“That’s right. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a lot,” she told me. “I’ve seen it happen in this building. A fella gets a theory about a case, all the evidence he has so far dovetails in nice and neat, and the fella decides that is what happened. Then, when some other evidence comes along that doesn’t fit into that package so neatly, the fella refuses to see it, refuses to admit that evidence even exists. Your kind of package there, it isn’t a way to close a case so much as it’s a way to close a mind.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said, impressed by her. “You may be right, and I thank you for saying it.”
She grinned: “But you still like your theory.”
“Oh, I like it, but not enough to make a fool out of myself,” I assured her. “Not if I can help it. I really do appreciate the warning, Sergeant. I still think the hidden tape is meaningful, but I’ll remember that I can’t be sure about it, not yet.”
“That’ll do,” she said, and got to her feet. The interview was over. “I can’t tell you to stop what you’re doing,” she admitted, as I also stood up, “but I can tell you, if anybody makes a complaint against you, don’t hope for any help from over here. The department doesn’t like free-lancers. If they get a chance, they’ll land on you with both feet.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
“More careful than you’ve been,” she suggested.
37
Matty Pierce, the acting student who’d had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It’s all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath at all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they’d had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy “rugged” good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There’s no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who’ve never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.
Tom Lacroix introduced me to Pierce and to Howard Moffitt, their acting teacher, at five that afternoon in the narrow old building on Bethune Street in the West Village — not far from Anita and Vitto Impero — where Moffitt’s class and theater were located. Moffitt, a stooped and craggy tall man of about sixty, reminded me of three or four other acting teachers I’ve met in my career, people who are theoretically fine actors, who not only know how it’s done but — much rarer — know how to communicate their knowledge, but nevertheless their credits in actual performances and productions are amazingly skimpy. Whenever one of these people takes a small part in a movie or a play, talked into it by some old student who’s made good, you see what the problem is: There they are, in the corner of the screen or the stage, acting. You can see them do it. Their strength as teachers is their weakness as performers: they don’t know how to not show you how it’s done.
Moffitt’s building was very narrow, probably twenty feet, and three stories high, wedged in among other quaint nineteenth-century brick townhouses, most of them now broken up into tiny apartments, a few converted to nursery schools or doctors’ and dentists’ offices. The ground floor of Moffitt’s place, behind a broad wooden garage door painted brown and apparently non-functional, had been turned into a small theater, with sixty or seventy seats — whatever maximum number would permit non-union productions in here — and the most basic lighting and backstage area. Minimalist experimental theater was the only kind possible here.
One entered the building through a small ornate door next to the garage door. A tiny box office and doorway on the right led to the theater, and a warped steep staircase straight ahead led up to the acting studio and theater’s storage rooms and male and female restrooms on the second floor. Moffitt’s living quarters were one more flight up, at the top.
We met on the second floor, in the studio classroom at the rear of the building. The room was nearly square, the width of the building, with two tall broad windows facing back yards filled with starkly leafless plane trees. The floor was well-oiled old broad planks, one side wall was brick and the other mirrored with black curtains drawn in front of the mirrors, and the furniture consisted of about fifteen metal folding chairs or wooden kitchen chairs, plus three battered wooden tables of various sizes. The front wall, opposite the view, contained a closed door and a large green blackboard on which the word MOTIVATION had been incompletely erased.
Tom Lacroix, anxiously looking at his watch, made the introductions and then went ka-drumming down the stairs, on the way to his waiter job. He’d already given both Pierce and Moffitt a rundown on my alleged background and interest here — the article for Vanity Fair about the interface between success and failure, with the peg of Dale Wormley as having been somehow midway between the two — so I could go straight into it, saying to Pierce, “I understand you and Wormley had a disagreement a while ago.”
He did the aggressive grin of his style of actor and said, “We had a disagreement every time we looked at each other. You’re not gonna put that in Vanity Fair.”
“No, I’m not,” I agreed. “I just want to get the background here, so I can be sure what does go into the piece is accurate. This is the part of the iceberg that stays underwater.”
Moffitt nodded judiciously, as though thinking of giving me a good mark, and said, “We work the same way in the theater. I tell my students, if all you know about the character is what you’re going to show the audience, you aren’t ready to take that part out on stage.”
Pierce, concentrating on me rather than acting lessons at the moment, said, “But I’ll be in the piece, right?”
“I’m not even sure,” I told him, not wanting to go so far as to promise an actor publicity in a non-existent article. “I’m just trying to get a handle on the subject matter at this point,” I explained.
He was wearing, naturally, a black leather jacket with many zippers, and now, from inside it, he drew a manila envelope and handed it to me, saying, “Just in case, here’s my resumé.”
“Fine.” Feeling awkward, but having to go through with the pretense, I put the folder away in my raincoat pocket and said, “Just what was it about Dale Wormley that rubbed you the wrong way?”
He shook his head, with a twisted grin; then, to emphasize the negative, he lifted a hand and shook his upraised thumb back and forth, as though telling me the bridge was out. “The other way around,” he said. “Dale was pissed off all the time. The way you got along with that guy was to back down. I’m not into backing down.”
“Why was he so angry?” I asked. “Because of his career?”
“I never cared enough to ask,” Pierce said, and hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets, and sat there looking tough.
Moffitt interjected, “Matty’s right about that. Dale was angry all the time. I think it was a true personality trait, not anything specific that happened or that anyone did to him.”
“He was a big guy,” Pierce said. “Like you. So he figured he could get away with stuff.”
“Be a bully, you mean,” I suggested, and Pierce shrugged. He probably was thinking it would sound sissy of him to accuse someone else of being a bully.
Moffitt said, “I’ve often wondered if that kind of aggressive hostile drive isn’t somehow an asset for somebody trying to succeed in a competitive field like acting. I suppose, Mr. Dante, you’ll be getting into that in your piece.”