The Role Players (10 page)

I could tell he was far from enthusiastic about the prospect, but was relieved when he said, “I'm going in early today to do some things. I'll be there around two, so if you want to come by…”

“Great! I'll see you there.” I hung up before he had a chance to change his mind.

I handed the phone back to Max, who hung it up, then carried it back to its regular place.

“Well,” he said, “
that
was simple…. Maybe too simple?”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I don't know, it's just that I've worked side by side with the guy for six weeks and, other than talking about work, never gotten enough complete sentences out of him to make a paragraph.”

“The Hardesty charm,” I said with a grin.

“I hope so,” Max replied, obviously unconvinced.

*

Breakfast was pancakes and sausage with chilled canned fruit, orange juice, and more coffee. Some friends of theirs had been on vacation in upper New England and brought them back a couple bottles of real maple syrup, which was delicious; we pretty much polished off a whole bottle.

We hadn't really discussed what we might do that day, but my meeting with Joe at two o'clock fairly well ruled out going very far from home. It was decided that while I as at the Whitman, Chris and Jonathan would walk down to the Hudson and watch the ships coming and going while Max stayed home to go over some notes he'd made during the previous night's rehearsal.

When Jonathan mentioned that we still had to get several presents for the gang back home, Chris said, “Doesn't your friend Jared teach Russian literature?” We nodded. “Well,” he continued, “there's a little bookstore...one of those ‘only in Greenwich Village' places…that specializes in used books in just about every language there is. Maybe you could find something for him there.”

“Great!” I said. “Is it far from here?”

“Just this side of Washington Square.”

“Can we go this morning?” Jonathan asked. “Before Dick has to go to the theater?”

“Sure.”

*

Jonathan and I did the dishes (he washed, I dried), then we all pulled ourselves together and went off to the bookstore. It was exactly as Chris had described it. I'd rather expected a thick layer of dust over everything and cobwebs in the corners, but it was very clean—cluttered but not messy. The woman behind the small counter just to the right of the door was a short white-haired lady with large, round, thick black-rimmed glasses that made her look rather like a friendly owl. When we explained what we were looking for, she smiled broadly.

“Of course!” she said in a soft, unidentifiable accent. “This way.” She led us to the back of the store, where a section about four feet wide and seven feet tall was labeled Russia. While I could see all the titles were in Cyrillic, I of course hadn't a clue what they said. She raised an index finger and, starting at the top row, made a quick sweep from book to book. On the fourth row down, her finger stopped and tapped a large volume.

“Here we are!” she said, pulling the book out from the shelf and handing it to me. I opened a couple pages at random and noticed several nice woodcut prints. I looked at the smiling clerk.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “I don't read Russian. What is it?”

She took the book and rubbed the flat of her hand lovingly across the cover. “It is a book of Russian folktales, she said. “Out of print for many years, now.”

It could have been a cookbook published last week for all I knew, but I instinctively trusted her. I turned to Jonathan. “What do you think?”

The clerk handed the book to him and he opened it as though it were made of eggshells, and gingerly turned through the pages.

“It's perfect!” he said, then leaned closer to me and whispered, “It looks pretty expensive. Can we afford it?”

The clerk smiled at him. “Of course you can afford it,” she said. “You'd be surprised how little call there is for Russian folktales in the original Russian.” She then quoted a price that was only slightly higher than the coffee table book we'd bought for Tim and Phil at the aquarium.

We took it. As she carried it to the counter and carefully wrapped it, I idly looked around the other shelves. On one wall they had a large section of old retail catalogs—Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penny, Sears and Roebuck. I spotted a Sears catalog from 1923 and suddenly remembered that, from the turn of the century up until the 1940s, Sears sold complete houses in kit form, with every single board identified as to exactly where it went, and including everything from doors and windows to nails and paint! You could get a three-bedroom bungalow for well under $1,000. I took it from the shelf and looked through it. Sure enough, there were pages after pages of houses, blueprints, and prices, including shipping. I took it immediately to the counter and showed it to Jonathan.

“How about this for Jake?” Jake was Jared's more-than-friend who was built like Paul Bunyan and had his own construction business.

“Wow!” Jonathan said. “He'll love it!”

Chris and Max came over to join us at the counter and Jonathan showed them the catalog. “Isn't this great?” he asked. “Maybe Jake will get some ideas from it.”

The clerk smiled. “I'll wrap that for you,” she said.

*

We returned to the apartment shortly before noon, and Chris made sandwiches.

Starting on his second sandwich, Jonathan said, “Would you mind if we came to rehearsal again tonight…if it's okay?”

I'd been just about ready to ask the same thing. Depending on what, if anything, I learned from Joe Kenyon, I'd like to be able to follow up on it.

“Sure,” Max said. “You can come any time you want.”

“If you're sure you won't get bored,” Chris said.

Jonathan gave him a wide-eyed look of surprise. “No
way
!” he said.

And that settled that.

“You know,” I said, “I think I'd like to try to set up a talk with Cam, too, after I talk to Joe.”

“Because of what he said about killing for the part? He was just joking.”

“I'm sure he was. But it wouldn't hurt to know a little more about him. Do you know his background? Where he's acted before? How he came to audition for
Impartial Observer
?”

Chris shook his head. “Not too much. I know he was a drama major at one of the Ivy League schools and has done quite a bit of stage work, but…”

I looked to Max, who also shook his head. “That's about all I know, too,” he said.

“That's okay. I'll find out.”

Finishing his sandwich, Max sighed. “Well, that should hold me till dinner.”

“I've got an idea,” Jonathan said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Is there a grocery store anywhere around here?”

“Grocery store, meat market, fruit stand, bakery…all in the same block. We don't have many supermarkets like back home,” Chris said. It was the first time he had ever referred to where Jonathan and I live now as “back home” though, in truth, I guess it was. And I was strangely pleased that he still thought of it that way.

“I was thinking,” Jonathan continued, “I could make a meatloaf and stick it in the oven on low. That way we can eat when we're ready and have plenty of time to get to the theater.”

“Good idea,” Chris said.

*

Chris, Jonathan, and I left the apartment at the same time and walked together for a couple of blocks before they turned off at a cross street leading to the stores. I continued on to the theater, rather enjoying the sensation of being alone in New York. It brought back a lot of memories.

The theater's side door was closed, so I walked back to the main entrance just in time to see Joe walking up, reaching into his pocket for a set of keys.

“Thanks for meeting me, Joe,” I said as he unlocked the glass doors and gestured me in and locking the door behind him. He walked to the swinging doors separating the lobby from the auditorium, opened one and reached behind the other to flip a couple of switches lighting the two dim spots on either side of the stage and a few equally dim ceiling lights, which provided enough light for me to see where we were going.

“Let's go into the booth,” he said. “I can start doing some things while we talk.”

He opened the door leading to the booth, flipped another switch near the bottom of the stairs, and I followed him up into the lighting/sound/stage manager's booth, which was the size of a slightly-larger-than-average bathroom. At the top of the stairs was a cluttered desk with stacked notebooks, what appeared to be an old peanut-butter jar filled with pencils and a rainbow of marking pens, and a clipboard holding sheets of papers with diagrams of the stage made almost indistinguishable by the scribbled notes and arrows and various markings in a variety of colors. Directly above the desk was a small window overlooking the auditorium and stage. Obviously Max's desk.

The rest of the room was taken up by a U-shaped series of what I assumed to be lighting and sound panels with row after row of knobs, switches, and small levers. How any one person could figure out which lever/switch/knob was for, I couldn't imagine. But I was sure Joe did.

He gestured me to Max's chair and moved around to the center of the U to take his own seat behind the console.

“So,” he said, looking out another small window over the center of the console and into the auditorium, “what's this all about?”

“Well,” I began, “as I told you on the phone, I'm a private investigator by trade, and the only reason I'm in New York is to visit Max and Chris, who invited us to the opening of the show. I was particularly looking forward to it because I heard Rod Pearce was in it, and I've had the hots for him ever since I saw him in
War and Destiny
. I never met the guy, never even saw him in person, and was pretty disappointed when I learned that now I never would.”

“You didn't miss much,” Joe said, leaning back in his chair.

“So I understand ever since I got here. But over the years I've developed a really weird gut-level instinct for when something just isn't right, and it's telling me that something about Rod Pearce's death just isn't right.”

He looked directly at me for the first time. “So you think somebody from the Whitman killed him?”

I shook my head. “I really don't know. But it's a possibility worth looking into.”

Joe shrugged. “I suppose.”

“So tell me what you know about him.”

He took a deep breath. “You know how in the Bible Jesus tells St. Peter, ‘I shall make you a fisher of men'?”

I nodded.

“Well, Rod was a fisher of men, too. Only he'd hook 'em, reel 'em in, then rip out the hook and toss 'em back in the water. He got a big kick out of it.”

I looked at him closely. “Can I gather from that that you were one of the ones he hooked?”

He stared out the small window at the stage. “Yeah, you can. I'm sure as hell not proud of it. I knew what a prick teaser he was before he even zeroed in on me. But he was Rod Pearce, and that's one tempting piece of bait to dangle in front of any fish. I think he looked on me as a kind of special challenge, since I keep pretty much to myself and don't mix well with many people. Anyway, he kept dangling the bait and dangling the bait until I bit. Then one night in bed and he tossed me back overboard the next day. I mean, hell, I wasn't looking for a big romance, but he made it pretty clear that I was just a number on his scoreboard.”

“And you were pissed.”

He gave an exaggerated, slow nod. “Oh, yeah. But actually I was a lot more pissed at me than I was at him. I'll tell you one thing; something like that doesn't exactly encourage me to come out of my shell.”

“So how about the rest of the cast and crew? Anyone whose anger wasn't directed at themselves?”

He thought a minute. “First of all, Rod's criteria seemed pretty simple: you had to be male and breathing. He went through just about everybody. I understand he even hit on Max in the bathroom one night. Chris wasn't too happy about that, you can be sure. Russ, the prop man, was really crushed when Rod baited him then dumped him…that was a really shitty thing for Rod to do; take advantage of a kid who barely knows the ropes yet. But that was Rod.”

I was really surprised that Joe was being as talkative as he was. Part of me wondered why. Maybe he just needed to talk. Or…?

“What do you know about Rod's association with Gene Morrison?” I asked.

Joe raised one eyebrow and actually almost smiled. “It was pretty obvious from day one that Rod and Morrison were more than mentor and mentee, so when Rod came out from California with Gene for the casting, it hardly floored anyone when Rod got the lead. Gene stuck around for the first week of read-through and blocking before heading back to California to work on some project or another. They played it really cool, but they sure didn't fool anyone.

“I mean, here's this hot looking stud actor whose career had flat lined being taken under the wing of a well-known playwright more than twice his age, and he lands first lead in the playwright's new play? Come on!”

“Do you think Gene knew what was going on with Rod while he wasn't around?”

Joe shook his head. “Gene's far from stupid. And I'd say that if you were looking for somebody from the Whitman who might have an excellent reason to kill Rod, it would be Gene. But he didn't come into town until the day after Rod's body was found.”