I had no choice but to laugh at the image he’d conjured up, and he laughed along with me. “Still,” I said, “in fact, there are people in this world without a terrific sense of humor.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “Down home, we say, ‘Forget the Alamo, it’s over, man,’ but some people just have to be mad all the time, it’s the only way they can keep their heartbeat regular.”
“Like Dale Wormley, for instance.”
“A perfect example,” he agreed, and then he looked surprised and said, “You know, though, there is another.”
“Another what?”
“Another tough case, like Dale,” he told me. “Now, those two made a pair. But I just can’t see Matty taking it as far as all that.”
“Matty?”
“Matty Pierce.” Lacroix nodded, looking thoughtful. “He’s been in our class, part of the group, longer than me. Longer than Dale, even.”
Matty Pierce. The name rang a bell. It seemed to me Julie had said something about a Matty Pierce; not in Florida, but earlier than that, maybe in Mort’s office. I said, “Tell me about this Matty Pierce.”
“Well, one thing weird about him,” Lacroix said, “oddball, I mean, is that he’s a real New Yorker. The rest of us are all from to hell and gone, but Matty comes from Brooklyn.”
“Oh?”
“He’s kind of a tough guy,” Lacroix said, “or at least he likes to play tough guy. He grew up in some tough neighborhood out there. In fact, he still lives out there, takes the subway in.”
“I’m living in Brooklyn myself right now,” I said. “In Midwood.”
“Is there a section called Canarsie?”
“Yes. Way out by Jamaica Bay.”
“Well, that’s where Matty grew up,” Lacroix told me. “And where he still lives. The story is, they made some TV movie out there a few years ago. You know, they shot some exteriors there, used some of the neighborhood kids.”
I almost said, That’s how I got started, which was the truth for Sam Holt but not for this journalist form of Ed Dante; so I stopped myself in time. But, in fact, I’d gotten into this career because a movie was being shot in Mineola, Long Island, where I worked as a cop on the town force. The movie people used a few of us cops as extras — to get on our good side, essentially, justify paying us some money that couldn’t be called a bribe — and someone like the way I looked in the dailies; and the rest is pop history.
Lacroix was going on, saying, “Matty got the bug, he pestered the movie people, and somebody gave him an introduction to one of the casting agencies in Manhattan. And Matty looks good, he looks like your average run-of-the-mill rotten local boy, which is what he is, so he gets extra work a lot. But what he wants is to be a star. Charles Bronson, or at the very least Robert Blake.”
“Stand in line,” I suggested.
“Oh, you know it. In two words, Matty’s getting no-where. And it makes him mad.”
“Sounds like he and Dale Wormley were born for each other,” I said.
“Sounded that way to Howard, too, for a while,” Lacroix agreed.
“Howard?”
“Howard Moffitt, our teacher.”
“Acting teacher.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well,” I said, “what changed his mind?”
“He assigned the two of them a scene together,” Lacroix told me, grinning at the memory. “From True West. The brothers are supposed to be mad at each other, and Howard figured they could use their intensity, learn to get it under control that way. We had to peel them off each other.”
“They fought?”
“It was grim,” Lacroix said, but he chuckled when he said it, and shook his head. “Howard said we’d all learned something that day.”
“Did Wormley and— What’s his name?”
“Matty Pierce.”
“Did they learn to get their intensity under control?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” Lacroix said. “And they still hated each other afterward just as much. Maybe more.”
“I wonder,” I said, thinking about it, “if it’d be a good idea to talk to both of those people. Matty Pierce, and Howard.”
“Well, Howard, anyway,” Lacroix agreed. “If you want to talk about Dale in connection with success and failure, he’s the guy to see.”
“But also Matty Pierce,” I said. “If I’m going to give a rounded picture of the guy, I should have a variety of people’s viewpoints on him.”
“Could be,” he said, shrugging. “You know your business.”
“Could you help me set it up?” I asked. “Call these people, introduce me the way Julie did with you? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Well, I’ll see them both in class later today,” he said. “I could tell them about you, what you’re up to, see if they want to talk. Matty might not.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, well,” Lacroix said, grinning again, “he might feel he didn’t want to say anything bad about the dead, you know, and I know he doesn’t have anything good to say about Dale, so he might not want to say anything at all.”
“I’d particularly like to talk with him,” I said. “For the sake of balance. Tell him— Tell him I promise nothing he says will be for attribution.”
Lacroix smiled at me. “He can speak ill of the dead anonymously.”
“Not an offer you get all the time.”
“Indeed not. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be seeing them both in class later on today, I’ll ask them and see what they say.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Give me a call late tomorrow morning,” he said, “I’ll tell you what happened.”
“I appreciate it.”
Pointing at my bottle with his bottle, he said, “You done with that beer? Want another?”
“I’d better not,” I said. “I’ve still got more interviews to do this afternoon.”
“More about Dale?”
“Yes.” Then, to see what it might get me, I bounced the name off him. “Rita Colby, in fact.”
“Ah,” he said, with a knowing smile. “Now there’s the interface between success and failure. It isn’t who you know, it’s who you fuck.”
“Really? Julie didn’t think—” I stopped at his little grin and headshake. “Oh,” I said. “Wormley told you so, huh?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I’ll give the lad that much, he didn’t kiss and tell. But figure it out for yourself. He meets Rita Colby through his agent. She’s separated from her husband — this is before he died — so she needs somebody to be her escort at a couple of public occasions, and Dale looked good, knew how to dress, didn’t spill things on himself when he ate, so he was it. And all of a sudden he’s walking around with this little grin, you know.”
“The cat that ate the canary.”
“Yellow feathers in both corners of his mouth,” Lacroix agreed. “And Rita Colby insisting he be in her next play.”
“I see what you mean.”
He grinned, shook his head, and looked at his empty bottle. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have to interview anybody today, I’m giving myself another beer. Sure you won’t?”
“No, thanks.”
Getting to his feet, crossing the tiny room, he said, “Of course, I’m just a rube from the sticks of downtown Dallas, could be I’ve just got a dirty mind. Could be, what Dale and Rita Colby had in common was Scrabble.” He paused, a fresh Dos Equis in his hand, and grinned over at me. “What do you think?”
29
There were still cheerful cliquey conversational groups in the waiting room at Kay Henry’s offices. And the icy Miss Colinville still manned the Chippendale. “Hi, there, beautiful,” I said, with my stupidest grin, leaning again on her table. “Remember me?”