“Oh, this is about the actress who got killed, right? Michelle whatever. Someone told me Andy was in the same play with her.”
“Yes,” he said. “Was Miss Packer in that class?”
“Yes, she was. Is that what she told you?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Well, she was telling the truth.”
“I figured she might be,” Kling said, and sighed.
In fact, even before he’d shlepped away the hell over here, he’d been dead certain she’d been telling the truth. Not once in his entire time on the force, as uniformed officer or detective, had anyone given him an alibi that later turned out to be false. Not once. Well, maybe once, but if so he couldn’t remember when. Well, actually, yes, he could remember some guy telling him he was at a movie when actually he was out chopping up his mother-in-law. But never had anyone told him. This is where I was at such and such a time on such and such a night and—
Well, wait a minute. How about that jackass Johnny Milton, who’d told them he was at O’Leary’s at seven when he didn’t get there until seven-fifteen, the jackass. A person had to be crazy to tell you he was someplace he wasn’t when there were people who could absolutely state otherwise. Yet each and every goddamn alibi had to be checked out against the likelihood that the person was lying, which he’d have to be an idiot to do, when it was so easy to verify.
“Why didn’t you simply call?” Carol asked.
Another good question.
He hadn’t simply called because then he wouldn’t have been able to ascertain that the person to whom he was speaking on the telephone was not being coerced into saying Yes, Andrea Packer was here bouncing around on Tuesday night. Over the phone, you couldn’t tell if someone was holding a gun to a person’s head. So what you did, you marched all the way over to Swift Avenue and waited on a bench while a lot of women you didn’t know jumped in the air to the accompaniment of unheard music, and then finally you talked to the alibi and got the answer you knew you’d get all along. Sometimes, he thought he might enjoy being a fire fighter.
“Have you had lunch yet?” Carol asked.
“No,” he said.
“Would you like to join me?” she asked. “There’s a very good deli just around the corner.”
He thought of Sharyn.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the office.”
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“The Eight-Seven? Uptown. Just off the park.”
“I might stop in sometime.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“See what a police station looks like.”
“Uh-huh. Well, thanks for your help, Miss Gorman, I appreciate it.”
“Thanks for coming by,” she said, and raised one eyebrow.
Freddie Corbin was telling Carella that non-fiction writing wasn’t really writing, anyone could write a non-fiction piece. In fact, all non-fiction writing was just “What I Did Last Summer” over and over again. Carella didn’t think he could write a non-fiction piece; he even had trouble writing detective reports.
They were sitting in a small sun-washed room Corbin called his study, “Not because I’m affected,” he said, “but because a portrait painter had this apartment before I took it, and he used to paint in this room he called his study. As painters are wont to do,” he added, and smiled.
Two side-by-side windows were open to a mild April breeze that wafted up from a small garden two stories below. A fire escape crowded with red geraniums in clay pots was just outside the windows. Corbin was sitting in a black leather swivel chair behind his desk. Carella was in a chair across the room. The playwright had been interrupted while rewriting several scenes in his play, but he seemed in no hurry to get back to the work at hand. Carella wanted to know what Corbin knew about Michelle Cassidy. Instead, Corbin wanted to tell him what he knew about writing.
“So let’s dismiss non-fiction as something any child of eleven can do,” he said, “and let’s dismiss most forms of fiction as writing that requires no discipline whatever. The novel, in particular, is by definition a form that defies definition. Moreover, most novelists at work today are writing as poorly as the people writing non-fiction. What it’s come down to, if a person can successfully string together nine or ten plain words to fashion a simple sentence, then he or she may be dubbed ‘author’ and be permitted to go on author’s tours and speak at Book and Author luncheons and generally behave like a writer.“
Carella couldn’t see the distinction.
“An author,” Corbin went on, seemingly reading his mind, “is anyone who’s written a book. The book can be a diet book, or a cookbook, or a book about the sex life of the tsetse fly in Rwanda, or it can be a trashy woman-in-jeopardy mystery, or a high-tech novel about a missing Russian diplomat, or any one of a thousand poorly written screeds or palimpsests. An author doesn’t need to study literature, he doesn’t need to take any courses in the craft of writing, all he needs to do is impulsively and ambitiously sit himself down in front of a computer and write as badly as he knows how to write. In this great big land of the literary jackpot, if he writes badly enough, he may hit it really big, therefore qualifying as a bona fide author entitled to go on book tours and television talk shows. A playwright, on the other hand, ahhh-hah!”
Carella waited.
“A playwright is a writer,” Corbin said.
“I see,” Carella said.
“The living stage is the last bastion of the English language,” Corbin said. “The last arena permitting exploration of character in depth and with perception. It is the final stuttering hope for beauty and meaning, the last stand, the only stand of the word itself. That’s why I write, Mr. Carella. That’s why I wrote Romance.“
Though Carella couldn’t remember having asked him. ”
Now you may ask…”
I wish I could ask about Michelle, Carella thought.
“… why I’ve chosen to express myself in terms of a mystery. But is my play a mystery? Oh, yes, there is a stabbing in it, an attempted murder, if you will, but the focus of the play is not upon the perp, as you call it, but instead on the vic, as you call it. Unlike the mysteries you deal with every working day of your life…”
Carella was thinking that in police work there were no mysteries. There were only crimes and the people who committed those crimes. He was here today because someone had committed a most grievous crime against Michelle Cassidy.
“… in a straight play occurs at the end of the story,” Corbin was saying. “And this change, this epiphany, can take many different shapes and forms. It can occur as insight, or simple recognition, or even the realization by a character that he or she will never change, which in itself is a change of sorts. In a mystery, on the other hand, the change takes place at the very beginning of the story. A murder is committed, there is an aberration in the normal orderly flow of events… a change, if you will. And a hero or heroine comes into the story to investigate, ultimately finding the killer and restoring order, correcting the change that took place in the beginning. So you see, there’s a vast difference between a straight play and a mystery play. Romance is not a mystery. I will not think kindly on any critic who treats it as such.”