“I hadn’t talked to her in months. I gave her my card after the play ended, to help her out. She was set on New York, you know, and I still have some contacts there. I told her to call me when she was moving.”
“Did she say when that would be?”
“After she graduated, I thought.”
“When’s the last time you talked to her?”
“Christmas. I sent her one of my old camcorders and she called to thank me.”
“Video camera?” There hadn’t been anything like that in Hattie’s room. “What for?”
“It helps some actors rehearse. To record and review their takes. Hattie had talent and I wanted to help her refine it.” Then he smiled ruefully. “Also, I’d just bought myself a new one and Michael had forbidden me to bring any more equipment into the house without getting rid of some of the old.”
“Right. Can you think of anyone else she might have been close to during the play? Anyone she maybe met while doing it?”
“Not that I ever saw. She was always so busy, between her classes and work schedule. She was in and out of rehearsals without talking to much of anyone, and she even did her homework during the few scenes she wasn’t in.”
“Do you have records of who bought tickets to come see the play?”
It turned out he did and after a little finagling he let me go through the sales slips on site without having to get a warrant. It was grunt work, something I should have sent Shel to do, but I needed to be on the front lines of this. Sitting back in the office signing payroll or doing a press conference while someone else looked for Hattie’s killer would have driven me mad. I sat on the visitor side of Jones’s desk, pulling all the receipts for male customers to scan back to Jake. There were a lot. Who knew this many people went to plays?
Jones grabbed some coffee for both of us and watched me work. After a while, he quietly commented, “This wasn’t the play that killed Hattie.”
“Save it.” I kept flipping through receipts.
“You don’t believe in the curse.”
“No. I don’t believe a spook story can murder someone.”
“Then you’ve never heard of the Astor Place riots.”
He went to a file cabinet and rustled around, pulling out two pieces of paper.
“William Macready was one of the finest British actors in the early eighteen hundreds. Here he is.” I glanced up at a drawing of a little guy with a wig, tossing his head back and smiling at something outside the frame. Looked like the tax-evasion type.
“Great.” I went back to work.
“At the same time in the US, Edwin Forrest was making a name for himself in the New York theaters.”
He showed me the other picture. This one was a stocky, ruddy-looking guy with black hair sticking straight up. A brawler.
“The two were friends early in their careers, until Forrest performed Macbeth in London. The audience booed him and Forrest got it into his head that Macready had orchestrated the reaction out of jealousy. A few weeks later, while Macready was playing Hamlet, Forrest stood up in the middle of the audience and heckled him. He was immediately cast out of London society and had to return to New York.”
“Is this going anywhere, Jones?” I checked my phone and saw two missed calls, both from Jake.
“In May 1849, Forrest and Macready performed competing versions of Macbeth in New York on the same night. An army of Forrest’s fans stormed the Astor Opera House, determined to put a stop to Macready’s production. The rioters pummeled the theater with rocks and tried to set the building on fire, which prompted the militia to start firing into the crowd.”
“All this over a couple of theater actors?”
“These men were the movie stars of their time. Over twenty people died that night and a hundred more were injured. It was the worst tragedy in the history of theater. And it happened because of Macbeth.”
“It happened because of a bunch of idiot rioters and some policemen who couldn’t do their jobs.”
“But what set it off? Macbeth. Forrest’s terrible performance in London, which started the whole rivalry in the first place. What were they both playing that night? Macbeth. It’s the story of a man who murders his way into a crown. Not an insane man. Not a manipulated man. Just an ordinary man, drawn to extraordinary evil. That’s what Macbeth is, and for four hundred years, violence has been drawn to that play like a moth to the flame.”
He put the pictures away and looked at the one of Hattie lying on top of the desk. His voice dropped, as if the story had exhausted him.
“You’ll find your murderer, Sheriff. You’ll have a weapon and a motive and everything you need for your day in court. The curse is what you won’t be looking for, what you’ll never be able to prove with forensics. It’s the catalyst. It’s what makes things boil over.”
I’d fallen still, my hands lost in the papers. Something about his words brought the memories back. They could be gone for years, healed over and laid to rest, and then out of nowhere the gun smoke stung my eyes, the wet jungle invaded my nose, and I had to bury them all over again. You could leave a war, but it never left you.
“Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time. Trust me.”
He smiled a bit and nodded in deference. “You would know.”
I started working again and shook my head. “You know what that play really is? An insanity defense from heaven.”