Sleuthing at the Copper Queen

MYROER ATTHE COPPER QUEEN HOTEL

Sometimes I think about Shirley Livingston. She was there that weekend when a man was murdered at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee. A few fingers pointed in her direction, but it wasn't her. She was only a girl from Clovis, New Mexico. So she said. We were both attending the annual meeting of the Southwest Sleuth Society held at the hotel. More than 20 members had made the trip, some from as far away as New York City. None of us had anything in common, as far as I knew, except for the shared knowledge that there would be a murder that weekend, and for the next 40 hours nothing would be exactly as it seemed. There were Harvey and (OPPOSITE PAGE) A whodunit takes center stage at Bisbee's Copper Queen Hotel, and our author's right in the middle of it.

Yvonne, that delightful couple from Reno who played the lounges, he on piano and she in full voice. They weren't from Reno at all. And Sarah was no housewife from Bakersfield. Her husband, Rudy, didn't run the local paper, and Tina and Dean didn't own a motorcycle shop in northern Arizona. Liars, all of them. And they looked so nice. We all did. It was so very 1950s: women in calf-length dresses, white gloves, and heels. Men with short hair and button-down shirts, although two leather garments made an appearance. The biker type was sporting a leather vest, and Rudy the editor wore a leather tie, about as radical as our part of the '50s was going to get.

Dressed to kill, we met for dinner Friday night. Then, after coffee and cake, businessman Bob Collins hit the floor, poisoned, they said, by one of us.

As luck would have it, bad for some, one of Bisbee's finest was already on the scene. Constable Simonson had joined us for dinner and so was able to pick up the pieces, Collins to be exact, and to supervise the removal of the body.

Male members of the society jumped at the opportunity to carry the corpse down the stairs to the hotel lobby. No less bloodthirsty, female members leapt up to yell their encouragement. The diminutive and, up to that moment, charming Yvonne shouted, "Why don't they throw him down?"

At my table, Rudy was warning Sarah not to move, and Jim, who said he ran a hardware store, was cold enough to take notes as murder and mayhem swirled around us. Good grief, what had I gotten myself into? A murder mystery weekend.

Three days and two nights designed and scripted to lead willing participants through a murder and to the murderer among them.

Weeks before the event, players had received brief descriptions of their characters. We could add whatever depth and embellishments we wished. What we were asked not to do was to fall out of that character, not to let our fellow players know who we were in real life.

The request came from Lavonne Seymour, the writer, the director, the deus ex machina of the murder mystery weekends at the Copper Queen.

"Let loose, forget who you really are and where you really came from" she advises anyone who signs on for the game. She also advises to dress the part. We did.

Our mystery took place in the 1950s, and there were times when some of us looked as though the last movie we saw was Rebel Without a Cause and the next song we would hum would be "Mr. Sandman.

"It's kinda fun going around trying to find this stuff," reported one of the male guests who had made his preparatory round of the clothing thrift stores, as had so many of us.

One participant did complain briefly about her purchases at dinner that first

HYROER AT THE COPPER QUEEN HOTEL

Under the auspices of her weekends, Seymour has sent people out to the streets of Bisbee in Victorian splendor, Roaring '20s flash, 1960s love beads, and barely a head has turned.

HYROER AT THE COPPER QUEEN HOTEL

We faced the Saturday morning inquest. Clues were dropped right and left. The real waitress had disappeared. Yvonne was married once before. Two participants said they never knew the man. And this shocker: Shirley Livingston once went by the moniker of Bubbles Ballou.

One night. “I itch,” she said, not quite into her role of Susanne Baldwin, a waitress from Santa Fe. “Does anybody else itch?” Probably. A number of us were wearing other people's clothes, people we didn't know. But, we were cool or was it hip? Regardless, we took it to the streets. Also advisable, according to Seymour. “We have always encouraged people, since it started, to walk around in their costumes because nobody cares,” she said. Under the auspices of her weekends, Seymour has sent people out to the streets of Bisbee in Victorian splendor, Roaring '20s flash, 1960s love beads, and barely a head has turned, especially to that last period of apparel. “You're not even out of place here,” she said of the Bisbee of the '90s. This town has seen it all. It roared through the 1880s, sitting smack-dab on the mother lode of copper in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona. It crossed the decades as the big business town of copper in its prime, full of families, churches, schools. When the ore ran out, the hippies came in, finding cheap housing and business potential. Now the tourists pour in the way copper used to pour out, and high-class art galleries grace the same streets that once supported 40-plus low-down saloons. Shocked at a few people wandering around town in poodle skirts and rolledup jeans? Hardly. Back at the hotel, we faced the Saturday morning inquest. Clues were dropped right and left. The real waitress, the one who served the cake, had disappeared. Aha. Yvonne was married once before, to Bob Collins. Oh ho! At least two participants said they never knew the man. Not possible. And this shocker: Shirley Livingston once went by the moniker of Bubbles Ballou. There were other leads to follow. One of the players, Barbara Williams, who claimed she too was from Santa Fe, mentioned she had to go home and walk her dogs. Long trip. Then there was Dwayne Vaughn. On the first night, he was heard to mumble, “I'm not very good at this.” And later he said about the weekend, “I was always forgetting I was Dwayne.” Curious. The lounge act from Reno was seen dining with The Banker and his wife and the bike shop owners. Didn't fit. And then there was the photographer. Supposedly he was the only one among us who was, just as he said, in town taking pictures of the weekend for Arizona Highways. Yet he was seen running afterShirley Livingston in the streets of Bisbee trying to pass her a note.

Oh, clues abounded but not about the murder. They were evidence to be applied to the other mystery of the weekend. Who were all these people, and how did they end up here?

Certain predictions could be made. "I venture a guess that we've had an attorney in every group," said Seymour. There would be two in ours, but neither managed to solve the murder. Hmmm.

She also remembered the drug dealer character of one of her other weekends. He turned out to be so scary and vicious nobody wanted to be anywhere near him. He also turned out to be a real-life federal judge, retired. No judges in our midst, but there was one high-placed court administrator.

We wouldn't find out any of this until the end of the weekend when we also discovered a cellist among us, Juilliard trained, a retired Navy captain, a loan company account executive, an entertainment lawyer from the biggest theater of them all, New York, and me, a writer from Arizona Highways. I was on an undercover assignment. What were their reasons?

Marge, the wife of the note taker, saw an ad in the Tucson paper. "I just held on to it saying we've got to do this sometime."

One couple received their weekend as a gift from a family member. "She thought it would be a fun thing for us to do," Rosemary the wife says of her sister. The husband, it was Dwayne, wasn't so sure."We're not really outgoing," he ex-plained. Oh, Dwayne, weren't you the fel-low up there belting out a very good rendition of "Your Cheatin' Heart" at the dreaded No Talent Talent Show?

There was a lot of talent evident that weekend, most of it acting, people staying in character. Important, said Jim the note taker when the weekend was over.

"Half the trick of the whole weekend is that you have to get a few in the group who really get into it."

We had them. Yvonne was one, solid in the role of an always-on-stage chanteuse. Sarah was another. Sarah was a free spirit, sassy, loud. She was a pivot on which the attention and the action often turned.

By Saturday, you believed. Sarah, Yvonne, Jim, they were real. Now, did they kill Bob Collins? And, if not, who did?

We met, we talked, we speculated but to no avail. Perhaps we needed the voracity, if not the budget, of a previous game participant. He was the guy who tried unsuccessfully to bribe the hotel busboy.

"Told him he would give him a hundred dollars if he could tell him who did it," remembered Seymour.

HYROER AT THE COPPER QUEEN HOTEL

There was one additional mystery that weekend, the identity of the person who danced down the darkened streets of Bisbee, poodle skirt atwirl. She was one of ours, freed by a weekend of being someone else.

Some people played tough, but we seemed to lean more toward good-natured cynicism. As Yvonne told Marge, “Now remember, this is no big Shakespearean plot.” Maybe not, but it still proved beyond us all. On Saturday night, it was Constable Simonson who had to reveal whodunit and Seymour who had to explain. It was the hardware store owner from Yuma and the singer from Reno. Was the solution clear to me? No, but what I really cared about was the resolution of the other mystery.

It came on Sunday morning with the confessions of true identities. Our sweettalking Tina was Jana Glasser, entertainment lawyer. Leather-vested Dean was John Reed, recording artist, who served his time in Juilliard. The man with the notes was not Jim but Bill Klein of Tucson, whose description of his work as an electrical engineer in the field of nuclear medicine was so complicated the eyes of listeners glazed. His wife, not Marge but Sue, worked at the University of Arizona College of Agriculture. Yvonne was Jeanne Acuff of Green Valley. She had played many other roles as a professional actress in New York. Her husband, Harvey, was Capt. Jim Acuff, USN, retired.

“His men loved him,” says his wife of 50 years, in true character at last.

Janna aka Tina was their daughter. James Acuff Jr. aka The Banker was their son and our second lawyer.

Dwayne, who couldn't remember who he was but who probably never forgot a Hank Williams lyric, was Walter Plewa, retired auto mechanic, Tucson.

“I would recommend it,” he said of the two-day life change.

The waitress was a student, the librarian was in marketing. Rudy the editor was Pat Jacobs, administrator of the Justice Court of Pima County. And Sarah?

Well, Sarah had slipped out of character once. When the murder was solved, she had slammed handcuffs on the accused with such speed that jaws dropped.

Once he could speak, Jim/Harvey said this about the unveiling of Sarah. “I really don't know anyone personally who carries around handcuffs.” He does now.

Sarah was Kim Jacobs, a senior adult probation officer in Tucson. Her clientele: drug addicts. Would she want to do this again, solve a safe mystery?

“Yes,” she states, more Kim than Sarah, “I would.” There was one additional mystery that weekend, the identity of the person who danced down the darkened streets of Bisbee, poodle skirt atwirl, singing to the buildings of that old mining town. She was one of ours, freed by a weekend of being someone else.

It wasn't me. A poodle skirt would never be the style of someone who once answered to the name of Bubbles Ballou.

Editor's Note: Characters developed for the Copper Queen Murder Mystery Weekend are fictional. Copyright Lavonne J. Seymour, 1990. To inquire about mystery weekends at the Copper Queen, contact the hotel at 11 Howell St., P.O. Box CQ, Bisbee, AZ 85603; (520) 432-2216.