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  Praise for the Movie Palace Mystery Series

  “Edgy enough to push a timeworn formula from the basement up to the balcony. Dumas adds just enough zany to her mix to have readers lining up for more.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “Murder at the Palace has great characters, including Trixie. It’s a delightful book, and…the movie summaries just add to the appeal.”

  – Library Journal

  “Murder at the Palace is a downright hoot. Fans of classic films will love this smart tale of travail starring Nora Paige…Rest assured that although the films involved are old, the story is witty and fresh. Especially enjoyable is watching the thoroughly modern Nora attempt to explain computer passwords to ghostly Trixie, whose idea of modern is a Duesenberg Model X Boattail Roadster.”

  – Mystery Scene Magazine

  “This story immediately grabbed my attention…I could not put this book down…And Trixie…oh my goodness, I love her and…had me laughing on the subway…boy I’m excited for the next book in this delightful entertaining debut series.”

  – Dru’s Book Musings

  “Old movie buffs, fans of San Francisco, and lovers of well-done mystery series debuts will shout huzzah and encore at author Margaret Dumas.”

  – Criminal Element

  “Stands with the best modern cozy mysteries and reminded me a lot of the Lily Ivory series by Juliet Blackwell. I’m adding this to my list of must-read series. Recommended.”

  – It’s All About The Book

  The Movie Palace Mystery Series

  by Margaret Dumas

  MURDER AT THE PALACE (#1)

  MURDER IN THE BALCONY (#2)

  MURDER ON THE SILVER SCREEN (#3)

  Copyright

  MURDER ON THE SILVER SCREEN

  A Movie Palace Mystery

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition | June 2020

  Henery Press, LLC

  www.henerypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, LLC, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Dumas

  Author photograph by Robin Clark

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-619-9

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-620-5

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-621-2

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-622-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  For the gang I’ve watched the best movies with:

  Dolores, Keith, Richard, and John.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As I write these acknowledgements, I’m under a stay-in-place order due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am filled with gratitude. Not just for all the people who helped me write and produce this book - this book seems pretty trivial at this moment. Right now I’m grateful that so far all my loved ones are safe. I’m grateful that, for the most part, this crisis is bringing out the best in people. I’m grateful for every single person who is doing their best to be a light in the darkness. Thank you.

  Meanwhile, many thanks to the Henery Press team, especially Maria Edwards, Kendel Lynn, Christina Rogers, and Art Molinares. Massive thanks as always to trusted first readers Denise Lee, Erick Vera, and Anne Dickson, and critique group stalwarts Claire M. Johnson and Michael J. Cooper. And a huge shout-out to the fabulous Martha Francescato for the sharpest eyes ever.

  I’m so grateful for the support I’ve gotten from fellow writers (House of Clues gang, Camille Minichino, and Ann Parker, I’m looking at you) and independent booksellers, particularly Dori Jaroslow at Books Inc. and Anne Saller at Book Carnival.

  I don’t know what the world will look like after this pandemic. As a writer, what I do is imagine a hundred different outcomes of a given situation and go with the one that’s most interesting. But this time I’m really hoping for the boring. I hope, by the time you’re reading this, that we’re all going to be able to do something as normal, as trivial, as mundane, and as amazingly fabulous as going out to a movie together.

  “You’re not afraid of ghosts are you? It would be awful if you were.”

  David Niven as Peter Carter

  A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

  Chapter 1

  “The world has lost its mind!”

  Marty Abrams, the Palace theater’s senior (only) projectionist and resident curmudgeon, swept into the lobby riding a wave of irritation. But he also swept in carrying a box of pastries from the café across the street, so I decided to overlook it.

  His co-worker Callie didn’t seem to notice his mood. “Did you get my cream puff?”

  “Technology is ruining everything!” he proclaimed.

  “Not cream puffs,” she replied. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about. You love technology. It’s literally what you do for a living.”

  He drew himself up to his considerable height and looked down upon her, the forty-something tower of rumpled flannel addressing the petite powerhouse of bohemian grad student. “How dare you?”

  His voice dripped with outrage. She shrugged and took the pink box from him. “Movies wouldn’t exist without technology. Projection is technology. Sound on film is technology. Face it.” She removed a mocha cream puff and handed the rest back to him. “Every day when you come in here and use your phone to play your overture through the theater’s sound system, you’re legit embracing technology.”

  Marty turned a shade of purple that I’d only ever seen once or twice before. As entertaining as his meltdowns could be, I figured I’d better diffuse this one before we lost an entire afternoon’s work to it.

  I stepped between my two employees. “I take it something happened?” I said to Marty.

  He redirected his glare toward me. “Yes, something happened!”

  I waited. I’d spent ten years in the trenches of Hollywood, negotiating and maneuvering on my almost-ex-husband’s behalf. Temper tantrums had lost their power to faze me.

  “I was at the café,” he said. “Minding my own business, just waiting my turn in line, when I saw what this…person ahead of me was doing with his phone.”

  A number of unpleasant possibilities occurred to me in the dramatic pause Marty took. Someone watching porn? Someone tweeting something hateful? Someone using a filter to make his selfie look like Bogart? Anything was possible.

  “He was…” Here Marty shuddered and passed me the pastries. “He was watching Lawrence of Arabia.”

  “Ooohhhh.” Callie exhaled in sudden and sympathetic understanding.

  “Right?” Marty turned back to her. “Of all films!”

  “Of all films,” I agreed. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and not one woman in a speaking part) is one of the greatest achievements of wide-screen spectacle in the history of film. There is truly a cast of thousands, and that’s not counting the camels. Watching it on a phone was completely missing the point of a legitimate screen epic.

  “Marty,” I asked, fearing the worst, “what did you do?”

  “I merely pointed out that he was committing a sacrilege,” he sniffed.

  I could on
ly imagine at what length and volume he had pointed this out. “And?”

  “He smirked.”

  I steeled myself for another tirade, but suddenly all the fight seemed to go out of him.

  “What kind of world are we living in?” he wailed. “With what kind of people? People who smirk at the idea of giving a film the respect it deserves?”

  “Well—” I began, but he wasn’t finished.

  “And how complicit are we? What are we even doing here today? What fresh hell are we going to unleash on an unsuspecting world tomorrow?” His distress, once we got past his bluster, was oddly touching.

  Callie apparently thought so too. She took the bakery box and offered it back to Marty. “Have a cupcake. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I don’t want a cupcake. I don’t even know what’s in the box. Lisa just handed it to me and rushed me out of there.” He took a deep breath. “She probably didn’t want a scene.”

  She probably already had a scene, and she wanted to end it. Lisa, the owner of Café Madelaine, was a friend. I’d ask her about it later.

  Callie raised the lid. “There’s, like, a scone…”

  “A scone is small consolation for a world gone mad,” he sniffed. But he took it.

  “I don’t really think we’re complicit in the end of civilization,” I said, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “We’re still holding on. I consider us a last bastion.”

  Marty took an enormous bite, scattering crumbs and sighing. He looked up at the vast high ceiling, painted with small gold stars and home to an enormous glittering chandelier. The lobby we stood in was a glorious remnant of a time when movie theaters were modern palaces, with gilt touches on hand-carved wooden paneling, a long glass concessions stand, and an elegant staircase sweeping up to a balcony. Admittedly, if you looked too closely you saw the wear in the deep blue carpet, and perhaps some of the fixtures were less than pristine, but still. This single-screen relic was the kind of theater where a person should see Lawrence of Arabia. Or any of the other thousands of classic films we showed.

  “We are a last bastion,” Marty said, squaring his shoulders. “This is the hill we die on.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “This is the theater we show movies in. At least as long as we can afford to keep the doors open. Speaking of which…” I gestured to the stacked cartons of merchandise that cluttered the lobby. “Shall we get started?”

  But that would have been too easy. Instead, we were interrupted by the bang and clatter of the lobby doors announcing the hasty arrival of a third member of my staff.

  “Am I too late? Is he here?” Brandon Dunbar, high school senior and part-time popcorn wrangler, glanced around the room with breathless anticipation. Of what, I had no clue.

  “Is who here?” I greeted him. “Why are you here? Don’t you have school today?”

  He waved a hand at this triviality. “Is S Banks here?”

  He pronounced the name with a sort of hallowed awe, indicating the lofty position this S Banks person held in the online gaming culture that Brandon had recently become devoted to. “I saw online that he checked in at a coffee shop on Divisadero,” he continued. “But he isn’t there. Is he here?”

  “Who is S Banks?” Callie asked, for which I liked her more than usual, which was quite a lot. “And why are you stalking him?”

  “Who’s…?” Brandon stood before her flummoxed. Normally he stood before her in a sort of haze of unrequited passion, so her cluelessness must have hit him hard.

  “S Banks is the antichrist,” Marty told her unhelpfully.

  At this Brandon recovered. “He’s a genius!” he protested, flushing to the roots of his ginger hair. “He’s just the most brilliant game designer on the planet, that’s all! What he’s doing with AR is just—I mean—he’s only the—”

  He might have gone on sputtering for a while, but Marty cut him off, nodding. “He’s the antichrist.” As if they were saying the same thing.

  “Okay, enough.” I raised my voice before things got even more out of hand. “He may be a genius,” I told Brandon, “or he may be the antichrist. He may be both. I don’t know or particularly care. What I do know is that the whole point of tomorrow’s webcast is to announce his new thing. Whatever that is and whoever he is only matters to us because it matters to Tommy. So how about we start unpacking these cartons?”

  Tommy May was a Silicon Valley tech guru and, more importantly, a one-quarter owner of the Palace. He was also a partner in Banks’ new offering and the reason we’d be playing host to a gaggle of nerds the next day as they watched a live feed of the webcast announcement.

  Setting up for the high-tech unveiling was the whole reason we were working that day. Usually the Palace is closed on Mondays, but since we were one of only eighteen theaters worldwide that would be getting the live stream the next day, we had a little prep work to do.

  I’d opened a few of the cartons the night before, when they’d arrived by special courier, shrouded in a veil of secrecy. The tape that sealed them was printed with all sorts of dire warnings about security protocols and strict injunctions against sharing any of the contents with members of the press or general public. I’d taken a peek, expecting marketing pamphlets or brochures or something, which just shows that I have no business living in the epicenter of technology that is the San Francisco Bay Area.

  “They’re tablets,” I told Brandon, who had approached the nearest carton with the same kind of awestruck fascination that Sidney Greenstreet had for the Maltese Falcon.

  He stopped in mid-reach and stared at me.

  “I got instructions from Tommy last night,” I explained. “He sent a text to all the theaters. Apparently the ‘old media’ way of printing brochures has too many opportunities for information to be leaked, so everything about the game will be delivered online. These tablets will get it all first.”

  There were fourteen cartons on the counter. “Those are all full of tablets?” Marty said. “How much are they spending on this thing?” He looked slightly queasy.

  “I mean, why would they care?” Callie asked. “Whatever they’re announcing will be so huge they might as well be printing money.”

  She had a point. Tommy, who I assumed was already printing money from a handy little travel app that everybody seemed to use, had partnered with the hottest game developer on the planet: Brandon’s hero with the one-letter name. Whatever Tommy and S were going to announce the next day was bound to rake in more money than I could imagine. And I have quite the imagination.

  Brandon took a boxed tablet from a carton. He held it in both hands like a grail.

  “There’s some special app on it,” I told him. “Tommy said they’ll hit all of them with data, all over the world, tomorrow during the announcement, so everyone attending in the theaters will get the same thing at the same time.”

  “And I’ve got one.” Brandon hugged the boxed miracle of technology to his chest.

  Marty plucked another one out of the carton, holding it between two fingers as if it were toxic. “What are we supposed to do with them?”

  “One per seat in the auditorium,” I told them. “We need to take them out of their boxes and make sure they’re ready to get the bat signal tomorrow. Let’s get moving. There are also a couple of banners to hang.” I reached into another carton and pulled one out, unfurling a length of heavy crimson fabric more suitable to a medieval castle wall than a theater—even the Palace.

  “It’s a logo,” Brandon breathed.

  I looked at the image, embroidered in gold thread. “It’s a globe. It probably means there’s some sort of travel component to whatever they’re announcing, right? Which would explain why S the game guy partnered with Tommy the travel app guy.”

  Brandon swallowed. “It’s going to be awesome.”

  “Uh huh.” I put the banner back in the bo
x. “In any case, we’ll find out all about it tomorrow. Meanwhile, the fee for hosting this event is enough to pay our electricity bills for the next six months, so how about we get set up?”

  I picked up a box and opened the door to the auditorium, where I found another member of the Palace family hanging out. Beatrix George, more generally known as Trixie, was the longest-serving usherette in the history of the Palace and possibly the only person in the city with less technical know-how than myself. Although she had a better excuse. She died in 1937.

  Chapter 2

  “Hiya, Nora!”

  Trixie was perched on the steps up to the stage, waving enthusiastically. I didn’t answer her, beyond a quick stealthy nod, because I had some silly desire not to be committed to a quaint little asylum for the completely insane. I was the only one who could see or hear the ghost of the Palace. I knew she was real, but I had no expectation that anybody else would take my word on that.

  She scampered up the aisle toward us, the shiny gold buttons and braid of her usherette’s uniform gleaming, her little cap at a jaunty angle on her bouncing blonde curls, her wide blue eyes taking in the boxes and the banners with delight.

  “What’s all this? What are you doing? Gee, are we having a party?” She clapped her hands. “Oh, I love a party! Why, I haven’t been to a party in I don’t know how long!”

  I gave her a warning glance. One that reminded her that I really couldn’t chat when there were other people around. She nodded and grinned, then mimed a zipper across her mouth.

  Callie, Marty, and Brandon had hauled the cartons into the auditorium and were now doing the math to figure out how many of the theater’s seats were going to get a tablet.