Something Rotten, page 11
Ford Branff was harder to figure. I still didn’t trust Candy’s protests of his boss’ innocence. Branff had a dangerous man on the inside, and could easily have ordered Rex Prince out of the way. And just because Claude didn’t want to sell now didn’t mean he and Candy had known that before. What if they had poisoned Hamilton’s father, thinking Claude couldn’t resist a six-billion-dollar carrot dangled in front of his nose? Or maybe they had bet on Branff’s charm to sweet-talk Mrs. Prince into selling before Claude got tangled up in the mix. No matter what, the media mogul was used to getting what he wanted, and Rex Prince’s death spelled opportunity of one kind or another.
Paul and Olivia Mendelsohn came next. Hamilton was right: What Claude and Trudy commanded, Paul obeyed, usually dragging his daughter along for the ride. Olivia wasn’t in the mood to talk, much less look at me, and I couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t wearing my Cardinals cap. I wanted to say I was sorry—for everything—but I knew that wasn’t anything she wanted to hear right now. Worse, I still suspected Olivia could have had something to do with the death of Hamilton’s father, and I hated myself for even thinking it.
Olivia wanted the Copenhagen River to be clean, and she wanted the Prince family to pay for it. Rex Prince claimed it wasn’t possible; Ford Branff told us it was. Maybe Olivia had decided the old man needed a taste of his own poison. She seemed to have the run of the Prince house whenever her dad was around, but it still didn’t seem her style. It was easy to think that she might have wanted to punish Hamilton too—but I had to remember that Hamilton and Olivia hadn’t broken up until after his father’s death. If she had been involved in his father’s death, she had certainly paid a larger price for it than she could ever have bargained for.
Pops Mendelsohn got a program from the top, and as much of a stretch as it was, Olivia got one from the bottom.
Hamilton was among the last of the audience to filter in, and I was surprised to see Roscoe and Gilbert tagging along. He had stayed clear of me all afternoon, maybe embarrassed by his little performance by the pool, or maybe not. He came over to see me while the boys bought their tickets.
“I can’t believe you got them to come,” I said.
“I had to tell them somebody got naked in the third act. What are you doing?”
“Handing out programs,” I told him. I slid him one from the bottom of the stack.
“Yeah, I can see that. But I mean, what are you up to? How is coming to some dumb play going to prove anything?”
Roscoe and Gilbert walked up, and I put on a barker’s smile.
“Here you go, gents. Programs. Programs.”
“Hey,” said the one I was calling Roscoe. “How come you gave me one from the bottom of the stack?”
I blinked. He was the first person who’d noticed.
I laughed. “Wha—I didn’t even realize,” I told him. “Here.” I took his program and put it on the bottom, flipped the stack over so the bottom was the top, and gave the same program back to him. “There you go.”
“Dude, Hamilton said somebody gets naked,” said Gilbert. “Izzat true?”
“Very nearly,” I told him.
“What, just down to pasties or something?”
The house lights dimmed a couple of times, and the audience grew quiet.
“In you go,” I told them. “Hamilton, I saved us a couple of seats near the back.”
When the lights went down I left the rest of the programs in a folding chair by the door and went inside to find my seat. Roscoe and Gilbert sat close by. Claude and Mrs. Prince were down front, Olivia and her father were in the risers on the other side of the theater, and Ford Branff was sitting midway up to our right. It had taken me a while to find just the right place in the theater where we could see everyone and, most importantly, the stage.
The director of the play came out, and it being opening night, took a while to give special thanks to the sponsors and volunteers who had made the magic happen.
Hamilton leaned over and whispered at me. “Okay, seriously, Horatio. What’s going on?”
“Turn to page seven in your program,” I told him.
Hamilton rolled his eyes and sighed. He flipped through the photocopied booklet until he found it: a full-page ad for Elsinore Paper, proud sponsors of the Denmark Players. There with a marker I had written, “I know what you did to Rex Prince. I have proof. Meet me behind the stage after the pirates attack.”
“ ‘After the pirates attack’? What is that supposed to mean, ‘after the pirates attack’?”
“It means go backstage after the pirates attack. I don’t know how much clearer it can be.”
“Did everybody in the theater get one of these?”
I gave him a look that asked him just how stupid he thought I was. “No. Just the people who had a reason or an opportunity to kill your father.”
“How do you know any of them are going to see this?”
“If there’s one thing everybody does,” I whispered, “it’s read the program before a show. There’s nothing else to do while you’re waiting.”
A few seats down, Roscoe and Gilbert had rolled up their programs and were using them to thwack each other.
“Well,” I said, “almost nothing.”
Unfortunately, the pirates didn’t attack until act three. The play roughly followed the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, focusing on the minor characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Personally, I’m a little tired of every author without a bright idea of his own putting a modern spin on a “classic,” but I was a big fan of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Apparently Hamilton wasn’t. He drove me nuts the whole play.
“Do the pirates attack soon?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“Do the pirates attack any time this act?”
“No.”
And so on.
When the third act finally arrived, Hamilton was on the edge of his seat. Candy, as the Player, got to do some of his best work in act three. He was using a different voice and carried himself in a completely different way, and I had to admit he was good. But that just meant he could have been acting innocent when he smoked a cigarette with me in my room.
“Hey, do I know that guy?” Hamilton asked.
“He’s brought you a drink once or twice,” I whispered back.
As the act wore on, Hamilton slumped in his chair. Then someone on stage yelled, “Pirates!” and suddenly people were running back and forth across the stage fighting and dying.
“This would be the pirate attack,” I told Hamilton. “Now watch.”
Instead of focusing on the melee happening on stage, we watched the audience. “Come on, come on,” I muttered. “One of you get up.”
Mrs. Prince stood.
“No,” Hamilton whispered.
Hamilton was about to leave his seat. I put an arm across his chest and looked around the room. Down to our right, Ford Branff was still in his seat, his eyes on the stage, but on the other side, Olivia was already gone. Damn, when was the last time I had looked for her?
“It can’t be my mom,” Hamilton said. I held up a finger to tell him to wait, then pointed it across the room. Mrs. Prince was just getting up so Claude could get past her, and she sat back down once he had gone.
“Claude,” Hamilton said. “What are we waiting for? Don’t we have to get backstage? Make sure he’s not just getting up to go to the bathroom?”
“Patience, grasshopper.” I directed his attention toward the stage.
The pirate attack had finished and the Player (Candy) and his troupe had retaken the stage to banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play was almost over, and the Player was trying to tell them that it had to end with death. Their deaths. They were building up to the scene I had watched being rehearsed when I sat in the stands with Mrs. Prince the day before. The way the trick worked, the two hanged dummies would be magically revealed behind what stage techs call “scrim.” It’s a big piece of gauze that looks opaque until you shine light on the back. Then you can suddenly see whatever’s behind it like you’re looking through a window.
“Show!” cried the Player with a flourish.
The lights came up. The scrim disappeared. The bodies of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appeared, swinging from ropes.
And right below them, illuminated for everyone to see, stood Claude Prince.
The audience cracked up. There probably wasn’t a person there who didn’t know him, and half of them probably worked for him. The actors on stage froze. Claude’s face went from shocked to scared to embarrassed all in the span of about three seconds.
“Sorry,” he joked, “just looking for the bathroom.”
I didn’t have to point out to Hamilton that the only bathroom in the place was in the lobby, and there was little chance that his stepfather could have gotten that turned around. The audience didn’t seem to care, though, and they ate it up as Claude slinked away.
“Psst, hey!” Roscoe called back to us. “I like the pirate stuff and all, but when do we get to see some boobs?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I sat in the kitchen the next morning waiting for my coffee to reach my toes. After the play I had stayed up until I was sure everyone else had gone to sleep—even Roscoe and Gilbert, who played video games until two a.m.—and then taken care of a little business that I hoped would pay off later. I wasn’t sure if my hunch was right, but if I had waited, I might have missed my chance. Still, I was paying for it now.
A few of the Prince family’s servants were busy cutting grapefruit and frying bacon and making toast, and I admired their abilities to function before noon. The hard drive in my brain was just starting to spin up, and the number one item on today’s task list was Claude. Now that we knew he was our mark, how did we prove he killed Hamilton’s father?
Candy came into the kitchen, there for work but apparently not yet on the clock. He saw me the moment he walked in. He poured himself a cup of coffee, grabbed a bagel, and sat down across from me at the little breakfast table in the corner. For a few minutes we pretended not to know each other, and then he started talking so just the two of us could hear.
“I suppose I have you to thank for ruining my best scene.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I told him. “You were good, though. Good stage presence.”
“So, can I take it you know Claude Prince killed his brother?”
“If I did, sport, that information would be for Hamilton Prince’s ears only.”
Candy recognized his own words and saluted me with his bagel.
“So how do you plan to rein your boy in?”
“Hamilton?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how do you plan on keeping him from doing something stupid? Ford is very interested in seeing Claude go to jail—if he’s the killer. Like I told you, all he cares about is the plant. Hamilton doesn’t seem to want it, but he can’t sell it to Ford if he’s in jail.”
“Are you talking about revenge? Hamilton wouldn’t do anything that stupid.”
Hamilton walked in just then, and I was surprised to see him awake so early. I was even more surprised to see what he was wearing. On top of jeans and a T-shirt he wore an eye-scalding orange hunting vest and an orange hat with earflaps. By ten thirty he’d be roasting.
Hamilton came over to the table where we sat. “We’re going hunting,” he said. “Want to come?”
Candy shot me an “I told you so” look, then watched Hamilton out the side of his eyes and drank his coffee with both hands.
“You mean you’re actually going outside in that getup?” I asked.
“You should see Claude’s gear. It’s a bright orange camo print. In case he has to hide out in an orange grove.”
There was something strange about Hamilton, like his body was moving in slow motion. It was a subtle thing, but he seemed to really focus on the simple act of sitting down at the table.
“Is he going with you?” I asked. “Claude?”
Hamilton reached out and slowly took a Danish from a tray on the table. “Nope. It’s just me and my mother.”
I set down my coffee. “Hamilton, we haven’t talked about last night. About your uncle.” Candy was going to hear our whole conversation, but I didn’t care and Hamilton probably didn’t even think of him as a real person sitting with us.
“What is there to talk about?” he said. He was still super-naturally calm. “You saw the same thing I did.”
“We haven’t talked about what we’re going to do now.”
“Got any ideas?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I haven’t been working on it long enough to—”
“Orange juice,” Hamilton said. “I think I want some orange juice.”
I blinked as he got up from the table in mid-conversation to seek out a glass of OJ.
“He’s drunk,” Candy said quietly.
“What? He can’t be. It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”
Candy shrugged. “If you say so. But Catalina told me she took him drinks all night long. He never drank so much that he passed out, just sat by his window looking out at the stars or something.”
If Hamilton had some kind of buzz on, it was a new kind of drunk for him, one I couldn’t anticipate. I closed my eyes and cursed myself. Why had I thought Hamilton would take the revelation about Claude lying down?
Hamilton returned with his glass of orange juice and drank it like it was nectar of the gods.
“Hamilton,” I said. “Hamilton, are you listening to me? We can’t do anything stupid now.”
“Sure. Of course not,” he said. “We’ll just wait until you come up with something clever.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You seem to be taking all this pretty lightly.”
Hamilton stood. “Meet me in the mudroom if you want to go.”
He left, and I closed my eyes and sighed. When I opened them again, Candy was smiling at me over his cup of coffee.
“Shut up,” I told him as I stood to follow Hamilton. “Just shut up.”
Hamilton had just finished lacing up his boots when I found him. He nodded when he saw me and pulled a bright orange vest off a peg.
“Here, put this on,” he said. “It was my dad’s.”
“Is this really necessary?” I asked. I meant more than the orange vest.
Hamilton turned around with a rifle cradled in his arms—a .22 by the smallish looks of the bullets he was feeding into it. It was a squirrel-hunting gun, a small-game rifle kids learn to shoot with. He locked the bolt with a click.
“Safety first,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get shot by accident now, would you?”
“Hamilton, wait.” He went outside and I followed him like a lemming. “I don’t think you’ve got a clear head. Let’s go back inside. Play a video game or something.”
“No, man. You’ve got it all wrong. I see everything clearly now. For like the first time ever.”
I was pretty sure now that Hamilton planned on doing something completely idiotic, but there was no stopping him short of tackling him. Mrs. Prince waited for us on the lawn and we said our hellos. She frowned at Hamilton’s gun.
“Do you really need to bring that?” she asked. “Why don’t we just go for a walk instead?”
“Dad and I used to go hunting every Saturday morning. Or did you forget?”
“I haven’t forgotten, Hamilton,” she said tiredly. “Shall we go?”
Hamilton turned to me and smiled. “Come on. Claude said he might join us later.”
So there it was. Mrs. Prince walked down the hill behind the house, where a well-worn path led to a thick forest of deciduous and pine. Hamilton was right behind her, and I brought up the rear. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t help feeling like I’d been brought along as a witness.
“Hamilton. Hamilton!” I called.
He stopped while his mother walked on ahead.
“What’s going on here?”
“We’re going for a walk in the woods.”
“With a gun? Is it even legal to hunt anything right now? It’s the middle of summer.”
Hamilton shrugged. “I’m sure something’s in season.”
I caught his arm. “Hamilton. You’re drunk. You may be hiding it, but I know.”
“What if I am?” he asked.
“Oh, Hamilton. This is so not the time to do something stupid.”
“Is there a right time to do something stupid?” he asked. “I tell you what. When that time comes, you let me know, okay?” He shook me off and headed down the trail again.
I could have stayed behind. I could have gone back to the kitchen and finished my breakfast and let Hamilton be responsible for himself for a change. What was I, anyway, his best friend or his babysitter?
I kicked at a root growing across the path. I was his best friend, damn it, and I followed him into the woods. Hamilton and his mom walked on ahead and I stayed close enough to listen in but far enough away so I wasn’t part of the conversation.
“Hamilton, you’ve offended your stepfather,” Mrs. Prince was telling him.
“Well, you’ve offended my real father.”
“Why does everything you say these days have to be smart?”
“Would you rather I said something stupid?”
“I would rather you say nothing at all if you’re going to be nasty,” Mrs. Prince told him.
“And I wish you had said nothing when Claude asked you to marry him.” Hamilton stopped. “I mean, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I loved him, Hamilton.”
“Don’t—don’t,” he told her. “Say that you were lonely. Say that you needed a replacement husband or whatever you say to rationalize it. But do not say you’re in love. Not with him. Not Claude.”
Mrs. Prince’s voice rose. “Why do you hate your uncle so much?”
“You don’t know how much he hated Dad. How jealous he was. You don’t know what he did to him, but I do.”
“ ‘What he did to him’?” Mrs. Prince repeated. “Does this have something to do with that ridiculous thing in the program last night? Did you write that?”
