When the scene ended, a bearded man in the front row personally critiqued it, and then called for reactions and responses from the assembled students on the hard wooden folding chairs. A half hour later, he called a break and Josie and the old guy went out into the corridor together. She was standing by a radiator in front of a very tall window, smoking, when they joined her. The old guy was nowhere in sight. Josie’s strawberry-blond hair was piled on top of her head. She was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and she looked very young and fresh and innocent. But she was twenty-one years old and an experienced actress. And she had inherited the starring role in Romance from another actress who’d been brutally stabbed to death.
“How’s it coming along?” Kling asked.
“Oh fine. Well, you know, I knew all the lines and stage directions already, I was her understudy, you know, this wasn’t like coming into something cold, taking over cold for somebody. Chuck rehearses all the understudies — Chuck Madden, our stage manager — three, four times a week, so really we’re pretty much up on it.”
She had stubbed out her cigarette and was leaning against the radiator now, arms folded across her chest, a defensive posture, Carella noticed, but nothing else about her seemed guarded. Rail thin in the tight-fitting blue jeans and T-shirt, she appeared almost waif-like. Brown Bambi eyes wide in a pale white face crowned with masses of reddish-blond curly hair, her mouth lipstick-free, a single ruby-red earring in…
She saw where his eyes had wandered.
“This isn’t an affectation,” she said.
Carella looked puzzled.
Her hand went immediately to her right ear, tugged the earlobe there. “I lost the other one,” she said, “I can’t imagine where. I know I had both of them on at rehearsal today.”
“I’m sure things have been pretty frantic,” Carella said.
“Well, yes, but understudies are used to going on at a moment’s notice, you know, if anybody gets sick or anything. So I really do know the part.”
“Must be a strain, though,” Carella suggested.
“A strain? How?”
“I mean replacing a murder victim,” he said softly, and watched her eyes.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s a terrible thing, what happened to Michelle. But this is show business, am I right? The show must go on, isn’t that so?” Eyes clear and bright, eyes unflinching. “And what you said, replacing her, this isn’t really replacing her, it isn’t as if she was fired so I could take the role, it isn’t that at all. I was her understudy and something happened to her, and so I’m going on in her place, but that isn’t replacing her, is it? You don’t really think it’s replacing her, do you?”
“Only in a manner of speaking,” Carella said, and kept watching her eyes.
“Well,” she said, and shrugged. “I feel awful about what happened to Michelle, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel happy for myself, for getting the opportunity to play the leading role in a play that now… well, this’ll sound terrible, too. But, you know, we really do have a shot now. With all the publicity the play’s getting, I mean. I know that’s awful, we wouldn’t be getting the publicity if someone hadn’t killed Michelle, but that’s the simple truth of the matter. She got killed and now there’s a lot of focus on the play. And a lot of focus on me, too — there, I said it before you did,” she said, and smiled.
“I wasn’t about to say it,” Carella said.
“Neither was I,” Kling said.
“No, but you were thinking it, weren’t you? You’ve got to be thinking it. If it wasn’t Johnny who killed her, then it had to’ve been somebody else, am I right? The papers said he admitted stabbing her but not killing her. So, okay, what you’re thinking — the police, I mean, not you two individually, though I’m sure you’re both thinking it, too — what all of you are thinking is that it must’ve been somebody who had a lot to gain from her murder, am I right? So who gains more than her understudy? Who gains more than me? If I go out there and do a good job in this play that everybody’s already talking about weeks before it opens, I’ll get to be a star. Me. Little Josie Beales. So, sure, I can understand why you’re wondering where I was the night she got killed.”
“In fact…” Carella said.
“Sure,” she said, and nodded.
“… where were you, Ms. Beales?”
“I had a feeling you’d ask that right on cue,” she said, and smiled again.
“You understand…”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m the one who got the part. I’m the one who gets a shot at stardom. So, sure. But did I kill Michelle to get it?”
“No one’s suggesting…”
“Oh, please, guys, why are you here otherwise?”
“A routine visit,” Kling said.
“Routine, my ass,” she said, and smiled yet again.
Carella wondered if the smile was an actress’s trick. Or even an actress’s tic. He realized all at once that with an actress, you could never tell when she was acting. You could look into her eyes from now till doomsday, and the eyes would relay only what she was performing, the eyes could look limpid and soulful and honest, but the eyes could be acting, the eyes could be lying.
“From what I understand,” she said, and paused dramatically, very serious now, almost solemn now.
“According to the newspapers and television,” she said, and paused again.
He was thinking she was a very good actress.
“Poor Michelle was…” she said.
The word caught in her throat.
“Killed…” she said.
One hell of an actress, he thought.
“… around seven-thirty, eight o’clock on Tuesday night.”
“That’s right.”
“In her apartment on Carter and Stein.”
“Yes.”
“In Diamondback.”
“Yes.”
“A black neighborhood all the way uptown,” Josie said.
Kling wondered why she’d felt it necessary to comment on the racial breakdown of the neighborhood. He wondered, too, how Sharyn might react to such an observation. Or was Josie merely establishing that the neighborhood, black or otherwise, was all the way uptown?
“Yes,” he said. “A black neighborhood.”
“Which doesn’t mean a black person killed her,” Josie said.
“That’s true,” he said.
“But who did?” she asked, and opened the brown eyes wide. “If not Johnny, and not some black junkie burglar…”