Hide Thee, Thou Bloody Hand: A Murder Mystery

By Samuel F. Babbitt

A small troupe of actors is putting on Shakespeare’s King Lear when, as one scene shifts to another, one of the actors is found dead onstage. In the panic that follows, “Doc” Blanchard, who has been playing the old king, teams up with Inspector Dwayne Eccles of the local police to try to make sense of a grisly murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669810773

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 by Samuel Babbitt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/14/2022

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Contents

1 DOC BLANCHARD

2 VICKIE PALUSKI, STAGE MANAGER

3 TONY D’ANGELO

4 DOC BLANCHARD

5 PHIL ARNSTEIN

6 RICHARD DORSTED

7 DOC BLANCHARD

8 DET. DWAYNE ECCLES

9 RICHARD DORSTED

10 TONY D’ANGELO

11 DOC BLANCHARD

12 MARIA VIEQUES

13 TONY D’ANGELO

14 DETECTIVE ECCLES

15 DOC BLANCHARD

16 DETECTIVE ECCLES

17 RICHARD DORSTED

18 DOC BLANCHARD

19 SALLY BLANCHARD

20 DETECTIVE ECCLES

21 VICKIE PALUSKI

22 DETECTIVE ECCLES

23 RICHARD DORSTED

24 DOC BLANCHARD

25 SALLY BLANCHARD

26 DOC BLANCHARD

27 DETECTIVE ECCLES

28 RICHARD DORSTED

29 DETECTIVE ECCLES

30 TONY D’ANGELO

31 RICHARD DORSTED

32 DETECTIVE ECCLES

33 SALLY BLANCHARD

34 TONY D’ANGELO

35 DETECTIVE ECCLES

36 RICHARD DORSTED

37 DOC BLANCHARD

Tremble, thou wretch that hast within thee undivulged crimes unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand.

— King Lear, Act iii, Scene iii

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THE PLAYERS

Lear, King of England……………………………… Doc Blanchard

Edgar, Legitimate Son of Gloucester: ……………...Richard Dorsted

Edmund, Bastard Son of Gloucester ……Antonio Tony D’Angelo

Goneril, Nasty Daughter of Lear:…………Sally (Blanchard) Nevins

Duke of Cornwall:…………………………………... Jamie McKinney

Oswald, Steward to Goneril: …………………………….Jim Balmer

Servant/Stagehand: ……………………………………..Phil Arnstein

THE CREW

Stage Manager: Vickie Paluski

Stagehands: Phil Arnstein and Maria Vieques

The Detective: Dwayne Eccles

1

DOC BLANCHARD

DOC_I.jpg am what you might call an amateur-professional actor. My late-in-life acting career (if you can call it that) has taken place in a modest-sized northeastern city where I helped resuscitate a theatrical troupe that was about to fold for lack of money. Its original founders had moved on to mundane things like jobs and families. Having completed those things as an academic some years before, I was blessedly free, in retirement, to follow my bliss, as they say, and become an actor.

I had the good fortune to be cast in one of their productions (as an old man who dies—my specialty), at a time when it was unclear whether the group could survive. There were four of us left, and we were sitting in a newly rented garage, empty save for an eclectic pile of props and tools and a costume or two, dumped out in the middle of the concrete floor in a pathetic pile. The question before us was: do we call it quits, or do we see what might be done in this new space? Foolishly but not surprisingly, we opted to carry on.

Not easy, this business of running a small theater. But we made it. Wobbly at first, but we attracted some good actors, and we did some good plays, and enough people came to see us so that we almost prospered. It’s been my experience that very few, if any, small theaters can be said to prosper. Nonetheless, we stayed afloat, and in my retirement from a make-a-living job as a college professor, I got to practice my favorite craft.

By the time the murder happened, the theater was in a comparatively stable moment economically. We had actually begun to pay our actors. Not much, you understand, but something—which, in the world of small theaters, is indeed something.

A little time back, we were about to do a production of The Weir by Connor McPherson. For those of you who don’t know the play, it is a wonderful evening of storytelling—ghost storytelling, I should say—that is set in a pub in the Irish countryside. Very spooky tales told by a mixed bag of locals and a guest or two. The thing is, it requires actors who can speak with a passable Irish brogue.

Jim Balmer had auditioned, but he couldn’t get his mouth around the proper sounds; nor was he alone among those who tried out. Still, he seemed particularly upset. Well, we’ve all experienced this kind of rejection—it’s part of being an actor—but Jim seemed to take it very hard. He blamed it mainly on Tony D’Angelo, our lead actor. Jim sent him a blistering email, accusing him of everything from personal animus to sexual discrimination. That last one was hard to decipher since Tony had a reputation as a rather successful lady’s man, and as far as I knew, Jim was jealous of that.

At any rate, these kinds of spats are not all that rare in theatrical circles, and so life moved on. The production of The Weir was considerably enhanced by the fact that, at the time when sound effects and verbal allusions in the script were conjuring a downpour in the surrounding moors, the roof of our theater-garage began to leak generously in one corner of the actual playing space. It couldn’t have been more appropriate, and it helped make the production a great success.

Not long afterward, I got the chance of a lifetime—a crack at the lead in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Talk about chutzpah. But I jumped at it, and we went into rehearsals with a large and enthusiastic cast. Since the theater didn’t have two nickels to rub together, someone had the idea of making the Lear set out of hay bales. That’s right. The set was cannily designed through the deployment of rectangular hay bales stacked strategically around the central playing space, with bleachers for the audience on two sides. Period furniture came in and out as needed, through spaces shielded by black hanging material or sides, as they are called in the trade. The rest was all a configuration of hay bales. Amazingly, it worked. After all, with Old Will, it’s the text that counts, and we threw ourselves into those glorious words with love and zeal.

It all went wonderfully until Saturday evening in the second week.

2

VICKIE PALUSKI, STAGE MANAGER

Vickie_O.jpg nce the audience is in, I check the lights and sound, make sure that the cast is in position, and then—and only then—give the nod to go. We were about two weeks into the life of our production. The director has done his bit, and now it’s my show.

In a small theater