A Midsummer Night's Scream

She’d once been caught in a traffic snarl that clogged a whole lane because a truck was on its side. All she’d had to read in the car was a Horchow catalog, which she had practically memorized by the time she could creep far enough to take a side street.
    There was enough light to read an old Ngaio Marsh paperback while Shelley was probably on the pay phone in the lobby, tearing a strip off the owner of the catering company.
    She was also half watching the rehearsal. It was interesting to her that the book she was reading also took place in a theater. This rehearsal seemed to be going well. Everybody knew their lines. Nobody but the butler, who was still making side remarks, flubbed a single one. Ms. Bunting was wonderful. This pleasant woman in real life playing a nasty old woman was amazing to watch. Denny’s replacement was barely okay. He, like Imry, didn’t have an appealing personality.
    But nobody else really sparkled. How could they with such a dreary, stupid, humorless, pointlessly plotted script? For a moment, Jane felt a tiny bit sorry for the director/scriptwriter Imry. She wondered if there would even be a second performance.
    Mel was starting to have doubts. Both Sven’ s boss and his sister, who knew him best, had claimed he was too shy to talk to strangers. There was no good reason to doubt either woman’s judgment. Maybe the blackmail theory was, in fact, wrong. Could a timid person like Sven muster the courage to blackmail anyone? He didn’t seem to have the nerve to even speak to strangers. He couldn’t imagine Sven confronting anyone repeatedly for cash, much less arranging for where and when the cash would be exchanged.
    On the other hand, Mel knew he’d clearly done the right thing by seizing the money for the time being. He’d put an extra officer on duty watching the Turners’ house, just in case word leaked out that it was full of cash. Everybody involved in counting the money knew that it had been removed. That might not discourage a neighbor or one of the people who did the counting from thinking they might have missed some of it.
    Could a man in his forties and his sister in her fifties have genuinely stashed away that much money? It was possible. Apparently Hilda had once had a well-paying job. She could have turned her earnings over to her brother. And the story of Sven’s gambling could be accurate. Hilda had also told Officer Jones that neither she nor her brother had children or had ever married.
    The Turner siblings certainly hadn’t spent much on themselves or the house. It seemed stuck in the late nineteen-fifties. Same wallpaper. Same paint. Same old-fashioned kitchen and bath, though the bath had handicapped equipment installed. That wasn’t a frivolous expense, it was a necessary one. They could simply be the most frugal people in the world. Who or what were they saving the money for?

Fifteen

    Having taken care of Sven and Hilda’s situation for the time being, Mel turned his attention back to Dennis Roth’s murder. He made his fifth try at the Roths’ answering machine, which again didn’t work. Two different cops in the suburb the Roths lived in had tried to find a neighbor who knew when they might be home. Apparently the Roths weren’t sociable enough to have told them. As he cruised through the paperwork one last time, he found that one of his researchers had discovered that Denny was adopted. But the original birth certificate wasn’t available.
    It wasn’t much help. It might be possible to do a search of some sort for a baby named Dennis born on the same date, which might lead to a birth certificate. But what would that prove? Just that he was probably born illegitimate.
    The background check of Professor Imry was just as useless. Born three years earlier than Denny in a small town in western Oklahoma, he’d gone to grade and high school there, then went to Chicago to the university that now owned the theater. His grades all through his life had been high C’s and low B’s. Medical records showed nothing out of the ordinary except one episode of asthma. Census records in Oklahoma merely gave information that his father was a Nazarene minister and that his mother was a housewife a few years older than her husband. Both parents had been born in the same town as their only son. There had been a sister named Carol two years older than the boy.
    The Buntings were harder to trace. All that could be found was their theater and film credits. He