Ellen Hart Presents Malice Domestic 15: Mystery Most Theatrical. Karen Cantwell

found Jill still sobbing in the first row of the fifty seats that made up the audience area. I sat down next to her and put my arms around her shoulders.

      “Jill,” I said softly. “I heard a gunshot earlier.”

      She nodded.

      “What happened?”

      “It was a real gun,” she whispered. “I had no idea. Bobby just gave it to me. Said it would look great under the lights. I knew he was right. But I didn’t know it was real. I truly didn’t.”

      “So, you were playing with it today,” I said.

      “I was aiming out the window and it went off,” Jill gulped. “It scared me to death. I ran out to the front. I was praying to God I hadn’t hit anything. Anyone.”

      Jean screeched. “You mean he’s been pointing a real gun at me all this time?”

      “Apparently so,” I said, patting Jill’s arm, then getting up.

      Jean screamed and collapsed into my arms. I could hear sirens in the distance.

      Tom opened his eyes. “Is there a reason you don’t use real guns?”

      Tom was an Iraq war vet, so maybe you could give him a pass. I wasn’t ready to.

      “Yeah,” I said, patting Jill and getting up. “Like what happened.”

      “But it wasn’t loaded.”

      I glared at Tom. “Apparently, it was.”

      He had the decency to go pale again and pick up his deep breathing with even more focus. I slid Jean into a seat next to Jill.

      “We don’t know that it was the weapon,” Berto pointed out, coming out onto the stage. “We’re just guessing at this point.”

      “I don’t care,” I yelled. “Why the hell was there a loaded gun on my set? That’s what I want to know.”

      Everyone assembled stopped crying and looked at me blankly, except Jill, who shrunk even further into herself. I suppose it was a bit much to expect a real answer. I took a deep breath.

      “Who here knew Bobby was about to bolt?” I asked.

      Everyone except Berto erupted into confused chatter.

      “I did,” said Dev, loudly. He was a sandy-haired man with a deep, soft voice. The others stilled. “Well, I didn’t really know. But he asked me to fly away with him to Mexico yesterday.”

      “Bobby?” cried Lee. He looked like he was about to fall off the stool. Jean went over and held him.

      I looked at Lee and shuddered.

      “That’s the thing,” I said. “Jill didn’t know the gun was real, and she had no reason to kill Bobby. In fact, the only person here who knew the gun was real also had the least motive to kill Bobby, and that’s you, Tom.”

      “Are you sure?” Berto asked quietly.

      “Reasonably sure,” I said. The sirens grew louder and I figured I only had a few minutes more before the police arrived and did their thing. “So, if the gun was originally Bobby’s, and it turned out to be loaded, then who would the logical victim be?” I looked at Lee. “Don’t you press the gun to your temple and pull the trigger at the end of the first act?”

      Lee turned white. “It couldn’t be.”

      “As in Bobby’s Perfect Crime?” I pressed. “Lee, Bobby was being sued, probably by one of our supporters. He closed the company account this morning and took all the money in cash. I don’t know how you two were getting on, but the fact that he asked Dev to go with him to Mexico suggests to me that things were not all that great.”

      “He was being horrible!” Lee wailed as Jean held him close. “He said he was tired of me. I couldn’t do anything right.”

      I couldn’t help but think, if only we could get that kind of emotion out of him during the performance. I looked over at Berto to steady myself.

      “Maybe,” I said. “In any case, Bobby finally had his Perfect Crime. He takes off to Mexico. You use the gun as scripted. Only it goes off and you’re dead.”

      Both Lee and Jean wailed again.

      “More to the point,” I continued. “Bobby’s just dumped you. There’s no reason to believe that you haven’t pulled off some overly dramatic suicide because you’re not around to tell us that you didn’t know the gun was loaded. It’s about as close to a perfect crime as you can get. The only thing Bobby didn’t take into account was Jill.”

      “I didn’t know it was real!” Jill cried. “How was I supposed to know? I’ve never even seen a real gun before.”

      Berto looked skeptical, which I could understand. He actually dealt with real guns on a regular basis. However, I totally got where Jill was coming from. The weight of the gun supposedly should have given it away, but I would have assumed it had been weighted to be more “real.”

      “Exactly,” I continued. “Jill was goofing off with what she had every reason to believe was a prop gun and not the real thing. Call it irony. Call it Karma. But Bobby was hoisted on a petard of his own making.”

      “And what makes you so sure?” Berto asked.

      “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

      “The Thin Man,” Berto said. “1934. William Powell and Myrna Loy.”

      He was right. I’d unconsciously parroted that line from the end of the movie, which is one of my all-time faves.

      The police arrived and did their thing. It took forever. However, the physical evidence supported my theory. Berto teased me later that, thanks to me, he’d lost some extra billable hours, but his bosses at the law firm were pretty impressed with how he’d handled things. I couldn’t have cared less that he got the credit for figuring it all out, especially since I couldn’t have done it without him telling me what he knew.

      Jill eventually recovered. Amazing what good therapy will do. She’ll even still work with me, but not on anything with a prop gun. We did eventually get Tom’s show up and running. Turned out people had been lining up and taking numbers to sue Bobby. So, just to cover our backsides, we figured we’d better mount it, trauma or not.

      Lee found the money to do it, too. He told us he wanted to prove Bobby wrong about the script. So much for that. The show closed after the second night. Like I mentioned earlier, it was a pretty depressing piece of work.

      Anyway, that’s how Berto and I met. It didn’t take that long before we got to be best friends. He is the big brother I never had, and while he does have a younger sister, it’s like I’ve been adopted by his family, too. Berto’s kids even call me Tía, or Aunt Daria.

      Berto does bug me sometimes about working with him. While I do the odd job for him now and then, the work he does as a P.I. makes even the stuff I do in the theater look sane. I’ll stick with my kind of crazy, thank you. At least that I get.

THE GHOST IN BALCONY B, by Michele Bazan Reed

      Clarissa is determined to be an actress and perform at Syracuse’s grand new movie palace, the State Theater. When her plans take an unexpected turn, PI Harry Jerome is on the job.

      Clarissa always said she was born to be in the theater.

      She was a sweet young thing, barely twenty, with curly red hair and freckles betraying her origins on Tipperary Hill, when I met her serving drinks over at Art’s speakeasy. But she was quick to tell me she was only doing that to keep body and soul together until she could fulfill her real destiny—to be an actress.

      She even had her stage name picked out, Claire de Vianne. “I think it makes me sound classy and French,” she said with a giggle.

      “It