Murder on Location (14 page)

“How well did you know him?”

“He was in
Streetcar
. That was a terrible show. The Ferret did it with scrims and loud music. He got a decent
Mitch from David, I'll say that much.” The Ferret was Ned's name for Robin O'Neil, his chief rival as a theatrical magnate in our community.

“Tight as a Dublin tinker. Ten bucks,” said Will.

“Shut up, Will.” When Will had been drinking, his conversation snagged on a line and he kept repeating himself for the rest of the night.

“The Ferret added a funeral procession at the end.”

“Back to the libretto. What else do you know about Hayes?” Ned shrugged his big shoulders and looked at Williams for sympathy.

“Monty thought he was the brightest coin to pass through his hands since Neil Furlong went off to Hollywood by way of Toronto.”

“Ah yes: Furlong is a local boy,” said Williams. “What sorts of things did he do in his salad days?”

“He owes me ten bucks,” said Will, his nose not an inch from the rim of his glass.

Ned and Jack seemed to recognize something in Will's behaviour that brought both of them to their feet at once.

“Come on, Will,” said Jack, “we're going to see a man.” He and Ned pulled at an arm and Will came to life, rising out of his chair like mist above a sewer. “We'll be right back,” Jack said, putting a two-dollar bill on the table so we'd remember him. Together they shuffled into the smoke in the direction of a running toilet.

“Pistachio,” Peggy said, “Neil Furlong was the first grown man to ask me for a date. I was scared to death, I mean, ‘Why me?' Mom knew his first wife and he was
married to Miranda Pride. Mom said that he had more brass than a hundred-foot yacht.”

“Who was his first wife?” I asked. “I never heard about her.”

“I love gossip, don't you, Dawson?”

“Oh, no, my dear. I've
been
gossip.” He looked around like he was looking for an interruption with an autograph book.

“When Mom was a secretary at Paramount, Blanche Tyler was her best friend. A long time after that, Blanche was in television and married to Neil. She was executive producer on the Basil Simpson series. Remember that?”

“Basil Simpson, ‘the internationally-known lawyer-sleuth,'” Dawson intoned. “God, the world really was young once, wasn't it?”

“Pistachio, if you were me, would you have gone out with a divorced and remarried man? Ever since Mom got religious, I can never tell what ordinary reactions will be. And you can never tell what the papers will do with an item like that.”

“He seems like a friendly enough guy to me.”

“Friendly!” Peggy exclaimed. “The trouble with men is they aren't women.”

“You're a philosopher, my dear,” said Dawson, finishing another draft of beer and setting the empty glass down harder than he'd intended.

“And Dawson,” she said to me, “is the best pro in the business.”

“Oh, come now.”

“It's true. You never get cross with me when I blow a line. You give me the camera all the time. Dawson, you're the best. Last summer I did
The Lion's Share
. The director treated me like an idiot, my co-star wouldn't talk to me and used every cheap trick in the book to mask me so that you needed a program to see that I was in the damned thing. And the producer kept coming on with ‘sweety this' and ‘sweety that.' It was torture. I think
Ice Bridge
is going to be lucky for me. You know, Dawson, I'll bet it'll be lucky for all of us.”

“It's cold. Especially down on the river. I can't take it the way I used to.”

“Oh, Dawson, you should see yourself out there. You carry all of us. Mr. Sayre depends on you. You're the best there is, and I'm so proud to be working with you. It gives me goose-bumps every time I think of it.” Dawson looked pleased.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said. Then we were listening to the racket of the room all around us. I sipped my beer. Peggy and Dawson started new ones.

“Will's cute,” said Peggy. “But he should send his suit to the cleaners.”

“I remember one year Ned did a history of theatre on the radio in ten weeks. Will was in it. We all helped out.” I felt an urge to explain my friends. I hadn't set up this meeting and I felt uncomfortable. “Monty Blair, who discovered Neil, directed the plays.”

“That sounds like such fun,” said Peggy. “It must be wonderful coming from a small town where you have to
make your own entertainment. Tonight's going to help me a lot with Karen Brophy. I mean, it's a whole new dimension.”

“Karen Brophy?” I asked. I thought I'd seen the name somewhere not so long ago. “Any relation to Alden Cory?”

“I say, that's me, old boy,” said Dawson. “Peggy's right. I'm glad we came. Have to soak up the atmosphere.”

“And what about Rosemary Beattie and Tony D'Abruzzi?”

“You've got the names. Where'd you get them?” I reached in my breast pocket and waved a wrinkled paper placemat at them.

“What can you tell me about them?” I asked in a voice that didn't quite sound like my own.

“You mean you don't know who they are?” Peggy said, with a superior and sidelong glance at Dawson. I should have given her the award for answering a question with a question. I tried to withhold the look of exasperation from my nod.

“Why they're the names of the characters in
Ice Bridge.”

“That's right, old boy; I'm Alden and Peggy's Karen. Have you seen the script then?”

“Right now I don't know what I've seen.” And I remembered suggesting two of the names to that fellow from the CBC. “I wonder,” I said out loud, “what David Hayes was doing with those names.”

From nowhere, Ned, Jack and Will were back in their places. Drinking beer edits out loops of time. Another dozen full glasses had appeared.

“This round's on me, Ned,” said Dawson. “I want to hear more about
Richard III
. Will you use the usual pieces from
Henry VI?
And what about that rigmarole at the end?” Ned looked at Williams darkly. I don't think he'd even been challenged before. “I saw a production once …” Ned sank deeper into his chair as Dawson began to expand, telling stories about the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as funny stories about the first sound version of
Romeo and Juliet
“with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” Ned wasn't used to hearing about the world of greasepaint beyond Grantham. But stories are stories, and soon they were taking turns trading anecdotes while the rest of us drank our beer and listened.

“Well, you know your theatre, I'll say that for you,” said Jack, a grin animating his blunt face.

“It's in the blood, old boy,” said Dawson, expanding with sleepy eyes. “My great-grandfather played Macbeth at Covent Gardens in 1857.” Will made a wheezy snort.

It was now past midnight, and Ned suggested that we all go across the street for spaghetti. We got up. Ned's chair tumbled backwards again. He and Jack lifted Will between them. Peggy fumbled with the unfamiliar buttons of her mackinaw.

The walk out of a pub is always shorter than the walk into one. Before you know it the night air is nipping at
your cheeks. We hurried across the street in a clump and found an empty table in the back of the restaurant. It was decorated with empty Chianti bottles and mended red and white tablecloths. The waitress was sleepy and bored. She looked as Italian as plum pudding. It was my second spaghetti dinner of the evening, but it had been a crazy day from the beginning. I needed something to sit on the beer.

“There is an excellent likeness of David Garrick in the Royal Collection,” Williams confided to the company, wagging a finger in the air near Ned's half-closed eyes. “Ralph Richardson says it hangs outside the Queen's bedroom at Buckingham Palace. I assume she told him.” Peggy was yawning openly, but relaxed. Jack was staring straight down at his congealed pizza and Will, sitting between them, was fast asleep, like the Dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland
. I was examining the tomato-sauce stains on my tie and wondering if they would come out with lighter fluid.

“Will youse be wantin' anythin' else?” asked the girl.

Will awoke with a start. He looked with heavy eyes at all of us, like we'd been glimpsed in a dream that had come true. He finally settled on Dawson. “Covent Garden,” he said in a voice pulled thin. “Covent Garden burned down in 1856.” He smiled at Peggy. “And the new theatre wasn't finished until 1858.” Then he retreated back to sleep again. And then the bill came.

It was after 1:00
A.M
. when they finally said good night. The four cops were still parked outside. The glass of the windshield was steamed up. I walked Peggy and
Dawson to their car, then went up to my room, where I fell into a deep sleep without even trying.

Some time later I awoke out of a comfortable dream and felt a minty breath on my face and heard the words in the parking lot again: “We'll catch you up later.” I looked around and there was nobody in the room. I turned on the light and confirmed the fact. The rest of the night was fitful, with tangled bedclothes and sweaty pyjamas. Visions of Peggy were banished by a dark Chevy opening its doors like jaws and pulling me inside.

TWELVE

It was a well-storm-windowed house on Brock Street, one of those tiny bungalows that has been looked after to death. The sidewalk had been shovelled and the steps cleared of snow and ice. The cement porch was newly patched and painted; fake awnings in green stripes matched the swan on the aluminum screen door. I knocked on the brass knocker.

Harvey Osborne hardly looked like a man who would throw a punch at a popular screenwriter as he stood in his shirtsleeves in the doorway, blinking at the early morning light. He looked surprised, and well he might, since he wasn't expecting me.

“I'm Cooperman. The guy who telephoned. You told me not to bother coming around. But, you see, it's no bother.” He backed his two hundred pounds out of the doorway. It wasn't an invitation to follow him into the house; not a
prima facie
invitation, but he hadn't closed the door behind him. He'd gone through the small hallway into the front room. He wasn't much over five-feet five, but his shoulders were big and his arms hadn't turned to fat. The room told me that he lived alone: a television set was crowned with an ashtray and an empty
foil tray from a frozen TV dinner. Only the piano looked out of place, but the potted palms on the piano bench told me that nobody played it any more. He was shaking his head from side to side.

“I shouldn't have hit him. It was a wrong move. I want to get Furlong, but that's not the way.”

“What's he to you?”

“Ha! That's a laugh! ‘What's he to me?' It's my girl, Dulcie. She's dead and I hold Neil Furlong responsible. Oh, I know he isn't guilty in the legal way, wasn't even there, but I sniffed bad news the first time I heard his name.” He hadn't asked my business yet, but I thought that it was a bad time to remind him. “That's her picture on the piano.” I looked between a metronome and a bronze attendance medal and saw a young, pleasant, dark-haired girl looking past me into the void. “That was taken two years before the accident, just before she met Furlong.” He let me digest that, then launched into a story about how his talented daughter had been lured by young Furlong from honorable paths to those that led to the stage. “In our whole family, we never held with dancing or getting up on a stage. Music's different. Music is, well … I told her I didn't want her acting foolish in a theatre.” Harvey had reworked this tale more than once, with or without an audience. He seemed to swell like a bullfrog in the telling of it. Neil was doing public relations for the railway then and doing plays on the side. Dulcie fell in love with him. Furlong left town for Toronto. “Young kids think they know everything,” he
said reaching out to me to match his emotion. “Well, Dulcie was all upset. Next thing I heard was that she'd been killed in an accident on the Lewiston Road driving Furlong's old Ford. There's a bad turn between Lewiston and Youngstown.”

“But it's not as if Furlong killed her.”

“Well, he didn't take a gun and shoot her. But she's just as dead. It's all the same to me. If it hadn't been for him and his high and mighty ideas, I'd still have my girl. Do you wonder that I hate the man? I swore I'd kill the bastard if I ever got the chance, and I will.”

I tried not to look shocked. I did it so well he settled down into an overstuffed chair beside me, sitting so close I could see fresh razor nicks at the ends of his sideburns and the frayed edges of his shirt cuffs. “Furlong's not liked in this town. It's not just me,” he said, with a look at the wilted plants on the piano bench. “You ever hear of Clark Mattingly?” I shook my head. “Clark worked at the Upper Canadian Bank, assistant manager. At the time I'm talking about, he'd been there over fifteen years. He fell for a woman that worked in a bar over the river. Place called the Surf Lounge. Clark lost his senses over her. The upshot was that he took some money that wasn't rightly his to take and he served a term in the penitentiary at Kingston. The man made a mistake and paid for it. Go into any town and you can find out the same sort of thing if you ask the right people. Nothing unusual about it. The insurance people must have figures on how it happens one-point-something times for every hundred thousand
population. Doesn't matter. When Clark got out, he tried to pay people back. Then one night the whole town was treated to a TV play by Neil Furlong. Oh, he changed the names, you know. He didn't say it was the Falls. He called it Cataract City. Now that might have fooled the cat if it was asleep. Clark couldn't take it. It was like it was happening to him all over again. Killed himself with a cut-throat razor. There hasn't been a television play or a movie of his that didn't make this town wince one way or another.”