“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “But what I’m interested in at this point is the background on Wormley himself, his relationships with the people around him.” Turning back to Pierce, I said, “Tom Lacroix kind of led me to believe there was a particular feud between you and Wormley, but you say he acted toward you the way he acted toward everybody, and it was just your refusal to be a doormat that made for any special problem between you.”
“Damn right,” Pierce said. “I know a couple people — you know them, too, Howard — that would just roll over and play dead if Wormley gave them a look. So there there’s no problem, right?”
“Resentment, though, I should think,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” Pierce said, “a couple people were always talking big, they’re gonna do this, gonna do that, but they weren’t, you know?”
“Anyone I ought to talk to?” I asked. “I mean, anybody in par—”
Moffitt, smoothly interrupting, said, “Matty, get the playbook, will you? Let’s take a look at the casts Dale worked with. You know where it is?”
Rising, looking a bit confused, Pierce said, “Sure. I don’t know what you need it for. It’s in one of those drawers under the lightboard, right?”
“That’s right,” Moffitt agreed. “I think Mr. Dante should get a sense of the ambience here, the kind of group Dale was interacting with.”
“Okay,” Pierce said, shrugging. He went away downstairs, his feet thumping more deliberately and heavily than Lacroix’s had, and Moffitt turned to me, smiling amiably as he said, “I’d say you have about one minute, Mr. Holt, to tell me why I shouldn’t tell Matty who you really are.”
38
Which meant I had about one second to decide on a response. When time is tight, there’s always the truth: “Wormley’s mother,” I said, “is suing me in civil court for violation of her son’s civil rights by killing him. I’ll get less of a fair shake in civil court than in criminal court. The official murder investigation is absolutely inactive. I just met this afternoon with the detective on the case, and there’s nothing doing there.”
Moffitt frowned at me. “So you’re trying to put the blame on Matty?”
“I’m trying to find out where the blame goes,” I told him. “Somebody killed Wormley, and I know it wasn’t me. So who was it?”
Pierce was coming back up the stairs. Moffitt glanced in that direction, then said to me, “Matty didn’t do it, I can tell you that much.”
“And the others in the class? The resentful ones?”
“Follow my lead,” he said, and Pierce arrived, carrying a large black looseleaf notebook.
The next ten minutes were very strange. Moffitt and I were running a scene together, an acting exercise, for an audience of one: Pierce. Our prop was the notebook, a record of all productions and extended scenes done by Moffitt’s classes in the last two and a half years. The scene we were playing was Interview, with Moffitt both performing and directing, and Pierce both audience and unwitting cast member. Because all I had to do now was follow Moffitt’s lead and play my part, because I didn’t have to warp my questions to suit a secret agenda, I actually gave a better performance than before, and was almost sorry to see it end.
Almost. On the other hand, when Moffitt moved us into end game I went along with a real sense of relief; if Matty Pierce had seen through what was happening here, there would have been another fistfight in Moffitt’s acting studio, no question.
But finally Moffitt said, “Matty, I know you have to get to work, and I’d like to discuss this theme of Mr. Dante’s from my point of view. For a teacher in this profession, his ideas might be very interesting.” With an innocent gaze in my direction, he added, “If you have time?”
“Sure,” I said. “The more I learn, the better.”
“That’s undoubtedly true,” Moffitt agreed.
Pierce had been growing increasingly restless, in fact, as the conversation had moved farther away from himself, and was very happy to leave. “Don’t lose the picture and resumé, now,” he told me, shaking my hand, squeezing harder than necessary. “You’ll be able to say you knew me when.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” I told him.
Pierce went hammering back down the stairs, and Moffitt and I waited till we heard the front door slam behind him. Then Moffitt smiled at me and said, “Please excuse my stretching that. I admit it was an elitist impulse.”
“It was?”
“I don’t expect a television actor to have much by way of technique,” he explained.
Was he trying to get a rise out of me, push me off-balance a bit and see what happened? I said, “Acting is acting, isn’t it?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” he said, eyes widening; I’d touched on some bugbear of his, obviously. But then he waved the matter away, saying, “In any event, it was pleasant to have my prejudices confounded. What are you working at these days?”
“I’m between jobs,” I said, that being the standard face-saving answer from an actor who isn’t working at anything at the moment.
I expected Moffitt to recognize that and respect it, and he did, with a faint smile, saying, “You should work. Exercises can only go so far.”
“If that civil court endorses the idea I’m an unconvicted murderer,” I said, “I’ll never work again.”
He raised a surprised eyebrow: “Not even as the notorious Sam Holt? Wouldn’t there be some publicity value in that?”
I shuddered. “That would be worse.”
“All of my prejudices are in ruins,” he said.
Looking at his ascetic and satisfied face, I decided I didn’t have to like him. “Not all, I think,” I said.
Surprised, he laughed and said, “My God, I’m still responding to your Mr. Dante, who wasn’t that intelligent. All right, Mr. Holt, forgive me. Let’s get down to cases. The fact is, whatever it was in Dale’s life that led someone to kill him, it would not have derived from this class, or the people he dealt with here.”
I said, “Are you sure you aren’t just defending your turf?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “You see, the raison d’être of this class is its artificiality, its separation from real life. I have had my successes, Mr. Holt; there are former students of mine who have gone on to some fame and accomplishment in this profession.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“But they, I must admit, are the exceptions,” he went on, and shrugged, saying, “Which must be true, in any of the arts. The students come, they learn what they can about the art and about themselves, and then they go on, into the world, toward the narrow end of the funnel. Very few will make it, which most of them know. But it’s impossible ahead of time to be sure which ones will succeed. So they all, when they come here, have the potential, but that’s all. In their real lives, they work as waiters or carpenters or cabdrivers or receptionists or sales clerks. Here, they are stars in embryo. A great deal of passion is released in our classes, passion being, as you know, one of the tools of our trade. But none of them would carry that passion home, would mingle this world with the world of driving a taxi. Sometimes romances start in here, particularly after we do intense love scenes—” he smiled, and shook his head “—but they never last.
Never. The passion in here never survives in the air outside.”
Was that true? Moffitt, it seemed to me, was suggesting some sort of romantic Shangri-La specialness about this building, his class, himself; but wasn’t what he was describing actually the kind of office politics that exists everywhere that people work closely together with some element of competition in it?