Sitting and smoking in her dressing room at the theater, wearing rehearsal clothes that consisted of a shirred purple tube top, white boating sneakers without socks, and low-slung jeans that exposed her belly button, Andrea Packer snubbed out her cigarette the moment they entered the room, like a kid who’d been caught sneaking a drag in an elementary school toilet.
Nineteen years old if she was a day, lean and coltish, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held with an elasticized band the same color as her precarious purple top, she stood at once, extended her hand, told Kling she was sorry if she’d sounded distracted on the phone, but she’d been studying her new lines, Freddie had put in a whole new scene, would he like a cup of coffee or something, there was a big coffeemaker on the table near the stage door where Torey stayed. All of this in a breathless rush that made her sound even younger than she was.
“I thought you’d be coming alone, Mr. Kling,” she said, making the focus of her interest immediately apparent, and flashing him a brown-eyed glance and a radiant smile that in tandem could have melted granite. She then turned her chair so that her back was almost to Carella, who understood body language about as well as any other detective in this city. He felt suddenly useless. In fact, he felt invisible.
Kling explained that they were here because they’d been told that she and Michelle had shared a dressing room here in this small rehearsal theater…
“Yes, that’s true. Well, now Josie and I do.”
… and they were wondering if Michelle might have mentioned anything to her that could possibly throw some light on her murder.
“Confidential girl talk, huh?” she said, and smiled again at Kling.
“Anything she might have said about anything that was troubling her, or annoying her, or…”
“Everything annoyed her,” Andrea said.
“How do you mean?” Carella asked.
“Well…”
They waited.
Carella moved around in front of her so that he could see her face and her eyes. Outmaneuvered, she sat in the chair before the dressing-table mirror, her hands spread on her thighs, and looked up into their faces. In a tiny little girlish voice, she said, “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead,” and lowered her eyes.
“We know how difficult it must be for you,” Carella said, bullshitting her.
“I’m sure you do, sir,” she said, bullshitting him right back, and then raising her eyes to meet Kling’s, excluding Carella as effectively as if she’d again turned her back to him. “The thing is,” she said, “and I’m not the only one who felt this way, Michelle was a total pain in the ass with an ego out of all proportion to her talent. Well, look what she put him up to doing. Johnny, I mean.”
“What was that, Miss Packer?” Kling asked.
“Stabbing her in the alley,” Andrea said.
From the stage, Kling could hear the other actors running a scene over and over again. In high school, he had played Christian in Cyrano. He had fallen madly in love with the girl playing Roxanne, but she’d had eyes only for the guy playing the lead, a kid named Cliff Mercer who almost didn’t need the fake nose they stuck on his face every night. Kling had once thought seriously of becoming an actor. That was before the war. That was before he saw friends getting killed. After that, acting seemed a frivolous occupation.
“Was there any prior indication that she and Mr. Milton were planning to stage a stabbing incident?” Carella asked.
Without looking at him, she said, “If you mean did she tell me Hey, guess what, Johnny’s gonna stab me tomorrow night so I’ll get a lot of publicity and become a big movie star, no. Would you advertise it in advance?” she asked Kling.
“Did she tell you she wanted to be a movie star?”
“Everybody wants to be a movie star.”
Not me, Carella thought.
“As you probably know,” Kling said, “Mr. Milton has admitted stabbing her…”
“Yes, it’s all over the papers, all over everything, I’m sick of it already. This is a good play. We don’t need cheap publicity to guarantee its success.”
But it couldn’t hurt, Carella thought.
“I guess you also know,” Kling said, “that Mr. Milton denies having killed her.”
Andrea shrugged. The tube top slipped a bit lower on her breasts. Automatically, she grabbed it in both hands and yanked it up.
“What does that mean, Miss Packer?” Carella asked.
“What does what mean?”
“The shrug.”
“It means I don’t know who killed her. It could’ve been Johnny, it could’ve been anybody. What I was trying to say before is that nobody liked her. That’s a plain and simple fact. Ask anybody in the show, ask anybody working the show, nobody liked her. She was an arrogant, ambitious, untalented little bitch, excuse me, with delusions of grandeur.”
But tell us how you really feel, Carella thought.
“When you said earlier that everything annoyed her…”
“Everything, everything,” she said, and rolled her eyes at Kling. “The play, the scenes in the play, the lines in the play, her costumes, her motivation, the sun coming up in the morning, everything. She kept wanting to know who stabbed her! As if that mattered. Freddie’s play surmounts cheap suspense. It supersedes the genre, it subverts it, in fact. If Michelle had understood her part in the slightest, she’d have realized that. This isn’t a mystery we’re doing here, this is a drama about a woman’s triumph of will, an epiphany brought about through a chance stabbing, an almost casual stabbing, accidental, random, totally meaningless in the larger scheme of things. So Michelle kept wanting to know who stabbed her. Is it the waiter, is it the butler, is it the upstairs maid? I swear to God, if I’d heard her ask one more time who stabbed her, I’d have stabbed her, right in front of everybody.”
“You seem to have a good understanding of the character she was playing,” Carella said.
“You have to understand the conceit of the play,” Andrea said to Kling, smiling, “its internal machinations. Michelle was playing a character listed in the program only as the Actress. That’s the part Josie is doing now. It’s the starring role. I’m playing someone called the Understudy. Well, an understudy is supposed to know all the lines and moves of the person she may have to replace one night, because of illness, or accident or…”
Or death, both detectives were thinking.
“So whereas I wasn’t Michelle’s real understudy, I was her understudy in the play, and knowing all of her lines and moves was part of my preparation for the role.”
“Of Understudy.”
“In the play.”
“In the play, yes.”
“Josie was her understudy in real life. Which is why she took over the part when Michelle got killed.”
“Did you ever think you might get the part?” Carella asked.
She turned to him. Looked him dead in the eye.
“Me?” she asked.
“Since you knew all her lines and moves?”
“Surely not as well as Josie does.”
“But did it ever occur to you, once Michelle was dead, that you might get the starring role? Since you knew all the lines and moves?”
“It occurred to me, yes. But not because I knew all her lines and moves?”
“Then why did it?”
“Because I’m a better actress than Josie is.”