Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 (19 page)

“Love or money, that’s it, it’s either one or the other. He stabs her, he can expect to
lose
money, so scratch that. Love? Is there another guy or girl in the picture, who knows? Maybe there
is
a man out there who was somehow involved with her, or a woman, for that matter. One thing you learn about homicides is never
to take anything for granted, nothing is
ever
what it seems to be. So maybe it’s love, okay, that’s a possibility. I don’t think we’ve got a crazy loose out there, this
doesn’t look like a crazy to me. So it’s either love or money, the same old standbys, you can count on them every time, love
or … excuse me, honey, but are you falling asleep?”

She nodded vaguely.

Smiling, he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and then found her mouth and kissed her lips and then looked into her
eyes and said, “Goodnight, Teddy, I love you.”

And she signed with her right hand
I love you, too,
and turned out the light, and then snuggled up close to him in the dark.

C
ARELLA AND KLING WERE ON THEIR WAY OUT OF THE
squadroom when this big black guy who looked like a contract hitter for either the Crips or the Bloods came up the iron-runged
steps leading to the second floor. From above, Carella saw the top of a red and blue knit hat, brawny shoulders in a black
leather jacket, and the clenched ham-hock fists of a man in one hell of a hurry. He figured he’d better get out of the way
fast before he got stampeded. Kling, younger and more foolhardy, said to the top of the man’s head, “Help you, sir?” They
were both surprised when he looked up sharply and—lo and behold—it was Detective/Second Grade Arthur Brown, dressed for what
was undoubtedly a waterfront plant since Carella now noticed the baling hook hanging from his belt.

“How’d it go last night?” Brown asked.

“Barney’s, you mean?” Kling said.

“Yeah. Well,
all
of it.”

“We left kind of early.”

“Too Oreo, huh?”

“Yeah. Kind of unnatural.”

“I was worried about that. But I figured … ”

“No, listen, it worked out fine. We both felt the same way about it.”

Carella figured this was the woman Kling didn’t want to talk about just yet. But here he was, babbling about her to Brown.

“Who
is
this woman, anyhow?” Brown asked.

Good question, Carella thought.

“You don’t know her,” Kling said.

“What’s her name?”

“Sharyn.”

“Irish girl, huh?” Brown said, and burst out laughing for no reason Carella could fathom.

“With a `y,’ ” he offered helpfully. “The Sharyn.”

“Now
that
makes more sense,” Brown said, still laughing. “Black folks don’t know how to spell their own kids’ names. Where’d you …
”

What? Carella thought.

“… end up?”

What?

“When you left Barney’s, I mean.”

“Top of the Hill.”

“Hoo-boy!” Brown said. “I figured her being black and all, Barney’s might ease the way. But it turned out to be overkill,
huh?”

“Yeah, it really was, Artie.”

Carella stood by silently.

“How black
is
she, anyway? Is she black as me?”

“Nobody’s as black as you,” Kling said, and Brown burst out laughing again.

Carella suddenly felt like an outsider.

Well, is she the color of this banister here?” Brown asked.

“A little darker.”

“That makes her blacker than me.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You think you’ll be seeing her again?”

“Oh, sure. Well, I hope so. I mean,
she’s
got a say in it, too.”

“Cause if you’d like to some night, maybe Caroline and me could join you, go out for Chinks or something, if you think you’d
like that. Both of you.”

“Let me ask her.”

“Might be nice, you know?” Brown said. “You ask her, okay?”

“I will.”

“Is the Loot in yet?” Brown asked, and started charging up the stairs again.

“Artie?” Kling called after him.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, man,” Brown said, and disappeared from sight.

Together, Kling and Carella went down the iron-runged steps in silence, their footfalls clanging as if they were in armor.
He was wondering why Kling hadn’t told him Sharyn was black. Surely, he didn’t think …

“We’d better hurry,” Kling said. “I told her ten o’clock.”

End of discussion, Carella guessed.

Sitting and smoking in her dressing room at the theater, wearing rehearsal clothes that consisted of a shirred purple tube
top, white boating sneakers without socks, and low-slung jeans that exposed her belly button, Andrea Packer snubbed out her
cigarette the moment they entered the room, like a kid who’d been caught sneaking a drag in an elementary school toilet.

Nineteen years old if she was a day, lean and coltish, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held with an elasticized
band the same color as her precarious purple top,
she stood at once, extended her hand, told Kling she was sorry
if she’d sounded distracted on the phone, but she’d been studying her new lines, Freddie had put in a whole new scene, would
he like a cup of coffee or something, there was a big coffeemaker on the table near the stage door where Torey stayed. All
of this in a breathless rush that made her sound even younger than she was.

“I thought you’d be coming alone, Mr. Kling,” she said, making the focus of her interest immediately apparent, and flashing
him a brown-eyed glance and a radiant smile that in tandem could have melted granite. She then turned her chair so that her
back was almost to Carella, who understood body language about as well as any other detective in this city. He felt suddenly
useless. In fact, he felt invisible.

Kling explained that they were here because they’d been told that she and Michelle had shared a dressing room here in this
small rehearsal theater …

“Yes, that’s true. Well, now Josie and I do.”

… and they were wondering if Michelle might have mentioned anything to her that could possibly throw some light on her murder.

“Confidential girl talk, huh?” she said, and smiled again at Kling.

“Anything she might have said about anything that was troubling her, or annoying her, or … ”

“Everything
annoyed her,” Andrea said.

“How do you mean?” Carella asked.

“Well …”

They waited.

Carella moved around in front of her so that he could see her face and her eyes. Outmaneuvered, she sat in the chair before
the dressing-table mirror, her hands spread on her thighs, and looked up into their faces. In a tiny little girlish voice,
she said, “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead,” and lowered her eyes.

“We know how difficult it must be for you,” Carella said, bullshitting her.

“I’m sure you do, sir,” she said, bullshitting him right back, and then raising her eyes to meet Kling’s, excluding Carella
as effectively as if she’d again turned her back to him. “The thing is,” she said, “and I’m not the only one who felt this
way, Michelle was a total pain in the ass with an ego out of all proportion to her talent. Well, look what she put him up
to doing. Johnny, I mean.”

“What was that, Miss Packer?” Kling asked.

“Stabbing her in the alley,” Andrea said.

From the stage, Kling could hear the other actors running a scene over and over again. In high school, he had played Christian
in
Cyrano.
He had fallen madly in love with the girl playing Roxanne, but she’d had eyes only for the guy playing the lead, a kid named
Cliff Mercer who almost didn’t need the fake nose they stuck on his face every night. Kling had once thought seriously of
becoming an actor. That was before the war. That was before he saw friends getting killed. After that, acting seemed a frivolous
occupation.

“Was there any prior indication that she and Mr. Milton were planning to stage a stabbing incident?” Carella asked.

Without looking at him, she said, “If you mean did she tell me Hey, guess what, Johnny’s gonna stab me tomorrow night so I’ll
get a lot of publicity and become a big movie star, no. Would you advertise it in advance?” she asked Kling.

“Did she tell you she wanted to be a movie star?”

“Everybody
wants to be a movie star.”

Not me, Carella thought.

“As you probably know,” Kling said, “Mr. Milton has
admitted
stabbing her … ”

“Yes, it’s all over the papers, all over everything, I’m sick of it already. This is a good play. We don’t need cheap publicity
to guarantee its success.”

But it couldn’t hurt, Carella thought.

“I guess you also know,” Kling said, “that Mr. Milton denies having killed her.”

Andrea shrugged. The tube top slipped a bit lower on her breasts. Automatically, she grabbed it in both hands and yanked it
up.

“What does that mean, Miss Packer?” Carella asked.

“What does what mean?”

“The shrug.”

“It means I don’t
know
who killed her. It could’ve been Johnny, it could’ve been anybody. What I was trying to say before is that
nobody
liked her. That’s a plain and simple fact. Ask anybody in the show, ask anybody
working
the show, nobody liked her. She was an arrogant, ambitious, untalented little bitch, excuse me, with delusions of grandeur.”

But tell us how you
really
feel, Carella thought.

“When you said earlier that
everything
annoyed her …”

“Everything, everything,” she said, and rolled her eyes at Kling. “The play, the scenes in the play, the lines in the play,
her costumes, her motivation, the sun coming up in the morning,
everything.
She kept wanting to know who
stabbed
her! As if that mattered. Freddie’s play surmounts cheap suspense. It supersedes the genre, it subverts it, in fact. If Michelle
had understood her part in the slightest, she’d have realized that. This isn’t a mystery we’re doing here, this is
a drama
about a woman’s triumph of will, an epiphany brought about through a chance stabbing, an almost
casual
stabbing, accidental, random, totally meaningless in the larger scheme of things. So Michelle kept wanting to know
who
stabbed her. Is it the waiter, is it the butler, is it the upstairs maid? I swear to God, if I’d heard her ask one more time
who stabbed her,
I’d
have stabbed her, right in front of everybody.”

“You seem to have a good understanding of the character she was playing,” Carella said.

“You have to understand the conceit of the play,” Andrea said to Kling, smiling, “its internal machinations. Michelle was
playing a character listed in the program only as the Actress. That’s the part Josie is doing now. It’s the starring role.
I’m
playing someone called the Understudy. Well, an understudy is supposed to know all the lines and moves of the person she
may have to replace one night, because of illness, or accident or … ”

Or death, both detectives were thinking.

“So whereas I wasn’t Michelle’s
real
understudy, I
was
her understudy in the
play,
and knowing all of her lines and moves was part of my preparation for the role.”

“Of Understudy.”

“In the play.”

“In the play, yes.”

“Josie
was her understudy in real life. Which is why she took over the part when Michelle got killed.”

“Did you ever think
you
might get the part?” Carella asked.

She turned to him. Looked him dead in the eye.

“Me?” she asked.

“Since you knew all her lines and moves?”

“Surely not as well as Josie does.”

“But did it ever occur to you, once Michelle was dead, that you might get the starring role? Since you knew all the lines
and moves?”

“It occurred to me, yes. But not because I knew all her lines and moves?”

“Then why did it?”

“Because I’m a better actress than Josie is.”

“Do you feel any resentment about Josie getting the part? An understudy? Taking over the starring role? While you—an actress
in an important
supporting
role … ”

“Of course,” Andrea said.

“You resent it,” Carella said, and nodded.

“Sure, wouldn’t you?” she asked Kling.

“I guess,” he said. “Miss Packer,” he said, “there are questions we have to ask, I hope you understand this doesn’t mean we
suspect you in any way of having killed Michelle Cassidy. But there
are
certain routine questions …”

“You sound like Mark.”

“Who’s Mark?”

“Riganti. He plays the Detective. In the play. That’s the sort of thing he would say.”

“Well, it’s the sort of thing
we do say
.”

“I understand,” she said softly, and lowered her eyes again.

“So maybe you’d like to tell us where you were on Tuesday night between seven and eight o’clock,” Carella said.

“I was wondering when you’d get to that,” she said, the brown eyes snapping up to his face. “All that business about knowing
the part, and resenting Josie … .”

“As my partner explained …”

“I know, I’m not a suspect. Especially when I tell you where I was.”

“Where were you?”

“Aerobics class.”

“Where?” Kling asked.

“Which one of you is Mutt?” she asked. “In the play, Freddie writes all about Good Cop, Bad Cop. Mutt and Jeff, isn’t that
what you call them?”

“Where’s your aerobics class?” Kling asked.

“You must be Jeff.”

“I’m Bert. Can you tell us … ?”

“Hello, Bert. It’s on Swift. I’ll give you a card. Would you like a card?”

“Yes, please.”

“I was there on Tuesday night from six-thirty to seven forty-five. Then I went home. Check it out.”

She turned toward the dressing-table mirror, reached for her handbag where it sat among a dozen or more makeup jars and powder
puffs and brushes and liner pencils, snapped open the bag, rummaged in it for a moment, and handed Kling a card.