Whoever had said, “The show must go on!” surely hadn’t had to deal with the death of a parent two weeks before opening night.
The stress of it all had given him indigestion. He opened his desk drawer and found a half-empty container of Tums. He tapped three of them into his palm and started chewing.
His phone rang.
He was going to let it go to voice mail — he’d already changed his message to indicate he would be gone for the week due to a family emergency — but he could see from the flashing light that it was not a call from outside, but from reception.
Albert sighed and picked up. “Yes?”
A young woman said, “There’s a police detective here asking for you.”
“Um, oh,” he said. “Did you get a name?”
There was an exchange of words at the other end, and then the receptionist said, “Detective Hardy?”
“Send — send her back.”
He put the phone back on its cradle and thought, Oh no.
Albert really did not want to talk to Detective Marissa Hardy. Needless to say, he no longer needed to feign interest in some mysterious woman who’d shown up at Brie’s old address. Nor did he need the detective to track down who had waved to him and his sister and Norman from the hospital parking lot.
Not important.
He rose from behind his desk and greeted the detective as she reached his office door.
“Mr. McBain,” she said.
“Detective Hardy,” Albert said. “Please come in and take a seat.”
Hardy sat. “I’d like to offer my condolences. I didn’t know, until just now, that your mother had passed. Your receptionist said I was lucky to catch you, that you’d only come in to the bank for a short period to clear up a few things.”
“Yes,” Albert said solemnly. “We knew it was coming, of course, but it’s still kind of a shock. I mean, we were all talking to her on Saturday and she seemed, well, she didn’t seem like someone who was going to go in the next day. But things can turn on a dime, you know.”
Hardy nodded sympathetically. “Of course.”
“But if you only just learned about my mother, that can’t be why you’ve come in.”
“That’s correct,” she said.
“You still asking around about our strange sighting on Saturday?”
“In part,” Hardy said slowly.
“You know,” he said, “I think we might have overreacted, jumped to conclusions. And we were several floors up from the parking lot. I’m sorry if we got you involved in this for nothing.”
“Not at all,” Hardy said. “I always like to follow up on any lead.”
“Well, okay,” he said. “But honestly, I wouldn’t worry much more about it.”
“The reason I’m here is, I want to ask you about the Stamford Players.”
“Oh?” He was genuinely surprised. If he’d ever known the detective was interested in community theater, it was a nugget of information that he’d forgotten.
“You’re the director, and author, of the upcoming production?”
“That’s true,” he said. “Although just now I was thinking about that, wondering whether we should postpone. Unless I can get someone else to take over the directing. There are a couple of members of the company I might be able to call on.”
Hardy nodded. “You have a Candace DiCarlo in the production?”
Albert thought, Oh-oh.
“Yes, yes, we do. Very talented actress. Not a professional, of course. She has a regular day job. But like pretty much all of us, we have theater in our blood. We may not be ready for Broadway, but we like to have fun.”
Hardy nodded slowly.
“Was there some reason you brought up Candace’s name?” Albert asked.
“When was the last time you saw or spoke with Ms. DiCarlo?”
“Uh, well, let me think,” he said.
Albert knew exactly when he had last seen or spoken with Candace DiCarlo. It had been the previous evening, at the Motel 6.
“Yesterday, at some point,” he said. “We had a rehearsal yesterday morning, but I had to cut it short when I got the call about my mother.”
Hardy said, “Hmm.”
“I’m still wondering, why do you ask?”
“I think it’s very possible, Mr. McBain, that your actress Candace DiCarlo is the woman you all thought might be Brie.”
Albert feigned surprise. “You don’t say.”
“I do.”
“She told you this? She confessed to it?”
“No,” Hardy said. “She did not.”
Albert felt a slight sense of relief. “Then what leads you to think this?”
“Her car, for one. Her Volvo wagon appears to be the same car from the neighbor’s surveillance video. And there’s a witness, of sorts.”
“A witness?”
“Someone who recognized her from the surveillance image.”
Albert said nothing.
After several seconds of silence, Hardy said, “Aren’t you curious to know why she might do something like that? Get everyone to think she was Brie?”
“Well, yes, of course. If it’s actually true that it was her. Have you asked her? Point-blank?”
“I would if that were possible.”
“And why isn’t it?”
“Because Candace DiCarlo is dead, Mr. McBain.”
Albert’s lips looked ready to form words, but nothing came out. He was stupefied, and his hands, resting atop his desk, began to shake.
“Are you okay, Mr. McBain?”
“I... uh... I don’t understand. Candace is dead?”
“That’s correct.”
“What — what happened? An accident? Was she in a car accident?”
“No, Mr. McBain. She was murdered.”
Albert looked as though he might choke. He put a hand to his throat and coughed. “How... That’s impossible.”
Hardy said, “I’m afraid it’s not. I’m sorry. I’m assuming, given that she was part of your theater group, she was a friend.”
“She — yes, she was a friend,” he said. He scanned the top of his desk as though looking for something.
“Mr. McBain?”
“I need... I need a drink of water.”
There was a plastic water bottle on the other side of his computer monitor. Hardy pointed and said, “There.”
Albert found it, twisted off the cap, and took a swig. “This is just... this is horrible. This is unbelievable. Who... what happened?”
“We have someone in custody. The thing is, Mr. McBain, it appears that her death and her little performances on Saturday are linked. I want to ask you again, why do you think she might have posed as Brie?”
“I... I...”
Albert was too shaken to speak.
“Mr. McBain, what was the nature of your relationship with Candace DiCarlo?”
“She... she was in our production.”
“Was that the full extent of your relationship?”
He turned away from the detective, looked at his screen, the mortgage numbers blurring beyond his tears.
“We... we were... we were seeing each other.”
“Seeing each other? Romantically? An intimate relationship?”
With considerable difficulty, as though there were an iron rod in his neck, Albert managed to nod. “Yes,” he said.
“If you were involved romantically, is it possible Ms. DiCarlo confided in you as to why she was pretending to be Brie?”
Albert’s nose twitched at the question, as though Hardy had asked him the wrong thing. She picked that up and asked, “Or maybe it was the other way around. It was your idea, something you talked her into doing.”