“Ashley…”
“If it’s good for them. it might be good for the scene. Let’s see it, Mark!” he called to the stage.
“Ashley…”
“What we tried to do…” Riganti started.
“Don’t tell it, show it,” Kendall said.
“Thank you.” Riganti said, and nodded to Andrea, who immediately sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and lowered her head. The stage and the theater went silent. There were just the two actors on stage with a work light and a chair, getting ready to do an improvisation for a director, a playwright and a detective in a hushed darkened theater. Riganti started circling the chair. Carella watched intently. Riganti didn’t say a word, just kept circling the chair.
“Look, miss,” he said at last, “let’s he realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe…?”
“Those aren’t my words,” Corbin said in a whisper that carried clear to where Carella was standing at the back of the theater.
“It’s an improv,” Kendall said in an equally loud whisper.
“I won’t have them changing…”
“For Christ’s sake, let’s just hear the thing!”
The theater went silent again.
On the stage, the two actors looked out into the darkness, puzzled, waiting for instructions.
“Again, please,” Kendall said softly.
Riganti hesitated a moment. Then he nodded to Andrea, who struck the same pose she had earlier, hands folded in her lap, head bent. Riganti began circling the chair again. Carella thought he did that very well, circling the chair. “Miss,” he said at last in a voice that sounded gruffly familiar, “let’s be realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe you’re understudyin the starring role in this play, and the girl gets killed and you never even once think Gee, maybe I’ll get to go on in her place?”
“I never once thought that, no,” Andrea said.
“Don’t you ever go to the fuckin movies, miss?”
“Of course I go to the…”
“Didn’t you ever see a movie where the star breaks her leg and the understudy has to go on for her?”
“These are not my words!” Corbin whispered.
“Shhh!” Kendall whispered.
“… and all these fuckin workmen are sittin up on these little catwalks,” Riganti said, “high above the stage where the lights are hangin, and they all catch their fuckin breaths when she starts singin? And this old guy who pulls the curtain is standin there with his fuckin mouth open in surprise,” Riganti said, circling the chair like a shark closing in for the kill, “and a little old lady with costumes in her hands and pins stickin in her dress is standin there like she got struck blind, too, and all over the fuckin theater they’re amazed by what this understudy is doin,” Riganti said, and stopped dead in front of Andrea and pointed his finger into her face and shouted, “You mean to tell me you never saw that scene, miss?”
“Yes, I saw that…”
“… you never saw that movie, miss?”
“I saw that movie, but…”
“Then let’s be realistic here!” Riganti shouted, and suddenly turned off the character he was playing, suddenly stopped being this raging detective in the scene he was improvising, becoming in the wink of an eye simply the self-effacing actor Mark Riganti again, standing there in jeans and a floppy sweater and Italian loafers without socks, smiling weakly and turning for approval to where Kendall and Corbin were sitting in the sixth row center in the dark.
“Bravo,” Kendall whispered.
“Bravo, my ass!“ Corbin shouted, and stormed out of the theater.
“If there is one thing I absolutely despise,” Kendall said, “it’s writers. I would truly be the happiest person on earth if I could direct the telephone book. Give me a handful of trained actors and I could make a hit out of the telephone book, i promise you.”
They were sitting in the delicatessen alongside the theater alley where Michelle Cassidy was first stabbed. Kendall had called a half-hour break after calming down his actors and promising them their playwright would be hack after he’d got over his little fit of pique.
“Which I’m not sure he really will, by the way — unless he’s a better actor than anyone in the cast.
““How do you mean?” Carella asked.
Both men were drinking coffee. Carella didn’t really give a damn about writers or telephone books, although he guessed somebody wrote even telephone books. But he let Kendall talk. When a person talked, you learned a little something about him. And sometimes, incidentally, about the person who’d been killed.
“Well, this was a monumental explosion, this was rage of heretofore unseen proportions!” Kendall said, and rolled his eyes. “How dare they this, how dare they that, I’m going directly to the DGA, I’ll have their heads…”
“The what?”
“What?” Kendall said. “Oh. The DGA. The Dramatists Guild. Of America, that is. Where else, Poland? Freddie threatened to go there and have all the actors fired, have me fired for encouraging them to subvert his play… his exact word, by the way, subvert… went out of the theater in high dudgeon. Now either this was the performance of the century, designed to let everyone know exactly who’s in charge here and don’t fuck with me, mister, or else he really was enjoying a totally childish temper tantrum unproductive to the collaborative theatrical effort.”
“Which do you think it was?”
“A tantrum,” Kendall said. “The trouble with writers—especially writers in the theater, where they do, in fact, have outrageous control — is that they mistakenly believe their contribution to the creative process is the most important one. Which, of course, is absolute drivel.”
“Mr. Kendall,” Carella said, “as I’m sure you know, we’re still investigating the murder of…”
“Yes, I assumed that’s why you were here,” Kendall said dryly.
“Yes. That’s why I am here, in fact. In fact, we can save a lot of time…”
“On the night Michelle was killed,” Kendall said, “I was with Cooper Haynes.”
“Who’s Cooper Haynes?”
“He’s the gentleman who plays the Director in Romance. I use the term advisedly. Gentleman, that is. Most actors aren’t. But Coop is a dignified, courteous gentleman, thank God for small favors. He thought it might be valuable if he had an in-depth conversation with a real director. This, mind you, all this time alter we went into rehearsal. Suddenly decided he ought to know what a real director was all about if he was to portray effectively a director onstage. They’re such children, really, even the best of them. So I spent several hours with him, holding his hand, trying to convey the essence of… when I say holding his hand, by the way, I don’t mean that literally. Coop is a happily married man with three children, straight as an arrow.”
“And you?”
“Is that a question? And if so, what does it have to do with Michelle’s death?”
“You raised the subject,” Carella said.
“So I did. I am homosexual, Mr. Carella, yes. I am currently living with a set designer named Jose Delacruz, who is similarly gay and fifteen years my junior. I will be forty-seven in October. If my arithmetic is correct, the last time I looked he was thirty-two. And, by the way, he was there with us on the night Michelle was killed.”