

“My world is difficult to describe. Clifton can be…well he can be quite demanding.”

They reached a strange and distrustful looking oasis in the desert of statuary. Tropical palms of some sort now ringed around them. There was a wrought iron table with two chairs.

An unseen power pulled them to the table and forced them to sit down.

“When I arrived in New York—my God, what was I, nineteen?
 
I had one year at Interlochen, but even after that I knew nothing. Nothing at all. I got hired by a repertory house off off off off Broadway—so far off Broadway it was probably in Illinois or at least it seemed that far. It was actually New Jersey, as I told you a few days ago. The subway didn’t even go out there.
 
But anyway, someone told Clifton about me and he came to watch a performance. After that, it all changed.”

“I’m sure it did.”

“After that…well, the world was different.”

Silence for a time.

Then…

You have to ask it, Nina.

You have to ask it.

“Does he hit you often?”

“I need…I need discipline.”

“You need what?”

“Discipline.”

“That’s what was happening today? That’s what we saw?
 
Discipline?”

‘Yes.”

“Helen, your husband hit you.”

“I deserved it.”

“You what?”

“I deserved it. We’re twelve days from opening. Missing a spot like that—professionals can’t do that. Not in Bay St. Lucy, not on Broadway, not in London—I think it may have been Paul—the actor playing Polonius—I think Paul may have thrown me off.
 
Or having Grandmama in the audience.
 
I don’t know.
 
But I deserved to be slapped.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Nina…artists, at the highest level…well, there has to be a…”

“Divorce him.”

“What?”

“Divorce him.”

“Nina, he’s all that’s …”

“Divorce him.
 
Right now.
 
This minute.”

“Hey, you two!”

This from Margot, who was making her way along the paths toward them.

“We’ve got
 
to go!
 
I’ve got four more shops to visit!”

Nina rose.

So did Helen.

“Divorce him, Helen.”

Whereupon Helen Reddington looked at her, shook her head, slowly, and said:

“I can’t.”

Then she turned and walked away.

During the following shop visits, and the ride back to Margot’s, and the ride back to her own shack, Nina could think of only one good thing about the entire situation.

That was the fact that no one in Bay St. Lucy knew that Helen had been slapped, except for Nina and Hope.

She arrived home to find John Giusti’s van parked in her driveway.
  

John himself was sitting on her top step.

He rose as she ascended the stairs, looked down at her, and asked:

“Did he hit her?”

Nina hesitated for a second.

John asked again:

“Did he hit her?”

“Yes,” she answered.

He walked past her down the stairs, got into his vehicle, and drove away.

“Oh, bloody hell,” she whispered.

She found herself wondering if she had any gin.

CHAPTER 9:
 
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER

Nina spent most of the rest of the evening and all of the following day waiting to hear that John Giusti had assaulted Clifton Barrett.

This news did not come.

Clifton Barrett was in fact assaulted.

Just not by John Giusti.

The assault took place in the following manner:

The new income pouring into the town, plus news of its soon-to-be status of The French Riviera reborn into The Southern Mississippi Cannes Summer Festival—had lured various art entrepreneurs to attempt new ventures, some of which only a few months earlier might have been deemed
 
imprudent, unwise, or just ridiculously stupid.

But people, Nina had surmised upon hearing of the plan, often did stupid things, and if a young man from somewhere in New Mexico wanted to open a coffee house/wine cabaret/cinema playhouse, featuring foreign films (especially French foreign films) in the upstairs portion of The Stink Shoppe (two hundred yards down the street from Margot’s own emporium)—why, that was his business.

It might even have been a good idea.

At any rate, people such as she and Margot were the kind of citizens who needed to patronize French films, if such films were ever to gain their rightful place in the hearts of the people of southern Mississippi;
 
and so they
 
planned to go together to the Wednesday evening performance of Claudel Desmoulins’
Le Renouvillier
, a work which purported to be fabulous entertainment
 
for anyone who enjoyed the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Nina had always enjoyed the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Dial M for Murder.

North by Northwest.

Psycho.

(Well,
Psycho
was a little scary, and there was that scene in the shower, which had caused Nina to take only baths for several years…but which was now stored far enough back in her memory bank that it did not directly affect her life, except for the troublesome fact that she almost had a heart attack every time Furl nosed open the bathroom door and came in to use the litter box while she was taking a shower, making her expect a tall shadow to appear outside of the shower curtain, and an otherwise prim churchgoing woman to start hacking at her with a butcher knife and screaming:
 
“EEEEEEEEEEEE!
 
EEEEEEEEE!
 
EEEEEEEEEE!”

So 7:30 on the evening in question found the two of them at their tables. There were no rows and no theater chairs, just small circular tables that might have come from the Rue Montparnasse and upon which had been placed the small glasses of Chardonnay they had ordered.

They had not talked a great deal during the course of an afternoon spent selling some of the newer purchased items that now graced the walls and nooks and crevices and porticos and junctures and door jambs of Elementals:
 
Treasures from the Sea and Earth.

There were, when one thought about it, only two things to talk about.

They learned about the less important thing at 3:30 in the afternoon when Officer Moon Rivard (head of Bay St. Lucy’s police department) parked his squad car in the parking lot, waddled up the driveway (Moon was not an obese man, although he had a kind of barrel chest; it was just that his short and powerful legs resembled parentheses rather than human limbs, and turned what would have been ‘walk’ for most people into ‘waddle’ for him)—and approached the shop.

He smiled broadly upon entering. He bent as he passed through the doorway––a fact which always surprised Nina, since the top of his head was two feet shorter than the door itself)––and he made his announcement somewhat like a father who’d just learned of the birth of his healthy child.

“Did you ladies hear?”

Oh God
, thought Nina.

She hated it when people said that.

One of the possible answers was always: ‘Hear what?’

But that sounded so dumb.

And, whatever it turned out to be, whatever it was, she had not in fact heard of it.

So why bother with that answer?

The better answer was the one she gave Moon Rivard now.

“No.”

His smile became broader, and the wild, iron gray- eyebrows which sat atop his gleaming blue eyes like barbed wire protecting beach fortifications, seemed to glow somehow, as though the excitement inherent in BRINGING NEWS had electrified it.

Anyone who touched it during this one instant would have been shocked.

“Hurricane!”

Well, Nina found herself thinking, that’s just the hell what we need.

A hurricane.

Helen Reddington’s husband beats her.

John Giusti is probably going to kill him for it.

It’s her fault, for having told John Giusti about it.

And we’re having a hurricane.

That’s just the hell what we need.

Margot took a step forward and placed the object she was holding—a thing that was golden and black, but had no function that Nina could recognize—on a thing that Nina could not recognize either, and said:

“This is the first we’ve heard.”

Moon nodded.

“Just got word from the Weather Service. Named Deborah.
 
Hurricane Deborah.”

“It’s coming here?”

“Naw.”

He shook his head and stared at the things around him, much like a diver might look at the long sunken artifacts of a lost civilization.

“Naw, they think it will hit over by the Florida panhandle.
 
They’re warning Pensacola.”

“I see.
 
When?”

“Couple of days, the way it’s looking now. I thought I might drive around town and let people know though:
 
if it follows the path it seems to be on now, and grows a little—they think it will—we might get some heavy rain on Friday and Saturday.”

“Flooding?”

“Don’t know. All the shops that have basements, though—well, be good not to have something too valuable down there.
 
If it’s two, three inches of rain, there’ll be lots of runoff. You might want to warn your boarders.
  
Shouldn’t panic or have to leave town.
 
Nobody’s evacuating or nothing.
 
But it won’t be very good down on the beach, and the fishing boats will be moored up tight. Those are two days when folks might want to rent a movie, maybe just stay in their rooms.”

And so there was that bit of news.

It produced little conversation between Margot and Nina, neither of whom knew anything to say about hurricanes and both of whom avoided mentioning the weather except to say “A tornado is coming!”—which it clearly was not.

As for the other bit of news—

––it was, of course, the fact that Clifton Barrett had struck his wife.

Nobody knew
 
how this information had leaked out.

Nina had thought it might remain a “Production Company Secret” until John Giusti had questioned her about it the previous day.

But of course that would have been too much to expect.

Somebody had talked.

Or maybe not.

Maybe ‘news’ was like late-spring pollen, which, try as you might, could not be kept out of people’s hair and off their breakfast tables.

But the strange thing about this ‘news’ was that it had not been allowed to turn into gossip.

There were, even in towns as inquisitive as Bay St Lucy, untouchable subjects.

No one, incredibly, talked about it.

It was as though the minister’s zipper were down.

It must be noticed; could not be missed; was horrible to contemplate; and foretold dire consequences.

But there was simply no appropriate time in which to talk about it, and no words with which it could adequately be expressed.

No one was going to stand up during the scripture reading
 
from
 
Second Timothy and shout:
 
“Zip up!”

Anyone who had, during the first minutes of The Fellowship Hour, started a conversation with the words, “Did you notice that Brother Daniels had forgotten to…”

…would have been stared down, and would have been forced to return home for the afternoon carrying an unopened bowl of green beans and French onion sauce.

And so, time had hung on their hands.

And so they found themselves here, waiting for Alfred Hitchcock to begin speaking French.

The film began.

A few characters, two at first, then two more, entered an apartment.

They sat down on a couch where they began smoking cigarettes and talking.

They continued to talk for twenty minutes.

After thirty minutes Nina went to sleep.

She awoke to find Margot punching her in the knee.

“Wake up.”

“What?”

“Wake up.”

“Where am I?”

“The Cinema Verite.”

“The what?”

“The Cinema Verite.”

“There is no such thing.”

“Of course there is; we’re in it.”

“Doing what?”

“We just watched a movie, Nina!”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, it’s over now and we have to go.”

“What was it about?”

Margot was tugging and pulling and hauling at her now, and so she rose.

“What was it about?”

“I don’t know, Nina.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I was asleep.”

“You too?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were just concentrating.”

“I was concentrating for a while, then I went to sleep.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought
you
were concentrating.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten-thirty.”

“Ten thirty? We slept for two hours?”

“Well. We had a hard day.”

They were descending the stairway now leading down into the ‘foyer,’ which was really The Stink Shop, which sold bizarre dresses the size of handkerchiefs, and which was now closed.

They made their way outside, moving slowly in a line of movie-watchers who were all rubbing their eyes and looking at their watches.