Murder at the Summer Theater: Double V Mysteries, #5

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

Rehearsals grow tense at a summer theater on the Connecticut shore.  The lead actress goes missing – or was she murdered?

Juliet Van Allen and Elmer Vartanian, the "Double V" duo, are called in on the case, but even with Juliet pretending to be an actress and newcomer to the cast, the players are guarding their secrets closely.  There are spurned lovers, jealous wives, scene-stealers and heartbreakers, with enough spirit of vengeance to fill up the loge.  Will the show go on?  Even when a body is found?

Murder at the Summer Theater is the fifth book in the Double V Mysteries series set in New England in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

If you like the charm of a classic film, this "cozy noir" will return you to an era of soft ocean breezes and a glamorous game of suspicion played between acts.  The painted backdrop is the heyday of summer theatre, when greats from the New York stage and Hollywood performed in barns and tents on New England's famed "straw hat circuit." Passionate accusations and grim consequences lurk in the dressing room.  Join the nervous producers on the veranda for a champagne cocktail.

It's a seaside caper where murder is in the spotlight in the summer of 1951, and Juliet and Elmer are on the verge of a new professional – and personal – partnership. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jacqueline T. Lynch
• Release date: Dec 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386731252

Jacqueline T. Lynch

Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional and national publications, several plays, some award winners, one of which has been translated into Dutch and produced in the Netherlands.   Her several books, fiction and nonfiction, are available in eBook and print online.  She has recently published the first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth – Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  She writes a syndicated newspaper column on classic films: Silver Screen, Golden Years, and also writes three blogs: Another Old Movie Blog (http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com)  A blog on classic films. New England Travels (http://newenglandtravels.blogspot.com)  A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England. Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. (http://annblythactresssingerstar.blogspot.com) website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing --  https://www.etsy.com/shop/LynchTwinsPublishing?ref=search_shop_redirect

Book preview

MURDER AT THE SUMMER THEATER

A Double V Mystery

Volume 5

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

***

If you would like to join my mailing list, there’s a special offer for you at the end of this story—receive the first book in this Double V Mysteries series FREE!  See you at the end of the book.

***

All rights reserved by the author.  Unauthorized copying is prohibited.

Published by Jacqueline T. Lynch

P.O. Box 1394, Chicopee, Massachusetts  01021

***

Rehearsals grow tense at a summer theater on the Connecticut shore.  The lead actress goes missing – or was she murdered?

Juliet Van Allen and Elmer Vartanian, the Double V duo, are called in on the case, but even with Juliet pretending to be an actress and newcomer to the cast, the players are guarding their secrets closely.  There are spurned lovers, jealous wives, scene-stealers and heartbreakers, with enough spirit of vengeance to fill up the loge.  Will the show go on?  Even when a body is found?

Murder at the Summer Theater is the fifth book in the Double V Mysteries series set in New England in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

If you like the charm of a classic film, this cozy noir will return you to an era of soft ocean breezes and a glamorous game of suspicion played between acts.  The painted backdrop is the heyday of summer theatre, when greats from the New York stage and Hollywood performed in barns and tents on New England’s famed straw hat circuit. Passionate accusations and grim consequences lurk in the dressing room.  Join the nervous producers on the veranda for a champagne cocktail.

It’s a seaside caper where murder is in the spotlight in the summer of 1951, and Juliet and Elmer are on the verge of a new professional – and personal – partnership. 

***

Chapter One

Elmer Vartanian walked the several blocks from Colt’s Manufacturing Company to his tenement apartment in the south end of Hartford, Connecticut, ostensibly to give expression to his Puritan sense of guilt for quitting a good job that he needed.  Mostly, he walked to save the bus fare that he was probably going to need for food if he didn’t get another job soon.  He knew without too much weighing of his conscience that it was really more in celebration, not guilt.  He was glad to be walking out of that dark, noisy gun factory, to be breathing the fresh air again and enjoying the summer sunshine.  He felt like a free man again.

Freer even than his first walk outside of prison gates two years earlier.

The Colt factory, one of Hartford’s, and Connecticut’s, most historic industries, was no prison like the state penitentiary, not to the thousands who happily worked there.  He just wasn’t one of them. Was he lazy?  He asked himself this as he observed cracks in the sidewalk and gave sidelong glances to busy Saturday traffic passing by on Main Street.

No, he felt he was not lazy.  He was hardworking and disciplined; he had trained himself to be in repentance for his teen goof-off years and the stupid stunts, and the crime that had sent him to prison.  No, he had learned better, learned the hard way.

But he was not a 9-to-5 man, he told himself, at least not indoors.  He had enjoyed driving a truck, and working on a tobacco farm, jobs that kept him outdoors.  Maybe it was his seven years at the Wethersfield State Prison that made him claustrophobic at the thought of spending the rest of his days inside the walls of a factory.

Maybe it would be different if he worked in a store?  A drugstore, or a department store.  A place with windows where a guy could look out and see the daylight, with customers he could talk with and not just keep his nose glued to a noisy machine, risking the wrath of the foreman if he dared look up from the monotony of his drill press. Would one of those grand old stores downtown hire him, like G. Fox, or Sage-Allen, or even just a five-and-ten, like Kresge’s?  Would they hire an ex-con? 

He had liked working at the Wadsworth Atheneum art museum as a janitor.  It was quiet, and it was a place of beauty.  But he had quit there, too, to avoid too much contact with Juliet.

It was all different now.  He looked forward to seeing her this afternoon, had thought about it all day. He was to meet her for a late lunch at the Connecticut Room at G. Fox and take her shopping.  Or wander behind her while she shopped, which was what all men did when they shopped with a woman, which was okay with him.

He arrived at his building, sidling through the kids in the neighborhood as they chased around each other, making their roughneck, happy noise.  He threw a smile to a little boy on a tricycle who lazily rode in circles in the middle of the sidewalk.

The building was old, shabby, soot-stained brick, but it was home.  He trotted up the stairs to his second floor one-room apartment, the sounds of radios and loud conversations from other apartments echoing in the hall.

He took his key from his pants pocket and opened the door to his room.  A telegram lay on the floor.  He immediately drew back and looked up and down the hall, foolishly, as if to see if he were being observed opening his own mail, as if there was something wrong with that.

He entered his one-room furnished inner sanctum, closed the door and sat down at his old wooden kitchen table on one of the two chairs.

The telegram was from Danny Martin.

He knew nobody named Danny Martin.

CALL CIRCLE-923 SOONEST STOP JOB STOP.

Elmer felt tingling in his body, almost a chill despite the warm day.

JOB.

Something akin to a premonition, a good feeling, made Elmer decide to call this Danny Martin now, but not on the payphone on the first floor.  There was never enough privacy in this building where neighborly curiosity ran high.  He left the building again and walked down a block to a mom-and-pop variety store where there was a phone booth.

The door to the store was propped open by a wooden case of Cokes; unlike the bigger stores calling themselves supermarkets, this little hole in the wall wasn’t about to get air-conditioning anytime soon. Elmer went to the trademark red cooler inside, fished out a cold Coke, flipped off the bottle cap on the built-in bottle opener on the side and put a nickel on the counter. Eddie, the owner, hunched over the far end of the counter, listening to a ballgame on the radio. He chewed on a toothpick and waved Elmer off as if to say, yeah, I see you—don’t bother me.

Elmer hiked back to the phone booth in the back of the store and closed the squeaky cantilevered door. He took out the telegram and dropped a handful of change in the box when the operator connected him. After five rings, Elmer was about to hang up, but then a male voice answered, Yes, who is it?

Elmer was halfway into a slug on his Coke bottle.  He swallowed and belatedly answered, Is Danny Martin there?

There was a pause, and the speaker drew a breath. Is this Elmer Vartanian?

The question startled Elmer. He had also downed the Coke too fast, being thirsty from his walk home, and released a deep carbonation-infused belch. He swallowed hard and recovered, Who wants to know? And felt suddenly foolish because it sounded like something a gangster would say in the movies.

Look, is this Elmer or isn’t it?

Something about the voice seemed familiar. Elmer took a chance. Yes. I got a note to call Danny Martin at this number. Are you Danny Martin?

Are you alone? Can we talk?

Yes. Elmer frowned at the telephone and glanced out the booth window to where Eddie was concentrating on the radio. Kids came to buy candy and Eddie was clearly annoyed at them for bothering him.

Where you calling from?

Elmer answered, "A phone booth. I’m not going to play twenty questions with you. I’m asking the questions now. Who are you and why am I supposed to be calling you?"

The voice on the other end let out a ragged sigh, then Elmer could hear the strike of a match and what sounded like the man drawing in on a cigarette he had just lit. The voice answered, It’s Leon Welch.

Now Elmer remembered the voice. Leon Welch, the husband of Juliet’s friend Betty Ann, one of the many houseguests that New Year’s Eve over a year ago at the mansion of Juliet’s wealthy father. There’d been a murder, and Juliet had called Elmer to help. Together he and Juliet got to the bottom of it, just as they had the year before when they had first met, when Juliet’s husband was murdered. He ruefully mused their relationship was a based on a string of corpses.

Elmer? Are you still there?

Elmer had liked Betty Ann but he thought Leon was a weasel. Yeah, Leon, I’m still here. Who’s Danny Martin?

I’m Danny Martin. I mean, I just wanted to leave a fake name. I wanted you to call me but I didn’t want to just leave a message with my name on it. I have a job for you, Elmer, if you’re interested, but it requires discretion.

Discretion was a word Elmer had heard before in these matters. It seemed these rich people were more interested in discretion than they were in ethics. Still, it always meant a pretty good pay envelope at the end of the shenanigans for him.

What’s it all about, Leon? Or should I say, Mr. Martin?

You know that I run the Hammonasset Playhouse down here on the shore? Well, an actress in the cast has gone missing.

Why don’t you call the cops?

Here’s how it is:  The girl’s been missing since last night. The cops won’t even consider her missing for three days. Meantime, I have this show to get up. We open on Monday night. It’s not like this girl to just walk out. And there’s something else... The thing is, she and I... Well, I hope you’re a man of the world enough to understand how it is.

Elmer took another, much slower sip from the soda bottle. No, Leon, why don’t you tell me how it is?

You know what I’m saying, I’ve been seeing the girl.

What exactly am I supposed to be discreet about, Leon? The fact that you’ve been cheating on your wife, or the possibility that you have something to do with this girl being missing?

Leon answered, I’m not paying you to be my conscience, Elmer.

What are you paying me for?

Find the girl, or find out what happened to her, and keep my name out of it. I will call the cops when it’s time to call, but if she’s still missing by then, they’re going to start looking for suspects and if it ever gets out that I’ve been seeing her, I’m going to be the chief suspect. I want to save my wife that trauma. His voice sounded a little too self-righteous at the end of that sentence.

"You want to save yourself that trauma. Incidentally, how much would you be paying me?"

I read in the papers how you solved the murder mystery over at that art bunker in the Berkshires this past winter. They make it sound like you’ve gone into business for yourself as a private detective. I suppose you’re charging standard rates? I thought fifty dollars a day.

I’m not a licensed detective.

But you solved four murder mysteries so far, pretty well-publicized ones.

With Juliet’s help.

Leon paused and took another drag from his cigarette. The papers are full of her being blacklisted, you know, the feds catching up with her commie past.

Elmer answered angrily, Knock it off. Juliet’s no commie.  It was a frame-up.

Leon replied, Take it easy. I’d rather you handle this case by yourself, Elmer. Juliet attracts the wrong kind of attention these days. I have a very conservative clientele at my playhouse. I don’t want the FBI coming down on me, thinking I’m guilty of being a commie by association with Juliet. These are dangerous days. Anybody in business has to watch out for that sort of thing. If your name gets tainted, you’re done.

Yeah, Juliet’s finding that out. It’s nice she has such supportive friends.

Does that mean you’re not going to help me?

Elmer answered, One hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.

Leon cursed. His voice rose to nearly a little girl’s shriek. You’re crazy! You’re not even a professional!

But I’m discreet. Elmer sneered as he said it and drained the eight-ounce bottle of Coke.

Okay.  But no Juliet.  Don’t tell Juliet about this.

***

G. Fox department store owner Mrs. Beatrice Fox Auerbach would build a five-level parking garage for her customers this year of 1951. Hartford began to grow vertically. Public parking here cost forty-five cents per day but was free to customers of G. Fox with their receipt.

Inside the store on Main Street, Juliet Van Allen glanced morosely at the career dresses department on the second floor before proceeding with Elmer to the Connecticut Room restaurant, still mourning for her career as an administrator at the Wadsworth Atheneum that had been derailed when she had been blacklisted.

Juliet mumbled over the menu, We have to stop at the bakery here and get some cupcakes for my father.

Elmer smiled the at thought of the patrician Jonas Van Allen succumbing to so human an affliction as a cupcake vice. Elmer was pleased that Juliet thought of her father; their relationship had never been very good, though in their last caper, the old gentleman’s help in assisting Elmer to free Juliet from her kidnapper was nothing short of heroic. Poor old Mr. Van Allen had been recuperating ever since, and cupcakes were surely part of his recovery as much as his reward.

Elmer asked, You shopping for anything in particular today, or is this just an outing?

An outing, I suppose. I’m bored and restless, and the job hunt is not going very well. Being blacklisted as an accused communist has further reaching consequences that I imagined. Sometimes it doesn’t even come up; it’s just implied. How can you defend yourself against someone’s suspicions, especially when their suspicions are not even articulated? I had no idea when I was eighteen years old that a six-month membership in a college club for global politics would make me a social pariah and an enemy of the state a decade later.

Elmer did not bother to read his menu. He watched her. She was tastefully, immaculately dressed as always, in a form-fitting light blue suit, her white gloves and her purse casually tossed to the side. She had shorn her former hairdo, which was usually combed back off her face and tucked into a neat chignon or a bouquet of cluster curls at the back of her neck.  This summer she adopted a short, curly bubble cut; her tight blonde curls escaped in wisps under her half Breton straw cap.  In a moment, she would fumble for cigarettes but for now she gripped the menu and tapped it on the tablecloth a couple of times to punctuate her sentences. He knew she was not really reading it.

He replied, Maybe you are shooting for a field that has too-high visibility. Is there some other administrative job in your line of work where you won’t be so public? Or maybe a place where they won’t take this kind of scrutiny so seriously?

Is there such a place? I don’t know. I don’t know. Her light green eyes lost their brilliance and she could focus on nothing, not the present and certainly not the future. She saw only bleakness there.

Elmer cleared his throat. Leon Welch contacted me.  He’s got a job for us.

Juliet looked up, her brow furrowed, and she looked almost comically dumbfounded. She sipped from her water glass, as if needing to ponder this for a moment. She answered, The only kind of job ‘us’ had has been solving murders, and that was entirely incidental, and if I may say, accidental. Don’t tell me he’s got a body in the library?

Elmer smiled, ruefully. A body, yes, but not dead—missing. She’s an actress in his latest production at the Hammonasset Playhouse. She went missing, he thinks, yesterday. Officially, she’s not a missing person yet, at least according to police, but he us wants to get a jump on finding her.  He thinks if we can find her that will save the show, and possibly avoid bad publicity.

Now she fumbled for cigarettes, in agitation and excitement. While she opened a fresh pack, Elmer reached over for her purse, retrieved her lighter from it, ignited the flame and held it up for her cigarette. A slight smile played on her lips, and he knew she was pleased with the gentlemanly gesture and also amused, because Elmer did not smoke. He thought the practice ridiculous and he wished that she would stop.

Immediately upon drawing in and releasing a stream of smoke through the side of her mouth, she began, "What on earth are we supposed to do? Does he really think we’re private investigators? It must be Rat Fink’s columns in The Hartford Times."

Rattinger.

"Double V Investigators, that fool said, Vartanian and Van Allen. Who would have thought Rattinger would end up being our publicity agent?" Juliet rubbed her forehead and giggled.

Elmer was glad to see her finally smile over something. He chose his words carefully, partly to entice her to come along and partly to avoid mentioning that the missing person was also Leon’s mistress. He intended to withhold that information from her.

I told him we’d help. I’ll go alone, if you’d rather. But we make such a good team that it seemed only natural to work together.

Elmer, are you serious? You really want to go down to Hammonasset to look for this person? Where do we begin?

The same way we always do:  By observing, asking questions, and perhaps even pretending.

Pretending what? Oh, you mean using fake names again? Who are we supposed to be?

He answered, Well, I’m going to be me. He wants his other actors to know that someone is on the case looking for this girl. He wants to calm his backers and assure the police if there is an eventual investigation with them that he did everything he could to find this girl on his own so he’s not legally negligent. You, however, are not going to be you. Here’s what I think:  You will be an actress.

Oh, my lord.

There’s a woman who was supposed to be playing one of the minor roles that’s now stepping into the role of the actress who went missing.  So, you are going to be taking over her original part. It’s a smaller role. I just need you to spend time with the cast, get to know them, listen to whatever dirt you can find. There should be a lot of chatter backstage that the boss never hears.  That will help a lot. I’ll question them, of course, but they’re going to be on their guard with me."

I can’t believe this. What am I saying, I could hardly believe any of the other capers we were involved in, either. Well, at least there’s no dead bodies in this one.

I hope not.

She asked, Do you suspect murder?

I don’t know what to expect. Exciting, isn’t it?

I think you’ve found your niche, Elmer.

He grinned.  Right in this room, two years ago, did I not watch you trap a killer over lunch, with the Hartford Police watching you from the sidelines? I think we both found our niche, Juliet.

Juliet was loath to recall the traumatic experience of her husband’s murder in the late spring of 1949 and the equally traumatic discovery of his infidelity, and that he had married her only because of her family’s wealth. As humiliating and horrific as the experience was, it did bring Elmer into her life. She was still sorting out what that meant. They were friends. They helped each other to survive a very bleak time for both of them. They continued to call upon one another in need.

Would it ever be more? After two years she still didn’t know what he wanted and did not know what she herself wanted. She looked into his dark eyes and his rugged face with a crooked nose like a boxer’s that she would not call handsome, except that it appealed very much to her. He was looking at her. She blushed and looked down at the cigarette nestled in her slender fingertips. It burned slowly and the smoke rose in wispy ringlets to the ceiling.

Elmer asked, You’ve been to Leon’s playhouse before, haven’t you?

"Yes. Many times. It had once been a barn, as is the case with many New England summer theaters. It’s right on Route 1, on