Taking the Fifth (9 page)

That information didn’t leave Big Al and me much option but to go back to the house on Bellevue Avenue East. As far as we could tell, it was undisturbed. There were no lights, no open doors or windows, nothing to indicate anyone had been there since Tom Riley had taken the cat and abandoned ship late that morning.

“You got any bright ideas?” Big Al asked.

“Let’s leave a note for her to call us,” I suggested.

Al reached for one of his business cards, but I stopped him. “Don’t use that. It says Homicide on it.” I rummaged through my wallet and found a bank deposit slip with my name and telephone number on it. “We can leave this. If she calls my number and I’m not there, she’ll get an answering machine, not the department.”

Big Al nodded in agreement. We left a note on the door asking her to call me, nothing more.

We were on our way back down the hill headed for the Fifth Avenue Theater when dispatch came through with an urgent summons for Al. Molly, his wife, wanted him to go with her to Children’s Hospital, where their four-year-old grandson had been taken by ambulance for an emergency appendectomy.

Al dropped me off at the theater entrance. The doors were just opening. I flashed one of the complimentary tickets Dan Osgood, the P.R. man, had given me and was one of the first people inside the lobby. A program hawker was busy unwrapping a stack of programs. I bought one, thinking it might give me a little more in-depth information about the people connected with the show than I would find in the free program provided by the theater.

I tracked down the house manager and told him I wanted to talk with Alan Dale, Ed Waverly, or Dan Osgood. He took my name and ticket location and told me he’d pass along the message. He said he doubted that any of them would have time to see me before the curtain, but that he’d see what he could do. I had no choice but to settle into my front-row center seat, read my programs, and wait for the theater to fill up around me.

The glossy color program consisted mainly of action shots of Jasmine Day, singing and dancing in front of a series of lavish sets and backdrops. The color photos did more to show her vitality than the black-and-whites I had seen earlier outside the theater. Those had been sexy, sultry, inviting. These were also sexy and inviting, but there was a subtle addition, an exuberance and enthusiasm that was somehow lacking in the others.

I read all the bios carefully, particularly those of people whose names I recognized. Alan Dale came from Sarasota, Florida. His credits were primarily in drama, both off and on Broadway. This was his fifth show with Westcoast Starlight Productions.

Ed Waverly, the director and road-show manager, had been with Westcoast for a number of years. He originally had been with the New York City Ballet as a dancer, choreographer and director before signing on with the Westcoast company.

I read Jasmine Day’s bio with special interest. She had been born in Jasper, Texas, a town only some fifty miles from Beaumont, where my own father was born. For years I had threatened to go to Texas and track down my father’s people and let them know of my existence, but I had never gotten beyond the map-studying stage. That was how I knew about Jasper, Texas, and that wasall I knew about Jasper, Texas.

The article said Jasmine had begun her career by singing in church and Sunday school and had gone on to become a rock star. Now she had moved away from her rock background and was hitting the big time again, only this time in an adult, easy-listening format. I thumbed through the book again, studying the pictures closely. I didn’t know about the easy-listening part, but she sure as hell was easy on the eyes.

The theater was gradually filling up and the house manager still hadn’t come back with a message for me. I finally got up and went looking for him, entering the plush lobby just as the lights blinked their five-minute curtain warning. When I found him, he was behind a counter, busy passing out hearing-aid equipment to a group of blue-haired little old ladies. I waited in line impatiently until he finished with the LOLs.

“Remember me?” I asked when I finally reached the counter.

“Of course I remember you, Mr. Beaumont. I took your message backstage, but they’re all up to their eyeballs right now. They said they’d try to see you during intermission, after the show, or tomorrow sometime.”

They could stall me, they could put me off, but they wouldn’t get rid of me. “I’ll try intermission,” I told him, but he didn’t hear me. He was already turned to the next person in line and was reaching down to lift the equipment to the counter.

I hurried back to my seat. To my surprise, the cavernous theater was only a little over half full, but the audience was far different from what I expected. Dan Osgood’s and the bio’s descriptions of Jasmine Day as a rock-star-gone-pop had led me to believe I’d be rubbing shoulders with black-clad, spike-haired, rock-loving punks. Instead, I found myself seated among well-dressed, lavender-haired ladies, some of them escorted by dutiful but mostly bored husbands, with nary a black leather jacket in sight.

The curtain was just going up as I sat down. The opening act was an impressionist who billed himself as PeeWee Latham. He did a creditable job of imitating all the presidents from FDR to Reagan. His material was good enough to tickle the funny bones and occupy the interest of his over-the-hill audience, but when he started wandering through Hollywood personalities, he lost me. Sitting still in the warm theater combined with my loss of sleep to put me under. I faded into a nodding stupor.

I was too far gone to force myself awake as applause escorted PeeWee off the stage. I continued to doze, dimly aware that the orchestra I couldn’t see had struck up an enthusiastic overture. The music was a comfortable mixture, made up of bits and snatches of old, familiar tunes. It lulled me further down into my restful slumber.

A crash of cymbals at the end of the overture made my eyes snap open abruptly.

Around me, the theater was completely dark, with only the green exit signs glowing dimly near the doors. Suddenly, a splash of blinding spotlight illuminated the center of the stage.

The cityscape scrim I had seen earlier in the day covered the stage, and in front of it, captured in a brilliant circle of spotlight, stood a woman with her back to the audience, a woman in a long satin, nearly backless, dress. A vivid, vibrantly blue, dynamite dress.

Long blonde hair fell in casual ripples across bare shoulders. She stood there in a provocative, sway-hipped stance, her body undulating gently in tune to the music. A microphone was cradled lightly in one hand, and her arms hung loosely at her sides.

She was wearing gloves—long, white gloves that ended well above her elbows. One slim, well-formed leg was thrust out from a long slit up the side of the satin skirt, and her toes were tapping in time to the beat. She was wearing heels, incredibly high, shiny black spike heels.

Jasmine Day had yet to turn to face her audience, but already I, along with every other red-blooded male in the audience, grasped that she was a very beautiful woman. There was an almost palpable sucking in of middle-aged paunches and a visible straightening of shoulders as the men in the audience came to full attention.

The orchestra’s introduction ended. With cat-like grace, Jasmine Day swung around to face us, her motions fluid and easy. Raising the microphone to her lips, she began a sultry rendition of Frank Sinatra’s hit “My Way.” She sang with the mike almost against her lips, yet there was no fuzzing of the consonants. Her voice had a bell-like clarity and a resonance that made every word, every syllable fully understandable, even in that cavernous auditorium.

As she sang, the mane of her blonde hair framed her face, shifting and shimmering under the stage lights. Her eyes, a wide, opaque blue, never seemed to blink. The dress, a wonder of engineering, clung to every curve of her body, with no visible means of support except those shapely curves themselves. I was close enough to the stage to note that the golden tan on her legs was smooth, bare skin, not nylon. There was no hint of panty line under the sleek material of her dress.

She stood on the stage with her legs spread as far as the taut material of her skirt allowed, belting out the song as though her very life depended on it, pouring herself into the music until she and it were one. When that song finished, it was as though the audience had been holding its collective breath. Around me people broke into ecstatic applause. This was the kind of music they had paid good money to hear, and Jasmine Day was giving them their money’s worth.

The performance was electrifying. Jasmine Day danced and sang, her voice swelling over the sixteen-piece band that backed her. Each song was accompanied by sets that, through Alan Dale’s technical wizardry, flowed on and off stage without a pause or hitch.

The first act was pure pleasure for me. Unfortunately, pleasure isn’t my business. When the curtain came down for intermission, it was time for me to go to work.

I headed backstage. A security guard stopped me before I even made it to the top of the steps.

“No one’s allowed back here.”

I was attempting to talk my way around him when Dan Osgood appeared behind the security guard’s shoulder.

“It’s all right,” Osgood said. “You can let him through.”

Grudgingly, the guard let me pass.

“Thanks,” I said to Osgood.

I had spotted Alan Dale and several other people near the band shell. As I started in that direction, Osgood fell into step beside me.

“Enjoying the show?” he asked. I nodded. “She’s something else, isn’t she?” he continued. “Better than I expected.”

Osgood was still congratulating himself on his good taste when we reached the turntable. The band shell sat like a gigantic wedding cake, balanced on what seemed to be a single metal leg that disappeared into the raised wooden platform beneath it. Alan Dale was walking around the turntable checking the bolts underneath, followed by a slightly built, balding man. I recognized Ed Waverly from his picture in the program.

“You’re sure it’ll work?” Waverly asked.

Alan Dale stopped and turned on him, looking as though he wanted to bash Waverly over the head with his wrench.

“Look, Ed,” Dale said with an air of forced tolerance. “I told you it would work, and it will. This’ll do for tonight and tomorrow. The clutch will be waiting for us when we get to Vancouver. We can fix it when we do the load-in there. Meantime, we’re leaving the safety plate off so if something does go wrong with the track, it won’t be so hard to fix it.”

I turned to Osgood. “That’s Ed Waverly, right?”

Osgood nodded. I turned back, intending to introduce myself to the road-show manager, but he was already halfway across the stage. Instead I caught Alan Dale’s eyes. “Can you talk to me now?”

“How about tomorrow morning?” he asked. “Say ten-thirty or so at the Mayflower?”

There was no point in alienating him. “Sure,” I said and went looking for Waverly. I was too late. He’d already gone back out front, where there were people waiting for him. Frustrated, I decided to try talking to Jasmine Day herself.

To my surprise, I discovered that once I was backstage, no one questioned my presence or my reason for being there. I wandered off toward the dressing rooms. There was a small common area where the musicians were already lounging. I made my way through the crush to a door with a removable plastic nameplate that said, in an elegant script,Jasmine Day . I knocked.

“Who is it?”

I opened the door. Inside, Jasmine Day had changed from the blue dress into a black silk jumpsuit. She was standing with one foot on the seat of a chair, lacing up a high-topped boot that ended just below her knee. She glanced at me over her shoulder and returned to the boot.

“If it isn’t Sleeping Beauty,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Thinking she must be speaking over my shoulder to someone else, I glanced behind me. No one was there.

She finished lacing the second boot and turned toward me, tying and smoothing a heavy gold belt around her waist.

“Call it morbid curiosity,” she said, sauntering past me. She walked up to a light-studded dressing-room mirror, wiped a smudge of mascara from her cheek, and applied a fresh coat of lipstick.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Oh?” she replied, checking the line of lipstick. “You’re sitting in the road manager’s comps, front-row center. Divine right of kings and all that. I always check during PeeWee’s act to see what I’m going to be stuck with after the show. I checked on you, just before I went on. You were sawing logs.”

An embarrassed flush crept up my ears. She saw it and laughed.

“You’re blushing. This the first time you’ve been caught sleeping in a theater?”

Before I could answer, there was a knock on the door behind me. It swung open, narrowly missing me. I moved out of the way. A stagehand stuck his head into the dressing room. “Five minutes, Miss Day,” he said.

She nodded and turned back to me. “So who are you?” she asked. “An old crony of Ed Waverly’s?”

I had been reaching for one of my cards. I dropped it, letting it fall back into my jacket pocket.

“I know Dan Osgood,” I replied.

She shrugged and gave me an openly appraising once-over. “Well, at least you’re under seventy and not half bad-looking, for a change. So where are you taking me for dinner?”

That caught me off guard. Dinner? The flush got worse. My nose probably could have glowed in the dark. I didn’t remember mentioning dinner.

“It’s a surprise,” I mumbled, amazed by my own quick thinking. Being around beautiful women usually paralyzes both my tongue and my brain, in that order.

She laughed aloud at that. “I like surprises,” she said. There was another quick knock on the door. “I’ve gotta go,” she added, darting past me on her way out of the room. She paused momentarily with her hand on the doorknob.

“What’s your name?”

“Beaumont. J. P. Beaumont. My friends call me Beau.”

She smiled. “All right, Beau. Pick me up at the hotel about half an hour after the show.”

She hurried out and left me standing there in the dressing room, feeling like I’d just been picked up and put down by a very selective tornado. I looked around me. The blue dress was slung carelessly over a brass-framed dressing screen. Two black shoes lay side by side in front of the screen, discarded and forgotten where Jasmine Day had hastily kicked them off.